City, Culture and Society最新文献

This article looks at the creative district development process of a rural area in Thailand and sheds light on the transformative potential of utilising arts- and culture-based activities like festivals as a rural community development and regeneration strategy towards its creative placemaking agenda. Using Old Town District, Sakon Nakhon as a case study, this research investigates the application and implementation of the creative district concept outside of the usual urban centres and as a specific output of the development process. It utilises the logic model framework in evaluating the process and is further supported by interviews, focus group, observations, and document analysis in examining the various contexts surrounding its development and in analysing festivalisation as its main operational approach. Key findings highlight Thailand's political context and the selective community engagement as major barriers to the process. It also underscores the lack of authenticity and the quasi-coerced participation of the residents in the curation of the festival, reducing the locals' sense of place and belongingness instead of enriching it. This paper concludes that there is a shortfall in theory and implementation on the creative district development process of the Old Town District.

This article focuses on the cultural politics of contemporary urban Muslim men's fashion in Malaysia. By looking at the debates surrounding these Muslim men's fashion trends and based on my observation in Muslim men's fashion boutiques and other urban spaces, this article explores how masculinity, ethnicity and Islam implicate each other. Most Malay Muslim men wear baju Melayu (traditional Malay clothing) during the festive seasons. However, there have been evolving trends in Malay men's fashion. The jubah (a long Arabic robe) and kurta (a long upper garment which many South Asians wear) have become popular, especially among segments of young Muslim men in urban Malaysia. The popularity of jubah a decade ago prompted some observers to worry about an ‘Arabisation’ or the perceived growth of Islamic conservatism. However, as I observe, the jubah in Malaysian fashion industries has been adapted to the local taste and fashion trends; hence, it is a modern and creative adaptation of ‘Arabness’ instead of a form of sweeping ‘Arabisation’. Since 2018, there has been a trend of wearing tanjak (traditional Malay headgear) to assert Malay political power and cultural identity. From modern appropriation of ‘Arabness’ to the contemporary reinvention of traditional Malay costume, urban Malay Muslim men's aesthetic expressions reveal the mediation of religious and ethnic identities amidst rapid urbanisation and socio-political change in contemporary Malaysia. How should an ideal Malay Muslim man dress? This debate reveals the politics of different versions of Islamic piety and Malay identity in Malaysia today.

This study examines the perceptions of public spaces through the five senses on place attachment, place loyalty and civic participation. The study proposes an innovative analytical model (based on the stimulus-organism-response model) that maps the complex relationships between the five senses (sight, sound, scent, touch and taste) and desired community outcomes. An online survey was conducted with 396 residents of Rasht and the data were analyzed using structural equation modelling (SmartPLS 3). The results show that sensory experiences have a modest effect in strengthening people's attachment to the city, which in turn induces loyalty to the city and generates higher levels of civic participation. The study provides recommendations for urban planners and government officials on how best to encourage place attachment, place loyalty, and civic participation by adopting policies for promoting sensory experiences.

This paper examines how the spatial environment and the activities within these spaces contribute to their social value in turn informing the concept of everyday heritage within urban public spaces. We develop a novel methodological framework that combines visual representation and narrative analysis to provide insights into how the physical, emotional and perceptual dimensions of a public open space translate into associative social values. By including both adults and children in our study, we capture a comprehensive range of perceptions, highlighting the diverse ways in which different user groups give meaning to everyday heritage. Children and their guardians showed agreement on natural elements and personal representations, but differed on the garden's spatial layout and activities. While they shared values like childhood memories and family time, children prioritized play, forming new friendships, and connecting with nature, whereas parents emphasized children's happiness and personal space. Notably, both groups indicate that childhood – both lived and remembered – is that which gives this public urban space its everyday heritage status. The findings advocate for an expanded understanding of urban public spaces, recognizing the significance of everyday heritage in shaping collective cultural identity.

With a focus on local government's role in participatory cultural governance, this paper argues two points. First, self- and critical reflexivity of institutional brokers is important to community-wide capacity building for participatory cultural governance. Second, this reflexivity can be enabled through slow, inquiry-based collaboration between practitioners and researchers. The paper presents the experiences of a practitioner-researcher collaboration between a local authority arts officer and a cultural policy scholar in the development of a place-based local arts development programme taking place from 2017 to 2019 in Dublin, Ireland. The paper surfaces how efforts to promote greater participation in local decision-making require acts of reflexivity as core to the repertoire of capacity building for enabling participatory cultural governance practice in local public arts administration. Three interrelated factors are determined to have helped enable this reflexivity: (1) the arts officer's openness to engage in collaborative processes that (2) emphasised reflection and learning and were supported by (3) the presence of an embedded researcher with mutual interest, beliefs and experience or knowledge of the institutional context. Limitations in the study highlight areas for further research regarding the affective nature of practitioner-researcher collaborations and the potential of promoting reflexive practice in processes aimed at promoting participatory governance.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out in early 2020, has disrupted China's population mobility on which its cities depend. Especially, during the two years of the pandemic, female migrant laborers have been taking the risk of becoming the surplus population in an unstable and hyper-competitive job market. Such circumstance has led their images and urban engagement to be finitely recorded by the narrative that emerged based on the pandemic -- outbreak narrative in Priscilla Wald's term (2008), serving as an essential archive to examine Chinese women labor and urban history during the COVID-19. Taking an article narrating the vagrancy of a female migrant worker -- Ah Fen in Shanghai as a threshold, this paper explores China's gendered migrancy and female migrant communities during the COVID-19. By tracing China's COVID-19-related outbreak narratives through literary analysis, this paper reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic has flooded more migrant workers, especially female laborers, into the gig economy and this new urban engagement pattern has made migrant women's mobility higher and encouraged them to rebuild migrant communities in the city. However, the high mobility and fragmented urban distribution, in turn, have strengthened their roles as “infected strangers” in the outbreak narrative, particularly in the context of China's strict differentiated quarantine governance. This research, initiated by literary analysis, on the one hand, draws a dynamic map of capital and population flow during the pandemic era, while on the other hand, exposes the injustice among different classes, genders, and ages in urban China enlarged by the virus.