Urban Professionals Research Articles

Rankings Have Proven the Need to Develop Sociopsychological Competences in Technology Students

Urban planning is deemed to improve the living standards and the life satisfaction of urban residents. However, it does not always work this way. It is anticipated that the formation and development of sociopsychological competencies in urban planning professionals can boost both the living standards and life satisfaction. In the article, the author presents the findings of the study of several international rankings; she also offers some definitions, and formulates a number of probable reasons for the insufficient development of sociopsychological competencies in urban planning professionals. The author also offers several actions, aimed at the prevention of social dissatisfaction of urban residents’ within the framework of the sociopsychological competence.

Reasons to adapt to urban heat (in the Netherlands)

The future will be warmer with more tropical days, heat stress and related impacts for the healthy and liveable city. This is clear from many scientific studies and papers. Yet many local governments in the Netherlands claim to have insufficient understanding of the importance of these impacts in order to make the necessary step to climate adaptation and to take practical actions to manage the risks associated with rising heat levels. They struggle with defining the urgency of heat stress and finding good arguments for the need to adapt urban environments to rising temperatures. In order to provide urban professionals with reasons to adapt their urban environments to heat, we analyzed the potential impacts of urban heat from international policy reports and scientific literature. We summarized the impacts in a mind map. This map visualizes the large number and variety of heat-related risks. They can be subdivided into risks for health, open space, liveability, water and infrastructure networks. We believe that this mind map provides useful insight into the reasons to take heat adaptation actions. It can also be a helpful visual for urban professionals in outlining the reasons to take action for heat adaptation.

Climate Change Adaptation Pathways in Kolkata

Disaster risk management and wider processes of adaptation are too often understood in isolation from development. Kolkata faces increasing heatwaves, flood hazard and everyday waterlogging as a result of climate change but the social and spatial distribution of impacts will likely be mediated by historic and contemporary development decisions. The paper reports on a study that has combined a scenario workshop method and expert interviews to surface the views of risk and resilience planners, academics and urban professionals on the adaptation–development nexus. Kolkata is experiencing rapid and fundamental transition in its governance regimes and economic structures as state-led development gives way to stronger market forces. Planners welcome an opening of urban governance but are worried by the speed of change. Transition in risk governance is observed in a predicted shift from a contemporary orientation where capacity is limited but focused on protecting development gains, to one which also embraces the flexibility of resilience.

Perth as a ‘big’ city

The bigness of cities has attracted much attention from urban academics and professionals whose perspective may be divided into two camps: productive science using agglomeration-based analysis or impact science using anxiety-based analysis. The two approaches need to be joined in order to resolve issues of urban ‘bigness’, and in this article the growth of Perth is used to illustrate the potential and challenges of this integration.

Urban accessibility issues

After many struggles from disability rights and independent-living advocates, urban accessibility has gradually become a concern for many urban planners across post-industrial countries. In this paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork studies in Barcelona working with urban accessibility professionals and activists, we argue for the importance of the ‘documentation interfaces’ created in their struggles: that is, the relational processes to collaboratively build multi-media accounts in a diversity of formats seeking to enforce different translations of bodily needs into specific urban accessibility arrangements. In discussion with the asymmetries that the ongoing expertization of accessibility might be opening up, we would like to foreground these apparently irrelevant practices as an interesting site to reflect on how urban accessibility struggles might allow us to rethink the project of technical democracy and its applications to urban issues. Two cases are analyzed: (1) the creation of Streets for All, a platform to contest and to sensitize technicians and citizens alike of the problems of ‘shared streets’ for the blind and partially sighted led by the Catalan Association for the Blind; and (2) the organization of the Tinkerthon, a DIY and open-source hardware workshop boosted by En torno a la silla to facilitate the creation of a network of tinkerers seeking to self-manage accessibility infrastructures. These cases not only bring to the fore different takes on the democratization of the relations between technical professionals and disability rights advocates, but also offer different approaches to the politics of universals in the design of urban accessibility arrangements.

Modernization and the restructuring of the Shanghai speech community

This paper reports the results of direct observations of language use in two shopping areas in Shanghai, Nanjing East Road and Xujiahui. The data reported in this paper were collected in 2007. In Nanjing East Road, four traditional stores provided a base line for the use of Shanghainese. That base line (60 percent) was compared to a hierarchy of department stores in Xujiahui. The results showed that the store that best matched the base-line data attracted customers representing upper-working class / lower middle class customers. The remaining two stores attracted middle class and upper class customers. In the latter setting, it was found that a certain segment of the customers switched from Shanghainese to Putonghua for the business transaction, an effect we associated with the presence of young urban professionals of all backgrounds. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of speech community theory, and network density, which allows predictions of changes taking place within the dominant language of the Shanghainese speech community.

