Unified City Research Articles

Финансовые аспекты развития Саратовской агломерации

Introduction. The issue of financial support for the development of urban agglomerations is one of the most relevant, since the timeliness and completeness of the integration processes financing largely determine the success in achieving the goals of creating agglomerations. Of particular importance is the budgetary and tax integration of local territories included in the single agglomeration space, since the current legislation establishes significant independence of local authorities in the formation of local budgets. Theoretical analysis. The article analyzes the approaches and processes used to include new rural areas in the already established system of urban agglomeration management using the example of the creation of “Greater Saratov” as part of the Saratov urban agglomeration. Legal and economic factors hindering the development of the agglomeration are identified. The features of the unified city budget formation and the budgetary powers of rural administrations as part of the agglomeration are studied. The problems of local taxation differentiation, taking into account the differences between rural and urban areas, are considered. Discussion of results. The study of the rural and urban areas integration features into a single socio-economic system revealed the advantages and problems of creating a unified budgetary and tax system in the agglomeration. The analysis carried out made it possible to substantiate measures for the urban agglomeration development, in terms of improving taxation and the budgetary process on its territory.

List of essential public healthcare functions as a basis for analysis and evaluation of the public health system in a city

Introduction. The World Health Assembly in resolution WHA69.1 defined the essential public health operations (EPHO) as the most cost-effective, comprehensive and sustainable ways of improving population health and reducing the burden of disease. In recent years Russia has been actively working to introduce a system for motivating people to lead healthy lifestyles into the medical prevention system. A special place is given to the regions. Moscow as an independent region of the Russian Federation has a great potential in this field. However, for the effectiveness of health system planning and public health promotion measures at the national, regional and municipal levels, more clarity is needed on the issue of EPHOs. Objectives. To study the main characteristics of EPHO list and results of its application in the countries of the world as a tool of public health system construction on the level of a city. Materials and methods. A content analysis of World Health Organization documents, scientific publications of foreign and domestic authors, country reports on the development of EPHOs lists and evaluation of POPs implementation was performed. Results. The list of EPHOs varies from country to country because of different national priorities, demographics, financial resources, etc. The European Region's list of ten EPHOs describes elements inside and outside the public health system. The list of EPHOs is used as a tool for analyzing public health systems or organizations at the national and local level. Discussion. More conceptual clarity is needed for public health systems planning and public health advocacy, as well as adaptation of the EPHO assessment tool to the context of Moscow. Conclusion. The structure of the EPHOs list included in the instrument of WHO Regional Office for Europe can reflect the public health landscape in Moscow and be used as a tool for investigation of public health systems or organizations at the city level and can contribute to the elaboration of the unified city public health policy and establishment of integrated public health services.

Can the internet reshape the national city size distribution? Cross‐country evidence

AbstractThis paper examines the effect of the internet on city size distribution at a global level based on city identification in nearly 100 countries. The results show that the internet first promotes the decentralization of the national city size distribution and then promotes the concentration with an increase in the internet penetration rate. These results differ from those found in the existing literature and help deepen the understanding of the internet's impact on city size distribution by providing new evidence with more reliable data and unified city definitions. The findings also have important policy implications for predicting population distribution and planning human habitations at the national level.

SPATIAL ENTRAPMENT OF WOMEN WORKERS IN METROPOLITAN AREAS

Intercity integration in a metropolitan area forms a unified city that is interconnected like a mutualism symbiosis. Metropolitan areas provide opportunities for people between regions or between cities to connect with each other by doing non-permanent mobility. The purpose of this study is to identify how much potentially women are trapped spatially than men in some metropolitan areas in Indonesia. Spatial entrapment is a condition that is more common in women who trip in shorter distance and times during commuting between place of residence and place of work. This study uses micro data from the 2018 national labor force survey (SAKERNAS), which the survey was conducted by Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS). The research approach is quantitative by using descriptive analysis to see the relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable through bivariate cross tabulation analysis and graphics. Then, inferential analysis is used to determine the effect of independent variables on dependent variables inferentially. The inferential analysis model used in this study is multinomial logistics regression. The results show variables that influence the spatial entrapment of women workers are wage, work statues, and mode of transportation.

