Proposal of a methodology for accessibility projects on urban roads and places / Proposta de uma metodologia para projetos de acessibilidade em estradas e lugares urbanos

A study of the current accessibility legislation was carried out in order to obtain a clear assessment of the physical aspects of an urban region, given the importance of accessible spaces for integration of the general people, based on the survey of the positive and negative points of roads and public places. From these studies, a systematization of activities was proposed to favor design interventions and corrections in accordance with the ABNT Technical Standards. The methodology is composed by identification e register files of the accessibility conditions, the analysis of post-occupation assessment carried out, postposed by the elaboration of an architectural-landscape-urban project. The main objective of eliminating architectural barriers, promoting safety and movement without interferences, in addition to optimizing of urban place use is completed.

Water-Shed: Architectural Opportunity in Infrastructure

<p>The current systems of infrastructure that comprise water supply are incapable of recognising value in water's urban place in anything other than in empirical terms. The 'Water-Shed' scheme transforms this utility into a rarely considered design opportunity that reinvigorates the relationship between the borough of Petone and its water supply at Waiwhetu aquifer. With a framework compiled from history, art, landscape and architecture practice, it entails the re-appropriation of the systems and technologies of contemporary water extraction. The outcome is an architecture that recovers meaning within this amenity and re-confirms waters central value to life. Light in conjunction with material manipulation are used directly and incidentally to reveal water's character. The scheme also conceives of nature in constructed terms, opening the possibility for infrastructures like Water-Shed to negotiate non-oppositional relationships between city and environment. The result is the maturation of industrial landscape the reinforcement of the hydrological and civic identities of Petone. No longer is water amenity simply reduced to productive issues of cost, efficiency and reliability. Debate regarding the access and availability of drinking water will be one of the defining issues of the 21st century. Water-Shed contributes to this discussion by asking how we can re-think the buildings and sites that form parts of the city's water distribution network.</p>

Water-Shed: Architectural Opportunity in Infrastructure

<p>The current systems of infrastructure that comprise water supply are incapable of recognising value in water's urban place in anything other than in empirical terms. The 'Water-Shed' scheme transforms this utility into a rarely considered design opportunity that reinvigorates the relationship between the borough of Petone and its water supply at Waiwhetu aquifer. With a framework compiled from history, art, landscape and architecture practice, it entails the re-appropriation of the systems and technologies of contemporary water extraction. The outcome is an architecture that recovers meaning within this amenity and re-confirms waters central value to life. Light in conjunction with material manipulation are used directly and incidentally to reveal water's character. The scheme also conceives of nature in constructed terms, opening the possibility for infrastructures like Water-Shed to negotiate non-oppositional relationships between city and environment. The result is the maturation of industrial landscape the reinforcement of the hydrological and civic identities of Petone. No longer is water amenity simply reduced to productive issues of cost, efficiency and reliability. Debate regarding the access and availability of drinking water will be one of the defining issues of the 21st century. Water-Shed contributes to this discussion by asking how we can re-think the buildings and sites that form parts of the city's water distribution network.</p>

Atmospheric Citizenship

In Mumbai the sonic dimensions of place-making and religious life are deeply connected to the right to the city. For Twelver Shi‘i Muslims, who are marginal to both the city and the nation, public religious rituals and processions have long played very important roles in staging claims to the city. Investigating the sonic aspects of urban place-making, including its religious dimensions, this essay draws on an analytic of atmospheres in order to capture the powerful emotive dimensions of place-making through sonic performances. Through its coupling with the feltbody, the sonic plays a privileged role in giving urban locales a specific feel as belonging to particular groups, investing this feel with an air of facticity that is largely immune to discursive critique. This article focuses on ritual performances and processions among Twelver Shi‘i Muslims during the Islamic month of Muharram in order to analyze nondiscursive and atmospheric forms of citizenship.

Transcending the Scottish Postmodern City: Ken MacLeod’s Future Urban Geographies

A place cannot exist if it has not been imagined, if it has not been perceived, as Alasdair Gray famously stated. Scottish Science Fiction goes a step further by emphasizing the need not only to recognise and represent Scottish places, but also to recreate and to re-imagine them in its possible futures. To (re-)imagine Scotland and its places means also to envision its potential spaces. Ken MacLeod is one of the figures who has successfully managed to set Scotland on the Science Fiction map. His novels Intrusion (2012) and Descent (2014) are remarkable examples of what some critics have called ‘Transmodern fiction’. Both are set in urban Scotland in the near-future and they portray new configurations of place. My analysis will focus on the interconnectedness of place as presented in both novels, creating a new territory that transcends the Scottish Postmodern urban geographies. In MacLeod’s fiction, a Transmodern urban place is conceived, where the glocal and the virtual meet in a new multifold reality without ever losing its local specificity

The Scale, Logic and Structure of Intra-urban Place Communities Based on Place Niche Theory

Spatial agglomeration phenomena on the earth's surface permeate in various fields of the natural and human world, yet their researches in human society are relatively few with the focus mainly on the economic concept of "industrial clusters". Precise quantitative descriptions, in-depth logical analyses and overall systematic explanations are lacked in various intra-urban spatial agglomeration phenomena. Using over 10 million POIs in the mainland China, 18 grid network models of 9 grid scales based on two kinds of spatial relationships (co-location/adjacent) are constructed in this article. 23 typical place communities are extracted based on complex network analysis, and four types including 11 sub-categories of agglomeration patterns are summarized. Drawing on the concept of "ecological niche", we further propose the theory of "place niche" and analyze the logic and structure of intra-urban place communities within its framework. This study extends the spatial scales and dominating factors of the agglomeration phenomenon research.

Practices of discursive urban place-making in Brooklyn, New York: (hidden) digital and embodied discourse

This paper investigates practices of urban discursive place-making in selected neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. I investigate the forms and functions of hitherto neglected multimodal data – semiotic landscapes written on the body, (hidden) Wi-Fi Service Set Identifiers, that is, SSIDs or Wi-Fi names, and #Brooklyn Tweets – and how I have compiled these into a corpus. The corpus currently consists of multivariate data including – among others – ca. 1.3 million words of semi-structured interviews with Brooklynites, ca. 8,000 photographs of the semiotic landscapes in Brooklyn, New York, and ca. 47,000 Wi-Fi SSIDs. The aim of this paper is to show which semiotic forms and constructions of both Wi-Fi SSIDs and #Brooklyn Tweets take on foregrounded practices of so-called discursive urban-place-making and how these interact in the various neighborhoods of Brooklyn and in the virtual spheres related to them. I will show how these practices carry the potential for (re-)indexing specific social values of an urban neighborhood or even the borough itself and how Brooklynites and others comment on the respective neighborhoods. They position themselves in the social, cultural, political, and economic spheres of urbanity. The mixed-methods approach draws on corpus linguistic, sociolinguistic, and stylistic methodology.

On the Meanings and Uses of Urban Space in the Arab City: An Historical Perspective

This special issue of The Journal of Public Space deals with the idea of re-visioning places of public gathering in the Contemporary Arab City. The three keywords or concept in this formulation are the “Arab city”, and “Public gathering” and “urban place or space”. It is worthwhile to spend some time interrogating each of these concepts by themselves and in a relationship to each other. We may first ask what is the Arab city? Is it a city that is truly different from its counterparts in much of the global south? It is different from the non-Arab Middle East, or for that matter other cities in the developed world that underwent substantial changes over during the last few decades. Equally important is to posit the question regarding the types of public gatherings that occur in the Arab city today which require a specific spatial accommodation. And finally, it is essential to inquire about the nature of urban space in the so-called Arab city and to interrogate how this space is used to accommodate, contain and sometimes even to restrict different forms of public activities.