Cityscapes

How can we develop a political critique of urban form at the time of a tall building boom? Pointing to limitations of interpreting towers as representations of finance and power, I introduce an understanding of skylines as phantasmagoria of capitalist culture: a dazzling image that abstracts from the commodified urban landscape by promoting its further commodification. I show that both professionals who argue for and those who argue against the construction of tall office buildings in London approach the city’s ‘new skyline’ as an easily marketable visual reproduction that is defined as a compositional whole: a bounded composition with St Paul’s Cathedral at its centre. I claim that this approach and the widespread idea that commercial skyscrapers ‘destroy’ the historic cityscape assume an element of integrity that is ideological and which itself must be ‘ruined’. My argument for a shift of the ways in which cityscapes are viewed draws on Walter Benjamin’s critical montages and allegories. I explore his reading of ruins as emblems of the fragility and destructiveness of capitalist culture and his understanding of ruination as a form of critique. My argument for ruining the cityscape’s ‘beautiful appearance’ focuses on compositional wholeness and symbolic coherence. In so doing, I provide an interpretation of skylines that sheds light to the ways in which financial capitalism is justified by a specific way of viewing the city and the ways in which it is embedded in texts that are deemed to be socially meaningful.

The streetscape is considered a very important issue in architecture and urban design as well, as it affects the whole society and has an enormous impact on humans’ quality of life. Streetscape can change people’s behavior and the way they interact in society and the public realm. Streetscape has an enormous impact on human’s social behavior; however, and it impacts on how they behave and interact in a public realm. In Arab cities, trough the history they used the street to socialize, meet and getting food and products. Plaza outside mosques was used for social and public use each Friday after Jumah’s prayer and in other days as well. Nowadays, streets in Saudi Arabia are known to be transition links that people use to go from one place to another while in many other countries streets are used to socialize with people. This research will investigate how to encourage people to use the streets to create social interactions. The main goal of this research is to conclude a set of criter...

Matthias Mansen developped a particular approach to colour woodcut, based on found material that he uses as printing blocks. Their appearance is an important part of the final result and determines the creative process as well as the choice of colours.

Victor Burgin's search for meaning within the modern cityscape reflects the attempt to build depth into a genre that, by definition, is superficial in nature. Capturing both the city and its inhabitants in a symbiotic manner, where one's significance reflects the other, Burgin's visual essays represent the successful development of a form of narrative view painting. For generations cityscapes that focused on both the physical areas of the city and those individuals who daily-occupied those areas, fell into the no-man's land between landscape and genre; neither entirely view painting nor that depicting everyday life. While certain works within this genre suggested pure attempts at topographical documentation, recording what is actually seen and focusing on the permanent, others seemed more like discursive social exercises. This latter type, embracing the local populace and expressing something of the experience of the individual within their environment, rested along the periphery of the classical cityscape. By developing both a convincing feel for the surface, as well as the potential for narrative which naturally exists within any outdoor, peopled scene, Burgin's oeuvre presents a convincing representation of the city. Our ability to appreciate Burgin's contribution to this genre, to discern between works of genre and cityscape and furthermore, to assess the fluidity between the documentation of fact and the exploration of experience, is greatly assisted by the enlistment of a theory developed to explore the same phenomenon within the field of literature. This essay will apply a theory on descriptive and narrative approaches in nineteenth century literature developed by literary historian Georg Lukács (1885–1971) to Burgin's oeuvre. Lukács' distinct separation of the role of the observer from that of the participant, with its concomitant effect on the nature of any realistic work, effectively enhances our comprehension of the deep and insightful portraits of the modern city provided within Burgin's narrative cityscapes. Victor Burgin's search for meaning within the modern cityscape reflects more than a century of determining how to build depth into a genre which, by definition, describes the surface. Capturing both the city and its inhabitants in a symbiotic manner where one's significance reflects the other, Burgin's visual essays represent the successful development of this genre. For generations cityscapes that focused on both the physical areas of the city (its streets, buildings and green areas) and those individuals who daily occupied those areas fell into the no-man's-land between landscape and genre;

This article discusses the approaches and methods of Christiane Baumgartner as one of the most innovative printmakers at the moment. She works mainly in woodcut, but based on digital images taken from her own videos or photos. Often their prints have large to monumental scales.

