scholarly journals Why and how central Europe's largest logistics complex developed on a brownfield site

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
Robert Krzysztofik ◽  
Iwona Kantor-Pietraga ◽  
Tomasz Spórna ◽  
Weronika Dragan ◽  
Tomasz Szymonowicz

The aim of the article is to explain the dependence on key factors and development path in the expansion process of the largest Central European logistics complex situated on postmining brownfield. Here, a highly original example is the city of Sosnowiec in the Katowice conurbation (Poland). In the article, the development of this complex and its model of spatial diffusion, with an indication of both facilitating and restricting aspects of its further expansion is discussed. The following issues are also brought to light: spatial location, urban policy, transport accessibility and local labour market. In the article, the development of this complex is discussed according to model of spatial diffusion.

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110059
Author(s):  
Leslie Quitzow ◽  
Friederike Rohde

Current imaginaries of urban smart grid technologies are painting attractive pictures of the kinds of energy futures that are desirable and attainable in cities. Making claims about the future city, the socio-technical imaginaries related to smart grid developments unfold the power to guide urban energy policymaking and implementation practices. This paper analyses how urban smart grid futures are being imagined and co-produced in the city of Berlin, Germany. It explores these imaginaries to show how the politics of Berlin’s urban energy transition are being driven by techno-optimistic visions of the city’s digital modernisation and its ambitions to become a ‘smart city’. The analysis is based on a discourse analysis of relevant urban policy and other documents, as well as interviews with key stakeholders from Berlin’s energy, ICT and urban development sectors, including key experts from three urban laboratories for smart grid development and implementation in the city. It identifies three dominant imaginaries that depict urban smart grid technologies as (a) environmental solution, (b) economic imperative and (c) exciting experimental challenge. The paper concludes that dominant imaginaries of smart grid technologies in the city are grounded in a techno-optimistic approach to urban development that are foreclosing more subtle alternatives or perhaps more radical change towards low-carbon energy systems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 317
Author(s):  
Ahmad M. Senousi ◽  
Junwei Zhang ◽  
Wenzhong Shi ◽  
Xintao Liu

A city is a complex system that never sleeps; it constantly changes, and its internal mobility (people, vehicles, goods, information, etc.) continues to accelerate and intensify. These changes and mobility vary in terms of the attributes of the city, such as space, time and cultural affiliation, which characterise to some extent how the city functions. Traditional urban studies have successfully modelled the ‘low-frequency city’ and have provided solutions such as urban planning and highway design for long-term urban development. Nevertheless, the existing urban studies and theories are insufficient to model the dynamics of a city’s intense mobility and rapid changes, so they cannot tackle short-term urban problems such as traffic congestion, real-time transport scheduling and resource management. The advent of information and communication technology and big data presents opportunities to model cities with unprecedented resolution. Since 2018, a paradigm shift from modelling the ‘low-frequency city’ to the so-called ‘high-frequency city’ has been introduced, but hardly any research investigated methods to estimate a city’s frequency. This work aims to propose a framework for the identification and analysis of indicators to model and better understand the concept of a high-frequency city in a systematic manner. The methodology for this work was based on a content analysis-based review, taking into account specific criteria to ensure the selection of indicator sets that are consistent with the concept of the frequency of cities. Twenty-two indicators in five groups were selected as indicators for a high-frequency city, and a framework was proposed to assess frequency at both the intra-city and inter-city levels. This work would serve as a pilot study to further illuminate the ways that urban policy and operations can be adjusted to improve the quality of city life in the context of a smart city.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 2323
Author(s):  
Constantin Nistor ◽  
Marina Vîrghileanu ◽  
Irina Cârlan ◽  
Bogdan-Andrei Mihai ◽  
Liviu Toma ◽  
...  

