Contemporary Metropolis Research Articles

Field Notes: Athens in Flux

These Field Notes present a fragmented and diachronic portrait of Athens through the mobilities of people and cultures, which, as they clashed, intersected, and syncretized, defined different aspects of the city. Fourteen short essays and an introduction provide glimpses into an Athens continuously marked by the movement of people, labor, crafts, and capital, from the ancient city-state to the contemporary metropolis, a telling of history that is posed against ethnocentric narratives of continuity of presence. Demonstrating a multitude of historiographical approaches and voices, the essays collected here are treated as ‘field notes’ because of their brevity in treating a nascent field of study of the Athenian built environment that crosses time periods and disciplines.

Architecture of Alienation

This paper approaches the emergence, over the 20th century, of a public architecture that occupies sights/sites once associated with industry and social alienation, in this case the conversion of London’s Bankside Power Station into the Tate Modern Art Museum. Utilising Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary theories on performance, the celebrated architecture of Herzog and De Meuron is investigated alongside ‘Double Bind’, an installation by the late Spanish artist Juan Mun?oz whose work highlights the quality of isolation in the contemporary metropolis. In investigating architecture and installation, a space is opened up between the art and architecture revealing a performativity that engages with 20th century trauma and the crisis of the modern. This spatial dynamic forms an architecture of alienation where the participants are estranged from the environment, rendering them strangers, even within familiar environments ... tourists in their own land.

Metropolises - the Contemporary Challenge to Local Governments

Metropolisation is a process that includes the consequences of global phenomena transferred to the level of metropolitan areas, being the result of various legal and social processes, which is best illustrated by the example of French and Polish institutional solutions. France has been chosen to perform the analysis on due to the uniqueness of its legal regulations in the field of the issues covered in the study (e.g., the institution of metropolitan poles [le pôle métropolitain]). The possibility of creating a metropolis in its current form has existed in France since 2010, but the legislative bodies are still introducing changes to strengthen the legal position of this institution. The French legal order continues to reinforce the role and importance of the metropolis as a unit of inter-municipal cooperation that can take over the department and region’s essential competences to manage the metropolitan area more effectively. In a sense, France is becoming a model of organisation and functioning for contemporary metropolises in Poland, which are beginning to emerge as a certain remedy to the effectiveness issue of performing supra-regional tasks. This article provides an analysis of the law as it stands for legal regulations concerning the organisation and functioning of metropolises both in France and Poland in a comparative and legal context, with the aim of making postulates regarding the choice of a right formula for performing tasks in contemporary local governments.

Dialogues between the rehabilitation of buildings and the sustainable development of consolidated metropolises

With the 2030 Agenda, the nations that ratified the Paris Agreement have taken steps towards achieving Sustainable Development. Certain strategies have been identified as determining factors to meet the goals outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Number 11. In this context, consolidated cities have buildings that do not meet contemporary needs, being, in many cases, underutilized or in obsolescence integral. This article examines two case studies: the Pruitt-Igoe residential complex built in the city of St. Louis, in the USA and the Wilton Paes de Almeida building, built in the city of São Paulo, in Brazil. Both examples of modern architecture were lost in the context of contemporary metropolises. The study discusses the retrofitting of these urban structures of the metropolises, in the perspective of the 2030 Agenda, highlighting the need to expand the measures of rehabilitation of buildings as a strategy for a Sustainable Development, in order also to reduce the existing idleness built in the areas centers with the use of existing resources and reduce the spread of the urban area that assigns the extremes to the most vulnerable in the context of the São Paulo metropolis. With this analysis, the article seeks to demonstrate that investment in in retrofitting techniques can be a favorable alternative to Sustainable Development and the regeneration of metropolises.

French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy

Since her interring in the Pantheon in Paris, where “great men” of the nation lie, no one personifies French St. Louis more aptly perhaps than native daughter and subsequent singer, French citizen, and Résistante Josephine Baker. Although “many of the dwindling remnants of St. Louis's past, of any era, fell to the wrecker's ball,” the Gateway City's French age has not entirely disappeared from record, argues Robert J. Moore Jr. (p. 193). A group of historians, fortuitously, coordinated efforts to recollect parts of the French heritage of the city (founded in 1764). St. Louis, the other French city on the Mississippi River, lies nearly seven hundred miles north of New Orleans. French St. Louis explores, as Robert Englebert describes them, the “creole transcolonial networks” between and beyond these two port cities, each of which developed distinctly despite their shared trajectories (p. 41). Beginning at the symbolic and actual gate to the American frontier, the contributors direct readers' gaze toward individual actors, items, and ideas coalescing along the tributaries of the Mississippi Valley. The editors ask themselves how such a wide lens might sit with residents of the contemporary metropolis.

