scholarly journals The Exiled Spaces Of The City: Transforming Laneways Into Community Spaces

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Dmuchawska

This goal of this project is to re-imagine a derelict, underutilized, and exiled laneway in the Roncesvalles Village neighbourhood (alternatively known as ‘Roncy’), into a place that can be celebrated and used by the community. I imagine it to be a project that expands the street level excitement into the laneways. This project is heavily grounded in the practical. The idea for it flourished while standing on a rooftop of a building during a festival in the ‘Roncy’ neighbourhood. After spending the afternoon on the ground we retreated from the busy street to a private rooftop. From here, I was able to watch as people squeezed by each other enjoying street vendors and local artisans and music. But I could also see the intricate network of laneways that stood vacant and still amidst the heavy traffic on the street below. Since then I’ve spent countless hours wandering through the laneways in Roncy hoping to see activity, kids playing, informal economies, or seniors sitting and reading books. But alas, the only people I’ve come across are those looking through garbage and recycle bins in search of bottles to return for a few cents.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Dmuchawska

This goal of this project is to re-imagine a derelict, underutilized, and exiled laneway in the Roncesvalles Village neighbourhood (alternatively known as ‘Roncy’), into a place that can be celebrated and used by the community. I imagine it to be a project that expands the street level excitement into the laneways. This project is heavily grounded in the practical. The idea for it flourished while standing on a rooftop of a building during a festival in the ‘Roncy’ neighbourhood. After spending the afternoon on the ground we retreated from the busy street to a private rooftop. From here, I was able to watch as people squeezed by each other enjoying street vendors and local artisans and music. But I could also see the intricate network of laneways that stood vacant and still amidst the heavy traffic on the street below. Since then I’ve spent countless hours wandering through the laneways in Roncy hoping to see activity, kids playing, informal economies, or seniors sitting and reading books. But alas, the only people I’ve come across are those looking through garbage and recycle bins in search of bottles to return for a few cents.


Food Security ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Kiaka ◽  
Shiela Chikulo ◽  
Sacha Slootheer ◽  
Paul Hebinck

AbstractThis collaborative and comparative paper deals with the impact of Covid-19 on the use and governance of public space and street trade in particular in two major African cities. The importance of street trading for urban food security and urban-based livelihoods is beyond dispute. Trading on the streets does, however, not occur in neutral or abstract spaces, but rather in lived-in and contested spaces, governed by what is referred to as ‘street geographies’, evoking outbreaks of violence and repression. Vendors are subjected to the politics of municipalities and the state to modernize the socio-spatial ordering of the city and the urban food economy through restructuring, regulating, and restricting street vending. Street vendors are harassed, streets are swept clean, and hygiene standards imposed. We argue here that the everyday struggle for the street has intensified since and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mobility and the use of urban space either being restricted by the city-state or being defended and opened up by street traders, is common to the situation in Harare and Kisumu. Covid-19, we pose, redefines, and creates ‘new’ street geographies. These geographies pivot on agency and creativity employed by street trade actors while navigating the lockdown measures imposed by state actors. Traders navigate the space or room for manoeuvre they create for themselves, but this space unfolds only temporarily, opens for a few only and closes for most of the street traders who become more uncertain and vulnerable than ever before, irrespective of whether they are licensed, paying rents for vending stalls to the city, or ‘illegally’ vending on the street.


Noise Mapping ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-161
Author(s):  
Jerónimo Vida Manzano ◽  
José Antonio Almagro Pastor ◽  
Rafael García Quesada

Abstract The city of Granada is experimenting a big urban transformation, attending national and international commitments on clean air, energy efficiency and savings linked to greenhouse gases reduction strategies and sustainable development action plans. This situation constitutes a good scenario for new noise control approaches that take into account the sound variable and citizens empowering in urban design, such as the soundscape assessment of urban territory. In this way, soundscape tools have been used in Granada as a complementary method for environmental noise characterisation where traditional noise control techniques are difficult to be carried out or give limited results. After 2016 strategic noise map and in the preparation of the new noise action plan, the city came across a great acoustic challenge in a new area located outskirts characterised by growing urbanisation, still under development, the greatest legal protection because of sensitive teaching and hospital buildings and the greatest noise exposure from nearby ring-way supporting heavy traffic flow. As quiet urban areas are not characterised by the absence of noise but for the presence of the right noise, this research intended to provide the local administration with results and proposals to transform this conflict area in a pleasant or quiet urban place. Main results came from important and significative differences in morning and evening characterisation, as great differences appear in soundscape assessment over the day and along the soundwalk path, indicating the importance of time and local issues to adequately characterised citizens perception to be considered by administration in the development of strategies and effective noise control actions.


2008 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 411-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Eskola ◽  
V. Peuraniemi

AbstractLake sediments were studied from four lakes in environmentally different areas in northern Finland. Lakes Pyykösjärvi and Kuivasjärvi are situated near roads with heavy traffic and the city of Oulu. Lakes Martinlampi and Umpilampi are small lakes in a forest area with no immediate human impact nearby. The concentration of Pb increases in the upper parts of the sedimentary columns of Lake Kuivasjärvi and Lake Pyykösjärvi. This is interpreted as being an anthropogenic effect related to heavy traffic in the area and use of Lake Pyykösjärvi as an airport during World War II. High Ni and Zn concentrations in the Lake Umpilampi sediments are caused by weathered black schists. Sediments in Lake Martinlampi show high Pb and Zn contents with increasing Pb concentrations up through the sedimentary column. The sources of these elements are probably Pb-Zn mineralization in the bedrock, Pb-Zn-rich boulders and anomalous Pb and Zn contents in till in the catchment area of the lake.


