Women,Property and Urban Space in Tenth‐Century Milan

This paper deals with Milan, north‐west Italy, in the tenth century CE. It investigates the nature of property ownership and transfer, within the intramural circuit, in the suburbs and further afield. Its particular focus is on the property in which women dealt, both as members of religious communities and as wives and widows. The main conclusion is that women of all sorts and in many different sorts of situations owned far less property than men. The reasons for this pattern, which is common across western Europe in this period, remain obscure. It certainly has something to do with perceptions of female passivity prevalent in contemporary texts but it does not necessarily mean that some women could not have agency in other ways, notably as nuns with spiritual power.     

Lay-Religious Associations, Urban Identities, and Urban Space in Eighteenth-Century Milan

Religious life was integral to the social and political organization of eighteenth-century Milan. The composition and character of lay-religious activities reflect not only official hierarchies within the city but also unofficial bonds and identities, such as those of neighbourhood. They reveal the multiple identities of neighbourhood, parish, trade and family, but equally the tensions between collective forms of piety and the new religious values and aesthetic adopted by the Milanese elites during the late Enlightenment.     

近代上海虹庙的转型与城市社会空间构建

上海开埠以后,传统民间信仰赖以存续的社会环境发生改变,虹庙由官、民共同信仰转变为以妓女行业为主要信仰群体的局面,并构建出以虹庙为中心的特殊城市社会空间,进而促使公众对虹庙的意象由护国安民变为“妓女烧香的地方”。研究发现,上海开埠后,行业种类繁盛背景下妓女职业的发展,以及政府祭祀政策转变等因素是虹庙信仰变迁的主要原因。报刊、社会小说等近代传播媒介的宣传,加速了虹庙社会公众意象转变并强化了其空间属性,从而带来虹庙这一传统信仰在近代上海的转型。     

铁路与近代郑州城市空间结构变动及功能演变

平汉、陇海铁路相继筑通并在郑州交汇,为郑州城市的成长提供了前所未有的历史机遇及新生动力机制,城市的发展态势、空间结构、外在景观及城市功能均发生显著变化。大量人流、物流的汇聚,使火车站附近区域快速发展,并在火车站与老城区间形成了功能鲜明、以商品贸易为导向的新市街,城市空间大为拓展。郑州城市由老城区向火车站聚集发展,火车站和新市街逐渐成为新的生活中心,改变了以官府衙门和寺庙为重心的传统城市布局,城市空间结构随之变容。基于商业贸易对交通的需要,郑州城市平面与铁路沿线呈辐射状延伸,依托铁路形成新的功能分区,城市功能由此转换,交通功能得以彰显。     

Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining the Urban Commons

The commons is increasingly invoked as a way to envision new worlds. One strand of commons research focuses at the local scale, on small groups in “traditional”, mostly rural societies; this research asks how commons are maintained over time. Another strand focuses on the commons at a global scale; this is political research that asks how commons can be reclaimed from a capitalist landscape. Here, I bridge these two approaches by theorizing the commons as reclaimed and maintained in the context of the city, through examining the experiences of limited‐equity housing cooperatives in Washington, DC. I argue that the urban commons is marked by two distinct traits: it emerges in space that is saturated with people, competing uses, and financial investment; and it is constituted by the collective work of strangers. The challenges of reclaiming and maintaining an urban commons are substantial, but the need for them is urgent.     

The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics

This essay outlines a theoretical framework for investigating the links between the production of urban space (Lefebvre) and the production of ideology (Althusser) and hegemony (Gramsci) by proposing the concept of “the urban sensorium”. With a view to the aesthetics of urban experience and everyday life, this concept aligns Fredric Jameson's “postmodern” adaptation of city planner Kevin Lynch's research on “cognitive mapping” with Walter Benjamin's insights on “aestheticizing politics” in order to ask: how does urban space mediate ideology and produce hegemony while aestheticizing politics? In so doing, the spotlight falls on a conceptual constellation including four key theoretical terms: “ideology”, “aesthetics”, “mediation” and “totality”. While working through them, the essay argues that Jameson's outstanding contribution to a spatialized understanding of “postmodernism” lies above all in his Marxist (Lukácsian, Althusserian and Sartrean) theorization of mediation and totality; whereas radical students of the city can find the richest dialectical elaboration of these two concepts with special attention to space and urbanism in the oeuvre of Henri Lefebvre, especially in the recently translated The Urban Revolution.     

History, Memory, and Identity in Modern Singapore: Testimonies from the Urban Margins

In 2006–2007, I interviewed elderly Singaporeans on theirexperiences of resettlement from an urban kampong (village)to emergency public housing after a great fire in 1961. I learnedmuch about the lives of semiautonomous dwellers in an unauthorizedsettlement and the individual and social transformation followingtheir rehousing. My informants also highlighted what the experiencesmeant to them and their identity in a modern city-state. Thispaper treats the testimonies as both source and social memoryand seeks to avoid the essentialism into which many social historians,oral history practitioners, and memory scholars have fallenin their approach toward the craft. As a source of social history,when used in conjunction with other historical sources, thereminiscences are patently useful for understanding the roleof public housing in transforming a marginal population intoan integrated citizenry. This enables the writing of a new socialhistory of postwar Singapore that departs from the discursiveofficial accounts of urban kampong life and of the 1961 inferno.At the same time, the oral history also underlines powerfulsocial and political influences on individual memory, beingmarked by nostalgia for the kampong and ambivalence toward theimagined character of younger Singaporeans. Statements on therumors of government-inspired arson in the 1961 calamity, however,constitute a significant countermyth in contemporary society,revealing a more critical side to the social memory.