In this paper, we argue that nurses need to be aware of how the production of space in specific contexts – including health care systems and research institutions – perpetuates marginalized populations' state of social otherness. Lefebvre's idea regarding spatial triad is mobilized in this paper, as it pertains to two‐spirited, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer populations (2SLGBTQ*). We believe that nurses can create counter‐spaces within health care systems and research institutions that challenge normative discourses. Lefebvre's work (...) provides us the necessary tools to understand how various places or environments produce identities. In understanding Lefebvre's principles, we believe that nurses can play an essential role in creating counter‐spaces, thereby instigating counter‐institutional practices, for those who experience otherness. (shrink)

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space and real space. In the course (...) of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures. (shrink)

In Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Hsuan L. Hsu examines how literature represents different kinds of spaces ranging from the single-family home to the globe. He focuses on authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett, who drew on literary tools such as rhetoric, setting, and point of view to mediate between individuals and different kinds of spaces. These authors used forms such as the regional sketch, the (...) domestic novel, and the detective story to re-examine how local spaces and communities would change when incorporated into global economic and political networks. Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is valuable reading for American literature scholars, and for all concerned with intersections between literature and geography"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This essay applies Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space, particularly his conceptualization of the tension formed by the perceived-conceived-lived triad to analyze how space is produced in wartime hospitals as demonstrated in Richard Selzer’s “The Whistlers’ Room.” Wounded soldiers participate in producing the triad of the social space of military hospitals through their multilayered performances as fighting soldiers serving the nation and as living human beings longing for human connections. Contradictory performances demonstrate the strategic positioning (...) of wounded soldiers as active producers of different social spaces. By representing the lived spaces produced by wounded soldiers, Selzer challenges the hegemonic representations of the conceived spaces of military hospitals. Selzer’s exploration of soldiers’ contradictory performances opens up opportunities for discussion of writing physicians who assume a similar role by positioning themselves strategically within the medical institution. (shrink)

John Damascene, one of the most productive Greek theologians of the Middle Byzantine era, also composed a treatise on the Trisagion hymn, or how it should be sung correctly and why; a text that has been little discussed in contemporary scholarship. The present paper provides an overview of the work – with special reference to the notion of identity in John’s description of the Trinitarian doctrine. It also examines the treatise especially in the context of anti-heretical polemics. The author argues (...) that John’s approach to the question of the correct way of singing the hymn is gentle: instead of using pejorative language, he even praises the object of his reproach. (shrink)

This is a continuation of [2]. We study the Tychonoff Compactness Theorem for various definitions of compactness and for various types of spaces . We also study well ordered Tychonoff products and the effect that the multiple choice axiom has on such products.

How can performance transform places of urban renewal and regeneration? What does performance contribute to the creation of community? These are some of the questions addressed in this study of the relationship of performance to urban space. Marrying theory with a series of international case studies of performance practice and interviews with practitioners, this interdisciplinary study examines how space is performatively produced to create a sense of 'placeness'. Case studies are drawn from Canada, Brazil, the Czech Republic, the (...) UK and Spain. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the interplay between forcing with fusion and combinatorial covering properties. We illustrate this interplay by proving that in the Laver model for the consistency of the Borel’s conjecture, the product of any two metrizable spaces with the Hurewicz property has the Menger property.

We study the Tychonoff Compactness Theorem for several different definitions of a compact space.

