Urban Gateway Research Articles

A CASE FOR INTERNATIONAL LEGAL PERSONALITY OF CITIES AND LOCAL SUBNATIONAL GOVERNMENTS

In 2008, with half of the world?s population comprised of homo urbanus(or urban dwellers)[1], there was a growing realization that cities have become the most prominent site for de-nationalization that runs in congruence to rising globalization.[2] In fact, authors claim that even globalization has a defined locus, which is the city.[3]Cities are reconfiguring their relations with other cities and global institutions in a bid to secure relevance. Cities are rapidly asserting their influence on the international legal order, which does not formally accept these entities as international persons. The paper advances a case for recognizing the international legal personality of these sub-national units, using different theoretical approaches to international personality, including human rights and sociological-constructivist approaches. This paper also seeks to analyze the rights and duties of cities in international law, their de facto recognition in the international framework, as well as the development of international principles governing cities.
 
 
 [1]Alex Awiti, Building Cities for a Bulging World [analysis],Urban Gateway, http://www.urbangateway.org/content/news/building-cities-bulging-world-analysis
 
 
 [2]SaskiaSassen, Territory, Authority, Rights31 (2006)
 
 
 [3]SaskiaSassen, The global city: New York, London, Tokyo324 (1991)
 

A Case for the International Legal Personality of Cities and Local Subnational Governments

In 2008, with half of the world?s population comprised of homo urbanus(or urban dwellers)[1], there was a growing realization that cities have become the most prominent site for de-nationalization that runs in congruence to rising globalization.[2] In fact, authors claim that even globalization has a defined locus, which is the city.[3]Cities are reconfiguring their relations with other cities and global institutions in a bid to secure relevance. Cities are rapidly asserting their influence on the international legal order, which does not formally accept these entities as international persons. The paper advances a case for recognizing the international legal personality of these sub-national units, using different theoretical approaches to international personality, including human rights and sociological-constructivist approaches. This paper also seeks to analyze the rights and duties of cities in international law, their de facto recognition in the international framework, as well as the development of international principles governing cities.[1]Alex Awiti, Building Cities for a Bulging World [analysis],Urban Gateway, http://www.urbangateway.org/content/news/building-cities-bulging-world-analysis[2]SaskiaSassen, Territory, Authority, Rights31 (2006)[3]SaskiaSassen, The global city: New York, London, Tokyo324 (1991)

Impact assessments of intelligent transport system performance in a freight transport corridor

Transport network infrastructure including the use of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) is fundamental to the mobility of people and shipments. This study aims at understanding how different ITS measures may impact multiple traffic engineering goals with respect to a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The ordering of KPIs is determined by the preferences of the decision maker. A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis framework is proposed for impact assessments of ITS measures. Data about KPIs is derived with the help of traffic data gathered from the Gothenburg Region. Comparing the contributions of ITS measures to different goals suggest that the management of flow and speed in a road network is crucial for improving capacity utilisation. The goal assessments are then projected onto different use-cases in terms of socio-economic impacts. The result indicates that corridor section traffic management, transport management (focusing on transit traffic) and urban gate-way will generate socio-economic effects, respectively, in a decreasing order. Urban gateway is particularly interesting because it is the least intrusive and less costly use-case.

