Urban Modernity Research Articles

Эстетизация природы как тренд современной урбанистики

Globalizing mass culture, the total offensive of “digital postmodernism” in the XXI century have led to the need to consider issues of modern aesthetics in relation to the daily urban environment. The research interest lies in the analysis of the aesthetic activity of subjects in the sphere of everyday life in the context of socio-cultural interactions. The aestheticization of the natural component of the modern urban environment is a social prac-tice, indicating the universalization of the individual’s attitude to the basics of socio-cultural communication. Using the example of high-tech projects (Zaryadye park, HPP-2), the article represents the characteristics of the subject’s forming aesthetic experience – proceduralism, nonlinearity, and the use of postmodernist game ele-ments. It is emphasized that the desire to combine urban and natural landscapes is the background for the in-tensified process of awareness of the Russian national identity in society, which is facilitated by the use of aes-thetic projects in the symbols of Russian culture, theatrical techniques, containing allusions to samples of Rus-sian art and literature.

Centra, zázemí a periferie hospodářského života raně novověké společnosti v zemích České koruny. O smyslu hospodářských dějin raného novověku

The paper evaluates the representation of early modern economic history at the 12th congress of Czech historians in Ústí nad Labem in September 2022 and responds to opinions about the current decline of the discipline of economic history and its replacement by the “new” cultural history. It emphasises the continuing importance of classical economic history and the need to enrich it with new approaches, based on complexity, a comparative approach, and interdisciplinarity. Two historiographic probes demonstrating the meaning and significance of the study of territorial economic relations in the 16th and 17th centuries are presented. The first is a microhistorical insight into the management and function of the suburban estates of the Czech nobility in the immediate vicinity of the provincial capital, Prague, at the end of the 16th century, as can be observed through the example of the small manor of Košíř, owned in the years 1585–1597 by the lords of Hradec. The second probe shows the possibilities and benefits of analysing data from contemporary tax records and lists of serfdom duties and corvées for understanding the function and status of cities and towns in the South Bohemian domain of the lords of Hradec. It describes the structure of the urban network and the hierarchy of urban settlements in the 17th century, captures the original traces of war damage, and suggests the possibility of following the trends of early modern urbanisation in the territory of the former Bechyňsko region in a long wave from the end of the Thirty Years’ War to the beginning of industrialisation and the new “industrial” urbanisation in the 19th century.

Spatial differences and influence mechanisms of construction land development intensity in China, 2002–2020

Construction land development intensity is a spatial mapping of modern urbanization level, which integrally reflects urban development strategy, land use efficiency, and population carrying intensity. This article analyzed the spatial and temporal evolution of construction land development intensity using panel data of 31 provincial administrative divisions in China from 2002 to 2020, with the application of the Theil index and spatial autocorrelation. To further investigate the relationship between human activities and land development, the article used geographic detectors to analyze the influencing mechanisms. The results showed that: (1) The average intensity of construction land development of Chinese provinces from 2002 to 2020 showed a trend of "steady increase, a short decline, and then a steady increase," and there were significant differences in the characteristics of construction land development intensity changes in different regions. (2) The regional differences in construction land development intensity between provinces showed a decreasing trend. There were uneven differences among regions, with more minor regional differences in Central, South, and North China but more significant differences in Northwest, East, Southwest, and Northeast China. (3) The spatial agglomeration of construction land development intensity in the region increased initially and then decreased during the study period. The overall pattern was "small agglomeration and large dispersion." (4) Economic development factors such as GDP per land, industrial structure, and fixed asset investment completion significantly affect land development intensity. The interaction between the factors was apparent, and the effect of “1 + 1 > 2” was produced. Based on the study's results, it is suggested that scientific regional development planning, guiding inter-provincial factor flow, and rational control of land development efforts are the key to promoting sustainable regional development.

Unmasking the Metropolis: An Interrogation of Modernity in Orfeu Negro (1959)

Through carnival’s protagonism and positioning within the metropolis, Orfeu Negro defamiliarizes the urban experience and depicts urban modernity as a hellish force through its imagery of confinement, tension-filled editing schemes, vertical framing and an aesthetics of darkness. Representing the modern forces of Rio de Janeiro’s institutional sites in mythic terms, Orfeu’s katabasis into the city’s infernal underworld exposes the hollowness of civil services, renders bankrupt the State facilitation of citizen welfare and lays bare police oppression, crowd control and racial divide. Via a nuanced rendition of Bakhtinian carnival, Orfeu Negro problematizes the status of modernity as a democratic project.

Metropolisation, migrations and urban civilisation: the example of Hanoi

With 38% of its population living in cities, Vietnam is in the process of completing its urban transition. The arrival of populations from the countryside coupled with a process of spatial sprawl is part of the urban catching up that the country has been doing since the liberalization of its economy at the end of the 1980s. Poles of concentration of value and population are rapidly being formed: the metropolises. The Vietnamese metropolises, starting with the capital city-province of Hanoi, are the vehicle and modus operandi of the country's transition to a market economy, and they crystallize a number of social tensions linked in particular to the entrenchment, or even the clash, of rural and urban cultures. The purpose of this article is to see how, in the peri-urban area of Hanoi, an observation post for the advance of the city over the countryside, the urban civilization program is being called upon by the authorities to promote urban modernization based on social harmony and a certain vision of urban sociality.

Analysis of existing methods for calculating retaining walls from bored piles

An overview analysis of the methods of calculating retaining walls from driven piles was performed. Analytical calculation of piles in accordance with SNiP 2.02.03–85, calculation taking into account the requirements of change No. 1 DBN V.2.1-10-2009 on the calculation of horizontal stiffness of piles and static calculation of the section using the Lira-CAD software complex were considered, and calculation of a plane cross-section using the finite element method according to the Coulomb-Mohr model in the Plaxis 2D software complex.With population growth and the expansion of cities, the need for new residential, commercial and industrial buildings increases. Modern urbanization leads to an increase in the population density and densification of buildings. This requires the construction of multi-story buildings and infrastructure to ensure efficient use of the limited land area, construction on areas with significant elevation differences, or the construction of underground parking lots. Under such conditions, engineers increasingly have to solve construction problems in the conditions of compacted buildings, or in conditions of significant differences in the height of the building site.One of the most common engineering solutions to solve these problems is the implementation of massive retaining walls in the soil in the form of bored piles connected by a binding grid. The calculation of such structures requires special attention to the determination of the initial parameters of the considered problem and the choice of an approach to the calculation and analysis of the stress-strain state of the elements of the pit enclosure structures and the base.On the example, the calculation of the pile was performed in the engineering and geological conditions of the city of Kyiv with the same calculation parameters and different calculation methods. For the reliability of the comparison of loading results for all three cases, it was accepted according to DSTU NB V.2.1-31:2014. The obtained movements of the piles at the level of the bottom of the pit and the top of the pile were analyzed in three ways, and based on them, preliminary conclusions were formulated with prospects for further research.

Analysis on the coupling characteristics of urban ecological structure and local economy in the Yellow River Basin

The Yellow River Basin is an important part of China's ecological protection areas, but the stable development of the Yellow River Basin cannot be guaranteed due to the unreasonable setting of the local ecological structure and the slow pace of economic development. Many scholars at home and abroad have researched the ecological structure and urbanization level of the Yellow River Basin, but there is still a lack of work to analyze the coupling characteristics of the two. In this paper, the entropy weight method is used to study the coupling characteristics of economic development and ecological structure in the Yellow River Basin. The ecological environment, urbanization evaluation system and the ecological environment and urbanization coupling coordination characteristic evaluation system are constructed. The results show that the comprehensive evaluation coefficient of urbanization has increased by 276.2% from 2011 to 2020. The annual average increase of the comprehensive evaluation index of the ecological environment is over 35%. The degree of matching between the level of urban modernization and the ecological environment is basically above 95%.

Research on Intelligent Landscape Design Based on Distributed Integrated Model

Traditional landscape design methods rely entirely on the experience of designers and are difficult to adapt to the needs of modern society. This article proposes a landscape design method based on a distributed integrated model. Based on landscape design scheme data, the intelligent landscape design function is achieved by constructing a distributed geographic model, extracting features through data analysis and key point analysis, and using virtual environments in computer-aided design to display and restore the actual effects of landscape design. The results indicate that the landscape design method based on distributed integration mode is more in line with the needs of modern society and has significant advantages over traditional landscape design in terms of public interest and evaluation coefficient. The intelligent landscape design method based on distributed integrated models has important significance in modern urbanization construction, which can effectively improve the accuracy and speed of landscape design and create better living spaces for people.

Articulating relational rurality amidst urbanization: Agency, spatial paradox and the de/reterritorialization of lineage landscapes in contemporary rural China

AbstractThis paper seeks to offer a nuanced understanding of how the rural responds to and speaks back to the urban in the context of increasingly blurred rural‐urban landscapes. The prevailing theorizations remain entrenched in an intellectual impasse that still treats the rural as a residual space or a reactive actor besieged by external urban forces. Using lineage spaces as an empirical lens, this paper delves into rural geographies of lineage landscapes in post‐reform China by articulating rural agencies in more active, non‐lineal ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural Wenzhou, southeast China, this paper argues that the articulation of rural voices amidst China's urban modernity unveils a spatial paradox of landscape de/reterritorialization at the dimensions of discourse, practice and (trans)locality. We first reveal how official rural discourses de‐territorialize and lessen lineage groups' control over their symbolic buildings while simultaneously opening up opportunities for them to mobilize officially‐sanctioned discourses to expand lineage spaces and reterritorialize their power. Second, we show how villagers embrace the de‐territorializing practice of landscape commodification, which becomes a crucial source of finance for them to perform ritual activities at specific festivals, thereby re‐asserting rural collectivism, sociality and sacredness. Third, we unpack the trans‐local dimension of rural de/reterritorialization by exploring how villagers forge lineage‐based rural networking that transcends space‐time, which paradoxically reinforces the spatial claim for territorializing rural power that is demarcated from urban/modern orientations. We further argue that these multiple spatial processes of rural de/reterritorialization challenge a reactive or neatly‐divided account of rural agency during its engagement with urbanizing relations and processes. In all, this paper offers a more complex, paradoxical account of relational rurality in a rapidly urbanizing China, and foregrounds an agenda towards more ‘inclusive’ rural studies.

Place without an Owner: Urban Modernization and Waqf Property in post-Ottoman Niš

Abstract This article takes the example of post-Ottoman Niš to argue that the transformation of post-Ottoman cities was not a local, nationalism-induced architectural phenomenon, as suggested by the studies of “de-Ottomanization,” but rather a global development which was made possible through the dismantling of the local Ottoman legal regime of urban property. Focusing on the waqf as a quintessential Ottoman form of urban property, this article examines how war and displacement of the Muslim population on the one hand, and new associations between the modern city and particular forms of property on the other together contributed to the destruction of the waqf despite its protection by international law.

The Science of Eradication: Urban Modernity and Neoliberalism in Santiago, Chile, 1973–1990 by César Leyton Robinson (review)

The Science of Eradication: Urban Modernity and Neoliberalism in Santiago, Chile, 1973–1990 by César Leyton Robinson (review)

Spatial Accessibility of Urban Emergency Shelters Based on Ga2SFCA and Its Improved Method: A Case Study of Kunming, China

Emergency shelters are important public facilities for urban disaster prevention and mitigation. Measuring their spatial accessibility provides a valuable reference for urban modernization and a balanced layout of emergency shelters. In previous studies, the Gaussian two-step floating catchment area (Ga2SFCA) method has the shortcoming of ignoring the effect of a fixed search radius on accessibility. In this study, an improved Ga2SFCA method was proposed to evaluate emergency shelter accessibility in the main urban area of Kunming, China. The parameters of the serviceability of the shelters and the degree of population aggregation were introduced to calculate their effect on the search radius. The traditional Ga2SFCA method and the improved method were compared and analyzed. The results showed that the improved method is more reasonable and realistic in the search radius of densely populated areas and areas lacking shelters, thus providing highly objective and accurate accessibility to emergency shelters. Further, the spatial distribution of the emergency shelters in the main urban area of Kunming was unbalanced and did not match the population density distribution. The accessibility of shelters in parts of the northwestern, eastern, and central parts of the city was low. The method presented in this study could be used to provide reference and support for the government and planners to reasonably plan shelter facilities and promote equal access for all residents to shelter resources.

Unpeeling the banana dance: The quare fugitivity of Joséphine Baker

Unpeeling the banana dance: The quare fugitivity of Joséphine Baker

Bioregional urbanism: reflecting on the legacy of the RPAA through the lens of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt

ABSTRACT The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) was formed in 1923 to promote urban development based on the English Garden City ideal linked to the regionalism of Patrick Geddes. But Lewis Mumford, the RPAA’s principal spokesperson, incorporated his version of Geddes’ ideas in the RPAA’s agenda. Arguably the RPAA/Mumford’s vision of garden cities as a remedy for the problems of the sprawling metropolis incorrectly became identified with Geddes. This essay presents a more nuanced perspective by examining the RPAA and efforts to relaunch it, starting in the late 1930s, through the lens of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, who was largely responsible for the revival of interest in Geddes’s ideas after World War Two. The paper traces the development of Tyrwhitt’s ideas as she introduces Geddes in his own words to a new generation, thus dispelling previous misconceptions, and formed an influential synthesis of Geddes’ bioregionalism and modernist urbanism that framed debates on post-war reconstruction. She put forward the urban constellation – a further development of Geddes’ concept of the conurbation – explicitly as an alternative to the relaunched RPAA’s call for decentralization, now as strategy for civil defense.

Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher, by John Davis

The London of the 1950s was a city the late Victorians would have recognised. By the 1970s, John Davis writes in his idiosyncratic and wide-ranging history of post-war London, the city’s driving economic, social and cultural forces had shifted in ways that would have confounded a Victorian observer. Davis examines this process of urban transformation in sixteen chapters that cover, among other things, the life and death of ‘the Sixties’, changing patterns in home ownership, the rise of the conservation movement, and the Notting Hill riots. Ultimately, he argues, these changes laid the groundwork for a political environment in which the ideology of Thatcherism could take root. In lieu of an introduction, Chapter One examines how the capital’s increasingly visible youth culture and a trend-hungry media converged to create ‘Swinging London’, a public relations exercise that nonetheless captured the city’s post-war optimism. So why did the party end? Davis highlights the obvious factors, notably deindustrialisation and the erosion of manufacturing jobs, paired with economic headwinds after the Wilson government’s deflationary measures in 1966–7. But the book also identifies a growing, if inchoate, resistance to the paternalism of the Beveridge welfare state. Chapters Six and Seven detail the backlash against urban modernism, as expressed in protests against motorway construction and a renewed impulse to conserve the Victorian cityscape. Chapters Nine, Ten, and Twelve chart the emergence of new, oppositional identities among groups as varied as East End cab drivers, suburban home-owners, and Black British youth. Chapters Eight, Thirteen, and Fourteen sketch the reorientation of municipal politics, from the demise of the consensus around the East End’s subsidised post-war prosperity to the emergence of grass-roots voluntary action groups that sought to redefine the imperatives of the welfare state, to the breakdown of local Labour Party hierarchies in the 1960s and 1970s.

Analyzing Long-Term High-Rise Building Areas Changes Using Deep Learning and Multisource Satellite Images

High-rise building areas (HRBs) provide significant social and environmental services and play a crucial role in modern urbanization. The large-scale and long-term spatial distribution of HRBs is of great interest to many fields, such as urban planning and local climate analysis. While previous studies have confirmed the value of Sentinel-2 images in extracting HRBs and their changes, current work is limited to relatively local areas and short-term analysis. One reason is due to the fact that the earliest Sentinel-2 image can only date back to 2015. To address this research gap, this paper proposes an efficient procedure to intelligently extract HRBs and their changes from multitemporal Landsat-7 and Sentinel-2 images, using a specifically designed fully convolutional network. To validate the proposed method, we selected four typical cities in China, namely, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Zhengzhou, as study areas. We utilized Landsat-7 images acquired in 2000 and 2010, along with Sentinel-2 images acquired in 2020, as experimental data. We extracted and analyzed three periods of HRBs and their changes in the four cities, along with urban rail terminal data and gross domestic product (GDP) data in the same period. The results show that the proposed method can efficiently extract HRBs and their changes in the four cities over the past 20 years, with an overall accuracy of more than 90%. HRBs changes are primarily driven by urban planning policies and geographical factors. There is a strong positive correlation between the increase in HRBs and the increase in rail terminals, both in terms of quantity and spatial distribution. Additionally, there is a positive correlation between HRBs increase and GDP increase in terms of quantity, but the trend varies in different cities due to their diverse developing modes. Overall, the results indicate that the proposed method can be a potential operational tool to extract large-scale and long-term HRBs and their changes in China.

Building a Dream: Pan Arab Modernism in Kuwait in the 1960s

Kuwait’s post-oil modernisation is often attributed to a sequence of masterplans designed by British architects and planners. Throughout the recent history of Kuwait’s urban development, these plans foreshadowed policies mediated by local actors and an ambitious public infrastructure building conceived by a new Arab muhandis (architect-engineer). This paper seeks to illuminate a specific period in Kuwait’s architectural and urban history that was facilitated by Arab actors hired in the 1960s in different capacities, and the emergence of the Arab architectural firm in the 1970s. By taking on the role of “expert,” refining what it means to be a muhandis, and by looking at more regional references, these local actors were able to experiment, attempting to develop a distinctly Arab architectural and urban modernism situated in a global modernist movement. This paper offers an expanded reading of the making of Kuwait’s architectural and urban production beyond the polarisation between imported masterplans and locally produced building knowledge and the role played by muhandis in such development.

Gedung Sarinah: Memori dan Kontinuitas Modernisme Kota Jakarta

<p><em>The physical change of Sarinah in 2022 captivates the residents of Jakarta. In the previous era, this building had lost its glory due to the lack of focused planning for renovations, especially when Jakarta's development accelerated with the presence of many new modern buildings. This writing uses a qualitative descriptive method with a historical approach. The analysis of architectural typology on the building facade is conducted by exploring the history to find out the origin of events, functions, and simple forms of a building. The aim is to provide an overview of the importance of giving more attention to the renovation of historic buildings. Changes in building facades can show a different identity from one urban space related to the political and socio-cultural context. Determination of cultural heritage status provides benefits for its preservation by increasing the potential of buildings to revive memories and the continuity of urban modernism. </em></p>

Agglomeration of population and employment in the urbanization - industrialization interaction: The case of Izmir

As production and economic activities shaped the growth of cities during the pre-industrial era, they are still the most important factors explaining modern urbanization. Economic restructuring is being reshaped with agglomeration economies, bringing spatial restructuring with it. Regional economic growth, emergence of new centers and production foci are formed in the equilibria of positive and negative externalities of agglomeration. Positive externalities do not arise solely from internal economies of scale related to factors of production such as easy accessibility in the region. It also results from external economies of scale, including economies of localization and urbanization. On the other hand, as cities grow the attractiveness of large agglomeration and advantages of economies of scale decrease. Negative externalities in the larger agglomerations may eventually lead to decreasing returns to scale in cities. Economic view of regional science and geography considers cities maintaining equilibrium between two competing forces, i.e., centripetal forces (agglomeration) and centrifugal forces (dispersion). This study examines recent agglomeration and dispersion processes in the settlement pattern from the relationship between urbanization and economic growth. To do so, we take Izmir as a case and use general explanatory variables such as population and employment. Specifically, we investigate spatial agglomeration in the Izmir city region and metropolitan area by using population and employment data of 2009 and 2019. Based on empirical results, we discuss new sub-regions, urban centers, and clustering that emerged due to economies of scale as well as positive and negative externalities of agglomeration.

Village-ness, discrimination, and urban modernity: Thinking alongside ‘village people’ in Lebanon

Based on qualitative phenomenological research alongside village dwellers in Lebanon, this article identifies village-ness – an experience of being labelled as ‘non-urban’ with an upbringing and habitus considered to be ‘of the village’ – as difference and lack. I accordingly argue for the recognition of a hierarchization between those considered ‘city people’ and ‘village people’ in mainstream Lebanese imaginary that establishes experiences of discrimination, prejudice, and assault. Developing this, the article explores participants’ understandings of transformation improving these conditions. (Western-style) education, (capitalist) employment, (modern) technology, and a deepened connectivity to the city emerge as key variables in this respect. This change, my analysis shows, is conceptualised as ‘becoming urban’ understood as ‘becoming modern’, where Modernity is specifically framed as a Western-centric formation with discourses of ‘civility’, linear time, ‘development’, and ‘progress’ dominant. Accordingly, the article posits that the construction, inferiorisation, and assault of village-ness is a key site of the establishment and (re)production of a Eurocentric ‘urban modernity’ at the level of everyday lived experiences. Recognising that this phenomenon extends far beyond Lebanon, I posit the need to seriously bring the ‘urban question’ into anti/post/decolonial thought.