Link to Manuel Delgado Ruiz’s blog

new link to Manuel Delgado Ruiz’s blog posted at right in blogroll (also below)

http://manueldelgadoruiz.blogspot.com/

Manuel Delgado Ruiz (Universitat de Barcelona) is author of a number of books and articles on topics from Urban Anthropology/Urban Studies, the Barcelona model, the city as a site of struggle, public space and more…

Also from the Universitat de Barcelona is the geography journal Scripta Nova (online):

http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/nova.htm

Great post from Stephen Vilaseca’s blog.

Dr. Stephen Luis Vilaseca

Cabanyal15

Urban art found in the Cabanyal neighborhood of Valencia, Spain. Photo by Stephen Vilaseca (2009)

Deleuze theorizes the mind-body relationship as the event, and argues that it will be through the event that capitalism may be challenged and resisted. According to Paul Patton, Deleuze’s philosophy of events owes much to the Stoics’s dual conception of being and to Elizabeth Anscombe’s philosophy of action. The Stoics believe that “being” consists of a material component and an incorporeal component. One “is” in the world because, first, one lives the world through the body (the material component) and, second, one expresses those bodily events through language (the incorporeal component). Anscombe is also interested in the relationship between the body and the mind. She links actions (the acts of a body or a body politic) to the mind via intention because, as Patton explains, “actions involve intentions and intentions presuppose some description of what it…

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JUCS full speed ahead

Just a quick note explaining all the reblogs recently, the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies is well underway and we’re hoping to finalize content for the first issue in the coming months. Thanks to all who have submitted and reviewed so far. Volume 1 issue 1 should be in production for a while appearing at the end of 2013 if all goes according to plan. Submissions are rolling/continuous, so pass the word! As we get closer I hope to reveal the list of content here for those interested.

Social Network Unionism

GlobalSquare is a series of online and physical meetings and assemblies whose participants and organisers are individuals linked to the 15M, Occupy, student movements, Yo Soy 132, T’harrek, Idle No More, VIA22 as well as other grassroots and horizontal movements. Our objective is to prepare a lively open space for physical contact and exchange during the World Social Forum (WSF) which will take place from 26-30 March 2013 in Tunis. Read more…

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metrhispanic

An acre can be an opened or a close surface, or something in between. The squares around the eastern flank of the Cathedral of Santiago are the result of a set of circunstances: a complex natural slope, the previous presence of a cemetery, the presence of monastic buildings… This makes for a set of spaces enclosed by strong institutions, which have grown in power throught time with a magnificent architecture, whose expresion has sometimes been baroque, and in other moments quite austere, with new proposals in the interiors like the fine project by BMJ for Casa da Conga.

In Berlin, on the other side, the combined surface of both Spanish squares is covered by … well, a square slab, supported on eight steel columns (the building has a larger basement, but it is scarcely visible from the outside, its presence resting on the upper part). The building, by the…

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Edinburgh Strikes Back

My Foreign Policy article ‘Scotch This Plan’ (see link at the end of this post) caused quite a fuss in the UK media this week – you might like to read it, as it’s about more than local questions. A few caveats: (1) it’s a polemic, so don’t expect balance; (2) likewise, it’s not based on a piece of  academic research; (3) FP were responsible for the headline and subheader, so it appears to emphasise the independence question more than it actually does; (4) despite all these things, the response was overwhelmingly positive at the local level. The city council (city hall) objected, needless to say, but they were in a minority. The broader questions concern how cities with historic legacies imagine their futures. On the narrower question of Edinburgh’s waterfront, there’s scope for a PhD thesis at least.

Here’s the article:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/13/scotch_this_plan_edinburgh_scotland_independence

Call for reviews – “Lo urbano” (Critical Reviews on Latin American Research)

Please find the entire call in Spanish and English at http://www.crolar.org/index.php/crolar/announcement

Call for reviews, Volume N° 4: CROLAR – Critical Reviews on Latin American Research

We cordially invite you to contribute a book review for “Lo Urbano”, Volume 4 of CROLAR – Critical Reviews on Latin American Research , which will appear in October 2013. CROLAR IV calls for reviews on recent publications on “the urban” and urban phenomena in and from Latin America.

As place of anonymous cohabitation and social diversity (Simmel, 1903), as a sphere of capitalist reproduction and collective consumption (Castells, 1974), via the imaginarios urbanos (García Canclini, 1996), to the “Rebel Cities” (Harvey, 2012), the city has evoked systematic analysis of the tight linkages between public space and collective culture, the effects of capital accumulation, and social discontent. Moving beyond a broad range of questions which have been (or can be) studied in urban environments by the social, cultural as well as natural sciences, CROLAR IV calls for reviews on the particularity of “the urban” itself. Which phenomena constitute “the urban” as a field of study and how are urban areas studied differently from (or even in a dialectical relation to) rural areas?

Many urban theories have claimed to have universal applicability independent of the location they were built from, or where they are applied. Our more specific interest lies in publications which reflect on such dichotomization – either by compiling and comparing research results from diverse locations, or by discussing limits to travelling concepts (Said). It is well known that Latin America is not only the most urbanized continent and the one with the highest inequality in incomes, but that it also offers a long interdisciplinary tradition of urban studies. We therefore also call for reviews which mirror the rich contribution of Latin American urban research to a general understanding of issues such as violence, migration, citizenship, protest, ecology, spatial segregation, or the financial crisis, amongst others. With respect to “the urban”, what can and has been learned from Latin America?

The editorial team is eagerly awaiting your reviews – which may be written in Spanish, Portuguese, English or German – no later than July 15th, 2013. If you are considering writing a review, please take notice of our formal guidelines (http://www.crolar.org/index.php/crolar/about/submissions#authorGuidelines).

If you are interested in contributing, please directly contact the editors of this volume: Anke Schwarz (anke.schwarz[at]ufz.de) and Frank Müller (frank.mueller[at]fu-berlin.de).


Dipl.-Ing. Anke Schwarz
Department Urban and Environmental Sociology

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research GmbH – UFZ
Permoserstraße 15 / 04318 Leipzig / Germany
Phone +49 341 235-1726
Fax +49 341 235-1836
anke.schwarz@ufz.de
http://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=4519

taCity

Many years ago I coined the phrase Urban Subversion that began as an interest in parkour as a creative act of urban re-appropriation. It soon became apparent as I looked for additional ways in which people were interacting with the city in novel and innovate ways, there was a small, but increasing swath of people who were actively reconfiguring their urban environment for sometimes playful, sometimes anti-hegemonic, and sometimes subversive, but always in creative and innovate ways. Nearly 5 years hence, Maria Daskalaki and I have (finally) managed to get the ideas and musings we had about Urban Subversions all those years ago published. In the intervening period, I have witnessed (first hand through my travels and via the relentless march toward information-domination of Twitter and social media) the boom of these kinds of creative engagements become popularised and in some cases, accepted as legitimate and formal urban development…

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