Urban legends are stories that have been fabricated and interwoven into the history and essence of a city (Young,
2016). An urban legend usually lies in part truth, an incident or the ambience of a place is given prime importance and
a tale builds up. They have their origins in folklore (Ashcroft et al. 2000). Urban legends have a strong historical and
cultural setting (Biswas, 2010) even though they are mostly fictional in character. Hence, some of them have been
documented in books, others remain in the oral form while many are slowly lost with time and a change in the city’s
character (Bird, 2002).

In the past decades, numerous studies on the cities of Japan have been published in the international academic environment based on the premise that the material expressions of a culture reflect its history, values, and social organization. After a review of the changes in Western attitudes towards the Japanese city, this paper examines the characteristics that make the urban centers of Japan a topic of interest for other cultures. The discussion is organized under three categories: 1) Ambiguous structures, where the nature of the normative framework and layout that shape the city are analyzed; 2) Materiality and memory, where the relation of the Japanese people with the materiality of their cities is examined in order to understand the intense processes of urban renewal; 3) Vitality, where the causes and characteristics of the active Japanese urban life, a subject repeatedly emphasized in Western works, are considered. Without intending to draw lessons applicable to other cultural contexts, this study will examine the different logics Japanese cities in order to enrich our understanding of the factors affecting urban space

Research report for Stedelijk Museum Breda:
From a low perspective, with the horizon positioned at the bottommost quarter of the canvas, the viewer looks upon the scene as if standing alongside the artist on a river bank. Four ships create a hustle and bustle on the swaying water; one disappears just around the corner of the city wall in the direction of a harbour. The small sloop (‘praam’) on the left is transporting barrels. A smoking man sits on one of the barrels, while three men move and steer the vessel.

