Urban Inclusion Research Articles

Concultural Practices of Young Ukrainians as a Challenge for the Intercultural Openness of Warsaw

Institutional intercultural openness is a crucial part of urban inclusion policy towards migrants. In cities with a long history of social and cultural diversity such as Berlin, London or Amsterdam, intercultural openness provides migrants with full or partial participation, initiating activities in the metropolitan space, access to public resources, and social security. In Warsaw, a relatively new inflow of economic migrants from Ukraine, who constitute a large and heterogeneous group, has necessitated changes in municipal cultural and integration policies to facilitate the needs of the new group of recipients. In our article, we focus on results from 91 interviews with Ukrainian students living in Warsaw conducted between 2019 and 2020. We analyse whether, how and why young immigrants from Ukraine use the offer of Warsaw’s cultural institutions; what their expectations are and how their cultural participation is connected with their acculturation and integration. Our research shows that despite the fact that Warsaw tends to build up its culturally open policy for diverse participants, it is not adjusted to the needs of young Ukrainians. As a result, this new diaspora begins to create its own conculture (not to be confused with counterculture). We understand this phenomenon as a set of cultural practices initiated by a minority group of migrants in their new place of residence, which result from the national cultural script of this group. Through these practices, this group cultivates the community, without any connection to the dominant (national) culture of the wider society they belong to or in the space of which its members live. On the one hand, the diversification of a municipal cultural offer allows migrants to find their preferred places and events within Polish culture, although on the other hand, it creates a space for the development of concultural practices that can lead to ghettoisation.

Improving sport spaces into urban areas for healthy and inclusive communities: the case of Milan

Abstract Background Cities are health promoters, although many of them lack of spaces for sport practice. In the meanwhile, for instance, several recreational and sport spaces, that can be open to the community, are offered by the network of churches. A research is developing a tool for making more efficient the assets of sport activities in parishes in a multi-generational, inclusive and health education perspective, in response to increasingly evident needs related to social and sports demand, education health, enhancement of the built heritage and social inclusion. The social and technical value based tool merges several issues related to Public Health, Urban Health, sport facilities design, urbanism and social impact. Methods The first part of the tool refers to an urban analysis of the city to be investigated and it highlights the correlations among the parishes, sport infrastructures, population density and social inequalities, physical activity and green areas. All the analysis refer to the GIS systems in which all the data are collected and organized by districts. Results The application was done in the city of Milan (Italy). The analysis with GIS system gives rise to several maps (a-population health status with a focus on physical activity, b-sport infrastructures availability, c-parishes available, etc.) with different results and they have been merged together. Some areas show some critical aspects related to the lack of public sport spaces, green areas and social inequalities. It permits to select the case studies to be taken in consideration for the application of the Strategic Design Framework, and it will allow to give rise to a detailed examination of the parishes' potentialities for improving the sport practice. Conclusions The tool is working progress and it will be validated through the application on 5 case studies in the city of Milan. The research is funded by Politecnico di Milano - PoliSocial Award 2019, entitled “SPèS” (Sport is Society). Key messages Social governance, health promotion and urban inclusion, through the reactivation system of the sport infrastructures in the parishes of Milan. Local parishes as health promoters of sport practice: sport infrastructures for the local communities in Milan.

Analysis of Spatialization and Determinants of Urban Inclusiveness

Analysis of Spatialization and Determinants of Urban Inclusiveness

Consumption and Retail in Urban Spaces: Studies on Italy and Catalonia

The article, based on the scientific results of the last phase of the project “Retail, Consumption, and the City: Practices, Planning and Governance for Urban Inclusion, Resilience and Sustainability”, proposes further reflections on the changing urban landscapes of retail and consumption through studies on Italy and Catalonia. This stage of the research project has been aimed at investigating – through specific in-depth studies (thematic or related to case studies) – aspects not adequately dealt with in the published volumes of the seven research units, or even to take inspiration from themes and cases already dealt with to advance in a reflection that could contribute to build a further piece of a new research agenda on retail, consumption, and the city. By cross-referencing descriptive evidence and theoretical reflections, the article traces the main themes of this special issue, with regard to the evolutionary and, in some cases, analytical trajectories starting as from the different case studies analyzed, all aimed at reflecting on the relationship between consumption, retail and urban spaces in Italy and Catalonia at different scales.

