Urban Revolution Research Articles

Rehumanize the Streets and Make Them More Smart and Livable in Arab Cities: Case Study: Tahlia Street; Riyadh City, Saudi Arabia

An urban revolution has brought a qualitative change related to the globalization of technologies and the economy. This, in turn, leads to changes in the city’s “human face”. Riyadh is the capital city of Saudi Arabia, which has been impacted by rapid population growth. The significant urban expansion negatively impacted various human characteristics as streets became more devoted to transportation than urban space. Various efforts have been made to re-establish the human aspects of streets by creating built environments and urban spaces. This study aims to determine the physical street features that impact Riyadh city streets’ livability. The study also determines people’s perception of the physical quality of Riyadh’s city streets. An exploratory sequential mixed research method has been adopted. Two separate qualitative and quantitative research approaches have been used to answer the research questions. Through a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews, the physical aspects of the case study street were assessed, and physical issues were identified. The finding of this study showed that physical issues such as scarce planting, lack of services for disabled people, traffic congestion, inadequate seating, and inadequate canopies and shelter are deteriorating the Riyadh city street livability. Responding to these physical problems will require measures to be built in municipalities to make Saudi cities more livable. The first practical measure is the provision of facilities such as seating and street furniture, adequate parking spaces, adequate shelter, and services for disabled people. The second is improving the quality of existing facilities, such as planting and landscaping. Lastly, traffic congestion can be controlled by changing Tahlia Street to a transit street that allows only public transport. Overall, the findings of this study will help planners and decision-makers create a livable environment within the framework of the re-humanization of the cities. A collaborative system to support the rehumanization of urban spaces should be adopted by encouraging smart design and improving the open spaces functions to fulfil the community need through a participative method, including the involvement of citizens.

An urban revolution that doesn’t make me a statistic

An urban revolution that doesn’t make me a statistic

Tbilisi, Baku, and Yerevan: Neoclassicism and Imperial Signification in the Caucasus

Contrary to urban histories of the Caucasus that have tended to take an individual capital city and chart urban development from the Persian imprint and the Russian imperial legacy to the Soviet reconstruction, this article takes a comparative look at three national capitals, Baku, Yerevan, and Tbilisi, in order to argue for their similarities as well as their distinctness. It puts forth that the markers of the “national monumentality” and “capitality” of these three cities were set in place in the period of Russian imperial rule and that the central cores of Yerevan, Baku, and Tbilisi remained relatively unchanged into the Soviet era. This argument stresses that the impact of both the historiography of the Soviet urban revolution and the nationalizing historiography that continues to idolize genius figures like Armenian–Soviet architect Alexandr Tamanyan has led to an under-appreciation of the many imperial traces remaining in the Soviet-era cities. The article proceeds by using the architectural evidence, alongside travel accounts authored by those very familiar with imperial urban settings that describe Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan in some detail in these periods, to shed light on the changing dynamics of these locations (or lack thereof) into the Soviet era. Imperial travelers are supplemented by literary sources, as well as a spotlight on the example of Tamanyan and his centrality to movements like the World of Art group of neoclassicist architects in St. Petersburg. It is argued that it was neoclassicism that united the urban approaches in Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan under the Russian and Soviet periods of rule and that this violent rupture from the Persianate past continues to dominate these cities today.

Comprehensive systematic review of information fusion methods in smart cities and urban environments

Smart cities result from integrating advanced technologies and intelligent sensors into modern urban infrastructure. The Internet of Things (IoT) and data integration are pivotal in creating interconnected and intelligent urban spaces. In this literature review, we explore the different methods of information fusion used in smart cities, along with their advantages and challenges. However, there are notable challenges in managing diverse data sources, handling large data volumes, and meeting the near-real-time demands of various smart city applications.The review aims to examine smart city applications in detail, incorporating quality evaluation and information fusion techniques and identifying critical issues while outlining promising research directions. In order to accomplish our goal, we conducted a comprehensive search of literature and applied selective criteria. We identified 59 recent studies addressing machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques in smart city applications. These studies were obtained from various databases such as ScienceDirect (SD), Scopus, Web of Science (WoS), and IEEE Xplore. The main objective of this study is to provide more detailed insights into smart cities by supplementing existing research. The word cloud visualisation of machine learning/deep learning and information fusion in smart cities papers shows a diverse landscape, covering both technical aspects of artificial intelligence and practical applications in urban settings. Apart from technical exploration, the study also delves into the ethical and privacy implications arising in smart cities. Moreover, it thoroughly examines the challenges that must be addressed to realise this urban revolution's potential fully.

SettingsAustin Williams. China’s Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-Cities

Austin Williams. China’s Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-Cities. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 2017. 220 pages. Price US $ 124.95 (Hardback). China is still considered to be a polluter and its city life is deplorable with unbreathable air and contaminated drinking water. These are the thoughts of the past and China is now bidding to emerge as an environmental soft-power at an impressive rate. The main argument of this book revolves around China’s rapid urbanisation and China’s government-led eco-city building programme. It is an attempt to falsify the Manichean Worldview of China, which tries to provide comprehendible classifications of a country that is much advanced for that. With rapid development and wealth creation, China’s fast urbanisation has outpaced that of any other country in the world, adding 458 cities in just last 4 decades—110 cities in a decade. But China is now pausing to think what it had done right and wrong in the last 40 years. William starts the book by explaining what a city is as well as the eco-city, and simplifies the definition of eco-city provided by the Chinese government i.e. a city where main drinking water sources are ‘adequate’ and its air quality is rated ‘good’ on 123 days of a year. Then he moves on how China has turned barren lands into wealth creating giants. But all this wealth and prosperity at that pace resulted in urban challenges like degraded environment. Over the course of the book, William contextualises the Chinese society and its evolution with respect to political events. Wealth creation is still the top priority of the Chinese government. To portray a soft image of the country, China is trying on multiple facets. For example, the Chinese Society for Urban Studies has created a new 28-item eco-city friendly list, which is different from other checklists such as by UNHABITAT and BREEAM. Throughout the book William uses sarcastic notes on how China is learning to experiment with spaces either by inviting rural households to newly developed cities or by reforming the older ones. From the book, it looks like there is a long way ahead for China to become eco- friendly. [Aqeel Anwar Chaudhry]

Postcapitalist Planning and Urban Revolution

Through what kind of spaces might postcapitalist planning emerge? How will the process of wresting collective control over the relations of production and reproduction, and over our metabolic exchange with the rest of nature, unfold through struggle? In seeking answers to such questions, this article reviews the literature on democratic economic planning beyond capitalism and makes the case for a renewed engagement with issues of space and the urban through a closer reading of Henri Lefebvre’s work on planetary urbanization and the production of space. We argue that, to date, the economic planning literature has tended to focus on overcoming abstract labour time rather than abstract space – an oversight that prevents us from fully apprehending the urban form through which capitalism produces and reproduces its conditions of possibility and carries the seeds of its own destruction and potential supersession. Engaging with recent critical theorizing on the logistics revolution and the logistical state, we argue that postcapitalist forms of planning will arrive through an urban revolution, through struggles over urban everyday life. We suggest that future investigations into the possibilities for a democratic economic planning beyond capitalism should attend to actually existing empirical struggles over the urban – as the mediator of capitalist relations – and look for inspiration to historical and contemporary examples of municipalist praxis aiming to reinvent the commune.

A ‘Shoehorn’ at Altyn Depe: A Biased Application of the Urban Revolution Model of Vere Gordon Childe (1950)

A ‘Shoehorn’ at Altyn Depe: A Biased Application of the Urban Revolution Model of Vere Gordon Childe (1950)

Review of Fulong Wu 2022: Creating Chinese Urbanism: Urban revolution and governance change. London: UCL Press.

Review of Fulong Wu 2022: Creating Chinese Urbanism: Urban revolution and governance change. London: UCL Press.

Emerging rurality: rethinking the city based on valuation of the urban-rural

The development of urban and rural environment concepts pervades landscape characteristics and the dichotomous relationship between these areas. The urban and rural understandings are related to their economic, industrial, and agrarian activities to the city and countryside, respectively. Thus, the urban-rural duality departs the notion of a city that includes multiple environments and induces both an erasure of the ecosystem logic of humans and nature relations and consideration of humans as part of its decrease. In that regard, aspects connected with the dynamic of products and services store, such as water and food provisions, have unstuck from their origins which trivializes the process of production, supply, and consumption. Furthermore, a discussion between urban and rural must consider several points, including food sovereignty, agribusiness, land access inequality, local and regional territorial articulation, and climate. Based on a bibliographic review of academic articles published in journals, periodicals and events, this article intends to ponder these aspects in defence of an idea of urban-rural interdependence from the conception of the urban revolution and the urban phenomenon concept. Besides, this study seeks to strengthen the debate on consolidated and conflicted territorial practices aimed to rethink new public policies toward a more integrated and less unequal territory.

