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News>>
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New Look for Mecca: Gargantuan and Gaudy
2011/01/15
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — It is an architectural absurdity. Just south of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the Muslim world’s holiest site, a kitsch rendition of London’s Big Ben is nearing completion. Called the Royal Mecca Clock Tower, it will be one of the tallest buildings in the world, the centerpiece of a complex that is housing a gargantuan shopping mall, an 800-room hotel and a prayer hall for several thousand people. Its muscular form, an unabashed knockoff of the original, blown up to a grotesque scale, will be decorated with Arabic inscriptions and topped by a crescent-shape spire in what feels like a cynical nod to Islam’s architectural past. To make room for it, the Saudi government bulldozed an 18th-century Ottoman
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Global Cities Now? Current Perspectives in ‘Global Urban Studies’
2009/03/07
Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Urban
Geography Research Group (UGRG) Annual Conference, Thursday 5th - Friday
6th November 2009, Centre for Urban Theory, Swansea University, UK.
Call for Contributions
Contributions of papers and postgraduate posters are invited. Abstracts due
12th September 2009.
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Book review>>
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Two Tales of a City: An Exploratory Study of Cultural Consumption among Iranian Youth
2007/11/02
Two Tales of a City: An Exploratory Study of Cultural Consumption among Iranian Youth
Author: Aliakbar Jafari - Aliakbar Jafari is currently a Ph.D. candidate in consumer behavior at the University of Wolverhampton, UK.
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The complexity of the issues of youth has made this broad subject a focal theme for a large number of researchers and scholars who have looked at it from different perspectives (e.g., anthropology, sociology, psychology, and politics). Positioned in consumer culture theory, this paper is another attempt to explore a different dimension of the youth's world: cultural consumption among Iranian youth. The article, therefore, follows two objectives: First, within the context of cultural consumption among young Iranians, it seeks to demonstrate the complexity of consumption as a creative process of reflecting and constructing identities, meanings, and values. Second, it examines the impact of cultural globalization on the identity of such consumers and the varying relationships between their consumption patterns and identity construction. In so doing, the first part of the paper will concisely elaborate on consumer culture. Then, cultural globalization will be briefly defined and, within this framework, consumer culture among Iranian youth will be discussed.
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City report>>
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View point>>
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Ray Pahl’s academic career and (selected) publications
2011/07/18
By Michael Harloe
I first met Ray in the early 1970s when I worked at the Centre for Environmental Studies in London. CES, funded by the Ford Foundation and the British government, had a young and dynamic multidisciplinary staff many of whom went on to become leaders in the field of urban and regional research. And Ray was already an intellectual leader in what came to be known as ‘the new urban sociology’.
His own work had broken decisively with what had become an increasingly sterile tradition of, on the one hand, ‘community studies’ and, on the other hand, methodologically sophisticated but theoretically banal urban ecology, both deriving from the pioneering work of the Chicago School but without its intellectual excitement or relevance to contemporary urban policies and events; a tradition he explored and began to transcend in his Introduction to a path breaking collection which he edited Readings in Urban Sociology (1968). Ray’s subsequent work, deeply influenced by Weberian perspectives on power and bureaucracy, focused initially on the role of the ‘urban managers’ as the ‘gatekeepers’ of access to urban resources and had an immediate resonance with those of us just entering our professional life as sociologists, politically and socially committed to social justice in the city and seeking a means of both understanding and changing our cities and societies.
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Urban theory & history
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Urban sites>>
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Seminars>>
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Urban research>>
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Saudi Urban Projects Are a Window to Modernity
2011/01/15
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — Just off a desert road about an hour’s drive from this port city, an enormous arched gate capped by three domes rises out of the sand like the set for a 1920s silent film fantasy. It is, instead, a fantasy of contemporary urban planning, the site of what one day will be King Abdullah Economic City, a 65-square-mile development at the edge of the Red Sea. With a projected population of two million, the city is a Middle Eastern version of the “special economic zones” that have flourished in places like China.
The city is one of four being laid out on empty desert around this country, all scheduled for completion by 2030. They follow on the heels of the country’s first coeducational university, which opened last year next to the King Abdullah site, and a financial district nearly the size of Lower Manhattan that is rising on the outskirts of the capital, Riyadh.
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