The Four Axes of Palermo’s Commerce: a Geographical Perspective

Commercial dynamics within a city represent an excellent observatory desk to study urban transformation processes. These dynamics reflect the verticality and horizontality relational system, but also the exchanges and reciprocation of the cultural and socio-economic relations. From a geographical perspective it is interesting to detect cultural, social and economic changes both permanent and in evolution which constitute the urban pattern and shape its viability. This work originates in 2015 within the PRIN project (Relevant Interest National Project) “Commerce, consumption and the city: practices, planning and governance for urban inclusion, resilience and sustainability” which has studied some relevant commerce dynamics in Italian main cities. Here we focus on the case of Palermo, by analysing four important streets in the city center: via Maqueda, via Ruggero Settimo, viale della Libertà and via Lincoln. They represent significant cut outs of how consumers’ habits have developed in Palermo and have strongly characterized the present urban landscape by establishing a complex network of relations which shape the pattern of the city. By employing both a diacronical and synchronical approach, on one hand we analyse the evolution of the four axes. On the other hand, we illustrate the results of the research carried out by using questionnaires aimed to reveal the present conditions of the shops taking place through the business owners’ perception.

Foreword

This special issue of the Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana completes a research work funded in 2017 for a period of three years by the Ministry of Education, University and Research as part of the 2015 PRIN Program (Research projects of relevant national interest) entitled: Retail, Consumption and Cities: Practices, Planning and Governance for Urban Inclusion, Resilience and Sustainability.

Evaluating Accessibility Benefits of Opening Gated Communities for Pedestrians and Cyclists in China: A Case Study of Shanghai

Opening gated communities (GCs) has been widely discussed for urban inclusion and revitalization. With the policies of opening GCs being promoted in China, the quantitative and comprehensive evaluation of the potential benefits is heavily needed. Taking Shanghai as an example, this study quantifies and analyzes the accessibility benefits and risks of opening GCs for pedestrians and cyclists considering two GC types, two opening levels, two travel modes, and different facilities. We found that (1) opening GCs can bring 50 m+ accessibility gains to 17% and 52% of the residents in moderate opening (MO) and complete opening (CO) scenarios, respectively. (2) Cyclists benefits more than pedestrians in all scenarios. (3) Conventional GCs have fewer benefits in MO but more in CO than newly established ones. Trips to bus stations demonstrate the largest accessibility gains. (4) The accessibility benefit of a residential building is highly determined by its closeness to the gates and relative location in the block. (5) Only 1% and 5–7% of external trips may penetrate the opened communities in MO and CO scenarios, respectively, which are far less than both the expectation and the benefits. Finally, several local design guidelines are proposed.

Barreira pandêmica à acessibilidade: do direito ao medo na cidade contemporânea

This paper discusses how the appropriation of city spaces has been changed with the Covid-19 pandemic, extending the discussions about barriers to accessibility to the issues of health safety. Therefore, is presented a Brazilian overview that show how the disabled person is inserted in the dynamics of urban life and in the period of proliferation of the covid-19 pandemic.  The theoretical basis is supported by the texts of Bauman (2009), Lefebvre (2001), Jacobs (2011), Gehl (2015), Castells (2020), Agamben et al. (2020) and Morin (2020). The discussions pointed to growing forms of social exclusion in relation to the different presentations of disabilities in the social strata of the Brazilian population. The pandemic aggravated previous urban problems, making explicit the health security crisis in Brazil and the lack of accessibility to consistent information by these people for their protection and prevention of the disease. In the face of the uncertainties that permeate today, the post-pandemic future does not yet present itself as a promising scenario. We are left with the hope of change for better health security conditions, access to information, and a new mentality focused on policies that assist people with disabilities, that aimed their social and urban inclusion.

ВІД ПРАКТИК НЕОЛІБЕРАЛІЗМУ ДО ПАРТИСИПАТИВНОЇ ДЕМОКРАТІЇ ІНТЕГРОВАНОГО МІСЬКОГО РОЗВИТКУ: ШЛЯХ МІКРОРАЙОНУ ЖК “ЛІКО-ГРАД”, КИЇВ

