Search

Recent studies show that environmental noise in urban environments continues to be a great health risk. This noise is especially further transmitted by the hard materials that are mostly used for façades. To predict these effects it is desirable to have a reliable prediction method. There are already several ways to predict sound levels in an urban context. This paper investigates two while focusing specifically on a practical approach to show that the methods are suitable to use during an actual design project. The impact of changing a façade at a specific location is investigated using both prediction methods. A façade which reflects sound to a location where it has a smaller impact, a sound absorbing façade, and a façade which combines both are taken into consideration. These façade adaptions have the potential to improve the sound levels in the investigated area from 1.7 up to 9.3 dB(A). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Flash houses', a distinctive type of public house associated with criminal activity, are a shadowy and little-studied aspect of early 19th-century London. This article situates flash houses within a wide perspective, arguing that the discourses on flash houses were part of concerns about the threat of the urban environment to the moral character of its inhabitants. The article draws on an original synthesis of a range of sources that refer to flash houses, including contemporary literature, newspapers, court documents, and government papers. It demonstrates that flash houses were part of both popular intrigue about the perceived 'criminal underworld' and official concerns about the collusion between police officers and suspected offenders, since police officers allegedly frequented flash houses to gather criminal information. A detailed examination of this term reveals anxieties about the state of the metropolis, poverty, and criminality that were central to the early 19th-century consciousness. However, the discussion of flash houses in this context also demonstrates a powerful connection in contemporary minds between the physical spaces of the city and the risks that they posed to inhabitants' morals. While associations between the physical environment and morality have been drawn throughout history, flash houses represent a paradigmatic moment in this dialogue. This is because different moral concerns coalesced around the discourse on flash houses: anxieties about the criminal underworld, the potential for moral degradation of young people who frequented these spaces, and the corruption of police officers through contact with known or suspected offenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual system can recover 3D information from many different types of visual information, e.g., contour-drawings. How well can people navigate in a real dynamic environment with contour-drawings? This question was addressed by developing an AR-device that could show a contour-drawing of a real scene in an immersive manner and by conducting an observational field study in which the two authors navigated in real environments wearing this AR-device. The navigation with contour-drawings was difficult in natural scenes but easy in urban scenes. This suggests that the visual information from natural and urban environments is sufficiently different and our visual system can accommodate to this difference of the visual information in different environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the notion of 'break-down' as a way of going beyond claims to recover the discarded or practice repair. It experiments with ethnographic cross-pollination, setting vignettes from seemingly disparate field-sites alongside one another, to meditate on singular unfinished moments that together reflect wider dynamics of invisibility, negation, stigma and suspension at the urban interstices. From the peripheral neighbourhoods of Zaria, Nairobi, Paris, Berlin and London, these vignettes evoke shifting relationships to labour in precarious urban environments, where fleeting but situated codes, logics and deals have emerged out of seemingly broken urban worlds. Engaging with Stephen Jackson's notion of 'broken world thinking' and Donna Haraway's invitation to 'stay with the trouble', this article argues for staying with the breakdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social clubs began in India in the late eighteenth century in the wake of British colonial expansion. Clubs flourished in colonial India's two great administrative divisions: those areas under direct control and the indirectly controlled princely states of India. This article explores the role of clubs in Hyderabad city, the capital city of India's largest and wealthiest princely state. Here, club dynamics operated differently. By the nineteenth century, princely state urban capitals supported two centres of power: the local Indian ruler and that of the British Resident. These multiple centres of power forced clubs in this urban environment to be less attentive to difference among members (race and class) and more attentive to reaching across divisions. An examination of clubs in a princely state urban environment, thus, reveals an Indo-British clubland, largely marked by forms of social coexistence and cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acoustic environment in an urban dwelling is a key factor in human health, especially in megacities, where there are high levels of traffic noise. This study investigated the effects of various socio-economic indicators (gender, age, roadside residence, average daily time at home) on the subjective evaluation of residential acoustic environments, employing a series of questionnaire surveys and in-depth interviews in two Chinese megacities (Chongqing and Guangzhou). The findings indicate that residents in Chongqing, a typical mountainous city, are less satisfied with their acoustic environment than those in Guangzhou, a city built on a plain. However, there were no significant differences between residents in the two Chinese megacities in terms of their perspectives on their thermal, humid or luminous environments or noise-related health symptoms. Regarding perceptions of acoustic environments, there were significant differences between residents in the mountainous city and the plain city, as well as those in roadside and non-roadside homes, but no significant differences were identified between the views of men and women or the young and the old, and time spent at home appeared to have no impact. Moreover, age and average daily time spent at home are likely to be associated with noise-related health symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late-nineteenth-century Berlin, the rapid growth of tenements (Mietskaserne) housing the city's expanding lower class population provoked a strong moral reaction from bourgeois social reformers in Germany, who railed against the perceived social disorders found therein. This essay explores the less understood moral terms upon which the problem of mass housing was articulated in response to the growth of the tenement system in Berlin, from the city's first housing crisis in 1871 to the first widespread photographic inquiry of Berlin's dwelling conditions