Recognizing synesthesia on the international stage: The first scientific symposium on synesthesia (at The International Conference of Physiological Psychology,Paris, 1889)

ABSTRACT

At the first ever worldwide international conference of psychology in Paris, 1889, one symposium included a round-table event devoted entirely to the neurodevelopmental condition of synesthesia. Details of this seminal gathering on synesthesia and its international reception have been lost to historical obscurity. A synesthesia study committee emerged from this meeting, as well as a new research tool. Moreover, the scientific findings discussed during this symposium would be echoed over a hundred years later, when a new wave of synesthesia research in the late-twentieth century arose. This article sheds new light on this seminal gathering and aims to answer the following historical questions: Why was synesthesia included in this conference? What science was discussed? Who were the members of the committee and how did they come to be involved? What were their contributions to synesthesia research before, during, and after the conference? What has history shown us about the impact of this symposium on the science of synesthesia?     

From Politicization to Policing: The Rise and Decline of New Social Movements in Amsterdam and Paris

This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left‐wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for both politicization and policing. Cities serve as sites of politicization because they are incubators of the relational conduits that enable activists from different sectors to engage with one another's struggles and look beyond narrow temporal and spatial horizons. However, cities also serve as sites of policing because authorities constantly attempt to reconfigure governmental arrangements in such a way that civil society serves as an extension of the government and comes to fulfill an instrumental role in the development and implementation of policy. Just as politicizing implies the widening of temporal and spatial horizons, policing implies the narrowing of such horizons. The analysis shows the social movements of the 1960s lost steam in two of the major hubs of the new left and reveals some of the more universal mechanisms through which cities generate or quell dissent.     

Indexing the great ledger of the community: urban house numbering, city directories, and the production of spatial legibility

Despite the recent focus on the spatial politics of calculation, few studies have explored the historical geography of house numbering, a spatial practice that has arguably been one of the principal strategies for rationalizing the geographic spaces of everyday life over the course of the last two centuries. This paper provides the beginnings of a critical spatial history of street and house numbering in the gridded cities of the United States since the eighteenth century. City directory publishers were among the leading proponents of numbering houses at a time when many local governments had yet to firmly commit to systematic house numbering as an essential responsibility of the local state. I therefore examine the connection between the publishing of city directories and the development of urban house numbering systems, both of which were integral to the production of spatial legibility and the individualization of the urban population. The notion of viewing the city as a ‘text’ is historicized through a critical analysis of the modernist comparison of urban space to a recordkeeping book. The paper concludes by tracing the institutionalization of house numbering as a practice of spatial governmentality.     

A diasporic right to the city: the production of a Moroccan diaspora space in Granada,Spain

In this paper, I bring together ideas of ‘diaspora space’ and ‘the right to the city’ and empirically demonstrate how the formation of diasporas is frequently dependent on migrants attaining certain rights to the city. These rights, I argue, are conditioned and attained by the interplay of urban structural context with the place-making strategies of migrants. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that Moroccan migrants in Granada, Spain, have achieved a partial right to a neighbourhood of the city, producing a multi-sensory, self-orientalised diaspora space. First, I show that certain urban conditions in Granada provided a foothold for Moroccan migrants to begin to form a diaspora and transform urban space. Second, I demonstrate that through the mobilisation of a strategically self-orientalised cultural capital, the diaspora have partly appropriated the valuable history of Al-Andalus, a key component in the city’s tourist imagery. These factors and strategies have enabled Moroccan migrants to gain a right to have a visible presence in the city, a right to produce and transform urban space and a right to spatalise diverse identities – all key rights, I argue, in the formation of a diaspora.     

Local knowledge is required: a rhythmanalytical approach to the late Mesolithic and early Neolithic of the East Anglian Fenland, UK

This is a paper about blurring the boundaries between people, land and water in the past and of appreciating the importance of the wider environment in our accounts of prehistory. Maritime approaches to time/space are shown to offer new ways of looking at how people engage with the world around them. Informed by these approaches, and building on Lefebvre’s concepts of lived space and rhythm, current tensions within archaeology between cartesian and phenomenological approaches to the past will be shown to be unconstructive. These issues are all addressed in relation the late Mesolithic and early Neolithic of the East Anglian Fenland. Here a rhythmical, maritime approach will be shown to offer us a subtly different view of life during this period.     