Preliminary evaluation of infrastructure and mobility services in mega-event: the Italian case study

Mega-events play an important role in the urban agenda of contemporary metropolises. This importance lies in the fact that such events are seen as possible catalysts for the urban development of a metropolis and more generally of a territory, and an opportunity to establish them as global cities.The planning and programming of a mega-event can be a country's showcase on the international landscape, and the mobility sector plays a significant role in defining its success or failure.Transport infrastructure generally requires high resources for both construction and maintenance even after the event. Therefore, in order to ensure a good outcome, it needs to be planned strategically at multiple levels; this condition brings a benefit to both the host city and the community. The main purpose of this study is to analyze a mega event like the Olympic Games by highlighting the relationship between existing mobility solutions and sustainable solutions considering also the surrounding area. This is to enable the creation of new intelligent transportation options.The Olympic Games, in fact, can represent a valuable opportunity to modernize the existing infrastructure of a country by improving the level of service and quality. The study considers, on the one hand, the expected demand for transport during the event and, on the other, the specific features of the different solutions that can be adopted to meet mobility needs.

Hip-hop, identity, and conflict: Practices and transformations of a metropolitan culture.

In this paper, I expose how it is possible to investigate the hip-hop culture on three levels of analysis—historical, semiotic, and phenomenological—precisely as theorized by Cohen (1997) for his study on modern subcultures. The analysis will focus on the hip-hop of the beginning, since the middle of the Seventies and Eighties in the United States, but then it will broaden to a reflection on its diffusion and re-invented, with particular reference to the interactions with the globalization and the changes occurred in contemporary metropolis. In this sense, considering hip-hop as a subculture in the following pages, I reflect (a) on the origin of rap music, its interrelation with the Afro-American culture and the concept of blackness which it conveys. Subsequently, I clarify (b) that the art of writing, in the form of Tag, and break dance have certificated the presence of young people from the United States outskirts, and then the passage to a precise historical moment. Finally, I try to demonstrate (c) that today, a different dimension of hip-hop is implemented, whose features have changed in parallel with the transformations that have affected the metropolis and the youth cultures. These last one are increasingly hybrid and involved in a recreational, market system, where the changing nature of hip-hop allows: its enormous success, with the domain of the musical market and other assimilation processes, such as clothing, which have contributed to its mutation in a global culture, some margins of autonomy.

Urban Shrinkage and Depopulation Dynamics for Sustainable Urban Governance

This analysis has the objective of addressing the shrinkage of the Municipality of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco, México treated here as the counterpart of suburban expansion, which has been caused mainly by the depopulation the city and determines a tendency that defines the dynamics of the great contemporary metropolis in terms of urban sustainable governance. The methodology used consisted of tours to neighborhoods and communities, the observation of structure and the opinion of qualified informants, in addition to the review of documents of municipal government institutions and publications in the local press. The analysis concludes that the great challenges of the policy based on sustainable urban governance of territorial distribution of the population to reverse the depopulation and shrinkage of the municipality of Guadalajara are to achieve a balance of the same within the territory in accordance with a sustainable territorial order, and take advantage of the competitive advantages that the city offers, framed so much in the local economy as a state.

