1,720,957 research outputs found
The post-networked condition in the urbanized periphery: transforming water supply and sanitation services in a southern european metropolis
No full textUrbanized peripheries are frequently regarded as unsustainable due to the high costs of infrastructure provision, escalating resource demands, and low social cohesion stemming from unequal access to services. In an increasingly suburbanized world, addressing this complex infrastructural crisis is crucial. Meanwhile, in consideration of these challenges, the European Union introduced the New Green Deal, promoting a strategy of hybrid investment in both networked and alternative forms of infrastructure development. However, there is limited understanding of how current suburban infrastructures are (re)produced and how interventions should be designed to support a more sustainable and progressive approach to service provision. This article proposes a conceptual and methodological framework centered on the “post-networked condition” to examine the heterogenous socio-technical foundations of Southern European metropolises. I argue that through the operationalization of this framework we can better integrate the characterization, diagnosis, and transformation of these socio-technical landscapes, bridging gaps in the traditional siloed debates of infrastructure transition studies. I conclude by calling for a shift in suburban studies beyond the prevailing neoliberal emphasis on densification and compaction as the main drivers of urban periphery transformation. Extending the concept of the post-networked condition beyond city centers and into urbanized peripheries offers a more comprehensive framework for addressing these transformation challenges.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Opportunities and Challenges of Municipal Planning in Shaping Vertical Neighbourhoods in Greater London
Full text linkProduction of housing in London is driven by three factors: a housing crisis that requires the construction of more than 1.6 million homes by 2025, a model of social housing production mainly delivered through private developers’ contributions, and a metropolitan governance structure through which housing targets are allocated to municipalities with highly unequal pressures, being inner London boroughs the ones with the highest targets to meet. In the context of a non-prescriptive and liberalised planning system, this threefold scenario has resulted in the construction of unprecedented residential landscapes, dominated by high-density and high-rise buildings. Tower Hamlets Council is at the forefront of this challenge both in the UK and Europe and is trying to develop planning tools to shape them. This article discusses three innovative supplementary planning documents (SPDs) produced by the policy team that have had unequal success in shaping different aspects of this form of development: the South Quay Masterplan SPD, the High Density Living SPD, and the soon-to-be-adopted Tall Building SPD. A comparative analysis of these planning documents and the perception of urban planners working at different stages of the planning process on the effectiveness and limitations of these SPDs in shaping vertical neighbourhoods shed light on the key factors influencing the role municipal planning can have in delivering a built environment that supports residents’ quality of life. By doing so, this case study illustrates the limitations of municipal planning and planners in local government, pointing to more structural and strategic issues of metropolitan governance
A taxonomy of suburban fragments: a diachronic discussion of suburban value creation, state power and livelihoods in the periphery of a Southern European city
No full textThis article presents a morphological and diachronic framework for analyzing the (re)production of suburban space in the metropolitan periphery. Grounded in Suburban Critical Studies (SCS) and urban morphology, the framework advances Lefebvre’s implosion – explosion dialectic and Keil’s concept of disjunct fragments. It challenges linear, center-periphery models and regionally fixed suburban typologies by revealing how suburbanization unfolds through overlapping spatial, temporal, and socio-political processes. Focusing on a medium-sized city in Southern Europe, the study identifies eight suburban fragment types – organized into four categories – based on land assembly, infrastructure provision, and housing production. Drawing on cartographic analysis, planning documents, and interviews, the research traces how these fragments are shaped by diverse logics of value creation, state power, and everyday livelihood strategies. The findings show that suburban forms are relationally produced, coexisting and evolving over time, rather than emerging as residual extensions of urban cores. This approach enables a more nuanced understanding of intra-metropolitan heterogeneity and reveals emerging forms of centrality and decentrality in the metropolitan landscapes. The proposed framework contributes to current debates on suburban governance, placemaking, and sustainable transformation in rapidly urbanizing peripheries.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Learning from an ordinary suburban post-growth struggle: not by design, nor by disaster
No full textSuburbs worldwide are described as unsustainable given the high levels of resource consumption, waste disposal, and their vulnerability to climate change. While mainstream academic and policy discourses have long focused on densification - hence growth - as a solution to address the suburban sustainability crisis, an emerging body of scholarship suggests that the spatial and socio-technical structure of suburbs may off er opportunities for a postgrowth scenario. However, much of this literature remains either theoretical or rooted in narrow, anecdotal examples of single policy interventions, which replicate some of the shortcomings seen in broader postgrowth and degrowth studies. By exploring an ‘ordinary’ postgrowth transition in a medium-sized city in Southern Europe, I argue that such a shift will not unfold as suggested by existing literature: neither as a purely top-down or bott om-up process, nor as a totalizing victory or defeat, or a binary outcome of ‘by Design or Disaster’. Instead, a suburban postgrowth transition emerges as a multi-actor, multi-scalar, and multi-dimensional process of multiple niches, where although there is a broad consensus on the need to transition away from a growth-dependant water and sanitation system, a struggle for a more radical postgrowth future is taking place.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Temporalities for, of, and in Planning: Exploring Post-Growth, Participation, and Devolution Across European Planning Reforms
Full text linkIn the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the acceleration of climate change, many governments are turning to their planning systems to explore how national planning reform can help them address their current crisis. Time across planning reforms appears as a central dimension, building on governments' long-term ambitions to speed planning. While academic normative debates argue in favour of faster and/or slower changes to planning as inherently good or bad, this article draws on a comparative analysis of national planning reforms across three European countries to critically examine how time is being mobilised and with what objective. Through an analytical framework that seeks a more holistic understanding of the planning process, we argue that temporalities in planning are relational. Across the three cases, we can see how the generation of consensus depoliticises the use of time, and it is generally used to advance regressive agendas. We argue that despite ambitions to make planning more responsive and participatory at the local level, planning reforms (a) reduce the influence of public participation while strengthening private property rights; (b) are used to territorialise sectoral, top-down, and long-term agendas with no consideration of the timely and situated concerns and visions of residents and communities; and (c) are underpinned by a pro-growth and rapid urbanisation agenda that ignores sustainability debates
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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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