European urban culture,Javier de Mesones-Cabello’s planning practice and its legacy in city of Valladolid

Javier de Mesones-Cabello was an influential and active planner of the 1960s and 1970s in Spain, who passed away in December, 2016. His professional career as a self-taught urban planner was extensively linked to his academic and institutional activities. These connections supported the establishment of relationships with prestigious professionals working in urban planning practice. In planning the 1969 masterplan for the city of Valladolid, in Spain, de Mesones-Cabello made several intellectual references to the Greek urban planner Doxiadis. This masterplan covers a relatively unknown example of directional city growth in a European context. My findings elucidate the extent to which de Mesones-Cabello was influenced by Doxiadis, and the circumstances in which these ideas have continued to dominate thinking about Valladolid's urban development.     

The effects of Seoul’s greenbelt on the spatial distribution of population and employment, and on the real estate market

This paper examines the effects of Seoul’s greenbelt on the distribution of population and employment, and on the real estate market, under the assumption of the complete relaxation of the greenbelt using the random utility-based metropolitan input–output model with an endogenous land market for the Seoul metropolitan area. Simulation results show two important consequences of the greenbelt release. First, the greenbelt release would attract more residents and jobs into greenbelt zones and reduce the population and number of firms in both the central city and outer sides of the greenbelt, thereby implying the reduction of inner city densification and of development beyond the greenbelt. Second, both residential and nonresidential space rents would have declined for the whole metropolitan area from 0.4 to 13.7% had the greenbelt been completely released in 2006, thereby indicating that Seoul’s greenbelt made a contribution to raising space rents by limiting land supply.     

Contemporary tendencies in Colombian urban planning: the case of the ‘Planes Parciales’ in Medellín

After decades of internal conflict, Colombia is experiencing economic growth and urbanization. It remains, however, one of the most socially unequal countries in Latin America. Medellín, acclaimed the most innovative city, implemented large-scale transport infrastructures to link socially excluded areas to the city; new educational and cultural facilities; new public spaces and housing projects, rooted in the Barcelona model. This so-called ‘social urbanism’ has shifted local perceptions, though its socio-economic impact has been questioned. This paper focuses on the less analysed transformations in planning policy and management through two instruments: the Land Use Plan (Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial – POT) and the ‘Plan Parcial’. The research, based on a desktop review, interviews and site visits, examines the application of these instruments in Medellín, reflecting on how they contribute to achieving the aims of ‘social urbanism’. The paper explores the differences between ‘rhetoric’ and practice that are reflected in those between the city’s overarching plan (POT) and the implementation of ‘planes parciales’, focusing on redevelopment, urban renewal and urban expansion. Such differences mirror the deficiencies in the adaptation of the ‘urban project’ Barcelona model in Medellín, and provide the basis for a call to develop ‘social urbanism’ that is genuinely more socially, territorially comprehensive and inclusive.     

Complexity in urban agriculture: the role of landscape typologies in promoting urban agriculture’s growth

This research identifies the potential shortcomings of local initiatives to encourage urban agriculture projects by comparing citywide efforts with existing community projects. It investigates how more effectual policy might be developed to accommodate a fuller range of urban agriculture projects, and how urban agriculture stakeholders might use clearer promotion processes to meet stated goals. It hypothesizes the important role of clear urban agriculture definitions, typologies, and links to associated benefits towards meeting the stated goals of policy-makers. Utilizing San Francisco in California as a case study, this paper investigates recent efforts at citywide urban agriculture promotion.     

‘The imaginary texture of the real …’ critical visual studies in landscape architecture: contexts,foundations and approaches

In this paper I examine potential for critical visual research studies in landscape architecture and related disciplines. The reasons for a neglect of imagery in research publications and the gap between landscape architectural practice and theory are considered, and the ways in which this restricts understanding are explored. I argue that visual studies can be used to bridge the practice–theory divide and enable investigations which are currently limited or absent in text-based methods and dissemination. To this end, five kinds of visual study are defined and their philosophical and methodological underpinnings and potential discussed. I conclude with an examination of the relationship between critical thinking and visual processes and the role of the viewer. The overall aim is to provide openings for future visual research studies and the development of critical visual discourses.     