Skid Row, Gallery Row and the space in between: cultural revitalisation and its impacts on two Los Angeles neighbourhoods

As a means for neighbourhood improvement, cultural urban revitalisation seeks to draw business growth and investment by attracting a creative class of young urban professionals. Though criticisms abound that these strategies benefit the wealthy and displace low-income communities, there is little research focusing on how the efforts of social actors can shape or resist this process. The purpose of this study is to offer a micro-level look at the spatial and political contestations and negotiations that occur amongst a variety of community organisations and individuals in two adjacent neighbourhoods in downtown Los Angeles undergoing revitalisation. By approaching ‘revitalisation’ as an arena where different neighbourhood groups can compete to achieve their goals, it argues that we scrutinise prevailing notions of gentrification and seek to understand the values and actions of stakeholders involved in order to enable more equitable outcomes of urban revitalisation.

Ariel Heryanto. Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture

Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen CultureAriel HeryantoSingapore: NUS Press in association with Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2014, xiv+246p.At the risk of rehashing the old orientalist cliches we must acknowledge that contemporary Indonesia can be a bewildering place. This holds true both for outside observers and for engaged in fashioning the practice of daily life. During my daily motorcycle commute to Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta (Jogja) in 2012-13, the massive billboards at major intersections never ceased to fascinate me and make me question what I thought I knew about Indonesia. Advertisements for self-help seminars by Muslim televangelists competed with images of Korean boy bands; Coca-Cola offered itself as the perfect drink for breaking the Ramadan fast; an appliance store suggested buying a refrigerator to celebrate Kartini Day (a national holiday honoring a Javanese princess who promoted education for women); and portraits of political candidates in stock poses blocked the view of Monjali, a massive monument left-over from Suharto's authoritarian New Order which now housed a nightly display of Hello-Kitty-themed paper lanterns. In March 2013, after a bar fight led to the murder of an off duty solider and a commando squad broke into the prison and executed the suspects, banners applauding Kopassus (the elite army special forces) and denouncing preman (street thugs) mysteriously appeared at these intersections. I was constantly amazed by what one saw on the street of Jogja. Fortunately, Ariel Heryanto's latest book offers wide-ranging and insightful analysis into Indonesian political culture and cultural politics since the fall of Suharto in 1998. Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture is a brilliant study of the diverse and seemingly contradictory forces at play in the world's fourth largest nationBook state. This ethnography of urban Indonesian youth and mid-career professionals explains that what I witnessed in the streets of Jogja were public manifestations over the struggle for identity. Heryanto delves into the ways in which his subjects actively negotiate consumerism, Islamicization, social media, and the violent legacy of authoritarianism.While an important book, Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture will frustrate some readers. Despite the title, Heryanto is very clear that the book is not a history of Indonesian cinema. Nor is it an encyclopedic account of Indonesian television and film. Rather, the book uses screen culture (television, film, and social media) as a prism to explore post-New Order identity politics. Heryanto analyzes films, televisions shows, and aspects of social media to understand the ways in which are actively engaged in the construction of their own identity. That his study discusses certain Indonesians is seen in his clear focus on urban middle-class young people and mid-career professionals (what Americans used to call Yuppies: young upwardly mobile urban professionals) in several Javanese cites, including Jakarta, Surabaya, Semarang, Bandung, and Malang. Thus, this is not a study of all elements of Indonesian society, only of a privileged subset. Heryanto states that his analysis is narrowly qualitative rather then broadly quantitative. But the author's admittedly tight focus does not diminish the work's larger significance. Indeed, this may be one of the most useful contributions to the understanding contemporary Indonesia, comparable to John Pemberton's history of the present, On the Subject of Java, which probed the New Order in the mid-1980s (Pemberton 1994). Perhaps the most striking feature of Identity and Pleasure is Heryanto's ability to find meaning in seemingly trivial and mundane aspects of popular culture.At times Heryanto's description of Indonesian cultural politics can seem pessimistic. Cynical politicians use Islam to garner support from pious voters and Muslim televangelists seem more preoccupied with promoting a path to material wealth than spiritual salvation. …

The Split of the Nation

The article's main objective is to show that the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine fulfilled a political role it had not anticipated. By relying on the logic of exclusion of enemy, Euromaidans contributed to the political consolidation of the national enemy in its struggle against its own political regime. They helped the formation of both the liberal, protest collective subject in Russia and the Ukrainian liberal, collective subject. Such a strong correspondence, even melding, of the nationalist, political subjectivity of the Ukrainian maidans with Russian, liberal, protest subjectivity indicates a coinciding of two types of nationalism (Ukrainian and Russian), which both equally divide the nation into two subjects: (1) the subject of the Nation, with a capital “N” (educated urban professionals, “the elite of society,” etc.) and (2) the subject of the nation, with a lowercase “n” (“vatniks,” “gopniks,” etc.).*

Contemporary Latin American gentrification? Young urban professionals discovering historic neighbourhoods

ABSTRACTA process of urban metamorphosis is under way in many inner-city neighbourhoods across Latin America. The theoretical framework of “new-build gentrification” reveals the multiple dimensions of this process, which seems to be more prevalent in the Global South than in Global North inner cities, and involves specific urban typology and urban incentives. This paper explores the emergence of new socio-spatial environments over the last three decades in Santiago, Chile. Two examples—the neighbourhoods of Bellavista and El Llano—are used to illustrate how urban renewal has expanded through changes in the contemporary physical fabric as well as social replacement by “young urban professionals.” Analysis of these changes highlights the particularities of Latin American gentrification, including the distinctive mixture of public- and private-sector incentives to replace deteriorated properties and the subsequent loss of neighbourhood meaning and community identity.

The Improvisional City: Valuing urbanity beyond the chimera of permanence

So-called temporary uses of urban space, including ‘pop ups’ or meanwhile spaces, have recently attracted much attention by urban professionals as providing short-term ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of vacancy. Yet the ways in which these urban innovations are conceived, studied and evaluated continue to reify a capitalist framework of development and conceptual understanding of the city that valorises exchange value and permanence. The result is that little empirical research exists about smaller projects that offer the city and its residents many non-monetary benefits. In this article, we argue that evaluating urban space according to the dichotomy of permanent or temporary land use is problematic: it misses the fluidity and multiple rhythms of how places are made and spaces experienced that are inherent to the regular life of any city. Rather than temporary use, we use the concept of ‘interim space’ to consider projects that may be responsive to local needs and available resources. Such initiatives often include ‘non-visible’ advantages which stem from use values, healthy place-making and creating shared spaces, offer alternative economies, and provide residents and guests with new ways of imagining their neighbourhood and city. To make our arguments, we analyse Granby Park, a ‘pop up’ park in north Dublin, initiated by the artistic collective Upstart that was open to the public in the summer of 2013, using qualitative research conducted before, during and after the official time the park was open. To begin a conversation about new frameworks of analysis that might capture the intricacies of interim urban spaces such as Granby Park, we conclude by offering a new concept, the ‘improvisional city’, to encourage more empirical research that takes seriously the many tangible and intangible benefits of these initiatives.

The Improvisional City: Valuing urbanity beyond the chimera of permanence

So-called temporary uses of urban space, including ‘pop ups’ or meanwhile spaces, have recently attracted much attention by urban professionals as providing short-term ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of vacancy. Yet the ways in which these urban innovations are conceived, studied and evaluated continue to reify a capitalist framework of development and conceptual understanding of the city that valorises exchange value and permanence. The result is that little empirical research exists about smaller projects that offer the city and its residents many non-monetary benefits. In this article, we argue that evaluating urban space according to the dichotomy of permanent or temporary land use is problematic: it misses the fluidity and multiple rhythms of how places are made and spaces experienced that are inherent to the regular life of any city. Rather than temporary use, we use the concept of ‘interim space’ to consider projects that may be responsive to local needs and available resources. Such initiatives often include ‘non-visible’ advantages which stem from use values, healthy place-making and creating shared spaces, offer alternative economies, and provide residents and guests with new ways of imagining their neighbourhood and city. To make our arguments, we analyse Granby Park, a ‘pop up’ park in north Dublin, initiated by the artistic collective Upstart that was open to the public in the summer of 2013, using qualitative research conducted before, during and after the official time the park was open. To begin a conversation about new frameworks of analysis that might capture the intricacies of interim urban spaces such as Granby Park, we conclude by offering a new concept, the ‘improvisional city’, to encourage more empirical research that takes seriously the many tangible and intangible benefits of these initiatives.

