scholarly journals Waiting for Immigration to Come. The Case of Lodz

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3 (181)) ◽  
pp. 293-317
Author(s):  
Marcin Gońda

The paper discusses the development and implementation of local policy measures towards stabilisation and facilitation of migrant settlement in Lodz at the time of a dynamic increase of immigration into Poland that has taken place in recent years. The narrative, institutional and practical dimensions of urban policy in this domain are under further analysis. The immigration, mainly from Ukraine, is presented by local authorities as a chance to mitigate the advanced depopulation processes affecting the city of Lodz, and they undertake various institutional initiatives to encourage Ukrainian immigrants to settle for good. However, in reality the inflow of immigrant is not considered to be a burning issue. It is seen as a one of many social challenges the city has to cope with and therefore no separate integration instruments have been offered to immigrants. Newcomers are seen as a (temporary) addition to labour force shortages rather than one of the pillars for longterm developments of the city of Lodz.

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-81
Author(s):  
Denys Kutsenko

AbstractThe paper analyzes the transformation of identity politics of Kharkiv local authorities after the Euromaidan, or Revolution of Dignity, the annexation of Crimea, and the War in Donbass. Being the second largest city in Ukraine and becoming the frontline city in 2014, Kharkiv is an interesting case for research on how former pro-Russian local elites treat new policies of the central government in Kyiv, on whether earlier they tried to mobilize their electorate or to provoke political opponents with using soviet symbols, soviet memory, and copying Russian initiatives in the sphere of identity.To answer the research question of this article, an analysis of Kharkiv city and oblast programs and strategies and of communal media were made. Decommunisation, as one of the most important identity projects of Ukrainian central authorities after 2014, was analyzed through publications in Kharkiv’s city-owned media as well as reports from other scholars. Some conclusions are made from the analysis of these documents: Kharkiv development strategy until 2020, Complex program of cultural development in Kharkiv in 2011–2016 (and the same for 2017–2021), The regional program of military and patriotic training and participation of people in measures of defense work in 2015–2017, Program of supporting civil society in 2016–2020 in Kharkiv region and the city mayor’s orders about the celebration of Victory Day (9 May), the Day of the National Flag (23 August), the Day of the City (23 August) and Independence Day (24 August) in 2010–2015.


2019 ◽  
pp. 74-86
Author(s):  
Marianna Kokhan ◽  
Anastasiya Mazur

The article considers the concept of startups and ecosystems of startup development. It investigates the innovativeness ratings of countries and regional ecosystems of startups and the factors influencing the successful development of startups. The article considers the ranking of the best regional startup ecosystems in the world. It covers the experience of the leading regions, whose effectiveness is driven by attention to financing, networking, expanding access to markets, attracting and nurturing talents, accumulating experience and scientific development. Particular attention is given to the impact of the specialization and effectiveness of the regional focus strategy. Based on the methodology and results of the Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking 2019, authors have empirically investigated the startup ecosystem of the Lviv city. Authors described and systemized the startups operating in the city, the elements, and dynamics of the urban startup infrastructure. The preconditions for successful development of startups - financing, talents, experience, connectedness, access to markets - have been identified. The effectiveness of the activity of city authorities, the local policy of promoting the startup environment development - documents, measures and results – have been investigated. The main factors of Lviv’s regional leadership in the development of digital startups in Ukraine are: the dynamic development of the IT industry, the development of digital competencies and the concentration of talent in leading universities, the development of corporate universities and innovative infrastructure, the development of infrastructure and comfort in the city. For the development of the Lviv startup ecosystem, it is recommended to focus the efforts on further accumulation and transfer of experience, retention of talents, improvement of technology transfer systems, focusing on areas of exclusive competence while expanding access to finance and the global market.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 273-287

The article examines the impact of the discourses concerning idleness and food on the formation of “production art” in the socio-political context of revolutionary Petrograd. The author argues that the development of the theory and practice of this early productionism was closely related to the larger political, social and ideological processes in the city. The Futurists, who were in the epicenter of Petrograd politics during the Civil War (1918–1921), were well acquainted with both of the discourses mentioned, and they contrasted the idleness of the old art with the dedicated labor of the “artist-proletarians” whom they valued as highly as people in the “traditional” working professions. And the search for the “right to exist” became the most important goal in a starving city dominated by the ideology of radical communism. The author departs from the prevailing approach in the literature, which links the artistic thought of the Futurists to Soviet ideology in its abstract, generalized form, and instead elucidates ideological influences in order to consider the early production texts in their immediate social and political contexts. The article shows that the basic concepts of production art (“artist-proletarian,” “creative labor,” etc.) were part of the mainstream trends in the politics of “red Petrograd.” The Futurists borrowed the popular notion of the “commune” for the title of their main newspaper but also worked with the Committees of the Rural Poor and with the state institutions for procurement and distribution. They took an active part in the Fine Art Department of Narkompros (People’s Commissariat of Education). The theory of production art was created under these conditions. The individualistic protest and “aesthetic terror” of pre-revolutionary Futurism had to be reconsidered, and new state policy measures were based on them. The harsh socio-economic context of war communism prompted artists to rethink their own role in the “impending commune.” Further development of these ideas led to the Constructivist movement and strongly influenced the extremely diverse trends within the “left art” of the 1920s.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-44
Author(s):  
Emilia KORKEA-AHO ◽  
Martin SCHEININ

In the coronavirus pandemic that has swept the world, the Finnish Government, like many of its peers, has issued policy measures to combat the virus. Many of these measures have been implemented in law, including measures taken under the Emergency Powers Act, or by ministries and regional and local authorities exercising their legal powers. However, some governmental policy measures have been implemented using non-binding guidelines and recommendations. Using border travel recommendations as a case study, this article critically evaluates governmental soft law-making. The debacle over the use of soft law to fight the pandemic in Finland revealed fundamental misunderstandings about the processes and circumstances under which instruments conceived as soft law can be issued, as well as a lack of attention to their effects from a fundamental rights perspective.


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.


Transport ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 418-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Basarić ◽  
Jadranka Jović

The research presented in this paper is aimed at defining a model that enables the management of the relationship between private vehicles and public transport applying the available instruments of city transport policy such as parking policy and public transport policy measures. Statistical data used for modelling is sourced from the database in a wide range of EU cities. The target model was developed in the form of stepwise regression analysis. Very favourable statistical results were obtained, and the subsequent tests on the city of Novi Sad (250000 inhabitants) led to the conclusion that the obtained results were suitable for implementation in practice. The results of the implemented procedure are of great importance for the enhancement of the existing transport policies in cities, as they enable the development of strategies for finding combinations of instruments that would bring the transport system and urban environment into a desired-viable rather than consequential condition.


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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document