scholarly journals Designing Slow Cities for More Than Human Enrichment: Dog Tales—Using Narrative Methods to Understand Co-Performative Place-Making

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Jane Turner ◽  
Ann Morrison

Designing for slow cities and the need to design for future urban environments that include the more than human is a major priority for our times. This position paper problematizes the nature–culture divide in research about place and place-making, where place is understood to be about the sense of meaning we layer on locations in the physical world. It emphasizes the importance of narrative identity and place-making in the context of designing for urban environmental futures and creation of slow cities. We present an overview of a methodology to re-emplace place-making with animals in the context of slow cities and designing for the more than human. The work discussed here explores the use of narrative inquiry with some early narrative data (in the form of stories) about dog walks and those moments where our companion animals demonstrate agentic place-based meaning-making. The problem of understanding “what animals want” and how they make might ”make sense” of an experience is approached via a focus on a rich exemplar case in order to distinguish between emplotment (narrative meaning-making as self) and emplacement (narrative meaning-making as an aspect of place). This is used to create a framework for future evaluation with a view to revealing how “more than human stories”—just like our own familiar human stories—are also about agency and meaning in place. This recognition has import for ways in which we might approach decentring the human when we frame urban design activities.

Author(s):  
Philip James

Relationships between organisms within urban environments are many and varied. Plants are found in many households, and in addition to the benefits derived from their decorative properties, they also purify the air by removing pollutants. Over the course of history some animals have become domesticated: cows, horses, goats, providing food and transport. Of these, a select group have become companions (cats, dogs, and more exotic pets). Such domesticated and companion animals are an important part of the overall biology of urban environments and these relationships are explored and discussed. Some former companion or domestic animals have become feral, and other animals have never been domesticated and live freely in the urban environment. Some of these animals have beneficial relationships with humans whereas others are parasitic or are considered pests. These relationships are the focus for the later part of the exploration set out in this chapter.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 4875
Author(s):  
Barry Hayes ◽  
Dorota Kamrowska-Zaluska ◽  
Aleksandar Petrovski ◽  
Cristina Jiménez-Pulido

This work discusses recent developments in sharing economy concepts and collaborative co-design technology platforms applied in districts and cities. These developments are being driven both by new technological advances and by increased environmental awareness. The paper begins by outlining the state of the art in smart technology platforms for collaborative urban design, highlighting a number of recent examples. The case of peer-to-peer trading platforms applied in the energy sector is then used to illustrate how sharing economy concepts and their enabling technologies can accelerate efforts towards more sustainable urban environments. It was found that smart technology platforms can encourage peer-to-peer and collaborative activity, and may have a profound influence on the future development of cities. Many of the research and development projects in this area to date have focused on demonstrations at the building, neighbourhood, and local community scales. Scaling these sharing economy platforms up to the city scale and beyond has the potential to provide a number of positive environment impacts. However, significant technical and regulatory barriers to wider implementation exist, and realising this potential will require radical new approaches to the ownership and governance of urban infrastructure. This paper provides a concise overview of the state of the art in this emerging field, with the aim of identifying the most promising areas for further research.


Biomimetics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Maibritt Pedersen Zari

Redesigning and retrofitting cities so they become complex systems that create ecological and cultural–societal health through the provision of ecosystem services is of critical importance. Although a handful of methodologies and frameworks for considering how to design urban environments so that they provide ecosystem services have been proposed, their use is not widespread. A key barrier to their development has been identified as a lack of ecological knowledge about relationships between ecosystem services, which is then translated into the field of spatial design. In response, this paper examines recently published data concerning synergetic and conflicting relationships between ecosystem services from the field of ecology and then synthesises, translates, and illustrates this information for an architectural and urban design context. The intention of the diagrams created in this research is to enable designers and policy makers to make better decisions about how to effectively increase the provision of various ecosystem services in urban areas without causing unanticipated degradation in others. The results indicate that although targets of ecosystem services can be both spatially and metrically quantifiable while working across different scales, their effectiveness can be increased if relationships between them are considered during design phases of project development.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Austin H. Mackesy-Buckley