This article examines recent practices of landscape photography in light of Henri Lefebvre's influential theorisation of the production of space. The abiding value of Lefebvre's analysis for our understanding of social geography and contemporary Capitalism is elaborated through discussion of selected photographic works that, in different ways, each foreground the socio-hisotrically constructed character of space. This analysis enables the rearticulation of Lefebvre's influential analysis of space in light of later artistic practices and in relation to subsequent developments (...) in the form of Capitalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space by Juan HerreraAída R. GuhlincozziCartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Spaceby juan herrera Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022Juan Herrera’s historical recounting of Latino activism in Fruitvale, California, in Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space is stellar. In fact, the case focused on by Herrera as an example of (...) activism producing space and creating change in the name of social justice is not the only top-quality contribution to Latinx geographies to be found in this book. Herrera’s conceptualization of “cartographic memory” builds on the intertwining of Latinx writers and historians with traditional spatial thought from the history of geography. His definition of “cartographic memory” as a “political remaking of urban geography and therefore a selective mapping” adds to the broader oeuvre of activism and space coming out in recent years (14).The geographic location for Cartographic Memory comes from the author’s long history of working in and around Fruitvale as both a volunteer and community member. As a new resident of the Oakland area, Herrera mistakenly navigated himself to Fruitvale, where he found the elements of the place clearly speaking to a cultural aesthetic of Latin-idad. Intrigued, Herrera began volunteering in the area, and learned more of the long activist history of the space. That activist history, Herrera argues, has long been under-studied, or even forgotten, in Chicano activist history, and merits recognition. Herrera’s efforts with [End Page 139] this book go a long way to gathering together that spatial history and reconstructing it for the reader through interviews and oral histories with numerous activists, extensive archival research, and ethnography focusing on the 1960s and 1970s Mexican-American activist mobilization in support of the Chicano movement.The power of the focus on Fruitvale must be recognized, as Herrera also makes space for intently peeling apart the layers of nonprofit funding, social movements, and community-building and support. The chapter, “Revolution Interrupted,” is about the funding situation of the Unity Council in Fruitvale and how the funding structure was constructed over time in the context of the political and economic opportunities of the 1960s. It speaks to how this had a profound effect on the organizers and community given the shift from grassroots to institutional funding. This chapter opens the book with a focus on the national scope of funding opportunities for organizations in the 1960s that focused on race and ethnicity. Through this lens are explored the effects of local political actions—such as the 1969 speech by San Antonio-based Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) leader Jose Angel Gutierrez—on funding at the federal level. Because of the perceived militancy of these remarks, the U.S. Congress became concerned, and eventually passed the 1969 Tax Reform bill, limiting the types of projects that could be funded philanthropically. This type of multi-scale understanding of Fruitvale activism is threaded throughout the entire book, from chapter 1, “Making Place,” in which Herrera summarizes activist perspectives on Fruitvale as emphasizing “not only how the neighborhood itself [produced] a geography of activism but also how it was interconnected to other places of struggle throughout the United States” (emphasis in original; 33).Herrera also navigates the interactions of race, ethnicity, and space, tracing how coalitions, influences on political efforts, and collaboration took place throughout Fruitvale and Oakland during this period. His second chapter, “The Other Minority,” identifies where Black Panther Party-related work occurred; the marketization that began to occur of a non-threatening, non-Black “Latino” identity; the effect that this had on activist efforts; and more. Importantly, in this chapter Herrera’s interviews reveal that part of the interest in these coalitions came from the clear organizational success Black activists had achieved in their [End Page 140] work, leading Mexican American activists in Oakland to pursue similar efforts. One interviewee, Herman Gallegos, a prominent activist at the time, spoke of recalling an event where Black men would gather monthly to focus on leadership. Thinking highly of them, he says that he recognized them as future “mayors, judges... [but] kept thinking... (shrink)

We establish the following results: 1. In ZF (i.e., Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory minus the Axiom of Choice AC), for every set I and for every ordinal number α ≥ ω, the following statements are equivalent: (a) The Tychonoff product of| α| many non-empty finite discrete subsets of I is compact. (b) The union of| α| many non-empty finite subsets of I is well orderable. 2. The statement: For every infinite set I, every closed subset of the Tychonoff product [0, 1] (...) I which consists of functions with finite support is compact, is not provable in ZF set theory. 3. The statement: For every set I, the principle of dependent choices relativised to I implies the Tychonoff product of countably many non-empty finite discrete subsets of I is compact, is not provable in ZF⁰ (i.e., ZF minus the Axiom of Regularity). 4. The statement: For every set I, every ℵ₀-sized family of non-empty finite subsets of I has a choice function implies the Tychonoff product of ℵ₀ many non-empty finite discrete subsets of I is compact, is not provable in ZF⁰. (shrink)

