This study examines urban agriculture (UA) in Sacramento, California (USA), the nation's self-branded “Farm-to-Fork Capital,” in order to highlight UA’s distinct yet entangled roots. The study is based on 24 interviews with a diverse array of UA leaders, conducted as part of a five-year transdisciplinary study of UA in Sacramento. In it, we unearth three primary “taproots” of UA projects, each with its own historical legacies, normative visions, and racial dynamics. In particular, we examine UA projects with “justice taproots,” “health (...) taproots,” and “market taproots.” We use this analysis to understand how different kinds of UA projects are embedded in racial capitalism in ways that transform relationships between people, the city, and food systems. Unearthing these entangled roots helps illuminate UA’s underlying politics, showing how these roots grow in both competitive and symbiotic ways within the soil matrix of racial capitalism. We argue that these roots interact differently with racial capitalism, creating disparities in their growth trajectories. In particular, UA projects associated with the justice taproot are historically underrepresented and undervalued. However, we argue that there are some prospects for building alliances between the UA movement’s three roots, and that these are both promising and problematic. (shrink)

An exploration of London during the time of More identifies the geographical dimensions of the two centres that were developing at Westminster and in the city of London. The article continues to explore various dimensions of London life. The civic organisation is discussed and the ecclesiastical presence is described. Included in this description is a consideration of the prominence of the religious houses, which were suppressed during the English Reformation. The author continues to consider the immense (...) challenges that confronted the medical provision that existed in 16th century London. Finally, an account of the educational developments based on the new learning is given. (shrink)

Volume 14, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 123-125.

Last October the Director‐General of the Confederation of British Industry delivered the annual Gresham Special Lecture in Gresham College in the City of London, in which he considered ways of developing a closer and potentially more fruitful relationship between the City and the UK manufacturing industry. The lecture is here reproduced with permission.

This paper is both an exercise in historical recovery in that it details some of the events surrounding the founding of the City and Guilds of London Institute and describes the way in which the Institute set about the building and running of two of its colleges, the City and Guilds Technical College, Finsbury, and the Central Institution in South Kensington and an attempt to interpret the above material in terms of various forms of association within the (...) City Corporation and the guilds. Collectively the City and the guilds made an effort to come to terms with a modernizing world through the means of providing scientific and technical education. The guilds wanted to remain important even though traditional apprenticeship was dying out. In joining in a new venture to provide technical education for young people it was necessary to maintain an order in which the City's presence was clear and apparent. This paper will show how such an order was achieved and, in so doing, it shows something more generally of the relationship of tradition and rhetoric to institution building. (shrink)

This article explores aspects of the textual relationship between women and early modern London by examining three verbal ‘snapshots’ of the city in works either written by women or focusing on women in their urban environment. The first text, Isabella Whitney's ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573), addresses London from a rural perspective, treating the city as a fickle male to whom she wants to hand back all his treasures. The poem constructs a vivid and ironic social topography, (...) giving a glimpse of the roles of men and women in the Tudor city. The second text is by Mary Carleton, the roguish Restoration figure who defended her apparently ‘counterfeit’ life in the prose of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663). Carleton's London is a place of unwanted seduction and sexual intimidation, highlighting a gendered moral geography even while the memoir itself titillates the reader with the account of her bizarre experiences. Finally, in a coda to the discussions of Whitney and Carleton, early eighteenth-century London is viewed through Jonathan Swift's satirical mock-pastorals of squalid urban life, in which female identity, like the city itself, is a site of violence, disgust and deception. Together, these textual representations of women and early modern London indicate the complex interactions of gender, literature and the early modern city. The analysis of the texts also suggests the significance of the ironic voice as a quintessentially urban literary mode, the prevalence of the idea of woman as a commodified topographical site, and the function of metaphors of courtship or marriage as indicators of the paradoxical attractions of the city. (shrink)

This article reviews Scott McQuire's book, The Media City, which focuses on the historical formation of the media-architecture complex of the current urban environment. While the book provides rich insights into the ways various media technologies have become interconnected with urban architectural structures, the underlying concept of media in McQuire's discussion could be criticized in three respects: visual-centred, technology-based and real-time oriented. After considering these three points in the context of the theoretical ideas put forward by Henri Lefebvre, Friedrich (...) Kittler and Walter Benjamin, particular attention is paid to Benjamin's prominent figure of the flâneur. Through reconsidering the experience of the flâneur in terms of the technique of getting lost in the city, possibilities are suggested as to thinking differently about the `media city'. In other words, it is proposed that we should examine the theoretical possibilities concerning the modern urban experience between the `media city' and the `city as a medium'. (shrink)

Revolution of a next kind : building black London from the bottom -- On the bus my oyster card goes ding de diing de ding ding : transforming the space of London's public transport -- I see the glow in you : summoning the aura in London's post hip-hop culture -- That there kind of sumthin' sounds strange to me : social representation and the recorded soundscape -- From a junior spesh to the keys to the Bentley (...) : the routes of grimey London -- Conclusion. Take back the scene. (shrink)

Modern cities have recently evolved as centres for material and intangible exchanges and this obliges us to rethink the urban scene. The passing from the industrial era to the new age of information has rendered obsolete the models envisaged by Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. Basing her argument on the typology put forward by Saskia Sassen, Barbara Freitag sketches out the different profiles of contemporary cities. Urban centres are now defined by the level, scale and intensity of the (...) exchanges to which they give rise. On the first level is the global city, nerve centre of the globalized economy (Tokyo, New York, London...) and capable of challenging the power of the state. On the second level are the megalopoles (Mexico, São Paulo...), which are only prevented from joining the ranks of the global cities because much of their population is excluded from the global economy. Next come the metropoles, cities like Paris (‘19th-century capital’), which have retained a way of life global centres can no longer provide. However, most of the world’s population is concentrated in the peripheral boroughs of the information society’s global economy. It is for the sake of this population that attention must be paid to the transformations endured by 21st-century cities. (shrink)