Reconstruction Of Urban Space Research Articles

The re-construction of urban space in the place between art and architecture: Selected paradigms of in situ art of the period 1950–2000


 This study investigates in situ art of recent art history and its potential regarding the reconstruction of public space and its meanings. Paradigms of art and architecture conjugation in site specific interventions are examined with a view to answer questions such as the transformative role art can play when it constitutes a plastic phenomenon functioning in a complementary or reactive way as a part of the urban and social space. In situ’s art sculptural objects, due to their transitional form, serve as metaphors for space and time and their condition of constant change in the everyday life of the city. They constitute a physical input in the urban space that seeks to redefine its material boundaries and highlight the interaction between the individual and the city seen as an incomplete entity in a constant re-casting. Through the practice of repetition and movement, sculptural objects are put in dialogue with the objects we come into contact daily, taking part into a new aesthetic reality. It is about a process of re-configurating of the everyday aesthetics of the city, challenging the relationship between art and architecture and thus offering new modes of spatialisation. By examining specific paradigms from the in situ art of the second half of the twentieth century (e.g. Aldo Van Eyck, Daniel Buren, Rachel Whiteread), this paper, seeks to unveil the process of activating the coexistence of the visible and the invisible, the inside and the outside, the private and the collective that this specific artistic process offers in material terms. The main question that this paper seeks to answer is how in situ art- e specially when oscillating between art and architecture- affect the everyday flow of the undifferentiated space and time? How does it shape the coexistence and interaction between city’s objects and subjects? Which alternative – discursive – reality does it offer?

КОМПЛЕКСНИЙ АНАЛІЗ ТА ОЦІНКА ТЕРИТОРІЙ МІСТА ЯК ПЕРШОЧЕРГОВЕ ВИЗНАЧЕННЯ ПОТРЕБ ДЛЯ ФОРМУВАННЯ КОМФОРТНОГО ТА БЕЗПЕЧНОГО МІСЬКОГО ПРОСТОРУ

The formation of urban space that is comfortable and safe for its users is the highest goal of modern urban planning science. After analysing existing planning practices, it was found that the primary prerequisite for the formation of urban space is to determine the needs of the area, which are established after comprehensive analyses and assessment of the territories. The needs determine the direction of their development. This paper reviews the existing methods of analysis and assessment of territories and identifies their characteristic features that require analysis and assessment to establish clearer actions to improve the space. This article investigates the issue of comprehensive analysis and assessment of urban areas and their impact on the formation, reform and reconstruction of urban space. The purpose of this study was to systematize knowledge on the analysis and assessment of urban areas. Based on the identified problems, the prerequisites for the formation of a comfortable urban space for all levels of needs of its residents and users are established. In a modern city, many processes take place simultaneously, which affect the functional division of territories in accordance with the dominant activities on them. Formulating clear urban planning tasks helps to: preserve the positive and change the negative characteristics of urban space, take into account the views of local residents and space users, analyse investment opportunities, primarily to understand the material prospects of the area. A comprehensive analysis and assessment of the city's territories allows identifying problems or conflict situations in the urban space that negatively affect its functioning, development and comfort. Usually, the definition of city comfort is defined as a separate assessment criterion, but in the author's opinion, it is the formation of a comfortable urban space that is the main task for urbanists, which includes many criteria that ensure the safety, environmental friendliness, identity and modernity of the space in accordance with the needs of the local community. As a result of the research, it was found that supplementing the existing practices and methods of analyzing and assessing urban space in accordance with the current needs of urban planning would allow for a better and more relevant formation of the urban space that is needed by the resident and its user.

Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870. By Esther Da Costa Meyer

Drawing on a rich collection of archival materials, photographs, illustrations, newspaper reports, memoirs, and literary sources, Esther da Costa Meyer asks: ‘How […] can one do justice to the terrifying complexity of the urban transformation of Second Empire Paris — a city that, like all others, does not exist outside representations and thus exceeds any single author or methodology?’ (p. 9). The book’s striking cover hints at its critical approach. Eugène Moreau’s illustration of Paris’s new Boulevard de la Reine Hortense, embellished with gardens and fountains, is juxtaposed with detail taken from Félix Thorigny’s 1858 depiction of demolitions on the Left Bank. While urban reform in nineteenth-century Paris is often examined for its effects on dichotomized social and political categories (men/women; the affluent/ the proletariat; those living in the centre/ those displaced to the periphery; municipal authority/ the private sector), da Costa Meyer’s extensive study approaches Haussmannization as an act of ‘tense syncretism’ (p. 305), in which multiple identities, perspectives, and cultures are to be understood in relation to each other. Venturing beyond a focus on individual Parisian monuments and biographical scholarship, da Costa Meyer considers the dynamic interactions of class, age, gender, national origin, and language in the reconstruction of urban space. The book’s scope is vast, with urban renewal analysed in the context of saturation, revolutions, and epidemics in the first chapter alone. While the needs of the bourgeoisie are presented as one of the major driving forces of Paris’s transformation and the effects of segregation and marginalization are clearly underlined throughout, the book points to the need to avoid totalizing views and binaries if we are to apprehend the complex consequences of Haussmann’s reforms. Thus, working women, who often took jobs as domestic servants in the affluent western half of Paris, were ‘more highly sought where they were most poorly represented’ (p. 103), while those economically displaced to the periphery were nonetheless some of the most active participants in the physical construction of the new city. One of the most significant aspects of the study is the attention it devotes to the relationship between urban reform and geopolitics: imported works of colonial art in Parisian museums, new parks filled with exotic plants from across France’s empire, migrant labour, and the quelling of insurrection by the généraux africains are all discussed comprehensively, as is the annexation of Paris’s peripheral communities, itself a ‘brutal act of colonization’ (p. 305). Da Costa Meyer persuasively argues that if the renewal of Paris is to be understood in relation to the Second Empire, the very influences that shape and underpin it simultaneously undermine Eurocentric myths about the city’s status as ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ or ‘capital of modernity’. This landmark book, brimming with detailed analyses (and over 300 references in some chapters), is also an aesthetically pleasing one, containing 60 colour and 115 black-and-white illustrations. It offers a perceptive reassessment of the effects of urban reform in Second Empire Paris by bringing into dialogue a multiplicity of perspectives and voices, many of which have been overlooked until now.

