•The idea of the smart city is ambiguous, as there are multiple meanings.•Citizenship is evolving, becoming more and more tied to the urban scale.•Four imaginaries of smart urbanism are explored, ...questioning the position of citizens.•All the considered imaginaries locate citizens in a subaltern position.•Smart city visions are largely disconnected from social needs and aspirations.
Imagining tomorrow’s life implies, to a large degree, imagining the kind of cities we will inhabit in the future. In this framework, the smart city is actually a popular vision in discourses on urban development. This paper explores alternative ways in which citizens are positioned within different imaginaries of the smart city. The premise is that most mainstream discourses implicitly assume that smart city projects will empower and improve the lives of citizens. However, their role is often ambiguous. While some visions of the smart city are characterised by the absence of citizen’s voices, others are populated by active citizens operating as urban sensors. Furthermore there are fearful visions of a future in which citizens will be subjugated by technologies that will hamper their freedom. This paper analyses the role of citizens in four alternative smart city imaginaries. The thesis proposed is that all four imaginaries are characterised by citizens playing a subaltern role, and hence the smart city is a relatively poor concept if intended as a model of the urban life of the future.
The Invisible Garden is a landscape mediation installation carried out by Bruit du frigo in conjunction with the Base agency of landscape architecture as part of the redevelopment of the landscaped ...spaces in the Saragosse district of the French city of Pau. The Invisible Garden provides an urban Utopian opportunity for experimentation allowing inhabitants to experiment with and test their living environment while making active contributions to it. It is a form of action involving direct human consultation relating to the surveyed territory that was implemented from November 2017 to January 2020 with town hall departments and local associations. This article describes the different phases of the project and gives an account of how the network of contacts was built among individuals encountered during the collective actions. In addition to the chronological presentation of the process, extracts from the journal provide an insider’s view of the project and reveal what was at stake over and beyond the landscape itself.
Abstract Privately organized collective housing is currently included in agendas for sustainable urban development in a range of European cities as a resource-efficient form of housing that prevents ...isolation and contributes to social cohesion within urban communities. However, research has shown that the recent surge of different forms of private-collective housing in Berlin could be a driver of gentrification and segregation. This article aims to uncover potential causes of the discrepancies between the ideological, and at times utopian, motivations underpinning self-build housing projects in the former East Berlin district Prenzlauer Berg, and their actual outcomes. I do so by analysing the literary (counter) discourse on self-build groups developed in Anke Stelling’s novels Bodentiefe Fenster Floor-Length Windows (2015) and Schäfchen im Trockenen (2018, published in English translation as Higher Ground in 2021). I show that the realization of socially progressive, or even utopian, plans for urban private-collective housing prove difficult, and sometimes impossible, for the characters in the novels, due to the influence of other societal structures such as gender and class inequalities, urban segregation and gentrification, discrimination and the neoliberal logic of individual competition and consumption.
Resumo Este artigo discute o progressivo descolamento observado entre cidade, urbano, rural e natureza em contexto amazônico. Partiu-se da geo-história, abordagem lefebvriana de análise da formação ...espacial, do sítio de Santarém (PA) e adjacências, para explicitar a natureza híbrida de um tecido urbano extensivo, formado por tipologias urbanas descontínuas (cidade e vilas), periurbanas (comunidades e assentamentos) e rurais (campo de soja, floresta e comunidades extrativistas), segundo arranjos socioespaciais herdeiros de diferentes matrizes culturais. A partir da revisão de literatura, da análise de cartografia histórica e de dados digitais, observa-se que o urbano, orientado por processos globais e pelo interesse econômico, nega e desestrutura territórios, nos quais a sociobiodiversidade e as práticas desenvolvidas ao longo dos séculos são portadoras de potencial reconciliação entre urbano e natureza, bem como valiosas em contexto de mudanças climáticas. O estudo detalha a análise para a mancha urbana da cidade de Santarém, assumida como um amálgama que espelha a diversidade socioespacial da região e que melhor ilustra a forma como a concepção hegemônica de cidade, aplicada ao urbano periférico amazônico, tem distanciado Santarém do potencial de expressar o urbano utopia, o qual será capaz de resgatar a indissociabilidade de pessoas, biodiversidade, solo e água, que já vem sendo manifestada há séculos na Amazônia.
This article analyses the permanent exhibition Montreal love stories – The Cultural Connection of the Montréal museum of archaeology and history, Pointe-à-Callière. This exhibition shows an official ...image of the metropolis of Québec, an image of a cosmopolitan city through love between inhabitants, between groups and between these groups and the city. This exhibition – an institutionalized media which is used to build consensus and inspire dreams – depicts an ideal city. What are the landscapes and the urban forms of this cosmopolitan city, between urban utopia and dwellers’ practices? How the exhibition approaches the urban ethnocultural diversity through identification process? How does it produce an image of Montréal to promote for the inhabitants and for the tourists? Can the exhibition be read like an ideal program to develop in the city, both real metropolis and utopia ?
Cet article propose d’analyser l’exposition permanente Les Amours de Montréal, au carrefour des cultures du musée d’archéologie et d’histoire de la ville de Montréal, Pointe-à-Callière. Celle-ci montre une figure officielle de la métropole québécoise, celle d’une ville cosmopolite au prisme des amours entre les personnes, entre les groupes et entre ces derniers et la ville. Cette exposition, média très institutionnalisé propre à créer du consensus et « machine à faire rêver », brosse un portrait de ville idéale. Quels sont les paysages et les formes urbaines de cette ville cosmopolite mise en récits, entre utopie urbaine et pratiques habitantes ? Dans quelle mesure l’exposition s’adresse à la diversité ethnoculturelle de la ville par le processus d’identification et comment produit-elle une image de Montréal à promouvoir chez les habitants et chez les touristes ? L’exposition peut-elle se lire comme un récit programmatique idéal à mettre en place dans la ville, à la fois métropole montréalaise et utopie de la ville ?
Opened in 1958 the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry was the very first purpose-built, not-for-profit, civic, regional producing theatre. It remains exceptional in the historical record because of the ...utopian vision of the urban planners who established it. However, largely because of the subsequent collapse of Coventry's utopian dream in the face of major industrial and economic trauma, the Belgrade has had to fight hard both to retain its place within the city and its artistic visibility in the overall landscape of regional theatre. Positioned, as are all subsidized, not-for-profit arts organizations, within the third sector, successive Belgrade managements have had to manoeuvre between the original founding public service aspirations of social transformation and the imperatives imposed by a market economy. The result has been an attempt to create a place of convergence and coexistence for a range of disparate communities of interest representative of a constantly shifting external environment.
Suite à l’indépendance de l’Inde en 1947, le Premier Ministre, Jawaharlal Nehru, lance un plan de villes nouvelles sur tout le territoire. Le nouvel État du Punjab devait être doté d’une Capitale ...dont Nehru demandait qu’elle soit : « …le symbole de l’Inde, désentravée des traditions du passé…une expression de la confiance de la Nation dans le futur… ».À soixante-trois ans, Le Corbusier réalisera enfin une de ses ambitions : concevoir l’urbanisme d’une ville de plus de 500 000 habitants. Il mobilisera des idéaux théoriques en tenant compte du particularisme local. Soixante ans après cette conception, il devient pertinent de revisiter cette « utopie urbaine » par la pratique de ses résidants. Les hiérarchies traditionnelles indiennes structuraient les espaces urbains. À Chandigarh, pour répondre aux vœux du Premier Ministre, de nouvelles dispositions devaient permettre « l’émergence une société nouvelle ». Le Master Plan de Le Corbusier et sa réalisation répondront à cette exigence. Ensuite, nous avons voulu comprendre les liens entre urbanisme et urbanité et comment des rapports sociaux « nouveaux » pouvaient encore s’exprimer six décennies après les premiers coups de crayon. Enfin, nous avons considéré que l’urbanisme d’une ville répond aux attentes de ses résidants dès lors que ceux-ci s’approprient « leur ville ». Chandigarh prévue pour 500 000 habitants, en accueille plus d’un million et devient le centre d’une grande agglomération.Pour comprendre la ville, nous avons mobilisé l’analyse paysagère et réalisé des entretiens qualitatifs auprès de plus de cent personnes pour apprécier les liens sociaux et le niveau d’appropriation. Nous en concluons que cette ville est appréciée et que ces concepteurs ont eu une vision prospective importante.
Subsequent to the independency of India in 1947, its Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, developed a plan of new cities over the whole territory. The new state of Penjab should get a metropole that Nerhu asked it to be : « …the symbol of India, detached of past traditions …an expression of the Nation trust in the future… ».When sixty-three years old, Le Corbusier could achieve one of his ambitions : Conceive the urban planning for a town of more than 500 000 inhabitants. He put forward theoretical ideals while taking into account the local particularism. Sixty years after this inception, it becomes pertinent to revisit such an « urban utopia » by investigating the practice of its residents. The traditional indian hierarchies used to be reflected in urban space management. In the town of Chandigarh, in order to observe the Prime Minister wishes, new regulations were necessary for achieving the « emergence of a new society ». Le Corbusier’s Master Plan and its implementation fulfilled this requirement. Then, we wanted to understand the relationships between ‘urbanism’ and ‘urbanity’ and to which extent « new » social relations could still develop six decades after the original design. At last we have considered that the urbanism of a town meets the expectations of its residents if they take in hand the ownership of « their city ». Chandigarh, initially planned for 500 000 inhabitants, has now more than a million of residents, and it has become the center of a large metropole. In order to get an understanding of the town, we have performed a landscape analysis and conducted qualitative interviews with more than hundred people, the objective being to appreciate their social links and level of appropriation. Our conclusion is that this town is appreciated and that its designers have had a major forward-looking perspective.
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