The right to write the city: Lefebvre and graffiti

Modern graffiti has become a universal urban phenomenon, an almost ubiquitous feature of towns and cities across the world. This paper will situate the practice and production of graffiti within various urban contexts (aesthetic, political, economic, social and semiotic) through the seminal works Henri Lefebvre as a means for analysing and understanding the complexity of the modern urban and to contextualize and explore graffiti’s role in challenging and contesting the socio-spatial norms of increasingly privatized and commodified public and social space. That is, to read graffiti as a means for reclaiming and remaking the city as a more humane and just, social space. Key Words Lefebvre, Space, Graffiti, Right to the City, Urban

Park spaces: leisure, culture and modernity - a Glasgow case study

The importance of a critical understanding of space in contemporary social scientific enquiry is increasingly recognised as fundamental for the analysis of the development, enlargement and experience of modern capitalism. In particular, the concentration of forces and relations of production, circulation and consumption, of people, commodities and services, is progressively appreciated as achieved through the creation and exploitation of urban space. The thesis presents a critical examination of a variety of theories of space and spatial theories as a foundation for the analysis of urban modernity. These include the works of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Georg Simmel. The syncretic adaptation of these formative theoretical analyses provides a conceptual framework for the subsequent substantive analysis of a case study of specific forms of modern urban social space. That is, an exploration of the processes by which the origins and development of what came to be integral features of the landscape of the modern city were produced, namely, the creation of the social spaces of public parks. The growth and increasing importance of the city in the 19th century had important social as well as economic and political consequences for the development and administration of the infrastructure and experience of the urban environment. The physical and mental, medical as well as moral consequences of city development led to campaigns to improve the condition of the urban population that provoked a response by the local state. One prominent aspect of this municipal commitment was the development of urban public parks as an ameliorative response. Glasgow’s experience of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in the 19th century and the particular conditions that arose led to a specific form of municipal government that produced a network of public parks that was unrivalled by any other city. The investigation and analysis of the production of municipal public parks in the city of Glasgow in the period from the early 1850s to the late 1970s gives detailed consideration to a large number and variety of empirical sources to deliver an historical, sociological and geographic account of the complexity involved in the analysis of such commonplace everyday spaces as public parks. As such, the investigation of parks as social spaces constructed, depicted and used for leisure and recreation contributes to the understanding of the development and experience of urban modernity, as well as to contemporary socio-spatial analysis

Lefebvre’s Politics of Space: Planning the Urban as Oeuvre

Henri Lefebvre’s project, developed over decades of research produced a corpus of work that sought to reprioritise the fundamental role of space in the experience and practice of social life. His assertion that there is ‘politics of space’ provides a challenge to the planning and design of the built environment by emphasising the need to understand the complex of elements involved in ‘the production of space’. Lefebvre’s approach and his ‘cry and demand’ for a ‘right to the city’ reflects the fundamental focus and importance he imparts to the practices, meanings and values associated with the inhabitation and use of the social spaces of everyday life. It will be argued that planning and design theory and practice should seek to address more fully and incorporate Lefebvre’s spatial theory as a means to reinvigorate and regenerate the urban as a lived environment, as an oeuvre, as opportunity for inhabitation, festival and play and not merely as a functional habitat impelled by the needs of power and capital

First principle study on electronic structure of ferroelectric PbFe0.5Nb0.5O3

The full potential linearized augmented plane wave (FLAPW) method was used to study the crystal structure and electronic structure properties of PbFe0.5Nb0.5O3 (PFN). The optimized crystal structure, density of states, band structure and electron density distribution have been obtained to understand the ferroelectric behavior of PFN. From the density of states analysis, it is shown that there is a hybridization of Fe d - O p and Nb d - O p in ferroelectric PFN. This is consistent with the calculation of electronic band structure. This hybridization is responsible for the tendency to its ferroelectricity.Comment: 10 page

Politics, Pastiche, Parody and Polemics: The DIY Educational Inspiration of the Clash

The Clash, for many of us growing up in the 1970s outwith the metropolitan dominance of London, offered if not the only at least the most consistent and concerted experience of the explicit politics of punk, as well as a critical transnational and multicultural perspective and analysis. Whilst other bands may have been more explicitly political (e.g. Crass, Dead Kennedys) or more infamous (the self-promoting self-aggrandising Sex Pistols for example) or more nihilistic (the Damned), the Clash popularised a coherent alternative critique to the politics of the age, the failure and end of the post-war social and political consensus, the birth of neo-liberal conservatism and the mutually assured apocalyptic politics of the cold war. The Clash presented a range of conscious raising comment and critique on unemployment, poverty, statism, the politics of community and multiculturalism, racism, policing, injustice, marginalisation, resistance and revolution. etc. They also opened up historical events, foreign policy, cold war politics and conflict, imperialism, globalisation, etc. to a scathing attitudinal destruction of the taken for granted but failed status quo. They provided a popular and hard political edge to punk. This chapter will address how the DIY culture of punk created not only opportunities for empowerment through participation but also how the music and lyrics of the Clash introduced and popularised political ideas and events, theory and practice, music and resistance from around the world to marginalised, disenfranchised and exploited youth not only in the UK but Europe, the US and elsewhere. This not only influenced a transnational awareness and community of interest but was allied with the opportunity and demand to explore via a DIY educational politics, cultures, ideas and experiences from beyond the dead-end streets and housing schemes where punks seed was sown, was spawned and flourished. The chapter will explore how the topics and themes covered in various Clash lyrics and songs opened up to a wider public alternative perspectives, understandings and interpretations. The Clash had a mission, music with a message, that was concerned with not only the dissemination of information but also for creating a self-sustaining and critical openness and awareness of cross cultural and global experience, resistance to injustice and exploitation through a musical and political education