Professional Documents
Culture Documents
With its growing population and economy Istanbul is dealing with lots of
changes in every scale. New developing urban areas, infrastructure
investments, physical planning strategies reshape the city according to the
needs of the century. On the other hand, Istanbul tries to have a highlighted a
place in global scale among other competing cities. Global consumer culture
and international investments affect the city’s culture as well as the physical
urban structure. These changes in upper scales affect everyday life and public
spaces immediately. One of the most remarkable changes happened in coffee
consuming places. Istanbul is a city that has a coffee house culture for
centuries. Coffee houses are the public centers of neighborhoods and also
socializing places especially for men since Ottoman times. With global
consuming trends and international coffee chains the culture and also the
reflections to the street life has changed. Café’s started to develop, coffee
chains defined a new trend, brought a new decoration approach to the stores
and a marketing strategy to this old product. New style of coffee consumption
creates a new approach to urban social life for different groups, change street
scene and urban interfaces and defined new gathering places in the city.
silent. Managers feel that there is no need for complex communicative skills in
order to do this kind of job. The fact of not speaking Spanish or Catalam is not a
barrier for hiring them. There is a widespread perception that these workers,
coming from a former socialist country, constitute a docile and industrious
labour force. Romanians have not been able to get a promotion towards
managerial positions in any of the companies. The semi-rural location and the
strictly national dimension of the companies have contributed to isolate this
cluster from international production and distribution networks. Even the arrival
of workers with more language skills, such as Romanians being able to speak
English and German, has not increased the international dimension and
connection of local managers. However, competiveness is centered presently in
a foreign labour force (Romanians) that accepts low work and employment
standards. Spanish and Catalan are learnt not because of the requirements of
production or job but as assets for integration in the local community.
In the world context which is defined by the neo-liberal economic system, the
cities rule the world. Especially the world cities and the global cities- as defined
by Sassen- are the propellent power of the world economy. Istanbul, as the
most important economical and cultural center in Turkey and one of most
important centers in its region, intends to compete as a global and a world city,
in international scales. To reach this goal, new projects must be developed that
meets historical character and heritage with international ideas and needs. As a
city which is going to be the European capital of culture in 2010, cultural
industries and creative economies have crucial importance for Istanbul. This
paper aims to examine four architectural/urban transformation projects which
have taken place in Istanbul in the last decade, in the context of creative
economies, cultural industries and urban competition:
1- Tophane-i Amire Building, which used to function as a factory that cannons
were manufactured for the Ottoman Empire, and now being used by Mimar
Sinan Fine Arts University as an exhibition center since 1998.
2- SantralIstanbul, which used to function as a power plant, and now beig used
as the main campus of Istanbul Bilgi University since 2007.
3- Istanbul Modern, which used to function as a bonded warehouse, and now
being used as a modern arts museum since 2005.
4- Old Galata Bridge, which is a historical bridge which was built in 1845, and
now hosting the “Istanbul Design Week” once a year since 2006.
‘Immigration act as an analyser of the new [and old] territorial processes’ (Tosi,
2000: 1). Since the making of post-war urbanisation, Southern-European cities
have constantly entailed a distinctive territorial correlation between migrants’
insertion processes and housing regimes. Partly explored within the post-war
urbanisation processes, this correlation is currently eclipsed in the
understanding of past and present immigrants’ urban insertion and of
segregation issues. Neighbourhood and city level analyses have been
effectively unravelling complex urban processes and the diverse grained
patterns of ethnic residential segregation across Southern European cities.
Nonetheless, housing regimes and other contextual macro-processes remain
overlooked; their mechanisms of socio-spatial differentiation and particularly
their impacts on migrants’ urban insertion are misinterpreted, often when
context-indiscriminate USA-based references and overgeneralisations from
globalisation discourses are employed. This presentation seeks to investigate
the abovementioned territorial correlation, thus contributing to a more adequate
interpretative framework for the Southern European cases and for policy-
making purposes. It examines the socio-urban impact of housing regimes
before/after the liberation of the housing market (mid-‘80s), by presenting one
particular pattern of ethnic urban segregation - called inverted ‘ring buoy effect’
given its geographic connotation and here identified for the first time. This
pattern is distinctive only of Southern European cities and is/was visible on
those metropolises that, despite the process of ethnic peripheralisation, see the
absence of immigrants’ settlement in those former working-class first peripheral
belts developed during the rural-urban migratory inflows. (Lisbon MA is the
exception that confirms the pattern.) This socio-ethnic mismatch exemplifies
how present changes in housing production/provision and of access to land –
yet strengthening traditional Southern-European tenure-policies - have
generated a distinctive and additional mechanism of socio-spatial differentiation,
and have made it more difficult for current international migrants to pursue an
inclusive housing progression similar to previous rural-urban migrants.
In the past four decades, Nigeria has experienced various dangerous scenes of
incessant dysfunctional conflicts. Although there have been various studies on
African peace and conflict, however, when assessed jointly, the publications are
relatively weak in terms of systematically providing empirical evidence to
substantiate its claims. Social identity refers to that part of the self-concept
which derives from one’s knowledge of one’s membership of a social group (or
groups), together with the value and emotional significance attached to that
membership. As such it is derived from the belonging to or affiliation to precise
categories such as ethnic groups with which individuals identify themselves and
which generate a group of internal attributions and external attributions that
define the make up of this identity. As observed in the literature, social identities
are neither merely subjective self-images, nor fixed objective entities. They are
inter-subjective processes and are constantly being re-constructed, contested
and negotiated through discourses and practices. Observation from the
literature shows that one of the major important elements in ethnic conflicts is
socio/cultural identity. In the paper the interest is to examine socio/cultural
identity issues in urban-ethno communal conflicts in Nigeria using Ife-Modakeke
crisis as a case study. This is with a view to have a better understanding of the
challenges facing local urban residents in Nigeria. Among the issues that will be
examined are the construction of social identity, the role people played in the
conflict and in the community as a reflection of ethnic attachment and inter-
personal relationship among the people of the two communities. The data used
in the study is from a larger survey carried out by the author in Ife and
Modakeke communities between July/August, 2006.
São Paulo is the biggest Brazil’s city and like other great cities of the world has
many urban problems. Understanding housing use is an important way to
understand how the cities’ space is organized. This paper pretends to analyze
São Paulo housing market and how it influences urban organization. This
analysis includes the relations between formal and informal market, its actors
and influences on spatial changes. In São Paulo, it is possible to identify the
transformation in the public politics to produce affordable houses moving from
the exclusive public production in large scale to a crescent participation of
private sector. It is important also to know the time line of public housing politics
and the space production regulatory systems to discuss how the changes can
affect the face of the city. More than the suburban sprawling and fragmentation
evident effects in urban configuration, we are looking for how much this could
be the result of different politics and relations between the public and private
actors in diverse conditions.
The paper aims to explore the urbanization pattern in the developing countries
since the last sixty years and show how the national development policies was
strongly influenced by the western concept of modernization. Since the 1990’s
urbanization in the developing countries is associated with the transformation of
urban structure resulting from foreign direct investment (FDI) made by
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Public space is a delicate art of presences and absences, uses, non-uses and
misuses. This chemistry emerges in the interplay of design, rules, regulations
and practices. The contemporary politics of public space seems to revolve
around the removal of the metics and misfits of neoliberal restructuring: people
who have no power but their presence. The paper is about how this unfolds in
and around the public spaces of globalizing cities, and examines how the
reinsertion of those removed may hold out the possibility of an alternative
politics. The discussion relies on examples of public art that scrutinize the
notion of the public, criticize and overwrite dominant contemporary practices of
public space.
sustainability goals, they have often ignored the deeper potential for economic
and social sustainability, a goal that is aligned not only with the merger of
material and non-material sustainability but with a call for justice as well. The
opportunity in New Orleans is to move beyond surface-level sustainability and
attempt to understand how sustainability might align with social justice.
However, this approach calls for re-thinking political action, participation, and
socio-historical ties to place. It requires understanding the tensions between
distributive and transformative practices in re-making the urban fabric and in
addressing critical environmental issues. This paper critically examines the
sustainability practices that have emerged in New Orleans and theorizes the
potential for deeper sustainability that includes social and economic justice.
Using qualitative research and historical analysis of the city’s social and
environmental settlement, this paper proposes that a deeply sustainable city
calls for the alignment of social, economic, cultural, and environmental justice
with material and non-material sustainability practices.
Creativity and innovation are now main issues in the literature dedicated to
urban transformations, according to which cities that want to attract talented
people and flourish economically need to generate a favourable “atmosphere”
(Florida, 2002; Scott, 2006). However, these approaches are often criticized for
promoting a limited vision of human progress. They tend to rely almost
exclusively on market economy principles, neglecting other dimensions of urban
development such as social issues, which are particularly important in polarized
contexts, where market forces are frequently unable to provide basic needs
(Moulaert and Nussbaumer, 2005). Social innovation is presented as an
alternative concept, since it aims to integrate social, cultural and environmental
objectives in the “creative cities” agenda through community-centred agency.
