Posts tagged urban studies

Report: Urban cultures as a field of knowledge and learning

This report tries to answer the question What is Urban Cultures? and subsequently outlines what a research field called “Urban Cultures” should consist of.  By focusing on Urban Cultures, both as a theoretical concept and as a more practical standpoint, this report aims to uncover tools and knowledge that might be used both within urban planning/development and scientific work aiming to influence urban life.

Authors: Daniel Gillberg (ed), Ylva Berglund, Göteborg City Museum; Helene Brembeck, Centre for Consumer Science, University of Gothenburg, Olle Stenbäck, Dept of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg.

Published by Mistra Urban Futures.

EXCERPT - During the last ten years, urban culture studies have evolved as an interdisciplinary research field within urban research. This focuses on the intersection of daily life with the surrounding material, discursive, and social landscapes – the reciprocal relationship of how urban life is shaped by and, in turn, shapes the urban environment. This includes cultural practices but also spatial embodiment, i.e., the shaping of the material landscape, structures, and physical space in which urban life unfolds. Do-it-yourself (DIY) urban design and urban sports are examples of common themes. Culture is here understood in terms of possibilities. Topological approaches provide a set of tools to analyze how different kinds of change can be stimulated with network-building, spontaneity, and self-organization being considered primary engines for change. Humans are conceived of as constant “becomings,” with the potential for lifelong growth and development. Society is seen as rhizomatic, organic, and constantly unfolding. […]

Open access: http://mistraurbanfutures.se/download/18.480afbf41392fd999a430c/PA1UrbanCultures40sid.pdf

CFP: Communication and the City - Voices, Spaces, Media (due Nov 30)

“What are the communicative dimensions of urban ‘spaces’ in their own right? How does space mediate specific ideologies and subjectivities, and how is urban space constructed and communicated as place?” This is one of the questions addressed in this CFP for a conference in Leeds.

Communication and the City: Voices, Spaces, Media; 14-15 June 2013; Urban Communication Foundation & Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds

Abstracts due Nov 30, 2012.

Conference themes

  • What are the ‘voices’ that animate contemporary cities? How do different identities, groups, cultures, and constituencies interact, intersect and/or compete in mediated and non-mediated urban contexts?
  • What are the communicative dimensions of urban ‘spaces’ in their own right? How does space mediate specific ideologies and subjectivities, and how is urban space constructed and communicated as place?
  • What is the role of the ‘media’ in relation to both the symbolic and material existence of cities? How do both traditional and new media contribute to representing and experiencing, but also financing and structuring the urban environment?

Full call: http://www.pvac.leeds.ac.uk/communicationandthecity/about/

Conference: City of Flows - Interdisciplinary Perspectives On The Digital City and Analog Spaces (12-14 July, Potsdam, DE)

How can cities be sustainably designed and developed without losing sight of the needs of their residents? What roles are played by analog spaces and local commitment? Which options are generated by the global use of digital technologies? How and where can these digital and analog opportunities be connected to each other?

These are some of the questions under consideration at the international conference City of Flows, taking place from the 12th to the 14th of July 2012 in, Potsdam, Germany.

Read more and register:

http://www.stadt-der-stroeme.de/en/

CFP: Cities to be Tamed? Questioning the role played by urban planning, design, and policies in the urbanisation processes of the global South (Nov 2012, Milan)

International conference aimed at simultaneously exploring and questioning the role played by urban planning, design, and policies in the continuous urbanisation processes affecting the so-called ‘global South’.

Abstracts due June 15, 2012. The conference will be held at Politecnico di Milano, November 15-17, 2012.

Read full call-for-papers: http://www.contestedspaces.info/

CFP: Mediated Urbanism - Int’l Communication Gazette (due May 31)

In this special issue we wish to address the digitally sustained urban environment in terms of public life. Our approach in the issue is to combine the perspectives of city planning and design, on the one hand, with the perspective of people’s activities as urban audiences, on the other.

Abstracts due May 31, 2012.

Double Special Issue of the International Communication Gazette to be published by Sage Publishers on Mediated Urbanism.

See full CFP here: http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu/system/files/CFP_ICG_Mediated-urbanism.pdf

New Book: Sustainable City and Creativity - Promoting Creative Urban Initiatives

This book offers a coherent set of articles on sustainable and creative cities and addresses modern theories and concepts relating to research on sustainability and creativity. It analyzes principles and practices of the creative city for the formulation of policies and recommendations towards the sustainable city. It brings together leading academics with different approaches from different disciplines to provide a comprehensive and holistic overview of creativity and sustainability of the city, linking research and practice.

