Tag: Urban Geography
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The Bear: Gentrification & its discontents
The opening shot of the highly acclaimed TV show ‘The Bear’ sees the main character Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto staring down a caged brown bear in the heart of Chicago’s downtown. The motif, evidently a dream, nightmare or general vision rather than actual events, serves a telling mark not only of…
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Reflexive Creativity in Urban Politics?
Many years ago I coined the phrase Urban Subversion that began as an interest in parkour as a creative act of urban re-appropriation. It soon became apparent as I looked for additional ways in which people were interacting with the city in novel and innovate ways, there was a small, but increasing…
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Practising urban diversity
I’ve been reading Sharon Zukin’s latest book, and it is a stark reminder of the plight of current urbanism. While focused solely on New York, the sentiments hold true for a number of other cities around the world (but by no means all). In criticizing Jacobs, a bold move it…
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My kind of town: Ode to the crucible of modernism, Chicago
Stepping off the Loop onto street level in Chicago is an attempt to navigate through one of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe‘s dreams. The canyons of steel, glass and concrete are striation par excellence, linearising not only the spatiality around you, but your psychological satnav. Left, right, forward or back,…
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The Urban Communicate: From T-Mobile to the Love Police via the Reichstag
Having just been reading up on the ‘Media City’ (the academic fundamentals of which are articulated very acutely by Scott McQuire’s 2008 book, which I have just finished reviewing for the Urban Geography Research Group), the ways in which technology, consumption, networks and the city collide in contemporary society are becoming increasingly apparent,…
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CFP RGS-IBG 2010: “Urban Subversions: Conceptualising alternative urban pastimes in the modern World City”.
Call for Papers: Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference, 1st – 3rd September 2010, RGS, London. Session conveners: Oli Mould, Department of Geography, Loughborough University. Bradley Garrett, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway. Sponsors: Urban Geography Research Group Geographies of Leisure and Tourism Research Group Discussant:…
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Visualising Cities: Part 5… Get Lost.
Well, I never thought that my visualising cities series would be one of the more popular posts on my blog, but then if you put a reference to the women in the red dress from The Matrix in a blog, you are bound to see the hit counter rise… Google…
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A Paradox of the Urban Condition
Gary Bridge once asked “Surely it is time to banish reason, with all it’s exclusivities and homogenisations, from the city, and to let difference in?” (Bridge, 2004: 1). A poignant issue, given that that more and more people are flooding into our cities. And yet, they continue to show signs…
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Visualising Cities: Part 4 – Ecstacity
During the course of navigating the gargantuan library of literature and visual material on urban life, finding a book which encapsulates the complexity of the urban condition succinctly and concisely is much like searching for some sort of knitting implement in some sort of stack. This is in part due…
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Visualising Cities: Part 3 – “…starring, Sydney as Nowhere in Particular…”
Carrying on my series of visualising cities (see Part 1 and Part 2), I wanted to focus on one of my specialist cities…. No doubt you have all seen the Matrix films, and no doubt you would have recognised the fact that it was Sydney in the background, playing the…
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