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The natural environment and historical evolution, together with different cultures and religions, have shaped Africa's unique and diverse urban fabric. Although Africa remains the least urbanized continent in the world, its cities are subject to processes of macrocephaly and are driven by an accelerated rate of growth. The analysis focuses on a large number of filmed movies that make it possible to approach a study that offers theoretical reflections on the relationship between audiovisual fiction and urban areas in that continent in order to know what spaces are represented, what are their characteristics and what urban imaginaries the African city projects. From a methodological point of view, a broad approach is used, related to Landscape Geography and Cultural Geography, and the study is limited to the films of the last decades. Among the results we can highlight the existence of new visual references and new interpretative keys that allow us to characterize the current urban landscapes of Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the ways murals can become symbols of both heritage and divisive gentrification processes are analyzed in the context of the contemporary media city. Taking the case of Detroit, USA, how is the urban imaginary of the "music city" mediated through street art, and its meaning reconstituted and reframed in the contemporary networked mediasphere? Applying a cultural justice perspective, a selection of Detroit music murals, their Instagram lives, and the public debates surrounding three specific street art projects are analyzed along (1) the symbologies of place the murals represent, (2) the historiographies of space attached to the murals, (3) the social ties and community networks that keep the murals in place or protest their presence. This study shows that the proposed cultural justice framework offers an opportunity to more fully understand how cultural materialities such as murals shape mediated public space in areas of gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes, from the municipal project, Domingo na Rua, the movements that occur as multiple interactions with the city and its public condition, in terms of the different logics of relationship with spaces. Thus, describing a perception of the city from the experience of its aesthetics, recognizing marks of the interpretations of cultural, social and environmental dynamics in an exercise of street ethnography (ROCHA and ECKERT, 2013). We seek to understand how people who are attracted by the aesthetic experience of closing the street perceive a city in a different way, expressing a change in meaning and symbolization of the city, since the street leaves a functional flow, commerce and traffic, to allow a place of popular experience and integrator of the city's imaginary. In the last analysis, this procedure becomes an experience that involves the urban imaginary and is a practice of education for the imagination (contact with nature, public leisure space, social relations, outdoor activities). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart urbanism is a currently popular and widespread way of conceptualising the future city. At the same time, the smart city is critiqued by several scholars as difficult to define, and as being almost invisible to the naked eye. The article explores two urban spaces through which the smart city is rendered visible, in two UK cities that are prominent sites for smart urban experimentation and development. Bristol's Data Dome and Glasgow's Operations Centre are analysed in light of their iconic nature. The article develops a conceptual understanding of these flagship spaces of the actually existing smart cities through three interrelated conceptual lenses. Firstly, they are understood as a videological type of Leibniz's concept of the windowless monad. Secondly, they are conceptualised as examples of banal and serialised architecture. Thirdly, these spaces and their attendant buildings are understood as totemic assemblages that point to newly emergent forms of elite urban power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical geography of school choice illuminates how parental school choice reproduces unequal urban conditions. This paper contributes to this scholarship by arguing that the reproduction of urban spaces is reinforced by the ways the dominant urban imaginary shapes how youths imagine and organise their school options. I draw from the fields of critical geography, school choice, and sociology of moral panic to theorise how children's geographies are informed by the dominant urban imaginary and reconstituted reiteratively by moral anxiety. Through this lens, I analyse ethnographic data collected on school choice policy, along with interviews with 59 youth (ages 11–19) in Vancouver, Canada. My analysis demonstrates that the dominant forms of classed stigmatisation of marginalised urban schools are important to young people's rejection of those schools. My analysis also shows that moral panic and rising fears of violence underwrite the spatial patterns of youth participation in school choice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the "spontaneous drawing" of different age groups in public spaces in the city of Guanajuato, Mexico; with the intention of establishing how the urban imaginaries in relation to the socio-spatial elements, are presented as modes of cultural expression. Through the application of techniques of qualitative research, such as the ethnographic observation and analysis of "mental maps" we can established how "the