scholarly journals Ocean As Place For Urban Life:  Building on Water to Combat Urban Congestion & Climate Change

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Piers Brereton Bowman

<p>Coastal cities form some of the largest and most important cities in the world. The unique character of these cities has been shaped and moulded by the coastal environment. As powerful as these cities seem they have became vulnerable. Coastal cities face the need to expand with rapidly growing populations, also, sea level rise has been increased by climate change, which threatens this expansion and the city itself. This thesis explores how the effects of climate change and urban congestion can be mitigated through architectural development, incorporating a flexible framework for housing and the adaption of the urban fabric to living on water. It seeks to change the perception of buildable space and adapt to the changing face of the coastal city and its environment. The research finds that responses to the coastal city problem exist only as separate projects independent of one another. A unified solution is needed to mitigate these issues between all coastal cities. This can be resolved by combining strategies within further inner city developments. The project responds to coastal city issues as well as adapting to current city inhabitation. Modern city life is one of change and movement. Travel between cities is frequent due to changing lifestyles and job opportunities. Developing on this lifestyle, the project successfully investigates a solution to help protect and improve the life of the coastal city, addressing the problems of tomorrow, today.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Piers Brereton Bowman

<p>Coastal cities form some of the largest and most important cities in the world. The unique character of these cities has been shaped and moulded by the coastal environment. As powerful as these cities seem they have became vulnerable. Coastal cities face the need to expand with rapidly growing populations, also, sea level rise has been increased by climate change, which threatens this expansion and the city itself. This thesis explores how the effects of climate change and urban congestion can be mitigated through architectural development, incorporating a flexible framework for housing and the adaption of the urban fabric to living on water. It seeks to change the perception of buildable space and adapt to the changing face of the coastal city and its environment. The research finds that responses to the coastal city problem exist only as separate projects independent of one another. A unified solution is needed to mitigate these issues between all coastal cities. This can be resolved by combining strategies within further inner city developments. The project responds to coastal city issues as well as adapting to current city inhabitation. Modern city life is one of change and movement. Travel between cities is frequent due to changing lifestyles and job opportunities. Developing on this lifestyle, the project successfully investigates a solution to help protect and improve the life of the coastal city, addressing the problems of tomorrow, today.</p>


1997 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Curran

This rhetorical question was poseu by Jerome in AD 411 to challenge a young man of good family from Toulouse who was contemplating the responsibilities of monastic life. The old man of Bethlehem wrote on city life with some authority; he had achieved fame and notoriety simultaneously at the court of Pope Damasus in Rome in the 380s.2 And yet, as both men knew well, the moral and physical dangers of the city, the latter resoundingly demonstrated by the Gothic capture of Rome in the previous year, had not prompted the rejection of urban life by western Christians, save by a small and eccentric group of extreme ascetics. Jerome's praise for this group is well known, and his criticism of less committed Christians in Rome is legendary. But when one examines the uniquely vivid testimony of Jerome's letters, one can detect beneath the praise and polemic a vigorous struggle for the support of the city's elite. The social background to the struggle as revealed in Jerome's writings is the subject of this article. What emerges is a complex, contradictory and divided Christian community which Jerome unsuccessfully attempted to influence, a failure that brought final and ignominious exile from Rome.


Transfers ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-130
Author(s):  
George Revill

As the articles in this special section show, railways mark out urban experience in very distinctive ways. In the introduction, Steven D. Spalding makes plain there is no clear relationship between railway development and the shape and size of cities. For many cities, suburban rail travel has been either substantially insignificant or a relative latecomer as a factor in urban growth and suburbanization. Walking, tramways and the omnibus may indeed have had a much greater impact on built form, yet the cultural impact of railways on the city life should not be minimized. Iconic city stations are both objects of civic pride and socially heterogeneous gateways to the promise of a better urban life. The physical presence of substantial tracts of infrastructure, viaducts, freight yards and warehousing, divide and segregate residential districts encouraging and reinforcing status differentials between communities. Subways, metros, and suburban railways open on to the often grubby quotidian underbelly of city life whilst marking out a psychic divide between work and domesticity, city and suburb. Railways not only produced new forms of personal mobility but by defining the contours, parameters, and possibilities of this experience, they have come to help shape how we think about ourselves as urbanized individuals and societies. The chapters in this special section mark out some of this territory in terms of, for example: suburbanization, landscape, and nationhood (Joyce); the abstractions of urban form implicit in the metro map (Schwetman); the underground as a metaphor for the topologically enfolded interconnections of urban process (Masterson-Algar); and the competing lay and professional interests freighting urban railway development (Soppelsa). In the introduction Spalding is right to stress both the multiple ways that railways shape urban experience and the complex processes that continuously shape and re-shape urban cultures as sites of contest and sometimes conflict. As Richter suggests, in the nineteenth century only rail travel demanded the constant and simultaneous negotiation of both urban social disorder and the systematic ordering associated with large technological systems and corporate business. Thus “the railroad stood squarely at the crossroad of the major social, business, cultural and technological changes remaking national life during the second half of the nineteenth century.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-346
Author(s):  
Peter T. Dunn

