Free Culture and the City

Free Culture and the City
Author: Alberto Corsín Jiménez
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2023-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501767208

Free Culture and the City examines how and why free software spread beyond the world of hackers and software engineers and became the basis for an urban movement now heralded by scholars as a model for emulation. By the late 1990s, digital activists embraced a philosophy of free software and "free culture" in order to take control over their cities and everyday lives. Free culture, previously tethered to the digital realm, was cut loose and used to reclaim and resculpt the city. In Madrid the effects were dramatic. Common sights in the city were abandoned as industrial factories turned into autonomous social centers, urban orchards, guerrilla architectural camps, or community hacklabs. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic and historical work with free culture collectives in Madrid, Free Culture and the City shows how, in its journey from the digital to the urban, the practice of liberating culture required the mobilization of, and alliances between, public art centers, neighborhood associations, squatted social centers, hackers, intellectual property lawyers, street artists, guerrilla architectural collectives, and Occupy assemblies.

The Power of Culture in City Planning

The Power of Culture in City Planning
Author: Tom Borrup
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 100024508X

The Power of Culture in City Planning focuses on human diversity, strengths, needs, and ways of living together in geographic communities. The book turns attention to the anthropological definition of culture, encouraging planners in both urban and cultural planning to focus on characteristics of humanity in all their variety. It calls for a paradigm shift, re-positioning city planners’ "base maps" to start with a richer understanding of human cultures. Borrup argues for cultural master plans in parallel to transportation, housing, parks, and other specialized plans, while also changing the approach of city comprehensive planning to put people or "users" first rather than land "uses" as does the dominant practice. Cultural plans as currently conceived are not sufficient to help cities keep pace with dizzying impacts of globalization, immigration, and rapidly changing cultural interests. Cultural planners need to up their game, and enriching their own and city planners’ cultural competencies is only one step. Both planning practices have much to learn from one another and already overlap in more ways than most recognize. This book highlights some of the strengths of the lesser-known practice of cultural planning to help forge greater understanding and collaboration between the two practices, empowering city planners with new tools to bring about more equitable communities. This will be an important resource for students, teachers, and practitioners of city and cultural planning, as well as municipal policymakers of all stripes.

Experimental Collaborations

Experimental Collaborations
Author: Adolfo Estalella
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1785338544

In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as “fieldwork devices”—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of “experimental collaborations” to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.

Save Our City

Save Our City
Author: Diane Kalen-Sukra
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-04-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9781926843421

At a time when incivility appears to be on the rise and increasingly tolerated, Diane Kalen-Sukra's new book, Save Your City, is a vital call to action for communities and leaders everywhere. The book takes readers from the very beginning of democracy to the challenges being addressed by communities today. This special Municipal World edition contains a forward by George B. Cuff and an exclusive companion workbook.

Infrastructures and Social Complexity

Infrastructures and Social Complexity
Author: Penelope Harvey
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317224353

Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.

Planning for a City of Culture

Planning for a City of Culture
Author: Shoshanah Goldberg-Miller
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2017-02-17
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1315309246

Planning for a City of Culture gives us a new way to understand how cities use arts and culture in planning, fostering livable communities and creating economic development strategies to build their brand, attract residents and tourists, and distinguish themselves from other urban centers worldwide. Goldberg-Miller brings a new, fresh perspective to the study of creative cities by using policy theory as an underlying construct to understand what happened in Toronto and New York in the 2000s.

Designs and Anthropologies

Designs and Anthropologies
Author: Keith M. Murphy
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826362796

The chapters in this captivating volume demonstrate the importance and power of design and the ubiquitous and forceful effects it has on human life within the study of anthropology. The scholars explore the interactions between anthropology and design through a cross-disciplinary approach, and while their approaches vary in how they specifically consider design, they are all centered around the design-and-anthropology relationship. The chapters look at anthropology for design, in which anthropological methods and concepts are mobilized in the design process; anthropology of design, in which design is positioned as an object of ethnographic inquiry and critique; and design for anthropology, in which anthropologists borrow concepts and practices from design to enhance traditional ethnographic forms. Collectively, the chapters argue that bringing design and anthropology together can transform both fields in more than one way and that to tease out the implications of using design to reimagine ethnography—and of using ethnography to reimagine design—we need to consider the historical specificity of their entanglements.

Strategies for Urban Development in Leipzig, Germany

Strategies for Urban Development in Leipzig, Germany
Author: Jean-Claude Garcia-Zamor
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2013-10-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1441966498

The demographic pressure caused by migration offers a considerable challenge for urban centers today. It results in an uneven development of the community and focus of urban planners becomes how to provide decent, low-cost housing and transportation in order to facilitate the integration of poorer residents among the rest of the community. In large industrialized countries the challenges of urban policy-makers are made even more complicated since these governments depend on state or federal legislators to obtain the massive amounts of funding required for adequately addressing these local issues that are in global cause. The book analyzes the strategies for urban development in Leipzig, Germany, and shows how civic leaders were able to harmonize planning and equity. They relied heavily on two interesting approaches in that process: the promotion of culture as a key component of urban development and the reconciliation of the inevitable process of gentrification with social equity. The book also looks at the globalization aspect of urban development, reviews research in social equity in urban development in Europe and the United States and describes sustainability as an important element of urban renaissance.