Programs implementation prospects for the large city territories development in Russia: institutional aspect

The article shows that the development of large cities as centers and locomotives of economic growth requires efficient use of urban areas, ensuring their sustainable and balanced development. This necessitates improving the institutional framework and methodology for spatial planning. The authors note that the functioning of the institutions on which the rational land use in large cities depends does not meet modern requirements, primarily in the field of integrated sustainable territorial development (ISTD). The article analyzes the experience of St. Petersburg in the urban areas‘ development aspect, which made it possible to identify the main problems, including the lack of public consensus on the choice of territories for the programs‘ implementation. ISTD and insufficiently active participation of the city in the implementation of these programs, especially in terms of engineering infrastructure Preparation. Analysis of literature and practice in the study area showed the need to improve the mechanism for the formation and implementation of programs for the territorial development in large cities, the development of real estate market institutions, rules and regulations related to ISTD. The article presents the recommendations of the authors, to a certain extent filling the existing gaps. The author‘s definition of the “depressed territory” concept is proposed (to solve the problem of choosing the territories for ISTD), substantiated the need to form a unified city program for ISTD project development with their introduction into the General Plan of the city development, as well as the use of the economic-spatial model of the developed territory to determine the possible effect of its development and the costs necessary to obtain it. The article proposes a unified methodological basis for the territorial development programs‘ formation and implementation. The recommended methodological approach is aimed at improving the analysis and assessment quality oof development programs for the territories in a megapolis, at ensuring the effective use of urban land.

Multi-LOD seismic-damage simulation of urban buildings and case study in Beijing CBD

A multiple level-of-detail (LOD) simulation framework is proposed in this study, to take full consideration of the diversity of structural types, available data, and simulation scenarios in an actual application of seismic-damage simulation to urban buildings. Firstly, key features of the frequently used seismic simulation methods for buildings are discussed, and logical relationships of these simulation methods, as well as the available multi-source data, are established in different LODs. Secondly, implementation of the proposed multi-LOD simulation framework is presented, and a unified city data structure is proposed to enable effective management and storage of data with different LODs. Finally, the Beijing central business district, which has various types of buildings, is investigated in detail to demonstrate the proposed multi-LOD framework. The accuracy, efficiency, and corresponding requirements of different LOD simulations are compared and discussed. The outcomes of this work are expected to provide a useful reference for the application of seismic-damage simulations in complex urban areas.

Brasília: Life Beyond Utopia

Brasília is renowned the world over for its realisation of a visionary Modernist plan, designed by Brazilian architect and planner Lúcio Costa (1902–98). The reality of the city's design and its development, as explained by architect, author and academic researcher Thomas Deckker, is, however, much more complex. Contrary to public perception, Brasília falls a long way short of being ‘a unified city’, though it is one that has prospered with a growing population and stronger economy than other Brazilian cities.

농촌체험관광마을의 실태조사를 통한 활성화 방안 - 통합 청주시를 중심으로-

In this study the location condition and the management of the Rural Experience Tourism Villages located around unified Cheongju city has been surveyed or investigated. On the basis of the results of the survey or investigation this study is to suggest a way to make activate the Rural Experience Tourism Villages which have been inactive. The ways of the research include the understanding of what means the activation of rural areas and then this study is to find the problems with the Rural Experience Tourism Villages and to suggest final ways or plans after the field investigation of the condition of the location and management of the Villages. In this study I had full understanding of the concept of the activation for rural areas and the humanistic and geographical characteristics and then made a wide investigation and analysis of the location condition and the management of the Rural Experience Tourism Villages in this area. Based on the theory and the results of the actual investigation I made a suggestion of basic direction for the improvement of the Villages and the ways for activation of the Villages. I really expect these suggestions of mine to make active contribution to make the actual plan through the promotion of the Rural Experience Tourism Villages.

Politics, infrastructure and representation: The case of Jerusalem’s Light Rail

This article will focus on the official representation of the Jerusalem Light Rail in the public discourse. We argue that the implementation of the Light Rail was and is entangled with discourses that portray it as a neutral, modern and efficient means of transportation for Jerusalem as a “metropolis”, legitimizing the connection between the West of the city and the East, creating facts on the ground against the background of a controversial territorial and political situation. Drawing on Lefebvre’s theory on social space and our own field research in Jerusalem, we seek to analyze how the official representation of the Light Rail became part of its political and territorial legitimation. We will look in particular at the way symbols and signs are used to connect the Light Rail to a wider discourse of Jerusalem as a modern “metropolitan” unified city, offering easy transportation, leisure and lifestyle to all its citizens. Thus, the representation of a highly contested city is at stake.