Urban Communication Strategy Based on Short Video Platform: A Case Study of TikTok

The concept of urban communication bred in the new media era takes short video platforms as the vehicle for emerging Internet-famous cities. The internal relationship between the communication strategy and development orientation of urban communication and the image practice and performance space of short videos is worth studying. Taking Chongqing and Xi’an as the research objects, this paper explores the operation mode and communication concept of urban space in the new media era from the perspectives of communication origin, user participation, and in-depth communication. The research shows that the advent of mobile short-video platforms offers a new vehicle and channel for the communication and reconstruction of urban space and enriches the audience’s cognition of city images.

Encountering Everyday Racist Practices: Sociospatial Negotiations of Immigrant Settlement in Athens, Greece

AbstractThis article delineates the ways in which the context of institutional and non‐institutional racist practices, legitimated by the rise of extreme right‐wing populism and racism, affects immigrants’ everyday lives in Athens, Greece. In this research, I explored the transformations of immigrants’ settlement trajectories, coping strategies and tactics, and their bodily interactions when encountering racist violence at the local level, through extensive fieldwork in two case study areas in metropolitan Athens—Omonia and Nikaia. The article is based on previous work on encounters with difference and everyday racism, with the aim of contributing to existing scholarship by examining urban encounters with manifestations of racism in the form of violent practices, which are on a rise not only as exceptional but also as everyday lived events. I demonstrate how immigrants’ encounters with police raids and patrols, and with racist violence perpetrated by neo‐Nazi militias, transform immigrants’ daily lives in the city at the micro‐scale. These encounters have an impact not only on immigrants’ social relationships, strategies and tactics of settlement, but also on the reconstruction of urban space. My argument is that urban encounter remains an open and dynamic field for negotiation of interethnic cohabitation, as it produces both violent confrontations and sociospatial embodied opportunities for coexistence.

HISTORICAL ELECTRONIC RESOURCES FOR STUDYING THE SOCIAL TOPOGRAPHY OF SIBERIAN CITIES AT THE END OF XIX — THE BEGINNINGS XX CENTURIES (SPECIAL ASPECTS OF THE CREATION AND THE USE)

Creating historical Internet resources, databases and informational systems, which are available to a wide user community in on-line mode, is one of the relevant directions of modern historical research. The use of spatial analysis to study the social topography of Siberian cities at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries based on the geographic information system created on the NextGISWeb platform is especially relevant due to the contemplation of creating an information system, containing a various body of data, which are presented as an open user resource with the use of a Web-GIS platform and availabled to a wide circle of researchers. The main source of this study are one of the most complete and representative collections of census forms of the Tobolsk Governorate cities, kept in the State Archives of Tobolsk city, the Tyumen Region (GATO). The types and structure of the census forms formed the basis of the created database, which has an analogous structure with the census forms. Working with maps and city plans, which act as sources for creating a base map and include not only digitizing the source map, but also attracting additional materials containing a description of the infrastructure and urban areas, which involves a broad analytical effort, which is not transfer of information from historical maps to the digital environment, but reconstruction of urban space. The integrated approach and the use of all possible sources allow to achieve the maximum possible effect of the reconstructed space of the urban environment.

Reconstruction of Urban Space and Changes of Urban Governance in China: From Work-Unit to Communities

Reconstruction of Urban Space and Changes of Urban Governance in China: From Work-Unit to Communities

Water supply and the reconstruction of urban space in early twentieth-century Tianjin

ABSTRACT:The emergence of tap water supplied through water grids changed the spatial structure of cities. As a commercial port containing foreign settlements and divided urban political systems, Tianjin became host to two major, long-term water supply systems. Different social environments and systems of municipal government meant that tap water was accepted by urban society in different ways. In the settlements, the supply of tap water was the foundation for the formation of a modern community. In the Old City, the introduction of tap water for the most part had a different effect: it manifested the ways in which traditional and new lifestyles conflicted and mingled with each other. Yet, in any case, as tap water entered the lives of the people from the end of the Qing to the Republican period, new ideas of health and hygiene associated with tap water were gradually accepted, and modern urban lifestyles gradually took shape.

