Urban Crisis Research Articles

Application of Crisis Management Principles in Earthquake-Stricken Urban Areas

Human weakness and vulnerability to urban hazards are taken for granted. Human development has the tendency to move from villages towards the cities. In accident-prone countries, the consequences of crises are a major deterrent to development. The general effects of accidents include death and injury of individuals, damage to property, products, services, and infrastructure, and thus the impact on lifestyle and its social and psychological dimensions, from a doctrinal point of view, accidents, and disasters are part of the world of creation and divine test for awakening, and sometimes, the result of the actions and punishment of human sins and its occurrence causes the growth and excellence of human society. The disasters that have occurred in recent years indicate that societies and individuals have increasingly become vulnerable and that the risks have increased as well. About three-quarters of the world’s population lives in areas that in recent decades have experienced at least one of the four leading causes of death from crises: earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, or droughts have experienced. In recent years, the occurrence of accidents and the number of injured people and the financial losses caused by them have increased significantly. Therefore, the main purpose of this article is to try to explain the components and constructive characteristics of resilience and determine the share of factors affecting resilience in crisis management in Tehran’s 15th district. Also, the results show that there is a significant level of 0.000 between resilience and the final situation. At the level of p = 0.01 , then, this relationship is significant, the researcher’s hypothesis is confirmed with 99% confidence, and the null hypothesis will be rejected. The results show a linear relationship between the mentioned variable and social, economic, and physical resilience; that is, the results show that compliance with resilience indicators in natural disasters (earthquakes) can be effective in urban crisis managers.

Productive urban landscape: Exploring urban agriculture multi-functionality practices to approach genuine quality of life in gated communities in Greater Cairo Region

Despite having roots through history, gated communities have emerged as a new urban phenomenon facing the effects of urbanization. They became a dominant typology for achieving better quality of life (QOL), especially in Greater Cairo Region (GCR). This typology of urban development has become the target of many Egyptian families. Thus, capitalism emerges at the node where urbanization crisis, QOL and gated communities meet. This appears in the marketing of gated communities that tackles landscapes as one of its commodities as a response to the demand for better QOL. This aim will be attained via theoretical and practical methods. Theoretically, correlating the concepts of QOL, urban agriculture, and local gated communities landscape architecture practices was carried out. Then, two models of questionnaires were pursued targeting gated communities’ residents and practitioners, in addition to field visits and observation. The study ended by recommendations to enhance the QOL domains via following all productive urban landscape.

Planning at the edge: urbanism and socio-political transition in Chelas, Lisbon

ABSTRACT Throughout the twentieth century, many European countries developed public housing policies where planners and architects pursued creative, even radical design. This optimism collapsed within a few decades, re-emerging today as a hope in face of impending urban crisis, housing-access shortages and environmental decline. Here, we observe the urban process of Chelas, the largest social housing area ever planned by the Portuguese State, located in Lisbon. Its ambitious and progressive plan started during a dictatorial regime yet completed during a democratic one. Specific original plan features allowed Chelas to evolve over time, demonstrating the resilience of the territory and of its residents, and testifying to complex political and social changes. To understand this process, we disclose: (i) What territorial conditions existed prior to urbanization; (ii) What solutions were originally planned and under what circumstances; (iii) How the built forms of Chelas have accommodated change over time and which urban processes allowed such changes to occur. Focusing on one of Chelas’s sectors, Zone N, we trace its evolution from planning to reality, while also considering its spatial, social and ecological conditions and highlighting its future possibilities as a sustainable suburban neighbourhood.

Urbanizatition in Developing Countries

Urbanization is a complex global phenomenon that many countries of the world are going through, and this process is characterized by a set of traits, which lead to a change in the life style. Urbanization in developing countries has special forms that differ according to different internal and external factors and the pattern of urbanization in developing countries differs from the developed countries, and this is due to the presence of a set of factors related to them. Urbanization in developing countries is the mere occurrence of the increase in the size of urban centers over time, so this process continues to increase, and its negative impact on developing countries more than developed countries, so the results and problems resulting from them create practical behavior for those who suffer from the urban crisis at the present time. In its theoretical aspect, this study relied on the historical descriptive approach of urbanization in developing countries, taking into account the differences of their societies and regions by revealing their internal and external factors and their indicators.