The paper investigates the urban landscape changes for the last 50 years in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania. Bucharest shows a complex structural transformation driven by the socialist urban policy, followed by an intensive real-estate market development. Our analysis is based on a diachronic set of high-resolution satellite imagery: declassified CORONA KH-4B from 1968, SPOT-1 from 1989, and multisensor stacked layers from Sentinel-1 SAR together with Sentinel-2MSI from 2018. Three different datasets of land cover/use are extracted for the reference years. Each dataset reveals its own urban structure pattern. The first one illustrates a radiography of the city in the second part of the 20th century, where rural patterns meet the modern ones, while the second one reveals the frame of a city in a full process of transformation with multiple constructions sites, based on the socialist model. The third one presents an image of a cosmopolitan city during an expansion process, with a high degree of landscape heterogeneity. All the datasets are included in a built-up change analysis in order to map and assess the spatial transformations of the city pattern over 5 decades. In order to quantify and map the changes, the Built-up Change Index (BCI) is introduced. The results highlight a particular situation linked to the policy development visions for each decade, with major changes of about 50% for different built-up classes. The GIS analysis illustrates two major landscape transformations: from the old semirural structures with houses surrounded by gardens from 1968, to a compact pattern with large districts of blocks of flats in 1989, and a contemporary city defined by an uncontrolled urban sprawl process in 2018.


1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (10) ◽  
pp. 1647-1665 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Portugali ◽  
I Benenson

We suggest considering the city as a complex, open, and thus self-organized system, and describing it by means of a cell-space model. A central property of self-organizing systems is that they are not controllable—not by individuals, nor by economic, political, and planning institutions. The city, in this respect, is complex and untamable. Inability to recognize and accept this property is one of the reasons for the difficulties and problems of modernist town planning. The theory and model we present are built to describe the urban process as a historical one in which, given identical initial conditions, each simulation run is unique and never fully repeats itself. From the point of view of urban policy and planning, our heuristic model can guide decisionmakers by answering the following question: ‘given the initial conditions of an inflow of new immigrants (that is, from the ex-USSR), what possible urban scenarios can result, and what are their global structural properties?’.


10.1068/c0416 ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 697-713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Halpern

Reunification profoundly challenged the local government structure inherited from the Cold War period in Berlin. Yet this sudden socioeconomic and political change did not produce any immediate impact on institutional arrangements or policy instruments within the urban policy field. In this context, the implementation of the European Community Initiative URBAN, between 1994 and 1999, offered an opportunity to actors who were willing to challenge the existing balance of power to contest the legitimacy of preexisting interests and representations. The author argues that, in a context of competing interpretations of the issues raised by segregation processes which have left pockets of poverty in both parts of the city, the URBAN programme has managed to become an important driving force behind an underlying process of change. Its innovative approach to urban poverty and social exclusion exerted an impact on the parameters of this process of change, exacerbating existing political and organisational conflicts and challenging local networks, sources of legitimacy, and policy instruments.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Willemien Van Niekerk

It is highly likely that hazards and extreme climatic events will occur more frequently in the future and will become more severe – increasing the vulnerability and risk of millions of poor urbanites in developing countries. Disaster resilience aims to reduce disaster losses by equipping cities to withstand, absorb, adapt to or recover from external shocks. This paper questions whether disaster resilience is likely to be taken up in spatial planning practices in South Africa, given its immediate developmental priorities and challenges. In South Africa, issues of development take precedence over issues of sustainability, environmental management and disaster reduction. This is illustrated by the priority given to ‘servicing’ settlements compared to the opportunities offered by ‘transforming’ spaces through post-apartheid spatial planning. The City of Durban’s quest in adapting to climate change demonstrates hypothetically that if disaster resilience were to be presented as an issue distinct from what urban planners are already doing, then planners would see it as insignificant as compared to addressing the many developmental backlogs and challenges. If, however, it is regarded as a means to secure a city’s development path whilst simultaneously addressing sustainability, then disaster resilience is more likely to be translated into spatial planning practices in South Africa.


