Cities In Relation Research Articles

Reshaping water-related urban places with collaborative participation: a critical examination of the Kabataş waterfront

PurposeThis study aims to draw a general framework for recreating water-related urban places. It discusses design criteria and processes that will strengthen people's and the city's relationship with the waterfront. It also explores the functional requirements of a participatory process to incorporate social and functional relations into place making.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a comprehensive case study of the Kabataş project process. Data collection methods include archive searches, questionnaires, interviews and analysis. The study analyses the architectural decisions, the role and perspectives of the key actors and the current dynamics that shape the process. It points out shortcomings and needs of communication and collaboration with different stakeholders, especially with the users.FindingsThe results show that political and power dynamics play an important role in shaping the process. Non-transparent processes increase the gap between the aspects of community and decision makers in current practices. Establishing holistic, waterfront-specific and collaborative approaches is a necessity. The results also show that the success of participation depends on procedural dynamics such as scope, method, timing, representativeness of the community, institutionalisation level, transparency and deliberation.Originality/valueDespite the intense interest in waterfront regeneration, few studies have focused on the potential of the participatory process. The study examines the intersections of waterfront design decisions and collaborative participation at various scales and emphasises the importance of local actors in the social production of space.

The new normal or the forgotten normal: contesting COVID-19 impact on contemporary architecture and urbanism

PurposeThe term New Normal has become a buzzword to describe the anticipated changes in human life across the globe due to the impact of COVID-19. The paper's purpose is challenging the surrender for the notion of the “New Normal” and constructing a framework by which a call for understanding the practice of architecture, urbanism and city planning before the COVID-19 and contest its responsibility towards the city and the community.Design/methodology/approachMethodologically, literature review, analysis of emerging positions and interviews are the selected tools for conducting the research. The paper adopts a position perceiving COVID-19 has provided an opportunity for reflections and revisions about the way people dwell on Earth. The paper aims at analyzing the positive impacts of COVID-19 in sociological and urban perspective.FindingsConsequently, the main finding of the paper, calls for reviving the forgotten normal in the way places, neighborhoods and cities are designed and planned. Lessons learned from the lockdown time and the actions taken will be analyzed with special attention to Gulf States.Research limitations/implicationsIn months, New Normal developed as the most used expression since the spread of the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic marked the year 2020 with one of the biggest public health crises of all time, threatening to take away millions of lives. It is already initiating a massive economic crisis, triggering further negative consequences for human life, wellbeing and lifestyle. Numerous researchers illustrate that through history, humans faced the challenges of epidemics and pandemics and were able to use their will, capacities, resources and courage to resist and survive.Practical implicationsPandemics such as COVID-19 have caused a critical reassessment of urban spaces. This paper examines the city's relationship to concepts such as the individual, society, creativity, production and power to understand the causes and effects of urbanization. Cities, especially the globally significant ones – such as Wuhan, Milan, Madrid, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles – are disproportionally affected. Thus, the pandemic is evolving into an urban crisis, forcing us to reconsider our deeply held beliefs about good city form and the purpose of planning.Social implicationsThe nature of the architectural, urban and planning theory and practice, is responsible for looking ahead, formulating visions and offering alternatives. Consequently, the methodological approach adopted in the paper is structured on three main pillars. First, observing, monitoring, and provide diagnosis (what we learned from isolation). Second, understanding the local, regional and global context as the COVID-19 crisis creates a ripple of change on all levels and requires both global and local understanding. Third, formulating visions and looking aheadOriginality/valueSuffering from epidemics and pandemics is new to our time and our contemporary experience but not new to the history of humankind. Revisiting the concepts of the New Normal vs. the Forgotten Normal and use the outcomes to construct an alternative framework for producing places in the post COVID-19 paradigm crystalize the value and originality of the paper.

Digging down into the global urban past

AbstractIn our introduction to this Special Issue on early modern cities and globalization, we explore the current place of cities before 1850 in global urban history and address the promise of a greater focus on their role. We argue that the interplay between the large scale and the small scale in the imperial global city is an essential dialogical force in the formation of each city's relationship to the wider early modern world. Furthermore, early modern global urban history can help explain the creation of spaces that facilitated connections between distant, global locations, as well as illuminate the emergence of networks of exchange between city communities around the globe. Yet, it also reveals the tense, messy negotiation of the meaning of these urban spaces, as well as the incredibly diverse communities they harboured.

