The article is based on the analysis of fieldwork studies of the local graffiti and street art production in Sofia, Bulgaria. The author argues that at present the majority of the graffiti writers ...there tend to produce TTP graffiti following the global graffiti tradition and taking into consideration its conventions and heritage. As a result of that the meaning of the local TTPs and street art is quite clear and understandable to the foreign TTP writers, to the majority of the young people in the city as well as to a growing group of connoisseurs. The rest usually see in the same writings either strange art or nothing but scribbles, oddly deformed letters and unclear symbolic images. The article interprets the processes of mutual understanding or misunderstanding which contribute to the creation of new types of coherences and differentiation in the local urban milieu.
Covid-19 has dramatically changed life in cities across the globe. What remains uncertain is how national policies and appeals to comply with suggested rules translate to changes in the behaviour of ...citizens in urban areas. This lack of local knowledge leaves urban policy makers and planners with few clues as to the determinants of social resilience in cities during protracted crises like a pandemic. Methods are required to measure the capacity of people to conduct routine activities without risking exposure to a prevalent disease, particularly for those most vulnerable during a health crisis. By spanning the fields of urban resilience, human geography, mobility studies and the behavioural sciences, this study explores how to measure social resilience in cities during a protracted crisis. Using a public participation GIS online platform, we observe changes in citizen behaviour within urban spaces during the Covid-19 pandemic. Inhabitants from three districts of a Dutch city mapped their activity routines during the lockdown period and during the year before the pandemic. Spatio-temporal analysis reveals changes in the clustering of activities into what we describe as ‘activity bubbles'. We reflect on the influence of the urban space on these changes and assess the contribution of this exploratory research methodology for gaining insights into behavioural change. Implications for urban planning and resilience theory are discussed.
•This study discusses urban space and its features as key determinants of pandemic resilience.•A PPGIS survey method is used to co-create insights into changes in activity routines.•Protracted crises require study of their dynamic qualities rather than static capacities.•Social resilience entails trade-offs between health and well-being both in the short- and long term.•We propose activity bubbles as a framework to measure social resilience spatio-temporally.
Thinking about the post-Covid city represents an opportunity for a reflection that, starting from the differences inherent in each city, from the knowledge of its history, of its past, critically ...analyses the conceptual fracture operated by the globalization. When asking about the way of inhabiting a space whether private or public, is necessary to read the opposing levels that the city is built on. The “ability to inhabit” is therefore constituted as an immanent quality of places, proposing solutions that establish degrees of “collaboration” between building and urban space and forms of relationship that the contemporary city seems no longer able of producing: therefore only by developing a “prescient” environmental vision and recovering the ethical need to imagine the city beyond contingency.
► A comprehensive review of urban outdoor comfort and outdoor space use is presented. ► An introduction of the most widely used outdoor thermal comfort assessment methods is presented. ► Future ...directions of development of planning-support tools are discussed.
Outdoor spaces are important to sustainable cities because they accommodate pedestrian traffic and outdoor activities, and contribute greatly to urban livability and vitality. In the global context of climate change, outdoor spaces that provide a pleasurable thermal comfort experience for pedestrians effectively improve the quality of urban living. The influence of thermal comfort on outdoor activities is a complex issue comprising both climatic and behavioral aspects; however, current investigations lack a general framework for assessment. This paper presents a review of research over the past decade on the behavioral aspects of outdoor thermal comfort. The article focuses on perceptions of outdoor thermal comfort and the use of outdoor space in the context of urban planning. We further discuss a general framework for assessing outdoor thermal comfort based on behavioral aspects and the need for predicting tools in the design and planning of outdoor thermal comfort.
This paper engages with a recent set of critical arguments concerning the 'post-crisis city' and the political economy of 'austerity urbanism'. The focus of the discussion is on practical ...interventions in the vacant and disused spaces of recessionary cities, and in particular on temporary designs and provisional uses. In this way, it opens a further line of argument about urbanism under conditions of austerity, alongside analyses of the formal politics of austerity or the possibilities of urban activism in these settings. Its concern is with forms of urban intervention that re-work orthodoxies of urban development as usual: in particular the timescales that inform conventional development models; the understandings of use around which sites are planned and designed; and the ways in which value is realized through the production of urban spaces. The argument centres on European contexts of austerity urbanism, drawing on critical examples of urban design and occupation in the region's largest economies. Such urban strategies are concerned with a politics and a practice of small incursions in material spaces that seek to create a kind of 'durability through the temporary'.
A geographical perspective is crucial to understanding sustainability transitions and transformation, but previous research on place framing in sustainability transitions and transformation has had a ...marked focus on the politics of the future and its performativity in the present. This paper analyzes place-framing in sustainability transitions and transformation by examining how the conflicting collective memories of a place and the framings of the future of this place interact and lead to the justification of particular forms of socio-material development, land use and sustainability of the peri-urban spaces of the city of Sogamoso, Colombia. Based on 38 semi-structured interviews, we identify three distinct assemblages of future visions, collective memories and place frames, which we call urban development, recovering tradition, and cultural revitalization. The analysis shows that place framing is an exercise through which collective memories and future visions are connected and co-constituted in a spatio-temporal ‘dialogue’: collective memories, future visions and place frames are processes of social construction activated in the attempt to shape or contest sustainability transitions and transformation. We contend that the existence and mobilization of collective memories—and their critical influence on future visions—are a core aspect of the politics of place framing fundamental to the socio-material processes of sustainability transitions and transformation. Furthermore, a politics of place-making in sustainability transitions and transformation involves acknowledging and negotiating collective memories of the past as much as future visions. This suggests ways to critically counterbalance the marked future orientation taken in recent years by sustainability science and transition studies.
Buenaventura, Colombia's rapidly expanding Pacific port, is simultaneously a city of violence. Focusing the linkages between local violence and the port economy, this contribution explores the role ...the port's global interconnections play for Buenaventura as a site of violence. In which ways does everyday violence shape urban spatial practices, particularly movement? How do every day coping strategies, reacting to a violent context, produce urban space? I suggest an analysis that links the production of urban space through everyday practices to the notion of violence as inherent to urban power relations on the one, and to the role of global flows of goods in urban space on the other hand. The main argument is that, global interconnections through the port are not decoupled from, but rather constitute a condition for violence in Buenaventura, particularly in neighbourhoods next to port terminals. This urban space is constituted both by daily violence and by stretching along global supply chains. Both violence and the secured, off-access port spaces shape, transform and limit inhabitants' mobility, while they enable global flows. I identify coping strategies such as mapping safe spaces, accompaniment, adaptation of movement to zig-zag patterns, and organised spatial strategies. The article contributes to recent debates on violence and the everyday, and urban space shaped by violent global-local encounters.
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