Nevertheless, theoretical debates about social innovation used to be focused on
transformations of society as a whole (Moulaert et al, 2005). They barely
highlight territorial-specific aspects such as interrelationships between different
urban functions related with creative activities and the role of urban fabric as an
“incubator” of social innovation (Musterd and Deurloo, 2006). By analysing
socially innovative case studies, the paper aims to bring out these issues in
Porto Metropolitan Area, an agglomeration that over the last two decades
experienced considerable transformations in different domains of urban
creativeness.
This paper will focus the social transformations that took place in the
Portuguese rural space. In particular, we will study a village (called Albernoa) in
the region of Alentejo (South of Portugal), as a way to characterize how this
place has suffered a deep structural social change. In fact, as resemblance of
what is happened with the major rural areas in the region, this village has
suffered a progressive ageing, and a continuous depopulation. These
tendencies occurred simultaneously with the reducing of several agricultural
occupations and activities. At the same time we identify some dynamic
indicators connected with the increasing of spatial mobility (sprawl) and the
gradual integration of urban habits. Although these modern social factors are
not strong enough to invert the tendency towards a progressive demographic
depression, we can say that urbanisation has swept through the village at such
a rate, that it has led the village further and further away from its traditional
agriculture system. Albernoa is now in the crossroads between suburbanisation
and marginalisation. To analyse these changes we will use a multidimensional
perspective of the concept of social space, based on the theoretical approach
presented by H. Lefebvre, who refers that the space should not be interpreted
as a mere receptacle of the social relationships. On the contrary, the social
space is produced daily in concrete places having for base different kinds of
practices and social representations. The distinction, and consequent
articulation, between the notions of space and of place will help us to look at
this reality as a complex gear from which the rural and the urban do not cease
to reinvent themselves.
Migrants that over the last decades have arrived to European countries have
had an intense relationship with cities. Cities are generally the place where they
settle and live in, and, migrants’ public image is in many occasions intimately
associated to certain urban areas and phenomena. In this sense, migrants have
played a key role in shaping the current dynamics of European cities and these
have influenced the social place migrants occupy in society. Following this idea,
the paper’s objective is to explore the role of urban spaces in the anti-immigrant
attitudes present in European societies, focusing its attention in those cases in
which there is a political party that benefits from, and stirs, the negative image
of the immigrant population. The paper will present the literature that has
adopted urban spaces as a factor to take into consideration in the explanation
of these anti-immigration attitudes and their political expressions. It will also
explore the role of urban spaces in comprehending the recent success achieved
by an anti-immigrant political party in a number of mid-sized cities of the
Spanish autonomous region of Catalonia.
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The paper will take up the idea outlined in the session proposal that “serious
analysis of sociospatial issues” need to take into account contextual
considerations, but also suggests that the scale is an important issue when
looking at residential segregation. Questions of context will include the
following considerations: a) The general socio-economic, class and ethnic
composition of the city’s population; b) the housing markets corresponding to
this population composition; c) differential access to benefits offered by
transport networks; d) urban policies and differential relations between the
population and the government (modos de gestión). These contextual factors
affecting urban segregation work at different scales: at an interurban level,
between municipalities or neighbourhoods, between buildings in the same
neighbourhood and even within a single household. Similarly, the effects of the
resulting residential segregation need to be evaluated taking into account these
different scales of operation. These ideas will be illustrated with reference to
Mexico City, based on an on-going research project into urban restructuring and
mobilities.
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This paper aims to analyze the influence of urban structures and city-planning
interventions in social conflicts. These conflicts are sometimes interpreted as
ethnic because of the over-representation of immigrant population in many
urban areas. In these cases, social and political interventions usually focus on
immigrants instead of on other structural problems. So that, as a result of a
process of ethnicity-building, immigration tends to become a social “problem”.
But, are these conflicts really ethnic? Is there any alternative explanation? We
will present the results of a case study: the district of Tetuán, in the city of
Madrid. Tetuán has the second largest immigrant population rate in the city. So
that, the opposition between immigrants and Spanish inhabitants usually raises
ethnicity as an easy explanation to conflicts. However, there may be other
issues disregarded by the public agenda. We will concentrate on three of them:
generational differences (between young people and older adults), social issues
(urban segregation mainly reflecting social segregation instead of ethnicity) and
the need of city-planning interventions (the fight against bad housing).
creativity and how that paradigm takes shape in the urban policies of Barcelona.
Secondly, we want to stress the relevance of the artists in the urban
transformation process of Poblenou by studying the development of three
different artistic workshops of Poblenou. We will study the cases of La Makabra
(a squattered centre), Hangar (a rented space ownership of the city council) and
La Escocesa (a rented space ownership of a private landlord). Finally, we put
into relation the relationship between artists, private developers and policies at
the local level to explain the sending-off, the resistance and institutionalization
of the artists.
industries and could benefit other cities. Supporting this assertion is the
argument that there is not a shortage of affordable workspace in the UK overall,
the problem is that it is not provided in places (mostly London) where there is a
demand. So, what could we do to stimulate a more decentralised development
of creative industries in the UK?
The scientific community of urban research increasingly supports the idea that
globalisation has increased the importance of (urban) places such as districts
and public places for the self-organisation of both knowledge-based service
society and civil society (‘glocalization’). Even if virtual communication is
opening up completely new worlds of information exchange and
communication, the local/regional level based on face-to-face contacts
becomes more and more important for anchoring economic, cultural, and social
processes. This paper will suggest some of the ways in which places and
districts at inner city sites are contributing to a renaissance of the European City
by way of their role as `vibrant places´, both through processes of gentrification
processes and as being a location of creative industries. As Läpple (2001,
2003) has clearly shown, at ‘successful’ creative places there is a tight relation
between new ‘weak ties’ of civil society supporting new forms of social
cohesion. The variety of creative industries ranging from successful market
presence networks to fluid cultures/scenes of events and recreation has
developed creative clusters in inner city districts. Moreover, economically
successful creative industries need the ‘amalgamization’ of these ‘sticky places’
to build these creative clusters and networks. Cities have always had places
where the production and consumption of cultural goods happens. In this
context, creativity and knowledge have played an outstanding role for the
development of new ideas and goods. During recent years, scientific literature
has again addressed these creative characteristics: terms such as “Creative
City” (Landry 2000), Cultural Industries” (Wynne 1992), Milieux Innovateur”
(Aydalot 1986), or “Creative Class” (Florida 2002) are examples of combining
creativity and urban life. The common diagnosis is that cities and particularly
urban inner-city districts provide specific conditions for creative innovation in the
context of knowledge and culture production and that there are new kinds of
social community in the sense of newly regulating ways of work and life. This
potential of cities in the context of a knowledge society might contribute to a
“renaissance of the city” (Läpple 2003). This paper is based on an empirical
study and PhD project investigating this relationship and describing four places
of cultural production in contemporary Vienna. Using qualitative field research
methods (30 biographical-narrative interviews with an approach to spatial
mapping by Georgaphical Information Systems) this study will examine four
traditional industrial places in terms of their spatial cluster of cultural workers.
The analysis of the four places of “loft working” (see Zukin 1988) (a former
screws factory, a former chocolate factory, a former milk center and old trade
centers) will identify the three following resources: "space-resources", that is the
spatial-local work environment, "we-resources", i.e. networks and social capital,
as well as "I-resources", that is the knowledge and creative abilities of
participants. The concept of an "amalgamated city" aims at a mixture of different
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places to form the urban spatial space of use, perception, and living. The
"amalgamated city" names a) the melting into one of places (physically-
materially) and the social (at least for the moment) and b) the
interdependencies of places due to actors moving around among them (also
information, images, streams of money and goods). For the use of regulations
and the setting of norms, making flexibility and diversity possible for spatial
development means keeping open every possible future of use and
development, city development not clearly determining how every possible
future should be regulated. In order of pushing through the various concepts of
so-cial and cultural life in an amalgamated city, city development must also
invent tools of "non-planning". "Planning the non-planning" allows more flexible
reactions to social and group-specific or also individual change of needs and
situations in life. The actors within the "crea-tive milieus" may themselves
design, organize, and utilize the thus resulting leeways - sup-ported by tools of
"non-planning".
Fujita, Kuniko and Richard Child Hill, Michigan State University, USA
fujitak@msu.edu, hillrr@msu.edu
Arts and culture have placed a primordial role in the urban renaissance of many
cities. These two factors have contributed to the urban renewal of their centres
and helped to attract both tourists and “creative class”. Barcelona and
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Philadelphia are both second cities and share an industrial past and an
important crisis in the 70s. They have also followed quite similar paths in their
attempts to adapt to a new post-industrial period. Culture has been used to
great effect in changing their images, redefining their economies, promoting
tourism and stimulating creative local economies. On the other hand, they are
also quite different in other aspects. In this paper we study the role played by
public and private investment in culture and art venues in these cities: more
public effort in Barcelona and more private collaboration in Philadelphia. The
objective is to show lights and shadows of two options and how they result in
different urban planning models.
Transformation of the space in Buenos Aires city: The role of the cultural
policies from the end of the convertibility.