Urban risk and crisis communication in post-human cities: A media ecology approach

Planning and policy leaders often rely on technical expertise and technological advancement to manage urban crises, privileging smart city developments that iron out the complex and contradictory textures of urban experience. Smart cities, as post-human cities, often abstract risk and crisis phenomena from the everyday contexts of communication in which they emerge and inform the historically situated identities of urban stakeholders. Smart city environments are, therefore, biased against the complexities and contradictions of urban media ecologies that create mosaics of experience and more dynamic responses to risk and crisis phenomena. It is found herein that the mosaic identities of urban stakeholders emerge in networks of communication and commerce that contrast the efficiencies of smart city systems and cultivate dialogically complex relations among publics dwelling in urban contexts.

Corrigendum to: White Ethnicity in the Urban Crisis: Newark’s Italian Americans

Corrigendum to: White Ethnicity in the Urban Crisis: Newark’s Italian Americans

Compound urban crises

The crises that cities face—such as climate change, pandemics, economic downturn, and racism—are tightly interlinked and cannot be addressed in isolation. This paper addresses compound urban crises as a unique type of problem, in which discrete solutions that tackle each crisis independently are insufficient. Few scholarly debates address compound urban crises and there is, to date, a lack of interdisciplinary insights to inform urban governance responses. Combining ideas from complex adaptive systems and critical urban studies, we develop a set of boundary concepts (unsettlement, unevenness, and unbounding) to understand the complexities of compound urban crises from an interdisciplinary perspective. We employ these concepts to set a research agenda on compound urban crises, highlighting multiple interconnections between urban politics and global dynamics. We conclude by suggesting how these entry points provide a theoretical anchor to develop practical insights to inform and reform urban governance.

What Can We Learn from Urban Crisis?

The irreversible transition towards urban living entails complex challenges and vulnerabilities for citizens, civic authorities, and the management of global commons. Many cities remain beset by political, infrastructural, social, or economic fragility, with crisis arguably becoming an increasingly present condition of urban life. While acknowledging the intense vulnerabilities that cities can face, this article contends that innovative, flexible, and often ground-breaking policies, practices, and activities designed to manage and overcome fragility can emerge in cities beset by crisis. We argue that a deeper understanding of such practices and the knowledge emerging from contexts of urban crisis may offer important insights to support urban resilience and sustainable development. We outline a simple conceptual representation of the interrelationships between urban crisis and knowledge production, situate this in the context of literature on resilience, sustainability, and crisis, and present illustrative examples of real-world practices. In discussing these perspectives, we reflect on how we may better value, use, and exchange knowledge and practice in order to address current and future urban challenges.

White Ethnicity in the Urban Crisis: Newark’s Italian Americans

Abstract Scholars have largely understood the urban crisis, including racial violence, as a matter of Black versus white, with white ethnics in possession of a largely inconsequential ethnicity. An examination of two community leaders from Newark’s North Ward reveals competing Italian American perceptions of the urban crisis. Anthony Imperiale, the race-baiting demagogue and politician, has been portrayed by the media and by scholars as the lone voice of the North Ward. Stephen Adubato argued that urban white working-class ethnics like Italian American Newarkers were reacting to economic hardship at a time when they believed the government was advantaging African Americans. Rather than foster a white identity and anti-black sentiment, Adubato aimed to promote stronger Italian American ethnicity as a basis for making claims on resources. A consideration of the two men, using newspaper accounts and archival sources, illustrates that Newark’s Italian Americans as a distinct ethnic group had diverse if at times overlapping interpretations of their experience of the urban crisis rooted in identification by race on the one hand and ethnicity on the other. The attitudes toward and relations with African Americans represented by both men were grounded in real and imagined socioeconomic, political, and cultural realms within the specific racial context of the era and the challenges of the urban crisis which extended to the Italian American community.

Urban History: between History and Social Sciences

The article analyzes the formation and development of Urban History as a branch of historical science before and immediately after the era of the Urban Crisis of the 1950s and 1960s. The concept of the article suggests that urban history was formed in a constant dialogue with the social sciences. At the beginning, academic urban historians appeared in the 1930s as opponents of American “agrarian” and frontier histories. Drawing their ideas from the Chicago School of sociology, they reproduced the national history of civic local communities that expressed the achievements of Western civilization. However, in the context of the impending Urban Crisis, social sciences, together with urban historians, have declared the importance of generalizing social phenomena. A group of rebels soon formed among historians. They called their movement ‘New Urban History’ and advocated the return of historical context to urban studies, and were against social theory. However, in an effort to reconstruct history “from the bottom up” through a quantitative study of social mobility, new urban historians have lost the city as an important variable of their analysis. They had to abandon the popular name and recognize themselves as representatives of social history and interested in the problems of class, culture, consciousness, and conflicts. In this situation, some social scientists have tried to try on the elusive brand ‘New Urban History’, but their attempt also failed. As a result, only those who remained faithful to the national narrative or interdisciplinary approach remained urban historians, but continued to remain in the bosom of historical science, rushing around conventional urban sociology and its denial.

