Contemporary Urban Landscape Research Articles

‘Making Strange’: The Photography of Steffi Klenz and Thomas Weinberger

This paper discusses the work of the contemporary German-born artists Steffi Klenz and Thomas Weinberger, who share an interest in ‘making strange’ as a device for bringing to visibility the processes that shape our environment. Klenz and Weinberger belong to a generation of young photographers who, across a considerable variety of subject matter and technique, have been challenging the categories of ‘urban’ and ‘landscape’; they have also been investing in processes of ambiguation through their work, offering an open space for the viewer's own projection and engagement. Quite distinct in focus and technique, Klenz and Weinberger turn away from urban life as action in order to meditate on the spaces where it unfolds. Their work shows complex modes of construction, appropriation and destruction of contemporary urban landscapes and their representations. The work of the two artists is discussed alongside ideas of the homely and the strange as devices of re-cognition, and is situated in the context of contemporary photographic practice that rethinks ways in which we look at our environment.

Growth dynamic of retail locations: a methodological approach using a logistic model

This study investigates the processes of growth and development of retail locations in urban space. The formation and development of multiple business centers is part of the contemporary urban landscape, creating heterogeneous spatial and temporal patterns which defy the understanding of urban theorists and planners. The study of these processes requires dynamic approaches, consistent with the scale and pace of such changes. This paper presents a proposal for the model of growth dynamic of commercial locations in urban areas over time. It also proposes the adaptation of a logistic model, a nonlinear dynamic model originated in studies of population ecology, which is used to describe growth dynamic in environments with a limited capacity. In this study, the growth of retail locations is represented by the variation in the amount of retail establishments over time in specific urban sectors. In order to develop a preliminary empirical validation of the model, its application is developed in four areas in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, considering data on the number of shops during 23 years, from 1983 to 2006. The investigation showed a good fit of the model to empirical data in all studied areas.

Unpacking a Smart City Model: The Hegemony of Ecological and Information Paradigms in Urban Space

The city is a privileged place from which to analyze the emergence of new social demands and conflicts. Informational and ecological paradigms of contemporary urban landscape collect them in an ideal type called, in many scientific and policy perspectives, Smart City. To be economically competitive, socially developed and culturally modern, cities have to face sustainability and digital innovation challenges. This involves implementing new technologies and organizational architectures in both sectors: recycle, zero energy buildings, car sharing as well as broadband, cloud computing services, and accessibility. Often these elements are not isolated: ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) research is increasingly focused on the improvement of environmental outputs. The convergence between technologies is directly linked with the emergence of new social practices and cultural acquisitions. Digital innovation, ecological issues and integrated solutions populate the policy agenda of many European cities, often overcoming political belongings, generating new life styles. You can project zero energy buildings because you have 3D Digital Software, but you use it to save energy because we are aware of environmental risks. The key topic of this paper is communication understood as collective and connective intelligence able to solve problems, an immaterial infrastructure linked with material and human capitals able to change the network of power between sub social systems. To be still functional, sub social systems should increase interoperability and decrease auto-reference. In essence it means creating a platform where citizen, firms, and public administrations share data, opinions and information. It requires expanding the opportunity for everyone to be connected, to widen participation, to increase openness and interoperability. What is the shape of this platform? What consequences would produce her implementation in the organization of power? To what extent is the Smart City Model politically naive?

Post-colonial consciousness, knowledge production, and identity inscription within Filipino American hip hop music

Over the past decade a distinctly Filipino American rap music movement has emerged on the West Coast of the United States. At its core, the political thrust of this music is founded on a critique of US Empire that considers its historical and contemporary implications for people of colour and the working class. Through examining (1) the social location of Filipino youth within contemporary American urban landscapes, (2) the extent to which their marginalized position has involved dimensions of historical racialization, (3) the ability of young Filipino Americans to gain a foothold in hip hop’s other expressive forms, and (4) the current rise of Filipino Studies as an academic field, this essay explores how an emergent post-colonial consciousness contributes to Filipino American claims to hip hop authenticity and serves a vehicle through which to utilize rap as a medium for extending a grassroots knowledge-building tradition.