Most major cities in Ukraine are experiencing widespread use of neoliberal approaches in urban planning and governance. These approaches are focused on economic priorities and the accumulation of capital by individual government-private coalitions both for new urban projects and practices of modifying urban space in areas of existing development. They ignore the needs of the local people, who, in turn, do not have a deep awareness of their importance and role in making management decisions regarding urban development. Simultaneously with the application of neoliberal urban practices, some integrated urban development projects are being implemented in a number of cities or districts of cities of Ukraine within the framework of international technical assistance and exchange programs. They provide opportunities for all segments of society to understand the consequences of decision-making in a particular area. These efforts increase the importance of this research task which aims to analyze the processes of public participation in urban decision-making and the formation of integration in new local and multi-family residential housing development in Kyiv where there is no involvement in international cooperation in integrated urban development. The authors consider these issues using the example of the new “Liko-Grad” residential development. Our working hypothesis examines the dominance of neoliberal urban practices prevailing in such areas. The results of a survey of residents, conducted in 2018 and 2020, raises issues related to integrated development, the inclusiveness of urban space and the extent of involvement of residents in decision-making related to housing and urban landscape. These results as well as expert analysis of open-source data about the development, help to understand that the residential complex “Liko-Grad” which was built by a developer based on neoliberal management decisions. The potential residents were unable to participate in the decision-making process on building and planning the infrastructure. Today, in the process of community formation, residents reveal they are somewhat satisfied with the level of landscaping and are taking the first steps to address certain issues as evidenced by their active participation in social networks and some non-systematic landscaping activities and other small projects within the public budget. The survey also revealed low levels of job opportunities, social infrastructure, poor street infrastructure, and public transport needs as well as a low level of urban inclusion. These results, together with the lack of business activities and function, do not enable the residents of “Liko-Grad” to become a multifunctional urban space according to the integrated approaches designed for this space. We conclude that the path of Ukrainian cities to participatory democracy is just emerging; it requires a deep awareness of local communities of its importance of such efforts and also incorporating management decisions which affect the interests of all residents.

Urban porosity: a chronicle of spatial inclusion in Matonge, Brussels

ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of porosity as a metaphorical device to investigate the interplay between urban space and urban inclusion. It develops a diachronic case study of Brussels’ so-called “Congolese” or “African” neighbourhood of Matonge, drawing from urban analysis and fieldwork observations. Different historical and current modalities of city-making (including formal plans, urban projects and more “spontaneous” forms of urbanization) are examined in their respective impact on social exclusion and inclusion. This way, the aim is to reflect on the peculiar role of the built environment vis-à-vis socio-cultural diversity and inclusion. It will be argued that the notion of urban porosity allows to shed light on the intricate interplay between the formation of urban form and its subsequent capacity to “include” diverse forms of urban life. The case study of Brussels’ neighbourhood of Matonge thus advances porosity as a qualifier of space in view of urban inclusion.

When Design Fiction Meets Geospatial Sciences to Create a More Inclusive Smart City

Smart cities are especially suited for improving urban inclusion by combining digital transition and social innovation. To be smart, a city has to provide every citizen with urban spaces, public services, and common goods that are effectively affordable, whatever the citizen’s gender, culture, origin, race, or impairment. Based on two design workshops, the “Vibropod” and the “Pointe-aux-Lièvres”, this paper aims at highlighting the contributions of design fiction to the improvement of the spatial capability of hearing impaired people. This research draws its originality from both its conceptual framework, built on an interdisciplinary and intersectoral composition of arts and sciences, and its operational approach, based on the use of the DeafSpace markers and the TRIZ theory (Russian acronym for Inventive Problem Solving Theory) principles. The two design fiction workshops demonstrate that considering the singularity of the human being as an actual acoustic material constitutes an innovative opportunity to improve the role of universal design in a smart city project. By reversing the classic posture, and defining disability by looking at characteristics of the environment rather than as limits of the people themselves (their bodies or their senses), this research proposes an innovative way of addressing smart city inclusivity issues. This paper shows how increasing spatial enablement and having better control of spatial skills can offer deaf people new skills to improve the use of technology in support of urban mobility, as well as give them tools for feeling safer in urban environments.

Examining the Urban Inclusivity of Xita Koreatown in Shenyang: With a Focus of the Actor-Network Theory

Examining the Urban Inclusivity of Xita Koreatown in Shenyang: With a Focus of the Actor-Network Theory

Integrated Multimedia City Data: Exploring Learning Engagement and Greenspace in Glasgow

This paper showcases a holistic, data-led, analytical approach to complex research questions about the associations between learning engagement and green spaces, and uses this exemplar to reflection, and make recommendations relevant to, future implementation of CIM approaches to aspects of urban inclusion. This research offers a holistic picture of educational engagement, digital use, sustainability, cultural and civic participation, and transportation, employing data from diverse strands of the Integrated Multimedia City Data (iMCD) project in the Glasgow city region. This includes a household survey, individuals' travel diaries and GPS trails around the city, linked to other urban administrative datasets on area deprivation and greenspace. Triangulated findings from iMCD data indicate that greenspace is generally positively related to adult learning engagement (in particular, less formal learning), highlighting the value to urban planners of considering varied types of data capture for lifelong learning, with linkage to more objective measures of active mobility (e.g. walking) around the city. iMCD, in line with CIM approaches, offers an interdisciplinary bridge to address healthy ageing and educational inclusion. Insights generated in a CIM-based context can help education policymakers, city planners, and other educational stakeholders reconsider resource and infrastructure allocation, for instance, in promoting lifelong learning engagement for adults in urban settings.

