Spaces of Vernacular Creativity

Spaces of Vernacular Creativity

Author: Tim Edensor

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-10-29

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 1134018444

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Creativity has become part of the language of regeneration experts, urban planners and government policy makers attempting to revive the economic and cultural life of cities in the 21st century. Concepts such as the creative class, the creative industries and bohemian cultural clusters have come to dominate thinking about how creativity can contribute to urban renewal. Spaces of Vernacular Creativity offers a critical perspective on the instrumental use of arts and creative practices for the purposes of urban regeneration or civic boosterism. Several important contributions are brought into one volume to examine the geography of locally embedded forms of arts and creative practice. There has been an explosion of interest in both academic and policy circles in the notion of creativity, and its role in economic development and urban regeneration. This book argues for a rethinking of what constitutes creativity, foregrounding non-economic values and practices, and the often marginal and everyday spaces in which creativity takes shape. Drawing on a range of geographic contexts including the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia, the book explores a diverse array of creative practices ranging from art, music, and design to community gardening and anticapitalist resistance. The book examines working class, ethnic and non-elite forms of creativity, and a variety of creative spaces, including rural areas, suburbs and abandoned areas of the city. The authors argue for a broader and more inclusive conception of what constitutes creative practice, advocating for an approach that foregrounds economies of generosity, conviviality and activism. The book also explores the complexities and nuances that connect the local and the global and finally, the book provides a space for valuing alternative, marginal and displaced knowledges. Spaces of Vernacular Creativity provides an important contribution to the debates on the creative class and on the role of value of creative knowledge and skills. The book aims to contribute to contemporary academic debates regarding the development of post-industrial economies and the cognitive cultural economy. It will appeal to a wide range of disciplines including, geography, applied art, planning, cultural studies, sociology and urban studies, plus specialised programmes on creativity and cultural industries at Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels.


Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation

Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation

Author: Nettrice R. Gaskins

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-08-10

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0262542668

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A novel approach to STEAM learning that engages students from historically marginalized communities in culturally relevant and inclusive maker education. The growing maker movement in education has become an integral part of both STEM and STEAM learning, tapping into the natural DIY inclinations of creative people as well as the educational power of inventing or making things. And yet African American, Latino/a American, and Indigenous people are underrepresented in maker culture and education. In this book, Nettrice Gaskins proposes a novel approach to STEAM learning that engages students from historically marginalized communities in culturally relevant and inclusive maker education. Techno-vernacular creativity (TVC) connects technical literacy, equity, and culture, encompassing creative innovations produced by ethnic groups that are often overlooked. TVC uses three main modes of activity: reappropriation, remixing, and improvisation. Gaskins looks at each of the three modes in turn, guiding readers from research into practice. Drawing on real-world examples, she shows how TVC creates dynamic learning environments where underrepresented ethnic students feel that they belong. Students who remix computationally, for instance, have larger toolkits of computational skills with which to connect cultural practices to STEAM subjects; reappropriation offers a way to navigate cultural repertoires; improvisation is firmly rooted in cultural and creative practices. Finally, Gaskins explores an equity-oriented approach that makes a distinction between conventional or dominant pedagogical approaches and culturally relevant or responsive making methods and practices. She describes TVC habits of mind and suggests methods of instructions and projects.


Creative Placemaking

Creative Placemaking

Author: Cara Courage

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780367586935

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This book makes a significant contribution to the history of placemaking, presenting grassroots to top-down practices and socially engaged, situated artistic practices and artsled spatial inquiry that go beyond instrumentalising the arts for development. The book brings together a range of scholars to critique and deconstruct the notion of creative placemaking, presenting diverse case studies from researcher, practitioner, funder and policymaker perspectives from across the globe. It opens with the creators of the 2010 White Paper that named and defined creative placemaking, Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, who offer a cortically reflexive narrative on the founding of the sector and its development. This book looks at vernacular creativity in place, a topic continued through the book with its focus on the practitioner and community-placed projects. It closes with a consideration of aesthetics, metrics and, from the editors, a consideration of the next ten years for the sector. If creative placemaking is to contribute to places-in-the-making and encourage citizenled agency, new conceptual frameworks and practical methodologies are required. This book joins theorists and practitioners in dialogue, advocating for transdisciplinary, resilient processes.


Emergent Spaces

Emergent Spaces

Author: Petra Kuppinger

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-01-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 3030843793

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This book explores different emergent spaces where diverse urbanites spontaneously negotiate, make and remake urban spaces, create opportunities, produce social change, challenge urban life, culture, and politics, or simply ask for their right to the city. The focus of this book is on spaces and contexts where change is seeded, regardless of whether it was planned and whether it was or will be successful in the end. Contributors analyze the seeds of change at their very inception in diverse cultural contexts across four continents. How do small groups of ordinary and often also disenfranchised people design, suggest and implement ideas of change? How do they use and remake small urban spaces to better suit their purposes, voice claims to the city, create opportunities, and design better urban lives and futures? The emphasis of this volume is not on the nature of activities and change, but on the minute processes of initiating change.


Vernacular Eloquence

Vernacular Eloquence

Author: Peter Elbow

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-01-13

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0199782504

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Since the publication of his groundbreaking books Writing Without Teachers and Writing with Power, Peter Elbow has revolutionized how people think about writing. Now, in Vernacular Eloquence, he makes a vital new contribution to both practice and theory. The core idea is simple: we can enlist virtues from the language activity most people find easiest-speaking-for the language activity most people find hardest-writing. Speech, with its spontaneity, naturalness of expression, and fluidity of thought, has many overlooked linguistic and rhetorical merits. Through several easy to employ techniques, writers can marshal this "wisdom of the tongue" to produce stronger, clearer, more natural writing.This simple idea, it turns out, has deep repercussions. Our culture of literacy, Elbow argues, functions as though it were a plot against the spoken voice, the human body, vernacular language, and those without privilege-making it harder than necessary to write with comfort or power. Giving speech a central role in writing overturns many empty preconceptions. It causes readers to think critically about the relationship between speech, writing, and our notion of literacy. Developing the political implications behind Elbow's previous books, Vernacular Eloquence makes a compelling case that strengthening writing and democratizing it go hand in hand.