A Site from Seen to Contextualized: Urban Place in Busan, South Korea

Many contemporary urban landscapes influenced by anonymous commercialization and urban development are faced with the problem of spatial homogeneity and featurelessness. While this paper is grounded on the critical reading of contemporary landscapes, it proposes that such characterizations entail a particular epistemological approach in which landscapes are gazed upon at a distance by a third person observer. This approach is problematic as it does not take into account the role of human agency and socio-cultural contexts. This paper argues that personal experiences and socio-cultural contexts play a critical role in shaping place meanings of South Korea urban landscape as the landscape has evolved over massive social changes influenced by colonialism, war and rapid modernization. Taking hyper consumptive landscapes of Gwangbok-dong and Nampo-dong in Busan as examples, this research analyzes residents' landscape memories and narratives and provides an alternative reading of the seemingly anonymous and featureless consumptive landscape. Contextualized by unique historic events, socio-cultural contexts, and personal experiences, the landscape of Gwangbok-dong and Nampo-dong is reconstructed as a centre place.

Slums, space and spirituality: religious diversity in contemporary Brazil

Since the late 1980s, a growing body of academic literature has focused upon the ‘evangelicalisation’ of Latin America and other, less affluent world regions (e.g. Africa and Southeast Asia). Valuable for exploring a host of interconnected social, political, economic and cultural practices, this research has consistently pondered the implications of changing religious affiliations and what the effects of these changes might hold for society and space more generally. In Brazil, for example – with more Catholics than any country in the world and a rapidly growing evangelical population – researchers suggest that the country's spiritual shift may bring with it significant political and cultural change, particularly in the impoverished urban communities (i.e. favelas) where evangelical churches are most prominent. While numerous accounts exist to document these changes and reflect upon their potentialities, few geographers, as of yet, have contributed to these debates. Still unknown are the spatial changes that accompany this spiritual shift, the ways that neighbourhoods and cities are changing, and the day‐to‐day effects of new and syncretistic religious practices. Through a case study of a favela community in northeastern Brazil, this paper considers the socio‐spatialities of religious diversity and change within Brazil's contemporary urban landscape.

Processing Downsview Park: transforming a theoretical diagram to master plan and construction reality

The winning competition scheme for Downsview Park proposed a process based landscape strategy. Ten years later, the park is undergoing significant construction. Changes in the original design team membership along with political and economic factors have steered park development toward reliance on a staticmaster plan instead of the proposed iterative process design where site development would be guided over time. With material collected through interviews with the designerscurrentlyinvolved in the formation of Downsview Park, this essay offers an account of the time that has elapsed since the international competition, and documents current park construction and what is planned in the near future. In the context of Downsview Park's design development, it examines the oppositional approaches of open-ended process based designs and traditional fixed form master plans to posit a landscape framework approach that accommodates the flexibility, iterations and resiliency necessary to support contemporary urban landscapes.

Automobility in Manchester Fiction

This article contributes to recent debates concerning automobility and ‘mobile, embodied practices’ (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011) by considering how various ‘driving events’ entail modes of perception that are of interest from an ontological perspective; that is, how drivers and passengers see the world through the windows of a moving car and how the driving ‘sensorium’ (Gilroy, 2001; Sheller, 2004) may be associated with emotional states (such as ‘escape’, ‘frustration’, ‘nostalgia’) that arguably characterize the everyday life of late modernity. In addition, the discussion speculates on what this altered perception means for how we see and conceptualize the contemporary urban landscape, concurring with Doel (1996) that such space has effectively become a ‘scrumpled geography’ that can no longer be accounted for in traditional cartographical terms. These reflections are explored through close readings of a selection of literary texts (principally, crime fiction novels) emanating from Greater Manchester (England) and thus the article also contributes to recent work (both cultural and sociological) on the re-imagining of this particular urban landscape in recent times (Haslam, 2000; Pearce et al., forthcoming).

PAISAGEM URBANA CONTEMPORÂNEA E GEOGRAFIA DAS REDES NA ESCOLA: UMA CONTRIBUIÇÃO AO ESTÁGIO-DOCÊNCIA EM GEOGRAFIA

This work analyzes the teacher training under the internship during the licentiate in geography including the design of critical-reflective professional is by discussing the role of science and knowledge in general training of citizens. Is at the university who build dialectical relations between dialogical and teaching-research, theory-practice, promoting basic (s) reading (s) of the contemporary urban landscape in which they are located schools internship field.

