Spatial Cultures

Spatial Cultures

Author: Sam Griffiths

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-10

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1317051556

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What is the relationship between how cities work and what cities mean? Spatial Cultures: Towards a New Social Morphology of Cities Past and Present announces an innovative research agenda for urban studies in which themes and methods from urban history, social theory and built environment research are brought into dialogue across disciplinary and chronological boundaries. The collection confronts the recurrent epistemological impasse that arises between research focussing on the description of material built environments and that which is concerned primarily with the people who inhabit, govern and write about cities past and present. A reluctance to engage substantively with this issue has been detrimental to scholarly efforts to understand the urban built environment as a meaningful agent of human social experience. Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary urban case studies, as well as a selection of theoretical and methodological reflections, the contributions to this volume seek to historically, geographically and architecturally contextualize diverse spatial practices including movement, encounter, play, procession and neighbourhood. The aim is to challenge their tacit treatment as universal categories in much writing on cities and to propose alternative research possibilities with implications as much for urban design thinking as for history and the social sciences.


Mediated Identities in the Futures of Place: Emerging Practices and Spatial Cultures

Mediated Identities in the Futures of Place: Emerging Practices and Spatial Cultures

Author: Lakshmi Priya Rajendran

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-02

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 3030062376

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This book examines the emerging problems and opportunities that are posed by media innovations, spatial typologies, and cultural trends in (re)shaping identities within the fast-changing milieus of the early 21st Century. Addressing a range of social and spatial scales and using a phenomenological frame of reference, the book draws on the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Don Hide to bridge the seemingly disparate, yet related theoretical perspectives across a number of disciplines. Various perspectives are put forward from media, human geography, cultural studies, technologies, urban design and architecture etc. and looked at thematically from networked culture and digital interface (and other) perspectives. The book probes the ways in which new digital media trends affect how and what we communicate, and how they drive and reshape our everyday practices. This mediatization of space, with fast evolving communication platforms and applications of digital representations, offers challenges to our notions of space, identity and culture and the book explores the diverse yet connected levels of technology and people interaction.


Spatializing Culture

Spatializing Culture

Author: Setha Low

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-08-12

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1317369637

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This book demonstrates the value of ethnographic theory and methods in understanding space and place, and considers how ethnographically-based spatial analyses can yield insight into prejudices, inequalities and social exclusion as well as offering people the means for understanding the places where they live, work, shop and socialize. In developing the concept of spatializing culture, Setha Low draws on over twenty years of research to examine social production, social construction, embodied, discursive, emotive and affective, as well as translocal approaches. A global range of fieldwork examples are employed throughout the text to highlight not just the theoretical development of the idea of spatializing culture, but how it can be used in undertaking ethnographies of space and place. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars from a number of disciplines who are interested in the study of culture through the lens of space and place.


Designing Spatial Culture

Designing Spatial Culture

Author: Roderick Adams

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-07

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1000957853

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Designing Spatial Culture investigates a powerful experiential dialogue formed between the habitation of space and a diversified cultural realm. This creative proposition binds and positions human activity and experience framing its histories, currency and future. Whilst the book distinguishes between the conditions of the existing urban/ architecture/ interior canon, it embraces a new agency of space, showcasing the encounters, assemblies and designs that shape human behaviours and the cultural forms of the built environment. Using authoritative case studies, the book examines many locations and spaces, ranging from new urban landscapes, historical domestic spaces and contemporary architecture. It embraces the most lavish and flamboyant to the most simplistic and minimal, establishing a connected cultural narrative. The book shifts the focus in the spatial realm from an object-based experience (where space is filled with things) to a more complete immersive experience (combining physical and digital). A key part of this exploration is the relationship between the architecture and the interior which is often the most predominant spatial experience and fundamental to the understanding spatial experience and existing cultures. Without the architectural enclosure, the interior would lose its site context and structure for its existence. Without an interior, architecture would not fully develop an engaging spatial experience for the user. The book rationalises this through extended use of a spatial probe which documents and summarises an evidence-based research project capturing spatial culture data from a predominantly domestic setting. The book is essential reading for students and researchers in architecture, interior design and urban design.


