Parkour, graffiti, and the politics of (in)visibility in aestheticised cityscapes

In the last decades urban scholars have discussed at length how the production of aesthetically pleasing and consumption-enticing cityscapes has become the core of post-industrial urban economies. Critical analyses have underlined how the “dictatorship of the visual” (Brouderhoux, 2015) characterizing these urban processes implies the expulsion from public life of “unacceptable” differences and conflicts within. While fundamental, these perspectives have not fully engaged with a variety of urban practices and groups that are simultaneously addressed by urban leaderships as visible assets and threats for image-based re-development processes. Drawing on two ethnographic studies in Turin and Bologna, Italy, this paper contributes to address this gap by focusing on parkour and graffiti's ambiguous and controversial positions in these re-branding cities. By addressing how traceurs and writers reconciled and negotiated their positioning within image-led urban redevelopment processes, this paper expands existing discussions on the nexus between (in)visibility, publicness, embodied geographies and aestheticised cityscape

The Rock and The Map: two tales of contemporary heritage landscaping in Scotland

As opposed to the ingrained and popularly rehearsed notion that Scotland’s quintessential landscapes are mountainous, remote, rugged and wild, this thesis considers the local landmarks of Dumbarton Rock and the Great Polish Map of Scotland as exemplary of a “New Scottish Landscape”. That is, a new aesthetic, or ‘way of seeing’ the Scottish landscape as one defined by ‘everyday’ local landscapes of affiliation, as much as the ‘special’ and spectacular. Such a belief is given added traction with the demographic fact that the majority of Scotland's population inhabits the densely urbanised Central Belt, in which landscape qualities of 'wildness' and 'remoteness' are generally lacking. Despite this ‘grandeur deficit’, there is increasing recognition that exurban, post-industrial, partially degraded or abandoned landscapes have the capacity to generate intensities of belonging and attachment, reflecting new, distinctive heritage values. Aligned with ‘processual’ conceptual understandings of landscape and heritage as situated, subjective phenomena, ‘the Rock’ and ‘the Map’ are approached in this thesis as instances of “heritage landscaping”, whereby landscape and heritage are figured as conjoined; emerging and unfolding together in practice and experience. Informing a phenomenological methodological design around fieldwork principles of observation, sensation, practice and performance, a range of research materials are gathered to tell the stories of the Rock and the Map. Recounted in two central empirical chapters, the Rock and the Map are explored respectively through the provision of a historical-cultural biography, lending context and time-depth to my own situated experiences through participative intervention. As contrasting but related instances of community-driven heritage landscaping, the Rock and the Map are then considered together to critically engage with recent conceptual developments in landscape and heritage practice towards ‘democratisation’. That is, a loosening of traditionally top-down professional landscape and heritage decision-making, to better account for the often intangible ‘social values’ held by ‘unofficial’ local communities of interest. Drawing upon my situated inquiries of the Rock and the Map, I contend that landscape phenomenology and a ‘performative ethos’ provide a creative and effective means of apprehending and accounting for these alternative narratives, allowing us to uncover and illuminate the latent potential and cultural value held within the New Scottish Landscape

Rock Art Pilot Project Main Report

A report on the results of a pilot project to investigate the current state of research, conservation, management and presentation of prehistoric rock art in England commissioned by English Heritage from Archaeology Group, School of Conservation Sciences, Bournemouth Unviersity and the Institute of Archaeology, University College Londo