It is shown that the product of finitely many sequential, CLP-compact spaces is CLP-compact.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have continued a long tradition of diligent efforts of theorists, historians, and practitioners to establish novel and procreative connections between utopia and architecture. These, however, suffer from a lack of unitary articulation on the dynamics through which utopian ideals transact with reality—on where and how utopia, both as a concept and a construct, subsists among the processes of space production. Specifically dwelling on spatial ideals constituted primarily as works of architecture this (...) text aims to illustrate this interstitial domain between existent and utopian space, and the agents, forces and percolators therein. On this ground, as an attempt to map the internal dynamics of space production in relation to the utopian imaginary, it builds upon Bloch's, Lefebvre's, Jameson's, Harvey's, Levitas's, and Soja's theoretical conceptualizations that specifically expound the processes of utopianism through a comparative and critical reading. (shrink)

Let {: i ∈I } be a family of compact spaces and let X be their Tychonoff product. [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C] denotes the family of all basic non-trivial closed subsets of X and [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C]R denotes the family of all closed subsets H = V × Πmath imageXi of X, where V is a non-trivial closed subset of Πmath imageXi and QH is a finite non-empty subset of I. We show: Every filterbase ℋ ⊂ [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL (...) C]R extends to a [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C]R-ultrafilter ℱ if and only if every family H ⊂ [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C] with the finite intersection property extends to a maximal [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C] family F with the fip. The proposition “if every filterbase ℋ ⊂ [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C]R extends to a [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C]R-ultrafilter ℱ, then X is compact” is not provable in ZF. The statement “for every family {: i ∈ I } of compact spaces, every filterbase ℋ ⊂ [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C]R, Y = Πi ∈IYi, extends to a [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C]R-ultrafilter ℱ” is equivalent to Tychonoff's compactness theorem. The statement “for every family {: i ∈ ω } of compact spaces, every countable filterbase ℋ ⊂ [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C]R, X = Πi ∈ωXi, extends to a [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C]R-ultrafilter ℱ” is equivalent to Tychonoff's compactness theorem restricted to countable families. The countable Axiom of Choice is equivalent to the proposition “for every family {: i ∈ ω } of compact topological spaces, every countable family ℋ ⊂ [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C] with the fip extends to a maximal [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL C] family ℱ with the fip”. (shrink)

The 2023 edition of the Venice Architecture Biennial Time Space Existence will draw attention to the emerging expressions of sustainability in their numerous forms, ranging from a focus on the environment and urban landscape to the unfolding conversations on innovation, reuse, community, and inclusion. In response to climate change, exhibited projects will investigate new technologies and construction methods that reduce energy consumption through circular design and develop innovative, organic, and recycled building materials. Participants will also address social justice by (...) presenting living solutions envisioned for displaced communities and minorities, while others will examine the tensions between the built urban environment and the nature surrounding it, identifying opportunities for coexistence. Time Space Existence not only aims to be a display but also a living workshop where established and emerging practitioners can work together and present their own visions of the status of architecture and the built environment nowadays. By bringing together ideas from across the world, the exhibition presents itself as a platform for exchange and experimentation and strives to stimulate an engaging dialogue that is inclusive of all voices. (shrink)

El texto plantea una lectura de la obra de Michel Foucault según la cual en la época clásica –siglos XVII y XVIII– se construye una concepción del espacio que es correlativa a las prácticas discursivas que caracterizan la “episteme de la representación”. Esta concepción vincula los campos estético, social y epistémico a través de la idea del espacio como un ‘campo de visibilidad’ cuyas reglas de constitución comunican un tipo de representación pictórica, un modelo de distribución de las poblaciones y (...) una forma de discurso sobre la enfermedad. Dado que esas reglas, a su vez, se realizan a través de dispositivos concretos de producción de saber y de relaciones de poder, en su descripción espero dar cuenta de los límites históricos y epistémicos de la época clásica. (shrink)

We investigate in ZF conditions that are necessary and sufficient for countable products ∏m∈ℕXm of finite Hausdorff spaces Xm resp. Hausdorff spaces Xm with at most n points to be compact resp. Baire. Typica results: Countable products of finite Hausdorff spaces are compact if and only if countable products of non-empty finite sets are non-empty. Countable products of discrete spaces with at most n + 1 points are compact if and only if countable products of non-empty sets with at most (...) n points are non-empty. (shrink)

We study the role that the axiom of choice plays in Tychonoff's product theorem restricted to countable families of compact, as well as, Lindelöf metric spaces, and in disjoint topological unions of countably many such spaces.

Techniques for constructing the tensor product of two generalized sample spaces which admit unital sets of dispersion-free weights are discussed. A duality theory is developed, based on the 1-cuts of the dispersion-free weights, and used to produce a candidate for the tensor product. This construction is verified for Dacification manuals, a conjecture is given for other reflexive cases, and some adjustments for nonreflexive cases are considered. An alternate approach, using graphs of interpretation morphisms on the duals, is also presented.

This paper argues against evolutionary accounts of aesthetics by defending the idea that our fundamental aesthetic categories have undergone great changes in the last two millennia, in particular, during an “artistic revolution” that lasted from 1680 to 1830. This revolution was made possible by the development of a number of technologies of art that created a separate cultural space for this new invention. The attempt to extend this revolution to include the aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment is aided (...) by a new set of technologies that help make an aesthetic object out of natural environments. This even morerecent development is further evidence against an evolutionary explanation of art. (shrink)

For non-additive set functions, the independent product, in general, is not unique and the Fubini theorem is restricted to slice-comonotonic functions. In this paper, we use the representation theorem of Gilboa and Schmeidler (Math Oper Res 20:197–212, 1995) to extend the Möbius product for non-additive set functions to non-finite spaces. We extend the uniqueness result of Ghirardato (J Econ Theory 73:261–291, 1997) for products of two belief functions and weaken the requirements on the marginals necessary to obtain the Fubini property (...) in the product. More importantly, we show that for the Möbius product one side of the Fubini theorem holds for all integrable functions if one of the marginals either is a probability or a convex combination of a chain of unanimity games, i.e., we relax the requirement of slice-comonotonicity and enrich the set of possible applications. (shrink)

In this book we approach the development of the main doctrine of Trinitarianism. It is important to remind as we do so that that doctrine must be studied by both the criteria of Christian theology and history, and that as we study the development of doctrine, we need to establish a connection between what is confessed, or dogmas, and what is believed and taught, and go back diachronically from what is confessed to what was taught and to what was believed.

Philosophers and geographers have converged on the topic of public space, fascinated and in many ways alarmed by fundamental changes in the way post-industrial societies produce space for public use, and in the way citizens of these same societies perceive and constitute themselves as a public. This volume advances this inquiry, making extensive use of political and social theory, while drawing intimate connections between political principles, social processes, and the commonplaces of our everyday environments.

Discover the truth about sex in the city (and the country). Mapping Desire explores the places and spaces of sexuality from body to community, from the "cottage" to the Barrio, from Boston to Jakarta, from home to cyberspace. Mapping Desire is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desires presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring (...) how the heterosexed body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. Editors David Bell and Gill Valentine have brought together contributors with a wealth of approaches to ways in which the spaces of sex and the sexes of space are being mapped out across contemporary culture. Among the many sexual geographies covered are: Lesbians at home and on the streets; gay men on fantasy islands; bisexual identities; The heterosexualization of the workplace; bachelor farmers and spinsters; surveillance and sexuality; prostitution; queer politics; sexual citizenship, and the transformation of intimacy. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualized spaces: global/local; sexualized spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature. Mapping Desire will be a valuable and accessible travelogue of information for anyone interested in social, cultural and political geography, lesbian and gay studies, cultural studies, or simply those who want to find out more about the sexual landscape of contemporary society. Contents: Part I: Cartographies/Identities; Resolving Riddles: The Sexed Body, Julia Cream ; Locating Bisexual Identities: Discourses of Bisexuality and Contemporary Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings; Of Moffies, Kaffiers and Perverts: Male Homosexuality and the Discourse of Moral Order in the Apartheid State, Glen Elder; Femme on the Streets, Butch in the Sheets (a Play on Whores), Alison Murray; Body Work: The Performance of Gendered and (Hetero)Sexualized Identities in City Workplaces, Linda McDowell; Part II: Sexualized Spaces: Global/Local; Whenever I Lay My Girlfriend That's My Home: The Performance and Surveillance of Lesbian Identities in Domestic Environments, Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine; The Lesbian Flaneur, Sally Munt; Fantasy Islands: Popular Topographies of Marooned Masculinities, Gregory Woods; Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis, Lawrence Knopp; Part III: Sexualized Spaces: Local/Global; "And She Told Two Friends...": Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space, Tamar Rothenberg; Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality and the Production of Queer Space, Jon Binnie; Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota, Jerry Lee Kramer; (Re)Constructing a Spanish Redlight District: Prostitution, Space and Power, Angie Hart; Part IV: Sites of Resistance; "Surveilliant Gays": HIV, Space and the Construction of Identities, David Woodhead; Sex, Scale and the "New Urban Politics": HIV-Prevention Strategies from Yaletown, Vancouver, Michael Brown; "Boom, Bye, Bye": Jamaican Ragga and Gay Resistance, Tracey Skelton; The Diversity of Queer Politics and the Redefinition of Sexual Identity and Community in Urban Space, Tim Davis; Perverse Dynamics, Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation of Intimacy, David Bell; Guide to Further Reading; Bibliography. (shrink)

Introduction -- Henri Lefebvre : the production of theory -- Research : from practices of dwelling to the production of space -- Critique : space as concrete abstraction -- Project : urban society and its architecture -- Afterword : toward an architecture of jouissance.

Smart cities build on the idea of collecting data about the city in order for city administration to be operated more efficiently. Within a research project gathering an interdisciplinary team of researchers – engineers, designers, gender scholars and human geographers – we have been working together using participatory design approaches to explore how paying attention to the diversity of human needs may contribute to making urban spaces comfortable and safe for more people. The project team has deployed sensors collecting data (...) on air quality, sound and mobility in a smart city testbed in Norrköping, Sweden. While these sensors are meant to capture an accurate ‘map’ of the street and what is going on along it, our interdisciplinary conversations around the sensors have revealed the heterogeneity both of smart city planning and spatial formulations of the city. The discussions have given rise to questions regarding the work that goes into constructing the sensor box itself, as well as the work of deploying it, and how these influence the ‘map’ that the sensors produce. In this paper, we draw on Lefebvre to explore how the sensors themselves produce smart spaces. We analyze how the box depends on perceived space to function (e.g. requiring electricity), and simultaneously it produces conceptualizations of space that are influenced by the materiality of the box itself (e.g. sensors being affected by heat and noise). Further, we explore how the (in)visibility of sensor technology influences lived space. (shrink)

Recent discussions of human categories have suffered from an over emphasis on intention and language, and have not paid enough attention to the role of material conditions, and, specifically, of social space in the construction of human categories. The relationship between human categories and social spaces is vital, especially with the categories of class, race, and gender. This paper argues that social space is not merely the consequent of the division of the world into social categories; it is (...) constitutive of social categories. To put it more bluntly, if who we are is bound up with place, then not only do we inhabit a divided America; divided America inhabits us. The second, and equally dramatic, conclusion is that attempts to transform social categories must involve the transformation of social space. When we sort people by categories, we do so spatially: with race come racialized spaces. And because our place comes to inhabit us, when we divide spatially we cannot help but to inscribe and produce categories and identities associated with our spatial divisions: with racialized spaces come race. Recognition of this dialectic is a direct challenge to the one-way considerations of social identity and social space that occurs in much urban sociology and history. Moreover, it demonstrates that there is an internal contradiction in policies--often based in urban sociology and history--that assume that integration can be accomplished along with the conservation of ethnic and racial identity. (shrink)

