City Living is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. More people live in cities than ever before: more than 50% of the earth's people are urban dwellers. As downtown cores gentrify and globalize, they are becoming more diverse than ever, along lines of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and age. Meanwhile, we are in the early stages of what seems sure to be a period of intense (...) civil unrest. During such periods, cities generally become the primary sites where tensions and resistance are concentrated, negotiated, and performed. For all of these reasons, understanding cities and contemporary city living is pressing and exciting from almost any disciplinary and political perspective. Quill R Kukla offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. The book draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of urban life. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order, but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, Kukla makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book concludes with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants. (shrink)

The incidence of obesity, defined as the fraction of persons with BMIs exceeding 30·0, was examined in two birth cohorts of 401996 decade obesity increased dramatically among males with trade school education only; concomitant shifts were much smaller or absent in the college-educated groups. The contrast in obesity between the opposite ends of the educational scale has widened markedly in both genders; and the between-gender gap has declined somewhat.

Support for gender equality has increased globally, and studies of this trend usually examine individual- and/or country-level factors. However, this overlooks subnational variation. City-dwellers are more likely to support gender equality in education, employment, leadership, and leisure. This article investigates the causes of rural–urban differences through comparative, qualitative research in Cambodia. The emergence of rural garment factories presents a quasi-natural experiment to test the theory that female employment enhances support for gender equality. Rural female employment may diminish rural–urban (...) differences in gender inequalities or there may be other important aspects of city-living that amplify support for gender equality. Drawing on Cambodian fieldwork, I suggest that cities raise the opportunity costs of the male breadwinner model, increase exposure to women in socially valued roles, and provide more associational avenues to collectively contest established practices. Interests, exposure, and association reinforce a snowballing process of social change. By investigating the causes of subnational variation, I advance a new theory of growing support for gender equality. (shrink)

Intercultural citizenship seems to benefit from certain generic aspects of city life that carry a negative quality, such as “blasé attitude” or the typical “indifference” of city dwellers. The main part of this essay argues that this observation allows the formulation of a moral minimum—a threshold conception—of intercultural citizenship in the urban setting, namely, what I call side-by-side citizenship. A certain level of indifference makes possible personal freedom and a tolerant multicultural city, although there are more (...) ideal formulations of intercultural citizenship, such as in terms of agonism or cosmopolitanism. However, these more ambitious forms easily become too demanding given the muddle of everyday urban living conditions, which tend to promote mutual reserve and impersonal social relations. A modest and realistic conception of intercultural citizenship could prove crucial in motivating citizens to act according to some minimal standards. (shrink)

New York may be most easily recognized by its trademark skyscrapers and brick tenement buildings, but the truth is that the city is actually teeming with luxurious roof gardens and private courtyard oases. Creative gardeners and architects have risen to meet the unique challenges of the urban landscape, designing spaces that celebrate the city while providing a restful escape. New York City Gardens presents New York’s evolving tradition of garden culture through images and discussions of thirty of (...) its most outstanding gardens, from world-famous botanical gardens to richly re-cultivated public urban spaces, luxurious penthouse terraces, and innovative art gardens without soil or plants. Many of the gardens are set against vistas of the quintessential New York—Central Park, the Empire State Building, skyscrapers of Midtown, and the sensational skyline of Lower Manhattan. Other gardens reveal surprising and exotic intimate retreats from the bustle of the city. While most were designed by noted landscape architects, including Dan Kiley, Hideo Sasaki, Ken Smith, and Halsted Wells, many others were created over decades by talented homeowners themselves. As more and more city dwellers in New York and beyond look to cultivate their own kitchen and container gardens and individual outdoor sanctuaries, this book provides hundreds of inspiring images as well as historical background and insight into the practical and imaginative solutions of city garden designers. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the power-related infrastructural dynamic that actualises in the interrelations of big data collection and the bodily movement of urbanites in contemporary cities. By drawing from Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologies of the body and combining them with recent theorisations on choreography, material media theory and critical technology studies, the authors address city dwellers’ embodied relations with mobile devices and ambient technologies as integral to the micro-, meso- and macro-level production (...) of urban infrastructures. By way of discussing the technologically mediated kinaesthesia and movement trajectories of lived bodies, the chapter develops a novel conceptualisation of urban choreography for exploring the mechanisms through which dwelling-in-the-city today functions in a globally extensive cybernetic feedback loop with profit-motivated and surveillant big data operations. (shrink)

This essay takes seriously Heidegger’s claim that a given place influences what gets built in it, which both expresses and creates how we dwell in that place. This in turn is a guiding metaphor for how we think about ourselves as dwellers, which for Heidegger is the true nature of philosophy. I argue that philosophy itself is most fully supported in an urban, city environment.

When town planning emerged at the end of the 19th century, its proponents did not envisage the city without nature. Some, such as Ebenezer Howard, believed the garden city would become the new face of the urban landscape, bringing together only the positive aspects of both city and country. Others, health experts and rationalists, advocated functional planning, where the ‘green space’ was part of the overall plan. And so nature was not forgotten. But what ‘nature’? A ‘nature’ (...) external to the town-dweller, like an ornament or decoration? Something that enhanced the built environment and not the very condition of our existence as human beings? Behind the planners’ inclusion of ‘nature’ lie very different intentions, from one period to another and one culture to another. The globalized, standardized ‘nature’ that was subsequently part of marketing the city is just an image; whether wild or tamed, it is no longer localized, no longer a partner in our condition as denizens of the earth. Thierry Paquot examines these continuing processes of change. (shrink)

Cities are large and densely populated areas, a fact that can influence how individuals relate to each other. However, the intensity and dynamism of cities make them a site for particular kinds of divisions, which may produce inequalities. This is visible through residential segregation, which is the territorial division of groups into largely homogeneous areas correlated with socio-economic disparities and individuals’ negative perceptions of otherness. At the very least, residential segregation delimits what some can get from cities in terms of (...) accessing resources and respectful treatment. According to Elizabeth Anderson, it is necessary from a normative perspective to remedy residential segregation with integration. Drawing on her approach, I put forward a relational egalitarian diagnosis, as well as an integrationist project, to help foster mutual respect between city dwellers. In order to operationalise this normative demand, but in a way distinct from Anderson’s project, I explore what is lost when integration focuses only on physical changes, overlooking role divisions in cities and a fair participatory process for achieving equality. (shrink)