‘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.     

Virtual enclosure,ecosystem services,landscape’s character and the ‘rewilding’ of the commons: the ‘Lake District’ case

Abstract

It is paradoxical that, while there is a generally increasing recognition of the scientific and cultural importance of conserving ‘semi-natural’ pastoral environments, and the negative effects of their widespread abandonment and overgrowth, British ‘rewilding’ activists and environmental managers are effectively advocating policies that will have a similar negative effect on the character of the semi-natural pastoral commons of places like England’s iconic Lake District. This situation, it will be argued, owes to the mindset of ‘virtual enclosure’ whereby the character of landscape is pre-defined by an assumed, behind-the-scenes, Euclidean/Ptolemaic spatial logic that leads to the comprehension of nature as a bounded scenic property; an (e)state of nature with its own economic system and services. This mindset is antithetical to both the practice of pastoral commoning and much contemporary natural science and conservation policy. It fits well, however, with older teleological ideas of nature, as well as modern ideas of privatisation, private property and management control.     

Housing context and legitimacy in the transformation of a stigmatized estate: the case of Rosengård

Large housing estates built in the post second world war era have been the object of extensive debates and research in Europe and in North America, due to their social and maintenance challenges but also their high symbolic value. A wide range of regeneration strategies has been employed in addressing issues of segregation and stigmatization of these estates. This paper examines the role of local housing and public management in the selection of regeneration strategies. The paper starts from the concept of housing context as means of explaining the selection of regeneration strategy. The paper is informed by a case study of regeneration efforts in Rosengård, where a minor regeneration effort, the Bokals, led by the municipal housing company, crystalizes a new integrated approach in regenerating the estate. This sets the stage for subsequent developments. We argue that legitimacy, in the sense of management being perceived as a credible agent of change, is critical in the cumulative strengthening and shaping of the regeneration strategy in Rosengård. We put forward the notion of legitimacy trading to capture the mutual and instrumental public support of the main actors. The main contribution of the paper is to demonstrate how including aspects of management legitimacy can develop the concept of housing context, by extending the range of applicability and broadening the range of regeneration strategies that can be accounted for.     

‘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 difference of ‘being diverse’: City branding and multiculturalism in the ‘Leicester Model’

This city profile on Leicester focuses on the representation of ethnical diversity in city branding. Through a historical approach, the paper discusses how the local authorities have taken advantage of the arrival of different migration flows into the city, in order to redefine its post-industrial identity in terms of multiculturalism, tolerance and inclusivity. In so doing, the paper emphasises the combination of deliberate marketing communicative activities, the provision of services for attracting and retaining foreign businesses and the creation of an open urban milieu where various ethnic groups are free to express and celebrate their own cultures through festivals and events. The paper identifies the alignment between place communication and place ‘offerings’ development as the crucial element underpinning Leicester's model for multicultural cooperation and critically assesses the recent challenges that are being posed to the sustainment of a multicultural city image.     

Modelling the urban future: planning,slums and the seduction of growth in St Louis, 1940–1950

This paper considers the attempts by planners during and after World War II to forecast population change for the purposes of long‐range planning. St Louis is used as a case study to examine the social, economic and political contexts within which decisions about how to map the city’s future were made. At the heart of the problem is the adoption by the city of a growth model to justify a large‐scale slum clearance agenda at the very moment when the city was poised for catastrophic population loss. It is argued that planners allowed themselves to be caught up in the momentary crisis of a wartime population spike, ultimately ignoring their own frequent warnings about underlying trends toward population decline. Within this post‐war crisis of temporary overcrowding, planners made the critical decision to move ahead with slum clearance projects of unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, by the time their projects were complete, the city for which they had been undertaken no longer existed.     

The Villages,Florida: Small-town Metropolitanism and the ‘Middle of Nowhere’

With over 110,000 inhabitants , The Villages is the world's largest retirement community. Its numerous distinct ‘villages’, surrounded by artificial landscaping and golf courses and served by three ‘downtowns’, cater to those who crave the idealised rural life of times gone by while also offering the convenience and stimulation of the modern metropolis. Deane Simpson , leader of the Master's programme in Urbanism and Societal Change at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture, investigates.     