This research arises immediately after the intensive changes registered in the
City of Buenos Aires, specially linked to the promotion of the tourism and the
culture, from the devaluation of the Argentine currency in the year 2002 and
with the consistent one “boom tourist". This study proposes to analyze the
actions of the local government in the production, elaboration, promotion and
diffusion of the city across the cultural policies. It is a question of analyzing the
impact of such policies on the city of Buenos Aires in its differents modalities
and the level of development that it has facilitated. In this sense, certain areas
of the city turn out to be paradigmatic to describe the orientations of the cultural
policies, since in them there is constructed a way of "thinking" and "doing" the
city. In this respect, is observed a mercantilización of the culture and try to
explain of the role that is playing the cultural policies in the invention, not only
of the cultural value of the (tangible and intangible) heritage, but also the culture
and the tourism as economic resource.
In order to compete with other cities, ‘urban elite’ seek to find new ways for
reshaping the city in creative manner. If creativity is a way of discovering
previously unseen possibilities it can not be reduced to “removing bureaucratic
obstacles to creativity” which Bianchini and Landry assert in their book The
Creative City. If it so, in other words, if creativity means merging into neo-liberal
policies to reduce the role of bureaucracy and politics in the management of the
economy and to unfetter the business from the burdens imposed upon it by the
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regulatory environment, one can easily believe that the Mayor is the most
creative actor in Antalya. As he declared in an interview:
I have decided to make Antalya fly. In order to make this possible, I am going to give way
to private sectors. […] We are going to turn the Antalya National Golden Orange Film
Festival into an International one like the Cannes Film Festival. […]
This paper aims to analyse the cultural policies for transforming “the Antalya
National Golden Orange Film Festival into an International one”. For this
purpose, the field research is conducted in Antalya based on the realist
methodology by using the various tools and techniques of qualitative research
method of sociology. Following the Antalya National Golden Orange Film
Festival since 1964, the Golden Orange Eurasia International Film Festival
since 2005 and the Golden Orange Film Market Fair Events since 2006 are the
two striking examples to industrial cultural policy which focuses on the local
production of cultural goods to be consumed nationally or exported through the
mass media. Research shows that the crucial intention for organizing the
Golden Orange Eurasia International Film Festival can be described as to
nominate a fourth center of film industry in Antalya, in between Asia and Europe
beside other recognizable centers in the world, namely Hollywood, Europe, and
Bollywood.
The squatter movement is one of the actors in the urban arena in several
European cities, and in many of them has played a leading role in the
contestation to large urban regeneration plans and new urban policies. The
squat embodies a form of political claim over urban issues. Despite similarity in
the nature of its political discourse, there are different types of squatting, which
may represent diverse models of contestation. In cities where the movement
was carried out just during the last two decades (e. g. many Spanish cities), its
development has taken place along with the raise of housing prices and high
rates of real estate’s construction. Whereas, in European cities which saw the
origins of the squatting as social movement in the early seventies, (e. g.
Amsterdam or Milan) this movement has reached a different profile, both
regarding the kind of organizations involved and the institutional responses.
Although there is an important tradition of research about social mobilization
both in the field of social movements’ theory and urban studies, there is little
investigation about radical movements in urban settings. Those investigations
have been formed basically for case studies; which mainly consist of structural
approaches that use ethnographic or historical methodologies. In these cases,
the variation is explained by structural factors in longitudinal perspective. Unlike
these approaches, this presentation aims to identify the set of variables which
bring about the squatter movement emergence in selected cities of Western
Europe, and to distinguish patterns of activation and development of radical
movements in urban settings by taking into account interactions between
factors. In order to illustrate the argument we will show up some evidence
regarding these selected cities.
The Land and Administration Law of the People’s Republic of China stipulates
that land in the urban areas of cities shall belong to the state and land in rural
and suburban areas shall belong to rural collectives. The rapid urbanization has
left in the middle of urban areas, rural villages (villages-in-the-cities,
Chengzhongcun) where peasants cannot anymore cultivate their land nor take
rural jobs because they do not have urban household registration. The only
option for these heroes of the socialist period to survive has been to become
landlords which were in the socialist period regarded as class enemies.
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Peasants have managed to negotiate with the local government for the use of
some part of the collectively owned land (less than 10%) (so called keep-on-
land (liuyongdi)) to develop housing for immigrants migrating to cities from all
over China. As a result urban villages have the whole variety of ethnic diversity:
from Hunan to Sichuan. The paper will analyze how the state, local state and
peasant developers co-operate and negotiate in order to develop land and
housing in urban villages and discuss the changes in the class and ethnic
composition in urban villages.
Many nations today are marked by a growing sense of social alienation, leading
to marginalized and disenfranchised communities increasingly prone to violent
actions. Unlike wars, this growing phenomenon takes place on a daily basis
within the boundaries of nation-states, essentially resulting in a new kind of
urban warfare and social aggression over resources and power. To what extent
is this warfare derived from racial tensions and class conflict? The paper looks
at this socio-spatial dynamic through the concrete place, the public arena, which
serves not merely as a locus to conflicts but is part of it, as a catalyst, as a
symbol, as material. Taking the 2005 riots in France as a point of departure this
paper explores the interrelationships of aggression, alienation and urban space
in order to expose the intensifying waves of social aggression within urban
habitats. The 2005 French riots, provide a case to be recognized for their
significance beyond French national boundaries.
retrenchment since they usually do not have a say regarding public policies
affecting their lives.
20 years ago Genoa was an industrial city in decline. The ailing port and heavy
industry on the western outskirts defined the city, and there was hardly any
tourism. Today Genoas urban landscape could present itself as a fresh and
modern European city, the vertical city structure had been enhanced, the former
port transformed into a tourist magnet. However, the elements of this new
urbanity evoke a déja vu: the reconstituted urbanity resembles a facsimile of the
modern Europe as portrayed in the urban developers’ trade journals. It was both
impulses from outside that prompted Genoa onto this development path, as well
as the endogenous potentials that lead to the accumulation of already existing
resources. In my lecture I will entangle the process of transformation and I will
show that governance could be attained rather through “soft strategies” like
strategical and on the surface democratic forms of planning. Such “soft
strategies” went as well along with the use instruments of “European planning”
like URBAN II and the participation in big events as catalysators for urban
develoment. The intelligent re-evaluation of the historical heritage in the center
and its integration with modern architecture paved the way for social
restructuring also. The dismission of the social question and the exclusion of the
periphery turn out to be integral part of the transformation.
All kind of cities became global with the new round of capitalist urbanization,
notwithstanding of its size and regional location. The cities are facing new
processes of suburbanization, exopolization, physical and social fragmentation,
are experiencing a great obsession for security that led to the proliferation of
gated communities; it is raising a new flexible and service economy connected
to global markets, new segmented labor markets are arising, it is growing a new
underclass, a new postmodern sensibility, and new political rules commanded
by an entrepreneurial elite with public agendas oriented to the competitive of
cities. Culiacan, capital of the Northern State of Sinaloa, number 16th in the
urban hierarchy of Mexican cities (720,000 inhabitants in 2007), is experiencing
a neoliberal urbanization that undermine its historical and ecological landscape,
which collapse the riverside of its three waterflows (Humaya, Tamazula and
Culiacan). The urbanization is leaded by a few big developers connected with
local commercial retailers (HOMEX, COPPEL, LEY, VIZUR). The entrepreneurs
integrated several spurious NGO’s for blocking the urban political process, to
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inhibit the grassroots movements that challenge its mega projects. The Coppel
group has the control of the boards of the Urban Planning Institute of Culiacan,
the Botanical Association of Sinaloa, Artistic society of Sinaloa, Sinaloa
Ecoregion, and so on. These organizations rule different projects: the downtown
redevelopment, the new urban system transportation, the so-called “Riverside
Park”. Recently, new urban environmental grassroots movements are pushing
for new rules in the urban political machine, appealing for accountability and
transparency on urban projects. In this paper, we shall analyze the new urban
political actors in Culiacan and the new grassroots movements from the
perspective of the critical geography.
Boyle Heights is a poor Mexican barrio located in the inner city of Los Angeles
city, featured for to be overcrowded and for the insecurity. Because of this,
since 2004 the local government begun to implement in this neighborhood, an
urban restructure project called “Adelante East Side”, which contemplate the
citizen participation and overview throughout community forums where the
inhabitants can express their opinion. Notwithstanding, the residents of Boyle
Heights have realized that this project is an attempt to evict the poor from this
area in order to construct high value residential projects, also they found the
community forums just as a mechanism to legitimize this capitalist urban
restructure process . In this sense, this paper analize how the community now
are organized by their own means and funds for participate independently from
the government giving, under their own conditions, a real social sense to the
planning in the city.
This paper explores the mobility and moorings, soft and hard infrastructure and
related image production of Canada’s largest private theme park. Using
theories of the Zwischenstadt and neoliberalism it reveals some of the trends of
uneven development that recur in both theories. Beginning with work on the
‘mobility turn’ of geography we can examine the infrastructure or ‘moorings’ that
have enabled the growth and development of the Zwischenstadt. The
Zwischenstadt would not exist in turn without the moorings of mass hyper-
mobility, creating unsustainable urban form enabled by the neoliberalized
market. This is legitimated by shared cultural understanding of movement and
place, replicated and propagated through image-production and the state. By
exploring mobility and the car-culture of the mega-amusement development one
can address questions of environmental sustainability and equity, access and
competence of infrastructure in the space of flows.
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It is being generally argued that the process of urban development in India and
so in Punjab is not equitable and therefore is not sustainable. Social Sciences
have increasingly started to debate the model of development-a direct offshoot
of globalization-that currently dominates the world. In the recent past, the state-
led gentrification initiatives under Jawahar Lal Nehru National Urban Renewal
Mission (JNNURM) by the municipal corporation in coalition with private
developers have uprooted few hundred families and small business
establishments from the core of the city of Amritsar. All this has been done in
the name of development and beautification of the area around the Golden
Temple Complex, the most popular holy Sikh shrine. This has led to some
serious implications not only for the uprooted working middle class and the poor
who have been forced to move to the fringe areas of the city but have also
affected the social fabric of the community life. The present study is based on
empirical investigations and it (i) explores the logic and motive of state-led
gentrification and the role of private developers. (ii) examines the impact of
displacement on the uprooted in particular and the community life of the city in
26
general and (iii) tries to see implications for the working middle class and the
poor on account of this state-led urban restructuring.
Central public places in world/global metropolises are the very locations where
forces of world-scale social change manifest themselves via the intersection of
flows and fluids of mobile persons, objects and cultures. Such locations hold
together vastly different kinds of places (work, leisure, tourism…), people
(workers, tourists, homeless…), and activities (vending, wandering, servicing,
policing…) in shared time and space. The study of this kind or places requires
construction of a new conceptual framework and new methodology. The paper
applies theoretical resources of ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (John Urry), ‘study of
heterotopias’ and sociology of space (Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Edward
Soja), ‘flâneur’ and ‘situationism’ (Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel de
Certeau) to construct a critical conceptual framework. Such a framework
presupposes a methodology of research based on participant observation and
experimenting (simulation of ‘flaneur’s’ action). The practical application of such
framework and method allows for the rich case-study description of specific
places that serves to recollect the understanding of public spaces’ constitution
27
In recent years, culture, arts and creativity have acquired a central place in the
debate on urban/local development, as a dynamic and highly competitive sector
of economic activity and/or as means to successfully combat social exclusion
and marginalisation of deprived neighbourhoods. The terms used in this broad
range of theory and policy often result in ambiguities and, at best, in a multi-
faceted debate. The present contribution aims to explore some limits of the
dominant approaches that correlate cultural and economic development,
highlighting contradictions and side effects of the pursued policies, eg. in terms
of unequal labour relations or wider issues of social justice. It proposes a
contextual reading of socially creative strategies, which may question the
homogenising and universalist approaches that prevail.
Drawing from examples which mobilise culture and arts as a resource, an
instrument or an end in itself in the regeneration of urban neighbourhoods, the
paper proposes to analyse how a broader view and practice of arts and culture,
incorporating a range of place- or community-specific material practices and
knowledge, can foster dynamics to overcome situations of deprivation and
social alienation. The various perceptions that come out from the different cases
point to a broader view of culture and arts, activated in a multiplicity of ways and
in a variety of geographical scales. Moreover, our examples indicate that
socially embedded strategies and local bottom-up initiatives have many aspects
and effects: personal/symbolic, political/ ideological and developmental.
How can the recent upsurge of ethno-nationalisms and the civil war in Sri Lanka
be understood as a reaction to and as an accomplice of globalization, stirred up
by the neoliberal economic policies introduced in late 1970s? How do
neoliberal, neocolonial interventions reframe nationalist ideologies in the
production of space? This paper argues that nationalism is a social, cultural and
historical phenomenon as well as a powerful means of producing and utilizing
space. The projection of Sri Lanka as 'the motherland' created by the dominant
Sinhalese Buddhist ideology continues to alienate the non-Sinhalese, non-
Buddhists. On the other hand, the concept of the 'traditional Tamil homeland' of
the Tamil Hindus in the North and the East of the country represents separation
from the majority ethnic group while marginalizing the minority Sinhalese and
Muslims living in these regions. In what ways does neoliberalism fuel these
28
Over the past ten years Toronto has seen an unprecedented condominium
boom that had significant impact on the socio-economic composition of large
parts of the inner city. This paper critically investigates the unintended
consequences of state-led policy documents on a local and regional level,
which, under the framework of ‘sustainability’, had asked for an intensification of
the already built up areas in the City of Toronto. The paper argues that
Toronto’s condominium boom represents a subtle and not yet scrutinized
enough form of state led gentrification that not only responds to structural
features of the political economy, but also represents a state led strategy to
displace the “obstacles” to capital accumulation, such as low-income
populations, members of Toronto’s working class, the poor and ethnic minority
groups (as well as the space of production and reproduction they inhabit) from
inner city areas that have been identified as potential sites to be reconnected to
the circuits of capital by transferring them to “higher and better” uses. Initiated
by state-led policies that contributed to new-build gentrification, Toronto is a
prolific example to discuss the accidental consequences that these policies
have on a city that prides itself to be balanced in its socio-economic and ethnic
mix. What this research is indicating is that the old urban middle class is being
squeezed out of the market and the poor are neglected all together, while
ethnicity is reduced to some socio-economic stereotypes. As a consequence,
Toronto’s condominium boom not only represents a state led rediscovery of the
inner city by capital, followed by a more and more homogenous upper middle
class workforce of mainly young, highly educated and well paid professionals,
but also represents a somewhat under examined form of state led displacement
of low-income groups from Toronto’s inner city. This paper seeks to draw
attention to the negative outcomes of “sustainability” seeking urban policies for
somewhat underrepresented groups in Toronto’s inner city and culminates in a
discussion of citizenship, social justice and the right to the city.
local cultural policies, not the whole world should nor can be included.
Accordingly, we need to reflect on the scale of intervention. In order to deal with
today’s diversity in an open and enriching manner; different kinds of social and
cultural capital (than the one put forward in national and regional, hence more
homogenous setting) are needed. Searching for a new interpretation of these
new forms of capital should take place in those places dense and diverse
enough and in that way representative for the complexity of today’s society. We
argue for the importance of proximity, of local settings in the city where people
relate to in one way or another. We examine how social-cultural policy(s)
interfere in local places which are consequently real cultural spaces in people’s
lives. This paper looks at possible constructions (socially, culturally, planning-
wise…) of such heterogeneous places in such a way so they enable enriching
interactions and attitudes of openness.
Since the late 1990s, Israel has become a new destination of the Chinese
migrant workers. In view of many works conducted in Israel, the Chinese
migrant workers are a neglected group that shows a dim figure in the distance.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the initiation of this migration trend and
its social consequences. The major discussion of this study focuses on how the
whole process of migration is carrying on at the interface between the legality
and illegality. The research in the sending area explores that, the badly need of
manual labour in Israel provides possibilities to allocate both documented and
undocumented migrant workers and therefore push the labour transportation
become a profitable business. Although no one agree that undocumented
working activities should be continuing, all of the factors interacted and resulted
in a permissive situation that allow this particular combination of the illegal but
licit to persist in transnational labour migration. More than anything else, this
micro-level study attempts to find the true picture from the individual voices of
the local.
City-level competition across national borders means that urban assets and
urban economic performance matter more for national economic outcomes.
Major cities benefit materially from these shifts and be recognized as key sites
of economic opportunity, so that they are seen as crucial to the achievement of
competitiveness, cohesion, governance and environmental sustainability.
Governments acknowledge the need to empower these cities in order to help
create the sort of dynamic, innovative provincial cities and regions. Cultural
30
Uses and meanings of the public space: the social construction of the
Zocalo of Mexico City
In this investigation takes as study of case the Zocalo with the idea of offering
elements for the discussion of how a public space is constructed from the social
perspective. The Zócalo is the public space par excellence Mexico City: no
other place summons so diverse activities and so varied collective
representations. Its symbolic significance dates back over more than 500 years
of history: the Zócalo was in pre-hispanic time an avenue in the most important
ceremonial center of the city. Nowadays, the Zócalo is surrounded by the
federal and local government building, by the Metropolitan Cathedral and the
Supreme Court of Justice. It is the place where every day the national flag is
flewn and where the two most important events in the history of Mexico are
celebrated. In this square it is possible to observe a wide range of activities:
political rallies, public protests, massive camps to protest or resist against
political incidents, concerts, nudity groups in artistic performances, dancers etc.
It is the interest of this study to rebuild the symbolic public space inolved in the
Zócalo from a sociological perspective taking into account the social relations
developed there on the basis of practice, speeches and collective
representations of that public space.
