A Walk on the Wild Side: Steps towards an ecological arts pedagogy

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Haley
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Arts Pedagogy ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
Ecological Science ◽  
Home And School ◽  
The City ◽  
Erasmus Darwin

between home and school walking a way to learning life through the city. (David Haley) This article takes the reader for a stroll through a programme of ecological arts-led, performance-based research. The style is more poetic than scientific, although much ecological science is embedded within the art form. Indeed, Charles Darwin was known for his regular walks, as time and space for his reflections on evolution and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was noted for the poetic form of his scientific treatises. Here also, the author breaks with academic convention to engage with walking and research as creative activities to deal with ecological issues. Of course, other artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton have walked as part of their practice, and there are a growing number of artists who consider walking as practice-as-research. In this article, the focus is specifically on walking as a creative form of inquiry, through community participation within urban contexts to create a critical dialogue focused on ecology in action.

scholarly journals Applying the SDGs to Cities: Business as Usual or a New Dawn?

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 3201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Zinkernagel ◽  
James Evans ◽  
Lena Neij
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Sustainable Urban Development ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
The Many ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
The City ◽  
Indicator Sets

With growing urbanisation the sustainability of cities has become increasingly important. Although cities have been using indicators for a long time it is only in the last decades that attempts have been made to collate indicators into sets that reflect the many different aspects required to assess the sustainability of a city. The aim of this paper is to review the evolution of indicators for monitoring sustainable urban development in order to understand how ‘new’ the indicators suggested by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are for cities and the challenges they may face in using them. The review reveals that previous indicator sets emphasised environmental sustainability, health and economic growth. It is also shown that indicator sets that pre-date the SDGs lacked dimensions such as gender equality and reduced inequalities. In all, the SDG indicators provide the possibility of a more balanced and integrated approach to urban sustainability monitoring. At the same time, further research is needed to understand how to adapt the SDGs, targets and indicators to specific urban contexts. Challenges of local application include their large number, their generic characteristics and the need to complement them with specific indicators that are more relevant at the city level.

scholarly journals Review of "A recipe for gentrification: Food, power, and resistance in the city"

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Engler-Stringer
Keyword(s):  
Food Environment ◽  
Food Access ◽  
Property Values ◽  
Food Justice ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
The City

The book, A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City is a well-crafted and useful contribution to the food environment, food access and food justice literatures. The premise of this edited book is to take a close look at the intersections between gentrification, increased property values, displacement and food justice and race in urban contexts.

scholarly journals [a] Project for the Sub-Centre

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Grace Helen Salisbury Mills
Keyword(s):  
City Centre ◽  
Urban Structure ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Specific Design ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
A Site ◽  
The City

<p>In the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake, a state of polycentric urbanity was thrust upon New Zealand’s second largest city. As the city-centre lay in disrepair, smaller centres started to materialise elsewhere, out of necessity. Transforming former urban peripheries and within existing suburbs into a collective, dispersed alternative to the city centre, these sub-centres prompted a range of morphological, socio-cultural and political transformations, and begged multiple questions: how to imbue these new sub-centres with gravity? How to render them a genuine alternative to the CBD? How do they operate within the wider city? How to cope with the physical and cultural transformations of this shifting urbanscape and prevent them occurring ad lib? Indeed, the success and functioning of the larger urban structure hinges upon a critical, informed response to these sub-centre urban contexts. Yet, with an unrelenting focus on the CBD rebuild - effectively a polycentric denial - little such attention has been granted.  Taking this urban condition as its premise and its provocation, this thesis investigates architecture’s role in the emergent sub-centre. It asks: what can architecture do in these urban contexts; how can architecture act upon the emergent sub-centre in a critical, catalytic fashion? Identifying this volatile condition as both an opportunity for architectural experimentation and a need for critical architectural engagement, this thesis seeks to explore the sub-centre (as an idea and actual urban context) as architecture’s project: its raison d’etre, impetus and aspiration.  These inquiries are tested through design-led research: an initial design question provoking further, broader discursive research (and indeed, seeking broader implications). The first section is a site-specific, design for Sumner, Christchurch. Titled ‘An Agora Anew’; this project - both in conception and outcome - is a speculative response to a specific sub-centre condition. The second section ‘The Sub-centre as Architecture’s Project’ explores the ideas provoked by the design project within a discursive framework. Firstly it identifies the sub-centre as a context in desperate need of architectural attention (why architecture?); secondly, it negotiates a possible agenda for architecture in this context through terms of engagement that are formal, critical and opportunistic (how architecture?): enabling it to take a position on and in the sub-centre. Lastly, a critical exegesis positions the design in regards to the broader discursive debate: critiquing it an architectural project predicated upon the idea of the sub-centre.  The implications of this design-led thesis are twofold: firstly, for architecture’s role in the sub-centre (especially to Christchurch); secondly for the possibilities of architecture’s productive engagement with the city (largely through architectural form), more generally. In a century where radical, new urban contexts (of which the sub-centre is just one) are commonplace, this type of thinking – what can architecture do in the city? - is imperative.</p>

The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-195
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Student ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.

