The Ludic City
The Ludic City

Author: Quentin Stevens

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-04-11

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 1134143958

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This international and illustrated work challenges current writings focussing on the problems of urban public space to present a more nuanced and dialectical conception of urban life. Detailed and extensive international urban case studies show how urban open spaces are used for play, which is defined and discussed using Caillois' four-part definition – competition, chance, simulation and vertigo. Stevens explores and analyzes these case studies according to locations where play has been observed: paths, intersections, thresholds, boundaries and props. Applicable to a wide-range of countries and city forms, The Ludic City is a fascinating and stimulating read for all who are involved or interested in the design of urban spaces.

The Ludic City
The Ludic City

Author: Quentin Stevens

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-04-11

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1134143966

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Featuring extensive observation of behaviours in public spaces and detailed studies of Melbourne, London, Berlin, New York and Brisbane, this book represents a fresh and detailed depiction of play in the specific context of urban public space.

Encountering the City
Encountering the City

Author: Jonathan Darling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-15

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1317143949

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Encountering the City provides a new and sustained engagement with the concept of encounter. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical work, classic writings on the city and rich empirical examples, this volume demonstrates why encounters are significant to urban studies, politically, philosophically and analytically. Bringing together a range of interests, from urban multiculture, systems of economic regulation, security and suspicion, to more-than-human geographies, soundscapes and spiritual experience, Encountering the City argues for a more nuanced understanding of how the concept of 'encounter' is used. This interdisciplinary collection thus provides an insight into how scholars' writing on and in the city mobilise, theorise and challenge the concept of encounter through empirical cases taken from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. These cases go beyond conventional accounts of urban conviviality, to demonstrate how encounters destabilise, rework and produce difference, fold together complex temporalities, materialise power and transform political relations. In doing so, the collection retains a critical eye on the forms of regulation, containment and inequality that shape the taking place of urban encounter. Encountering the City is a valuable resource for students and researchers alike.

Play and the City
Play and the City

Author: Alex Bonham

Publisher: Robinson

Published: 2021-07-08

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1472144791

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Play is essential, for children but also adults. It's how we relax and revitalise ourselves, build and maintain friendships, try new things, learn and innovate. Cities have always been sites of play, bringing people together and pushing the boundaries of what is humanly possible. And now we need our cities to encourage and facilitate play of all kinds more than ever. If we want a world for our children to play in, we need to have a go at doing things differently. A city that is enjoyable to live in - that provides welcoming spaces, plentiful resources, and an attitude of 'yes, you can' - is a playful city. A city that is good for eight-year-olds as well as eighty-year-olds is a city that's good for all of us. By looking at how different cities across space and time have sought to encourage and facilitate play, Bonham shows us how to conceptualise our own contemporary city as a game, and encourages us to become participants rather than spectators. Play the city! Get involved, make a difference and help to bring your city back to life. There is help here to identify opportunities, build a team of friends and allies, take part - and win! It's time to make your move.

Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City
Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City

Author: Dale Leorke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-30

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1000217787

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This book explores what games and play can tell us about contemporary processes of urbanization and examines how the dynamics of gaming can help us understand the interurban competition that underpins the entrepreneurialism of the smart and creative city. Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City is a collection of chapters written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from game studies, media studies, play studies, architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. It situates the historical evolution of play and games in the urban landscape and outlines the scope of the various ways games and play contribute to the city’s economy, cultural life and environmental concerns. In connecting games and play more concretely to urban discourses and design strategies, this book urges scholars to consider their growing contribution to three overarching sets of discourses that dominate urban planning and policy today: the creative and cultural economies of cities; the smart and playable city; and ecological cities. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students and scholars of game studies, play studies, landscape architecture (and allied design fields), urban geography, and art history. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003007760

Performance and the Contemporary City
Performance and the Contemporary City

Author: Nicolas Whybrow

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1137120061

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Cities, with their rising populations and complex configurations, have become key symbols of a fast-changing modernity. This timely collection gathers together various urban writings from a range of relevant disciplines, including architecture, geography, sociology, visual art, ethnography and psychoanalysis. Its focus, however, is performance. Underscoring the importance of the field, it shows how performance functions as a dynamic, interdisciplinary mechanism which is central not only to understanding the multiplicity of urban living but also to the way the identities of cities are shaped. Gathering together key writings on the city and performance by authors ranging from Walter Benjamin to Tim Etchells to Carl Lavery, the reader can be navigated in any number of ways. Supported by extensive introductory material, it will be essential and evocative reading for anyone interested in making connections between performance and urban life.

Translating the City
Translating the City

Author: Hossam Aldy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1134950977

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The city is a highly fragmented, heterogeneous subject; those who study, analyze and question it make a use of a variety of disciplines and methods and have different areas of expertise. How is a dialogue built between heterogeneous urban contexts and urban researchers, architects, developers, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists? What capacity do concepts and methods have to travel from one context to another? How can they be transferred? The strength of Urban Translations lies in its disciplinary and geographical comparison and dialogue on a global scale. It openly targets an international audience, bringing together leading researchers from a variety of disciplines (urban planning, sociology, architecture and anthropology) and presenting case studies from highly contrasting urban settings, including Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Cape Town, Dubai, Montreal, Geneva, Lisbon, Ljubljana and Berlin.

Art and the City
Art and the City

Author: Nicolas Whybrow

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2010-10-30

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0857718827

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To Henri Lefebvre, the space and 'lived everydayness' of the inter-dependent, multi-faceted city produces manifold possibilities of identifiction and realisation through often imperceptible interactions and practices. 'Art and the City' takes this observation as its cue to examine the role of art against a backdrop of globally rising urban populations, taking into account the more recent performative and relational 'turns' of art that have sought in their city settings to identify a participating spectator - an implicated citizen. In exploring how artworks present themselves as a means by which to navigate and plot the city for a writing interlocutor, Nicolas Whybrow discusses diverse examples, representing three key modern modalities of urban arts practice. The first, walking, involves works by Richard Wentworth, Francis AlA s, Mark Walllinger and others, the second, play, includes art by Antony Gormley, Mark Quinn and Carsten Holler. The third, cultural memory, Whybrow addresses through the controversial urban holocaust memorial sites of Peter Eisenman's memorial in Berlin and Rachel Whiteread's in Vienna.