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The aim of this study was to explore the multiple roles of public art in urban renewal and sustainable development goals, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, with an emphasis on community engagement and the application of theoretical frameworks. Through a detailed analysis of public art projects in Teruel, Spain, and Chengdu, China, this study shows how public art plays an important role in enhancing cultural values, promoting social inclusion, and driving economic growth. Qualitative methods such as interviews and content analysis were used to gain in-depth insights into the views and experiences of artists, urban planners, policymakers, and community members. At the same time, quantitative methods such as questionnaires and spatial analysis were used to assess the specific impacts of public art on urban beautification, social inclusion, and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text is a welcome message from the Department of Earth, Environmental and Sustainability Sciences at Furman University to attendees of the 2024 Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers meeting in Greenville, South Carolina. It provides information about Furman University, the interdisciplinary faculty in the department, and the degrees offered. It highlights Greenville's location and accessibility, as well as its natural resources and protected areas. The text also mentions the history of Greenville as a mill town and its revitalization efforts, including the reclamation of the Reedy River. It discusses the development of the Swamp Rabbit Trail and the creation of Unity Park, which aims to redress historical injustice and serve as climate- and flood-resilient green infrastructure. The text acknowledges concerns about gentrification and displacement in Greenville and the efforts to incorporate public art and remember the city's history. It concludes by mentioning the comprehensive plans and sustainability initiatives in Greenville and the range of field trips and activities available to conference attendees. [Extracted from the article]

The practice of stormwater management has evolved from a singular focus on drainage to a multifaceted approach to support the integrated urban development of healthy, livable, ecological, and water sensitive cities from neighborhood to metropolitan scales. A review of the knowledge base and practice by the professional stormwater management community shows attributes that favor an integrative approach to achieve co-benefits across sectors. Research into stormwater management addresses its functional areas of drainage, flood control, flood plain management, water quality control, urban ecology, recreation, and city beautification. Legacy path dependance affects the potential to reform land use practices, while stormwater management practice is affected by climate change, sea level rise, urbanization, inequality, and poor governance. This review shows a status where technical methods are well advanced but integrative frameworks to address social, ecological and infrastructure needs are more challenging. The sensitivity of ecological issues is most evident in cities in coastal zones. Organizational initiatives are needed to counter the neglect of essential maintenance and sustain flood risk reduction in cities. Stormwater management is related to other integrative tools, including IWRM, One Water, One Health, and Integrated Flood Management, as well as the broader concept of urban planning. This research review demonstrates the opportunities and needs for the advancement of an integrated approach to stormwater management to support urban development. Stormwater capture and rainfall harvesting offer major opportunities to augment scarce water supplies. Nature-based solutions like low-impact development and the sponge city concept show promise to transform cities. Major cities face challenges to sustain conveyance corridors for major flows and to store and treat combined sewer runoff. The neighborhood focus of stormwater management elevates the importance of participation and inclusion to advance environmental justice and strengthen social capital. Integrating organizational initiatives from local to city scales and funding improvements to stormwater systems are major challenges that require leadership from higher governance levels, although governments face resistance to change toward integration, especially in countries with poor land use and public works management systems. Finding solutions to neighborhood issues and the connectivity of water systems at larger scales requires complex approaches to urban planning and represent an important agenda for urban and water governance going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Charles Baudelaire's poem "The Swan" and its portrayal of the urban river, specifically the Seine in Paris, as a symbol of exile and an eerie environment. The poem reflects the effects of industrialization and urbanization on the river, which had become polluted and forgotten. It presents a hazy image of a natural landscape beneath the surface of the city, evoking feelings of nostalgia and alienation. The article also discusses the influence of romantic depictions of the urban river in French poetry, particularly the work of Victor Hugo. [Extracted from the article]

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AbstractBeauty, as an aesthetic ideal and intrinsically power-laden paradigm, is central to urban development projects. Yet there remains limited critical work that interrogates the colonial underpinnings, violent outcomes, and negotiations of beauty politics in urban beautification programs. In our article, we approach urban beautification campaigns in downtown Kampala, Uganda via an explicitly African, and Black feminist analytic of beauty. Specifically, we center the experiences of women market vendors as they navigate city greening initiatives and development plans which promise to ‘transform’ Kampala and re-brand it once again as the ‘Garden City of Africa’. We argue that pairing urban beautification and Black and African scholarship around beauty offers generative insights as it understands such spatial programs as always embodied, contested, and inseparable from intersectional power hierarchies. In turn, we take seriously and carefully examine discourses around beautification: by tracing its colonial and gendered foundations and its visceral impacts as it is internalized and renegotiated by low-income women operating in downtown markets in Kampala. As such, our focus on beauty situates beautification as a disciplining and displacing practice and as mentally and physically violent. Finally, it reveals how women try to envision their own beautiful Kampala. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the challenges faced by trees in urban areas due to extreme weather events and changing climate patterns. The author highlights instances of trees collapsing in parks and the impact of weather on iconic trees like Sherwood's Major Oak. The article also addresses the issue of staff shortages in tree and woodland services, which can lead to lapses in professional standards and missed opportunities for funding. The journal presents research papers on various topics related to urban forestry, including tree loss in Nigeria, the evolving human-nature paradigm, historic tree bounties in the USA, urban forests in Ethiopia, and roadside tree species in India. The author emphasizes the importance of sharing and disseminating research on urban trees and climate change. [Extracted from the article]

Russian interference and invasion in Ukraine have transformed that nation's historical practice of mural painting. A traditional art form with deep religious and political resonance in Ukraine, murals have become an instrument for patriotic mass mobilisation against the Russian military threat. From the mid-2000s, spraypaint graffiti underwent a gradual process of professionalisation and reconciliation with mainstream culture as Ukrainian municipalities pursued urban beautification initiatives and city-branding strategies to mitigate the socioeconomic challenges of postsocialism. It was this legacy of apolitical, privately funded street art that provided the foundations for patriotic muralism following the Maidan "Revolution of Dignity" and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Amidst the post-Maidan search for a postcolonial understanding of Ukrainian culture disentangled from Soviet and Russian influences, professionally produced murals in central urban districts proposed new visions of national identity. The war's intensification since 2022 has resulted in a decentralisation of mural production. No longer reliant on international festivals in urban centres, conflict murals are now made by Ukrainian artists in large cities and small towns across the country. The newest murals represent a blending of the physical and digital—with a subject matter often inspired by viral conflict memes; artworks are, in turn, shared with worldwide audiences via social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the corner of Mohamed Mahmoud Street and Youssef El-Gendy Street in Cairo, Egypt, to examine the gendered and classed underpinnings of urban processes of securitization, privatization, and beautification during the 25 January Revolution, notably following the 2013 military coup. This particular intersection was the scene of many of the protests that ultimately led to Hosni Mubarak's ouster in February 2011. Throughout the revolutionary process, its walls became a contested site of representation through, on the one hand, graffiti engaging the revolution along the fault lines of gender and class and, on the other hand, its periodical whitewashing by public and private campaigns. Taking up visual cultural production as a primary site of analysis, the article draws on visual ephemera written on this corner between 2011 and 2017, online debates about these changes, and interviews with some of their protagonists to discuss the significance of this place in relation to questions of access to and control of public/private urban spaces, and memory. Adopting a feminist perspective that foregrounds gender and class as the main categories of analysis, it focuses on two particular moments--WOW Unchained in 2015 and Calligraphy Nefertiti in 2017--to investigate the transformation of this area through the erasure of the traces of the revolution via public/private beautification projects articulated around transnational discourses of women's empowerment and neoliberal notions of gender and class respectability, and its implications for Egyptians' access to public space in post-coup Cairo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significant change in urban space in Paris during the Second French Empire is an example of modern urban and architectural planning. Paris was modernized by a powerful planning entity, represented by the state, as well as a clear goal and consistent plan to realize the city beautification plan. The modernization process of Paris was a high-level movement that created a new urban culture through physical urban space planning, which is a combination of 'urbanism', meaning French urban planning, and 'modernism', meaning urban art movement. The modernization of Paris is defined by the concept of 'urban modernism'. The urban modernism of Paris is a movement with strong norms aimed at city beautification that has sustainable characteristics in urban space planning. Consequently, urban modernism remains the basis of modern and future Paris city planning and plays an important role in maintaining the unique urban cultural identity of Paris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the contemporary features of aesthetic capitalism (Böhme, 2001; 2017) in the city, connecting beauty studies with established analyses of ‘territorial stigmatization’ (Wacquant, 2007) in the framework of critical whiteness studies. My argument is that beautification practices in marginal public spaces can be regarded as an attitude of aesthetic neocolonialism. The text investigates the role that art plays in establishing spaces of difference, focusing on the analysis of the idea of beauty exhibited and used in processes of urban transformation. This beautifying operation could mask the intent of domesticating the ‘urban exotic’, representing the aesthetics of the ‘urban other’, overlapping processes of hypervisibilization and invisibilization within the production of normative white visual domains. The resulting transformation is viewed as a new field of value extraction from the urban space while at the same time being a new arena for privilege and inequality production.

The city of Corumbá, founded in 1778, was invaded by Paraguayans in 1865, during the period of the Paraguayan War (1864-70). This conflict was responsible for the destruction of several villages and fortifications on the southern border of Mato Grosso. Because of the destruction, the space had to be reorganized, receiving new institutions that helped in the development of the city. This article aims to expose the architectural elements that refer us to those used in the ancient world in the construction of buildings and in the beautification of the city, especially the Greek, which are easily found in the facades of the houses and civil and religious buildings scattered throughout the city of Corumbá. These facades, in my analysis, are historical sources because they are the materialization of a past that no longer exists, but that can be reinterpreted by historians. My proposal is to show how it is possible to study Ancient History through them and, at the same time, reinforce the need of the city to protect its cultural heritage not only as an element of construction of the history of Corumbá, but also as a curricular component of schools, contributing to the development of heritage education in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1961, the Mexican government launched the Programa Nacional Fronterizo (Pronaf) in partnership with the country's economic elites, a precursor to the state's more widely known border industrialization project. Pronaf was ostensibly an urban beautification program targeting nine cities at the Mexico‐US border, led by former Ciudad Juárez mayor Antonio Bermúdez and with architecture supervised by Mexico City–based modernist Mario Pani. However, as this article argues, Pronaf sought to better integrate the borderlands to the national market and political structure at a moment of crisis. The state's capitalist modernization plan of import substitution industrialization, which produced the so‐called Mexican Miracle in the 1940s, was showing signs of strain. Greater consumption of products made in Mexico, based on a more patriotic identification by citizens at the border, would buttress the "Miracle," which had initially ignored these very citizens based on metropolitan perceptions of their lack of allegiance to Mexico and affinity for the US. Understanding spectacular architecture to have not only a didactic but an affective function, Pronaf deployed a network of soaring, Jet Age–inspired built environments. These parabolic hyperboloid environments, accompanied by a hyperbolic rhetoric from Bermúdez, sought to convince border residents of the "beauty" and "desirability" of national culture and the fluidity of the national market just as their socioeconomic mobility came under greater government scrutiny. Pronaf piloted an affective infrastructure that desired to channel border residents' citizenship and consumption toward the reproduction of the political and economic status quo, eventually setting the stage for neoliberal transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seema Golestaneh's book, "Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran," provides an ethnographic study of Sufism in contemporary Iran. The book explores the concept of ma'rifat, which is translated as "unknowing" in Sufi traditions. Golestaneh engages with Sufi interlocutors to understand their ways of knowing through rituals such as zekr and sama'. The book also delves into the historical context of Sufism in Iran and examines the practices of textual hermeneutics, bodily relationality, memory, and place within Sufi communities. This well-written and insightful study offers a valuable perspective on Sufism and Islamic mysticism in Iran. [Extracted from the article]

Many women and women-run associations were involved in historical urban beautification in the United States, especially tree planting, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While men had formal roles as city foresters, arborists, horticulturalists, and landscape architects, women from elite families sometimes labored for free to organize and advocate for urban tree planting. Tightly knit social circles of high-society women in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, yielded much greater influence in nascent tree planting and park creation movements than has generally been recognized. They often contributed their time, finances, input, and skill to landscape planting projects; however, they were not considered equal to the men who were compensated employees. These women planted, plotted, studied, and persevered, overcoming preconceived notions of womanhood, although their meaningful efforts were often viewed as merely an offshoot of their feminine domestic role. For women, limited by opportunities in male-dominated arenas, shaping their cities was a socially accepted means for empowerment. Ellen Waln Harrison (1846 to 1922) was a key figure in civic beautification in her hometown of Philadelphia and beyond. Ellen Harrison was married to Charles Custis Harrison, Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and she personally oversaw campus landscaping efforts, and was referred to as his "right hand." Her story is emblematic of a larger trend regarding women in botany, horticulture, and urban forestry around the turn of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English Government's press release about the launch of their New Model Design Code (MHCLG, [66]) proudly states that [a] ll new developments must meet local standards of beauty, quality and design under new rules. Another example is the New South Wales government initiative Connecting with Country which aims for everyone involved in delivering government projects to adopt the following commitment: Through our projects, we commit to helping support the health and wellbeing of Country by valuing, respecting, and being guided by Aboriginal people, who know that if we care for Country - it will care for us.[29] "Knowing that Country communicates what it needs to keep the land, water and air healthy means that we, as humans, need to ensure we are listening to those communications" (Hromek, [102]). Someone in government, set up the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission (BBBBC) to tell professionals in England how to do things better (BBBBC, [133]). B Contents b B Introduction: Planning in the Name of Beauty b Hooman Foroughmand Araabi, Hannah Hickman and Katie McClymont B A Legal Challenge to "Beauty" in the National Planning Policy Framework 2021 b Oliver Carr B Power Elites as Arbiters of Design Quality and Beauty in the Built Environment - The English Experience Since 1947 b Richard Simmons B Beauty as Violence b Günter Gassner B On Beauty: Aboriginal Australians and the Particularity of Relationships to Place b Angelique Edmonds B Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder? They have been a political football since a left-wing Labour government enabled them in 1947 (HM Government, [58], S.12 et seq.). [Extracted from the article]

Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor By Juned Shaikh. The two books reviewed here chart the making of urban spaces, politics, and lives in Bombay/Mumbai across these transitions - from colonial planning to welfare-oriented postcolonial development to development by economic liberalization. Shaikh's book encapsulates well the complexity of the Dalit encounter with modernity - its radical possibilities of equality and its intensification of caste subordination. [Extracted from the article]

Urban Agro-forestry and Landscaping (UAL) is a term referring to farming systems and technologies to transform unused urban landforms into a beautiful and attractive piece of land by combining trees, crops, flower cultivation and as well as livestock keeping. UAL has been touted to reduce the effect of urbanization by enhancing biodiversity, food production, and livelihoods, promote ecotourism and urban beatifications as well as increasing urban resilience. To exemplify the contribution of UAL to urban tourism, a cross-section research design using questionnaires and interview was conducted in Mwanza city. A total of 114 enterprises involved in UAL were surveyed. Findings indicate that UAL are contributing to expanding tourism satisfactions in Mwanza city tours. Among the 114 enterprises surveyed 54 enterprises (47%) often receive tourists as part of Mwanza city tours while 60 enterprises (53%) often don't receives tourists at their sites. Tourists usually visits these UAL enterprises for photographing (36%), organizing events (23%), Trees and flowers collection (15%) urban farms and livestock walking tours (9%), Visiting Agro-forestry markets (9%) and others (8%). Interestingly, name and identity of some areas in Mwanza city notably Mkuyuni and Mkolani are related to indigenous fig tree "nkuyu" (Ficus sycomorus) and pod mahogany "nkola" (Afzelia quanzensis) which existed in this area. Some of the trees and flowers such as ginger bush (Tetradenia riparia), Life plant (Bryophylum pinnatum) basil "kashwagala" (Ocimum basilicum), blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) lemon (Citruslimon), lime (Citrus aurantiifolia) guava (Psidium guajava) have medicinal values and were linked to low Covid-19 incident within Mwanza city in 2020 and are still being used for same purposes by administering either orally or through self steaming. Similarly, UAL contributed significantly to city beautification, cultural food supply, green environment and clean air which contribute a resiliency and sustainable development of city tourism. This suggests UAL is paramount concept in enlarging urban tourism and it should be incorporated in urban policy and planning in order to broaden tourist experiences in urban areas as well as reducing the negative effects of urbanization in Tanzania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impacts of heritage-led urban redevelopment on local communities and the associated consequences of gentrification. The instrumental role of cultural heritage in urban governance presents an underdeveloped research field on gentrification. Especially in fast-developing countries like China, redevelopment is often associated with urban beautification that favours the interests of the affluent middle classes while disregarding the needs of the urban poor and migrants. This paper uses Qujiang New District in Xi'an and