A History of Blackpool Illuminations

Cities of Light is the first global overview of modern urban illumination, a development that allows human wakefulness to colonize the night, doubling the hours available for purposeful and industrious activities. Urban lighting is undergoing a revolution due to recent developments in lighting technology, and increased focus on sustainability and human-scaled environments. Cities of Light is expansive in coverage, spanning two centuries and touching on developments on six continents, without diluting its central focus on architectural and urban lighting. Covering history, geography, theory, and speculation in urban lighting, readers will have numerous points of entry into the book, finding it easy to navigate for a quick reference and or a coherent narrative if read straight through. With chapters written by respected scholars and highly-regarded contemporary practitioners, this book will delight students and practitioners of architectural and urban history, area and cultural studies, and lighting design professionals and the institutional and municipal authorities they serve

Mundane mobilities, performaces and spaces of tourism

Tourism is commonly understood as an exception or special time, a period when the normal everyday constraints are suspended: tourists are temporarily immersed in spaces of difference, free from the bounds of home and work, and may transgress their ordinary 'appropriate' performances. This article questions the extent to which much mass tourism is 'extraordinary', suggesting instead that it is more typically associated with habitual routine, cultural conventions and normative performances which circumscribe what should be gazed upon and visited, and modes of touristic comportment and recording. These conventions are also managed by the directors of the tourist product and encouraged by the production of distinct, serial forms of tourist space in which cultural differences are tamed for easy consumption. The paper argues that such forms of performance and their staging are designed to maximize comfort, a touristic desire that should not necessarily be the focus of critical scorn. On the other hand, so managed can the tourist experience become, that there are frequent attempts - often thwarted - to escape the tourist enclaves and schedules and become more closely acquainted with difference. Tourism then, because it is not separate from the quotidian, is an exemplary site for an exploration of the ways in which the everyday is replete with unreflexive practice and habit but simultaneously provokes desires for unconfined alterity

Entangled agencies, material networks and repair in a building assemblage: the mutable stone of St Ann’s Church, Manchester

This article explores the fluidities and stabilities of urban materiality by looking at the ongoing emergence of a 300-year-old church in central Manchester. The notion of assemblages is utilised to investigate how places, such as the building featured here, are simultaneously destroyed and altered by numerous agencies, and stabilised by repair and replacement building material. By examining the vital properties of stone and the particular non-human agents that act upon the stony fabric of the building, I explore some of the processes that render matter continuously emergent. I subsequently consider the consequences of these material transformations by looking at how they promote the enrolment of two human processes of spatial (re)ordering, the forging of connections between the city and sites of stone supply, and the changing and contested process of repair and maintenance. I argue that by acknowledging complexity, historical depth and geographical scale, non-human and human entanglements, and ambiguity, we might write accounts that do justice to the emergence, contingency and unpredictability in a world of innumerable agencies