REVISTARQUIS ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ángela Matesanz Parellada ◽  
Agustín Hernández Aja

ResumenDesde Europa, en un contexto global de crisis económica, social y ambiental, agravado en el caso español por las consecuencias de la burbuja inmobiliaria, se preconiza la apuesta por la Regeneración Urbana Integrada enmarcada dentro de la Estrategia de Desarrollo Urbano Sostenible Integrado (MHAP, 2015). Aunque ambas estrategias tienen continuidad con el modelo de intervención urbana territorializada de enfoque integrado, impulsadas mediante programas de financiación europeos y dirigidas a barrios desfavorecidos, se incorpora la visión, hasta ahora poco visible, de la necesidad de considerar estas áreas como parte de una ciudad concebida como un todo y en la que resulta fundamental el equilibrio entre sus partes. Esta idea de la rehabilitación urbana como una herramienta de cohesión global, apenas tratada hasta ahora, precisa de un nuevo marco que permita evaluar los resultados de las acciones desarrolladas hasta la fecha, de forma que sus experiencias puedan servir de base para desarrollar nuevas propuestas.Este artículo parte de la necesidad, urgente en el contexto español en el que se enmarca, de definir un nuevo modelo de rehabilitación urbana, que además de integrar las políticas sectoriales y la participación de todos los agentes, incluya el objetivo de la integración de los barrios en un modelo integrado de ciudad. Para ello, plantea un modelo de análisis del objetivo de integración que supere las metodologías, en muchos casos sectoriales, de las actuales políticas e intervención en barrios. AbstractIn the European context of economic, social and environmental crisis, we find theSpanish case where its context is hardly worse, as consequences of an economic model based on real estate market. From this point the European Union’s commitment advocates the Integrated Urban Regeneration framed in the overall context of the strategy for Integrated Sustainable Urban Development (MHAP, 2015). Moreover, both strategies establish some continuity with the line of area-based urban interventions with integrated approach promoted by European programs and targeted on disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Equally the vision of the city as a whole and the necessary balance between its parts has been incorporated to them. This last issue, treated so far in a context with falling interest in planning, requires a new analysis framework to assess the actions taken and also to date and serve as a basis for developing new proposals.Therefore, it is considered the urgency in defining a new model of urban rehabilitation in Spain, which integrates sectoral policies and the (real) participation of all actors, so that, the paper will be based on the need of the neighbourhood’s integration into the city. It is also purposed a possible base of analysis for such integration, which might improve or get over the current urban policy interventions in neighbourhoods.


2019 ◽  
pp. 168-194
Author(s):  
Jan Lin

Examines the impacts of the sharpening gentrification process in Northeast Los Angeles and its socioeconomic and racial overtones as immigrant working class Latino/a families are increasingly threatened by displacement through rent increases, evictions, and socially traumatic uprooting of multi-family networks. Gentrification is tied to neoliberal local state efforts in Los Angeles to incentivize private investment through urban policy strategies like transit-oriented development, transit villages and small lot housing development. I argue the creative frontier of urban restructuring in Northeast LA also generates social violence expressing capitalism’s tendency to foster “accumulation by dispossession” that has been countered by neighborhood “right to the city” movements. I examine the rise of the urban social movements like Friends of Highland Park and Northeast LA Alliance that advocate for the rights of those threatened by housing displacement and eviction, address community and environmental impacts of new high-density housing projects, and campaign for more socially just housing and urban planning policies in Los Angeles. There is also examination of the plight of the homeless and rehabilitating gang members


Author(s):  
Jessica Symons

This chapter argues for an ‘emergent city’ urban policy, inspired by organisers of civic parade in Manchester which involved over 1,800 participants from 90 community groups. The analysis compares the top-down, command-and-control process of cultural strategy development in the city with the nurturing emergent approach of the organisers commissioned by the council to produce a civic parade. Drawing on parade making as a cultural trope, the chapter describes how the parade makers held back, allowing the parade shape to develop rather than over-directing it. It suggests that city decision makers can learn from this restrained approach.


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