Feasibility of Building Information Models for 3D Cadastre in Unified City Models

The current cadastral systems are usually based on a 2D parcel maps and land registries having references to different documents. In many countries, the parcel maps, as well as the registries and referenced documents, are represented digitally. The 3D cadastral systems have usually a similar approach, where the descriptions of the 3D components are represented by drawings in PDF format. This article focuses on creating the 3D geometries corresponding to 3D property based on existing 3D building models. The article investigates shortages of IFC and CityGML, the most prominent semantic building models for representation of BIM and geospatial models respectively, as well as a unified building model (UBM) that was developed earlier for modelling complete and real 3D cadastre information system. The result shows that IFC, CityGML, nor the UBM has capabilities for such tasks. The article proposes an extension to the UBM in adding different subtypes to the boundary surfaces above and underground. The extended UBM is then implemented in a case study of a hospital building in Sweden. The implementation shows that by adding the four subtypes “Building Elements Surfaces,” “Digging Surfaces,” “Protecting Area Surfaces,” and “Real Estate Boundary Surfaces” of boundary surfaces, it has become possible to model all the needed surfaces that define 3D cadastral information of a building.

Review: Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic, 1970–1990 by Florian Urban

Florian Urban. Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic, 1970–1990 . Farnham, England, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2009, x + 294 pp., 94 b/w illus., and 3 diagrams. $124.95, ISBN 9780754676164 For most of its existence, the German Democratic Republic was committed to mass-produced housing, pragmatic modernism, and socialist universalism. Having built a sea of prefab high-rises and slabs, during the 1970s the government turned to neohistorical architecture and the renovation of historical neighborhoods, especially in the capital, Berlin. In Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic, 1970–1990 , Florian Urban offers the first systematic exploration of this paradox.1 The explanation, he suggests, lies in a mixture of pragmatism, provisional decisions that were later amplified into lasting policy, and shifting cultural attitudes. The paradox might have been only apparent, as Urban argues that neohistoricism was not always antipodal to modernism. What Urban calls neohistorical architecture comprises refurbishment, reconstruction, and new structures. His examples are showcase projects located in the center of the city, all somehow exceptional: spaces aimed at tourism, or at representing the GDR to an international public, or located in areas famous for their vibrant alternative culture. The resulting buildings and neighborhoods do not necessarily abide by visual or material authenticity, but rather evoke a “historical character” or “feel” through the use of past architectural forms and the staging of history “in period shops and restaurants”(74). The most notorious example is the Nikolaiviertel, a patch of winding streets and old-looking buildings, which Urban calls a “prefab old town” in reference to the concrete plates used in a large portion of the reconstruction. The area was at the heart of medieval Berlin, but most of it lay in ruins in the postwar era—including the Nikolaikirche, one of Berlin’s oldest structures. The Nikolaiviertel’s central location and history made it attractive to the GDR government not only as a site for tourism, but also to boost claims to German national …

Berlin: Stadt in Planung und im Wandel

Berlin has always been a city in a process of change. Since the reunification, however, the transition has gained pace. Berlin has reclaimed the status of the German capital city and become a target of international direct investment. Despite prestigous developments such as the Potsdamer Platz or the new central station brought forth in the earlier years after re-unification, the economics recovery has not gained strength until recently. The historic center has re-established itself as the center of the unified city while at the same time, the City West, despite several ups and downs, is thriving. The new international major airport is finally close to completion. Not least, the city has become a research lab for e-mobility and a center of IT and creative industries. At the same time the economic recovery has started to eliminate excess supply of space, which was characteristic for the city over the recent decades, giving rise to affordability concerns and social conflicts. This city tour introduces into the tensions between ambitions and anxieties of planners and residents that are associated with the ongoing transition.

GeoScope: Full 3D geospatial information system case study

Aiming at the integrative management and comprehensive applications of large-scale 3D geospatial information covering the full 3D space of a city, this paper briefly introduces the design and implementation of a full 3D GIS platform: GeoScope, which provides a professional solution for the massive full three-dimensional geospatial data integration, management, analysis, visualization, and applications. GeoScope is characterized by: (1) extendible software architecture based on the hierarchical message bus, facilitates multimodal integrative applications of 2D GIS and 3D GIS; (2) unified 3D city models, support multiscale semantic representation of outdoor & indoor and aboveground & underground 3D objects; (3) high-efficient 3D geospatial database engine, supports integrated management of massive 3D geospatial data for real-time applications; and (4) high-performance visualization engine exploiting the massively parallel computation architecture of modern GPUs, supports real-time realistic rendering of large-scale complicated 3D geospatial environments. The successful pilot application of GeoScope is also illustrated with the 3D city models of 8494 km2 of the whole Wuhan City, the largest city in middle China.

The Project of Unified City Library Network Foundation in Pre-revolutionary Petrograd

The article describes a project of the unified city library system creation in Petersburg-Petrograd (1914—1915) based on the transformation of the city reading hall libraries existing at that time and belonging to the City Government, split-off of the children’s libraries and creation of the central city library.

MAKING THE DIVIDED CITY WHOLE: MAINSTREAMING GENDER INTO PLANNING IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

Women have long identified the problems that they encounter in seeking to combine their home and work roles, in cities divided by traditional land-use zoning. This paper draws on work for the British Royal Town Planning Institute on mainstreaming gender considerations into spatial planning, including the creation of a ‘Toolkit’ to do so, along with research on accessible city centres. City-wide transport policies are examined, along with race equality and local accessibility issues. It is argued that promoting mixed land-uses, higher densities, and less car use, can be as problematic for women as old fashioned zoning. This is because policy-makers still hold a divided world view, in which women's needs are secondary to public realm considerations. It is concluded that gender considerations must overarch and crosscut all spatial policy-making, however above reproach, in order to create a unified city that meets the needs of everyone.

Molding the History of a Maritime Empire: The Role of the Thirteenth‐century Mosaics of San Marco in Reforming the Venetian Past

The mosaics of the Venetian Church of San Marco embody how this empire used imagery for political and ecclesiastical purposes. The church of San Marco is recognized as a force which drew the island fragments of primitive Venice into a unified city and empire. This paper will examine the thirteenth-century mosaics by analyzing a variety of factors in the visual environment and the iconography of the mosaics themselves. First, I will examine briefly the nature medieval visuality and the previous architectural and artistic tradition within San Marco, moving then to analysis of the mosaics of the Old Testament cycle, the methods of transfer, and the model from which they were made. Next, I will explore the mosaics of the Cappella Zen and the South Transept as they pertain to the legend of Saint Mark. Last, I will present the historical context of the imagery in thirteenth-century Venice as well as the history of imitation and appropriation at San Marco. Finally, I will examine as a part of the historical context the medieval concept of time and history within the thirteenth-century environment, how it continues with and departs from prior traditions, and what this illustrates about the mosaics and the use of time and historical memory. Faculty Mentor: Anne McClanan

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

The apartheid city is typically touted as a negative role model for urban planners in other parts of the world, largely because of the fragmentation that apartheid social engineering imposed on the lives of urban residents. Under apartheid, the lines of fragmentation were forcibly racialized. This institutionalised racialization has been demolished, while other sites of splintering remain. Yet the aspiration to a wholly unified and orderly city is not necessarily desirable, or attainable. This article argues, somewhat controversially, that the persistent legacy of fragmentation which marked the apartheid city offers unforeseen opportunities to those who live in the cities now and are engaged in daily struggles for survival and mobility. Ironically, such multiple and discrepant orders of urban life can be seen to characterize, increasingly, many cities around the world today.

Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. By Engin F. Isin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 384p. $62.95 cloth, $24.95 paper

Over the course of the past year, we have had many opportunities to reflect on the nature of citizenship. Defining and contesting citizenship is a high-stakes enterprise, and in light of the current climate, Engin F. Isin's Being Political is a timely intervention into these debates. It is a series of genealogies that describe citizenship as alterity in cities, chronologically spanning urban spaces from the Athenian polis through the present-day cosmopolis. Taking his methodological cue from Michel Foucault, Isin's genealogies seek to break up the continuous narratives of citizenship imagined by the victors of history—that democratic citizenship in the United States, for example, is the direct descendant of Athenian democracy—and reveal the disparate forms that citizenship and its others have taken over time. By exposing these discontinuous narratives of citizenship, Isin demonstrates how the fiction of the unified city serves the interests of dominant groups by suppressing the agonistic character of this space.

Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (review)

Reviewed by: Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City Thomas A. Idinopulos Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City, by Bernard Wasserstein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. 412 pp. $29.95. After conquering the Arab-populated eastern half of the city in 1967, and reuniting Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, and ostensibly setting forth to practice peaceful co- existence with the more than half-million Arab Jerusalemites living for the first time under a Jewish government, the Israeli government has left a sad and sorry record of the treatment of Arab Jerusalemites from 1967 to the present day. [End Page 181] Begin with the confiscation of Arab-owned lands which provided the territory for the construction of a number of massive exclusively Jewish high-rise apartment complexes that today ring East Jerusalem. The complexes effectively shut off Arabs living in the city from Arab villages and towns that neighbor the city. In addition to fragmenting Arab living space, the complexes made an important political statement: With Jews inhabiting apartment buildings on the edges of east Jerusalem, a demographic argument is provided against any future proposal to re-divide Jerusalem between predominantly Jewish- inhabited West Jerusalem and the Arab-populated eastern half of the city. The government-funded confiscations and constructions were thus meant to bolster the extension of Israeli sovereignty to the Arab-populated half of the city. The annexation of East Jerusalem in June 1967 was received joyously by Israelis, who also cheered the demolition of the ugly concrete wall which the government of Jordan had built to keep Israelis and Arabs from moving freely about the city. But whatever new freedoms Arabs enjoyed under the Israeli-governed “unified” city, they were more than offset by unexpected losses. Beyond the land confiscations, Arabs found themselves combating a government effort to impose an Israeli school curriculum on their school children. Arab Jerusalemites consistently refused to participate as voters and candidates in municipal elections, once their own original pre-1967 Arab municipal leaders had been dismissed from office by Jewish authorities. The offer to the Arabs of joining the Jewish municipality under the leadership of Jerusalem’s Jewish mayor, Teddy Kollek, was rejected. The record of Jewish administration of the “unified city” under Teddy Kollek was also a sad and sorry one. While both Arab and Jewish inhabitants of the city were taxed equally, Arabs received a disproportionately lower level of services affecting housing, education, welfare, sewage, waste collection, recreation, green areas, electricity, and water. While millions of shekels were spent on refurbishing and beautifying Jewish West Jerusalem, Arab East Jerusalem was allowed to fall to increasing ruin. Israeli policy in Arab Jerusalem, dictated by the government and the municipality, was to do as little as possible so as to encourage the Arabs to leave the city in the hope of bolstering Israel’s demographic right to act as sovereign over all Jerusalem. With exemplary honesty and courage Bernard Wasserstein has told the story of Jerusalem under Israel’s rule. Much of the book recounts the past and present-day history of Jerusalem well known from previous studies. The final pages are worth examining for what they reveal about the last serious efforts to politically divide Jerusalem to allow for both an Arab capital and a Jewish capital in one city. Anyone who knows the past history of Jerusalem recognizes that coexistence between often contentious communities was only possible by mutual and clear respect for each other’s space. The American poet, Robert Frost, said it best when he wrote the line, “. . . good fences make good neighbors.” The Israeli slogan of an “undivided Jerusalem” flies in the face of the elementary truth of co-existence through recognition of areas, [End Page 182] borders, or “fences.” In this regard it is worth considering the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan for introducing “fences” in Jerusalem that would have allowed for coexistence. As described by Wasserstein the plan called for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Jerusalem “would remain an open and undivided city with free and unimpeded access for people of all faiths and nationalities.” The eastern borders of the city would be expanded to include several Arab villages...

The Greater Toronto area revisited

The former municipality of Metropolitan Toronto was Canada’s largest government and a unique body. It was abolished on 31 December 1997 and a new unified City was ushered in on 1 January 1998. It consists of all the former municipalities of the Metropolitan Council and has reduced the former two‐tier system to a single tier. There was considerable opposition initially to the establishment of a unicity by local politicians and the citizenry at large. This has to be seen against a background of general opposition to some of the policy decisions of the Ontario Provincial Government at that particular point in time. Despite the opposition, legislation was enacted establishing the new City. The councillors initially elected in late 1997, the top management team of the Council and virtually all the residents have since accepted the decision on unification and have committed themselves to building the new City. The transition team appointed by the Province and the political and management component of Toronto have done considerable groundwork in developing the unified City to meet present and future challenges locally, regionally and internationally. The amalgamation of the municipalities has resulted in savings of $150 million resulting from inter alia, reduction of departments and divisions, staff, information technology systems, office space, consolidating of the corporate fleet and the City Service Boards. It should be noted that amalgamated programmes only constituted 27 per cent of the budget of the new City. However, coincidental with the amalgamation process was the implementation of the “Who Does What” policy introduced by the provincial government and the Council had to take on significant additional responsibilities. Provincial assistance was provided by way of a one‐off grant of $50 million and a $200 million loan. Consequently, any actual savings achieved initially will have to be viewed in this context.