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Living Spaces

Denise Tse-Shang Tang

in Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life

Family interactions in living spaces can be perceived as specific practices in a spatial context that lay claim to how certain gender and sexual codings are formed, normalized, and regulated. Family ... More

Family interactions in living spaces can be perceived as specific practices in a spatial context that lay claim to how certain gender and sexual codings are formed, normalized, and regulated. Family and space are interconnected concepts that can be found in two colloquial Cantonese terms. The first term denotes a house, a physical dwelling and a family space. The second term points to family members and by implication, persons underneath one roof, which can be perceived as a form of cohabitation. This chapter discusses the complexities within family relations and how outside forces affect the ways respondents view their relations with family members in response to their sexualities. The issue of living together creates many difficulties for respondents when it comes to hiding their sexualities and, as a result, they come up with multiple coping strategies to live with family members.Less

Disciplining globalization for local purposes? The peculiarity of contending Singaporean economic nationalisms

Alan Chong

in Globalization and Economic Nationalism in Asia

This chapter presents four stresses of globalization that Singapore faces and argues that official politics is attempting to only minimally command but always serve borderless capitalism in a joint ... More

This chapter presents four stresses of globalization that Singapore faces and argues that official politics is attempting to only minimally command but always serve borderless capitalism in a joint mission with foreign investors to further prosperity of Singaporeans. These stresses are local frustrations over living space, the maladjustments of foreign workers in Singapore, the compulsion to host major economic conferences thinking that these are trouble-free forms of globalization, and the “revanchist economic nationalism” abroad that challenges Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds. The chapter surveys official Singaporean (People’s Action Party) economic thinking on hosting capitalist globalization, discusses how globalization has produced significant economic, social, and political challenges, and consequently emerging skepticism and thus economic nationalist views toward untrammeled globalization. The chapter nicely illustrates mercantilism with a globalist face.Less

Afterword: Mapped?

Emma Widdis

in Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War

This chapter explains that Sovietness is a cultural construct that owed its form and influence to an extraordinary project of mass media representation. During the years after the revolution, ... More

This chapter explains that Sovietness is a cultural construct that owed its form and influence to an extraordinary project of mass media representation. During the years after the revolution, processed images of the new Soviet identity were in conflict with the older imperial Russia identities; the imaginary map of the new world met with the lived space of the old. Thus, the imaginary imagined space of the old imperial Russia was changed and was redefined to meet with the demands of the revolutionary age.Less

The Soviet Promise: A Separate Apartment for Every Family

Jane R. Zavisca

in Housing the New Russia

This chapter examines the evolution of the Russian ideal of the separate apartment from the time of Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev until it became the cornerstone of a normal life in the late ... More

This chapter examines the evolution of the Russian ideal of the separate apartment from the time of Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev until it became the cornerstone of a normal life in the late Soviet period. Housing the populace in separate apartments laid the groundwork for a post-Stalin social contract, which aimed to achieve social quiescence without recourse to terror. However, the most appealing features of the separate apartment—prosperity and privacy—also made it ideologically dangerous. This chapter considers how expropriated homes were redistributed according to the principle of “living space” and how allocation of housing in square meters paved the way for so-called “communal apartments.” It also discusses housing inequality in the Soviet Union and how the separate apartment became normal. Finally, it explains how the separate apartment's normalcy produced a sense of abnormalcy among those who lacked one.Less

Teen Noir: The Suburb as Lived Space

Timotheus Vermeulen

in Scenes from the Suburbs: The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television

The fifth chapter looks at the ways in which three teen suburban noirs – Brick (Johnson, 2004), Alpha Dog (Cassavetes, 2006) and Chumscrubber (Posin, 2005) – engage with the suburban environment. The ... More

The fifth chapter looks at the ways in which three teen suburban noirs – Brick (Johnson, 2004), Alpha Dog (Cassavetes, 2006) and Chumscrubber (Posin, 2005) – engage with the suburban environment. The chapter pays attention to the ways which the teenagers – and their parents – (are able to) navigate space: where do they go, how do they move, how can they interact in space? Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau as well as close textual analysis of dialogue and composition, it argues that these films, each in their own way, present the suburb not as a static, depthless non-place, but on the contrary as a space that can be experienced, extended and appropriated – in short, as a lived space.Less

The New Economic Policy

Lynne Attwood

in Gender and Housing in Soviet Russia: Private Life in a Public Space

This chapter is concerned with the 1920s, the time of the New Economic Policy (NEP). It deals with the return to private housing, the establishment of an official norm of living space, and the ... More

This chapter is concerned with the 1920s, the time of the New Economic Policy (NEP). It deals with the return to private housing, the establishment of an official norm of living space, and the policies of ‘compression’ and ‘self-compression’. The ‘housing revolution’ of War Communism came to an end with the NEP. Overcrowding inevitably led to tensions between neighbours, some of which were serious enough for the authorities to intervene. Many of the disputes took place between women. Drunkenness and violence on the part of men featured prominently in disputes. The close proximity of neighbours might provide women and children with some protection against violent partners or parents. The ways in which the housing shortage impacted on relationships between men and women was a particularly popular subject for fiction writers. The child's perspective on communal living also made an appearance in magazine fiction.Less

Henri Lefebvre: Lived Spaces

in Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory

This chapter discusses Henri Lefebvre's concept of lived spaces. Lefebvre addresses space in respect of their vision and ideology. He specifically concentrates on lived spaces and the everyday life. ... More