CHANGES AND TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE SPACE OF BIG CITIES. ANALYSIS AND ACCOUNTING IN THE JUSTIFICATION OF DEVELOPMENT WAYS

The city in today's urban planning is treated as a dynamic, flexible and ergatic (capable of self-organization) system. The author distinguishes between the concepts of urban planning and urban development: urban planning — the fundamental science of urban research, identification of fundamental laws and patterns of their functioning and development; urban development is an applied activity (construction) related to solving project tasks. The article clarifies the content of the concepts: changes, transformations in the context of the provisions of metabolism, which determine changes in the structure and processes in cities, determine their viability and the basis of development. It is argued that the cause of today's problems are philosophical and ideological errors and the need to form a new philosophy of human existence, which should be based on finding a balance between man and nature, present and future, change and stability, private and common, and the priority of gender, religious and economic equality.Trends, processes and problems of urban functioning are analyzed, in particular: growth of economic advantages of urbanization, increase of concentration of riches in cities; the dominance of the influence of material factors on urban development; aging of engineering infrastructure and difficulties of its development; increasing uneven settlement of population within cities and regions; change of relations of the city with the environment, etc. The importance is emphasized and some provisions of the methodology of analysis of processes and changes in cities, their consideration in the substantiation of town-planning decisions are substantiated.The requirements of system, sustainability and prospects of urban development, which are united by the concept of regenerative urbanization and circulatory metabolism, are substantiated. Local recommendations for the development of Lviv are given, which include: optimization of urban settlement systems in the region and the city's relations with the environment; equalization of spatial accessibility conditions; improving the safety of the environment and protecting the city from natural and man-made disasters; improvement of management systems and mechanisms at different levels, etc. The task to continue the study of processes, changes and transformations in cities is outlined.

City of Saints: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages by Maya Maskarinec

A central claim of the book is that the relics of saints translated to Rome were a pivotal element in the city's newfound status as a Christian capital. [...]the study of this particular category of foreign saints permits the author to explore the agency of those responsible for introducing them to Rome, namely Byzantine administrators, refugees, monks, pilgrims, and others . . . from across the Mediterranean and western (3). The decision to recast the conventional pope-centered account of Rome's metamorphosis into a Christian capital in light of the city's relations with the Mediterranean and western Europe constitutes this study's most significant contribution. In a few isolated instances, particularly the introduction, a more extensive discussion of what is at stake in this book and how the author sees her contribution and her original approach vis a vis existing scholarship would have been beneficial.

The Music Room: Betty Freeman's Musical Soirées

AbstractFor over ten years, Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009) welcomed composers, performers, scholars, patrons, and invited guests into her home for a series of monthly musicales that were known as ‘Salotto’. In this article, I analyse Freeman's musicales within a sociological framework of gender and what Randall Collins calls ‘interaction rituals’. I contextualize these events, which took place in a space in her Beverly Hills home known as the Music Room, within a broader history of salon culture in Los Angeles in the twentieth century – a history that shaped the city's relationship with the artistic avant-garde and made Los Angeles an important amplifier for many of the most important voices in contemporary Western art music of the last sixty years.

Archaeology, hydrogeology and geomythology in the Stymphalos valley

This paper uses the results of recent excavations of the city of Stymphalos and environmental studies on the floor of the Stymphalos polje to examine the role of both the lake and springs in the history of the classical city. Associated with Artemis and famed for Herakles' sixth labour (killing of the Stymphalian birds), the city has a rich (geo)mythology. While this narrative has been associated solely with the lake, it is argued here that this geomythology was part of the city's relationship to environmental unpredictability and the relationship between water supply and water loss. Seen in this context, the construction of the fountain-house above the contemporary lakeshore is symbolic of the importance of springs to the foundation and sustainability of the classical city during both the Greek and Roman Periods. Through these archaeological and environmental analyses, we seek to illustrate the complimentary, but complex nature of archaeological, hydrogeological and palaeoenvironmental data that intersect in the geomythological landscapes of Mediterranean antiquity.

