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Global London: Highs and Lows, Spaces and Places

Malini Guha

in From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema

This chapter situates the film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) within a wider historical continuum of “migrant London” cinema, while examining the longevity of social realist modes of storytelling and its ... More

This chapter situates the film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) within a wider historical continuum of “migrant London” cinema, while examining the longevity of social realist modes of storytelling and its “global turn.” It presents a departure from an interpretation of Dirty Pretty Things as a film that allegorizes the conditions of global London in order to chart a history of representation of post-imperial migration to the city. Furthermore, the chapter analyzes the concept of the “dirty/pretty” as a bifurcated understanding of city space, one that scholars argue has its origins in a Victorian imaginary of the city but is subsequently re-imagined in the telling of other urban stories.Less

In Search of the Ghostly in Urban Spaces*

Esther M. K. Cheung

in Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong

This chapter focuses on the spectral spaces in Made in Hong Kong. It explores the feeling of estrangement or homelessness with reference to two major kinds of uncanny city spaces which provoke ... More

This chapter focuses on the spectral spaces in Made in Hong Kong. It explores the feeling of estrangement or homelessness with reference to two major kinds of uncanny city spaces which provoke questions about presence/absence, visibility/invisibility, and appearance/reality. They are the low-cost public housing estates and the old neighborhoods in Hong Kong. These urban spaces, whether they are indoor domestic spaces or outdoor ones, are cinematically represented through the manipulation of light and darkness, warped space, shadows, and abject images.Less

Conclusion

in Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia

This chapter reviews the main points made in the last six chapters, including the right to the city, which is considered to be the right to live in city spaces. It introduces three different main ... More

This chapter reviews the main points made in the last six chapters, including the right to the city, which is considered to be the right to live in city spaces. It introduces three different main ideas explored throughout the book. The first is that the experience of urban life and the state in Brickfields usually occurred in the rift that comes between formal legality and local understandings of relatedness and justice. The second is that the local Brickfields residents as a result of the scale and pace of efforts to change the neighborhood tried to start existing modes of ethical living within the community. The third and last thesis is that the members of this community tried to pursue other ways of engagement with the state. This chapter emphasizes a new understanding of the ways urban spaces are comprised, imagined, and inhabited.Less

Circulatory life: 9/11 as architectural catastrophe and the hypermodernity of Terror

Julian Reid

in The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies

This chapter develops an account of the significance of the 9/11 attack understood in explicitly architectural terms. It focuses on the critique of the bias toward orthogonal and vertical forms in ... More

This chapter develops an account of the significance of the 9/11 attack understood in explicitly architectural terms. It focuses on the critique of the bias toward orthogonal and vertical forms in architecture developed by Paul Virilio. It is argued that that to interpret the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 in architectural terms is to challenge prevailing understandings of its significance and symbolic value. An attack, which liberal critics such as Elshtain argue to have been perpetrated by individuals incapable of humanity, becomes recontextualised as an attack upon a building which symbolised the artificiality and violence of the liberal ideal of human life. Yet this artificiality was disclosed to us not for the first time in the violence of the Terror attack of 9/11. Authors such as Virilio have been arguing it to be the case for many years, and his interventions in debates on architecture have acted to make us think more critically about the ways our experience of life and our relations with others are conditioned by such peculiar spatial forms.Less

Race and the Spatial Boundaries of Respectability

in I've Got to Make My Livin': Black Women's Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago

This chapter examines the racial and spatial boundaries of respectability in the context of the sex economy in Chicago. It suggests that the visibility of African American prostitutes generated ... More

This chapter examines the racial and spatial boundaries of respectability in the context of the sex economy in Chicago. It suggests that the visibility of African American prostitutes generated complex reactions among uneasy white residents and respectable urbanizing blacks and that the African American prostitute's body represented the potential collapse of racial boundaries in and beyond the sex trade. This chapter also describes how working- and middle-class African Americans strived to imprint a moral geography on black city spaces.Less

The Journey Narrative: Arrivals and Departures

Malini Guha

in From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema

This chapter offers a wider applicability for the methods of reading for city space by positioning the journey narrative of the cinematic city as integral to the larger story of migrancy and the ... More

