Urban resilience

Will COVID-19 end the urban renaissance that many cities have experienced since the 1980s? This essay selectively reviews the copious literature that now exists on the long-term impact of natural disasters. At this point, the long-run resilience of cities to many forms of physical destruction, including bombing, earthquakes and fires, has been well-documented. The destruction of human capital may leave a longer imprint, but cities have persisted through many plagues over the past millennia. By contrast, economic and political shocks, including deindustrialisation or the loss of capital city status, can enormously harm an urban area. These facts suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic will only significantly alter urban fortunes if it is accompanied by a major economic shift, such as widespread adoption of remote work, or political shifts that could lead businesses and the wealthy to leave urban areas. The combination of an increased ability to relocate with increased local redistribution or deterioration of local amenity levels, or both, could recreate some of the key attributes of the urban crisis of the 1970s.

Urban public space regeneration in Tokyo's urban center by urban renaissance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the process and result of urban public space regeneration (UPSR) plans in Tokyo's urban center under the guidance of Urban Renaissance. It aims to clarify why public space has a close relationship with urbanization and urban regeneration, and why compact and diverse urban public spaces can promote public life.Design/methodology/approachFirstly, this paper investigated urbanization and urban renaissance in Tokyo, and analyzed the motivation for implementing UPSR from the perspective of urban policy. By on-the-spot investigations and literature materials, this paper introduced urban regeneration measures of Roppongi Hills to Toranomon Hills, and then summarized the similarities and differences between Roppongi Hills and Toranomon Hills by studying them on the basis of contrast.FindingsUPSR had been an important component of the re-urbanization process and an essential method of strengthening urban vitality. Moreover, it promotes the development of polycentric urban structure and the return of population to urban center. First, the UPSR pattern integrating vertical space and street space can form a net-shaped urban life circle. Second, more diversified public activities can serve more varied groups of people.Originality/valueThis paper systematically analyzes the development reasons and process of UPSR project in Tokyo from both internal and external factors, and summarizes the future development direction of public space through the comparison of the two projects, and provides a reference for urban public space renewal in the future.

Multi-Scalar Metropolisation. Challenges and Opportunities of Plural Urban Reconversion Processes in the Métropole Aix-Marseille-Provence

Marseille is broadly considered a postindustrial city in crisis, which has failed to achieve a functional reconversion and a change of narrative in the age of globalization. Over the last two decades, however, processes of regionalized and integrated metropolisation have had an impact on the city’s urban renaissance prospects. This paper identifies three central projects, which symbolically represent and concretely articulate different axes of Marseille’s metropolisation processes: Euroméditerranée (1995-*); The European Capital of Culture Marseille-Provence 2013; and the institutional creation of the Métropole d'Aix-Marseille-Provence. This paper proposes to approach metropolisation as a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Drawing on the three aforementioned cases, we analyze the different territorial-spatial scales affected, as well as the various geographic scales of governance stakeholders involved. Reflecting on their scopes of impact respectively, the aim of the study is to investigate the challenges and opportunities of multi-scalar metropolisation for Aix-Marseille-Provence, and to discuss to what extent this conflictual plurality might (not) be promising for a consensual metropolitan integration in the future.

»Reclaiming« the City: A Collective Endeavor

This contribution elaborates upon the appropriation of urban space in spatiotemporal and procedural interventions in the example of the city of Kharkiv, as well as the impact of urban space on the process of how various groups rediscover and use various parts of the city. Being moved during collective actions - in the sense of feeling urged to move along - goes beyond routine practices by influencing the city and its perception. It seems that these general processions, celebrations, and festive activities of the residents are their contributions to the process of »urban renaissance« - the rebirth of interest in the urban way of life. Since public spaces reflect the historical inheritance of local communities, joint transformative actions such as, »appropriation «, »production«, and »governance« of urban spaces are considered. This article advocates for the practice of domestication of urban space by the local community, as well as the need for the existence of »urban lagoons« - free (unregulated) areas of the city used as resources for urban development and interaction of citizens.

Urbs in rure: race-grounds, grandstands and the commercialized consumption of urban leisure, 1750–1805

This article brings together three aspects of early modern urban life: the later stages of the urban renaissance, the consumer revolution and horse racing. Those towns identified as having an effectively commercialized ‘race week’ between 1750 and 1805 challenge notions of any trickle-down effect from London. Successful organization and funding came largely from co-operation rather than division between the county aristocracy and gentry and the urban middling sort. Both groups attended, while race weeks were sufficiently popular for many rural and urban workers to sacrifice production time for the allure of their leisure experiences. Racecourse consumer space, with its booths, tents and stands, allowed spectators to enjoy either cross-class mixing or increased social differentiation, the latter most especially on the permanent stone grandstands, an innovation of the period.

Subversions of Ethnicity in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Neo-Sensationist Writings

This chapter examines Yokomitsu Riichi's urban fiction, as well as his modernist treatise, in the context of the rhetoric of urban renewal that emerged in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake. The earthquake, which precipitated a crisis in the ideology of progress that had fueled national modernization for the previous several decades, inflected the fervor over-consumption practices promoted in the language of daily life reform to focus much more intensively on the self and the spirit. Yokomitsu responded to this through his “Neo-Sensationist” (shinkankaku) literature. His essay of that title strategically employs Kantian phenomenology to complicate and subvert essentialist phenomenological models and expose the ideologies of ethnic purity they implied. His urban fiction employed perceptually disorienting language to narrate the experience of protagonists who become cognitively estranged from their environments. In this way, his fiction directly disputed the ethnic essentialism that was chauvinistically being posited as the foundation for a new imperial urban renaissance.