<p>The main objective of the research is to better understand the concept of human scale and the role that it has to play in the design of our urban environments. The need for a clearer, less ambiguous understanding of human scale is identified as a result of its poor definition and numerous manifestations across a multitude of literature. Human scale is an important part of design that flourished particularly in the middle ages, but has largely been neglected in the industrial and technological ages. Its remergence comes with the return of consideration for the comfort of people. Yet we cannot successfully apply a concept we do not wholly understand. Human scale is therefore redefined as a collective concept that embodies the multitude of existing definitions and treats them as aspects of a larger theory. As a broader but more comprehensive definition it better facilitates the identification and exploration of relationships with what are currently treated as separate urban design objectives, such as enclosure, in an endeavour to better understand the influence of human scale. The design case study proposes a design that tests the relationship between enclosure and human scale. A large site is chosen to display how human scale operates at urban, as well as architectural and detailed levels. Through aspiring to achieve a thorough human scale design, without any exclusive emphasis on enclosure, the process and the outcome still reveal that the theoretical relationship identified in the research (that aspects of human scale foster the formation of enclosure) is unavoidable in design practice. Enclosure simply results as a consequence of thorough human scale design. The research suggests that many urban design objectives may fall under human scale's sphere of influence meaning it is not a singular concept, but an ethic of design that has many desireable consequences. While the idealistic nature of the design may be unrealistic to achieve at present, it highlights the incompatibilities with contemporary approaches and succeeds in generating discussion.</p>


2019 ◽  
pp. 1071-1093
Author(s):  
Gunnar Cerwén

This chapter deals with speaker installations and the potential to use such installations for designing soundscapes in cities. Through employment of a designer's perspective, eight intersections between speaker sounds and the environment in which they are installed are brought forward and discussed. The intersections were originally deduced by the author theoretically but have subsequently also been examined in relation to existing speaker installations. This chapter describes and exemplifies each of the eight intersections, which have been denoted as sound sculpture, sound space, atmospheric design, sound and light, sound binocular, sound postcard, interactive event, and retuning of soundscape. Discussions in the chapter cover the role of speaker-induced sound in relation to the notion of acousmatics as well as urban design.


Author(s):  
Gunnar Cerwén

This chapter deals with speaker installations and the potential to use such installations for designing soundscapes in cities. Through employment of a designer's perspective, eight intersections between speaker sounds and the environment in which they are installed are brought forward and discussed. The intersections were originally deduced by the author theoretically but have subsequently also been examined in relation to existing speaker installations. This chapter describes and exemplifies each of the eight intersections, which have been denoted as sound sculpture, sound space, atmospheric design, sound and light, sound binocular, sound postcard, interactive event, and retuning of soundscape. Discussions in the chapter cover the role of speaker-induced sound in relation to the notion of acousmatics as well as urban design.


Author(s):  
James T. White

This chapter considers the evolving urban form of residential architecture and urban design in Glasgow. It traces the history of the Victorian tenement, the city’s failed modernist redevelopment, and the subsequent emergence of a place-making agenda that has reimagined the tenement for contemporary living. The chapter uses interviews with key informants and a review of archival data to describe the city’s approach to contemporary placemaking at two major urban regeneration projects, Laurieston and Pollokshaws. The chapter argues that both projects attempt to ‘recreate’ lost parts of the Victorian city and erase the city’s experience with modernism, while also mixing social housing with market housing to encourage more complete communities. The paper argues that this approach has led to a creeping reliance on the viability of market housing to deliver social housing and the wider regeneration aims of the project masterplans.


2020 ◽  
Vol 164 ◽  
pp. 04004
Author(s):  
Sergey Norenkov ◽  
Evgenia Krasheninnikova

The purpose of the article is to pose the problem of the universals of urban design and show schematic features of its solution in modeling and planning ensemble spaces of modern cities. An integral, correlatively universal model of urban design is yet to be created in the paradigm of sustainable development of “smart garden-cities” - as opposed to stochastic random development processes of urban territories following some quick-fix projects. Deductive and inductive methods are proposed as a basis. The general methodology is developed in the spectrum of transitions from generalized vision in the logic of universals, to particulars, revealing in the specifics of the unique. In a city that lives its own life, as a kind of faceted, multisided “Philosopher’s stone”, the universals are present everywhere and realized in the consistency of each and every element. Urban ensemble spaces that organically link the unique expressiveness of every historical chronotope gain their own algorithms in the process of urban design, supported by modeling and planning. The main results relating to the productivity in application of the universals as criteria for the estimation of architectural urban design were obtained in the design activities of the LLC “SynARChiya” and in the educational process in Nizhny Novgorod State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document