Mobility, Space, and Culture

Mobility, Space, and Culture

Author: Peter Merriman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0415593565

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Over the past 10 to 15 years there has emerged an increasing concern with mobility in the social sciences and humanities. Here, Peter Merriman provides a contribution to the mobilities turn in the social sciences, encouraging academics to rethink the relationship between movement, embodied practices, space and place.


Surveillance, Architecture and Control

Surveillance, Architecture and Control

Author: Susan Flynn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-01-21

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 303000371X

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This edited collection examines the culture of surveillance as it is expressed in the built environment. Expanding on discussions from previous collections; Spaces of Surveillance: States and Selves (2017) and Surveillance, Race, Culture (2018), this book seeks to explore instances of surveillance within and around specific architectural entities, both historical and fictitious, buildings with specific social purposes and those existing in fiction, film, photography, performance and art. Providing new readings of, and expanding on Foucault’s work on the panopticon, these essays examine the role of surveillance via disparate fields of enquiry, such as the humanities, social sciences, technological studies, design and environmental disciplines. Surveillance, Architecture and Control seeks to engender new debates about the nature of the surveilled environment through detailed analyses of architectural structures and spaces; examining how cultural, geographical and built space buttress and produce power relations. The various essays address the ongoing fascination with contemporary notions of surveillance and control.


African Cultures, Memory and Space

African Cultures, Memory and Space

Author: Munyaradzi Mawere

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2014-07-17

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9956792152

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African Cultures, Memory and Space is an impeccable volume that powerfully grapples with a gamut of cultural heritage issues, challenges and problems from a vista of inter- and multi-disciplinary approach. The book, which is designed as a foundational text to the study of culture in ever-changing environments, makes an important argument that the dynamism of culture in highly globalised societies such as that of Zimbabwe can be studied from any perspective, but most importantly through careful examination of cultural elements such as memory, oral history and space, among others. While the book makes special reference to Zimbabwe, it profoundly and audaciously dissect and cut across different geographical and cultural spaces through its penetrating interrogation and scrutiny of different issues commonplace in many African contexts and even beyond. The book, written by scholars from different backgrounds and orientations, should appeal to scholars, researchers and students from various disciplines which include but not limited to Cultural Heritage Studies, Policy Studies, Social-Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, Development Studies and African Studies.


Patterns and Layering

Patterns and Layering

Author: Kengo Kuma

Publisher: Gestalten

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783899554618

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Patterns and Layering is a journey into the activities of Kengo Kuma Research Lab. The book aims to establish the interrelation between patterns and layering within architecture. These two previously detached notions can now be integrated into one methodology mediated by structural concepts. Patterns and Layering is the first book to introduce this new interrelationship, which has the potential to begin a new architectural and design revolution.


Space and Time in Languages and Cultures

Space and Time in Languages and Cultures

Author: Luna Filipovi?

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9027223912

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This is an interdisciplinary volume that focuses on the central topic of the representation of events, namely cross-cultural differences in representing time and space, as well as various aspects of the conceptualisation of space and time. It brings together research on space and time from a variety of angles, both theoretical and methodological. Crossing boundaries between and among disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy, or anthropology forms a creative platform in a bold attempt to reveal the complex interaction of language, culture, and cognition in the context of human communication and interaction. The authors address the nature of spatial and temporal constructs from a number of perspectives, such as cultural specificity in determining time intervals in an Amazonian culture, distinct temporalities in a specific Mongolian hunter community, Russian-specific conceptualisation of temporal relations, Seri and Yucatec frames of spatial reference, memory of events in space and time, and metaphorical meaning stemming from perception and spatial artefacts, to name but a few themes. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different albeit related point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Linguistic Diversity (HCP 36) which focuses on the language-specific vis-à-vis universal aspects of linguistic representation of spatial and temporal reference.