With its interdisciplinary approach, the volume for the first time makes clear how strongly mental images of urban space, both ancient and modern, have been shaped by the techniques of their representation in media. The examples of ancient texts and works of art, and modern literature and films, are used to elucidate the artistic potential of images of the city and the techniques by which they are semanticised. One focus is on the question of which literary, visual and acoustic means prompt their recipients’ spatial imagination another is to inquire into the semantics and functions that are ascribed to the image of a city as constructed in various media. It thus turns attention away from built urban spaces and onto mental images of cities. This is essential reading for academics and practitioners in sociology, disaster studies, sport-for-development and political ecology.Author by: Therese Fuhrer Language: en Publisher by: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 54 Total Download: 837 File Size: 45,5 Mb Description: The term ‘cityscaping’ is here introduced to characterise the creative process through which the image of the city is created and represented in various media – text, film and artefacts. Featuring the work of ex-professional athletes, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, political ecologists, community development workers and philosophers, this book offers new perspectives on capitalism, nature, sociality, morality and identity. This includes topics such as DIY skateparks in Jamaica former child soldiers in Africa the funding of sport, recreation and cultural activities by extractive industries in northern Canada mountain biking in the UK and urban exploration in New Zealand. Drawing from international case studies, this book uniquely explores the different landscapes and contexts of catastrophe as well as the affective qualities of sporting practices. Acknowledging that catastrophes are complex, overlapping phenomena in need of sophisticated, interdisciplinary solutions, this book explores the social, economic, ecological and moral injustices that determine the personal and emotional impact of catastrophe. This book considers the ability of individuals and communities to maintain healthy relationships with their surroundings-before, during and after catastrophic events-through physical activity and sporting practices.īroad and ambitious in scope, this book uses sport and physical activity as a lens through which to examine our catastrophic societies and spaces. A secondary text the size of an article cannot illustrate them all, but making an imperfect – although representative – selection it can at least hope to succeed as an invitation to a systematic, and inspired, (re)reading of what the article signals as Calvino's most authoritative pronouncement, however invisible, on the world of his vocation.
There are also correspondences with the various approaches and contributions of literary criticism. Its self-referentiality is presented so condensedly and thoroughly (despite the modest size of the book) that the initiated reader will have made his journey through the fifty-five cities, woven together (precisely as a textus!) by the narrator's voice and the conversations between a fictional Marco Polo and an equally such Kublai Khan, with the feeling that both language and its expression closest to perfection, that is, literature, have been covered in all their crucial aspects. Once appreciated as such, the (anti)novel starts opening up as language on language, and as literature on literature, which, according to the author of the article, is the novel's prime concern. Such practices have contributed to bypassing what Invisible Cities is in the first place: a linguistic artifact. Consequently, it has attracted all kinds of interpretation, including sociological, urbanist, even political.
It is actually one of the few literary attempts that have managed to palpably approach the realization of Mallarmé's ideal Book, into which the entire world would collapse. Invisible Cities, Calvino's novel, or rather antinovel, is about very many things.
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