La grande dimensione: misura e dismisura

TERRITORIO ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 9-13
Author(s):  
Remo Dorigati

- The "mega structure" just refers to itself and its dimensions are simply related to the relationship between economical and technological issues, while its vitality is supported by mobility flows. The large scale, both on the physical and on the conceptual side, asks to reflect about the traditional paradigms of urban and architectural design, but most of all about the new relationship occurring between planning strategies and architecture. Large size buildings are mainly located in the urban sprawl areas, with efficient infrastructures and weak urban fabric, where integration is quite difficult. Mega structures have always existed - monuments, public buildings or infrastructures - as every culture has raised its own monuments as a demonstration of power through an impressive possibility of dominion on nature, a continuous challenge of man.

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-21
Author(s):  
Kris Scheerlinck

Urban transformation is directly related to the planning, design and use of a series of urban infrastructures, from streets to highways, from pedestrian, bicycle, bus or train lines and their connecting transport hubs to rivers, canals or harbor facilities. They play an essential role in the transformation of the urban fabric. Recent societal changes, especially in developing countries, demanding higher mobility and urban interaction, influence the used planning and design strategies to transform or extend urbanized areas by planning or renewing these infrastructures. However, its relationship to the surrounding urban fabric, more specifically the collective spaces it constitutes at the level of the streetscape, is not always an initial or integral part of providing these infrastructures. In many cases, the urban fabric is wrapped around or fragmented by these infrastructural projects, causing scale contrasts and struggle to integrate within, generating processes of misappropriation or misuse. Especially in developing contexts, new infrastructures are often planned and built in a fast way, rarely considering the qualities of the existing urban fabric. During the last decades, research on planning and design models related to the building or integrating of urban infrastructures has been developed and tested via specialised disciplinary approaches to produce insights on the relationship urban infrastructures have with the surrounding urban fabric (Secchi, 2013; Hasan, et. al. 2010; Shannon and Smets, 2009; De Maulder, 2008; Hillier, 1996;). However, additional in-depth research is needed to achieve critical insights on the relationship of infrastructures and their direct environments, starting from their constituent streetscapes - considering the level of the street that defines the perception and use by the inhabitants at an intermediate scale. This paper focuses on an ongoing research project in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), where different visions and models of urban growth are at stake (Figure 1). The recent increase of (foreign) investment in major infrastructures, changes the city's streetscapes drastically. This large scale and formal approach of installing high speed trains, Light Rail Transit's (LRT) or expanded highways and ring roads, to stimulate urban growth, contrasts with the daily routines of the proper citizens that move around by walking or by means of mini buses, both adding to the informal qualities of the city's streetscapes. Within this multi-centred capital, the location of built and planned housing projects, commercial centres, administrative or commercial high rises is studied in relation to the present infrastructural axes and questions models of proximity, accessibility and permeability. Keywords: Streetscapes, High Speed Trains, LRT, Addis Ababa, Infrastructure


Author(s):  
Cidália Ferreira Silva ◽  
Marisa Carvalho Fernandes

What happens when a small city expands from 15,000 to 100,000 inhabitants in the summertime? How do temporary inhabitants of Nazaré (Portugal) change the rhythms of its everyday life? How does large-scale tourism change their supporting economic activities or even replace activities such as fishing? Is this seemingly rigid urban fabric elastic enough to expand and adapt to these exponential “others”? The “impermanent alterity” explains the result of the relationship established between land and water, between the “I” and the “other” that come to Nazaré to step onto the warm sand during the summer days. There is a visible cycle of summer-winter change, which the network of lived time interconnections can be found in simple things like the gray pavement line organizing uses, as a device that adapts matter to the cycles of change. Time is the operator of this “impermanent alterity,” and the residents and outsiders alike make it visible.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jason Macquet

<p>The neglected coastal edge of the port landscape has left behind unreceptive scars on the city’s urban fabric. These prominent locations are pivotal links between coastal towns and the sea; they are currently in very poor condition.¹ This thesis explores a site with these characteristics, Nelson, nestled between the Southern Alps at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. The compact and intimate geography of the Nelson region is surrounded by the ocean; with the city growing central to its port. Due to the once thriving local exports and industrial trade the port hastily expanded, the inevitable decline of the industrial era has resulted in a landscape of disregard which has distanced the city from the water. These neglected waterfront locations now taint the pristine image of the Nelson Haven.  This thesis examines how a carefully considered architectural design can reintegrate this pivotal location back into the city’s urban fabric while reinforcing the relationship between the people of Nelson and the water. This design-led research utilises the sport of rowing with its link to the water as the catalyst to reconnect the people of Nelson to the waterfront and the water itself.  This design-led thesis employs the ideologies of atmospheric experiences to materialise the importance of water to sense of place. This is achieved by exploiting the atmospheric experiences of material, space and time through an architectural dialogue with the water’s duality. The Nelson Haven experiences vast tidal movements which forms the foundations for the experience observed at the interface of architecture and water. This thesis further argues that this framework of architectural experience has the potential to serve as a catalyst project to rejuvenate and reintegrate the city of Nelson with its prime waterfront location.  ¹ “Rutherford & Trafalgar Parks & Maitai Walkway” Nelson City Council. accessed July 15, 2015. http://nelson.govt.nz/assets/Leisure/Downloads/R-and-T-parks-redevelopment.pdf.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jason Macquet

<p>The neglected coastal edge of the port landscape has left behind unreceptive scars on the city’s urban fabric. These prominent locations are pivotal links between coastal towns and the sea; they are currently in very poor condition.¹ This thesis explores a site with these characteristics, Nelson, nestled between the Southern Alps at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. The compact and intimate geography of the Nelson region is surrounded by the ocean; with the city growing central to its port. Due to the once thriving local exports and industrial trade the port hastily expanded, the inevitable decline of the industrial era has resulted in a landscape of disregard which has distanced the city from the water. These neglected waterfront locations now taint the pristine image of the Nelson Haven.  This thesis examines how a carefully considered architectural design can reintegrate this pivotal location back into the city’s urban fabric while reinforcing the relationship between the people of Nelson and the water. This design-led research utilises the sport of rowing with its link to the water as the catalyst to reconnect the people of Nelson to the waterfront and the water itself.  This design-led thesis employs the ideologies of atmospheric experiences to materialise the importance of water to sense of place. This is achieved by exploiting the atmospheric experiences of material, space and time through an architectural dialogue with the water’s duality. The Nelson Haven experiences vast tidal movements which forms the foundations for the experience observed at the interface of architecture and water. This thesis further argues that this framework of architectural experience has the potential to serve as a catalyst project to rejuvenate and reintegrate the city of Nelson with its prime waterfront location.  ¹ “Rutherford & Trafalgar Parks & Maitai Walkway” Nelson City Council. accessed July 15, 2015. http://nelson.govt.nz/assets/Leisure/Downloads/R-and-T-parks-redevelopment.pdf.</p>


VASA ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Hanji Zhang ◽  
Dexin Yin ◽  
Yue Zhao ◽  
Yezhou Li ◽  
Dejiang Yao ◽  
...  

Summary: Our meta-analysis focused on the relationship between homocysteine (Hcy) level and the incidence of aneurysms and looked at the relationship between smoking, hypertension and aneurysms. A systematic literature search of Pubmed, Web of Science, and Embase databases (up to March 31, 2020) resulted in the identification of 19 studies, including 2,629 aneurysm patients and 6,497 healthy participants. Combined analysis of the included studies showed that number of smoking, hypertension and hyperhomocysteinemia (HHcy) in aneurysm patients was higher than that in the control groups, and the total plasma Hcy level in aneurysm patients was also higher. These findings suggest that smoking, hypertension and HHcy may be risk factors for the development and progression of aneurysms. Although the heterogeneity of meta-analysis was significant, it was found that the heterogeneity might come from the difference between race and disease species through subgroup analysis. Large-scale randomized controlled studies of single species and single disease species are needed in the future to supplement the accuracy of the results.


Author(s):  
Alexander Vasilievich Dvernik

The article studies different shell constructions of mid-water trawls and their properties. The problem settled is suggested to be solved taking into account real geometric interrelations between spacious and surface properties of cone shells. The author suggests to accept a so-called geometric quality coefficient as a criterion of the properties of a conical shell, which represents the ratio of the shell to the area of its side surface and by analogy to use it to the shell of the trawl. The relationship between the trawl dimensions and geometric quality coefficient have been studied. Comparing these figures with the actual characteristics of trawls showed good convergence. According to the results of theoretic analysis and parameters calculation, trawl large-size shells will always have advantages in geometric characteristics over mid-size and, especially, small-size shells. The results of the analysis can be used for approximate calculations of the parameters of the trawl and justification of ways to improve the performance of existing mid-water trawls.


2020 ◽  
pp. 27-34
Author(s):  
Vladimir Batiuk

In this article, the ''Cold War'' is understood as a situation where the relationship between the leading States is determined by ideological confrontation and, at the same time, the presence of nuclear weapons precludes the development of this confrontation into a large-scale armed conflict. Such a situation has developed in the years 1945–1989, during the first Cold War. We see that something similar is repeated in our time-with all the new nuances in the ideological struggle and in the nuclear arms race.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Karami ◽  
Brandon Bookstaver ◽  
Melissa Nolan

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly all aspects of life and has posed significant threats to international health and the economy. Given the rapidly unfolding nature of the current pandemic, there is an urgent need to streamline literature synthesis of the growing scientific research to elucidate targeted solutions. While traditional systematic literature review studies provide valuable insights, these studies have restrictions, including analyzing a limited number of papers, having various biases, being time-consuming and labor-intensive, focusing on a few topics, incapable of trend analysis, and lack of data-driven tools. OBJECTIVE This study fills the mentioned restrictions in the literature and practice by analyzing two biomedical concepts, clinical manifestations of disease and therapeutic chemical compounds, with text mining methods in a corpus containing COVID-19 research papers and find associations between the two biomedical concepts. METHODS This research has collected papers representing COVID-19 pre-prints and peer-reviewed research published in 2020. We used frequency analysis to find highly frequent manifestations and therapeutic chemicals, representing the importance of the two biomedical concepts. This study also applied topic modeling to find the relationship between the two biomedical concepts. RESULTS We analyzed 9,298 research papers published through May 5, 2020 and found 3,645 disease-related and 2,434 chemical-related articles. The most frequent clinical manifestations of disease terminology included COVID-19, SARS, cancer, pneumonia, fever, and cough. The most frequent chemical-related terminology included Lopinavir, Ritonavir, Oxygen, Chloroquine, Remdesivir, and water. Topic modeling provided 25 categories showing relationships between our two overarching categories. These categories represent statistically significant associations between multiple aspects of each category, some connections of which were novel and not previously identified by the scientific community. CONCLUSIONS Appreciation of this context is vital due to the lack of a systematic large-scale literature review survey and the importance of fast literature review during the current COVID-19 pandemic for developing treatments. This study is beneficial to researchers for obtaining a macro-level picture of literature, to educators for knowing the scope of literature, to journals for exploring most discussed disease symptoms and pharmaceutical targets, and to policymakers and funding agencies for creating scientific strategic plans regarding COVID-19.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Olthaar ◽  
Wilfred Dolfsma ◽  
Clemens Lutz ◽  
Florian Noseleit

In a competitive business environment at the Bottom of the Pyramid smallholders supplying global value chains may be thought to be at the whims of downstream large-scale players and local market forces, leaving no room for strategic entrepreneurial behavior. In such a context we test the relationship between the use of strategic resources and firm performance. We adopt the Resource Based Theory and show that seemingly homogenous smallholders deploy resources differently and, consequently, some do outperform others. We argue that the ‘resource-based theory’ results in a more fine-grained understanding of smallholder performance than approaches generally applied in agricultural economics. We develop a mixed-method approach that allows one to pinpoint relevant, industry-specific resources, and allows for empirical identification of the relative contribution of each resource to competitive advantage. The results show that proper use of quality labor, storage facilities, time of selling, and availability of animals are key capabilities.


Author(s):  
Richard Culliford ◽  
Alex J. Cornish ◽  
Philip J. Law ◽  
Susan M. Farrington ◽  
Kimmo Palin ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Epidemiological studies of the relationship between gallstone disease and circulating levels of bilirubin with risk of developing colorectal cancer (CRC) have been inconsistent. To address possible confounding and reverse causation, we examine the relationship between these potential risk factors and CRC using Mendelian randomisation (MR). Methods We used two-sample MR to examine the relationship between genetic liability to gallstone disease and circulating levels of bilirubin with CRC in 26,397 patients and 41,481 controls. We calculated the odds ratio per genetically predicted SD unit increase in log bilirubin levels (ORSD) for CRC and tested for a non-zero causal effect of gallstones on CRC. Sensitivity analysis was applied to identify violations of estimator assumptions. Results No association between either gallstone disease (P value = 0.60) or circulating levels of bilirubin (ORSD = 1.00, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.96–1.03, P value = 0.90) with CRC was shown. Conclusions Despite the large scale of this study, we found no evidence for a causal relationship between either circulating levels of bilirubin or gallstone disease with risk of developing CRC. While the magnitude of effect suggested by some observational studies can confidently be excluded, we cannot exclude the possibility of smaller effect sizes and non-linear relationships.


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