in the first decade of the twentieth century. As this essay shows, debates on housing reform were not confined to bourgeois circles of social and public health expertise—they pervaded popular literature and formed an important part of a broader social imaginary that gave meaning to the urban environment and the task of nation-building at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the Mukuru Special Planning Area in Nairobi (Kenya), this article analyses enabling conditions for scaling participatory planning in otherwise exclusionary urban political environments. It contributes to debates that focus on qualitative changes required to enhance citizen participation and on the integration of low-income residents' needs, demands and innovations into city-wide planning practices around informal settlement upgrading. The article identifies three conditions that are key to enable and enhance the success of scaling efforts. First, moving to scale requires identifying, generating and making strategic use of political opportunities and building political momentum around them. Second, in addition to mobilizing, organizing and connecting stakeholders at different levels, successful scaling efforts must also promote qualitative changes in the way these stakeholders see themselves, and how they interact with and relate to each other. Third, going to scale requires the capacity to manage conflict successfully and prevent attempts to disrupt, co-opt or halt a scaling process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In urban environments, humans often encounter other people that may engage one in interaction. How do humans perceive such invitations to interact at a glance? We briefly presented participants with pictures of actors carrying out one of 11 behaviors (e.g., waving or looking at a phone) at four camera-actor distances. Participants were asked to describe what they might do in such a situation, how they decided, and what stood out most in the photograph. In addition, participants rated how likely they deemed interaction to take place. Participants formulated clear responses about how they might act. We show convincingly that what participants would do depended on the depicted behavior, but not the camera-actor distance. The likeliness to interact ratings depended both on the depicted behavior and the camera-actor distance. We conclude that humans perceive the "gist" of photographs and that various aspects of the actor, action, and context depicted in photographs are subjectively available at a glance. Our conclusions are discussed in the context of scene perception, social robotics, and intercultural differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognized that crimes are clustered in space. Features of the built environment are among various factors associated with crime clustering patterns. There are two competing perspectives on this association: the "encounter" and "enclosure" hypotheses. This study examines the effect of the built environment on the spatial distribution of residential burglary in Wuhan, China, aiming to test these two competing perspectives. First, we review existing studies analyzing the influence of the built environment on residential burglary, especially those based on the two hypotheses. We then conduct an exploratory data analysis to observe the spatial and temporal distribution patterns of residential burglaries. Next, we use a multivariate spatial regression model to evaluate the influence of various built environment characteristics on residential burglaries, after controlling for socio-demographic variables, guardianship, and the time-of-day effect. The results suggest a double peak in the hourly distribution of burglaries: 6:00 a.m.–8:59 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.–7:59 p.m. Burglaries are positively and significantly autocorrelated in space and mainly concentrated in the north-west and central areas of Wuhan. Two transport facilities features (intersection density and the presence of subway stations), three building features (multiple stories, high housing prices, and older houses), and land-use mix are each positively correlated with burglary. However, the burglary count is negatively correlated with the ratio of the residential land. Overall, neighborhoods with high permeability are vulnerable to residential burglaries. Thus, the principle of access control promoted by the enclosure hypothesis appears effective in preventing residential crime. The results' implications for crime prevention and urban design practice are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the present-day problematic of gender-biased street names as prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa's cityscapes. That is, the abundance of masculine street names as opposed to feminine ones in the urban environments of this region. The article first provides a comparative view on the scope of this toponymic phenomenon in other geographic regions with relation to sub-Saharan Africa. It also identifies few decisive factors in the creation of the gender-biased urban landscapes in sub-Saharan Africa. These factors consist of: recent tendencies in critical toponymy studies; colonial and post-colonial cultures of governmentality; and inadequate urban planning legislation and vision as pertained by post-colonial states. This toponymic problematic is then exemplified in a site-specific analysis of the city of Bindura in north-eastern Zimbabwe. The article concludes with recommendations for designing a more socially inclusive urban management policy in the region, pointing to future research directions of this under-studied phenomenon in critical place-name studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/significance: Based on the urgent needs of the status quo of urban anti-terrorism, combining the present situation of intelligent city construction, we carry out the research on the key problems such as the collection and analysis of counter-terrorism information for urban environment. This paper puts forward a kind of city anti-terrorism information perception system based on the Internet of things, and realizes to improve the level of surveillance and early warning of terrorist activities facing the urban environment. Method/Process: The system collects and merges the heterogeneous information of terrorism, which is based on the information perception layer, the intelligence identification layer and the intelligence inference layer, which is based on the city's focal area. To filter suspicious information by constructing a semantic database of terrorist action signals Combined with complex event processing and machine learning technology, real-time monitoring and mining prediction of mass event flow, using the comparison between historical data of terrorist attacks and real-time data, increased the area of counter-terrorism intelligence. Results/Conclusions: We hope to provide a better model and an exploratory study on the construction of the counter-terrorism early warning for the urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vertical-axis wind turbines have been confined to small-scale generation in urban environments where their omnidirectional capability offers them an advantage over the more ubiquitous horizontal-axis wind turbine. With a drive towards renewable energy, more opportunities exist for the implementation of wind turbines in a multitude of environments. Based on its inherent operational drawbacks, the vertical-axis wind turbine has not undergone extensive investigation. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the technology. This article addresses the torque ripple, a variation in torque produced by the turbine, present during operation. The variation in torque generated by a vertical-axis wind turbine increases the likelihood of failure due to fatigue. Current treatment is symptomatic and addresses the result of the torque fluctuation and not the cause. A novel blade design, capable of altering the lift and drag response through shape alteration, is presented as a solution. The blade design and operation is achieved through genetic algorithm optimization and computational fluid dynamic simulations. Comparisons with previous work show the novel blade presented here surpasses the reduction seen with pitching solutions. A 25% reduction in torque ripple was demonstrated for a 17% reduction in performance coefficient using the surface distortion approach. This surpasses the foil pitching approach which achieved a 15% torque ripple reduction for the same loss in performance coefficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we propose to expand the field of urban political ecology (UPE) by analyzing the role of discourse in the production of urban nature. We exemplify our case by analyzing media discourses and exploring discursive modes of justification and hierarchies of worth mobilized in socialist and postsocialist struggles over allotments in what is now the Czech Republic. We unravel particular discursive strategies and arguments used to depoliticize the struggle and justify the abolishment of allotments. Using the example of allotments, we argue that incorporating a rigorous analysis of discourse in the scope and practice of UPE and paying close, explicit attention to how worth and value are mobilized might help us not only to better understand the complex processes of the production of socio-natures in (neoliberal) cities but also to empower UPE scholars with tools to further the fight for more just urban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To assess the attentional demand of different contextual factors in driving.Background: The attentional demand on the driver varies with the situation. One approach for estimating the attentional demand, via spare capacity, is to use visual occlusion.Method: Using a 3 × 5 within-subjects design, 33 participants drove in a fixed-base simulator in three scenarios (i.e., urban, rural, and motorway), combined with five fixed occlusion durations (1.0, 1.4, 1.8, 2.2, and 2.6 s). By pressing a microswitch on a finger, the driver initiated each occlusion, which lasted for the same predetermined duration within each trial. Drivers were instructed to occlude their vision as often as possible while still driving safely.Results: Stepwise logistic regression per scenario indicated that the occlusion predictors varied with scenario. In the urban environment, infrastructure-related variables had the biggest influence, whereas the distance to oncoming traffic played a major role on the rural road. On the motorway, occlusion duration and time since the last occlusion were the main determinants.Conclusion: Spare capacity is dependent on the scenario, selected speed, and individual factors. This is important for developing workload managers, infrastructural design, and aspects related to transfer of control in automated driving.Application: Better knowledge of the determinants of spare capacity in the road environment can help improve workload managers, thereby contributing to more efficient and safer interaction with additional tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing the concept of kinaesthetics, this article undertakes a critical re-description of amateur sports and fitness to explore the topographies, materials, innovation, and socialities that make up urban environments. Extending work on affect and urban materiality within geography and elsewhere, we argue that amateur sport and fitness animates many cities in ways that are frequently overlooked. The paper aims to 1) broaden understandings of amateur sport and fitness practices; 2) reframe perspectives on the kinds of environments cities are; 3) develop a prospective politics of provision involving the design and maintenance of a social infrastructure of amateur sport and fitness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban research in Germany has started to address the socio-spatial distribution and architectures of so-called collective accommodation for asylum seekers, refugee camps, and new forms of ethnic segregation triggered by refugee movements in recent years. The spatial practices of refugees themselves within these processes have not yet been a subject of substantive research. Combining research methods from social and architectural sciences, this article investigates the physical, material, social and symbolic appropriation processes and the spatial dimension of homemaking by Syrian refugees currently housed in refugee accommodation in Berlin, Germany. What spatial knowledge is mobilized at the place of asylum in order to turn the accommodation into a home? How do spatial practices and knowledge hybridize practices of the place of origin, experiences made during the flight and the arriving and uncertain period of stay at an unfamiliar place of asylum? How do spatial appropriation processes collide with humanitarian logics and technocratic emergency management approaches at the place of asylum? With these questions, the article focuses on the ways in which refugees perceive, adapt to, appropriate and alter their new urban environment physically and socially, and how they thereby draw on existing and evolving stocks of urban knowledge, urban experiences and social relationships. It argues that to develop a homelike space in temporary accommodation, arriving refugees mobilize knowledge at the place of asylum which can only be understood as a re-figuration process that is equally at work in the case of other migrants, migration and translocal processes. Studying these urban re-figurations thus helps us to reveal how the interplay of refugees' agency and their knowledge and the technocratic regime – as a state of permanent temporariness – affects the making of a 'home'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ageing in place agenda emphasises the importance of supporting older adults to age in their communities surrounded by the personal resources to age well. In exploring the relationship between older people and their environment, the concept of place insideness is seen as central to constructing feelings of identity, belonging and attachment in old age. Yet there has been little research exploring how older adults experience place insideness across different urban, social and cultural contexts which is an impediment to identifying effective interventions for age-friendly cities and communities. This article explores how place insideness is experienced amongst