Locating the Moving Image

ART & CARTOGRAPHY

The book entitled “ Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place ” edited by Julia Hallam and Les Roberts has just been released. It includes 11 chapters exploring the relationships between films and places through maps from a variety of perspectives. This truly interdisciplinary project provides an extensive overview of the ways scholars in film studies, geography, cartography, history, and communication studies have mapped films.

Topics include cinematic practices in rural and urban communities, development of cinema by amateur filmmakers, and use of GIS in mapping the spatial development of film production and cinema going as social practices.

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Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds (and prezi)

My new book Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds: A Philosophy of Painting is entering production with Bucknell University Press – it should be available in August 2014 (appearing on amazon at present for pre-order).

It represents rather a new form of writing for me – inspired by the meandering and philosophical style of Spanish author / civil engineer Juan Benet’s El ángel del señor abandona a Tobías (1976) where he mixes a range of disciplinary questions together, using the famed painting of the same name by Rembrandt as a point of departure.

Here I’ve devoted a chapter each to specific paintings (Gran Vía, Madrid desde Torres Blancas, and Madrid desde la torre de bomberos de Vallecas…), which I use as points of departure to fold Spanish literature, film and urban planning together with larger interdisciplinary and philosophical, geographical questions.

If you CLICK HERE you can see a ‘prezi’ that I’ve used with a lecture focusing on an excerpt of the second chapter’s Madrid desde Torres Blancas (visuals only).

Introducing the blog for the new Deaf space project – and a first BSL post.

MIKE GULLIVER

As you’ll know if you read this blog, I’ve recently been appointed Research Assistant (which is a slightly demeaning way of saying that I’m the main researcher!) on a three year project to research the spaces produced for Deaf people by the 19th century Church, and the spaces produced by Deaf people within that same Church.

That project now has a blog – at http://sdds.blogs.ilrt.org/

Catchy address isn’t it? Well, the ‘sdds’ bit is ‘Scripture, Dissent, Deaf Space’ – and then the blogs.ilrt.org bit is the home for blogs at the University of Bristol, and somewhere where I can get technical support.

Just visit and bookmark it, and you won’t have to worry about it again. I’ll get a ‘follow’ tool up there as soon as I work out how.

Until then, I’ll post here when I update it, and you can always follow me on Twitter @mikegulliver where I’ll be…

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URBAN QUESTIONS: Personal and Political Interrogations

Mobilities in Conjunction with Universities

New Plan Aims to Balance Urbanization of Land and People

A Layover in Wuhan

On Sunday, China released a 31-point plan mapping out the next six years of the nation’s urban development. Between now and 2020, the government will take steps to modernize agriculture and transform into a consumer driven, service-based and environmentally friendly economy, all while ameliorating the various social and economic gaps between urban and rural, and coastal and inland that have widened since Deng Xiaoping opened the country to free market activity in 1978. China will also superintend the urbanization of an additional 100 million migrants into cities, while granting urban status to 100 million of 234 million total people who currently live in cities but can’t access basic services.

Social and economic imbalances featured prominently in the plan issued on Sunday. The document stated that while China’s urbanization rate has risen to 53%—lower still than nations with comparable per capita income levels—only about 36% are legal urban residents, meaning that…

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The art of parkour: misuse of The Monument

iQ Magazine

Misuse of The Monument: The art of parkour and the discursive limits of a disciplinary architecture
By. Matthew D. Lamb
From. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 1.1

IQ Overview

Parkour is an art form that does not conform to social expectations. In the eyes of a traceur (a parkour practitioner) stairs, walls and rooftops are not physical boundaries but instead they offer options to the individual – options for an alternative way to travel through an urban landscape.

In Lamb’s article, he explores the misuse of public space and asks whether parkour can be a practice of empowerment that challenges spatial expectations of use.

Parkour is ‘almost exclusively an urban practice’ (Mould 2009: 739). It is a seamless, free-flowing and improvised movement that offers a new way to move through an environment. Lamb compares the movement to the flow of water, ‘as water adapts and flows so too does the…

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CityLAB II – Urban Studies Summer School / 16-20 June 2014

CityLAB II – Urban Studies Summer School

Theme: Suburbanism

Organised by: Stijn Oosterlynck (OASeS) & Ilja Van Damme (CSG)

Date: 16-20 June 2014

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in the study of suburbs, suburbanization and suburbanism. Central to this revival is a concern with the empirical diversity of suburbs and processes of suburbanization as well as with the growing internal and spatial differentiation of suburbs due to the impoverishment, increased ethnic diversity, densification and sprawl of economic activities in an increasing number of suburbs. These concerns undermine established understandings of suburbanism and turn the study of suburbs into a promising field for conceptual renewal and interdisciplinary reflection.

