Rabea Blue - Fantasyautorin
Rabea Blue is an author, writing fantasy, science-fiction and romance. She alreasy published short stories & novels.
View Rights PortalRabea Blue is an author, writing fantasy, science-fiction and romance. She alreasy published short stories & novels.
View Rights PortalTouting informal settlements or informality in general as illegal, crime-ridden, unsafe, filthy, chaotic, and formal developments as legal, orderly or safe, and so forth has not solved anything and informality as a way of life or an economic reality lingers and grows. Demystifying informal urban design and planning delves deeper into this conundrum and seeks to debunk some common misguided perceptions about it. Borrowing popular philosophical and political analogies from Isaiah Berlin and Gregory Treverton and others, it encourages urban designers and planners to become multitaskers like foxes rather than hedgehogs who can do one thing right. The book ends with some general takeaways on assuming more proactive roles in informal urban design issues and avoiding two potential pitfalls while interacting with them.
Digital technologies promise efficiency and comfort, but the smoothness of platform services relies on the hidden social labour of those who keep the gig economy running. This book presents a comparative ethnography of young men making a living through digital technologies: selling mobile airtime in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and app-based delivery riders in Berlin, Germany. These case studies explore the significance of symbolic capital in urban youth's social existence and organisation of livelihood in the digital economy, and the technological mechanisms producing a new form of urban precarity. Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan puts forward an original comparative approach to develop a global urban sociology for the digital era. It provides an innovative analytical toolbox that decentres discussions of precarity from the standard of a normal employment contract. With its focus on symbolic capital, the ethnography shows the consequences of the proliferating gig economy for status struggles among urban youth, and carefully embeds the densification of software and services into the socio-material relations on which these new urban infrastructures are built.
Social democratic parties struggle to appeal to a divided electorate. Particularly prescient is the clash between working-class voters thatare socially conservative and middle-class voters who are liberally inclined but economicallyleft. Are politics and policies that appeal to both even a possibility? Nowhere is thatdebate more acute than in European cities, yet in no other political space are answers more likely to be found.Where urban voters turn left, they are increasingly attracted by radical and green alternatives to social democracy.Social democracy and urban politicsdelves into the changing relationship between these three party families on the urban scene. Mapping electoral geography, governing strategies and the interface between parties and social movements on the left, the authors reflect upon the formation and dilemmas of a broader progressive alliance.
As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.
The imperatives of public health shaped our understanding of the cities of the global north in the first industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are doing so again today, reflecting new geographies of the urban age of the twenty-first. Emergent cities in parts of the globe experiencing most profound urban growth face major problems of economic, ecological and social sustainability when making sense of new health challenges and designing policy frameworks for public health infrastructures. The rapid evolution of complex 'systems of systems' in today's cities continually reconfigure the urban commons, reshaping how we understand urban public health, defining new problems and drawing on new data tools for analysis that work from the historical legacies and geographical variations that structure public health systems.
Conducting a Lacanian-inspired psychoanalysis of some of the most candid interview materials ever gathered from former IRA members and loyalists, the author demonstrates through a careful examination of their slips of the tongue, jokes, rationalisations and contradictions, that it is the unconscious dynamics of socio-ideological fantasy, i.e. the unconscious pleasure people find in suffering, domination, submission, ignorance, failure and rivalry over jouissance, that lead to the reproduction of antagonism between the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. In the light of this, he concludes that traditional approaches to conflict resolution which overlook the unconscious are doomed to failure and that a Lacanian psychoanalytic understanding of socio-ideological fantasy has great potential for informing the way we understand and study all inter-religious and ethnic conflicts. Whether you find yourself agreeing with the arguments in this book or not, you are sure to find it a welcome change from both the existing, mainly conservative, analyses of the Northern Ireland conflict and traditional approaches to conflict resolution.
This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.
This book examines the television serials created by influential showrunner David Simon. The book argues that Simon's main theme is the state of the contemporary American city and that all of his serials (barring one about the Iraq War) explore different facets of the metropolis. Each series offers distinctly different visions of the American city, but taken together they represent a sustained and intricate exploration of urban problems in modern America. From deindustrialisation in The Wire and residential segregation in Show Me a Hero to post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme and the transformation of the urban core in The Deuce, David Simon's American city traces the urban through-line in Simon's body of work. Based on sustained analysis of these serials and their engagement with contemporary politics and culture, David Simon's American city offers a compelling examination of one of television's most arresting voices.
This comparative study of urban poverty is the first to chart the irregular pulse of poverty's encounters with officialdom. It exploits an unusual methodology to secure new perspectives from familiar sources. The highly localised characteristics of the welfare economy generated a peculiarly urban environment for the poor. Separate chapters examine the parameters of workhouse life when the preconceptions of contemporaries have been stripped away; the reach of institutional charities such as almshouses, schools and infirmaries; and the surprisingly broad clientele of urban pawnbrokers. Detailed analysis of the poor is achieved via meticulous matching of individuals who fell within the purview of two or more authorities. The result is a unique insight into the survival economics of urban poverty, arising not from a tidy network of welfare but from a loose assembly of options, where the impoverished positioned themselves repeatedly to fit official, philanthropic, or casual templates of the 'deserving'. This book will be essential reading for historians of English poverty and welfare, and eighteenth-century social and economic life. ;
A compelling account of the project to transform post-war Manchester, revealing the clash between utopian vision and compromised reality. Urban renewal in Britain was thrilling in its vision, yet partial and incomplete in its implementation. For the first time, this deep study of a renewal city reveals the complex networks of actors behind physical change and stagnation in post-war Britain. Using the nested scales of region, city and case-study sites, the book explores the relationships between Whitehall legislation, its interpretation by local government planning officers and the on-the-ground impact through urban architectural projects. Each chapter highlights the connections between policy goals, global narratives and the design and construction of cities. The Cold War, decolonialisation, rising consumerism and the oil crisis all feature in a richly illustrated account of architecture and planning in post-war Manchester.
The dream of the ideal city is as old as the city itself. Since real cities often develop chaotically, the idea of perfecting them, even tearing them down if necessary, and rebuilding them according to the prevailing patterns of thought is an obvious one. The latest manifestation of this utopia is the smart city - the intelligent city, packed with the latest technology and extensively digitised. But will air taxis and hyperloops, ubiquitous sensors, access control systems and data-driven management really make the city of the future a better place to live? Are they the answer to the enormous challenges facing today's fast-growing metropolises? Or will the supposed administrative paradise ultimately mutate into a digital juggernaut?
From author: This is a cutting-edge exploration of black urban politics in Parisian racialized working class and working poor districts, the formation of abolition geography, and the possibilities of new forms of political blackness. In Black Socialities. Urban resistance and the struggle beyond recognition in Paris, Vanessa E. Thompson argues that black urban politics in the French banlieues are multi-racial and spatially grounded towards abolition. Based on a close engagement with urban black activist practices against racial imagery in the city, policing and state racism, and housing insecurity, she shows how radical anti-racism goes beyond struggles for recognition and unfolds alongside new formations of political blackness that is based on urban conviviality. This form of black politics has much to teach us in this current conjuncture of liberal anti-racism and state recognition politics.