scholarly journals La recuperación del espacio público y la evolución del patrimonio común: prácticas colaborativas a través de la agencia cultural / Restoring the public space and the evolution of common patrimony: collaborative practices via cultural agency

Author(s):  
Salvador Leetoy ◽  
Diego Zavala Scherer

Resumen: Este artículo revisa el uso de prácticas creativas promovidas por agentes culturales que compiten discursivamente con la racionalidad instrumental imperante en las sociedades modernas contemporáneas. Particularmente, los casos que aquí se exploran son acciones colaborativas llevadas a cabo por dos asociaciones de la ciudad mexicana de Guadalajara: el despacho de urbanismo CUADRA y Fundación CEDAT. Se analizan, por un lado, iniciativas de intervención artística a través del grafiti como forma de creación de identidad; y por el otro, la exposición y comunicación realizada a través del documental como herramientas de reactivación y socialización de espacios públicos.Palabras clave: agencia cultural, consumo cultural, capital social, espacio público.Abstract: This article offers a critical route for studying creative practices challenging instrumental reason in contemporary modern societies. Particularly, this article explores a couple of cultural agency strategies undertaken by civic associations in Guadalajara, Mexico: the urban studies agency CUADRA and CEDAT Foundation.  On the one hand, a discussion is held with regard to the revitalization of collective identities through the production of collaborative graffiti paintings. On the other hand, it presents an analysis about the strategic use of video documentaries for communicating participatory civic actions and its function to restore public spaces. Keywords: Cultural Agency, Cultural Consumption, Social Capital, Public Space.

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valérie Amiraux

This article is based on ongoing fieldwork conducted in France and Quebec with Muslim women who stopped wearing a headscarf. It offers a puzzle for reflection: what is achieved when a sign of religious affiliation disappears (in this instance, wearing a headscarf)? The first part of the article describes the general framework in which public conversations about the visible piety expressed by Muslim women has been discussed in public spaces. The second part looks at the double bind in which Muslim women have been placed by being asked, on the one hand, to be as discrete as possible when expressing their religiosity and, on the other, to behave in full transparency. How and under which conditions can these women ‘find a place’ in the public space (Joseph, 1995) of secular societies? To conclude, the article invites reflection on the role of secrecy, the impossibility as well as the necessity of the secret in society in order to be able to consider the proper room available for pious female citizens in democratic secular societies.


2020 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Barbara Konecka-Szydłowska

Public space of the Morasko Campus in Poznań in the opinion of students Public spaces are an important part of urban space. The paper presents the results of the research on the assessment of the public space of the Morasko Campus situated in the northern part of Poznan. The analysis covers the years 2006 and 2017 and uses the semantic differential method worked out by Osgood, Succi and Tannenbaum in 1957. The study of public space was conducted in terms of five basic categories of spatial order: (1) town-planning – architectural order, (2) functional order, (3) aesthetic order, (4) social order and (5) ecological order. The obtained results show that, in the opinion of students, the Morasko space obtained a higher assessment in all the categories over the study period (an increase in the average assessment from 3.9 to 4.8). In 2017, ecological order was the category assessed highest , and functional order the one assessed lowest,. In the studied years the Campus space was assessed lowest by the students of the Faculty of Geographical and Geological Sciences, which was caused by its peripheral location. Due to the great importance of the natural values of the Campus, their detailed description is presented at the end of the study. Zarys treści: Ważną częścią przestrzeni miejskiej są przestrzenie publiczne. W opracowaniu zaprezentowano wyniki badań na temat oceny przestrzeni Kampusu Morasko, położonego w północnej części Poznania. Zakres czasowy analizy obejmuje zasadniczo lata 2006 i 2017. W opracowaniu posłużono się metodą dyferencjału semantycznego opracowaną przez Osgooda, Succiego i Tannenbauma w 1957 r. Badanie przestrzeni publicznej przeprowadzono w odniesieniu do pięciu podstawowych kategorii ładu przestrzennego: 1) ładu urbanistyczno-architektonicznego, 2) ładu funkcjonalnego, 3) ładu estetycznego, 4) ładu społecznego oraz 5) ładu ekologicznego. Uzyskane wyniki pozwalają stwierdzić, że zdaniem studentów w badanym okresie nastąpił wzrost oceny przestrzeni Kampusu Morasko we wszystkich kategoriach (wzrost średniej oceny syntetycznej z 3,9 do 4,8). W 2017 r. zdecydowanie najwyżej ocenianą kategorią był ład ekologiczny, a najniżej ład funkcjonalny. W badanych latach najgorzej przestrzeń Kampusu oceniali studenci Wydziału Nauk Geograficznych i Geologicznych, co spowodowane było peryferyjną lokalizacją tego wydziału. Ze względu na duże znaczenie walorów przyrodniczych Kampusu w końcowej części pracy przeprowadzono ich pogłębioną charakterystykę.