Taipingqiao in Shanghai as cases for examining the impacts of heritage-led redevelopment on the urban landscape and social fabric of Chinese cities. Following a qualitative approach based on built environment analysis and observation, together with in-depth, semi-structured interviews, this study shows how cultural heritage becomes an effective tool for governance in the context of urban redevelopment. The values generated by cultural heritage and its associated ideas, including urban beautification, high culture and economic benefits, legitimise state-dominated spatial reconstruction and the resulting gentrification and social fragmentation. Heritage-led urban redevelopment in China produces new spaces for social interaction, where the state's control over its citizens is reinforced. These spaces support investor and upper-high class interests of capital accumulation and leave limited room for the development of alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between artistic interventions in the public space and their impact on urban cultural commons. We focus on the case study of the Muri Liberi street art project in NoLo, a semi-peripheral neighbourhood of Milan traditionally characterized by a multi-ethnic, low-income resident population and now witnessing the early signs of socio-economic transformation. We propose a comparison with a case of art-based regeneration in another semi-peripheral neighbourhood of Milan, the Ortica district, specifically the Or.Me project. We study how the analyzed street art projects functioned, in the NoLo case, as a symbolic appropriation of the public space of the neighbourhood that bypassed its longtime residents and undermined their local urban commons, as a likely premise to future gentrification of the neighbourhood; in the Ortica case, we show instead how a community-based public art project in a similar context can foster social cohesion and improve a functional relation between the local community and its commons. We comment on how disregarding the political implications of artistic 'beautification' projects negatively impacts the social sustainability of art-driven urban renewal projects and delegitimizes the social credibility of public art as an anti-hegemonic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Moscow has been going through a transformation of its surface transport network during the past decade as part of a broader policy of urban beautification. Despite a renewed interest in public transport, this policy has led to the dismantling of the trolleybus system. This was met with resistance from various groups. Bringing together scholarly discussions on urban growth coalitions and on degrowth, we repoliticise urban mobility policies and put the entangled issues of ecological sustainability and social justice at the centre of the analysis. To do this, we outline a degrowth vision of urban mobility and introduce the concept of ecosocial justice, through which the case is analysed. Our results show that the trolleybus dismantlement increases biophysical throughput, compromises Moscow's ecology of culture, and is rooted in injustices, not least because Moscow authorities have ignored the many objections and alternative proposals put forward by residents. However, opposition groups paid limited attention to procedural injustices and to the configuration of Moscow's political economy. This was a limitation of the campaign, but suggests possibilities for repoliticising urban mobility policies at other sites of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leadership has an expansive meaning because it is a field study that comprises several different dimensions such as psychology, management, organization, and politics. On the other hand, the study of leadership’s role on urban development issues is still relatively scarce, especially in developing countries. The literature shows that local governments under the mayor as the highest-ranking position of municipal prioritise urban development is very much a function of socio-cultural norms and leadership styles. Therefore, mayoral leadership is vital regarding local government interventions to promote urban beautification in Indonesia. It is undeniable that leadership is a significant aspect of urban governance. Taking a case study in Surabaya, evidence shows that leadership plays important roles in urban governance, especially in facilitating and advising processes. Drawing on analysis of relevant documents, literature, and interviews with key decision-makers in Surabaya, the findings indicate that the quality of mayoral leadership has played a vital role in enhancing the beautification of urban form in Surabaya as a result of the urban design process. The mechanisms underlying this role include that the mayor has a sound understanding of the urban design and has been able to intervene to insist on good urban design as policy and has the standing to approach officials and community members on the urban beautification process. The quality of mayoral leadership has played a vital role in shaping the better urban beautification of Surabaya. A Mayor who has a wide-ranging grasp of urban design has advantages for the local government.