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E-book London’s Urban Landscape : Another Way of Telling

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Penilaian

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Substitute the term ‘place’ for the apricot-cocktail glass, and you have the overall theme of this book. It puts forward an account of London’s urban landscape by considering it as a constellation of places linked by paths of movement between them.The aim of this book is to describe these places as faithfully as possible through phenomenological description grounded in participant observation. It is claimed that it is only through ethnographic research that we can understand the reality of contemporary urban experience and the meanings that people give to their lives. We achieve this by a thick description of the deeply sensuous character of the places in which people work and dwell and think and move between. This is a return from the abstracted character of most discussions of cities to the things themselves, the people themselves and the materiality of the built environment that the people inhabit.One of the aims of this introduction is to justify this view of London as a collection of places that holistically constitute its urban landscape and make the city what it is and distinct from others. Through the buildings in place, we can understand the people, and through the people the buildings. Through an entangled dialectic, they form part of each other and mediate each other’s existence and significance in the practices of everyday life.I also attempt to situate the book and the individual studies in it in relation to some of the relevant themes and perspectives in the vast and burgeoning literature on urban studies by social and cultural geographers, sociologists and ethnographers, and, more specifically, from the standpoint of material culture studies in anthropology. In this section I provide a brief critique of the dominant trend in recent urban studies in human and cultural geography and sociology, underlining their shortcomings, to provide a counterpoint to the alternative perspective put forward in this book.Danny Dorling’s book The 32 Stops is an account of the Central Line on the London Underground. The subtitle is Lives on London’s Central Line(Dorling 2013). It is one of a series of 13 books in which individual authors write about different London Underground lines through their personal experience of using them, thus conveying a sense of the urban through use of the city’s transport network and the places along it. Dorling’s book is undoubtedly the most accomplished of the series in terms of the manner in which we can understand a succession of different places across the centre of the city, from West Ruislip at the western end to Woodford in the east.Dorling’s account, written for a popular audience, is in many respects quite typical of mainstream geographical approaches to urban analysis. The 32 Central Line stops simply become names in the account. They are not considered as distinctive places or locales along the line. There is no description of any of them. In this sense, the names are just empty signifiers of place.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

307.76421 JEE l

Penerbit

London : UCL Press., 2019

Deskripsi Fisik

458 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781787355583

Klasifikasi

307.76421

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Urban Communities, Cities in London

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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