Production, Creative Firms and Urban Space in Shanghai

This paper examines the firms in Shanghai’s official “Creative Industry Clusters (CICs)”. It aims to contribute to the creative city debate by unveiling the relationships between the production of new economy firms and the reconstruction of urban space in the Chinese context. Based on questionnaire surveys conducted in 2009, the paper finds that Shanghai’s creative firms are new, small and flexible and this image conforms to the prototypical “creative firms” described in widely cited Western literature. The paper argues that Shanghai’s CICs represent a market- oriented, fluid, and risk-taking production culture that is a break from the city’s socialist past. However, Shanghai’s new economy spaces in the making are faced with many constraints and contradictions. On the one hand, although market and neoliberalized urban spaces are providing critical resources for firms to grow at a time of state retreat, they also imposes risks, such as career instability, confusion for creative talents and cost pressure for new firms. On the other hand, the state’s ideological control reinforces the market’s homogenizing effect on cultural production. Therefore, Shanghai’s trajectory toward greater innovation and creativity are far from guaranteed despite fast proliferation of creative clusters in the city in the past decade.

Actually existing neoliberalism in Glasgow: the case of Buchanan Galleries

A number of scholars have drawn attention to neoliberalism to describe and theorize the ongoing deconstruction and reconstruction of urban space. While this has widened the interest in neoliberalism, such discussions have also deepened its problematic through a number of conceptual variations – including neoliberal, neoliberalized and neoliberalization. This paper will focus on one such variation in actually existing neoliberalism to emphasize the contentious and volatile nature of retailing in the in the west of Scotland. As part of Glasgow's retail-led regeneration, the concepts of ‘path dependency’ and ‘creative destruction’ are used to give a focus to the Buchanan Galleries case study. It is shown that neoliberalism's demand for more space has served to further intensify intra-regional competition between Glasgow and its surrounding hinterland. In conclusion, I then offer some critical reflections for future research.

Study on Reconstruction of Urban Space and Development of Residential Area about Suzhou, Modern Times

Study on Reconstruction of Urban Space and Development of Residential Area about Suzhou, Modern Times

Study on Reconstruction of Urban Space and Development of Residential Area about Suzhou, Modern Times

Study on Reconstruction of Urban Space and Development of Residential Area about Suzhou, Modern Times

The Material and Visual Cultures of Cities

The author adapts Lefebvre's (1991) triadic theorisation of the production of space to the study of objects and ways of seeing in cities. Governmental power is condensed in monuments, planning, mapping, and film; capital organises the spaces and events of the city through the circulation of commodities and the destruction and reconstruction of urban space. Local cultures of consumption on one hand and spectacular events on the other shape the lived experience of the urban. In tracing the history and networks of things and images, the article unravels the reification and fetishisation of urban life that would hide the power relations that structure everyday life within the glittering spectacle of the commodity or the smooth veneer of the monument.

Ciudad de memoria: imaginario urbano una de clases en la obra de Bias de Otero

Using some of Blas de Otero's texts as a starting point, this article suggests interpreting urban space as the setting where the history of the conflict of social classes during its final stages takes place. Bilbao, as a model of Otero's urban imaginary, thus appears as a space that in its distribution evokes a sociological map of the modern city, in its inner conflict with late capitalist development, which Blas de Otero portrays to perfection. Through memory, the reconstruction of urban space evoked by the poetic subject serves to deconstruct the ideology of the financial bourgeoisie, holder of social power using pharisaic ethics founded on hypocrisy. The utopian construction of urban space transforms Bilbao into the emblem of a future city, a space of miscegenation that crosses class barriers, where the industrial proletariat has created a true democratic society that moves forward towards a liberating Utopia by means of community in work. At the same time, urban space becomes the space of heteroglossia, of which Blas de Otero's poetry gives evidence.Bilbao thus becomes a multifaceted symbol in Otero's poetry, the materialization of an ideological conception rooted in Marxism and willing to unveil itself. The urban geography of Bilbao, with its strict social distribution, offers the poet a perfect map where he can project the ideological conflict of the different social classes from the period between the wars until the last stages of the capitalist economic development promoted under Franco.

Spatialisation of Power/Knowledge/Discourse

This study focuses on the problem of the reconstruction of urban space through discursive representations. Understanding how discourse is spatialised will provide a conceptual ground for the discussion of the problem. The evaluation of knowledge, power, and representation in spatial terms becomes the fundamental premise in the study. Urban space is the space where discursive representations have a social and spatial existence. Here, urban space is approached as an archival space that renders spatial-social-political information visible. The problem is studied in reference to the Sultanahmet district in Istanbul. The Sultanahmet district is an urban palimpset whose archival structure has been made through discursive representations, each constructed on the proceding one.