Hanoi : biography of a city

As Vietnam opened up to the West since the late 1980s, awareness of the architectural richness of the national capital, Hanoi, has grown. Its striking combination of Chinese-influenced shop-houses, French boulevards, Soviet housing and recent Western-style commercial developments in unique. Hanoi: Biography of a City is the first book to trace the history of the fabric of the city since its origins a thousand years ago.

Intercultural harmony and understanding in the city of Whittlesea

The City of Whittlesea is one of the most ethnically diverse urban areas in Melbourne that attracts settlers, often humanitarian migrants from countries in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. With settlers arriving from a broader range of countries than ever before, increasing ethnic as well as ethno-religious diversity presents opportunities for local government to address intercultural harmony and understanding but also significant challenges. This paper reports the findings of fieldwork conducted in 2009 among residents focusing on attitudes towards ethnic diversity and evaluations of the capacity of local government to promote intercultural harmony and understanding. The results suggest that if local government is to be inclusive and gain the confidence and trust of residents necessary to foster empowering partnerships, political spaces that facilitate interactions between long-term residents, new residents, elected leaders and council officers must be facilitated. Such initiatives will contribute to strengthening programs and policies being developed by local government that aim to address discrimination experienced by ethnic minorities and encourage greater acceptance of cultural diversity among the broader community in ways that move beyond measurable outcomes.

That's artertainment! Art galleries, events and city life

This key note address uses branding, as one way for galleries to tell their stories about 'artertainment' to enrich the wider story of the city to their various audiences.  Despite the centrality of telling stories in galleries as a means of positioning city cultural life, rarely has branding 'artetainment' been explored in the marketing literature.  What do case studies reveal about the marketing techniques used by art galleries as far as representing culture in the city? Using historical research methods, annual reports and interviews, the paper views art galleries from the inside out as a means of branding city cultural life through 'artertainment'.  The originality of this article is in its depiction of case studies of art galleries from the inside out as brands for city cultural life.

Festivals as a tool to integrate cultural identities in the city of Belfast

During the past few decades Belfast has witnessed a growing interest in festivals celebrating local cultural and historical traditions. In order to understand the context of festival development in Belfast an understanding of the city's history is essential. Belfast has around half a million inhabitants of two ethnic backgrounds, Irish nationalist (predominately Catholic) and British Unionist (predominately Protestant) (Russell 2005). Ethnicity in Northern Ireland mainly refers to the Catholic and Protestant populations. The people of Northern Ireland are predominantly white, with only o.8s per cent of them having non-Irish backgrounds. This percentage increases slightly to 1.3 per cent in Belfast, with 29 per cent of these being of Chinese origins.

ID scanning, the media and the politics of urban surveillance in an Australian regional city

Computerised ID scanning technologies have permeated many urban night-time economies in Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. This paper documents how one media organisation’s overt and tacit approval of ID scanners helped to normalise this form of surveillance as a precondition of entry into most licensed venues in the Australian city of Geelong. After outlining how processes of governance “from above” and “from below” interweave to generate distinct political and media demands for strategies to prevent localised crime problems, a chronological reconstruction of media reports over a three-and-a half year period demonstrates how ID scanning became the centrepiece of a holistic reform strategy to combat alcohol-related violence in this nightclub precinct. Several discursive techniques helped to normalise this “technological fix”, while suppressing critical discussion of viable concerns over information privacy, data security and system networking. These
included pairing reports of an initial “signal crime” with examples of “virtual victimhood” to stress the urgency of a radical surveillance-based response, which was supported by anecdotal statements from key “primary definers” highlighting the success of this initiative in targeting a wider population of antisocial “others”. The implications of these reporting practices are discussed in light of the media’s central role in reforming the Geelong night-time economy and broader trends in using novel surveillance technologies to combat urban crime problems at the expense of alternative measures that protect individual liberty.

Second city syndrome : media reportage of urban rankings

This paper investigates the popularly reported phenomenon of city rankings and, in particular, the category of the ‘second city’ that regularly features as part of this prolific evaluative discourse. Our paper proposes that the category ‘second city’ has a specific analytical value that has to date been underestimated in academic accounts (particularly in the confusing, interchangeable use of ‘second-tier’, ‘secondary’ and ‘second cities’ in the dominant urban studies literature). Instead, we are interested in how second city identifications permeate popular forms of urban comparison in some places.

The example of Melbourne (Australia) is used to investigate how second city identities are historically sustained through evaluative media representations. In particular we examine how, through their reportage of various world city rankings, metropolitan newspapers reveal and articulate a ‘second city consciousness’. How do media institutions, and more specifically, media reports, frame these urban rankings in such a way to confirm Melbourne’s similarity to other globalised places (i.e. proposing its status as a ‘world city’), yet also as a city also marked by a particular historical specificity? And how do they draw on already existing popular and political traditions of urban comparison? This article will identify and analyse the role of newspapers in perpetuating both formal and informal urban comparisons.

Indigenous place-making in the city : dispossessions, occupations and implications for cultural architecture

This paper considers Indigenous place-making practices in light of an idea for a major Victorian Indigenous Cultural Knowledge and Education Centre in central Melbourne as championed by Traditional Owners in Victoria. With only eight Aboriginal architects in the country, collaboration with non-Indigenous architects will be inevitable. Two case studies from the recent past—the Tent Embassy in Canberra and a street corner in Collingwood—reveal that dominant cultures of place-making continue to marginalise Aboriginal people in urban Australia. This paper will contend that delivering spatial justice will require both an opportunity for Indigenous Victorians to build visibility in the centre of the city and a willingness within the dominant culture to be deterritorialised.

Introduction : making Indigenous place in the Australian city

This introductory essay situates this special issue's concerns in the context of Indigenous cultural centre design in settler-colonial Australia. Given the very small number of Indigenous architects in Australia, architectural facilities for Indigenous communities are routinely designed by non-indigenous architects. The implications of this are significant. Given the often complex social, historical and political ambitions that are invested in the construction of Indigenous cultural centres, and their frequent intention to represent a broad Indigenous constituency, can non-indigenous architectural and spatial practice ever realize these? As a way into this question, the essay surveys postcolonial and architectural scholarship that explores the spatialization of setter-colonial politics and the distinct place-making traditions of Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The making of place in the Australian city is an ongoing force of conflict, assertion, exclusion and forgetting, but it is also central to the realization of a possible post-colonial state in which no one ‘centre’ can ever stabilize and resolve questions of legitimacy and power. Instead, such a centre might hold these questions in tension and as questions in common, which would mean a new foundation for the making of place.