2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 4577
Author(s):  
Carmela Cucuzzella ◽  
Morteza Hazbei ◽  
Sherif Goubran

This paper explores how design in the public realm can integrate city data to help disseminate the information embedded within it and provide urban opportunities for knowledge exchange. The hypothesis is that such art and design practices in public spaces, as places of knowledge exchange, may enable more sustainable communities and cities through the visualization of data. To achieve this, we developed a methodology to compare various design approaches for integrating three main elements in public-space design projects: city data, specific issues of sustainability, and varying methods for activating the data. To test this methodology, we applied it to a pedogeological project where students were required to render city data visible. We analyze the proposals presented by the young designers to understand their approaches to design, data, and education. We study how they “educate” and “dialogue” with the community about sustainable issues. Specifically, the research attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How can we use data in the design of public spaces as a means for sustainability knowledge exchange in the city? (2) How can community-based design contribute to innovative data collection and dissemination for advancing sustainability in the city? (3) What are the overlaps between the projects’ intended impacts and the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Our findings suggest that there is a need for such creative practices, as they make information available to the community, using unconventional methods. Furthermore, more research is needed to better understand the short- and long-term outcomes of these works in the public realm.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Stutz

AbstractWith the present paper I would like to discuss a particular form of procession which we may term mocking parades, a collective ritual aimed at ridiculing cultic objects from competing religious communities. The cases presented here are contextualized within incidents of pagan/Christian violence in Alexandria between the 4th and 5th centuries, entailing in one case the destruction of the Serapeum and in another the pillaging of the Isis shrine at Menouthis on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the literary accounts on these events suggest, such collective forms of mockery played an important role in the context of mob violence in general and of violence against sacred objects in particular. However, while historiographical and hagiographical sources from the period suggest that pagan statues underwent systematic destruction and mutilation, we can infer from the archaeological evidence a vast range of uses and re-adaptation of pagan statuary in the urban space, assuming among other functions that of decorating public spaces. I would like to build on the thesis that the parading of sacred images played a prominent role in the discourse on the value of pagan statuary in the public space. On the one hand, the statues carried through the streets became themselves objects of mockery and violence, involving the population of the city in a collective ritual of exorcism. On the other hand, the images paraded in the mocking parades could also become a means through which the urban space could become subject to new interpretations. Entering in visual contact with the still visible vestiges of the pagan past, with the temples and the statuary of the city, the “image of the city” became affected itself by the images paraded through the streets, as though to remind the inhabitants that the still-visible elements of Alexandria’s pagan topography now stood as defeated witnesses to Christianity’s victory.


Author(s):  
Minh-Tung Tran ◽  
◽  
Tien-Hau Phan ◽  
Ngoc-Huyen Chu ◽  
◽  
...  

Public spaces are designed and managed in many different ways. In Hanoi, after the Doi moi policy in 1986, the transfer of the public spaces creation at the neighborhood-level to the private sector has prospered na-ture of public and added a large amount of public space for the city, directly impacting on citizen's daily life, creating a new trend, new concept of public spaces. This article looks forward to understanding the public spaces-making and operating in KDTMs (Khu Do Thi Moi - new urban areas) in Hanoi to answer the question of whether ‘socialization’/privatization of these public spaces will put an end to the urban public or the new means of public-making trend. Based on the comparison and literature review of studies in the world on public spaces privatization with domestic studies to see the differences in the Vietnamese context leading to differences in definitions and roles and the concept of public spaces in KDTMs of Hanoi. Through adducing and analyzing practical cases, the article also mentions the trends, the issues, the ways and the technologies of public-making and public-spaces-making in KDTMs of Hanoi. Win/loss and the relationship of the three most important influential actors in this process (municipality, KDTM owners, inhabitants/citizens) is also considered to reconceptualize the public spaces of KDTMs in Hanoi.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 2102
Author(s):  
Tin Oberman ◽  
Kristian Jambrošić ◽  
Marko Horvat ◽  
Bojana Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci

This paper discusses the soundscape assessment approaches to soundscape interventions with musical features introduced to public spaces as permanent sound art, with a focus on the ISO 12913 series, Method A for data collection applied in a laboratory study. Three soundscape interventions in three cities are investigated. The virtual soundwalk is used to combine the benefits of the on-site and laboratory settings. Two measurement points per location were recorded—one at a position where the intervention was clearly perceptible, the other further away to serve as a baseline condition. The participants (N = 44) were exposed to acoustic environments (N = 6) recorded using the first-order Ambisonics microphone on-site and then reproduced via the second-order Ambisonics system in laboratory. A series of rank-based Kruskal–Wallis tests were performed on the results of the subjective responses. Results revealed a statistically significant positive effect on soundscape at two locations, and limitations related to sound source identification due to cultural factors and geometrical configuration of the public space at one location.