Creative Placemaking

Creative Placemaking

Author: Cara Courage

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-03

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1351598597

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This book makes a significant contribution to the history of placemaking, presenting grassroots to top-down practices and socially engaged, situated artistic practices and artsled spatial inquiry that go beyond instrumentalising the arts for development. The book brings together a range of scholars to critique and deconstruct the notion of creative placemaking, presenting diverse case studies from researcher, practitioner, funder and policymaker perspectives from across the globe. It opens with the creators of the 2010 White Paper that named and defined creative placemaking, Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, who offer a cortically reflexive narrative on the founding of the sector and its development. This book looks at vernacular creativity in place, a topic continued through the book with its focus on the practitioner and community-placed projects. It closes with a consideration of aesthetics, metrics and, from the editors, a consideration of the next ten years for the sector. If creative placemaking is to contribute to places-in-the-making and encourage citizenled agency, new conceptual frameworks and practical methodologies are required. This book joins theorists and practitioners in dialogue, advocating for transdisciplinary, resilient processes.


The Power of Culture in City Planning

The Power of Culture in City Planning

Author: Tom Borrup

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1000245047

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The Power of Culture in City Planning focuses on human diversity, strengths, needs, and ways of living together in geographic communities. The book turns attention to the anthropological definition of culture, encouraging planners in both urban and cultural planning to focus on characteristics of humanity in all their variety. It calls for a paradigm shift, re-positioning city planners’ "base maps" to start with a richer understanding of human cultures. Borrup argues for cultural master plans in parallel to transportation, housing, parks, and other specialized plans, while also changing the approach of city comprehensive planning to put people or "users" first rather than land "uses" as does the dominant practice. Cultural plans as currently conceived are not sufficient to help cities keep pace with dizzying impacts of globalization, immigration, and rapidly changing cultural interests. Cultural planners need to up their game, and enriching their own and city planners’ cultural competencies is only one step. Both planning practices have much to learn from one another and already overlap in more ways than most recognize. This book highlights some of the strengths of the lesser-known practice of cultural planning to help forge greater understanding and collaboration between the two practices, empowering city planners with new tools to bring about more equitable communities. This will be an important resource for students, teachers, and practitioners of city and cultural planning, as well as municipal policymakers of all stripes.


Vernacular Visionaries

Vernacular Visionaries

Author: The Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0300101732

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Outsider Art is a name for the often mesmerizing creations of those who live and work at a distance from prevailing notions about mainstream artistic trends, individuals who are frequently unaware of themselves as artists or their works as art. This book presents and discusses some of the 20th century's most significant examples of Outsider Art. artists from around the world, including Gedewon, a cleric from Ethiopia who made unique and psychedelic talismans; William Hawkins, an African-American self-taught artist with a unique pop sensibility; the Mexican artist Martin Ramirez, creator of large-scale works that tell tales of mestizo life; Nek Chand Saini, whose Rock Garden in India is a leading visionary site; Hung Tung, whose colourful scrolls reflect both traditional Taiwanese culture and fantastic imagination; former Navajo medicine man Charlie Willeto, carver of raw, expressionistic figures and animals; Anna Zemankova, Czech maker of dreamy, biomorphic drawings, perhaps done in a trance or mediumistic state; and Italian artist Carlo Zinelli, whose bold graphic compositions display incredible patterns and energy. of international Outsider Art and demonstrates the importance of place and time - as well as internal genius - in these artists' creative processes.


The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries

The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries

Author: Kate Oakley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-22

Total Pages: 714

ISBN-13: 1317533976

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The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries is collection of contemporary scholarship on the cultural industries and seeks to re-assert the importance of cultural production and consumption against the purely economic imperatives of the ‘creative industries’. Across 43 chapters drawn from a wide range of geographic and disciplinary perspectives, this comprehensive volume offers a critical and empirically-informed examination of the contemporary cultural industries. A range of cultural industries are explored, from videogames to art galleries, all the time focussing on the culture that is being produced and its wider symbolic and socio-cultural meaning. Individual chapters consider their industrial structure, the policy that governs them, their geography, the labour that produces them, and the meaning they offer to consumers and participants. The collection also explores the historical dimension of cultural industry debates providing context for new readers, as well as critical orientation for those more familiar with the subject. Questions of industry structure, labour, place, international development, consumption and regulation are all explored in terms of their historical trajectory and potential future direction. By assessing the current challenges facing the cultural industries this collection of contemporary scholarship provides students and researchers with an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates in the field.


A People's Guide to Los Angeles

A People's Guide to Los Angeles

Author: Laura Pulido

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-04-23

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0520953347

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A People’s Guide to Los Angeles offers an assortment of eye-opening alternatives to L.A.’s usual tourist destinations. It documents 115 little-known sites in the City of Angels where struggles related to race, class, gender, and sexuality have occurred. They introduce us to people and events usually ignored by mainstream media and, in the process, create a fresh history of Los Angeles. Roughly dividing the city into six regions—North Los Angeles, the Eastside and San Gabriel Valley, South Los Angeles, Long Beach and the Harbor, the Westside, and the San Fernando Valley—this illuminating guide shows how power operates in the shaping of places, and how it remains embedded in the landscape.