Contemporary Urban Space Research Articles

Contemporary Demands of Scenes in Urban Historic Conservation Areas: A Case Study of Subjective Evaluations from Foshan, China

A historic area situated within contemporary urban space must adapt to modern lifestyles and aesthetic sensibilities to sustain its vitality and facilitate effective heritage transmission. A key criterion for evaluating adaptation is its ability to fulfill people’s ‘demands’ for it. This paper focuses on people’s demands as its core, employing the post-occupancy evaluation theory and the scene theory to develop a subjective evaluation framework for scenes within urban historic conservation areas. An application case study uses the typical historical area of Foshan, China, as an evaluation framework. The discussion encompasses spatial vitality, extraction of scene elements, construction of an indicator set, satisfaction evaluation, and differences in evaluations across areas and individual indicators. The research findings reveal several key points: (1) People’s attention and demands regarding scene elements in urban historic conservation areas are multifaceted. (2) There is a high degree of tolerance among people towards urban historic conservation areas, with varying preferences for different areas. (3) The approach to area protection and development needs diversification. (4) People’s overall perception of an area is influenced by various elements within the scenes. The application of this evaluation framework can aid in understanding people’s “demands” and their underlying reasons while also providing assistance for future optimization efforts related to urban historic conservation areas. Furthermore, the subjective evaluation framework has potential applicability for research into other historical cultural street areas.

Relire Désert (1980) de Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

Désert (1980) is a landmark novel, first and foremost for personal reasons but also for its location at the junction of several French intellectual and aesthetic dynamics. The work marks a significant stage in Le Clézio’s career as a writer. Whereas his previous novels, from Le Procès-verbal (1963) onwards, evoked contemporary (even futuristic) urban spaces and their perils, Désert (1980) is set between the desert of Morocco and the city of Marseille, from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. The novel engages Le Clézio’s work in a more assertive representation of travel and foreign countries. It also encounters several French intellectual movements: a critical evaluation of colonization, growing ecological concerns, the evocation of the difficult migration from the Maghreb to France, and a fascination for the desert space. Considering all these elements, the paper proposes a socio-critical re-reading of this important novel.

Transforming Urban Landscapes: Reuse of Heritage Sites through Multi-Value Interpretations in Xi’an, China

As a catalyst for urban landscape transformation, the reuse of heritage sites plays a pivotal role in shaping contemporary urban spaces and influencing socio-economic development. However, this phenomenon is not without controversy, particularly regarding the quality of preservation and the potential risks associated with over-commodification. Consequently, there has been an increasing research focus on reconciling these conflicting aspects. This study employs a multi-value interpretation framework to delve into the reuse of heritage sites in the urban area of Xi’an within the broader context of China’s urbanization. Utilizing a comparative case study method, this research specifically examines the burgeoning phenomenon of heritage parks. This exploration sheds light on how the reuse of heritage intertwines with urbanization processes, by taking into account environmental, economic, social, and cultural values. The findings suggest that a multi-value interpretation framework is crucial to address the limitations of the current heritagization. Heritage sites in Xi’an have been integrated into the urban transformation process through heritage conservation and the production of new heritage spaces. However, the evolving multi-value evaluation of these heritage sites continues to influence the city’s interpretation of its significant and fading past in planning. This study highlights the dynamic nature of heritage sites in the urban context and underscores the need for nuanced approaches to balance heritage preservation with the evolving demands of contemporary urban development.

The Role of Cultural Landscape in Shaping the Urban Spatial Context of Changzhou (1843–2021) from a Spatial Syntax Perspective

Changzhou is a city situated in the eastern region of China and serves as a pivotal juncture of the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site, the Grand Canal of China. The study employed spatial syntax foreground and background network analysis to examine the cultural landscape characteristics and determinants of the urban spatial context in Changzhou, influenced by the Grand Canal, with a focus on rivers, streets, and social networks. The findings revealed that: (1) Foreground network construction: serving as the fundamental framework of urban space, street and river networks exhibited distinct functionalities in terms of structural configuration, functional organization, and potential impact. (2) Background network construction: social networks identified through spatial structure recognition demonstrated sustainable characteristics, as their layout was not directly correlated to the foreground network but contributed to the identification of the identity and the traits of social networks. (3) Dual network adaptability to contemporary urban space: it was imperative to redefine the role of river networks to augment their potential impact in shaping scenic leisure systems. This study provides novel insights into preserving and acknowledging the urban spatial context while offering valuable references for safeguarding regional cultural landscapes.