Cities of Refuge, Rebel Cities, and the City to Come

2019 ◽  
pp. 253-271
Author(s):  
Giovanna Borradori
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
To Come ◽  
The City

As the processes of globalization transform cities into nodes of accumulation of financial and symbolic capital, it is fair to assume that urban contexts have never been more vulnerable to the systemic imperatives of the market. It is thus surprising that cities continue to be the site where the deepest social and political transformations come to the surface. What, then, preserves the city as a space of dissent? The claim of this chapter is that a critical reflection on the political agency of Northern and Southern cities has to start from asking what it means today to occupy the pavement of their streets. The argument explored here is that, in this age of molecular neoliberal encroachment and restructuring, it is a certain experience of dispossession, rather than the quest for identification and recognition, that makes the city the core of a shared experience of refuge and resistance.

scholarly journals Charles Darwin and the scientific mind

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID STACK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Scientific Mind ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Erasmus Darwin ◽  
William Whewell

AbstractAlthough often presented as an essential, ahistorical or innate psychological entity, the notion of a ‘scientific mind’ is ripe for historical analysis. The growing historical interest in the self-fashioning of masculine identities, and more particularly the self-fashioning of the nineteenth-century scientist, has opened up a space in which to probe what was understood by someone being said to possess a ‘scientific mind’. This task is made all the more urgent by the recently revived interest of some psychologists in the concept and the highly gendered and culturally conditioned understanding of the scientific mind displayed in some contemporary debates. This article contributes to that task, and fills a rare gap in Darwin studies by making the first detailed exploration of Charles Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind, as revealed in the psychological self-analysis he undertook in his ‘Recollections of the development of my mind and character’ (1876), and supplemented in hisLife of Erasmus Darwin(1879). Drawing upon a broad range of Darwin's published and unpublished works, this article argues that Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind was rooted in his earliest notebooks, and was far more central to his thought than is usually acknowledged. The article further delineates the differences between Darwin's understanding and that of his half-cousin Francis Galton, situates his understanding in relation to his reading of William Whewell and Auguste Comte, and considers what Darwin's view of the scientific mind tells us about his perspective on questions of religion and gender. Throughout, the article seeks to show that the ‘scientific mind’ is always an agglomeration of historically specific prejudices and presumptions, and concludes that this study of Darwin points to the need for a similarly historical approach to the question of the scientific mind today.

scholarly journals Vertigo in the City: Urban Crime, Consumerism and the Theopolitical Act

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Richard Bourne
Keyword(s):  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Urban Crime ◽  
Youth Work ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
The City ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
Offender Reintegration

This article explores some theological points of contact and development arising from an understanding of the city not yet receiving sustained attention in urban theologies—crime and punishment. It gives an account of the expressive criminality of late modern cities and the attendant sociology of vindictiveness that shapes practices of punishment. It demurs from an influential but highly pessimistic vision of the persistence of consumerist desire, the only escape from which comes in a largely unsustainable politics of renunciation (Steve Hall drawing on Slavoj Žižek). It begins to develop an account of non-consumerist desire and political subjectivity though a critical dialogue with Žižek’s exposition of Romans 7. It suggests that the fragmentary urban practices of Christian mercy (offender reintegration, education programmes, anti-gang social projects, youth work) enact a form of asceticism which more satisfactorily parallels the covenantal and participatory thrust of Romans 5–8.

scholarly journals Segregation in London: A City of Choices or Structures?

2021 ◽  
pp. 311-328
Author(s):  
David Manley
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Occupational Segregation ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Micro Scale ◽  
Economic Segregation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
The City

AbstractThis chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the socio-economic segregation in London. The cosmopolitan nature of the city means there is an interwoven complexity that prevents the separation of social, cultural and economic residential trajectories of the population. As a result, the chapter explores socio-economic segregation within the context of the changing nature of the (sub)urban contexts. In particular, the chapter documents not only the occupational segregation but also introduces the often-used dimension of ethnicity and pairs it with the less commonly explored age and tenure dimensions through which the social structure of the city is inscribed. This enables a broader understanding of the rapid changes that have been wrought on the micro-scale can be understood in the context of a city that has, in terms of the overall composition, changed little.

scholarly journals In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities

Urbani izziv ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol Supplement (30) ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Oldfield ◽  
Netsai Sarah Mathsaka ◽  
Elaine Salo ◽  
Ann Schlyter
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
African Cities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
The City

How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these groups of women should be poles apart, the first with rights imbued in citizenship, the second migrants without. Here instead, we demonstrate the ways in which gendered political subjectivities embed in the hard, lived realities of home. In placing gender and everyday body politics at the forefront of our analysis, the paper makes visible the micro-realities of making home. We demonstrate that an assumed recursive relationship between citizenship and home, as a physical and social place in the city, is problematic. Building on debates on citizenship and its gendering in post-colonial African urban contexts, we demonstrate instead that citizenship and its gendered contestations and emergent forms in Southern African are crafted in quotidian activities in homes and everyday city contexts.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document