We introduce the horizontal and vertical topologies on the product of topological spaces, and study their relationship with the standard product topology. We show that the modal logic of products of topological spaces with horizontal and vertical topologies is the fusion ${\bf S4}\oplus {\bf S4}$ . We axiomatize the modal logic of products of spaces with horizontal, vertical, and standard product topologies. We prove that both of these logics are complete for the product of rational numbers ${\Bbb Q}\times {\Bbb Q}$ (...) with the appropriate topologies. (shrink)

Recognizing the centrality of representation in philosophy and social sciences as constitutive of knowledge concerning the interpretation of social reality, this article highlights on the need to e...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place by Setha LowCarlos J. L. BalsasSpatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Placeby setha low London: Routledge, 2017Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place adds clarity to our understanding of the value of ethnographic scholarship in the study of socio-economic, cultural, and developmental transformations. The book is a thorough review of two established conceptual frames of (...) analysis—the social production of space and the social construction of space—coupled with an in-depth discussion of four newer ways to make sense of the world around us: embodied space, language and discourse, emotion and affect, and translocal space. As the world is transformed by a myriad of forces and events occurring simultaneously, its complexity intensifies insurmountably and we require clear and robust concepts, theories, methods, and tools to not only interpret it, but above all to attempt to change it in ways that are more beneficial to our collective co-existence while enabling the flourishing of those most at risk.Readers of Spatializing Culture will find plentiful theoretical constructs, lineages, diverse viewpoints, examples, and overall opportunities for reflecting on how the (built) environment, spaces, and places have been changing mostly due to our behavior. Inspired by Foucault’s take on genealogy, in chapter 2, Setha Low traces the history of space and place according to distinct interpretative schools of thought ranging from philosophical and mathematical, French social theory, geographical, architectural, environmental psychology, to anthropological, and even archeological. Five Venn diagrams are utilized to illustrate the main conceptual relationships between space and place. Most of the book’s in-depth case studies were researched by the author with only a small number investigated and written up by fellow scholars, which Low utilizes in the book with gratitude. The interrelated thematic and distinct geographical scope of the cases is one of the book’s hallmarks. The illustrative case studies come from such faraway places as Latin America (San José, Costa Rica), Asia (Taipei, Taiwan), North America (New York City; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and San [End Page 151] Antonio, Texas), Southern Europe (Smederevska Palanka, Serbia), and the Middle East (Beirut, Lebanon; Cairo, Egypt; and Tel Aviv, Israel).Spatializing Culture was first mentioned to me years ago by a former colleague at the University at Albany, SUNY. His ongoing work in Latin America, coupled with his ethnographic training and prior work in a region of the world also extensively examined by Low in other scholarly works, was likely the reason for bringing it up in a conversation about the latest developments in the field and potential research opportunities. I acquired the book when I was teaching Global Urbanism and Culture and International Urban Planning. I was pleasantly surprised with the book’s thorough conceptual lineage, historic characterizations, attention to detail, comprehensive ethnographic investigations, and implications for transforming reality as well as institutional processes. Spatializing Culture is a welcome addition to urban planning textbooks, which tend to be relatively less critical, are often covered with normative constructs and statistics, and are more institutional in their characterization of problems and recommendations for further action.For the most part, the ethnographic method is qualitative, participa-tory, detailed, and quite comprehensive in characterizing key variables as the researcher found them on the ground. This differs slightly from urban planning’s preoccupation with public policy, policy analysis, rules and regulations, institutionalized procedures, the public good, and overall positivist and rationalist concerns with documenting reality and helping to lead transformative planning processes, whether in the realm of land use, transportation, housing, economic development, infrastructure, or the environment. Although International Urban Planning was to be taught in a rather orthodox manner with recourse to understanding planning cultures, best practices, lessons learned, and implications for similar situations, the Global Urbanism and Culture course was slightly more aligned with the discussions put forward by Low. These included attention to postmodern ideals, the use of creativity in community planning, distinctions between popular and highbrow culture, and the building of iconic structures in contexts of urban regeneration and mega-event planning. As such, my students were somewhat already exposed to issues of embodied spaces and to ideas of... (shrink)