urban imaginary" could express experiences of life in urban spaces (in the consciousness of the person), and how them could be reflected in spontaneous drawings. On the other hand,the results of this research allowed us to understand which urban and architectural elements present in public spaces are significant for the inhabitants of the city, as well as their level of identification with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From medieval city views to contemporary urban imaginaries, imagination has always played a major role for outlining human understandings of urban life. Just recently, urban studies, urban planning, and artistic research have re-discovered imaginary approaches to urban lifeworlds as viable stimuli for urban transformation and social critique. In order to find pathways for sustainable development, creative strategies and imaginations of collective utopia have become a vital source of inspiration for urban planning and architecture. Interdisciplinary, inclusive approaches to create urban utopia have become central to thinking and writing about the urban as a shared imaginary matrix for collective sensemaking. This article provides a selective overview of the role of urban imaginaries from the Middle Ages, to the 20th century, and on to contemporary perspectives on urban spaces. In this brief tour d'horizon the potentials of images, imaginations, and utopian perspectives on urban life are sketched out for exploring and ultimately designing places of urban cohabitation. As an introduction to this journal issue on the role of urban imaginaries for creating liminal spaces for social change and critique, this article also aims to describe the use of creative strategies and urban imaginaries for urban studies, urban transformation projects, and artistic interventions in urban spaces. The articles in this issue demonstrate the multifaceted nature of urban imaginaries in contexts as diverse as exhibition design, visual anthropology, urban studies, and virtual/augmented reality. Adopting different imaginary perspectives ultimately paves the way for understanding urbanization as a utopian project, a collective struggle, and a manifestation of collective will, which continuously produces tangible and intangible outcomes. Processes of planetary urbanization, therefore, also inspire us to reflect on social, economic, and cultural co-evolution and participation on a global scale. This way, urban imaginaries become blueprints for social change, critique, and societal innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on notions of the symbolic economy and urban imaginary as an inherent dimension of the neoliberal public sphere, this paper examines historicized city plans and their visions, and develops a framework for understanding the role of city plans in shaping urban imaginaries and branded spaces. The paper claims that future city visions, fundamental to plan-making, help legitimize the power elites' growth agendas and ambitions to invest in both symbolic and material flagship place-making projects heavily bolstered and publicized by the media. The study examines this claim in the American context, selecting Dallas, Texas as a unique entrepreneurial city overly concerned with its public image characterized by a long-standing legacy of place promotion and plan-making. Using archival research and semi-structured interviews with key informants, this paper finds that city plans' visions, subservient to the civic elites' cultural tastes, have been instrumental in rallying public support to materialize place-making projects in accord with the city's larger preoccupation with "world-class" status showcased and widely promoted by media outlets. This study concludes by reflecting on the subtle yet tangible link between plan-making and urban imaginaries, an overt tendency of ever more commodified urban spaces, and the paradox it poses to city planning. • Urban imaginaries are embedded in textual narratives, conceptual symbols, and visual renditions. • Plan making and city plans are fundamental to legitimizing the power elites' pro-growth urban imaginaries. • Planners and architects, as urban imagineers, play a key role in mobilizing the public to approve of place-making projects. • Media heavily brands and disseminates elites' growth-oriented urban imaginaries in the public sphere. • Elites' imposing urban imaginaries are often at odds with more pressing urban imaginaries based on social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to suggest by example a theoretical reversal rather than presupposing that cities are self-delimited and relatively stable spaces, connected by circulations to other urban spaces. It was argued that the postmodern city exemplified by Miami is an increasingly global space that is better conceptualized as, constitutively, the site of multiple, transversal, and reflexive circulations that are variously and provisionally stabilized to engender the urban imaginary. The tension between circulation and stabilization by focusing on the highly ambiguities categories of ethnicity and ethnic identity, which exemplify the centrality of circulation and the quasi-ritualized rites of stabilization necessary to map the image, ideology, and institutional grounding for the imagination of Miami as a city, was highlighted. Though it was Cornelius Castoriadis who coined and invented the notion of the social imaginary, Charles Taylor has produced the most sustained contemporary elaboration of this concept. The crucial insight is that, for the citizen-subjects of the modern, social imaginaries are concepts for grasping sociality and the collective force of the social that become social entities themselves and that mediate collective lifeways.

