scholarly journals Inclusive, Safe and Resilient Public Spaces: Gateway to Sustainable Cities?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asifa Iqbal

The rapid urbanization process of cities is majorly coupled with extreme climate change, housing shortage and urban safety issues. These issues are raising new challenges to address the capability of urban resilience. Enhancing Urban Safety and Security is one of the major principles addressed by UN-Habitat in Sustainable Development Goal number 11. Making cities safe and sustainable means ensuring access to safe and affordable public spaces for all. This book chapter aims to highlight how do the city’s public spaces are linked and affected by crime and fear of crime? How do crime and fear of crime interconnect to the built environment in cities while promoting positive urban transitions in terms of safe and sustainable cities? This book chapter explores answers to these questions through the parks and public spaces of the city as a case study. In other words, the book chapter deals with the issue of safety and security by (1) showing links between parks and public spaces, and crime and fear of crime, (2) highlighting how different attributes in the built environment can affect people’s perception of safety, (3) understanding socio-technical perspectives i.e., how technological systems and equipment’s (such as lighting sensors, security alarms, security electronic devices, closed-circuit television (CCTV), smartphones or other technological instruments) are influencing safety/security and sustainability, (4) demonstrating the issues and challenges found in Stockholm, Sweden, and, (5) providing recommendations on how these places can be planned and designed to become more sustainable.

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Ferretti ◽  
Andrea Pozza ◽  
Anna Coluccia

The issue of urban safety is a research topic that has attracted the attention of scholars for several years, particularly in relation to the effects of individual and environmental variables that influence the fear of crime. Some recent studies have redefined the study of fear of crime, widening it to a more general dimension represented by the perception of safety. However, no specific tool has been proposed to measure this construct. In this paper, a new assessment scale of the perception of unsafety has been used to examine the impact of individual factors (gender, age, etc.) and ecological factors (ethnic composition of the neighbourhood, residential stability, etc.) on the dimensions of the scale (general sense of unsafety, perception of physical and social disorder, collective efficacy perception and preoccupation with crime). Results showed a strong convergence with the existing evidence with regard to the ambiguous role of some individual variables, such as gender and age, and for the influence of the characteristics of the neighbourhood.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth E. Cooper

Teaching methods to improve the safety of care for patients has been a priority for nurse educators. This article discusses the student nurses’ use of error reporting tools in the clinical setting, revealing study results completed by the Quality and Safety Officer in a School of Nursing and Health Professions. The aim was to report on the use of safety tools and the perception of safety issues in clinical settings identified by 121 prelicensure baccalaureate nursing students. Responses suggest that it is challenging for nursing students to report errors and near miss events. Barriers exist for the nursing student. The survey reveals difficulty in reporting but discloses that safety for the patient continues to be a primary concern for the nursing student.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zexu Li ◽  
Jiansong Wu ◽  
Mingyu Liu ◽  
Yuntao Li ◽  
Qiuju Ma

With the rapid urbanization in China, directly buried municipal pipelines have been gradually replaced by urban utility tunnels due to a serious shortage of urban underground spaces and weak disaster prevention of traditional municipal pipelines. The urban utility tunnels normally contain electricity pipelines, natural gas pipelines, heat pipelines, sewer pipelines, etc. If a natural gas pipeline leaks, a fire and explosion might occur and lead to serious consequences. In this study, the characteristics of gas explosion in a natural gas compartment of urban utility tunnel are investigated based on FLACS (Flame Acceleration Simulator) simulations. The results revealed that the flame profile undergoes two unstable flame stages. When the ignition position is set at the middle area (100.25, 1.2, 1.4 m) of the 200 m-long natural gas compartment, the maximum overpressure of the gas explosion in the 200 m-long natural gas compartment is 25.17 bar, which is the largest maximum overpressure under all gas explosion simulation setups. It is also found that the length of the natural gas compartment and different ignition positions have slight effects on the maximum overpressure. This study could provide technical support for structural strength design and division of the fireproofing area of the natural gas compartment in the utility tunnel, which is of great significance to improve urban safety during sustainable development.


2020 ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Ahmad El-Atrash

The urban development and rapid urbanization that the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip have recently encountered have adversely affected the quality and availability of open spaces inside the Palestinian urban and rural areas. Public spaces are fundamental in the lives of any community striving to achieve a sustainable and inclusive environment and improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. In that respect, the prevailing planning practices fall short in terms of adequately addressing the provision of public spaces. Laws and regulations are designed to focus on limited physical properties of buildings (e.g. building design, elevation, heights, setbacks, parking, etc.,) with little or no attention to the residual space, inevitably, created between those blocks. Lands are chiefly privately owned, and considered of a very high value due to the artificial land scarcity phenomenon resulted from the geo-political classification of the West Bank Existing public spaces are not welcoming to the general public. Spaces are misplaced and scattered, they offer pre-defined activities and an inflexible environment. Many parts of the society feel alienated to such public spaces, created by a top-down process with minimal integration of their needs and aspirations.


2016 ◽  
pp. 79-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konrad Matyjaszek

The rules of the reservation. On the book Jewish Poland Revisited by Erica Lehrer The paper offers a review of Erica Lehrer’s Jewish Poland Revisited, a publication presenting outcomes of an anthropological research on Jewish-Polish memory projects in Cracow's former Jewish district of Kazimierz. In a discussion of the book's theses, the author critically analyses Lehrer's postulate of 'ethnography of possibility' and the resultant strategy of approval for contemporary Kazimierz as a 'space of encounter' alongside with its rules of participation, imposed by the Polish proprietors of the district on its visitors.The article focuses on two such rules that condition a visitor’s possibility of participation in shrinking public spaces of Kazimierz. First of these laws is discussed as an imperative of abandoning the immediacy of district's physical space and its histories signified by the surviving built environment. Instead, Lehrer introduces a conceptual division of "social" and "physical" spaces, which leads to silencing of otherwise immediately present evidence of the violent past. The second rule is analyzed as a requirement of accepting the contemporary Polish owners’ role of 'brokers" and "purveyors" of Jewish heritage, consequential with an approval of a doubtful legal and moral title to the appropriated spaces.Through focusing on these rules of participation that determine and perpetuate the conditionality of Jewish presence in the space of Kazimierz, the author argues for a necessity of questioning and re-defining the traditional divisions of disciplines that establish conceptual separations of "social" and "built" spaces, as well as for a necessity of a critical outlook on contemporary Central European understandings of "heritage". Such an inquiry is discussed as conditional for overcoming the largely avoided yet still present "heritages" in the history of Polish-Jewish relations: the traditions of violence and exclusion, either social and spatial. Regulamin rezerwatu. O książce Jewish Poland Revisited Eriki LehrerArtykuł stanowi recenzję książki Jewish Poland Revisited Eriki Lehrer, prezentującej wyniki antropologicznych badań na temat żydowsko-polskich projektów pamięci realizowanych w byłej dzielnicy żydowskiej na krakowskim Kazimierzu. Omawiając tezy pracy, autor poddaje krytycznej analizie proponowany przez Lehrer projekt etnografii możliwości i wynikającą z niego strategię akceptacji współczesnego Kazimierza jako przestrzeni spotkania, za którą idzie akceptacja zasad uczestnictwa narzuconych gościom przez polskich zarządców Kazimierza.W artykule rozpatrywane są dwie takie zasady, warunkujące możliwość uczestnictwa gościa w kurczącej się przestrzeni publicznej Kazimierza. Pierwszą z nich autor opisuje jako nakaz porzucenia bezpośrednio dostępnej, fizycznej przestrzeni dzielnicy i niesionych przez nią historii, których znakiem jest ocalała zabudowa. W to miejsce Lehrer wprowadza podział na przestrzeń społeczną i fizyczną, skutkiem czego stłumione zostają ślady brutalnej przeszłości, w przeciwnym razie bezpośrednio obecne. Drugą zasadę autor odtwarza jako wymóg akceptacji roli współczesnych polskich właścicieli jako brokerów i pośredników żydowskiego dziedzictwa, co w konsekwencji pociąga za sobą akceptację ich wątpliwych prawnie i moralnie roszczeń do zawłaszczonej przestrzeni.Skupienie uwagi na regulaminie uczestnictwa, który ustanawia i utrzymuje warunkowy charakter żydowskiej obecności w przestrzeni Kazimierza, prowadzi autora do wniosku o konieczności rewaluacji i redefinicji tradycyjnego rozdziału dyscyplin, który tworzy konceptualny podział na społeczne przestrzenie i architektoniczne obiekty, oraz do krytycznego namysłu nad obowiązującym obecnie w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej rozumieniem pojęcia „dziedzictwo”. Tego rodzaju poszukiwanie uznaje autor za warunek przezwyciężenia ignorowanego zwykle, choć mimo wszystko obecnego w polsko-żydowskich stosunkach „dziedzictwa”: tradycji przemocy i wykluczenia, tak społecznego, jak i przestrzennego. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 01027 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jawoto Sih Setyono ◽  
Wiwandari Handayani ◽  
Iwan Rudiarto ◽  
Landung Esariti

