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Publication date: 29 March 2022

Stefano Rozzoni, Beitske Boonstra and Teresa Cutler-Broyles

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Re-Imagining Spaces and Places
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ISBN: 978-1-80071-737-4

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Publication date: 29 March 2022

Stefano Rozzoni

Since the establishment of ecocriticism, the traditional Western dualistic categories of spaces and places have become objects of increasing pluralistic refigurations in light of…

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Since the establishment of ecocriticism, the traditional Western dualistic categories of spaces and places have become objects of increasing pluralistic refigurations in light of the challenges posed by current environmental crises. More and more scholars have discussed how rooted dichotomies, including country/city and nature/culture, should be reconsidered for better acknowledging the sense of connectedness occurring between humans and the surrounding nonhuman world. Consequences of this approach in literary and cultural studies have been pivotal: new environmentally oriented hermeneutic practices have developed, which allow for reevaluating phenomena linked to old-fashioned understandings of the natural world. Among them, the pastoral, traditionally conceived as the contrast between the rural and the urban, has been reexamined by ecocritics through new concepts, starting from the “post-pastoral” (Gifford, 1999). By stressing the investigation of the relationship between the human and the environment in pastoral representations, the post-pastoral has become a favorable tool (Gifford, 2006) for enhancing ethical considerations in response to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

This transdisciplinary chapter is also inspired by “geocriticism,” which reflects on how literary narratives influence spatial practices in the real, material world. Specifically, this chapter discusses how the neologism “cittagna” – blending the Italian terms città (city) and campagna (country) – which first appeared in Stefano Benni's novel Prendiluna (2017), allows critics to reflect on the development of similar combinatory processes in contemporary urban spaces. When considering this process in parallel with the notion of post-pastoral, “cittagna,” becomes a useful concept for observing how, in current cityscapes, the emergence of new spaces and places negotiates the conventional country/city split, while highlighting the sense of intertwining between the two terms. Hence, attention is placed on how two possible examples of rising “cittagnas” – roof gardens and off-leash dog parks – can be read as evidence of the increasing attentiveness toward issues of human-nonhuman relationality in today's urbanism, which becomes a hope on the horizon for facing current environmental concerns.

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Re-Imagining Spaces and Places
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-737-4

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Moving Spaces and Places
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ISBN: 978-1-80071-226-3

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Publication date: 29 March 2022

Stefano Rozzoni, Beitske Boonstra and Teresa Cutler-Broyles

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Re-Imagining Spaces and Places
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-737-4

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Publication date: 29 March 2022

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Re-Imagining Spaces and Places
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-737-4

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Publication date: 9 August 2022

Beitske Boonstra, Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Stefano Rozzoni

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Moving Spaces and Places
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ISBN: 978-1-80071-226-3

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Publication date: 9 August 2022

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Moving Spaces and Places
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ISBN: 978-1-80071-226-3

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Publication date: 9 August 2022

Clint Abrahams

In 1948, South Africa's Apartheid legislation imposed modernist spatial planning on its populations and created worlds Black people struggled to connect with. Crime, poverty and…

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In 1948, South Africa's Apartheid legislation imposed modernist spatial planning on its populations and created worlds Black people struggled to connect with. Crime, poverty and unemployment have emerged as legacies of Apartheid that continue to impact the lives of Black people living in the townships. In 1994, the new democratic government identified community engagement (CE) as a critical process that could help restore the values of Black people and the places they live in.

This chapter explores a CE process as storytelling to trace the spatiality of agency. As a researcher-architect living in a township, I examined the voluntary community organisation (VCO), Studiolight's CE process, and an exhibition entitled Who we are Macassar, which was conducted between 2016 and 2018 in the community of Macassar, a township in the Western Cape of South Africa. The VCO worked with local youth to produce story maps and a street photography project that reauthors (retells and rewrites) the stories of life in Macassar to critically engage the spatial legacies of Apartheid. Brazilian theorist Paulo Freire's writings on how neglected population groups can self-organise to create knowledge that can restore social narratives is useful to make sense of the CE process. I highlight the spaces of the CE process and use Freire's concepts of critical action, praxis and co-creation to structure the study. I then reflect on the nomadic and sporadic spatiality that emerges in Macassar to discuss how architects can think about forging places with a sense of community identity and belonging.

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Moving Spaces and Places
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-226-3

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Publication date: 9 August 2022

Martin Blum

Underpinned by Henri Lefebvre's notion of the production of space with its triad of spatial practice, lived space and conceived space, this project traces the history of East…

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Underpinned by Henri Lefebvre's notion of the production of space with its triad of spatial practice, lived space and conceived space, this project traces the history of East German urban modernism through its trajectory of change from an ambitious socialist project via market-driven failure, to its revival as creative space. The physical manifestations of East German urban modernism are its large-scale residential estates with their ubiquitous high-rise buildings, assembled from precast concrete elements, or plates, lending them the vernacular German name Plattenbauten. In terms of their design, planning, construction and scope, these buildings and their locations were once part of a large, government-driven experiment in urban modernism: in the reconstruction of the country after World War II, residential estates were designed from scratch to be proof of a new, progressive, idealistic and somehow ‘better’ post-war Germany and were one of the most visible manifestations of urban modernism in Germany. After the German unification, however, many of the housing estates from the 1970s to 1980s fell into disrepair: many buildings were demolished and the remaining ones frequently became social and economic trouble spots. In the latest and (almost) ironic twist, however, the history of urban modernism changed direction once more: after more than 20 years of neglect, the Plattenbau has been rediscovered as much needed affordable and, due to its unique engineering, easily adaptable creative living, working and commercial space.

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Moving Spaces and Places
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-226-3

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Book part
Publication date: 29 March 2022

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Re-Imagining Spaces and Places
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-737-4

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