The overall policy and strategies of an organization i.e. employeepolicy or employee development strategies, resource management as well asmonitoring and control strategies characteristically have an effect on the qualitymanagement of the organization. These policies usually also have impact onthe stakeholders i.e. satisfaction of the wider community and employees ofthe particular organization. The aim of this paper is to examine the policyand strategies of the Chittagong City Corporation for quality improvementand how these policy and strategies impact on the needs of (...) its stakeholders.This paper is guided by the EFQM model as the theoretical underpinning thatprovides specific enabler criteria of quality management of organizations suchas employee policy, development of partnerships and resource management,and the monitoring of strategies. These enabler criteria help to explain the waysin which total quality management is implemented in any organization.Data for this study was collected from a total of 142 participants, includingselective officials of the Chittagong City Corporation, city dwellers,government officials and civil society representatives by using a structuredquestionnaire. The findings of this study reveal that the CCC has failed toconvey clearly its quality mission and objectives to its employees at all levels. (shrink)

It is more than a coincidence that in his two essays, “Wilderness and the City: Not such a Long Drive After All” and “Can Cities Be Both Natural and Successful? Reflections Grounding Two Apparently Oxymoronic Aspirations,” Scott Cameron looks to water as a basis for evaluating the city in relationship to the wild and in imagining new possibilities for urban nature. In an attempt to complement and enrich Cameron’s thinking, this essay focuses on emerging, decentralized and ecologically responsive (...) approaches to water and wastewater systems in architectural projects in dense urban environments. Such an emphasis on “blue architectures” allows for a reframing of the city/nature relationship in terms of degrees of concentration—of water, organisms, and pollutants—as a precursor to considerations of distances involved (“not such a long drive”). To concentrate on localized hydrologic conditions is to support the integrity of broader scale ecological systems and to reconnect urban dwellers to processes that bear directly on the wild. (shrink)

This essay elaborates a magical realist reading of urban dispossession and the displacement of slum dwellers in contemporary New Delhi. More generally it argues that realist descriptions of the magical and magical descriptions of the real can help us sense and engage the multiple, fractured temporalities of the postcolonial city. The essay foregrounds an impending slum demolition in postcolonial Delhi’s (in)famous magicians’ ghetto in the heart of the city, excavating a concept of ‘moving slums’ from Salman Rushdie’s (...) classic magical realist text Midnight’s Children. The interpretive concept of ‘moving slums’ describes the precarious temporality of slum demolition and re-settlement in postcolonial Delhi, juxtaposing dominant urbanist ideologies with everyday experiences and narratives of urban change. In societies deeply marked by the historical violence of uneven development, moving slums index the haunted morphology of the postcolonial city. (shrink)

City-dwellers who are threatened by the risk of natural or social disasters are in search of safer houses. Each attempt to satisfy their need for safety, however, turns into another version of the security problem; so much so that, escaping from risk itself turns into different risks. The film 10 to 11 focuses on the socio-spatial conflict between a stranger and his neighbours who are anxious about a possible earthquake risk in Istanbul. Mithat, the protagonist of the film, (...) is a stranger not only to place but essentially to time. He lives within time and understands place as an essential means loaded by temporal experiences and memories. This paper deals with the multiple dichotomies between time and memory, between risk and fear, between aesthetics and security, and between attachment and profit in the context of urban transformation. The stranger, who is analysed for the first time as a temporal being in this paper, is discussed using Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of uncertainty and liquid modernity, Richard Sennett’s capitalism, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, Frank Furedi’s culture of fear, Stephen Bertman’s hurried culture, Elias Canetti’s death, Giorgio Agamben’s forgotten and gone, Svetlana Boym’s nostalgia, and Halbwachs, Assmann, Connerton, and Arendt’s memory, as well as around the temporal spaces of museums, bibliopoles, antique shops, and cemeteries. (shrink)

The genealogy of ethics starts in the polis. Plato and Aristotle had an optimistic view of polis life, even though Plato was born shortly after the plague of Athens, an experience that left a deep imprint in his society, and interestingly not a very good opinion of democracy. The idea of the polis as the ideal locus for human flourishing can be contested because we do not share the same face-to-face form of life with the ancient polis-dwellers. Contemporary megacities (...) do not harbor an agora in which citizens debate current affairs. Such debates have shifted to social media. It is worth investigating the value of face-to-face interaction even today. Despite the risk of spreading airborne lung diseases like the Corona virus, the possibility of face-to-face interactions allows the cultivation of attention necessary for ethics. Knowing your neighbor by acquaintance, seeing her face every day can make pedestrians better attuned to the need to protect her in times of the pandemic, by maintaining distance and wearing a mask. If this is indeed the case, then it has implications for urban design: urban density can be designed in a way that affords functional proximity and more humane neighborhoods. (shrink)

From 1942 to 1952, a programme took place at Johns Hopkins to devise new methods of controlling Baltimore’s rat population. This article focuses on three individuals closely connected to this project at various stages of its development: psycho-biologist Curt Richter, animal ecologist David E. Davis, and ecologist and psychologist John B. Calhoun. For all three, the challenges of controlling rat numbers highlighted the significance of stress – a homeostatic mechanism critical to the survival of the animal. This was a process (...) that was analyzed and manipulated by (re)introducing the wild rat into the laboratory. Here the rat not only contributed to new methods of rodent control, but offered new possibilities for the control and improvement of humankind. Yet it was not just the animal, but the physical structure of the laboratory that came to model the world outside. Through examining the experimental systems of the three scientists, this article will trace a series of transgressions between laboratory and field, urban and wild, animal and human. The result was that while animals were used to model the behaviour and pathologies of human city dwellers, the laboratory spaces in which they existed came to model the urban environment. We shall also see how differing perspectives on the value and uses of animal models and environments encouraged and reinforced alternative visions as to the role of science in the service of the city. (shrink)

