Dorota Mantey

Bio: Dorota Mantey is an academic researcher from University of Warsaw. The author has contributed to research in topics: Public space & Suburbanization. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 24 publications receiving 127 citations.

Types of Public Spaces: The Polish Contribution to the Discussion of Suburban Public Space

Abstract: Intensive suburbanization, especially in postsocialist countries, and a deficiency of fully public spaces result in an increasingly complex mixture of different types of spaces of public functions....

Social Consequences of Gated Communities: The Case of Suburban Warsaw

Abstract: This article aims to determine how three factors—the fence, the internal public space, and the type of building—affect the sense of community, as well as the perception of social divisions that gated communities generate and the need for integration between people living in and outside gated communities. Its results are based on the survey conducted in two villages, Jozefoslaw and Julianow, located in the Warsaw metropolitan region. It has been found that the existence of a physical barrier in the form of a fence affects the perception of human relationships. Research has confirmed the negative impact of fencing off on social bonds, the sense of community, and attachment to the area beyond the housing estate. The study of Jozefoslaw and Julianow, however, has proved that for the residents of suburban gated communities the key factor that can increase their sense of community is access to an internal public space. The sense of community and the attachment to the area of residence are also dependent on the ...

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities@@@Plato's Invisible Cities: Discourse and Power in the Republic

Abstract: With an eye toward the architecture, art, literature and technology of urban life one of America's observers of society gives us an incisive study of the search for shelter and the fear of exposure to strangers and new experience in Western culture - and how these two concerns have shaped the physical fabric of the city. The author examines the development of urban society and structure from the ancient world to the present. His discussion takes the reader from the assembly hall of Athens to the Palladium Club, from Augustine's \"City of Gold\" to the Turkish baths of the lower east side, from 18th century English gardens to the housing projects of east Harlem and from Nietzsche's \"Birth of Tragedy\" to subway graffiti. By the author of \"The Hidden Injuries of Class\", \"The Fall of Public Man\" and \"Authority\".

Privatopia: homeowner associations and the rise of residential private government

Abstract: ore, but there are others well worth mining. For example, women do not feature much in his narrative. It might have been better if he left them out completely as his analysis of the feminine side of landscape is worn out and riddled with arcane clichfis of mother earth’s dark vaginal caves and fecund fields. That landscapes have gender is a perspective worth pursuing; however, Schama’s emphasis is towards masculine conceptions and interactions with landscape. The book might have been more compelling had he offered careful discussion of women and the femininity of place. As it stands women play silent partners to men in building culture and remembering it in the land. In Water, he offers the worn out metaphor of a dark wet crevice in the earth as vagina. My response is one of ennui, tiring of yet another scholarly glance up a woman’s skirt as a token nod to understanding the mysteries of female sexuality and its relation to landscape. More often than not it is a thinly veiled need to flash a woman’s genitalia in a dark room full of scholars (keeping in mind this book originates from a series of lectures) in an effort to seem progressive or risqufi. Another annoying interpretation of women is in attributing their assertiveness to androgyny or some desire on their part to be like men. Can’t a woman climb a mountain without, as Schama puts it, \"acting out her quasimasculinity\" (p. 495)? Does Schama need to point out what Henriette d’Angeville wore when she climbed Mont Blanc in 1838? Reference to her attire seems to be presented as evidence of her validity as a woman. As though to say she did a manly thing, but because she dressed so prettily her femininity remained intact. What a relief. If Schama wants to offer a new way of looking that derails the fast track to the future bereft of \"myth, metaphor, and allegory, where measurement, not memory, is the absolute arbiter of value\" (p. 14), then he might have shown where these interpretive lenses of culture exist in the machine age. The deeply embedded bonds of nature and culture through myth and symbol emerge even in modern societies. He brings his readers to the gates of modernity after a long, sometimes fascinating, always well-documented, but painfully laborious journey. I’m glad to have read the book, but am not convinced Schama has offered a new way of looking at landscape. What he illuminates well and often are the rich and diverse reasons for looking at landscape--seeing landscape as auger for cultural meaning that nourishes humanity’s raison d’etre. However, that he succeeds in his claim to stick to Thoreau’s aversion to the esoteric is debatable. Perhaps one person’s concrete is another’s quicksand, but his references seem only accessible to readers familiar with European and American history of the arts and letters and may be esoteric to many. Near the book’s close, he emphasizes that the local, the nearby, holds the key to landscape memory, as though it was to these places he took his now well-traveled reader: