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From the ashes of the creative city paradigm, there is a growing awareness of the urban creative economy as an adaptive complex system of intertwined actors and institutions. Yet, especially in the European context, little attention has been given to understanding informal and alternative art spaces and venues that contribute to the vibrancy of the urban cultural scene. Drawing on the emerging creative and cultural ecology literature, the article proposes a conceptual and empirical framework to analyze alternative cultural production as an ecological community. After providing a conceptualization of distinct types of alternative cultural organizations, we investigate the economic, spatial, and relational structure of more than 50 art spaces in Turin, Italy, an industrial city that has experienced a radical urban transformation based on culture-led development strategies. Using both a quantitative and qualitative approach, our findings unveil a distinction between centers pursuing artistic specialization and those more oriented toward aggregating diversified cultural activities. The two types of organizations coexist within the community, but the difference in their mission and operation influences the organizational structure, the involvement in neighborhood revitalization, and features of the local network of collaborations. From a spatial perspective, while the centers tend to cluster in the main peripheral areas of social and urban transformation, the analysis points out possible different locational choices and spatial dynamics for the two types of organizations in distinct areas of commercial and real-estate-led transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An investigation on partial discharge (PD) propagation in power cables is carried out in this paper with the aim of inferring limits for PD detection as a function of the distance between PD source and detector. Although this problem has not an exact solution unless noise levels are not specified, useful information concerning detectability and error in estimates are provided in this paper for both medium and high voltage polymeric cables. The issue of calibrator characteristics with respect to sensitivity detection is also tackled. Index Terms--Partial discharges, power cables, condition based maintenance, risk assessment.

This paper presents a technique for outdoor ceramic insulator pollution assessment based on partial discharge detection and analysis. Laboratory tests and data coming from a monitoring activity carried out on some insulators of transmission lines are reported. They support the effectiveness of partial discharge detection and analysis as a tool to carry out condition-based maintenance of insulators of overhead lines. In particular, it can be seen that partial discharge analysis highlights the mechanisms bringing insulators to flashover (dry band arc activity) and is, therefore, well suited to predict increasing pollution and imminent flashover. As a consequence, algorithms are proposed to provide a quantitative evaluation of pollution severity. Index Terms--Outdoor insulators, partial discharge, diagnosis, maintenance, power transmission and distribution.