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Prototypes as open-ended artefacts in urban design
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017When dealing with the quality of an urban space the criticism sets, almost without exemption, the end product of the urban design process as the main object of judgment. However, the product of urban design, in contrast to other consumer products, is more than a cohesive product of aesthetics and function. On the contrary, the design of space is a complex system of multiple individual products (open spaces, buildings etc.), each one with its own functions and needs. Moreover, due to the fact that each one of these individual products follows a unique path of development through time, it appears that the orchestration of this multitude of individual activities is difficult to accomplish. Following the reasoning mentioned above, it becomes clear that the shaping of physical space is rarely under the full control of the designer and that most of the times the formulation of a physical space becomes the design of an overall framework of development. The latter highlights the importance to consider urban design not only as an object of design, but more importantly as a process of design. If we assume that participatory design, self-organizing, user-centered design and open-source design are considered to be bottom-up processes, the hypothesis here is that open-ended design is a process that can either be initiated as a top-down or a bottom-up approach, but nevertheless, requires the participation of more than one person, in order to be successful. This implies that a set of rules must be negotiated and tested among all the actors participating in the process for any open-ended project to be implemented.Published versio
Participatory modelling to support group decision making processes in climate resilient urban design
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Interest in climate resilience is growing worldwide among policy makers, urban planners, citizens and scientists. Climate Resilient Urban Design (CRUD) relates to the (re-)design of urban areas in such a way that cities and citizens become less vulnerable to climate change. Weather phenomena like heat stress, droughts and floods impact the lives of city dwellers, villagers, and rural residents all over the globe. The making of policies dealing with climate resilience in urban environments is a process that inevitably involves stakeholders from various disciplines, each with their own interests, constraints and goals. Group Model Building (GMB) (Vennix, 1999) is known to facilitate the decision making processes by modelling important variables and their causal relations in a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD). This participatory group modelling process creates a shared understanding of the problem, incorporating the views of all stakeholders, and it improves the support for the final decisions taken. The GRACeFUL (Global systems Rapid Assessment tools through Constraint Functional Languages) project aims at supporting decision making in complex problems by connecting participatory processes (using GMB) to scientific evidence through novel tools. Rapid Assessment Tools typify causal factors and linkages with concrete data from other system layers and produce a set of viable and acceptable alternative solutions to be used in decision making. Simulation tools will simulate the alternative scenarios over time and visualization tools will show the results of the different CRUD solutions on maps. The case study area is a neighbourhood in the city of Dordrecht, the Netherlands. The municipality is planning to redevelop the public space in this neighbourhood taking into account climate resilience and involving different stakeholders, including citizens.Published versio
Regional planning responding to climate change
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Climate change, although defined with global and long-term scales, has currently caused substantial impacts to many local places. Even though wide efforts are being made to ameliorate the future environment, increasingly frequent extreme events due to the changing climate have been rather unbearable to many places and population. The integration of mitigation and adaptation efforts becomes a critical issue, so that improvement is available to both current and future, both local and global conditions. Spatial planning for urban regions demonstrates unique potential of promoting this integration. With the review of existing studies, we lead the mitigation-adaptation integration to the topics of regional planning and policy mobilities, for which regional governance is proposed as the appealing innovation in climate governance.Published versio
Enabling youth geographies in the digital smart city. An action-research approach
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Some categories of citizens are excluded by most decisions about how to manage, transform and use urban space. Among these weak categories of citizens there are teenagers, who are the object of many specific urban policies, even if they are rarely involved as active subjects of the policy making process. The understanding of the real urban geographies, through bottom-up perspectives, and the engagement of citizens, with participatory policy-making, are central in the smart cities narratives, often associated to the use of ICT technologies. There is often a gap between the city for teenagers – formally planned and ruled by adults – and the city of teenagers, which is actually lived, transformed, occupied and represented by young people. Can the use of ICT fill this gap of knowledge to support participatory policymaking? This contribution presents the methodologies and the results of an action-research project called Teencarto, carried out by the University of Turin and the City Council. The project involved more than 600 teenagers from 16 schools, in a massive process of community mapping aiming at producing a representation of their urban geography. The mapping process has been based on First Life, a map-based social network, which aims at reconnecting digital and real spaces, using cartographic representations and crowdsourcing. The specific relational perspective allowed by the social networking functionalities of the application, specifically redesigned for this project on user-centered principles, favors a real shared representation of urban space.Published versio
Everyday nationalism and urban culture – normalizing nationalist representations, discourses and practices in public space
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Public space research has engaged in depth with progressive social and political movements which have appropriated and reframed public space as a political sphere and a space for local, lived democracy. However, urban public spaces have not only been the place of these progressive movements’ protests and occupations in the face of crisis and austerity policies. I want to briefly sketch some of the different phenomena that show that public space has also become the place of anti-pluralist, xenophobic and nationalist protests: The Brexit-vote, a result of anti-immigrant sentiments and Euro-skipticism, brought increased xenophobic violence to public space. When the unleashed violence of terrorists has disconcerted public space yet again, the French government has extended the state of emergency curbing citizen’s rights such as the right to assembly and protest. Another example of urban space being used for rightist and nationalist strategies is Turkey. After the failed coup in Turkey, thousands followed the call of Erdogan for a “Democracy Watch” in Taksim square, re-appropriating the symbol of the 2013 Gezi Park Protests against the government with national symbolism. In 2015 the rightist movement Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident (PEGIDA) came to a head with 10.000 citizens protesting in Dresden (Zeit.de). These observations point to the relevance of urban public spaces in the operation of rightist political organisation. They postulate a closer look at urban public space as a central arena of the right’s antipluralist, xenophobic and nationalist agenda. Furthermore, they expose the city a contested space of both progressive and rightist appropriations. The aim of this paper is to pay attention not to the overt protests and demonstrations but to expose everyday and popular nationalism in public space. It seeks to address the representations, discourses and practices that normalize nationalism in public space. The research therefore challenges the notion of rightist spaces as rural phenomena as well as it challenges the notion of urbanity at the heart of inclusive and cosmopolitan societies. Based on Bulut’s (2006) definition of popular nationalism as “the exacerbation of nationalist feelings and the increased attachment to the idea of the nation in everyday representations, discourses and practices” (p.125) this paper points out the return of nationalisms to public space, drawing on the democracy watch protests and the popular festivities of the Austrian National Day. It aims to present first explorations of rightist appropriations and nationalism in public space to develop future research propositions.Published versio
Gated communities in Turkey as a governance structure: Istanbul case
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017The privately managed housing areas are the most common examples of decentralization of state centered governance policies and their transformation to society based management practices that can be seen in urban space. These housing areas called ‘common interest developments’ whose different examples can be traced over the world are such residential areas whose residents form some certain management structures to regularize common rules within contracts. Those housing complexes including various social, physical and environmental features; facilities, services and activity areas are managed by a user group consisted of residents or a representative government body with unique internal structures. Those privately managed areas commonly known as CID are the fastest spreading housing structure around the world (McKenzie, 2003). CID, seen as a form of privatization of local government also symbolizes the reducing local government dependency and rising trust for market systems. CID areas, whose common characteristics are being privately managed, have various types in various names (McKenzie, 2003; Ruju, 2014; Tummers, 2015; Chiodelli 2015). Gated communities have become the most controversial type of CID included in CID literature which has been spreading over the world sincethe 1970s. The most well-known and accepted definitions of gated communities generally imply the privatization of public space and restricted access to housing area (Blake and Snyder, 1997). The common view explaining the emergence of gated communities refers to the safety need originating through the effect of global neoliberal restructuring over the social polarization (Tanülkü, 2012). In that sense, gated communities are the structures emerge in the urban space where social housing and public spaces lose their meaning, gentrificated, entrepreneur and privatized areas arise while urban regeneration works towards city center, mega projects and imbalanced development create neoliberal city (Hackworth, 2007). Those places isolated via physical and cultural barriers from the rest of the society are supported by an internal governance mechanism. Thus, a private governance mechanism operating certain rules to provide order and maintenance is applied for these housing areas (Atkinson and Blandy, 2009; Soja, 2000).Published versio
Flanders´ spatial (policy) planning in the making: potential and limits to collaboration as collective learning
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Planning has to adapt itself to changing challenges and circumstances. But also innovative ideas and new ambitions from within can lead to changes of an established planning system. In Flanders (one of three Belgian regions), the administration of spatial planning is currently developing a new concept, format and approach: spatial ‘structure planning’ will be followed-up by ‘policy planning’. To foster flexibility, a new legal frame and instruments redirect planning towards combining a long-term strategic vision with mid-term realization-focused policy-frames. The regional government hopes to approve the new planning system by the end of 2017. Worth mentioning here is the shift from hierarchical relationships between planning levels to partnership-relationships based on equivalence. Collaboration at and between governance levels, policy domains, and relevant actors is central to this. The regional planning agency will provide rather guidance than norms. Since that kind of collaboration is not yet a structural part of the actual planning culture, this new direction is at odds with practices until now, and needs critical support. This paper has the ambition to assess the actual situation in Flanders and to contribute to theoretical positions on flexible planning within constellations of uncertainty, while developing concepts on collaboration and reframing concepts on participation. In terms of method, the recent ‘White Paper’ – approved November 2016 - about this ‘policy planning’, is scrutinized in the light of research findings from the Policy Research Centre (Steunpunt Ruimte: research by 3 universities for the administration Spatial Planning Flanders), i.e. conclusions from the research on methods for future explorations and collective learning for complex spatial issues (Kuhk, et al, 2016). This study analyses stimulating large-scale pilot practices, identifies crucial methodological issues and formulates valuable policy-recommendations. In our analysis, we acknowledge collaboration as means (methodological aspects), as a goal (collectivity aspect), and as a medium (collective learning as a mode of ‘rehearsing the future’). Collective learning has a huge potential for collaboration in planning practice. The recommendations in the paper built on and attempt to widen results from separate case-studies, i.e. to allow for a more generalized implementation. It is hoped this critical analysis will stimulate the ongoing stakeholder consultations and partner debates and thus amend the document that will be prepared for preliminary approval and public consultation.Published versio
Multi-criteria decision analysis for promoting bike-friendly city vision of Izmir using GIS
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Deploying GIS at its analysis of multilayered spatial data about Izmir (the third biggest metropolitan city in Turkey), this paper aims at suggesting ways of providing bicycle routes and roads in the already developed built environment of the densely populated cities. Focusing on multiple characteristics of topography, land use and population, the study deploys overlay analysis and network analysis respectively at city level and district level. Despite of the limited number and characteristics of data available about Turkish cities, this study has been limited to the lack of crime data and travel demand data of related neighborhoods.Published versio
Introducing business regions in Denmark : Towards a new planning culture?
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Significant attention has recently been paid to the new forms of territorial governance emerging at the scale of urban regions in Western Europe (Allmendinger et al., 2015; Janssen-Jansen and Hutton, 2011). In the planning literature, these new spaces of governance have been conceptualised as ‘soft spaces’ with ‘fuzzy boundaries’, as they are often located in between formal levels of governance, and are not necessarily univocally bounded (Haughton et al., 2010). It is claimed, that the new spaces of territorial governance do not as much replace formal levels of governance, as they seek to supplement existing governance structures in strategic ways, e.g. around specific policy agendas, thus adding extra layers to an increasingly complex and fragmented governance landscape (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009a). As in many other European countries, Denmark has experienced an explosion in the number of informal governance networks working across formal boundaries in recent years. As part of this general trend, a number of city region networks have emerged around the biggest Danish cities. Drawing on experiences mainly from other Nordic countries, several of the networks identify themselves as ‘business regions’, and have formulated goals and visions revolving primarily around attracting businesses and a highly educated workforce to the region. In the Danish debate the concepts of ‘business regions’ and ‘city regions’ are often used interchangeably, as the networks, regardless of the self-proclaimed label, seek to address similar challenges. For convenience, we adopt the terminology of ‘business regions’ in this paper to describe the new governance networks at the scale of city regions. In this paper, we explore the rationalities behind the emergence of business regions in and around the four biggest cities in Denmark. In order to get a sense of the nature of the strategic spatial planning that is practised in such spaces, we examine the spatial strategy-making initiatives that takes place in the auspices of those regions. We built our analysis on document analysis of strategies, visions, policy documents, official webpages etc., together with semi-structured interviews carried out with the key actors involved in the business regionsPublished versio
A contrastive study on strategic value of public space plan in urban development from the perspective of space production
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Public space is one of the most important elements to realize the concept of resilient city. Not only could it provide emergency shelters when disasters, it also could provide a flexible and sustainable development for industries as a macroscopic spatial strategy. The value of public space has been rising gradually with calls for human-centered environment, after its concession for economic development in decades. Because it could beautify environment and promote social communication. What’s more, it has a tendency from its own ecological, social and aesthetic value to strategic one as a catalyst in urban development. Urban catalyst, means that a particular element has a positive influence on the external or internal conditions of the existing ones and causes a “chain reaction”, promoting continuous urban development as arrangement (Atton W.& Logan D., 1994). There is no doubts that public space has a great potential to be a catalyst in urban development.Published versio