Civic Centers Research Articles

Rural Settlements in Different Stages of Development. Case of Gjirokastra Region in South of Albania

Recent years has been put into scientific circulation rich documentation, in which data is important for rural settlements and their economy. First Ottoman cadastral registers, which have a value first hand, but also for a more extensive documentation which comes out more clearly the face of the Albanian medieval village, the size, the main economic resources, relations with civic centers, economic power of the settlements, the role of agriculture in village life, crops etc.. The size of the settlements and their economy were closely related to each other. Most have been populated hilly South Albania and less western coastal lowlands of Albania and hilly villages in their vicinity. Construction of various settlements of stone was spread rapidly for a period of time. Stone materials were present everywhere and therefore their spread was massive and quite fast. Rural areas are characterized by a landscape architecture built by 2-3 storey residential houses. Typology is varied and reflects the special features of natural, historical, psychological, ethnographic and economic. In the construction of rural settlements have been preserved traditional elements, with special features according to the different areas and historic development. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n2p533

The State of Ambiguity of the Communist Civic Center in Three Romanian Secondary Cities

The article proposes a revaluation of a type of public space constituted in communist Romania. New county capitals’ central squares, constituted between 1965 and 1989, are rightfully considered as a fertile source for architectural icons of the period, as well as embodiments of totalitarian power. Yet, the present research, based on case studies, brings evidence that they not only constituted quite diverse answers to a homogenizing ambition, but also that political tension around these civic centers ended up providing often disarticulated results. Such results testify today more convincingly about the weaknesses of the communist system than about its aims to provide unity samples of leadership for people.

Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. By Victor M. Rios. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 218 pp. $20.00 paper.

Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. By Victor M. Rios. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 218 pp. $20.00 paper.Punitive strategies such as tough on and zero tolerance policies that have traditionally been restricted to the field of criminal justice are currently being implemented in mainstream institutions that serve youthful populations, such as schools and civic centers. While examinations of punitive discourses and practices, poverty, and crime are widely documented within the current sociological, criminological, and legal literature, studies often fail to take into account the lived experiences of the themselves. Through life history interviews and observations, Victor Rios's book, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, provides a voice for marginalized young men in Oakland and elucidates the processes through which these young men are shrouded in a culture of punishment that shapes their life experiences and trajectories. Moreover, Rios's work is a timely contribution given the current social and political debates regarding punitive policies.Rios's study demonstrates how criminalization, as a systemic form of punitive social control, is a dominant and omnipresent phenomenon in the lives of young males in Oakland that systematically governs and limits their life choices and trajectories. Within this community, young men of color are marginalized through constant surveillance, harassment, and discipline. Rios refers to this phenomenon as the youth control complex in which young people's everyday behaviors are perceived and responded to as criminal by mainstream social actors.Rios argues that while criminalization is often portrayed as a mechanism to protect certain populations, such as increasing prison sentences to seemingly protect victims from violent criminals, its social and political utility becomes visible when examining the consequences of criminalizing young men of color. While many reactions to the youth control complex in Rios's study are perceived as negative, such as resisting mainstream institutions by establishing subcultures and creating hypermasculine behaviors, others are positive. For example, by resisting the system, some young men created a sense of self-respect and empowerment in their own lives that was often denied by institutional authority figures. As a result, some of the boys were capable of engaging in critical analyses of the systematic oppression they encounter within their own communities. Thus, while many acts of resistance by the boys were perceived as illogical by mainstream standards, they often played a functional role in the boys' personal responses to the omnipresent punitive strategies they encountered in their everyday lives. …

Mic Check: How the 99% Pitched a Movement from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Cal

Author(s): Bintliff, Jacob | Abstract: The University of California, Berkeley, became a site of Occupy Movement in fall 2011. On November 9, university found itself in company of financial hubs, civic centers, and parks and plazas world over when Sproul Plaza was re-appropriated by sleeping bags and “mic checks” that came to symbolize disenfranchised majority, the 99%. Occupy Cal was immediately subject to a brutal suppression of student protest by police, as both students and university administration struggled to impose their respective meanings upon university's Main Street, Sproul Plaza. Like other Occupy encampments, controlling public space on university campus became a way of projecting meanings of public: how public is constructed and represented, and what types of voice and access it would have in determining future of public education and social justice.