Copyright of On the W@terfront is the property of University of Barcelona, Centre de Recerca POLIS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the recent decades of post-globalization India, a digital explosion in media platforms and technologies has created a new cartography of the city. This 'informational' vocabulary addresses the city not merely through built urban architecture but also through a mobile infrastructure of screens. MMS clips, surveillance footage, television news, home videos, memes, and so on are all symptomatic of this new digital archive of the city. This essay attempts to reflect on how Delhi's urban imaginary is given a graphic volatile form through the viral circulations of its digital profile. As a new generation of Delhi-born directors emerge in the landscape of Bombay cinema, some of these filmmakers mobilize the recent televisual archive of crime in Delhi to respond to the city. At the same time, it is also interesting how a more generalized relation between the space of the night and urban violence is given a specific concrete iconography in these fictionalized accounts. Located within an intersection of Delhi's urban imaginary, its expanding media infrastructure, and an aesthetic mobilization of the night, this essay examines Dibakar Banerjee's Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010), Anurag Kashyap's Dev.D (2009), and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Delhi-6 (2009) to argue that the violence in these films as much material as it is technological. It is not only the anxiety related to murder itself, but the viral circulation of death and a television aesthetic of replayed and sensationalized crime that haunts the contemporary metropolitan experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Romani contribution to the construction of urban space(s), focusing on the city of Berlin between about 1890 and 1933, with a particular emphasis on the period between the turn of the century and the First World War. Drawing on press reports, it offers evidence for public awareness of a new Romani presence in and around the city, and proposes that media representations of 'Gypsies' in the new suburbs reflected the heightened sensitivity to setting boundaries between urban and rural, civilized and uncivilized, that informed Berlin's 'urban imaginary' at a time of expansion and modernization. In a second step, the agency of Romani Berliners in defining the city as a multi-ethnic metropolis and shaping spaces within it is considered. The account focuses on productive interactions between Romani and non-Romani actors in the horse markets which drew Sinti and Roma to settle in Berlin and on the lives of horse-dealing families in the city at large, including the tendential emergence of 'Gypsy' neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the field of city‐governance urban labs are being constructed as experimental spaces of knowledge production, innovation and urban governance. This perspective is mirrored in the majority of the literature engaging with the urban lab. However, empirical evidence shows that 'urban labs' are also constituted through imaginative work practices that remain unexplored in theory and practice. In order to address this gap and to delineate how these spaces matter for urban governance, this article critically examines urban lab projects in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. We approach the initiatives under study from the perspective of the urban imaginary, which is shaped through three types of imaginative work—branding, dreaming and assimilating. These imaginative practices reveal how the process of constructing and practising the urban lab has political implications for the city. This point is important, as it brings up questions about urban governance and participation, such as who has access to, and who is allowed to imagine and experiment in, the city? In this way we connect the literature on urban imaginaries to debates on participation and experimental urban governance in the urban lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terms urban restructuring and growth are political economy terms meant to signify positive recreation of urban space within the urban imaginary. While this idea may actually produce positive benefits for some, the urban restructuring products like urban renewal for low-income people of color, have come to represent the way in which inequality is spatially articulated in the urban landscape. Using the city of Atlanta as a case study, four examples of urban restructuring in the last century is explored to further this argument: segregation and zoning (1913–1931); The Downtown Connector (1946–1950); Federal Urban Renewal (1950's – 1960's); and the 1996 Summer Olympics (1990–1996). Here, I will discuss how power and capital interact with race and class to determine how these restructuring projects differentially affect spatial arrangements along class and racial lines in Atlanta. In doing so, the article will consider how urban restructuring has been a mechanism of power by the state and the private sector to advance capitalists interests of growth and profit, and while also to achieving goals of racial and class segregation, thereby displacing low-income people, often of color, with little to no access to power in order to advance their own economic interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban renewal is central to 'world-class' city aspirations on the African continent: demolitions and evictions exemplify the power of the state to restructure urban space, prioritizing elite forms of accumulation and enforcing aesthetic norms of cleanliness, order and modernity. The ubiquity of world-class city-making has been taken by urban studies scholars as evidence of African leaders' converging on a unitary aspirational urban imaginary. This article contends that the concept of world class should instead be understood as a key terrain on which African governments' distinctive and diverse ideational ambitions are expressed. In Oyo State, southwest Nigeria, vernacular political traditions—in this case Yoruba cultural nationalism centred on the ideas of Obafemi Awolowo—were deployed by the state governor to legitimize urban renewal. Drawing on the Yoruba notion that elitism can be 'generalized', the cultivation of globalized urban forms was not only a project of becoming ever more homogenously 'international' but a historically grounded aspiration to become ever more essentially Yoruba. Thus, beyond commonalities across the discourses used to legitimize neoliberal urban development—world class, international and global—these universal sounding imaginaries may at the same time express much more particularistic political projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban imaginary of the historical centre of Quito is strongly linked to the configuration of the Ecuadorian national identity and to the official patrimonial discourse which guide the planning and management of the city centre while ignoring the daily spatial relationships and local memories that make up a different city. Therefore, this research seeks to understand how the residents, merchants and artisans of the city centre experience, think and value their space. This research uses a mobile ethnography and combines different qualitative tools such as mapping and photography to analyse corporeal and affective experiences in the city. The inhabitants use the notion of movement to describe an abundant flow of people, money and goods in different places and streets. The research identifies a variety of places in and around the historic centre remembered by the inhabitants for their movement and related to positive emotions and a sense of place. The article identifies and discusses how the relationship between movement, transportation and popular commerce generates affective atmospheres and problematizes the loss of movement of different public spaces that are currently perceived by the inhabitants as empty and dead. The article proposes that the places of movement evoke another type of popular imaginary and generate an alternative urban identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of residential segregation in Latin America have been approached mainly from socioeconomic criteria, but in recent years, this phenomenon has gained relevance from its subjective dimension. The objective of this article is to analyze the effect of the new expression of socio-spatial segregation in the city imagined and lived by its residents, having Ibagué, Tolima, Colombia as case study. To achieve this, the theoretical analysis was made from the sense of place and socio-spatial segregation, and the methodology was developed from the qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and the method of data collection was applied using mind maps. The most relevant evidence shows that the practices of the actors, understood as territoriality, are related to the relative position that they occupy according to the socioeconomic stratification, i.e., the interviewed groups, through the space they inhabit, use the imagination to portray the socio-spatial segregation they live in the city, which generates a social space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Urban Studies (Sage Publications, Ltd.) is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Community screenings in this study are understood as the exhibition of moving images outside conventional theatres and commercial circuits. Based on fieldwork observations and interviews conducted between January 2019 and January 2020 with film workers, community groups, and venue providers who knitted together a rhizomatic community screening network in Hong Kong, this paper explores the (self-)making of urban cultural space by way of the reinvention of "screens" and the rebuilding of a place-based, people-centred community with ethical concerns for small businesses, artists, craftspeople, workers, and members of the public during the first two decades of postmillennial era. The paper concludes with some observations about the phenomenal shift in not only the mode, but also the site of film dissemination from Hong Kong to overseas diasporic communities before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and following the emigration wave in the 2020s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces (dis)continuities in colonial logics across disjunctures of decolonisation and democratisation through a large infrastructure project in contemporary Lahore, Pakistan. Analysing Lahore's Orange Line Metro Train, a project constructed under China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the article shows how colonial extractive and racial logics can limit the redistributive potential of typically inclusive infrastructures like mass transit by continuing to shape the conditions of their development and (re)producing precarious configurations of citizenship in the postcolony. It finds that Pakistan's colonial-era land acquisition law erased a range of land relations and rights from recognition and thus