Hispanic Urban Studies book series launched [Palgrave Macmillan]

Hispanic Urban Studies

[Click here for *.pdf announcement: Hispanic Urban Studies]

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Edited by

Benjamin Fraser, East Carolina University, USA

Susan Larson, University of Kentucky, USA

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Hispanic Urban Studies is a series of scholarly monographs, edited volumes, and translations focusing on Spanish, Latin American and US Latino urban culture.

The humanities and the social sciences are closer in methodology than ever before. Hispanic Urban Studies serves a dual purpose: to introduce radically original humanities work to social science researchers while affirming the relevance of cultural production to discussions of the urban. This book series takes advantage of and further contributes to exciting interdisciplinary discussions between Hispanic Studies and Cultural Geography with the aim of bringing in new ideas about space, place, and culture from all parts of the Hispanic world. Monograph titles bring together analyses of the cultural production of the Hispanic world with urban and spatial theory from a range of disciplinary contexts. The series also welcomes proposals for edited volumes related to cities that contribute in creative ways to our understanding of the spatial turn in Hispanic Studies. Translations published in the series introduce English-language readers to the rich legacy of materials on urbanism, urban culture, and cultural geography originally published in Spanish.

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Advisory Board

Malcolm Compitello, University of Arizona, USA; Monica Degen, Brunel University, London, UK; Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, University of Oregon, USA; Amanda Holmes, McGill University, Canada; Marcy Schwartz, Rutgers University, USA; Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain; Armando Silva, National University of Colombia, Bogotá; Michael Ugarte, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA; Víctor Valle, California Polytechnic State University, USA.

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If you would like to submit a proposal for the Hispanic Urban Studies Series please feel free to contact:

Farideh Koohi-Kamali

Palgrave Macmillan

Farideh.Koohi@palgrave-usa.com

 

Urban Renewal Brochures

As one is wont to do, clicking here and there and avoiding grading and writing, I came across this blog and its very interesting current post containing urban renewal brochures from the 1950s. Most interesting to me is that the images from New York are so seemingly devoid of people. Where are the people? More importantly, after they lay this “abstract space” across the landscape  where will the people that live there go. . . .Thanks to dubravka sekulic for this blog.

http://arsenalofexclusion.blogspot.com/2012/04/urban-renewal-brochures-from-1956.html

(an) Indian City–Gurgaon (urban planning vs. urban life)

I knew nothing about the city of Gurgaon, India before watching this…. its current building boom…

Nonetheless, this video is a clear example of how worldwide discourses of ‘globalization’ often lack nuance. Notions of growth (w/o development) are largely unproblematized (they lead with talk of multinationals coming to the city)–as painted by interviews with urban planners, discussions of infrastructure, the problems with predatory developers, etc. the city comes across as a thing (the bourgeois project of modernity) instead of a complex organism (a la Jane Jacobs) or a human lived space (Lefebvre) (a panel member–Prof & Environmental Planner Darshini Mahadeva–voices this complaint in other words around minute 14:00-15:15).

Link

Dr. Reena Tiwari published a book called Space-Body-Ritual: Performativity in the City in which she puts a reading of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis to use in arguing for approaching the ‘city-as-body’, rather than ‘city-as-text’. It’s in my stack of current ‘to-reads’, and may be of interest to readers here.

Looking for information about the author, I came upon this Q&A, in which she touches on issues relating to urban architecture, public housing, poverty and migration. She makes some interesting points about making spaces that are ‘mixed’, both socioeconomically and public/private. Tiwari is both a scholar and an urban planner; is anyone here familiar with her book, or her work in general?

Note too that the website (www.cluster.eu) hosting this conversation may well be worth exploring, especially to readers interested in urban thought in Italy.