scholarly journals Exploring the spatial tools to generate social inclusive and empowered space for people living in margins

Author(s):  
Charles Porwal ◽  

A good public space must be accommodative for everyone including the marginal, the forgotten, the silent, and an undesirable people. With the process of development, the city leaves behind the marginalized section of the society especially urban poor, who constitute about 20-30 percent of the urban population and are majorly involved in informal settlement like congested housing typologies and informal economy in which they face the everyday social, physical and economic exclusion. Thus, the informal sector and the marginalized becomes the forgotten elements in urban space. ‘Cities for the Citizen’ a slogan described by Douglas address the same issues of democratization, multicultural/gender difference between humans. Though these people have strong characteristics and share a unique pattern and enhances the movement in the city which makes a city a dynamic entity. The lack of opportunities and participation to such section leaves the city divided and generates the negative impacts in the mind of victims which further leads to degradation of their mental health and city life because of their involvement in crime, unemployment, illiteracy and unwanted areas. The physical, social, cultural and economic aspects of space should accommodate the essential requirements for the forgotten and provide them with inclusive public environment. It is very necessary that they generate the association and attachment to the place of their habitation. We can easily summarize that the city which used to be very dynamic and energetic is now facing the extreme silence in the present pandemic times. The same people are returning back to their homes after facing the similar problems of marginalization and exclusion even during hard times where they had no place to cover their heads. So, we have to find the way in which they can be put into consideration and make them more inclusive and self-sustaining. With the economic stability, social stability is also equally necessary for the overall development of an individual. So, the paper tries to focus upon the idea of self-sustaining livelihood and social urbanism which talks about development of cities aiming to the social benefit and upliftment of their citizen. The social urbanism strategy in any project tries to inject investment into targeted areas in a way that cultivates civic pride, participation, and greater social impact. Thus, making the cities inclusive and interactive for all the development. The paper will tries to see such spaces as a potential investment in term of city’s finances and spaces to generate a spatial & development toolkit for making them inclusive by improving the interface of social infrastructure.

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-54
Author(s):  
Anna Cudny

Influence of social capital of inhabitants on shaping common spaces in a housing environment The last two decades of the century have brought unusually many changes in the built environment. These include not only changes directly related to the emergence of a new urban fabric, but also changes in social attitudes towards common spaces located in residential areas. The built environment has never been evaluated so strongly. This assessment translates not only into the everyday outdoor activities of residents (necessary, optional and social activities), but also to economic projects (purchase, sale and rental of real estate). At the same time, the city ceases to be, as it has been so far, mainly subjected to criticism, and the residents are gradually changing their demanding attitude concerning the development of space to participate in the process of its creation. Society wants to have a real impact on urban space, especially on the space closest to them. Thus, the right to the city is no longer a privilege or a duty, but it becomes a need. Trying to meet this need results in a phenomenon which we can increasingly observe in Poland, and which we have been witnessing abroad for many years: activities in public space are changing into activities for public space. They include the transformation of common spaces related to the place of residence—improving their aesthetic quality, functional changes, modernization of development elements. Observing numerous examples of public participation in shaping public spaces, it was noticed that the initiation, course and effects of activities largely depend on the social capital of the group undertaking said activity. Accordingly, there is a need for research on the mutual relation between the level of social capital and the issue of shaping and managing public space with the participation of local communities, which will be the main topic of the paper. To investigate the above-mentioned issue, qualitative research methods were used in relation to the relationship: site visit, non-participant observation and focus interviews. This contributed to a comparative study of three selected Warsaw case studies. They were analysed in terms of meeting the qualitative criteria selected for the study. These criteria have been indicated on the basis of the Social Capital Development Strategy 2020, which is one of the parts of the Medium-Term National Development Strategy. The result of the analyses is an indication of derived factors from within the group of space users and external factors that have a positive and negative impact on initiating, carrying out and maintaining the effects of changes in common spaces developed with the participation of local communities in Polish conditions. The conclusions can be used to improve future participation processes related to urban space - both by non-professionals participating in them, as well as experts - architects and town planners.


ZARCH ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 138-153
Author(s):  
Lorena Bello Gómez

Using Mexico City (CDMX) as a paradigmatic example of seriously unbalanced water regimes, our project Resilient Code helps strengthen and communicate CDMX’s government efforts toward risk reduction and water resilience in marginal communities. Our project does so by bridging otherwise separate agents in the government towards a common goal: equitable resilience. Resilient Code provides design solutions that link the social infrastructure of PILARES (a network of 300 vocational schools distributed throughout the city) to CDMX’s environmental and risk reduction initiatives, including their Risk Atlas. This strategic program of design-based solutions began with “water resilience” as a Pilot to repurpose public space throughout underserviced barrios as a network of “water-commons”. Resilient Code helps partners in CDMX implement projects to reduce environmental risks and complement socio-economic programs, fostering growth of the “water-commons”. Resilient Code is socialized through a participatory game-based workshop, and through an online Atlas of Risk Reduction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-108
Author(s):  
Sevi Bayraktar

This article investigates a recent period in which dissenting activism has been shifted in Istanbul under the state of emergency (2016-2018). Based on an ethnography conducted with activists in feminist and LGBTQI+ demonstrations, anti-emergency decree vigils, and the Presidential Referendum protests, the study discusses how activists resist and undermine mobilization of violence through using the hegemonic tools of repression tactically, and choreographically. By employing Hannah Arendt’s concepts of “politics” and “isolation,” I examine that state agencies like the police forcefully disperse protesters and display authority, oppression, and occupation of public spaces by constantly creating an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. In opposition, dissenters practice and rehearse dispersal as a resilient choreography to once again relate each other against the forces of isolation. I suggest the term “tactics of dispersal” to define and analyze how activists depart from the central assembly of the social movement to create smaller, mobile, and ephemeral assemblies. In the city-scale, by scattering themselves in the city of Istanbul and mobilizing peripheries of the urban space, dissenters re-choreograph and subvert a thanatopolitical strategy of dispersal in favor of pluralism under political hardship. In the bodily-scale, activists claim the public sphere through the transience of folk dance. Whenever protesters depart from folk dance collectives to create new ones, they perpetually re-configure the area and initiate novel actions contingent upon their temporal and positional assessments during the dance. Such tactical applications of dispersal characterized by the smaller scale and transitory gatherings with ever-changing combinations of bodies at the peripheral space of urban activism manifest its great potential for collective agency and plural politics. 