Experience of Urban Hospitality: An Ecological Approach to the Migrants’ World

This article was inspired by a collaborative action-research experience undertaken in Brussels by ARCH (Action Research Collective for Hospitality), aimed at further understanding the dynamics of hospitality and improving hospitality towards refugees, based on collaboration with actors of civil society. In a context of spreading policies of hostility and exclusion in Europe and the lack of arrival infrastructures for undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, the people tend to occupy public spaces of the city. Consequently, these spaces become the central nodes where civil society organizes the humanitarian aid and practices of hospitality and at the same time are places for interactional tensions and institutional violence. In other words, they become an urban stage where the tension between hospitality and exclusion is played out. Based on this research, our article proposes to take the urban consequences of hostility policies seriously by analyzing the ecology of the migrants’ world in the city. Our aim is to understand their experience of segregation and hospitality in the urban environment—and more specifically in public spaces. Public spaces are indeed the only livable spaces for people for whom no room has been made. However, what constitutes their hospitality for migrants, i.e., their capacity to be inhabited, enters into tension with the constitutive dimensions of urban publicness (like accessibility, visibility, or urbanity). Understanding the experience of hospitality in urban public spaces for those who have no other place to live is seen as a condition as well as a means to enhance their urban inclusion.

Towards Developing a New Model for Inclusive Cities in China—The Case of Xiong’an New Area

Along with unprecedented urbanization in the last few decades, cities have experienced rapid social and economic transformation in China. A major challenge facing urban authorities in the immediate future is how to plan and govern cities such that they can serve as inclusive systems where everyone is enabled and empowered to fully participate in and contribute to socioeconomic life. A first step towards realizing this is to conceptualize an integrated framework that allows analysts and decision-makers to delineate, evaluate, and guide the development of these cities towards inclusiveness. In this study, we conducted a conceptual analysis of urban inclusiveness and then proposed a multidimensional framework for the evaluation of inclusive development. This is followed by the presentation of the case of Xiong’an, for which inclusive development indicators (IDIs) were selected. By comparing the state before the establishment of Xiong’an with its current development progress, and analyzing the area’s management structure and policy measures, the inclusive development challenges are identified. Subsequently, suggestions are given on how to direct Xiong’an toward higher levels of inclusiveness, including offering equal access to public services and employment opportunities, preserving environmental health and sustainable use of natural resources through waste recycling, and encouraging public participation in decision-making to bring higher levels of inclusion within reach.

The City and the Barracas: Urban Change, Spatial Differentiation and Citizenship in Maputo

The paper discusses Maputo municipality’s plans for the modernisation of the Mercado do Museu, an iconic informal market located in the high-end Polana neighbourhood, which has long been a place for fervent social encounter among people from different social and economic origins. The Mercado’s upgrading plans emerge within the context of Maputo’s intensely urban transformation that has led gentrification effects, especially in the city’s wealthiest areas. This stems partly from private real estate investment, and also from large infrastructure and housing projects promoted by the Mozambican state. Modernist planning ideals and their ordering impulses shape the way municipal authorities view the city and its spaces of informality, contradicting the urban form produced and lived by the majority of Maputo’s inhabitants. While Mercado do Museu has enabled the production of urban social life and the foundations for urban inclusion and citizenship, the modernisation project brings forward “conflicting rationalities” (Watson Planning Theory and Practice, 4(4), 395–407, 2003). However as modernist views of cities are broadly shared across Mozambique’s urban society, the “conflicting rationalities” being played out are not only situated around urban material form; but rather between material expressions of urbanity and personhood; between urban form and urban citizenship.

(In)visibilizing Vulnerable Community Members: Processes of Urban Inclusion and Exclusion in Parkdale, Toronto

The visibility and invisibility of vulnerable individuals or groups in public space have been extensively used as a conceptual tool to assess the “public” character of space. This article analyses the case study of the Parkdale neighborhood in Toronto demonstrating how public space is constructed in a path-dependent territorial process where different layers play a dynamic constitutive role: a material, a discursive, and a policy dimension. It argues that urban visibilization and invisibilization in public spaces extensively affect the dynamics of urban inclusion and exclusion, particularly when they are used in specific territorial stigmatization and destigmatization processes. The investigation enables to better understand the socio-spatial conditions comprising the “denial” and “recognition” of certain groups and individuals at the neighborhood level by understanding how local policies and community-based practices influence the complex dynamic of “seeing and being seen” in an urban environment.

The good Arab: conditional inclusion and settler colonial citizenship among Palestinian citizens of Israel in Jewish Tel Aviv

AbstractDominant majorities often use idealized categories to validate the ‘goodness’ and deservingness of minority citizens. For Palestinian citizens of Israel, this category is the ‘good Arab’. Since its origins in early Jewish settlement of Palestine, it has become a powerful and controversial metaphor in Israeli public discourse. As an experienced condition of limited inclusion, the ‘good Arab’ exemplifies the Palestinian dilemma of accessing socioeconomic opportunities in Jewish Israeli spaces that stigmatize and fend off their ethnonational identity. Combining a historical genealogy of the ‘good Arab’ with ethnographic research among Palestinians in Tel Aviv, this article shows how a historically evolved logic of settler colonial control and indigenous erasure continues to define liberal frameworks of conditional citizenship and inclusion. Theorized through the emerging concept of conditional inclusion, these insights open up new avenues for analysis and comparison in anthropological debates surrounding indigenous struggles, settler colonialism, urban inclusion, and citizenship.

Street-scale air quality modelling for Beijing during a winter 2016 measurement campaign

Abstract. We examine the street-scale variation of NOx, NO2, O3 and PM2.5 concentrations in Beijing during the Atmospheric Pollution and Human Health in a Chinese Megacity (APHH-China) winter measurement campaign in November–December 2016. Simulations are performed using the urban air pollution dispersion and chemistry model ADMS-Urban and an explicit network of road source emissions. Two versions of the gridded Multi-resolution Emission Inventory for China (MEIC v1.3) are used: the standard MEIC v1.3 emissions and an optimised version, both at 3 km resolution. We construct a new traffic emissions inventory by apportioning the transport sector onto a detailed spatial road map. Agreement between mean simulated and measured pollutant concentrations from Beijing's air quality monitoring network and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) field site is improved when using the optimised emissions inventory. The inclusion of fast NOx–O3 chemistry and explicit traffic emissions enables the sharp concentration gradients adjacent to major roads to be resolved with the model. However, NO2 concentrations are overestimated close to roads, likely due to the assumption of uniform traffic activity across the study domain. Differences between measured and simulated diurnal NO2 cycles suggest that an additional evening NOx emission source, likely related to heavy-duty diesel trucks, is not fully accounted for in the emissions inventory. Overestimates in simulated early evening NO2 are reduced by delaying the formation of stable boundary layer conditions in the model to replicate Beijing's urban heat island. The simulated campaign period mean PM2.5 concentration range across the monitoring network (∼15 µg m−3) is much lower than the measured range (∼40 µg m−3). This is likely a consequence of insufficient PM2.5 emissions and spatial variability, neglect of explicit point sources, and assumption of a homogeneous background PM2.5 level. Sensitivity studies highlight that the use of explicit road source emissions, modified diurnal emission profiles, and inclusion of urban heat island effects permit closer agreement between simulated and measured NO2 concentrations. This work lays the foundations for future studies of human exposure to ambient air pollution across complex urban areas, with the APHH-China campaign measurements providing a valuable means of evaluating the impact of key processes on street-scale air quality.

Governing the multicultural city: Europe’s ‘great urban expectations’ facing austerity and resurgent nativism

This article analyses European discourses on ‘optimal’ urban inclusion policies, as they are embodied in EU-sponsored city networking initiatives. Drawing from the scholarships on multiculturalism and urban austerity, it builds an inclusion agendas matrix that identifies four ideal-typical agendas for ethnic and racial inclusion: multicultural, diversity inclusion, community cohesion and neoliberalised diversity. It identifies a shift from group-based to individual-based concerns (mainstreaming) and from a politicised to a depoliticised approach to inclusion (depoliticising). It argues that (a) this double shift should be understood as the result of the mutually reinforcing pressures of nativism and austerity, and (b) inconsistencies in network discourses and policy advice suggest a pragmatic-adaptive logic that challenges simplistic understandings of cities as either (only) sites of resistance or (only) sites of full-blown accommodation of nativist and austerity imperatives.