Search

Following the discussions of how to define a city, in Chapter 4 Storey guides the reader through case studies of primary cities. In his primer on ancient urbanism, Glenn Storey provides an introductory text that encompasses many crucial topics across a range of past urban sites. Storey classifies cities into "hyper" and "hypo" cities, which are compact high-density or physically large areas of with low-density populations, respectively. [Extracted from the article]

This paper focuses on the way people define and challenge practices of distance during protest and the way protesters disrupt ‘generally established and universally visible and valid distances’ associated with the place. In illuminating these ideas, two case studies with seemingly similar socio-spatial characteristics are explored. The first case was initiated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and aimed to call attention to the nation's neediest people by embarking on the ‘Poor People's Campaign’, which settled people on the National Mall in an encampment they called Resurrection City (RC). The second action, the Occupy Movement, was an international protest movement directed towards social and economic inequality. The Occupy Movement called upon protesters to ‘flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months’ to call attention to the inequalities of global capitalism. The paper interprets the strategies and tactics used by the Poor People's Campaign and the Occupy Movement to challenge distance, concluding with some reflections on the way contemporary forms of dissent are changing the way we perceive public space and its politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The occupation of public urban space is a prominent feature in most descriptions of the global wave of protests after 2011. This paper examines the occupation of one significant space, New York’s Zuccotti Park, to investigate how first, ‘occupying’ became the central form of practice of what later was called Occupy Wall Street. By reconstructing the habitus of the movement’s core constituency and its resonance with the practice of the occupation, this investigation also explains why it was so difficult for the movement to evolve into other forms. It sketches out how the practice of occupying influenced the cooperation between members of different social classes participating in the protest and compares the development of this occupation to the very different trajectory of the Occupy movement in Germany. It is argued that the US occupation only temporarily overcame obstacles to mobilizing the discontent of those young adults that found themselves biographically blocked from joining the new petty bourgeoisie and to building alliances with other social groups in the USA of the post-recession era. Since the eviction from the park reinforced these obstacles, it triggered a de-mobilizing dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the expanding popularity of Web 2.0, there has been a huge surge in the use of social media, like Twitter, to express user sentiments or opinions. Delays and breakdowns in transit operations can make riders annoyed and irritated, and as a result, they express their anger and frustration via social media posts. Understanding the tipping points of public frustration will help in developing better solutions. This study aims to develop a framework by developing multilevel sentiment analysis and determine the emotion and politeness measures using transit-related tweets from New York (New York City) and California (San Francisco). The popular hashtags associated with the transit systems of New York and California were collected during 2019. The words associated with negative sentiments widely differ in these two states. Moderate levels of differences are seen in the politeness measures for these two states. Additionally, co-occurrence measures associated with negative emotions identified unique issues based on the demographics. This study demonstrates that Twitter provides a great opportunity to understand the public perception of transit, and the findings can help authorities design a more efficient transit system to improve user experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I analyse a commemorative gathering "The White Armbands Day" which works as the reperformance of dehumanizing practices dating back to the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia–Herzegovina. The commemoration specifically presents a request for the construction of a monument for the 102 killed children in Prijedor, the third largest municipality in the Serb Republic entity. The study is structured as a transdisciplinary reading (Halliday 2001. "New Ways of Meaning: The Challenges to Applied Linguistics." In The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment, edited by Alwin Fill, and Peter Mühlhäusler. New York: Continuum. First published in Journal of Applied Linguistics 6 (1990): 7–36.) of the "living memorial" (Allen and Brown 2011. "Embodiment and Living Memorials: The Affective Labour of Remembering the 2005 London Bombings." Memory Studies 4 (3): 312–327. doi:) showing that the affective and experiencing body is key in the production of more-than-visual/verbal, highly fluid discourses of remembering. My analysis shows that public spaces materialized through living memorials accomplish their moral dimension (Waksman and Shohamy 2016. "Linguistic Landscape of Social Protests: Moving from 'Open' to 'Institutional' Spaces." In Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, edited by Robert Blackwood, Elizabeth Lanza, and Hirut Woldemariam. London, New York: Bloomsburry) as they call attention to human rights and unspeakable violence, powerfully representing a resistance to the imposed memory regimes and the marginalized status that people have in their own country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze a recent conflict over drumming in a Harlem park to understand the ways in which cultural and racial symbols are employed in negotiations of space within cities. Specifically, I argue that racial belongingness--a racialized claim to space that exists outside of property rights and demarcated through iconography--can be used to both resist and facilitate gentrification in urban locales. The Harlem case illustrates how racial belongingness functions as a device that allows groups to contest power, representation, and access to public space across temporal, physical, and aural boundaries. Thus, I look closely at the city as a canvas and stage upon which passive forms of communication manifest in a racially and culturally coded fashion. Additionally, I argue that contemporary public space discourse is overly preoccupied with class, often neglecting the significance of race in the constitution and experience of urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many men who have sex with men (MSM) have sexual encounters in public places, and some data suggest that this behavior is more common among Latino than non-Hispanic white MSM in the USA. In a sample of 482 Latino MSM born in Brazil, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, and living in the New York City metropolitan area, we examined how demographic and psychosocial characteristics are related to having sex in public venues. Logistic regression was performed with the dichotomous outcome of sex in a public place in the previous six months. Demographic variables included education, HIV-positive serostatus, unknown HIV serostatus, and years in the USA; psychosocial variables included self-efficacy for safer sex, depression, and gay community involvement. Results indicated that those individuals with unknown serostatus were more likely than those with HIV-negative serostatus to have had sex in a public setting, as were men with lower self-efficacy for safer sex. These findings suggest that the partner pool may pose some risk to men who have sex in public sex venues, and therefore, low-risk sexual practices and condom use should be promoted in such settings. Contrary to expectations, higher education was related to sex in public settings, but neither depression nor more recent immigration was. Greater involvement in the gay community was also associated with having sex in public places, which may reflect the larger social function served by gay venues such as bathhouses and bars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]