The second edition of CityLAB, organized by the Institute for Urban Studies will explore both the empirical diversity of suburbs and their increasing internal differentiation from an interdisciplinary perspective. It will examine the complexity of suburban phenomena from insights deriving from sociology, history, economic geography, political sciences, architecture and urban planning. Its target group is PhD and early stage post-doctoral researchers who want to develop such multi-perspectival understanding of suburbs, suburbanization and suburbanism and become more sensitive to the diversity of actually existing suburbs. The CityLAB Summer School is explicitly international and interdisciplinary in orientation and will take full advantage of its location in one of the most (sub)urbanized regions in Western Europe, Belgium. The programme combines international and local speakers, and two field trips to explore the suburban diversity of the biggest city of Flanders, the sprawling port town Antwerp. Roger Keil (Faculty of Environmental Sciences, York University) and Mark Clapson (Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Westminster) will deliver keynote lectures, and engage in discussion with the participants on the basis of their own research.

FOR ORIGINAL POSTING CLICK HERE

 

SEEING LIKE A CITY: A Symposium at Queen Mary University of London [June 6-7]

SEEING LIKE A CITY

A Symposium

Queen Mary University of London

Keynote Address: Professor Mariana Valverde (University of Toronto) and Michael McKinnie (Queen Mary University of London)*

Keynote: Friday 6^th June 6pm (open to the public)

Symposium: Saturday 7^th June (all day)

 How have infrastructures of performance shaped civic ideas and ideals in mundane and spectacular ways? How are these ideas and ideals contained, contaminated, revealed and concealed spatially, temporally, legally and historically through cultural activity? How does cultural activity shape and see the city?

Seeing Like a City is an interdisciplinary symposium centred on the relationships between theatre, performance and urbanism.  In the past, theatre and performance scholars including Marvin Carlson, Jen Harvie, D.J. Hopkins, Ric Knowles, Kim Solga, have seen the city as a fertile site for considering a range of urban performances. Seeing Like a City builds on this work; it invites researchers to take up the challenge of accounting for contemporary urban performance.

This event is inspired by Mariana Valverde’s article ‘Seeing Like a City’ (2009), which offers a reading of the urban that acknowledges the influence historically distinct ways of seeing contribute temporally and spatially to the negotiation of property, land and its uses in the contemporary moment. More recently, theatre studies scholar Michael McKinnie reconfigured Valverde’s ‘seeing like a city’ as ‘performing like a city’ in his analysis of London’s South Bank Centre (2013). McKinnie argues that the entrepreneurial performance of today’s South Bank relies on the performance of the building as a national and social welfare project. The Seeing Like a City symposium aims to provoke analysis and discussion that extends and challenges approaches by theatre and performance studies to ‘seeing’ and ‘performing’ the city as a complex and contingent entity.

Seeing Like a City encourages presentations from researchers at

Uneven mobilities: Santiago de Chile, October 13-16, 2014 / Final call for papers March 31, 2014

Uneven mobilities. Access to activities, people and places in contemporary cities.

Santiago de Chile, October 13-16, 2014 / Final call for papers March 31, 2014
Organizers: PanAmerican Mobility Network and University of Chile

One of the most common problems faced by Latin American societies today is their patent and often invisible inequality. Many of these inequalities shape the way cities operate as well as the people’s ability to access opportunities. Currently urban inequalities and social exclusion are placed in most development agendas; however, research in this area is becoming increasingly complex, multidimensional and multispatial.

With the irruption of the mobility approach, the way cities and space are accessed has become crucial to understand current inequalities. These problems are not only present in Latin America, and can be observed in other places in the Americas, and in many cities and regions in developing and developed countries, even stretching through national borders.

The PanAmerican Mobility Network intends to connect the various mobility related research taking place in the Americas. In this context, although we welcome any paper on the broad theme of mobility research, we encourage papers to be presented in relation to the following questions:

1.     What methodological strategies can be used to research the production of uneven mobilities?

2.     How do citizen movements impact in the production of uneven mobility?

3.     How do transport and communication devices affect uneven mobilities?

4.     How do urban design and urban planning influence the production of uneven mobilities?

5.     What types of relations exist between migratory process and the production of uneven mobilities?

6.     What forms of experiences are related to the production of uneven mobilities?

7.     Other open questions.
Abstracts of approximately 250 words should be