A paisagem urbana como herança cultural: a praça Santos Dumont, Umuarama, Estado do Paraná, Brasil

The urban landscape has strong historical meaning because it can be considered as cultural heritage. In this context, public open spaces are important registries, reinforcing traditions, values and identities. In the four main cities projected by the Companhia Melhoramentos Norte do Paraná (CMNP), the squares and plazas carry out the task of ordination elements for the configuration of the civic, religious and commercial centers, reinforcing the close relation between public open spaces and their surroundings. This research was done under the Scientific Initiation Program of Universidade Paranaense, and is about Santos Dumont Plaza, the biggest one that supported important historical moments of early Umuarama, in northwestern Paraná, Brazil. The analysis was based on the research of photographic registries, newspapers, and the publications about the conceptual roots of the urban morphology of the city and its historical context.

Security in Public Space: An Empirical Assessment of Three US Cities

Critics often mourn a loss of publicness in cities due to the increased presence of antiterror security zones and related behavioral and access controls, although recent work suggests that security landscapes have shifted from the hard, intense, militarized architecture of the late 1990s–early 2000s to a softer, less obtrusive approach more commonly seen today. Nonetheless, these studies are mostly anecdotal in nature: few studies attempt to back these claims with empirical evidence and even fewer connect this physical security imposition with the policies and plans governing its implementation and operation. In this paper I describe results of site visits to Civic Centers and Financial Districts in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In each neighborhood I catalog security landscapes using a simple tool to assess the intensity, duration, and location of individual security zones. I find that the security landscape covers between 3.4% and 35.7% of publicly accessible space in the districts studied, and that this landscape is most prevalent and intense in New York City. I also find that security zones governed by multistakeholder networks are more intense and militarized than zones managed by a single entity. By understanding how the policies impact physical security, albeit in a relatively small sample of cities and districts, we can better predict what the future of urban security measures might hold. This paper provides empirical grounding to more common theoretical speculations regarding the future of the urban security landscape in the global West.

Assessing Cultural and Contextual Components of Social Capital: Is Civic Engagement in Peril?

Much research on political participation and civic engagement centers on the question: “What motivates people to get involved?” Several communication variables have been purported to influence these activities, such as television, newspaper, and Internet use. The general conclusion is that civic and political participation is declining. However, the rates of decline (or increase) in these activities among certain racial and cultural groups, such as Blacks compared with Whites, is not clear. Furthermore, the roles of religion and the church—an important component in creating bonds and networks that encourage such participation—have received little attention among communication scholars. The authors sought to examine the intricacies among race, religiosity, and political and civic engagement by expanding the current literature on social capital to include cultural and contextual components of church involvement. They found that in a national sample, the more involved Blacks are with church and the more frequently they attend services, the more involved they are in their communities. Moreover, their findings are consistent with previous research regarding media use; newspaper reading, and Internet use were positively related with civic engagement and voting, whereas television use was not. Implications for communication research, social capital, and measurement of race and culture are discussed.

Networks of history and memory

Many Archaic and Woodland period monuments in south-eastern North America were civic and ceremonial gathering centers. The built landscapes that emphasized these features are likely to have incorporated histories and memories in locally distinctive ways across the region. However, their attribution by archaeologists to broad temporal and social categories has tended to disguise this individuality. In this article I argue that the major structural changes that define the transition between the Archaic and Woodland periods were intersected by landscapes that were integral to the construction of locally important histories and memories. I point to an example from the Woodland period on the lower St Johns River, Florida, in which spatial relationships between monuments, recurrent deposition of mnemonic artifacts, and movement of people between places recreated a relational kind of social identity and personhood that was locally distinct.

