Cultural Strategy at the Urban Periphery: The City of Parramatta

Since the 1990s, when the successful cultural-led urban renewal of cities like Bilbao and Glasgow held out the promise that peripheral cities, no less than world cities, could capitalise on culture, much urban cultural strategic planning has sought to gain global attention and achieve socio-economic growth. Such planning has produced mixed results in granting citizens access and production to their city. This essay looks at strategies in multicultural urban areas that lie at the margin of global cities, focusing on the City of Parramatta.

Spatial Grain Effects of Urban Green Space Cover Maps on Assessing Habitat Fragmentation and Connectivity

The scientific evaluation of landscape fragmentation and connectivity is important for habitat conservation. It is strongly influenced by the spatial resolution of source maps, particularly in urban environments. However, there is limited comprehensive investigation of the spatial grain effect on urban habitat and few in-depth analysis across different urban gradients. In this paper, we scrutinize the spatial grain effects of urban green space (UGS) cover maps (derived from remote sensing imagery and survey data) with respect to evaluating habitat fragmentation and connectivity, comparing among different urban gradient scenarios (downtown, urban periphery, and suburban area) in Hangzhou, a megacity in China. The fragmentation was detected from three indices, including Entropy, Contagion, and Hypsometry. Then morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA) was applied for the landscape element identification. The possibility of connectivity (PC) and patch importance (dPC) were proposed for measuring the landscape connectivity based on Cores and Bridges from MSPA results. The results indicate that the farther the location is from downtown, the less sensitive the landscape element proportion to the spatial resolution. Among the three fragmentation indices, the overall hypsometry index has the lowest sensitivity to the spatial resolution, which implies this index’s broader application value. Considering connectivity, high spatial resolution maps are appropriate for analyzing highly heterogeneous urban areas, while medium spatial resolution maps are more applicable to urban periphery and suburban area with larger UGS patches and less fragmentation. This study suggests that the spatial resolution of UGS maps substantially influence habitat fragmentation and connectivity, which is critical for decision making in urban planning and management.

Economies and employment in growing and declining urban peripheries in South Africa

Urban peripheral growth takes diverse forms, including the development of new economic centralities, raising questions about access to employment for residents, especially in contexts where unemployment is high and economies are shifting towards more skilled and service-related employment. This article explores two case studies of residents’ experience of access to employment close to economic centralities on the urban edge in South Africa: the growing northern eThekwini area (Durban), which has developed major retail and office complexes since the 1990s and more recently a new airport and industrial spaces, and a declining industrial decentralisation point established in the 1980s on the eastern edge of the City of Tshwane (Pretoria). It shows the severe impact of industrial decline in the Tshwane case, but while unemployment is less in northern eThekwini, access to employment for low-income residents in these areas is still very limited and constrained. Experiences are however differentiated, suggesting a complexity of outcomes. The cases point to the vulnerability of these economic centralities to economic change and the limits of new developments on the urban periphery to addressing unemployment. These findings have implications for the current advocacy of ‘new cities’ in economic contexts such as South Africa.

The ocean and the city: Spatial forgeries of racial capitalism

This article tries to look beyond what I call the spatial forgeries of racial capitalism in early 20th century Durban, South Africa, a set of renditions of the ocean and the city, to make sense of quite a surprising and relatively unremarked set of events. In a period of racial and xenophobic vitriol, Black subalterns from the Indian Ocean who had lived through harsh periods of indentured labour slowly and concertedly transformed the urban periphery and interstices. I trace three moves through which Indian indentured labour was ‘shoaled’ on South Africa’s racial shores, the way mixed Black populations in the urban periphery and interstices ‘built’ marginal and interstitial infrastructure to support their communal survival, and the way they literally ‘rooted’ themselves in place in ways that make Durban distinctive as an 'Indian' city on African shores, in partial complicity with a deepening landscape of racial segregation. What is clear is that these forms of spatial praxis accomplished nothing less than the decisive dissolution of the fantasy of a white city by the Afro-Indian sea. The complexities of this account also offer a cautionary tale with respect to our own desires for spacetimes of marronage to prove ‘successful’.

