Christian Schmid

Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023 This book presents an encompassing, detailed and thorough overview and reconstruction of Lefebvre's theory of space and of the urban. Henri Lefebvre belongs to the generation of the great French intellectuals and philosophers, together with his contemporaries Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre. His theory has experienced a remarkable revival over the last two decades, and is discussed and applied today in many disciplines in humanities and social sciences, particularly in urban studies, geography, urban sociology, urban anthropology, architecture and planning. Lefebvre, together with David Harvey, is one of the leading and most read theoreticians in these fields. This book explains in an accessible way the theoretical and epistemological context of this work in French philosophy and in the German dialectic (Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche), and reconstructs in detail the historical development of its different elements. It also gives an overview on the receptions of Lefebvre and discusses a wide range of applications of this theory in many research fields, such as urban and regional development, urbanization, urbanity, social space, and everyday life.

Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space

Richard Milgrom

Kanishka Goonewardena

Stefan Kipfer

In the past fifteen years, Henri Lefebvre’s reputation has catapulted into the stratosphere, and he is now considered an equal to some of the greats of European social theory (Bourdieu, Deleuze, Harvey). In particular, his work has revitalized urban studies, geography and planning via concepts like; the social production of space, the right to the city, everyday life, and global urbanization. Lefebvre’s massive body of work has generated two main schools of thought: one that is political economic, and another that is more culturally oriented and poststructuralist in tone. Space, Difference, and Everyday Life merges these two schools of thought into a unified Lefebvrian approach to contemporary urban issues and the nature of our spatialized social structures.

Reading Henri Lefebvre

Space, Difference, Everyday Life

Jacques Herzog

Roger Diener

Marcel Meili

Pierre de Meuron

Top Swiss architects create a new urban topography for Switzerland.

Vol. 1: Introduction; Vol. 2: Borders, Communes – a Brief History of the Territory; Vol. 3: Materials

Switzerland – an Urban Portrait

ETH Studio Basel, Contemporary City Institute

Liisa Gunnarsson

Mathias Gunz

Vesna Jovanović

Christian Mueller Inderbitzin

Between 2008 and 2014, ETH Studio Basel, under the guidance of Roger Diener and Marcel Meili, has been investigating the process of urbanisation taking place outside cities. Territory - in the context of this investigation denotes both: the surroundings that a city subsumes into its own structure and the core city itself, which is the centre of this process of urbanisation, or "confiscation". Investigated were six regions on six continents: The Nile Valley with the dense corset of natural landscape surrounding a linear city; Rome-Adria, where territorial cells have formed within the territory, spawning an urban type of tremendous dynamism; Florida, presenting highly complex patterns of territorial organisation; Vietnam's Red River Delta, where recent reform exposed traditional settlement and cultivation of the delta to freer forces; Oman, where urbanisation of a territory essentially means reclaiming the desert with the immediate necessity to develop a system for water distribution; and Belo Horizonte, where natural conditions likewise play a major role in organising the territory as surface mining entails huge transformations of the natural terrain. The new book features two introductory essays on ETH Studio Basel's research approach and on terminology, concise illustrated reports on the six regions, and four concluding topical essays.

On the Development of Landscape and City

Territory

Seine beiden Bestseller "Blas mer i d Schue" und "Mir stinkts" sind längst zu Longsellern geworden. Jetzt taucht Christian Schmid erneut tief in den Wörtersee. Um unsere Tiere in der Sprache geht es dieses Mal. Bunter Hund. Hornochs. Alpenkalb. Ich glaub, mich tritt ein Pferd. Da mues ja nes Ross lache. Ist die Katze aus dem Haus, tanzen die Mäuse auf dem Tisch. Es Gsicht mache wi ne Chatz, wes donneret. Christian Schmid beschäftigt sich in diesem Buch mit Wörtern und Redensarten, erzählt, wie und seit wann man sie in übertragener Bedeutung braucht und woher sie kommen. Zum Beispiel die Redensart "Nur die allergrössten Kälber wählen ihren Metzger selber". Die stammt, wie Christian Schmid belegt, ursprünglich nicht von Bertolt Brecht (wie oft behauptet wird), sondern von Christian Wiedmer, im Jahr 1850 Redaktor des "Emmenthaler Wochenblatts". Weshalb der Mann für diesen Satz vier Tage ins Gefängnis musste, steht auch in diesem Buch.

Nur die allergrössten Kälber wählen ihren Metzger selber

Uwe Wilkesmann

Hochschulen sind im Wandel und befinden sich seit einigen Jahren auf dem Weg zu korporativen Akteuren. Ursprünglich war der Modus ihrer Entscheidungsstrukturen zwischen Interessensorganisationen und Arbeitsorganisationen angesiedelt. Mittlerweile verschiebt sich dieser Modus immer mehr in Richtung Arbeitsorganisation. Einige Universitäten werben sogar damit, eine unternehmerische Hochschule zu sein. Dieser Wandel beeinflusst sowohl ihre Organisationsidentität, ihre internen Steuerungsoptionen und -mechanismen, als auch die Produktionsebene von Forschung und Lehre sowie externe Netzwerke. Es gab und gibt in der jüngsten Zeit einige empirische Forschungsprojekte, die den Wandel der Universitäten in Richtung Organisation in den Blick genommen haben. Die Ergebnisse sollen in diesem Sammelband dokumentiert werden.

Hochschule als Organisation

When Henri Lefebvre published The Urban Revolution in 1970, he sketched a research itinerary on the emerging tendency towards planetary urbanization. Today, when this tendency has become reality, Lefebvre’s ideas on everyday life, production of space, rhythmanalysis and the right to the city are indispensable for the understanding of urbanization processes at every scale of social practice. This volume is the first to develop Lefebvre’s concepts in social research and architecture by focusing on urban conjunctures in Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Dhaka, Hong Kong, London, New Orleans, Nowa Huta, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo, Sarajevo, as well as in Mexico and Switzerland. With contributions by historians and theorists of architecture and urbanism, geographers, sociologists, political and cultural scientists, Urban Revolution Now reveals the multiplicity of processes of urbanization and the variety of their patterns and actors around the globe.

Christian Schmid

Books

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