The Vertical Space Problem

2013 ◽  
pp. 9-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Adam Perdue

Populations in contemporary cities are being measured, analyzed, or represented in less than optimal ways. Conventional methods of measuring density of populations in cities rely on calculating the number of people living within a bounded surface space. This approach fails to account for the multiple floor residential patterns of the contemporary urban landscape and exposes the vertical space problem in population analytics. To create an accurate representation of people in contemporary urban spaces, a move beyond the conventional conception of density is needed. This research aims to find a more appropriate solution to mapping humans in cities by employing a dasymetric method to represent the distribution of people in a city of vertical residential structures. The methodology creates an index to classify the amount of floor space for each person across the extent of the city, a metric called the personal space measure. The personal space measure is juxtaposed with the conventional population density measurements to provide a unique perspective on how population is concentrated across the urban space. The personal space metric demonstrates how improved metrics can be employed to better understand the social and structural landscape of cities. Chicago, with a large population and a high vertical extent, makes an ideal case study to develop a methodology to capture the phenomena of urban living in the 21st century and to explain alternative approaches to accurately and intelligently analyze the contemporary urban space.

Author(s):  
Alessandra Como ◽  
Luisa Smeragliuolo Perrotta ◽  
Carlo Vece

If the morphology and the studies on the urban form are closely related to the social aspects and are responsibility of architects and policy makers, the issue becomes even more complicated if we're talking about cities with a high number of buildings under public ownership or urban fragments with important dimensions. In Italy there is a very rare case of recent foundation that is the neighborhood Monteruscello in the city of Pozzuoli. Built in the 80s to face the bradisism events that had made uninhabitable other city areas, Monteruscello today, for its dimension, can be considered a "city in the city" where the 90% of the buildings are under public ownership. The neighborhood's project is designed by Agostino Renna who had built Monteruscello through analogical composition with fragments of spatial references of other places and cities. The architect has put in the neighborhood - mainly made up of rural areas - its urban model adapting it to the specific geography of places. During the years the neighborhood has never built an own identity becoming one of the most degraded areas of the city. The paper deals with the issue of urban form and morphology today starting from the study of Monteruscello - as imagined by its creator through the critical issues that underlie its design - and through an experimental design of a new agro-urban landscape for the neighborhood that involves three hectares of public green spaces - now abandoned - turning them into agricultural lands to urban use and growth resource. References Renna, A. (ed.) (1980) L’illusione e i cristalli : immagini di architettura per una terra di provincia (Clear, Roma) Giglia, A. (1997) Crisi e ricostruzione di uno spazio urbano : dopo il bradisismo a Pozzuoli : una ricerca antropologica su Monteruscello (Guerini, Milano) Capozzi, R. (ed.) (2016) Agostino Renna : la forma della città (Clean, Napoli) Pagano, L. (ed) (2012) Agostino Renna : rimontaggio di un pensiero sulla conoscenza dell’architettura : antologia di scritti e progetti 1964-1988 (Clean, Napoli)


Author(s):  
Rosario Sommella ◽  
Libera D'Alessandro

The contribution starts from the historical importance of the commercial function in Naples in structuring the urban space, a function to which it is possible largely to trace the long-lasting relationship between consumption and demand for places, as well as many changes in the urban image. Retail organized the city not only on the main streets but also at the scale of non-minoritarian and widespread micro-spaces in the various neighborhoods, in a Naples that, especially in the twentieth century, was transformed according to macro logic very different from today’s. Today the element that seems to most order the structure of places and the urban landscape is consumption, mixed with living and related activities, walking and cultural functions: elements mediated by local authorities, which in turn must deal with new phenomena. The question arises in territorial terms, as retail and consumption (and their protagonists) claim places and public space. The case study will be that of the metropolitan territory in an extended sense and will be analyzed through four scales chosen as the most exemplary of the change: the upgraded/touristified city-centre; the historical centre in its marginal parts; the metropolitan interstices; the small and medium-sized centers at the metropolitan scale. Demands of products and places that become the expression of a new demand for cities bring out the potential, contradictions and conflicts of a Mediterranean city in transition.


Urban History ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
AARON FREUNDSCHUH

Taking the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum as a case study, this article examines the historical relation between crime storytelling and the myriad local struggles for spatial control that animate urban life. Modern Europe's most staggering art heist left city officials and police wholly clueless, and inspired a two-year outpouring of explanatory narratives from Parisians of virtually all social strata. This article shows how, in ostensibly making sense of the ‘impossible’ theft, the city's inhabitants imaginatively wove it into the social fabric of everyday life, thereby bringing the event to bear on a broad range of spatial tensions and rivalries. As they re-fashioned mass press versions of the theft to fit local concerns – both public and intimate – contemporaries understood crime stories as a tool with which to shape the city as they knew it.