Much of everyday life in cities is now mediated by digital platforms, a mode of organization in which control is both distributed widely among participants and sharply delimited by the platform’s constraints. This article uses examples of smartphone-based platforms for urban mobility to argue that platforms create new political arrangements of the city, intermediating the social processes of management and movement that characterize urban life. Its empirical basis is a study of user interfaces, data specifications, and algorithms used in the operation and regulation of ride-hailing services and bike-share systems. I focus on three aspects of urban politics affected by platforms: its location, its participants, and the types of conflict it addresses. First, the programming forums in which decisions are encoded in and distributed through platforms’ core digital architecture are new sites of policy deliberation outside the more familiar arenas of city politics. Second, travelers have new opportunities to use platforms for travel on their own terms, but this expanded participation is circumscribed by interfaces that presuppose individual, transactional engagement rather than a participation attentive to a broader social and environmental context. Finally, digital systems show themselves to be well suited to enforcing quantifiable distributional goals, but struggle to resolve the more nuanced relational matters that constitute the politics of everyday city life. These illustrations suggest that digital tools for managing transportation are not only political products, but also reset the stage on which urban encounters play out.


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E. Agbiboa

ABSTRACTDespite their centrality to the rhythm and practice of everyday urban life, there are, surprisingly, few studies on commercial minibus-taxis as a microcosm of city life in Africa, especially its precarious materiality. Using the trademark yellow minibus-taxis (danfos) in Lagos as a frame of reference, this paper explores what an interpretative analysis of the slogans thatdanfoworkers paint on their vehicles can tell us about the city in which they weave their routine existence, especially the hopes, fears and actual material circumstances which informed their unique choice of slogans. Foregrounding thedanfosas mobile bodies of meaning, the article finds that slogans not only reflect the lived realities ofdanfoworkers, but are themselves vital means through which these workers get by, define their identity and expand their horizons of possibility.


1970 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 94-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsi-Huey Liang

During the Second Empire, tens of thousands of poor people from East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Posen moved to Berlin every year. They came primarily to improve their economic position. A large number of them were transient agricultural laborers who had been accosted by private employment agents in Berlin railway stations. Others were provincial craftsmen in declining trades who sought to start a new life in the city: for example the cigar maker hoping to make enough money to buy a tobacco shop. Coming on the mere chance of a job, such men were likely to end up as anything from a coal carrier or hackdriver to kitchen help in the Charité hospital. Most of them became factory hands. Journeymen on the tramp who arrived on foot from as far as the Bohemian border were better off as far as job opportunities went. They had not as yet burnt their bridges and could still move on with a small travel allowance from their guilds if nothing lucrative turned up in Berlin. But Berlin needed young looksmiths, turners, carpenters, molders, tinsmiths, and harnessmakers. (In 1905,72 per cent of the workers in Ludwig Loewe's machine-tool factory were immigrants from outside Berlin.) There were also those who became Berliners in the course of their military service: after two or three years of garrison duty in or near Berlin, a country boy often had no wish to renounce the “big-city life” and would go to great lengths to find a living there.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Maram Falah Tawil ◽  
Christa Reicher ◽  
Mais Jafari ◽  
Katrin Baeumer

<p>In the scene of the urban transformation processes taking place in the world nowadays, it is crucial to verify the need for sustainable change in public space in Amman. The paper aims at capturing the demands of public space in regards to the socio economic urban life in Amman. It also investigates the role of public space from the perception of the local communities and tries to find the relation between public space and the other vital layers that constitute the urban public life whether social, economic or urban regeneration. Key dimensions and success factors of best practices in Dortmund, Germany are investigated in order to shed the light on potential strategic thinking in dealing with problems in Amman. As a result, defined characters of magnets and anchor nodes in Amman were specified to make the city more readable and accessible.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (s3) ◽  
pp. 58-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lili Wang ◽  
Wenwen Xiao ◽  
Chengwei Wang

AbstractIn this paper, a comprehensive research of the evolution of the hierarchical structure and spatial pattern of coastal cities in China was conducted based on the data of distribution of the headquarters and subsidiaries of marine-related enterprises in 1995, 2005 and 2015 using the city network research method proposed by Taylor. The results of the empirical research showed: China’s coastal city network had an obvious hierarchical characteristics of “national coastal cityregional coastal city-sub-regional coastal city-local coastal city”, in the 20 years of development process, the hierarchies of coastal cities in China showed a hierarchical progressive evolution; in past 20 years, the spatial pattern and network structure of coastal cities in China tended to be complete, and the city network was more uniform, forming a “three tiers and three urban agglomerations” network structure; the strength of connection among the cities was obviously strengthened, and the efficiency of urban spatial connection was improved overall.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murat Furat ◽  
İsra Karabiber ◽  
Senem Kocaoğlu

The emerging technology, electric vehicles (EVs), has gained more attention due to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, climate change, and air pollution in the cities. The rising demand for EVs brings new benefits and challenges to the city life of citizens. Balancing the demand in the electrical energy distribution grid, charging scheduling, dynamic pricing, and different types of charging stations change the priorities of city life. In order to manage the new requirements and perform the permanent transition from gasoline-powered vehicles to EVs, a strategic plan must be prepared by the city authorities. Currently, a number of cities in different countries have published their strategic plans for the sense of perspective about reaching a 30% sales share for EVs by 2030. These plans focus on the solutions to maximize the benefits of EVs and the awareness of the citizens. In the present study, fundamental components of a strategic plan for both EVs and necessary infrastructure are outlined with different aspects.


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