compensation by the state. In an instance of informal policy making, the state eventually created an ad hoc 'grant-in-aid' scheme to compensate landowners in informal settlements. However, the scheme continued the property centric politics of recognition embedded in the expropriation law by only compensating people with long-term land claims. The public script of the scheme invoked welfare obligations of the state but structured these through moral-legal norms of property. The postcolonial state thus bypassed the transition from colonial subjects to citizens and instead repositioned people as humanitarian subjects. The article thus highlights the contradictions of developing subsidized public infrastructure in postcolonial cities, where construction becomes another conduit of imposing land commodification and disciplining pro-poor self-built neighbourhoods that have escaped the rigidity of private property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mounted police units around the world have entered social media, with the aim of bringing the police closer to the public. In this paper, I analyze the Facebook page of the mounted police in the city of Helsinki, the capital of Finland. I ask how equine agency, animal work, interspecies care, and the relational networks of memory are interpreted, communicated, and performed on social media, contributing to the co-production of urban imaginaries. I approach the material as performances of animality and human–animal relations, concentrating on shared interpretations and representations of the horses and their agency. To be able to analyze human–animal encounters and interaction in urban space as they are experienced, imagined, remembered, and collectively shared, I suggest a novel concept of multispecies urban imaginary. Developing the concept widens the focus of understanding the multispecies nature of urban environments and includes animals in the experiences and perceptions of city space – where they belong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text is a book review discussing two books that examine the social dynamics and transformations of urban spaces. The first book, "Les sauvages de la Civilisation: Regards sur la Zone, d'hier à aujourd'hui" by Jérôme Beauchez, focuses on the marginalized inhabitants of the "Zone" in Paris and their cultural and political power. The second book, "The People's Hotel: Working for Justice in Argentina" by Katherine Sobering, explores the transformation of a hotel in Buenos Aires into a cooperative space. Both books highlight the violence of capitalist urban governance and the need for alternative forms of urban living and governance. The texts emphasize the importance of social justice and the empowerment of marginalized communities in shaping urban spaces. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Dilemas: Revista de Estudos de Conflito e Controle Social is the property of Dilemas: Revista de Estudos de Conflito e Controle Social and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the popular practice of water calligraphy (dishu) across Changsha, Guiyang and Chongqing to demonstrate its aesthetic potential. Specifically, it suggests that dishu can be interpreted as a new expression of calligraphy and an exemplary case of living aesthetics. To demonstrate this, this article discusses the author's on-site observations and conversations with water calligraphers alongside the longstanding aesthetic principles of traditional calligraphy and the experimental works by Wang Dongling (b. 1945) and Song Dong (b. 1966). Moreover, by adopting a socio-geographical and historical lens, it views water calligraphy as a living, familiar and slow practice against China's spectacular and fast urban rhythms. Overall, this article demonstrates that water calligraphy can contribute to the discourse of living aesthetics by favouring sensual encounters within the familiar, collective and slow-paced everyday. Last, this article can contribute to shaping a new aesthetic paradigm that favours the living in a non-western context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gender & Development is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Gender & Development is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the ways in which debates about urban policy became a space for members of the literate Turkish public to negotiate the boundary between state and society during a period of dramatic social transformation in the 1930s. Inspired by circulating urbanist discourses, Turkish reformers reimagined society from street level up by passing a series of laws which empowered municipalities and abolished the neighborhood muhtar and council of elders, the basic units of local administration since 1829. Eleven years later, however, these offices were reconstituted and absorbed into municipal bureaucracy where they became the focus of heated party politics and struggles across Turkey. The debates which brought about this transformation, I argue, were ultimately about how far into daily life the authority of the government should extend and in what ways Turkey was able to adopt international standards of urbanism in a time of economic and political uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Feature explores the negotiated bureaucratic politics shaping urbanization in South Asia. City drafting refers to the flexible and contextual practices, procedures and policies required to haul diverse property regimes into order and provisionally render urban land clear and settled. The drafted city, we argue, is necessarily provisional and uneven, left open to