Towards Integrating a Model of Urban Socioeconomic Structure and Urban Imagery

1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 765-787 ◽  
Author(s):  
A N Spector

In this paper a link is made between variations in socioeconomic characteristics of urban residents and the understanding of spatial relationships in an urban landscape. It is contended that the development of activity spaces and the understanding of space and place are tied to the social, political and economic organization of a social formation. Although some of the arguments posed here parallel recent works on space-time geography, it is argued that these could be usefully augmented with the consideration of the factors influencing the knowledge and understanding of place and space. Salient features of a case study undertaken in Columbus, Ohio, are included which indicate interrelationships between the activity space elements, the knowledge of the location of various commonly known places, and the socioeconomic characteristics that urban residents have in this city.

2013 ◽  
pp. 9-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Adam Perdue

Populations in contemporary cities are being measured, analyzed, or represented in less than optimal ways. Conventional methods of measuring density of populations in cities rely on calculating the number of people living within a bounded surface space. This approach fails to account for the multiple floor residential patterns of the contemporary urban landscape and exposes the vertical space problem in population analytics. To create an accurate representation of people in contemporary urban spaces, a move beyond the conventional conception of density is needed. This research aims to find a more appropriate solution to mapping humans in cities by employing a dasymetric method to represent the distribution of people in a city of vertical residential structures. The methodology creates an index to classify the amount of floor space for each person across the extent of the city, a metric called the personal space measure. The personal space measure is juxtaposed with the conventional population density measurements to provide a unique perspective on how population is concentrated across the urban space. The personal space metric demonstrates how improved metrics can be employed to better understand the social and structural landscape of cities. Chicago, with a large population and a high vertical extent, makes an ideal case study to develop a methodology to capture the phenomena of urban living in the 21st century and to explain alternative approaches to accurately and intelligently analyze the contemporary urban space.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Lunsheng Gong ◽  
Meihan Jin ◽  
Qiang Liu ◽  
Yongxi Gong ◽  
Yu Liu

Residents’ activity space reflects multiple aspects of human life related to space, time, and type of activity. How to measure the activity space at multiple geographic scales remains a problem to be solved. Recently, the emergence of big data such as mobile phone data and point of interest data has brought access to massive geo-tagged datasets to identify human activity at multiple geographic scales and to explore the relationship with built environment. In this research, we propose a new method to measure three types of urban residents’ activity spaces—i.e., maintenance activity space, commuting activity space, and recreational activity space—using mobile phone data. The proposed method identifies the range of three types of residents’ activity space at multiple geographic scales and analyzing the relationship between the built environment and activity space. The research takes Zhuhai City as its case study and discovers the spatial patterns for three activity space types. The proposed method enables us to achieve a better understanding of the human activities of different kinds, as well as their relationships with the built environment.


Author(s):  
Alessandra Como ◽  
Luisa Smeragliuolo Perrotta ◽  
Carlo Vece

If the morphology and the studies on the urban form are closely related to the social aspects and are responsibility of architects and policy makers, the issue becomes even more complicated if we're talking about cities with a high number of buildings under public ownership or urban fragments with important dimensions. In Italy there is a very rare case of recent foundation that is the neighborhood Monteruscello in the city of Pozzuoli. Built in the 80s to face the bradisism events that had made uninhabitable other city areas, Monteruscello today, for its dimension, can be considered a "city in the city" where the 90% of the buildings are under public ownership. The neighborhood's project is designed by Agostino Renna who had built Monteruscello through analogical composition with fragments of spatial references of other places and cities. The architect has put in the neighborhood - mainly made up of rural areas - its urban model adapting it to the specific geography of places. During the years the neighborhood has never built an own identity becoming one of the most degraded areas of the city. The paper deals with the issue of urban form and morphology today starting from the study of Monteruscello - as imagined by its creator through the critical issues that underlie its design - and through an experimental design of a new agro-urban landscape for the neighborhood that involves three hectares of public green spaces - now abandoned - turning them into agricultural lands to urban use and growth resource. References Renna, A. (ed.) (1980) L’illusione e i cristalli : immagini di architettura per una terra di provincia (Clear, Roma) Giglia, A. (1997) Crisi e ricostruzione di uno spazio urbano : dopo il bradisismo a Pozzuoli : una ricerca antropologica su Monteruscello (Guerini, Milano) Capozzi, R. (ed.) (2016) Agostino Renna : la forma della città (Clean, Napoli) Pagano, L. (ed) (2012) Agostino Renna : rimontaggio di un pensiero sulla conoscenza dell’architettura : antologia di scritti e progetti 1964-1988 (Clean, Napoli)


Urban History ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
AARON FREUNDSCHUH

Taking the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum as a case study, this article examines the historical relation between crime storytelling and the myriad local struggles for spatial control that animate urban life. Modern Europe's most staggering art heist left city officials and police wholly clueless, and inspired a two-year outpouring of explanatory narratives from Parisians of virtually all social strata. This article shows how, in ostensibly making sense of the ‘impossible’ theft, the city's inhabitants imaginatively wove it into the social fabric of everyday life, thereby bringing the event to bear on a broad range of spatial tensions and rivalries. As they re-fashioned mass press versions of the theft to fit local concerns – both public and intimate – contemporaries understood crime stories as a tool with which to shape the city as they knew it.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Jade Power-Sotomayor

Afro-Puerto Rican bomba, the island’s oldest extant genre of drum, dance, and song, is a fundamentally sonic practice. Unique in the tight relation between the execution of movements and the simultaneous sounding of the lead drum, bomba dance enacts a challenge to the Western focus on the visual spectacle of dancing and draws attention to what Ashon Crawley calls the “choreosonic,” or the inextricable linking of movement and sound. Bomba dance attends to creating rhythmic variation through specific movement choices strategically placed within and simultaneously producing the sonic framework of drumming and dancing. As such, it requires a listening that ultimately structures a relationality that interrupts the colonial, white supremacist and heteropatriarchal logic that contains Puerto Rican bodies. Through a close reading of different bomba dancings, this article examines how the dancer’s sounded movements claim, not space itself, but a relation to space and place, pulling bodies into the social and unravelling temporal boundedness. It argues that bomba’s growing popularity on the island and in the diaspora is a measure of its capacity for “listening to flesh,” “listening to flesh speak,” underscoring how this particularly addresses and is attuned to a subaltern, racialized, and femme-identified flesh. As such, bomba is an important case study examining the intersections between sound studies and performance studies, blurring clear distinctions between listening to and doing sound.


2018 ◽  
pp. 12-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Villet

This essay claims that heterotopia is characteristic of post-Apartheid South Africa, i.e. where heterotopia is usually the exception in society, it is the norm in South Africa. This claim reinterprets and expands Foucault’s concept: heterotopia here refers to the racialization of place and space, and hence to otherness and difference as primary. The ubiquity of heterotopia post-Apartheid is evident in the life-worlds of white suburbia and the black township. A case study is undertaken of white suburbia through a series of phenomenological descriptions of contemporary South Africa using heterotopia as a heuristic tool. This study demonstrates how Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is relevant but also too narrow when related to the postcolonial context. An expanded notion of the term as denoting a racialized experience of space and place is necessary for the purposes of coming to terms with the strangeness of post-Apartheid South Africa, where contradiction and otherness are the norm rather than the exception.


Author(s):  
Melanie SARANTOU ◽  
Satu MIETTINEN

This paper addresses the fields of social and service design in development contexts, practice-based and constructive design research. A framework for social design for services will be explored through the survey of existing literature, specifically by drawing on eight doctoral theses that were produced by the World Design research group. The work of World Design researcher-designers was guided by a strong ethos of social and service design for development in marginalised communities. The paper also draws on a case study in Namibia and South Africa titled ‘My Dream World’. This case study presents a good example of how the social design for services framework functions in practice during experimentation and research in the field. The social design for services framework transfers the World Design group’s research results into practical action, providing a tool for the facilitation of design and research processes for sustainable development in marginal contexts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Apgar

As destination of choice for many short-term study abroad programs, Berlin offers students of German language, culture and history a number of sites richly layered with significance. The complexities of these sites and the competing narratives that surround them are difficult for students to grasp in a condensed period of time. Using approaches from the spatial humanities, this article offers a case study for enhancing student learning through the creation of digital maps and itineraries in a campus-based course for subsequent use during a three-week program in Berlin. In particular, the concept of deep mapping is discussed as a means of augmenting understanding of the city and its history from a narrative across time to a narrative across the physical space of the city. As itineraries, these course-based projects were replicated on site. In moving from the digital environment to the urban landscape, this article concludes by noting meanings uncovered and narratives formed as we moved through the physical space of the city.


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