Time and the Shape of History

Corfield, Penelope J.

doi:10.12987/yale/9780300115581.001.0001

“…Relatedly, the everyday also serves as a counterfoil to the 'tyranny of the epochal' that all too frequently pervades the social sciences, as evidenced in a typical preoccupation with radical discontinuity, disruption and transformation at the expense of persistence, micro-change and accumulation in the everydayness of the (long-term) shape of history (Corfield 2007). Too often such 'epochalism' makes 'change appear the inevitable outcome of abstract non-locatable impulses and imperatives… rather than the result of specific (and traceable) political choices ' (du Gay 2003: 670) that build upon each other in incremental ways.…”

Section: Thinking Through the 'Everyday'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping the Contours of ‘Everyday Security’: Time, Space and Emotion

Crawford¹,

Hutchinson²

2015

CRIMIN

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This article develops a conceptual framework that prompts new lines of enquiry and questions for security researchers. We advance the notion of 'everyday security' which encompasses both the lived experiences of security processes and the related practices that people engage in to govern their own safety. Our analysis proceeds from a critical appraisal of several dominant themes within current security research, and how 'everyday security' addresses key limitations therein. Everyday experiences and quotidian practices of security are then explored along three key dimensions; temporality, spatial scale and affect/emotion. We conclude by arguing that the study of everyday security provides an invaluable critical vantage-point from which to reinvigorate security studies and expose the differential impacts of both insecurity and securitisation.

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“…Certainly the historical and design disciplines tend to converge on issues of 'preservation', 'conservation' and 'heritage' rather than the exploration of design possibilities as such. Yet a more sophisticated articulation of built-environment 'diachromesh' - Corfield's (2007) term for the interlocking of different temporal scales or 'frames' -could reveal the historical potential of a high street to generate patterns of social co-presence, encounter and engagement in relation to an expanded range of normative agendas and design scenarios. For example, a given high street might be designated as a site of special 'social and economic interest' with a range of accompanying incentives for investment in community and commercial infrastructure, including that of the road network itself.…”

Section: Morphological History and Morphological Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Suburban Urbanities

Legeby¹,

Pont²,

Marcus³

2015

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ForewordIn recent years there has been much debate within urban studies as to which came first in the evolution of human settlements, the countryside or the city. There was always a third context to this discussion, however, and that was the suburb. Life beyond the city walls was a distinctive feature of ancient urban civilisations from Persia to Minoan Crete, and today in the Anglophone world the suburban population is a majority. How surprising, then, that few scholars have attempted to understand the nature and agency of suburban living as a dominant characteristic of human settlements. This was symptomatic of a wider academic indifference and even hostility towards 'the suburban' which has only (ridiculously) recently been challenged by a new generation of scholars who take suburbs seriously.Suburban Urbanities is a hugely important contribution to understanding our suburban world. Drawing upon scholarship within the now rapidly expanding field of suburban studies, synthesising historical geography with space syntax theories and methods, and the sociology of everyday life, it sheds new light on the historic and spatial evolution of the city. It shows that suburbia is not a synchronic caricature of a life-less-lived, but a dynamic context of metropolitan agency and creativity. As an historic process, suburbanisation is not something that evolved beyond the city to suck the life out of it, but was intertwined with trajectories of growth, with the socioeconomic patterning and structuring of cities large and small. It is impossible to grasp the meaning of class relations, of gendered lifestyles, of ethnic segregation and integration, of urban economies and patterns of mobility and communications, without placing suburbia at the forefront of the analysis. The universality of the themes of Suburban Urbanities is obvious: the dynamics of growth are significant historically because suburbs are starting points in change over time, not the end of the line. Old suburbs were once new, and today's new suburbs, springing up rapidly across the world, will one day be old. As dynamic environments they continue to act as vectors of social, economic and political development, locally, nationally and globally.The book is timely in another important sphere, and that is the personal subjectivity of suburbanites. To those who live in them, suburban lives viii FOrEWOrD have meaning. Back in 2013, I went for a walk in Fort Totten, an AfricanAmerican suburb of Washington, DC. On a sweltering August lunchtime, as I took photographs of the comfortable suburban homes of middle-class black people in roads that were empty except for flowering trees and parked cars, a woman's voice called out to me with a gentle but audible 'good afternoon'. Across her neatly trimmed front lawn I began chatting with a woman in her sixties who was taking tea with a friend on her veranda. She had left downtown DC in 1976 and as she stated with some passion, 'I couldn't wait to get out'. Fort Totten had its problems, but it was an attractive and spacious plac...

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“…Such a network history does not lend itself to metaphors of layers and palimpsests so much as knots in timber that describe processes of growth and decay. The spatial configuration of the grid is reticulated in space and time, a materialisation of Corfield's (2007) 'diachromesh'.…”

Section: Morphological History and Morphological Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

High Streets and the Pedestrian Realm

Rofè¹,

Yerushalmi²,

Margalith³

et al. 2015

Suburban Urbanities

0

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ForewordIn recent years there has been much debate within urban studies as to which came first in the evolution of human settlements, the countryside or the city. There was always a third context to this discussion, however, and that was the suburb. Life beyond the city walls was a distinctive feature of ancient urban civilisations from Persia to Minoan Crete, and today in the Anglophone world the suburban population is a majority. How surprising, then, that few scholars have attempted to understand the nature and agency of suburban living as a dominant characteristic of human settlements. This was symptomatic of a wider academic indifference and even hostility towards 'the suburban' which has only (ridiculously) recently been challenged by a new generation of scholars who take suburbs seriously.Suburban Urbanities is a hugely important contribution to understanding our suburban world. Drawing upon scholarship within the now rapidly expanding field of suburban studies, synthesising historical geography with space syntax theories and methods, and the sociology of everyday life, it sheds new light on the historic and spatial evolution of the city. It shows that suburbia is not a synchronic caricature of a life-less-lived, but a dynamic context of metropolitan agency and creativity. As an historic process, suburbanisation is not something that evolved beyond the city to suck the life out of it, but was intertwined with trajectories of growth, with the socioeconomic patterning and structuring of cities large and small. It is impossible to grasp the meaning of class relations, of gendered lifestyles, of ethnic segregation and integration, of urban economies and patterns of mobility and communications, without placing suburbia at the forefront of the analysis. The universality of the themes of Suburban Urbanities is obvious: the dynamics of growth are significant historically because suburbs are starting points in change over time, not the end of the line. Old suburbs were once new, and today's new suburbs, springing up rapidly across the world, will one day be old. As dynamic environments they continue to act as vectors of social, economic and political development, locally, nationally and globally.The book is timely in another important sphere, and that is the personal subjectivity of suburbanites. To those who live in them, suburban lives viii FOrEWOrD have meaning. Back in 2013, I went for a walk in Fort Totten, an AfricanAmerican suburb of Washington, DC. On a sweltering August lunchtime, as I took photographs of the comfortable suburban homes of middle-class black people in roads that were empty except for flowering trees and parked cars, a woman's voice called out to me with a gentle but audible 'good afternoon'. Across her neatly trimmed front lawn I began chatting with a woman in her sixties who was taking tea with a friend on her veranda. She had left downtown DC in 1976 and as she stated with some passion, 'I couldn't wait to get out'. Fort Totten had its problems, but it was an attractive and spacious plac...

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Time and the Shape of History

Cited by 91 publications

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Mapping the Contours of ‘Everyday Security’: Time, Space and Emotion

Mapping the Contours of ‘Everyday Security’: Time, Space and Emotion

Suburban Urbanities

High Streets and the Pedestrian Realm

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