Perception Of Urban Space Research Articles

Meta-Modern City: the Problem of Authenticity

The aim of the article is to analyze the urban research paradigm that has developed at the turn of the XX and XXI centuries in the works of Western experts and the possibility to use it for domestic research. Methodologically, the author relies on the heritage of the Manchester sociological school, which effectively applied the concepts of actor-network theory to analyze the sociology of a city. The city is considered as a single object complex. Its main characteristics are contingent and contextual. The author analyzes the city as a derivative of stable sets of objects and networks of relations. A change in the components that make up a city leads to a change in the entire object. The article notes that in modern urbanism there is another way of classifying cities not according to the principle of geographical location, economic structure, or national identity, but according to the system of forming networks of relations. The author analyzes the linguistic metaphors system, which is used to describe urban space. The problems of metaphor, code and reading, perception of urban space in the form of text are analyzed. The concept of "language" and "text" allows you to create a system of describing a city as a complex phenomenon. In this case, the constructs "modern", "postmodern", "meta-modern" are presented as a system of grammar and punctuation for interpreting the phenomenon of the city. The article notes the difficulties of using the characteristics of a postmodernist and metamodernist city for domestic research. The author suggests that the development of the domestic city in the twentieth century took place according to the scenario of a more radical modernism. As a result, we got a post-Soviet city with a different rationality, which is combined with the modernist principles of architecture and urban planning. The article provides examples of the semiotic analysis of architectural objects. The author concludes that the mental image of the city restructures the physical space, turning it into a personalized network of human life relations.

ПОВСЯКДЕННЕ ЖИТТЯ ВОЛИНСЬКИХ ЄВРЕЇВ У МІЖВОЄННИЙ ПЕРІОД (ЗА МАТЕРІАЛАМИ МЕМОРІАЛЬНОГО МУЗЕЮ ГОЛОКОСТУ У США)

The interview is an important historical source of studying the problematic issues of the history of Ukraine in the XX century. The interview has a lot of factual materials, interpretations, impressions, observations, and development of the interviewees about the described events. Between the two world wars, Western Volhynia remained a part of Poland. About 10% of its population was Jews. This article examines historical evidence of the life of the Jewish population in the cities of Volhynian Voivodeship in the interwar period from the collection of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). USHMM documents, studies, and interprets the history of the Holocaust. The mission of the museum, due to the museum's strategy, is to help citizens of the world to fight hatred, to prevent genocide, to promote human dignity and to strengthen democracy. Interviews from the USHMM collection are semi-structured and focused, thus aimed at studying a person’s "experience" of individual historical divisions and situations that arose. The examined memoirs show the construction and spread of Jewish public cities of Volhynian Voivodeship, which was inhabited by about two-thirds of their inhabitants. Education issues are most often addressed to in interviews for those reasons that the interwar period lead to the formation and maturation of respondents. The articles describe the construction, professional employment, religious and social life, as well as the perception of urban space. The analysis of memories gives us idea of a young resident of the Jewish community. On average, this was a person from a religious family which had own small business. Such person attended public and religious school, had acquaintances or friends from different ethnic groups, knew several languages and was not interested in politics at all. The material presented in this article represents the experience of Holocaust victims. Attention of the researchers in this group is evidence of one-sidedness — one of the main methodological problems of oral historical research. The exploitation of traumatic experience in this article is changed due to the chronological limits of the interwar period. Despite the above problem of oral historical research, methods permit us to add some kind of personal to the general narrative.

Fluid spaces in a contemporary urban context: Questioning the boundary between architecture and infrastructure

The aim of this paper is to research the relations between the contemporary networked context and transformations in the understanding of architectural and infrastructural spaces, and to research the main models of fluidity within this relation. The contemporary urban context is characterized by globalization, transculturalism and increased technological development, which simultaneously change the everydayness, usage and perception of urban spaces and architecture. New networking phenomena occurring on informational, communicational and spatial levels transform the city and its architecture into constant processes of flows. Fluidity is positioned as the main problem of this research, simultaneously causing, and manifesting in, transformations of contemporary spatial conditions where the notion of flow becomes the new spatial quality. This research is focused on one of the main spatial manifestations of the fluidity phenomenon in contemporary cities - the dispersion of the boundary between architectural and infrastructural space. The aim of the paper is to present the idea that fluid spaces are characterized by: 1) increased loss of disciplinary boundaries; 2) loss of physical boundaries - inner-outer space overlapping; 3) dispersion of perceptual boundaries in space. The research is significant because it defines new meanings of spaces of flows and movement in a contemporary urban context.

The influence of “night” factors on urban earthquake disaster prevention

Existing urban planning and urban disaster prevention measures are mostly based on urban space and crowd behaviour patterns during the day, ignoring the anti-disaster demand for urban space at night. Since people‘s perception of urban space is quite different by night and daytime, with behaviours patterns varying much accordingly, thus the consequences of urban disasters occurring at night are more serious than those occurring during the day, including the trigger of secondary disasters, which are more harmful. This paper collects and analyses the data collected from the target location, and finds that the night factor has a certain degree of impact and change on urban disasters. Through the construction and improvement of disaster prevention lighting facilities, it can guarantee the normal function of evacuation and avoidance paths and areas at night to a certain extent, and help the affected people to carry out effective self-rescue and mutual rescue at night, thereby reducing the impact of disasters and protecting the lives of personnel.

El potencial de la percepción social aplicada al análisis de la vulnerabilidad en planificación urbana

Today, the role of the social perception of urban space is scarce in the documents that guide the adequate integration of the urban development of cities. A better understanding of the influence of social relationships within the city allows new knowledge to be brought to the underlying mechanisms of vulnerability and social exclusion in the urban space. This work focuses on studying the relationship between the quantitative approach of current urban vulnerability reports and a qualitative approach based on social perception, developed within the framework of the Social Risk Map of Zaragoza (Spain) research project between 2014-2017. The cartographical analysis shows that the risk of social isolation is not greater unequivocally in the areas currently characterized as vulnerable and reveals the importance of this type of research for city and urban planning activities.

Walking in St. Petersburg—Vienna Walks Continued

Inspired by the bold methodological experiment on auto-ethnography in Vienna (Rhodes et al. Human Arenas, 1, 151–165, 2018), we conducted several walking sessions in St. Petersburg. During the walk, each participant took photos of objects, which attracted his/her attention, and dictated to the voice recorder what he/she was experiencing at this moment. The data allows to expand and supplement the existing ideas about individual differences in the perception of urban spaces, which are based on both the influence of the subject’s past experience and deeper, possibly neurophysiological factors causing these differences. The results we compared with theoretical models of the structure of the image of the world elaborated in Leontiev’s school in context of the activity theory. Among the main results of our work, the participants noted two effects that, being a sort of by-effect of the investigation, turned out to be extremely important and interesting for them. First, the self-reflection of the impressions of the environment turned out to be a means of self-discovery. It brought some new knowledge about oneself, sometimes surprising, helping to reveal something about oneself, which was not obvious before. The second unexpected result was a kind of “therapeutic effect” of our walks, noticed by the participants. The possibility of “mediated” self-discovery while focusing on an informational and emotionally saturated object of reality may have potential as a therapeutic practice.

Importance of Trees with Low-growing Branches and Shrubs in Perception of Urban Spaces

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence of trees with low-growing branches and shrubs on human perception and their preference in large urban spaces. Such a narrow choice of the landscape elements is done in order to prove the hypothesis that trees with low-growing branches and shrubs are perceived as legibility, a type of a refuge that is an essential element of survival in the setting according to environmental psychology. Semi-structured interviews in walk-along mode were used to talk to residents about the ways they saw and enjoyed yards and streets in four residential areas: ‘Agenskalna priedes’, ‘Kengarags’, ‘Zolitude’, ‘Lenina iela’ in Riga. A discursive as well as nonverbal (gestures) analysis of interviews was conducted. The extracted information was compared between two groups of spaces: an open-undefined category of space and an enclosed category of space. The results show that trees with low-growing branches and shrubs have a positive impact on the preference and perception of the size in open-undefined spaces. Whereas the impact on preference of such trees in enclosed spaces is negative or neutral. It can be concluded that trees with low-growing branches and shrubs play a positive role as a legibility element in the space that appears to open and undefined for a human eye since these elements propose safety via better readability of the space. Trees with low-growing branches in the space that is narrow and enclosed also have the role of a legibility element. However, their importance is not the same in such a setting: an enclosed space has well-defined borders, and elements helping to oversee it are redundant.

Light in Nightscape and Perception of Security among Pedestrians, Case Study: Tehran

One of the most important urban areas is street s and intersections that play an important role in shaping the overall identity of a city. The city is defined by the presence of the humans at night and nightlife plus visual sense plays the most important role in the perception of urban space. In addition, most of the things that are received by the sense of sight are with the help of light. Therefore, light and lighting in urban spaces as a non-physical element will have a huge impact on the quality of urban space. The main question in this study is the effects of lighting on the pedestrians’ understanding of the sense of security in Valiasr Street .In this regard, two variables of light color and light intensity are evaluated and considered based on eight hypotheses. To test these hypotheses, the main variables were first investigated and scrutinized. Then, according to the survey conducted, indicators related to the variables were determined and the items were designed. The main data collection tool is the questionnaire and among the pedestrians of Valiasr Street in Tehran that were selected as statistical population, 228 persons were randomly questioned. Due to the discrete nature of variables, a nonparametric function was used for their analysis. Calculation method using Kendall’s correlation analysis was analyzed using SPSS software. The findings show that that the satisfaction rate of light intensity is low, but their satisfaction with the lighting, light color, sense of security, and the ability to recognize faces is assessed averagely. Regarding the light color, people preferred white color to yellow one. The findings in this study suggest that using the white light instead of yellow and increase of light intensity increase the sense of security in pedestrians.

Agency, social space and conflict-urbanism in eastern Congo

ABSTRACTWar, a protracted humanitarian crisis and the omnipresence of an active volcano in eastern Congo's North Kivu province have had a massive impact on the formation of urban social space in Goma. Recent perspectives on urbanity in Africa echo complaints about the ungovernability of mushrooming cities and the appraisal of urban vitality and innovation. Studies that consider and reflect both the agency of the actors and the city as a structured setting are still rare and virtually non-existent in urban and conflict theories. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork since 2008, this actor-centred approach provides insights into Goma's “conflict-urbanism” by examining the particular nexus of roads, rumours and roaming the city. Therefore, this paper identifies how urbanites or more precisely motorcycle taxi drivers (motards) engage in the formation of social space across the city and how dialectically the city is transformed by their practices. In particular, motards connect diverse urban landscapes and social networks while transporting people, goods and information in a fast transforming context. Furthermore, as urban infrastructure, roads provide or restrict access to certain urban areas, are used to transport conflict-related material or information, are spaces of trade and commerce, and their condition is part of everyday communication. This hints at my take on conflict-urbanism which is based on Lefebvre's “production of space” (1974). My contribution interrogates how conflict-cities can be conceptualized through paying attention to urbanites’ imagination of Goma's social space. By investigating the dialectical processes of agency, the different actors’ perceptions of urban space and their impact on the material and social environment, this paper demonstrates how the urban in Goma is lived, conceived and perceived and argues that an ethnography of motards’ everyday lives provides an in-depth local-level analysis of the relationship between urbanization and protracted armed conflict in eastern Congo.

The Value of Urban Parks in Lodz

Abstract An awareness of the role of public space is growing among the inhabitants of cities. This space is an integral part of our daily lives. It consists of places outside the home where we spend free time, i.e. the streets we walk on, the squares and greeneries where we meet, as well as playgrounds, parks and green areas where we rest and do sports. The quality of such space affects many aspects of human life. Positive trends in terms of growing public awareness do not, however, seem to be reflected in the awareness and actions of public entities in Poland, strong evidence of which are the widely criticized amendments of regulations governing the felling of trees. The goal of this article is to present the different dimensions of the value of urban parks, as well as to apply the direct use approach to measure the recreational value of the park system in Lodz. Expressing different aspects of the value of public space, especially parks, in monetary units and incorporating these values in spatial planning analysis can contribute to a significant improvement in the quality of life of urban dwellers and their perception of urban space.

The Conception and Perception of Traditional/Contemporary Urban Space About the City: Theory of Representation vs. Everyday Practices

AbstractIn this essay will be given a great importance to the traditional and contemporary conception and perception of urban space as elements referred to the city. Throughout the analysis, in the level of the contemporary perception of the city, will be presented the theory that insists on the conception and construction of urban space by the practices of everyday life and the so-called strategy of resistance. This refers not only to a new frame of sociology but also to a new methodological approach for the construction of the urban space. Regarding the latter, will be elaborated the thought of Henri Lefebvre and Michael De Certeau as a vector for the explanation of some problems observed in the methodological conception of urban space such as the city of Tirana. Through this approach, we will specifically disclose some problems observed about the use of certain urban spaces. Traditionally, the theory of representation emphasizes a conception of abstract and rational presentation of urban space analyzed from above, giving us an incredibly simplified bureaucratic view of the city. This theory does not analyze specifically micro-urban space and social problems facing the people in this space. Therefore, a new contemporary theory appears as a critique which aims to use a new anti-bureaucratic method that starts from the study of practices of everyday life, using instrumental analysis of the body and micro-social practices to present urban space in the most comprehensive frame.

Urban space and the social control of incivilities: perceptions of space influencing the regulation of anti-social behaviour

Contemporary cities are increasingly governed through space. In this article, we examine how urban space and perceptions thereof can influence the social control in the area of incivilities. To this end, we first inspect the existing literature, in particular the socio-spatial studies that emphasise the importance of culture and values in the interaction with social control. Partly drawing on examples from our previous studies, we suggest that people’s perceptions of urban space (influenced by cultural symbols, social and media representations, aesthetics and other values) affect their perceptions of incivilities, while the latter often determine or at least importantly contribute to the shaping of the social control of incivilities. We further highlight the role of gentrification as a medium and a tool of social control. The paper concludes by discussing implications of this for the possible future, more integrated and interdisciplinary research on the social control of incivilities in the city.

Conquering the City

With the increasing popularity of mobile video games, game designers and developers are starting to integrate geolocation into video games. Popular location-based games such as Ingress or Pokémon Go have millions of users, yet little is known about how the use of such games influences the nature of a user’s interaction with other users and their physical surroundings. To investigate how location-based games are integrated into a player’s daily life, how they influence a player’s mobility through the city, their perception of places and the role of human territoriality in this context, we have developed a location-based mobile multiplayer game called CityConqueror. In this paper, we present CityConqueror and the results of a study, which has focused on participants playing the game over a period of two weeks. The findings show that location-based games can be designed to give the player the illusion of playing in the context of the “real” world rather than a virtual or hybrid game reality. Our findings also suggest that location-based games can have a strong influence on a player’s mobility and perception of urban space and that human territoriality can be expressed through location-based games. Based on our findings we propose a series of design implications for the design of mobile location-based games.

Spatial Practices in Lowliebenhof: The Case of Maphango v Aengus Lifestyle Properties (Pty) Ltd

In Maphango v Aengus Lifestyle Properties (Pty) Ltd 2012 5 BCLR 449 (CC) the question before the Constitutional Court was when a landlord may legally cancel contracts of lease and evict tenants. In answering this question the court had to consider the constitutional protection against arbitrary evictions in section 26(3) and the provisions of the Rental Housing Act 50 of 1999. The applicants sought a declaratory order that the landlord had terminated their leases unlawfully, because the termination had been intended to double (and in some instances more than double) the rent. The applicants argued that this escalation violated contractual and legislative provisions governing the procedure and conditions under which a landlord can increase the amount of a rental. The Constitutional Court found in favour of the tenants and postponed the appeal to allow any of the parties to lodge a complaint at the Gauteng Rental Housing Tribunal. The narrow focus of this note is the manner in which the Constitutional Court in the Maphango case interpreted the concept of "practice" in the Rental Housing Act and how this in turn corresponds to perceptions of urban spaces. The inquiry is informed by the spatial justice turn and relies on the works of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey

Determination of acceptable thermal range in outdoor built environments by various methods

Purpose Assessment of outdoor thermal perception in urban spaces is of particular importance due to its financial, social and ecological consequences. Thermal perception includes four elements: thermal sensation votes (TSV), thermal preference (Tpref), overall thermal comfort (Tc) and thermal acceptability (Taccept). Thermal acceptability can offer a benchmark that specifies the acceptable thermal range (ATR), which is useful for urban planners, designers, and bio-meteorologists. ATR, however, can be defined either using direct or indirect measures. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the validity of the indirect measures of ATR, which are most commonly used in outdoor thermal comfort assessments. Design/methodology/approach This study was conducted in the context of Melbourne, which has an oceanic temperate climate (Cfb). Three sites forming RMIT University City Campus (RUCC) were selected as the case studies, which were located in the heart of Melbourne Central Business District. A field survey was conducted in RUCC during three seasons, from November 2014 (Spring) to May 2015 (Autumn), which consisted of concurrent field measurements and questionnaire surveys from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Findings In total, 1,059 valid questionnaires were collected from the three sites of RUCC. The results of comparative analysis between the different measures of ATR determination showed that the various elements of thermal perceptions expressed the users’ thermal judgements in different ways. Therefore, it was found that the instruction recommended by the thermal comfort standards on the definition of ATR failed to provide an appropriate estimation of ATR for outdoor built environments. The ATR, defined using TSV, therefore, was revised by the direct measure of thermal acceptability. The resulting range showed broader limits in acceptable thermal conditions in RUCC outdoor spaces users. Lastly, the results suggest that in the absence of directly measured acceptability of thermal conditions in field surveys, overall comfort is the most appropriate indirect measure to use. Originality/value Some indoor thermal comfort studies have used the alternatives for defining ATR. However, as the applicability of these four methods is yet to be fully explored in outdoor conditions with large weather variations, it is valuable to conduct a comparative analysis among these methods. This study also intended to understand the dynamics of comfort range under non-steady and non-uniform outdoor conditions. The resultant outcome has provided information on the relationship between different measures of thermal perceptions. Ultimately, this research aimed to explore the extent to which the indirect measures of acceptability are considered as a reliable source of information compared to the direct measure.

El panoptismo de lo cotidiano: Hegemonía de la visión, espacio burgués y patriarcal en la narrativa urbana de la Renaixença

This essay explores the role of vision as a controlling device in the public space of Barcelona according to the Catalan Renaixença fiction published between 1862 and 1888. Through an analysis of the works of Narcís Oller, Joaquim Riera i Bertran, Robert Robert, and Emili Vilanova, we will see how the disciplinary panopticism designed by Jeremy Bentham and analyzed by Michel Foucault is also present in the everyday life of the modern bourgeois city. Catalan Realism and Costumbrism of the period show a special preoccupation for the impact of urban modernization. They both try to expose the way in which the effects of the industrial revolution and the implementation of Ildefons Cerdà’s urban expansion project of Barcelona affected not only the overall perception of urban spaces but also the social practices of citizens in the public space. In particular, this essay tries to demonstrate how urban space is perceived and represented as a visual spectacle which works like a twofold panoptical regime. On the one hand, it allows for the imposition of the new socio-economic values of the emerging bourgeoisie while, at the same time, it perpetuates the traditional patriarchal values by controlling and restricting the access and the mobility of women in the public space.

Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects by Jordan Sand (review)

Reviewed by: Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects by Jordan Sand Sally A. Hastings (bio) Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects. By Jordan Sand. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013. xiv, 208 pages. $75.00, cloth; $34.95, paper. In his acknowledgments, Jordan Sand says that this book on Tokyo began as autobiography and took an anthropological turn before becoming history. He was a student of architecture when he thought of writing autobiography, and this study is above all a history of preservation. Sand aspires to historicize the process by which, in the decades since 1969, the people of Tokyo have rediscovered the history of their city as a distinct place and sought to preserve and record it. Three of his four substantive chapters address the topics included in the subtitle of the book: common spaces, local histories, and found objects. In the fourth, Sand turns from grassroots activities to the leadership of the metropolitan government in the construction of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which opened in 1993. Sand uses “vernacular” as a term of urban analysis to refer to “a language of form, space, and sensation shaped by the local history of habitation” (p. 2). The traits he identifies as Tokyo’s vernacular include small lots, construction in wood, and low-rise buildings. The vernacular city stands in contrast to elements of the city intended to be monuments to the nation. He argues that vernacular urbanism in Tokyo is primarily a reaction to the postwar nation that staged the 1964 Olympics and the World Exposition in Osaka in 1970 rather than to the imperial state that built the Diet Building. Sand contrasts citizen engagement in preservation not only to state monumentalism but also to the monumental form taken by the mass demonstrations that culminated in Anpo 1960. Complicating the standard narrative of postwar economic growth, Sand draws attention to the dematerialization of wealth since 1971, linking floating currencies to real estate speculation, the decline of manufacturing, and the transformation of the Tokyo landscape from low-rise wooden construction to a landscape dominated by high-rise office buildings made of inorganic materials. Such changes were, of course, characteristic of economies worldwide. Sand is equally aware that the preservationist movements he documents in Tokyo were part of a worldwide enthusiasm for public history. While preservation was often populist, “heritage became part of a global industry” (p. 1). In his chapter on commons, Sand treats the protests of the late 1960s in the plaza at the west exit of Shinjuku Station as different in nature from the Hibiya Riots of 1905, the May Day demonstrations of the occupation era, [End Page 163] and Anpo, all of which addressed national issues and occurred on state-owned property where permits were required. What distinguished the Saturday evening antiwar gatherings staged by the activist group Beheiren and others was that they were built around interaction among strangers. Sand suggests that the participants were claiming “the common right of access to open space by virtue of being an inhabitant of the city” (p. 38). Whereas Hibiya Park, the plaza in front of the Imperial Palace, and the grounds of the National Diet Building, the sites of earlier mass protests, were all spaces indisputably owned by the state, the Shinjuku West Exit Underground Plaza was designed by the sponsoring transport companies to facilitate movement through the space. In contrast to the regimented marches of political protests, the actions of the “folk guerillas” who opposed the Vietnam War were carnivalesque. The playful free exchange of ideas stimulated by the folk guerillas ended on May 28, 1969, when the Metropolitan Police changed the signage at the West Exit of Shinjuku Station, substituting the word thoroughfare for plaza and thus justifying the removal of the demonstrators for impeding the flow of office workers necessary for Japanese capitalism. Sand is attentive not only to what citizens did in common places but also to how historians, architects, urban theorists, and other intellectuals thought about such spaces. He asserts that both the spontaneous nature of the demonstrations at Shinjuku and the expulsion of the protesters in 1969 affected “perceptions of urban space and what citizens could do with it...

Local materials in the regeneration of urban space of the historic centre of the Metropolitan City of Naples

The contribution is part of the studies conducted by the Urban Planning Board, Land Management, Environment Laboratory for the “metropolitan city” and the Big Project “Historic centre of Naples, enhancement of the UNESCO site”. Among the issues under discussion, very important for the 92 municipalities of the Metropolitan City, is the preservation of different urban identities which, although united administratively, are claiming their own cultural profile rooted in the urban space, in the architecture of places and in local resources. The work is based on the principle that the use of local resources affects the quality and perception of urban space and, as evidence of belonging to the place, it is necessary to deal its exploitation under sustainable auspices.

Społeczna percepcja przestrzeni w mieście o wielokulturowej przeszłości. Przykład Białegostoku

Społeczna percepcja przestrzeni w mieście o wielokulturowej przeszłości. Przykład Białegostoku

Bipolar antagonism and multipolar coexistence: framing difference and shaping fear in two Caribbean cities

This article proposes a new approach to urban geographies of fear, focusing on the connection between fear and cultural understandings and representations of difference. Much of the existing work on the relationship between fear, urban space, and social difference tends to take social difference as more or less given. In this article, we argue that how differences (such as ethnic, political or class differences) are framed has strong implications for geographies of fear. The article suggests that dualistic and nondualistic framings of difference influence levels of fear and that this becomes visible in the use and perceptions of urban space, and in the built environment through the erection of physical barriers. These spatial factors, as they limit mobility and interaction, tend to reproduce the specific framing of difference. Two discursive modes of representing difference are discussed. The first, ‘bipolar antagonism’, is based on a dualist rhetoric of irreconcilable opposites. This is contrasted with ‘multipolar co-existence’, in which social categories are understood as multiple or hybrid, with flexible or fluid boundaries, and as not necessarily antagonistic. This argument is elaborated through a comparative analysis of social–cultural and spatial processes in two Caribbean cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and Paramaribo, Suriname.