Environment Shapes Health, Including Children's Mental Health

At the end of the 19th century, nearly every American had lost friends and loved ones to illness and early death. During the course of the 20th century, there was a 30-year improvement in the American life span. Although this may seem a medical miracle, most of those added years of life were due to environmental changeVbetter water, food, and housing; less crowding; and safer workplaces. 1 These changes were often spearheaded by the advocacy of physicians, but became reality through the work of civic leaders, business people, engineers, and designers. What may have been seen as a hopeless Utopian effort to create cities and towns with healthy water, decent transit and schools, and civic centers such as libraries and hospitals turned out to be a spectacular public health success. Now, in the early years of the third millennium, the American public faces a new set of challenges. In the United States, we have transitioned from an era marked predominantly by infectious diseases to one dominated by chronic diseases such as coronary artery disease, diabetes, cancer, and mental disorders. 2 Addressing these modern ailments, clinicians and researchers have been working ever harder to promote healthy lifestyles and to offer the latest therapies and medications. However, there is much to be learned from the lessons of a century ago. Physicians, as daily witnesses to the ill health caused by contaminated water and intense crowding, were valuable advocates in the efforts to improve people_s living environments. The role of the physician is just as critical today: the challenges are different, but the environment still shapes many of our health problems, including those of mental health. Throughout humanity_s history, children have been immersed in the natural world, but over the past several generations, the natural environment has been dramatically displaced by the Bbuilt[ environment. Children now spend almost the entirety of their days in houses, schools, vehicles, and commercial facilities. Children

Regional differentiations of rural villages in the Czech Republic

Rural villages are the sole subjects in rural area which integrate all elements acting in the rural area to one functional whole. They can be therefore taken as the pivotal element of rural development. The research was done in 2004 and was based on the search for rural villages’ characteristics and exploration of the elements of regional differentiation. The project results from the presumption of difference between the rural villages given by their size, location in specific areas or on exposed roads, distance from civic centers etc. It is supposed that these characteristics have specific and significant connections with such phenomenon as the level of unemployment, the level of civic and technical facilities in villages, the activity of inhabitants and the village itself, etc. The challenge was to define problem characteristics of rural areas, which mirror significant regional differences, structure and interconnectedness of these differences and their importance for future regional development. Interdependence of particular indicators was explored by statistical evaluation.

An Integrated Survey of Roman Urbanization at Potentia, Central Italy

Our research contributes to the study of Roman urbanization in the Italian peninsula, both in the central Adriatic area and beyond. It focuses on the integrated use of archaeological field methods and non-destructive techniques. The study of the urban layout of the city of Potentia is an example of the use of low altitude aerial detection combined with regular grid-walking and geophysical survey to intensively investigate abandoned classical town sites. Information can be combined in a new approach to the study of urbanization processes in the heartland of the Roman world, and this integrated methodology can be applied to any large archaeological site with regular patterning such as orthogonal street layouts and planned civic centers.

When the Killers Go Home: Local Justice in Rwanda

The international community ignored the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were macheted to death, many by their own friends and neighbors, and it was almost entirely absent on the most momentous day in Rwanda since the genocide. Two Western media agencies, BBC Radio and the Canadian television network CTV, together provided a total of three and a half minutes' coverage when, on May 5, 2003, more than twenty thousand confessed genocide perpetrators were provisionally released into their hometowns, after spending nearly a decade in prison. I had expected to fight my way through hordes of journalists to talk to the detainees before they boarded buses, returning to the same communities where they committed their crimes. Instead, I walked unimpeded into the Kinyinya "solidarity camp" on the outskirts of Kigali, one of eighteen civic education centers around Rwanda, where, for three months between leaving prison and being released into the community, around a thousand confessed génocidaires received instruction from government officials on how to be good citizens in the post-genocide society.