Disputing the Character of the City: Heritage, Regeneration and the Urban Design Turn

Like many cities with an abundant legacy of heritage structures and aspirations to expand their economic and population base, Halifax (Nova Scotia) experiences significant tensions between heritage conservation and urban development ambitions. On the one hand, Halifax has a vigorous heritage movement spawned in the wake of slum clearance and urban redevelopment efforts in the 1960s; heritage advocates work consistently to conserve the low-rise character of the historic city. On the other hand, it has an emergent urban design lobby supported by economic development interests and creative class ideas; development advocates call for signature high-rise buildings to attract investment and young people. With each new development proposal, community groups argue about the meaning of past and future, the nature of cultural identity and the image of the city. In this essay we examine the recent emergence of a social network of young urban professionals whose influence is growing rapidly in local debates about urban regeneration. Whereas a decade ago heritage conservation enjoyed high priority in planning debates in many parts of the world, today it competes with arguments for signature architecture and greater urban density. The urban design turn reflects changing cultural priorities but also reveals the operation of new governance mechanisms within local growth machines.

Not Only a Workplace. Reshaping Creative Work and Urban Space

This research article examines the intersection of two current topics: the ongoing flexibilisation of creative work on the one hand, and the emergence of urban temporary working landscapes on the other. Their interrelatedness is inspected through a case study of one particular creative hub, the former Volkskrant building in Amsterdam, and through analysing its transformation into a ‘creative’ hotel. Based on intensive qualitative fieldwork in 2012 and 2013, we argue that the importance of such temporary hubs lies beyond the fact that these places provide professionals in the creative industries with desk space. By mobilising the concept of engagement, we draw parallels between the ways in which creative urban professionals shape the physical spaces they use, and the ways digital media users appropriate virtual spaces. We argue that an understanding of the changing practices of creative workers might benefit from a revisiting of the concepts ‘loose space’ and ‘Thirdspace’, as these notions help challenge the false dichotomy between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ space. We believe that this continuous re-imagining and repurposing of space while working in it, together with the possibility of actual, physical modification as afforded by the particular countercultural heritage of Amsterdam, reveals the creative potentialities of these flexible work practices.

Urban Acupuncture: Hybrid Social and Technological Practices for Hyperlocal Placemaking

This paper considers an emerging planning practice that uses networked connections to interact with urban places and re-create enlivened cities. The paper presents “urban acupuncture” as a new planning approach that broadens communication and strategically targets interventions across the city. Defined as an approach, which, through the use of digital social networks and interactions, involves citizens and planners in place activations in order to stimulate and reinvigorate place, thus creating meaningful relationships between citizens and their urban settings. This paper uses the UR[BNE] Brisbane Festival 2012 as a qualitative case study of urban acupuncture, best defined as a hyper-localized healing treatment through place activation to enliven and recreate cities. It examines the challenges faced and opportunities embraced by a network of urban professionals. Their aim was to activate the underused urban spaces of central Brisbane through the festival's activities and events. The findings identify the key elements required to design public spaces using socially and technologically networked interactions.

Understanding the Disposition of Urban Planning Students Toward Social Justice and Equity Themes

This research surveys how graduate level urban planning students think about social justice and equity issues and how academic instruction in urban planning affects the disposition of students toward these issues and themes in the context of their development as urban planning professionals. Although the quantitative findings did not demonstrate that the graduate curriculum and instruction had any appreciable impact on student understanding and navigation of equity and social justice themes, qualitative evidence did suggest that students are understanding and care about issues related to social justice and equity and were interested in incorporating those issues into their professional practice. This research also suggests that graduate academic instruction may fall short in supporting students with the useful integration of social justice and equity issues into their professional practice.

Building sustainable cities: tools for developing new building practices?

AbstractUrban professionals have a widespread interest in sustainable cities and the use of assessment tools to monitor performance. Much of the research on such assessment tools focuses on gauging their differences and similarities. Scholars give insufficient attention to what the tools ‘do’ to those who use them and to how this affects building practices. Drawing on insights from actor‐network theory and an empirical study of two Danish urban development competitions in which design teams were required to use a sustainability assessment tool, the analysis shows how this artefact mediated interaction among different professionals and initiated iterative, dialogical processes that affected building practices. The analysis emphasizes a number of aspects that the construction and urban development literature often overlook: such tools can facilitate and mediate knowledge creation and flow, but the entanglement of relationships, the assemblages, in which the designers are situated conditions the outcome.