This chapter discusses Henri Lefebvre's concept of lived spaces. Lefebvre addresses space in respect of their vision and ideology. He specifically concentrates on lived spaces and the everyday life. He then pays attention to modernity, specifically to urbanisation. He argues that the ‘urban’ is a complex field of tensions. He pushes his analyses of the urban arena even further in The Production of Space. He continuously adapts his concept of space to an evolving situation in France. He mobilises powerful arguments for the everyday world, the world in which an ecology of space is made possible that is not a passive habitus.Less

Representation: Images in Social Interactions

Tonio Hölscher

in Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome: Between Art and Social Reality

Regarding the role of images in social life, three fundamental categories are to be distinguished: representation, decor, and objects of discourses. Representation was a major aim, because ancient ... More

Regarding the role of images in social life, three fundamental categories are to be distinguished: representation, decor, and objects of discourses. Representation was a major aim, because ancient societies consisted not only of their living members but also of two other social groups, their dead ancestors and their gods and heroes. Community life developed in interactions, through rituals and other cultural practices, between these social partners, of which those that were, in fact, absent could be made present by images within the society’s living spaces. Specific groups of images, such as cult statues, votive images, athletes’ statues, and honorary portraits, had their specific places, in sanctuaries, public spaces, and necropolises, where they were dealt with according to specific rules of “living with images.”Less

On City and Cinema

Iván Villarmea Álvarez

in Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film

This chapter maps the urban shift from post-industrialism to a postmetropolis—a process marked by both objective changes and subjective perceptions, in which the physical disappearance of lived ... More

This chapter maps the urban shift from post-industrialism to a postmetropolis—a process marked by both objective changes and subjective perceptions, in which the physical disappearance of lived spaces and places of memory does not necessarily entail their immediate forgetting. Urban documentary makers, in capturing this transition, can take on three of many possible roles, as they are further highlighted in this book: the voyeur, the walker, and the driver. Their respective gazes at the city entail a series of socio-cultural connotations that automatically condition the meaning of any image taken from their point of view, that is, from above, from below, and from a moving car. Urban documentary makers have indistinctly adopted these three roles with a wide variety of results, taking advantage of their implicit meanings to produce a visual discourse about the effects of new spatialities on places of memory.Less

Cinematic Geography: Mobilizing the Archive City

in Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool

This chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the history of the cinematic representation of the city of Liverpool, England. The book examines the case for the development of a ... More

This chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the history of the cinematic representation of the city of Liverpool, England. The book examines the case for the development of a cinematic geography in which cities-in-film provide virtual pathways to and from a city's lived spaces of history and identity, and suggests that cinematic geography offers itself up as a strategic mode of urban engagement in the contested politics of space, place and cultural memory which are shaping the landscapes of the postmodern city. It also argues that the visual geographies of representation by which film and moving-image practices compose and construct an ‘image of the city’ are typically those that map the limits, edges, gateways and synoptic spaces of representation which enable the city to be perceived as an urban object.Less

War and Peace: Population, Territory, and Living Space

Alison Bashford

in Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth

This chapter discusses the issues of population and territory as they both stand at a crossroads to internationalism, as well as the notion of a “living space”—the lebensraum—composed by scholars of ... More

This chapter discusses the issues of population and territory as they both stand at a crossroads to internationalism, as well as the notion of a “living space”—the lebensraum—composed by scholars of the Geopolitiker. The lebensraum is an ostensibly geopolitical worldview that uses population pressure as a nationalist ruse to pursue expansion of territory. The urge for a greater “living space” intensified when, during the early nineteenth century, the world “closed” itself to colonizing nations as they eventually run out of territory to conquer. This dilemma created a tension between proponents of lebensraum and the internationalists advocating for peace, prompting a revival of Malthusian thought as the “struggle for room and food” went global.Less

Psychogeographical Landscaping

Iván Villarmea Álvarez

in Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film

This chapter discusses the second type of landscape film, which entails a greater degree of subjectivity on the part of the filmmaker, in intending to relate the current look of landscape to its ... More

This chapter discusses the second type of landscape film, which entails a greater degree of subjectivity on the part of the filmmaker, in intending to relate the current look of landscape to its former incarnations, whether the buildings or structures that formerly stood in the same spot, or the events that took place right there years or centuries ago. Such a device is termed “psychogeographical landscaping”, because it refers to works that simultaneously depict landscape as a historical location and a lived space, paying particular attention to the emotional effects of the territory in the subject, who may be both the viewer and the filmmaker. The objective record of landscape is combined with its historical and sociological interpretation, thereby offering a series of counter-narratives of urban change in cities such as Los Angeles or London.Less

After Latino Metropolis: Cultural Political Economy and Alternative Futures

Victor Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres

in Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy and Redevelopment

This concluding chapter makes the general case for grounding a twenty-first-century critical Latina/o urbanism in something provisionally called the “cultural political economy” in an attempt to ... More

This concluding chapter makes the general case for grounding a twenty-first-century critical Latina/o urbanism in something provisionally called the “cultural political economy” in an attempt to resolve lingering theoretical tensions between socioeconomic (structural) and culture-based (semiotic) approaches to the neoliberal present. This postdisciplinary interpretation reaffirms the centrality of capitalist formations in the study of the Latino urban question by embedding social and cultural categories in the lived spaces of the macroeconomic order. Using this approach, the chapter sketches a few strategic lines to confront changing class formations and deindustrialization in neoliberal capitalism's period of indefinitely prolonged crisis. It then explores the ways the current economic crisis implicates the scholarly projects of Latina/o and Chicana/o urban studies and how these interpretations of cultural political economy might reconfigure these projects to answer the continued attacks from the populist Right.Less