scholarly journals Urban Commoning Under Adverse Conditions: Lessons From a Failed Transdisciplinary Project

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Zielke ◽  
Paul Hepburn ◽  
Matthew Thompson ◽  
Alan Southern
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Urban Ecosystem ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Urban Neighbourhoods ◽  
The Commons ◽  
The City

While the commons and commoning are generally associated with community-based ecosystems at the localised scale of the neighbourhood, ambitious reinterpretations explore possibilities for scaling up commoning as a collaborative and sustainable form of urban governance engaging multiple stakeholders through the quintuple helix. Inspired by the City as Commons approach first imagined and formulated in Bologna, Italy, this paper presents original findings from a transdisciplinary action research project for studying and cultivating commoning-as-governance in a politically disaffected and economically marginalised inner-city neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. It examines the social relations (re)constituting an urban ecosystem for commoning and asks how such initiatives for designing collaborative programmes for transforming urban environments through public-common partnerships might work in contexts in which the material and affective resources for commoning have been exhausted by post-democratic privatisation and neoliberal austerity. Drawing on theories of radical democracy and post-politics, the City as Commons approach is critically evaluated and argued to be insufficient to the challenging task of engendering commoning in the disintegrating urban neighbourhoods that would arguably benefit most from such activities. The paper tells the story of how this transdisciplinary project ultimately failed in its aims and, through engagement with recent interventions on the politics of failure in the neoliberal university, reflects on the implications for future action research on commoning.

Times of the city

2002 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich Mückenberger ◽  
Jean-Yves Boulin
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Local Time ◽  
Local Authority ◽  
Interdisciplinary Cooperation ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Empirical Survey ◽  
European Foundation ◽  
Working And Living Conditions ◽  
The City

Urban time policies have to be regarded and embarked upon as a democratic and cross-sectional process. For such policies to become institutionalised requires citizens’ forums, model experiments and surveys within the community as well as interdisciplinary cooperation between the various branches of the local authority administration. The article has its focus first on Eurexcter — a European action-research project in five European countries which has been promoting practical experiments with local time policies — and secondly on an empirical survey concerning time policies in Europe conducted for the European Foundation for the Improvement of Working and Living Conditions/Dublin.

Participatory budgeting for culture: handing power to communities?

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-146
Author(s):  
Phil Jones
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Action Research ◽  
Participatory Action Research ◽  
Participatory Budgeting ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Global North ◽  
The City

The concept of participatory budgeting was developed as a means of bypassing corrupt local elites and creating better governance in developing countries. Applied in the global north, it attempts to give power back to communities to set spending priorities within their neighbourhoods. This chapter examines two attempts at participatory budgeting for the arts in Birmingham – the city council’s Arts Champions scheme and a participatory action research project led by the author. Two key problems highlighted by the case studies are identified. First, funders being reluctant to hand full control to neighbourhoods over how spending is undertaken, with a tendency to push communities toward the funders’ spending priorities. Second, and related to this, is a lack of capacity at neighbourhood level to move beyond the “ideas generation” stage, toward having the confidence to design and commission cultural projects to realise those ideas. This speaks to wider problems in deprived communities – notably education, skills and confidence – that cannot be tackled simply by adding cultural activity.

Realising the City

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Entrepreneurial City ◽  
Football Fans ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City ◽  
Distributed Analysis

This book demonstrates how a city is constituted in the productive tension between making and realising, between directing activity and allowing for its emergence. It presents nine ethnographic accounts across Manchester UK, including residential neighbourhoods, cultural events, public spaces, the council, areas of urban regeneration and the airport. The authors examine the dynamics of power for those developing the city, experiencing such interventions and the spaces in-between. These perspectives trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant post-industrial city, showing how people’s decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. The ethnographic accounts focus on issues including self-policing (Smith), loss and de-industrialisation (Lewis), disenfranchised football fans, (Poulton), sexuality and public space (Atkins), nurturing an emergent city (Symons), defining the commons in public spaces (Lang), conflicting futures thinking (Pieri) networked urban governance (Knox), and how airport design shapes behaviour (O’Doherty). Their specificity provides grounded contexts for identifying ideological patterns and structural processes. They demonstrate the potential of ethnographies to beyond the particular. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester’s renaissance as an entrepreneurial city. The Afterword argues that even though a city’s future may be planned, it does not materialise as the perfect representation of its blueprint drawings, strategies or vision documents. Instead it is realised through the accumulative efforts of all those who live and work in the city. Researchers of cities can undertake a similar distributed analysis, attending to the unexpected insights that emerge through an open and discursive ethnographic process.