Public markets and civic culture in nineteenth-century America

Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. By Helen Tangires. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xx, 265. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00.)The buying and selling of food was an inherently political process in nineteenth-century urban America. Who was entitled to which merchandise, from whom, at what price, at what location, and at what level of profit? As we learn from Helen Tangires's social history of municipal planning and privatism, the answers to these questions rarely went uncontested.Tangires begins her book in the 18.'3Os with the public market house as an expression of the idea of moral economy. Revolutionary ideology, supported by longstanding European traditions, supported the belief that individuals could not be permitted to manipulate basic food supplies for their own profit; only transparent and communally sanctioned transactions would foster republican institutions. Municipal authorities sought to assure reliable flow of pure food and fair price by issuing slew of regulations and by mandating that all market activity take place in an easily monitored central space. Residents volunteered their own funds and energies in popular subscriptions to build the covered sheds, located in the middle of the main street and acknowledged to be a town's most precious asset (47). Indeed, Tangires suggests that the markets assumed the status of multifaceted civic centers and sites of democratic interaction in the dense fabric of antebellum New York and Philadelphia.Within generation, however, the idea of the public market house came under attack. Many influential politicians, subscribing to laissezfaire ideology and devoted to party building, regarded the public market system more as source of patronage tban as an institution to be nurtured. Merchants and middlemen (formerly distrusted) stepped enthusiastically and effectively into the power vacuum. As cities such as New York and Philadelphia grew rapidly in population and physical extent, those living on the outskirts sought opportunities to shop closer to home. At the same time, individual trades and vendors began to insist on individual proprietorship of key locations and exemption from market rules; New York City recognized the right of its butchers to set up independent shops in the 184Os. But for the resistance of market advocates, the city might have dismantled its market houses altogether in the 185Os, as Philadelphia did. This scenario was repeated in number of smaller towns, where deregulation advocates portrayed municipal markets as obsolete and even corrupt.Public market houses were marginalized and neglected by the 187Os, Tangires concludes, but they survived by adapting to the changed political terrain and by accommodating more wholesalers and individual proprietors. By the 188Os, the tide had turned slightly: cities that had deregulated began to regret their inability to assure the safety both of the food supply and of the municipal revenue stream; others decided to keep full municipal control. …

Interpreting Ancient Maya Civic Plans: Reply to Smith

AbstractIn response to Smith’s critique, we situate our work within the scientific method. We review how our hypotheses arose, how and by whom they have been tested, and with what results. Like Smith, we focus on whether Maya civic centers include emphatic expression of a north-south axis, and on the inference of a partially cosmological basis of Maya axial orders. We indicate sources of our inferences and review explicitly the criteria that Smith faults us for having omitted. We reaffirm that these ideas merit further testing, and welcome renewed and expanded collaboration as to the best methods for doing so. In the spirit of collaboration, we offer specific programmatic suggestions for how this inquiry might proceed.

The Woodland Southeast

The Woodland Period (ca. 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1000) has been the subject of a great deal of archaeological research over the past 25 years. Researchers have learned that in this approximately 2000-year era the peoples of the Southeast experienced increasing sedentism, population growth, and organizational complexity. At the beginning of the period, people are assumed to have been living in small groups, loosely bound by collective burial rituals. But by the first millennium A.D., some parts of the region had densely packed civic ceremonial centers ruled by hereditary elites. Maize was now the primary food crop. Perhaps most importantly, the ancient animal-focused and hunting-based religion and cosmology were being replaced by solar and warfare iconography, consistent with societies dependent on agriculture, and whose elites were increasingly in competition with one another. This volume synthesizes the research on what happened during this era and how these changes came about while analyzing the period's archaeological record. In gathering the latest research available on the Woodland Period, the editors have included contributions from the full range of specialists working in the field, highlighted major themes, and directed readers to the proper primary sources. Of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists, both professional and amateur, this will be a valuable reference work essential to understanding the Woodland Period in the Southeast.

Spatial Orders in Maya Civic Plans

Ancient civic centers materialize ideas of proper spatial organization, among the Maya as in other societies. We argue that the position and arrangement of ancient Maya buildings and arenas emphatically express statements about cosmology and political order. At the same time, the clarity of original spatial expression is often blurred in the sites we observe archaeologically. Factors responsible for such blurring include multiple other influences on planning and spatial order, prominently the political life history of a civic center. Specifically, we argue here that centers with relatively short and simple political histories are relatively easy to interpret spatially. Those with longer development, but relatively little upheaval, manifest more elaborate but relatively robust and internally consistent plans. Sites with longer and more turbulent political histories, however, materialize a more complex cumulative mix of strategies and plausibly, therefore, of varying planning principles invoked by sequent ancient builders. We examine evidence for these assertions by reference to civic layouts at Copán, Xunantunich, Sayil, Seibal, and Tikal.

Neighborhood Planning

Neighborhood planning in American cities goes back more than one hundred years. The settlement house social workers pressed demands for neighborhood and housing improvements. They were followed by early city planners, who included neighborhood multipurpose civic centers within their comprehensive citywide plans. Clarence Perry’s neighborhood unit plan of the 1920s saw the urban neighborhood as a means to organize space and socialize residents. Today, with the rise of community development corporations, neighborhoods are again the focus of renewed interest. This commentary discusses the past and present of neighborhood planning within the context of a survey of ACSP faculty who are teaching neighborhood planning.

