How the Euro divides the union: the effect of economic adjustment on support for democracy in Europe

As often pointed out in the literature on the European debt crisis, the policy programme of austerity and internal devaluation imposed on countries in the Eurozone's periphery exhibits a lack of democratic legitimacy. This article analyses the consequences these developments have for democratic support at both the European and national levels. We show that through the policies of economic adjustment, a majority of citizens in crisis countries has become ‘detached’ from their democratic political system. By cutting loose the Eurozone's periphery from the rest of Europe in terms of democratic legitimacy, the Euro has divided the union, instead of uniting it as foreseen by its architects. Our results are based on aggregated Eurobarometer surveys conducted in 28 European Union (EU) member states between 2002 and 2014. We employ quantitative time-series cross-sectional regression analyses. Moreover, we estimate the causal effect of economic adjustment in a comparative case study of four cases using the synthetic control method.

Gestión del territorio y proceso de construcción de la ciudad : reacciones y posicionamientos ante la redefinición de la normativa urbanística para las áreas centrales de Rosario

El artículo se refiere a la propuesta de la Secretaría de Planeamiento de la Municipalidad de Rosario para el reordenamiento urbanístico del área central y primer anillo perimetral expuesta públicamente en marzo 2007 y al proceso de discusión previo a su elevación al Concejo Municipal para su tratamiento en la ciudad de Rosario. Se trata de dar cuenta acerca de las dificultades encontradas –y los intereses manifestados– para arribar a una propuesta consensuada acerca de la transformación y futuro de la ciudad y del valor otorgado a su patrimonio construido. En el trabajo a presentar se abordará las siguientes cuestiones: situación en el momento en que se formula la propuesta, la propuesta de reordenamiento urbanístico, los mecanismos de discusión, la reacción de los actores, la oposición del mercado inmobiliario (Cámara Argentina de la Construcción, Asociación de empresarios de la Vivienda, Cámara Inmobiliaria, Colegio de Arquitectos), la opinión y participación de los concejales y del mundo académico, las propuestas de los vecinos y la opinión del comité de expertos convocados para la audiencia pública. El trabajo se basa fundamentalmente en el análisis del discurso de los distintos actores en base notas oficiales, comunicados de prensa, apuntes de reuniones, información periodística, presentaciones escritas ante la audiencia pública, documentos de expertos. Para la interpretación de la dinámica del proceso de construcción de tiene en cuenta la documentación municipal respecto de la dinámica de la construcción en la ciudad en los últimos años, la opinión de economistas especializados en el tema y la opinión de agentes inmobiliarios.

La monumentalización de la ciudad : los sitios de memoria como espacios de intervención experta de los hacedores de ciudad

Este trabajo coloca su foco de atención en la intervención de arquitectos, planificadores, urbanistas y ‘hacedores de ciudad’ en la creación de espacios de memoria sobre la última dictadura militar en la Argentina. A través del análisis de la creación del Parque de la Memoria en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires se mostrará cómo estos espacios se insertan en programas de reforma del espacio urbano que involucran desde dirigentes políticos en campaña electoral hasta la participación de expertos y especialistas en la gestión de la ciudad y cómo la intervención de este universo de agentes – y sus propias representaciones y lógicas de actuación – van a incidir en la manera en que estos espacios de memoria son concebidos, gestados e implementados. Mostraré cómo, dentro de este mundo de relaciones, la memoria y el olvido se vuelven categorías significativas en el marco de sus propias disputas por definir qué es la ciudad, quiénes pertenecen a ella y quiénes son los actores legítimos para intervenir en su definición. A través de esta intervención urbana - la creación del Parque de la Memoria - un área marginal de la ciudad ha sido convertida en un espacio sagrado para conmemorar a las víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado y en un paseo público donde los vecinos de la ciudad realizan diversas actividades recreativas.

Individuales y colectivas : la vivienda popular en la agenda política y técnica del período conservador (Mendoza, 1932-1943)

La primera mitad del siglo XX, fue un período de discusión y experimentación en torno al tema de la habitación popular. El interés por la modernización del hábitat, la industrialización de la construcción y la necesidad del abaratamiento de la vivienda para el “alojamiento popular", hizo que algunos estados provinciales comenzaran a plantear su intervención en el tema habitacional a través de políticas públicas que facilitaran el acceso a la vivienda. Este artículo presenta la acción técnico-política del período conservador en torno de la vivienda popular, es decir, sobre la habitación individual o colectiva de bajo costo destinada a sectores sociales medios y bajos, provista por el Estado en forma masiva y que responde a propuestas de técnicos, en nuestro caso, arquitectos insertos en la burocracia estatal. Abordamos, en clave histórica, los proyectos y las concreciones que consideramos sitúan a Mendoza como una de las primeras provincias argentinas en encarar el “problema de la vivienda" desde la órbita estatal en los años treinta.