older adults across India, Brazil and the United Kingdom. The article presents qualitative findings from 294 semi-structured interviews collected across 9 cities and 27 neighbourhoods. The findings reveal that older adults cultivate their sense of place insideness in old age through dimensions of physical insideness (i.e., environmental competence in navigating and engaging in the community), social insideness (i.e., knowing others) and autobiographical insideness (i.e., shared place histories). In drawing on older people's understanding of their communities, this article explores the opportunities and challenges in developing a sense of place insideness to support ageing well. We identify implications for policy and practice in terms of how we can better design urban environments as age-friendly communities which support a greater sense of place for older people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multipath interference has been one of the most difficult problems when using global navigation satellite system-based vehicular navigation in urban environments. In this article, we develop a multipath mitigation algorithm exploiting the sparse estimation theory that improves the absolute positioning accuracy in urban environments. The navigation observation model is established by considering the multipath bias as additive positioning errors, and the assumption for the proposed method is that global navigation satellite system signals contaminated due to multipath are the minority among the received signals, which makes the unknown bias vector sparse. We investigated an improved elastic net method to estimate the sparse multipath bias vector, and the global navigation satellite system measurements can be corrected by subtracting the estimated multipath error. The positioning performance of the proposed method is verified by analytical and experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on fieldwork carried out among Muslim migrants in Moscow. The research focuses on practices of ritual healing and expelling djinn in an urban post-secular environment and in the context of migration. Concerning the procedure of exorcism, both self-reflection and introspection of all the participants of the treatment are of interest to me – the mullah, his patients, their relatives and even critics of these Muslim practices. In this study, it is not my intention to delve too deeply into the analysis of what possession is or determine its causes, but rather to look at specific situations from my fieldwork through the lens of morality, authority and precarity, in order to attempt to present the experience of possession and my informants' struggle against it in all its richness and complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper qualitatively explores how runners orientate themselves to a time and a route to run in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. The experiences of urban running enable a better understanding of the embodiments and techniques involved in physical activity participation in an urban environment. The paper draws on data from a mixed methods research project of recreational running in Sofia, offering a discussion of everyday experience, running practices and urban space. The study combines participant observation, running diaries and in-depth qualitative interviews with runners to think through the many processes involved in learning and maintaining a physical practice in an urban environment. The paper concludes by identifying the key issues and experiences of the runners and how these can be utilised to improve our knowledge of running in cities. This study draws attention to the challenges in establishing landscapes of movement for European cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on experiments with techniques of visual documentation and representation in circumstances of topographic intensity in Hong Kong. Centrally, the authors ask: how can approaches to visual representation reveal or reframe assemblages of material and immaterial processes in hyper-dense and hyper-topographic urban landscapes? The shaping and reshaping of the ground are essential parts of the formation of recombinant ecosystems, especially in intensively built-up environments – the constant reconfiguration of materials and spaces continually brings into being new ecological conditions. However, the visualization and representation of these transformations are often absent from the repertoire of techniques used to map and understand urban processes. This article addresses how landscape architecture can continue to develop methods to record, represent, visualize and design recombinant ecosystems in our urban environments. It considers which tools and techniques might provide 'thickened' understandings of hyper-dense, small-scale and intensely topographic urban environments like Hong Kong, with the objective of assisting designers and planners develop new ways to understand and see public space that can address the human and more-than-human nuances of complex urban spaces over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on a Situationist dérive in Central London, which mobilised a creative engagement with the city's Quaternary history (the last 2.6 million years). The aim was to animate paleoecological knowledge in the resistant, opaque and frenetic environment of a dense urban centre. This brief excursion into an alternative London is offered as a model for contemporary drifting that stretches out beyond our immediate situation to connect to successive geological and biological strata, reframing experiences of the urban environment through shifting scales and chronologies. The Situationists had declared 'sous les pavés, la plage!' (under the paving stones, there is a beach!), evoking the playful space of possibility behind the veneer of the city's systems and structures. This drift aimed to search even deeper, encountering spectral inhabitations revealed by the bones beneath the streets. The article argues that uncovering these hidden ecologies has the potential to counter the urban prevalence of spectacular representations of wildlife and develop an eco-politics of co-existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational resilience is often linked to educational success of various immigrant youth including Black immigrants despite the challenges they face. However, few studies have explored the factors that promote and/or constrain educational resilience and academic achievement of Black immigrants. To address this gap, the current article focuses on the educational resilience and academic achievement of Ghanaian-born immigrants (N = 60) attending urban high schools in the United States. Results indicate that self-regulation, technology, religious faith, past experiences, parental support, resources, and safety issues played an important role. Implications and recommendations for educators and policymakers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the thesis that the façade, as a diaphragm between two worlds, private and public, architecture and city, domestic and urban, embraces the representation and expression of architectural character, looking at its leading role in the definition of the urban environment, both reacting to it and defining it. However, in particular, the paper focuses on the theme of façade as an inhabited threshold: not a two‐dimensional vertical plane but a real architectural interior space. The inhabited façade becomes a place through which it is possible to experience the relationship between interior and exterior, between private and public, architecture and city, not only through the physical movement of "going inside," "stepping outside," "walking through" but also through the act of staying, living, and enjoying it as a space and a place that allows relationships between inside and outside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on increased profitability of urban environments that has led to the rise of new wave of urban entrepreneurialism across the world, under scrutiny. Topics include reports that urban environments have become increasingly more attractive for profit-driven economic activity, as vast and heterogeneous concentrations of consumers, knowledge and social relations.