The city-province distinction is usually construed in economic terms: the city is the center of consumption and wealth, while the province the center of production and raw materials. In this paper, I propose that we can also draw the distinction epistemologically; instead of distinguishing between city-dwellers and provincedwellers, we can talk about city-minded and province-minded people. In this perspective, we discover the crucial position of education as the paradoxical interplay of the city mentality and (...) province mentality. After examining this “paradox of education” as witnessed in Philippine history, especially during the Spanish and American occupations, I suggest that we can resolve the paradox by developing our system of education towards a more “nationalistic education,” as per Renato Constantino. (shrink)

What, if anything, is problematic about gentrification? This article addresses this question from the perspective of normative political theory. We argue that gentrification is problematic insofar as it involves a violation of city-dwellers’ occupancy rights. We distinguish these rights from other forms of territorial rights and discuss the different implications of the argument for urban governance. If we agree on the ultimate importance of being able to pursue one’s located life plans, the argument goes, we must also agree (...) on limiting the impact of gentrification on peoples’ lives. Limiting gentrification’s impact, however, does not entail halting processes of gentrification once and for all. (shrink)

The goal of the present paper is to construct a formal explication of the pluralistic ignorance explanation of the bystander effect. The social dynamics leading to inaction is presented, decomposed, and modeled using dynamic epistemic logic augmented with ‘transition rules’ able to characterize agent behavior. Three agent types are defined: First Responders who intervene given belief of accident; City Dwellers, capturing ‘apathetic urban residents’ and Hesitators, who observe others when in doubt, basing subsequent decision on social proof. It (...) is shown how groups of the latter may end in a state of pluralistic ignorance leading to inaction. Sequential models for each agent type are specified, and their results compared to empirical studies. It is concluded that only the Hesitator model produces reasonable results. (shrink)

Society faces various daily urban living problems – cities are becoming denser, green spaces and recreation areas for citizens are at the bottom of the policymakers’ priority list, and infrastructure decisions mainly satisfy business interests. We stand in traffic jams for hours. At the same time, climate change makes it increasingly difficult for cities to live in every summer. To understand how society should operate these challenges to shift the urban environment in the desired direction, empowering city dwellers (...) and allowing them to participate in this multi-layered phenomenon entirely, we must fundamentally understand the importance of the urban community. The central thesis of this paper is that in urban studies, it is necessary to discuss what an urban community is and in what critical dimensions it shapes the identity of a city, or vice versa, the city shapes it. This article presents an interdisciplinary scientific literature analysis conducted using the method of comparative analysis to identify critical dimensions of a contemporary urban community. (shrink)

Photographs and text document disappearing cultural landscapes and lifestyles in rural China, capturing poignant scenes far from Beijing or Shanghai. Just a few kilometers from the glittering skylines of Shanghai and Beijing, we encounter a vast countryside, an often forgotten and seemingly limitless landscape stretching far beyond the outskirts of the cities. Following traces of old trade routes, once-flourishing marketplaces, abandoned country estates, decrepit model villages, and the sites of mystic rituals, the authors of this book spent seven years exploring, (...) photographing, and observing the vast interior of China, where the majority of Chinese people live in ways virtually unchanged for centuries. China's Vanishing Worlds is an impressive documentation in images and text of modernization's effect on traditional ways of life, and a sympathetic portrait of lives burdened by hardship but blessed by simplicity and tranquility. The scars of China's recent history and the decay of centuries-old traditions are made visible in this volume, but so is the lure and promise of technology and another life for young people. In the next twenty years, an estimated 280 million Chinese villagers will become city dwellers, leaving their ancestral homes in search of urban jobs and opportunities. In striking and evocative color photographs, we see picturesque villages set against a background of rolling hills, planned centuries ago according to the principles of feng shui; a restaurant with bright pink resin chairs and a wide-screen television; traditional buildings preserved by the accident of poverty and isolation; ramshackle rooms decorated with portraits of Chairman Mao; backpack-wearing children walking to school; festivals with elaborately costumed performers; old men playing cards; buyers and sellers at open-air markets. China's Vanishing Worlds offers readers a rare opportunity to glimpse China as it once was, and as it will soon no longer be. (shrink)

E-mapping technologies are a recent technological intervention promising to promote accessibility for disabled city residents. As part of their promise, they seem to position disabled people as agents, rather than as merely passive users of a city. Using Quill Kukla’s analysis of cities as “containers for agency,” I suggest that disabled people’s agency as city dwellers is often constrained in unnoticed ways that this technological intervention does not necessarily address. In particular, city life involves movement (...) between different “stances,” or embodied modes of interaction with the environment. I discuss these constraints on spatial agency as enforcing “stances of justification,” pressures to explain or justify our presence, arising out of features of urban life. This analysis motivates new considerations in assessing whether technologies like e-mapping support accessibility and agency, framing our investigation in terms of whether an intervention allows users to take a wider range of stances. (shrink)

Faced with the charge of value-ladenness in their theories, researchers in evolutionary psychology (EP) argue that their science is entirely free of values; their hypotheses only concern scientific facts, without any socio-cultural value judgments. Lynn Hankinson Nelson, a renowned feminist scholar of science, denies this. In her book and papers, Nelson finds that their hypotheses do contain evaluative components. One such example is the fear of snakes. While this fear was adaptive to the environment in the past, evolutionary psychologists argue (...) that this trait is now “maladaptive” because city-dwellers would rarely encounter snakes in their environment. However, Nelson argues that labeling this trait “maladaptive” implies that this fear is irrational since this claim cannot be understood otherwise. This paper argues that this and other arguments made by Nelson for demonstrating the value-ladenness in EP’s hypotheses have serious flaws. For instance, we argue that investigating the psychological mechanisms behind the fear and their developmental and energy costs would allow for proper interpretation of evolutionary psychologists’ claims for the maladaptive fear of snakes without any normative implication. We also maintain that some of her arguments fail to demonstrate their connection to the point at the center of the debates between EP and feminism. While Nelson may be right in stating that EP’s hypotheses have evaluative components, she does not prove their strong political or normative implications, which is central to the debate over EP. (shrink)

Alongside the photographs are short pieces of critical commentary by Vicki Karaminas and Toni Johnson-Woods, shedding light on the city's changing culture and how this is expressed through the clothing choices of ordinary city-dwellers ...

