Streetwise Asia, a practical guide for the conservation and revitalisation of heritage cities and towns in Asia.

This is a practical and accessible guide for residents and professionals concerned to preserve and revitalise heritage cities in Asia. Heritage cities (many listed by UNESCO) are of course of major interest to one of the world's largest industries, tourism. Using inset colour photographs to complement the text, the realities of destructive and constructive development, repairs, restoration and usage are made clear. Legal, financial, administrative, historical and educational aspects of conservation policies, incentives and implementations are discussed. With outlines for strategy, goals and bibliography.

Marketing of place to attract and retain population in regional Australia

In Australia, as in many other developed countries, regional and rural areas are suffering from an overall decline in population with a specific loss of young adults (16-30 year olds). A decline in population, linked with the Australia-wide problems of ageing populations and diminishing birth rates, is leading to a social and economic decline in many regional cities and towns that threatens their long-term sustainability due to the lack of skilled workers and professionals. Although the loss of population from regional and rural areas has the potential to affect the national economy, it has mainly fallen to local government to combat the problem. Local government is beginning to use place marketing to attract and retain residents in addition to its traditional use of place marketing to attract industry and investment.

This exploratory paper examines regional decline in Australia and the concept of "place" marketing as means of arresting or reversing the decline, A conceptual model of place marketing by local government in Australia has been developed and a number of hypothesis are proposed for testing in future research.

Envisioning Indochina : the spatial and social ordering and imagining of a French colony

The emergence of Indochina in the French imagination was articulated in both representational and institutional modes. Representation involves the transmission of colonial ideals through more obtuse means; that is, through literary texts, travelogues, exhibitions, film and advertising. However, these textual sites feed from and invest in a material situation, which was the institutional arm of colonialism. Indochina was institutionally articulated in cartographic maps and surveys, in the new social spaces of cities and towns, in architectural and technological forms, through social technologies of discipline and welfare and in cultural and religious organisations. The aim of this thesis is to analyse, across a number of textual sites, the representation and institutionalisation of Otherness through the politics of space in the French colony of Indochina, Indochine in this sense becomes a spatial discourse. The French constructed a mental and physical space for Indochina by blanketing and suffocating the original cultural landscape, which in fact had to be ignored for this process to occur. What actually became manifest as a result of this projection stemmed from the French imagination. Just as the French manipulated space, language also underwent the same process of reduction. The Vietnamese script was latinised to make it more 'useable' and ‘accessible’. Through christening the union of Indochina; initiating a comprehensive writing reform; and renaming the streets in the colonial cities, the French used language us another tool for 'making transparent'. Furthermore, the colonial powers established a communication and transport network throughout the colony in an attempt to materialise their fictive (artificial) vision of a unified French Indochinese space. The accessibility and design of these different modes of transport reflected the gendered, racial and class divisions inherent in the colonial establishment. At the heart of representing and institutionalising Indochina was the desire to control and contain. This characterised French imperial ordering of space in the city and the rural areas. In rural areas land was divided into small parcels and alienated to individuals or worked into precise grids for the rubber plantation. In urban centres the native quarter was clearly demarcated from the European quarter which functioned as its modern, progressive Other. The rationale behind this segregation was premised on European, nineteenth century discourses of race, class, gender and hygiene. Influenced by Darwinian and neo-Lamarkian theories of race, this biological discourse identified the 'working class', 'women' and 'the native' as not only biologically but also culturally inferior. They were perceived as a potential, degenerative threat to the biological, cultural and industrial development of the nation. In the colonial context, space was thus ordered and domesticated to control the native population. Coextensively, the literature which springs from such a structure will be tainted by the same ideas, and thus the spaces it formulates within the readers mind feed on and reinforce this foundation. Examples of gender and indigenous narratives which contest this imaginative, transparent topography are analysed throughout this thesis. They provide instances of struggle and resistance which undermine the ideal/stereotypical level of architectural and planned space and delineate an alternative insight into colonial spatial and social relations. The fictional accounts of European women and indigenous writers both challenge and reaffirm the fixity of some of these idealised colonial boundaries. In various literary, historical, political, architectural and cinematic discourses Indochina has been und continues to be depicted as a modern city and exotic Utopia. Informed by the mood of nostalgia, exotic images of Indochina have resurfaced in contemporary French culture. France's continued desire to create, control and maintain an Indochinese space in the French public imagination reinforces the multi-layered, interconnected and persistent nature of colonial discourse.

Interactive urban language and city growth

The thesis is a refinement of semiotic theory in architecture which aims towards developing a conversation between Western theory and the Eastern city. Using theoretical bases including semiotic theory, Japanese analytical text and analogies of cultural products, this thesis proposes that urban language can be perceived and analysed.

Edge of centre: Australian cities and the public architecture of recent immigrant communities

In the late 1990s, the author undertook a survey of the public architecture of non-western immigrant communities in Melbourne (Beynon 2002). The survey was undertaken within a social context of rapid recent growth in non-Western immigration to Australian cities, coupled with a political context where at state and local level Australian governments were engaged in managing cultural diversity through multiculturalist policies. By the late 1990s, the number of overseas-born, or with overseas-born parentage, had become almost 40% of Australia's total population (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1998-89). Substantial numbers of such immigrants originated from outside the 'West'. Compared to other Australian cities, Melbourne had at the time of the survey the largest communities of certain birthplace groups: notably Sri Lankans, Malaysians, Turks and Somalis. The purpose of this survey was to see to what extent Melbourne's diversifying demography had changed its architectural landscape, and more broadly, what such changes in the built environment indicated about Melbourne's (and by extension Australia's) cultural identity.

Rethinking value in the stack: smart cities and digital currencies

O Seminário Estratégico "A Reinvenção do Dinheiro e a Emergência das Moedas Criativas" reunirá 15 especialistas de diferentes áreas para discutir as transformações contemporâneas implicadas na digitalização do dinheiro e na emergência resultante de novos circuitos de monetização da produção, do consumo, da distribuição, do financiamento e da reciclagem de todos os bens e serviços, assim como da própria informação.O debate marca o lançamento da campanha MIL CLICKS de monetização de projetos de Media and Information Literacy (MIL) pela UNESCO na USP, plataforma desenhada pelo grupo de pesquisa Cidade do Conhecimento em parceria com Dentsu Aegis Network e UNESCO, integrada à Global MIL Week UNESCO 2016 na Escola de Comunicações e Artes da USP (2 a 6 de novembro de 2016).

Modelling the marketing of place by local government in Australia

Much of Regional Australia is suffering from an overall decline in population with a specific loss of young adults (16-30 year olds). A decline in population, linked with the Australia-wide problems of ageing populations and diminishing birth rates, is leading to a social and economic malaise in many regional cities and towns that threatens their long-term sustainability due to the lack of skilled workers and professionals. This paper examines the concept of “place” marketing, and the approach of local government to market regions, cities, and towns to attract targeted population to help maintain the sustainability of Regional Australia.

Regional development through the enterprise of arts leadership

The literature in the field suggests that a community without arts-practice risks its future. Contemporaneously, evidence suggests that the future of some communities, specifically regional or rural communities, are at risk because of the withdrawal of essential services, which leads to economic and social decline. There is also evidence that arts practice has revived economic and social activity (and performance measures) in regional cities and towns. In this article, I argue that the arts foster regional sustainability, and I propose that an arts leadership that is collective in nature and associated with vision and creativity is needed if the arts are to achieve regional sustainability.