Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the Contemporary City

Some of the most recent literature within urban studies gives the distinct impression that the contemporary city now constitutes an intensely uneven patchwork of utopian and dystopian spaces that are, to all intents and purposes, physically proximate but institutionally estranged. For instance, so–called edge cities (Garreau, 1991) have been heralded as a new Eden for the information age. Meanwhile tenderly manicured urban villages, gated estates and fashionably gentrified inner–city enclaves are all being furiously marketed as idyllic landscapes to ensure a variety of lifestyle fantasies. Such lifestyles are offered additional expression beyond the home, as renaissance sites in many downtowns afford city stakeholders the pleasurable freedoms one might ordinarily associate with urban civic life. None–the–less, strict assurances are given about how these privatized domiciliary and commercialized 'public' spaces are suitably excluded from the real and imagined threats of another fiercely hostile, dystopian environment 'out there'. This is captured in a number of (largely US) perspectives which warn of a 'fortified' or 'revanchist' urban landscape, characterized by mounting social and political unrest and pockmarked with marginal interstices: derelict industrial sites, concentrated hyperghettos, and peripheral shanty towns where the poor and the homeless are increasingly shunted. Our paper offers a review of some key debates in urban geography, planning and urban politics in order to examine this patchwork–quilt urbanism, In doing so, it seeks to uncover some of the key processes through which contemporary urban landscapes of utopia and dystopia come to exist in the way they do.     

Tales of the Unexpected: Exploring Car Boot Sales as Marginal Spaces of Contemporary Consumption

Marginal and/or resistant consumption practices have been neglected in current geographical debates on consumption and retailing. This has resulted in partial and skewed theorizations of exchange within contemporary consumption. Consumption spaces such as car boot sales represent sites in which the conventions of the marketplace are suspended or abandoned, and replaced by forms of sourcing, commodity circulation, transaction codes, pricing mechanisms and value quite different from those which typify more conventional retail malls and department stores. Drawing on the anthropological literature on traditional and peasant markets, we argue that exchange within the car boot sale is socially, culturally and geographically embedded and we emphasize the intrinsic importance of fun and sociality to such activities. Marginal spaces such as the car boot sale offer both some important clues into the potential for rethinking marketplace dynamics, notably with respect to our understandings of value, and some intriguing possibilities for consumer politics.     

杰斐逊的学术理想国——弗吉尼亚大学

<正>对国家的最大贡献,莫过于在其文化土壤上添植一棵有益的树木。——托马斯·杰斐逊从美国首都华盛顿驱车南行,两个多小时便可抵达弗吉尼亚州一座风光旖旎的小城——夏洛特维尔     

城墙的文化意义与当代城墙文化保护

城墙是人类文明发展史上阶段性的产物;城墙文化伴随城墙自始至终,是人类城市文明史的重要组成部分。即便当物质城墙消失以后,城墙文化仍然肩负着解读城市历史的功能。中国的城墙发端于新石器时期,发展于春秋战国,普及于秦汉,颠峰于明代大部分消亡于20世纪。其中有三次筑城高潮。现存的中国地面遗存城墙绝大多数为明清时期建造或修筑。到了近现代,重型火炮等先进军事设备在中国的出现,昭示着冷兵器时代城市防御工事——城墙原始功能上的蜕化与不足。最终导致大量地面城墙的消失。这种消失主要由自然界因素,战乱摧残和人为拆除三种因素造成,最严重和最彻底的是后者。     

Closed Condominiums as Urban Fragments of the Contemporary City

Contemporary cities have witnessed the emergence of new real-estate products in which gated communities and closed condominiums (CCs) can be included. The proliferation of these urban products is worldwide, with similar patterns that are analysed in this paper according to five perspectives of analysis: physical, economic, social, political and cultural. These perspectives cross-cut some of the main issues of discussion of the contemporary urban debate associated with private residential developments. These developments seem to appeal to an increasing number of social groups and have been able to adapt to different planning systems. With a smaller scale, these developments emerged in Portugal in the form of CCs, and are analysed in a case study in Greater Oporto. The purpose of this paper is to present the Portuguese singularities of this phenomenon in comparison with the worldwide dimension. In our case study we find some important particularities strongly associated with the Portuguese planning system. Some of these particularities have negative impacts on the surrounding urban landscape. As a result, CCs demand specific planning policies to counteract the negative consequences they are likely to generate in local social and urban fabrics. In the absence of these policies, CCs, as well as other private residential developments, are likely to contribute further to an increasingly fragmented and divided urban landscape.     

The Economic Geographies of the Outer City: Industrial Dynamics and Imaginary Spaces of Location in Copenhagen

The paper focuses on the changing economic geographies of the outer city of Copenhagen. The outer city is not a well-defined place but can be understood as a set of processes transforming the urban economic landscape outside the built-up area. Several central and interrelated economic processes transform the outer city. The paper examines the changing industrial dynamics and location spaces within the framework of geographical proximity and relation propinquity in order to examine the social and cultural embeddedness of location. Imaginary spaces of location are the social constructs of the firm (of the interviewee representing the firm). They are representations of the perception, experience and interpretation of the location of the firm. The imaginary spaces of firms in the outer city are different from those of the firms in the built-up area, and a survey points to the fact that multiple rationalities are important in order to understand industrial location.     