scholarly journals EVALUATING URBAN INTENSITY THROUGH A CITY INFORMATION MODEL – INTERMEDIATE RESULTS FROM AN ACTION RESEARCH PROJECT

2021 ◽  
Vol VIII-4/W2-2021 ◽  
pp. 153-160
Author(s):  
A. Deprêtre ◽  
F. Jacquinod
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Information Model ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Automated Quantification ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Urban Analysis ◽  
Intermediate Results ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

Abstract. Urban planning is a very complex task, especially considering the many challenges it faces, including an increasing need for housing in response to demographic growth and a need to limit abusive land artificialisation. As part of an interdisciplinary action-research project focused on experimenting with various uses of an existing City Information Model (CIM) for urban design, we are developing a new indicator to characterize urban intensity and a method to quantify it through the City Information Model (CIM) of a French eco-district. Our project is ongoing, and, in this paper, we present intermediate results on the potential of this CIM to support the automated quantification of our urban intensity indicator. We also describe the solutions currently implemented so that our experimental CIM can provide the necessary information for a more complete and automated urban intensity analysis. Finally, we shed light on key issues regarding the use of CIM, specifically CIM made up of various BIM models (of buildings lots and public spaces) for urban analysis at the district scale during the design phase. These issues include the need to generalize BIM entities and to manage property sets and nomenclatures to allow automation of analyses at the district scale, as long as there is no BIM+ data model allowing for urban analysis.

Action Research between Large-Scale Socioeconomic Changes and Workplace-Level Developmental Activities

1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-229
Author(s):  
Antti Kasvio ◽  
Maarit Lahtonen
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Socioeconomic Changes ◽  
Internationalization Strategies ◽  
The City

Global economic competition is currently placing modern welfare states under increasing pressure to change. New kinds of solutions must be sought in all spheres and at all levels of the state's functioning. But it is very difficult to mediate the macro- and micro-level approaches in a sensible manner and to utilize the innovatory potentials of social science in actual research practice. This article describes a current ongoing action research project within the City of Helsinki for the development of work in a number of the City's workplaces. The local developmental activities are closely connected to broader discussions about the development of the city's internationalization strategies and of the role of high-quality welfare services in their realization. The project assumes that it is possible to build a fruitful interaction between the development of new practices at local level and the broader strategic discussions that are going on in other echelons of the City's organization.

scholarly journals Curating Inclusive Cities through Food and Art

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Tammy Hulbert
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Mobile System ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Socially Engaged Art

Flavours of Glenroy (2013–4) was an action research project where artists imagined mobile edible gardens as a way to connect and engage with locals through project presentation and execution. As a socially engaged art project, it focused on developing ways to connect the mobile, diverse and transforming community of Glenroy, Victoria, Australia. The transnational, Australian dream suburb, reflecting the fluid and globalizing conditions of our cities, was emphasized through the strategy of growing and distributing plants using a mobile system that aligned with the mobility and diversity of the suburb. The project emphasized how social relations, encouraged through art, has the capacity to transform public spaces, providing a platform to introduce new voices and narratives of a community and encourage inclusive participation in sustainable citizenship.

Minimetrò in Perugia as leverage for urban regeneration

TERRITORIO ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 148-163
Author(s):  
Luca Fondacci
Keyword(s):  
Urban Regeneration ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Sustainable Mobility ◽  
Field Surveys ◽  
Peripheral Area ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Considerable Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Historical Centre

In the 1970s, the fragile historical centre of the city of Perugia was a key area where the binomial of sustainable mobility and urban regeneration was developed and applied. At the turn of the xxi century, the low carbon automatic people-mover Minimetrò broadened that application from the city's historical centre to the outskirts, promoting the enhancement of several urban environments. This paper is the outcome of an investigation of original sources, field surveys and direct interviews, which addresses the Minimetrò as the backbone of a wide regeneration process which has had a considerable impact on the economic development of a peripheral area of the city which was previously devoid of any clear urban sense. The conclusion proposes some solutions to improve the nature of the Minimetrò as an experimental alternative means of transport.

Exploring the Fourth Order

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Barend KLITSIE ◽  
Rebecca PRICE ◽  
Christine DE LILLE
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Fourth Order ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Building Trust ◽  
Current Business

Companies are organised to fulfil two distinctive functions: efficient and resilient exploitation of current business and parallel exploration of new possibilities. For the latter, companies require strong organisational infrastructure such as team compositions and functional structures to ensure exploration remains effective. This paper explores the potential for designing organisational infrastructure to be part of fourth order subject matter. In particular, it explores how organisational infrastructure could be designed in the context of an exploratory unit, operating in a large heritage airline. This paper leverages insights from a long-term action research project and finds that building trust and shared frames are crucial to designing infrastructure that affords the greater explorative agenda of an organisation.

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