This article uses nationwide survey data to answer two questions: who participates in environmental governance in China and why? First it explores the social structural characteristics that distinguish participants, finding that city dwellers, the more educated and those with higher incomes and higher social status are more likely to participate, while women, the elderly, those with rural residence registration and migrants are less likely. It then tests two main explanations as to why people participate in environmental governance: instrumentality (...) and identity. Participation is associated with attention to conservation issues, the perceived effectiveness of local environmental governance, knowledge of environmental problems, reading newspapers and magazines, voting in local elections, identification with a middle-class lifestyle and observance of Western holidays. Combining the analyses into a structural model shows that instrumental and identity-related variables account for nearly all of the social structural variation in participation. Participation is thus a function both of instrumental considerations and identities. (shrink)

Democratic theory offers robust resources in order to defend the claim that noncitizens are, in many cases, entitled to the right to vote in their place of residence, regardless of their citizenship. On this, Avner de Shalit and I are in broad agreement. But the route we take to justify this right rests on substantially different argumentation: whereas I believe that residence is necessary and sufficient to justify the right to vote at the municipal and, more controversially, at the national (...) level, de Shalit believes that noncitizens must also intend to reside in a city over the longer term in order to merit the right to vote on city matters. I will argue that this focus on intention is dangerous for the most vulnerable of city dwellers, who are most in need of the right to vote, even if only at the city level. In particular, I argue that the only way that the right to vote can play its protective role is if it is available to migrants on the basis of residence, regardless of their stated intention. (shrink)

Our attitude to nature has changed over time. This book explores the historical, literary and philosophical origins of the changes in our attitude to nature that allowed environmental catastrophes to happen. It presents a philosophical reflection on human societies' attitude to the environment, informed by the history of the concept of landscape and the role played by the concept of nature in the human imagination and features a wealth of examples from around the world to help understand the contemporary environmental (...) crisis in the context of both the built and natural environment. Thinking Through Landscape locates the start of this change in human labour and urban elites being cut off from nature. Nature became an imaginary construct masking our real interaction with the natural world. The book argues that this gave rise to a theoretical and literary appreciation of landscape at the expense of an effective practical engagement with nature. It draws on Heideggerian ontology and Veblen's sociology, providing a powerful distinction between two attitudes to landscape: the tacit knowledge of earlier peoples engaged in creating the landscape through their work - "landscaping thought"- and the explicit theoretical and aesthetic attitudes of modern city dwellers who love nature while belonging to a civilization that destroys the landscape - "landscape thinking". This book gives a critical survey of landscape thought and theory for students, researchers and anyone interested in human societies' relation to nature in the fields of landscape studies, environmental philosophy, cultural geography and environmental history. (shrink)

This article investigates the constitutive ties of modernity and the modern subject to the phenomenon of boredom, through its interpretation by Walter Benjamin. The nineteenth century—with Paris as its capital—forms the material for this interpretation, and the fragmentary constellations of quotation and reflection in Convolute D of The Arcades Project present boredom both in its social aspect (the city as protagonist) and as experience. A number of the forms of boredom is thus elaborated: the relation of city dweller (...) to nature and the cosmos, as weather; in its temporal orientation, as waiting; the mechanistic character of the modern world and its subject, as repetition; in the cycles of production and consumption, as the ideological boredom of the ruling class. Among three of Benjamin’s typologies for the bored modern subject—the gambler, the flaneur, and the one who waits—I turn particularly to the experience of the flaneur, the dedicatee of Convolute D. In flaneurie the experience of boredom is accumulated and distributed, and in this way the flaneur is in the city but also constitutes and memorializes it, as boredom. This ambivalent relation to the urban fabric and landscape is also captured in his characteristic observation and exhibition, his consumption without acquisition and without production. After considering some possible antitheses to Benjamin’s types of boredom, I conclude with the reflection that passing over boredom to its opposite would require the overcoming of modern subjectivity itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1Barbara K. GoldW. R. Johnson. Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. xiv 1 172 pp. Cloth, $27.50. (Townsend Lectures)A colleague once expressed shock that I was reading Horace’s Epistles. They are, she said, the most boring works in all of Latin literature. It seems likely that this was not an (...) idiosyncratic pronouncement: the Epistles are rarely the subjects of critical work and even less frequently taught.But now we have the second book to appear in the past decade on the first book of Horace’s Epistles. Ross Kilpatrick’s 1986 volume on The Poetry of Friendship: Horace, Epistles 1 focused closely on the theme of amicitia in these poems. Now Ralph Johnson has produced a new appreciation of Horace by tracing another theme through Horace’s letters to his friends: freedom. The book is less a critical exegesis of the Epistles than a highly personal and emotionally charged meditation on what drove Horace to write these so-called letters in the twilight of his composing years. The chapter headings indicate the unorthodox approach Johnson has chosen: “Running on Empty,” “In the Rag and Bone Shop,” “Gardens.”Johnson presents us with a Horace who is engaged in a “messy” and irresoluble dialectic with himself, his friends, and his readers. Neither Horace nor Johnson offers any comforting or banal bipolarities; Johnson cautions often against the sic et non approach whereby we, like boll weevils, bore through the haze of confusions looking for the “nugget” (Virginia Woolf’s word) behind the complexities instead of accepting the power of antinomies and their meaning for human experience (144). Johnson’s Horace is thus an ambivalent and protean creature: still a satirist, but somewhat softer now than he was in the 30s; an outsider looking in but never really a part of the hive; a man suffused with anger and resentment, yet capable of a dry and impartial skepticism and a sanguine hope about our ability to live our lives well; carnal and crazy, but mature and clear-headed; an Orphic shaman figure, who mediates between lowly humans and figures of the great (Augustus) or nature herself and delivers the truth from his lofty position, but also a poet of lowly beginnings, caught in embarrassing positions and forced to kowtow to his superiors; a man absolutely insistent on his [End Page 335] freedom and individuality yet part of a court circle of sorts; a wry picaro who nonetheless sometimes plays the role of Stoic progrediens: a naughty scarecrow in the garden, an agrarian sophist, with one foot in the city and one on his Sabine farm, trying to figure out how to be a proper gardener.But, for me, there are too many Horaces here, and they cannot all exist simultaneously. It is hard to see the spontaneous, wry picaro next to the poet who desires a return to civility and decorum or the committed city dweller who develops a love for the rural life. While it may be true that Horace changed masks when the occasion suited, his representations of himself seem to me to be fairly consistent by Ep. 1.20. The Horace I see here is more comfortable with himself than Johnson’s Horace is. He has come to terms with Maecenas, with his father, and with his life in Rome. He understands why it is necessary to avoid chasing after wealth (fuge magna, 10.32) in order to achieve the internal peace and true freedom that he seeks. But he is always a city dweller and never comfortable with his Sabine farm as more than a symbol of what the rural life could offer. (In an interesting aside, Johnson admits that he might be sentimentalizing Horace’s view of the farm: “I’m an ardent urbanite without even a window box” [150 n. 5].) Horace saw and used elements of nature throughout his poetry as evocative symbols of the place of human life in the larger natural universe, but I’m certain that he never got his hands dirty.It is, however, no wonder that so... (shrink)

