Shaping an urban Amazonia: ‘a planner’s nightmare’

This paper discusses the massive colonization plan and settlement scheme implemented in the early 1970s by the Brazilian government as part of the development of the Amazonian territory, and accounts for some of the reasons for its failure. Building on the notion that the Amazonian settlement scheme had taken a mid-twentieth-century private-colonization enterprise in northern-Paraná state as a planning model, this paper reveals that they were both grounded in garden-city repertoire; particularly the ideas of decentralization, satellite towns, and the marriage of town and country. However, unlike its model, the Amazonian settlement scheme failed badly. The adaptations made to the model and the innovations of the new scheme will also be identified.     

Transnational urban policies: ‘relocating’ Spanish and Brazilian models of urban planning in Buenos Aires

This article examines the transnationalization of urban policies by analysing the adoption of two ‘foreign’ models of participatory urban planning in the city of Buenos Aires. Both schemes are modelled on internationally acclaimed experiments: Barcelona's Strategic Plan and Porto Alegre's Participatory Budget. In Buenos Aires, however, these policy transfers have failed to produce the remarkable results for which their Spanish and Brazilian exemplars have been internationally praised. Traditional accounts of policy transfers ponder on the institutional compatibility between imported schemes and host environments. The author argues that these works tend to overlook the significance of the stochastic conditions presiding over the adoption of particular policy models in different cities. She proposes to deviate from traditional approaches by seeking an explanation for the poor results of the schemes in Buenos Aires in (a) the contextual conditions framing their adoption in the Argentine capital, and (b) the circumstances surrounding their emergence in Barcelona and Porto Alegre.     

‘The field of grain is gone; It's now a Tesco Superstore’: representations of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ within historical and contemporary discourses opposing urban expansion in England

Ideas about the difference between rural and urban areas are woven into the fabric of English society. This paper asks how two different campaigns against urban expansion and rural homebuilding in England – one interwar and one more contemporary (related to the production of the ‘National Planning Policy Framework’ document) – represent the difference between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ and how they use these representations to justify and naturalize their arguments. Utilizing interpretive textual analysis to compare the two periods, we show that, whilst planning has undergone significant paradigm shifts during the period between the two campaigns, in both archives a dominant ‘rural idyll’ is (re)produced and reinforced through the representational themes of beauty, nature, purity, an elite educated class, and a traditional social order. This is strongly contrasted to the representation of the ‘urban sphere’ as an unnatural, ugly, modern, and socially fragmented dystopia. ‘Urban’ areas are therefore constructed as the constitutive ‘Other’ to the rural idyll. In this way, the apparently natural urban characteristics associated with built-up areas are represented as ‘out of place’ within the rural sphere. These representations work to justify the argument that ‘development’ is a threat to the intrinsic characteristics of the countryside and should not be allowed to take place. This rural idyll/urban dystopia binary is argued to continue to have an important influence on shaping policy debate.     

The birth of ‘land use planning’ in American urban planning

Although the concept of ‘land use planning’ is now firmly enmeshed in American urban planning, its meaning still remains vague. This paper aims to clarify the meaning by examining the historical development of land use planning in the USA. At the beginning of the twentieth century, city planners viewed a city as an organic unit of public facilities. While city planning thereafter provided potential elements of land use planning, such as zoning, zoning surveys and land use classification systems, the idea of land use planning itself was actually derived from rural county planning and was initially utilized in urban county planning as a guide for zoning in the 1930s. After bringing about a change in the way cities were viewed, that is, as a pattern of land use and population density, land use planning was further employed as a guide for urban redevelopment policies in the 1940s, and finally reaching full integration into city planning in the 1950s and 1960s.     

‘Orthodox’ and ‘alternative’ explanations for the reduction of urban violence in Medellín,Colombia

In 2016, 43 of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world were located in Latin America. In reducing levels of urban violence and preventing future outbreaks, approaches developed in Western Europe and North America are the most influential and have been subjected to considerable testing in high-income urban environments.

This article focuses on Medellín, Colombia. By drawing from qualitative data collected in Medellín, the article scrutinises claims that the social urbanism policies caused the significant reduction in homicides. An alternative explanation for the reduction in homicides is then presented, focusing on the methods of the perpetrators of violence.     

Can we ‘Catch ‘em All’? An exploration of the nexus between augmented reality games,urban planning and urban design

Urban planners and designers have spent the last 50 years trying to activate unused public spaces, create walkable cities and encourage sociability through urban design. Pokémon Go has succeeded, almost overnight, to entice people of all demographics into the streets of cities around the world. In fact, many previously underutilized public spaces have suddenly become hot spots for all demographics, playing Pokémon Go and other similar augmented reality games (ARGs). While anecdotally it seems that ARGs activate public spaces, increase community interactions and facilitate exploration of urban spaces, little study has been done on the influence of ARGs on sense of place, or the way in which these games are influencing player engagement with the public spaces they are playing within. This paper reports the findings of a survey of 994 Australian players. The paper explores whether ARGs affect user needs being met in public spaces, and the implications of these findings for urban practitioners.     

Problematizing data-driven urban practices: Insights from five Dutch ‘smart cities’

Recently, the concept of the smart city has gained growing popularity. As cities worldwide have set the aim to harness digital technologies to their development, increasing focus came to lie on the potential challenges and concerns related to data-driven urban practices. In the existing literature, these challenges and concerns have been dominantly approached from a pragmatic approach based on the a priori assumed ‘goodness’ of the smart city; for a small group of critics, the very notion of the smart city is questionable. This paper takes the middle-way by interrogating how municipal and civil society stakeholders problematize the challenges and concerns related to data-driven practices in five Dutch cities, and how they act on these concerns in practice. The lens of problematization posits that the ways of problematizing data-driven practices contribute to their actual enactment, and that this is an inherently political process. The case study shows that stakeholders do not only perceive practical challenges but are widely aware of and are (partly) pro-actively engaging with perceived normative-ethical and societal concerns, leading to different (sometimes inter-related) technological, legal/political, organizational, informative and participative strategies. Nonetheless, the explicit contestation of smart city policies through these strategies remains limited in scope. The paper argues that more research is needed to uncover the structural-institutional dynamics that facilitate and/or prevent the repoliticization of smart city projects.     

Between urban and national: Political mobilization among Mizrahim in Israel’s ‘development towns’

In the face of persisting deprivation, marginalized ethno-classes generally mobilize against their governments and/or against rival groups. Two key arenas of such mobilization are extra-parliamentary protest and local electoral campaigning. The paper examines these arenas in Israel’s peripheral ‘development towns’, established during the 1950s, and populated primarily by “Mizrahim”—Jews who migrated to Israel from the Muslim world. The public protest by Mizrahim in the towns has been consistent, though not intense. Generally, it voiced ‘external’ demand to the state for a fairer share of public resources, falling within the ‘legitimate’ boundaries of Zionist political discourse. In local elections, however, the Mizrahim raised a more militant political voice, focusing mainly on their competition against the large number of ‘Russians’ immigrants who arrived during the 1990s. Local election campaigns often transgressed the acceptable boundaries of Zionist discourse, by questioning the core values of immigrant absorption and Jewish unity. In explaining the different agendas and discourses, we argue that the answer is rooted in two related phenomena. First, on a national level, Mizrahi identity at the Israeli periphery has been ‘trapped’ by the settlement agendas of the Zionist project. The local election discourse, however, demonstrates the centrality of place for the Mizrahim in both their communal identity and political power. While the towns were created as peripheral and impoverished places in the attempt to Judaize the land, they have now become a significant, and threatened, ethnic and political resource. The external and internal discourses therefore combine as two key ‘layers’ in the making of the peripheral Mizrahi ethno-class.     

