Fantasies of urban futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Greenhalgh
Keyword(s):  
Local Governments ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Modern Architecture ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
Post War ◽  
Visual Materials ◽  
Urban Fantasy ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

This chapter examines the origins of the post-war Plans as a means to interrogate a number of historical stereotypes about Britain after the Second World War. In 1945 Hull and Manchester, in common with many other British towns and cities, produced comprehensive, detailed redevelopment plans. These Plans were a spectacular mix of maps, representations of modern architecture and ambitious cityscapes that sit, sometimes uneasily, alongside detailed tables, text and photographs. Initially examining continuities between the inter- and post-war plans, the chapter emphasises the importance of the Plans in local governments’ attempts to express long-held desires to control and shape the city. I argue that the Plans evidence an attempt to mould the future shape and idea of the modern city through imaginative use of urban fantasy. Images of modernism, I argue, were not presented as a realisable architectural aim, but as a way of mediating between the present and an indistinct, but fundamentally better future. I suggest flawed interpretations of the visual materials contained in the Plans are responsible for an over-emphasis on the influence of radical modernism in post-war Britain.

‘If you strike a King you must kill him’: Sir Archibald Salvidge and the Revolt of Liverpool’s Conservative MPs, 1927-1928

2020 ◽  
Vol 169 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Paul A. Nuttall
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Second World War ◽  
News Story ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World ◽  
Local Party

In the spring of 1927, Liverpool’s Conservative MPs concluded that the local party was not equipped to counter the rise of Socialism in the city. They therefore demanded significant changes were made to the structure of the Liverpool Conservative Party. At the head of the local party was Sir Archibald Salvidge, a ruthless political operator who was determined not to give up the powers he had accrued over decades of service. What began as an internal row between Salvidge and seven rebel MPs became a national news story, and the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Conservative Party Chairman became entangled. In many ways, the row represented the moment when Liverpool’s pre-war rowdy Unionism clashed with Stanley Baldwin’s post-war consensual conservatism; and the outcome of the dispute determined the character of Liverpool’s politics until the outbreak of the Second World War.

scholarly journals Ruins of the smart city: a visual intervention

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-368
Author(s):  
Emma Fraser ◽  
Clancy Wilmott
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
World War ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World ◽  
Rose Macaulay

The visual imaginary of the future city is increasingly dichotomized between visions of hyper-technological digital urbanism and the city in a state of ruin, without people, overtaken by nature. These alternating imaginaries key into concerns over urban futures, as questions of sustainability and rising inequality come to bear on urban life. Such binary imaginaries produce volumes of visual material, lauding and critiquing philosophies of newness, endless progress and the city without decline. This article uses an inventive visual methodology to ask how these imaginaries become situated in the everyday ecologies of living. This methodology focuses on several so-called ‘brownfield’ sites in Salford, UK, and the ‘smart’ Oxford Road Corridor in neighbouring Manchester, to playfully and visually map the entanglement of digital urban ecologies through the themes of wilderness, play and compost. These three themes relate to the pleasure of urban wilderness described by Rose Macaulay, reflecting on London’s wild ruins after the Second World War; the playful contrast between smart urbanism and urban wastelands, understood through interdisciplinary visual methods; and Haraway’s notion of compost as the fertile ground of collaboration that marks a material–semiotic entanglement between place, people and nature. The authors investigate how these frameworks reflect the diversity of urban ecology (animals, plants and humans) and might provide an alternative vision of how the city could be, a vision built from how the city currently is.

scholarly journals Muddy Waters: Cross Currents in Fundraising and Its Control – 1907–1954

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-298
Author(s):  
Putnam Barber
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
State Governments ◽  
World War ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Second World

AbstractDuring the first half of the 20th century, many of the techniques of modern fundraising were developed. During these decades, fundraising demonstrated its potential for supporting important community goals, financing efforts to combat dread diseases, and initiating change in public policies. In this same span of years, community leaders, journalists, and policy makers became increasingly concerned with growing opportunities for inefficient or even downright dishonest fundraising. Local governments, federated fundraising organizers, and nonprofit charity ratings agencies attempted to forestall abuses of the public’s generosity. Further, during the Second World War, the federal government imposed significant controls on fundraising for war-related activities. The year 1954 saw the passage of new laws in two states that anticipated the most common form of charitable solicitations regulation in the second half of the century, a form that is widespread today. This paper traces developments from the end of the 19th century to show how the ground was prepared for post-war efforts by state governments to regulate charitable fundraising.

Reconstructing modernity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Greenhalgh
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Architectural Modernism ◽  
Housing Estates ◽  
Second World ◽  
Spatial Governance

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.

scholarly journals Wojenne i powojenne dzieje banków, ich skarbców i dokumentacji – przykład Komunalnej Kasy Oszczędności powiatu poznańskiego

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 233-242
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Stryjkowski
Keyword(s):  
Banking System ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Savings Bank ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World ◽  
German Mark

Dokumentacja bankowa jest dzisiaj przedmiotem wielostronnego zainteresowania. Najbardziej istotne było zawsze jej znaczenie praktyczne (dla banku oraz jego klientów). Z biegiem czasu stała się ona także przedmiotem studiów historyków, przede wszystkim gospodarczych. Okazuje się jednak, że materiały wytworzone przez banki i ich administracje posiadać mogą również wartość do innych badań. Badacze zainteresowani końcowym okresem II wojny światowej i walkami o Poznań odnajdą w prezentowanym dokumencie wiele informacji, które rzucą nowe światło na sytuację w mieście oraz pozwolą wczuć się w klimat tamtych dni. Dokument ukazuje ponadto problemy związane z odbudową systemu bankowego oraz wprowadzaniem w stolicy Wielkopolski nowego środka płatniczego – złotego polskiego, który zastąpił obowiązującą dotychczas markę niemiecką. War and post-war history of banks, their vaults and records as exemplified by the Communal Savings Bank of the Poznań county At present, banking documentation is a subject of interest for many parties. The practical value of this documentation has always been of prime importance, both for the bank and for its clients. With time, it also became a subject of interest for historians, particularly those specialized in economy. It turns out, though, that materials created by banks and their administrative bodies can also be of value for other researchers. Researchers interested in the final period of the Second World War and battles for Poznań will find this document informative, as it not only sheds new light on the situation in the city, but will also enable them to feel the atmosphere of those days. The document also shows the problems related to reconstructing the banking system and introducing the new currency, the Polish złoty (which replaced the German mark used until that point), in the capital of Greater Poland.

scholarly journals „Całemu miastu nadać odpowiednie obramowanie” — analiza tekstów prasowych na temat przygotowań do Wystawy Ziem Odzyskanych

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 159-172
Author(s):  
Waldemar Bojakowski
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Systematic Description ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World ◽  
Linguistic Means

“To provide the right frame for the whole city”. An analysis of press articles devoted to the preparations for the Recovered Territories ExhibitionThe article is an attempt to provide a systematic description of journalistic narratives associated with the preparations for the Recovered Territories Exhibition which took place in Wrocław in 1948. In the first part of the article the author examines issues relating to the propaganda of Poland’s post-war authorities, providing a historical introduction to the following discourse analysis. He enumerates the most import­ant reasons why the Polish Workers’ Party was interested in the Recovered Territories as well as the most frequently cited arguments in favour of the “Polishness” of the territories incorporated into Poland after the end of the Second World War. In the second part of the article the author discusses the results of his analysis of pieces published in the Słowo Polskie daily. The texts have been divided — on the basis of the type of linguistic means used in them — into two overlapping categories. The first concerns the obligation to prepare Wrocław for the Recovered Territories Exhibition by giving the city the right Polish appearance. The second encom­passes articles treating the Exhibition as an opportunity to assess the process of re-Polonisation of the Lower Silesian metropolis as the capital of the Recovered Territories.

Squatting: The Fight for Decent Shelter, 1970s–1980s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Housing Needs ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.

Metamorphoses of memory of the the Russian-Serbian Brotherhood of War in Modern Serbia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Party System ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Second World

The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.

Western Ethnic Borderlands in the Influence of Russian-Soviet Propagangda Before and in the Years of the Second World War

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (46) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
Igor Lyubchyk
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Russian Identity

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR. Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics

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