Volume 02 (2016)

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/1777

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Open Access
Critical Cities volume 3 Ideas, knowledge and agitation from emerging urbanists
(AESOP, 2016) Tanulku, Basak
Inequality is a matter of everyday life and cities are places where inequality is experienced more violently. As Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield argue, cities, particularly large metropolises are sites to generate and reproduce inequalities, a similar process seen in different parts of the world. They suggest this is a result of what they call the “urban industry”. Critical Cities Volume 3—the third in a series published by “This Is Not a Gateway” (TINAG) platform—is an attempt to explore various urban inequalities. The editors, Naik Deepa and Trenton Oldfield, are actively involved in bringing forward various forms of inequalities related to cities. They formed the platform, which organizes the annual festival bringing together a wide variety of people working on and interested in urban issues. They also run Myrdle Court Press, an independent publishing house, and organise “Salons” to discuss urban and spatial issues. In addition, Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield also advise various cultural and not-for-profit organisations, charities, private businesses, independent publishers and organises courses, produces articles for a range of publications, prepares lectures, and presents research findings at various conferences, festivals and similar events.
Open Access
Editorial introduction Vol 2 (2016) : plaNext New ideas and perspectives on planning
(AESOP, 2016) Hammami, Feras
This volume marks an important stage in plaNext. It publishes original works following an open call, as the special-issue inaugural volume was dedicated to selected contributions from the 8th AESOP-YA annual conference. With the growing interest in plaNext, we see a bright future as a leading open access journal in planning and other related fields. Thanks to the generous contribution of AESOP, all articles are openly available at AESOP’s digital platform, InPlanning, and authors do not pay any article processing fee. In this respect, we envision plaNext as an effort by the young academic community of AESOP to help free the dissemination of knowledge from any unjust global academic system.
Open Access
Honolulu rail transit International lessons from : Barcelona in linking urban form, design, and transportation
(AESOP, 2016) Boeing, Geoff
The city of Honolulu, Hawaii is currently planning and developing a new rail transit system. While Honolulu has supportive density and topography for rail transit, questions remain about its ability to effectively integrate urban design and accessibility across the system. Every transit trip begins and ends with a walking trip from origins and to destinations: transportation planning must account for pedestrian safety, comfort, and access. Ildefons Cerd ’s 19th century utopian plan for Barcelona’s Eixample district produced a renowned, livable urban form. The Eixample, with its well-integrated rail transit, serves as a model of urban design, land use, transportation planning, and pedestrian-scaled streets working in synergy to produce accessibility. This study discusses the urban form of Honolulu and the history and planning of its new rail transit system. Then it reviews the history of Cerd ’s plan for the Eixample and discusses its urban form and performance today. Finally it draws several lessons from Barcelona’s urban design, accessibility, and rail transit planning and critically discusses their applicability to policy and design in Honolulu. This discussion is situated within wider debates around livable cities and social justice as it contributes several form and design lessons to the livability and accessibility literature while identifying potential concerns with privatization and displacement.
Open Access
Immigrant entrepreneurs' access to information as a local economic development problem
(AESOP, 2016) Doyle, Jessica
Sociologists and geographers have examined immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States to discuss what types of industries immigrants enter, why some groups are more inclined to entrepreneurship than others, and how social networks influence business formation. But such analyses have generally not included considerations of how the larger geographic setting in which the immigrants operate—including the urban form, the built environment, and local economic-development efforts—affect entrepreneurial decisions. Meanwhile, immigrant settlement patterns have changed in recent decades, bringing groups of immigrants outside of larger cities and into suburban areas not accustomed to hosting immigrants. In such environments, a would-be entrepreneur might have even more difficulty accessing the information necessary to successfully start and maintain a business. This paper will survey previous literature on immigrant entrepreneurship, largely from sociology, geography, and planning, to argue that local economic-development resources, even when targeted at small business owners, fail to address the needs of immigrant entrepreneurs. Instead, these would-be entrepreneurs rely on their own personal networks and on co-ethnic community support institutions.
Open Access
Preserving and promoting the urban landscape The French a d Italian debates of the Post-World War II decades
(AESOP, 2016) Greco, Elena
