Production Of Urban Space Research Articles

2016 올림픽과 리우데자네이루 내 신자유주의적 도시 공간의 생산

2016 올림픽과 리우데자네이루 내 신자유주의적 도시 공간의 생산

Special Issue: Examining Public-private Partnerships and the Production of Urban Space

Special Issue: Examining Public-private Partnerships and the Production of Urban Space

Resources, Consumers, Non-citizens: Representation of the Citizens in the Discourse of the New Residential Areas in Moscow

This article explores the representation of the citizens in the discourse of new residential areas in Moscow. The article focuses on how different agents of discourse representing citizens helps to reveal which citizens are taken into account in the production of urban spaces and who is left out of it. In Moscow, new residential areas represent the contradictions of how citizens are represented in certain agendas. For authorities, such areas embody extensive policy, capital, and successful political management. In the media, such a type of housing becomes stigmatized: it is labelled as “ghetto” and imaged as environmental, which does not suit the correct path of city development. In this article, focusing on the production of urban citizenship in the part of public discourse produced by authorities, developers, and critical agents, I will show (1) when citizens are used as a faceless, impersonated category in the discourse in one row with the infrastructural achievements of the current government; (2) the construction of the “average citizen”, who is the main character in space production; (3) the grounds behind the “consumer-citizen” in discourse, who is entitled with only the economic agency on housing market; and (4) citizens who are symbolically excluded from their right to the new residential areas’ space. Through the characters-citizens in the discourse, I will show the lack of fundamental differences in the discourse of different agents, such as the authorities, developers, and critical agents.

Designing 'youth master plans' in a CLE space: lessons from using Minecraft in secondary school outreach project in Scotland

Lefebvre (1991) argued for a 'right to the city' so that more people are involved in the (re-)production of urban spaces but this is problematic to implement for 'hard-to-reach' groups such as young people. I argue that the constructivist learning environment (CLE) space developed in this paper has potential, both as theory and method, in offering an environment where young people can critically assess and re-design the spaces in the 'real' world through a virtual portal. The CLE space as a 'relational space' will be distinct to the spaces where conventional participatory approaches unfold e.g. a community hall - this is where virtual gaming software such as Minecraft have potential and which would prevent workshop 'gatekeepers' from presenting an a priori blueprint as to how design solutions ought to be carried out by young people. Policy makers can use CLE space for developing 'child-friendly cities' or 'youth master plans'.

Designing 'youth master plans' in a CLE space: lessons from using Minecraft in secondary school outreach project in Scotland

Lefebvre (1991) argued for a 'right to the city' so that more people are involved in the (re-)production of urban spaces but this is problematic to implement for 'hard-to-reach' groups such as young people. I argue that the constructivist learning environment (CLE) space developed in this paper has potential, both as theory and method, in offering an environment where young people can critically assess and re-design the spaces in the 'real' world through a virtual portal. The CLE space as a 'relational space' will be distinct to the spaces where conventional participatory approaches unfold e.g. a community hall - this is where virtual gaming software such as Minecraft have potential and which would prevent workshop 'gatekeepers' from presenting an a priori blueprint as to how design solutions ought to be carried out by young people. Policy makers can use CLE space for developing 'child-friendly cities' or 'youth master plans'.

Shopping centers at zmcm. The companies, location and production of a neoliberal urban space

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar diferentes aspectos de los centros comerciales en la Zona Metropolitana de la Ciudad de México (zmcm), como ubicación, año de apertura y empresa desarrolladora, así como identificar diversas características como etapas económicas y políticas en el país, además del papel que tienen las compañías urbanizadoras y los centros comerciales en la producción de un espacio urbano neoliberal.

Los procesos de mixturación socioespacial y su evolución en la ciudad de Temuco, 1992-2017

La producción actual del espacio urbano chileno está fuertemente condicionada por el actuar del mercado inmobiliario y la flexibilización que el Estado hace de las normativas de edificación. A partir de este escenario, en las últimas décadas es posible observar importantes problemas de segregación residencial en las principales ciudades chilenas, lo que agrava las posibilidades de encuentro entre distintos grupos. Si bien el tema de las relaciones sociales en las ciudades ha sido abordado por muchos estudios, lo cierto es que la gran mayoría utiliza los indicadores tradicionales de segregación residencial, obviando con ello los determinantes que configuran la posición de clase en los espacios urbanos. El presente trabajo describe los procesos de mixturación socioespacial en Temuco, una de las ciudades intermedias de Chile con mayor crecimiento poblacional en el último tiempo. Considerando las dimensiones ocupacionales de las personas en el mercado laboral, que teóricamente están a la base de la noción de clase social, se comparan el nivel y tipo de relaciones sociales en distintas zonas de la ciudad durante el periodo intercensal 1992-2017. Combinando análisis estadísticos descriptivos y exploratorios, y utilizando la zona y entidad censal como unidad territorial, los resultados indican una ampliación de la mixturación social en extensas áreas, y una consolidación de las clases más altas al poniente de la ciudad. Finalmente, y como constata este artículo, los grupos más favorecidos se han distanciado con el tiempo de las clases medias y bajas.