Coping with the “Black Dragon: Mudflow Hazards and the Controversy over the Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958–66

The People, of course, is its own savior, The People itself erected the dam's powerful rampart. But folks remember: you, Leader, Signed the decision on the explosion. You took a risk, But lived in great faith And thought not of your own fate, Uniting in yourself the qualities of Leader and engineer. (1) Visitors to Almaty, Kazakhstan's former capital, are commonly offered a trip up the Malaia Almatinka River to the Medeo Dam, a 150-meter high, 530-meter long, and 800-meter wide rock pyramid barring the gorge. If climbs the 842 steps to the top (1,900 meters altitude), the dam offers a vista over a famous skating rink downstream. It is not only a place of tourism, sport, and leisure for Almaty's inhabitants and visitors; it is of the symbols of the city's short history: as a defensive wall against the unbridled forces of nature, the rockfilled dam saved the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan from destruction in 1973 by catching a disastrous mudflow rushing down the valley. It is hard to imagine now that the dam that saved the city was once, in the first half of the 1960s, a highly controversial project in Soviet Alma-Ata. As authoritarian as the republic's leadership may have been, it could not immediately impose the dam on the inhabitants, even though the project was deemed urgent. Eight years elapsed from the approval of the definitive design until the beginning of the dam's construction (1958-66). The dam project developed against a set of uncertainties that account for the hesitation and substantial postponement. First, the last years of Nikita Khrushchev's rule proved unstable for the Kazakhstani political establishment. Between 1960 and 1964, the post of first secretary of Kazakhstan's Communist Party changed hands three times. The competing candidates for power in Kazakhstan were so split on the dam issue that they could not enforce any definitive decision on it. Second, although Alma-Ata's inhabitants lived under the growing fear of destruction by a massive mudflow, no could precisely forecast when this would occur. Everyone was expecting the big one soon. The dam offered a possible solution, but in the view of some its brutal construction method--directional blasting--and the fact that it concentrated protection on spot might turn out to be even more dangerous to the city than no dam at all. In this context of both urgency and uncertainty, politicians were reluctant to take definitive responsibility for mudflow protection. Third, both the political instability and the anxiety about the natural hazard engendered a lively discussion on the pros and cons of the dam and alternative projects. Since civic concerns about major projects could become matters of public concern in the more relaxed atmosphere of the Khrushchev Thaw, from 1959 on, scientists and citizens in Alma-Ata and Moscow opposed the Medeo Dam project submitted by the Kazakhstani leadership and proposed a lighter and more complex protective system based on small dams and embankments. Opposition to the dam was typical of the reemergence from the 1950s on of groups of scientists and other members of the intelligentsia warning publicly of the potential for environmental damage to natural resources caused by large transformational development projects. (2) The argument between proponents and opponents of the dam involved the pragmatic question of the most effective protection for the city from a scientific and engineering point of view. It revealed opposing conceptions of the city's relationship to its natural environment and diverging views of the environmental costs of disaster protection. Yet for all of this, a new context emerging between the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods enabled the Kazakhstani leadership eventually to impose certainty and to silence protesting voices. This article contends that a technocratic alliance united the rising republican leader Dinmukhamed Akhmedovich Kunaev, top scientists, and planners backed by the political leadership in Moscow. …

