Urban Experts Research Articles

Intersections of power: videoconferenced debriefing of arural interprofessional simulation team by an urban interprofessional debriefing team.

IntroductionSimulation as an educational tool is known to have benefits. Moreover, the use of simulation in continuing interprofessional development is vital in rural and remote communities with limited case volumes and resources. This study explored power dynamics between rural simulation participants and urban expert co-debriefers during a simulated operating room crisis and debriefing. The aim is to gain a rich understanding of rural/urban relational dynamics embedded within the constraints and affordances of videoconferencing technology.MethodsIn situ observations of a videoconference-enabled simulation and debriefing were conducted, followed by seven semi-structured interviews, in this qualitative case study. A sociomateriality lens with additional sensitizing concepts of power from critical theory was employed to explore human and nonhuman interactions between rural learners, urban co-debriefers, and videoconferencing technology.ResultsThe interviews exposed subtle expressions of power dynamics at play that were curiously not observable in the enactment of the exercise. Rural learners appreciated the objectivity of the urban debriefers as well as the nurse/physician dyad. However, rural participants appeared to quietly dismiss feedback when it was incongruent with their context. Videoconference technology added both benefits and constraints to these relational dynamics.DiscussionAwareness of power relationships, and insights into affordances and constraints of videoconferencing may enhance operationalization of interprofessional simulation-based education (SBE) in rural and remote contexts.

Getting the Right Shade of Ochre: Valuation of a Building’s Historicity

This article examines the praise and controversy that a change in color to the façade of the Główny railway station in Wrocław, Poland, provoked during 2010–2012. Ethnographically following the definitions and makings of a “historical” color during the reconstruction process, it pinpoints two contrasting and conflicting ways of valuing and devaluing historicity: the “scientifically accurate” historicity versus the “familiar” one. Examining urban experts’ practices of valuating the historicity of this building, the valuation devices urban experts relied upon, and the versions of historicities they consequentially produced, this article shows that the “good” of historicity is not a given but is discovered and learned about by various actors during the very activities that constitute valuation.

STRUCTURE OF INFORMATIONAL AND ANALYTICAL SUPPORT OF URBAN ENGINEERING ACTIVITIES IN THE SPHERE OF LAND USE PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT

Research paper "The structure of informational-analytical support of urban engineering activities in the field of land use planning and management" consists of - introduction, 6 sections, 5 infological models, conclusions, and a list of 35 sources. The object of the study are methods and models of the discipline of land use planning and management.
 The subject of the research is the structure of informational support of urban planning activity, cadastral survey and expert systems.
 The purpose of the paper: to develop the structure of informational and analytical support of urban planning models, and also structural and logical models of natural conditions and processes, activities and structures in the field of land use planning and management.
 Area of application: information support of all types of urban planning activities. It is advisable to use the results of the work for Improvement of informational support of legislative bodies, municipal administrations and other institution responsible for urban development.

Deriving Mobility Service Policy Issues Based on Text Mining: A Case Study of Gyeonggi Province in South Korea

Mobility services facilitate various tasks related to transportation and passenger movements. Because of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the importance of mobility services has been recognized by many countries. Thus, research is ongoing to provide more convenience to passengers and to obtain more efficient transportation systems. In the Republic of Korea, the officials of Gyeonggi Province are interested in providing an advanced mobility service to its residents; however, they still do not have any specific or detailed policies. This study aimed at deriving the key issues facing mobility services, especially in the case of Gyeonggi Province, by using a text mining technique and a clustering algorithm. First, a survey was taken by traffic and urban experts to collect reasonable plans for Gyeonggi-Province-type mobility service, and a morpheme analysis was then used for text mining. Second, the results reveal that the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) algorithm has better performance than frequency analysis. Third, the K-means application results in six clusters and six mobility service policy issues were determined by combining the words in each cluster. Finally, the methodology confirmed the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method by showing that the results reflect the current situation in the province.