Cross-Border Migration of Hong Kong Residents Under the ‘One Country,Two Systems’ Policy

In market economies the built environment is largely the product of private sector property development. Property development is a high-risk entrepreneurial activity executing expensive projects with long gestation periods in an uncertain environment and into an uncertain future. Risk lies at the core of development: the developer manages the multiple risks of development and it is the capital injection and financing that is placed at risk. From the developer's perspective the search for development capital is a quest: to access more finance, over a longer term, with fewer conditions and at lower rates. From the supply angle, capital of various sources—banks, insurance companies, superannuation funds, accumulated firm profits, retail investors and private equity—is always seeking above market returns for limited risk. Property development presents one potentially lucrative, but risky, investment opportunity. Competition for returns on capital produces a continual dynamic evolution of methods for funding property developments. Thus, the relationship between capital and development and the outcomes for the built environment are in a restless continual evolution. Little is documented about the ways development is financed in Australia and even less of the consequences for cities. Using publicly available data sources and examples of different development financing from Australian practice, this article argues that different methods of financing development have different outcomes and consequences for the built environment. This article also presents an agenda for further research into these themes.     

浅谈‘土风’抬梁式和‘木风’穿斗式

“大兴土木”作为对古代一切建筑活动的概括,从中可以窥见土和木在古代是建筑的主要材料。而关于建筑的起源,则有两种：“掘土为穴”以及“构木为巢”。以中原文化为代表的“土风”和以楚国文化为代表的“木风”,各有其独自的特点。文章想要阐述的一个观点是：以官方建筑为主的抬梁式实际上是“土的风格”,而以民间建筑为主的穿斗式则是“木的风格”。     

‘紫花’醉鱼草

在烈日炎炎的夏季,走进上海市园林科研所邬桥墓地,有一种盛开着蓝紫色花的灌木给你凉爽的感觉;在众花凋落的深秋,它仍开着清秀的花朵向你微笑。这种植物就是近年我们从荷兰引进并已开始推广应用的优良花灌木品种‘紫花’醉鱼草(Buddleja ‘Lochinch’),株高1.5～2.5米,冠幅2.5～3米,叶片披针形,灰绿色。圆锥花序顶生于枝端,长15～20厘米。花蓝紫色,有芳香,花期很长,从春末一直到初霜前开花不断。     

‘甜心’玉簪

玉簪为百合科玉簪属(Hosta)多年生宿根草本。玉簪属是一类变异很大的植物群体,共有70多个种,原产中国、韩国、日本和前苏联,现在世界各地广泛栽培,以美国为主已培育出大量的园艺杂交品种。根据美国玉簪协会的资料,目前已登记的玉簪品种有2000多个,其性状千变万化,是阴生花园的宝贵财富。如果说萱草为阳性花卉之最,那么玉簪则可称为阴生花卉之王。玉簪叶片有蓝绿色、黄绿色和绿色之别,且常具有不同颜色、不同形状的花斑,叶片大小和形     

尤加利‘冰点’

尤加利为桃金娘科、桉属植物,原产澳大利亚,是一种非常好的制作鲜切花和干花的植物,同时也是非常优秀的园林绿化观赏植物。目前在我国南部及西南部有种植,主要在云南省和海南省的部分地区,另一些省区也曾做过相应的引种实验,均因品种、种源选择及相关的引种技术等问题而失败。上海诚功投资发展有限公司于2002年从澳洲引入新品种在上海种植,历经3年选择、培育,终于选育出尤加利‘冰点’。该品种完全适应上海地区的各种气候条件因子,并经历了2004年冬季低温及2005年夏季高温的考验。形态常绿大乔木,生长速度中等偏快,树干圆而直立,枝叶亮丽;树高可达25米,树冠圆形,树皮红棕色,主干树皮在夏季易裂而     

尤加利‘蓝梦’

桃金娘科按属植物，常绿阔叶乔木。原产澳大利亚，高可达10－15米。幼态叶近圆形，直径1－3厘米，对生，被白粉；成态叶则变成长卵圆形，渐尖，叶色蓝绿。因其幼态叶圆圆的，被白粉，