Rome’s GRAB—Great Bicycle Ring Route—As Complex Landscape Infrastructure

This paper aims to describe the design strategy adopted in Rome to support and enhance sustainable mobility. It is a strategy aimed at promoting new green infrastructures for urban accessibility, daily sports practice and social inclusion in a historic city, stratified and not very inclined to change. Therefore, the dissemination of this experience is useful for planning a sustainable future for heritage cities that ensures an appropriate and equitable balance between conservation and development. Sustainable mobility is now considered one of the most important challenges for metropolitan areas and large conurbations. In these terms, Rome is a weak city. The city’s great bicycle ring route (GRAB), an integral part of the Extraordinary Tourism Mobility Plan 2017-22, is a key infrastructure for increasing more sustainable and healthier modes of travel, even on a local scale. The GRAB project, whose complex infrastructure provides multiple services, differs from a simple cycle path network. Its complexity refers to an ability to attract different types of users in different types of urban contexts—historical settings, monuments, newer neighborhoods and areas of contemporary urbanization. The project results can be measured first in relation to its progress (already funded, in the executive planning phase, with the approval of the first construction sites expected by 2022). A second important result is the participation of institutional bodies and citizens’ associations, which will oversee the construction and maintenance work as well as infuse into the project a constant vitality, in a true civic ecology perspective. Third, the results are important for enhancing metropolitan area accessibility and the environmental and social re-activation of the areas crossed, achieved directly and through the project’s realization. The GRAB strategy belongs to the new generation of landscape projects that have radically changed the priorities and hierarchies of intervention in the contexts of contemporary urbanization. These projects are based on the ecological analysis of the context but are located close to the fluctuating dynamics of contemporary metropolises and the problems of exclusion and marginality—both spatial and social—linked to the very rapid ecological, economic and demographic transformations.

The panopticon prison as a “social condenser”: The study of the project for De Koepel prison by Rem Koolhaas/OMA (1979–1988)

Rem Koolhaas/OMA carried out the study for De Koepel prison throughout a decade (1979–1988). However, only its initial stages (1979–1980) were disclosed and have been investigated. The hypothesis presented in this article suggests that Koolhaas implemented his —then— recent thesis present in Delirious New York (1978) on “life in the metropolis” and the “Culture of Congestion” in the conception and design of this project. Thus, this article has the aim of examining —by means of the documents compelling the entire period of the study— how the project suggested transforming the domesticity of De Koepel prison into a “social condenser” of the contemporary metropolis. By doing so, it makes it possible to consider the role of this project within the first decade of Koolhaas' career as an architect (1978–1989), and to establish that Delirious New York is, in fact, the theory on which it was based on when first conceived. This project anticipated the strategy and the methodology he implemented, at a later time, in other projects, offering a different perspective. On this occasion, this diagrammatic investigation took place in Bentham's Panopticon; reason why, he was then able to develop the reflections on heterotopias and prisons carried out by Foucault.

Femonationalism and anti-gender backlash: the instrumental use of gender equality in the nationalist discourse of the Fratelli d’Italia party

ABSTRACT In the context of the current escalation of anti-gender backlash, this article analyses the instrumental use of gender equality by nationalist forces and unpacks the ways in which the latter dynamic threatens feminist politics and gender justice. I study the intersection of gender and sexuality issues with the co-option of selected aspects of the feminist project by right-wing parties and I reflect on the ways in which femonationalist actors enable and fuel the attacks on women and LGBTQI+ people. In particular, I investigate the instrumental use of gender equality to vilify Black and People of Colour migrants and promote anti-immigration sentiments, with a focus on the framing of gender-based violence in racialised terms. By applying a postcolonial lens, I analyse the redeployment of the gendered colonial narrative in the context of contemporary metropolis focusing on the discourse of the far-right Italian party Fratelli d’Italia. I demonstrate that femonationalist discourses (1) reinforce gendered and racialised power structures, hence patriarchal and heteronormative values; and (2) reshape the understanding of gender equality issues, diluting the meaning of activists’ demands. Unpacking the convergence between femonationalism and anti-gender backlash, the paper provides insights on the complexity of the latter phenomenon and contributes to an understanding of the necessity of challenging the narratives promoted by nationalist discourses to dismantle unequal power relations and all hierarchies of dominations. I conclude by discussing the need for feminists to form intersectional alliances among the oppressed to remain true to their emancipatory and transformative political project and build sustainable, equitable, and inclusive movements.

Ryazanskaya Transit Oriented Development

The Ryazanskaya Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is a large intervention included in Moscow’s 2030 urban planning, realizing a transit hub, commercial / retail spaces, an office tower and two metro/rail terminal buildings, to be built around a public park where ground transportation is also located. Within this master plan, the Terminal 2 integrates an underground transit hall to provide access for three mass transportation lines merging at Ryazanskaya TOD. Such urban-scale complex required international best practice architectural solutions, particularly focused onto the relationship between underground spaces and above-ground structures. The Ryazanskaya project is a case study useful to understand and explain the typical TOD urban design methodology, as a part of a large city-making process originated by the design of underground infrastructures and concluded with the architectural design of a strategic asset for the contemporary metropolis.

