Lifestyle diseases: Health in the contemporary city

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-35
Author(s):  
T. S. Martynenko

The article presents an overview of studies of the factors that affect health in the contemporary city. The increase in the urban population makes it necessary to analyze factors (environmental, social, etc.) and features of the urban structure in terms of their impact on the quality and standards of living. However, assessments of the city in the study of healthy lifestyle are contradictory. On the one hand, researchers emphasize the availability of medical care, effective fight against infectious diseases, and numerous attempts to transform the visual urban space. On the other hand, researchers stress the spatial inequality of the urban structure (for example, in access to health care), the spread of noncommunicable and lifestyle diseases in cities, the destruction of social ties and the problem of loneliness. Therefore, it is necessary to systematize the current research, identify the main risks of urban lifestyle, and discuss the role of social sciences in such interdisciplinary studies. The proposed typology of health research in the contemporary city is based on Yu.P. Lisitsyns ratio of factors that determine the level of health. Although many studies claim an integrated approach, the analysis showed that most of them present one of three approaches: the study of sanitary-hygienic features of the urban space (or its medical aspects); the study of ecology and architecture of the urban space; the study of social-psychological features of the urban lifestyle. The systematization of the main risks of the urban lifestyle allowed the author to identify the priority areas of its study. Thus, based on the features of the covid-19 pandemic in cities, the author argues that there is a need for more active participation of sociologists in the discussion of both infectious and non-communicable diseases, which should focus on social factors of their spread, course, prevention and control.

Author(s):  
N.V. Melnik ◽  
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A.Ye. Demenko ◽  
M. Mirets ◽  
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...  

The article is of a generalizing nature; the authors investigate the problem associated with architectural design in the historical environment. The newly built civilian objects are considered as examples of the organic interaction between “old” and “new” in European cities. The authors’ positions of domestic and foreign professionals regarding the development of the potential of the historical centres of modern cities are considered. In connection with the dynamics of urban growth in the XXI century, the problem of renewal and development of historically established centers arises. Development as a modernization of the historical environment assumes a high-quality level of integration of relevant functions in the unique conditions of authentic urban structures. The cultural aspect of the problem is to solve the main problem of the historical environment -the preservation and protection of the valuable architectural and urban planning heritage. The authors highlight the need for an integrated approach to theproblem and formulation of a development strategy. The experience of Odessa shows the negative results of delay in such matters. Urban space as a living organism presupposes a progressive process of regeneration of both the urban structure and the “tissue” of the city, filling the space and being subordinated to the structure. A scientific approach presupposes discussion, variability and flexibility concerning the protection and development of the historical environment. However, taking into account the whole complex of economic, administrative, and cultural conditions, we can say about two main approaches in relation to the historical architectural environment in Ukraine. One is based on a conservative approach and denies the objects of modern architecture in the historical environment. This approach assumes that a historically formed urban planning formation is an integral urban planning phenomenon and only allows the construction of new objects in historical styles, allows the priority task of restoration and reconstruction of existing objects. Another approach is based on a dialectical approach and allows the introduction into the historical tissue of the city of new objects that meet all progressive achievements of engineering and technology, have modern and current features of the style (stylistic direction). At the same time, an important aspect is the novelty and high aesthetic level of architecture, due to the requirements of modern society. The logic of this approach comes from the very essence ofarchitecture, placed in the classic triad of benefit, strength and beauty. The most important factor that determines the value of the historical core of the city, in particular, the historical centre of Odessa, is the integrity of the historical structure, the interaction of all elements of the architectural complex, and a balanced urban infrastructure. At the same time, the architectural complex consists of objects of different value categories. Some are historical and architectural monuments of the universal, state and local importance. Others are authentic objects of “back-ground” development that contribute to the integrity of the city’s historical tissue. This is the picture that shows a historical accuracy. According to the authors, the scale for determining the objective value of each architectural object in this case is of a relative nature and, to a large extent, in our time is not the primary task of preserving the architectural heritage. The task of an integrated approach to the problem and elaboration of a preservation strategy is a priority task. In recent years, intensive construction has taken place on local fragments of the historical part of the city, which leads to the final destruction of the historical city. In many cases, modern civil engineering works are monotonous and have doubtful cultural qualities, and at the technical level they exacerbate the situation of collapse at the infrastructural level. There is an international, in particular, European experience in solving the problem of the conflict between new and historical in the cities of Germany, Poland, Spain, etc. The destructive cataclysms of the XX century caused great losses to the architectural heritage. The world community has developed norms and rules that allow for a huge number of implementation options in the context of regional features. The problem of a new construction in the historical environment today is not about the question of whether the object is stylized or modernized. The problem is to determine the principles of interaction of the historical environment with new structures, in the degree of “civility” of a new architecture, the ability of the “new” to further develop the potential of urban space.