Building Resilience to Compounding Urban Crises in South and Southeast Asian Cities in Times of Global Uncertainties

Building Resilience to Compounding Urban Crises in South and Southeast Asian Cities in Times of Global Uncertainties

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

Race for Profit is a landmark study of how structural racism transforms and reproduces disadvantages. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor tells a convincing story of race and capitalism in late twentieth-century urban American housing markets in transition. The book develops the theme of “predatory inclusion” of African-descended Americans in home ownership sponsored by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and financed by private lenders after the urban riots of the mid-1960s (p. 5, passim). One was Wilhelmina Gause of Philadelphia. A twenty-seven-year-old Black mother of three, she could not afford a house, yet a real estate agent said there were none for rent in the neighborhood. She saved the $500 down payment, signed the mortgage, and moved in to discover that a broken pipe leaked sewage into her basement, a wall leaked rain into her house, and a backyard drain was stopped up, flooding the yard. And Gause now owned the property. Her family's experience typifies the transition from redlining to predatory inclusion. Taylor wonders, “How could a house that appeared to be falling apart also be appraised by the FHA as having any value and then approved for a mortgage subsidy?” (p. 142).Race for Profit intervenes in a historiography of race, capitalism, and urban housing that includes Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2017), Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017), Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996), and Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004), among many others. Before civil rights legislation including the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, legal discrimination excluded Black borrowers from loans, segregating urban spaces and trapping low-income homeowners, particularly Black and Latino residents, in enclaves of impoverished schools and services.Instead of exclusion, the HUD Act subsidized lenders, which encouraged them to lend to those who were traditionally excluded, particularly Black women who were heads of households. But in the shift from legal discrimination to predatory inclusion, brokers and lenders worked to sell substandard and unsafe housing to homebuyers who found themselves saddled with debt in a home they owned but could not safely live in. Black borrowers set up to fail lost their property at a moment in the 1960s and 1970s when urban areas became targets of renewal projects and other investment.Race for Profit explores how the change from exclusion to homeownership occurred. Taylor's narrative seamlessly weaves stories like that of the Gause family with Black women's organizing, policy-making, and an eagle-eyed view of the financial and regulatory landscape of the post-1968 housing market in urban cores. “The end of FHA redlining and the introduction of home finance into American cities created a new market for urban housing almost out of thin air,” Taylor argues, and yet like so many aspects of American capitalism, African Americans paid more for less and were blamed for systemic failures (p. 140).And the predation was the point, at least so far as the real estate industry was concerned. The system of federal subsidies benefited real estate brokers and lenders rather than homeowners, and policy makers tended to blame buyers rather than an interlocking system of predatory lending and deceptive real estate practices. The African American McCrudden family of Philadelphia bought their house soon after the HUD Act subsidized the $9,000 purchase. After they moved in, they realized it had major defects, including holes in the floors, which the broker who sold them the property said would be fixed but were not. In 1972 Carmel McCrudden testified that she was “tired of living in a half-built, torn apart house,” which was now her problem as the buyer (p. 205). Such deceptive practices sapped the incomes and time of predominantly Black borrowers while enriching brokers and lenders. Yes, the McCruddens were homeowners, but their living standards were not necessarily better than public housing. And now they had a mortgage and owned a property that could not easily be sold or rented out. In response, Carmel McCrudden helped organize the Concerned City-Wide Homeowners, a grassroots organization that brought the predatory practices to light and demanded policy responses, and failing that, launched class-action lawsuits.Race for Profit defies an optimistic narrative of civil rights and economics. Markets are not self-correcting and incorporate the values and assumptions of those who govern them. Taylor warns against market-based solutions to systemic racism since the real estate and lending industries that thrived on racist practices before 1968 adjusted to thrive on racist practices after 1968.

Urban Social Hauntings: Disappearing Gravestone Murals in Gentrifying Brooklyn

This article concerns the disappearance of gravestone (or “rest in peace”) murals in gentrifying Brooklyn, New York. Social hauntings reveal the unresolved violence of Black disposability and dispossession, as it manifests in the urban landscape in periods of urban decline and gentrification; gravestone murals are forms of “wake work” that attend to social haunting, accounting for Black life and death in urban place. This article first considers the wake work of gravestone murals, that they are memorials, archives of collective memory, spaces of worldmaking, and resistance to anti-Black violence. Because gravestone murals illustrate how Black people produce meaning in the urban landscape, they are also forms of Black spatial production. The article then explores the emergence of newer, stylized murals as aesthetic commodities that bring social and economic value to urban space, while commodifying Black life and death. The disappearance of gravestone murals, a visual record of the urban crisis, indicates the transformation of Black urban space in the 21st century.

Identify space gene: Deal with the phenomenon of all cities with similar urban form

The approach of Space Gene is the latest proposal used within urban design field in China to deal with the urban identity crisis, via three steps: space gene’s identification, evaluation and guidance. However, there is not yet a universal, systematic approach that could identify the local space gene, which greatly affects the accuracy and effectiveness of subsequent urban planning process. Therefore, the aim of this PhD study is to propose an approach for space gene’s identification. Based on the space gene’s mechanism, the identification process of space gene is elaborated, including summarizing local urban characteristics, abstracting the spatial pattern, and validating that the spatial pattern is the local space gene. Finally, the approach is represented and proved by cases studies.

When Saturday comes: football, public disorder and Liverpool's urban crisis, c. 1965–1985

AbstractThis article uses oral histories, media representations and local archives to examine how football-related disorder in Liverpool impacted the lived experiences of local communities and informed perceptions, reactions and solutions to the city's unfolding urban crisis. It traces how the aggressive architectural transformation of the city's stadiums wrought significant and unintended consequences upon supporters and inner-city communities alike. By conceptualizing the stadium as a succinct example through which to view the anxieties that surrounded problematic urban spaces, it examines the relationship between the governance, materiality and use of the inner city during the urban crisis.

The wages of acclimation

Epidemic disease regularly tore through nineteenth-century American cities, triggering public health crises and economic upheaval. These epidemic panics also provoked new racialised labour regimes, affecting the lives of innumerable working people. During yellow fever outbreaks, white authorities and employers preferred workers of colour over ‘unacclimated’ white immigrants, reflecting a common but mistaken belief in black invulnerability. This article chronicles enslaved burial labourers in antebellum Virginia, who leveraged this notion to seize various privileges – and nearly freedom. These episodes demonstrate that black labour, though not always black suffering or lives, mattered immensely to white officials managing these urban crises. Black workers were not mere tools for protecting white wealth and health, however, as they often risked torment and death to capitalise on employers’ desperation for their essential labour. This history exposes racial and socioeconomic divergence between those able to shelter or flee from infection, and those compelled to remain exposed and exploitable.

Urban resilience

Will COVID-19 end the urban renaissance that many cities have experienced since the 1980s? This essay selectively reviews the copious literature that now exists on the long-term impact of natural disasters. At this point, the long-run resilience of cities to many forms of physical destruction, including bombing, earthquakes and fires, has been well-documented. The destruction of human capital may leave a longer imprint, but cities have persisted through many plagues over the past millennia. By contrast, economic and political shocks, including deindustrialisation or the loss of capital city status, can enormously harm an urban area. These facts suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic will only significantly alter urban fortunes if it is accompanied by a major economic shift, such as widespread adoption of remote work, or political shifts that could lead businesses and the wealthy to leave urban areas. The combination of an increased ability to relocate with increased local redistribution or deterioration of local amenity levels, or both, could recreate some of the key attributes of the urban crisis of the 1970s.

Urban Renewal in American Cities and Responses of the White Working-Class Ethnic Groups: A Preliminary Exploration

In the post-World War II decades, urban renewal became a part of the larger vision for the revitalization of American cities. Between 1949 and 1974, federal legislation provided a legal and economic framework for demolition of so-called blighted areas and replacing them with new modern housing, infrastructure, and facilities for services and commerce. It was a response to the perceived urban crisis: a move of city residents to the suburbs and collapse of the tax base, congestion of urban areas, and aging urban infrastructure. The areas slated for demolition or highway construction belonged often to communities of color and to older urban working-class white ethnic communities. This article examines the responses of various white ethnic groups, including American Polonia, to the local plans of urban renewal, which ranged from apathy, to acceptance and support, to internal mobilization and protest, to coalition building and political action.

