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This book is an investigation of the cultural phenomenon of branding and its transformational effects on the contemporary spatial – and urban – reality. It develops a novel understanding of the rationale behind the construction of large-scale architectural complexes that relate to corporate brands, and of its tremendous cultural effects. The author suggests that what we see today is the creation of "global mass ornaments", of a thorough ornamentalization of the entire globe. The origins of this are discussed with regard to examples of corporate brand-building from Europe and China (Autostadt Wolfsburg, BMW Welt Munich and Anting New Town). Additional cases are several simulated spaces in Berlin and the space-branding activities of companies like Apple or Prada. Theoretically, the author develops an innovative poststructuralist framework, combining ideas from Gilles Deleuze with the space philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk. He analyzes how the corporate redefinition of space makes the city enter into a mode of virtual urbanity. This idea leads to a notion of a "global urban" and, ultimately, the "global mass ornament". This concept of a global mass ornament is developed here with reference to Sloterdijk’s concept of a world of "spheres". The latter is used to understand the new mode of spatiality of mediatized spaces. The book makes the point that our world is involved in a process of mass ornamentalization that has only just begun. The concept of the global mass ornament is the first to come to grips with a culture in which branding is effectively changing the physiognomy of the earth. The global mass ornament is a banner for a cultural transformation that employs architecture, sign theory and mechanisms borrowed from traditional advertising and from social media, as well as social processes – and that we have yet to properly understand. This book is a significant step forward in this respect.
Landscape and branding explores the way landscape is conceptualised, conceived, represented and designed by professionals in a brand-driven age. Landscape - incorporating tangible physical space as well as intangible concepts, narratives, images, and experiences of place - is constructed by a number of creative industries. This book tests the hypothesis that place branding, a powerful marketing and management practice, increasingly blurs the distinction between the promotion of landscape and its production in design terms. Place branding involves the strategic and systematic composition of single-minded, experiential and market-friendly place identities which are consistently communicated across various media, including physical space. How does this implicate or transform notions of place, nature, landscape experience, and the qualitative value of landscape itself? How does this affect the role of landscape architecture? To answer these questions, place branding theory and practice is critically examined alongside an in depth case study of one specific landscape - the Blue Mountains (Australia). Projects undertaken between 1995 and 2015, including a branding strategy for the region, media campaigns, television, cinema, and several landscape architectural works in the public and private domain are comparatively analysed, focusing on the discourse, conventions and values informing their production, and the landscape narratives they convey.
Urban segregation is one of the main challenges facing urban development around the globe. The usual outcome of many urban development patterns is an unequal social geography, with the urban poor living in large clusters that are remote, isolated, dangerous or unhealthy. The result is inequality in a number of dimensions of urban life, from deficient urban access, services or infrastructure to social isolation, neighbourhood violence, and lack of economic opportunity. This book brings together debates on ethnic and economic segregation, combining theory and practical solutions to create a guide for those trying to understand and address urban segregation in any part of the world, and integrate ameliorating policies to contemporary urban development agendas.
Cultural sociology - or the sociology of culture - has grown from a minority interest in the 1970s to become one of the largest and most vibrant areas within sociology globally. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Sociology, a global range of experts explore the theory, methodology and innovations that make up this ever-expanding field. The Handbook′s 40 original chapters have been organised into five thematic sections: Theoretical Paradigms Major Methodological Perspectives Domains of Inquiry Cultural Sociology in Contexts Cultural Sociology and Other Analytical Approaches Both comprehensive and current, The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Sociology will be an essential reference tool for both advanced students and scholars across sociology, cultural studies and media studies.
Cities expand, upwards and outwards, and their physical structure can last a very long time, not just tens but hundreds of years. Nevertheless, they are rarely designed for expansion. Their layout does not allow for extension or for the retrofitting of infrastructure and can constrain, and often prevent, the growth and change of activities within them - cities are not 'robust' in their design. In other words, change is not planned for but involves costly reconstruction. The Robust City argues that a robust, expandable and sustainable urban form can be deduced from planning goals. Development should not just follow public transport corridors but should not be allowed beyond walking distance from them. This would create 'green enclaves' that would permit not only recreational access but also the retrofitting of infrastructure and the efficient circulation of motor vehicles. The same principles could also be applied within neighbourhoods and to facilitate the rational handling of urban intensification.