The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia by Daniel Fisher

Reviewed by: The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia by Daniel Fisher Aaron Corn Daniel Fisher, The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 344 pp. In The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia, Daniel Fisher of the University of California, Berkeley, offers an insightful and well-theorized analysis of the challenging domain of Aboriginal radio broadcasting in Australia's north. It presents research grounded in fieldwork that was undertaken last decade before the Howard government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which was a conduit through which many Indigenous public programs were funded. Fisher's observations recount the trials faced by Aboriginal radio networks under the constant pressures of dwindling public funds, low wages for Indigenous broadcasters employed through government work-for-welfare and training schemes, and mounting imperatives to find alternative income streams in the struggle to stay on air. Fisher argues that these engagements of Australian Indigenous peoples with audio media production double and actualize through sound their complex socialites and politics of aspiration. Fisher's fieldwork was principally situated within two radio networks. The first, which he addresses in detail in Chapters 3 and 4, was 4AAA in Brisbane, which is owned by the Brisbane Indigenous Media Association (BIMA), and services the local Murri community and other Indigenous Australians living in southeast Queensland. As the capital of the northeastern state of Queensland, which has a long and well-documented history of dispossessing Indigenous peoples, Brisbane is generally considered to be the most populous urban gateway to Australia's northern expanse. The second radio network, which Fisher discusses at length in Chapters 5 and 6, was the Top End Aboriginal Bush Broadcasting Association [End Page 851] (TEABBA). TEABBA is headquartered in Darwin, the tropical capital city of the Northern Territory, but services a diverse audience of Indigenous Australians who speak a multitude of different Australian languages within an area known as the Top End that spans some 1,100 kilometers from north to south and 1,800 kilometers from east to west. Also running through these chapters is the story of the long-standing Indigenous Australian affinity with country music, which Fisher introduces in Chapter 2, and exemplifies through analysis of two recent films by Indigenous Australian directors, Samson and Delilah by Warwick Thornton (2009) and The Sapphires by Wayne Blair (2012). Fisher locates 4AAA's beginnings in 1984 in the studios of student radio station 4ZZZ on the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland in Brisbane amid the staunch conservatism of the Bjelke-Petersen state government. He recounts how its iconic manager, the late Tiga Bayles, had been guided by activist imperatives at the commencement of his career, yet came to realize over the years that 4AAA could cultivate a much broader reach beyond Indigenous audiences with a more accessible country music format. Fisher adeptly traces how 4AAA was positioned to negotiate the multiple tensions that arose over this time as the auditing and compliance regime to which it was subjected by government funders grew more and more onerous, as the Queensland state government sought to transform community radio services into commoditized creative enterprises, and as younger audiences began to identify with and wanted to hear newer styles of popular music. TEABBA, by contrast, was founded in 1989 in a visionary initiative to network media equipment and infrastructure that government had introduced into remote Aboriginal communities under the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS). One of the greatest proponents of BRACS and the usefulness of radio as a means of improving Aboriginal people's lives in remote Australia was the late Frank Dj. Garawirrtja, whom Fisher identifies in his manuscript as FD. Garawirrtja was a man of Yolngu ancestry from Galiwin'ku, a remote town on Elcho Island within the Yolngu homelands of northeast Arnhem Land some 800 kilometers east of Darwin. He was the founding Deputy Chair of TEABBA, and later its Chair, and I was immensely privileged to have worked with him after commencing my own fieldwork on the continuum of traditional and popular musics in Arnhem Land in 1996 (Corn 2013...

Conviviality, Rights, and Conflict in Africa’s Urban Estuaries

Varied forms of mobility are rapidly transforming communities across the world. In Africa’s cities and urban peripheries, the results of human movements include ever more diverse sets of new arrivals living alongside longer-term residents as they seek protection, profit, and passage elsewhere. Some move on and others return home, while still others shift within in search of new opportunities or security. In the absence of muscular state institutions or dominant cultural norms, these areas have become estuarial zones in which varied communities of convenience are taking shape. Unlike well-documented urban gateways or ghettos, these communities range from radical forms of exclusion to remarkable modes of accommodation that enable people to extract usufruct rights: to live in but not become fully part of the cities they occupy. Using examples from Maputo, Johannesburg, and Nairobi, this article explores the nature of these estuaries in ways that challenge the conceptual foundations typically informing debates over migrant rights, integration, and the boundaries of belonging. This means eroding clear distinctions between hosts and guests along with a call to reevaluate the relative importance of state institutions and policies. Most fundamentally, it questions new residents’ interests in localized political and social recognition and participation. The article concludes by suggesting the need to reconsider the forms and scale of community through which the newly urbanized claim rights and the nature of the rights they desire.

Resistance or Resilience? Tracking the Pathway of Recent Arrivals to a ‘New’ Rural Destination

AbstractRecent patterns of migration indicate that international migrants are not confined to urban gateways. Instead many migrants have settled in new destination areas located in rural and small town areas. While this might appear to be a positive phenomenon for rural areas struggling with decline and stagnation, the reality is that many of these areas are ill‐equipped to manage the rate and pace of change that has been witnessed in recent years. Migration to established, typically urban areas has been the subject of extensive research. However, little is known about the way in which migrants navigate their way through social structures as they settle into destinations with little experience of immigration. Using empirical research, this article considers the way in which migrants navigate their way through social structures to establish life in a so‐called ‘new’ migration destination. It analyses the way in which government and civil society respond to their needs of recent arrivals, showing how both NGO’s and the statutory sector play an important role in this process. It considers the ramifications for these different sectors and the implications for so‐called ‘new’ destinations as they become more established or ‘mature’ areas of immigration.

