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      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        June 2024

        Gendered urban violence among Brazilians

        Painful truths from Rio de Janeiro and London

        by Cathy McIlwaine, Paul Heritage, Miriam Krenzinger Azambuja, Moniza Rizzini Ansari, Eliana Sousa Silva, Yara Evans

        This book aims to examine the nature of and resistance to gendered urban violence among Brazilian women in London and in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on the conceptualisation of translocational gendered urban violence framework, it highlights the importance of examining direct forms of gender-based violence across private, public and transnational spheres as interlinked with structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. The book also explores the embodied and spatialised nature of gendered urban violence, explored through artistic engagements and arts-based methods. In developing a translocational feminist tracing methodological and epistemological approach across the social sciences and the arts, the book argues for the importance of a collaborative approach among academic, civil society organisations, artists and creative researchers with a view to engendering empathetic transformation to address gendered urban violence in the long-term.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2024

        The machinic city

        Media, performance and participation

        by Marcos P. Dias

        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2024

        The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

        Engaging in everyday struggle

        by Alexandrina Vanke

        Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2025

        The Derby philosophers

        Science and culture in British urban society, 1700–1850

        by Paul A. Elliott

        The Derby Philosophers focuses upon the activities of a group of Midland intellectuals that included the evolutionist and physician Erasmus Darwin, Rev. Thomas Gisborne the evangelical philosopher and poet, Robert Bage the novelist, Charles Sylvester the chemist and engineer, William George and his son Herbert Spencer, the internationally renowned evolutionist philosopher who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest', and members of the Wedgwood and Strutt families. The book explores how, inspired by science and through educational activities, publications and institutions including the famous Derbyshire General Infirmary (1810) and Derby Arboretum (1840), the Derby philosophers strove to promote social, political and urban improvements with national and international consequences. Much more than a parochial history of one intellectual group or town, this book examines science, politics and culture during one of the most turbulent periods of British history.

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      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        August 2020

        Urban transformations and public health in the emergent city

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        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.

      • Trusted Partner
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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2006

        The experience of urban poverty, 1723–82

        Parish, charity and credit

        by Alannah Tomkins

        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. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2022

        Jacopo da Varagine's Chronicle of the city of Genoa

        by C. E. Beneš

        This book offers the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine, an author best known for his monumental book of saints' lives, the Golden legend. Jacopo's Chronicle presents a coherent vision of Genoa's place in history, the cosmos and Creation as written by the city's own archbishop - mixing eyewitness accounts with scholarly research about the city's origins and didactic reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life. Accompanied by an extensive introduction, this complete translation provides a unique perspective on a dynamic medieval city-state from one of its most important officials, broadening the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2019

        Jacopo da Varagine's Chronicle of the city of Genoa

        by Carrie Beneš, Rosemary Horrox

        This book offers the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine, an author best known for his monumental book of saints' lives, the Golden legend. Jacopo's Chronicle presents a coherent vision of Genoa's place in history, the cosmos and Creation as written by the city's own archbishop - mixing eyewitness accounts with scholarly research about the city's origins and didactic reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life. Accompanied by an extensive introduction, this complete translation provides a unique perspective on a dynamic medieval city-state from one of its most important officials, broadening the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2019

        Jacopo da Varagine's Chronicle of the city of Genoa

        by C. E. Beneš, Rosemary Horrox

        This book offers the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine, an author best known for his monumental book of saints' lives, the Golden legend. Jacopo's Chronicle presents a coherent vision of Genoa's place in history, the cosmos and Creation as written by the city's own archbishop - mixing eyewitness accounts with scholarly research about the city's origins and didactic reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life. Accompanied by an extensive introduction, this complete translation provides a unique perspective on a dynamic medieval city-state from one of its most important officials, broadening the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        African cities and collaborative futures

        Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics

        by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell

        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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Lifestyle, Sport & Leisure
        August 2016

        Culture in Manchester

        Institutions and urban change since 1850

        by Janet Wolff, Mike Savage

        This book brings together studies of cultural institutions in Manchester from 1850 to the present day, giving an unprecedented account of the city's cultural evolution. These bring to light the remarkable range of Manchester's contribution to modern cultural life, including the role of art education, popular theatre, religion, pleasure gardens, clubs and societies. The chapters show the resilience and creativity of Manchester's cultural institutions since 1850, challenging any simple narrative of urban decline following the erosion of Lancashire's industrial base, at the same time illustrating the range of activities across the social classes. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the cultural life of the city of Manchester, including cultural historians, sociologists and urban geographers, as well as general readers with interests in the city. It is written by leading international authorities, including Viv Gardner, Stephen Milner, Mike Savage, Bill Williams and Janet Wolff.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2021

        Remaking the urban

        by Naomi Roux

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        The devil’s highway

        Urban anxieties and subaltern cultures in London’s sailortown, c.1850-1900

        by Brad Beaven

        Between 1850 and 1900, Ratcliffe Highway was the pulse of maritime London. Sailors from every corner of the globe found solace, and sometimes trouble, in this bustling district. However, for social investigators, it was a place of fascination and fear as it harboured chaotic and dangerous 'exotic' communities. Sailortowns were transient, cosmopolitan and working class in character and provide us with an insight into class, race and gendered relations. They were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated and at other times clashed with one another. The book argues that despite these challenges sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban-maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2025

        An unorthodox history

        British Jews since 1945

        by Gavin Schaffer

        A bold, new history of British Jewish life since the Second World War. Historian Gavin Schaffer wrestles Jewish history away from the question of what others have thought about Jews, focusing instead on the experiences of Jewish people themselves. Exploring the complexities of inclusion and exclusion, he shines a light on groups that have been marginalised within Jewish history and culture, such as queer Jews, Jews married to non-Jews, Israel-critical Jews and even Messianic Jews, while offering a fresh look at Jewish activism, Jewish religiosity and Zionism. Weaving these stories together, Schaffer argues that there are good reasons to consider Jewish Britons as a unitary whole, even as debates rage about who is entitled to call themselves a Jew. Challenging the idea that British Jewish life is in terminal decline. An unorthodox history demonstrates that Jewish Britain is thriving and that Jewishness is deeply embedded in the country's history and culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2025

        Growing up and going out

        Youth culture, commerce, and leisure space in post-war Britain

        by Sarah Kenny

        In the decades following the Second World War, youthful sociability was remade as young people across Britain flocked to newly-opened coffee bars, beat clubs, and discos. These spaces, increasingly unknown and unfamiliar to the adults who passed by them, played a remarkable role in reshaping town and city centres after dark as sites of leisure and recreation. Telling the history of youth in post-war Britain from the ground up, through the towns and cities that young people moved through, this book traces how the new spaces of post-war youth leisure transformed both young people's relationship with their local environment and adults' perceptions of the possibilities and dangers of modern leisure. Growing up and going out offers a timely study of youth, commerce, and leisure that explores the reimagination, remaking, and regulation of the post-war city after dark.

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