Liberty and the City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thilo Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Gated Communities ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Subsidized Housing ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Economic Segregation ◽  
Jane Jacobs ◽  
The City

The city is the locus of our every-day lives. It is where we are free to live, socialize, shop, and labour. However, with this freedom also comes unfreedom. Policies and systemic structures are capable of denying freedom as much as supporting it. With the freedom of the automobile came the erosion of sidewalks, with the increased provision of common parks (like those in gated communities) came the elimination of genuine public space, and with the construction of subsidized housing projects came the destruction of many dynamic neighbourhoods and socio-economic segregation. Debates over the content of “freedom” have long been a tradition within political theory. This thesis transplants those debates to the urban realm of the “every-day.” Guided by the works of both urban theorists (including David Harvey and Jane Jacobs) and theorists of liberty (Rawls, Nozick, and G.A. Cohen, among others), the completed project will synthesize the two and demonstrate how features of urban environments affect the realization of human freedom.

scholarly journals Possibilities to Apply the Urban Acupuncture Concept in Kaunas: Social Aspect

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 18-27
Author(s):  
Aurelija Daugelaite ◽  
Indre Gražulevičiūte-Vileniške ◽  
Mantas Landauskas
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Ecological Design ◽  
Social Aspect ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The City

The concept of urban acupuncture, which has been gaining ground in recent decades, is based on the activation and revitalization of urban environments using small architectural or landscape architectural interventions in precise carefully selected locations of urban fabric. However, the rapid and unexpected design solutions of urban acupuncture, based on ecological design, nature dynamics, street art, material re-use, can cause different social and psychological reactions of urban population and these reactions may vary depending on cultural contexts. Consequently, in order to implement successful urban acupuncture projects in Lithuanian cities, it is very important to find out public opinion and priorities in the fields of public space management, aesthetics, and public art. The aim of the research was to analyze the opinion of Kaunas city residents regarding these issues. For this purpose, a sociological questionnaire survey was used. The questionnaire containing 20 questions was designed, with the aim to find out the trends of use of public spaces in the city, the attitudes of residents towards street art and other small-scale initiatives in public spaces implemented in the recent years, possibilities of creating landscape architecture based on ecological ideas in urban environment, the attitude of inhabitants towards community spaces and community space design in the city, etc. 100 residents of Kaunas participated in this online administered survey. The survey has demonstrated general positive attitude towards contemporary design trends of public spaces and public art; however, the surveyed population expressed preferences towards fully equipped public spaces offering possibilities for a wide range of activities.

scholarly journals Income Inequality and Socio-economic Segregation in the City of Johannesburg

2021 ◽  
pp. 91-109
Author(s):  
Richard Ballard ◽  
Christian Hamann
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Large Population ◽  
Unemployed People ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Economic Segregation ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Paradoxical Finding ◽  
The City ◽  
White Suburbs

AbstractThis chapter analyses income inequality and socio-economic segregation in South Africa’s most populous city, Johannesburg. The end of apartheid’s segregation in 1991 has been followed by both continuity and change of urban spatial patterns. There is a considerable literature on the transformation of inner-city areas from white to black, and of the steady diffusion of black middle-class residents into once ‘white’ suburbs. There has been less analysis on the nature and pace of socio-economic mixing. Four key findings from this chapter are as follows. First, dissimilarity indices show that bottom occupation categories and the unemployed are highly segregated from top occupation categories, but that the degree of segregation has decreased slightly between the censuses of 2001 and 2011. Second, the data quantifies the way in which Johannesburg’s large population of unemployed people are more segregated from top occupations than any of the other employment categories, although unemployed people are less segregated from bottom occupations. Third, over the same period, residents employed in bottom occupations are less likely to be represented in affluent former white suburbs. This seemingly paradoxical finding is likely to have resulted from fewer affluent households accommodating their domestic workers on their properties. Fourth, although most post-apartheid public housing projects have not disrupted patterns of socio-economic segregation, some important exceptions do show the enormous capacity of public housing to transform the spatial structure of the city.

scholarly journals Growing public spaces in the city: Community gardening and the making of new urban environments of publicness

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802097228
Author(s):  
Paul Milbourne
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Community Gardening ◽  
City Community ◽  
Space Transformation ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
The City

The demise of public space in cities across the Global North has received considerable scrutiny from urban scholars in recent years, with accounts of the loss, privatisation and increased regulation of public space prevalent within the academic literature. This paper seeks to complicate these dominant narratives of public space transformation by exploring the complexities of existing public spaces and the emergence of new spaces of publicness in the city. It uses a case study of community gardening in mundane and everyday neighbourhood spaces to provide a more nuanced and progressive reading of the relations between publicness and space in the city. Drawing on empirical materials from recent research on community gardening projects in 15 cities in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA, the paper highlights how community gardening is creating new environments of publicness across public, private and in-between spaces that complicate both the end of public space discourse and conventional understandings of public space within urban studies.

scholarly journals Perception of Public Space and Gated Communities in Cali: dynamics of public space in the city

Prospectiva ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 77
Author(s):  
Enrique Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Gated Communities ◽  
The City

<p dir="ltr"><span>Se podría decir que buena parte de la historia de una ciudad es aquella que cuenta cómo se ha transformado su espacio público. El de Cali ha dado un vuelco significativo en sus últimos cien años. Los lugares emblemáticos de hace un siglo han cambiado dramáticamente y resulta cada vez más difícil pensar en la ciudad en términos de su espacio público. Uno de los rasgos más significativos de esas transformaciones recientes proviene de las formas de construcción de vivienda y en el modo de ocuparlas. Las Unidades residenciales cerradas constituyen, a partir de la década de mil novecientos ochenta, el impacto más visible en la ciudad. A su proliferación se le opone un discurso que propone recuperar, aumentar y revitalizar el espacio público, a veces sin conocer qué valoración tienen los caleños del mismo. Las inversiones económicas asociadas al sistema de transporte masivo han tenido el propósito de aumentar el espacio, sin embargo la cantidad de espacio público disponible por habitante, luego de una década de intervención no aumenta, al mismo tiempo que la oferta de vivienda sigue asociada a la construcción de unidades cerradas, especialmente para los estratos de ingresos medios y altos. Este trabajo examina la percepción de los caleños sobre el espacio público disponible, a partir de la encuesta del programa </span><span>Cali cómo vamos</span><span>, y contrasta esta percepción con el modo como se vive el espacio público por habitantes de Unidades residenciales del sur de Cali. Este contraste pone en evidencia las tensiones entre las pretensiones de los ciudadanos, la oferta de espacio y el papel del Estado como mediador de estas tensiones.</span></p>

scholarly journals How a stream can change a city

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Matthew James Stone
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Strategic Change ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Design Tool ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Natural State ◽  
Adjacent Area ◽  
The People ◽  
The City

<p>The motivation of this thesis is to generate an understanding of how cities can begin to shift towards pedestrian friendly centres for activity. Introducing streams into urban environments through the process of daylighting can generate public life, improve sustainability, and enable growth. Daylighting is the process of bringing a stream back to the surface into a more natural state. By ensuring the stream is used as the core driver for strategic change, development can occur on the edges of the stream as a decentralised hub for activity and movement within the public realm. The stream as a public element can connect people and create active stakeholders within urban communities as the contributors to the vibrancy of the city.  Daylighting can be the catalyst to revitalise Wellington and demonstrate that urban environments are not confined to the existing structure of the city when reintegrating natural elements. Pedestrian activity along stream edges can act as a central mode of urban life, complementing Wellington’s existing waterfront. Generating public space around water as a central hub can connect people to social spaces that the city has previously turned from in favour of roads. Establishing dominant pedestrian areas located around a daylighted stream enables public space to prioritise activity over movement and allows infrastructure to prioritise people over vehicles. From hills to harbour, water can be used as a design tool, generating a language that can activate urban environments.  In developing the stream’s framework, it is important that the first considerations take regard of the direction and flow of the water’s path. The directionality of the stream should have the greatest benefit to the affected stakeholders to ensure the stream positively contributes to the qualities of the city. This contribution is essential for the people that work or live adjacent to the new infrastructure, as they will occupy the new space most frequently. Viability of the stream is dependent on the path it takes through the city, as this affects which landowners will be included in the project. Old or small structures, empty sites such as car parks, or roadways with limited vehicle movement could provide the greatest opportunity for development within the city. These should be considered fundamental to the implementation of the stream as they mitigate the changes to the affected stakeholders and benefit other members within the adjacent area.</p>

Desire lines and defensive architecture in modern urban environments

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (13) ◽  
pp. 2980-2995 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Smith ◽  
Peter Walters
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Urban Populations ◽  
Productive Force ◽  
The City

