Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant

Much current activism and scholarship has raised concern that the various processes of neoliberal restructuring are threatening democracy. More specifically, researchers in geography and other social sciences have stressed that political and economic restructuring in cities is negatively affecting the enfranchisement of urban residents. Much recent research and writing has explored progressive responses to this perceived disenfranchisement in cities. One popular trend has been a fascination with the idea of the `right to the city' as a way to respond to neoliberal urbanism and better empower urban dwellers. I argue that the right to the city holds promise, but that in the literature the idea remains both theoretically and politically underdeveloped. It remains unclear (1) what the right to the city entails or (2) how it might address current problems of disenfranchisement. This paper examines the right to the city in greater depth. It does so by offering a close reading and analysis of the intellectual roots of the idea: the writings of Henri Lefebvre. I suggest that Lefebvre's right to the city is more radical, more problematic, and more indeterminate than the current literature makes it seem. The paper concludes by suggesting that the right to the city does offer distinct potential for resisting current threats to urban enfranchisement. However, the right to the city is not a panacea. It must be seen not as a completed solution to current problems, but as an opening to a new urban politics, what I call an urban politics of the inhabitant.     

一种海绵城市社会效益计算方法:以天津大学北洋园校区为例

海绵城市的社会效益是指海绵设施建成后对社会的贡献,其远大于海绵城市所产生的直接经济效益。但是,海绵城市的社会效益难以客观计算,这阻碍了人们对海绵城市的深入了解。因此,客观合理计算海绵城市的社会效益不仅可以反映海绵城市建设是否合理有效,也可为政策的制定提供参考。为此,本文提出一种将主观评价与客观计算相结合的海绵城市社会效益计算方法,通过对可客观计算的社会效益进行主观评价,利用客观计算的效益值将主观评价分值货币化,以此客观计算其他仅可主观评价的社会效益。文中以天津大学北洋园校区为例计算校区内海绵设施的社会效益,结果显示:该校区雨水花园、下凹式绿地和雨水湿地等5种海绵设施的社会效益为1.0~15.5元/(m²·a),植草沟为2.97元/(m·a)。其中,社会效益最高的是雨水湿地,下凹式绿地社会效益最低。根据天津大学北洋园校区各海绵设施建设面积,该校区海绵设施总社会效益约为232.8万元/a。     

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.     

南阳市城市地下水监测网优化设计

深入研究了河南省南阳市城市地下水系统,分析了现状地下水监测工作存在的问题,全面系统、经济合理、科学地设计了南阳市城市地下水监测体系,加强对城区段白河水文要素的监测,满足监控地下水资源质和量的变化及研究需要,为合理开发利用和保护地下水资源,保障城市饮水安全服务.     

Blending in for a life less ordinary? Off the beaten track tourism experiences in the global city

Cities worldwide are becoming tourism destinations and tourism is at the centre of urban economic production built around networks and connections. Attractions within the city are driving regional economies. However, there is little information about the practices of the city by tourists and residents and how they change the understanding of the place as city and destination. Research still focus on reasons for tourists to be attracted to a city and their impacts. Yet, how this infusion is conceptualized in the touristified city remains unanswered. The objective of this paper is to conceptualize specific tourism trends in the urban context, where boundaries are becoming less visible and where network hospitality is an enabler of urban infusion. This concept paper is structured to correspond with the research propositions, an investigation of the infusion in the global city.     

Carboniferous crustaceans

Higher crustaceans of distinctly modern type first diversified in the Lower Carboniferous. Some, from Scottish and Northern English localities, are exquisitely preserved, so that much can be inferred about their biology. Yet they seem to have been environmentally restricted, confined to close inshore marine fades and to lagoons and ponds of reduced, salinity. For all their apparent modernity, no Carboniferous crustaceans ever developed pincer–like claws, so common in modern types. Might this have been one of the factors that limited them?     

Water equivalent method for city phytostructure of Indonesia

This paper proposed a simple method and rapid to carry out for organizing city phytostructure. Carbon dioxide sequestration was addressed and referred to population number instead of city area. The unit storage of carbon dioxide, which was nothing less than greenspace area, was determined using equivalent method of determining unit storage of water. For various population number (P) of city area in Indonesia, the greenspace unit (GU) was 29P^?0.3 ? 3.2, and the greenspace area (GA) was 29P⁰⁷–3.2P. Greenspace distribution was preferably on wetlands, river lines, top ground level, and north south direction.     