The Houses for music - concept and place. Modern tendencies, author’s own experience

The subjects of this dissertation are buildings intended for music and their role in urban space. Houses for music – that is how we can briefly name buildings whose basic function is listening to music in the form of a concert - Philharmonic buildings. Also in the form of a show or performance fused with music. The third function of such buildings is to ensure the possibility for people to meet, adding certain nobility to the event in question, and therefore, added nobility to the venue itself. This last function is gaining significance. It is accompanied by the phenomenon of identifying the event as the function itself and simultaneously identifying the site. The growing value of such places stems from the oldest concept of urban planning, in search for that ‘modernity’ of the 20th century, an idea which has been forgotten and is now going through its revival. As Jan Gehl, an urban expert and humanist, reminds us, referring to the ‘city for people’. He reminds us that the number and the quality of the places are of utmost importance – places which create the occasion to participate in the urban membrane. The need for meeting builds the identity of a place, connecting cultural ideas with concepts which create culture and put architecture and music in the centre. The sound of the music itself becomes an element of the identity, the sound – however invisible, is very important for the place – on equal rights with the architecture of the designed buildings. The sound facilitated in the designs of these buildings creates the final quality of the architecture of the opera house or the Philharmonic. The dualism of the architectural and musical thought in the creation of the concept played a decisive role in creating the functionality of the venue, creating the true value of the place. It becomes a highly significant element of the quality of urban space. This short musing shows us that architecture and music are linked inter-disciplinarily as an important or perhaps even basic material for these buildings. The increasing significance of the relation between the buildings intended for music with the social strata of the city is very much visible in contemporary architectural concepts. The subject of this dissertation is the architectural concept and the context of buildings intended for music in urban space. This topical question has been presented on the basis of the following: The majority of the presented examples have been researched in situ by the author of the article. Historical thoughts presented based on the venues in Milan and New York, namely the La Scala and Carnegie Hall. Modern buildings: the Berlin Philharmonic, the Hamburg Philharmonic and the Philharmonic in Paris. The author’s own experiences related with the design of the seat of the National Symphony Orchestra of the Polish Radio in Katowice, Poland. The majority of the presented examples have been researched in situ by the author of the article.

Российское гетто: воображаемая маргинальность новых жилых районов


 
 
 
 На окраинах крупных российских городов с середины 2000-х годов растут районы новостроек, многие из которых реализованы по программе комплексного освоения территорий. В массмедиа и публичных дискуссиях новые жилые районы критикуют за множество проблем, связанных с социальной и транспортной инфраструктурой, высотностью зданий и качеством общественных пространств. Медиа и эксперты по развитию городской среды используют применительно к периферийным жилым комплексам в больших городах категорию «гетто», указывая на уже существующие проблемы и предполагая перспективы деградации подобных территорий, ассоциируя их с западными модернистскими жилыми комплексами, которые постигла печальная судьба стать районами с «плохой репутацией».В статье рассматривается появление и трансформация академического понятия «гетто», а также анализируются практики производства новых периферийных жилых районов как гетто (в локальном значении) на примере исследования жилого комплекса «Северная долина» (Парнас) в Санкт-Петербурге. Автор показывает, как возникает imarginality, или воображаемая маргинальность жилого района, которая аналитически может быть представлена через два связанных воображения — гетто-в-настоящем и гетто-в-будущем. В статье подробно рассматриваются их компоненты, созданные медиа и экспертами по городскому развитию. Исследование показывает, что воображение гетто-в-настоящем не имеет эмпирических оснований в случае ЖК «Северная долина». В статье также рассмотрены перформативные эффекты функционирования категории гетто: воображаемая маргинальность (imarginality), которая формируется вокруг жилого района, может «действовать» и в том числе приводить в движение механизмы, которые заложены в описываемом процессе геттоизации.
 
 
 

Urban Experts in the Building of Post-Stalinist Bratislava

Urban Experts in the Building of Post-Stalinist Bratislava

The Battle of Žižkov: Urban Planners’ Transition from Heritage Protection to Neoliberal Discursive Planning

On the example of working-class Prague quarter of Žižkov, the article studies the interrelation between heritage protection of late nineteenth-century tenement housing and neoliberal city policies after 1989. It locates the common root of both phenomena in the strong sense of crisis of socialist modernist urbanism among urban planners and architects since the early 1970s. The criticism of socialist urbanism culminated shortly before the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in a public struggle against demolition and redevelopment of the entire Žižkov quarter, led by a group of young architects. The article concludes by describing a bitter victory as the quarter’s architecture was eventually saved, while neoliberal urban policies and gentrification eroded its working-class nature. This process illustrates a major shift in urban expertise from social planning under socialism to neoliberal discursive planning in which a “story” of a city is constructed through preservation of belle-époque tenement housing.