In moral debates about human’s relationship with nature, one often hears references to nature’s wildness. Apparently, postmodern city dwellers seem to be deeply fascinated by wild nature; for them, wildness somehow seems to have strong moral significance. How should we interpret this fascination? Moral meanings of nature come into play as soon as we start articulating our relationship with the world.In this process, we transform the neutrality of space into a meaningful place, that is, through interpretation we make (...) mere environment into a meaningful and inhabitable world that we can live in. However, there is something peculiar with experiences of wild nature that seems to go beyond this hermeneutical framework. The word ‘wilderness’ refers to the sphere that lies beyond culture, a part of the world that is not subject to human intervention and that is not our home.Does this mean that wildness cannot be part of a meaningful world? In this paper, I argue that Nietzsche’s account of nature can help elucidate today’s fascination with wilderness as a place of value beyond the sphere of human intervention. For Nietzsche, wild nature is a realm where moral valuations are out of order. In his work, however, we can discern a paradoxical moral concern with this wildness. Wildness is a critical moral concept that reminds us that our moral world of human meanings and goals ultimately rests on a much grander, all-encompassing natural world. Nietzsche’s concept of wildness acknowledges the value of that which cannot be morally appropriated. Wild nature confronts us with the limits of human valuing. Wildness as a concept thus introduces the ‘beyond’ of culture into the cultural arena of values. (shrink)

It is an old wag among environmentalists that humans have become disconnected from nature. The culprits for this conundrum are various. If it is not our addiction to technological enticements then it is our life in big cities which alienate us from our “earthen elements.” The presumed result of this disconnection is that we do not respect the land anymore and turn a blind eye to the environmental consequences of our collective acts of consumption and pollution. Various bits of evidence (...) are produced to prove this point – mostly anecdotal – such as the claim that many city-dwellers, when asked where their food comes from, will respond blankly, “from a grocery store.” What is the curative for this ailment? Surprisingly, it is not that we should send urbanites out to the factory farms, county-sized feed lots, or flavor factories in New Jersey, which actually put most of the food on the shelves of neighborhood markets. It is instead usually suggested that we should send people to wilderness areas, that we should become more connected with nature in the raw, as it were. E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia” hypothesis is a good case in point. Defending a sociobiological account of why humans are innately attracted to living things, Wilson suggests that this connection is best realized in the residual attachment of humans to wild nature. This grounds a claim that the most important task at hand is to focus on “the central questions of human origins in the wild environment” (Wilson 1992, 351). It is probably unfair to suggest that Wilson thinks that we should all go to the wilderness in order to be better connected with nature, and implicitly, to then.. (shrink)

Every human society has some code of behavior for its members. This is true of nomads and city-dwellers, of hunter-gatherers and of industrial civilizations, of Eskimos in Greenland and Bushmen in Africa, of a tribe of twenty Australian aborigines and of the billion people that make up China. Ethics is part of the natural human condition.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate (...) students, and independent scholars. Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T100404 With a half-title. Anonymous. By P. P. F. J. H. Le Mercier de la Rivière. Possibly printed in Paris (or the Low Countries). Londres: chez Jean Nourse; & se trouve à Paris, chez Desaint, 1767. [2], vii, [1],511, [1]p.; 4°. (shrink)

In terms of phenomenology, I often wonder about the relevance of what I do as a philosopher for the life of those with whom I come into contact. This ‘coming into contact’ happens for me on several levels: as one human among many, as a husband and father and son and brother, as a teacher, as a neighbor, and as country or city dweller. I remember with fondness those times in the late sultry summer months when, as a youth, (...) I would drive with my father to this or that local farm-stand on some remote back road in the hills of Hunterdon County, New Jersey—the Garden State—in order to seek out the freshest sweet corn that was being harvested by our farming friends. In the 1960s, there was not even the slightest inkling that any of those ears of corn might at all be the product of genetic engineering, although I was vaguely aware that some cross-fertilization may have occurred to produce such sweetness. How could the earth, entirely on its own and without the assistance of human artifice, generate such delicacies? I recently made a trip to Queretaro, Mexico and am happy to report that I tasted once again the experience of my youth, reminiscent of that sweet white corn laden with goodness and available for sale on the farm stands of New Jersey. I was able to relive that taste not because of the miracle of gm-engineered corn in itself, but because of the resistance of the Mexican people to the introduction of genetically modified food products into their daily buying habits. They have been especially resistant to buying corn. On the one hand, my paper takes the form of a phenomenological analysis of genetic modification of food products, while on the other hand, I consider the phenomenological significance of the transfer of biotechnology for its deeply rooted cross-border ethical, political, and cultural significance. As a way to focus my remarks, I limit my analysis to the phenomenon of GM corn. (shrink)

From time immemorial the Silk Road, with its hundreds of byways, was considered the highway that linked the worlds of East and West. In the mid dle of the twentieth century, scholarly research revealed the crucial role played by oases in linking the North to the South; these oases, even more than the transversal lines of the Silk Roads, played the role of crossroads where successive waves of nomads, farmers, pastoral groups and city dwellers met. Today, thanks to (...) UNESCO, we are working on land and sea to secure a different destiny for this network of roads. By balancing warp and woof, each side can give back some of its native wealth and help realize the ancient dream of peace. (shrink)

