scholarly journals City in Modern Cultural Criticism: Lewis Mumford and István Hajnal

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Gábor Kovács
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
European City ◽  
Lewis Mumford ◽  
The City

Abstract The critique of the city is an almost obligatory cliché of the 20thcentury cultural criticism. This paper offers a parallel critical analysis of the conceptions of American ecologist Lewis Mumford and Hungarian historian István Hajnal. They were contemporaries, and their approaches had been inspired by interwar cultural criticism. Mumford did not hate the city: it was, for him, the engine of history, a reservoir of cultural creativeness. The theory of Hajnal, from many aspects, runs parallel with Mumford’s – moreover, the Hungarian historian gives a detailed theory on the types of European city. What connects them is an ecological approach.

Lewis Mumford

1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68
Author(s):  
Leonidas Donskis ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Regional Planning ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Garden City ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
American Romanticism ◽  
Great Tradition ◽  
Lewis Mumford ◽  
The City

Lewis Mumford's discursive map, uncovering the trajectories of modem consciousness and Western social philosophy, dates back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the great tradition of American Romanticism However, Mumford's discursive map of the idea of the city cannot be reduced to architecture and city planning alone. His world of ideas draws on such thinkers and concepts as Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, Benton MacKaye's Eutopian ideas, Patrick Geddes' regional planning, and Frank Lloyd Wright's organic architecture (Broadacre City), anticipated by Louis Henri Sullivan. Mumford's theoretical constructions also reflect the worldviews of Simmel, Tönnies, Spengler, and Toynbee, as well as other influential social theories of the last two centuries, Mumford was apparently the first among twentieth-century intellectuals to grasp that human creation, interaction, self-fulfillment, and the search for perfectibility all take place in the city.

THE FREEDOM OF THE AESTHETIC: MONTSERRAT ROIG’S USE OF THE CITY IN RAMONA, ADÉU

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
Catalan Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.

Where do Black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 898-918 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenna M. Loyd ◽  
Anne Bonds
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
Critical Criminology ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Class Inequality ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Spatial Metaphor ◽  
The City ◽  
Discursive Constructions ◽  
Zip Code

This article analyzes how the spatial metaphor of 53206, a zip code within the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, connects with crises in the legitimacy of policing and politicians’ claims to care about Black lives. It examines how, in the context of deepening racialized poverty, ongoing mobilizations against police violence, and increasing rates of violent crime, liberal and conservative rhetoric about 53206 largely obscures the roles that decades of deindustrialization and labor assaults, metropolitan racial and wealth segregation, and public school and welfare restructuring play in producing racial and class inequality to instead emphasize racializing tropes about ‘Black-on-Black crime,’ broken homes, and uncaring Black communities. Situating the examination within critical analysis of urban poverty, geographic scholarship on the racialization of space, and critical criminology, the authors consider the salience of the term territorial stigmatization as a means to understand how historical and contemporary processes of racialized capitalism shape Milwaukee’s urban and social divides. They argue that discursive constructions of 53206 and the rhetorical posture of saving Black lives deployed by elected officials have had the effect of entrenching policing power while further rendering neighborhoods like Milwaukee’s Northside as already dead and dying.

Citizens in the Smart City

2022 ◽  
pp. 126-143
Author(s):  
Zsuzsanna Tomor
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
European City ◽  
Citizen Empowerment ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

While the role of citizens in smart cities is hotly debated, there is a dearth of empirical research on the subject. This in-depth study of a European city, selected for its typical smart city ambitions, explores the roles that citizens actually play in smart city projects. The study examines twelve initiatives in the City of Utrecht (NL) using a framework that differentiates between types of citizen participation. The findings show that technology-enabled citizen participation in Utrecht is highly diverse and embraces all types of participation rather than simply taking the form of either “citizen empowerment” (as the advocates argue) or “citizen subjugation' (as the critics stress). The diversity found in the study highlights the need to conceptualize the role of the smart citizen at the micro (project) level rather than at the level of the city as a whole. The study shows that citizen participation in the smart city should not be understood as a technological utopia or dystopia but as an evolving, technologically mediated practice that is shaped by a variety of factors.

No Natural Disaster: New Orleans, Katrina, and War

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 331-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara McPherson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Navigation System ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
European City ◽  
Virtual Navigation ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
The City ◽  
Early Manifestation

It has always been difficult to talk about new orleans without resorting to cliché. Long positioned as “America's most European city” or “the city that care forgot,” the locale looms large in the national—and the literary—imagination, triggering vivid fantasies of excess and decadence but also of old–world gentility and grandeur. New Orleans, especially in its juicy Gothic flavorings, has often performed as a stand–in for the South at large, while also exhibiting a certain unique cosmopolitanism or hybridity. We might even think of it as an early manifestation of a networked global hub, the routes of the slave trade mapping our first virtual navigation system. New Orleans and indeed the entire South perform powerful ideological work for the nation, functioning throughout the twentieth century as a convenient repository and origin story for much that ails the country: poverty, racism, rigid fundamentalism, decadence, and crime.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document