2019 ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfredo Manfredini

Considering place-based participation a crucial factor for the development of sustainable and resilient cities in the post-digital turn age, this paper addresses the socio-spatial implications of the recent transformation of relationality networks. To understand the drivers of spatial claims emerged in conditions of digitally augmented spectacle and simulation, it focuses on changes occurring in key nodes of central urban public and semi-public spaces of rapidly developing cities. Firstly, it proposes a theoretical framework for the analysis of problems related to socio-spatial fragmentation, polarisation and segregation of urban commons subject to external control. Secondly, it discusses opportunities and criticalities emerging from a representational paradox depending on the ambivalence in the play of desire found in digitally augmented semi-public spaces. The discussion is structured to shed light on specific socio-spatial relational practices that counteract the dissipation of the “common worlds” caused by sustained processes of urban gentrification and homogenisation. The theoretical framework is developed from a comparative critical urbanism approach inspired by the right to the city and the right to difference, and elaborates on the discourse on sustainable development that informs the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda. The analysis focuses on how digitally augmented geographies reintroduce practices of participation and commoning that reassemble fragmented relational infrastructures and recombine translocal social, cultural and material elements. Empirical studies on the production of advanced simulative and transductive spatialities in places of enhanced consumption found in Auckland, New Zealand, ground the discussion. These provide evidence of the extent to which the agency of the augmented territorialisation forces reconstitutes inclusive and participatory systems of relationality. The concluding notes, speculating on the emancipatory potential found in these social laboratories, are a call for a radical redefinition of the approach to the problem of the urban commons. Such a change would improve the capacity of urbanism disciplines to adequately engage with the digital turn and efficaciously contribute to a maximally different spatial production that enhances and strengthens democracy and pluralism in the public sphere.


2020 ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Iman Hegazy

Public spaces are defined as places that should be accessible to all inhabitants without restrictions. They are spaces not only for gathering, socializing and celebrating but also for initiating discussions, protesting and demonstrating. Thus, public spaces are intangible expressions of democracy—a topic that the paper tackles its viability within the context of Alexandria, case study Al-Qaed Ibrahim square. On the one hand, Al-Qaed Ibrahim square which is named after Al-Qaed Ibrahim mosque is a sacred element in the urban fabric; whereas on the other it represents a non-religious revolutionary symbol in the Alexandrian urban public sphere. This contradiction necessitates finding an approach to study the characteristic of this square/mosque within the Alexandrian context—that is to realize the impact of the socio-political events on the image of Al-Qaed Ibrahim square, and how it has transformed into a revolutionary urban symbol and yet into a no-public space. The research revolves around the hypothesis that the political events taking place in Egypt after January 25th, 2011, have directly affected the development of urban public spaces, especially in Alexandria. Therefore methodologically, the paper reviews the development of Al-Qaed Ibrahim square throughout the Egyptian socio-political changes, with a focus on the square’s urban and emotional contextual transformations. For this reason, the study adheres to two theories: the "city elements" by Kevin Lynch and "emotionalizing the urban" by Frank Eckardt. The aim is not only to study the mentioned public space but also to figure out the changes in people’s societal behaviour and emotion toward it. Through empowering public spaces, the paper calls the different Egyptian political and civic powers to recognize each other, regardless of their religious, ethnical or political affiliations. It is a step towards replacing the ongoing political conflicts, polarization, and suppression with societal reconciliation, coexistence, and democracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Galluzo ◽  
Ambra Borin

Almost two years later of a pandemic condition, one thing is sure: the pandemic will change permanently the world and its systems. Nowadays, the reflection on public space is crucial within a more sustainable and inclusive development at urban scale, amplified also by the ongoing experience of the pandemic that still presents. Public space is a real opportunity to test new urban and social models, thus becoming a principal catalyst for positive changes in the entire urban context. It is therefore necessary to re-establish a relationship between the public space and its inhabitants, providing a system of proximity by highlighting the human and non-human dimensions and consequently connecting services, relationships, and opportunities. Acting in public space is the first step in the development of innovative urban transformations, generated by collaborative phenomena working in the collective interest. The use of participatory practices within the design processes favors the reconnection between people and territory, generating a shared sense of belonging that leads to taking care of one's own places. The reversibility of the intervention and its adaptability are key characteristics that allow experimenting with new ways of experiencing public spaces and responding to unforeseen experiences, thus accommodating the inevitable changes in society. This scientific contribution aims to set forward distinctive points of view on the planning strategies implemented in the pandemic and post-pandemic period to achieve intelligent transformations on a small and large urban scale with an impact from short to long-term; hence shaping the future cities.


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