Articles

“Democra-city”: bringing the city back into democratic theory for the 21st century?

Almost 50 years ago Robert Dahl maintained “we can […] reasonably hope 1 day to achieve great democratic cities. As the optimum unit for democracy in the 21st century, the city has a greater claim, I think, th...

Authors: Mauro Tebaldi and Marco Calaresu

Technological city and cultural criticism: challenges, limits, politics

Technology has become a ‘life companion’ in our cities. Thanks to its fascinating power and the huge economic interest behind it, technology has recently reached an ‘epic’ role in our expectations for exiting ...

Authors: Paolo Pileri

Water in Las Vegas: coping with scarcity, financial and cultural constraints

Las Vegas has often been described as offering the paradox of wasting large amounts of water for the tourism industry, whereas it is located in an arid desert area. However, a closer examination shows that it ...

Authors: Frederic Lasserre

Eliante in Sardinia: problematic contextualisation

The paper deals with the complex relationship between tradition and modernity inspired by a fundamental essay by Cesare Brandi, Eliante or On architecture? The dialectic between tradition, supported in the Italia...

Authors: Placido Cherchi

A lifeline and a reason to be: the future of sustainable architecture in Spain and its European context

Architecture and construction in Europe have felt, like few other sectors, the consequences of the financial crisis that set in during 2008. This is only a logical result of their enormous dependency on differ...

Authors: Ir Sander Laudy

Troublesome trade-offs: balancing urban activities and values when securing a city-centre governmental quarter

Homeland security measures increasingly affect urban life and activities. Standoff distance, which prevents unscreened vehicles from approaching within a certain distance of a building, is a widely applied mea...

Authors: Sunniva F Meyer, Sissel H Jore and Kjell W Johansen

Strategic planning as the intentional production of a “Trading Zone”

For a long period of time there has been a kind of mirroring between the development of decision making models in Political science and the concepts and paradigms used in Planning theory. The dialogue has bee...

Authors: Alessandro Balducci

Perceived restoration scale method turned into (used as the) evaluation tool for parks and open green spaces, using Tartu city parks as an example

Estonian parks are well known for their history and dendrology. Usually, city maps show no nuances of the green areas, they could be for example abandoned areas, parks, green squares, usable/non-usable areas f...

Authors: Piret Rennit and Kadri Maikov

Designing the future cities: trends and issues from the interaction design perspective

The design of future cities is a challenging endeavour, to which interaction design can contribute by applying its well-established principles and methods. Interaction design methods aim at optimising interact...

Authors: Simone Pozzi and Sebastiano Bagnara

Analysis of land use and land cover spatial pattern based on Markov chains modelling

Population growth and the expansion of cities together with an increase in environmental pollution from human activity create non-principled changes in vegetative cover and land use in forestland built-up area...

Authors: Jafar Mirkatouli, Ali Hosseini and Abdolhamid Neshat

The challenge of rural life nostalgia: barriers in redevelopment of Malay Reserve Land (MRL) in Klang Valley

The development of Malay reserve land is a nationwide issue which can be overcome through better understanding of the existing barriers. While many barriers have been examined, the challenges relating to land ...

Authors: Noor-Rosly Hanif, Wan Nor Azriyati, Hamzah Abdul-Rahman, Chen Wang and Lincoln C Wood

Gambling on land fill and infrastructure to reposition Macao in the Pearl River Delta

Emerging regions worldwide increasingly involve cross-border relations. The Pearl River Delta (PRD) in south China in particular has been the focus of investigation in the recent literature on multiple jurisdi...

Authors: John Zacharias

Local security policies and the protection of territory: an analysis of the Italian experience (2007-2009)

This paper explores the territorial dimension of local security policies, with reference to the “Security Pacts” signed in Italy between 2007 and 2009. These Security Pacts are an innovative instrument introdu...

Authors: Marco Calaresu and Mauro Tebaldi

An activity theory of research methods in architecture and urbanism

Using activity theory this article argues that intentional activities are central to knowledge-production and may be compared to methods in research, and the worldview within which these activities are perceiv...

Authors: Michael AR Biggs

Urban public space between fragmentation, control and conflict

The article is focused on the different tendencies affecting urban public space in contemporary cities. It is based on a reflexion on some emerging themes in the recent debate in urban studies, paying particul...

Authors: Alfredo Mela

Ecological planning as an inner-city revitalisation agenda for Harare, Zimbabwe

This article examines approaches for integrating ecological thought in inner-city revitalisation with a special focus on the inner-city of Harare. It is an exploration and possible (re-)framing of the garden s...

Authors: Abraham Matamanda and Innocent Chirisa

A spatial strategy for the production of place in two German cities - Urban design interventions as a driver for spatial transformation

The paper introduces a new methodological perspective to the process of urban design, which reacts to the increasing interdependence of multipe scales in almost all facets of life. The production of place in t...

Authors: Anne Wiese, Agnes Förster, Lukas Gilliard and Alain Thierstein

Towards a polyphonic urban score

By drawing on literature from various disciplinary fields, in particular branches of geography, philosophy, urban design and planning, the article investigates the deep spatial transformations affecting cities...

Authors: Lidia Decandia

Stratigraphies: archaeology as a threshold and passage

Authors: Antonello Marotta

Rethinking waste as a resource: insights from a low-income community in Accra, Ghana

Conventional solid waste management protocols and thinking generally tend to assume that waste already exits and therefore needs to be managed. Consequently, most models of solid waste management, especially i...

Authors: Martin Oteng-Ababio

Municipal regulations and the use of public space: local ordinances in Italy

The article discusses the regulation of public space with specific reference to municipal by-laws. It focuses on the case of municipal “ordinances” in Italy. The basic features of the municipal by-laws will be...

Authors: Stefano Moroni and Francesco Chiodelli

To design is to design oneself

This article begins with the analogy between work in philosophy and work in architecture proposed by Wittgenstein, based on the idea that in both cases we are faced with work on ourselves and on the constructi...

Authors: Silvano Tagliagambe

What ever is happening to urban planning and urban design? Musings on the current gap between theory and practice

Over the last decades, the gap between disciplinary dreams and real outcomes has been growing in the field of urban planning and urban design. Great difficulties are evident in problematic contexts as the Ital...

Authors: Pier Carlo Palermo

State, citizenship, and common good: British idealists’ influence on social philosophy and planning culture

This paper is part of an investigation of the relationship between planning and citizenship, and considers the contribution of British Idealists because it advances of almost a century the contribution given b...

Authors: Luigi Mazza

The future of the city from Science to Science Fiction and back (and beyond)

There are many ways of imagining the future of the city. We can start with the growth of urbanisation, which envisages that in 2050 more than two-thirds of the world population will live in cities. And from th...

Authors: Arnaldo Cecchini

Public art and the making of urban space

Following in the footsteps of seminal studies like E. W. Soja Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000) or Miwon Kwon One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (2004),...

Authors: Félix Duque

Spatial primitives and knowledge organization in planning and architecture: some experimental notes

Cities and territories share structural references to a common environmental ontology, in which space perception and representation play a major role. Many human abilities deal with space management, whose ont...

Authors: Dino Borri, Domenico Camarda and Rossella Stufano

The territory as an intermediate space

Authors: Giovanni Maciocco