HCMC: mirroring the city center, inversing contemporary logics

Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), the largest agglomeration in Vietnam, is a multitude of cities and where spatial development is inherently intertwined with a continuously transforming water structure. HCMC is a relatively young city—the foundational citadel dates from the end 18th century—that nevertheless was always complex. Its original dichotomic nature, with Chinese Chợ Lớn and Vietnamese Sài Gòn, forcefully colonized and domesticated a quagmire. It eventually became colonized itself by France (formalized by the Indochina federation 1887-1954). The agglomeration subsequently underwent strong growth and transformation during the American War (1955-75), to explode even more after the (re)opening up to the market in 1986 (Đổi Mới: the change to the new). Shock and wave development (and significant disruption), hand-in-hand with forceful public intervention and laissez-faire dynamics, led to odd bedfellows—a partially planned and spontaneous urban environment, iterating between conscious design decisions anchored on territorial characteristics (predominantly defined by water structures) and generic additions regardless of the terrain, between structuring and undirected fabrics. Amidst another wave of rampant growth and expansion, the city plans to double its center eastwards across the Sài Gòn River in the water-sick districts 2, 9 and Thu Duc. This offers the occasion to boldly rethink the formation of the contemporary tropical deltaic metropolis. The article will plead for an alternative for the future development of HCMC through the elaboration of a project for the twin center of Sài Gòn, foreseen in an interfluvial land that is systematically permeated by canals, river branches, ditches, etc. The plan recognizes that the water system defines the base spatial register of the territory and intelligently anchors urban development on this register.

Culture of an inclusive educational organization as an indicator of the quality of education in a contemporary metropolis

In modern realities, the design of conceptual aspects of educational inclusion is the actual research problem. The key concept for the formation of an inclusive platform of an educational organization is “organizational culture” which is understood as the result of the complex integrative interaction of the educational process participants and various learning environments created in the space of educational organizations of megacities. The purpose of the present study is to substantiate the need to support and develop organizational culture by different participants, including pupils with health limitations. This naturally removes the restrictions on any kind of support, care, and accompaniment that children with developmental disabilities can receive in an inclusive educational organization to achieve social and academic success. The review presented in the article is based on the analysis of several significant scientific and practical studies on the concerned problem. Following this goal, the article reveals the conditions for building, as well as trends in the development of an inclusive culture in educational organizations, which is necessary for the effective inclusion of the latter in a broader inclusive educational environment. The article emphasizes that different actors need different training to implement organizational culture, which significantly affects the involvement of different learning environments as an incubator in such training. The authors carried out the analysis of the Russian and Western models of organizational culture. Based on the data of foreign studies, the authors show the characteristic features of the European model of an organizational inclusive culture, as well as list the basic principles necessary to form an organizational culture included in the inclusive practice of an educational organization in the Russian Federation.

Quality of life and everyday mobility of schoolchildren: what choice do Moscow parents make?

The educational space of a contemporary metropolis is characterized by broad diversity. Often, the choice of an educational institution that best meets the needs of the child and family is made in favor of a school that is at a distance from home, and the development of transport infrastructure makes this choice easier. Studies of children’s daily mobility, the factors that determine them, and the quality of families’ involvement in moving around the city to get an education are becoming quite relevant. The goal of the present research is to assess the significance to families with children of different ages of choosing a school within remote or walking distance and to describe the difficulties faced by parents. Methods included the authorial questionnaire, a sample of 414 parents of children studying in one of the administrative districts of Moscow. The basic results of the study can be formulated as follows. The topic of everyday educational mobility in the views of parents is relevant and significant for the city; the convenience of the school location is a key factor of choice; mobility increases as children grow up, with enlargement of schools, and the implementation of the “Big city schools” project which increases intraschool mobility; the average travel time to school is about 10 minutes on foot; for families whose children study in remote accessibility, the most important are vital topics of safety for the children’s life and health, including lifestyle issues; developing programs for parents whose children walk to school, and families who use private vehicles requires a differentiated approach.

Bodies and spaces in the public city. Towards a new proxemics?

