Transforming Cities: Discourses of Urban Change (original) (raw)
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Urban Life and the Changing City
Asian Social Science, 2013
Cities hold both the promise of economic opportunities and social mobility yet at the same time are hosts to massive poverty and social exclusion. The nation is confronting a host of problems associated with urbanisation common to the contemporary world, such as the impact of the auto mobile and mass transits, and the pressure of modernity on traditional society and community life. The impacts of our urbanites society coupled with the common issues of modern world certainly had impacted our society and cultural values that we have uphold for generations. This paper takes a critical look at issues plaguing urban life and argues that the perfect modern city living is only in a state of mind and our daily existence are already radically different from the urban images we carry in our minds and hearts. Our city has suffered from the dreary sea of uniformity, lacking in the diversity of orchestration of spaces to completely evoke a complex and dynamic public use. This paper identifies the factors which contribute to the phenomena and that have an impact on the makings of a liveable city. This paper reiterated that the challenge lies ahead of us to make changes and improvement to our cities for the loss of our great public life and public realm in city spaces. Urban public spaces when given prominence and focus can achieve monumentality and serve as a marker or gesture for the public to engage socially. Our city must invest its future in these spaces by creating all the opportunities and forms to respond to a dynamic public environment.
Publics and their spaces. Renewing urbanity in city and suburb
New Urban Configurations, 2014
In Europe, the beautiful old city, with its compact morphological structure, seems to have no relation to the suburban environment sprawling outside the perimeter of recognizable urban values. For many, the inner city still serves as the dominant centre where the whole suburban area converges, a stage for community life and cultural identity. However, the liveability of old cities has been transformed during recent decades. To preserve the historical values of buildings and public spaces, municipalities have conserved, sometimes obsessively, their physical elements, freezing their function for daily life. This has turned many old cities into open-air museums, with decreasing opportunities for public and social interactions. Pedestrianised zones attract shoppers and profits, bringing chains of luxury shops that replace everyday needs with boutiques for clothing, jewellery and gifts. Museums and palaces become cultural anchors in historic centres, resembling theme parks for tourists. This process is most visible in Italian cities such as Venice, Florence and Rome. To preserve a physically coherent environment, cities expel to the periphery any function or architectural style that doesn’t fit their model of coherence. As a result, the historical European city appears to be disconnected from the development of contemporary society, leading to a decline in the social significance of its public spaces. Meanwhile, the vast land of suburbia has become a complex and multifunctional environment. Its sprawling morphology accommodates new functions and typologies in new spaces and territories, often independent of the historic centre. During a single century, fast growing suburbs in Europe have produced forms, building types, and urban patterns completely different from historic morphologies. Exurban development produces phenomena as different as gated communities, ethno burbs, lifestyle centres, shopping malls and entertainment complexes, and restructured rural towns. Far from the centre, they are singular episodes in an “in between” zone, neither city nor country. Every development constitutes a new piece of a broader puzzle, still to be completed.
Used inevitable every single day, by all people, despite the age, social class, economic status of ethnicity, public space represents a great deal in our wellbeing and in the image of the city. In particularly, residential public spaces do have a high economic, social and emotional importance. The present empirical study aims to highlight the first step in a complex process of planning. The observation of the most important issues of the residential public spaces in Bucharest represents the foundation of future researches themes like urban planning, social wellbeing and segregation, urban image and urban identity. Considering the recent history of the city the main focus is set on the elementary challenge to adapt the democratic modern life style and expectation to a predominantly socialist urban structure.
Urban Forms and Future Cities: A Commentary
Urban Planning
The commentary reflects on the critical ways in which the proliferation of private property rights and local planning powers constrain and delimit the changes in the forms of cities that will be required in the coming years to ensure that they remain productive, inclusive, and sustainable. It argues that the effective management of the coming disruptions now require a shift of power from the private and the local to the metropolitan and the regional.
