scholarly journals Journeying to the actual World through digital games: The Urban Histories Reloaded project

2021 ◽  
pp. 271-294
Author(s):  
Stefano Caselli ◽  
Farah Polato ◽  
Mauro Salvador

The paper aims at reflecting on the potential of digital games to convey meaning, tell stories and, most importantly, become a tool to discover and experience the actual world. Using as a case study the experience of the Urban Histories Reloaded. Creatività videoludica per azioni di cittadinanza (Urban Histories Reloaded. Digital Game Creativity for citizenship actions) project (UHR), we will discuss the role digital games can play in activating territorial processes, by favouring the engagement with the actual world as well as with playful approaches to city living. In particular, we will focus on the artist residency for game designers, game artists, and game programmers held in Padua between September and October 2020 within the frame of the project and on its main outcome, the mobile game MostaScene. MostaScene consists of a fifteen-minute mobile game set in District 5 Armistizio-Savonarola of Padua. Both its design and its overall content have intertwined with the urban space since the very beginning. Above all, we will inspect the use of digital games for city-making actions via two different paths: on the one hand, through the involvement of stakeholders (public institutions and specific groups, but also and most importantly citizens) as co-designers; on the other hand, using digital games as non-functional experiences that may encourage innovative interpretations of the urban space for player. From a theoretical perspective, this research requires us to look at digital games as both fictional worlds that involve imagination and interpretation, as well as digital worlds that are experienced as part of reality in a phenomenological sense. Once this is acknowledged, we can provide an overview of how games can tackle reality and engage with the actual world.

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-79
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Nikorowicz-Zatorska

Abstract The present paper focuses on spatial management regulations in order to carry out investment in the field of airport facilities. The construction, upgrades, and maintenance of airports falls within the area of responsibility of local authorities. This task poses a great challenge in terms of organisation and finances. On the one hand, an active airport is a municipal landmark and drives local economic, social and cultural development, and on the other, the scale of investment often exceeds the capabilities of local authorities. The immediate environment of the airport determines its final use and prosperity. The objective of the paper is to review legislation that affects airports and the surrounding communities. The process of urban planning in Lodz and surrounding areas will be presented as a background to the problem of land use management in the vicinity of the airport. This paper seeks to address the following questions: if and how airports have affected urban planning in Lodz, does the land use around the airport prevent the development of Lodz Airport, and how has the situation changed over the time? It can be assumed that as a result of lack of experience, land resources and size of investments on one hand and legislative dissonance and peculiar practices on the other, aviation infrastructure in Lodz is designed to meet temporary needs and is characterised by achieving short-term goals. Cyclical problems are solved in an intermittent manner and involve all the municipal resources, so there’s little left to secure long-term investments.


Author(s):  
Luigia Mocerino ◽  
Franco Quaranta

The scope of this work is to try to quantify the reduction of emissions due to COVID-19; an analysis covering the entire port of Naples will be presented. The explosion of the global pandemic from SARS-CoV-2 led to the adoption of local and global countermeasures aimed at containing contagions. The transportation sector, and in particular the passenger moving sector, was deeply affected; this almost total block of movements between regions and countries if, on the one hand, seriously slowed the economy, on the other, it drastically reduced the emissions on a global and local scale. In this work, the case study of the cruise ships berthed at the Maritime Station (Stazione Marittima) in the port of Naples is examined. The traffic of cruise ships during the lockdown and in the immediately following months was analysed and compared first with respect to the calendars scheduled for the same period and then with respect to the same months of 2019. The reduction in number of cruise ships and passengers were analysed and compared to the previous trends. The vessels collected, for 2019 and 2020 (both those that arrived and those that suffered the effects of the movement block) were subsequently characterized in terms of power and speed. Finally, an estimate of the emissions of NOX, SOX, CO2 produced and saved was carried out. The 2020 results will be compared with the hypothetical emissions that would have occurred in the absence of the lockdown and with those of the same period of the previous year.


Author(s):  
Maurice Roche

This chapter explores the ‘material embedding’ of mega-event spectacles in the legacies they leave in host cities which can be of both a negative and positive kind, and consist of the creation of new place and space legacies. These themes are illustrated with reference to the modern Olympics, and particularly in the contemporary period. The chapter’s main focus is on Olympic mega-events as urban ‘place-makers’. That is they often involve new constructions, on the one hand of sports and related event facilities complexes, and on the other hand of community-related developments in housing and places of employment. Since the turn of the millennium they are now effectively required by the IOC bidding system to leave such legacies. The chapter explore such legacies in some detail in the influential case of the Sydney 2000 Olympic project which, in some respects, was understood to represent a ‘model’ for subsequent Olympic cities. The case of the Sydney Olympics is seen to show how mega-events can simultaneously be urban ‘space-makers’ as well as ‘place-makers’. Since Sydney mega-events have often been notably associated with strategically important values and policies of both ‘greening’ and humanising modern urbanisation through the provision of open and green spaces in urban centres.


Author(s):  
Enrico Baraldi ◽  
Giancarlo Nadin

This chapter relies on a case study featuring the business network around Stella, an Italian home textile manufacturer, to illustrate the challenging issue of engaging other firms into complex “Network Process Re-engineering” (NPR) projects. While the strict technological dimension of selecting, developing, and implementing ICT solutions is certainly very important and poses several challenges to this type of projects, this chapter focuses on other types of challenges, namely those pertaining to the nature and quality of relationships between the actors taking part in a NPR project. We stress the importance of the connection between the specific inter-organizational activities that need to be redesigned and coordinated in better ways, on the one hand, and the bonds existing among the actors, on the other hand. We suggest that very advanced and complex coordination tasks, entailing sensitive communication patterns, can be tackled only if supported by strong, integrative relationships characterized by high trust and commitment between the involved parties. We conclude by discussing how the pivotal firms or the “strategic centers” of a network can support and facilitate complex change projects like NPR by carefully combining different strategies, whereby they both exert coercive power and make concessions to their counterparts in the network.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 5128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Zdon-Korzeniowska ◽  
Monika Noviello

In the modern economy, there is a significant increase in interest in tourism, both at the level of states, regions, communes and individual places. Tourism is seen primarily as an opportunity for economic development, but also for social development and activation of local communities. Well-managed tourism can become a way to preserve and protect the natural, cultural and historical heritage of specific places or regions by exploring and nurturing it. Heritage elements become, on the one hand, attractions around which unique tourism products are created, and on the other hand, a kind of distinguishing feature of a given place or region, based on which local communities build their identity and sense of belonging. The concept of creating regional tourism products could integrate these two factors, i.e., tourism and heritage. The article presents the concept of a regional tourist product on the example of the Wooden Architecture Route (case study).


Author(s):  
Giulia Terzian

Abstract The starting point of this paper is a claim defended most famously by Graham Priest: that given certain observed similarities between the set-theoretic and the semantic paradoxes, we should be looking for a ‘uniform solution’ to the members of both families. Despite its indisputable surface attractiveness, I argue that this claim hinges on a problematic reasoning move. This is seen most clearly, I suggest, when the claim and its underlying assumptions are examined by the lights of a novel, quite general and, I contend, promising take on inter-theoretic analogy. The ensuing discussion is intended to serve as both a possible case study and a first step towards the broader aim of the paper: namely, to initiate a wider conversation on the methodology of paradox-solving on the one hand, and the use of inter-theoretic analogies on the other.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 1187-1220
Author(s):  
Francisco de Abreu Duarte

Abstract This article develops the concept of the monopoly of jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) through the analysis of the case study of the Investment Court System (ICS). By providing a general framework over the criteria that have been developed by the Court, the work sheds light on the controversial principle of autonomy of the European Union (EU) and its implications to the EU’s external action. The work intends to be both pragmatic and analytical. On the one hand, the criteria are extracted as operative tools from the jurisprudence of the CJEU and then used in the context of the validity of the ICS. This provides the reader with some definitive standards that can then be applied to future cases whenever a question concerning autonomy arises. On the other hand, the article questions the reasons behind the idea of the monopoly of jurisdiction of the CJEU, advancing a concept of autonomy of the EU as a claim for power and critiquing the legitimacy and coherence of its foundations. Both dimensions will hopefully help to provide some clarity over the meaning of autonomy and the monopoly of jurisdiction, while, at the same time, promoting a larger discussion on its impact on the external action of the EU.


Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (10) ◽  
pp. 2031-2046
Author(s):  
Salla Jokela

There have been two types of scholarly discussion on city branding. On the one hand, city branding has been conceptualised as a differentiation strategy of entrepreneurial cities involved in interspatial competition. On the other hand, researchers have recently emphasised the need to pay attention to increasingly pervasive and transformative forms of city branding, including branding as an urban policy and a form of planning. Drawing on a case study carried out in Helsinki, Finland, this article connects these two approaches by analysing Helsinki’s recent city branding endeavour in the context of the qualitative transformation of the entrepreneurial city. The article shows how city branding highlights and constitutes the city as an entrepreneurial platform and enabler bound up by the extended entrepreneurialisation of society.


2020 ◽  
pp. 105268462097206
Author(s):  
Jeff Walls

Schools are expected to be sites of caring, but there is evidence that both students and adults often experience them as uncaring places. One reason is that a sustained and heavy policy emphasis on accountability and demonstrations of effectiveness has placed pressure on educators to perform in certain ways, and to care about things other than caring. This case study explores how leaders and teachers at two schools balance their efforts to care for students, on the one hand, with the performative pressures they feel, on the other hand. Teachers who were able to prioritize a balance of care used collaborative relationships with colleagues to manage the pressure they felt, and took a longer term, more emotionally attuned, and more inquiry-based approach to meeting student needs. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.


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