The “Ethnic” Markets of Irkutsk: Production and Transformation of Urban Social Space

This article presents results of the study of the role of “ethnic” markets in the processes of urban transformations. The case of Irkutsk demonstrates the integration of the markets into everyday life of the city and their incorporation into the urban infrastructure. “Ethnic” markets are a special phenomenon of urban life and a complex of social, economic, and interethnic relations. The aim of this study is to analyze ethnically marked markets as specific localities and an important part of urban space. The analysis is based on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of construction of social space. This theory enables the study of “ethnic” markets as a complex of multidirectional processes that determine the forms and contents of social interactions. The social anthropological focus of the study allows us to consider “ethnic” markets as special localities included in various coordinate systems. The analysis includes not only the physical but also mental and social spaces and facilitates more in-depth and systematic conclusions. Moreover, the case is typical enough to allow for generalization of these conclusions. The results of field observations of Irkutsk “ethnic” markets suggest that markets are important for the city in terms of their impact on the organization of urban space. Most importantly, they function as the attraction of people, goods, and other elements involved in the implementation of the city’s everyday practices, as well as the intersection of social and infrastructure networks, which ensures a high density of the interactions. Article in Russian DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-3-70-99

Urban Connective Action: The Case of Events Hosted in Public Space

In the past decade, significant transformations have influenced the governance of urban public spaces. There has also been a growth in new public spheres associated with digital media networks, informing and influencing the production and regulation of urban space. In this article, we explore the role of digital and social media as a form of connective action supporting public campaigns about the privatisation and erosion of public space in the Scottish city of Edinburgh. We draw on analysis of Twitter data, interviews and observations of offline events to illustrate how a broad coalition of actors utilise online and offline tactics to contest the takeover of public space, confirming that that the virtual and the physical are not parallel realms but continuously intersecting social realities. Finally, we reflect on the extent to which digital media-enabled connective action can influence the orientation of urban controversies debates and lead to material change in the way urban public space is managed and regulated.

Eletrificação, vida urbana e o papel da mulher

Technological innovations have significantly changed the society in many ways. This paper analyses the major changes caused by the development and the spread of electric energy utilization in the production of urban space, in labour, in the organization of family and households, in everyday life and in the role of women, such as the changes brought to the households as an outcome of the introduction of everyday technologies in them, as well as in the role they play, whether in the job market, in the artistic and political vanguards and in the fight for rights, as well as in their role of household management as the person responsible for maintaining the conditions of social reproduction of their families. This debate is supported by the notions of modern, modernization, modernity and utopia, while highlights the contradictions and inequalities that remain and permeate the life of the working class in the cities.

Small city politics in the Global South: state imaginaries and everyday realities of a frontier city in northern Vietnam

ABSTRACT In the northern Vietnam uplands, the socialist state’s urbanization plans are rapidly expanding the region’s small cities and re-configuring their built form. Drawing on conceptual debates concerning small cities, urban space production, and everyday politics, we investigate dynamics of urbanization in one such small upland city, Cao Bằng. While legislative planning documents and official ideologies prioritize Cao Bằng’s regional economic expansion, we find the resulting transformations in the city’s built form engender sprawl and fragmentation. In reaction to both these physical changes and retributions for “disorderly” space use, the city’s most marginalized residents adapt their everyday spatial approriation tactics, while implementing a range of covert resistance approaches to protect their livelihoods. We suggest that such contentions between residents, state officials, and the plans they implement, reflect broader struggles regarding the state’s “territorialization” project for these remote uplands, with the region’s small cities being adopted as useful entry points.

Flat rate taxicabs and the production of urban space in depression-era Madison, Wisconsin

The Great Depression prompted a reconsideration of value in urban space. This occurred in the taxi industry when flat rates supplanted metered rates. The arrival of low fare flat rate taxis in Madison, Wisconsin in 1932 quickly led to a threefold increase in the number of cabs and the nearly complete cessation of cabs’ use of taximeters. Similar developments occurred elsewhere in U.S. cities during the 1930s. Earning the same fee for trips that varied in length and distance disrupted the homogeneity and abstraction of space and time which meters provided. The low fare flat rate system held out the promise of affordable transportation to passengers and economic self-sufficiency to drivers. However, despite its standardized rate, the space produced by participants in this system was characterized by unpredictability and uncertainty, as drivers sought to maximize their number of trips while minimizing the distance and duration of each trip. The uncertainty generated by these efforts, the lower capital costs associated with the flat rate system, and a rise in customer demand led to a significant increase in taxicabs traveling city streets, which in turn made it more difficult for drivers to make a living. By examining the production of space engendered by the low fare flat rate system, this article demonstrates how the pressures of the Depression deepened the contradictions of capitalist political economy.

The metabolic urban network: Urbanisation as hierarchically ordered space of flows

Urban ecosystems perform a distinctive metabolism appropriating fundamental materials and energy resources from other ecosystems. This appropriation enables a productive circularity which sustains the material production of urban space: urbanisation. Upon entering the urban ecosystem, the material fluxes are processed by human labour to be consumed, exchanged and accumulated. The appropriation of raw materials and the further production of technomass are entangled processes along a complex material circulation, sustained by internal metabolic processes of production, consumption, transformation and accumulation. The overall process couples several ecosystems along a metabolic urban network (MUN), a large-scale interconnected metabolism of urban and non-urban ecosystems. Long and short distance metabolic interactions configuring a huge space of flows from which distinct urbanisation patterns arise. The extended urbanisation, differential urbanisation, accumulative urbanisation, cascade urbanisation and speculative urbanisation are historically and ecologically determined. The MUN is an asymmetric spatiotemporal exchange structure to and from which matter, energy and information flow, producing profound socio-ecological asymmetries in a global range of dispersed urban tissues. The MUN is the vortex where the planetary processes of ecological and social deterioration is driven. The MUN is an analytical device to unveil urbanisation as a socio-ecological process of colonisation of urban and non-urban ecosystems.

‘For the People’ Without ‘by the People’: People and Plans in Shanghai's Waterfront Development

AbstractThe constant interplay between top‐down authority and bottom‐up agency in the production of urban space has invigorated much scholarly debate in urban studies. China, with its astonishingly rapid urban change, offers a fruitful context for empirical investigations. In this article, we seize the opportunity of Shanghai's recent waterfront development to unpack the process by which the local state in Shanghai planned, designed, delivered and governed the city's much‐storied waterfront. Ostensibly framed as an initiative for the people, the development of Shanghai's waterfront was decidedly not by the people. Powerful state actors and their affiliates in universities and architectural firms collaboratively pursued an urban developmental process that paradoxically enhanced residents’ right to urban space and denied citizens’ right to participation. The local state reconciled this apparent paradox by articulating a ‘quality people’ it sought to serve, fabricating an entire profile of their supposed aesthetic values, leisure habits, spatial preferences and luxurious lifestyles. In its essence, this ‘people’ framing represents an extraordinarily cunning approach to state hegemony, enabling the local state to pursue heavy‐handed interventions while upholding a gentle, humanistic ‘for the people’ discourse.

Influência das agências de financiamento às políticas públicas de planejamento urbano

Os agentes da produção do espaço urbano sofrem influência de interesses e conflitos que envolvem instituições e setores do mercado e do Estado inerentes ao diferentes dos modelos de desenvolvimento. Para que haja melhorias na qualidade urbana, políticas públicas são necessárias com o intuito de criar – ou recriar – espaços. As políticas que auxiliam na transformação do espaço urbano possuem contornos conceituais poucos significativos e com inúmeros problemas, de naturezas diversas, seja à definição de tributos, efetivação, perspectivas, controle ou avaliação de resultados. Dessa forma, torna-se necessário compreender a relação mutável dos espaços com a cidade, a vida urbana e a “mão invisível do mercado” que é o capital que emerge fora das relações sociais. Esta pesquisa analisa a relação entre as políticas públicas e o BID - financiador para a requalificação do Parque da Gare, influenciando economicamente, socialmente e politicamente na cidade de Passo Fundo, RS. A metodologia é exploratória descritiva, iniciando com a revisão bibliográfica e analisando dados do processo de financiamento da Gare. Diante desta pesquisa, percebemos a forte influência que o mercado do capital tem sobre o desenho e planejamento urbano, reorganizando diretrizes e leis locais.

MARCO REGULATÓRIO URBANÍSTICO DA CIDADE DE GOIÂNIA, GOIÁS

Ao examinar a história da produção do espaço urbano brasileiro, percebemos como a terra urbana sempre foi compreendida como um produto (excedente) lucrativo para diversos atores sociais, como os promotores imobiliários, os proprietários e o próprio Estado. Tal produção ocorre em duas vertentes: uma, em processos regulares, no planejamento urbano e outra, à margem desse processo, na luta pela terra urbana. Assim, não foi diferente quando da construção da Capital goiana. Um histórico de como se estrutura a legislação urbana na cidade, revela os arranjos que se estabeleceram entre os agentes produtores do espaço urbano, desde sua origem, e que culminaram com a paisagem que se apresenta hoje. No caso de Goiânia, a questão fundiária explica parte da constituição dessa Cidade, concebida como um patrimônio particular, apesar de o Centro Cívico e os edifícios administrativos, motivo de sua existência, terem o significado literal do que é o uso público. Desde a fundação, há 87 anos, a Capital (metropolitana) registra ocupações ‘ilegais’, que conformaram a paisagem espraiada e desigual. As gestões ocuparam-se em publicar planos de desenvolvimento urbano, pautados nos acordos com o circuito imobiliário, mas não se furtaram de usar esse mesmo marco regulatório para publicar a ‘regularização’ dos movimentos do capital.

Digital Social Innovation and Urban Space: A Critical Geography Agenda

Digital Social Innovation (DSI) is a new concept referring to social innovation initiatives that leverage digital technologies potentiality to co-create solutions to a wide range of social needs. These initiatives generally take place in urban contexts. However, in the existing literature, scarce attention is devoted to the spatial dimensions and the social, cultural or political space-related effects of DSI practices. This article suggests that a critical geography perspective can address these gaps. After a review of existing relevant contributes, the article elaborates a research agenda for a critical geography of DSI. This articulates along four research lines, including the emergence of DSI networks, the (re)production of DSI processes and socio-cultural urban space, the representations of DSI practices and the power relationships these mobilise.

Urban real estate technologies: genealogies, frontiers, & critiques

ABSTRACT The production, perception, and representation of urban space and urban property relations have been urgent “technological” questions since before the birth of urban geography as a discipline. The growth and differentiation of cities worldwide has been shaped by a long-evolving technical frontier, one often turned toward the accumulation imperatives and exclusions of private real estate development. Today, real estate in global cities is experiencing a fresh technological boom, featuring novel techniques for real estate mapping, valuation, financialization, and other key functions. This special issue explores and theorizes these technological developments in real estate, past and present. Collected papers articulate urban geographical scholarship with insights from critical political economy and technology studies, including digital geographies. The collection argues that the relational politics of property manifest in crucial ways through the development and application of urban real estate technologies, and that geography and urban planning are well positioned to offer insights into such technological and political economic mediations, both historical and unfolding.

Towards a morphogenesis of informal settlements

Informal settlement is the most pervasive mode of urbanization throughout cities of the global South, yet little is known of how informal urban design works as a production of urban space. This paper maps the emergence and transformation of street/laneway networks and buildings in a broad range of settlements. While such data cannot reveal the social, economic and political complexity of individual cases, it demonstrates the range of informal morphologies and self-organizational practices that produce them. Building types, plots, blocks, streets and lanes are analyzed to extract the informal rules or logics that are embodied within such morphologies. This is a nascent study that begins to reveal the ways in which informal settlement works to produce habitable land, affordable housing and public space. The prospect is a better knowledge base for understanding how such practices may or may not produce ‘slums’, how upgrading practices may be improved and how informal production may be anticipated and harnessed.

Climate change and the unsustainable urbanism in the municipality of João Pessoa, PB, Brazil

In the scope of urban space production, Brazilian urban policy, despite pointing out in its guidelines the struggle for the right to the city, seems indifferent to the impacts of real estate speculation on ecosystems. Given the context of the climate emergency, there is an urgent need to align urban and environmental policy for planning cities adapted to climate change. This work presents, based on spatial data from the recent deforestation of the city of João Pessoa, the legal and socioenvironmental characteristics of the urban expansion of the city and how the municipal urban and environmental policy has catalyzed processes of socioenvironmental injustice. It appears that planning and management are limited to following the trends signaled by the real estate market and that pressure ecosystems, especially in the southern portion of the municipality, and also that democratic arrangements are forged to make society's role in defending ecosystems unfeasible.