Author(s):  
Olena Oliynyk

The article deals with the most characteristic features of postmodernism in architecture and in the formation of urban spaces. Postmodernism in architecture was involved as a solution that would combine the rationality and feasibility of modernism with artistic and design solutions. However, in the postmodern era, the urban environment is gradually losing its historical memory, its importance as an anthropological category and as a place of identity identification. Urban centers are turning into purely commercial theme parks for tourists. Postmodern space is an urban structure formed by signs that meet the demands of society. The Postmodern City Image is a conglomerate of ideas and images built with the help of visual personality memory. Rem Koolhaas calls this phenomenon a «Junkspace»,  built as a conglomeration of ideas, concepts and dreams. This space is designed to please people thanks to whimsical and exaggerated elements: neon, casinos and buildings that combine architectural elements of any age with the intention to create a new architectural style. Las Vegas is a hypertrophied example of a postmodern city. Its urban landscape leaves facades and walls aside, replacing them with signs and symbols. Such a symbolic place becomes timeless, unrealistic and transit, not intended for everyday life. Space and time in such a city lose their essence. Urban space brings together different elements from other historical, artistic and cultural eras to interpret them as reflecting modernity. The value of images copied from historical reality becomes more important than reality itself. Humanity regards this unreal world as an idealized model of society, parallel to the one that actually exists, more attractive and interesting. Thus, the very essence of the architecture, the meaning of which is replaced by temporary advertising symbols, is lost.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Stutz

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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 01002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Gagulina ◽  
Sergei Matovnikov

The paper explores the compact city concept based on the «spatial» urban development principles and describes the prerequisites and possible methods to move from «horizontal» planning to «vertical» urban environments. It highlights the close connection between urban space, high-rise city landscape and conveyance options and sets out the ideas for upgrading the existing architectural and urban planning principles. It also conceptualizes the use of airships to create additional spatial connections between urban structure elements and high-rise buildings. Functional changes are considered in creating both urban environment and internal space of tall buildings, and the environmental aspects of the new spatial model are brought to light. The paper delineates the prospects for making a truly «spatial» multidimensional city space.


2015 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 137-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Goldman

AbstractThis article engages the question of what happens to labor as Indian cities become transformed into “global cities.” It does so by focusing on the convergence of three interrelated trends over the past few decades: the informalization of labor, the making of global cities, and the financialization of the economy. The article explains the effect on labor, capital, and urban space of this concatenation of trends. It challenges the conclusion of urbanization scholars who emphasize how labor has been largely excluded and bypassed by the growing urban economy. Instead, the article demonstrates, by using nationwide data as well as examples from Bangalore, that as labor is being displaced from formal employment and as wages become compressed, the urban commons is becoming a more valued terrain. On the one hand, displaced urban and rural workers must increasingly rely on subsistence practices and depend more upon the city's public spaces and goods to survive. On the other hand, these spaces, vital to city life, are becoming attractive to indebted municipal governments and aggressive financial investors for their speculative land values, and hence have led to greater insecurity and dispossession. The global city, therefore, is being built in large part with workers' wageless labor. Consequently, the struggle between capital and labor has reached far “beyond the factory” and farm, to the urban commons, sites simultaneously key to the majority's survival and integral to the urban speculative project of financialization.


2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-456
Author(s):  
Ishita Chakravarty

This article tries to reconstruct the world of the property-owning, mortgage-holding and money-lending women in late colonial Bengal and especially in Calcutta, the commercial capital of British India until the First World War. It argues that as all poor women occupying the urban space were not either sex workers or domestic servants, similarly all middle-class women in colonial Calcutta were not dependent housewives, teachers and doctors. At least a section of them engaged in other gainful economic activities. However, existing scholarship sheds very little light on those women who chose other means of survival than the bhadramahila: those who bought and sold houses, lent money for interest, acquired mortgages, speculated in jute trade and even managed indigenous banking business. Evidence of court records suggests that they, along with the lady teacher, the lady doctor, the midwife and the social worker or later members of political organisations, could be found in considerable numbers in late colonial Calcutta. Due to the enactment of stringent laws to control moneylending, on the one hand, and the commercial decline of Calcutta, on the other hand, these women were possibly driven out of the shrinking market of the 1940s and 1950s.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (55) ◽  
pp. 980-1005
Author(s):  
Tiago Santos