This paper explores empirical accounts of perceived insecurities and accompanying issues that make urban place problematic and can impact older adults' well-being and overall quality of life. Findings reported derive from the project 'Place-Making with Older People: Towards Age-Friendly Communities' which investigates both barriers and facilitators to developing age-friendly cities. Drawing on interviews with older adults in three cities in the United Kingdom (UK), the analysis demonstrates that physical and social vulnerabilities, along with the characteristics of the built and social environment, play a role in influencing older adults' behaviours, routines and habits in the community. The results are discussed with a view of influencing practice and policy priorities relating to age-friendly cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges cities face in supplying safe water and disposing effectively of sewage and wastewater are affected by historical and environmental conditions and the long-lasting effects of choices of infrastructure. This article provides case studies of two similar cities, San Francisco and Melbourne, from the mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes to 1920, to show how differences in geography and governance structure can shape water technologies in a path-dependent way. While the two cities developed safe water supplies early in their histories, these were not well integrated with sewerage systems. The use of typhoid death rates, which provide a proxy for water quality and urban pollution, reveals the impact of defective water technology on the urban environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charter schools in urban environments have been scrutinized for their effectiveness. This study attempted to determine whether students attending Midwestern urban charter schools outperformed students in traditional schools on the state's accountability system over a 5-year time period. Using a quasi-experimental research design, data were collected from 31 Midwestern urban school districts, along with data from 88 adjacent contiguous charter schools during the 2008 to 2012 school years. Findings in this study suggest that students who transferred from traditional public schools to charter schools did not outperform academically as their corresponding counterparts in mathematics and reading, and had lower attendance rates, over the first three consecutive years of their attendance. In the succeeding 2 years, however, charter school students outperformed traditional students in both reading and mathematics, and had greater attendance rates, than students attending traditional public schools. The study also found that a student's ethnic and socioeconomic background had a significant influence on student outcome measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Kettling' has emerged in recent decades as an established, if controversial, tactic of public order policing. Departing from a historical emphasis on dispersal, kettling instead acts to contain protesters within a police cordon for sustained periods of time. This article elaborates upon the spatial and temporal logics of kettling by investigating the conditions of its historical emergence. We argue that kettling should be understood as a territorial strategy that co-evolved in relation to forms of disruptive protest. Whereas techniques of crowd dispersal serve to diffuse a unified collective, 'kettling' aims to capture the volatile intensities of public dissent and exhaust its political energies. Drawing on police manuals, media coverage, accounts from activists and expert interviews, we show how the 'kettle' re-territorializes protest by acting on its spatio-temporal and affective constitution. By fabricating an inner outside of the urban milieu, freezing the time of collective mobilization and inducing debilitating affects such as fear and boredom, kettling intervenes into the scene of political subjectification that each congregation of protesting bodies seeks to fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An atmospheric corrosion campaign was carried out to update the information on the environmental corrosivity in Portugal, available from earlier MICAT and ICP-Materials projects. This communication summarises the initial atmospheric corrosion of copper, zinc and grey cast iron in the cities of Coimbra and Aveiro. The new data was produced in the scope of the project TRAPHIC, which aimed at evaluating the effects of air pollution on materials in the city of Coimbra. Samples of the three metals were exposed in three different locations and the surface modifications were monitored over time together with the local environmental conditions. Chromatic alterations in copper and zinc were analysed and corrosion products were characterised using SEM/EDS. First-year corrosion rates were measured for the three locations to complement the national corrosivity map. Results indicate the reduction of acidic pollution and decreasing of corrosion rates over the past 30 years in Portugal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how Teju Cole's Open City and Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow, two "pedestrian novels", imagine alternative modes of being and belonging in the postcolonial globalized city by foregrounding the mediatory capacity of indigenous African epistemologies and the sacred in what might otherwise be thought of as a secular environment. The protagonists of these novels embark upon what I term "pedestrian mapping", as a means of resisting the isolation and marginalization experienced within New York and Johannesburg respectively. Pedestrian mapping enables us to read the incorporation of African epistemologies into the urban environment in tandem with the rituals of walking, thereby exposing the strategies of incorporation and resignification undertaken by Cole's and Mpe's protagonists as they establish new physical and ontological "homes". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Investigate the potential relationship between officer characteristics and poststop outcomes during police–citizen encounters. Methods: Data on police-initiated contacts were drawn from a large, racially/ethnically mixed urban environment. Cross-classified, multilevel models were estimated to identify correlates of five poststop outcomes. Results: Officer gender, race/ethnicity, and length of service exerted a direct and/or moderating effect on the likelihood of a traffic citation, criminal citation, and a search. Conclusions: Officer characteristics are a key, yet understudied, component to understanding the complexities of police officer decision-making in police–citizen encounters. The results indicate a noticeable component of the variation in poststop outcomes rests at the officer level thereby substantiating the continued exploration of these relationships. Moreover, the moderating effect of officer characteristics on the relationship between minority citizens and poststop outcomes presents new potential directions for expanding the social conditioning model and offers evidence regarding the in-group versus out-group perspectives within the context of police–citizen interactions. Limitations include omitted variable bias and inexact measurement of some variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims at analyzing and discussing how "the social" is perceived in processes of social sustainability within the context of the nonprofit housing sector in Denmark. The investigation takes as point of departure a specific renovation project, which exemplifies an attempt to bring social sustainability to the core of the process. As such, the study analyses the process by distilling various understandings of "the social" appearing in the project and herein the different types of participation that these understandings relate to. The analysis demonstrates that working with social sustainability and the aims and ideals connected to it is not straight forward, since "social sustainability" is not a tangible target, but rather something which is reinterpreted and subject to changing perceptions along the process. The dynamic and changing character of "sociality" suggests that social sustainability requires a focus on the platforms and on-going processes and interactions which continuously constitute the social life in a neighborhood and the relations between the residents. In this manner the article adds to empirical knowledge about processes organized to strengthen social sustainability in urban environments and contributes theoretically with a nuanced understanding of what "social" denotes in the context of sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the low environmental impact, smaller storage units, low wind speed, low power system distribution network impact, and low maintenance, small wind turbines have gained more attention. However, the usage of small turbines usually faces several shortcomings, and the actual yield is often lower than expected, generally because the output power is low when compared with the manufacturer, and the actual wind turbine behavior does not reproduces. In a view of performance evaluation of a small wind turbines using high-accuracy measurement devices to measure wind speed and energy production, this article illustrates an experimental seasonal performance evaluation of a 0.5-kW Hummer small wind turbine, placed in an urban environment. In addition, we study the influence of the height in the energy output and analyze its effect in the system performance, which is another aim in this work. Three cases have been carried out: 4 m in order to protect rotor blades during strong winds and storms in the first scenario and 6 m the manufacturing height in the second scenario while 10 m the third case. A 0.5-kW Hummer wind turbine has been installed in Noagia-Benghazi since 2010 for educational purposes, field studies, training, graduate projects, and research. The wind turbine seasonal performance under different periods was obtained and compared in terms of the wind speed, output power, energy production, and average wind speed. The average wind speed is 6.4, 4, 5.8, and 4 m/s, and the average energy production is 948.24, 172.8, 648, and 172.8 kWh in spring, summer, winter, and autumn, respectively. Spring has the highest wind speed followed by winter and autumn then summer for all height. Improvement is attained if the wind turbine tower height is 6 m, and 10 m where more energy is harvested. But the main problem at 10 m is that the system control needs more improvement because the wind speed exceeds 14 m/s which represents the maximum speed. The system can produce about 1.942 MW yearly and save CO2 emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent academic and urban policy writings the term urban diversity is usually understood, or discussed within the context of, increasing 'socio-cultural' diversity in cities or is explicitly connected to debates over immigration and demographic change. Although policy agendas follow certain common trends 'to deal with' the consequences of diversity, there is a lack of evidence-based research on how representations of diversity are mobilised and implemented by institutions of governance operating at multiple scales and how these narratives relate to each other. Policy-makers are faced with new dilemmas over how to govern and manage cities that are becoming increasingly diverse, on the one hand, and increasingly 'sensitive' to certain channels of flows of people (such as refugees), on the other. In some cases, city authorities promote the idea of inclusive diversity as a mark of modernisation and tolerance. In others, its recognition may be seen as a threat to an imagined social order and is perceived to be fuelling neo-assimilationist policies in many European Union cities. This special issue aims to fill this gap by providing evidence-based research outcomes that tackle different dimensions of the governance of diversity in cities. The principal aim of the research project, named DIVERCITIES, that underpins this collection was to critically assess evidence concerning the range of socio-economic outcomes that may emerge from the presence of greater urban diversity. DIVERCITIES has shown that city policy agendas across Europe are often more 'positive' towards diversity than national policies and media reports. Moreover, local policy initiatives, mostly formed at the bottom-up scale, sometimes as a cooperation between state and civic actors and sometimes as purely private or even individual arrangements, address the actual needs of certain population groups by acting as bridge-builders between public authorities and target groups. This collection aims to provide a clear understanding of how diversity is understood, operationalised and dealt with at different scales of policy-making. In focusing on European examples, it provides an important addition to a literature that has become Anglo-American focused, both in terms of the concepts and policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the question of how and why urban governments have implemented diversity policies in the context of a broader backlash against multiculturalism. The starting point of our analysis is the conceptualization of multiculturalism as a set of institutional arrangements for ethnic minority group representation and recognition. While scholars have largely focused on