Book review: Creating Chinese Urbanism: Urban Revolution and Governance Changes

Book review: Creating Chinese Urbanism: Urban Revolution and Governance Changes

Overlapping cities: Trans-urban augmentation in the digital era of western cities

The digital revolution has produced and is still creating new lifestyles that are being reflected in a new urban revolution which sees the overlapping of different environments to enrich the urban experience and respond to emergent necessities. It leads to a dissolution of the strictly defined spaces and uses to create hybrid places that colonize the urban environment. The dualities of public and private, of exterior and interior, of work and leisure, of man and woman, of house and city, are then changing, and with them also the traditional pillars of the modern society. The digital is overlapping the material, changing the urban organizational structure through new relationship between people, city and technology in a new reality recently dubbed the “metaverse”. Most of the spatial needs are then transformed, opening up to a profound rethinking of the structure of places and of the meaning itself of urban environment. The article analyses the current relationship between the material and the virtual by identifying the possible resulting spatial emergencies.

African cities by 2063: Fostering theologies of urban citizenship

Grounded in a postcolonial, liberationist urban vision, this article lamented the theological and political paralysis of urban denialism that fails African cities and African urban populations. Considering different possible urban trajectories towards 2063 – ranging from floundering to flourishing, implosion to explosion, and apocalyptic disaster to complete rebirth – it then proposed theologies of African urban citizenship, as response. It sought to articulate a vision of citizen-driven African cities, remaking cities ‘from below’, through interconnected and intersectional urban movements. It considered urban citizenship not as the decent and orderly conduct of subjects of the nation-state but as the disruptive and transformative presence and participation of citizens of God’s new city, breaking into cities across the African continent. While it bemoaned the absence of ‘Africa’s urban revolution’ from mainstream theologies and politics practised in the African context, and the insufficient attention paid to it even by the Africa 2063 manifesto, it dared to evoke hope, in spite of evidence to the contrary. This should be viewed as a conceptual contribution, fusing literature study with deep urban immersion.Contribution: Grounded in a postcolonial, liberationist urban vision, this article lamented the theological and political paralysis of urban denialism that fails African cities and African urban populations, contemplating theologies of African urban citizenship instead.

Integrated multivariate data analysis for Urban Sustainability Assessment, a case study of Casablanca city

• The satellite images and census data are good information sources for urban management and development. • The PCA method is robust, flexible, and provides an accurate outcome in the case of a large number of indicators. • The population density is one of the main driving forces of urban sustainability. • The urban sustainability is inadequate in 50% of Casablanca city containing two-thirds of the whole urban population. In the last few years, the world's urban population has significantly increased and it is expected to undergo a continuous accelerated growth. This urban revolution confronts us with real challenges to promote urban sustainable development and has significant effects on socioeconomic development and the urban environment. This research suggests an approach to assess urban sustainability (US) based on the integration of census information, GIS, and remote-sensing data, which can support urban planners and decision-makers in broad environmental and socioeconomic perspectives. Five environmental indices retrieved from Landsat-8 imagery were coupled with eight general census socioeconomic indicators using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). PCA produced three components, and each one was considered a unique urban sustainability aspect covering social, economic, and/or environmental dimensions. Furthermore, the obtained result was exploited to develop a synthetic US index at the commune level with the main aim to assess urban sustainability and its spatial distribution. The outcome depicts that the US is adequate in 50% of Casablanca city, which contains nearly the third of the urban population. This research remains so promising and can be considered by urban planners as a reference to take necessary actions to improve sustainability, resilience, and well-being in the most vulnerable communes.

The limits to urban revolution: the transformation of Ankara, Turkey, under the Justice and Development Party

ABSTRACT Contemporary urbanization is characterized by the incorporation of historically isolated places into vast urbanized networks that are planetary in scope. We underscore the political processes and actors that instantiate urban transformation. Drawing on Lefebvre’s writings on urban revolutions – in plural – we show that he considered comprehensive urban transformation the result of multiple place-based revolutions that are typically driven by a state. We then present Turkey as an example in which the Justice and Development Party embraced an agenda of absolute national development whose primary mechanism was a nationwide urban revolution. We focus on Ankara, which served as a laboratory for urban policy experimentation from 1994 onwards, and we present original research to show how its urban governance mechanisms informed urban planning legislation at the national scale after 2002 when the Justice and Development Party embarked on a program of national renewal. This regime was based on the distribution of short-term gains but its long-term costs became apparent after 2010 and it faced increasingly fierce contestation. This case not only exposes the limits of urban revolution in Turkey, but it also shows that urban revolutions are negotiated political processes and inherently contingent, uneven and incomplete.

The morphological faces of Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

The urban revolution of Barra da Tijuca-RJ was characterized by a late growth, due to its location, to be an immense sand and concentration of great extensions of land in the hands of a few. This finding reflects subsequent actions in the region, where the real state growth process and road connections were the focus of urban actions. Lucio Costa's pilot plan, with modernist characteristics, arises from the need to anticipate the uncontrolled and inevitable ocupation process of the area. The plan aimed to prevent the reprodution of what had happened with other neighborhoods on the Rio de Janeiro coast, which were experiencing intense densification. 
 After 50 years, several changes were made to update the plan to the present, to remedy some points in which the plan did not have enough detail and many that succumbed to real estate pressures. 
 In this way, this article aims to analyze the transformations that took place in Barra da Tijuca, from the implementation of the plan to the current urban fabric, and verify the urban design performance and real estate pressure as modelers of the neighborhood.

The main stages of urbanization and their comprehension in contemporary sociological theory

The article discusses the main stages of urbanization, which are distinguished on the basis of Soja’s concept of urban revolutions. The specificity of the spatial organization of each of the stages is analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the features of the current stage of urbanization, in which there are not only cities, but also more complex spatial formations, such as agglomerations. The article focuses on the postmetropolis as the main contemporary spatial form, according to Soja, which is replacing the traditional metropolis. This process is a result of the development of information and communication technologies. The transformation of the suburbs is also considered; the suburbs are turning from homogeneous residential areas into multifunctional “edge cities” and even “edgeless cities”, which are extremely difficult to map due to their dispersal over vast territories. Modern urbanization demonstrates a spatial morphology that reflects the changes caused by the formation of a postindustrial society, globalization and scientific and technological progress.

Against Method

Against Method

Skillful portrayal and reflection of the Naxalite Movement of Bengal (1970s) in world of stories

The Naxalite Movement of Bengal ( 1970s ) was undoubtedly a landmark in history of political movements of Bengal and it had undoubtedly a pan – Indian character for spreading in Andhra Pradesh , Uttar Pradesh , Bihar , Kerala and Punjab . The movement had its root in the historical Tebhaga Movement and Telengana Movement, the Food Movement (1959), the Movement against hike in tramfare (1965), the Food Movement (1966) etc. The Naxalite Movement was devastated in face of police atrocities but its imprint was long-lasting in world of literature of Bengal such as on dramas, poetry, novels and stories. Actually it influenced literature of Punjab , U.P., Maharashtra , Dandakaranya , Andhra Pradesh , Kerala also as well as songs and movie- making in whole India but here in this article I have tried my best to depict only impact of the bloodbath and political violence in stories of our Bengal and it must be admitted without any hesitation that those stories were reflection of social realism which did not always consider the importance of pure aesthetic value related to creation of literary treasures. Dearth of mass base , excessive loyalty towards ideology of China , personal vengeance in name of urban revolution , ruthless attack on schools – laboratories- libraries – images / statue of famous personalities , policy of annihilation and bloodbath, extreme authoritarianism in leadership style of Charu Mazumdar and Saroj Dutta, amalgamation of urban and rural youth power during days of the rebellious upsurge and glorious role / contribution of courageous women in revolution were skillfully described in various stories some of which had been written by the Naxalite revolutionaries themselves.

Protest, platforms, and the state in the Belarus crisis

ABSTRACT Despite nationwide mass protests in August 2020, the regime of Aleksandr Lukashenka remains in power in Belarus. In this essay, I discuss three articles focusing on the origins of the protests, the role of social media platforms and the strategies and results of state repression. Together they provide new insights on the events in Belarus and deepen our understanding of contemporary urban revolutions.

The status of Arab urban centers in the geographical heritage

The emergence of Islam is one of the most important human events in human life. It results in an urban revolution that became a center of stability for the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and then spread to the rest of the regions, especially Asia, Africa, and Europe. The emergence of these urban centers was accompanied by great progress in the fields of human knowledge. Geographers have been interested in studying urban centers because they are prominent urban areas. Thus, the main purpose of this study is the formation of basic concepts that help in knowing the growth or decline of urban centers in the ancient Arab cities. The main purpose of this study is to clarify the conditions of Arab urban centers in our geographical heritage that helped the growth or decline of urban centers in ancient Arab cities. Military, economic, and health purposes are among the main variables that contributed to the emergence of urban centers. The study clarified that many of the variables that helped in the emergence of urban centers in the early stages have lost their role and erased their entity, while many of them continued to enjoy the prosperity of their commercial markets and their importance increased over time. The tracking of what happened to these cities over time was not followed by geographers and this led to the failure to identify many of the facts that led to their decrease or prosperity.