On September 9, 2015 at the University of Kentucky, esteemed writer, social theorist, and urban geographer Andy Merrifield, professor at the University of Cambridge and author of The New Urban Question, presented the kickoff lecture for A Year of Europe.
Andy Merrifield is a Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge and the author of numerous books including Magical Marxism (Pluto, 2011) and The Wisdom of Donkeys (Short Books,2009).
(from Pluto Press Blog)
This is great stuff: radio station with the show about the cities for everybody who love cities, want to live in cities, move out of cities or just want to listen to smth that even might be interesting 😉
http://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-urbanist/
Highly recommend to listen!
P.s. they have more interesting shows, check them out
The rapid urbanization of China is an event unparalleled in human history. Fueled by a near-continuous rural-to-urban migration, the country’s urban population has leaped from a mere 18% in 1978 to 54% in 2013. The effects of this process are evident in a variety of ways; for example: satellite images of the Earth at night have revealed the intense increase in the illumination of China, indicating the fervent expansion of urban built-up areas. Traveling through the country exposes one to the uninterrupted urban/suburban landscapes of the many urban agglomeration clusters, such as the Yangtze River Delta (Shanghai-Nanjing-Hangzhou), the Pearl River Delta (Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong), and the Bohai Sea Region (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei). Remote sensing images reveal the alarming rate at which agricultural land is being subsumed by this wave of growth.
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(Published by Latino Rebels)
April 23, 2014
BUENOS AIRES—Neighbors and activists from Buenos Aires’ poorest villas (neighborhoods) began a hunger strike Monday in a giant tent situated around the city’s obelisk at the intersection of two main avenues. The organizing group, la Corriente Villera Independiente (CVI), is demanding their neighborhoods be urbanized by the city government.
A declaration by the CVI states, “A villera tent for the city government’s failure to respond. Hunger strike for urbanization. We demand: the declaration of a housing, socio-environmental and socio-educative emergency in the villas, enforcement of the urbanization laws and construction in the neighborhoods, authorization for work cooperatives, rent regulations, housing subsidies. No more crime against the poor.” (Villero/a is a loaded slang term used to describe anything that has to do with the poor neighborhoods.)
The group began to set up the tent at 10 a.m. Monday morning. Villa 31 resident Dora…
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Henri Boucquet, Plan for Frontier Camp (1765)
(Introduction for a seminar given at the Architectural Association in Diploma 14’s ongoing research on The Architecture of Territory, 16 November 2015–Thanks to Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Giudicci for the invitation)
Clearly there is something about the way questions present themselves to us today, and the issues that they carry, that refer us more and more to territory. Questions of resources, extraction and logistics draw our attention to it, as does the ‘scaling up’ thesis of prominent Marxian urban geographies. And of course, much more pressing questions brought about by climate change, contemporary warfare, migration and so on, all force us to consider posing questions at larger scales. In many cases, however, the fixation on territory is a kind of placeholder for other things: landscape, nature, ecology, an area of land, a prescribed ‘zone’ of activity, or a realm in which…
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We would like to invite you to a continuation of a series of events that the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona has launched in Virtual Reality for the academic year of 2015-2016. They will take place at Cibola, the Department’s home in Second Life. The third conversation will be between Prof. Malcolm Compitello (The University of Arizona), Professors Susan Divine (College of Charleston) and Juliana Luna Freire (Framingham State University), and the new Cibola Manager Laura Vazquez Blazquez (ABD, The University of Arizona). It will be about the relationships between urban studies and Hispanic culture. It will begin this upcoming Thursday, Nov. 5, at 5:00 p.m. Tucson time.
We will be discussing three texts: Errejón, Martínez, and the Introduction, published at the Special Theme: Geografías del 15-M: Crisis, Austeridad y Movilización Social en España. All texts are available here: http://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/issue/view/80
We will also be meeting on Nov. 19 (Thursday), to discuss the article by Bécquer Seguín entitled “Podemos and its critics”, published at the Radical Philosophy 193 (Sept/Oct. 2015).
We hope to see you at the event. In order to access Cibola, you will need to install Firestorm in your computer (http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/cibola/26/180/28). If you need help, please contact any of us.
urbanculturalstudies 