In early 2007, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, released the City of
Sydney’s ‘City of Villages’ strategy. A local action plan governing a range of
public space and urban policy interventions, the strategy identifies a series of
strands which are now becoming an orthodoxy in urban planning worldwide:
‘greening’ Sydney, walking connections, improved public transport, creative
31
More than half the population of Malaysia are Malay, whose party dominates
the nation’s executive. The nation’s resources – land, labour and capital – are
distributed according to ethnic quotas. Recent political crises prove it ‘patently
clear that even the minimal conditions necessary for the practice of democracy
… do not prevail in Malaysia’ (Gomez, 2004, 1). Ethno-nationalist symbolisms
for Malaysia are, I argue, representative in the architecture of central Kuala
Lumpur. It is a young city – permanent settlement is recorded from 1857 shortly
before it became a British protectorate. This paper describes turns in urban
architecture, marked by four urban conflicts in Kuala Lumpur. In 1875, colonial
policemen assisted in ending the first inter-ethnic civil war. In 1942, the
32
Japanese army captured the city during the worst World War 2 defeat suffered
by the British. In 1969, clashes in the city led to the massacre of Chinese and
the burning of Chinese-owned property. In December 2007, the Malay-Muslim
executive violently suppressed an Indian rally against state discrimination.
Urban architecture in Kuala Lumpur conveys, within a compact two-kilometer
radius, cross-historical ideas of race and nationalism. This paper introduces
historical-comparative aspects of my PhD research, on the uses of city streets
in Kuala Lumpur.
The focus of the paper is on the process of reshaping of public space by its
inclusion in the domestic sphere. I will use, for this purpose, the concept of
domestication as it is been employed within the media and technology studies
(R. Silverstone, 2006). Domestication has to do with the capacity of individuals,
families, households to bring new technologies and services into their own
culture, to make them their own. It involves both practices and the construction
of meaning and it is a dialectical process, for these technologies and services
change the way things are done in everyday life. The aim of the paper is to
explain: why the concept of domestication can be used to analyse public spaces
and urban culture (which characters space share with technology); why it is
worth using it (overcoming the dichotomy used-objective space vs. lived-
subjective space it helps to understand the production of space in the cities);
how the phases of domestication process (appropriation, objectification,
incorporation, conversion) can be applied to public spaces. I will then show
some examples from a research in progress on the domestication of public
space in a medium sized city in Italy using narrative interviews and
ethnographic observation.
Compostela, silvia.rosende@rai.usc.es
67
Weak Citizenship and Soft Environment Planning: The Key Role of Method
and Contexts
The paper presents the results of a comparative research addressing the issue
of the representation of ethnic diversity in two cities of Southern Europe, Milan
and Barcelona. The research focuses on the representations constructed by
“autochthonous” residents, and key actors in particular, of the presence of non
communitarian immigrants in urban space in relation to variables linked to the
neighborhood and to its public spaces. To this aim three neighborhoods have
been taken into account, each characterized by different kinds of ethnic
relations and forms of conflict. In Milan: a peripheral neighborhood in which the
arrival of immigrants is considered to worsen the already difficult conditions and
a more central one in which the interests of middle-high class Italian residents
clash with the needs of immigrants who have opened shops in the area or who
gather in the neighborhood’s public spaces. In Barcelona: a quite central
neighborhood with middle-low class residents in which relations between
autochthonous and immigrants are mediated through local policy actions. The
comparison between the neighborhoods is analyzed against the backdrop of
public discourse on immigration and the different ways in which local authorities
pretend to integrate ethnic diversity into the image and identity of cities.
Divided Cities in the Global Age: Observing the prevalence of urban walls
in Europe
Cities are made of multiple and different parts that are connected or isolated
form each other, but in either case give form and reflect the social relations
which the functioning of the city produces. In shaping these divisions
boundaries and margins often play a more constitutive role than what
conventional, often centre-oriented policymaking discourses, show. In this
paper I discuss one specific urban form, namely walls, as the concrete
embodiment and the symbolic metaphor for the nature and reproduction of
urban segregation. I discuss ethic and religious divisions and conflict as they
34
are reflected by the presence of walls, which in turn paradoxically give shape to
the unity of the “city” space. While the mediatic impact of the fall of the Berlin
wall coincided with the consensual rejection of the presence of walls, ghettos or
segregated communities within cities in the European discourse, the examples
of the Peace Lines in Belfast, a recent wall built in Padua and the encircling
walls in the Spanish autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, show the contrary.
Arguments of ethnic and/or religious differentiation underpin the fear of
immigration, crime or terror attacks and serve as justifications for the presence
of walls in these societies. Thus, this paper begins by describing the ancient,
but still valid role walls play in the definition of the European urban experience.
Subsequently, relaying on the given of walls still erected in European territory, I
discuss whether their presence in their respective cities is sign of the unity of
the city or its progressive segmentation. This debate necessarily leads to a
discussion on the nature of the urban bond and the role debates on identity
formation play in shaping the nature of the urban experience. Finally, in the
conclusions, I recall the situationist claim, le droit à la ville, to state the need for
walls that protect urban experiences rather than fragment them.
Selling the ‘Creative City’: Planning, Culture, and the Control of Public
Space
One of the much discussed manifestations of global restructuring has been the
rise of the entrepreneurial city and the multidimensional processes of inter-
urban competition they engage in to secure a place in the new global economy.
Among these dimensions, scholars have underscored the significance of culture
and cultural representations of place within political economic processes of
urban restructuring, and have provided examples of strategies pursued by
different cities in response to historical global shifts. This paper seeks to
contribute to such discussion and add to critical scholarship exploring the role of
urban planning and local policy in the production and control of public space, as
well as the impact of such control upon alternative forms of cultural expression.
Looking to the examples of New York and Barcelona, the paper focuses on the
latter to discuss the much questioned Civic Bylaws (2005) implemented by the
City Council. The local government aggressively markets Barcelona as a safe
tourist destination, and as a ‘creative city’ that caters to the global business elite
and the ‘creative class.’ However, the question remains whether the city’s
concomitant promotion of homogenized representations of the historical avant-
garde comes at the expense of ‘dissonant’ cultural expressions and practices
that do not conform to the new urban and economic development priorities.
The last few decades, urban policy and collective action debates have been
overshouted by discourse based on ideological premises, guru claims,
decontextualised research results and hastily delivered public survey outcomes,
etc. In an almost populist renouveau, the contemporary perception of how
public space and its governance should evolve in the near future, based on
outcries for more ‘urban’ technology, ‘intelligent’ networks and elite arts and
‘creativity’ communities, expected to foster security and equality for all Citizens,
dominates agendas of urban development. The paper argues that this new style
of public governance is sustained especially through a public discourse whose
reproduction is based on a triple ‘truth generating’ dynamics: (i) the self-feeding
‘democracy’ illusion of new-style governance; (ii) the ‘networkization’ of urban
society, as a collective metaphor and analytical category, increasingly
portraying urban communities as dense interactive patterns among rational
agents and functional nodes living within structure-free and acultural societies;
(iii) the commodification and instrumentalisation of social relations, with a
tendency to reduce human interaction to individual utility-based transactions
agglomerating into an creasingly ‘rationalised’ social capital. The paper
examines the role of social science in the reproduction of these discursive
dynamics. It shows that social science has not only lost a significant part of its
impact on public action and policy analysis, not the least within an urban
context, but has increasingly also become an ‘uncritical intaker’ of discourse of
the kind stylised above. While the loss of impact can be ascribed to a
36
reconfiguration of social forces and (urban) regime change, the latter only offers
a partial explanation for the increasingly uncritical role that social scientists play
within research communities and their relations with public policy and collective
agency. Still both explanations refer to the same fundamental problem, i.e. the
absence of a reflexive epistemology that addresses contemporary urban
problematics, due, among others, to the privileging of ‘flat of ontologies’ of
urban society and communities within urban analysis (polities without histories,
economies without structure, societies without pluroform cultures, futures
without past). Such flat ontologies can only be overcome by way of a structural-
institutional approach to urban development and urbanity, which focuses on the
collective agency roles of researchers and research communities. By reflexively
addressing the roles of the scientist in the understanding, bespeaking,
imagining and making of cities, urbanity will receive substance, both with
respect to the understanding and making of urban past and futures. However,
reflexivity does not refer to a condition of isolated scientific activity but is cross-
referential condition and attitude. It refers to the multiple roles which scientists
effectively or potentially have in society. Within the context of urban
development, collective agency and public action, this multiplicity can best be
explained by looking at the social scientist as a social innovator. However,
social innovation cannot be addressed by anology with the engineer’s or
economist’s view of (technological) innovation, but should be considered as part
of society’s cultural transformation. Within the context of the city, this means in
the first place the cultural transformation of urbanity.
The European Union is working for putting cultural as one of the Lisbon agenda
pillars as well as the economy, the social and the environment for making
improving the competitiveness of the 2010 Europe. Furthermore, EU has
recently proposed a Cultural programme (2007-2013).The cultural and creative
sector represent between the 2.6 per cent of Eu GDP in 2003 (in the same year
the building sector contributed for 2.1 per cent and the food sector for 1,9 per
cent). The Cultural and creative sector invoices more than 654.00 million of
Euro in 2003 (considering that the car industry has turnover 271.000 millions
and in 2001 and the TIC 541.000 million in 2003). In the cultural and creative
sector work 5,8 million of workers in 2004 which is the 2.4% of the active
working population of the 25EU. Very interesting is the profile of the workers
employed in this sector. The 46,8 per cent of the workers in this sector has at
least a university degree and (compared to the 25,7 per cent of the total of the
employers ), a high percentage is self-employees (28,8 per cent in contrast to
the 14,1 per cent in other sector) and are temporary contract (17 per cent in
respect to the 13 per cent of the total amount of the employers).
In Italy the creative-knowledge industry economy in 2001 employed more
than 4.5 millions workers, constituting about the 30 per cent of the total
employment. Lombardy Region is the leading area of the country. And Milan
metropolitan area is the heart attracting 1/5 of the creative-knowledge labour
37
force. These figures show that present and, probably, future of the European
and Italian economy is going towards the creative-knowledge industry.
Surprisingly, the growing of this sector has not, at least in the Italian
context, been supported by any national or local policies and strategies. The
combination creative-knowledge industry and policy framework is very recent. It
is in fact a common agreement that the Milan metropolitan area has developed
this economic sector thanks to the cultural and economic heritage of the golden
age of the industrial time. The contribution shows very clearly that until few
years ago the leading role of Milan metropolitan area in the fashion, design and
bio-technology sectors has not been the outcome of a cohesive and structured
political strategy as well as other EU cities. On the contrary, it has been the
slow and persist work of innovative and inventive entrepreneurs who has
transformed their skills “forged” in the heavy industry into a new and innovative
sectors. Can this Milan self-made model resist to the international
competitiveness? The blindness of local institutions for promoting cultural
innovation can still be possible? Based on the result of ACRE Project -EU
research project –- the paper will present how Milan is in a crucial moment. In
the nineties private local actors have been acting for promoting innovation and
supremacy in different creative cultural and knowledge sectors. However, the
lack of an institutional role has created a situation in which Milan has damaged
its economic and cultural growth. In the fashion industry, Milan has lost ground
compared to Paris and London. In the design scene, Milan “has passed” the
change to Turin to been crowned European capital of Design 2008. It is very
recent that a political framework has been created to fostering the
competitiveness of territory. And the new century has the real land mark of this
new tendency. Is Milan at a turning point? From the nomination to the 2015
Expo to the new attitude of local politicians, it can be said that Milan might be
entering in a new Renaissance. Although local authorities- Council, Province
and Regions- have recognized that building multilevel governments is
necessary for entering in the international competition, partnership between
local authorities and networks actors, multi-sectoral strategies, participation of
the inhabitants and sustainability are only partially part of the public discourse.
This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s insights on space and power to examine
the micro-politics of ethnic and class segregation in cities. We posit that power
becomes manifest in urban space through the application of a wide variety of
techniques used by planners to govern urban space (i.e. zoning, taxing,
housing, parking, etc.). Planners and politicians combine different techniques to
form the ‘socio-spatial architectures’ of their particular municipalities. These
39
socio-spatial architectures not only affect the ethnic and class mix of
municipalities, but they also regulate how different status groups use particular
spaces (i.e. sidewalks, buses, parks, shopping centers, etc.) within them. When
shifting from the municipal to metropolitan scale, the particular architectures of
municipalities combine to create a general system of institutional channels that
shape the spatial behaviour of residents, diverting them into different locations
on the basis of ethnicity and class and regulating behaviour in the multiple
spaces that constitute daily life. This paper documents three distinct moments in
the application of these techniques: (1) It identifies changes in dominant
segregation strategies over the past 50 years, from strategies that stressed
large-scale, visible, and collective techniques (i.e. redlining, urban
renewal/removal, homeless warehousing in skid rows, etc.) to those that stress
stealth and individualized techniques (i.e. zoning, micro-displacements,
regulating homeless behaviour in residential neighbourhoods, transit
restrictions, etc.); (2) It surveys and catalogues techniques used to shape the
class and ethnic mixes in several Los Angeles municipalities, and (3) It
analyzes how these techniques aggregate to form socio-spatial architectures
that influence the location patterns of different status groups in these
municipalities.
The urban network in Roraima, incipient and with low city density, is marked by
the precesence of the capital, Boa Vista, in all aspects such as demographic
and urban functions. In this relation of domination-dependence the road BR-174
which connects Brazil to Venezuela assumes an important role in the social
spatial interactions between the few existing cities, specially in relation to the
disposal of goods and services. The fragility of this urban network, specially due
to the concentration of most of the urban functions in the capital, contributes to
the maintaince of the precariety of the infrastruture of the other cities giving
ocasion to diverse social spatial and economic problems. Such problems
constitute vulnerabilities that permits the enforcement of ilegal activities such
as, for example, practices of commercial sexual exploration specially of children
and teenagers. In this sense, this paper analyses the role played by the urban
network and the sexual exploration network aiming to undersand the dynamics
of the predominace of the urban network , its fluxes and the road.
There is an adage that says ‘there is unity in diversity’ but this has not been the
case in Nigeria’s urban cities. In fact, urban ethnic and religious violence have
become recurring issues in Nigeria’s body politic. Though many factors are
responsible, including issues of resources, rights and space, the impact of Oro
religious festival (a traditional religion) on urban ethno-communal violence in
Sagamu, between Yorubas and Hausas living within the terrain cannot be
imagined as it spurred conflicts to other states in Nigeria. Based on an empirical
study, this paper intends to explore the trajectories of urban ethno-communal
violence in Nigeria with focused attention on Oro festival conflict that occurred in
Sagamu in 1999, its impact on ethnic dichotomy and what the conflict portend
for current peace in an ethnically-divided society.
There is an adage that says ‘there is unity in diversity’ but this has not been the
case in Nigeria’s urban cities. In fact, urban ethnic and religious violence have
become recurring issues in Nigeria’s body politic. Though many factors are
responsible, including issues of resources, rights and space, the impact of Oro
religious festival (a traditional religion) on urban ethno-communal violence in
Sagamu, between Yorubas and Hausas living within the terrain cannot be
imagined as it spurred conflicts to other states in Nigeria. Based on an empirical
41
What did cities win, when they take part in a federal competition to get the title
European culture capital? They put their historical grown cultural organizations
under competitiveness. With a self searched trouble they try to stimulate
creativity in the city. They become temporal creative cities: A very heavy task
for cities in a middle range. In a case study I analyse the impact on city culture
in three dimensions. First, the programmatic formation of a mission or
a corporate image of the city. Second, I analyse the transformation
of organizational field of cultural institutions and third, I take a special view on
external cultural consulting, and the federal financial or administrative support.
Third, I will provide an answer to the question: “Do cities become more than
temporal creative cities?”
42
The aim is to examine some taken for granted claims which are made about the
impact of globalization and neo-liberalization, the hollowing out of the
state, theories of state scale, the functions and working of the local state
(growth coalitions, partnerships etc.), etc. The argument will be that too many
claims have been accepted without adequate evidence and have become an
obstacle to understanding.
Social justice and the declining city: the evolution of governance in four
West-European former industrialized cities
influence of the urban civil society over this period of entrepreneurialism. The
comparison between four cities and two national contexts allows us to ask
several questions: which parts of the urban civil society have managed to gain
political power and why? Which political outputs have resulted from the shifts in
the governance of these cities? More generally, which kinds of conflicts appear
between social cohesion and capital attraction around urban regeneration
policies, and how are these conflicts managed or hidden?
concentrated debate and social effervescence, urban festival highlight the art of
living together that the city supposedly always represented – from Simmel’s
stranger to contemporary theories of the global city – enabling a perspective on
cosmopolitanism not as an abstract or exclusively élite driven phenomenon, but
as it enters the public debate and culture. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork
research on some major urban festivals (the European Capital of Culture,
Brighton Festival, Venice Biennale), the paper offers both a theoretical advance
in their definition as a special type of festival, and an empirically informed
investigation of the link between cosmopolitan orientations connected to
aesthetic experiences, trasnational identifications and post-traditional festivals.
In areas with low demographic densities and large distances such as the
Brazilian Amazon, where 70% of the population lives in cities, the analysis of
how the sparce cities interact with the urban network is essential to understand
the urban dynamic and subsidize sustainable socio-ecological policies. The
empirical research on the urban network along the rivers Solimões-Amazonas
in the Brazilian Amazon State permitted the creation of a new category that can
be useful for this debate: Cities of Territorial Responsibility. The research done
in the Brazilian Amazon permits a new understanding of the city function in low
density areas where the few existing cities are essential for the continuity of life
in all its aspects including the conservation of biodiversity.This paper presents
the methodology constructed for the analysis of the urban network in the
Amazon, the empirical data collected, the results synthesized in thematic
cartography and the theoretical category constructed.
In the 21th century with the passage to a post-industrial society culture and
creativity became a means for coming out of the political and economical
insecurity (Zukin, 1995) and the engines of economic growth. Creativity has
became a characteristic which when present, allows to the economy of
businesses, of particular industrial sectors, and of a city in general to flourish.
The role of government, industry and university are defined by the triple helix
model (Etzkowitz, Leydesdorff, 1998) as the engine for innovation inside
46
The ‘creative city’ concept has high political and symbolic importance for global
cities seeking to attract jobs and investment. But the concept contains a well-
established dilemma: local creative subcultures, which feed city cultures, can be
vulnerable to the gentrification that often results. Increasing land rents in
Australian central cities are placing pressure on local creative initiatives,
displacing small cultural producers and dispersing local networks.
Genuinely creative cities foster new ideas and practices and new uses of space,
requiring that we plan for the unplanned. Some city governments are beginning
to understand this, and are developing planning policies that can create the
conditions for the continuity of their valued (and valuable) creative subcultural
activities. This paper examines the complex relationships between ‘creativity’
and place, and evaluates recent initiatives intended to nourish local cultural
diversity. In identifying cases of best practice in Australia, and with reference to
similar practices overseas, the research reveals an evolution in the range of
regulatory and negotiating tools available to governments, and in public
discourses around the maintenance of sustainable city competitiveness.
Fourteen percent of the Berlin population is foreign and even more have non-
German heritage. However, immigrants and ethnics are unevenly distributed
across the city’s neighborhoods and districts, with highly visible ethnic clusters
in some places. This has led to vocal concern about the rise of “parallel
societies” in Germany. The Federal Government, with its new seat in this
reunited capital city, has launched an official “Integration Summit” and a new
“integration policy” that emphasizes acculturation, especially German language
acquisition, but also democratic values, Christian public culture, German cuisine
and customs, and of course, labor market participation. From the ethnic
47
‘Regeneration’ has been the focus of a great deal of research, the majority of
which seeks to understand the political economy of the production of sites such
as Cardiff Bay yet there is a paucity of research in the U.K. which seeks to
understand the role of the social actor, subjectivity and meaning in the
constituting of the complex nature of the reconfigured urban setting. This paper
will explore a multi-modal interactionist approach to understanding regenerated
urban locales and impacts upon the contours of subjectivity, notions of urban
citizenship and identities. The paper will focus on the methods employed by
social actors to navigate, interpret and utilise arrangements in their
surroundings as a resource for the accomplishment of legitimated actions,
interactions, and identity work. I will also explore how this social interaction is
constrained and regulated within this particular ‘strip of activity’. The paper will
also consider the relations that exist between orders of social organisation,
power and the mundane activity observed in ‘regenerated space’. This in turn
allows for a consideration of the fluid and reflexive interaction that occurs
between the global and the local, the self and the social, as well as temporal
relations where representations and interpretations of pasts, the present and
futures shape accounts of this specific regenerated area.
48
Since the mid 1990s cultural policy in Athens supports strongly the activity of
private non-profit institutions. After the dominance of a socialist re-distributive
logic during the 1980s, Greek urban cultural policy started, since the mid 1990s,
regarding culture as an important productive sector. This change was, mainly,
the outcome of the adaptation to European Union funding criteria and led to
quite extended public investments. The larger part of the latter was undertaken
by the central state and orientated towards archaeological sector. A smaller part
was channeled through private non-profit institutions into arts and science
popularisation. This evolution coincided with an ongoing, since the early 1980s,
increase of non-profit cultural institutions founded by entrepreneurs issued by
the prosperous sectors of constructing, banking and finance. The paper
explores the urban cultural policy/non-profit institutions partnerships by
examining strategies and resources of the groups and individuals implicated.
Data come from semi-structured interviews, documentary research and a record
of the organizational and social characteristics of the non-profit institutions. We
conclude that the partnerships in question result from the way that EU funding
programs regulate the interaction between Greek cultural policy and cultural
strategies of the local business elite.
can one, perhaps, understand the creative power of defacement. To hide may
mean to invent new ways of seeing the urban landscape. To hide may mean to
re-face (as the anthropologist M. Taussig suggests). De-facement and re-
facement can be taken as the two poles of urban memory dialectics: Memory is
performed and contested (explicitly or implicitly) in practices that re-invent public
space.
TANG, Wing Shing and Kim Ching CHAN, Hong Kong Baptist University, China,
wstang@hkbv.edu.hk
This paper contributes to the debate about the attempts to interweave the
substantive and procedural dimensions of urban sustainability. It is insightful to
argue that such attempts must pay heed to the regimes of practices of any
society. Nevertheless, even such an argument has its limitation, as its relevance
is usually restricted to a Euro-centric spatiality, where the procedural and
substantive dimensions of sustainable development can have a ‘symbiotic’
interaction. What about the situation in other parts of the world, where the
imperial employs discursive production to incorporate other parts of the world
into such a spatiality? Discursive production, such as sustainable development,
breaks down the barrier of socio-political practices of the local, serving the
interests and the governance of the ruling regimes. On the other hand, the local
may employ this kind of discursive production for its nationalist nation-building
project. Then, the interweaving of the procedural and substantive takes on a
form and content completely different from the West. The documentation of this
form and content, which is missing in the literature, not only provincialises any
serious understanding of the interweaving in the West but also sheds light on
the way urban problems are tackled in the developing world. This paper is a
contribution to such a documentation. It draws on a case study of the Wanchai
District in Hong Kong, where the concept of sustainable development was
recently invoked to prepare for a future plan. It illustrates step by step how the
sustainable development concept was re-interpreted and institutionalised by the
colonial government, deployed by NGOs and local district councils, understood
by the public and, finally, demanded to be incorporated into the development of
guidelines for the future plan.
The social effect of the urban restructuring process in the city centre of
Barcelona: fighting against urban segregation?
city. The nature of the concentration in the territory can be of a certain housing
tenure, social class or ethnic groups. The relationship between specific types of
urban segregation, housing systems and welfare regimes has been taken into
consideration in the European context. The paper considers that approach in a
more micro level scale in a neighbourhood level. The urban segregation in its
social, economic and ethnic dimensions is considered as a clear difficulty to
reach a cohesive and integrative city, offering the same opportunities to all the
citizens. The urban renewal policies in many European countries introduce
ways to fight against urban segregation. The ideas of a more balanced ethnic
mix are under consideration in these policies, by attracting middle classes to
unpopular neighbourhoods or promoting the different housing tenures and
income levels as a way to stimulate social integration. There are a variety of
experiences that consider the advantages of economic, social or ethnic
heterogeneity in order to improve the welfare of population. The idea behind this
statement is that mix gives to people new economic opportunities, stops
isolation and contains processes of stigmatization. In general, mix would help
residents of deprived areas of cities, on their particular social integration
processes. The general objective of this paper is to consider the theoretical
statements of social and residential segregation related to the specific case of
Barcelona city in order to define their limits and applicability. The urban renewal
projects under consideration will be the Raval neighbourhood and St. Caterina-
St. Pere neighbourhood. Those areas have been the focus of a massive urban
renewal intervention of the city centre of Barcelona developed between 90s until
today. The specific evaluation of the outputs of the regeneration project
especially in relation to levels of urban segregation and social mix will be the
main objectives of the paper.
The focus of the paper is on the identification and explanation of the factors and
mechanisms producing socio-spatial changes in neighborhoods.
Gentrification, in particular, has been commonly explained by macro factors like
urban renewal, changes on the urban economy, immigration or alterations on
the housing markets. However, there are still some black boxes dealing with the
specific mechanisms through which these macro changes influence the
residential behavior of individuals. Defending and developing the concept of
“residential adjustments”, the paper argues that macro results in terms of social
changes in the city must be explained considering the different ways in which
groups react and adjust their residential behavior to their changing environment.
To do so, we compare the residential adjustments of three different groups: 1) a
long-time settled group of migrants (Philippines); 2) new young middle class
neighbors; and 3) working class youngsters – both from Spanish and migrant
origin – that are willing to emancipate from their household. Through in-deep
qualitative interviews variables like housing careers, or attitudes towards
housing and towards the neighborhood are researched. The research is
51
focused on the neighborhood of Ciutat Vella in Barcelona. During the last ten
years, this inner city neighborhood has experienced a deep physical
transformation as a consequence of an aggressive urban renewal plan.
Moreover, only partly as a result of this transformation, housing prices have
grown much faster than the city average. Although it is often used by the
academic literature like an example of a successful state-led gentrification, the
percentage of low income non-EU migrants (the highest in the city) has also
grown sharply. The result is a complex scenario in which process of segregation
and gentrification seem to be taking place at the same time.
area was not perceived as favoring particular income group. For those who
were not living in the prioritized promotion area did not realize the investment in
the selected area was done at their expense. The trickle down effect is not yet
observed.
Gentrification has become part and parcel of governmental strategies for urban
development since the 1980s. In the Netherlands, too, we find that state
agencies and housing associations that once curtailed processes of
gentrification are now actively implicated in the process. There is a new
consensus that there are too many affordable houses in cities and that the
housing stock needs to be transformed in order to keep the city ‘mixed’ and
‘liveable’. This paper traces the genealogy of this gentrified urban vision of the
city and examines how it is gains the power to shape reality in its image.