During the 1960s, building sites in Paris became spaces that expressed preoccupations about urban transformation, labour immigration and national identity. As new buildings and infrastructure changed the city, building sites revealed the substandard living and working conditions of migrant construction workers in France. Moreover, construction was the touchstone in debates about the dangers of urban life, and triggered action in communities whose districts faced demolition. Paris Under Construction explores the social, political and cultural responses to construction work and urban transformation in the Paris metropolitan region during the 1960s. This examination of a decade of intensive building work considers the ways in which the experience of construction was mediated, produced and reproduced through a range of complex and sometimes contradictory representations. The building sites that produced the new Paris are no longer visible, and were perhaps never intended to be seen, yet different groups closely observed and recorded construction, giving it meanings that went beyond specific building activities. The research draws extensively on French newspaper, television and radio archives, and delves into rarely examined trade union material. Paris Under Construction gives voice to the witnesses of—and participants in—urban transformation who are usually excluded from architectural and urban history.
Recent history has seen Bosnian and Herzegovinian (BiH) cities undergoing several transitions. Their cities have developed under socialism (1945 – 1992), have suffered through the civil war during the 1990s, and during the last twenty years have been undergoing a slow and multifaceted transition to an indeterminate end point. Focusing on the post-socialist, postwar, and neoliberal transitions experienced in BiH, the book shows that planning systems deviated from control-oriented and top-down regulation to flexible approaches for more open for informal development. The book analyzes several levels of planning-related processes: the former Yugoslavia, BiH, the city of Mostar, and three urban zones (the Industrial Zone Bišće Polje, the City Zone Rondo, and the Historic District and the Old Town Zone) in order to offer insights into the new planning systems in the late phase of post-socialist transition.
Much of feminist architectural scholarship focuses on the enormous task of instating women’s experience of space into spatial praxis. Hypersexual City: The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism suggests this attention to women’s invisibility in sociocultural space has overlooked the complex ways in which women already occupy space, albeit mostly as an image or object to be consumed, even purchased. It examines the occupation of urban space through the mediated representation of women’s hypersexualized bodies. A complex transaction proliferates in the commercial urban space of cities; this book seeks to address the cause and consequence of the increasing dominance of gendered representation. It uses architectural case studies and analysis to make visible the sexual politics of architecture and urbanism and, in doing so, reveal the ways that heterosexist culture shapes the spaces, behaviour and relationships formed in neoliberal cities. Hypersexual City announces how examining urbanism that operates through, and is framed by, sexual culture can demonstrate that architecture does not merely find itself adrift in the hypersexualized landscape of contemporary cities, but is actively producing and contributing to the sexual regulation of urban life.
Today, urban scholars think of cities and regions as evolving through networks of human associations, technologies, and natural ecologies. This being the case, planners are faced with the task of navigating a profoundly material world. Planning with and for humans alone is unacceptable: in the unfolding of urban processes, non-human things cannot be ignored. This inclusive vision has consequences for how planners envision the connections among norms, technologies and life-worlds as well as how they design and implement their plans. The contributors to this volume utilize a variety of examples – ecologically-sensitive, regional planning in Naples (Italy); congestion pricing in New York City; and public participation in Europe, among others – to explore how planners engage a heterogeneous and restless world. Inspired by assemblage thinking and actor-network theory, each chapter draws on this "new materialism" to acknowledge, in quite pragmatic ways, that spatial politics is a process of becoming that is inseparable from the materiality of urban practices.
Planning is centrally focused on places which are significant to people, including both the built and natural environments. In making changes to these places, planning outcomes inevitably benefit some and disadvantage others. It is perhaps surprising that Actor Network Theory (ANT) has only recently been considered as an appropriate lens through which to understand planning practice. This book brings together an international range of contributors to explore such potential of ANT in more detail. While it can be thought of as a subset of complexity theory, given its appreciation for non-linear processes and responses, ANT has its roots in the sociology of scientific and technology studies. ANT now comprises a rich set of concepts that can be applied in research, theoretical and empirical. It is a relational approach that posits a radical symmetry between social and material actors (or actants). It suggests the importance of dynamic processes by which networks of relationships become formed, shift and have effect. And while not inherently normative, ANT has the potential to strengthen other more normative domains of planning theory through its unique analytical lens. However, this requires theoretical and empirical work and the papers in this volume undertake such work. This is the first volume to provide a full consideration of how ANT can contribute to planning studies, and suggests a research agenda for conceptual development and empirical application of the theory.