Le dimensioni del viaggio e della diaspora: sono questi gli aspetti centrali rintracciabili in quel concetto che muove il tutto e che amalgama queste due dimensioni: ovvero il concetto di mobilità. Lo scambio culturale ha come base il movimento. Dentro questo concetto ho cercato di individuare le diverse forme di capitale fisico, ma soprattutto umano che intervengono nella modificazione del paesaggio culturale. Per abbordare un’analisi del paesaggio culturale è necessario considerare lo spazio come un elemento dinamico, mobile ed in continuo cambiamento. La geografia culturale, utilizza sempre di più le arti, dal cinema alla musica per passare dalla stessa letteratura, nello studio e nella ricerca sullo spazio, e inoltre, fa sempre più largo uso di altri strumenti d’indagine, forse meno considerati, come l’olfatto e l’udito. Accade in questo modo che quei luoghi di cui si è sentito solamente parlare, o che sono stati lontanamente immaginati, si materializzino e vengano messi per iscritto nelle pagine di articoli di giornale, libri e poesie.
L’identità del continente sudamericano, già dalla sua stessa genesi, è intimamente connessa con le dimensioni del viaggio e della diaspora: si tratta di un’identità che non può essere rintracciata nell’appartenenza linguistica, di sangue, di nazione, non si struttura a partire dall’immanenza della tradizione ma trova la sua dimora nella connessione tra le singole realtà, nelle interazioni e nelle dinamiche transnazionali e transculturali.
Un continente che sembra quindi fondarsi su un’ irriducibile e complessa irruzione del locale nel globale. Tutto confluisce in un unico insieme, nulla è puro, dalla lingua alla storia, fino ad arrivare allo stesso essere nel mondo. La condizione umana è incontro. In piazza, nei mercati, insomma, in quelli che sono considerati i luoghi di scambio per eccellenza. “A vida è a arte do encontro, embora haja tanto desencontro pela vida”, come recitava il celebre poetinha brasiliano Vinicius de Moraes.
Il mio lavoro si propone di ripercorre la storia dell’emigrazione italiana. Luoghi che raccontano e che hanno bisogno di essere raccontati. Luoghi in cui lo spazio vissuto si intreccia con lo spazio raccontato, creando un ricco crogiuolo nel quale l’italiano s’integra e prospera, radicandosi in un contesto completamente “altro” da quello da cui proviene. Un luogo in cui non smette di essere sé stesso, e allo stesso tempo, viene assorbito involontariamente.
Il breve excursus storico, che mira ad individuare le tappe fondamentali dell’ondata migratoria, interessa il lasso di tempo compreso tra l’inizio e l’origine dei flussi, fino ad arrivare al periodo del modernismo brasiliano. Lo spazio investigato è principalmente quello del centro urbano di São Paulo. Uno spazio in cui la voce di scrittori, critici e antropologi ha cercato di ricostruire la vita e le dinamiche sociali in cui l’emigrante italiano, in cerca del paradiso edenico d’oltreoceano, s’instaura e si riposiziona. Dentro questo spazio in continuo cambiamento quali sono, quindi, le difficolta che l’emigrante si trova ad affrontare? In che modo i nuovi mammalucchi, i figli degli italiani, si appropriano di questa nuova dimensione nella società brasiliana? Oltre agli ostacoli, che non furono di poco conto, l’italiano fu oggetto di preconcetto da parte delle altolocate famiglie paulistane non solo per causa della sua condizione economica, ma anche, forse, per i diversi modi in cui veniva dipinto.
Quella dell’emigrante italiano in Brasile è una storia caratterizzata sia da segregazione, che da integrazione. Un’integrazione che non è da considerarsi semplice e scontata, in un continente, quello sudamericano, ma soprattutto in un paese, il Brasile, in cui apparentemente, le distanze sembrano maggiori delle vicinanze. Distanze economiche e sociali rintracciabili soprattutto nello spazio. Quello spazio rappresentato dalle ricche élites, che è adiacente a quello delle favelas brasiliane. Non sempre distanza sociale è sinonimo di distanza fisica. È questa la realtà brasiliana odierna, quella dei condomini chiusi, delle barriere e degli alti cancelli di ferro.
Allo stesso modo vengono prese in considerazione le vie dell’assimilazione gli elementi di contatto e il percorso che venne intrapreso dagli emigrati italiani e che portò alcuni di loro a scalare la piramide sociale dominata dalle élites locali. Dentro le vie dell’integrazione e dei contrasti, dentro questi due poli estremi, di cultura eterogenea, di un periodo ibrido di contatto tra diverse lingue, tra usi e costumi, si inserisce la figura di Antonio Castilho de Alcântara Machado de Oliveira, scrittore brasiliano che ha rivolto il suo sguardo verso uno dei tanti attori coinvolti nel processo di amalgamazione del Brasile: o intalhaninho. Che cosa ci vuole dire l’autore nei suoi racconti? Qual è l’immagine che traspare di questo nuovo attore che partecipa alla vita sociale e che lentamente conquista posizioni di rilievo nella città di São Paulo?

This paper aims to delineate the relationship between Ankara, the capital of the Republic of Turkey since its foundation in 1923, and Istanbul, the capital of the late Ottoman Empire. With all the urban planning and developments initiated and encouraged by the leading figures since the 1920s as an important component of the nation-state building project after the fall of the empire, Ankara has become the second largest city after the megacity Istanbul.  Despite all these fervent endeavors to make the new capital the center of new Turkey, the fact remains that Ankara has always been the second city and/or the other city under the shadow of the centuries-long imperial capital Istanbul. The center of gravity has been expeditiously changing in the favor of Istanbul in the recent years as a result of both global and local factors. Thus, the following pages reveal the intriguing question of whether a capital city can be “the second city” with an affirmative answer in the example of Ankara.

