Syrian Children’s Imagination and Play Areas beyond the Physical Reality of Urban Spaces in Beirut

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 467-484
Author(s):  
Roula El Khoury ◽  
Paola Ardizzola
Keyword(s):  
Local Population ◽  
Informal Settlements ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Displaced Children ◽  
The City

This study examines the play areas of displaced Syrian children in Beirut. It depicts informal play areas and patterns in the centre of the city and those that emerge in the informal settlements of the Burj Al-Barajneh Palestinian camp. The study depicts the children’s ability to understand the environment around them while transforming it into a stage for loosely structured forms of play. It is important to note that the article does not aim to portray the dense and overcrowded urban setting of Beirut and its informal settlements as favourable environments for children at play. Instead, the discussion focuses on the children’s ability to re-semanticize and colonize anonymous places. Our aim is to demonstrate that Syrian displaced children develop a cognitive relationship to the spaces around them that goes beyond the physical boundaries of their play areas. Additionally, we argue that the formal urban fabric and the local population of the city alienate these children by maintaining their status as strangers or ‘others’. Despite the dire conditions and the seemingly chaotic setting of the informal camp settlement, Syrian children residing there are able to free themselves from the perception of estrangement and integrate as part of their new context.

scholarly journals The Sensorial Latency of Urban Spaces

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Dylan Kanagaratnam
Keyword(s):  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
City Life ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Meaningful Experiences ◽  
Everyday Performance ◽  
Meaningful Connections ◽  
The City

<p>Architecture provides the platform for the inherent connections between people and their city to flourish. The urban realm naturally invites diverse people to inhabit and interact together, giving city life its vibrancy. Urban spaces encourage spontaneous interactions between people and with architecture, to produce creative acts of play and liberating moments of leisure. It has been suggested that these events encapsulate the everyday performance of the city and are the antithesis to everyday life. It is argued this performance is often ignored in modern urban design. It has been noted that Wellington’s waterfront offers areas where momentary and impotent engagement can be developed into meaningful experiences.  Simultaneously, the importance and potency of sound within urban spaces may be undervalued. It is often argued that modern cities assault our senses with sounds leading to discomfort and distracted inhabitation, contributing to a lack of engagement. Urban sounds are commonly dampened in public spaces to combat this assault, but with more thoughtful design these sounds can be reinterpreted to augment the innate everyday performances. This thesis proposes that controlling how people experience urban sounds through architecture can create a deep sensory performance that increases engagement, awareness and interaction.  This research explores ways to harness the latent sounds of the city to form meaningful connections between people and their city while providing moments of play and leisure. Once isolated and harnessed, the urban sounds’ unique and intrinsic power can aid the development of urban spaces, thus producing greater significance within the urban fabric. There will be focus on the connection between the senses, performance and the urban context. The opportunity to enable the acceptance of the environment and reflection on their city marks an important role within the urban fabric.  Concurrently, this research explores how an intuitive drawing-led process can integrate and challenge the boundaries of both interior and the exterior urban realm. Other interior architectural strategies, together with soundscape design and urban interior principles aid this interdisciplinary exploration.</p>

scholarly journals Informal Food Deserts and Household Food Insecurity in Windhoek, Namibia

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Crush ◽  
Ndeyapo Nickanor ◽  
Lawrence Kazembe
Keyword(s):  
Food Insecurity ◽  
Food Deserts ◽  
Informal Settlements ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Food Sector ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Open Markets ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Informal settlements in rapidly-growing African cities are urban and peri-urban spaces with high rates of formal unemployment, poverty, poor health outcomes, limited service provision, and chronic food insecurity. Traditional concepts of food deserts developed to describe North American and European cities do not accurately capture the realities of food inaccessibility in Africa’s urban informal food deserts. This paper focuses on a case study of informal settlements in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, to shed further light on the relationship between informality and food deserts in African cities. The data for the paper was collected in a 2016 survey and uses a sub-sample of households living in shack housing in three informal settlements in the city. Using various standard measures, the paper reveals that the informal settlements are spaces of extremely high food insecurity. They are not, however, food deprived. The proximity of supermarkets and open markets, and a vibrant informal food sector, all make food available. The problem is one of accessibility. Households are unable to access food in sufficient quantity, quality, variety, and with sufficient regularity.