Communications Networks, Movements and the Neoliberal City: The Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia

AbstractUsing the Philadelphia‐based organization Media Mobilizing Project as a case study, this article argues for a more sophisticated understanding of social movement networks. We argue that the fragmentation of the neoliberal city has increased the saliency of networked‐based organizing. Contrary to much of the existing scholarly literature, however, we argue that such networks combine horizontal and vertical forms of organization, as well as online and offline media. Networks are not purely horizontal, nor are new media necessarily the best or most natural apparatus for developing networked social movements. Instead, we argue, radio and video may be better suited to connecting poor people in today's cities. We also shift the locus of analysis away from transnational networks to local ones. While the fragmentation of communities and isolation of the poor can be found across a range of deindustrialized cities in the United States and globally, the effect of deindustrialization and neoliberalism is asymmetrical. This difference gives the specifics of particular locations greater saliency in scholarly analysis. The local network reveals a three‐dimensional political and organizational response that joins the contemporary urban landscape with the contemporary media landscape.

Mountain Contemporary Urban Landscapes: A Conceptual Approach in Architecture

Mountain Contemporary Urban Landscapes: A Conceptual Approach in Architecture

Qualifying urban landscapes

The article presents an attempt to develop alternatives to the dominant planning and design principles used in building and rebuilding the contemporary urban landscape. The basic idea is that the ‘forces of modernisation’ driving current development might result in a broader and more interesting palette of places and spaces if supplementary principles of design and organisation could be developed. The idea of formulating a normatively oriented theory for practice is based on an ‘almost all right’ approach but moves beyond the purely ‘non-judgmental’ attitude to contribute at a generic level to the task of constructing and improving things. With this goal, a set of objectives based in important insights from recent urban theory are formulated constituting the normative spine of the analysis of a number of found situations as basis for formulating eight generic concepts of qualification for contemporary urban landscape design practice.

Jackson's Concluding with landscapes – full circle

The article presents an attempt to develop alternatives to the dominant planning and design principles used in building and rebuilding the contemporary urban landscape. The basic idea is that the ‘forces of modernisation’ driving current development might result in a broader and more interesting palette of places and spaces if supplementary principles of design and organisation could be developed. The idea of formulating a normatively oriented theory for practice is based on an ‘almost all right’ approach but moves beyond the purely ‘non-judgmental’ attitude to contribute at a generic level to the task of constructing and improving things. With this goal, a set of objectives based in important insights from recent urban theory are formulated constituting the normative spine of the analysis of a number of found situations as basis for formulating eight generic concepts of qualification for contemporary urban landscape design practice.

Place Identity and PlaceMaker: Planning the Urban Sustainability

The questions connected to the urban analysis, which study aspects that are not univocally translatable into objective facts, regard in particular three appearances: the scientificity, and so the objectivity of the results and the repeatability of the method in different contexts; the updating capability, and so the possibility to add new data, to modify the existing ones and to obtain other results; and the times, and so the sustainable possibility of using the results respecting the evolution of a sustainable programming and town planning process. To answer to those questions the method of analysis PlaceMaker and the relative software, actually under development, have the following main characteristics: flexibility, facility and rapidity of use, strong graphical impact, and indexing of the results. PlaceMaker is a method for analyzing the contemporary urban landscape designed to identify the elements that do not feature in traditional mapping and that constitute the contemporary identity of the places, representing them in a complex map that renders those places intelligible. Starting from those premises, the aim of this work, carried out in the framework of a Convention between Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and Dipartimento di Progettazione Urbana e di Urbanistica–Università di Napoli Federico II, is that of illustrating the method of analysis of PlaceMaker and investigating on the construction of complex indices starting from data and symbols related to the place identity. In order to support the study and the project of the sustainable urban landscapes, the symbols created for the elaboration of the complex map, final result of the analysis, are translated by the PlaceMaker software into numerical indices. Thanks to those characteristics, the prime users of PlaceMaker are the following: urban planners, administrators, citizen, and all people involved in the sustainable city construction. To complete the work, suitable case studies are presented.

Paisajes desdoblados: radiografía de una condición urbana latinoamericana

Resumen es: El paisaje urbano contemporaneo se caracteriza por la yuxtaposicion, la fragmentacion y la sustitucion del medio natural y del propio tejido construido. ...