Authors: Luigi Fusco Girard, Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy, Tuzin Baycan, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey and Peter Nijkamp, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.ca/Sustainable-City-Creativity-Promoting-Initiatives/dp/1409420019

About the book

The notion of ‘creative cities’ - where cultural activities and creative and cultural industries play a crucial role in supporting urban creativity and contributing to the new creative economy - has become central to most regional and urban development strategies in recent years. A creative city is supposed to develop imaginative and innovative solutions to a range of social, economic and environmental problems: economic stagnancy, urban shrinkage, social segregation, global competition or more.

Cities and regions around the world are trying to develop, facilitate or promote concentrations of creative, innovative and/or knowledge intensive industries in order to become more competitive. These places are seeking new strategies to combine economic development with quality of place that will increase economic productivity and encourage growth.

Against this increasing interest in creative cities, this volume offers a coherent set of articles on sustainable and creative cities and addresses modern theories and concepts relating to research on sustainability and creativity. It analyzes principles and practices of the creative city for the formulation of policies and recommendations towards the sustainable city. It brings together leading academics with different approaches from different disciplines to provide a comprehensive and holistic overview of creativity and sustainability of the city, linking research and practice. In doing so, it puts forward ideas about stimulating the production of an innovative knowledge for a creative and sustainable city, and transforming a specific knowledge into a general-common knowledge, which suggests best future policy actions, decision-making processes and choices for the change towards a human sustainable development of the city.

Available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.ca/Sustainable-City-Creativity-Promoting-Initiatives/dp/1409420019

Aca-article: Urban Informatics Research and Insights for Libraries, Cultural Industries and Innovation Systems

Urban informatics explores the intersections between people, place and technology, and their implications for creativity, innovation and engagement. This paper examines how the key learnings from this field can be used to position creative and cultural institutions such as galleries, libraries, archives and museums to take advantage of the opportunities presented by these changing social and technological developments.

By Marcus Foth, Australian Business Foundation Research Fellow on Innovation and Cultural Industries 2011 and Mark Bilandzic and Greg Hearn, Urban Informatics Research Lab at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Access full paper here, 44 pages.

eprints.qut.edu.au

ISEA Panel: Think Beta - Participate Evolution of Smart Cities

The aim is to combine advanced new media art with research and development of innovative technologies, participation methodologies and innovative services for the design of the new urbanity.

Find paper abstracts and list of participants here.

Introduction

All thinking is in BETA - so how should the future city and urbanity be designed? The panel discusses new processes for the Participative Evolution of Smart Cities, the culture and technology of the new soft city. The aim is to combine advanced new media art with research and development of innovative technologies, participation methodologies and innovative services for the design of the new urbanity. The art objective is to arise new media and urban art scenarios in areas of re-design and re-construction. The technical objective is, to research and to develop mobile-stationary environment for smart cities as participatory and performative cultural media infrastructure for their development. It is about the requirements for future technical and cultural mass player infrastructure for the urban development of Smart Cities and the optimization of municipal services and digital infrastructures in form of media art and gaming processes. Which technical approaches from media art, urban art, conceptual art, eGovernance, e-services, e-mobility, LBS, to the user-affected eCulture and eCreativity are to be included to develop and to provide improved systems for urban development, planning and participation?

Citizen participation in urban development has a long cultural tradition in Europe. The rising complexity of urban development and infrastructure issues evoke the need of improved cooperation of governmental entities, experts and citizens. Decision making processes for future activities in the field of urban sustainability require an enhanced approach to citizen participation, artisic expression and user-friendly expert articulation. It is required to access the full potential of the new capabilities of communication networks, the broad availability of microcomputers, and the new design and e-skills. The design, development and implementation of the Betaville “software infrastructure” meet all demands of future citizen participation for a sustainable urban development.

Previous approaches did not took into account existing expertise (eg. of media art, civic arts, participation or gaming or set a single discipline perspectives unbalanced in the foreground. Which is be counteracted through the interdisciplinary configuration of the panel. Similarly, technical and organizational issues of participatory urban planning with different approaches for different user groups are to be considered. How alternative planning processes by artists, media activists, designers, researchers can be integrated should be discussed. Advanced art and environmental and socially sustainable design is to be of particular interest and will get exposed. Digital infrastructure should be directed to their local potential for participatory art and design, for development, for local knowledge processes and for the aspect of cross-generational, social and economic networking.