Considerando a dinâmica e a estrutura urbana de Belém no início do século XXI como expressão da acumulação das intervenções urbanas e das práticas de planejamento e gestão do espaço da cidade, analisa-se a genealogia do planejamento urbano para compreender a produção de um espaço que tem como característica a negação da natureza e a produção da desigualdade entre classes sociais. Nesse aspecto, identificou-se três períodos específicos que produziram impactos significativos na produção do espaço urbano de Belém: o terceiro quarto do século XVIII (1755 – 1777) com as reformas promovidas no período Pombalino na Amazônia, momento de expressão de uma modernidade urbana e arquitetônica; o final do século XIX e a primeira década do século XX (1890 – 1910), momento de ascensão da economia regional a partir da intensificação de atividades extrativas que produziram reformas urbanísticas com tons higienistas e; por fim, o período entre 1940 e 1970, que marcou uma série de propostas de planejamento com viés técnico-burocrático na produção do espaço. Do ponto de vista da metodologia adotada, estabeleceu-se como percurso de pesquisa: i) levantamento bibliográfico de caráter teórico e empírico da temática; ii) levantamento documental acerca das práticas de planejamento e intervenção dos períodos destacados com base em legislação, planos e projetos de cada um dos períodos; iii) coleta de iconografia representativa da época as quais as políticas foram executadas. Apresenta-se como resultados a hipótese de que a narrativa de uma pretensa ausência de planejamento como fator explicativo dos problemas da cidade é um discurso que não tem base na realidade, posto que historicamente é exatamente o oposto que a pesquisa indica, as modalidades de planejamento efetivadas em Belém acentuam problemas como a segregação socioespacial.Palavras-Chave: História, Planejamento Urbano, Modernidade, Belém.AbstractConsidering the dynamics and urban structure of Belém at the beginning of the 21st Century as an expression of the accumulation of urban interventions and planning and management practices of the city, the historical genealogy of urban planning is analyzed as a way of understanding production of a space that has as characteristic the negation of the nature and the production of the inequality between social classes. In this aspect, three specific periods were identified that produced significant impacts on the production of the urban space of Belém: the third quarter of the seventeenth century (1755 - 1777) with the reforms promoted in the Pombaline period in the Amazon, a time of expression of an urban and architectural design; the end of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century (1890 - 1910), a time of great rise of the regional economy from the intensification of extractive activities that produced urban reforms with hygienic tones; and finally, the period between 1940 and 1970, which marked a series of planning proposals with a bureaucratic technical aproach in the production of space in Belém. This work established as following research methodology: i) survey bibliographical of theoretical and empirical character of the analyzed subject; ii) documentary survey of the planning and intervention practices of the highlighted periods based on municipal, state and federal legislation, as well as the master plans and development plans of the periods; iii) collection of iconography representative of the time to which the policies were executed in the urban space. The hypothesis is that the narrative of a supposed absence of planning as a factor of the city's problems is a discourse that has no basis in reality, since historically it is exactly the opposite that the research indicates, that is, the modalities in Belém accentuate problems such as socio-spatial segregation.Keywords: History, Urban Planning, Modernity, Belém.


2009 ◽  
pp. 125-132
Author(s):  
Krisztián Lőrinczi

Consumer lifestyle and health are relevant factors to understanding consumption preferences. In the last few decades the number of lifestyle diseases has dramatically increased. The main cause for these diseases is the change in lifestyle; including a lack of attention to physical activity and good nutrition. Health and lifestyle are important factors by purchase decision process. In accordance with these, I examine the consumer behaviour toward soft drinks with special regards to healthy lifestyle and the state of health. My examinations can be considered mainly as aqualitative research, which can serve as a basis for further analyses and research, however, the conclusions and experience gained from it are worthy of consideration. I differentiated five soft drink categories: ice tea, carbonated soft drinks, fruit juices, mineral waters, sport and energy drinks and studied the consumer behaviour toward them. The study focuses on the consumption of these and the factors influencing their purchase with special regards to lifestyle.


Telos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 754-775 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Valdés Montecinos

Year after year the number of students in higher education increases worldwide, and particularly in the virtual mode. In the face of this reality, a series of phenomena combine that have driven university institutions to reinvent themselves. The objective of this work is to analyze the influence of globalization and internationalization on the curriculum of university education, with particular emphasis on Latin American virtual education. The methodology used is the review of both literature specialized in the subject and official documents of the agencies involved. The results reveal that: 1) multilateral agencies have been made efforts to establish two-way academic partnership and cooperation agreements, on the one hand, to promote the mobility of students and teachers, as well as the realization of joint projects; on the other hand, to promote the processes of quality control and internationalization of the curriculum. 2) Regarding virtual education in the region, the need to ensure and demonstrate the quality of its programs has been set, with the Latin American and Caribbean Institute of Quality in Distance Higher Education (CALED) being one of the main references regarding guidelines and instruments for evaluation and advice to universities on quality assessment and accreditation processes. It is concluded that the internationalization of the curriculum in virtual university education in Latin America faces the challenge of taking the step towards comprehensive internationalization, that is, the one that comprehensively impacts the curriculum from a conceptual and cultural structure including interdisciplinary studies and multiculturalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 01010
Author(s):  
Natalya Krivenko ◽  
Daria Epaneshnikova

The article considers modern demographic trends, in the conditions of medical care cost increasing and aging of the population. The expediency of studying aspects of health care efficiency is justified. The relationship and mutual influence of changes in the country’s economy and changes in the health care system are revealed. The problems of preserving the health of the population are considered comprehensively, taking into account the influence of environmental factors, behavioral factors and attitudes to human health, the effectiveness of public policy implementation and the effectiveness of the health system. An integrative model for evaluating the effectiveness of regional health care is proposed based on an integrated approach aimed at improving the population health and ensuring social and demographic security of the region. The integrative model is adapted on the example of the Sverdlovsk region. In dynamics for 2008-2018, improved medical and demographic indicators and high effects were achieved as a result of comprehensive measures to neutralize factors that have a negative impact on the health of the population, promotion and implementation of healthy lifestyle, strengthening state support for the industry, and the successful functioning of regional health care.


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