Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1914. / Bibliography: p. 73-77. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1914. / Bibliography: p. 73-77.

No description available.

In this thesis I investigate the narrative rendering of urban experiences and the place of agency within these renderings, looking in particular at the personal stories of urban dwellers. Grounded in anthropological fieldwork in Britain - in the town of Romford (Essex) to the east of London - but also relying on written sources on British social realities, this thesis challenges the idea and practice of a traditional place-based ethnography, calling in turn for an anthropological appreciation of the individual writing of human experience. This I define as the considered ordering of the forms in terms of which individuals experience their lives. I recognise that such ‘writing', conceived as a cognitive pursuit, is possible within speech and not, as some may have it, the exclusive preserve of literary culture. In allowing that individuals may exercise authorship over their lives in this way, I find it is possible, as well as potentially illuminating, to compare individuals' writings, their personal accounts of their lives, with other genres for writing the reality of urban and peri-urban milieux in Britain. I hear significant correspondences between each story-genre, especially as regards the impacts of town planning on urban space for the populations that inhabit it, and discuss the possible theoretical implications of this correspondence. I focus extensively on two such genres in addition to personal stories: the sociological - examining Michael Young and Peter Willmott's sociological classic text ‘Family and Kinship in East London' - and the literary - a reading of the work of English poet and journalist John Betjeman. Running through the thesis is also an appreciation of the figure of the amateur, both as a real actor and as a metaphor for the postmodernist approach to culture to which I also subscribe.

This thesis examines the ideal of the Anglo-Saxon and Irish ciuitas, c. 500-1050, by considering what Anglo-Saxon and Irish ecclesiastics understood a ciuitas to be, how they used the term in their own writings and what terms were its vernacular equivalent. When looking at early Insular history, there can be no doubt that the locations that were called ciuitates by Anglo-Saxon and Irish ecclesiastics are some of the most important sites in forming a better understanding of the time period. Ciuitates like Armagh, Canterbury, Clonmacnoise, Iona, Kildare, London and Winchester were settlements that attracted large numbers of people, as well as being centres of both secular and religious power. These ecclesiastical centres had a diversity of individuals within their boundaries, from the ecclesiastics of the sacred centre to monastic tenants and various types of visitors. The importance of Anglo-Saxon and Irish ciuitates cannot only be seen in the frequency of the term's use in primary sources, but also in the great extent to which these sites are mentioned in secondary sources on the time period. Although these communities are often used by scholars to prove or disprove different points of history, the term ciuitas has not been examined in a study devoted to the subject. This thesis has been divided into three chapters. Chapter one considers biblical inspiration in the ideal of the ciuitas, chapter two analyzes the Anglo-Saxon ciuitas and word usage, while chapter three reviews the Irish ciuitas and word use. By the end of this study it will become clear what Anglo-Saxon and Irish ecclesiastics thought a ciuitas to be, as well as the different definitions they understood to apply to these sites.

published_or_final_version / Urban Design / Master / Master of Urban Design