Convenience Stores As Social Spaces

Liquor, tobacco, processed food, and sugary snacks: this is the range of products that are far from healthy available in convenience stores. Yetthese stores have become people’s resource for meeting daily needs in deprived neighborhoods in the United States. In her book, Convenience Stores as Social Spaces: Trust and Relations in Deprived Neighborhoods in the U.S., Cosima Werner explores the contested meanings of these stores and their function as social hubs in a social fabric where poverty, violence, and social neglect are part of peoples’ daily life. Despite the strict security measures around the stores, language barriers, and cultural differences that make convenience stores appear as the antithesis of social spaces, trustful relationships are crucial for residents to access resources such as loans, food, drinks, or information to make ends meet. The concepts of trust and mistrust shed light on the fragility of trust within these communities. Through ethnographic research conducted in Chicago and Detroit, she reveals the unique ways in which these stores are viewed and utilized by residents.

The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces.

Abandoned lots and litter-strewn pathways, or rows of green beans and pockets of wildflowers? Graffiti-marked walls and desolate bus stops, or shady refuges and comfortable seating? What transforms a dingy, inhospitable area into a dynamic gathering place? How do individuals take back their neighborhood? Neighborhoods decline when the people who live there lose their connection and no longer feel part of their community. Recapturing that sense of belonging and pride of place can be as simple as planting a civic garden or placing some benches in a park. The Great Neighborhood Book explains how most struggling communities can be revived, not by vast infusions of cash, not by government, but by the people who live there. The author addresses such challenges as traffic control, crime, comfort and safety, and developing economic vitality. Using a technique called "placemaking"-- the process of transforming public space -- this exciting guide offers inspiring real-life examples that show the magic that happens when individuals take small steps, and motivate others to make change. This book will motivate not only neighborhood activists and concerned citizens but also urban planners, developers and policy-makers.

This book illustrates how social entrepreneurship can be used as a tool for addressing grand challenges. Combining leading theoretical insights with rigorous empirical methodologies, the book is the result of field work with 17 social entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom at various points during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting a highly innovative theoretical synthesis to discuss the role of social entrepreneurs as potential agents for positive social change, the book introduces the sociomateriality of space, Luhmann’s systems theory, and the social imaginary as missing building blocks in which disruption is created and navigated for creating positive social change. Concluding with a chapter that focuses on the practicalities of meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, the authors extend scholarship in social entrepreneurship and provide a comprehensive account of insights gained from the pandemic, demonstrating how these insights can enable the navigation of further grand challenges.

Without the often formal restrictions of corporate or institutional boundaries, architects and designers of social spaces are free to indulge their creativity. Featuring hospitality, conference, entertainment, education, sporting, cinemas and theatres, ar

Integrated exploration of the latest insights and advances on the intersection of technology and assessments around the world.

The Convenience Store has been evaded in (A)rchitecture. This thesis isn't about grocery stores inaccessible for those without cars or overpriced neoliberal food stores guised with organic ads, but Convenience Stores that are open 24/7 and sell basic necessities at moderate prices: from the slightly browning banana to almond milk to "3 for $1" Twinkies to the premium Trojan Ecstasy. The inclusivity of products marks convenience stores inclusivity to its consumers, a space utilised by the disenfranchised as much as the privileged. Convenience stores are for everyone. However such stores representation in media and lack of development in Architecture has removed such unifying qualities. Astoundingly, the term Convenience, Latin root convenientia: com "together" and venire "to come", means: to come together. This thesis is redesigning the Convenience Store to reclaim it's veiled and forgotten capacities to act as an Architecture of resistance and empowerment.

A unique comparative study of immigrant and diaspora literatures in America

A giant statue of a six-pipe musical instrument stands in the heart of Kaili city. Yet despite its prominent placement, intended to convey the essence of the city, residents hold extremely low opinions of music-making in Kaili, particularly when compared to the “authentic” music found in surrounding ethnic minority villages. In this engaging, accessible work, author Paul Kendall investigates this conundrum and comes to terms with conflicting representations of a small southwestern Chinese city branded “the homeland of one hundred festivals.” Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s triad of social space, the book explores the relationship between Kaili’s branding, built environment, and everyday life: how China’s post-Mao built environment hinders and hides everyday music-making, even in a tourist destination for ethnic music; how residents themselves deny or downplay the existence of ethnic music in the city, despite the government’s efforts to promote it; how amateur musicians have constructed generational hierarchies of musical practice within a shifting cityscape. Kendall argues that increased focus on the small city helps counter a tendency to conceive China as either timeless village or futuristic metropolis and enables a more comprehensive understanding of the urban experience, both in China and beyond. He shows that many Kaili inhabitants recognize not only a rural-urban divide—long a dominant geographical notion of China—but also a more complex conceptualization of village, small city, and big city. By interweaving theories of authenticity with an innovative interpretation of space, Kendall shows how the category of “fake” minority emerged from this small city as a surprisingly positive form of self-identification, suggesting that there are ways of not being ethnic, even in often-exoticized southwest China. The Sounds of Social Space makes a distinctive contribution across a range of disciplinary interests, including Chinese studies, urban studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology.