Creating Shared Public Space in the Contested City: The Role of Urban Design

This paper examines relevant characteristics of the ‘contested city’ and the concept of ‘public space’ in that problematic context. It offers an appraisal of the historical and contemporary role of urban design in shaping social space and interrogates the feasibility of using urban design to facilitate more integrated cityscapes. It presents detailed case studies of two ‘contested cities’, Nicosia and Belfast, based on content analysis of policy and planning documents, extensive site analyses in both places, interviews and seminar discussions with policy makers, planners, community and civic leaders. The paper comprises four dimensions—conceptual, descriptive, analytical and prescriptive—and in its final section identifies core values and relevant policies for the potential achievement of shared space in contested cities.

The Masculine Habitus as 'Distributed Cognition': A Case Study of 5- to 6-Year-Old Boys in an English Inner-City, Multi-Ethnic Primary School

This article provides a case study demonstrating the active role that 5- to 6-year-old boys in an English inner-city, multi-ethnic primary school play in the appropriation and reproduction of their masculine identities. It is argued that the emphasis on physicality, violence and racism found among the boys cannot be understood without reference to the immediate contexts of the local community and the school within which they are located. In making this argument the article draws upon and applies the concept of the habitus and develops this with the notion of 'distributed cognition' as proposed in sociocultural theory. Some of the implications of this analysis for working with boys in early years settings are discussed in the conclusion.

Mapping cosmopolis: moral topographies of the medieval city

Cosmopolis is a concept that has a long history in many cultures around the globe. It is a mirroring of the 'social' and 'natural' worlds, such that in one is seen the order and the structures of the other -- a mutual 'mapping'. In this paper I examine how the presence of cosmopolis -- a Christianised cosmopolis of the European Middle Ages -- was made evident in the representation and formation of cities at that time. I reveal a dualism between the social and spatial ordering of both city and cosmos which defined and reinforced social and spatial boundaries in urban landscapes, evident for example in the 11th and 12th centuries. Recently, Toulmin (1992) has taken the idea of cosmopolis to argue that it has been a persistent presence in Western - Enlightenment science, philosophy, and religion -- a 'hidden agenda of modernity'. I contend that, as an idea, cosmopolis has a much earlier circulation in European thinking, not least in the Middle Ages. Locating cosmopolis in the medieval and the modern periods then begs a question of what is it that really makes the two distinct and separate? All too often human geographers have emphasised discontinuities between the 'medieval' and 'modern' age, locating the 'rise of modernity' some time in the Enlightenment period. However, what 'mapping' cosmopolis reveals are continuities, binding time and space together, which when looked at begin to help query the modernity concept itself.