Dangerous Places and Wild Spaces: Creating Meaning with Materials and Space at Contemporary Maya Shrines on El Duende Mountain

Ethnoarchaeological observations at Maya shrines on a sacred mountain suggest that three potent material strategies imbue ritual practices with different social meanings: 1) the use of different types of materials as offerings in various rites, 2) the ways in which the physical conditions of an offering are altered during deposition, and 3) the choice of location where the offering is deposited within the site relative to a ceremonial focal point. Through these strategies, individuals creatively negotiate limited access to material resources and assign diverse meanings to the material culture, practices, and places of ritual. Materials that represent commoners' rituals may primarily consist of quotidian items that are transformed in meaning by how and where they are deposited into an archaeological context.     

A Principle of Hope: Recorded Music, Listening Practices and the Immanence of Utopia

In this paper I draw a set of partial connections between ways of using recorded music and utopia. The first half of the paper draws upon the process philosophy of Ernst Bloch to argue that utopia is not located else–where or else–when in a transcendent realm separate from the present but is paradoxically immanent to 'everyday life'. This argument revolves around the novel 'open' experimental ontology that Bloch elaborates through the operator the 'not–yet'. Bloch's work enables the beginnings of an immanent utopianism that is able to discern, rather than critique, the dimly vibrating figures of hope that exist within rather than outside 'everyday life'. The second half of the paper sets this thought in motion by connecting two of Bloch's concepts, the 'trace' and 'novum', to the logic of one particularly common way of using recorded music: the use of music to 'feel better'. Drawing on in–depth case study research with seventeen lower–middle–class households I describe how this practice enables people to momentarily enact two forms of hope that are both based around the geographies of affect and affection: how something better might feel and an ability to forget. I conclude by speculatively describing the practice of a Blochian 'immanent utopianism' that itself embodies 'a principle of hope'.     

A Principle of Hope: Recorded Music, Listening Practices and the Immanence of Utopia

In this paper I draw a set of partial connections between ways of using recorded music and utopia. The first half of the paper draws upon the process philosophy of Ernst Bloch to argue that utopia is not located else–where or else–when in a transcendent realm separate from the present but is paradoxically immanent to 'everyday life'. This argument revolves around the novel 'open' experimental ontology that Bloch elaborates through the operator the 'not–yet'. Bloch's work enables the beginnings of an immanent utopianism that is able to discern, rather than critique, the dimly vibrating figures of hope that exist within rather than outside 'everyday life'. The second half of the paper sets this thought in motion by connecting two of Bloch's concepts, the 'trace' and 'novum', to the logic of one particularly common way of using recorded music: the use of music to 'feel better'. Drawing on in–depth case study research with seventeen lower–middle–class households I describe how this practice enables people to momentarily enact two forms of hope that are both based around the geographies of affect and affection: how something better might feel and an ability to forget. I conclude by speculatively describing the practice of a Blochian 'immanent utopianism' that itself embodies 'a principle of hope'.     

From Utopia to reality: Plaid Cymru and Europe†

ABSTRACT. This paper traces the evolution of Plaid Cymru's attitude towards Europe. It does so by focusing in turn on: the place of Europe in the ideas of Saunders Lewis, the dominant figure in the party between its foundation in 1924/25 and 1945; the more ‘northern’ or Nordic vision of Europe that gripped the party in the post ‐ World War II era; and the waxing and waning of the party's most EU‐enthusiastic phase between the mid ‐ 1980s and the present day. By adopting a longer timeframe than is normally the case, the paper argues that Europe has played a wider role in the thinking of the party than is often conceded; a role that was not at all or only tangentially related to actually existing institutions. The paper goes on to argue that it was in part the chastening impact of Plaid Cymru's eventual exposure to actually existing European institutions that led the party in 2003 to abandon its utopian commitment to a post‐sovereign Europe in favour of an explicit commitment to ‘independence’ as its long‐term aim.     

The Perils of Utopia: The Russian Intelligentsia under Communism and Perestroika

After evoking the spirit of the Russian intelligentsia, this essay interprets its changing place in society. A force for humanism, universal brotherhood and freedom of expression within a succession of repressive political regimes, the intelligentsia should — one might think — be greatly favoured by perestroika. Yet its very idealism and uncritical faith in such abstractions as ‘the people’ and ‘beloved foreigners’ have ill prepared it to deal with harsh and complex realities. As earlier stereotypes crumble and the Communist regime disintegrates, the intelligentsia itself is confused and divided. Faced with moral and political dilemmas, Tolstaya suggests that there may be some virtue in a productive form of escapism in art.     

Spaces of Resistance,Spaces of Respite: Franchise housekeepers keeping house in the workplace and at home

As a contribution to a growing geography of domestic labour, I offer this micro-scale study as a glimpse into the lives of franchise housekeepers. This study sheds light on the ways women cope with their labour both in the workplace and at home. Scrutiny of the women's ordinary actions and reactions to their labour demonstrate how they devise coping strategies through mundane, common, everyday acts and forge spaces of resistance and respite. I discuss these strategies and spaces by drawing on in-depth interviews with 14 women employed in housekeeping services franchises.