Condemning the public: Design and New York's new 42nd Street

This paper examines the redevelopment of Times Square in New York City and brings together two discourses, the discourse of design and the discourse of eminent domain case law. I argue that both were inextricable parts of the Times Square redevelopment process and served similar functions: defining a public for The New Times Square. By determining what was `in the public interest', eminent domain case law set out two opposing publics: the criminal Times Square public and an idealized general public. By selectively editing the Times Square public's desires and behaviors, design helped define and represent new moral norms.     

The evolution of groundwater rights and groundwater management in New Mexico and the western United States

Historically, rights in water originated as public property and only later became individualized rights to utilize the public resource, in a manner consistent with the public welfare needs of society, but protected by principles of property law. Five basic regulatory systems for rights in groundwater in the United States have evolved to date. The problems raised by the hydrologic differences between groundwater hydraulically connected to stream systems and groundwater in non-replenished aquifers have been resolved to some extent by a couple of leading court cases. Numerical modeling and other technical methodologies have also evolved to evaluate the scientific issues raised by the different hydrologic conditions, but these are not immune from criticism. The current role of aquifers is evolving into that of storage facilities for recycled water, and their utilization in this manner may be expanded even further in the future. The policy implications of the choices relating to joint management of ground and surface water cannot be overstated. As this paper demonstrates, proactive administration of future groundwater depletions that affect stream systems is essential to the ultimate ability to plan for exploitation, management and utilization of water resources in a rational way that coordinates present and future demand with the reality of scarcity of supply. The examples utilized in this paper demonstrate the need for capacity building, not just to develop good measurement techniques, or to train talented lawyers and judges to write good laws, but also for practical professional water managers to keep the process on a rational course, avoiding limitless exploitation of the resource as well as conservative protectionism that forever precludes its use.

福建铁观音茶园生态地球化学特征

东南沿海是铅等重金属的地球化学高背景区。该地区广泛分布酸性红壤,酸雨沉降、不适当施肥导致土壤酸化以及由此引发土壤重金属生态风险令人关注。以福建省铁观音主产区为研究区,采集了79个茶园的表层和亚表层土壤样、茶叶样品,测定了重金属元素以及土壤常量元素和理化指标。研究表明,福建铁观音茶园土壤中Hg、Pb、Se、Zn高含量主要由地质背景所引起,土壤常量组分、有机质、酸碱度等理化条件对土壤元素含量有一定的影响;铁观音茶树老叶中As、Cd、Cr、Hg、Se、Pb、F等非植物营养元素含量明显高于嫩叶,显示这些元素随植物生长逐渐累积的特征,而嫩叶中植物生长必需的营养元素Cu、(Ni)、Zn则高于老叶,反映出微量营养元素在茶叶生长部位相对富集的特征;多数情况下土壤与茶叶间元素含量相关性差,说明茶树对土壤元素的吸收累积受到多种复杂因素的影响。研究表明茶叶与土壤Pb、Cr具有显著正相关性,为建立铅污染土壤生态效应预测评价模型提供了基础依据。     

开展矿业权人勘查开采公示信息管理工作存在的问题及对策

《矿业权人勘查开采信息公示办法(试行)》实施近三年来,有力推动了矿业权人诚信体系建设,提高了矿产资源勘查开发监督管理效能,但在实际工作中也存在一些问题。本文通过对近三年来工作的梳理,提出了解决问题的方法。     

让设计人才为城市添彩——访宁波市建筑设计研究院院长刘自勉

建筑设计师的任务是在城市总体规划指导下，为城市设计出最好的建筑物和居住环境。一座有创意的标志性建筑和标志性社区就是一张城市的名片，就像巴黎的艾菲尔铁塔、悉尼的歌剧院、华盛顿的白宫和国会大厦、上海的东方明珠电视塔、伦敦的大笨钟一样。[编者按]     

Migration from the city to the countryside in Hungary and Poland

After the changes of 1989, urban-to-rural migration in Poland and Hungary remained stable compared to rural-to-urban migration. This was connected to a growing importance of suburbanisation around major Hungarian and Polish cities. Suburban areas around these cities are attracting increasing numbers of migrants from the major cities. Pollution and higher crime rates, as well as rising living costs and increasing uncertainties make many people to decide to leave the city for the surrounding countryside. Not only upper middle-class people move to the suburbs, but also lower status people, for whom life in the big city became too difficult. Long-distance migration from the cities to the rural areas is declining. Economic problems together with low employment opportunities prevent people from making such a move. Though the overall level of urban-to-rural migration did not change too much, this article shows the rapidly increasing importance of suburbanisation. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Urbanization and class-produced natures: Vegetable gardens in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region