normative critiques of multiculturalism, arguing that it is unable to respond to the super-diversity in contemporary cities, this article focuses on the empirical complexities of diversity policy-making in a local context. More specifically, we investigate the changes in the policy practices and discourses regarding the representation and recognition of ethnic minorities in Antwerp, the largest city of the Flemish Region in Belgium. The minority policies in Antwerp had taken a multicultural turn by the 1990s, most evident in two strategies for group representation and recognition: the establishment of a migrant council to address the interests of ethnic minorities and the recruitment of an ethnically diverse city staff. We analyse how these measures became contested in the context of a wider backlash against multiculturalism. When multicultural policies became diversity policies, the migrant council was disbanded and a dress code prohibited minorities from displaying religious or other symbols in front-office public functions. With these cases, we argue that diversity discourses can be politicized in the governance of cities, with far-reaching consequences, such as the demise of ethnic minority representation and recognition, eventually reinforcing a neo-assimilationist focus urging migrants and their descendants to adapt to the cultural majority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the discourses, strategies and daily practices about diversity in Milan, Italy, framing them at different scales: (a) the national model of integration; (b) the city-level debate and policy framework about diversity; (c) the neighbourhood-level initiatives addressing (directly or indirectly) diversity; (d) representations and narratives about diversity among the residents of two neighbourhoods in the city. Drawing on qualitative research conducted between 2013 and 2015 with 33 interviews with key officials and policymakers and 52 interviews with inhabitants of two neighbourhoods in Milan, this work aims at disentangling how multi-scalar representations intertwine and intersect, to what extent the different scales influence each other and with what consequences on the multi-level governance of urban diversity. Considering both the bottom-up and the top-down perspectives, the results will highlight the detachment between people's narratives and representations and the local and national frameworks of discourses and policy practice, especially focusing on the reasons for and consequences of this detachment, and on the role that the meso level of local initiatives has in connecting the macro and the micro levels. The focus on the meso level allows one to underline the weaknesses and potentialities of the urban policy level in fostering the production of an institutional environment that is able to acknowledge and promote diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discourses and practices of central and local governments, as related to the issues of urban governance and diversity, and the emergence of new governance arrangements in different fields of Istanbul's diversity. The paper claims that current diversity discourses and policies in Turkey are being increasingly used as a rhetorical device to promote the economic development of the city, and to circumvent the different demands of people of diverse cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. In such processes of politicising diversity, governance initiatives undertake an important mission in coming up with pragmatic and non-discriminatory solutions to diversity-related issues. Through an examination of recent changes in the diversity policies of Istanbul and the emerging governance arrangements, this paper uncovers the conflicts and the mismatches that exist between the highly politicised discourses, policies and practices, and explores how different types of governance arrangements bring new arenas of expression to the diverse groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a longue durée study of Boston school governance based on the concept of strands of institutional development. The study identifies two strands of political development—rationalizing and democratic—that have operated on distinctly different logics in the formation and reformation of school governing arrangements. To explain institutional change in school governance, I adopt a conceptual framework that integrates structural (economic, social, and political context) and agency (local political actors) levels of analysis. This inquiry into political development conceives of governing institutions as instruments of collective problem solving, whose form and function are the product of the interactions between the urban environment and local political actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walking outdoors requires navigating a complex environment. However, no studies have evaluated how environmental barriers affect outdoor mobility in real time. We assessed the impact of the built environment on outdoor mobility, using mobile, wearable inertial measurement units. Data come from a convenience sample of 23 community-dwelling adults in Southeast Michigan. Participants walked a defined outdoor route where gait metrics were captured over a real-world urban environment with varying challenges. Street segments were classified as high versus low environmental demand using the Senior Walking Environmental Assessment Tool. Participants ranged in age from 22 to 74 years (mean age of 47 years). Outdoor gait speed was 0.3 m/s slower, and gait variability almost doubled, over the high- versus low-demand environments (coefficient of variability = 10.6% vs. 5.6%, respectively). This is the first study to demonstrate the feasibility of using wearable motion sensors to gather real-time mobility data in response to outdoor environmental demand. Findings contribute to the understanding of outdoor mobility by quantifying how real-world environmental challenges influence mobility in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that discourse related to residents of Boston's South End as environmental agents justified the removal of minority and working-class residents from the neighborhood, and, in particular, the New York Streets section in the 1950s. It combines analytical approaches of urban ecology and traditional elements of social history to examine how the neighborhood orientated to the city in an economic sense, how residents created a mixed-use neighborhood, how social institutions functioned as contested spaces of cultural production, how settlement house workers created a framework of discourse about the South End, how negative perceptions of working-class and minority residents coalesced across American life, and how city officials activated the discourse to create the first steps of urban renewal in Boston. The conclusion examines how minority groups understood environmental factors to be central to urban renewal and how social justice groups took an environmental focus in their activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through processes of colonization, many indigenous peoples have become absorbed into settler societies and new ways of existing within urban environments. Settler society