Insights/Opinion: Promoting Urban Studies and Practice with Emerging Technologies: City Laboratory, New City, and Future City Exploration

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, marked by emerging/disruptive technologies like mobile internet, big data, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), immersive media (VR/AR/MR), and the Internet of Things (IoT), is transforming cities and promoting urban development. This paper argues that these technologies foster urban studies and implementation in three pathways: methodology, epistemology, and practice. First, the new data environment offers a foundation for quantitative and objective urban studies, enabling researchers to treat cities as laboratories and conduct city experiments worldwide. Second, emerging technologies are reshaping contemporary urban life and space, promoting the update of urban theories. Third, these technologies are expected to be applied as new elements in the urban planning and design processes to create smart urban spatial forms that cater to contemporary needs. Overall, this paper highlights the potential significance of emerging technologies for urban research and development in terms of research methods and data support, theoretical updates and iterations, and practical urban planning and design.

Research on Full-Age Public Space Design in High-Density Cities

Abstract The concept of “full-age” urban public spaces is a critical aspect of modern urbanization, enhancing the multifunctionality of contemporary urban public spaces. This paper examines the design of urban public spaces using “Little Island at Park 55 in New York” as a case study. It delves into three key aspects: spatial intensive utilization, functional agglomeration, and landscape aggregation design. By thoroughly interpreting the original topography of the island space and employing classical Chinese garden techniques, particularly “scenery supporting,” this study analyzes the design evolution and core principles of the case. It summarizes the case’s value and underscores the significance and necessity of all-age inclusive design in modern urban public spaces.

The Beauty of New Urban Functions

The paper aims to answer the question of how the aesthetic value of functions that appear as a novelty in contemporary urban space is given on the example of buildings intended for urban agriculture. Due to the fact that most of them are created as part of multi-functional facilities and constitute an extension of the existing infrastructure, the way they are shaped and the final aesthetic expression is the result of technical needs and capabilities. Natural beauty in the city has been, often by contrast, associated with the emergence of greenery, which is built spontaneously, creating principles that inspire the discovery of a perfect geometry, a harmony within each urban scale. Hence the potential for a new function, which, although its subject is nature, is nevertheless enclosed by architectural form by design. The last decade has brought the first realizations of agriculture integrated into the urban fabric and treated as an urban function, so it has not yet managed to develop its own clearly defined aesthetic. However, the influence of several basic functions from which urban agriculture originates is clearly visible in this respect, i.e. intensive agriculture, industry, housing and recreation. These aesthetics are often in contradiction, but they already give the opportunity to pick out certain directions that are supposed to ensure a harmonious combination of seemingly contradictory elements. The use of the symbolism of a place, the existing characteristic elements that bear witness to local traditions, which are transformed for the new function, and their inscription, either by contrast or continuation in the existing urban context are often used tools. This analysis is based on examples of completed complexes and buildings for which it is possible to objectively assess the premises causing a sense of harmony or disharmony on various levels of reading space – physical, symbolic or historical. The discussed examples include housing developments, industrial and logistics functions, office and exhibition space.

Exploiting the Unexpected

Contemporary imaging technologies have expanded our ability to view contemporary urban space from many vantage points. The camera's portability has meant a departure from any singular ‘ideal’ viewing position previously proposed using linear perspective geometry. This visual and technological shift has brought new opportunities for how urban space is understood and conceived for various modes of inhabitation. By fracturing and multiplying its representation, the recording of dynamic space thus destabilises the traditional relationship between image and form and, in so doing, presents previously unconsidered spatial opportunities. This text-based essay explores the instrumentality of digital image processes in the production of new material and spatial strategies for design and architectural applications. Contextualised within a frame of the digital image and contemporary envisioned space activated by the Internet, it focuses upon the spatial and material properties of three different architectural scales — the residential dwelling, the apartment block, and the public building. The essay demonstrates how repurposed medical imaging software can uncover hidden and unexpected characteristics of different-sized interior spaces by recalibrating image data from captured video footage. The essay draws on a range of generative digital techniques that transform the temporal visual content of interior space — the image stack and its slices or frames — into diagrammatic abstractions of recalibrated colour and form. The various axes of the stack thus serve as a contemporary extrapolation of the traditional orthographic diagrams that currently define architectural production — the plan, section, and elevation. With the visual content of these axes completely redistributed across different scales according to the shifts of the colour- and contrast-based properties of the digital array, the emerging slippages within each slice compose a new dynamic template or diagram that informs new and uncertain strategies of inhabitation.

A tale of the city of Kolkata through the eyes of the “common women"

This paper focuses on working-class women from the informal settlements of Kolkata, India and their precarious relationships with the city. Their existence at the margins of society (socially, spatially, historically, and sometimes even geographically) tends to make them invisible actors in the production of contemporary urban spaces of Kolkata. This paper examines the role of class, caste, and gender in informing the spatial practices of these minoritized women that occur in the city’s liminal landscapes. These practices are quite distinct from those of women from middle- and upper-classes in Kolkata. Terms like “public women” or “bad women” or chhotolok (a common Bengali term used for people from lower classes or castes) have been used to represent and mark these working-class, lower caste women as deviant bodies in terms of their class, caste, and even sexualities. These labels are important to understand how these women have been represented historically in the urban history of Kolkata. By analyzing secondary literature, archival texts, songs, films, poems, and photographs, the paper investigates the following interrelated questions. First, how has the spatial organization of urban Kolkata historically determined the ways in which these women have navigated, engaged with, and attempted to overcome a wide array of structural and systemic constraints? And second, how have these women produced and applied various forms of situated spatial knowledge in the city’s liminal landscapes? In terms of the paper’s structure, I start by analyzing the existing literature on gender and urban space in India. Thereafter, I lay a theoretical groundwork to elucidate the importance of adopting an intersectional lens to understand overlapping regimes of power that affect the life-worlds of minoritized bodies; in this case, the working-class lower caste women of Kolkata. Finally, I use a chronological approach to examine the changes in Kolkata’s urban fabric and its material culture that have significantly added to the precarities faced by these minoritized and marginalized women. In other words, I trace an alternate urban history of Kolkata through the eyes of these “common women.”

A House for the Spirit

Abstract This paper highlights the architectural theory and practice of the twentieth-century Dutch Benedictine monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan as a lens through which to view architecture and urbanism’s underlying spiritual purpose. Van der Laan’s theologically grounded vision of architecture as a sacramental mediator between the human, the natural, and the divine and empirically based rubric by which to achieve that end—through human-centric proportion, polyrhythm, and humble materiality—provide a robust framework for crafting cities and homes that reveal the sacredness inherent in the world. Through an analysis of Van der Laan’s theory and an examination of his exemplary Roosenberg Abbey, the paper illuminates the spatial, sensory, and dimensional qualities currently lacking in many contemporary urban and architectural spaces and presents a set of strategies for adapting them to better support human flourishing.

İstanbul’un Deniz Kıyısından Kaybolmak: Sarayburnu Tıbbiye-Yedekçiler Mescidi/Değirmen Ocağı Camii

Located on the outer part of the seawalls of the Topkapı Palace, the area around Sarayburnu was permanently changed with a new development plan implemented in Istanbul between 1956 and 1960. Urban practices in this period aimed to modernize urban space but resulted in a permanent transformation of the city’s shoreline. In order to ensure the continuity of cultural transmission, this research aims to remind historical places that disappeared as a result of the demolitions under the development plan and discusses the exploration of the buildings that disappeared from the shoreline of Sarayburnu by utilizing visual archive sources. This case study uses a selection of historical photographs as research material for areas outside seawalls that form the border between the Historic Peninsula and the sea. Document analysis of historical photographs revealed the photographs of the Sarayburnu Tıbbiye-Yedekciler Masjid/Degirmen Ocagi Mosque that does not exist today. Case study research, one of the qualitative research methods, was preferred to examine this building. The research findings provide information about history, location and construction of the building as well as its traces in the contemporary urban space. In the context of the relationship between architecture, city and history, one of the forgotten memory places that are important for cultural transmission has been explored.

The Oblique Function Theory in search of a dynamic and fluid urban morphology

Today's cities are dynamic nodes where copious urban flows intersect. These flows have distinguished characteristics: the flow of money, the flow of vehicles, the flow of people who migrate, and the flow of information. The flows' amalgamation, intersection, and conflict form contemporary urban configuration and space. Many methods, such as historico-geographical, process typological, and space syntax in urban morphology studies, aspire to analyze, discuss, and design these flows. These, which have been practiced in English, Italian and French schools in Europe since the 1960s, have allowed the development of different research methodologies in the search for urban form. The article examines the postmodernist urban topo-morphological approaches, which developed in parallel with the French typo-morphological method influenced by the Italian school and the urban space perception studies of Gordon Cullen and Kevin Lynch through the Oblique Function Theory. In order to go beyond the Cartesian urban plan analysis of typo-morphological methodologies, topo-morphological approaches reexamine flows with paradigms of urban topological surface, fluid and dynamic morphologies, and architecture-landscape-infrastructure integrity. The Oblique Function Theory was theorized by architect Claude Parent and philosopher and urban theorist Paul Virilio in 1963 under the Architecture Principe group as an example of these approaches. Parent and Virilio use and utilize inclined surfaces, rejecting archetypal spatial components such as columns, walls, and roofs. The duo with inclined surfaces extrapolates the concepts of habitable circulation, mediated structure, fluid, and dynamic form in their projects with a topological perspective. Through urban sections rather than urban plans, form a topological and oblique urban order dominated and ushered by flows. The paper discusses Parent's oblique projects: Les Inclisites in 1968; Les Ponts Urbains in 1971; and Incision Urbaine in the 2000s, obtained from slightly researched archival materials and drawings to argue whether contemporary urban dynamics and flows would possibly create a contemporary urban morphology methodology and sui generis tropes with topo-morphological approaches.

Functional discourses of contemporary multilingualism in urban texts: A case study of three capital cities: Warsaw, Berlin, and Luxembourg

Multilingualism plays an increasingly significant role in the urban landscapes of contemporary cities. A city does not speak just one language; instead, it speaks the languages of its users, i.e. residents, visitors, companies, organisations etc. By producing urban texts, they simultaneously contribute to the communicative community that is also open to the needs and expectations of individuals who remain there only temporarily. From this perspective, a city gradually becomes a linguistic melting pot, in which the linguistic needs of a society are manifested but which also acknowledges and generates these needs. These processes result in the growing scientific interest in different aspects of textualisation of the contemporary urban space. In this paper, we attempt to describe functional discourses in multilingual texts appearing in contemporary public space. The researched corpus comprises urban texts from three European capital cities: Warsaw, Berlin, and Luxembourg. The applied research method is based on the functional discourses and supplemented with the basic criteria of multimodal analysis carried out depending on the language or languages used in the urban text, the genre and multimodal form of the urban text, its content and function, and communicative practice. As a result of combining and interpreting the available typologies of text types, we propose in the theoretical section 10 types of functional discourses. In the analytical part, we relate these discourse types to multilingual urban texts. Thus, we identify and analyse orientation, regulatory, commemorative, commercial, educational, artistic, protest, political, identity and alerting discourses.

Narrating religious processions in Visigothic Iberia: a sociology of saintly power

ABSTRACT The sources for Visigothic-era Iberia include several vivid accounts of processions at which royal power was presented forcefully to the people. Narratives of the triumphs of the martyrs over their persecutors function very differently, as those who had formerly been subject to abject humiliation were turned into victorious emblems of local resistance to hegemonic imperial authority. This article argues that through their adaptations of hagiographical and martyrological traditions, the ecclesiastical authors of the Visigothic era articulated a vision of the ideal relationship between leaders and their followers that was constructed through the display of consensus and reciprocity. Stories about saints moving through and displaying their power within urban space, accompanied by their entourages (or enemies) in front of friendly (or hostile) audiences reflect an attempt to negotiate and assert control over contemporary urban space in the context of historical contestation. The inclusion of such examples in texts that were deployed repeatedly in liturgical contexts would have helped to shape expectations about the nature of power and its appropriate (and inappropriate) performance, also configuring thinking about relationships between those who saw themselves as belonging to the Christian civic community and those who were excluded from it.

Świat post-naturalny? Teoretyczne, empiryczne i artystyczne rewizje

This article explores approaches to wilderness in contemporary urban spaces and the demarcations drawn through the concepts of nature vs culture, politics vs art, science vs narratives, city vs wild life in urban studies, philosophy and environmental art. The argument about the new forms of wild life, such as charismatic animals and weeds in cites, impacts the way in which we think about the encounters between posthuman philosophy, urban ecology and art. The paper seeks to pose the questions of post-natural world anew, in ways that allow for a resolution of the tension between contrary concept of wilderness and urban practices. It argues that all forms of life (human and wild) are connected, reassembled and exposed both materially and discursive in urban socio-ecological systems. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions and scales of urban life and is transferable from urban ecology to environmental art, from philosophy to politics, from popular culture to urban environment.

