Urban Social Life Research Articles

Suburban camouflage in urban neighbourhoods: new building typologies and their impact on social life of residential streets

ABSTRACT Centre-city neighbourhoods is where residents expect a diversity of residents and an active social life, along with numerous amenities. This study investigates the relationship between the transforming morphology of Over-the-Rhine – a historic centre-city neighbourhood in Cincinnati, Ohio – and its urban social life. Detailed observations and morphological analyses of four new residential projects reveal that typologies that on the face appear urban, in fact promote a suburban lifestyle that prioritizes independence and seclusion and focus on private domestic life, in an urban context. We conclude with a set of strategies to increase the interaction between the private and the public realm.

Crime and violence on the margins of society: How justice‐based power vacuums create deprived neighbourhoods

AbstractHow have crime, conflict, and violence shaped the social structure of neighbourhoods across diverse spatial and temporal landscapes in marginalised urban communities? To address to this central question, this study examines the socio‐political dynamics of New York City and Palermo, as well as the role of authoritarian actors, by juxtaposing different historical periods and contrasting the influences of political institutions with extra‐legal entities such as gangs and mafias. Utilising visual images, archival documents, and geographical mapping, the study introduces the concept of ‘justice‐based power vacuums’. This novel theoretical concept elucidates the mechanisms through which coercive power fosters social environments susceptible to extra‐legal domination, effectively entrapping vulnerable groups, be they ethnic or racial minorities or economically disadvantaged groups. I argue that while crime, conflict, and violence, especially under the auspices of gangs and mafias, often become the focal point, it is the obscured role of political authorities that stands as the genesis of such complex social problems. The present comparative historical social research indicates that recognising and addressing these obscured political influences is essential for a holistic understanding and subsequent mitigation of the structural challenges in urban social life that create deprived neighbourhoods across time and space similarly and perpetuate marginalisation in these communities.

WSPÓŁCZESNE TENDENCJE W DOSTĘPNOŚCI OBIEKTÓW KULTURY NA PRZYKŁADZIE BARCELONY

Cultural facilities play an important role in urban social life. It is a meeting place between culture and the participants in urban life, understood today as a place for discussion, exchange of ideas. To allow these processes to take place, it is necessary to ensure accessibility in all areas. The aim of this article is to analyse exemplary directions of activities in cultural venues in Barcelona as a city implementing accessibility in the broadest sense, including supporting activities in venues such as theatres and museums, for example. Based on the results of the research, an attempt was made to develop an accessibility model capturing spatial, technological, organisational and communication and information activities. The research involved a literature review and site visits to four cultural venues in Barcelona.

Social Infrastructures in Times of Corona: Exploring the Ambiguities of Sociality, Practices, and Materiality

The coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and associated public health measures continuously alter our everyday lives and routines. Here, we focus on social infrastructures of local provisions and the role they perform within cities under shutdown. Social infrastructures of local provisions such as supermarkets remained functional in Germany even during repeated shutdowns as they were perceived as essential for everyday life. Supermarkets hence turned from mundane sites of provision to sites where we could witness how infrastructures are deeply entangled with the microfoundations of urban social life. Based on auto-ethnographic accounts covering the period from March 2020 until May 2020, we explore how these spaces became primary sites through which to experience the changes caused by the pandemic. Writing from inner-city neighborhoods, we highlight the need to attend to the ambiguous role of design, objects, and materiality to adjust collective social practices and urban conviviality in the times of COVID-19.

Kent Etnografisinde Çoklu Yöntem Kullanımı: Yürüyüş, Fotoğraf ve Video

Bu araştırmada, 2013-2023 yılları arasında yaptığım saha araştırmalarının arka planına odaklanarak kent etnografisinde çoklu teknikleri bir arada kullanmanın metodolojik ve teorik katkılarını inceliyorum. Bu araştırmalar süresince tuttuğum alan notları üzerinden yürüyüşün kentsel mekândaki toplumsal yaşamı anlamaya katkısını ele alıyorum. İstanbul, İzmir ve Sapanca’da yürüttüğüm etnografik ve otoetnografik araştırmalar ve bu esnada yararlandığım yöntem ve tekniklerin kent etnografisinin olanaklarını genişletmeye etkisine odaklanıyorum. Metropolleşen kentin gündelik hayatını analiz ederken, kentte bir yaya olarak hareketliliği, hareketliliğin sınıfsallığını ve toplumsal cinsiyetini tartışıyorum. Görsel ve işitsel teknolojilerin imkânlarının gelişmesi, kentleşmeye başlayan bölgelerde kaybolan doğal yapının kaydını tutmaya da olanak yaratıyor. Mobil teknolojilerin artan etkisiyle sahada daha çok kullanılmaya başlanan fotoğraf çekimi ve video kaydı kent hafızası oluşturma ve kentin ve kentlinin hikâyesini toplamaya önemli katkı sağlıyor. Bununla birlikte, sahada çoklu metotları işletirken dikkate alınması gereken farklı dengeler devreye giriyor. Bu makalede, sahadaki ilişkilere ve araştırılanların gündelik hayatına müdahale etmeden metotların nasıl çoğaltabileceğine dair öneriler getirmeye çalışıyorum. Kent etnografisinde çoklu teknik kullanmanın dezavantajlı gruplar için ortaya çıkarabileceği katılımcı yöntemleri ve etnografiyi sosyal adalet için bir araç haline getirmenin imkanlarını değerlendiriyorum.

The Vertical Street as Everyday Place in the High-Density City: A Case Study of Mong Kok, Hong Kong

Cities are growing vertically, so are the streets. This qualitative study employs narrative city walk, spatial survey, field observation, and interview to develop and speculate on the notion of the “vertical street as everyday place” through examining its spatial formation, ordinary individuals’ everyday practices, and people’s conceptions. The article finds that the type-form of vertical street is a network of multilevel, segmented spaces that vertically extend within urban volumes. The vertical street is the city’s everyday place, which significantly accommodates a varied urban social life. The study thus provides a novel angle for urban designers and planners to rethink the streets and to promote urban livability in vertical.

Shared Housing as Public Space? The Ambiguous Borders of Social Infrastructure

The Folkhem era in Sweden set high architectural standards for social infrastructures dispersedly located in cities. Over the past two decades, however, Swedish planning, when it comes to the localization of social infrastructure, has been increasingly characterized by privatized social infrastructures added to housing. Methodologically, this article draws on a compilation of architectural designs of shared housing that includes social infrastructure, 12 interviews with developers, and 22 interviews with residents. The article argues, first, that two historical approaches can be identified: one in which porous borders support urban social life in and around the housing complex and another where distinct boundaries form an edge where things end. Secondly, the article argues that in recent shared housing complexes, the infrastructures of fitness, health care, and privatized services—previously available solely in the public realm—have moved physically and mentally closer to the individual, largely replacing residents’ everyday use of public space. The article concludes that in recent shared housing complexes, ambiguous<em> </em>borders are formed. Ambiguous borders allow a flow of goods and people, but the flow is based on the needs and preferences of residents only. Overall, such privatization counteracts the development of urban social life while adding to housing inequality, as this form of housing is primarily accessible only to the relatively wealthy. Furthermore, there is a risk that urban planning may favour such privatization to avoid maintenance costs, even though the aim of planning for general public accessibility to social infrastructure is thereby shifted towards planning primarily for specific groups.

IMPACTS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ON DEMAND OF PUBLIC BIKE SYSTEM AND ITS CORRELATION WITH URBAN LIFE

Abstract. Public bike systems provide the flexibility of bike-usage that users can rent and return a bike freely at any station. The convenience of the bike-travel system, however, may turn into a disadvantage of demand-supply imbalance in the bike inventory. The recent spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the mobility demands due to the lockdowns which restrict the business operating hours and transit services. Therefore, investigating the impacts of the pandemic on the urban social life patterns with the bike usage is an important issue for the bike demand prediction and the improvement of the public bike system service.This research aims to investigate the correlation between the public bike demand and social environment factors during the pandemic applying a multivariate linear regression model to public bike usage data in Seoul, Korea. The results show some promising findings to further promote shared mobility services through policy and marketing strategies. It is noteworthy that the transport disruptions during the pandemic have made a spillover effect from taxi and public transit to bike as an alternative transport mode. The lockdown has restricted the range of activity and resulted in the decrease of the taxi demand, so the number of taxis. On the other hand, the correlations of the geography, meteorology, and date with the bike demand have shown consistency. Therefore, supply of extra bike facilities to improve the system service should be determined based on more accurate demand prediction considering lifecycle-related factors.

Review of Ayse Çaǧlar and Nina Glick Schiller 2018: Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Migrants and City-Making is a path-breaking study of some of the key components of contemporary social science research. It provides a robust assessment of the analytic, methodological and comparative aspects of urban social life that residents construct, arguing that natives and migrants make cities together and therefore need to be located within the same […]

Between Tradition and Modernity:A Study on the Changes of Shanghai Citizens' Social Life in the Late Qing Dynasty——Focus on the Advertisement of The Shen Daily

As a commercial newspaper,The Shen Daily has paid great attention to the publication of advertisements since its inception. 
 With the changes of social life, the content and form of The Shen Daily advertising have evolved continuously. The social life of the 
 Shanghai people in the late Qing Dynasty has undergone earth shaking changes in both material and spiritual aspects. As the first group 
 of capital owners, The city impacted by justice economy has become an epitome of the evolution of urban social life in modern China.

Smog and the Psyche: Chen Qiufan’s Reading of the Urban Anthropocene

The growing concern for environmental issues has fuelled the rise of climate fiction [cli-fi], a subgenre of science fiction dealing with climate change that has become increasingly popular in the last few decades. In China, significant examples can be found, among others, in Chen Qiufan’s works, which address these problems from different points of view. In his short story “Mai” 霾 [The Smog Society], the author explores the relationship between human beings and nature from an unconventional perspective, overturning the traditional conception of the relationship between the environment and the human mind. This article aims to analyse Chen Qiufan’s short story as an attempt to subvert the causal relationship between pollution and happiness, outlining his interpretation of the urban Anthropocene. The analysis will set out from what Glenn Albrecht has defined as “psychoterratic emotional concepts”, namely earth-related mental health conditions, to explore the author’s view of man-made climate change. In particular, it will explore the depiction of the climatic emergency in the Chinese urban context and its consequences on the protagonist’s psychology and emotions, as well as on urban social life.

Critical Commentary: Fickle spheres: The constant re/construction of the private and other new habits

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed mechanisms of power and authority to enter new urban realms – especially the very relationships lived between friends and lovers in bedrooms and parks. All of a sudden, everyone has a right to know who we are close to, when and how, all for the sake of public health and safety, to ensure the further functioning of our established public health system. The new policies transform Western ideas of public and private spheres: our bedrooms have turned into the space of self-representation and workplaces at the same time. On the other hand, what had been known as public space before has turned into the space to be private in: a walk through the city alone or with an intimate person. Yet all of these tendencies come with increased surveillance, not only by our peers, but also through technologies such as tracing apps. The very possibility of privacy and ‘active’ publicity is being questioned, and, through this, the realm of the political. This paper traces the observed shifts in the nature of the private and public spheres through examples in German cities, tracing power via embodied experiences. Those traces are reorganised into three argumentative strands: re/constructing privacies, public space as non-place and the proliferation of the data body. Based on these observations the paper searches for emancipatory perspectives within the shifted spheres of urban social life.

Open Space Implications in Urban Development: Reflections in Recent Urban Planning Practices in Nepal

Open space has various implications in urban development planning and has been integrated in recent urban planning approaches and practices in Nepal. The open spaces are not only important for (re)shaping the urban form but are also important for enhancing urban social life and disaster risk management, particularly for dense cities. As most of the cities in Nepal have been growing haphazardly, the cities lack sufficient open space. However, the value of open space in dense cities like Kathmandu has been recognized more after the Gorkha Earthquake 2015 as the open spaces were extensively used for risk relief, treatment, recovery, and rehabilitation during and after the earthquake. With this background, this paper presents the major planning initiatives in Nepal and discusses how recent urban plans have provisioned and initiated open spaces development by reviewing concurrent urban planning practices, particularly reviewing Periodic Plans, Integrated Urban Development Plan, Smart City Plan, and Land Development Plan. The development of open areas has not been given much attention in the earlier urban planning practice but recent urban development planning has emphasized with a special focus which is very important for sustainable and safer city development and is expected to address the current bulging urban issues of spatiality and sociability. Therefore, it is very important for integrating open space implications in city planning and such open space should be conceptualized according to the city’s geography, landscape as well as socio-cultural contexts.

Friendship via a bus ride: urban mobility and social life in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan

ABSTRACT In social networks research, geographical distance between places of residence partially explains patterns of friendship ties in semi-isolated communities like classrooms or schools. For example, individuals that live close to one another are more likely to be friends than chance alone predicts. Explaining this pattern, researchers often argue that distance approximates meeting opportunities: when individuals live nearby, they are more likely to meet, both by chance and deliberately. This paper discusses the effect of distance in post-Soviet urban space and argues that, at least in this context, shared access to public transit explains the structure of social relationships better than geographical distance. I model the pattern of friendship ties among a cohort of 145 high-school students considering the distances between residential locations and the available public transit. Results suggest that students that live along the same bus routes are more likely to be friends than those who just live close to one another. I conclude with a discussion about how research in the post-Soviet region can enrich debates about the association between the social and spatial.

Beyond circulation: The sidewalk as a support for urban social life

Beyond circulation: The sidewalk as a support for urban social life

A New Urban Vitality Analysis and Evaluation Framework Based on Human Activity Modeling Using Multi-Source Big Data

A quantitative study of urban vitality brings new insights for evaluating the external construction environment and internal development power of cities. However, it still has limited knowledge of the relations between people’s diverse urban life and urban vitality, although urban activities are often used as the proxy for urban vitality. This paper aims to deeply mine the content of urban social life and reveal the driving mechanism of urban vitality after inspecting human activities. We propose a general framework for exploring the spatial pattern and driving mechanism of urban vitality using multi-source big data. It builds a mapping relationship between various urban activities and urban vitality aspects, including economic and social. In addition, the physical environment (static) and human–land interaction (dynamic) indicators are designed to analyze the driving mechanism of urban vitality using the Geographically Weighted Regression model. The results show that the spatial pattern and driving factors of urban vitality are heterogeneous over space regarding both the economic and social aspects of our experimental study. This work provides us with multiple perspectives to understand the connotation of urban vitality and urges us to develop rational strategies to make the city more vital, coordinated, and sustainable.

Reading Rules

This article examines how builders and users contested the cultural, political, and social mission and meaning of the Hà Nội Central Library [Bibliothèque centrale de Hanoi] from 1919 to 1941. I argue that the central library was not just a symbol of Western modernity, but a public space in which modern practices were defied and defined by Vietnamese students, urban readers, and administrators. Library readers freely accessed diverse print matter, practiced self-directed learning, and created a social space for study, research, and leisure. Through this historical study, I reveal how the library was a contested colonial institution and a formative space of urban social life.

Urban Mobility and Activity Space

Recent theoretical and methodological advances in urban sociology, including spatially located data, provide new opportunities to consider the joint influence of mobility and place in urban social life. This review defines the concept of activity space, describes its origins in urban sociology, and examines the extent to which activity space approaches advance sociological research in four substantive domains—spatial inequality and segregation, social connectedness and engagement, crime and offending patterns, and health and health-related behavior. It next describes the evolution of methods for location tracking and new approaches that hold promise for maximizing urban mobility and activity space contributions. It then discusses how location data may be augmented to enhance our sociological understanding of the structure, meaning, and implications of the places people visit or traverse in daily life. We close with new directions for activity space research, emphasizing how such work could enable comparative contextual research.

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.

Urban robotic experimentation: San Francisco, Tokyo and Dubai

Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and automation have the potential to transform cities and urban social life. However, robotic restructuring of the city is complicated and contested. Technology is still evolving, robotic infrastructure is expensive and there are technical, trust and safety challenges in bringing robots into dynamic urban environments alongside humans. This article examines the nascent field of ‘urban robotics’ in three emblematic yet diverse national-urban contexts that are leading centres for urban robotic experimentation. Focusing on the experimental application of autonomous social robots, the article explores: (i) the rationale for urban robotic experiments and the interests involved, and (ii) the challenges and outcomes of creating meaningful urban spaces for robotic experimentation. The article makes a distinctive contribution to urban research by illuminating a potentially far-reaching but under-researched area of urban policy. It provides a conceptual framework for mapping and understanding the highly contingent, spatially uneven and socially selective processes of robotic urban experimentation.