reblogged–from Public Spaces blog (Strasbourg)

I just saw this on the Espaces Publics blog out of Strasbourg…

great place for some interesting work on Public Space.

The image below is from Madrid…

Alicia Martin’s Biografias Installation

mars 20, 2012

 Reblogged from concerturbain:

Via Scoop.it – Le BONHEUR comme indice d’épanouissement social et économique. The Spain-based artist’s sculptural installation at Casa de America, Madrid depicts a cavalcade of books streaming out of the side of a building. The whirlwind of literature defies gravity and draws attention with its size. Via cubeme.com

Lire la suite… 3 liens, 1 image

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Videogame Space: What’s in it for Urban Studies?

There is a rich literature on space in videogames.

(non-specialists should start with M. J. P. Wolf’s The Medium of the Videogame—and the two readers on videogame theory he’s edited with B. Perron).

But how much of this is relevant to urban space specifically, and not merely to space in the abstract?–the answer: some, but not enough (yet).

Which only makes work by Michael Nitsche, for example, stand out more. His book Video Game Space: Image, Play and Structure in 3D Game Worlds with MIT Press even references urban theorist Henri Lefebvre. Here’s a brief online review.

Another book Space Time Play. Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism provides a number of articles that suggest a dialectical relationship between videogames/digital representation and the practice of urban planning itself. The Introduction to the book can be downloaded here.

Urban Voices: Georg Simmel (on urban movement)

Georg Simmel (1858-1918) was a sociologist of the urban environment who wrote (among other essays) the essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” where he in effect describes the modern urbanized consciousness: “The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” (original emphasis).

Simmel continues: “Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts–all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates.”

–in a sense, Simmel was an early forerunner of more contemporary urban theorists who define the city in terms of movement and mobility (of which there are too many to count–maybe start with these two journals):

Mobilities

and

Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies