scholarly journals DECOM JOB: NOTES ON THE DECOMMUNIZATION OF CITY SPACES

2017 ◽  
pp. 152-165
Author(s):  
Svitlana Shlipchenko
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
Public Parks ◽  
The Public ◽  
Contentious Issue ◽  
The Past ◽  
Complete Ignorance ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
Monuments And Memorials ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

Following Maidan-2014 and subsequent political changes, the processes of de-communization in Ukraine have considerably accelerated and received the new impetus. The Parliament adopted a number of laws and legal acts concerning toponyms, monuments, and memorials, communist symbols, etc. thatwere to be removed from public spaces. The new legislation applied equally to open public spaces of the cities and villages (streets, squares, piazzas, public parks) and to the spaces of public use (municipal and government buildings, museums, underground stations, universities, schools, etc.). Leaving certainlacunas (e.g. using communist symbols in mass consumerist culture) and not specifying the ways and means the laws were to be implemented, the parliamentary acts gave way to numerous conflicts and misunderstandings, when the incessant confrontations with a painful past shape political attitudes.Furthermore, these processes call for re-conceptualizing the ways the past is set into the work of memory and represented in the city spaces. In the same breath, it resulted in mostly spontaneous, even hectic application of the provisions, and remains the contentious issue for the public, experts andlocal authorities alike. On the one hand, we see démontage, removal or dismantling/demolition of the objects that the experts tend to see as a part of the cultural or historical heritage, but which so far are not listed or assigned as such. While on the other hand, it works towards complete ignorance from the part of local authorities if not setting the conflicts between local communities. The paperwill look at certain cases and practices of ‘de-communization’ in Ukrainian cities and analyze its pro-s and contra-s.

scholarly journals Public spaces as a factor of the quality of the urban environment (on the example of the city of Irkutsk)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Нина Полякова
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
City Management ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
The City

The article describes the relevance of the study of public spaces as an important element of the quality of the urban environment. Successfully functioning public spaces are called upon to solve a number of urban problems, including the social isolation of citizens caused by urbanization processes. The characteristic of public spaces of a particular city is based on an assessment of a set of attributes and related criteria developed by placemaking specialists. It is proved that this complex should reflect not only the general requirements for public spaces, but also the features of the city: the diversity of the socio-ethnic structure of the population, cultural and historical heritage, and the specificity of the existing urban environment. The characteristics of the four most visited public spaces of the provincial Siberian city of Irkutsk are fulfilled: the Kirov square; historical and memorial complex "Jerusalem Mountain "; Municipal Park "Yunost Island"; shopping and entertainment complex "130th quarter". The results showed that the public spaces of the city perform a number of functions with varying degrees of success: best recreational and entertaining, partially creative and the function of storing the “collective memory” of the city. At the same time, the city does not have public spaces that fully meet the objectives of the development of urban society; this applies to both historical and newly created. Their main drawback is the inconsistency with the modern challenge for Irkutsk, namely, the solution to the problem of social inclusion of new citizens. Some measures have been proposed for City management to purposefully strengthen the elements of public spaces that implement the function of involving residents, especially migrants, in the public life of the city.

scholarly journals Silent cities, silenced histories: subaltern experiences of everyday urban violence during COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 9s3 ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Jaideep Gupte ◽  
Syeda Jenifa Zahan
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Urban India ◽  
Containment Measures ◽  
Ontological Shift ◽  
The City

The public health containment measures in response to COVID-19 have precipitated a significant epistemic and ontological shift in �bottom-up� and �action-oriented� approaches in development studies research. �Lockdown� necessitates physical and social distancing between research subject and researcher, raising legitimate concerns around the extent to which �distanced� action-research can be inclusive and address citizens� lack of agency. Top-down regimes to control urban spaces through lockdown in India have not stemmed the experience of violence in public spaces: some have dramatically intensified, while others have changed in unexpected ways. Drawing on our experiences of researching the silent histories of violence and memorialisation of past violence in urban India over the past three decades, we argue that the experience of subaltern groups during the pandemic is not an aberration from their sustained experiences of everyday violence predating the pandemic. Exceptionalising the experiences of violence during the pandemic silences past histories and disenfranchises long struggles for rights in the city. At the same time, we argue that research practices employed to interpret the experience of urban violence during lockdown in India need to engage the changing nature of infrastructural regimes, as they seek to control urban spaces, and as subaltern groups continue to mobilise and advocate, in new ways.

scholarly journals Activating Data through Eco-Didactic Design in the Public Realm: Enabling Sustainable Development in Cities

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 4577
Author(s):  
Carmela Cucuzzella ◽  
Morteza Hazbei ◽  
Sherif Goubran
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Design Data ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
The Public ◽  
Community Based Design ◽  
The City

This paper explores how design in the public realm can integrate city data to help disseminate the information embedded within it and provide urban opportunities for knowledge exchange. The hypothesis is that such art and design practices in public spaces, as places of knowledge exchange, may enable more sustainable communities and cities through the visualization of data. To achieve this, we developed a methodology to compare various design approaches for integrating three main elements in public-space design projects: city data, specific issues of sustainability, and varying methods for activating the data. To test this methodology, we applied it to a pedogeological project where students were required to render city data visible. We analyze the proposals presented by the young designers to understand their approaches to design, data, and education. We study how they “educate” and “dialogue” with the community about sustainable issues. Specifically, the research attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How can we use data in the design of public spaces as a means for sustainability knowledge exchange in the city? (2) How can community-based design contribute to innovative data collection and dissemination for advancing sustainability in the city? (3) What are the overlaps between the projects’ intended impacts and the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Our findings suggest that there is a need for such creative practices, as they make information available to the community, using unconventional methods. Furthermore, more research is needed to better understand the short- and long-term outcomes of these works in the public realm.

scholarly journals Recomposing the City: A Survey of Recent Sound Art in Belfast

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 47-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gascia Ouzounian
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Sonic Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
The City ◽  
Radical Transformation

This article introduces examples of recent sound art in Belfast, a city that has undergone radical transformation over the past decade and is home to a burgeoning community of sound artists. The text investigates the ways in which sonic art can redraw boundaries in a city historically marked by myriad political, socioeconomic, religious and sectarian divisions. The article focuses on sound works that reimagine a “post-conflict” Belfast. These include site-specific sound installations in urban and public spaces, soundwalks, sculptures, locative and online works, and experimental sonic performances that draw upon traditional Irish song and music.

Mocking Parades and the Place of Pagan Statuary in Late Antique Alexandria

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-288
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Visual Contact ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

AbstractWith the present paper I would like to discuss a particular form of procession which we may term mocking parades, a collective ritual aimed at ridiculing cultic objects from competing religious communities. The cases presented here are contextualized within incidents of pagan/Christian violence in Alexandria between the 4th and 5th centuries, entailing in one case the destruction of the Serapeum and in another the pillaging of the Isis shrine at Menouthis on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the literary accounts on these events suggest, such collective forms of mockery played an important role in the context of mob violence in general and of violence against sacred objects in particular. However, while historiographical and hagiographical sources from the period suggest that pagan statues underwent systematic destruction and mutilation, we can infer from the archaeological evidence a vast range of uses and re-adaptation of pagan statuary in the urban space, assuming among other functions that of decorating public spaces. I would like to build on the thesis that the parading of sacred images played a prominent role in the discourse on the value of pagan statuary in the public space. On the one hand, the statues carried through the streets became themselves objects of mockery and violence, involving the population of the city in a collective ritual of exorcism. On the other hand, the images paraded in the mocking parades could also become a means through which the urban space could become subject to new interpretations. Entering in visual contact with the still visible vestiges of the pagan past, with the temples and the statuary of the city, the “image of the city” became affected itself by the images paraded through the streets, as though to remind the inhabitants that the still-visible elements of Alexandria’s pagan topography now stood as defeated witnesses to Christianity’s victory.

Reconceptualizing the Public Spaces of New Urban Areas in Hanoi: The End or the New of Public-Making?

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Minh-Tung Tran ◽  
◽  
Tien-Hau Phan ◽  
Ngoc-Huyen Chu ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Public ◽  
Doi Moi ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Neighborhood Level

Public spaces are designed and managed in many different ways. In Hanoi, after the Doi moi policy in 1986, the transfer of the public spaces creation at the neighborhood-level to the private sector has prospered na-ture of public and added a large amount of public space for the city, directly impacting on citizen's daily life, creating a new trend, new concept of public spaces. This article looks forward to understanding the public spaces-making and operating in KDTMs (Khu Do Thi Moi - new urban areas) in Hanoi to answer the question of whether ‘socialization’/privatization of these public spaces will put an end to the urban public or the new means of public-making trend. Based on the comparison and literature review of studies in the world on public spaces privatization with domestic studies to see the differences in the Vietnamese context leading to differences in definitions and roles and the concept of public spaces in KDTMs of Hanoi. Through adducing and analyzing practical cases, the article also mentions the trends, the issues, the ways and the technologies of public-making and public-spaces-making in KDTMs of Hanoi. Win/loss and the relationship of the three most important influential actors in this process (municipality, KDTM owners, inhabitants/citizens) is also considered to reconceptualize the public spaces of KDTMs in Hanoi.

“Satisfied with the Ruins of Berlin”: The German Capital’s Image in Soviet Graphics of 1945

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 564-575
Author(s):  
Irina I. Rutsinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Visual Image ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Public ◽  
Historical Justice ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

An artist who finds themselves in the last days of a war in the enemy’s defeated capital may not just fix its objects dispassionately. Many factors influence the selection and depicturing manner of the objects. One of the factors is satisfaction from the accomplished retribution, awareness of the historical justice triumph. Researchers think such reactions are inevitable. The article offers to consider from this point of view the drawings created by Soviet artists in Berlin in the spring and summer of 1945. Such an analysis of the German capital’s visual image is conducted for the first time. It shows that the above reactions were not the only ones. The graphics of the first post-war days no less clearly and consistently express other feelings and intentions of their authors: the desire to accurately document and fix the image of the city and some of its structures in history, the happiness from the silence of peace, and the simple interest in the monuments of European art.The article examines Berlin scenes as evidences of the transition from front-line graphics focused on the visual recording of the war traces to peacetime graphics; from documentary — to artistry; from the worldview of a person at war — to the one of a person who lived to victory. In this approach, it has been important to consider the graphic images of Berlin in unity with the diary and memoir texts belonging to both artists and ordinary soldiers who participated in the storming of Berlin. The combination of verbal and visual sources helps to present the German capital’s image that existed in the public consciousness, as well as the specificity of its representation by means of visual art.

Progress of Psychiatry in 1902

1903 ◽  
Vol 49 (204) ◽  
pp. 152-154
Author(s):  
H. M. Bannister
Keyword(s):  
Financial Management ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Special Events ◽  
American Psychiatry ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The One

The past year has not been notable for any special events in American psychiatry, though the usual amount of activity has existed. There has been no retrogression, and signs of a better future ahead as regards political control of charitable institutions have appeared in quarters where they are most welcome. In Illinois, for example, where for ten years past politicians have controlled the institutions, recent events have made reform in this regard a political issue, and both parties are, so to speak, tumbling over each other in their zeal to utilise it to their own advantage. The scandal that excited this was not abuse of patients or bad financial management, for neither of these has been proven, but the assessment of employés for political purposes, which has at last aroused the public conscience. The outcome can hardly fail to be good, and we may hope at least for a better state of affairs than existed even before the politicians took control. It is a slow work educating the public as to the political neutrality of hospitals for the insane, but it is being done, and the prospect is that they will before very long be as free from the abuses of partisan politics in Illinois as in any of the older states of the Union. I have spoken of this matter in previous letters, but it is right that I mention it again, for it is the chief fault of our public institutions, and the one that is more than everything else responsible for their failings.

scholarly journals The (No-)Public Space. Reviewing the Transformation of Al-Qaed Ibrahim's Urban Image

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Iman Hegazy
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Image ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Public spaces are defined as places that should be accessible to all inhabitants without restrictions. They are spaces not only for gathering, socializing and celebrating but also for initiating discussions, protesting and demonstrating. Thus, public spaces are intangible expressions of democracy—a topic that the paper tackles its viability within the context of Alexandria, case study Al-Qaed Ibrahim square. On the one hand, Al-Qaed Ibrahim square which is named after Al-Qaed Ibrahim mosque is a sacred element in the urban fabric; whereas on the other it represents a non-religious revolutionary symbol in the Alexandrian urban public sphere. This contradiction necessitates finding an approach to study the characteristic of this square/mosque within the Alexandrian context—that is to realize the impact of the socio-political events on the image of Al-Qaed Ibrahim square, and how it has transformed into a revolutionary urban symbol and yet into a no-public space. The research revolves around the hypothesis that the political events taking place in Egypt after January 25th, 2011, have directly affected the development of urban public spaces, especially in Alexandria. Therefore methodologically, the paper reviews the development of Al-Qaed Ibrahim square throughout the Egyptian socio-political changes, with a focus on the square’s urban and emotional contextual transformations. For this reason, the study adheres to two theories: the "city elements" by Kevin Lynch and "emotionalizing the urban" by Frank Eckardt. The aim is not only to study the mentioned public space but also to figure out the changes in people’s societal behaviour and emotion toward it. Through empowering public spaces, the paper calls the different Egyptian political and civic powers to recognize each other, regardless of their religious, ethnical or political affiliations. It is a step towards replacing the ongoing political conflicts, polarization, and suppression with societal reconciliation, coexistence, and democracy.

scholarly journals MODAL AWAL MENGEMBANGKAN WISATA DESA: PENGETAHUAN KESEJARAHAN, PERSEPSI, DAN PARTISIPASI MASYARAKAT PADA SITUS PETILASAN GADJAH MADA DI DESA LAMBANG KUNING

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Samidi M Baskoro ◽  
Sarkawi B Husain ◽  
Ikhsan Rosyid Mujahidul Anwari
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
Economic Motives ◽  
Depth Interviews

The past is present today through cultural heritage (historical heritage sites), but some ordinary people do not know the importance of the value of these objects, as evidenced by the trade in fragments of artifacts. This action is driven by economic motives and has no knowledge of historical objects. The main problem is how to build knowledge and awareness of historical heritage objects? The answer to this problem can be the elements used as initial capital to develop village tourism. The main value of the development of village tourism is the creation of public spaces where people can relax and gather at leisure. The development of village tourism should not be driven by economic motives that are often echoed by various parties. The methods used to elaborate are observation, in-depth interviews to find collective memory, and counseling or workshops. The findings obtained from observations, interviews, and literature studies are the use of historical sites as a destination for village tourism must be supported by the prerequisites for development, namely the knowledge of local communities on the site will foster awareness of historical heritage, uniformity of perception about the function of the site not for religious purposes, and participation community in site preservation.abstrakMasa lalu adalah masa kini yang hadir melalui warisan budaya (situs peninggalan sejarah), tetapi sebagian masyarakat awam tidak mengetahui pentingnya nilai benda-benda ini, terbukti dari adanya perdagangan serpihan artefak. Tindakan ini didorong oleh motif ekonomi dan tidak memiliki pengetahuan pada benda-benda sejarah. Pokok permasalahan adalah bagaimana upaya membangun pengetahuan dan kesadaran pada benda-benda peninggalan sejarah? Jawaban persoalan ini dapat menjadi unsur-unsur yang digunakan sebagai modal awal mengembangkan wisata desa. Nilai pokok pengembangan wisata desa adalah penciptaan ruang publik tempat bersantai dan berkumpul bagi anggota masyarakat setempat pada waktu senggang. Pengembangan wisata desa tidak harus didorong oleh motif ekonomi yang seringkali digaungkan oleh berbagai pihak. Metode yang digunakan untuk menguraikan adalah observasi, wawancara mendalam untuk menemukan memori kolektif, dan penyuluhan atau workshop. Temuan yang diperoleh dari observasi, wawancara, dan studi literatur adalah pemanfaatan situs sejarah sebagai destiasi wisata desa harus didukung oleh prasyarat pengembangan, yakni pengetahuan masyarakat lokal pada situs akan menumbuhkan kesadaran pada peninggalan sejarah, penyeragaman persepsi mengenai fungsi situs bukan untuk kepentingan religi, dan partisipasi masyarakat dalam pelestarian situs.

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