New York City politics: governing Gotham

A first-rate study of New York City's complex politics, with careful attention to interesting battles--such as the fight for an Olympic Stadium in Manhattan and the effort to redevelop Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn--and to important themes--such as the changing patterns of immigration and ethnic diversity and the conflicting interests among the city's many business organizations.-Jameson W. Doig, Princeton University This study is essential reading for students and scholars who want to understand New York City politics--its structure and decision-making process.-Jewel Bellush, professor emerita, Hunter College, CUNY Most experts consider economic development to be the dominant factor influencing urban politics. They point to the importance of the finance and real estate industries, the need to improve the tax base, and the push to create jobs. Bruce F. Berg maintains that there are three forces which are equally important in New York City politics: * Economic development. * The city's relationships with the state and the federal governments, which influence taxation, revenue, and public policy responsibilities. * New York City's racial and ethnic diversity, resulting in calls for representation, recognition, and equity in the delivery of services. Berg's focus is on all three forces, as well as the interplay among them. Along the way, Berg covers a range of topics, including the Dinkins, Giuliani, and Bloomberg administrations; the battles over sports arenas; party politics; rising immigrant groups and the role of their leaders; changes to the city's charter; and New York City politics in the post-9/11 era. An engaging look at the complex nature of urban politics, this book is the only one of its kind to offer a comprehensive narrative of the challenges, frustrations, and successes of New York's governing institutions, and their prospects for meeting the city's long-term needs. Bruce F. Berg chairs the political science department at Fordham University, where he is an associate professor.

The zero waste city: Tokyo's quest for a sustainable environment

This paper examines efforts to remake Tokyo, the world's largest megalopolis, into an ecologically sustainable city. The analysis is framed by two visions: a general model of eco-effectiveness derived from industrial ecology and an empirically grounded conception of a zero waste city rooted in the lean production practices of Japanese firms and extended beyond the firm to the city by government policies. We specifically focus on Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) programs to reduce waste and especially greenhouse gases. We also examine how TMG's environmental efforts have been shaped by local politics and by the city's relations with the central state. Tokyo's environmental efforts are impressive but they still fall far short of ecological sustainability. The zero waste city is ultimately a political project and Japanese are still divided over how to prioritize and integrate economic growth and environmental quality goals. The eco-effective, zero waste model envisions transforming the current trade-off between economic development and environmental well-being into a virtuous circle whereby environmental improvements can be achieved through new urban designs, technologies, products, jobs and economic growth. The divisions between advocates of growth and conservation are in fact blurring in Japan. But the Tokyo experience suggests that vibrant political leadership and vigorous government action will be required to accomplish this symbiosis.

Performing the Globalized City: Contemporary Hong Kong Theatre and Global Connectivity

This paper looks at how Hong Kong theatre is expressing the city's relationship to globalization and its own position within a changing international framework. The performances feature the city responding to challenges of globalization and nationalism by resorting to various means of global connectivity. The impact of globalization on presenting the ultralocal, the national, and the global on stage will be examined. These are responses to internal factors such as Hong Kong theatre history and conventions, as well as reactions to external factors such as the resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong by the People's Republic of China in 1997. Hong Kong theatre dexterously negotiates the conflicting claims of localism, nationalism, and globalism to create a unique Hong Kong identity as a capitalistic Special Administrative Region within the communist People's Republic of China. Vignettes of the Chinese diaspora can also be found, with people converging in and diverging from Hong Kong, trying to respond to calls for modernity and globalism without loosing Chinese identity.

Placing the Wild in the City: "Thinking with" Melbourne's Bats

AbstractThis paper uses academic and lay discourses to examine the ways in which "the city" is constructed in its relationship to "wildlife." The paper examines the negative and essentialized ways in which the city's relationship to wildlife has been represented in postcolonial theory and animal geography. The paper further explores these theoretical framings of the city in the empirical context of the relocation of an urban, flying fox colony, which provides opportunities to reconsider these bounded conceptualizations of the city.

A Godless City: Shabtai's Tel Aviv and the Secular Zionist Project

Critics have tended to consider Yaakov Shabtai an artist who succeeded in portraying Tel Aviv as a Hebrew city, in the manner of Yitshak Danziger who invented a face for the new Hebrew man in his well-known sculpture Nimrod. They thus made Shabtai into the secular prophet of Tel Aviv, whose life work delineated a proposal for a culture. Close consideration of the critical output over the years shows that the wish to read Shabtai's writings as a opus involves a tight knot of complex, and at times contradictory, positions. Shabtai is portrayed as a artist who labored to puncture myths, as someone who put a question mark behind Zionist as well as religious teleologies. But he is seen, too, as an author whose work offers the model for a secular pilgrim, or, alternatively, whose work almost rose to the status of myth— a myth. This article argues that the tangled, and even contradictory language of Shabtai criticism originates in a doubleness characteristic of Israeli cultural discourse. This doubleness moves between secularism, or the disavowal of the language of religion, and, at the same time, the use of the language of religgious revelation. A closer look at the language of Shabtai criticism reveals how this discourse actually reproduces a tension in Shabtai's own literary output. This article shows that Shabtai's Tel Aviv emerges from a combination of two opposing approaches toward secularism, pointing out how they are reflected in a dual of the city's relationship to the Zionist enterprise. Not only have critics so far been unaware of this doubleness: through identificatory reading, studies have tended to reproduce it. What we need here is a critical reading of the Tel Avivan space that Shabtai creates, from a political, national, ethnic, as well as a gendered point of view. The present reading unpacks the image of Tel Aviv by means of revealing the disavowals and identity politics that underlie such presumably nonideological notions as secularism or normalcy.

Tyranny under the Mantle of St. Peter: Pope Paul II and Bologna (review)

Tyranny the Mantle of St Peter: Pope Paul II and Bologna. By Ian Robertson. [Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies (formerly Binghamton Medieval and Early Modern Studies), Volume 5.] (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers N.V 2002. Pp. x, 245. euro55.00.) This book makes a solid contribution to understanding political realities that have long intrigued historians of late medieval Italy. Its focus is on Bologna, the second city in the Papal States, during a particularly intricate phase of the city's relationship with its distant overlord. In a less direct way Robertson also sheds light on problems faced by many other communes, beset as they were by conflict between families, factions, and sometimes individuals, all aspiring to power beyond that of their rivals. He also adds valuable insights into the nature, and the limits, of the papacy's secular power in governing a modestly sized but intractable territorial state. While the book has more general implications, Robertson never strays far from the topic to which his title makes reference ,Paul II's refusal to see tyrannies flourish under the mantle of St. Peter. In the case of Bologna, Robertson argues, the tyranny in question was not that of the Bentivoglio, but of the oligarchic Council of Sixteen, of which the Bentivoglio were members, but which they did not necessarily control. The first half of the book at times reads as a sustained explication du texte, based on the report of a Milanese ambassador to whom the pope had expressed his reservations about how the Sixteen exploited their position of power. Membership in the Council was reserved for an exclusive group and had come to be for life, even hereditary; members used public funds for their private purposes, and they abused the power of the Council by securing lucrative appointments for their relatives and friends. Robertson here quotes from the documents which he takes to express the Pope's views and then goes on to assess their justification by drawing on a very broad range of evidence (archival records, manuscript sources, and an extensive bibliography of published works). He concludes, on balance, that Paul's objections were generally well founded and, perhaps surprisingly, given the number of disaffected informants, based on accurate intelligence. The second half of the volume focuses on a drawn-out tug-of-war between Paul II and Bologna, ostensibly over the renewal of chapters (capitula) in which Nicholas V had guaranteed the city's privileges. Pope and city clashed over a small number of issues concerning taxation, and most important, the composition of the Sixteen and the term for which its members held office. …

Urban Hinterworlds Revisited

ABSTRACT This article further develops the concept of an urban binterworld. A binterworld defines a city's relations with other cities across the world. Within a framework of a world city network created by global service firms, new data are described and used to define the global network connectivity of 315 cities based upon the office networks of 100 global service firms. ‘Absolute’ hinterworlds are measured by aggregating the level of service provision that is available in a city for doing business in another city. The geography of this first measure closely mirrors global network connectivity and therefore a second ‘relative’ measure is devised. This is found in the residuals derived from regressing absolute service provision against global network connectivity. The methodology is illustrated by deriving and mapping the binterworlds of London and Manchester.