economic, legal, and social structures have facilitated this absorption by recasting indigenous selves in ways that reflect the cultural values of settler populations. Urban enclaves populated and textured by indigenous groups such as Māori (indigenous people of New Zealand) can be approached as sites of existential resistance to the imposition of colonial ways of seeing and understanding the self. In maintaining everyday social practices and ways‐of‐being that traverse rural and urban locales, Māori preserve and reproduce cultural selves in ways that make aspects of cityscapes more homely for Māori ways‐of‐being. This article brings issues of place and being to the fore by investigating Māori reassemblage of cultural selves within a low SES urban environment as an ongoing resistance to colonial absorption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues the case for art tourism as a new field of tourist studies. At present, art tourism is currently obscured under cultural tourism's voluminous bounds – which are as inappropriate as they are unwieldy and overloaded. More specifically, it cannot adequately contain art tourism's distinctive origins, forms of experience and articulation between art worlds, cities and regions and tourism industries. In part, a more dedicated research field is also needed to keep track of its rapid growth and development as a primary driver of regional and urban regeneration and for the much expanded exhibitionary complex it encompasses. As a place-changing vehicle for city life, art tourism also needs separate forms of data collection to assist in its effective planning and design. Museums that have historically catered for local art publics now need to relate increasingly to growing touring art publics. The article sets out the historical and contemporary significance of art tourism in order to identify the breadth of a new tourism agenda, as well as its connections to other disciplines including art, architecture, social anthropology, cultural economy, urban studies, museology, aesthetics and the sociology and geography of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syrian immigrants populated New York’s Lower Manhattan, creating a neighborhood known as Little Syria. Sources employ “mother colony” and other evocative terms to highlight the unique importance of New York’s Arabic-speaking enclave to Syrian immigrant settlements throughout the United States. Yet no scholarly monograph on Little Syria, covering the entire period of its existence, from approximately 1880 to 1946, has been published. This article argues that early Syrian immigrants used their distinctive ethnicity to economic advantage within this urban enclave but exited its unhealthy environment as soon as they could. Like others, Syrians found unparalleled opportunities for mobility and financial success in New York. Manifesting an Arabic culture and an affinity for the middle class, they left Little Syria behind, and made no concerted attempt to preserve the old neighborhood. They embraced ethnicity as an economic virtue but distanced themselves from ethnicity as an environmental burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Too often, master planning strategies have failed to produce spaces responding to the social, cultural, and economic needs of their inhabitants. Accordingly, many planners have turned to relational strategies to redefine their practices. These tend toward methodologies that explore relational forces preceding design interventions rather than unfolding by means of design interventions. This article considers an alternative mode of understanding relational processes: one that considers tactical urban strategies theorized through the lens of complexity theory. This article argues that tactical approaches harness relational junctures in situ, effectively exploring relational configurations of cohesive urban environments. A design competition entry provides an illustrative example of this approach: one that channels and choreographs relational urban processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two studies, we took a prospect–refuge based perspective to investigate how lighting and other physical attributes (i.e., prospect, concealment, and entrapment) affect people’s judgments of the safety of urban streets during nighttime. Both studies complement existing research, which predominantly use factorial designs, with more ecologically valid correlational research using a large and representative sample of urban streets as stimulus materials. Results from Study 1 corroborate existing research demonstrating that differences in prospect, concealment, and entrapment predicted, to a large extent, variation in the perceived safety of urban streets—thus demonstrating the utility of such environmental information for making safety judgments in real-life settings. Results from a mediation analysis conducted in Study 2 showed that the relation between appraisals of lighting quality and safety judgments was completely accounted for by co-occurring variation in appraisals of prospect and entrapment. Implications for theory and methodology are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents findings from an ethnographic case study of a community-engaged festival held annually in Downtown Vancouver. It explores how the festival functions as a small group that contributes to the establishment of local culture and place identities in order to resist engrained stereotypes. This study also examines the ephemeral space of the festival as an interactional arena where participants co-engage in the construction of community, identity, and meaning. The study expands the discussion of community festivals as socially meaningful devices for collective action, community building, and multiliterate meaning-making in urban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the Smart Cities imaginary, the bottom-up project Stgo2020 created a self-tracking device known as Rastreador Urbano de Bicicletas (or Urban Bicycle Tracker) to record the daily trips of cyclists in Santiago de Chile and use the data gathered to help government officials make better and data-driven decisions on cycling infrastructure planning. In this article, we examine the iterative design of this technology as well as its introduction into the everyday practices of cyclists. We argue that efforts to quantify the ordinary experience of cycling were overwhelmed and interrupted by an ecology of breakdowns, everyday contingencies, forgetfulness, and re-interpretations in the assemblage of devices, data, humans, and bicycles. These breakdowns generated incoherent or absurd bits of information that we call them as “idiotic data” based on recent conceptualizations of the character of the idiot. Significant displacements were provoked by these idiotic data, forcing the engineer behind the device to control and purify the sample by design and algorithms, waning the civic nature of the project at the same time. The case shows how new ways of knowing the urban space by smart devices should be not separated from the emergence of idiotic data, putting into question the versions of citizen participation and smartness at stakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]