This chapter offers a wider applicability for the methods of reading for city space by positioning the journey narrative of the cinematic city as integral to the larger story of migrancy and the city. Narratives of migration have always been a feature of cinematic cities, as materialized through the depiction of the journey from the country to the city in films such as Sunrise (1927) or Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927). Since one of the key tropes of migrancy is mobility, narratives of arrivals and departures are just as significant for the purposes of analysis as those set within the space of the city. As such, movement both away and toward urban spaces can be theorized as part of the cinematic story of the migrant in the city.Less

Race, Space, and Educational Opportunity

in Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America

Boston was the first in the nation to craft a system of common schools open to boys and girls, allocating more of its resources to public education than any other American city in the antebellum ... More

Boston was the first in the nation to craft a system of common schools open to boys and girls, allocating more of its resources to public education than any other American city in the antebellum period. African Americans benefited from this educational commitment in a lot of ways. The New England seaport ostensibly provided public education to African Americans free of charge — aside, of course, from their tax contributions. And unlike their counterparts in New Haven, Boston's white population did not resort to violence to suppress black access to education. Nevertheless, white Bostonians' loyalty to the promise of public schooling broke down because they were not comfortable with racial integration. When two groups of petitioners opposed the construction of a schoolhouse for black children, they did not ask the city to exclude African Americans from public schools altogether. To better understand the petitioners' rhetorical strategy, it is helpful to look briefly to the literature on race and homeownership in the twentieth century, when struggles over race, city space, and property became more frequent.Less

Movement and Fora in Rome (the Late Republic to the First Century CE)*

David J. Newsome

in Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space.

This chapter examines the changes to the use and perception of fora in Rome over the first centuries BCE and CE based on movement and accessibility. It begins by examining the ‘through-movement ... More

This chapter examines the changes to the use and perception of fora in Rome over the first centuries BCE and CE based on movement and accessibility. It begins by examining the ‘through-movement potential’ of the Forum Romanum and its role as a short cut between other urban places in the ‘natural movement’ of the city.Less

The Effect of Urban Land-Use Regulations on Density: The Case of Selected Indian Cities

Kala Seetharam Sridhar

in Seeking Middle Ground: Land, Markets, and Public Policy

Urban land is crucial to economic productivity and growth in cities, given substantial land intensive economic activity takes place. While land use regulations are needed for inclusive growth and to ... More

Urban land is crucial to economic productivity and growth in cities, given substantial land intensive economic activity takes place. While land use regulations are needed for inclusive growth and to protect the urban poor, they create distortions in the land market, and become counter-productive. Indian cities are characterized by strong urban land use controls, given its socialistic and planned economy for a long time. Draconian land use regulations that continue to exist in India’s cities are rent control and highly restrictive floor area ratios (FARs). In this chapter, I focus on FARs and rent control to a limited extent. I examine the impact FARs have on population and household density, in the context of the standard urban framework, taking the case of Bengaluru, where ward-level data have been recently put together on FARs. I find in Bengaluru that FARs impact (both population and household) density negatively, consistent with what other studies have found. The Karnataka rent control Act essentially renders the Act ineffective in Bengaluru. In the context of Mumbai, I use anecdotal evidence to examine FAR, where the effects are compounded by the existence of other distortions such as rent control. Based on the findings, the chapter summarizes the policy implications, its caveats, concludes and presents directions for future research.Less

Remembering Bombay: Present Memories and Past Histories

Jim Masselos

in Bombay Before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos

This chapter focuses on understanding Bombay’s social and political complexities as it grew exponentially over the 19th and 20th centuries. A typical colonial city it had a function as an entrepot in ... More

This chapter focuses on understanding Bombay’s social and political complexities as it grew exponentially over the 19th and 20th centuries. A typical colonial city it had a function as an entrepot in the trade routes that tracked around the globe as well as about the subcontinent. Its particularity as a city however was in part a product of the mix of its produce and its industries but also of what was brought to the city – social, political and economic diversity with elements of cultural, intellectual and creative benefit. It was a city that from its beginnings gloried in accommodating a mix of populations, ethnicities, social groups and religious adherents and of the urban spaces they severally occupied. In considering the locality as a city feature and as an active phenomenon implicitly and explicitly understood by its inhabitants, the chapter uses the idea of mental maps or templates that gave city spaces their characteristics as was also evident in those times of massive social conflict evident during riots and Bombay’s other forms of crowd aggregations. In drawing on notions of physical space as represented in the city’s localities or in mental maps of what might be understood as accustomed space, the research methods adopted in this chapter involved using city space and its patterns of customary behavior through the prism of the author’s subjective memories of the city from the 1960s as also textual research and analysis.Less