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2020 Brendan Gill Prize finalist For forty years, as New York’s Lower East Side went from disinvested to gentrified, residents lived with a wound at the heart of the neighborhood, a wasteland of vacant lots known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). Most of the buildings on the fourteen-square-block area were condemned in 1967, displacing thousands of low-income people of color with the promise that they would soon return to new housing—housing that never came. Over decades, efforts to keep out affordable housing sparked deep-rooted enmity and stalled development, making SPURA a dramatic study of failed urban renewal, as well as a microcosm epitomizing the greatest challenges faced by American cities since World War II. Artist and urban scholar Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani was invited to enter this tense community to support a new approach to planning, which she accepted using collaboration, community organizing, public history, and public art. Having engaged her students at The New School in a multi-year collaboration with community activists, the exhibitions and guided tours of her Layered SPURA project provided crucial new opportunities for dialogue about the past, present, and future of the neighborhood. Simultaneously revealing the incredible stories of community and activism at SPURA, and shedding light on the importance of collaborative creative public projects, Contested City bridges art, design, community activism, and urban history. This is a book for artists, planners, scholars, teachers, cultural institutions, and all those who seek to collaborate in new ways with communities.
Looks at how environmental issues have shaped the development of cities, examining the political, social and economic factors at play on both an international and a local scale.
"I was having a pretty good Friday until the crab men tried to kill me."? An exiled vampire queen. A vegetable demigod. A magic Nintendo.When supernatural forces collide, it will take a skilled mediator to keep the conflict from destroying San Diego.Unfortunately, all they have is John Smith.
“A theoretically sophisticated reading of the mediation of social and spiritual relationships in Fez.” —Gregory Starrett, University of North Carolina at Charlotte The sacred calls that summon believers are the focus of this study of religion and power in Fez, Morocco. Focusing on how dissemination of the call through mass media has transformed understandings of piety and authority, Emilio Spadola details the new importance of once-marginal Sufi practices such as spirit trance and exorcism for ordinary believers, the state, and Islamist movements. The Calls of Islam offers new ethnographic perspectives on ritual, performance, and media in the Muslim world. “A superb demonstration of anthropological analysis at its best. A major contribution to our understanding of the complicated nexus of religion, nationalism, and technology.” —Charles Hirschkind, author of The Feeling of History “An instructive contribution to the literature on Morocco’s socio-cultural and political idiosyncrasies.” —Review of Middle East Studies “Spadola’s dense but short study . . . manages admirably well to deal with a complex topic, skillfully balancing ethnographic and analytic elements.” —American Ethnologist “[The] tension between social classes is subtly drawn out throughout this exemplary book, and Spadola also does a magnificent job tying local, national, and transnational contexts together. Although writing about a very specific place and time, he manages to capture post-millennial anxieties about Islam and belonging that are far reaching in their scope.” —Contemporary Islam “Spadola’s book is theoretically sophisticated, skillfully constructed, and rich in detail.” —Journal of Religion
From its small beginnings in the UK 15-20 years ago, mediation has become well-known as a more positive method of resolving conflict than the adversarial methods we have been accustomed to using. Reflecting the range of contexts in which mediation is now used, this book includes chapters on: history of mediation in the UK mediation with divorced and separated couples peer mediation in schools resolving neighbour disputes in rural and urban settings victim-offender mediation and conferencing resolving workplace and industrial disputes commercial mediation dealing with patients' complaints about doctors elder mediation environmental mediation and consensus building international mediation. Drawing on their own experiences as mediators, the contributors to this book discuss the benefits and drawbacks of mediation in particular settings and use case studies to illustrate how mediation works in practice. This book provides a comprehensive overview of mediation for those wanting to find out more, or those beginning in the field, as well as containing useful information and advice for anyone involved in mediation.
A critical examination of urban policies and management practices used to make cities sustainable. With an international perspective, the book describes urban environmental agendas and how they arose in the context of globalization, urban economic restructuring, and the need to make cities competitive. It argues that the environment became an integral part of city development policy, turning attention not only to physical and ecological issues but also to improving the economic performance of cities and the lives of citizens. The authors also go beyond the technical issues to explore the political importance of urban environmentalism, using case studies to illustrate both its international scope and place-specific characteristics which are inexorably influencing city development throughout the world. In connecting the concept to its political effects, the book raises issues such as local democracy, equality and social regulation, all of which are increasingly concerning academics, professionals, environmentalists and city authorities alike.
Contemporary society of the early twenty-first century is defined by the technologies which it is dependant upon for mobility, communication, information gathering, and entertainment. The media in particular has had a dramatic impact on the sociological identity of our cities by allowing for the population to live an informed lifestyle without dependence on location. The exchange of information has, in fact, become completely divorced of any spatial relationship due to the capabilities of media technology. This has allowed information exchange to take place on a much broader level than ever before, but has conversely taken the sociality, and in turn the meaning, of this exchange away. The technological culture of the media today is one based heavily on individualized experience. Developments in the field focus on creating a holistic media experience with as little public interaction as possible. As a result, the polarity between public and private life continues to expand at the expense of relevant social exchange. These privatized developments, by relying on the assumption that the individual experience is more rewarding than the collective, contribute to a breakdown of the social fabric which holds our cities together. The idea of the collective as unnecessary and unrewarding needs to be brought into question if the societies of our cities are to reap any real understanding of themselves. As environmental designers, we must not openly fight the trends of a contemporary media obsessed with the individual, but look to them for the impetus of our critique. We must embrace media technology and uncover the sociologically beneficial effects of it within the public realm of the city. Only through this, can we open up a truly constructive sociological dialogue about the relationship between the media and social interaction.
Looks at mediation as it can be applied to resolving community and neighbourhood disputes. The book covers the history and theory of mediation practices before looking at how these can work in practice by analyzing the mediation process and examining detailed case studies. It goes on to look at the organizational structures which allow these processes to be delivered, from model structures and services to advice on recruitment and training. The book also examines practical issues such as the importance of equal opportunities in community mediation schemes, how to maintain standards and get accreditation, and how to maintain cost-effectiveness.
Henri Lefebvre is undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers in the field of urban space and its organization; his theories offer reflections still valid for analyzing social relations in urban areas affected by the crisis of the neoliberal economic system. Lefebvre’s ideal of the “right to the city” is now more widely accepted given today’s current cultural and social situation. Most current research on Henri Lefebvre refers solely to his ideas and their theoretical discussion, without focusing on the empirical transcription of the philosopher. This book fills this gap, and proposes examples about the empirical use of Henri Lefebvre’s sociology from the perspective of different cities and researchers in order to understand the city and its evolutions in the context of neoliberal globalization. The book’s main purpose is to revisit Lefebvre’s still-relevant key concepts to propose new comprehensions of the contemporary city. Case studies in this book will show also that the reception of Lefebvrian concepts differs across different contexts, depending on the social and political circumstances of each country. The debates in this book both expand the scope of urban imagination, and help to reinvigorate, unify, and empower shared desires for just urban outcomes. The contributions to this book also illuminate the everyday choices concerning the form and social processes of the city, and the inspiration that they draw from Lefebvre’s theoretical legacy in the realm of urban sociology.