Tracing urbanism: methods of actually doing comparative studies in Johannesburg

ABSTRACT This paper locates itself within comparative urbanism by employing the concept of ‘tracing’ as the starting point through which to think across a range of urban experiences. It first reflects on the historical development of comparative urbanism in particular considering the way in which contemporary understandings have been shaped by this long record of debate. From there, the paper refines its focus to ‘tracing’ as one method of actually doing comparative urbanism. Putting this theoretical argument into action, the paper then experiments with three approaches to ‘tracing’ in Johannesburg: the ‘trace’ – a YouTube video, the ‘process of tracing’ – a public lecture by an international urban expert, and the ‘pathways of tracing’ – a network of cities, each of which exhibits a method of actually doing comparative urbanism. These terminologies represent a fine-tuned analysis of ‘tracing’ as both a conceptual framework and a process for actually doing comparative urbanism.

West Lake Tourist: A Visual Analysis System Based on Taxi Data

Mining the mobile pattern of the urban population plays an important role in city construction, and visual analysis is a powerful technique in studying mobile patterns. In this paper, based on the taxi trajectory data in Hangzhou, we share our design for an interactive visual analytic system, which helps analyzers leverage their domain knowledge to gain insight into travel patterns, including travel time rules of tourists and the distribution rules of pick-up and drop-off locations. Besides, our system can present the dynamic travel process and the Point of Interest (POIs) information of the origin and the destination. A case study has been conducted, which verifies that our system can provide tools for urban managers or urban experts on the design of scenic spot open entrances and exits and travel route planning.

COMPLEX ODESSA SEA PORT ESTIMATION ON THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT CONCEPT BASIS

The publication is devoted to the problem of choosing a strategic direction for further development of the Odessa seaport territories. According to some urban planning experts, the main problem of these territories is that the development of a cargo port, handling of bulk cargoes and increasing the traffic load in the city center of Odessa inevitably leads to the degradation of the city-port system. Therefore, they raise the issue of the cargo port remove outside the city to develop these territories as a recreational facilities. But their opponents believe that the port is not only noise and dust, it is also thousands of jobs for inhabitants and the source of state revenue refill and taxes to the local budget. Sea ports are also plays an important role in state interests as a gate for export of Ukrainian products. So the aim of the study is a comprehensive assessment of the port activity based on the sustainable deve-lopment concept, which considers the sustainable development of complex systems of human settlements, states or civilization as a whole by ensuring balanced development of the social, economic and environmental spheres of these systems. The article provides an integrated analysis of the Odessa seaport activities in the economic, social, environmental and urban planning fields. The role of this enterprise and the strategic directions of its further development in the context of transportation, the ecology of the urban environment and urban planning activity are defined. The analysis showed the complexity and ambiguity of the Odessa seaport location and its further deve-lopment in residential area in the historic center of the Odessa city. In order to reduce the environmental and traffic negative impact of the port to residential buildings, it is necessary to modernize the port and ensure the development of appropriate infrastructure, as well as eliminate impossible activities from an urban planning point of view at the port's location. As the main private investment attractor for the seaport development can be used some areas freed up after the optimization of the port activity, which will be provided under certain investment conditions for building recreational facilities. The development of a model for the comprehensive assessment of similar development projects is a promising direction for further research in this field.

Performing real estate value(s): real estate developers, systems of expertise and the production of space

To date, critical work on real estate activities and the financialisation of urban development has focused mostly on investor-developer-government interactions to highlight how real estate and investors’ values, expectations and objectives are enacted through regulatory and fiscal reforms, which in turn affects how cities are built. However, less emphasis has been put on the relationship between urban expertise, real estate activities and the production of particular urban forms. Yet, the production of urban knowledge and associated city visions by specific ‘expert’ professions have been shown to influence how cities were planned and built throughout history. Using the redevelopment of King’s Cross Central (London) as a case study, this paper seeks to start addressing this gap, exploring how real estate developers shape the production and use of urban expertise in the context of planning, which in turn influences how cities are planned and built. In doing so, it posits that a renewed emphasis on the politics of expertise and the concept of performativity can help understand how real estate values permeate the built form and are performed in space. More specifically, it demonstrates the pivotal role of real estate developers in articulating and delimiting what constitutes legitimate urban expertise in decision-making regarding large-scale regeneration projects. In addition, it illustrates how the mobilization of calculative techniques and the use of narrow definitions of risks in assessing real estate projects viability and related uncertainties contribute to legitimising the design of planning instruments that enact and perform real estate values.

