Urban Culture

This paper elaborates a general theory of scenes as multi-dimensional complexes of
meaning embedded in material, local practices. It outlines techniques for measuring
scenes empirically and shows how certain types of scenes provide environments in
which new social movement (NSM) organizations (like human rights and
environmental groups) tend to thrive. However universal and cosmopolitan the
10 content of NSM goals, they appear to get much of their energy and support from
the qualities that inhere in concrete local contexts.

This chapter draws on research conducted into the cultural and historical geographies of film and popular music in the city of Liverpool, and the role of maps and mapping practices in shaping ideas of place, identity and cultural memory. The first part considers examples of “official” cultural mappings as developed around film and popular music geographies in Liverpool. The chapter then goes on to discuss the ways maps and mapping practices might productively inform alternative cartographies of place and memory, and argues the case for the development of a spatial anthropology of film and popular music cultures.

The structure of Nairobi Metropolis is a cross.
The four main urban corridors to Thika, Athi River, Limuru and Ongata Rongai, form a quasi perfect cross dividing Nairobi in four quadrants: North, East, South and West. Every quadrant has a different ecosystem, different directionality, and has to be planned in account of that.

The completion of the mobility structure for Nairobi must have two strategies:
1) The mass public transport: The development of centralities around the commuter stations along the branches of the cross (3) to prioritize rail access to Nairobi Center.
2) The road network: The formation of a consistent mobility network by completion of the short missing links across the existing dominating directionalities of the quadrants (3)
The result will be a homogeneous a resilient (stable equilibrium) mobility network linked to the metropolitan axes of the cross. The axes would be served by the commuter train service for access to the CBD.

The territorial (land-use) evolution of the structure will have two main tendencies:
1) The CBD economic activity expansion southwards, across the actual buffer of the Central Station and in the direction of the airport.
2) The housing land provision in response to the annual growth and need for 2,5 sq. km of new urban land. The infrastructure for that provision would be a reticular metropolitan network to the eastwards flat, featureless and environmentally poor land.

Fama or Legend ? The Lives of Italian Doctors according to Medieval testimonies" Looking for the tracks of the memory of certain doctors in the Middle Ages, one can question a wide range of sources ; what emerges is the figure of an admired intellectual, with an international reputation, about whom cities sometimes compete ; but practitioners also appear as a profession arising rivalries and conflicts, even critics and mockeries for specific failings. It is doubtless in the genre of the urban eulogy, a genre rapidly expanding in communal Italy, that the doctors reach completely in the group portrait. As a matter of fact, the memory of the medieval practitioners seems to have been more cultivated in Italy than in the other spaces and it can be easily explained. In Italy, the early development of the medical activity, associated with the creation of universities and with the formation of professional associations confered from the XIIIth century on a social and intellectual recognition to the doctors, who took sometimes also an important part to the political life of the city. But behind the praising accounts, individual or collective, concerning the physicians, defaults or less glorious behaviors or actions can also be found in this laudatory literature, and we can wonder if they are real or the fruit of the imagination. We know how much the fama was important for the doctors: as they often recognize themselves, the infamia was indeed the most dreaded danger. This papers tries eventually to determine on which conditions the fama of a practitioner stops being simple fame, to become legend.

This paper examines the idea of the ‘archive city’: a spatiotemporal construct oriented around the central metaphor of the ‘city as archive’. Surfing the cusp between the material and immaterial, the tangible and intangible, the embodied and virtual, the producer and consumer, and – not least – the analogue and the digital, the archive city denotes a conceptualisation of ‘archival space’ that straddles the material and symbolic city and which invites reflection on the ways cultural geographies of memory – in this case those specific to cities and other urban landscapes – are enfolded across the multi-sited and multi-layered spaces of everyday urban practice. Reframing the ontological question of ‘what is the archive in the digital age?’ in terms of ‘where is the archive?’, in the first part of the paper I survey the theoretical precincts of the archive city before moving on to discuss how we might conceive of a digital spatial humanities in which this more open and purposefully elusive conceptualisation of the archive can productively inform debates and practices relating to urban cultural memory. The paper then discusses two case studies, both of which map the cinematic geographies of cities: Liverpool in the north west of England, and Bologna in Italy. The paper ends with some concluding thoughts on the role of digital spatial humanities in urban-based cultural memory studies and the broader theoretical and practical implications this has in relation to digital and ‘open’ archival practices. 

A Região Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro vem atravessando conjuntura favorável, inclusive por ter sido a escolhida para sediar grandes eventos globais nos próximos anos. A metrópole polariza região rica em recursos naturais (petróleo), e recebe vultosos investimentos industriais e em infraestrutura urbana que alterarão sua lógica espacial. Somam-se a essa conjuntura as políticas de segurança pública, que alteram o paradigma de metrópole violenta que a caracterizou nessas últimas décadas. O presente artigo – com caráter de ensaio – problematiza essa conjuntura. O pressuposto é que, em razão desses fatores, a imagem da metrópole vem se modificando positivamente. Metodologicamente, a tratamos primeiro como um fenômeno macrossocial e, posteriormente, refletimos sobre seus problemas intraurbanos estruturais que interferem no imaginário que se tem sobre ela. Teoricamente fizemos uso de estudos históricos, demográficos, econômicos e sociais cuja síntese auxilia na construção de interpretações sobre a realidade metropolitana hoje e subsidiam as reflexões apresentadas.