Herramientas conceptuales y proyectuales en la construcción de la vivienda mercancía moderna en Rosario en el segundo cuarto del siglo XX

Este trabajo abordará el dispositivo vivienda mercancía moderna, entendiendo que el mismo surgió para responder a la necesidad de posicionamiento de la profesión frente al mercado inmobiliario de Rosario, en el segundo cuarto del s. XX. Este momento, signado por la creación de las primeras asociaciones profesionales, la institucionalización de la enseñanza, álgidos debates, nuevas regulaciones edilicias y políticas públicas, supuso la emergencia del arquitecto como actor protagónico del mercado inmobiliario. El objetivo principal de este trabajo es reconocer las herramientas de proyecto que aportaron estos arquitectos a la transformación tipológica de las viviendas para el mercado e identificar los insumos conceptuales de dichas herramientas, es decir, la traducción concreta del bagaje disciplinar y su adaptación a las lógicas del mercado de viviendas.

Los arquitectos corporales en la Educación Física y los Deportes : Entre fichas, saberes y oficios (Argentina primera mitad del siglo XX)

El siguiente artículo analiza la constitución de dos 'oficios' con saberes, procedimientos, técnicas y competencias específicas a la hora de educar a los cuerpos en movimiento: los profesores de Educación Física y los médicos deportólogos en la Argentina durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. Centra su mirada, a partir de la historia social del cuerpo (Turner, 1989; Porter, 2003; Vigarello, 2005), en los saberes (la antropometría, la biometría y la biotipología) y los procedimientos (boletines físicos y fichas biotipológicas deportivas) utilizados por ambos 'oficios' identificando los tipos ideales de corporalidad construidos así como las omisiones, exclusiones y silenciamientos que acompañaron dichos ideales corporales a la hora de ubicarlos en su 'justo lugar' gímnico, lúdico y/o deportivo

Los arquitectos corporales en la Educación Física y los Deportes : Entre fichas, saberes y oficios (Argentina primera mitad del siglo XX)

El siguiente artículo analiza la constitución de dos 'oficios' con saberes, procedimientos, técnicas y competencias específicas a la hora de educar a los cuerpos en movimiento: los profesores de Educación Física y los médicos deportólogos en la Argentina durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. Centra su mirada, a partir de la historia social del cuerpo (Turner, 1989; Porter, 2003; Vigarello, 2005), en los saberes (la antropometría, la biometría y la biotipología) y los procedimientos (boletines físicos y fichas biotipológicas deportivas) utilizados por ambos 'oficios' identificando los tipos ideales de corporalidad construidos así como las omisiones, exclusiones y silenciamientos que acompañaron dichos ideales corporales a la hora de ubicarlos en su 'justo lugar' gímnico, lúdico y/o deportivo

Los arquitectos corporales en la Educación Física y los Deportes : Entre fichas, saberes y oficios (Argentina primera mitad del siglo XX)

El siguiente artículo analiza la constitución de dos 'oficios' con saberes, procedimientos, técnicas y competencias específicas a la hora de educar a los cuerpos en movimiento: los profesores de Educación Física y los médicos deportólogos en la Argentina durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. Centra su mirada, a partir de la historia social del cuerpo (Turner, 1989; Porter, 2003; Vigarello, 2005), en los saberes (la antropometría, la biometría y la biotipología) y los procedimientos (boletines físicos y fichas biotipológicas deportivas) utilizados por ambos 'oficios' identificando los tipos ideales de corporalidad construidos así como las omisiones, exclusiones y silenciamientos que acompañaron dichos ideales corporales a la hora de ubicarlos en su 'justo lugar' gímnico, lúdico y/o deportivo

A multimodal tablet-based interface for designing and reviewing 3D engineering models

The ability to view and interact with 3D models has been happening for a long time. However, vision-based 3D modeling has only seen limited success in applications, as it faces many technical challenges. Hand-held mobile devices have changed the way we interact with virtual reality environments. Their high mobility and technical features, such as inertial sensors, cameras and fast processors, are especially attractive for advancing the state of the art in virtual reality systems. Also, their ubiquity and fast Internet connection open a path to distributed and collaborative development. However, such path has not been fully explored in many domains. VR systems for real world engineering contexts are still difficult to use, especially when geographically dispersed engineering teams need to collaboratively visualize and review 3D CAD models. Another challenge is the ability to rendering these environments at the required interactive rates and with high fidelity. In this document it is presented a virtual reality system mobile for visualization, navigation and reviewing large scale 3D CAD models, held under the CEDAR (Collaborative Engineering Design and Review) project. It’s focused on interaction using different navigation modes. The system uses the mobile device's inertial sensors and camera to allow users to navigate through large scale models. IT professionals, architects, civil engineers and oil industry experts were involved in a qualitative assessment of the CEDAR system, in the form of direct user interaction with the prototypes and audio-recorded interviews about the prototypes. The lessons learned are valuable and are presented on this document. Subsequently it was prepared a quantitative study on the different navigation modes to analyze the best mode to use it in a given situation.

Uso de DES y RANS no estacionario para la simulación del flujo alrededor de una carena Wigley - Use of Unsteady RANS and DES to simulate flows around a Wigley Hull)

Computer Fluid Dynamics tools have already become a valuable instrument for Naval Architects during the ship design process, thanks to their accuracy and the available computer power. Unfortunately, the development of RANSE codes, generally used when viscous effects play a major role in the flow, has not reached a mature stage, being the accuracy of the turbulence models and the free surface representation the most important sources of uncertainty. Another level of uncertainty is added when the simulations are carried out for unsteady flows, as those generally studied in seakeeping and maneuvering analysis and URANS equations solvers are used. Present work shows the applicability and the benefits derived from the use of new approaches for the turbulence modeling (Detached Eddy Simulation) and the free surface representation (Level Set) on the URANS equations solver CFDSHIP-Iowa. Compared to URANS, DES is expected to predict much broader frequency contents and behave better in flows where boundary layer separation plays a major role. Level Set methods are able to capture very complex free surface geometries, including breaking and overturning waves. The performance of these improvements is tested in set of fairly complex flows, generated by a Wigley hull at pure drift motion, with drift angle ranging from 10 to 60 degrees and at several Froude numbers to study the impact of its variation. Quantitative verification and validation are performed with the obtained results to guarantee their accuracy. The results show the capability of the CFDSHIP-Iowa code to carry out time-accurate simulations of complex flows of extreme unsteady ship maneuvers. The Level Set method is able to capture very complex geometries of the free surface and the use of DES in unsteady simulations highly improves the results obtained. Vortical structures and instabilities as a function of the drift angle and Fr are qualitatively identified. Overall analysis of the flow pattern shows a strong correlation between the vortical structures and free surface wave pattern. Karman-like vortex shedding is identified and the scaled St agrees well with the universal St value. Tip vortices are identified and the associated helical instabilities are analyzed. St using the hull length decreases with the increase of the distance along the vortex core (x), which is similar to results from other simulations. However, St scaled using distance along the vortex cores shows strong oscillations compared to almost constants for those previous simulations. The difference may be caused by the effect of the free-surface, grid resolution, and interaction between the tip vortex and other vortical structures, which needs further investigations. This study is exploratory in the sense that finer grids are desirable and experimental data is lacking for large α, especially for the local flow. More recently, high performance computational capability of CFDSHIP-Iowa V4 has been improved such that large scale computations are possible. DES for DTMB 5415 with bilge keels at α = 20º were conducted using three grids with 10M, 48M and 250M points. DES analysis for flows around KVLCC2 at α = 30º is analyzed using a 13M grid and compared with the results of DES on the 1.6M grid by. Both studies are consistent with what was concluded on grid resolution herein since dominant frequencies for shear-layer, Karman-like, horse-shoe and helical instabilities only show marginal variation on grid refinement. The penalties of using coarse grids are smaller frequency amplitude and less resolved TKE. Therefore finer grids should be used to improve V&V for resolving most of the active turbulent scales for all different Fr and α, which hopefully can be compared with additional EFD data for large α when it becomes available.

Dynamic Model-based Management of Service-Oriented Infrastructure.

Models are an effective tool for systems and software design. They allow software architects to abstract from the non-relevant details. Those qualities are also useful for the technical management of networks, systems and software, such as those that compose service oriented architectures. Models can provide a set of well-defined abstractions over the distributed heterogeneous service infrastructure that enable its automated management. We propose to use the managed system as a source of dynamically generated runtime models, and decompose management processes into a composition of model transformations. We have created an autonomic service deployment and configuration architecture that obtains, analyzes, and transforms system models to apply the required actions, while being oblivious to the low-level details. An instrumentation layer automatically builds these models and interprets the planned management actions to the system. We illustrate these concepts with a distributed service update operation.

A new way of teaching different subjects in a foreign language in the Building Engineering Degree at the Universidad Politécnica.

The European Union has been promoting linguistic diversity for many years as one of its main educational goals. This is an element that facilitates student mobility and student exchanges between different universities and countries and enriches the education of young undergraduates. In particular, a higher degree of competence in the English language is becoming essential for engineers, architects and researchers in general, as English has become the lingua franca that opens up horizons to internationalisation and the transfer of knowledge in today’s world. Many experts point to the Integrated Approach to Contents and Foreign Languages System as being an option that has certain benefits over the traditional method of teaching a second language that is exclusively based on specific subjects. This system advocates teaching the different subjects in the syllabus in a language other than one’s mother tongue, without prioritising knowledge of the language over the subject. This was the idea that in the 2009/10 academic year gave rise to the Second Language Integration Programme (SLI Programme) at the Escuela Arquitectura Técnica in the Universidad Politécnica Madrid (EUATM-UPM), just at the beginning of the tuition of the new Building Engineering Degree, which had been adapted to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) model. This programme is an interdisciplinary initiative for the set of subjects taught during the semester and is coordinated through the Assistant Director Office for Educational Innovation. The SLI Programme has a dual goal; to familiarise students with the specific English terminology of the subject being taught, and at the same time improve their communication skills in English. A total of thirty lecturers are taking part in the teaching of eleven first year subjects and twelve in the second year, with around 120 students who have voluntarily enrolled in a special group in each semester. During the 2010/2011 academic year the degree of acceptance and the results of the SLI Programme have been monitored. Tools have been designed to aid interdisciplinary coordination and to analyse satisfaction, such as coordination records and surveys. The results currently available refer to the first and second year and are divided into specific aspects of the different subjects involved and into general aspects of the ongoing experience.

Las normativas de construcción con tierra en el mundo/The earth building normative documents in the world

La tierra ha sido utilizada como material de construcción desde hace siglos. No obstante, la normativa al respecto está muy dispersa, y en la mayoría de países desarrollados surgen numerosos problemas técnicos y legales para llevar a cabo una construcción con este material. Este artículo estudia el panorama normativo para las construcciones con tierra cruda a nivel internacional, analizando cincuenta y cinco normas y reglamentos de países repartidos por los cinco continentes, que representan el estado del arte de la normalización de la tierra cruda como material de construcción. Es un estudio referenciado sobre las normas y reglamentos vigentes desarrollados por los organismos nacionales de normalización o autoridades correspondientes. Se presentan las normativas y los organismos que las emiten, analizando la estructura y contenido de cada una. Se estudian y analizan los aspectos más relevantes, como la estabilización, selección de los suelos, requisitos de los productos y ensayos existentes, comparando las diferentes normativas. Este trabajo puede ser de gran utilidad para el desarrollo de futuras normas y como referencia para arquitectos e ingenieros que trabajen con tierra. For centuries, earth has been used as a construction material. Nevertheless, the normative in this matter is very scattered, and in the most developed countries, carrying out a construction with this material implies a variety of technical and legal problems. This article analyzes, in an international level, the normative panorama about constructions with earth, analyzing fifty five standards and regulations of countries all around the five continents; these represent the state of art that normalizes the earth as a construction material. It is a study indexed on the actual procedures and regulations developed by the national organisms of normalization or correspondent authorities. The standards and the organisms that produce them appear, analyzing the structure and the content of each one. We have studied and analyzed the most relevant aspects, such as stabilization, soil selections, the requisites of the products and the existent test, comparing the diverse normative. The knowledge from this study could be very useful for the development of future standards and as a reference for architects and engineers that work with earth.

Sobre las casas Kaufmann:dos dibujos y una fotografía

This article explores the Kaufmann family houses, their architects and the american world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. . The first, designed by Benno Janssen, is not widely known but it is fantastic because it is capable of creating a landscape where it does not exist. I love it. There, in its living room, is where Wright received the commission to build Fallingwater house. And finally, I would like to dedicate a few comments to the house built by Neutra, in order to balance the article. Wright could be the guiding thread. I have always thought that Fallingwater house has some aspects that are a bit forced and therefore, paradoxically, unnatural. I also believe that with this building Wright distances himself from the interests of european architecture, and is focused on more realistic problems, such as those of collective housing

Ethics and materials: Some Spanish Cases

The problem is general: modern architects and engineers are trying to understand historic structures using the wrong theoretical frame, the classic (elastic) thery of structures developed in the 19th Century for iron and stell, and in the 20th century for reinforced concrete, disguised with "modern" computer packages, mainly FEM, but also others. Masonry is an essentially different material, and the structural equations must be adapted accordingly. It is not a matter of "taste" or "opinion", and the consequences are before us. Since, say 1920s, historic monuments have suffered the aggression of generations of archietcts and engineers, trying to transform masonry in reinfored concrete or steel. The damage to the monuments and the expense has been, and is, enormous. However, as we have an adequate theory (modern limit analysis of masonry structures, Heyman 1966) which encompasses the "old theory" used successfully by the 18th and 19th Century practical engineers (from Perronet to Sejourné), it is a matter of "Ethics" not to use the wrong approach. It is also "contra natura" to modify the material masonry with indiscriminate injections, stitchings, etc. It is insane to consider, suddenly, that buildings which are Centuries or milennia old, are suddenly in danger of collapse. Maintenance is necessary but not the actual destruction of the constructive essence of the monument. A cocktail of "ignorance, fear and greed" is acting under the best of intentions.