A review of integrated geophysical investigations from archaeological and cultural sites under encroaching urbanisation in İzmir, Turkey

In the new millennium, globalisation, and with it urbanisation, has been expanding as a consequence of economic development throughout the world. Urbanisation is a major social problem, not only for developing countries but also for developed countries. Urbanisation also has a major impact on archaeological sites and cultural heritages in urbanised zones. Non-destructive investigation techniques, such as geophysics, which uses remote sensing, and is non-invasive, are of great importance in urban areas. We are now capable of solving urbanisation-related problems, and these techniques reduce the cost of projects at urbanised sites. Geophysics has increased the possibilities of new applications in determining intensive urbanisation effects in earth science. Geophysics deals with numerous physical variations such as electricity, electromagnetism, magnetics, acoustics, gravity and radioactivity. There are numerous ways geophysics can be applied in archaeological and cultural heritage studies. In addition the hazard mitigation, infrastructure investigation, waste management, water supply, urban gateways and other factors are documented by geophysics. In recent years, archaeological sites under the encroachment of urbanisation have been investigated on numerous occasions using non-invasive geophysical techniques, allowing parameters such as the depth, dimension and extension of targets to be clearly determined. The term “urban geophysics” has recently been seen in various references related to geophysics and other earth science studies. This study reviews the results of geophysical investigations carried out at important archaeological sites under encroaching urbanisation in the city of İzmir, Turkey.

Urban Gateway: Just a Symbol, or More? (Reappraising an Old Idea in the Case of Ankara)

Physical planning and design literature is heavily dominated by the contemporary discourse on ‘urban sprawl’, ‘elusive metropolis’ or ‘edgeless cities’. One consequence is that many conventional notions of urban form now tend to be considered outmoded for contemporary urban strategies, such as urban gateway. The main aim of this paper is to elaborate on this view and to explore possibilities for updating the meaning of the concept in the current urban context. The paper examines the transformative connotations of the city gate as both artefact and idea. The concept is then related to the developmental history of Ankara, in order to develop a critical redefinition in a real case. The case discusses the emerging role of the urban gateway concept as popular discourse for a ‘radical urbanist’ approach within the capital city of a rapidly transforming country, Turkey.

La Calidad de Vida dentro de La Villita: An Investigation of Factors Affecting Quality of Life of Latino Residents of an Urban Immigrant Residential Enclave

The goal of this study was to examine factors affecting the quality of life of Latino residents of Little Village—a predominantly Latino urban gateway community in the city of Chicago. Two focus groups with Latino residents and eleven interviews with stakeholders in this community were employed to collect the data. The findings show that the quality of life of Latino residents was affected by a number of interrelated factors, including environmental degradation, insufficient access to open spaces, low sense of community, fear of crime, and undocumented status of many residents. Findings of this study are discussed and a number of practical implications are provided.

Sustainable urban development and geophysics

Sustainable urban development and geophysics

Local economic impacts of dragon tourism in Indonesia

Ecotourism in protected areas is viewed as a sustainable alternative to mass tourism and as a means of providing benefits to local communities which bear the greatest opportunity costs of protection. However, these ideals have rarely been tested. This study used small-scale survey methods to examine the magnitude and distribution of tourism employment and revenue generation in communities in an Indonesian park. Results suggest that distributional inequalities favor external operators and urban gateway residents rather than rural villagers. Just as the local economy remains peripheral to regional and national centers, so core-periphery relations also exist within the local context. Development around the park has yet to re-orient itself to the goals of ecotourism.

Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid B. PankratzDavid B. Pankratzis research and policy consultant for ARTS, Inc., a multidisciplinary arts service organization in Los Angeles. He also manages the Los Angeles site for “Profiles of Cultural Support,” a ten-city national research project, and a collaboration with UCLA in the twenty-five-site Cultural Policy Network. He has served in senior positions for the Independent Commission on the National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, and Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts in Education.Sandra GibsonSandra Gibsonwas named executive vice president and chief operating officer of Americans for the Arts in July 1998. Prior to this, she served on the governing and policy boards of Americans for the Arts and for more than eight years was executive director of the Public Corporation for the Arts (PCA) in Long Beach, California.

Conclusion: Implementing a Cross-Sectoral Action Agenda

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid B. PankratzDavid B. Pankratz is an independent writer and researcher based in Southern California. He is the author of Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy and coeditor of The Future of the Arts: Public Policy and Arts Research and The Challenge to Reform Arts Education. Dr. Pankratz has also served in senior positions for the Independent Commission on the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts in Education.