Author(s):  
Monika Wasilewicz-Pszczółkowska ◽  
Agnieszka Szczepanska

Current social requirements concerning the living environment tend to be more and more related to the natural values of the urban space. People are aware of the fact that contact with nature is extremely important for of mental and physical health. Therefore, the quality of the natural environment around the place of living influences the quality of life. The studies confirm that the presence of natural elements in the urban space may expressly affect the improvement of this quality. An example of a city with high quality of life is represented by Olsztyn, the capital of the Warmian- Masurian Province, located within the borders of the functional area of the Green Lungs of Poland, which is characterized by the particularly valuable quality of its natural environment. This is confirmed by the results of the social Diagnosis dated 2015, which put Olsztyn in 4th place among the largest Polish cities in the ranking concerning the quality of life. It is also influenced by the quality of the natural environment, which in the case of Olsztyn is manifested in a large number of green areas and standing bodies of water located within the administrative borders of the city. The aim of this paper is to compare the quality of the living environment of individual boroughs of Olsztyn conditioned by the natural elements (greenery, bodies of water, air, noise) in relation to the received public opinion polling results.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Apgar

As destination of choice for many short-term study abroad programs, Berlin offers students of German language, culture and history a number of sites richly layered with significance. The complexities of these sites and the competing narratives that surround them are difficult for students to grasp in a condensed period of time. Using approaches from the spatial humanities, this article offers a case study for enhancing student learning through the creation of digital maps and itineraries in a campus-based course for subsequent use during a three-week program in Berlin. In particular, the concept of deep mapping is discussed as a means of augmenting understanding of the city and its history from a narrative across time to a narrative across the physical space of the city. As itineraries, these course-based projects were replicated on site. In moving from the digital environment to the urban landscape, this article concludes by noting meanings uncovered and narratives formed as we moved through the physical space of the city.


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 004209802097265
Author(s):  
Matthew Thompson ◽  
Alan Southern ◽  
Helen Heap

This article revisits debates on the contribution of the social economy to urban economic development, specifically focusing on the scale of the city region. It presents a novel tripartite definition – empirical, essentialist, holistic – as a useful frame for future research into urban social economies. Findings from an in-depth case study of the scale, scope and value of the Liverpool City Region’s social economy are presented through this framing. This research suggests that the social economy has the potential to build a workable alternative to neoliberal economic development if given sufficient tailored institutional support and if seen as a holistic integrated city-regional system, with anchor institutions and community anchor organisations playing key roles.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Osman Nabay ◽  
Abdul R. Conteh ◽  
Alusaine E. Samura ◽  
Emmanuel S. Hinckley ◽  
Mohamed S. Kamara

The paper examined and brought to the fore the typical characteristic of urban and peri-urban farmers in Freetown and Bo communities which serves as major source of supply of agricultural products into the cities’ markets. The social and environmental aspect and perception of producers involved in urban and peri-urban agriculture was examined. Descriptive statistics and pictograms were used to analyze and present the data. Results indicate that 56.34% never went to formal school and mostly dominated by women, showing that farming became the alternative means of livelihood support for those groups. Crops grown are purely influenced by market orientation—demand and cost, as is evident in Gloucester (lettuce, cabbage and spring onions). Potato leaves were commonly grown in almost all communities, reason being that it serves as common/major sauce/vegetable cooked in every household in Sierra Leone. Maize and rice were featured in Ogoo farm—government supervised land set aside purposely for growing crops to supply the city. Findings also revealed that majority of the farmers are resource poor, judging from calculation about their monthly income earning and available household assets and amenities. About 70.4% of the lands the farmers grow their crops on is leased for production. Except for Gloucester community, when costs of production will be summed, minimal benefit seem to be realized from the farming activities. Even though some of these farmers are engaged in organization, many have limited access to micro financial organization that would probably loan them money to upscale production.


Author(s):  
Юрий Владимирович Преображенский

Рассмотрен вопрос о сущности социокультурного пространства и его пересечении с экономическим пространством города. Показано, что наиболее эффективная организация пространственного взаимодействия данных пространств во многом является географической задачей. Предлагается метод изучения социальных практик населения для локализации точек и линий взаимодействия социокультурной и экономической сфер. Рассмотрены практики, в ходе которых создаются социокультурные ценности, положительно влияющие на экономическое пространство города. Обсуждается проблема влияния пешеходных пространств (наиболее насыщенных практиками) на формирование имиджа города. The question of the essence of the socio-cultural space and its intersection with the economic space of the city is considered. It is shown that the most effective organization of the spatial interaction of these spaces is in many ways a geographic task. A method is proposed for studying the social practices of the population to localize points and lines of interaction between the socio-cultural and economic spheres. The practice is considered in the course of which socio-cultural values are created that have a positive effect on the economic space of the city. The problem of the influence of pedestrian spaces (the most saturated with practices) on the formation of the city's image is discussed.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document