Policy responses to informality in urban Africa: the example of Maputo,Mozambique

In the global South informality constitutes one of the leading issues for urban policy makers. The planning challenges around informality are particularly relevant in urban Africa as most Africans make their livelihoods in the informal economy. This paper examines issues of state policy responses to informality through the lens of street traders. Under scrutiny are policy responses towards street trading in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, a city that has experienced the advance of informalization. It is argued that the dominant approach towards informal trading across urban Africa is of a ‘sanitising’ policy response by the local state which is rooted upon traditions of modernist urban planning in search of ‘ordered development’. The research discloses that in Maputo national and municipal authorities have adopted a more tolerant approach to the informal economy, mainly because it provides a livelihood to so many of the city’s poor and because of potential social unrest likely to be triggered by a repressive approach. In Maputo the core narrative is of an urban informal economy viewed by officials as an important livelihood for the city’s poor, albeit one which is subject both to periodic harassment and encouragement to ‘formalize’. The analysis represents a contribution to the expanding corpus of writings on Africa’s informalising cities and specifically concerning policy responses towards street trading.     

‘All my hopes and dreams are shattered’: Urbanization and migrancy in an imploding African economy - the case of Zimbabwe

During the 1990s, urban livelihoods in Zimbabwe began to suffer a series of economic stresses, which accelerated in 1997 and then accelerated again, with the inception of fast-track land reform, from 2000. This has reduced urban living standards significantly and devastated real urban income levels. After a discussion of the economic and political parameters of this period, this paper links these to empirical changes in the urban livelihoods and perceptions of urban living standards of recent in-migrants to Harare. This draws on a longitudinal database of four surveys of recent migrants to the city conducted in 1985, 1988, 1994 and 2001. Among a range of qualitative issues explored in these surveys has been the question of migrants’ future plans in relation to their intended length of stay in town. It is shown that migrants have been feeling increasingly negative or unsure about their urban experience since structural adjustment began in the early 1990s, and that these perceptions had greatly strengthened by 2001. By the last survey only a small minority felt they would remain permanently in town and most of the migrants from rural areas felt that their living standards in Harare were either worse than rural living standards, or no better. While Zimbabwe’s current political and economic crisis is exceptional, serious urban poverty is a feature across sub-Saharan African countries and it is argued that this has had a depressing effect on net rural-urban migration rates.     

Magnetic properties of urban topsoils and correlation with heavy metals: a case study from the city of Xuzhou, China

Heavy metals in urban topsoils have been shown to be very useful tracers of environmental pollution. Thus, their detailed studies are of great importance. Apart from expensive and time-consuming chemical methods, several simple, rapid and cheap proxy methods have been developed recently, one of them being based on rock-magnetic parameters. This examines the use of rock-magnetic methods designed to assess the degree of heavy-metal pollution of urban topsoils from the city of Xuzhou (China). The aim was to identify the magnetic properties and to link the “magnetic pollution” to the concentrations of the heavy metals. Since a strong correlation has been found between saturation isothermal remanent magnetization (SIRM) and the heavy metals, namely, Fe, Se, Ti, Sc, Ba, Bi, Pb, Cu, Zn, Cr and Mo, an anthropogenic contamination origin is thought to be the cause. The present study shows that SIRM is a fast, inexpensive and non-destructive method for the detection and mapping of heavy-metal-contaminated urban topsoils.     

城市地质学理论创新与北京城市地质工作实践发展

城市地质工作,已成为未来地质工作的重要方面。然而,近年来城市地质问题越来越多。亟需城市地质学理论创新。本文创新了城市地质学理论,提出城市地质工作理念发展之路,谋划了未来10～15年北京城市地质工作,探讨了非正常情况下城市地质安全危机管理战略。北京城市地质工作应努力实现从问题推动型向理念发展型转变,在调查型地质工作基础上广泛开展监测型和信息服务型地质工作。重点做好正常型城市地质工作,严防非正常型城市地质安全危机事件发生。进一步提升战略资源和地质环境承载能力,为北京城市可持续发展提供地质保障。     