Constructing authority: Embodied expertise, homegrown neoliberalism, and the globalization of Singapore’s private planning

The rise of global urban consultancy and the role of private planners in facilitating “knowledge transfer” between cities have received much critical attention in the recent years. Notwithstanding the burgeoning literature critiquing such neoliberal “fast policy” transfer, little is understood in terms of the nuanced politics of expertise and the careering practices of urban consultants in negotiating the diverse international planning fields through their embodied knowledge. Using Singapore as a case study, this paper investigates how ‘homegrown neoliberal’ urban consultancy firms from the city-state operate overseas and interrogates the unwieldy geographies and histories behind the travel of the Singapore model. To the extent that Singapore has often been held up as an exemplary urban model, this paper is interested in how Singaporean planners negotiate foreign planning cultures and assert their authority as urban experts by positioning themselves in elite policy networks to strategically exploit their liminal status as public/private planners. In doing so, the paper not only sheds light on the politics of urban knowledge and expertise but also disrupts hegemonic understanding of neoliberalism by acknowledging the diverse histories and conjunctural contexts that underpin the globalization of private planning.

Web-Based Knowledge Evolution for Thinking Green Transportation Using Expert Systems

In many developing nations, it is difficult for development planners and novice engineers to determine the point of transportation service and usability based only on the master plan of the city. On the other hand, nowadays managers in the organizations use computerized support for making decisions on a day-to-day basis. The experts are capable of identifying problems easily and finding solutions fast but novice engineers are unable to do so. This expert system is designed to fulfill the gap that exist between the urban design experts and user who wish to use Green transportation system namely students, decision makers and engineers. Verification, process validation and comparison of the system with similar systems showed that the system is reliable and practical. In order to create the expert system, sources related to Expert system concerning transportation have been studied and interviews with experts have been conducted. The proposed expert system is developed using Visual Studio as the building tool and SQL as the query tool. The knowledge base of thinking green transportation [T Green T] includes three modules and each module may contain a number of sub-modules, parameters, strategies, and criteria. The system incorporate rules and images for various types of measurements. Lastly, several recommendations for maintaining and improving the system are suggested. The development’s suitability can be characterized using websites of other modes of transportation such as bicycles and pedestrian traffic.

Constructing the Essence of City Element in Gaining A Self-Identified City Branding in Quest of Attracting Tourist Visits

Several urban experts and some humanists from various cities complain that the development of metropolitan area construction in Indonesia nowadays are regressing the self-identity of the city itself. This paper is specifically discoursing on the model of construction and development of urban significance in quest of finding city branding in urban development. The goals of city branding itself is in finding a vision of city development that has its own identity, character, and sustainability in accordance with its uniqueness. Finally, each city has an identity that can upsurge tourist visits to the city and are able to improve the welfare of the city.

Engineering Cities: Mediating Materialities, Infrastructural Imaginaries and Shifting Regimes of Urban Expertise

AbstractThis symposium opens up new critical insights and analytical perspectives into the relationships between power, politics, materiality and urban engineering. In so doing it demonstrates the central role of engineers in the production and negotiation of everyday life in the city. In contrast to the technocratic exercise engineering often professes to be, the contributors to this symposium argue that the assembling and choreography of cities through the myriad techniques, routines, standards and visions of engineers is inextricably bound up with broader socio‐cultural, material and political urban dynamics and processes. This necessitates investigating the multiple and competing social imaginations, forms of knowledge and regimes of expertise associated with urban engineering. The symposium's five articles, straddling disciplinary backgrounds in geography, anthropology, engineering and history, focus analytical and empirical attention on the figure of the engineer and on the work of engineering in the cities of Paris, Mumbai, Singapore and London. Engineering, we suggest, is a diagnostic for probing the shifting forms of mediation that animate and inhabit contemporary dynamics of urban change. The symposium thus opens up a new avenue for cross‐disciplinary and transregional research for urban studies while also suggesting innovative ways of conceptualizing urban transformation and contestation.