A constant theme in human self-reflection has been our ability to escape the control of nature. As Sophocles remarks in his Antigone, “Many are the wonders, none is more wonderful than what is man. He has a way against everything.”[1] A list follows of the ways in which man overcomes the limits imposed by the seas, the land, and the seasons. We do this by creating new environments for ourselves. These environments condition us. Thus, we do not just escape nature (...) by building cities. We, in turn, become city dwellers. The fact that we determine ourselves by determining our world has led thinkers like Hannah Arendt to describe us as conditioned beings. In her words, “Men are conditioned beings because everything they come into contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.” This includes “the things that owe their existence exclusively to men.” They too “constantly condition their human makers.” [2] Since Hegel’s time, such self-conditioning has been understood to include our very nature. Our ability to determine our environments, i.e., escape being determined by nature, has been taken to mean that our nature is our own creation. There are, in other words, no external limits to the freedom we have to determine who and what we are. This freedom, to put it paradoxically, is ground-less. There is nothing prior to it that determines it. “Freedom,” here, does not signify some nature or essence, but rather the lack of such. As Heidegger writes, “Freedom is the abyss (Ab-grund) of human existence (Dasein).” It is our character as ground-less beings. (shrink)

The decades following the civil rights and decolonization movements of the sixties and seventies - termed the post-soul era - created new ways to understand the aesthetics of global racial representation. Daphne Lamothe shows that beginning around 1980 and continuing to the present day, Black literature, art, and music resisted the pull of singular and universal notions of racial identity. Developing the idea of 'Black aesthetic time' - a multipronged theoretical concept that analyzes the ways race and time collide in (...) the process of cultural production - she assesses Black fiction, poetry, and visual and musical texts by Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Dionne Brand, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Stromae, among others. Lamothe asks how our understanding of Blackness might expand upon viewing racial representation without borders - or, to use her concept, from the permeable, supple place of Black aesthetic time. Lamothe purposefully focuses on texts told from the vantage point of immigrants, migrants, and city dwellers to conceptualize Blackness as a global phenomenon without assuming the universality or homogeneity of racialized experience. In this new way to analyze Black global art, Lamothe foregrounds migratory subjects poised on thresholds between not only old and new worlds, but old and new selves. (shrink)

Technology extends human perception and it intervenes in relations to the environment. Life in cities is particularly affected by newest technological developments, and city dwellers are most shielded and disconnected from the natural world by these very same technologies. The term technology stems from the Greek techne, and it refers to an instrumental relation to the world—a manipulation and adaptation of the environment to human needs. However, by intervening in everyday life and modifying relations to the environment, technology (...) also produces new forms of life and is therefore also poetic in the sense of poiesis. It is clearly distinguished from literary works because it opens worlds of possibilities that are not fictional. This makes a reflection on its poeticity all the more urgent, because the large-scale advent of new technologies such as the industrialization or the digitization radically changes the modes of perception and relations to urban environments. Art works like literature absorb and articulate these changes and are therefore useful “strange tools” for putting on display the changing modes of experiencing cities. For instance, industrialization, explosive urban growth and the rapid modernization of cities overwhelmed the senses. In its very form and rhythm, modernist literature performs the fragmented and brisk-paced experience of modernity. The digital age ostensibly promises intelligibility and order, for digital technologies can survey and manage vast amounts of information. Smart cities are designed for this purpose and for offering tailored solutions to the inhabitants’ individual needs. However, data analytics cannot capture the phenomenological quality of lived experience. Art works can, and contemporary literary works put on display urban life-forms characterized by disembodiment and by exhaustive information on any subject that on its own does not translate into any sense of meaning or belonging. (shrink)

In this paper, I perform an analysis of Aristotle’s organic analogy when discussing the different “organs” of the Greek polis. I argue that this analysis demonstrates that the proper functioning of the polis depends upon the generation of different forms of life that will incline towards tension with one another, due to the fact that some members will be prevented by their form of life from enjoying the chief virtue of political life, namely, the accomplishment of human virtue and the (...) good life. I argue that, at least within the context of the polis, there remains the possibility that those disenfranchised people experience sensuous recognition that they are contributing to human thriving. I contrast this with the modern city, in which what existed as a natural and visible tension in the polis becomes a concealed tension, with the result that no such recognition is possible, leaving modern city-dwellers alienated from the conditions that generate their forms of life. (shrink)

Urban dwellers are more likely to develop mental disorders such as mood and anxiety disorder as well as schizophrenia compared to rural dwellers. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that even short-term exposure to nature can improve mood and decrease stress, but the underlying neural mechanisms are currently under investigation. In the present intervention study we examined the effects of a one-hour walk in an urban vs. natural environment on activity in the amygdala, a brain region previously associated with (...) stress processing. Before and after the walk 63 participants underwent an fMRI paradigm inducing social stress. Since there is a pronounced gap in the literature regarding interindividual differences in stress-related neural effects of urban and natural environments, we set out to explore sex differences. We observed that amygdala activity decreased after the walk in nature, but only in women, suggesting that women may profit more from salutogenic effects of nature. Moreover, performance on the arithmetic tasks improved in women after the walk in nature, whereas men performed better after the walk in the urban environment. To our knowledge, this is the first study to report differencial tendencies in men and women concerning the stress-related neural activity as an effect of acute exposure to urban vs. natural environments. Furthermore, our findings highlight the importance of sex differences when exploring effects of the environment on brain function and stress. Evidence for beneficial effects of nature on stress-related brain regions may inform urban design policies to focus on providing more accessible green areas in cities and this study suggests that sex differences in experiencing the environment should be taken into consideration. (shrink)

