1,720,983 research outputs found
Introduction
No full textAsian urbanism: three challenges In 2017, we are repeatedly reminded that we live in an urban world. Indeed, as far back as 2008, we were told that for the first time in the history, half of the world’s population lived in urban areas. The United Nations (UN) estimates that at current urban development rates, more than 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities or towns by 2050 (UN-Habitat 2009). While it is true that hubris around a new ‘urban age’ has been a characteristic of scholarly and media activity over the past few years, urbanisation is today associated with three features that make it distinctive from past urbanisation trends. The first of these is the geographical scale associated with urban areas. There are now 35 megacities (defined as conurbations with a population over 10 million) globally: 22 of these, including eight of the largest 10 (by population size), are in Asia (UN 2016). This is markedly different from the situation several decades ago, when most of the world’s largest cities were found in wealthy Western countries. In contrast, the world’s largest urban areas are now concentrated in developing countries. Among eight so-called ‘hyper-cities’ (those with a population over 20 million), six are located in the Global South (UN 2016)
Challenging the eco-city: residents’ perceptions of social sustainability in Tianjin Eco-City, China
Full text linkThis chapter discusses the case for 'humanizing' new-build urban mega-projects such as eco-cities by focusing on urban social sustainability, and on the experiences of new residents in newly-built cities such as Tianjin eco-city. It focuses on the eco-city as an economic space of both production and consumption. The chapter explores the ways in which the eco-city's residents experienced their move into a new-build urban environment, and the obstacles, frictions and positive possibilities present therein. One of the highly advertised and marketed features of Tianjin eco-city is the provision of 'green' domestic spaces for the new residents of the city. Jane Jacobs' work is useful because of its focus on moving past the plans, blueprints and rational urban visions proposed by master planners, engineers and architects, and towards valuing the role of the rather messier relationality found in the everyday city
Solar energy at the peri-urban frontier: An energy justice study of urban peripheries from Burkina Faso and South Africa
Full text linkThis is the final version. Available on open access from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordData availability:
Data will be made available on request.Most of the global population that lack access to electricity services live in sub-Saharan Africa. Peri-urban areas of large African cities, often characterized by the presence of informal settlements, exist in a kind of ‘scalar limbo,’ unable to benefit from either access to the city grid or from programs aimed at the electrification of rural areas. In addition, in those areas where lack of electricity access is common, energy poverty combined with proximity to the grid leads to a greater likelihood of illegal energy supply arrangements. In this fieldwork-based study, conducted through population surveys and interviews in the peripheries of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and Cape Town, South Africa, we employ a hybrid theoretical framework, based on work in urban political ecology and energy justice, to analyze the situation of electricity access in the two areas. We find that the planned scale, scope, and technological design of solar energy projects in peripheral areas are crucial in determining whether and how a project will be beneficial for local communities. This study provides guidance beyond academia to national and international policymakers and executives of renewable energy companies, as well as tools for a more in-depth assessment of energy justice issues.ERA4CSEuropean Union Horizon 2020Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)British AcademyAXA Research Fun
Internal colonisation, hegemony and coercion: Investigating migration to Southern Lazio, Italy, in the 1930s
No full textThis paper investigates the Italian fascist regime's use of internal colonisation as part of a wider ruralisation policy aimed at promoting population growth, curbing rural-urban migration, staunching emigration, and halting the spread of industrial urbanisation. By focusing on the case study of the Pontine Marshes, the paper demonstrates how, through targeted selection procedures aimed at displacing defined social and political undesirables, migrants were chosen and effectively coerced into migrating to the "fascist" landscape of the marshes. The area, reclaimed and developed in the 1930s, was celebrated as a sign of the regime's engineering and social success. The paper utilises Antonio Gramsci's thought on hegemony, and argues that the overt use of coercion hints at the fact that fascism, although ideologically totalitarian and hegemonic, was contested. Although statisticians, demographers and state bureaucrats were organised and institutionalised in the construction of hegemony based on consent, fascism based itself more in coercion than in passive consent in the case of internal colonisation. (c) 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd
The smart city as urban eco-modernisation: the case of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi
No full textThis chapter explores the notion and practice of the smart city with a geographical focus on Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates. Smart-city projects are understood and discussed as the product of overarching political economies related to fast-track urbanisation. The case of Abu Dhabi shows that smart-city initiatives are connected to the state’s goals of changing its economic base and preserving the political status quo, through the development and commercialization of smart-clean technology. In this sense, the smart city, as a living laboratory meant to produce new cleantech products such as smart grids and state-of-the-art solar power stations, becomes the physical locus where new strands of the regional economy are cultivated.
Through the example of Masdar City, a new high-tech city under construction in Abu Dhabi, the chapter unpacks and critiques the contradictions between the economic imperatives that underpin so-called smart interventions and their overall sustainability, revealing that, as in most cases of ecological modernisation, socio-environmental concerns are overshadowed by business interests. We conclude that, in addition to being ineffective against the social and the environmental problems caused by cities, by supporting transnational machines of production and consumption, smart-city solutions risk to backfire and exacerbate the same vicious circle that they should be breaking
Ordinary Chinese Smart Cities: The Case of Wuhan
Full text linkThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the link in this recordCommentaries on future-oriented Chinese urban development tend to focus on showcase projects underway in wealthy coastal cities. This chapter instead sheds light on the way that the smart has been integrated into more ‘ordinary’ Chinese urban life, using the case of Wuhan, a ‘Tier II’ city in Central China. It explores the conditions of the emergence of Wuhan’s smart city activities from three perspectives. First, it outlines a series of ‘vertical’ enabling factors, whereby an international body of discourse and practice has been ‘translated’ into national Chinese urban policies. Second, it considers the simultaneous significance of ‘horizontal’ links between Wuhan’s local government, city governments abroad, local private enterprises, and foreign firms. Third, it relates Wuhan’s smart credentials to a broader process of digitalisation of everyday life in the city. It concludes by reflecting on the distinctive characteristics of Chinese smart urbanism, as exemplified by Wuhan, and finally draws out some implications for future research into smart cities elsewhere. Specifically, it proposes that the smart city is most usefully approached as a shifting and locally inflected concept which not only channels multiple policy agendas, but also reflects broader changes to urban space and governance in particular contexts.This chapter draws on a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council (grant number ES/L015978/1) ‘Smart eco-cities for a green economy: a
comparative study of Europe and China’
Actually-existing Smart Dublin: Exploring smart city development in history and context
Full text linkHow does the ‘smart city’ manifest itself in practice? Our research aims to separate substance from spin in our analysis of the actually-existing smart city in Dublin, Ireland. We detail how the smart city has been brought into common discourse in the Dublin city region through the Smart Dublin initiative, examining how the erstwhile ‘accidental smart city’ until 2014 has been rearticulated into a new vision for Dublin. The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part we map out the evolution of smart urbanism in Dublin by tracing its origins back to the adoption of neoliberal policies and practices and the rolling out of entrepreneurial urbanism in the late 1980s. In the second part, we detail the work of Smart Dublin and the three principle components of current smart city-branded activity in the city: an open data platform and big data analytics; the rebranding of autonomous technology-led systems and initiatives as smart city initiatives; supporting innovation and inward investment through testbedding and smart districts; and adopting new forms of procurement designed to meet city challenges. In doing so, we account for the relatively weak forms of civic participation in Dublin’s smart city endeavours to date
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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