In order to analyze and reveal the importance of buildings and cityscapes and thus the spatiotemporal appropriation in context of open world game spaces a transdisciplinary approach is needed. The paper focuses on two theoretical complexes by Deleuze/Guattari and by de Certeau, which both consist of dichotomous aspects. So in oscillating between two different modes of perception players tilt between correlating and complementary gameplay styles that – by navigating urban game spaces – also are interfering with the widely known prospect-refuge theory which is one of the most used gameplay patterns in computer games. Therefore, and this is the central assumption of this paper, said ambiguous play patterns are caused by multistable cityscapes. The momentum of the staged city as spatial (often vertical) challenge and its systems of meaning in context of motion patterns, courses of action and game mechanics will be presented. Besides philosophy it is indispensable to incorporate theories and methods of research fields like urbanism as well as architectural history and theory for the purpose of a coherent reasoning.

We can try to imagine what an ancient traveller could have seen on reaching the city of Rome while walking along the via Tiburtina or the via Labicana-Praenestina. He would have appreciated the multifunctional landscape of the south-eastern Esquiline, where giant aqueducts, extended necropolis and monumental tombs shared borders with lavish gardens. This paper focuses especially on the highly debated issues concerning the topography, archaeology and history of the horti Tauriani, Pallantiani and Epaphroditiani, which embellished this area between the beginning of the Empire and the 1st century AD. It is crucial to analyse the coexistence here between public infrastructures, tombs and private estates owned by emperors’ trusted men and freedmen, in order to define their boundaries and interrogate their topographical interactions. It is also important to investigate the spatial and functional relationships between the limits of the urban space of Rome and the development of this area of transition between the city and the countryside. The ultimate goal is to emphasize the economic, political and ideological significance of this strategic area, thus investigating the importance of the urban sprawl of the ancient city for the development of this landscape located at the periphery of Rome.

西安與羅馬各自擁有豐厚的歷史積澱與城市遺址，其在保護與發展之間的張力、互動值得比較。西安歷代都城曾屢次短距離「水平遷移」，留下多處大型遺址區；羅馬城則始終定著於一處，後代城市層層「垂直疊壓」於舊城之上。兩座古都基於其興衰歷程、以及重要的文化象徵地位，如今皆以保護遺址、發展旅遊作為重返輝煌的手段。大型城市遺址既延遲城市現代化的進程，同時亦是全球地域化下城市發展的獨特資源。
結合文獻與實地調查，本文以分析兩類遺址的歷史成因、耙梳兩種保護思維的轉變為基礎，探討遺址分佈的特殊性如何分別引導西安、羅馬城市風貌的形塑，細察遺址保護與城市發展之間的互動。本文指出兩種「將時間空間化」的方式：西安著重「空間脈絡」的完整性，催生各朝代空闊遺址及其背襯的仿古高樓天際線，移植古風的城市新區遂於地圖中浮現；羅馬則力圖呈現「時間脈絡」，層疊積累的各年代遺構錯綜拼貼於不同深度的城市地底，依序凝凍於地層剖面中。本文同時剖析、反思推動此種互動關係的社會、政治與經濟力量。
This research aims at comparing how the horizontally distributed historic heritage sites and vertically layered ones influence contemporary urban development, conservation practice, and the creation of cityscape. This article explores how such paired spatial configuration, either horizontality or verticality, shapes historic urban landscape. Xi'an and Rome are chosen to make this comparison. Xi'an is a city with several ancient heritage conservation areas scattering horizontally while Rome's urban relics are layered vertically throughout history. Similar experiences of rise and fall left the two cities with rich ancient relics that were obstructions to modernization but nonetheless monopoly resources for development. Longing eagerly for revival, both of them coincidentally adopt the same strategy of capitalizing on the cities' splendid past to nurture cultural tourism. Based on archives, maps, planning documents, and on-site empirical research, this article analyzes the formation of such two types of heritage sites, scrutinizes the transformation of conservation methodologies, and demonstrates how these two sets of spatial particularities had influenced and shaped the image of the cities. This article thus identifies two ways of "spatializing temporalities." Horizontally distributed heritage sites and adjacent areas in Xi'an had been demarcated and labeled individually to guide certain architectural styles. The sense of historical periods was accordingly materialized and located on the map. Rome's superimposed urban history was illustrated in the historical stratigraphy and the collage of relics dated back to various periods.