New Urban Spaces

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Intensive Research ◽  
Spatial Strategies ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The City

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit—the city or the metropolis—and explores the multiscalar constitution, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

Theatre and Urban Space: the Case of Birmingham Rep

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-147
Author(s):  
Claire Cochrane
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Civic Consciousness ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

In NTQ61, Deborah Saivetz described the attempts over the past decade of the Italian director Pino DiBuduo to create ‘invisible cities’ – performances intended to restore the relationship between urban spaces and their inhabitants, through exploring the actual and spiritual histories of both. Earlier in the present issue, Baz Kershaw suggests some broader analogies between the theatre and its macrocosmic environment. Here, Claire Cochrane, who teaches at University College, Worcester, narrows the focus to a particular British city and the role over time of a specific theatre in relation to its urban setting. Her subject is the history and development of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in relation to the city – of which its founder, Barry Jackson, was a lifelong resident – as an outcome of the city's growth in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, which made it distinctive in terms of its manufactures, the workers and entrepreneurs who produced them, and a civic consciousness that was disputed yet also shared. She traces, too, the transition between old and new theatre buildings and spaces which continued to reflect shifting class and cultural relationships as the city, its politicians, and its planners adapted to the second half of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals The Sensorial Latency of Urban Spaces

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Dylan Kanagaratnam
Keyword(s):  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
City Life ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Meaningful Experiences ◽  
Everyday Performance ◽  
Meaningful Connections ◽  
The City

<p>Architecture provides the platform for the inherent connections between people and their city to flourish. The urban realm naturally invites diverse people to inhabit and interact together, giving city life its vibrancy. Urban spaces encourage spontaneous interactions between people and with architecture, to produce creative acts of play and liberating moments of leisure. It has been suggested that these events encapsulate the everyday performance of the city and are the antithesis to everyday life. It is argued this performance is often ignored in modern urban design. It has been noted that Wellington’s waterfront offers areas where momentary and impotent engagement can be developed into meaningful experiences.  Simultaneously, the importance and potency of sound within urban spaces may be undervalued. It is often argued that modern cities assault our senses with sounds leading to discomfort and distracted inhabitation, contributing to a lack of engagement. Urban sounds are commonly dampened in public spaces to combat this assault, but with more thoughtful design these sounds can be reinterpreted to augment the innate everyday performances. This thesis proposes that controlling how people experience urban sounds through architecture can create a deep sensory performance that increases engagement, awareness and interaction.  This research explores ways to harness the latent sounds of the city to form meaningful connections between people and their city while providing moments of play and leisure. Once isolated and harnessed, the urban sounds’ unique and intrinsic power can aid the development of urban spaces, thus producing greater significance within the urban fabric. There will be focus on the connection between the senses, performance and the urban context. The opportunity to enable the acceptance of the environment and reflection on their city marks an important role within the urban fabric.  Concurrently, this research explores how an intuitive drawing-led process can integrate and challenge the boundaries of both interior and the exterior urban realm. Other interior architectural strategies, together with soundscape design and urban interior principles aid this interdisciplinary exploration.</p>

San Francisco's Vision for the Future: An Integrated Urban Wastewater Management Plan

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan W. Loiacono ◽  
Chu-Fei H. Ho ◽  
Natalie V. Sierra ◽  
Domènec Jolis ◽  
Carolyn Chiu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Rainwater Harvesting ◽  
Control Plant ◽  
Management Plan ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Wastewater Management ◽  
Urban Watershed ◽  
Aging Infrastructure ◽  
The City

The City and County of San Francisco (“City”) embarked upon a 30-year master planning process in part prompted by public concerns related to the neighbourhood impacts of the Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant (SEP). The Sewer System Master Plan, as it is called, developed a long term Integrated Urban Watershed Management Plan for the City's treatment plants and collection system. This paper focuses on the planning framework and public input to the process, particularly as it relates to proposed changes to the SEP. The resulting improvements address issues of replacing aging infrastructure, eliminating odor emissions, and visually screening the treatment plants that are situated within an urban setting. The recommended project addresses the needed repair of the existing infrastructure; and proposes that the City move towards an integrated urban watershed approach, initially through localized rainwater harvesting and opportunistic water reclamation.

THE SUBURBANISATION OF THE KUALA LUMPUR METROPOLITAN REGION

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamalunlaili Abdullah
Keyword(s):  
Metropolitan Region ◽  
Kuala Lumpur ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
The Past ◽  
Klang Valley ◽  
The City

The Klang Valley has been experiencing rapid urbanisation especially during the past two decades. The area has expanded to become a larger entity known as the Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan Region (KLMR). But this development comes at the expense of Kuala Lumpur. The city had consistently recorded net-out migration during the period. This development has consequences on the urban fabric of the city and can lead to the problem

Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism

2019 ◽  
pp. 285-311
Author(s):  
Paul Niell
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New World ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
American Architecture ◽  
Political Norms ◽  
The City

The Baroque in Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism, in parts of the Americas formerly comprising the Spanish and Portuguese empires, has been traditionally studied as a question of adherence to or deviation from a Counter-Reformation style promoted primarily by ecclesiastical institutions. This article expands upon what is meant by “Baroque” in the architecture and urbanism of the Iberian empires in the Americas. Through the analysis of urban plans, images of the city, architectural interiors and exteriors, physical urban spaces, and other forms of material culture, this article argues that Ibero-American architecture and urbanism in the age of the Baroque belonged to a phenomenon of ordering and thereby creating the “New World” as ideologically constituted colonial spaces that reified social and political norms. Furthermore, human subjects actively negotiated the spaces created by architecture and the city, making the American Baroque also part of a process of negotiating order and thereby producing American spaces.

Territorial Governance Rehabilitation of Old Cities: Taza City Example: الحكامة الترابية وتأهيل المدن العتيقة: حالة مدينة تازة (المغرب)

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
El-bazoui Jaouad, Mohamed Chouitar, Abdelouaed Bouberria
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Building Block ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Historical Monuments ◽  
Ancient City ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
The City

The reality of historical cities of Morocco today .which is reflected in the fading and deterioration of its built framework and the loss of many of its social and economic functions has prompted many actors in the field of cultural and historical heritage to take a series of measures in order to rehabilitate them to cope with the pace of development, witnessed by its urban and social surrounding. In this context, the city of Taza is one of the ancient Moroccan cities that have a glorious history, an integrated urban fabric, and unique historical monuments. it is an essential building block of Morocco’s cultural heritage, which has played its part throughout history and withstood all the challenges it has faced. However; despite its importance the city has not received the attention it deserves for its historical value, its historical monuments are currently suffering from the continuous deterioration and fading, which necessitates the search for an effective strategy that evokes the criteria of governance as a gateway to the rehabilitation of its ancient heritage. To address this issue we will try to answer the following questions: To what extent is the territorial governance a mechanism for the rehabilitation and development of the ancient city of Taza? What are the most important rehabilitation projects of the ancient city of Taza?

THE ROLE OF URBAN AESTHETICS ON ENHANCING VITALITY OF URBAN SPACES

2021 ◽  
pp. xx-xx
Keyword(s):  
Urban Design ◽  
Direct Consequence ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Aesthetic Quality ◽  
Aesthetic Design ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
The Aesthetic

Several scholars have focused on the different approaches in designing convivial urban spaces, but literary evidence shows that the essence of aesthetic design in public urban spaces, by referring to the main dimensions involved in the shaping of urban vitality, has not been adequately researched. In this regard, this study, by hypothesizing that the quality of urban design leads to a vital urban environment, focuses on urban vitality from the aesthetic point of view. Thus, in using qualitative grounded theory as a main methodological tool and using a systematic review of the related literature as the main induction approach for collecting qualitative data, five main dimensions of urban vitality, which are necessary to attain a correlation with the aesthetic quality of urban design, were conceptualized. The study concludes that the aesthetic design of an urban setting has a direct effect on the active involvement of its users and that this, therefore, has a direct consequence on the level of public urban vitality, manifested. Integrating the complexity theory with the five main dimensions used for assessing urban vitality was suggested as a viable area for further research.

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