Urban planning as a way to pursue quality-oriented urbanization: Anatomy of the urban planning of Xiong’an New Area, China

ABSTRACT In the mid-2010s, China initiated a quality-oriented urbanization model aimed at overcoming the urban crises resulting from the past quantity-oriented urbanization. The Xiong’an New Area (XNA), China’s latest national-level new area, has been planned such that it serves as a showcase of the quality-oriented urbanization model. Based on a review of the official urban planning documents, this paper examines the characteristics of the XNA’s urban planning and finds that the urban planning has integrated environmental friendliness, social inclusion, innovation-driven economy, cultural inheritance, and smart urban governance to facilitate the XNA’s pursuit of quality-oriented urbanization. Besides analyzing its improvement over the previous urban planning, this paper also examines the XNA’s challenges in its urban planning implementation. Although the XNA is subject to circumstances that make it unique, its urban planning can serve as a point of reference for attempts to urbanize among the world’s other cities. This paper contributes to a more thorough understanding of the role of urban planning in promoting the transformation from quantity-oriented to quality-oriented urbanization models in the Chinese context.

The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay's New York by Mariana Mogilevich (review)

Reviewed by: The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay's New York by Mariana Mogilevich Noah Allison (bio) Mariana Mogilevich The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay's New York Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020 240 pages, 10 colored plates, 75 black-and-white illustrations ISBN: 9781517905767, $30.00 PB In The Politics, Aristotle makes a fundamental distinction between oikos, the household, and polis, the political community. Existing alongside the oikos, the polis is often translated as "city-state," and has territorial and political connotations. According to Aristotle, the polis was established "with a view to the common good" and it represented the sovereignty of the "civic body."1 In other words, the polis had the potential to become a space of political equality where men could assemble, deliberate, and make decisions that ideally would benefit citizens. While such ideology has certainly evolved—primarily to include women and children—Aristotle's polis construct continues to shape spatial practitioners' orthodoxy concerning city spaces to this day. For instance, designers often present public spaces as universal goods essential to equitable and sustainable urban development. However, history has shown time and again that the existence of public spaces in and of itself does not guarantee anyone's right to access, occupy, or control such places. In this way, the political promise of public space and its frequent outcome of inequitable urban development illustrates a paradoxical ideology. Mariana Mogilevich subsequently argues that public space ideals are never realized because of specific historical processes. To illustrate such processes, Mogilevich carefully presents how design approaches in the later twentieth century reproduced contemporary public space ideologies in her debut book, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay's New York. Mogilevich—a historian of architecture and urbanism—contends that in order to make sense of inclusive public space ideologies, they must be understood not in terms of access, ownership, or their relationship to the state, but rather as physical lived spaces. Through this lens, The Invention of Public Space details multiple open-space experiments in New York City under Mayor John V. Lindsay. Elected amid an "urban crisis" marked by White flight, he imagined the city as a model for fun, freedom, and diversity during his tenure between 1966–1973. Such vision gave unprecedented agency to his new government, which he staffed with "young urbanists"—architects, landscape architects, planners, and administrators who sought to ensure that the city provided personal freedom and a sense of belonging, an outcome they believed would stimulate full participation in city life. To be sure, Lindsay was no master builder and did not develop a totalizing vision. Rather, under his direction, public spaces were designed for and by New York City's heterogeneous publics in a broad array of places: existing city parks, undefined plazas, streets, vacant lots, and waterfronts. Analyzing archival materials, oral histories, and published accounts, interviews, films, and photographs, Mogilevich meticulously traces how these five types of experiments were respectively interpreted at the moment by designers, researchers, critics, and users. Composed of delightful narratives and captivating illustrations that demonstrate how psychological discourses, public participation, and urban scale informed these projects' designs, The Invention of Public Space significantly reveals the changing and contradictory ways that urban space produces political meaning and citizenship. After introducing the politics of "Lindsay's New York," each chapter focuses on a different open-space typology. Readers first learn how one design, in particular, promised a solution to the social and spatial problems plaguing the city. Although predating Lindsay's election, the Jacob Riis Plaza in a Lower East Side public housing complex sought to replace a landscape of isolation and marginalization with an environment for individual experience and personal development. Guided by contemporary psychological understandings, M. Paul Friedberg designed the plaza as a sequence of four demarcated spaces called "outdoor rooms." The four rooms were delineated in terms of their uses, alternating between quiet and active spaces. Such design had a sense of progression and enclosure, creating a topography of experience believed to help children develop into their "best selves." In fostering free play, individual development, and aesthetic experience, the plaza thus forged a new...