I was educated as a city planner and an architect. I am not practising any of these professions anymore due to the fact that they do not offer enough freedom during the process of creation. I later turned into an artist using mainly photography as a visual expression tool and a professional photographer shooting architecture and cityscapes. I always had a deep interest in urban photography, un/consciously referring to my educational past. I kept panoramic photography always in my orbit of most used visualisation apparatuses and techniques, in order to be able to construct more comprehensive urban depictions. Roofs, terraces of skyscrapers, observations decks, towers of any kind have usually been my typical platforms, where I have created a remarkably large collection of global cityscapes. It was and still is too expensive to hire a helicopter for a shoot that does not guarantee a commercial return. While I will keep using the above techniques, I feel like I entered a new era in my professional photography practice as I recently acquired a drone. Drones are not that easy to operate and that affordable to buy, if you intend to go highly professional with hires camera bodies on-board. You have to have an operator flying an octocopter and yourself in command of the operator telling him/her where to go and what angle to give, in order to end up with the " right " photograph. I preferred a low-priced quadcopter with a rather lower resolution camera, since I can control both the flying gismo and the camera myself. I can now send my eye to the sky, to a sky tier that I personally call " dronosphere " , a layer that is roughly in between 50 – 150 metres. This height gives me a particular viewpoint in between street view and map view. This paper will discuss if drone photography can bring a novel visual language to cityscape and / or street photography.

Keywords: Aerial photography, cityscape, urban photography, UAV, drone, art, panoramic, photographic visualisation.

How can we critically engage with capitalism in the 'urban age,' at a time when more and more people live in cities? How can we do so with regard to the built environment of a global city? I distinguish between two different approaches. The first starts from contradictions of capitalism such as the juxtaposition of overabundance and poverty and examines the ways in which these are represented in the cityscape. The second starts from a detailed exploration of practices of city making in order to explore the multiple different and often unexpected ways in which capitalist economies are justified and embedded in texts and images that are deemed to be socially meaningful. In other words, the first develops a critique of the capitalist city; the second allows a critique of capitalism through the city. These two approaches interrelate and overlap. However, their claims and scopes are not the same. Both have unique starting points and different directions of critique. In this essay I discuss these two approaches with regard to London's current tall building boom. At the time of writing, approximately 400 skyscrapers are in the planning stage or under construction in the city. Between fifty and eighty of them are towers that will be built by private developers not exclusively but to a large extent for industries that are pivotal for financial capitalism: banks, insurance and real estate companies as well as globally operating business service firms. These buildings are amongst the most visible manifestations of finance capital. Several of them are located in the City of London, which is London's historical core as well as a commercial center of Greater London. This essay, then, explores the relationship between history and financial capitalism or, better, the ways in which historiographical approaches are related to a critical engagement with urban processes under financialized capitalism. Put differently, I examine the ways in which urban historians criticize the visual impact of office towers on the historic built environment.

The Royal Library of Belgium holds three peculiar cityscapes of the city of Mechelen that have not been studied in any detail before. They show the city in two of its most distress-ful moments: the Spanish (1572) and English (1580) furies, both gruesome episodes in the Dutch Revolt. The present article is a first attempt to place the cityscapes in a wider context. It provides an overview of the history of the city of Mechelen in the late sixteenth century and then moves on to a closer study of the cityscapes in question. By looking at contemporary sources of a similar nature (cartography, printed depictions of the Revolt) and by sketching the outlines of the contexts in which these sources were produced and circulated, it hopes to provide new insight into the cityscapes under scrutiny, as well as to the function of similar sources in the post-Revolt Low Countries.

This article covers two chapters of the Rehabitar project which refer to the street [3], to ground floor premises [4] and to all that which makes it possible to consider them together.
Domesticating the street aims to return the condition of public space to urban space, encouraging social relations through a reflection on the nature of the street itself, on the uses to which it can be put –recovering others which have been abandoned or banned– and on the ability of ground floor premises to give energy to the street.