The Rise of the ‘Invisible Detail’: Ubiquitous Computing and the ‘Minimum Meaningful’

The architectural detail has provided the essential material building block for conveying an idea. Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ask how this, though, is all set to change in a digital context. As technologies shrink and vanish from sight, what might become the new minimum meaningful unit for architecture? How might a new relational scale establish itself, at the level of the ‘invisible detail’ or the microchip? How might this, in turn, change the very nature of buildings as they become highly responsive, human-occupied transmitters?     

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.     

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 flagship concept of the ‘4th urban environment’. Branding and visioning in Malmö, Sweden

In the process of turning the post-industrial city of Malmö, Sweden, into a knowledge-based, creative city, new urban planning strategies and visions are being developed. An important component of developing the “knowledge city” is the spatial conceptualization for renewal of urban life. One such concept introduced in Malmö is “the 4th urban environment” (det 4.e stadsrummet). In this article, based on critical urban studies, the development, branding, and practice of the 4th urban environment as a strategy to generate a creative economy and knowledge city is critically analyzed as part of a neoliberal planning discourse. The article raises the question, what kind of vision is “the 4th urban environment”? What is it an expression of; what does it mean for planning practice and to urban development? Contextualizing and investigating trends of neoliberal planning ideas are important to an understanding of the social and economic consequences of unequal power relations. The 4th urban environment and its application in Malmö is illustrative of existing neoliberal planning practices in a Nordic context, and in other similar economies with legacies of redistribution policies and long-standing leadership of the Social Democratic Party. This article focuses on what is articulated within discourses that re-present particular notions of space and place, to gain a better understanding of what neoliberal planning does to space.     

Paradigm of mediocrity: poverty and risk accumulation in urban Africa – the case of Korle Gonno,Accra

This paper examines how poverty has developed in Korle Gonno, an indigenous Ga community in Accra, Ghana, as a concrete challenge. This challenge has gone unnoticed until recently, though several informal studies exist in Ghana. By problematizing vulnerability, the literature is examined within Accra’s development dynamics. Through extensive fieldwork, the results show a socially stratified and highly dependent community experiencing vulnerabilities and the residents’ diverse coping strategies. Drawing upon the empirical data, it is argued that the lack of recognition of urban poverty (i.e., the raison d’être of slum) means many continue to be exposed to health risks. The paper concedes that the problem demands a multifaceted solution that includes more subjective issues like vulnerability and social exclusion, and objective ones like good urban governance and power relations. Failure to do so can lead to a downward spiral into extreme poverty that can affect the entire society.     

Can the periphery achieve core? The case of the automobile components industry in Spain

The paper analyses changes experienced by Spain as a European peripheral region in the automobile global value chain (GVC). Our attention is focused on both spatial concentration of value‐added and high‐skill activities, and generation of technology in the components industry. The analysis of plants set up (investments) and relocated (divestments) by multinationals (MNEs) between 2001 and 2010 shows that Spain is no longer a place for labour‐intensive activities and standardized processes using simple technologies in comparison with other peripheral regions. However, the continuing majority presence of foreign‐owned companies is limiting decision power for generating and transferring technology, concentrating it mainly in the areas in which Spanish MNEs are specialized.     

Building an urban ‘renaissance’: fragmented services and the production of inequality in Greater Downtown Detroit

Downtown Detroit has been undergoing a renaissance in recent years which is in stark contrast to the economic and social situation in much of the rest of the city. This renaissance has been taking place despite the city’s ability to provide good municipal services such as streetlights, security, public space and transport. This article focuses on how four areas which constitute part of Greater Downtown Detroit have relied on different combinations of actors to create and provide the services and amenities deemed necessary for capital investment and middle-class consumption. Each area has its own initiatives and actors who implement them, further fragmenting the city between its core and periphery. Renewed public spaces, private police forces and resident initiatives in middle-class neighborhoods have been created to serve specific needs of the small areas they serve. Rather than being unique, Detroit is an extreme example of fragmented and polarized urbanism which is part and parcel of contemporary cities. We argue that rather than passively reflecting existing socio-spatial divides, these private initiatives in Greater Downtown Detroit actively contribute to the production of sociospatial inequalities across the city.