politicised remapping, redrafting and resettlement by a host of institutionally embedded brokers, bureaucrats, clerks and surveyors each wielding their own political and socio-technical vision of land. These drafting practices, not only shape a politics of uneven urbanisation in South Asian cities, but also help to explain the persistent fractal morphology of urban property in South Asia; spanning categories of public, private, non-private, commons, unauthorised, regularised, agrarian, urban and so on. While the South Asian city is commonly understood through the high-resolution imagery of masterplanners, policymakers and investors, city drafting methodologically focuses on the grounded bureaucratic struggles of the map, plot, record and title, through which claims to property rights, exclusions and access are shaped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of smart cities has led to transforming modern city operations by applying emerging technologies from the fourth industrial revolution such as the Internet of Things, BIM and machine learning. To prepare for the future development of cities, it is necessary to investigate the current status of city development, research topics and the direction toward future cities. In this study, a systematic literature review was conducted following the combination of literature review guides by Kitchenham and the PRISMA statement. The review identified 141 peer-reviewed academic papers from web-based archives, such as Web of Science and SCOPUS, that were categorized into five topics related to smart cities and urban areas. The technologies applied in the research were analyzed to determine the direction future cities should take based on current smart cities and emerging technologies that will shape individuals' daily lives. However, it was discovered that research papers on critical areas, such as mobility and management, were lacking compared to those on building design and urban planning. This paper concludes with an example of a future urban area that has been transformed due to adoption of future mobility technology to address the shortcomings of the reviewed literature on building and urban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the circulation of the concept of Smart Cities (SC) in Chile and its impact on urban planning and governance. The study utilizes a mixed-methods approach, including ethnography and analysis of Twitter data, to explore how the idea of SC is disseminated in Chile. The research reveals that private companies and public economic institutions associated with innovation and digital transformation are the primary drivers of the concept. The article also discusses the limitations of the SC narrative, which focuses on technological industries and overlooks social issues and certain actors. [Extracted from the article]

The article proposes the notion of a "spectacle of repair," a carefully calibrated social technology of green governance aimed at managing the environmental degradation through control over images in Warsaw, Poland. Using case studies Million Trees for Warsaw project and a candidacy for the Green Capital of Europe and building on political ecology literature that addresses the rise of new opportunities for capitalist expansion through restoration activity, this article claims that the production of the green policy sphere allows for a creation of an array of possible "green" actions in the city that are presented as interchangeable and effectively commensurable. As the municipality heavily invests in greenery and a removal of visible signs of messiness and dirt in the city, the depoliticized spectacle of a clean and green urban space focuses on creating an image of the authorities actively combating the pollution as well as working towards making Warsaw more "livable." At the same time, the two major roots of pollution found in ever-increasing car traffic and old coal-heating systems remain insufficiently addressed amid a lack of political will. The paper argues that mitigation strategy of the city hall thus heavily relies on a management of visibilities; attempting to alleviate the citizens' pressure to tackle the largely invisible air pollution by delivering the tidy greenery desired by the urban elites, keeping the city fit for competing in the global neoliberal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I engage with the notion of the city as capitalist space, focusing on the specific actors that come together to realign economically heterogeneous spaces into the monolithic, capitalist city. By tracing the role of cartographic practice in enacting the city as a space of industrial economic production in the 19th century, I show how maps helped to bring the capitalist city into view by ‘drawing together’ cartographers, city managers and ordinary citizens, enabling the apprehension of the city as an economic object by emphasizing a specific understanding of what cities looked like, how they worked and what happened in them. In addition, I examine the place of urban nature within this emerging urban imaginary, and its role as a counterweight to the purported totality of the capitalist city. To illustrate these points, historical maps drive a discussion of the specific case of Philadelphia, focusing on two events that coincided with the expansion of the industrial city: the consolidation of the city in 1854 and the establishment of Fairmount Park in 1868. The paper concludes with a discussion of the political possibilities that are opened up by an assemblage-oriented approach for examining the early development of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about