Suchergebnisse

This book studies the production of urban culture in Tehran after 1979. It analyzes urban resistance and urban processes in underground cultural spaces: bookshops, cafes and art galleries. The intended audience is architects and urban planners interested in socio-political aspects of bottom-up space formation, but also those in humanities and particularly cultural studies. The idea of the book reflects architectural criticism and bottom-up processes of space formation. It analyzes alternative, non-official ways of forming cultural spaces in Tehran and the way they resist formally endorsed culture. Cafés, bookshops and galleries, each take various and different sets of strategies to constitute their territory and their communities within the city. From temporarily occupying street corners (booksellers) to constitution of an underground network of unfixed meeting points, to using the modern paradigms of ownership and the idea of private property, primarily as a political tool for management, to claim a safe alternative sphere of art, and finally to semiotic spatial codifications of spaces to make them as a safe gathering places taking food as a means. All these three cultural spaces deal with various conditions to form specific forms of resistance practices, throughout processes that leave their spatial traces on the city.

In the post-socialist and transition period, Croatia and especially its capital city Zagreb have experienced many physical transformations of space but, most of all, remarkable social changes. For example, socially-oriented housing construction planned and co-financed by towns in Croatia is in a very unfavourable position compared to private housing construction, especially on the outskirts of towns. This benefits neither towns nor their residents, but rather only those urban actors interested in the development of capitalism. In recent years, there has been a lot of building in the city core and on the outskirts of Zagreb, which is not well integrated into the existing urban structure, image or skyline of the city. There is also a major problem of insufficient primary and secondary infrastructure in the new housing estates. The current situation in the planning process is characterized by conflict and lack of balance between powerful political and economic actors and less powerful professional and civil actors. Experts of various profiles often point out that ignoring the process of planning means irreparable long-term damage to the space. Such incongruous transformations show the absence of comprehensive urban planning and urbanism. (IN CROATIAN: Cjelokupni je prostor Hrvatske u postsocijalističkom i tranzicijskom razdoblju doživio brojne i značajne promjene, i u smislu fizičkih transformacija, ali ponajviše onih socijalnih. Primjerice socijalna stanogradnja koju planiraju i sufinanciraju gradovi u Hrvatskoj u vrlo je nepovoljnom položaju prema stanogradnji privatnog tipa, pogotovo na rubovima gradova. Takva situacija nije povoljna za građane i grad, već samo za one urbane aktere koji podržavaju kapitalistički razvoj grada. Posljednjih godina pojavljuje se izgradnja u centru i na rubovima grada koja se ne uklapa u postojeću urbanu strukturu i njegovu vizuru. Prisutan je i problem neadekvatne primarne i sekundarne infrastrukture u novim naseljima. Trenutačnu situaciju u procesu planiranja karakteriziraju sukobi i neravnoteža između političkih i ekonomskih aktera na jednoj strani te stručnih i civilnih aktera na drugoj. Stručnjaci različitih profila upozoravaju kako ignoriranje procesa planiranja dugoročno ostavlja nepopravljivu štetu u prostoru te kako takve transformacije grada govore o nepostojanju urbanizma.)

AbstractAnanya Roy introduces the concept 'subaltern urbanism' in her 2011 article 'Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism'. She challenges researchers to move beyond existing epistemological and methodological limits, and offers four concepts which, taken together, serve as a useful starting point for understanding and representing subaltern urban space. In this article I argue that instead of a deductive approach that begins with an a priori identification of slums as subaltern urban space, an inductive approach of identifying subaltern urban space would expand the concept and show that subaltern urbanism exists in the global North. I present original research to show that Flint, Michigan, can be considered subaltern urban space. In the final section of the article I argue that this inductive approach to subaltern urbanism can foster comparative research across the North‐South divide, and generate the transfer of knowledge from South to North.