There are many ways to describe cities. As a physical environment, more so than many other environments, they are at least an extension of our present intentions. But cities are not confined to the moment. Built spaces are also in conversation with the past and oriented toward the future as physical manifestations of our values and priorities. But even with all of the ways we have to describe cities we do not normally think of them as in any way akin (...) to the “natural” environment. City and country, nature and culture, are opposed. We move through cities differently, with a different set of values, whether articulated or not. Consider just one small example: Even the most jaded urban dweller may hesitate to sully the environment around him when he perceives it to be something other than a product of the human community. Though we have all seen trash in a national park, we suspect (or at least hope) that there is a kind of hesitancy that occurs with a person wondering what to do with her candy wrappers on a trail in Yosemite. On the other hand, a visitor to my home, Greenwich Village, will usually not think twice about tossing his cigarette butts on the ground as he walks toward his next destination. (shrink)

The article presents the reasons for which the issue of providing housing to low-income citizens has been a real challenge in Addis Ababa during the recent years and will continue to be, given that its population is growing extremely fast. It examines the tensions between the universal aspirations and the local realities in the case of some of Ethiopia’s most ambitious mass pro-poor housing schemes, such as the “Addis Ababa Grand Housing Program” (AAGHP), which was launched in 2004 and was (...) integrated in the “Integrated Housing Development Program” (IHDP) in 2006. The article argues that the quotidian practices of communities and their socio-economic and cultural characteristics are related to the spatial attributes of co-housing practices. Drawing upon the idea that there is a mutual correspondence between social and spatial structures, it places particular emphasis on the analysis of the IHDP and aims to show that to shape strategies that take into account the social and cultural aspects of daily life of the poor citizens of Addis Ababa, it is pivotal to invite them to take part in the decision-making processes regarding their resettlement. Departing from the fact that a large percentage of the housing supply in Addis Ababa consists of informal unplanned housing, the article also compares the commoning practices in kebele houses and condominium units. The former refers to the legal informal housing units owned by the government and rented to their dwellers, whereas the latter concerns the housing blocks built in the framework of the IHDP for the resettlement of the kebele dwellers. The article analyzes these processes of resettlement, shedding light of the fact that kebele houses were located at the inner city, whereas the condominiums are located in the suburbs. Despite the fact that the living conditions in the condominium units are of a much higher quality than those in the kebele houses, their design underestimated or even neglected the role of the commoning practices. The article highlights the advantages of commoning practices in architecture and urban planning, and how the implementation of participation-oriented solutions can respond to the difficulties of providing housing. It argues that understanding the significance of the endeavors that take into account the opinions of dwellers during the phase of decision-making goes hand in hand with considering commoning practices as a source of architecture and urban planning frameworks for low-cost housing in this specific context. The key argument of the article is that urban planning and architecture solutions in Addis Ababa should be based on the principles of the so-called “negotiated planning” approach, which implies a close analysis of the interconnections between planning, infrastructure, and land. (shrink)

Summary Landscape planning lacked an evidence-based method for the reflection of planning models on the imaginary level in order to present the image content and the relationships in the image as the basis for interpretation in a verifiable manner. The contribution is based on the thesis that the perceptual analysis according to Rudolf Arnheim can be translated into landscape planning. The case study, here an illustration with two plan sketches for urban and landscape development, is described and interpreted with the (...) Gestalt theoretical perceptual analysis according to the criteria theme, theses, principle sketches and composition lines, interpretation, conclusion and Gestalt theoretical results. The analysed planning sketches have a low “reality level” and are part of the imaginary level. The theory of science contained therein can be understood by Gestalt theory as elementary theory of design. In the sketches, the living spaces and economic areas of the city are divided into the elements ‘settlement’ and ‘landscape’ and thereby undergo a revaluation of their significance. The replacement of figure (city) and ground (landscape) can be interpreted in terms of gestalt theory as a change of theme in the sketches as the greatest possible structural exchange. The results of the analysis are processed as research theses in the contextualisation of landscape planning and thus examined scientifically on the basis of circumstantial evidence against the reality of the living environments of the urban dwellers. The contribution proves that the perceptual analysis according to R. Arnheim is a suitable method in landscape planning for describing and interpreting graphic representations of planning models. Interdisciplinary cooperation is a contribution to the holistic treatment of a topic, because structuralist landscape planning has structural similarities with Gestalt theory and is committed to the dialogical principle. As a theory of organisation (development), Gestalt theory derives principles, structures, their relationships and qualities and is therefore suitable as a meta-theory of landscape planning to characterise the values and ethical bases in planning. This applies to all areas of the field of consciousness in landscape planning. (shrink)