Othering,governing, and resistance of abject urban animals: Egyptian geese and their right to the city

In this paper, we examine the controversy over the use of urban green spaces and water bodies by Egyptian geese in the German city of Frankfurt am Main as an example of more-than-human political conflicts over the right to an environmentally just city. Specifically, we analyze the media discourse and interviews that we conducted as multispecies go-alongs to identify how othering in media and policy constitutes Egyptian geese legally and discursively as “alien, invasive, and aggressive” as well as “disgusting, polluting, and health-threatening.” This othering constructs Egyptian geese as abject animals and justifies their governing through “geese management” technologies, ranging from monitoring to atmospheric engineering and to killing the birds. While the management objective is to displace the Egyptian geese from urban spaces dedicated for human recreation, these spaces also turn out to be places of animal resistance.     

Watching the city: the politics of space in Pizza,birra, faso

In this article, I discuss the representation of Buenos Aires in Pizza, birra, faso. Paying attention to some of the film’s salient aspects vis-a-vis its portrayal of urban space, my analysis has as its ultimate goal to reveal the ways in which the film engages in a political critique that might seem absent if studied solely from a narrative point of view. In this sense, Pizza, birra, faso is a paradigmatic example of the ways in which many of the films of New Argentine Cinema engaged with their political context differently to films of the post-dictatorship generation. To unearth this political content, I will argue, it is necessary to study these films as films, and not merely as texts.     

Prefiguring a future city: urban growth,spatial planning and the economic local context in Catalonia

This study undertook a quantitative analysis of town master plans to define future urban growth. Spatial direction and intensity of urban expansion were analysed in relation to local contexts using land zoning and a comprehensive database of socio-economic indicators at the municipal scale in Catalonia, Spain. Our results illustrate a progressive shift towards discontinuous settlements consolidating urban centres in most accessible rural areas. Contrary to what was hypothesized (and partly observed) in recent decades, settlement expansion will modestly contribute to a balanced urban spatial structure. Future urban development in Catalonia will not follow a polycentric model, fuelling instead the growth of medium and small urban centres. This process may consolidate the incipient divide in rural areas with high accessibility and a dynamic economic base with remote inland areas experiencing land abandonment and depopulation. The use of indicators derived from town master plans in the assessment of (scattered or polycentric) future urbanization in Europe is finally discussed.     

边境城市丹东的兴边富民政策特色研究

中国最大的边境城市和满族人口最多的聚居城市——丹东目前面临着边境城市功能定位和少数民族地区经济发展的双重任务。“兴边富民行动”为边境民族地区的经济发展、社会稳定和少数民族脱贫致富提供了空前的发展机遇。     

辛亥革命后的八旗驻防城:山东青州满城个案考察(1911-2003)

在清代八旗各驻防点中,山东青州的满城建立时间较晚,但却是距京最近、交通也比较便利的将军级驻防地之一,而且直至上世纪八、九十年代还基本保存完好,所以颇受研究满族史的学者瞩目。本文根据笔者2002年和2003年两次赴青州采访旗人后裔的经历,讨论青州满族通过“农民化“措施导致的边缘化过程,以及他们在这个过程中是否仍然保留着自己的民族意识,又是以何等样的方式将其表达出来的问题。     

Passing as a tourist: Exploring the everyday urban geopolitics of tourism

This paper presents a case study of territorial boundary transgression and intergroup encounters mediated by tourism in a volatile and contested urban space. I present the notion of ‘passing as a tourist’ as a prism to investigate the nexus between performative tourism and everyday urban geopolitics. Situated in East Jerusalem's core geographies of colonization and political violence, this paper uses archival news material and a textual analysis of primary questionnaire data to critically examine how Jewish Israeli Jerusalemites visiting the Muslim Quarter in the Old City negotiate encounters in a conflicted space. The study reveals how the performative dimensions of ‘tourism’ in a context of polarized ethnonational division expose the role of embodied, everyday geopolitics in the production of urban spaces of tourism.     

The desert,the border,and the city: Staging a spectacle on the Chile-Peru border

The 1970s saw Chile and Peru, both headed by military dictators, come to the brink of war. In order to avoid such a war, the Chilean military in the far north engaged in techniques of ‘spectacle’ for two reasons: firstly, to convince citizens on both sides of the border that Chile had a strong military and would succeed in the event of a war with Peru, and secondly, to create the impression of ‘fraternity’ with Peru. To perform these spectacles, the Chilean military employed the geography of northern Chile in three spaces: the desert, the border, and the city. These spaces became stages where acts of military deception could be implemented with the Chileans using fake tanks, military ceremonies, and bogus parades to appear militarily strong. This extends current scholarship by arguing that multiple environments can be harnessed for their specific geographical qualities in order to stage a unified geopolitical spectacle. Previous geographical scholarship has focused on individual environments as military spaces and scholarship on spectacle has treated environments as a backdrop and not a central part of how the spectacle is enacted. Here I show that it was the precise natures of the border, the desert, and the city that were exploited for a multi-scaled, heterogeneous, and fractured form of spectacle. Through the orchestrated control of these three spaces that define the border region, a clear narrative of military strength matched with a desire for peaceful co-operation with Peru was created.     