Este artículo reúne dos episodios del proyecto Rehabitar que hacen referencia a la calle [3], a las plantas bajas [4] y a todo  aquello que hace posible considerarlas de manera conjunta.
Domesticar la calle tiene como objetivo devolver al espacio urbano su carácter de lugar público, alentando las relaciones sociales a través de una reflexión sobre las características de la propia calle, sobre los usos que pueden desarrollarse en ella –recuperando otros que se han abandonado o proscrito– y sobre la capacidad de las plantas bajas para prestar a la calle su energía.

This essay explores drawing as an ethico-political practice. Taking London as an example, I speculate about a critical and creative, radical and imaginative engagement with speculative urbanization processes at a time when the extreme right is on the rise and the populist far right has become increasingly mainstream. Reflecting on a nonrepresentational drawing approach that responds to distantiated expert eyes by breaking free from their knowledge and pre-defined moral standards of the capitalist city, I explore different lines: lines that commodify the cityscape; lines that cross commodifying categories; lines that creatively produce alternatives; and lines of violent creativity. In so doing, I scrutinize conservative links between a visuality of capital accumulation and fascist urban aesthetics.

Urban plans and cityscapes of Hellenistic Sicily have received significant attention in scholarship in the recent 20 years. The aim of this paper is to discuss the formation, characteristics and socio-cultural context of settlements in the period before the Second Punic War. Focus is on inland settlements of indigenous tradition in western Sicily and their development in the period of the 4th and first half of the 3rd c BC. Detailed examination of the archaeological evidence in Monte Adranone shows that its assessment has so far been marred by two methodological problems: the reconstruction of a questionable “historical biography” and the use of Hellenizing or Punicizing models of cityscaping. A different approach is suggested here that focuses on the urban processes, forms and structures developed independently by the inhabitants of indigenous settlements like Monte Adranone. A brief comparison with Entella and Monte Iato supports the heuristic value of this approach.

This article focuses on describing the process of the establishment of emotional contact between an observer and an urban identity in small historic areas. The objective is to formulate the terminological tools for describing phenomena of visual observation and spatial exploration by the observer. The author sets out tasks for future research Keywords: historic areas, emotional and visual contacts, viewpoint, exterior and interior of the historic city.

— The streetscape is considered a very important issue in architecture and urban design as well, as it affects the whole society and has an enormous impact on humans' quality of life. Streetscape can change people's behavior and the way they interact in society and the public realm. Streetscape has an enormous impact on human's social behavior; however, and it impacts on how they behave and interact in a public realm. In Arab cities, trough the history they used the street to socialize, meet and getting food and products. Plaza outside mosques was used for social and public use each Friday after Jumah's prayer and in other days as well. Nowadays, streets in Saudi Arabia are known to be transition links that people use to go from one place to another while in many other countries streets are used to socialize with people. This research will investigate how to encourage people to use the streets to create social interactions. The main goal of this research is to conclude a set of criteria for the successful design of streetscape that would have a positive influence on human social behavior. The research paper aims to examine the impact of streetscape on the human's social behavior in Saudi Arabia's streets; especially Jeddah city. The study will include the streetscape elements which are: sidewalks, trees, and landscape, street corners, planters, street paving, benches, lighting, trash receptacles, bicycle facilities, crossing, public art, signage, & fountains. Then it relates them to the human's social behavior through analyzing the current streetscape and the people's opinion that is measured through the surveys and interview with the users of the streets in Jeddah like; Filastin Street and Cornish promenade. This will help in build a road map for designing the streetscape in Jeddah in a way that has a positive influence on human social behavior.

Cityscape painting or Urban Landscape Painting is an art that depends on city scenes and their elements such as streets, buildings, types, composition and other city elements. This kind of art considers cities as a source of inspiration, because it reflects all the different sides of the cities like its identity, ancientness, modernity, size, density, interstitial space built forms, and of course the architectural design. Moreover, this research is concerned with this form of art that reflects all the differences between the artists’ technical trends and the artistic visions of each one separately. This will be discussed given the interest to find the mutual effective relationship between the artist and the city through an analytical comparison between different examples of paintings that dealt with cities as a subject.

The album of topographic prints "Vues des plus beaux bâtiments de France" by Gabriel Perelle (1603–1677) and his son Adam (1640–1695) contains about 300 images, most of which are dedicated to the country residences of Louis XIV and his close associates. The most interesting is the part devoted to views of Paris in the 1660s and 1680s. The choice of viewing points, the objects depicted, the nature of compositional solutions the order in which the views are placed, all this reveals the image of the French capital of the classical era and at the same time - raises the problem of representation of the city in the prints of Western Europe of Early Modern period.

I landed in Canada in the Winters which are known to be chilly and fierce. I came from a hot climate, busy schedule, managing Work-life-Social balance from a hustled city of Pune, India. It was definitely difficult to acclimatize with the climate, as well as the life here. No contacts, no Work; this home-maker life was difficult. But I made myself busy with several other things. I joined library here, started living my passions, tried to make most of my time by reading, connecting with people on social media, meeting people in my field over coffee, applied for jobs, gave interviews, got rejected in a few, rejected a few, and so on.

I am also living another passion of mine - Travelling and exploring. I walked on the streets, I explored- the diversity here. I read- about the Social and Cultural History , the origin, the people, the life, the entire evolution, arts and architecture here, And I interpreted- the life and this Socio-Cultural cohesion.

I stay in a City in Greater Toronto Area, Brampton, which is 25 minutes away from Downtown Toronto. Life here is similar to the life in Toronto. I observed this since I keep visiting Toronto quite often. I am constantly amazed with this life and this entire Socio-Cultural Diversity that I find on the streets of Toronto (read streets as a metaphor for all types on public places here). I could see people from different countries, races, cultures who chose Canada as their home. This Blog is about my Experiences in Canada, the overall diversity I observed here, through my eyes, my perspective.

In this paper, the very original urban landscape perception caused by the emergency after the 2020’ New CoronaVirus Pandemic event will be discussed and analyzed. Most of the approaches conducted on social media and on the newspaper have pointed to putting in evidence the spectacular empty cities “as never seen before”, which thing is absolutely correct and underlines a unique condition otherwise almost impossible to experience. In fact, the total lock-down caused by the emergency made it impossible to move from a view of the urban landscape to another, where most of the people were able to see such an emptiness only for their own town, maybe just for their own neighbourhood and maybe just from some lucky windows. The global condition will be watched only composing together the pictures exhibited online and in the newspaper. A specific set of images, created in the days of the emergency will comment and describe the content of the paper.

This chapter draws on two of David Frisby's major contributions to our understanding of cities-Fragments of Modernity (1988) and Cityscapes of Modernity (2001) and positions itself in-between these texts by exploring a fragmentation of cityscapes. Frisby once observed that there is a lack of a critical theory of skylines. He made this observation in the context of my research on London's towering cityscape and it was this lack that attracted him to my topic. Yet, what does a fragmentation of contemporary cityscapes involve? The fragmentation of cityscapes that I develop in this chapter focuses on Benjamin's approach. Here, Benjamin's and Deleuze's approach are related through Leibniz and through the built space of the city. I suggest that a fragmentation of cityscapes as we find it in Frisby's analysis of Benjamin's work opens up a space for political action. This space is crucial for a critical theory of skylines because it opens up the possibility of different cities to come.

This article asks how a post-Soviet city went global and became something else, mutating, in the sense of generating a new set of features that go beyond a narrow understanding of postsocialism. The research provides a synthetic conceptualisation of Narva and the organisation of its ordinary life, by combining methods of urban observation and classification with geographical and ethnographic descriptions of this city. Using visual imagery of urban objects, along with field annotations and interview quotes as the materials analysed , the article carries out a Narvaology that consists in deploying this city 'as method'. It points out that cities such as Narva require a more relational and multi-scalar language, one with broader theoretical and methodological implications, able to account for fragmentary socio-political issues.