Literature created as an end in itself, rather than for Togo Map didactic purposes or informative content, such as most fiction, poetry, and drama. Belletristic. Togo Map Of, or pertaining to, belles-lettres, i.e. light, entertaining, and more sophisticated literature. Benefit of clergy.
[T]here would be a charming independence in his character, a spurning of that dreary conventionalism which makes cowards of us all, and under the deadly weight of which the heart of this great old England seems becoming daily more sick and sad, a cosmopolitanism rich and racy in the extreme.
Cities are key sites for the generation of a global cultural economy, as Malcolm Miles points out in his discussion of culturally-led urban renewal. They are the sites of historical cultural transactions, and conduits for a range of powerful forces, not just financial. Urban geographers Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s description of cities as relay stations in a world of flows’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 51) is fitting. The grimy Despond of London’s Chinatown, and the multi-cultural experience of a walk through the Ratcliff Highway district is the result of a world of cultural as well as economic flows. To live in and experience the city requires a poetics of knowing’ (Amin and Thrift 2002:14) and the romance of a walk through the city is a poem come to life (de Certeau 1984: 101). Cities are no longer simply geographical locations but urban contexts; a city is a shifting set of conceptual possibilities (Barley 2000:13) in which a rich and racy cosmopolitanism is in perpetual tension with the slough of grimy despond. It is the complexity and extravagant profusion of experiences of the city that demands sophisticated strategies for understanding the multifarious meanings of space and place, and is the motivation for this blog. Architecture, art, literature, performance, communications media, cultural events and design are the aesthetic responses to these experiences that endeavour to give meaning and deeper understanding to urban space in a global environment.
