Encountering Urban Places: Visual and Material Performances in the City

by Lars Frers, Lars Meier, Mark Boyle, Donald Mitchell, David Pinder

Overview

The aesthetics of urban life offer a curious quality, one that is both highly visible and hidden, both openly influencing and subtly imprinting. Exploring the encounter with the aesthetics, images and material design of urban life, this book offers analytic insights into contemporary urban space.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781409487814
Publisher:	Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	11/28/2012
Series:	Re-materialising Cultural Geography
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	24 MB
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About the Author

Lars Frers is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Technology Darmstadt, Germany. Lars Meier is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Technology Darmstadt, Germany.

Table of Contents

Contents: Preface; Encountering urban places – visual and material performances in the city, Lars Frers and Lars Meier; Urban aesthetics and the excess of fact, Helen Liggett; Perception, aesthetics, and envelopment – encountering space and materiality, Lars Frers; Eye-catchers. Staging the sociosexual – the example of prostitution, Martina Löw; Urban spaces re-defined in daily practices – 'minibar', Ankara, Deniz Altay; An uncommon common space, Zeuler R.M.A. Lima and Vera M. Pallamin; Seeing succession in little and big Italy – encountering ethnic vernacular landscapes, Jerome Krase; Working in the skyline – images and everyday action, Lars Meier; Simulation or hospitality – beyond the crisis of representation in Nowa Huta, Lukasz Stanek; Sensing place – mobile and wireless technologies in urban space, Katharine S. Willis; Working with the visual, Lars Frers and Lars Meier; Index.

Editorial Reviews

’Frers and Meier’s Encountering Urban Places brings research on visual and material culture to bear on city life. This book shows how aesthetics and new understandings of communication and consumption are relevant to students of planning and other urban disciplines in ways which go beyond architectural concerns: these include not only urban sights but social activity, highly visible roles and participants in urban life, and the symbolic aspects of the street.’ Rob Shields, University of Alberta, Canada 'Theoretically rich and geographically wide-ranging, these creative and varied essays open up a plethora of issues about the social construction of places, their role in identity formation, and their representation of other worlds. Drawing on Lefebvrian insights, the contributors range imaginatively over everything from body language, urban semiotics and wireless technology to representations of postcommunist cities and the political significance of the visual.' Anthony D. King, State University of New York at Binghamton, USA 'A thoroughly interesting and thought provoking book.' Urban-geography.org.uk 'I find Encountering Urban Places incredibly inspiring since it offers a range of interesting ways to explore the multidimensionality of everyday encounters and how these encounters may play a part in the production of places.' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space '...the discussion pursued by the authors and editors in this book has managed to shift the focus of my thinking from the weaknesses of visuality to its strengths and potentials, especially at those points where it intersects with, or is complicated, by materiality.' Urban Studies

From the Publisher