Rapid urbanization in developing countries has brought some unprecedented consequences in economic, social, and most notably environmental aspects. Many cities have to be dealing with the challenges of vulnerability as the risk of disasters increases. In responding to the challenges, the concept of urban resilience has been applied as an important part of the current development policies in many countries. In Indonesia, the current spatial policy framework has underlined the importance of integrating vulnerability and environmental carrying capacity into spatial planning document. However, attention has been mostly given to metropolitan or large urban areas. This policy imbalance has put aside the problems faced by smaller urban areas or small cities, although the growing importance of small urban areas or cities is widely understood. In fact, the problems faced by small cities are not less important compared to that of large cities or metropolitan regions, especially those which are in coastal regions. This research aims at analysing how the development and planning of small cities in coastal areas considers the resilience concept. This research applied qualitative methods based on content analysis of planning documents and secondary data. This study selected Lasem, a small urban area in eastern coastal region of Central Java with some 50,000 population, as a case. This research found that the current spatial policy framework is lacking in integrating vulnerability and resilience dimension in the policy and development processes. The research recommended some key important factors to be integrated in the future urban development model.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 2331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grazia Brunetta ◽  
Stefano Salata

The concept of ‘resilience’ breaks down silos by providing a ‘conceptual umbrella’ under which different disciplines come together to tackle complex problems with more holistic interventions. Acknowledging the complexity of Davoudi’s approach (2012) means to recognize that ‘spatial resilience’ is influenced by many phenomena that are difficult to measure: the adaptation and transformation of a co-evolutive system. This paper introduces a pioneering approach that is propaedeutic to the spatial measure of urban resilience assuming that it is possible to define a system as being intrinsically vulnerable to stress and shocks and minimally resilient, as described by Folke in 2006. In this sense, vulnerability is counterpoised to resilience, even if they act simultaneously: the first includes the exposure to a specific hazard, whereas the second emerges from the characteristics of a complex socio-ecological and technical system. Here we present a Geographic Information System-based vulnerability matrix performed in ESRI ArcGIS 10.6 environment as an output of the spatial interaction between sensitivities, shocks, and linear pressures of the urban system. The vulnerability is the first step of measuring the resilience of the system by a semi-quantitative approach. The spatial interaction of these measures is useful to define the interventions essential to designing and building the adaptation of the built environment by planning governance. Results demonstrate how mapping resilience aids the spatial planning decision-making processes, indicating where and what interventions are necessary to adapt and transform the system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 9263
Author(s):  
Isabelle Soares ◽  
Claudia Yamu ◽  
Gerd Weitkamp

To date, little is known about the spatial aspects of the creativity of university campuses and their public spaces. This study recognises that creativity is the fourth sustainability, because the spatial configuration of campuses and city-university accessibilities are ‘creative solutions’ conceived for human needs. At the same time, creative ideas depend on interactions between individuals and the built environment. Therefore, based on the theoretical framework of the scholars who have explored the spatial aspects of creativity, this study empirically investigates Zernike Campus, Groningen, and its public spaces using a mixed-methods approach that involves (1) a space syntax analysis of the campus’s spatial configuration, (2) volunteered geographic information (VGI) of the users’ perceptions, and (3) non-participatory observations of the interactions between people and the built environment in public spaces with high and low ‘potential for creativity’. The results show that creativity cannot be explained simply by analysing spatial configurations, but that it also depends on the combination of the land-use mix, physical features, positive experiences, and perceptions of a sense of place which enable trust and interactions, and which facilitate creative encounters. Therefore, the mixed-methods approach applied here can help urban planners and designers to address public spaces more effectively, integrating conditions that support creativity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Miguel FERREIRA ◽  
Rui MAIO

It is recognized that both community and urban resilience depends on the capacity of built environment to maintain acceptable structural safety levels during and after unforeseeable events, such as earthquakes, as well as to recover their original functionality. Investing in disaster risk mitigation policies is a great step towards promoting urban resilience and community preparedness, implicitly limiting damage to the built environment and subsequently reducing human, economic and environmental losses. Portugal is a moderate to high seismic prone area as the latest estimates indicate that within the next 50 years the country could be severely hit by a strong quake similar to the histori­cal 1755 event, which left a trail of destruction and death, mainly in densely populated areas, such as Lisbon. This manuscript aims to mitigate the impact of earthquake damage scenarios on social and economical terms, as well as evaluating the outcome of implementing traditional retrofitting strategies to existing masonry building stock located in urban areas of high seismic risk, using the old city centre of Horta, Faial island (Azores, Portugal), as a case study.


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