659 About the Challenged Notion of "Curve of a City": the Example of the Pilgrimage of Lourdes (France) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Emergence of a New City of Enligthenment
2003
0 Abstract This paper studies the urban change occurred in the city of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake. It discusses the morphological break that took place when the medieval spatial pattern was modified by the reconstruction of the city centre by Pombal, the King’s minister who was responsible for the reconstruction of the city. The main goal is to analyse the morphological transformation made by Pombal and to identify the spatial strategies that contributed to the conception and formalization of this new City of Enlightenment. The study starts with the spatial description of the medieval cartography and the analysis of historical data concerning the functional and social use of space main facilities, fairs, religious processions and royal festivities as well as the evaluation and discussion of the six proposals designed to give shape to the new city. Space Syntax methodology is applied to historical analysis of spatial and functional attributes of the city enabling the process of...
City as Sacred Space - Sacred Spaces in the City: a Response
Städte im lateinischen Westen und im griechischen Osten zwischen Spätantike und Früher Neuzeit. Topographie – Recht – Religion, Mihailo Popović, Martin Scheutz, Herwig Weigl and Elisabeth Gruber (eds) (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 66), 2015
Introduction [from Roundtable Reflection: The Past and Future of French Urban History]
2013
Long before 2008, when the world’s urban population surpassed the rural for the first time, cities and their populations have drawn outsized attention by all kinds of scholars—less for their unique individual histories than for their ability to represent the human experience. Giovanni Botero (1544-1617), musing on the variability of population growth over time, wrote in 1588, “Let us settle this question insofar as it concerns cities, however, because that will also settle it for the world as a whole.” To Botero the world does not hold cities; cities contain the world within them. Such a breathtaking claim of universality rests on the Aristotelian assumption that cities are a natural outgrowth of human nature: study cities and one will understand what makes people tick. And while scholars of the present may have a less rosy outlook on cities than did Botero, who saw reflected there both human and divine achievement, the universal quality of cities and their centrality for understand...
The Church, the City, and Modernity
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales
Dominique Iogna-Prat’s latest book, Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes. L’Église et l’architecture de la société, 1200–1500, follows on both intellectually and chronologically from La Maison Dieu. Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (v. 800–v. 1200). It presents an essay on the emergence of the town as a symbolic and political figure of society (the “city of man”) between 1200 and 1700, and on the effects of this development on the Church, which had held this function before 1200. This feeds into an ambitious reflection on the origins of modernity, seeking to move beyond the impasse of political philosophy—too quick to ignore the medieval centuries and the Scholastic moment—and to relativize the effacement of the institutional Church from the Renaissance on. In so doing, it rejects the binary opposition between the Church and the state, proposes a new periodization of the “transition to modernity,” and underlines the importance of spatial issues (mainly in terms of represen...
2008
This important book revives core issues from age-old albeit recently half forgotten debates over urbanity, its problems and advantages. The author suggests that the city concept itself is ripe for being transcended, socio-material condensation serving as its successor. He further outlines a dialectics of today's hardships and comforts of city/condensation life, in the grand tradition of a Howard (1902), Mumford (1938), Le Corbusier (1935), or a Williams (1973). To-day's condensations are analysed as socio-material sediments, each with its political code. Sartre's thinking is the main theoretical basis. A number of hardships and their remedies are discussed and a proposal for reform outlined. As important, a whole family of new concepts are put to use, e.g. the sub-individual, the imaginary.-We analyse the local reviews of the book as a "howl of hurt habitus": While most objections are repudiated, we
Cities Through the Ages: One Thing or Many
Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 2019
The variability among cities, from the ancient world to the present, can be organized usefully in two ways. First, a focus on the dominant urban activities and processes leads to the recognition of two basic urban types: economic cities and political cities. Most cities today are economic cities in which growth proceeds through agglomeration processes. By contrast, most cities in the ancient world (and some today) are political cities, in which power and administration play a major role in structuring cities and generating change. Second, an alternative focus on processes of social interaction within the urban built environment leads to the recognition that there is only one kind of settlement that includes all cities-economic and political; past and present. Cities in this sense are settings for "energized crowding." Processes of interaction generate both economic and political growth, and they produce and influence the built forms and social characteristics of all cities. Our model helps scholars distinguish the unique from the universal traits of cities today and in the past.
A theory of the city as object
A series of recent papers (Hillier et al 1993, Hillier 1996b, Hillier 2000) have outlined a generic process by which spatial configurations, through their effect on movement, first shape, and then are shaped by, land use patterns and densities. The aim of this paper is to make the spatial dimension of this process more precise. The paper begins by examining a large number of axial maps, and finds that although there are strong cultural variations in different regions of the world, there are also powerful invariants. The problem is to understand how both cultural variations and invariants can arise from the spatial processes that generate cities. The answer proposed is that socio-cultural factors generate the differences by imposing a certain local geometry on the local construction of settlement space, while micro-economic factors, coming more and more into play as the settlement expands, generate the invariants. Movement: the strong force The urban grid, in the sense used in this paper, is the pattern of public space linking the buildings of a settlement, regardless of its degree of geometric regularity. The structure of a grid is the pattern brought to light by expressing the grid as an axial map 1 and analysing it configurationally. A series of recent papers have proposed a strong role for urban grids in creating the living city. The argument centres around the relation between the urban grid and movement. In Natural movement (Hillier et al 1993), it was shown that the structure of the urban grid has independent and systematic effects on movement patterns, which could be captured by integration analysis of the axial map. 2. In Cities as movement economies (Hillier 1996b) it was shown that natural movement-and so ultimately the urban grid itself-impacted on land use patterns by attracting movement-seeking uses such as retail to locations with high natural movement, and sending non-movement seeking uses such as residence to low natural movement locations. The attracted uses then attracted more movement to the high movement locations , and this in turn attracted further uses, creating a spiral of multiplier effects and resulting in an urban pattern of dense mixed uses areas set against a background of more homogeneous, mainly residential development. In Centrality as a