Neighborhood Planning

Neighborhood planning in American cities goes back more than one hundred years. The settlement house social workers pressed demands for neighborhood and housing improvements. They were followed by early city planners, who included neighborhood multipurpose civic centers within their comprehensive citywide plans. Clarence Perry’s neighborhood unit plan of the 1920s saw the urban neighborhood as a means to organize space and socialize residents. Today, with the rise of community development corporations, neighborhoods are again the focus of renewed interest. This commentary discusses the past and present of neighborhood planning within the context of a survey of ACSP faculty who are teaching neighborhood planning.

Revisioning Argumentation Education for the New Century: Millennial Challenges

Argumentation instructors are increasingly called upon to adapt their methods to public argument forums dominated by mass mediation, audience segmentation, and the accelerating information age. Meanwhile, universities seeking to equip students to participate successfully in such circumstances have turned to curricular reforms emphasizing critical thinking and skill-based (as opposed to content-based) instruction. Communication departments have rushed to meet this demand based on their traditional strengths in teaching public speaking, argumentation, debate/forensics, and small group decision-making. The simultaneous appearance of these trends is not coincidental; argumentation pedagogy serves a critical function both inside and outside the academy. Within educational institutions, argumentation classes serve as sites where critical thinking, oral communication, research skills, and dialogic reasoning develop. Outside the academic setting, individuals equipped with argumentation skills emerge as active contri butors within society's political, legal, educational, and business contexts. The contributions to this special issue offer a range of pedagogical options to accommodate the evolving communication environment, in each case offering positions that skillfully blend emerging argumentation theory with proposals for revised curricular practices. ARGUMENTATION INSTRUCTION: EXTERNAL PRESSURES / INTERNAL FERMENT While new forms of mass mediated communication have been influential in shaping our theories of public controversy, little of the work done in this area seems to have trickled into the basic argumentation course or the texts most commonly used to teach argument. This is a curiosity, given the dominance of mass mediated arguments as examples used to illustrate conventional argumentative categories. Debates formerly conducted in town halls and civic centers have been turned over to Oprah Winfrey's television studio, and it is by now a well rehearsed position that America's deliberative politics have been transformed into a kind of talk show (cf. Thelen 1996). From a global perspective, the new media technologies portend for some observers a new epoch of identity politics. As Clifford Christians (1997) argues, an identity politics borne along by interactive technologies is the opening shot in a revolution heard round the world (201). The opportunities and constraints afforded by technological changes in the public arena have considerable implications for argumentation pedagogy. As Trend (1997) has argued, elaborating on a now familiar theme, Emergent forms of audio and visual communication helped create a myriad of new delivery contexts, each with its own reception characteristics. Such developments were accompanied by shifting approaches to commerce based on advertising and public relations, which further complicated the style and function of mass communication. Some analysts attribute to these changes a corresponding loss of agency within the population at large, as citizens began to see themselves less as participants in the ongoing drama of democracy than as observers of its effects. Others see media technologies as enhancements to democracy that provide more opportunities for viewers to exchange messages and engage in common decision making. Either way, within this technological transition the growth of electronic media produced the most consequences. (14-15) While similarly intrinsic connections have been observed by others, there remains a chasm between the typical undergraduate argumentation curriculum and the profound consequences of new technology highlighted by Trend. Changes in the modes by which arguments are typically transmitted and received are simultaneously energizing new scholarship on the socially constitutive nature of argumentation. As postmodern conditions yield increasingly fragmented and combative social exchanges, attacks on the nature of public argument and its instructional practices have mounted (cf. …

Civilizing and Selling Spectators: Audiences at the Madison Civic Center

Virtually every city in the United States now has a Civic Center. In large cities, this site functions variously as a convention center, a hockey rink, and the locale for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus. In smaller cities, it frequently serves as a venue for performance. Civic Centers host touring productions of Broadway shows, national dance companies, and local symphonies and operas. In addition to providing local access to a variety of performance forms, a city's Civic Center also signifies “the arts” and so implies the city's commitment to art and performance.