2019 ◽  
pp. 154-191
Author(s):  
Jonah Steinberg

This chapter explores children's engagement with and presence in railway space, a theme depicted, though not thoroughly unpacked, in Lion, Slumdog Millionaire, and beyond. Children use the railway to leave home behind and get to the city, and often stay in railway space for their whole sojourn in the city, or indeed for their whole lives; it is the thread yoking village and city. The railway constitutes perhaps a more powerful metaphor, rendered brick-and-mortar, than any other for child runaways' intimacy with history's forces—empire, capitalism, and rural transformation among them. It is also a space for a very vigorous control imposed upon children's bodies and movements through the vehicle of the state, of informal economies in global capital, and of other mechanisms of power, just as it is a space that the children in question occupy in a type of evasive practice that is irksome to society and government.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
HILMARIA XAVIER DA SILVA

<p><strong>Resumo:</strong> A partir do final da década de 1940 e início de 1950, Campina Grande passa por uma significativa urbanização e expansão, favorecida pelo crescimento econômico. Observamos que trabalhadores do campo migraram da zona rural para a zona urbana de Campina Grande à medida que o trabalho na lavoura estava se tornando inviável em razão das secas e viam no centro urbano de Campina possibilidades outras de trabalhar e ter condições de vida mais dignas. Nosso trabalho intenta refletir sobre como alguns populares migraram para Campina Grande no fim da década de 1950 e década de 1960, modificando suas práticas no mundo do trabalho e alterando as características da malha urbana, já que, concentrando-se na periferia, homens e mulheres outrora lavradores passaram agora a desempenhar funções de vigilantes, pedreiros, lavadeiras, vendedores ambulantes, carroceiros, quebradores de pedra, dentre outras.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave:</strong> Migração, Campina Grande, Trabalho.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract: </strong>From the late 1940s and early 1950s, Campina Grande undergoes a significant urbanization and expansion, favored by economic growth. We observed that rural workers migrated from rural to urban area in Campina Grande in so far as the farming activity was becoming unviable due to droughts and they could see, in the urban center of Campina, other possibilities of working and worthier life conditions. Our work attempts to reflect on how some popular migrated to Campina Grande in the late 1950s and 1960s, changing their practices in the workplace and changing the characteristics of the city, because massing in the periphery, men and women who were ploughpeople in past, have now the role of watchers, bricklayers, washerwomen, street vendors, cart drivers, stone breakers, among others.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> Migration – Campina Grande – Work.</p>


Africa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (S1) ◽  
pp. S51-S71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Malefakis

AbstractFor a group of Wayao street vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, kinship relations were simultaneously an advantage and a hindrance. Their migration to the city and entry into the urban economy had occurred along ethnic and kinship lines. But, as they perceived the socially heterogeneous environment of the city that potentially offered them opportunities to cooperate with people from different social or ethnic backgrounds, they experienced their continuing dependency on their relatives as a form of confinement. Against the backdrop of the city, the Wayao perceived their social relations as being burdened with an inescapable sameness that made it impossible to trust one another. Mistrust, contempt and mutual suspicion were the flip side of close social relations and culminated in accusations ofuchawi(Swahili: witchcraft). However, these accusations did not have a disintegrative effect; paradoxically, their impact on social relations among the vendors was integrative. On the one hand,uchawiallegations expressed the claustrophobic feeling of stifling relations; on the other, they compelled the accused to adhere to a shared morality of egalitarian relations and exposed the feeling that the accused individual was worthy of scrutiny, indicating that relationships with him were of particular importance to others.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorena Muñoz

During the past 20 years, street vendors in various cities in the Global South have resisted aggressive state sanctioned removals and relocation strategies by organizing for vendors’ rights, protesting, and creating street vending member organizations with flexible relationships to the local state. Through these means, street vendors claim “rights in the city,” even as the bodies they inhabit and the spaces they produce are devalued by state legitimizing systems. In this article, I present a case study of the Union de Tianguistas y Comerciantes Ambulantes del Estado de Quintana Roo, a “bottom-up” driven, flexible street vending membership organization not formalized by the state in Cancún. I argue that the Union becomes a platform for street vendors to claim rights to the city, and exemplifies vending systems that combine economic activities with leisure spaces in marginalized urban areas, and circumvent strict vending regulations without being absorbed into or directly monitored by the state. Highlighting the Union’s sustainable practices of spatial transformation, and vision of self-managed spaces of socioeconomic urban life in Cancún, illuminates how the members of the Union claim rights to the city as an example of a process of awakening toward imagining possibilities for urban futures that moves away from the state and capitalists systems, and akin to what Lefebvre termed autogestion toward resisting neoliberal ideologies that currently dominate urban planning projects in the Global South.


2019 ◽  
pp. 83-94
Author(s):  
Joshua Cole

This chapter assembles a broad array of archival sources on street-level interactions involving soldiers, café patrons, brothel owners, market-sellers, landlords, tenants, as well as children and adolescents that were retroactively seen as contributing to a rise in tension between Muslims and Jews in the city, beginning as early as 1914, but accelerating considerably in the late 1920s. This accumulation of incidents leading to interpersonal violence converged with and reinforced an atmosphere of political uncertainty related to the activities of the Federation of Muslim Elected Officials led by Mohamed Bendjelloul.


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