The issues of promotion and preservation of urban landscapes are increasingly gaining prominence in international cultural and political debates. These issues can lead to tensions, especially for historical cities, partly because the concept of urban landscape as an element of cultural heritage is still to be acknowledged, particularly on a legislative level. Nevertheless, as the paper highlights, this concept was theorized in Europe for the reconstruction of historical cities in the second post-war period. This paper focuses on the French and Italian debates of the post-World War II decades, because they both elaborated concepts of urban landscape which were particularly advanced for the time. This article attempts to demonstrate their possible influence on the contemporary international debate developed by UNESCO between 2005 and 2011. Furthermore, this paper inspects the origins of the concept of the historic centre, developed particularly in Italy during the 1960s, and examines its relationship with the urban landscape. The reasons for the success of the historic centre are highlighted together with the simultaneous failure of the urban landscape at the legislative level, by inspecting the similarities, the divergences, and the historical connection between the two notions.
Open Access
Prospects for an EU macro-regional approach in the Black Sea region
(AESOP, 2016) Vladova, Galya; Knieling, Jörg
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of the first EU macro-regional strategies as a new instrument for territorial governance. This paper argues that both the benefits and limitations of the macro-regional approach are largely determined by the existing territorial, political, institutional and socio-cultural context of each big transnational area. Studying the debate about macro-regionalisation of the European territorial cooperation, the paper assesses the prospects for projection of the macro-regional idea upon the Black Sea area. It analyses the complex Black Sea regional context, marked by ongoing political and economic changes, studies the cooperation landscape in the area and concludes that despite the existing high level of multi-functionality in the Black Sea, the region currently lacks clear perspectives for the development of a comprehensive macro-regional approach.
Open Access
The spatialisation struggle : The heritage of open spaces in Baghdad
(AESOP, 2016) Van de Ven, Annelies
This article explores the significance of open space to the formation of local culture and identity. Rejecting any absolute categorisation of open-public and closed-private space, the essay attempts to redefine open space, in order to make it more suitable to specific case studies outside the western democratic discourse within which it is often used. Space is a process, shaping the world around it as much as it is shaped by its own circumstances. This also implies that the experience of space is highly pluralistic, a notion made exceedingly clear in the changing structure and meaning of space throughout Baghdad’s history. In light of recent crises in Baghdad the discussion of its spaces has become critical. By analysing the evolution of Baghdad from a spatial perspective, I will explore how embodied experiences interact with the cognitive readings of space within the case of Baghdad. I aim to show the significance of open space to the self-identification of an urban population. This to suggest its immense value to the improvement of cultural heritage management, especially in conflict areas.
Open Access
Towards an ethical turn in urban studies : On the role of information and power in contemporary cities
(AESOP, 2016) Tedeschi, Miriam
This article explores an ethical approach to urban planning, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming. A central argument in this study is that the reality policymakers face when deciding how to pursue good (in the moral sense) actions or how to eschew bad ones is ontologically unpredictable and unstable. Unpredictability and instability are characteristics of urban assemblages, which compose and decompose affecting each other in a positive or negative way. Following Deleuze and Spinoza, this paper claims that urban composition and decomposition are good (empowering) and bad (harming), respectively, in an ethical and amoral sense. However, moral and fixed values, often left unchallenged in urban planning and policymaking, fail to describe these ethical transitions among assemblages: in fact, urban planning and policies’ unavoidable conatus, namely their survival as rational system, is to avoid direct confrontation with ethical and dangerous happenings and, instead, increase their power of acting so as to make urban bodies docile, controlled and normalised through standardised moral categories and classifications. These categories are but ethically generated information shorn of their situated and eventful role, acquiring the shape of data and transformed into fixed layers of apparently stable and predictable reality.
Open Access
Understanding resilience in urban slums Lessons from Pedda-Jalaripeta, India
(AESOP, 2016) Andavarapu, Deepika; Arefi, Mahyar
Slums are typically perceived as substandard eyesores, corrupt, makeshift, impoverished and crime-ridden. The growing literature on resilience challenged these perceptions, and promoted new debates on their ingenuity and adaptability to overcome external circumstances. Yet these debates are often limited to short term coping and adaptive capacity of slum dwellers. In this paper we look at long-term transformation of a slum over a forty-year period. Holling’s Adaptive Cycle model is a useful tool to study the transformations occurring within a slum. The four phases of the adaptive cycle are: conservation (K), creative destruction/release (Ω), reorganization (α) and exploitation (r). The Ω and α phases are together known as the “backloop” and are the focus of this paper. This paper explores how the residents of Pedda Jalaraipeta slum in Visakhapatnam use their social capital (bonding, bridging and linkages) to survive and recover from disasters. Based on empirical ethnographic findings, this paper shows that when slum dwellers collaborate with government or non-government agencies their community can recover and retain its unique social and cultural identity.

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