City in Transition and its Changing Features
Urban futures 2050, 2014
Everything is becoming more complex today. “We begin to think about the cities as patterns of the flows, of networks of relations, pertaining both to physical-material as well ethereal movements...” (Batty, 2013). Such innovative techniques as simulation models tend to forget about individualistic visions of the urban space. A city is a result of a collective action, rather than individual. The nature and functioning of each participant are invaluable. In the past “cities have been designed in a timeless future” (Batty, 2013), today the cities became a temporary phenomenon. The notion of a city became a process of construction of stories of people and places, where social urban movements permanently produce new urban meanings of public spaces (Castells, 1983). Each public space transformed into a product of decisions that might be optimal at any one time, but are always a subject of changing circumstances. In this respect a transitional condition has come to mean a constant state for every city. A sustainable urban design has come to mean a constant dialogue with every citizen and strategic planning. Public space acts as a catalyst of the social conversions. Probably the study of a city that experienced the most significant transition can help in finding solutions for the flexible cities of the future. This paper examines a unique situation of Berlin post-socialist transition. Before the reunification of Germany the state acted as the main agent of changes on public spaces, being responsible for the design and maintenance. After the reunification all these responsibilities became the liability of the municipality, private owners and public initiatives. When democratic values gained priority, a public space became an embodiment of collective thinking and dreaming. Not built up open areas turned to be profitable places that connected numerous interests of a new network of the stakeholders. To research these transformations five different neighbourhood squares were chosen in the district of East Berlin. Since 1999 the Neighbourhood management has become one of the main planning tools of the city redevelopment programme and helped to educate and direct people placemaking efforts. District administration support, new design of space and a permanent dialogue between all the actors made constant space transformations possible: direct and indirect, informal and formal communication; community’s events and gatherings; common art creations and common work under the revitalisation of space. To define the indicators and the mechanisms of the transformations the research developed a public space examination model on the basis of the term “publicness” (Carmona and et al, 2010). Quantitative data reflected the positive changes of built environment and the changes in the structure of social groups. Qualitative data reflected happiness and unhappiness of inhabitants because of the constant socio-economic changes. The findings demonstrate how a neighbourhood square turned into a place of belonging and a symbol of identification; how the new demands of the citizens and their spatial expression have shaped the urban environment; how a role of a “small” has grown within “big”.
Retheorizing the City Past the Edge of the Twenty-First Century
Journal of Urban History, 2014
One decade into the twenty-first century, the present and future of the city is a great concern for scholars, policy makers, and citizens alike. The planet's urban condition evokes both anxiety and promise. Will the city of the future be an engine of deepening democracy and prosperity or marked by stark poverty and exclusion? With over 50 percent of the earth's population now living in cities, returning to the question of how best to understand, manage, and reimagine urban areas seems to be long in the making.
Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2006
A central difficulty faced by the contemporary urban designer is that of giving shape to the formlessness of urban sprawl, creating collective spaces when human interactions are increasingly dispersed across electronic and vehicular communications networks. But until relatively recently it was difficult for the practitioner and student to readily locate literature on the phenomenon untinted by polemic and partisanship. Urban Mutations combines two sorts of essay, one hailing from academic analysis, the other from the architectural studio, which combine to produce a generally calm and considered appraisal of the dilemma faced by cities and their designers. The book originates in a small international symposium organized by the Aarhus School of Architecture in September of 2002, and the Danish editing of the volume retains a northern European and Scandinavian flavor in both its topical approaches (for instance, Poul Baek Pedersen's history of the Danish welfare city) and its somewhat uneven Englishlanguage editing (though credit is owing to the editors for making the selection available to English-language readers). Readers will find in here some statements of belief but no overall clarion call. The volume accepts that the management, through design, of the contemporary urban landscape is a challenge of such magnitude that it is best approached with a cool head: before we do anything, the title of the book tells us, let's step back and plot the mutation of the urban. When did it begin? (The book's short answer: with the relaxation of European and Scandinavian welfare state principles, and the adoption of neoliberal maxims.) What is its scale? (It is regional, national, international-'XL', to borrow architect Rem Koolhaas's shorthand, as several contributors do-but it equally affects small spaces and everyday life, and the welfare state bears a responsibility for increasing the political and physical scale of the urban footprint in the first place.) What is its nature? (Mobility-physical, social, economic-which apparently threatens traditional, fixed, concentrated cities.) Essays by political sociologist Bob Jessop and urban geographer Stephen Graham are notably helpful in getting the lay reader up to speed on these problems. An urban specialist might read the above abstract and contend that these phenomena have been known for a fair time now. Nonetheless, the serious literature on the politics and economics of the city is ever-more vast and dispersed, and there are few formats in which it is concisely connected, as it is here, tentatively, to the problems faced in the studio. When contemporary urban theory and practice are bridged it is usually as a supermodern eruption, headlines converted through CAD into mega-projects. Urban Mutations has dalliances with such projects, though their authors (like Jan Willem van Kuilenburg) will likely be unfamiliar to readers from American conference and publishing circuit, and more importantly, some chapters, like Morten Daugaard's, provide a commendably systematic account of pressing spatial issues (like 'after-sprawl'). Urban Mutations is actually of immediate interest to an architectural historian like the present reviewer. How long, one wonders, will the legacies of three successor waves of avant-garde architects who tackled urban mutations-Team X in the 1950s, Archigram in the 1960s, Rem Koolhaas and the 'Superdutch' school since-provide Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors .