Sound Art in Urban Architecture and Planning: An Introduction

This article will introduce a specially-commissioned edition of the JSS centering on articles developed from the International Symposium May 2014 by the Recomposing the City project.

Innovating urban policymaking and planning mechanisms to deliver knowledge-based agendas : a methodological approach

This paper aims to develop a comprehensive approach to innovate urban policymaking and planning to successfully deliver the knowledge-based agenda. The paper, first, examines the concept of knowledge-based urban development, which has become a popular urban development policy and strategy in recent years, through a comprehensive review of the literature. It, then, introduces and discusses a novel methodological approach for effective policymaking and planning mechanism to deliver the knowledge-based agenda of cities. The paper, with the proposed methodology, brings together urban policymaking and planning approaches, and introduces a novel way to assess knowledge-based urban development achievements and potentials of emerging and prosperous knowledge cities. The paper, thus, provides an invaluable instrument to inform local and regional decision and plan making mechanisms to deliver their knowledge-based agendas and help them in moving towards building their sustainable knowledge cities.

Understanding community empowerment in urban regeneration and planning in England: putting policy and practice in context

Community involvement in the fields of town planning and urban regeneration includes a wide range of opportunities for residents and service users to engage with networks, partnerships and centres of power. Both the terminology and degree of the transfer of power to citizens varies in different policy areas and contexts but five core objectives can be identified. This article approaches the subject of community empowerment by exploring the theoretical literature; reviewing recent policy pronouncements relating to community involvement in England and by discussing a recent case study of an Urban II project in London. The conclusions suggest that community empowerment is always likely to be partial and contingent on local circumstances and the wider context.

Urban Competitiveness and US Metropolitan Centres

This is the third paper Kresl and Singh have published on this subject. The first was for an OECD conference that was published in 1995. The second was published in Urban Studies in 1999. Hence in this most recent study they can examine urban competitiveness in the US over a period of three decades. Their methodology is distinctive in that it is statistical rather than subjective, as is the case with studies that use a benchmarking or a structural methodology. Their results can be used by city planners in design of a strategic-economic plan. They also capture the major changes in broad regional competitiveness.

A Global Review on Peri-Urban Development and Planning

Urban regions worldwide are increasingly facing the challenge of dealing with highly dynamic metropolitan growth and, at the same time, institutional changes like decentralisation and globalisation. These kinds of changes express themselves most evidently in peri-urban areas, where urban and rural life meets. These peri-urban areas in particular have been the stage for rapid physical, social and economic transformations, both in developed and developing countries. Peri-urbanization takes place here. Based on literature review, this paper presents an effort to identify generic attributes of peri-urbanisation and the way in which development planning tends to reply. Three major attributes are identified: peri-urban space (the spatial expression of peri-urban development), peri-urban life (the functional appearance of land uses, activities and peri-urban innovation), and peri-urban change (a causal and temporal perspective featuring flows and drivers of change). It is also shown that prevalent institutional replies in planning and development generally fail to acknowledge the dynamic and increasingly fragmented attributes of global peri-urbanisation.

Urbanism and dictatorship: perspectives of the field of urban studies

In 1933 public letter to Wilhelm Furtwängler, Joseph Goebbels synthesized the official understanding of the link between politics, art and society in the early steps of the Third Reich. By assuming the ethos of art, politics acquired a plastic agency to mold its objects —population and the state— as a unified entity in the form of a ‘national-popular community’ (Volksgemeinschaft); in turn, by infusing art with a political valence, it became part of a wider governmental apparatus that reshaped aesthetic discourses and practices. Similar remarks could be made about the ordering of cities and territories in this period. Dictatorial imaginations mobilized urbanism —including urban theory, urban design and planning— as a fundamental tool for social organization. Under their aegis the production of space became a moment in a wider production of society. Many authors suggest that this political-spatial nexus is intrinsic to modernity itself, beyond dictatorial regimes. In this light, I propose to use dictatorial urbanisms as an analytical opportunity to delve into some concealed features of modern urban design and planning. This chapter explores some of these aspects from a theoretical standpoint, focusing on the development of dictatorial planning mentalities and spatial rationalities and drawing links to other historical episodes in order to inscribe the former in a broader genealogy of urbanism. Needless to say, I don’t suggest that we use dictatorships as mere templates to understand modern productions of space. Instead, these cases provide a crude version of some fundamental drives in the operationalization of urbanism as an instrument of social regulation, showing how far the modern imagination of sociospatial orderings can go. Dictatorial urbanisms constituted a set of experiences where many dreams and aspirations of modern planning went to die. But not, as the conventional account would have it, because the former were the antithesis of the latter, but rather because they worked as the excess of a particular orientation of modern spatial governmentalities — namely, their focus on calculation, social engineering and disciplinary spatialities, and their attempt to subsume a wide range of everyday practices under institutional structuration by means of spatial mediations. In my opinion the interest of dictatorial urbanisms lies in their role as key regulatory episodes in a longer history of our urban present. They stand as a threshold between the advent of planning in the late 19th and early 20th century, and its final consolidation as a crucial state instrument after World War II. We need, therefore, to pay attention to these experiences vis-à-vis the alleged ‘normal’ development of the field in contemporary democratic countries in order to develop a full comprehension thereof.

Briefing: Re-Engineering the City 2020-2050 - Urban Foresight and Transition Management

Cities may be responsible for up to 70% of global carbon emissions and 75% of global energy consumption and by 2050 it is estimated that 70% of the world's population could live in cities. The critical challenge for contemporary urbanism, therefore, is to understand how to develop the knowledge, capacity and capability for public agencies, the private sector and multiple users in city regions systemically to re-engineer their built environment and urban infrastructure in response to climate change and resource constraints. Re-Engineering the City 2020-2050: Urban Foresight and Transition Management (Retrofit 2050) is a major new interdisciplinary project funded under the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council's (EPSRC) Sustainable Urban Environments Programme which seeks to address this challenge. This briefing describes the background and conceptual framing of Retrofit 2050 project, its aims and objectives and research approach.

Briefing: re-engineering the city 2020–2050 – urban foresight and transition management

Cities may be responsible for up to 70% of global carbon emissions and 75% of global energy consumption and by 2050 it is estimated that 70% of the world's population could live in cities. The critical challenge for contemporary urbanism, therefore, is to understand how to develop the knowledge, capacity and capability for public agencies, the private sector and multiple users in city regions systemically to re-engineer their built environment and urban infrastructure in response to climate change and resource constraints. Re-Engineering the City 2020–2050: Urban Foresight and Transition Management (Retrofit 2050) is a major new interdisciplinary project funded under the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council's (EPSRC) Sustainable Urban Environments Programme which seeks to address this challenge. This briefing describes the background and conceptual framing of Retrofit 2050 project, its aims and objectives and research approach.

Relating Bike Racks and Bike Ridership

Abstract The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the relationship between bicycle ridership and bike racks in a given area. The goal was to discern whether or not the density of bike racks determines the number of riders in the area. I predicted that there would be higher ridership in the areas with a denser bike rack concentration. To investigate this point, I set up five different areas of varying sizes with a similar number of bike racks, and then observed them over a period of 5 business days. By using a simple tally of the bikes found on the racks and bikes locked to other objects, like railings, I collected data in the area during the day when there were likely to be many commuter bikes parked outside. The results show that there is a positive relationship between the density of bike racks in a given area and bike ridership. While there is a positive r-value, more data collection needs to be done to determine the relationship that may exist between bike ridership and bike racks.

The Alliance for Progress and Housing Policy in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in the 1960s

This article explores the construction of publicly financed low-income housing complexes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1960s. These housing developments were possible thanks to the arrival of foreign economic and technical assistance from the Alliance for Progress. Urban scholars, politicians, diplomats and urbanists of the Americas sought to promote middle-class habits, mass consumption and moderate political behaviour, especially among the poor, by expanding access to homeownership and ‘decent’ living conditions for a burgeoning urban population. As a result, the history of low-income housing should be understood within broader transnational discourses and practices about the ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ of the urban poor.

The Centrality of Urban Economies to the Study of Competitiveness

In recent decades the role of cities and of urban areas in the enhancement of competitiveness has become steadily more important and central to policy formation. The study of urban competitiveness is of interest, first, because it allows us to more fully understand to bases for policy and, second, because it allows us to evaluate the performance of a number of cities so as to determine what policies lead to success and what factors lead to failure or to steady decline. This research should be of interest to scholars as well as to urban practitioners.

Studying the Roles of Nonprofits, Government, and Business in Providing Activities and Services to Youth in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area

The article addresses the questions, What do children in urban areas do on Saturdays? What types of organizational resources do they have access to? Does this vary by social class? Using diary data on children's activities on Saturdays in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metropolitan area, the authors describe the different types of venues (households, businesses, public space, associations, charities, congregations, and government/tribal agencies) that served different types of children. They find that the likelihood of using a charity or business rather than a government or tribal provider increased with family income. Also, the likelihood of using a congregation or a government facility rather than a business, charity, or household increased with being Hispanic. The authors discuss the implications for the urban division of labor on Saturdays and offer research questions that need further investigation.

Sleep Disturbance in the Homeless Population: The Relationship between Homelessness, Sleep and Health

Little is known about how sleep disruption impacts physical health among the homeless. The association between homelessness, quality of sleep and physical health were investigated in the current study. Convenience sampling was used to select participants from a pool of people attending the programs of Ecclesia Ministries. Interviews were conducted with 32 persons from the Boston metropolitan area, of whom 23 were currently homeless. The researcher assessed level of sleep disturbance, number of health problems and degree of homelessness using a standard demographic questionnaire, the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Our results found evidence of significant sleep disturbance as well as significant mental and physical health problems in the sample. Correlational analyses provided partial support for the hypothesis that degree of homelessness impacts both sleep quality and physical health. Future work should investigate whether change in homelessness status alters sleep quality and physical health and also whether interventions may be utilized in this understudied and vulnerable population.

Understanding Immigrants' Travel Behavior in Florida: Neighborhood Effects and Behavioral Assimilation

The goal of this study was to develop Multinomial Logit models for the mode choice behavior of immigrants, with key focuses on neighborhood effects and behavioral assimilation. The first aspect shows the relationship between social network ties and immigrants’ chosen mode of transportation, while the second aspect explores the gradual changes toward alternative mode usage with regard to immigrants’ migrating period in the United States (US). Mode choice models were developed for work, shopping, social, recreational, and other trip purposes to evaluate the impacts of various land use patterns, neighborhood typology, socioeconomic-demographic and immigrant related attributes on individuals’ travel behavior. Estimated coefficients of mode choice determinants were compared between each alternative mode (i.e., high-occupancy vehicle, public transit, and non-motorized transport) with single-occupant vehicles. The model results revealed the significant influence of neighborhood and land use variables on the usage of alternative modes among immigrants. Incorporating these indicators into the demand forecasting process will provide a better understanding of the diverse travel patterns for the unique composition of population groups in Florida.

Resident perceptions of natural resources between cities and across scales in the Pacific Northwest

As the global population becomes increasingly urban, research is needed to explore how local culture, land use, and policy will influence urban natural resource management. We used a broad-scale comparative approach and survey of residents within the Portland (Oregon)-Vancouver (Washington) metropolitan areas, USA, two states with similar geographical and ecological characteristics, but different approaches to land-use planning, to explore resident perceptions about natural resources at three scales of analysis: property level (“at or near my house”), neighborhood (“within a 20-minute walk from my house”), and metro level (“across the metro area”). At the metro-level scale, nonmetric multidimensional scaling revealed that the two cities were quite similar. However, affinity for particular landscape characteristics existed within each city with the greatest difference generally at the property-level scale. Portland respondents expressed affinity for large mature trees, tree-lined streets, public transportation, and proximity to stores and services. Vancouver respondents expressed affinity for plentiful accessible parking. We suggest three explanations that likely are not mutually exclusive. First, respondents are segmented based on preferences for particular amenities, such as convenience versus commuter needs. Second, historical land-use and tax policy legacies may influence individual decisions. Third, more environmentally attuned worldviews may influence an individual’s desire to produce environmentally friendly outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of acknowledging variations in residents’ affinities for landscape characteristics across different scales and locations because these differences may influence future land-use policies about urban natural resources.