Full Description
In recent years, an increasing number of separation walls have been built around the world. Walls built in urban areas are particularly striking in that they have exacted a heavy toll in terms of human suffering. As territorialising devices, walls can be protective, but the protection they grant is never straightforward. This collection invites inquiry into the complexities of the social life of walls, observing urban spaces as veritable laboratories of wall-making - places where their consequences become most visible. A study of the relationship between walls and politics, the cultural meaning of walls and their visibility, whether as barriers or as legible - sometimes spectacular - surfaces, and their importance for social processes, Urban Walls shows how walls extend into media spaces, thus drawing a multidimensional geography of separation, connection, control and resistance. As such, the collection will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture and politics with interests in urban studies and social theory.
Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction: The Life of Walls - In Urban, Spatial and Political Theory (Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm)
1. On Walls in the Open City (Alison Young)
2. Dismantling Belfast Peace Walls: New material arrangements for improving community relations (Florine Ballif)
3. Walling Through Seas: The Indian Ocean, Australian border security, and the political present (Peter Chambers)
4. Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative (Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke)
5. Screening Brazil: Footnotes on a Wall (Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni)
6. Warsaw Afterimages: Of Walls and Memories (Ella Chmielewska)
7. Wall Terrains. Architecture, body culture and parkour (Emma Nilsson)
8. Gating housing in Sweden: Walling in the privileged, walling out the public (Karin Grundström)
9. The Right to the City Is the Right to the Surface: A Case for a Surface Commons (in 8 Arguments, 34 Images and some Legal Provisions) (Sabina Andron)
10. The Multiple Walls of Graffiti Removal. Maintenance and Urban Assemblage in Paris (Jérôme Denis and David Pontille)
11. Walls as Fleeting Surfaces. From Bricks to Pixels, Trains to Instagram (Lachlan MacDowall)
Index