Think BETA Participatory Evolution of Smart Cities is chaired by the two directors Martin Koplin and Helmut Eirund of the “Think BETA Evolution of Smart Cities” interdisciplinary think tank. It has partners from Asia, Africa, North America and all over Europe. The think tank is funded by the BMBF German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) and goes back to the co-operation between Martin Koplin of the M2C Institute of Applied Media Technology and Culture at the University of Applied Sciences Bremen and Carl Skelton from the BxmC Brooklyn Experimental Media Center of the Polytechnic Institute of the New York University.

isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu

CFP: Local and mobile - Linking mobilities, mobile communication and locative media

Deadline for abstracts: 30 October 2011 (800 words, including references)

From March 16-18 2012, the Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media (CRDM) Program and the Mobile Gaming Research Lab at NC State University will be hosting the 3rd joint international conference of the Pan-American Mobilities Network and the Cosmobilities Network.

Invited keynote speakers:

  • Paul Dourish (University of California, Irvine)
  • Rich Ling (IT University of Copenhagen)
  • Teri Rueb (University of Buffalo, SUNNY)

Mobilities has become an important framework to understand and analyze contemporary social, spatial, economic and political practices. Being interdisciplinary in its nature, Mobilities focuses on the systematic movement of people, goods and information that “travel” around the world in rates much higher (or much slower) than before. As such, mobility studies challenge traditional scholarship that often ignores the social dimensions of mobility, overlooking how travel, movement, and communication and transportation networks help to constitute modern societies and communities. Mobility has always been critical for the creation of social networks and to the development of connections to places. In addition, Mobilities contributes to study of the technological, social and cultural developments in transportation, border control, mobile communication, “intelligent” infrastructure, surveillance.

While mobility is an important framework to understand contemporary society, the pervasiveness of location-aware technology has made it possible to locate ourselves and be networked within patterns of mobility. As user generated maps and location-aware mobile devices become commonplace, we experience a shift in the way we connect to the internet and move through space. Networked interactions permeate our world. We no longer enter the internet - we carry it with us. We experience it while moving through physical spaces. Mobile phones, GPS receivers, and RFID tags are only a few examples of location-aware mobile technologies that mediate our interaction with networked spaces and influence how we move in these spaces.

Increasingly, our physical location determines the types of information with which we interact, the way we move through physical spaces, and the people and things we find around us. These new kinds of networked interactions manifest in everyday social practices that are supported by the use of mobile and location-aware technologies, such as participation in location-based mobile games and social networks, use of location-based services, development of mobile annotation projects, and social mapping, just to name a few. The engagement with these practices has important implications for identity construction, our sense of privacy, our notions of place and space, civic and political participation, policy making, as well as cultural production and consumption in everyday life.

We invite papers that address themes at the intersection of mobility and location, or related topics, such as:

  • Mobile communication and location awareness in everyday life practices;
  • New urban spatialities developed with mobile gaming and locative social media;
  • Privacy and surveillance issues as they relate to mobile and location-based social networks;
  • Identity and spatial construction through locative media art / embodied performance;
  • Civic engagement and political participation through mobile social media, new mapping practices and location-aware technologies;
  • Borders, surveillance, and securitization with ubiquitous and mobile technologies;
  • Aeromobilities, air travel, and aerial vision;
  • Alternative mobilities and slow movements;
  • Planning, policy and design for future mobilities and location-based services;
  • Tourism, imaginary travel, and virtual travel;
  • Transitions toward sustainable mobilities;
  • New methodologies for mobilities research.

Disciplines represented at the conference may include (but are not exclusive to): Anthropology, Architecture and Design, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Communication, Criminology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Media and Visual Arts, Politics and International Relations, Public Policy, Sociology, Theater and Performance Studies, Tourism Research, Transport Research, and Urban Studies.

Conference website and abstract submission: http://crdm.chass.ncsu.edu/mobilities/

Urbanizing technology: When the City Talks Back.

Saskia Sassen at PICNIC Festival 2011, 15 September 2011.

From the presentation: “More and more technology are being ‘plopped down’ on our cities. If you read the engineers’ description, or the technologists’ description, of what that technology can do, you really expect a lot. Mostly, it doesn’t happen.  The technology might indeed be able to do A-B-C-D but it perhaps get to do only B. This then raises the question: what is it about that encounter between the technology and - which might be a very well intentioned technology - and the space that is the city. I want to name that space. A space which is when the engineer comes and talks to the city planner or the government official, that space is not visible. It’s like ‘here’s the technology, here is the space with the problem, the city - and it should work’. Mosty, it doesn’t. I want to recover that invisible gap that exists between the technology and the problem that the city might have - and name it and detect it and work at it.  

Saskia Sassen, author and professor of Sociology and Co-Chair, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.

Thanks to MEDEA co-worker Elisabet M. Nilsson for sharing this link after attending the PICNIC 2011 conference!

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