Critical Urban Theory or Urban Critical Theory or Just Critical Theory? (1 of 4)

The Rolling Blackout

BOOK SYNOPSIS Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, eds. Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, & Margit Mayer, (2012), New York: Routledge.

It seems almost late, compared to the original versions of these works, a conference held at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin in November 2008, but it would be foolish to pass this collected volume up because it is as timely as ever.  From authors rooted in numerous fields of scholarship, sociology, politics, geography, urban planning, and urban design,  this book holds a sprightly discussion of the contemporary issues in critical urban studies under the auspices of global capitalism and its crises of economic and social instability. The authors unveil the usefulness of critical theory to urban problems, to highlight the rampant inequities intrinsic to the capitalism, but also the contradictions inherent in capitalism which make it only a stage…

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Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo

Link to a great post on the open culture blog:

A Photographic Tour of Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Memory, and Reality Meet

Reading guides to Lefebvre and Sloterdijk in English updated

Progressive Geographies

I’ve made some minor updates to my reading guides:

Where to start with reading Henri Lefebvre?

Where to start with reading Peter Sloterdijk?

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Golden State Urbanity: 28 History Books That Get At The Heart of Metropolitan California

Tropics of Meta

For many Americans, the phrase “California history” sounds like an oxymoron. Born out of a Gold Rush and two World Wars, the Golden State, to easterners, has always seemed like the new kid on the block. Californians might have aided in such perceptions, notes the 1970s dean of West Coast literature, Joan Didion. “You might protest that no family has been in Sacramento Valley for anything approaching ‘always,’” she wrote, “But it is characteristic of Californians to speak grandly of the past as if it has simultaneously begun, tabula rasa, and reached a happy ending on the day the wagons started west.” For Didion, such depictions of the past cast melancholy over “those who participate in it,” because underlying the state’s origin story rest a belief that “we had long outlived our finest hour.”[1]

Yet, California with no uncertainty has a long past predating European arrival. In…

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Mapping London over the years

Rachel Bok

Saw this on The Guardian on mapping London over the years — just as I’m about to leave London for Singapore… 

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FSDG finds a new home in Rochester, NY!

Deaf geographies sandbox

The Field School in Deaf Geographies has found a new home. We are very fortunate to have landed at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, NY, and home of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID). Rochester has a ‘deep’ Deaf history and the community here is counted as the largest per capita in the US. It is most definitely a ‘sign language-friendly’ city.
FSDG has landed in a wonderful laboratory in which to study how signing peoples negotiate spaces and places. I hope you will help the school celebrate it’s new location! Please stay tuned for additional information. If you would like to get in touch about anything regarding the school, please contact me at mekgsh@rit.edu.

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Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom

All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski

Gilles Deleuze

GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI: REFRAINS OF FREEDOM

SUBMIT YOUR PAPERS!

“Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom,” an international conference to be held in Athens, is now accepting submissions.

Deadline for submissions is November 1, 2014.

 

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom

International Conference,
24-26 April, 2015, Panteion University, Athens, Greece.

We invite abstracts for papers and panel discussions on all aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and we particularly welcome contributions attempting to elucidate the meaning of Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that “pluralism equals monism” as well as its significance for a number of issues central to their writings:

* What are the implications of this claim for ontology, epistemology, ethics, politics, language and the arts?

* Given that Deleuze is talking about absolute difference (A differs from itself) rather than comparative differenc (A differs from B), can we…

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Walter Gropius’ International Architecture (1925)

This gallery contains 115 photos.

Rachel Bok

One of my favorite Yi-Fu Tuan quotes:

I was only fifteen when I chose geography as my field. Twelve years later, in 1957, I received my doctoral degree. So ended my long period of formal training. Ever since, I have not only taught and done research in geography but I have breathed and lived it. How was (is) that possible? How can geography, a rather down-to-earth subject, have such a hold on me, offer me ‘salvation’ when, from time to time, my personal life seemed to be the pits? I couldn’t have answered properly as a teenager or even as a newly-minted PhD. I can give a well-rounded answer only late in life — in retrospect, for the meaning of geography has expanded over a lifetime. It grew as I grew.

 

— Yi-Fu Tuan (1999)

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Everyday utopias and dystopias