The Reconstruction of a Postindustrial City

There is increasing competition between cities to attract investment. Older industrial cities have a particularly difficult time. It is in this context that there is an attempt to rewrite the meaning of the industrial city. Constructing a new, more positive picture involves marketing a new image, constructing a new environment, and reorienting a city's relationship with its physical environment. The process involves many actors, from business leaders eager to stimulate investment to local citizens' groups seeking to reclaim community space. This article examines these issues in the city of Syracuse, New York, and, in particular, documents the important changes in civic boosterism, the construction of a new iconography of the downtown, and the evolving discourse on environmental pollution.

The Lincoln Stonebow and the Flattery of Princes

This paper takes as its starting point the relatively unusual form taken by Lincoln's gatehouse-cum-guildhall, which was rebuilt in 1520. It is argued that the Stonebow's elevation bears a superficial similarity to the contemporary royal palace at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The local political background may suggest that the two buildings are, indeed, connected — through the city council's efforts to renegotiate the terms of their fee-farm with their feudal lords. The new building, and its simple Annunciation iconography, were intended to be understood at several levels of symbolic meaning, all of which referred to the city's relationship with its various lords. Consequently, the Stonebow's simplicity is deceptive; it is, in fact, a multi-faceted political statement, summing up the city's own view of its place in contemporary politics and, as such, it is a good example of the complexity sometimes achieved in early Renaissance architectural iconography.

The Lincoln Stonebow and the Flattery of Princes

This paper takes as its starting point the relatively unusual form taken by Lincoln's gatehouse-cum-guildhall, which was rebuilt in 1520. It is argued that the Stonebow's elevation bears a superficial similarity to the contemporary royal palace at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The local political background may suggest that the two buildings are, indeed, connected — through the city council's efforts to renegotiate the terms of their fee-farm with their feudal lords. The new building, and its simple Annunciation iconography, were intended to be understood at several levels of symbolic meaning, all of which referred to the city's relationship with its various lords. Consequently, the Stonebow's simplicity is deceptive; it is, in fact, a multi-faceted political statement, summing up the city's own view of its place in contemporary politics and, as such, it is a good example of the complexity sometimes achieved in early Renaissance architectural iconography.

HEALTH AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT. I. THE TREND AND PROBABLE FUTURE OF CITIES IN RELATION TO HEALTH.

Health and Urban Development I. The Trend and Probable Future of Cities in Relation to Health A. J. Harmon, Executive Director, Counsel CopyRight https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.54.5.699 Published Online: August 29, 2011

Reviews of Books

Book reviewed in this article:ST AMBROSE AND THE CHRISTIAN MISSION: Die Heidenbekehrung bei Ambrosius von Mailand. By Jean Mesot, SMB.FROM A DOUBLE VIEWPOINT The Protestant Ministry. By Daniel Jenkins.TO BE CHRISTIAN AND CHINESE Ame Chinoise et Christianisme. By F. Houang. Collection Eglise Vivante.BAPTISTS IN MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE British Baptists in China. By H. R. Williamson.UNDERSTANDING EAST ASIA Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Missionary Movement in China, 1890–1952. By Paul A. Varg.Failure in the Far East: Why and How the Breach Between the Western World and China First Began. By Malcolm Hay.A STUDY OF AN AFRICAN CHURCH The Growth of the Church in Buganda. An attempt at Understanding. By John V. Taylor.LEARNING COMMUNITY IN THE GREAT TRADITION The Christian Tradition and the Unity we seek. By Albert C. Outler.THE HOLY SPIRIT Fire upon the Earth. By J. E. Fison.ISLAM INTERPRETED BY MUSLIMS Islam, the Straight Path: Islam interpreted by Muslims. Edited by K. W. Morgan.A CHRISTIAN MEDICAL SYMPOSIUM Ärzte Helfen in aller Welt. Das Buch der ärztlichen Mission. Edited by Samuel Müller.HUMAN RELATIONS IN CITIES AND TOWNS Community Development in India's Industrial Urban Areas. Edited by P. D. Devanandan and M. M. Thomas.THE 1915 NYASALAND RISING Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915. By George Shepperson and Thomas Price.CLEVER, INDEPENDENT AND LOVABLE The Chiga of Western Uganda. By May Mandelbaum Edel.IN THE HEART OF AFRICA Peoples of South‐West Ethiopia and its Borderland. By Ernesta Cerulli.