Ecosystem services in urban land use planning: Integration challenges in complex urban settings—Case of Stockholm

The concept of urban ecosystem services (ES) is currently promoted in Sweden in the planning for more compact and sustainable cities. This study looks into how the implementation of the urban ES concept in Stockholm is understood by different urban professionals, based on semi-structured interviews and a stakeholder workshop. Although recognizing the usefulness of the ES concept, the professionals identified many remaining challenges linked to integrating the concept into land use planning. These are analyzed in relation to the gap between ES science and ES policy and structured according to the different types of planning uncertainties they represent. One issue that was persistently highlighted by stakeholders was that the promotion of urban ES – regardless of how beneficial it may be – will add further complexity to already strained workloads among planners, policy-makers and urban managers. Also, the political demand for increasing density in the urban areas of Stockholm seems to create a growing need for urban ES. Urban densification can thus potentially promote the interest in planning with ES as a vital parameter for urban qualities. They expressed a need for long term perspectives in planning with new tools and methods for valuing ES, supported through “high profile” projects.

SIGNIFICANCE OF MICROCLIMATIC STUDY IN URBAN CANYONS TOWARDS AMBIENT URBAN SPACE DESIGN

About 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and the fraction is growing. Thus the study of the urban boundary layer and urban climate is of great importance.Since urban centres of the world have immense growth of population, their quality requires a very careful screening for sustainable future, growth and development. The quality of outdoor urban spaces is more significant in tropical countries like India, since the activities are shared between indoor and outdoor. There are clear links between the climate of a settlement and its potential sustainability. Its opportunities for gathering energy, its need for energy conservation and its ability to dispose of airborne wastes are largely controlled by the climate it experiences. moreover, urban design decisions will create microclimates that either accentuate or moderate the properties of the background climate. Thus, there is a clear role for an applied urban climatology in the planning of sustainable settlements. hence there is a compulsive need for providing ambient environmental conditions outdoors, specific to the pedestrian users. The uhI (urban heat Island) phenomenon though is influenced by many factors, the role of urban design and professionals like architects, urban designers and planners cannot be ignored. Often they are neglected when urban design principles get executed onsite. Therefore there is a need for understanding the urban microclimate interaction with the urban geometry elements for deriving design solutions and guidelines for the future. Though urban microclimate is also dependent on multiple factors this paper focuses on its relation with various urban geometry elements specific to the urban streets. The unit chosen for the study is ‘urban canyon’. To understand the microclimatic variation various profiles of urban canyons were selected. The urban microclimatic discomfort is given by the term “microclimatic Stress” and the thermal index used for the measurement is PeT (Physiological equivalent temperature) and rayman Pro is used for its calculation. The study of the canyons concluded with findings that proved significant impact of street geometry elements on the microclimatic stress of urban outdoors.

The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned

The undesigned and the unplanned are the subject of Daniel Campo’s The Accidental Playground, and a perennially difficult topic for designers and planners to engage. The more value ascribed to such ad-hoc, DIY or insurgent spaces, the more difficult it is to define the role of urban professionals in creating or safeguarding them. In recent years, a spate of theories has highlighted the value for cities and their citizens of self-built and self-organized spaces. Design theories of everyday urbanism (Margaret Crawford), insurgent public space (Jeffery Hou) or loose space (Karen Franck) build on the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel De Certeau or. more recently, anthropologist James Holston. This tome, among the more concrete and practical-minded, takes the form of an ethnography of space. Our guide is a former planner for the city of New York turned planning educator, whose experiences inform his foray into and observations of his subject. The playground in question is a neglected space along Brooklyn’s post-industrial waterfront, the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal (BEDT)—an industrial freight yard turned leftover and contested space in Williamsburg’s dramatic redevelopment and gentrification saga of the 1990s and 2000s. There, Campo reveals a multi-layered, multi-functional space that offered freedom, access to nature, and community for a number of marginal populations. As the neighbourhood changed, the mainstream wised up, planners and official institutions got involved, and ultimately everything was ruined. What happened at BEDT and how it went wrong are the two poles of the story—both a nuanced appreciation and a cautionary tale. The result is as much a portrait of fin de siècle New York as it is a story of the park.