Urban underground space: Solving the problems of today’s cities

The world-wide trend of increased urbanisation creates problems for expanding and newly-developing cities alike. Population increase leads to an increased demand for reliable infrastructure, nowadays combined with a need for increased energy efficiency and a higher environmental awareness of the public. The use of underground space can help cities meet these increased demands while remaining compact, or find the space needed to include new functions in an existing city landscape. In many cases, underground solutions to urban problems are only considered if all other (above ground) options have been exhausted. When underground solutions are considered and evaluated from the planning or initial project stages onwards, more optimal solutions will become possible.Use of the underground is not limited to large scale infrastructure projects. This paper also shows innovative use of the underground for commercial and residential use, storage, water conveyance and treatment, and heritage conservation, and highlights how use of underground can bring more optimal solutions for urban development.     

Residential growth in Newcastle upon Tyne’s city centre: the role of the public and private sectors

This paper interprets the development of residential accommodation in Newcastle upon Tyne’s city centre as a complex, layered phenomenon. Provision of such accommodation has a longer history than is usually recognised. We trace the evolution of residential development schemes and illustrate the wide range of initiatives and actor groups involved. It is demonstrated that public support (including the third sector) has been the principal driver over a considerable period of time. Furthermore, the strategic role of the local authority has been central to the process. Without its policy commitment and strategic overview, partnerships and funding would not have been as fully developed. This calls into question the concept of re-urbanisation as some kind of ‘natural’ phase in an urban development cycle. However, the current financial climate does not bode well for the continuation of this role. Whilst the gradual emergence of private sector initiatives is demonstrated, it is clear that this has been somewhat slow and reluctant and its sustainable future remains questionable.     

Spatial practice,conceived space and lived space: Hong Kong’s ‘Piers saga’ through the Lefebvrian lens

By applying the Lefebvrian lens, this paper tries to understand why unlike previous similar cases, the latest removal of the Star Ferry and Queen’s Pier was so controversial. To Lefebvre, embedded in ‘spatial practices’ that ‘secrete’ a place are two contradicting spaces: ‘conceived spaces’ produced by planners to create exchange values and ‘lived spaces’ appropriated by citizens for use values. Applying Lefebvre’s framework to examine the ‘Piers saga’, it is found that the pre‐Second World War (WWII) piers were ‘conceived’ by spatial practices of a colonial and racially segregated trading enclave. The public space in the commercial heart that housed the previous generations of piers was not accessible to the Chinese community, thus denying them opportunities to appropriate them and turn them into ‘lived’ spaces. It was only after WWII when the Government carried out further reclamation to meet the needs of an industrializing economy that inclusive public spaces were conceived in the commercial heart, enabling the general public to ‘appropriate’ them as ‘lived’ space. When the Government planned to remove this very first ‘lived’ space in the political and economic heart of the city to conceive further reclamation for the restructuring economy, the more enlightened citizens were determined to defend it.     

Infrastructures for disorder. Applying Sennett’s notion of disorder to the public space of social housing neighbourhoods

This paper contributes to the debate on whether introducing too much order into urban regeneration processes hinders social life and interaction in the public space. It engages with Sennett’s call for introducing certain kinds of disorder into city life. While this debate has been addressed in urban literature, many urban regeneration processes in social housing neighbourhoods have attempted to remove all kinds of disorder from the city, thus removing urban life from the streets. This paper proposes ‘infrastructures for disorder’: strategies for intervention that create conditions for the unplanned use of the public realm in social housing estates.     

Shaping Seoul’s memories: the co-evolution of memorials,national identity,democracy and urban space in South Korea’s capital city

This paper examines the evolving subjects, forms, symbolism, and spatial constellation of the diverse memorials erected in Seoul since 1953. It explores how these memorials have expressed shifts in national identity towards democracy since the end of dictatorship in 1987. It illustrates how commemorative intentions in this massive, rapidly-changing metropolis have intersected with other urban design aims and pressures. The analysis reveals an evolutionary progression in memorial themes, from heroic statues that re-establish roots of Korean national identity and independence, to marginal grassroots memorials and wider themed precincts that present more inclusive, democratic, complex narratives of identity and history.     

Performing the Primitive in the Postcolony: Nyoni’s Kraal in Cape Town

The production of particular spaces for tourist consumption of the “exotic” other involves the performance of particular conceptualizations of people and places that recreates theatrical versions of the primitive. Through analysis of one such space—Nyoni’s Kraal in Cape Town—we contend that both hosts and visitors are complicit in the construction of these spaces and imaginaries. To this end, practices of social and spatial policing as well as performativity and representations of cultural constructs of an “authentic Africa” are deployed in the projection of a specific form of constructed, “benign” multiculturalism. We contend that such practices reproduce a mythical idyll of Africa for consumption that recreates—rather than questions—colonial power structures, and therefore remain imbued with the inequitable and uncertain outcomes of modernity.

Modelling the impact of outsourcing decisions on facilities management service-level performance: a case of Nigeria’s public hospitals

The evolving trends within the facilities management (FM) domain over the past decades mean that it is becoming increasingly complex while the interrelationship between FM services provision and the decision to outsource has added more pressure to the issue of strategic decision management in FM. Using data from Nigeria’s public hospitals, a developed conceptual model is tested in an attempt to understand the underlying attributes of outsourcing decisions and their links to FM services performance. The hypothesized model employs structural equation modelling (SEM) methodology to examine the relationships between five latent constructs of the outsourcing decision and their relative impact on FM services performance. Findings reveal that quality consideration is one of the most significant drivers impacting on service performance of FM services in hospitals. What is surprising, however, is the rejection of the proposition that strategy-related factors impact on service-level performance while social factors do not have a significant impact on service-level performance. It is hoped that these findings will contribute to the current methodological literature on the use of SEM for analysing complex interactions within the FM industry domain while they will avail practitioners of the key components of the outsourcing decision that are having the most significant impact on service performance.     

Assessment of the effect of modern transformation on the traditional settlement ‘Ksar’ of Ouargla in southern Algeria

The architecture of the Ouargla Ksar has long been recognized as an example of adaptation to harsh climate in the deep desert of Algeria. Over the last few decades, it has undergone some changes in its initial urban structure, due to accelerated and uncontrolled modern urbanization, that had negative implications and devaluation of its thermal characteristics. This article tries to understand the bioclimatic concept of adaptation of this Ksar and assess to what extent its morphological transformation has impacted its microclimatic conditions. This assessment is made through a comparative study between two different areas: one untransformed and the other transformed. A referential weather station situated in the suburbs was also exploited for consolidation of comparison. The investigation was undertaken using site measurements and observations.     

‘Agitating people’s brains’: Noulan Cauchon and the City Scientific in Canada’s capital

Noulan Cauchon (1872–1935) was a founder of the Town Planning Institute of Canada and the Ottawa Town Planning Commission. He played a significant role in the planning of Canada’s capital city in the early twentieth century. This article traces the evolution of Cauchon’s planning ideas and their place within the Canadian planning profession, based upon his numerous public lectures, newspaper and journal articles. He was a close ally of Thomas Adams during the 1914‐26 campaign to extend town planning across Canada. Cauchon’s background as a railway engineer influenced his City Scientific approach to planning, which contrasted with the City Beautiful proposals for the capital produced for the federal government. This City Scientific approach became the dominant mode of planning in Canada after 1918. Cauchon produced a comprehensive zoning by‐law and many small‐scale planning schemes for the Ottawa area. Few of his proposals were implemented by the municipality, which deferred to the national government on most planning issues during this period. But Cauchon’s ideas influenced the early evolution of the profession in Canada and the redevelopment of the national capital after 1945.     

Spatial patterns of innovation activities in France: market’s role versus public research efforts

In 2008, the spatial distribution of French research activities showed a polarized structure with two important agglomerations formed around Ile de France and Rhone-Alpes. A spatial analysis is here proposed to investigate the extent to which technology-specific innovation patterns are determined by the concentration of economic activities, the level and the quality of local research and knowledge flows from neighboring areas. The diversity of employment and the concentration of economic activities are found to be important drivers of spatial patterns of innovation activities, with an expected rate of innovation that increases with a higher concentration of economic activities. Such effect is higher in particular for technological fields as Chemistry. Although local research also stimulates innovation activities, the spatial distribution of the latter is subject to decreasing returns to local research. Additionally, knowledge flows from neighboring areas enforce local research activities, in particular for the case of Mechanical engineering and Electricity, locking-in the process of the localization of innovation activities. The knowledge of the appropriate channel of inducing technology-specific innovation patterns enables decision makers to formulate market-based or research support instruments able to stimulate private initiatives, with further consequences upon the spatial organization of innovation activities.     

