Concentrating minds: how the Greeks designed spaces for public debate

What can we learn from ancient Greece when it comes to designing spaces for political debate? In an article for Theatrum Mundi, Richard Sennett describes how ancient Athenians used amphitheatres and the agora to debate, take decisions and participate in public life. He recalls Aristotle’s notion of how a complex urban society could reconcile differences. Modern societies – where concentrating on a political question has become ever more difficult – need public spaces conducive to focus and deliberation

Plánování čistých měst

V tomto textu, který je překladem jedné z kapitol jeho práce The Uses of Disorder (1970), Sennett odkazem na konkrétní příklad podporuje tezi o poklesu komplexity sociálních forem v moderní společnosti v důsledku narůstající komplexity a nadměrného řádu, jež se projevuje mimo jiné ztrátou personálních postojů občanů a jejich možností ustavovat fungující komunity. Oním příkladem jsou mocenské vztahy vtělené do procesu městského plánování. Původ moderního urbánního diskurzu spatřuje v rekonstrukci města Paříže, jež probíhala pod vedením barona Haussmanna na konci 19. století jakožto artikulace potřeb rozvíjejícího se průmyslového světa. K hlavním předpokladům této urbánní tradice patří: centralizované plánování celého města a předem určené sociální využití města. Sennett ukazuje na historickou podmíněnost těchto předpokladů, která vedla k dominanci expertního vědění nad potřebami aktuálních obyvatel. V této tradici ústí autorita do pasivity a ne-participace, eliminujíce rozptylující prvky: chyby, anarchii, diverzitu nebo tvůrčí nepořádek

Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student

This article explores the formation of British evangelical university students as believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how students in this church come to embody a highly cognitive, word-based mode of belief through particular material practices. As they learn to identify themselves as believers, practices of reflexivity and accountability enable them to develop a sense of narrative coherence in their lives that allows them to negotiate tensions that arise from their participation in church and broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief – in contexts where it becomes an identity marker – is bound up with relational practices of belief, such that distinctions between “belief in” and “belief that” are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals

Common Extra House Lab: Recipes for Citizenship in Transition or the Domestic-collective Usage of the Common Good

Este artículo describe acciones que simulan mejoras en el modo de habitar de redes de ciudadanos. El marco formativo es el último curso de arquitectura llamado Common Extra House Lab. En este no se fomenta la distinción entre aula, laboratorio y ciudad. Lo doméstico y su espacio público inmediato (el extra-house) constituyen el punto de partida para nuevos experimentos sociotécnicos. La metodología resultó ser experimental para lo habitual del marco académico y produjo una colección de acciones y formatos de foros híbridos que gestionaban personas, tecnologías, escenarios y recursos, que acabaron formulándose como recetas para una ciudadanía en transición y se convirtieron en el legado para el siguiente curso.This article describes actions that have led to progress in ways of living in citizen networks. The training framework is the last architecture course called Common Extra House Lab, in which it was encouraged to consider that there is no distinction between classroom, laboratory, and city. The domestic and its immediate public space (the extra-house) are the starting point for new socio-technical experiments which could be considered experimental comparing them with academic standards, producing hybrid forums managed by people, technologies and resources. They ended up becoming recipes for citizens in transition and turned into the legacy for the next course

Towards a Critical Understanding of Music, Emotion and Self-Identity

The article begins by outlining a dominant conception of these relations in sociologically informed analysis of music, which sees music primarily as a positive resource for active self-making. My argument is that this conception rests on a problematic notion of the self and also on an overly optimistic understanding of music, which implicitly sees music as highly independent of negative social and historical processes. I then attempt to construct a) a more adequately critical conception of personal identity in modern societies; and b) a more balanced appraisal of music-society relations. I suggest two ways in which relations between self, music and society may not always be quite so positive or as healthy as the dominant conception suggests: 1) Music is now bound up with the incorporation of authenticity and creativity into capitalism, and with intensified consumption habits. 2) Emotional self-realisation through music is now linked to status competition. Interviews are analysed