From mise en valeur to cooperation – Ponts-et-Chaussées engineers overseas and the rise of planning expertise in the twentieth century

ABSTRACTBy shedding light on the overseas branch of the Corps des Ponts-et-Chaussées (CPC), this article analyses the scientific and technical contribution of this sub-group of engineers in the post-Second World War era. After introducing the historical background of the early involvement of the CPC in the French colonies, this paper concentrates on the late colonial period. Details of the strong interconnectedness of metropolitan and overseas technical expertise are provided. It is shown that civil engineering practised overseas not only enhanced many technical fields within the traditional preserve of the Corps but also facilitated the rapid expansion of the Corps out of this very preserve. Engineers were prompt in including urban expertise and town planning, rural hydraulic and hydrogeology within their current field of activities. Consequences were highly significant not only for overseas urban and rural milieu, but also for metropolitan territories undergoing post-war redevelopment. The last section of this article shows how the techno-scientific practice acquired overseas was instrumental in the post-colonial years to foster the redeployment of the CPC as a whole in the different fields of civil engineering on an international scale.

Improving operational efficiency in utility sector through technology intervention

The purpose of this paper is to perform an empirical study of factors which determine the improvement of operational efficiency in utility sector. The data was collected from various stakeholders of utilities sector viz. domestic rural consumers, domestic urban consumers, government employees, non-government employees and experts. The data was collected from 15 villages and three urban areas. Data from 222 respondents was collected, out of which 52 respondents were domestic rural consumers, 50 respondents were domestic urban consumers, 50 respondents were non-government employees, 60 of the respondents were government employees and ten respondents were expert to the utility. It was found out that process reengineering and reducing AT&C losses are the most important factors that determine operational efficiency. Results from the research can be used in other utilities sectors in other geographies.

In Search of the “Human Scale”

The article explores one of the most important tropes in twentieth-century urban planning discourses: the “human scale.” Drawing from printed and archival sources from Sweden and Germany, it demonstrates how, in the 1930s and 1940s, this metaphor provided urban planning experts—architects, social scientists, and housing reformers—with an important epistemological framework: it helped them define the social in technical terms and thus substantiated ideas about the malleability of society by means of spatial intervention. In practice, in both countries, the human scale informed schemes for a decentralization and delimitation of the urban fabric. Neighborhood units or settlement cells, as they were called in Germany, were to correlate with—and thus reinforce—“organic” social entities: primary groups like families and small communities of neighbors. Planners were attempting to re-calibrate urban agglomerations to what they perceived as measurable, natural social entities. They were compiling anthropometric data, claiming that quantifiable dimensions like the “pram-pushing distance” were ideal criteria in delimiting the built environment. Such data even crossed borders between political systems as different as those of the Nazi-“Third Reich” and the social-democratic “People’s Home” in Sweden. Thus, notwithstanding the great differences regarding its political implication, analyzing the semantics of humanization in urban planning helps explain transnational efforts to “engineer” the social to overcome the disorder attributed to modernity itself.

Post‐colonial careering and urban policy mobility: between Britain and Nigeria, 1945–1990

This paper sets out the value of the concept of ‘careering’ to understanding the global mobility of urban policy across historical and contemporary contexts. Through a case study of one colonial and post‐colonial career in urban development, we demonstrate the material and ideological connections between late colonial development in Nigeria, British reconstruction and international consultancy. Empirically, the paper provides novel post‐colonial perspectives on Britain's post‐Second World War reconstruction spanning the mid‐ to late 20th century, globalising the geographies of the British new town. Conceptually, the paper argues that careering provides a valuable tool for progressing the study of urban expertise and its mobility in four ways. First, it provides a tool for connecting geographically distant urban development projects. Second, careering allows us to explore intersections between urban development policies and geopolitical transformations. Third, careering allows us to see the impact of ideas, skills, experiences, affiliations and contacts formed at different stages of a career on later professional practice, slowing down and lengthening out our understandings of the processes though which urban policy is made mobile. Fourth, careering as a method demonstrates the continued value of biographical approaches to urban policy mobility, highlighting in particular professional lives worked with colleagues and contacts rather than in isolation, and foregrounding the everyday embodied nature of urban expertise. The article concludes by suggesting such approaches could be productive for the writing of new post‐colonial histories of geography and its allied disciplines.