Urban spaces as mirrors of multiple social identities: the Palestinian people of Israel

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-159
Author(s):  
Alessandra Terenzi ◽  
Matteo Colleoni

This study focuses on different groups of Palestinian citizens of Israel, representing more than 20% of the total Israeli population. Working on the link between urban space and social diversity, the authors will capture complex dynamics of segregation and social inequalities ex-isting among different Arab communities. This research aims to promote a new approach that, overcoming the stereotyped vision of two social monolithic blocks at war with each other - Jews and Arabs- shows a complex social mosaic of multiple cultural identities, characterizing the contemporary Israeli society.

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (10) ◽  
pp. 2160-2178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mayra Mosciaro ◽  
Alvaro Pereira

The entrepreneurial city discourse has been adopted around the globe by policymakers, with the urban redevelopment project as one of its most representative symbols. The predominantly favourable discourse revolving around this new political economy of urban space is supported by claims that newly regenerated areas bring multiple benefits to the city and its citizens. These narratives have been used in Brazil to justify increasing reliance on an urban planning tool known as Urban Operations. This planning tool, developed in the 1990s, seeks to facilitate cooperation between public and private actors in the production of new urban spaces. While projected by some as a ‘magic formula’ that enables major urban redevelopment projects without public expenditure, the outcomes of Urban Operations often differ significantly from expectations. The cases of Água Espraiada (São Paulo) and Porto Maravilha (Rio de Janeiro) are used to demonstrate that regenerated areas, as preferred spaces for the penetration of financialised practices into the built environment, have brought forward new dynamics that are serving to reinforce pre-existing social inequalities and to exacerbate uneven development in Brazil’s main cities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 097542532110401
Author(s):  
S. Irudaya Rajan ◽  
Anand P. Cherian

The urban–rural divide in India has been the cause of labour flow to Indian cities, which have historically witnessed an insufficiency in planning. Moreover, widening social inequalities exacerbate the living conditions in Indian cities, pushing the migrant labourers from rural areas to the margins of urban spaces. Public policymakers have long turned a blind-eye to migrants, denying them essential social security. This study attempts to review how these factors have made urban space unwelcome to migrants from rural areas, edging them to a state of inability to sustain themselves, especially amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also an attempt to re-evaluate the status of urbanization. The government imposed a sudden lockdown in 2020 to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak, leading to a massive exodus of migrants from cities back to their homes. The study also seeks to account for the significance of economic planning and social security with regard to migrant labour.


Author(s):  
Alessia Grigoletto ◽  
Mario Mauro ◽  
Pasqualino Maietta Latessa ◽  
Vincenzo Iannuzzi ◽  
Davide Gori ◽  
...  

This systematic review aimed to investigate the type of physical activity carried out in green urban spaces by the adult population and to value its impact on the population’s health. Additionally, another purpose was to examine if the presence of outdoor gyms in green urban spaces can promote participation in physical activity among adults. Searches of electronic databases, with no time restrictions and up to June 2020, resulted in 10 studies meeting the inclusion criteria. A quantitative assessment is reported as effect size. Many people practiced walking activity as a workout, which showed improvements in health. Walking is the most popular type of training due to its easy accessibility and it not requiring equipment or special skills. Outdoor fitness equipment has been installed in an increasing number of parks and has become very popular worldwide. Further, outdoor fitness equipment provides free access to fitness training and seems to promote physical activity in healthy adults. However, other studies about outdoor fitness equipment efficiency are needed. People living near to equipped areas are more likely to perform outdoor fitness than those who live further away. The most common training programs performed in green urban spaces included exercises with free and easy access, able to promote physical health and perception.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett J. M. Petzer ◽  
Anna J. Wieczorek ◽  
Geert P. J. Verbong

AbstractAn urban mobility transition requires a transition in space allocation, since most mobility modes are dependent on urban open space for circulation and the storage of vehicles. Despite increasing attention to space and spatiality in transitions research, the finite, physical aspects of urban space, and the means by which it is allocated, have not been adequately acknowledged as an influence on mobility transitions. A conceptual framework is introduced to support comparison between cities in terms of the processes by which open space is (re-)distributed between car and bicycle circulatory and regulatory space. This framework distinguishes between regulatory allocation mechanisms and the appropriation practices of actors. Application to cases in Amsterdam, Brussels and Birmingham reveal unique relationships created by the zero-sum nature of urban open space between the dominant automobility mode and subordinate cycling mode. These relationships open up a new approach to forms of lock-in that work in favour of particular mobility modes within the relatively obdurate urban built environment. Empirically, allocation mechanisms that routinise the production of car space at national level within the EU are shown to be far more prevalent than those for bicycle space, highlighting the constraints faced by radical city-level policies aimed at space reallocation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 858
Author(s):  
Wojciech Kisiała ◽  
Izabela Rącka

One of the main pillars of sustainable urban development at the local scale is to control the social aspect of urban equality of socio-economic systems. A number of studies confirm that poverty in urban space is accompanied by negative phenomena, such as high unemployment, social pathologies, increased crime rate, or the high level of the decapitalization of space, including the poor condition of housing and municipal infrastructure. However, there is a gap in defining the relation between urban poverty and city structure to control and preferably minimize social inequalities. The aim of the study was to empirically verify the impact of the location of residential properties in relation to poverty-stricken areas in the city. The research covered the housing market in one Polish city (Kalisz) in the years 2006–2018. By applying GIS technologies, we identified the location of each property in relation to poverty areas. The data was subjected to regression analysis, with the use of the hedonic approach based on exponential models. The analysis of data allowed us to conclude that location in a poorer area does affect the prices of new flats, which is not only a contribution to the development of science, but is also information that could be used by developers or property valuers to establish the prices of flats, as well as city managers to avoid pauperization of urban districts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Helen Appleton

AbstractThe Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces, reflects an Insular, West Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.


Author(s):  
Anette Stenslund

In recent decades, research has paid attention to the atmospheric ways computer-generated imagery (CGI) marks the experience of future urban design. What has been addressed in the generic abbreviation CGI has, however, exclusively concerned visualisations that communicate with stakeholders beyond designers and architects. Based on fieldwork within an urban design lab, the paper differentiates among the range of CGI used by urban designers. Focusing on collage, which forms one kind of CGI that has received scant attention in scholarly literature, I demonstrate its key function as an epistemological in-house work-in-progress tool that helps designers to refine their vision and to identify the atmosphere of future urban spaces. Based on New Aesthetics, collaging atmosphere is characterised by a physiognomic approach to urban space that selectively addresses aesthetic characteristics. Hence, the paper tackles a discussion that points towards cautious handling of the communicative scope of collages that can be well complemented by other types of CGI before entering a constructive dialogue with clients.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.


ILUMINURAS ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (36) ◽  
Author(s):  
Urpi Montoya Uriarte

Este trabalho se insere no que se chama hoje de antropologia da cidade, que se preocupa com a forma como os citadinos – em sua condição alternada de usuários, moradores, transeuntes ou consumidores – fazem a cidade (Agier, 2011). Nossa compreensão de cidade está marcada pela recente teoria do espaço no interior da Geografia (Massey, 2012) e nossa compreensão da produção do espaço se baseia na teoria de Henri Lefebvre, especialmente em seu La production de l´espace (1974). Com esta bagagem teórica, propomos uma antropologia dos espaços urbanos preocupada com a forma como os espaços na cidade são produzidos por pessoas comuns ou homens ordinários. Os dados empíricos analisados provêm de uma etnografia de dois micro-espaços na cidade de Salvador. As leituras teóricas destes micro-espaços nos levam a afirmar a atualidade e força dos espaços diferenciais que emergem no espaço abstrato, a significação política dos espaços apropriados e a vigência do valor de uso e as relações costumeiras na cidade contemporânea.Palavras-chave: Espaços urbanos. Produção do espaço. Espaços diferenciais. Apropriação de espaços. Valor de uso.Production of urban space by ordinary men: anthropology of two micro-spaces in the city of SalvadorAbstractThis work is part of what is today called anthropology of the city, that is concerned with how the townspeople – in their alternating condition of users, residents, bystanders or consumers – make the city (Agier, 2011). Our understanding of the city is marked by the recent theory of space inside the geography (Massey, 2012) and our understanding of the production of space is based on the theory of Henri Lefebvre, especially in its The production of the space (1974). With this theoretical background, we propose an anthropology of urban spaces concerned with how the spaces in the city are made by ordinary people or ordinary men . The data analyzed come from an ethnographic study of two micro-spaces in the city of Salvador. The theoretical interpretations of these micro-spaces lead us to affirm the relevance and strength of differential spaces that emerge in the abstract space, the political significance of the appropriate spaces and the duration of use value and customary relations in the contemporary city.Keywords: Urban spaces. Production of space. Differential spaces. Appropriation of spaces. Use value.  


Dimensions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-202
Author(s):  
Sergiy Ilchenko

Abstract This contribution elaborates upon the appropriation of urban space in spatiotemporal and procedural interventions in the example of the city of Kharkiv, as well as the impact of urban space on the process of how various groups rediscover and use various parts of the city. Being moved during collective actions - in the sense of feeling urged to move along - goes beyond routine practices by influencing the city and its perception. It seems that these general processions, celebrations, and festive activities of the residents are their contributions to the process of »urban renaissance« - the rebirth of interest in the urban way of life. Since public spaces reflect the historical inheritance of local communities, joint transformative actions such as, »appropriation «, »production«, and »governance« of urban spaces are considered. This article advocates for the practice of domestication of urban space by the local community, as well as the need for the existence of »urban lagoons« - free (unregulated) areas of the city used as resources for urban development and interaction of citizens.


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