Discourse,representation and urban planning: How a critical approach to discourse helps reveal the spatial re-ordering of street sex work1

This paper shows how a critical approach to discourse sheds light on processes of spatial re-orderings. It uses a case study of urban planning in an area of street sex work to explore the ways in which various representations of prostitution can be used to inform planning decisions. Representations of sex worker identity also expose complex spatial and social geographies and evolving processes of marginalisation and exclusion.     

流动摊贩疏导区的实践效应和挑战 ——以广州市荔湾区源溪社区疏导区为例

通过观察、问卷调查、访谈等质性研究方法分析疏导区政策出台的社会背景,梳理政策的详细内容,并以广州市荔湾区源溪社区流动摊贩疏导区为例,分析了疏导区的实践效应及面临的挑战。研究表明：疏导区政策是政府根据历史经验、兼顾多方利益主体出台的治理流动摊贩的手段,为摊贩提供了进入门槛低的合法经营空间,重新塑造了流动摊贩的空间分布和社区商业体系,提升了摊贩的认同感,便于城管规范管理,满足了更大范围的消费需求,存在一定的正面效应;但因噪音污染、管理不善等问题,疏导区的设立阻碍了社区环境的提升。由于用地临时性的弊端和所在社区定位升级的发展需求,源溪疏导区被要求撤销。案例显示：由于疏导区占用公共空间和所涉不同群体的利益无法协调等问题,疏导区政策并未帮助摊贩实现从非正规经济到正规经济的转变。因此,城市管理者可通过建立第三方组织,为疏导区利益相关群体建立沟通机制,合理地进行疏导区的选址和管理。     

大连城市绿地可达性对房价影响的差异性分析

研究房价、遥感影像等多源数据,采用邻域分析法和地理加权回归模型分析大连市中山区绿地可达性及其与房价之间的空间相关性。结果表明：① 房价均价14 745.35元/m²,呈环状分布,由沿海向内陆衰减、桂林街道起中心向外围递减;② 研究区内可达性最好的绿地类型是街旁绿地,绿地可达性总体水平最高街道是桂林街道;公园绿地可达性最好的住宅区分布在昆明街道和桃源街道,街旁绿地可达性最好的住宅区分布在桂林街道,附属绿地可达性最好的分布在老虎滩街道,其他绿地可达性最好的分布在桃源街道。③ 不同类型绿地可达性对房价影响作用程度递减排序为：附属绿地、街旁绿地、公园绿地和其他绿地;附属绿地、街旁绿地和其他绿地与房价呈现空间正相关,随着到达绿地距离降低,房价呈现增长趋势;公园绿地与房价呈现负相关,随着到达公园绿地的距离降低,房价呈现衰减趋势。     

Perception of pleasure in the urban running environment with street view images and running routes

The urban environment affects human behavior and health. Most studies on the feelings of street spaces have not considered a specific kind of realistic scene, such as running. To overcome this limitation, we explored the relationship between the urban environment and the pleasure of running. We collected 8260 street view images from 153 running routes in Beijing and invited more than 400 volunteers of different genders and ages to rate their sense of pleasure in street view images of the urban running environment through an online survey. Then, the proportion of visual elements in street images was extracted based on semantic segmentation, and the landscape was divided. Finally, a linear mixed model was used to predict the pleasure scores of different gender and age groups for different landscapes. The results show significant differences in the pleasure scores for different landscapes and age groups. Middle-aged people's sense of pleasure was lower than that of the young and the elderly. More greenery was associated with a higher pleasure score, while the proportion of urban elements such as buildings was negatively correlated with the pleasure score. The results indicate that running in a natural landscape is pleasurable and beneficial for mental health.     

1990 年以来广州市摊贩空间政治的规训机制

近年来,针对某些群体的复仇型或后公正空间政治成为西方城市地理学理解20 世纪80 年代以来城市转型的重要理论。现有的研究注意到了这种空间政治嵌入地方的多样形态,但对其内含的对立性缺乏研究。中国社会转型过程中发生的现实空间矛盾为开展我国背景下的公共空间政治研究提供了源泉。本文基于列菲弗尔的基本空间理论,采用结构-能动的分析路径,运用宏观的政策和制度分析与对典型案例的观察、半结构式访谈、深度访谈相结合的综合方法,以摊贩现象为切入点对90 年代以来广州城市空间政治进行了研究。研究表明,一种排斥性公共空间政治内在地包含了由结构性的规训与能动性的反规训构成的对立性,这一特性在广州表现为：① 对摊贩的排斥性空间政治是作为解决发展的潜在危机而实施综合环境改善战略的组成部分而产生,并导致一种更为明显的“全景敞视主义”式规训机制的形成。② 对立的空间通过摊贩日常式的伺机而动和温顺的不遵守与插曲式的个体暴力和集体行动而形成,结果战略空间被重构为以维持个体生存、摆脱贫困和追求自由为目的的工具空间。这种对立性在根源上是一种社会产物,而产生的实际冲突状况则将取决于空间发展观念及规训策略与反规训力量两者之间的对抗或协调程度。     

After the 1997 financial crisis in Bangkok: The behaviour and implications of a new cohort of street vendors

After the 1997 financial crisis, many retrenched workers preferred not to return to provincial homes but remained in Bangkok to establish informal retail businesses in branded and other consumer products. In contrast to traditional street vendors, who specialized in food items primarily catering for low‐income customers, and focused on high volume, these ‘new generation’ street vendors also adopted more formal business practices. Given their greater sophistication and better education, we hypothesized that they would be more organized advocates of vendors' rights and thus more prone to conflicts with municipal authorities. Based on interviews, however, we found that new generation vendors are adaptive to location and business strategy, and prefer a low profile in dealing with officialdom. By contrast, traditional vendors remained more tied to particular spaces, are more likely to stand up for their rights to use public space and, because they expect more from government, are more prone to conflicts with municipal authorities. Our findings relate to ongoing discussion on the rights and needs of street vendors to access urban public space and the responsibilities of authorities to meet and provide for these informal sector livelihoods that make up a significant share of the national economy in Thailand, as elsewhere in the global South.     

THE WOLVES AND LAMBS OF THE CREATIVE CITY: THE SUSTAINABILITY OF FILM AND TELEVISION PRODUCERS IN LONDON

ABSTRACT. The sustainability of creative producers‐businesses and individuals‐depends in part on the state of the urban environment, especially the one of the street. Relationships with the street differ among creative producers with different power positions and levels of embeddedness in street life. Thus an approach to the sustainability of the creative city needs to move beyond the simplistic ideals of “mixed use” and “vitality” to an understanding of the complexity and continuity inherent in the production of creative spaces with respect to the multiple transactions of both the strong and weak stakeholders involved‐the “wolves” and “lambs.” The example used in this article, which draws on evidence from interviews with producers, is the film and television industry in Camden Town, London, in relation to the “experience” economy.     

街景图片识别城市贫困的适用性——基于广州市中心城区的验证

以广州市为例,选取中心4个区6 670个采样点（涵盖121个社区）的百度街景图片,从城市建成环境特征探讨了城市贫困识别的可能。首先,训练基于深度神经网络的街景图片分类模型后,对街景要素进行语义分割,并通过缓冲区分析统计社区尺度的街景指标;其次,经主成分分析法提取出建筑围合感、植被围合感、天空开阔感和道路开阔感4个街景主因子,并验证其与多重贫困指数（IMD）的相关性;最后,通过采用简单随机抽样法选取61个社区,构建街景预测的多元线性回归模型,对剩余60个社区进行贫困预测,验证街景指标测度城市贫困的度量精度。结果发现,案例社区的多重贫困指数（IMD）与建筑围合感呈正相关,与植被围合感、天空开阔感、道路开阔感呈负相关;从整体看来,街景预测结果与传统城市贫困测度的空间规律基本相符,而且结果通常比传统测度的城市贫困程度高。这是因为受测度内容、社区类型、街道属性等方面的影响,街景识别方式比较适用于判断建成环境较差的贫困社区。街景图片预测有利于刻画城市贫困人群真实的生活环境,便于对城市建成区进行及时监测,在一定程度上可以与传统城市贫困测度相互校正、弥补不足。     

Community and Nostalgia in Urban Revitalisation: a critique of urban village and creative class strategies as remedies for social ‘problems’

We examine how normative constructions of ‘the creative city’ have entered into Australian planning discourses. Although welcoming a place-based approach, critical consideration is given to how the misappropriation of ‘place making’ in creative city revitalisation plans may enhance rather than address processes of social marginalisation. A Foucauldian framework is employed, exploring the notion of the social production of power through discourse. We draw on a case study of Wentworth Street, a key urban space in Port Kembla, the industrialised district of Wollongong, New South Wales. The study focuses on various ideas of a common place-making theme of the ‘urban village’ evoked by planners, the media and a targeted local resident group (here elderly Macedonians) for a street positioned in ‘crisis’ because of declining infrastructure, services and its association with crime, drugs and prostitution. The case study demonstrates that marginalisation and exclusions are products of creative city strategies and wider, more oppressive urban discourses. But we also demonstrate that despite becoming normative in the texts of planning policies, discourses of place and identity always remain multiple, negotiated, and contradictory.     

广州民间金融街空间生产动力机制研究

通过构建空间生产“资本-权力-阶层”三位一体的分析框架,研究了广州民间金融街空间生产的动力机制。研究表明：广州民间金融街的空间生产存在三种动力,分别是市场力、政府力和社会力,它们通过不同的机制作用于空间生产的过程,创造出新的实体空间和关系空间。市场力通过资本的增殖逻辑发挥作用,资本为了追求利润最大化而进入以小额贷款公司为代表的民间金融领域,从而实现对城市建成环境及社会消费的投入;政府力通过权力目标的实现发挥作用,为了政治、经济和社会目标的实现,政府创造条件引导资本进入指定的空间;社会力通过各阶层对新空间的反馈行为发挥作用,包括转型、让渡、协助和接受,从而促使多元化空间的生产。     

The Particularity of Global Places: Placemaking Practices in Los Angeles and Sydney

What makes places different from one another in the context of globalization? An analysis of 17 emblematic practices in two global cities, Los Angeles and Sydney, provides the empirical basis for answering this question. Evidence from the built environment, the social geography, and the patterns of disorder in the inner cities of these two global places shows that these cities were more alike in the late 1960s than they are today. The differentiation of the two places has increased as the effects of globalization have become more pervasive. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that there is nothing inherent in contemporary globalization that requires global cities to have inner city slums, ghettoes, massive homelessness, residential disinvestment, White flight, relict or suboptimally-utilized brownfields, illegal prostitution, a war on drugs, public spaces awash with guns, and so forth. Places are viewed here as constellations of distinctive practices configured in particular geographical settings at the intersection of specific conjunctures of historical change. Places matter in the epoch of globalization as differentially embedded, bounded particularities consisting of a mixed assortment of human practices forming causally consequential fields of effects.     

City of Women, City of Foreign Men: Working Spaces and Re-working Identities Among Female Sex Workers in Bangkok's Tourist Zone

In this paper I propose that spatially-informed and agency-centred treatments of prostitution as a practice can fruitfully highlight the moral and symbolic economies operating in the lives of women as they engage and disengage with prostitution in the tourist sex trade zones of Bangkok. By re-examining and re-contextualising the practices of prostitution in terms of interacting spatial/socio-cultural fields, we can gain more useful insights than heretofore obtained through a mono-dimensional political economy or gender-culture framework. We must accept that women sex workers are part of the geography of socio-economic transformation, responding to the centralisation and expansion of key sectors of the Thai economy. I conceptualise this broader geography as involving "oscillation" between urban and rural "places" (which represent key "fields" of value), and at the level of the city (and the tourist leisure infrastructure) as "movement" between different work sites and "arenas" of identity formation. Within this complex of circulation and engagement, women strategise to maximise what may be described as survival and status resources (conversion of income into cultural capital) aiming towards recovery of meaningful self-identity.     

北京城区绿地防灾避险功能评估

城市绿地具有重要的防灾避险功能。以北京城区具有防灾避险功能的绿地为研究对象, 划定了不同类型绿地的防灾避险服务半径, 利用ArcGIS的缓冲区分析工具, 对研究区内绿地 的防灾避险服务范围进行了分析。结果表明:绿地防灾避险有效服务面积占研究区的 71.22%,3.94万hm²的区域处于服务盲区, 主要分布在五环路以外的海淀、丰台和朝阳区; 从防灾避险绿地和服务范围的覆盖率来看, 西城区>东城区>朝阳区>石景山区>海淀区> 丰台区, 有111个街道、地区办事处和乡镇覆盖率在90% 以上, 但仍有占研究区面积 24.08%的办事处和乡镇覆盖率在80%以下;此外, 防灾避险绿地及服务区覆盖率由市中心向 外围呈现递减趋势。     

The Spatial Isolation of Elderly Single-Room-Occupancy Hotel Tenants*

This paper documents the spatial activity of elderly SRO hotel tenants in the service-dependent ghetto. Exploratory fieldwork was conducted in a neighborhood of Chicago during 1985 and 1986. At four of the identified hotels, 53 activity spaces were recorded by first-hand involvement in the geographical activity of the participants. The fear of both street crime and social-service agencies imposes isolation upon this population.     

Geography, law and the centralizing state: wages arrestment in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scotland

This paper analyses reform of the law of wages arrestment in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scotland to examine the spatial nature of the 'regulatory dilemmas' faced by the state in legal interventions in a spatially heterogeneous context. Though this reform was an example of how the nineteenth-century British state sought to regulate the spaces of everyday life, the analysis shows that law-making processes are the outcome of complex tensions between and within the state and legal systems. In these processes, local legal cultures, tensions between systems of common and statute law and the complex geographies of social life play important roles in shaping the conjunction of space, place and law.     

Courtroom Ethnography: Researching the Intersection of Law,Space, and Everyday Practices

This article argues for a more sustained use of courtroom ethnography by geographers as a means to research legal phenomena, especially in matters of court trials. To do this, I begin by referencing two main threads of courtroom ethnographies conducted in disciplines outside geography, specifically the spaces of the courthouse and courtrooms and the study of emotion and bodily performances by sociolegal and sociology scholars. To then underscore the ways in which a geographical perspective can enhance this existing research and point to topical and theoretical interventions that courtroom ethnography might offer geography, I draw on my experiences with courtroom ethnography on the criminal trial against former Enron chief executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. This experience produced a nuanced and lively understanding of how law, justice, and space comingle through the court’s physical spaces and performative embodiments. My conclusions emphasize courtroom ethnographies’ scholarly opportunities for researchers who study the intersection of law and space, while also reflecting on its challenges. Key Words: corporation, courtroom, Enron, ethnography, legal geography.     

A critical evaluation of 3D spatial information models for managing legal arrangements of multi-owned developments in Victoria,Australia

Three-dimensional (3D) spatial information models are increasingly being adopted to help communicate the spatial dimensions of complex built environments. Land administration practices in multi-owned developments include the subdivision, registration and management of legal interests associated with private, communal and public properties, which are often located along the vertical dimension. The spatial structure of each legal interest is normally composed of invisible spaces, defined as the inside and outside of multi-owned developments, as well as physically built structures. Additionally, a wide variety of legal boundary types mark out the spatial limits of the individual parts of each legal interest. These legal boundaries are typically delineated by either relying on fixed surveying measurements or referencing physically existent objects. This article provides a critical assessment of 3D spatial information models in terms of their capabilities for modelling legal interests and legal boundaries defined in the Victorian jurisdiction. We classify these models into three categories: purely legal, purely physical and integrated. This assessment provides the basis for developing a new 3D spatial information model, which would subsequently support a pathway towards realising the Victorian land administration system in a 3D digital environment.     

Postrevolutionary land encroachments in Cairo: Rhizomatic urban space making and the line of flight from illegality

After the January 2011 revolution, new and unpermitted constructions on previously empty land went up across Cairo at striking speed. This paper explores a case of such land encroachments carried out by waste collectors in the neighbourhood of Manshiet Nasser in Cairo, Egypt. It begins with theoretical debates about the production of urban space, arguing that the de Certeauian paradigm, in which urban marginals poach or hijack others' spaces evanescently, fails to account for the way such encroachments produce permanent new spaces rhizomatically alongside the pre‐existing order. The paper then turns to a close examination of the events in Manshiet Nasser. Although in a broad view the actors are marginals living in the ‘informal’ city, the conditions enabling the encroachments were such that only the wealthiest and most powerful members of the ‘community’ benefitted. In a context of generalized ‘illegality’, the squatters rely on practical norms and de facto recognitions to obtain some degree of tenure security. Since these efforts rely on and play off legal norms even as the squatters violate them, the paper argues that property rights in this context should be understood not in classificatory terms based on the legal/illegal binary, but rather through a trajectory of ‘becoming‐legal’: a ‘line of flight’ that approaches legality asymptotically.     

Defining and generating axial lines from street center lines for better understanding of urban morphologies

Axial lines are defined as the longest visibility lines for representing individual linear spaces in urban environments. The least set of axial lines that cover the free space of an urban environment or the space between buildings constitute what is often called an axial map. This is a fundamental tool in space syntax, a theory developed by Bill Hillier and his colleagues for characterizing the underlying urban morphologies. For a long time, generating axial lines with the help of some graphic software has been a tedious manual process that is criticized for being time consuming, subjective, or even arbitrary. In this article, we redefine axial lines as the least set of individual straight line segments mutually intersected along natural streets that are generated from street center lines using the Gestalt principle of good continuity. Based on this new definition, we develop an automatic solution for generating the newly defined axial lines from street center lines. We apply this solution to six typical street networks (three from North America and three from Europe) and generate a new set of axial lines for analyzing the urban morphologies. Through a comparison study between the new axial lines and the conventional or old axial lines and between the new axial lines and natural streets, we demonstrate with empirical evidence that the newly defined axial lines are a better alternative for capturing the underlying urban structure.     

The historical geography of prostitution in Perth,Western Australia

This paper charts major changes in the locational distribution of female prostitution in the Perth metropolitan area during the twentieth century, and aims to explain why these changes took place. The study confirmed that there is a positive relationship between changes to law enforcement policy and changes to the spatial distribution of the sex industry. Factors that affect law enforcement policy (and thus the location of prostitution) include the social stigma associated with prostitution, economic forces that compete for urban space and political pressures to contain and occasionally relocate the trade. At the same time, and despite a number of major spatial redistributions caused by changes to law enforcement policy in Perth, the central city area has remained the sex industry's geographical focus throughout the twentieth century. This strong preference to be centrally located is related to the sex industry's primary locational imperatives, being access to major client catchments and availability of appropriate operational premises. The paper argues that a complex set of endogenous and exogenous factors contribute to the locational behaviour of prostitution, and that these forces and their associated dynamics need to be understood in order to successfully integrate the sex industry into an equitable and orderly town planning process.