This paper examines urban vegetable gardens in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona (MRB) in the context of a political ecological approach. We argue that these gardens provide an interesting example of how the urbanization process creates particular “socionatures” linked in this case to retired members of the working class who occupy (often as squatters) and transform the interstices left by the expanding city in order to produce food at a small scale. We document how these vegetable gardens are the product of a peculiar form of the recent urban history of the area, and also how they are increasingly under pressure due to the rapid process of sprawl now characterizing the expansion of the built environment in the Barcelona region. Vegetable gardens also highlight the contradictions of public policies in managing urban development, since the general attitude towards their elimination from the urban landscape stands in opposition to many of the sustainability initiatives such as the “greening of cities” promoted by city councils in this area.The empirical analysis was carried out in the municipality of Terrassa, one of the largest cities in the MRB, and also one with a higher number of vegetable gardens. We interviewed 132 plot users and obtained data about the legal status of gardens, their size and appearance, and crops grown, as well as the reasons for pursuing this activity. Our results show that, in general, this is an activity undertaken by people over 60 years old, often retired members of the working class that migrated to Catalonia from other Spanish regions in the 1960s and 1970s, and that use these spaces for a variety of reasons (personal goals, support to their families, and also as a bond to their rural past). Finally, we develop some conclusions regarding vegetable gardens in which we maintain that different social classes may create different natures but that class and power relations appear to legitimize some of these natures over others, for example, private and public gardens having a much larger social and institutional appeal and support than the vegetable gardens of the retired workers.     

Planning the development of the socialist city: the case of Dubna New Town

For almost 70 years. Soviet urban planners have enacted policies to create an urban environment designed to further the development of socialism. This paper analyzes the planning and development of one Soviet new town, Dubna, in order to provide insight into Soviet urban planning in general, as well as to identify the problems and prospects for city planners as they attempt to translate general socialist planning goals into reality. The study indentifies specific characteristics of the ideal Soviet socialist city and examines the extent to which these have been realized in Dubna. This allows a comparison between the actual accomplishments of local officials in Dubna and the ideal planning goals expressed throughout the Soviet urban literature. It also helps identify barriers to effective implementation of urban policies, barriers that help explain the disparity between the real and the ideal. Given the strong parallels between Soviet and British new towns, the examination is further enhanced by comparing Dubna with British new towns. Using the British case as a yardstick provides a crosscultural comparison that extends our understanding of the Soviet case, where data and analyses are lacking.     

Regional landslide risk to the Cairns community

A GIS-based regional reconnaissance-level assessment of landslide risk to the Cairns community has been carried out to provide information to the Cairns City Council for planning and emergency management purposes. Magnitude recurrence relations were tentatively established for the two main slope processes: landslides on the hill slopes; and large debris flows extending out from the gully systems on to the plains. From the recurrence relations, landslide hazard (H) was estimated as the annual probability of a point being impacted by a landslide. The nature, number (E) and geographic distribution of the elements at risk were obtained by interrogating the GIS, and their vulnerabilities (V) to destruction by the two main landslide slope processes were assessed. From this information, specific risk (= H × V) and total risk (= H × V× E) maps were produced.Although total landslide risk is relatively low at present, it will increase as development extends further into the hill slopes, unless adequate mitigation measures are taken. Large debris flows, while considerably less frequent than landslides on cut slopes, could impact on subdivisions at the base of the slopes. Blockage by landslides of roads and railways providing access to Cairns can cause isolation of the community. Flash flooding in Freshwater Creek, or debris flows, have the potential to disrupt the Cairns water supply by blocking the intake or destroying sections of the pipeline.     

Police, politics, and the right to the city

Space and spatiality have recently been at the core of debates concerning the political possibilities of the city. The arguments advanced in this paper might be seen as an attempt to contribute to these debates through a reflection on the spatiality of (in) justice, politics, and the right to the city. The case of French urban policy, with its focus on distressed urban areas, and the `suburban problem' in France are used as examples to make arguments more concrete.     

Rights in places: An analytical extension of the right to the city

Following recent scholarship on place and place-making, we identify key challenges for contemporary empirical research using the “Right to the City” as an analytic. We seek to distinguish between the aspirational “right” articulated as a political and conceptual call to arms on one hand, and the “actually existing rights” that are carved out through both formal and informal mechanisms (including political protest) in the everyday city on the other. Actually existing rights are defined not through fiat or via momentary revolutionary acts, but through the durability of relationships between multiple actors, including residents, citizens, states, and corporate agents. We re-articulate urban rights as actually contingent and agonistic properties of the relationships that citizens have with places. This paper uses the historic conflict over community gardens in New York as an illustration of how thinking of rights regimes as multiple, overlapping, and placed helps better illuminate potential political interventions. Thinking of rights and places as plural, overlapping, and contingent is analytically productive because it highlights (rather than overwriting) conflicts between competing articulations of rights and privileges in cities.     