Following the premise that power is most easily identified when and where it is
contested, I present an ethnographic study into a case where a coalition of
residents, academics and activists promoted a counter-discourse that revolved
around ‘affordability’ and ‘diversity’. I analyze the competition between these
discourses and their respective strengths in various settings with the help of
theories of discursive and symbolic power. How and why can opponents or
proponents of gentrification promote their ‘common sense’ of what the city
should look like? What can the resistance against gentrified urban visions learn
us about the modalities and logics of state-led gentrification?
VALLADARES, Licia
The debate on the favela focuses largely on its innovative and creative capacity.
Its contribution to Brazilian music through samba and the samba schools,
through hip-hop and funk, through football and popular culture in general, is
largely recognized and has helped to create a positive image that counteracts
the negative image of marginalization, criminality and poverty. In fact the
traditional image of the favela seems to be fading. It is no longer the territory of
the migrants in the city or of the poor tout court. In cities such as Rio de Janeiro
the favela population is increasingly urban, socially mobile and heterogeneous
and many such urban areas now house buildings of six to eight floors and have
an active rental and real estate market. A new social actor seems to be on the
move; although so far a minority group, it deserves attention as it contributes to
new forms of social innovation. They are called in Brazil the “doutores” or the
“intellectuals” of the favelas. They work in NGO’s or are members of resident’s
associations, have gone or go to universities where they obtain an under-
graduate or a graduate degree and most of them continue to live in the favelas
where they grew-up. What does such a group represent? In which activities
exactly are they involved? Are they more legitimate to speak about the favela,
as they seem to claim, than those who are not originally from the favela but
study it ? How are they perceived by the majority of the local population? This
paper intends to explore the degree of social innovation and urban creativity
that such group represents.
This paper has the aim to analyze the ownership implications of the
transformation in Mexican governance since 1982. The turning point of the
implementation of a new model of development was prompted by the Mexican
State financial crisis of 1982, after a period of steady economic growth. The
entrepreneurial State since then has been under the attack of new business
elite, who are the direct beneficiaries of the massive transfer of public assets
and change in ownership from public property to private property. The Mexican
State is now captive under the interests of entrepreneurs rule and governance.
This paper brings some specific cases related with the change in ownership in
the land property, the banking and financial system, the telecom company
TELMEX, airlines, etc. The effects of this change in ownership are evident. A
weak system of regulatory agencies and mismanagement of privatization
programs has ended in private monopolies, low economic growth, uneven
social development, political instability, alarming increment of insecurity, social
unrest, etc
The relations between the material and the procedural dimensions of urban
sustainabilities can be linked into a more constructive and consistent dialogue.
A study of the implementation process of theses politics and thematic makes
evidence of different social supports: (a) The role of the social deliberation and
(b) the role of institutional and political coordinations, so to frame the
sustainable urban form (eco district, requalification of industrial area). We can
analyze the transformation of the urban and sustainable politics on these two
issues. This can be demonstrated on city cases (as Nantes and Plaine
Commune in France). This can be compared with the European frames of
urban sustainability. Within this approach, we compare the social outcomes in
the production of the urban sustainabilities between policies of the National
State and the policies of the local State: (1) The politics of the national State
focus the debates on the politics of energy, on transportation priority and
economy of energy. (2) The politics of local State on the sustainable
development may articulate citizenship mobilizations on concrete issues, an
open construction of these politics between public deliberation and social
changes, the framing of alternative way of life (compact district, soft mobility).
55
In recent years, there has been considerable debate over the changing nature
of contemporary gentrification. Current research suggests that gentrification has
mutated radically from its original meaning to include a variety of new forms and
geographies, challenging traditional definitions and leading to broader, more
inclusive definitions. Contemporary gentrification is also closely tied to
increasing state involvement in the process, with a larger role being played
today by local governments in promoting and supporting gentrification under the
influence of neo-liberal urbanism. And, while the role of urban policy in fostering
gentrification can be hardly considered as new, recently there has been
mounting evidence that gentrification, far from an unintended outcome, has
turned into an integral component of urban regeneration strategies.
Increasingly, local governments are actively pursuing gentrification dynamics as
a key means for regenerating distressed areas and redundant spaces in cities.
Indeed, urban regeneration policy has turned into a fertile ground for the
production of new exclusionary urban landscapes. This paper examines the
links between urban regeneration and gentrification dynamics in Bilbao through
a critical analysis of revitalization strategies implemented during the last
decade. It reviews urban policy-making and implementation in three areas in the
city, where despite quite distinct logics and regeneration initiatives, an explicit
and purposeful strategy of gentrification is nevertheless clearly identifiable. The
paper points to the emergence of policy-led gentrification as a basic feature of
urban regeneration strategies and examines the consequences and social costs
of this model.
Vieira Tomás, Ana Paula, Maceió City Hall, Brazil and Maria do Carmo Vieira,
Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil, carmov703@ Hotmail.com
Beyond the disparity of the city's size and amount of resources available, one
has to pay attention to distinct cultural, political and institutional realities. In
respect to the planning and management of the green urban areas, we propose
thinking about the sustainable city as a collective process. We rely on
institutional data from the city of Maceió - Alagoas and specific population
research within the city. We discuss sustainability principles such as: ecology,
cooperation, policies integration, democracy, community involvement,
transparency and accountability, in a context strongly marked by social
inequality.
within a wide gamut of direct action initiatives that challenge business as usual.
The city as playground is explored as unintended consequence of capitalist
accumulation. Through this study, I seek to broaden meaningful interpretations
of the built environment in order to forward nuanced visions of embodied social
change. The insights gained through the coupling of skateboarding and direct
action are useful for framing future research through critical ethnography of the
intersections of spatiality, democracy and public life.
This paper seeks to understand the nature of urban spaces that emerge within
the context of privatizing the provision of infrastructure networks and services,
through investigating urban mass-transit operations in Sitta October, Egypt a
suburban city near Cairo, linked to global flows of capital and labour. It focuses
on the dynamic interactions between government and non-government
providers of mass-transit and analyzes the nature of urban governance. It
contextualizes this dynamic within four overlapping forces: a) existing
institutions of local government, b) global capital and labour flows, c) regional
infrastructural and policy measures, and d) the will of mass-transit operators to
have a stake in their own livelihoods. The analytical framework conceptualizes
the city as an assembly of infrastructure networks, working at once
harmoniously and discordantly, to provide inhabitants with services and
amenities. It conceives roads and vehicles as socially constructed primary
technical systems, interdependent, with secondary systems of land use,
58
The main targets of New Labour’s regeneration policies in England are what it
considers to be anachronistic forms of housing which are culturally and
politically associated with the poor, inner-urban working class. In London this
means local authority (a.k.a. council) housing estates. New Labour has tied
funding arrangements for much-needed housing renewal to stock transfer, i.e.
tenants voting to transfer their landlord from the council to a registered social
landlord (RSL). Although RSLs nominally provide ‘social housing’, they
increasingly operate along business lines. One impact of stock transfer is that
the injection of private finance means houses are built for sale, not affordable
rents. Given high house prices in London, such new properties will not be
bought by the local poor but instead by incoming affluent gentrifiers. New
59
How did World War II affect the salience of “race” and “class” as bases for
identity and social action in the industrial cities of the U.S.? How did the
interaction of these two foci for identity affect urban development, and how, in
turn, did urban changes affect their interaction? While “nation” and
“nationalism” (in the form of patriotism” and support for the “war effort”) seem to
displace class” during these years, “class” was by no means absent and, for
some, may have even transcended “nation” in favor of a broader
“internationalism.” Even at home, the tremendous labor upsurge of the 1930s
continued into the 1940s and many unions retained some of their pre-war
militancy. Furthermore, changing class relations, both inter- and intra-class,
intersected with “race” and race relations in the U.S. in complex ways. In
previous work (with Maurice Zeitlin) I examined the impact of the intra-class
balance of power between rival unions on the emerging patterns of racial
inequality of this period. In this paper, I analyze the different ways in which cities
and their residents dealt with the increased competition over “place,”
“resources,” and “rights” which accompanied often profound racial and ethnic
shifts in the composition of the urban labor force
It is well accepted that not all cities experience the same levels of social and
spatial inequality. Phenomena such as poverty, social polarization and
exclusion are historically higher in Latin American cities than in European ones,
and those situations are clearly reflected in the urban space (and also
reinforced through it, as said by Gregory and Urry). However, and this is our
main hypothesis, in spite of these differences it is still possible to find common
60
patterns of spatial segregation in cities that, at first sight, seem very different.
Moreover, and on the assumption that economic models promote distinctive
socio-territorial configurations (Kesteloot; Torres), it is feasible to identify similar
transformations of the urban structures during the last years. In fact, a number
of studies have shown that due to globalization processes cities have started to
experience an increase of spatial segregation and socio-spatial contrasts (Borja
and Castells; Sassen; among others). The paper discusses this issue for “two
new regional centers of the global network” (Borja and Castells): Buenos Aires
and Barcelona. Using Census Data and statistical techniques such as Factor
and Cluster Analysis, it presents: i) the main socio-spatial transformations
produced in both cities between 1991 and 2001; and ii) the principal tendencies
regarding the evolution of spatial segregation and polarization, pointing out the
particular characteristics that the phenomenon has acquired in each city for the
period under analysis.