Tekst, czas a przestrzeń – kontinuum relacji. Obraz Zagrzebia i Dubrownika w Księdze podróży Ewliji Czelebiego, Cyklopie Ranka Marinkovicia i sadze Pieśń lodu i ognia George’a R.R. Martina

Space, like forms of expression, undergoes constant transformations. One may wonder about their relationships, since both space shapes the text, and text influences the perception of space as well as helps to read and understand its palimpsest, hidden elements. The article addresses the issue of time as read and written in the landscape and urban space. Using literary examples from different periods, it analyzes the presentation of Zagreb and Dubrovnik. It also seeks to point out the differences between the real and literary landscape to discover the topographical objects commemorated in texts in the contemporary urban space. The author wonders whether literature can be a burden for the semiotic landscape. Can it influence the perception of space in such a way that one does not want to see other dimensions of the landscape than those preserved in the texts?

Spatial video projection and public open spaces: A distinct bibliometric study approach

In the 21st century, digital technologies have begun to play a more active role in ensuring sustainability. This situation has led to studies examining the interaction between digital technologies and different academic disciplines in many study areas. In terms of spatial planning and design disciplines, this study focuses on spatial video projection (SVP). Through bibliometric analysis, this paper aims to identify and locate an assortment of SVP technologies and contemporary urban public open spaces (POSs) within the global research landscape. Utilizing WOS, Scopus, and the VOSviewer software, a 6-phase process is used to evaluate the current research landscape. The phases include: identifying groups of keywords for cross-examination within the manuscripts; exploring words inside articles with their dominancy levels and linkage clarity through bibliometric analysis; developing a grading technique regarding dominancy levels; grouping graded words into thematic fields; calculating overall values of each of the fields for both databases settings; and comparing the fields for developing discussions and strategies. The findings of this study indicate that architectural disciplines lack SVP-related research. In future academic studies, the approach used in this study could be used to develop topic selection strategies in multidisciplinary settings. In addition, it is expected that SVP will offer potential applications for enhancing the quality of the shared public spatial experience of cities. Thus, this study also forms a cornerstone for further research investigating the potential of utilizing SVP in POSs for the sustainability of cities.

Temporary Urban Interventions in Public Space

Insufficient research on the typology of temporary urban interventions, which has become a common tool for pointing out possible scenarios in the development of unused and neglected urban areas in recent 21st century projects, indicate the relevance of the article’s topic. A literature review has allowed for a definition and analysis of the typology of temporary urban interventions in order to determine their basic characteristics, the relationship between the intervention and public space, and the establishing initiatives. The paper determines the formative period through an analysis of architectural and artistic events in 20th century and distinguishes three direct predecessors: events in public space, experimental architectural projects of the 60s, and art installations in public space in the second half of 20th century. A synthesis of collected data is an important prerequisite for understanding the role and impact of temporary urban interventions on future public space. Based on the obtained results, the research emphasizes the importance of the relationship between temporary urban interventions and public space for the creation of contemporary urban space in 21st century.

The image of the urban space. Social semiotics readings, data, and assumptions

Contemporary urban space and contemporary urban life is rife with signs and markers with either collective or individual meaning, as the main symbolic regulator/leader in the socio-cultural presence and management of urban space. Urban city centres present a high degree of sign density that on the one hand express established conventional signs (in the strict sense of the term), which are accepted in a fairly, general way, and on the other hand define semantic symbolisms according to which the regulating modes and attitudes in our urban behavior are respectively indicated. This paper focuses on the ambiguity aspect of conceptual collective urban signs by examining important research variables such as: the degree of distinctiveness of the signs, the representation of the idea they ‘convey’, especially both as technical standards and as socio-environmental images of form.

The modern agoras - the relationship between urban open public space and political expression. The case study of the city of Poznań, Poland

Contemporary urban public open spaces are stages of political expression, reminiscent of the historical Greek agoras which performed similar functions thousands of years ago. What has clearly changed, however, is the form of political expression. Rather than individual speeches by ancient thinkers and politicians, we increasingly deal with collective protests and assemblies presenting the views of the communities involved. Nowadays public assemblies also take place in a much larger number of public spaces, depending on the needs. They are chosen on the basis of 3 main categories of factors: spatial, semiotic and reception-related, which may overlap. The main objective of this paper is to determine the role of urban public open spaces as places of expression of political views during public assemblies. The study was based on the analysis of data from the Municipality of Poznań, as well as individual in-depth interviews with people involved in the organisation of public assemblies in Poznań in 2019 and representatives of local associations.