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 24-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sławomir Palicki

Abstract This article raises the issue of assessing assets of urban public space, as a specific example of revitalizing the urban fabric. This subject is so important in that it actually defines the contemporary perception and use of the city, visualizing the forms of human functioning in common urban space which are frequently not directly verbalized and originate rather from a custom or local habit, encourages interaction, but also determines constraints in social accessibility, divides people and stirs conflicts. The main purpose of the study is to show the possibilities of assessing revitalization projects concerning various types of public space by means of multi-criteria comparison and the relative evaluation of the available action scenarios. The paper offers a thesis that it is possible to carry out effective assessment of public space, which can be applied when making decisions regarding socially desirable directions of revitalization.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Татьяна Андреевна Водчиц

В предложенной статье поднята на рассмотрение общераспространённая проблематика напряженного состояния социальной инфраструктуры города на примере Москвы. Также берется к рассмотрению тот факт, что растущая инфраструктура – одна из глобальных проблем мегаполиса. Выявлены основные причины формирования дисбаланса городской среды. Предложен ряд способов возможного решения данной задачи.In the proposed article, the widespread problems of the tense state of the social infrastructure of the city are raised for consideration. Also taken into consideration is the fact that the growing infrastructure is one of the global problems of the metropolis. The main causes of the imbalance of the urban environment are revealed. A number of possible solutions to this problem are proposed.


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


Food Security ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Kiaka ◽  
Shiela Chikulo ◽  
Sacha Slootheer ◽  
Paul Hebinck

AbstractThis collaborative and comparative paper deals with the impact of Covid-19 on the use and governance of public space and street trade in particular in two major African cities. The importance of street trading for urban food security and urban-based livelihoods is beyond dispute. Trading on the streets does, however, not occur in neutral or abstract spaces, but rather in lived-in and contested spaces, governed by what is referred to as ‘street geographies’, evoking outbreaks of violence and repression. Vendors are subjected to the politics of municipalities and the state to modernize the socio-spatial ordering of the city and the urban food economy through restructuring, regulating, and restricting street vending. Street vendors are harassed, streets are swept clean, and hygiene standards imposed. We argue here that the everyday struggle for the street has intensified since and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mobility and the use of urban space either being restricted by the city-state or being defended and opened up by street traders, is common to the situation in Harare and Kisumu. Covid-19, we pose, redefines, and creates ‘new’ street geographies. These geographies pivot on agency and creativity employed by street trade actors while navigating the lockdown measures imposed by state actors. Traders navigate the space or room for manoeuvre they create for themselves, but this space unfolds only temporarily, opens for a few only and closes for most of the street traders who become more uncertain and vulnerable than ever before, irrespective of whether they are licensed, paying rents for vending stalls to the city, or ‘illegally’ vending on the street.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Stutz

AbstractWith the present paper I would like to discuss a particular form of procession which we may term mocking parades, a collective ritual aimed at ridiculing cultic objects from competing religious communities. The cases presented here are contextualized within incidents of pagan/Christian violence in Alexandria between the 4th and 5th centuries, entailing in one case the destruction of the Serapeum and in another the pillaging of the Isis shrine at Menouthis on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the literary accounts on these events suggest, such collective forms of mockery played an important role in the context of mob violence in general and of violence against sacred objects in particular. However, while historiographical and hagiographical sources from the period suggest that pagan statues underwent systematic destruction and mutilation, we can infer from the archaeological evidence a vast range of uses and re-adaptation of pagan statuary in the urban space, assuming among other functions that of decorating public spaces. I would like to build on the thesis that the parading of sacred images played a prominent role in the discourse on the value of pagan statuary in the public space. On the one hand, the statues carried through the streets became themselves objects of mockery and violence, involving the population of the city in a collective ritual of exorcism. On the other hand, the images paraded in the mocking parades could also become a means through which the urban space could become subject to new interpretations. Entering in visual contact with the still visible vestiges of the pagan past, with the temples and the statuary of the city, the “image of the city” became affected itself by the images paraded through the streets, as though to remind the inhabitants that the still-visible elements of Alexandria’s pagan topography now stood as defeated witnesses to Christianity’s victory.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Prepeliczay ◽  
Henning Schmidt-Semisch

Purpose This study aims to describe and analyse an approach in the city of Bremen (Germany) to establish streetwork-supported tolerance zones for local open drug and alcohol scenes to reduce related disorder and nuisance in public spaces. Design/methodology/approach The qualitative methodology included systematic participant observations at public sites of drug and alcohol use, and problem-centred interviews with different groups of respondents (residents, passers-by, trades people, drug users, experts from addiction help and police). Findings In residential districts, tolerance zones were well accepted by their target group and found to reduce perceived disorder and nuisance in public space. However, their success depends on the social and spatial conditions of the chosen location, its surrounding urban infrastructure, cooperation among local actors and characteristics of drug using groups. Originality/value Usually, policing of open drug scenes focuses on repression and law enforcement. The example of Bremen suggests that streetwork-supported tolerance zones dedicated to the drug scene can substantially reduce disorder and nuisance in public space.


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