Growth and degradation in the Orient’s ‘Las Vegas’: issues of environment in Macau

This paper argues that the rapid growth of gambling‐related tourism and urban construction in Macau has given rise to serious environmental degradation. The major environmental issues include air quality, water supply, solid waste disposal, noise prevention, heritage conservation and environmental management. The author suggests that the government in Macau should refocus this city’s development direction and commit itself to sustainable development. At the policy‐making level, there are such urgent issues as integration of environmental, economic and urban planning with community participation in decision‐making; enhancement of environmental legislation and institutions; implementing vital measures to control of the numbers of visitors; developing a mass transport system; and protecting the city’s cultural heritage.     

Building a ‘new Middle East’: Israeli architects in Iran in the 1970s

Iranian-Israeli diplomatic relations, from the 1950s until the fall of the Shah in 1979, were part of the Israeli government's 'periphery doctrine': an effort to establish relationships with non-Arab states in the Middle East and to extend its commercial enterprises. For Israeli construction companies it opened up a new market. For architects it offered a prospect for transnational professional exchange: an opportunity to rectify modernism and make it more considerate of environmental conditions and socio-cultural needs.

To explore this transnational architecture, the paper examines a housing project designed for the Iranian navy by an Israeli architect in the 1970s for three locations on the coast of the Persian Gulf. The analysis is threefold. It first discusses the project as part of Israeli-Iranian diplomatic relations, raising questions about the export of architectural knowledge as part of a bi-lateral exchange. It further examines it within the recent discourse on modernism outside the West, in relation to the Israeli architectural context of the time. Lastly, the project is discussed as a reflexive professional quest to better modernism. The analysis reveals that this project was not merely a knowledge exchange, but an attempt to contextualise Israeli architectural praxis in a different locale, thereby establishing a site-specific yet universal modernist place.     

Building a ‘new Middle East’: Israeli architects in Iran in the 1970s

Iranian-Israeli diplomatic relations, from the 1950s until the fall of the Shah in 1979, were part of the Israeli government's 'periphery doctrine': an effort to establish relationships with non-Arab states in the Middle East and to extend its commercial enterprises. For Israeli construction companies it opened up a new market. For architects it offered a prospect for transnational professional exchange: an opportunity to rectify modernism and make it more considerate of environmental conditions and socio-cultural needs.

To explore this transnational architecture, the paper examines a housing project designed for the Iranian navy by an Israeli architect in the 1970s for three locations on the coast of the Persian Gulf. The analysis is threefold. It first discusses the project as part of Israeli-Iranian diplomatic relations, raising questions about the export of architectural knowledge as part of a bi-lateral exchange. It further examines it within the recent discourse on modernism outside the West, in relation to the Israeli architectural context of the time. Lastly, the project is discussed as a reflexive professional quest to better modernism. The analysis reveals that this project was not merely a knowledge exchange, but an attempt to contextualise Israeli architectural praxis in a different locale, thereby establishing a site-specific yet universal modernist place.     

Privileging the “Objective”: Understanding the State’s Role in Shaping Housing Aspirations

This paper is to be read as one half of a twofold analysis of recent qualitative research on the housing aspirations of the people of Scotland, focusing specifically on the dimension of housing tenure. Moving beyond individual subjective preferences (i.e. what people “consciously” want or desire in relation to housing), this paper draws influence from David Harvey’s historical materialist approach to illustrate the importance of understanding the dialectical relation between objective reality and subjective preferences. We argue that it is by examining the broad homologies between the qualitative data on one hand, and the corresponding epochs of capital accumulation on the other, that important power structures can be made visible, and changes in housing aspirations over time better understood.