The governmentalities of infrastructure and services amid urban conflict: East Jerusalem in the post Oslo era

Urban conflict in Jerusalem has mainly been studied through the lens of spatial and functional segregation and discriminative fragmentation between Israeli and Palestinian localities. This article adopts a governmentality approach to the study of the politics of urban infrastructure and services in urban conflict, and argues that a governmentalization process of East Jerusalem by Israel has evolved in the last two decades that has been enacted mainly through the control and management of Palestinian urban infrastructure and services. Since, as manifestations of resistance to Israeli occupation, many of the Palestinian urban functionalities historically operated separately from Israeli state apparatuses, this new development and its consequences indicate an increasing dependency and forced adaptation of Palestinians in Jerusalem to Israeli rule. Based on analysis of Palestinian public transport and education systems, the article demonstrates how the “soft” power of governmentality – mediated through the control and management of urban infrastructure and services – diffuses among the Palestinian population and in space, restructuring them as objects and subjects of Israeli administration and governmental order. In this light, urban infrastructure and services appear in the course of urban conflict as an arena of governmentality and counter-governmentality. On the one hand they serve as a site where identities are practiced and defended; on the other, they may mediate and facilitate the restructuring of political subjectivities and normalization of political structures and hierarchies.     

In the Shadow of the Tower: Spatial proximity to mosques,visible diversity,and support for the radical right

Growth in racial, ethnic, and religious minority populations in western societies has coincided with the growing success of nativist and radical right political parties. A leading target for nativist politicians has been Islamic religious symbols, particularly mosques. But does the presence of mosques within citizens’ milieux influence their political behaviour? To explore this question, we draw on longitudinal survey data from the Netherlands augmented by a web-scraped list of Dutch mosques to investigate the influence of local context – both architectural context in the form of spatial proximity to mosques and local demographic context in the form of visible diversity – on support for the Party for Freedom (PVV), a radical right, nativist political party. Our analyses reveal that while proximity to a mosque increases support for the radical right, proximity to a mosque with a minaret exerts a stronger effect. Also, closer proximity to a mosque with a minaret and greater local diversity amplify the differences in party support between the left and right. These findings allow us to better understand the impact of symbolic cultural threat on voting for nativist parties.     

Mendicants as victims: scale,scope and the idiom of violence

This article establishes the scale of violence perpetrated against mendicant friars in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe, and provides a list of these events in an on-line appendix. It underscores and analyses the wide variety of contexts in which such incidents took place and examines the ramifications for the history of the mendicant orders and medieval urban society generally. Violence was a subtler form of communicative action than is sometimes recognised, and the paper points to the inverse relationship between power and violence in medieval urban conflicts.     

The violence of spectacle: Statist schemes to green the desert and constructing Astana and Ashgabat as urban oases

Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have been home to the most impressive urban development projects in the entire post-Soviet world. Their capitals, Astana and Ashgabat, now boast uniquely monumental architecture and local leaders have invested heavily in ‘green belt’ projects to surround the cities with lush vegetation, as well as developing green and water-laden public spaces. In doing so, elites have drawn on Soviet-era ‘garden city’ idealism, as well as more recent environmental sustainability narratives. Yet these schemes are anything but sustainable. Unfolding on the arid Central Asian steppe, they depend on heavy irrigation, with water diverted from rivers that already fail to meet regional demands. Employing a comparative approach, I ask why and with what effect state planners have sought to craft Astana and Ashgabat as spectacularly green ‘urban oases,’ when their local climates should defy the logic of sustainability. In so doing, I consider urban greening in the two countries as part of a wider phenomenon of statist schemes to green the desert, which have a long and diverse history. Extending the literature on desert greening, I argue that the structural violence they manifest and perpetuate is best understood by attending to how they operate as a form of spectacle.     

The unheard voices of youth in urban planning: using social capital as a theoretical lens in Sunshine Coast,Australia

Despite the imperative that youth voices should contribute to shaping their future world, there is limited evidence of youth agency and participation which articulates their unique experience of community in urban planning decision-making. This study uses the lens of social capital to compare perspectives of community between young people aged 15–17 years and adults in a suburban community on the Sunshine Coast, South East Queensland, Australia. The results, derived from both quantitative and qualitative methods, illustrate the different experiences of community between youth and adults and suggest how urban planners and decision-makers can incorporate youth-friendly responses to address issues of power inequality between youth and adult residents and mechanisms to engage adult residents through collaborative governance approaches.