Article
Российские города в эпоху депопуляции
The chapter proposes a wide overview of social processes in the nineteenth-century world. First of all, with all the exceptions also treated in the chapter, it deals with urbanization, democratization and the formation of capitalist classes and class conscience.
Urban Studies currently apply the concept of creativity to the whole cities but not to the particular sites or practices within. We apply the micro-perspective to discover how the creative practices and actions such as flash mobs, performances, etc. change urban conventions and urban scenarios. Facilitating the physical contacts and communication among urban citizens, these events empower urbanites with communicative skills, decrease the alienation through bodily contacts and emotional reactions. Involving passersby into spontaneous improvisations, these open-ended actions turn them into creators of new urban practices, scenarios, and meanings. So, these actions may be considered as the mechanisms for producing and training social skills. Thus creativity becomes a general urban skill and not the attribute of some particular groups or classes. These ephemeral urban events are prolonged through their medialization (photo, video, internet, etc.). Being medialized, they keep affecting the viewers fostering emotional reactions and becoming the part of urban imagionary.
Previous studies have revealed a somewhat paradoxical strong positive correlation between per capita GDP and the intensity of anti-government demonstrations observed for the vast majority of countries (indeed, it turns out that the better people live, the more likely they are to join anti-government protests). The goal of this article is to identify possible causes of this unusual correlation. Our tests show that the processes of democratization and urbanization, as well as the expansion of formal education, are likely to be the main factors determining the positive relationship between per capita GDP and the intensity of antigovernment demonstrations, as urbanization, democratization, and expansion of education lead to an increase in the intensity of protests. Moreover, when controlling for these factors, the relationship between per capita GDP and anti-government protests becomes negative. Thus, high per capita GDP turns out to be a direct (proximate) significant negative factor affecting the intensity of anti-government demonstrations, but at the same time it is an ultimate, even more significant positive factor in the intensity of protests. The growth of per capita GDP is quite naturally accompanied by an increase in the level of urbanization, democratization and education, which more than compensates for the direct inhibiting effect on the protests on the part of the growing per capita GDP (at least for low- and middle-income countries). In addition, the negative binomial regression model that we propose can explain not only the strong positive correlation between per capita GDP and the intensity of protests, which can be traced for a range of GDP per capita values of less than $20,000, but also the weaker negative correlation recorded for the range exceeding $20,000. The fact is that in rich countries urbanization, democratization and education indicators reach saturation levels and the vast majority of high-income countries have more or less similar levels for all three indicators. As a result, for a zone of per capita GDP values of more than $20,000, we are essentially dealing with automatic control of the correlation between GDP per capita and the intensity of protests for factors of democratization, education and urbanization, and, as our model predicts, the final effect of GDP per capita on the intensity of protests for high-income countries becomes negative, not positive.
Urban public space continues to be the focus of debate regarding its conceptualization and how it is designed, (re)produced and managed. Nowadays public spaces are facing new challenges conceptually and practically. This book focuses on two of them: mobility and aestheticization. Mobility and flows are considered to be key characteristics of the post-modern era. While for some scholars it means the «end of place», others are trying to re-conceptualize it by bringing together notions of space, place, mobility and identity. Still surprisingly few authors address the concept of public space in this respect. Principles of aesthetic and diverse forms of aestheticization seem to have affected urban space and culture throughout Modernity, forming a dimension where power and conflict around urban space are performed. In this book nine authors with social science and arts backgrounds from six countries discuss how these processes shape the life of modern cities, and where the social sciences should move for a better understanding of them.
The volume presents papers delivered o the topic of Urban Dimensions of American Civilization.It reflects major themes and methodological approaches-interdisciplinary, comparative, imagological-applied to the national and transnational views of the ethnicity, race and gender identity, and to the multicultural society of the USA as projected in its literary, polemical, art, historical, social and political essays.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.