The Potential of Urban Peripheries to Manage the Stress Due to the COVID-19

This article focuses on the influence of the urban periphery in human health, particularly, in the management of the COVID-19 disease, which is generated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The periphery of cities can serve as an open space that allows people to get out of confinement and practice healthy activities, without risk of contagion. Therefore, routes of urban periphery can be visited by walkers and cyclists currently during pandemic. This publication emphasizes the potential of the Santo Domingo´s periphery (which also applies to the cities of San Pablo, San Rafael and San Isidro) as a space for rest, fun, recreation and, fundamentally, as a space that helps managing any disease that requires isolation and confinement. Routes of the studied area were chosen to observe the spatial transformations and recreational activities along them. Those routes are used for physical activity and recreation by both walkers and cyclists.

Dekolonialt socialt arbete

The purpose of this article is to identify and analyze the conditions and strategies for creating a critical and decolonial social work in the urban periphery. IIn this article we explore Save the Children’s program ”On equal terms”, that during the past decade created a space for local mobilization in several areas in Sweden, with the purpose of resolving communal problems. The article identifies three elements as central for their critical social work: the empowerment of a new generation of social organizers grounded in the urban periphery; the forming of alliances for the purpose of developing new languages and strategies to address problems and solutions in alternative ways; and the construction of counter-publics through the appropriation of space for the establishment of citizen-driven meeting places. Through these strategies and conditions, a decolonial social work was formed. Inspired by theories of resistance and mobilization, we interpret the work of ”On equal terms” as an expression of the politics of public-making and border work that transcends the separation between activism and social work, giving space for new alternatives and horizons.

Urban Japanese Encephalitis: Time for a Reality Check

Expansion of JEV from its historical rural origin in the Oriental Realm has been evident. Apprehensions were raised by several investigators that the occurrence of Japanese Encephalitis (JE) in the urban areas is a possibility. Creating wetlands, rice farms, and piggeries close to the rural-urban periphery to support the increasing urban population facilitates the migration of mosquitoes, ardeid birds, and pigs in these areas. The presence of vectors (Culex vishnui complex), reservoirs (the ardeid birds), and the amplifying hosts (pigs) together in these urban and peri-urban areas creates highly conducive situations for the JE transmission thus, creating an urban ecotype for JE. Apart from the primary vectors, JEV has been isolated from several species of mosquitoes belonging to different genera. JE antibodies have also been detected in several birds and mammals other than the known reservoirs and amplifying hosts. Such mosquitoes, birds, and mammals might be acting as complementary or maintenance vectors and reservoirs, respectively, which likely can keep the virus circulating perennially in nature. The reported occurrence of JE in urban areas from different geographical locations is decidedly indicative of the reality of the urban JE. It is thus pertinent that an inclusive approach encompassing sustained epidemiological surveillance and monitoring be adopted to formulate season-wise and area-wise strategies to contain JE both in rural and urban areas.

From Scampia to Rione Luzzatti: Marginality and its Language in the Age of Convergence

In the age of convergence, bestselling novels have become parts of the phenomenon known as ‘branding’, and cultural production is highly conditioned by the mechanisms that regulate global markets. This article argues that if the contemporary global novel tends to render the plurilingual experience implicitly to ensure translatability, the use of dialect has become crucial for the construction of marginality on screen for products designed to travel internationally. By focusing on a case study grounded in the Italian context, a comparison between Roberto Saviano's Gomorra (2006), with its extensions in theatre, cinema, TV and fandom, and Elena Ferrante's tetralogy L'amica geniale (2011–2014), with its dramatized versions for radio, stage and television, it compares the intersection of language, space and power in recent examples of transmedia storytelling. Drawing on studies of multilingualism and marginality, the author addresses the following questions: how do linguistic strategies influence the portrayal of the urban periphery as a marginal, subaltern space? How does transmedia transposition relate to interlingual translation? Does the relation between fiction and the socio-linguistic reality represented change in the translation process? To what ends is dialect deployed in transnational productions designed for global reach, and what characterizes the reception by Italian and international audiences? A focus on transmedia adaptations, this article suggests, leads us to reconsider the paradigm of multilingualism in translation.