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Urban Theory (urban + theory)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Urban Shadows: Materiality, the ,Southern City' and Urban Theory

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2008
Colin McFarlane
We may be witnessing a ,Southern turn' in urban studies, but the implications for urban theory are only beginning to be worked through. In this article, I argue the need for urbanists to engage with a variety of ,shadows' on the edges of urban theory. The article engages with literature that theorises the interactions between urban materiality and social change, from community development literature to more expansive sociomaterial theorisations of the urban fabric. I invoke an expansive conception of the relations between the urban fabric and social change, and draw on a variety of examples through which infrastructures come to matter politically in the creative destruction of capitalist redevelopment. The article ends with consideration of how comparison might be conceived as a strategy of indirect and uncertain learning that entails the possibility of transformation in a predominantly Euro-American-orientated urban theory. [source]

Neo,Bohemia: Art and Neighborhood Redevelopment in Chicago

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 5 2002
Richard Lloyd
Drawing on an extended case study of Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, this article develops the concept of neo,bohemia. Neo,bohemia suggests that traditions of cultural innovation in older city neighborhoods persist, but that these bohemian traditions intersect with economic development in new ways in the post,Fordist city. Neo,bohemia supports both residential gentrification and the concentration of entertainment and new media enterprises, creating the context for the redevelopment of former industrial spaces in Chicago. Neo,bohemia complicates contemporary urban theories that stress deconcentration, and theories of urban tourism that overstate the regulated and hermetic nature of consumption spaces. [source]

DOES DIVERSITY IN URBAN SPACE ENHANCE INTERGROUP CONTACT AND TOLERANCE?

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 1 2009
Terje Wessel
ABSTRACT. Contemporary urban theory has started to question the elevation of diversity as a panacea for enduring urban problems , segregation, prejudice and intergroup hostility. This critique coincides with an opposite tendency within classic contact theory and research. The latter tradition has developed an increasing enthusiasm for face-to-face interaction. The contact hypothesis, which presupposes established contact, has received conclusive support independent of target groups and contact settings. Research on ,lived diversity', which includes both contact and lack of contact, offers two supplementary insights. It shows, on the one hand, that boundaries are inscribed in social spaces. Physical proximity between ethnic and social groups tends to have a minor effect on interaction. Interaction, on the other hand, is not essential to attitude formation. Both subfields within contact research have confirmed that urban space may act as a catalyst for tolerant attitudes. This observation corresponds with increasing recognition of affective states, such as empathy, anxiety and group threat. Contact research has therefore, in summary, transcended the scope of the contact hypothesis. It has expanded into the realm of urban theory, which foreshadows future collaboration between the two traditions. Some key points for such exchange are suggested at the end of the article. Future research should combine an open-ended approach to casual contact with a diversified conception of diversity and a richer conception of urban space. A move in this direction would leave substantial space for geographical research. [source]

Urban Shadows: Materiality, the ,Southern City' and Urban Theory

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2008
Colin McFarlane
We may be witnessing a ,Southern turn' in urban studies, but the implications for urban theory are only beginning to be worked through. In this article, I argue the need for urbanists to engage with a variety of ,shadows' on the edges of urban theory. The article engages with literature that theorises the interactions between urban materiality and social change, from community development literature to more expansive sociomaterial theorisations of the urban fabric. I invoke an expansive conception of the relations between the urban fabric and social change, and draw on a variety of examples through which infrastructures come to matter politically in the creative destruction of capitalist redevelopment. The article ends with consideration of how comparison might be conceived as a strategy of indirect and uncertain learning that entails the possibility of transformation in a predominantly Euro-American-orientated urban theory. [source]

What Happened to Gender Relations on the Way from Chicago to Los Angeles?

CITY & COMMUNITY, Issue 2 2002
Daphne Spain
From the Chicago human ecologists to the Los Angeles postmodernists, urban theorists have tried to understand how space is structured by technological, political, economic, and cultural forces; gender is seldom examined. Yet both women's status and urban form underwent significant changes following World War II. As the home became less predictably the center of women's lives, the monocentric city was evolving into the polycentric metropolis. This article suggests that gender relations also have spatial implications for the metropolis, and that urban theory would be more comprehensive if it incorporated historically parallel developments in the literature on gender and space. [source]