Public space is being increasingly managed by defensive architecture, surveillance and other subtle filtering mechanisms to make it more palatable and attendant to the needs of capital. This reinforces social boundaries, making space inhospitable to those people whose presence is not welcome, and serves to ‘discipline’ city inhabitants into primarily consumption based modes of interacting with and in the city. However, disenfranchised urban populations still find ways to exist in and navigate these spaces. The purpose of this article is to highlight these ways by introducing the concept of ‘desire lines’ as a means of overcoming or re-imagining defensive space. We use Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire as productive force, combined with De Certeau’s notion of ‘walking the city’, to explore how individuals and social movements might practically, and in a metaphorical sense, create new collective paths, creating ‘desire lines’ of resistance and change within what is often an increasingly unforgiving and dominated urban environment, created by and for capital at the expense of a vibrant public realm.

scholarly journals Re-Inventing Public Housing

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Biehle ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Jane Jacobs ◽  
Mixed Use ◽  
One Step ◽  
Public Housing Estate ◽  
The City

In Public Housing that Worked Nicholas Bloom championed the success of the New York City Housing Authority, but to do so had to champion bureaucratic workability over architectural value. In fact, his assessment had to disregard the fact that nearly all of the high-rise low-income housing projects are psychologically partitioned island wastelands, anticities within the city. Louis Wirth, Jane Jacobs and now Steven Johnson have offered their generational testaments to density, diversity, mixed use, and continuity- what they considered made urban life meaningful. Steven Connsummarized- “the problem of the 21st century will be how we re-urbanize, how we fix the mistakes of our anti-urban 20th century.”The Pratt Institute UG urban design studio, Re-inventing Public Housing, is intended as one step toward meeting the challenge starting with the question-must we really accept the super block public housing estate for what it is or is there a way to transform and reinterpret it, and by doing so eliminate its stigma, its isolation, and anti-urban grip on the city?

scholarly journals How a stream can change a city

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Matthew James Stone
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Strategic Change ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Design Tool ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Natural State ◽  
Adjacent Area ◽  
The People ◽  
The City

<p>The motivation of this thesis is to generate an understanding of how cities can begin to shift towards pedestrian friendly centres for activity. Introducing streams into urban environments through the process of daylighting can generate public life, improve sustainability, and enable growth. Daylighting is the process of bringing a stream back to the surface into a more natural state. By ensuring the stream is used as the core driver for strategic change, development can occur on the edges of the stream as a decentralised hub for activity and movement within the public realm. The stream as a public element can connect people and create active stakeholders within urban communities as the contributors to the vibrancy of the city.  Daylighting can be the catalyst to revitalise Wellington and demonstrate that urban environments are not confined to the existing structure of the city when reintegrating natural elements. Pedestrian activity along stream edges can act as a central mode of urban life, complementing Wellington’s existing waterfront. Generating public space around water as a central hub can connect people to social spaces that the city has previously turned from in favour of roads. Establishing dominant pedestrian areas located around a daylighted stream enables public space to prioritise activity over movement and allows infrastructure to prioritise people over vehicles. From hills to harbour, water can be used as a design tool, generating a language that can activate urban environments.  In developing the stream’s framework, it is important that the first considerations take regard of the direction and flow of the water’s path. The directionality of the stream should have the greatest benefit to the affected stakeholders to ensure the stream positively contributes to the qualities of the city. This contribution is essential for the people that work or live adjacent to the new infrastructure, as they will occupy the new space most frequently. Viability of the stream is dependent on the path it takes through the city, as this affects which landowners will be included in the project. Old or small structures, empty sites such as car parks, or roadways with limited vehicle movement could provide the greatest opportunity for development within the city. These should be considered fundamental to the implementation of the stream as they mitigate the changes to the affected stakeholders and benefit other members within the adjacent area.</p>

Minimetrò in Perugia as leverage for urban regeneration

TERRITORIO ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 148-163
Author(s):  
Luca Fondacci
Keyword(s):  
Urban Regeneration ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Sustainable Mobility ◽  
Field Surveys ◽  
Peripheral Area ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Historical Centre

In the 1970s, the fragile historical centre of the city of Perugia was a key area where the binomial of sustainable mobility and urban regeneration was developed and applied. At the turn of the xxi century, the low carbon automatic people-mover Minimetrò broadened that application from the city's historical centre to the outskirts, promoting the enhancement of several urban environments. This paper is the outcome of an investigation of original sources, field surveys and direct interviews, which addresses the Minimetrò as the backbone of a wide regeneration process which has had a considerable impact on the economic development of a peripheral area of the city which was previously devoid of any clear urban sense. The conclusion proposes some solutions to improve the nature of the Minimetrò as an experimental alternative means of transport.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document