The social context and politics of large scale urban architecture: Investigating the design of Barcode, Oslo

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bengt Andersen ◽  
Per Gunnar Røe
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Urban Architecture ◽  
Class A ◽  
The Social ◽  
Transnational Companies ◽  
City Centres

The well-known and much investigated rise of urban entrepreneurial policies has fuelled a transformation of urban spaces and landscapes, and has led to changes in the social composition of city centres. This is the case for Oslo, Norway’s capital, where increasingly urban policies are designed to attract transnational companies and those in the creative class. A key strategy to achieve this has been to transform the city’s waterfront through spectacular architecture and urban design, as has taken place in other European cities. Transnational and local architects have been commissioned to design the Barcode, one of the most striking waterfront projects. This article investigates the role of architecture and architects in this process, because architects can be seen as influential generators of urban spaces and agents for social change, and because there is remarkably little published empirical research on this specific role of architects. It is argued that although there was an overall planning goal that the projects along the waterfront of Oslo should contribute to social sustainability, with the implication that planners and architects possessed information about the local urban context and used this knowledge, in practice this was not the case. It is demonstrated that the architects paid little attention to the social, cultural and economic contexts in their design process. Rather, the architects emphasized the creation of an exciting urban space and, in particular, designed spectacular architecture that would contribute to the merits of the firms involved. It is further argued that because of this the Barcode project will not contribute to the making of a just city.

Approaches to Supporting Local and Community Development

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liesel Mack Filgueiras ◽  
Andreia Rabetim ◽  
Isabel Aché Pillar
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Mining Company ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Social Partnership ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mining Investment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Corporate Social

Reflection about the role of community engagement and corporate social investment in Brazil, associated with the presence of a large economic enterprise, is the major stimulus of this chapter. It seeks to present how cross-sector governance can contribute to the social development of a city and how this process can be led by a partnership comprising a corporate foundation, government, and civil society. The concept of the public–private social partnership (PPSP) is explored: a strategy for building a series of inter-sectoral alliances aimed at promoting the sustainable development of territories where the company has large-scale enterprises, through joint efforts towards integrated long-term strategic planning, around a common agenda. To this end, the case of Canaã dos Carajás is introduced, a municipality in the State of Pará, in the Amazon region, where large-scale mining investment is being carried out by the mining company Vale SA.

THE FREEDOM OF THE AESTHETIC: MONTSERRAT ROIG’S USE OF THE CITY IN RAMONA, ADÉU

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
Catalan Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.

scholarly journals Street Cries and the urban ritornelle

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Jacob Kreutzfeldt
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Northern European ◽  
The Social ◽  
Environmental Relations ◽  
The City ◽  
Fertile Area

Street cries, though rarely heard in Northern European cities today, testify to ways in which audible practices shape and structure urban spaces. Paradigmatic for what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call ‘the refrain’, the ritualised and stylised practice of street cries may point at the dynamics of space-making, through which the social and territorial construction of urban space is performed. The article draws on historical material, documenting and describing street cries, particularly in Copenhagen in the years 1929 to 1935. Most notably, the composer Vang Holmboe and the architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen have investigated Danish street cries as a musical and a spatial phenomenon, respectably. Such studies – from their individual perspectives – can be said to explore the aesthetics of urban environments, since street calls are developed and heard specifically in the context of the city. Investigating the different methods employed in the two studies and presenting Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the refrain as a framework for further studies in the field, this article seeks to outline a fertile area of study for sound studies: the investigation of everyday refrains and the environmental relations they express and perform. Today changed sensibilities and technologies have rendered street crying obsolete in Northern Europe, but new urban ritornells may have taken their place.

Reframing Gentrification: How Tenant Shopkeepers’ Activism in Seoul Radically Reframed Gentrification

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 819-834
Author(s):  
Yewon Andrea Lee
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
New Agents ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Property Owners ◽  
New Locations ◽  
The City ◽  
Radical Shift

Critical scholarship on gentrification has contributed significantly to bolstering the rights of working-class residents against the forces that price them out of the city. However, working-class residents are not the only ones who suffer from dispossession and displacement with rampant hyper-commodification of urban space. Based on the case of Seoul, I examine how new agents—tenant shopkeepers—emerged at the forefront of challenging gentrification and successfully reframed the problem of gentrification. Within the new frame, the shopkeepers who make their livelihoods by using urban spaces are pitted against the property owners who attempt to profit at the expense of their tenants. Through this case, I ask ‘How can radical shifts occur in the ways that the problem of gentrification is constructed?’ My answer draws upon the framing theory in the social movement literature which identifies conditions under which a radical departure from institutionalized ways and social norms can transpire even when the radical shift means challenging the entrenched power structure—in my case, the property-ownership-based rights regime. I highlight the importance of further developing a gentrification scholarship on social change that unravels the rise of new locations of resistance, particularly at a time when the advance of gentrification seems inevitable.

scholarly journals A business balance model of interaction between structures participating in sustainable development of cities

2018 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 02003
Author(s):  
Ludmila Kamenik
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Factor ◽  
Business Community ◽  
Balance Model ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Industrial Areas ◽  
The Social ◽  
Additional Costs

The paper considers the following components: business and problems of modernization of former industrial areas, as one of the important trends forming urban development stability. It is revealed that the social factor is not considered, which also prevents city are as from transforming and business from developing. Reconstructing urban space while handling former industrial areas is becoming a growing problem of cities and requires that business community should be involved in this sector. The specific role of business here is that these objects are located in residential neighborhoods and are closely connected with the social factor (population). Itimplies that the social factor need to be considered and leads to additional costs. Business does not want to participate in bearing these costs, there is no attractive model, and authorities can not fully cover all the costs by themselves. Citizens protest if the transformations violate their interests, which is accompanied by risks for capital, business and government bodies. Within a market economy, citizens are a business structure too, since they have an impact on capital. To solve the problem it is necessary to search for a new form of interaction between the three structures: business, state andcitizens. The author suggests a new model of interaction between the participants of the process, which, in her opinion, if applied in practice, is able to activate business development and accelerate the transformation of depressed areas, thereby contributing to the sustainable development of a city.

Strange Birds: Ornithology and the Advent of the Collared Dove in Post-World War II Germany

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Lachmund
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Single Species ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Asian Origin ◽  
Cultural Image ◽  
The Social

ArgumentIn this paper I study the engagement of German ornithologists with the Collared Dove, a bird species of Asian origin that spread massively throughout Central Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Never before had the spread of a single species attracted so much attention from European ornithologists. Ornithologists were not only fascinated by the exotic origin of the bird, but even more so by the unprecedented rapidity of its expansion. As it is argued in the paper, the advent of the bird created an outstanding opportunity for ornithologists to study the process of biogeographic range expansion. The paper traces how knowledge on the dove's expansion took shape in the social, discursive, and material practices of a large-scale observation campaign of German ornithologists (both amateurs and academics). The paper also argues that ornithologists’ observation practices have contributed to the construction of a benevolent cultural image of the Collared Dove. This sets the case of the Collared Dove apart from many recent debates in which newly arriving species have been framed as a threat to biodiversity. The paper contributes both to a historical understanding of scientific fieldwork as well as of the role of scientific knowledge in the shaping of cultural meanings of animals.

scholarly journals Under the bridge: autoarchaeoethnographic study of an interstitial space in supermodern Mallorca

Complutum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-215
Author(s):  
Daniel Albero Santacreu
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Living Environment ◽  
Interstitial Space ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethnographic Observation ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

Supermodern cities have certain spaces that escape the regulations exerted by the authorities in our living environment. This is the case of interstitial spaces, abandoned areas that are often marginalized by urban planners. This paper presents the results of an autoarchaeoethnographic study focused on the analysis of a 21st Century interstitial space located on the urban periphery of Palma (Mallorca). The methodology used to record the appropriation strategies and practices developed in this space combined direct ethnographic observation with the analysis of materiality. The study aims to address some of the practices developed in such marginal peripheral urban spaces closely related to the non-places characteristic of our current supermodern world. These practices allow us to understand how these spaces work and are conceptualized and to see how they become active elements of our landscape that are crucial for the social development of certain groups and individuals. Through the study of these practices we verified how certain sectors of society make an appropriation and active use of certain marginal public spaces that must be related to large-scale social, economic and historical phenomena. Finally, taking into consideration some of the theoretical foundations of symmetric archeology, we made an assessment of the way in which the very materiality of these spaces (and other elements with which they are associated with) enhance their use as a social space

scholarly journals Explicit and implied significance of contemporary public spaces. Part 1. Spaces of attractions

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 063-082
Author(s):  
Dariusz Dziubiński
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Current Model ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Beach Bar

This text presents considerations encouraged by thoughts and conclusions gained from research on several beach bars and their comparison with other urban public spaces, run in Wrocław from 2018 to 2019. The similarities and differences between the two types of spaces provoke a question about the meaning of what we call „public spaces” today. The question is also asked, somewhat perversely, about the validity of following best practices based on proxemic principles and focused on attracting and retaining people in urban spaces. The paper examines not so much the rules but the purpose, in other words the type of space we receive/can achieve as a result of applying these principles, since people in the urban space (private or public) are only guests, while their choice is reduced to the top-down offer. The above doubt also results from the conclusion regarding the most important feature determining attractiveness of a beach bar space, which in my opinion, is the freedom of behaviour for users. In it we can see deficiencies of the prevailing narrative about our participation in space and, above all, the possibility of choice, or what should be called the limitations of choice – the lack of possession/self-agency. Such a situation, largely conditioned by politics (and economics), reduces public space to the role of a  “space of attractions” (curiosities), whose action and participation is based on experiencing – on a direct experience. The clash of these two forces – standardization and individualization, erodes the current model of common spaces based on the historical (nineteenth century) one, whose images are transferred only in the form of empty clichés. Thus, the limitation of choices, the need to fall into line and appearances of a community lead to an escape upwards – enclaves for the chosen ones (omnitopia) and downwards – niches for the rebellious ones (heterotopia), while beach bars represent both ways of escape. Against this background, the purposefulness of expert/ top-down creation of public spaces, carried out in isolation from other essential values and laws, appears problematic.

scholarly journals O urbanismo e o seu outro: raça, cultura e cidade no Brasil (1920-1945)

1999 ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
José Tavares Correia de Lira
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Identification ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Urban Renovation ◽  
The City ◽  
Racial Ethnic

Este trabalho explora algumas matrizes do pensamento social brasileiro em sua abordagem da formação do espaço urbano no país, em particular no que concerne às relações raciais, étnicas e culturais nas cidades. Parte da hipótese de que, a partir dos anos 20, o discurso urbanístico encontra na eugenia e no regionalismo bases confiáveis ao realinhamento nacionalista de sua intervenção técnica no espaço e na cultura de cidades complexamente divididas. Tendo em vista a problemática contemporânea das renovações urbanas, examina as questões de segregação social, distribuição no espaço e identificação cultural de grupos étnicos, nacionais e regionais em estudos e trechos de estudos sobre cidades de Oliveira Vianna, Gilberto Freyre, José Mariano Filho, Donald Pierson e Samuel Lowrie. Palavras-chave: urbanismo; cidade; nação; pensamento social brasileiro; relações raciais; etnicidade; eugenia; culturalismo; regionalismo. "Urbanism and its alter: race, culture and the city in Brazil (1920-1945)" Abstract: This paper deals with some important sources of the social thought in Brazil as they refer to the formation of the urban space in the country, particularly in respect to racial, ethnic, and cultural relations in the city. It raises the hypothesis that the urbanistic discourse, from the 1920s onwards, finds in eugenics and regionalism some reliable basis for the nationalistic realignment of its technical intervention in complexly divided urban spaces and cultures. Having in mind the contemporary question of urban renovation, it specially examines matters of social segregation, spatial distribution and cultural identification of ethnic, national and regional groups in some writings of Oliveira Vianna, Gilberto Freyre, José Mariano Filho, Donald Pierson and Samuel Lowrie. Keywords: urbanism; city; nation; Brazilian social thought; racial relationships; ethnicity; eugenics; culturalism; regionalism.

scholarly journals 'Making' A Statement - Exploration of 3D Printing Technologies as a form of Customisation and Ownership in Urban Spaces

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mark Bagley
Keyword(s):  
3D Printing ◽  
New Media ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Corporate Culture ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Observational Research ◽  
Parametric Modelling ◽  
Urban Context

<p>Ownership of urban space has been heavily contested in recent years by prominent artists, policy-makers and citizens alike. From Shephard Fairey and his condemnation of corporate culture in public space, to Banksy and his use of imagery as a form of political activism, the presence of 2D media in urban environments has become increasingly relevant. This research summarises recent advances in our thinking about space and place, and seeks the potential opportunities for customisation and taking ownership of these spaces to create a socially engaging, collaborative environment for the creative city (Florida, 2003). By using street art and graffiti culture as a model for creative inclusivity, this research explores the effects of new forms of data collection and configuration and the design opportunities they present. In doing so, this research hopes to promote discussion and debate into how we may use new media such as 3D printing and computer-generated imagery to make provocative statements and elicit responses.  To explore 3D printing as a means of customising and taking ownership of space, this research identifies recurring themes in traditional 2D media, as well as manifestations of 3D and 4D media in urban spaces. This background research is documented in a taxonomy of precedents combined with a technology review and observational research in the field. This background research provides a context for researching through design in the form of iterative physical experimentation and reflection. Beginning with abstract experimentation, the first stage of testing digital making technologies identifies opportunities provided by different software, materials, scanning and 3D printing itself, at all different scales and resolutions. This active process of making also tests the visual languages and aesthetics afforded by the technologies, particularly parametric modelling techniques as well as low resolution models with new visual qualities. By applying the knowledge gained from the abstract experimentation and observational research, different issues surrounding the urban context are identified and responded to using 3D technologies. These responses are carefully articulated to ensure that they are not only ‘of the street’ but also ‘of the technology’ and thereby serve as examples of ‘making meaning’ through 3D media in an urban context.</p>

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