Search results for "urban studies"
showing 10 items of 240 documents
The sharing economy as a way to urban commoning
2016
Sharing economy and urban commons are inherently intertwined. New technologies and business models for the production and consumption of goods and services are rapidly transforming cities across the world in many ways: carsharing, ridesharing, short-term rentals, shared housing and workspaces. These not only put into question how urban transportation and tourist accommodation are planned, but also disrupt traditional local services, influence housing affordability and redesigning city spaces, thus often making existing local rules obsolete. These profound changes raise many issues. What kind of city is molded by peer-to-peer activities? Is a sharing economy the way to a commons-based urban …
Etnografia giuridica a Ballarò. Per dirottare il verso del sapere
2021
In Palermo, the Law department and a poor bazar of used things share the same square. Even if so closed, the academy and the market ignored and inspect each other with a mutual suspect for a long time. This happened as long as in an academic course an experiment of collaboration between students and merchants has been launched. The aim was to look at the right from the margin and to rewrite the rules together. The produced regulation draft has been used by the Municipality to make the market official. From this experience emerges an idea of university epistemologically humble, able to renounce to the title of knowledge’s monopolist and to activate processes of knowledge co-creation.
Shopping malls and neoliberal trends in Southern European cities: post-metropolitan challenges for urban planning policy
2016
Whilst shopping malls have been explored at length by critical urban studies, there has been little exploration of their role in restructuring the practice of urban and spatial planning. This article uses the shopping mall as an object of study in the light of the neoliberal trends and post-metropolisation in Southern Europe, with the aim of exploring challenges for urban governance and planning practice and with a focus on the role of the ongoing economic crisis. A threefold exploratory framework – the ‘lost-in-time scenario’, the ‘messianic mall model’ and the ‘(im)mature planning explanation’ – is used to make sense of the local versions of shopping mall development in Lisbon (Portugal) …
Classifying Regions for European Development Funding
2010
Structural and cohesion funds play a prominent role in European Union regional policy, which aims to reduce gaps in development between regions and disparities in well-being between European citizens. The regions and areas eligible for funding — 308,000 million during the 2007—13 period — are chosen according to regional GDP per inhabitant as the variable of reference. Despite the great importance of this indicator, the complex socioeconomic reality of regions cannot be fully explained by means of a single variable. Hence, using the large number of variables on economic, political, cultural and demographic characteristics available at regional level, this article groups European regions in…
Political patterning of urban namescapes and post-socialist toponymic change: A quantitative analysis of three Romanian cities
2020
Abstract Critical scholars of place-name studies have compellingly demonstrated that significant transformations in a society's namescape follow suit major power shifts and regime changes. However, despite the wealth of particular case studies existing in the literature, scarce efforts have been made to examine street name changes in a comparative framework using statistical modeling techniques of multivariate analysis. This paper aims to overcome these shortcomings by developing a comparative approach to analyzing post-socialist street-naming transformations in three Romanian cities from Transylvania (Brașov, Cluj-Napoca, and Sibiu). Based on comprehensive data collected from multiple sour…
¿Se han hecho más democráticos los partidos en España? La evolución en las reglas de elección del líder (1977-2008)
2011
En este trabajo, los autores verifican si, entre 1977 y 2008, ha habido un aumento de la democracia interna en los principales partidos políticos españoles. Para ello, analizan el proceso de selección del líder, al tiempo que cuestionan si ha habido un incremento de la igualdad en la participación para elegirlo, favoreciendo sistemas representativos o de elección directa. El artículo plantea también la hipótesis de si el grado de igualdad en las reglas de la elección influye en el grado de competencia en la lucha por el liderazgo del partido. Para comprobar tal supuesto, los autores examinan las condiciones de elegibilidad así como la representatividad del cuerpo electoral que escoge al líd…
Shifting to climate change aware cities to facilitate the city resilience implementation
2020
Abstract Climate change (CC) is one of the most urgent threats to modern societies, having direct and indirect consequences on the rapid growth of urban areas. Cities are attempting to both reduce their impact on the environment and build resilience to be able to face the irreversible effects of CC through plans and strategies. However, barriers, such as the fact that cities are complex systems and the uncertainty posed by CC have led to less engaged and committed city stakeholders, which have hampered the operationalisation of city resilience. In this context, developing city stakeholders awareness has been demonstrated to be an effective way to put an end to passive behaviour and help tra…
Il muro di Padova: un muro di solida paura
2009
Il muro di Padova: un muro di solida paura - The Padua Wall: a Wall of Solid Fear, If there is a lucky relevance in the concept of liquid fear, it is the physical image of what, not having a solid content, slides over, trickles through chinks and floods any surface that comes across. If applied to a specific case, the concept materialises in its solid ambivalence. In the Padua case under examination, the municipality makes the choice, explosive from a communication perspective, to par8 tially isolate - with an iron fence, the so-called wall - an inhabited area, considered out of control because of the growing flow of regular and irregular immigrants, of crime episodes, of drug dealing, of a…
On the definition of generic multi-layered ontologies for urban applications
2000
Cooperation of information systems is essential for providing decision support for urban management applications. This involves sharing data across collections of the heterogeneous information systems that are used to manage large urban infrastructures. The objective of this work is to define a spatial ontology to describe key features of urban applications, providing a foundation for semantic reconciliation among heterogeneous spatial information sources. We propose a multi-layered ontologies definition framework consisting of ontology layers which are composed of a generic functional structure and one or more domain ontologies. The functional structure embodies general ontological concept…
Changes in the Intra-Metropolitan Location of Producer Services in Ile-de-France (1978-1997) : do information technologies promote a more dispersed s…
2003
Because of their intensive need for face-to-face contacts, producer services have, historically, been found at the core o f CBDs. However, it has been suggested that advances in information technologies could lead to the erosion o f the CBD’s economic base, rendering face-to-face contacts obsolete and enabling producer services to suburbanize. Although a considerable amount o f empirical work has been done on the suburbanization o f these activities in North-America, the same is not true of France. In this paper, we adopt an original methodology to study the role played by face-to-face contacts in the spatial distribution of producer services in the Ile-de-France region between 1978 and 199…