Practices of place : ordinary mobilities and everyday technology

This study examines four distinct ways people have encountered and interacted with place and explores how these experiences are impacted by certain technologies, paying close attention to the human experience of mobility. A fundamental idea in this study is that mobility is a crucial component to human identity and it is too limiting to view mobility as an abstraction absent of lived experience, as many postmodern theorists have done. Viewing mobility as an interrelation between people, place, and technology that shapes human beings and the physical environment, this study seeks to show how certain interactions with place contribute to a sense of self and identity for the individuals and communities discussed therein. The primary attempt in this study is to demonstrate how and why place is used in different ways by different people through various acts of mobility. Many of these practices, I believe, emerge as a response to postmodernity, even if their participants are unaware of larger structural processes. These practices are attempts to create stable meanings, definitions, and identities, to make known the unknown, to provide people with a sense of agency and autonomy, and give aspects of permanence to the ephemeral all in order to resist the destabilization, uncertainty, and powerlessness that exist in the present. Employing strategies such as bricolage and poetics, the human actors described in this study employ various practices of place in order to create meaning for themselves and the places they inhabit. This interdisciplinary project contributes to discourses of human geography, digital humanities, and material culture by locating previously unexplored intersections and relationships between place, practice, mobility, technology, and the human experience of being in place.American Studie

Plymouth, Montserrat::Apocalyptic Dark Tourism at the Pompeii of the Caribbean

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present contrasting approaches to the descriptive case study of tourism to the buried city of Plymouth, Montserrat, an example of the marketing and burying – the supply and demand – of apocalyptic dark tourism on the island. Design/methodology/approach A case study mixed-methods methodology is adopted, and findings are derived from tour guiding fieldwork, guide and tourist interviews, and an analysis of travel writing and tourism marketing campaigns. Findings Dark tourism is viewed as a contentious and problematic concept: it attracts and repels tourism to the former capital Plymouth, Montserrat. After 20 years of the volcano crisis, the islanders, government and Tourist Board are commemorating resilience living with the volcano and regeneration in a disaster scenario. Marketing and consumption approaches to dark tourism elucidate different facets to the case study of “the buried city” of Plymouth, Montserrat, and the Montserrat Springs Hotel overlooking Plymouth. The disjunct between these two types of approach to dark tourism, as well as the different criteria attached to working definitions of dark tourism – and the range of interests in apocalyptic dark tourism into the city and its surrounds – show some of the problems and limitations with theoretical and scalar discussions on dark tourism. Research limitations/implications The paper’s implications are that both supply and demand approaches to dark tourism are needed to fully understand a dark tourism destination and to reconcile the disjunct between these two approaches and the perspectives of tourist industry and tourism users. Originality/value This is a descriptive dark tourism case study of a former capital city examined from both supply and demand perspectives. It introduces the apocalyptic to dark tourism destination analysis. </jats:sec

Changing times: tactics

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Cinema and the Production of Spatial Memories: Fifty Years of Representing 1960s Montreal in Quebecois Films

Since the end of the 20th century, cinema has been widely recognized as a meaningful source of information for studying geographic phenomena including urban development. This thesis aims to further explore the potential of cinema to produce our spatial memories. The research question that structures this project is: how does the cinematographic representation of a certain place during a certain period evolve over time? This question is addressed through the study of the cinematographic representation of 1960s Montreal over time. Seven films released between 1964 and 2014 (Le chat dans le sac (1964), Entre la mer et l’eau douce (1967), Yesterday (1981), Emporte-Moi (1999), Monica la mitraille (2004), C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), Corbo (2014)) were selected for study since they can all be identified as unfolding in Montreal of the 1960s. Each of these films have then been evaluated according to four main criteria: politics, religion, urban mobility and urban development. This analysis first shows only a marginal interest in Québec cinema of the last 50 years for revisiting the Quiet Revolution despite the importance of this period in modern Québec history. Nevertheless, all seven of the films identified but one (i.e. C.R.A.Z.Y.) directly address the political tensions that were at stake during this period. Religion was the second-most common theme identified in these movies. Even though it was not as prevalent as politics, religious issues recurred throughout all the movies studied. The other two topics under study appeared more marginally in the selected movies, although some trends began to emerge from the study. For instance, the action of the movies released after 2000 took place in the suburbs of Montréal, while the earlier movies barely ventured beyond the downtown core, illustrating the growing importance given to the development of the suburban in recent decades. This centrifugal movement was not accompanied with a change of transportation since cars remained the main way of transportation throughout the seven studied movies. Overall this project did not identify radical changes in the way the cinematographic representation of Montréal of the 1960s has evolved over the last fifty years, but it contributed to the development of a methodology dedicated to further examining how cinema participates in the reshaping of our collective spatial memories