Land subsidence of Jakarta (Indonesia) and its relation with urban development

Jakarta is the capital city of Indonesia with a population of about 9.6 million people, inhabiting an area of about 660 square-km. In the last three decades, urban development of Jakarta has grown very rapidly in the sectors of industry, trade, transportation, real estate, and many others. This exponentially increased urban development introduces several environmental problems. Land subsidence is one of them. The resulted land subsidence will also then affect the urban development plan and process. It has been reported for many years that several places in Jakarta are subsiding at different rates. The leveling surveys, GPS survey methods, and InSAR measurements have been used to study land subsidence in Jakarta, over the period of 1982–2010. In general, it was found that the land subsidence exhibits spatial and temporal variations, with the rates of about 1–15 cm/year. A few locations can have the subsidence rates up to about 20–28 cm/year. There are four different types of land subsidence that can be expected to occur in the Jakarta basin, namely: subsidence due to groundwater extraction, subsidence induced by the load of constructions (i.e., settlement of high compressibility soil), subsidence caused by natural consolidation of alluvial soil, and tectonic subsidence. It was found that the spatial and temporal variations of land subsidence depend on the corresponding variations of groundwater extraction, coupled with the characteristics of sedimentary layers and building loads above it. In general, there is strong relation between land subsidence and urban development activities in Jakarta.     

研究海淀区产业结构变化对土地资源利用的影响

海淀区作为北京市城市边缘区的最重要区域之一，其土地资源利用随着产业结构的变化而发生着剧烈的变化。本文研究了产业结构变化对城市边缘区土地资源利用影响的规律及原因，并以海淀区为例详细分折了其产业结构变化及对土地赛场利用的影响，结合产业结构的变化趋势分折预测了海淀区将来土地资源利用的变化。     

小空间 大环境——境外建筑考察之日本印象

以笔者在考察日本建筑期间的感悟和理解,介绍了日本在合理开发利用城市小空间方面的成熟经验,突出强调了在有限的土地资源和生存环境中如何拓展城市公共空间、描绘无限的大环境品质的人性化设计理念。     

Distribution of effects in the urban area of Rome During the October 14, 1997 Umbria Marche earthquake

In the last years many studies were carried out in order to assess the correlation between nearsurface geology and seismic response of downtown Rome during local and regional earthquakes. Nevertheless, only historical macroseismic data and theoretical modelling could be used so far to estimate the ground motion in the historical part of the city. The occurrence of the October 14, 1997 Umbria Marche event (M_w = 5.7), located about 115 km far from Rome but largely felt in the city, allowed us to verify our knowledge of the seismic response on the basis of the present urban setting of Rome.A prompt macroseismic survey in the urban area within the ring-road (G.R.A.) was performed. 949 questionnaires were compiled by means of 1842 interviews: such a large amount of macroseismic information, for the first time available in Rome, was related to 669 observation points providing a picture of local intensity variations. The areal distribution of collected intensity points is quite homogeneous.The data analysis points out a preferential distribution of larger effects (65%) in correspondence of Holocene alluvium outcrops. Furthermore, a tight correspondence between remarkable intensities and alluvial sediments is pointed out in suburban areas characterized by the minor hydrographic network of the Tiber River. Macroseismic anomalies were outlined in sectors of the urban area where local hydrogeological conditions can be responsible for a significant deterioration of geomechanical properties.     

Farming the urban fringes of Barcelona: Competing visions of nature and the contestation of a partial sustainability fix

While the concept of urban agriculture investigates the way in which disused land within the consolidated city is returned to its citizens through a variety of farming practices, many pockets of rural land in peri-urban areas continue to be contested by institutions and communities – including informal farmers, formal farmers, municipal planners, metropolitan agencies, and investors – with contrasting interests. To date however, little scholarly attention has been paid to informal practices within the degraded areas of urban fringes and, more specifically, to the link between the expansion of peri-urban agriculture and the civic appropriation and negotiation of space in neglected peripheral areas. In this paper, we ask how a metropolitan sustainability fix is produced and contested both materially and discursively. We also explore how local residents involved in peri-urban agriculture claim the use of land for agricultural practices and in turn attempt to influence the urban agenda of the neoliberal city. Inquiring how competing visions of nature act as obstacles in this negotiation process, our analysis of the peri-urban Baix Llobregat Agricultural Park in Barcelona reveals that the imposition of official visions about how needs for food and agriculture should be fulfilled, which landscapes are esthetically acceptable, what nature is, and how land should be controlled and developed indicate why apparently “marginal” and informal urban agriculture in the periphery has come to be subordinated to the planning of the neoliberal city and of a metropolitan sustainability fix – a partial sustainability fix that is however progressively being questioned and renegotiated.     

