Spatial Cultures: Towards a New Social Morphology of Cities Past and Present / Edition 1

by Sam Griffiths, Alexander von Lünen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472450296
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/22/2016
Series:	Design and the Built Environment
Edition description:	New
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sam Griffiths is Lecturer in Spatial Cultures and a member of the Space Syntax Laboratory at the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture. His research interests include the spatial cultures of industrial cities, processional culture, high streets, the representation of spatial cultures in literary and historical writing, and interdisciplinary spatial-morphological theory and methods. He teaches a range of topics in spatial cultures on UCL’s Arts and Sciences BASc and MSc 'Spatial Design: Architecture and Cities' programmes. He has published widely on a range of urban and suburban topics.

Alexander von Lünen is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Huddersfield. He holds a degree in computer science and a doctorate in history, both from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. From 2007 to 2012 he was technical lead for the Great Britain Historical GIS and its website 'A Vision of Britain through Time'. He is co-editor, with Charles Travis, of History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections (2013).

Table of Contents

List of figures x

List of tables xiii

Notes on contributors xiv

Foreword Richard Rodger xix

Preface Sam Griffiths Alexander von Lünen xxi

Acknowledgements Sam Griffiths xxxii

Part I Spatial cultures in the ancient and medieval worlds 1

1 Ancient Rome: Mobility in Europe's first metropolis Ray Laurence 3

2 The ancient city and Huizinga's Homo Ludens Hanna Stöger 15

3 'Spatial culture' of an institution: Preliminary thoughts on Roman military bases Anna H. Walas 32

4 Approaching a lived experience of ancient domestic space Hannah Platts 43

5 Space for neighbourhood: Social identity and the built environment in medieval York Gareth Dean 51

Part II Spatial cultures in the long nineteenth century 65

6 Thirdspace? Historians and the spatial turn, with a case study ofpolitical graffiti in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England Katrina Navickas 67

7 From lines OH maps to symbolic order in the city? Translating processional routes as spatial practice in nineteenth-century Sheffield Sam Griffiths 76

8 Weaving patterns in the suburban fabric: Carnival procession routes, mapping place and experiencing space on London's changing periphery, 1890-1914 Dion Georgiou 95

9 Plasticine cities: On young people and historical urban morphology Simon Sleight 114

10 What has the future of urban parks to do with their past? Katy Layton-Jones 128

Part III Historical cities, contemporary spatial cultures 139

11 Between urban and digital spaces Vinigius M. Netto 141

12 Artefact and rhythm: Reflections on the introduction of Location-Based Services in the city Frederik Weissenborn 151

13 Mediated spatial cultures: Place-making in London neighbourhoods with the aid of networked interactive urban screens Wallis Motta Ava Fatah Gen Schieck 160

14 Commuting with others: Infrastructures and interactions in public transport space Anna Plyushteva 172

15 Grindr Guys #7: Difference, traces and spatial practices Regner Ramos 181

Part IV Perspectives and methods for spatial cultures research 191

16 So long, and thanks for the GIS: Digital spatial history Alexander Von Lúnen 193

17 Making space for each other: Reflections on incommensurate data in interdisciplinary research David Jeevendrampillai 203

18 Reassembling Durkheimian sociology of space Lasse Suonfera Liebst 214

19 Movement in Adaptive Architecture Holger Schnädelbach 225

20 Mobilities Design: Towards an experimental field of research and practice Ole. B. Jensen Ditte Bendix Lanng 236

Bibliography 247

Index 278

Editorial Reviews

’As someone who learns urban history by walking the streets and thinking about the past, I welcome this collection of essays. It is a book for thinking with. Its great strength is its enormous range, from ancient Rome to the digital, from theory to case study.’ R.J. Morris, Edinburgh University, UK

From the Publisher