This paper aims to explore community mapping through both urban theory and an in-depth psychogeographical analysis of Dumbarton Road via Gardner Street between Crow Road and Byres Road in the Partick area of Glasgow. (See Appendix 1, 2 and 3). Initially, this essay will provide a key insight into the history of the area aims to show to what extent post-industrialism and neoliberalism has influenced the modern Partick we know today. The study will then analyse the definition of psychogeography and the strategy of our motive and derive within a city context. This will follow on with a comparison of the group’s findings at different times of the day; investigating the typical paradigms involved within undertaking this particular field work. Finally, …show more content…
Before carrying out a psychogeographical analysis of Dumbarton Road and Gardner Street in the Partick area of Glasgow; it is important to explore the history of Partick and how it has shaped the place we know during the present day society. Historically, Partick has always been famous as a shipping dock and during the start of the 20th century, Partick attracted many migrant workers from overseas; mainly connections Ireland as well as from the Highlands of Scotland (of which Partick is most linked to) to work on within Glasgow’s shipping industry. Both clans and families from the above locations brought their Gaelic culture which highly influenced the nature of the residents in terms of traditions and customs. Industrial politics on Clydeside had long been …show more content…
During the 1950’s a revolutionary movement influencing everyday life and the city; members of Situationist International Guy Debord and Asger Jorn founded psychogeography and defined the research as: "the study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood or behaviour of the individual." (International Situationniste, 1958) These areas were mainly perceived as a new domain of experiment with the prospect of analysing the everyday familiarity of society and exploring the alienation highly involved within class society and capitalist production; infiltrating the fabrics of our social and cultural lives as we know it. There is the understanding of the “precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of
Phillips, E. Barbara. City Lights: Urban-Suburban Life in the Global Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Peckham has been dubbed as London’s buzzing up and coming new hotspot, with “galleries, rooftop bars and foodie night markets that make East London look positively parochial” according to an article by Chris Martin in 2013, a stark contrast to Olsen (1997) labelling it “an inner city area which is among the poorest and most deprived in the country... Blighted by ills such as drugs, crime, unemployment, low educational achievement, a deteriorating infrastructure; life lived at the margins.” In this literature review I am going to review the main issues surrounding how the area has changed, discuss the new demographics coming into the area, issues such as gentrification in the area and also the increasing cultural segregation that is becoming evident in the area, both spatially and temporally.
Another noteworthy urban sociologist that’s invested significant research and time into gentrification is Saskia Sassen, among other topical analysis including globalization. “Gentrification was initially understood as the rehabilitation of decaying and low-income housing by middle-class outsiders in central cities. In the late 1970s a broader conceptualization of the process began to emerge, and by the early 1980s new scholarship had developed a far broader meaning of gentrification, linking it with processes of spatial, economic and social restructuring.” (Sassen 1991: 255). This account is an extract from an influential book that extended beyond the field of gentrification and summarizes its basis proficiently. In more recent and localized media, the release the documentary-film ‘In Jackson Heights’ portrayed the devastation that gentrification is causing as it plagues through Jackson Heights, Queens. One of the local businessmen interviewed is shop owner Don Tobon, stating "We live in a
“The buildings in Harlem are brick and stone.and the streets are long and wide.but Harlem’s much more than these alone. Harlem is what’s inside.” (Hughes, 1945). Gordy realised that neighbourhoods also represented cultural cohesion where they could relate to each other.
“One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle-classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences .... Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.”
“gentrification as an ugly product of greed”. Yet these perspectives miss the point. Gentrification is a byproduct of mankind's continuing interest in advancing the notion that one group is more superior to another and worthy of capitalistic consumption with little regard to social consciousness. It is elitism with the utmost and exclusionary politics to the core. This has been a constant theme of mankind taking or depleting space for personal gain.
The ways in which people are placed within “time space compression” as highly complicated and extremely varied. For instance, in the book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara said, “ Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You do not need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high”(127). Barbara has a car so that she can drive to her workplace and save the time from waiting public transportation, and she also can go to different cities whenever she is free. Therefore, she has more control of her mobility. The social relations would change when she went to another city. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others, like Barbara; some initiate flows and movement, others do not; some are more more on the receiving-end of it than others. Instead of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imaged as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are structed ona far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. We can see that from her different work experiences in different places. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates ina apositive way the global and the
A sense of place is the ideology that people possess when they feel that they belong to a given surrounding. Therefore, through their existence and a sense of belonging on a given environment, people do tend to have a special connection with their immediate surroundings, and therefore, they will do everything to protect their habitat. This, in a sense, is instrumental in affecting the positionality of people with such belonging to one given
Very few people would want to live in a place where they don’t have security. Whether it be in cities or subdivisions, Jacobs, if alive, would ascertain that there needs to be a sense of connectedness to maintain communal safety. Public living “bring[s] together people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion” (Jacobs 55). Now that families typically center themselves around suburban lifestyles, residents should understand that the same connections that Jacobs says were to be made in cities need to now be made in subdivisions. Jacobs was scared that with houses being spread out in the suburbs, little interaction between neighbors would take place. In order to avoid this, neighborhoods need to promote a sidewalk lifestyle that they currently do not (Jacobs 70). With Kotkin stressing how urban areas are no longer preferable places to raise a family, saying only seven percent of their populations are children, he lacks compassion for the transients that now inhabit cities. Undoubtedly, those who now inhabit the city should also feel safe in their environments. Nowadays, members of a city isolate themselves from interactions with other citizens making it difficult to establish a social
Beginning in the 1960s, middle and upper class populations began moving out of the suburbs and back into urban areas. At first, this revitalization of urban areas was 'treated as a 'back to the city' movement of suburbanites, but recent research has shown it to be a much more complicated phenomenon' (Schwirian 96). This phenomenon was coined 'gentrification' by researcher Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe the residential movement of middle-class people into low-income areas of London (Zukin 131). More specifically, gentrification is the renovation of previously poor urban dwellings, typically into condominiums, aimed at upper and middle class professionals. Since the 1960s, gentrification has appeared in large cities such as Washington D.C., San Francisco, and New York. This trend among typically young, white, upper-middle class working professionals back into the city has caused much controversy (Schwirian 96). The arguments for and against gentrification will be examined in this paper.
Wirth, L. (1938). Urban as a Way of Life. In R.T. Legates, & F. Stout (Eds.). The City Reader (pp. 90-97). New York, NY: Routledge
Chaffey, J. (1994). The challenge of urbanisation. In M. Naish & S. Warn (Eds.), Core geography (pp. 138-146). London: Longman.
‘Through identifying places and organizing them, we make sense of the world we inhibit’ (Unwin,
MacKenzie, John M. and Richards, Jeffrey. The Railway Station, A Social History. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 1986.
Sociologist … explained that open pattern of suburb is because of seeking environment free noise, dirt and overcrowding that are in the centre of cities. He gave examples of these cities as St. John’s wood, Richmond, Hampstead in London. Chestnut Hill and Germantown in Philadelphia. He added that suburban are only for the rich and high class. This plays into the hands of the critical perspectives that, “Cities are not so much the product of a quasi-natural “ecological” unfolding of social differentiation and succession, but of a dynamic of capital investment and disinvestment. City space is acted on primarily as a commodity that is bought and sold for profit, “(Little & McGivern, 2013, p.616).