Suchergebnisse

Through their work, walking tour guides make the abstract histories and cultural flows of cities present and tangible for their followers – merging physical spaces, mental maps of information, and experiences through a kind of spatial storytelling. This social actor's position in regard to consumption and production thus lends itself to conceptualization as a pivotal cultural worker. To better understand this condition, this article has two interrelated goals: first, to raise the importance of Bourdieu's 'cultural intermediary' and the practice of spatial narratives as concerns for the study of culture, and, second, to refit Wendy Griswold's (1987a) 1987 framework for a sociology of culture in order to better suit social actors located within a 'circuit of culture'. Through the study of walking guides, this article places Bourdieu's provocative concept in dialogue with a clear epistemological framework.

Urban sociology, often and quite reasonably, emphasizes the effects of large–scale and corporate cultures of cities and yet, at the smaller scale, there is a diverse and complex set of practices that reinvigorate the urban landscape. By pairing ethnographic fieldnotes with interviews, this paper offers a limited rejoinder to these narratives, evincing the lived interactions of one set of characters that reenchants cities. for the purposes of this article, walking tour guides serve as examples of "urban alchemists," and three of their practices are advanced for discussion: their use of myths and revelatory stories to uproot banal visions of the city; their aim to incorporate chance and serendipity into their interactions; and their attempts to transform their participants into "better" urban dwellers.

Intro -- Contents -- Acronyms -- Introduction -- 1. Why Are So Many Hospital Neighborhoods Health Poor? -- 2. How History "Keys" the Hospital and Community Relationship -- 3. "What's Your Total Commitment to the Community?": Explicit and Implicit Hospital Development Strategies -- 4. Healthcare in the Contact Zone: Unconventional Spaces, Institutional Changes, and Communities of Color -- 5. Ambiguous Obligations and Mixed Expectations -- 6. Six Policy Ideas for Communities and Hospitals -- Acknowledgments -- Appendix A: On Methods -- Appendix B: Comparative Data -- Appendix C: Hospital-Identified Needs and Programs -- Notes -- References -- Index.

AbstractExternal forces always shape the social construction of 'the local'. In this article we offer a framework for understanding how external players and strategies reconfigure the social and symbolic character of local culture for new investments and new populations. We aim not only to propose a theory of urban cultural processing by nonlocals—what we call 'urban cultural terraforming'—but to identify pressure points for local groups to make claims on or even commandeer reshaping local culture. Using two cases, casino development in a deindustrialized city and state‐designated cultural districts, we illustrate how 'cultural terraformers' use identifiable strategies (e.g. colonization of local sentiment, re‐creating partnerships and respatializing) to change local culture, and how groups struggle to avoid marginalization.