the construction of space and place in the urban imaginary. It draws on multidisciplinary empirical research--on Violence, Sexuality and Space--conducted in a place that was simultaneously represented in one of the most controversial programmes ever to be screened on British television-- Queer as Folk . As the television programme intervened in the responses from the interviews and focus groups, we begin, through an exploration of spatial referents and characterisation, to explore the 'authentic' underpinning for the queer imaginary. We examine the sexual politics of place and space as a politics of verisimilitude, affectivity and political claims-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Camptowns (kijich'on) are neighbourhoods located near US military bases in Korea that are organised around the military service economy, especially the sex industry. While most studies of Korean camptowns point to the US military's involvement with the camptown sex industry as evidence of US military imperialism, this article argues that since 2004 anti‐prostitution polices have been essential to stabilising American militarisation in Korea's urban realm. Focusing on Anjeong‐ri, a camptown located adjacent to Camp Humphreys, the largest overseas US military base on the planet, the article examines how Korean development actors invoke hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and class to distance the camptown from the sex industry and to construct the camptown as a space of militarised urban prosperity. By showing emerging ways in which US military empire works through anti‐prostitution policies and through the urban system in Korea, the argument poses a challenge to anti‐prostitution feminists who have long located evidence of American empire in the sex industry itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The production of urban space in Latin America turns out to be a social product resulting from a historical process in which natural space undergoes significant transformations. This paper analyses how the urban history of Ibagué (Colombia) is related to three historical processes crossed by nature, identifying common aspects with other Latin American cities: nature as a limit to urban growth (conquest and colony), nature as an artifice of urban space (modern city), and nature as a transition zone between the city and the countryside (metropolitan edge). Methodologically, the article is approached from the historical perspective proposed by Fernand Braudel as the longue durée. To this end, an analysis of primary sources was carried out. These sources allowed us to see how urban space was constructed and planned throughout history. The primary sources emphasized written sources: chronicles of the Indies, royal ordinances, municipal decrees, pilot plans for urban growth, and urban development plans. Visual sources were also used: maps, sketches, engravings, and photographs to construct an image of the city and its relationship with nature. The results showed the importance of urban planning by considering the relationship between urban space and nature as two inseparable elements and providing elements for reflecting on contemporary environmental problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Área Abierta is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the articulation of the Black ghetto to authenticity through the involvement of hip hop star Jay-Z in two highly publicized basketball-related ventures during 2003. During that year, Jay-Z organized a team for the Entertainer's Basketball Classic (EBC) in Harlem's Rucker Park and joined a team of investors aiming to move the New Jersey Nets to a new arena in Brooklyn. Informed by cultural studies scholarship, the paper explains the context through which basketball and hip hop were articulated with authenticity, and were deployed towards the goal of managing a career transition for Jay-Z, and was also used to gain public support for a controversial proposal to build an arena in the Atlantic Yards area of Brooklyn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All operate galleries that exhibit art, facilitate the production of new art and support artists' practices. Beyond What is Finished in Practice The integration of art projects as essential components of so-called "culture-led regeneration" has necessitated an interdisciplinary working practice be forged between planners and artists and art professionals. (Dis)Ordering Space and Sense in the Built Environment Danny McNally and Katie McClymont Robin Hood Gardens: The Aesthetic Politics of Listed Buildings Edward Brookes Screaming Public Art: Tonalities of Agonism in Planning Politics and Practice Friederike Landau-Donnelly and Jason Luger Mapping Cities - Intersections in Art and Planning Gloria Lanci Beyond Beauty - Re-Discovering Planning as Civic Art Katy Lock and Rebecca Lambert From the Ground Up: Non-Profit Galleries and Planning Gerda R. Wekerle Creative Practices for Planning Urban Mobility Elahe Karimnia Beyond What is Finished in Practice Julie Crawshaw Planning and Urban Imaginaries: A Reflection on Speculative Planning with Slum-Dwelling Children in the Philippines Aireen Grace Andal Planning for Environmental Change and Learning from Engaged Creative Practice George Revill and Liza Griffin A Speculative Afterword: (Dis)Ordering Space and Sense in the Built Environment Danny McNally and Katie McClymont Planning, Art, and Aesthetics: (Dis)Ordering Space and Sense in the Built Environment This I Interface i presents nine pieces which engage with the broad theme of "art and planning" in a new and diverse way. Outlook: Art, Planning and the Complex Tones of Our Time Thus, given the a(nta)gonisms, complexities and shifting tonalities of art's interface with urban planning, we return, critically, to the possibilities and challenges between planning and art. [Extracted from the article]

