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A concept of a specifically "urban imaginary of nature" is developed through a dialectical (re)reading of Georg Simmel's and Louis Wirth's seminal texts on the nature of urbanism. We then examine how this urban imaginary is mobilized through the politics of nature in metropolitan Portland, Oregon. We demonstrate that the logic of Oregon's "Urban Growth Boundary" land-use policy promises the retrieval and spatial demarcation of a fading "nature" threatened by urbanization itself. We then examine how Portland's metropolitan planning agency ("Metro") imagines ways in which the urban growth boundary can reconcile and spatially delimit an "invisible line" where the urban ends and nature begins. These policies set the conditions through which Portland can market itself as the "green city." We conclude by arguing for a more radical and denaturalized political imaginary that takes into account the socioecological constitution of the urban "metabolism" itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As ambivalent hero of the urban imaginary of the nineteenth century, the flâneur enjoys the licence to loiter in the streets and look at the spectacle of the crowds and the hall of mirrors of the city scene. However, feminist inquiry has dislocated the flâneur's panoramic embrace of sites/sights of authority, and reconfigured the gendered mastery of urban perception by the all-seeing voyeur. Benjaminian approaches have focused on the production of art in an age of mass consumption and the flâneur's seduction by the erotics of capitalist consumption and commodity fetishism. Building on both interpretations, this article performs sensual re-readings of novels and essays by Balzac, Vallès, and Colette, in order to recapture the rich potential of the senses in the activities of walking, feeling, and representing the city. The embodied experience of boundaries undoes three hierarchies: the gendered and class divisions of social spheres, and the division of the senses into higher and lower faculties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses an interdisciplinary framework inspired by Rancière (1991, 2009, 2010) ideas such as intellectual equality, redistribution of the sensible, and aesthetic heterogenesis to analyze the production of video-narratives of self and place within a group of Latino eight-year-olds attending public school in Milwaukee. The essay film, with its specific formulation through the self-portrait, operates as Rancière's "third things" in a pedagogical encounter that searches for new visibilities for urban childhood through a learner-centered model that acknowledges the creative capacities of urban children, their contributions to the urban imaginary of the city, and their cultural status within communities of sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pocket Park, small areas that can make up for the emptiness, abandonment and no function of many spaces that are located within our cities, triggering processes of urban regeneration through the discovery of a new "life" and a new potentiality to accommodate. This must be rediscovered and brought to light so as to realize and perceive a different urban imaginary. A product of urban interior design that is confronted with large courtyards: rooms without roof, this product can improve the quality of everyday life, designed to be together and to know the other's culture, where the confrontation between people is based on the sharing of the common space, living outdoors to accommodate people and make them feel like "home", and together with the people ... with all the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pocket Park, small areas that can make up for the emptiness, abandonment and no function of many spaces that are located within our cities, triggering processes of urban regeneration through the discovery of a new "life" and a new potentiality to accommodate. This must be rediscovered and brought to light so as to realize and perceive a different urban imaginary. A product of urban interior design that is confronted with large courtyards: rooms without roof, this product can improve the quality of everyday life, designed to be together and to know the other's culture, where the confrontation between people is based on the sharing of the common space, living outdoors to accommodate people and make them feel like "home", and together with the people ... with all the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]