Since the Romantic era in Europe, walking has shifted from an obligatory activity tied to livelihood, through mobility, to a recreational pursuit of life quality, engaging the landscape on foot. 2 In the above quotation from the FABC, one of the earliest confederations of independent bushwalking or- ganisations in Australia, three elements make it germane: the bushwalker, the bush itself and the appreciation of the bush. As a therapeutic get-away from the city, bushwalking is amenable to “the mind and (...) the body” and remedies the effects of urban stressors like “hustle and bustle.” Through walking, the urban dweller assumes the persona of an early European explorer − say John Eyre or Alexander von Humboldt − who charted terra nullius “where no man has trod before,” or at least no European human. Most significantly, the recreational bushwalker, who would have typically been a male member of the upper-classes, experiences a transformation of values, realising that the bush looms largely beyond the horizon of city life, and its urban, suburban and rural spheres of organisation and commerce. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Radicalizing the Local: 60 Linear Miles of Transborder ConflictTeddy Cruz (bio)2008estudio teddy cruzmedium: collage and vinyl wallpaperThe international border between the US and Mexico at the San Diego-Tijuana checkpoint is one of the most trafficked in the world. A 60-linear-mile cross-section—tangential to the border wall—between these two border cities compresses the most dramatic issues currently challenging our normative notions of architecture and urbanism.This transborder “cut” begins 30 miles north (...) of the border, on the periphery of San Diego, and ends 30 miles south of the border. We can find along this section’s trajectory a series of collisions, critical junctures, or conflicts between natural and artificial ecologies, top-down development and bottom-up organization. It is in the midst of many of these metropolitan and territorial sites of conflict where contemporary architectural practice needs to reposition itself.1. Conflict between master-planned gated communities and the natural topography +30 miles / San DiegoTop-down private development has been installing a selfish, oil-hungry sprawl of detached McMansions everywhere, forming massive subdivisions that collide with the natural topography.2. Conflict between large infrastructure and the watershed +28 miles / San DiegoLarge freeway and mall infrastructure runs the length of coastal San Diego, colliding with a natural network of canyons, rivers, and creeks that descend toward the Pacific Ocean.3. Conflict between privatization and everyday life +25 miles / San DiegoThe archipelago of beige tract homes also exacerbates a land use of exclusion, leading to an apartheid of everyday life, as gated communities retreat from the complexities of mixed uses.4. Conflict between military bases and environmental zones +20 miles / San DiegoIronically, the only interruptions along an otherwise continuous sprawl, 30 miles inland from the border, occur as the military bases that dot San Diego’s suburbanization overlap with environmentally protected lands.5. Conflict between the formal and informal +15 miles / San DiegoThe informal densities and economies produced by immigrants yield three-dimensional land use that collides with the one-dimensional zoning that defines suburban tract subdivisions. [End Page 107]6. Conflict between two border cities 0 miles / San Diego-TijuanaThis territorial conflict is currently dramatized by the hardening of the border wall that divides these cities, incrementally transforming San Diego into the world’s largest gated community.7. Conflict between the natural and political +0.5 miles / TijuanaAs the large infrastructure of the Tijuana River clashes with the border wall, a faint yellow line is inscribed on the dry river’s concrete channel to indicate the trajectory of the border. The border checkpoint is exactly at this intersection.8. Conflict between the informal and natural ecologies-10 miles / TijuanaAdjacent to the checkpoint we can find many slums crashing against the border. The wall acts as a powerful dam, containing the density of Tijuana and preventing it from contaminating San Diego’s picturesque sprawl.9. Conflict between factories and emergency housing-15 miles / TijuanaThese American-style, mini-master-planned communities are intertwined with a series of informal communities or slums, and both provide maquiladora factory enclaves with cheap labor.10. Conflict between density and sprawl-20 miles / TijuanaThousands of miniaturized replicas of typical suburban Southern California McMansions are now scattered around the periphery of Tijuana. In recent years, dwellers have radically transformed them into socioeconomic microengines.11. Conflict between two horizons-30 miles / TijuanaAs we reach the sea on the Mexican side, we witness the most dramatic of all territorial collisions across this 60-mile-section of local conflict. Here, the border metal fence finally sinks into the Pacific Ocean. [End Page 108] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page c1] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 12] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 32] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 42] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 52] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 62] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page... (shrink)

Initiatives advocating for nature-based solutions, such as increased urban biodiversity, aim to promote public health as a part of creating sustainable cities. These initiatives are supported by a plenitude of scientific literature demonstrating the link between human health and nature contact. Despite these findings, positive human-nature interactions are declining worldwide, negatively effecting human development and health. We support an embodied approach to mental health. Taking this approach seriously illuminates how cities can be enhanced by modifying environmental and social affordances and (...) the ways in which urban dwellers interact with urban natural greenspaces. We argue that urban nature experiences can be used to promote mental health, but that indicators of environmental injustice need to addressed. (shrink)

In Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city, engineers work hard to control water flows and provide different sectors with clean and sufficient water. In 2011, only 10 percent of the totality of water used daily by Arequipa’s then close to 1 million people—in households, tourism, industry, and mining—was treated before it was returned to the river where it continues its flow downstream towards cultivated fields and, finally, into the Pacific Ocean. It takes specialized knowledge and manifold technologies to manage water (...) and sustain life in Arequipa, and engineers are central actors for making water flow. Examining the ecology of water management, this article asks to what extent we can talk of a way of knowing and enacting water that is particular to engineers. Through engineering practices, a technical domain emerges as separate from and superior to political and social domains. This production of categories can be understood as practices of purification. However, a purely technical grip on water is never possible. Unruly elements, like weather, contamination, urban dwellers, and competing interests, interfere and make processes of intervention unstable. Water is never completely cleaned, and, equally, the continuous processes of purification of categories and domains take place while other processes work to blur their boundaries. (shrink)

Resumen : Habermas realiza una contribución significativa a los estudios urbanos y a las ciencias de la educación. El mundo urbano representa un verdadero reto para la racionalidad comunicativa. La vida en las ciudades latinoamericanas parece ser, hasta cierto punto, un caos de códigos lingüísticos y de símbolos, donde mucha gente actúa de un modo individualista y apático. De ahí que sea difícil esperar que los habitantes urbanos sean capaces de cooperar mutuamente a fin de construi rsu sociedad sobre la (...) base de argumentos racionales y del consenso. Con todo, las ciudades son lugares en los que la comunicación alcanza grandes niveles de desarrollo. Una educación orientada comunicativamente, con la cual los estudiantes aprendan a argumentar persiguiendo un consenso fundamentado racionalmente en medio de la diversidad, puede ser un elemento decisivo para hacer de la acionalidad comunicativa una opción considerable para construir una mejor sociedad urbana. Palabras-clave : Habermas. Estudios urbanos. Educación. Teoría social. Consenso: Habermas makes a significant contribution to urban studies and education sciences. The urban worldrepresents a real challenge to communicative rationality. The life in Latin American cities seems to be, as it were, a chaos of linguistic codes and symbols, where many people act in an individualistic and apathetic way. It is therefore difficult to expect urban dwellers be able to cooperate with each other in order to build their society on the basis of rational arguments and consensus. However, cities are places where communication attains great levels of development. A communicative orientated education, in which students learn to argue pursuing a rationally founded consensus amid diversity, can be a decisive element to make communicative rationality a noteworthy option to build a better urban society. Keywords: Habermas. Urban studies.Education. Social theory. Consensus. (shrink)

The pervasiveness of technology has changed the way urban everyday is structured and experienced. An understanding of the deep impact of this development on everyday experience and its foundational aesthetic components is necessary in order to determine how skills and capacities can be improved in coping with such change, as well as managing it. Urban technology solutions—how they are defined, applied and used—are changing the sphere of everyday experience for urban dwellers. Philosophical and applied approaches to urban aesthetics offer (...) perspectives on understanding technologically mediated sensory experiences within the urban realm. This chapter shows how new urban technologies act as an agent of change within the familiar urban environment. We outline how the perspective of philosophical aesthetics can be used to understand urban technologies and their role in the constitution of everyday urban lifeworlds. (shrink)