L’esplosione della pandemia ha messo in crisi alcuni valori della metropoli contemporanea che sembravano ormai acquisiti: la tendenza alla concentrazione urbana e l’ormai condivisa equazione tra densità e sostenibilità, la rapidità e la facilità di spostarsi fisicamente, l’idea della condivisione degli spazi, e più in generale tutte le sharing economies. Al di fuori della retorica del ritorno alla “normalità”, occorre ripensare nuovamente la struttura stessa delle nostre città valorizzando le positive acquisizioni della modernità e alcune esperienze prematuramente abbandonate – la prossemica, la città come luogo della relazione tra corpi e spazi, la ripresa della riflessione sullo spazio pubblico come valore condiviso della civitas.

The Brave New World of Rem Koolhaas

In 1972, Rem Koolhaas presented his thesis project at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. The work was a collaboration of four authors: Koolhaas himself, architect Elia Zenghelis, artist Madelon Vriesendorp, and painter Zoe Zenghelis. Titled Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, it used a pictographic storyboard to present an alternative scenario for the contemporary metropolis. The text, illustrated by eighteen drawings, watercolours and collages, envisioned the creation of a restricted (albeit expansive) enclave in central London. The new urban tissue, protected from any external influence by high walls, was designed to cut through the existing structure of the city, offering the metropolis an alternative – and superior – social environment. With this project, Rem Koolhaas joined a group of visionaries, and the work itself ultimately was a catalyst for the formation of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Studying Exodus, one cannot help noticing a number of literary parallels. The title explicitly refers to the Second Book of the Biblical Old Testament, but the design itself also bears some resemblances to the utopian novel The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon and Aldous Huxley’s notorious dystopia Brave New World, written over 300 years later. It is sure, however, that all three had a tremendous impact on shaping the mind-set of generations of readers. Drawing on Koolhaas’s merging of architecture and literature, the author seeks to offer an interdisciplinary approach to Exodus that would echo the multifaceted spirit of Koolhaas’s work. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to show that interpreting Exodus alongside these three texts allows us to see it in a new light. The author argues that the literary context allows for a more comprehensive approach to Koolhaas’s Exodus, making it possible to see him as a future “prophet of a new modern architecture”.

Greenways in Athens, Greece:Enhancing connectivity through a greenway network in a contemporary European metropolis

ABSTRACT The Greenway Plan is a Network of green corridors, including open spaces and parks in Athens.Its objective is to bring together strategies for parks and urban landscapes, creating a novel andalternative vision of Athens Urban Web. The design approaches used in other countries have not been adopted in Athens as a matter of public urban policy and due to limited funds and lack of incentives. Since 2018, when the design was financed by Green Funds, the results were presented in 3 Athenian municipalities. This paper introduces innovative ecological and sustainable strategies that can be extended to whole Athens web.

INNOVATION PLACES: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL REMARKS FOR ANALYSING METROPOLITAN CREATIVITY AND INNOVATIONS

Metropolises are currently regarded as nodes in a global network of flows, becoming the driving forces for territorial development, characterised by high potential of creativity and the innovations generated as a result. A contemporary challenge is to find adequate concepts for analysing and understanding metropolitan innovativeness. The objective of the article is to provide the necessary features by which a new approach to studying metropolitan inventiveness can be adopted. The formulation of this model was inspired by the independently functioning concepts of metropolisation, innovativeness, and the concepts of place. By considering these three perspectives together and their specific methods of analysis, it is possible to describe and explain the process of generating innovations in contemporary metropolises. This article is divided into three main sections illustrating how the concepts of innovation environments, networks, and districts combined with the dynamic concept of place, all relate to innovation place. The analysis presented serves as the basis for the model of an innovation place, it being essential to future initiatives in this sphere of study. The article concludes with methodological remarks indicating the potential use for “innovation space” model.

Ein blinder Fleck der Diversitätsdebatte? Zur Neuguineaisierung der Stadt

Abstract. The contemporary metropolis is characterised by an increasing diversity of its population, which is called “super-diversity” or “hyperdiversity” in the urban discourse. This epistemological realignment breaks new ground away from the classic Chicago School. Associated with this “diversification of diversity” (Vertovec, 2007:1025) is a fragmentation of the different social and ethnic groups in the city. However, the concept of super-diversity camouflages a separateness of these groups that is called newguineaisation in this paper. With that said, this new urban reality claims for empirical investigations of the societal implication of this phenomenon especially with regard to social cohesion in contemporary cities.