Digital media technologies, from networked sensors to large video screens and mobile devices, have become pervasive urban infrastructure in the twentyfirst century. The dominant framework for understanding the integration of digital technology into urban space has been smart city discourse. In this article, I will argue that this framework, as it has so far been articulated, is inadequate to maximizing the social potential of digital urban infrastructure. Digital urban infrastructure not only changes how cities look, but how they function as social settings. I will propose the 'communicative city' as an alternative framework for thinking about digitally mediated cities. The communicative city offers an opportunity to consider networked urban space as a test case in which key problematics of contemporary globalized media are materially instantiated. It is the frontier zone at which everyday experiences of embodied media and new forms of communicative agency collide with powerful logics of tracing and tracking, and the widespread deployment of new forms of automation and machine learning as techniques of urban governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buildings and monuments are commonly prioritized in post-disaster reconstruction, but the role of urban spaces is often overlooked. The paper, therefore, seeks to shift the focus from buildings to open spaces by examining how urban spaces interact with the built fabric and cultural practices to help to build resilience. Drawing on interviews with survivors and rescuers and field observations of earthquake-ravaged Durbar Square in Kathmandu, this research links specific features of urban spaces to specific community actions to understand how historic urban spaces have allowed local values to be expressed in the disaster's aftermath creating a coping mechanism. It argues that historic urban spaces have inherent functional, performative, and restorative qualities that play an important role in post-disaster recovery, and more attention needs to be given to them in planning and urban studies. The paper reaffirms the value of urban design in a disaster and the argument that historic, incrementally "grown" cities feature more adaptive systems and are, thus, more flexible and resilient after a disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Peripheral urbanization is the predominant mode of producing space in the Global South, in which residents build their own homes and neighborhoods, becoming citizens and political agents in the process. In this article, I bring feminist ethnographic attention to community infrastructure such as childcare centers built collectively by women residents in MGR Nagar, an informal urban settlement in Chennai, India, as understudied examples of autoconstruction in peripheral urbanization. Marxist feminism enables a theorization of these infrastructures of social reproduction as urban commons that assert collective spatial autonomy and enable moral claims on urban space, while serving the everyday needs of its residents. The subsequent demolition of the childcare center caused symbolic and material loss to residents. However, the ceding of territorial autonomy and spatial privileges was a way for them to make new material and political gains in the city, suggesting that a feminist politics of space is possible in which legitimacy and responsibility are demanded from the state. The commons in turn can be seen as durable countertopographies enabling a politics of place in multiple locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of computer renderings of urban spaces created for architectural competitions to promote the Fjord City redevelopment plan for the waterfront in downtown Oslo, Norway. The renderings are assessed with compositional and semiotic analyses. Drawing from Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and literature on landscape, this paper argues that the renderings submitted to architectural competitions promote the 'myth of the attractive city', which is one way of viewing urban spaces. The conclusion highlights the relevance of the analysis and findings to urban theory and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Geografia: Revista Colombiana de Geografía is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper focuses on the extraordinary 245-metre-long Pergola on Hampstead Heath, designed by renowned landscape architect Thomas Mawson between 1905 and 1925, and funded by William Lever, Lord Leverhulme, owner of the property. The paper focuses on the Pergola's potential as an exemplar for considering more creative, sensory and sociable provision for urban pedestrians After detailing its origins and key features, the discussion explores the shifting uses of the Pergola over the past hundred years as it has changed from private realm to public space, yet these changes have accentuated its enduring landscape architectural qualities as a structure for pleasurable walking. The paper particularly focuses how the structure has been adopted as a contemporary site for walking and as a venue for numerous photographic and filmic practices. I conclude by suggesting that these virtues might inform more assiduous pedestrians provision following the rise in walking during the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]