New populations in the British city centre: Evidence of social change from the census and household surveys

Encouraged by government policies to promote city centre living and to increase residential land use on brownfield sites, there has been considerable repopulation of the city centre. Through detailed small-area census analysis of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea, supplemented by household surveys and key informant interviews, the research points to a range of population characteristics and changes occurring in the British city centre. Certain characteristics such as a high proportion of lone person households, fewer children and low car ownership remain fairly consistent. However, substantial population expansion affirms that a large part of the population is “new”. Between 1991 and 2001, men came to outnumber women, and each of the city centres saw a relative expansion of its young adult population. The new residents have a higher appreciation than longer term residents of proximity to work and leisure facilities, and of the stylishness of city centre living. Most of the new residents rent their accommodation, generally in flats, and the predominance of renting is associated with a transient attitude to city centre residence among the new population. Socio-economic evidence indicates a striking rise in social status or gentrification in all the city centres investigated, especially where high status private housing developments encourage the trend. With policies promoting residential development, the city centre is becoming increasingly socially exclusive.     

Precarious residence: Indigenous housing and the right to the city

Drawing on findings from a study of Indigenous housing in a regional Western Australian city, this paper examines the experiences of Indigenous peoples as a particular set of ‘right bearers’ within the right-to-the-city discourse. In settler-states, colonial discourses of absence, threat, and authenticity have informed policy frameworks that have militated against various Indigenous claims of belonging, rights, and aspiration in relation to urban places. Housing has been a representative domain of struggle in this respect. Consequently, today, Indigenous peoples have disproportionately high rates of dependence on more volatile and discriminatory forms of tenure than their non-Indigenous counterparts.The paper examines the incongruence between State aspirations to move (Indigenous) people along a housing continuum in urban environments, and the actual experiences of Indigenous urban residents, which fix discursively on barriers to such movements. It also traces the deleterious, displacing impacts for urban Indigenous households of the retreat of the State in its role as a landlord for the socio-economically disadvantaged, and in responding to market signals and particular sociological theses regarding poverty, with specific spatial logics. In so doing, we advance two interwoven arguments. First, we assert that Indigenous people face a unique precarity in the Australian urban housing system, which is a result of both colonial and racially discriminatory forces, and economically discriminating processes such as capital concentration and the commodification of land. Second, we contend that this precarity sets many Indigenous people on housing career trajectories that are antithetical to policy intentions.     

福鼎市新世纪大厦工程地质研究及基础形式的选用

福鼎新世纪大厦为23层高层建筑,作者通过对其场地岩土工程地质研究、分析,科学地提出采用箱型基础,并得到了施工验证和土建设计部门认可;从而既解决了实际施工难题,又节省了大量财力、物力,同时打破了以往高层建筑宜采用桩基础传统理论。     

A review of the community flood risk management literature in the USA: lessons for improving community resilience to floods

Natural Hazards - This study systematically reviews the diverse body of research on community flood risk management in the USA to identify knowledge gaps and develop innovative and practical...     

Understanding different perspectives on the preservation of community and heritage buildings in the Wellington Region,New Zealand

The Canterbury (New Zealand) earthquake sequence of 2010–2012 caused unexpectedly extreme levels of damage and disruption, being an unparalleled event in New Zealand in terms of the damage extent. Christchurch’s heritage buildings were seriously damaged during these events, with churches especially affected in 22 February 2011 M _w 6.2 earthquake. During this earthquake, a total of 84% of the heritage unreinforced stone and 81% of the clay brick masonry churches in the Canterbury region were either considered unsafe (receiving red placards) or with restricted access (yellow placards). Following the earthquakes, authorities across New Zealand are reassessing the capacity of older buildings to resist earthquakes. Current legislation requires that a building judged as earthquake prone either be strengthened by retrofitting or be demolished within a legislated number of years. Many building owners are facing the problems of owning earthquake-prone buildings and lacking the funding to upgrade. This affects both community and heritage buildings, resulting in the likely abandonment or demolition of some buildings. To address the problem of the balance between life safety and preservation in the Wellington Region, this project gathered and compared the perspectives of the general public, church communities, heritage specialists, professional engineers, and local authorities to assist in balancing the interests of these stakeholders. As a result of the findings, several recommendations have been provided that include standardizing structural assessment processes and training, feasibility of additional public funding to upgrade buildings, new signage to increase public awareness of earthquake-prone buildings, and regular communication among stakeholders to understand and resolve differences.