Dynamic weather forecaster: results of the testing of a collaborative, on-line educational platform for weather forecasting

The online Dynamic Weather Forecaster is an open, collaborative application available now to high-school and college instructors across the United States who would like to easily incorporate weather forecasting in their instruction. The application consists of a set of 13 questions that allow students to submit forecasts that cover most of the parameters used by professional weather forecasters. Submissions are automatically validated against weather parameters and graded. We tested the impact of the application on the learning of 199 undergraduate students in an introductory meteorology course in spring 2008. Students who begin forecasting early in the semester and continue to do so throughout the semester are statistically significantly more successful in the course than students who start late or complete a low number of forecasts. College, year in school, and gender were not significant predictors of success. Students found the application easy to use, and 92.3% of them found it at least somewhat helpful as they learned about the weather. Through the use of the DWF, students also experience first-hand that uncertainty is a critical part of weather forecasting and of scientific studies in general. With sufficient interest from potential users outside the USA, the DWF platform could easily be expanded to include global weather data.     

Visceral methodologies,bodily style and the non-human

An emphasis on visceral methodologies might seem to suggest that human bodies are the key site or organiser of experience. In this short reflection I argue that human bodies are also a medium that can be used to bring background or previously undetected non-human objects and forces to the forefront and so enable them to be studied and analysed.     

Unraveling the health-related challenges of women in the informal economy: accounts of women in cross-border trading in Accra, Ghana

The majority of urban informal sector workers lack basic health and social protection services and work in an unhealthy and unsafe environment. Women in cross-border trading are one such group. Even though they contribute significantly to and are an important component of many economies, they do so at their personal and economic risks. As these women travel, they experience health hazards which add to their existing occupational exposure. Using in-depth interviews and observation, this paper unravels the health-related risks that women in cross-border trading face. The most common physical health complaints were musculoskeletal problems such as body aches, back pains, waist pains and swollen feet as a result of long hours of travelling and poor road networks. In addition to the limited access to information on sexually transmitted diseases, women also go through psychosocial problems arising out of constant thinking and ‘worrying too much’ about their safety in the vehicles, the cash they carry along, the activities of gendarmes and armed robbers, untrustworthy clients as well as the safety of the children they leave behind. It is recommended that more attention should be paid to women’s work in the informal economy and cross-border trade in particular, so as to unravel the ways in which women’s work affects their physical and mental health. It is only through this that policies could be put in place to address the health-related challenges of women in the informal economy.     

Unbundling Stockholm: The networks, planning and social welfare nexus beyond the unitary city

This paper focuses on the extent to which recent infrastructure-oriented urban developments in Stockholm concord with various aspects of the ‘splintering urbanism’ thesis of Graham and Marvin. This contextualisation allows us to extend their work empirically and conceptually. In the first instance, we study a particular case of the decline of a unitary networked city (in an urban context largely absent from their book). In the second instance, we develop their notion of ‘unbundling’ to capture not just core changes in the organisation of infrastructure provision, but an overarching disjunction of the established nexus between networks, planning and social welfare in the city. This disjunction operates through interlinked transformations concerning, for example, privatisation and outsourcing in network services, separation of infrastructure planning from broader urban planning, contradictions between the environmental and social mandates of infrastructure, and a (prospective) curtailment of the redistributive, social role of essential network service provision. We conclude nonetheless that this ‘destructive’ moment of unbundling has not so far been pursued by more explicitly ‘creative’ urban fragmentation strategies, due largely to the vestiges of a socio-political consensus based around redistribution and equality. In this respect, the Stockholm case pleads for a conception of ‘splintering’ as a dynamic and multi-stage process which is not only always ongoing, unstable and incomplete, but also non-linear and open to resistance/regulation.