The new urban renewal: the economic transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville

Two of the most celebrated black neighborhoods in the United States - Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago - were once plagued by crime, drugs, and abject poverty. But now both have transformed into increasingly trendy and desirable neighborhoods, with old buildings being rehabbed, new luxury condos being built, and banks opening branches in areas that were once redlined. In The New Urban Renewal, Derek S. Hyra offers an illuminating exploration of the complicated web of factors - local, national, and global - driving the remarkable revitalization of these two iconic black communities.How did these formerly notorious ghettos become dotted with expensive restaurants, health spas, and chic boutiques? And, given that urban renewal in the past often meant displacing African Americans, how have both neighborhoods remained black enclaves? Hyra combines his personal experiences as a resident of both communities with deft historical analysis to investigate who has won and who has lost in the new urban renewal. He discovers that today's redevelopment affects African Americans differentially: the middle class benefits while lower-income residents are priced out. Federal policies affecting this process also come under scrutiny, and Hyra breaks new ground with his penetrating investigation into the ways that economic globalization interacts with local political forces to massively reshape metropolitan areas.As public housing is torn down and money floods back into cities across the United States, countless neighborhoods are being monumentally altered. The New Urban Renewal is a compelling study of the shifting dynamics of class and race at work in the contemporary urban landscape.

A Study on the Expressional Characteristics of a Spectacle on a Contemporary Architectural Surface

The concept of a spectacle as an element of urban landscape is demonstrated by the relationship between the idea of sensible urban experiences and the surface of architecture. The face of architecture can go beyond visual experiences and create surfaces that communicate images by expressing a spectacle. In other words, the installations and surface finishes of architecture make it possible for us to use architecture as a tool for experiential marketing. This study was conducted in order to understand the spectacle phenomenologically as a means of expression in urban consumer space that constantly changes according to the development of the media in urban consumer spaces, and according to the changes of visual perception. In addition, the spectacle is seen as a surface element of architecture that creates urban landscapes. The purpose of this study is to examine how rhetorical expressions of spectacles are used as strategic tools to merchandize architecture as a component of urban landscapes. In conclusion, the authors discuss what roles spectacles play in consumer spaces in order to determine the representative characteristics of surfaces in an attempt to understand architectural surfaces of contemporary urban landscapes as a phenomenon of perceptive communication.

The Sustainable Suburban High Street: A Review of Themes and Approaches

AbstractWhether suburbs are regarded as a distinctive feature of the contemporary urban landscape or as symptomatic of ‘sprawl’ the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in suburbia has done little to displace the dominant image of the suburb as a primarily residential phenomenon. In a wide ranging survey of the academic literature, taking account of current developments in the policy debate relating to suburban regeneration and also drawing on research conducted by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres project at University College London, this article argues for an approach to the suburbs that emphasises their importance as historical centres of diverse social and economic activity. The focus is on the ‘typical’ British suburban high street, regarded as a complex and dynamic socio‐spatial entity facing particular challenges to its vitality and viability in the light of ongoing socio‐economic change. It is suggested that an improved understanding of the relation between suburban society and the built form of suburban centres over time would lead to a fuller appreciation of the actual and potential contribution of the local high street to achieving sustainable built environments.

Constellations of Identity: Place-Ma(r)King beyond Heritage

In this paper we will critically consider the different ways in which history and belonging have been treated in artworks situated in the Citadel development in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. We will focus upon one artwork, Constellation by Stephen Hurrel, as an alternative to the more conventional landscapes of heritage which are adjacent, in order to examine the relationship between personal history and place history and argue the primacy of participatory process in the creation of place and of any artwork therein. Through his artwork, Hurrel has attempted to adopt a material process through which place can be created performatively but, in part due to its nonrepresentational form, it proves problematic, aesthetically and longitudinally, in wholly engaging the community. We will suggest that, through variants of ‘new genre public art’ such as this, personal and place histories can be actively recreated through the redevelopment of contemporary urban landscapes, but we will also highlight the complexities and indeterminacies involved in the relationship between artwork, people, and place.

Ambivalent landscapes—wilderness in the urban interstices

This paper explores the origins and development of ambivalent responses to particular contemporary urban landscapes in historical ideas about human relationships with nature and wilderness, and suggests that post-modern wilderness may be found in the urban interstices: in woodland, abandoned allotments, river corridors, derelict or brownfield sites and especially areas in which the spontaneous growth of vegetation through natural succession suggests that nature is in control. We propose that these interstitial wilderness landscapes have numerous important functions as well as being rich repositories of meaning with implications both for theorizing nature–human relationships and for urban landscape planning and design.