The Urban Imagery as a Starting Point for Citizenship

Estudos de Sociologia, 2022

This essay, which opens the dossier "Practices and Processes of Urban Space Production: Decentering Perspectives," takes this tension as a premise. The classical perspective that understood and analyzed the city as the ground for civil progress, the development of human potentialities—or as a stage for the reverberation of "modern" mistrusts and fears—overlooked a series of urban life experiences that have accumulated and evolved on the outskirts of global capitalism. On the one hand, these experiences are marked by the colonial past—hence by the effects of transatlantic slave trade, massive displacement of people, slavery, genocide, and racism—that historically interweaves "North-South" and "South-South". On the other, by the persistent legacies of this past, which obstruct the resolution of contemporary issues, such as segregation, inequalities, lack of infrastructure, problems in urban-environmental regulation and management, among others.

2014

Religion and Urbanity Online , 2020

This article deals with the meaning and the historical change of the term urbanity with the aim of making urbanity as an analytical term fruitful. Since urbanity is both a historical concept and the object of analysis, a brief semantic history must be undertaken. It takes us (at least) back to the time of the Roman Republic, experiences a change of meaning in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and shows how urbanism and urbanity finally found their way into scientific discourse, starting with the social sciences about 100 years ago. Far from representing a uniform concept, it is also often normative or based on quantitative, measurable criteria, thus neglecting practices and ideas. All this (historical change, regional differences, tendency towards normativity in scientific discourse) makes it seem necessary to venture a new approach. My proposal is therefore to understand urbanity as a concept of form that allows for the analysis and better understanding of spatiotemporal configurations, practices and representations in relation to cities.

Urban citizenship is a frequent topic in studies in social sciences and it carries many different and ambiguous meanings. This paper is focused on the studies of urban citizenship as a type of the new concepts of citizenship, which is based on the idea that the city is a primary social and political community within which individuals and groups should exercise their rights. Contemporary demands for urban citizenship are mostly seen as a corrective of the neoliberal policy and unequal social power reflected on the use of space, and they are based on the viewpoint that a more inclusive policy is needed, which would include more citizens in decision making with regard to the (city) space. In this way, its pronounced commercial and consumer function would be reduced, and its use value would increase. In addition to urban citizenship being related to the idea of the right to the city at the theoretical and practical level, it is also based on the concept of citizenship (as a broader term under which it falls) and this paper also points to its variations.

VLC arquitectura. Research Journal

En el complejo ámbito del análisis y la representación del fenómeno urbano, este texto aborda la evolución de aquellos trabajos que se ocupan específicamente de indagar en las relaciones que se establecen entre los individuos y la ciudad, centrando su atención en una de las líneas menos estudiadas: la representación cartográfica de los aspectos subjetivos, emocionales y perceptivos, ligados a la experiencia de recorrer y habitar un espacio urbano. La ciudad no puede considerarse como un espacio inocuo u objetivo, sino que, al contrario, siempre habrá un imaginario que la construye y acompaña. Este imaginario, que determina nuestra forma de percibirla, de estar y de movernos por ella, es fundamental para la comprensión integral de los procesos y las dinámicas urbanas. Y aproximarnos desde el análisis y la representación gráfica a esa relación dialéctica entre dimensión física y subjetiva de la ciudad, intangible en sí misma, es hoy posible gracias a los progresos teóricos y, sobre to...

2015

Palabras clave: Fotografia, Ciudad, Espacios, Ecuador, Politica. Abstract: The city is the scene where the life of thousands of people go by, where theirs works are developed, but it is also the place where we can find their leisure spaces. The city is more a habitable space, rather than an inhabited place, or so it should be, but often, and increasing in a worldwide level, happens that policies and governments decisions make this almost impossible. Ordinances are aimed to improve the lives of citizens under the umbrella of progress, but actually they make it much more difficult and less human. Contemporary art, especially those creations that show some concern about being a social / political construction, has approached the subject on several occasions and from many different points of view. In this case I will analyze how it is done through the work of a number of artists in Ecuador.

ABSTRACT Human being makes an effort to reach an absolute judgement inherently. Just like “cities”. They want life to proceed under control, its' own rationality and in the direction of cognition. At this point a major conflict begins. Today's modernity - rationality and history - tradition with a long past are waiting to collide for each other. It's almost impossible to creat universal and total structures in the light of all the modern discourses. Every settlement, every street, every building have certain characteristics in terms of that culture, perception and inhabitants. To understand and recognize the city, senses should belong to “it” before brains in contrary to the rationalist approach. Wars, especially the World Wars, throw up modernity to the transience of life. First I.World War, then II. World War caused a major trauma as the destruction of people, cities and countries. Big traumas were began to live in their own environment by individuals that are progressive in modernity. Life almost began to stop in cities that were destructed with their structure, vision, past and future. Immediately afterwards, this concerns and efforts to holding on life began to cover pain. At this point, architectural improvements have been effective for the cities that were demolished and struggled to re-stand up. Many items such as modernization, industrialization, urbanization begin to create traces through the texture and posture of the city. Should ‘connection with the past’ or ‘directly future orientation’ be effective for the settlement that wants to stand up to move on the road? Initially everything should be open, then all administrative and architectural decisions should be taken. First option for the city should restore a living organism with its' own dynamics. A place, in which its' people live their lives with the consciousness of their past, can entirely be "CITY". Necessary decisions about cities' own dynamics should be taken and make arrangements before important connections between regions, intersections, meeting points and transport networks. In order to reach right solutions, planning should be based on the transition from human& building scale to architectural scale. All the vital criterias should be determined carefully by emphasizing on the concepts as transformation, transition, interaction and ergonomics. From now on studies should be made for the creation of a real city. KEY WORDS: modernization, organism, inhabitants, settlement, building scale, architectural scale.

La interpretación de los procesos de transformación urbana siempre ha planteado grandes dificultades. El esfuerzo normativo desarrollado en el plano internacional sobre el ámbito que nos ocupa, ha generado una ingente cantidad de documentos relacionados con el denominado patrimonio monumental, arquitectónico, construido o edificado, cuyo análisis pone de manifiesto la propia evolución conceptual experimentada desde las primeras definiciones que consideraban al monumento de forma individual, hasta derivar en una percepción mucho más compleja con los conceptos de conjunto histórico o centro histórico y posteriormente con los de ciudad histórica o área urbana histórica. Este recorrido conceptual, nos ha conducido en la actualidad a la idea de paisajes urbanos históricos, aún en proceso de consolidación. El espacio urbano de las ciudades históricas actúa como un organismo vivo que evoluciona de forma paralela a los procesos de transformación social conformando el sustrato material expresión de la identidad y la memoria colectiva e incorporando muchas otras vertientes patrimoniales. En el S. XXI, la globalización y la sociedad de la información han originado que gran parte de estos procesos socio-económicos se hayan acelerado con unas repercusiones que aún no somos capaces de advertir en su totalidad. En este contexto, las ciudades tienen la necesidad de adaptarse a las dinámicas generales del desarrollo urbano y la integración de las actuaciones contemporáneas arquitectónicas y urbanísticas con su entorno natural, material e inmaterial, constituye un obstáculo de dimensiones considerables. Ni los agentes encargados en la tutela y gestión de las ciudades históricas, ni el nuevo marco conceptual y teórico en torno a la noción de paisajes urbanos históricos han sabido precisar cuáles son los “límites de cambio aceptables”, de forma que estos suelen hacerse a posteriori y de manera subjetiva. Este hecho ha originado que el carácter holístico, dinámico y transversal de este nuevo concepto, en muchas ocasiones pueda ser utilizado como un subterfugio al servicio de determinados agentes, que lejos de preocuparse por la preservación de su memoria, están priorizando otros intereses e naturaleza más lucrativa. Con el presente artículo, se persigue un acercamiento inicial que permita centrar la atención sobre estos problemas estableciendo propuestas para el desarrollo de metodologías de límite de cambios aceptables y evaluaciones de impacto sobre las que asentar las políticas y los modelos de gestión urbana.

e-science.unicamp.br

Any urban environmental problematic quarrel about cities demands the clarification on what it is the "urban space", its production, composition and dynamics of sócioespacial organization, as also of that it is the "urban environment". When the urban space in its social and natural dimension is analyzed it is impossible not to consider the ambient question and the social in the quarrels on the social transformations and the consequences of the new social produced arrangements in the cities.