scholarly journals The Changing Urban Landscape of Chinese Cities: Positive and Negative Impacts of Urban Design Controls on Contemporary Urban Housing

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2839 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Cheshmehzangi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Design ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Chinese Cities ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
Post War ◽  
Alternative Routes

China’s contemporary urban housing is increasingly developed at mass housing scale. In recent decades, it has transformed into large scale urban design approach rather than individual architectural design. This is generally common across major Chinese cities and is also becoming the case in some township regions. The increase in mass urban housing production firstly initiated in early years after establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and was then increased significantly from the 1970s onwards. Similar to the case of post-war European housing development in the 1950s and 1960s, China experienced a rapid transition and huge demand for new urban housing. The two decades of 1980s and 1990s are known as China’s remarkable era for rapid growth and urbanisation, which was unprecedented not only for China but also globally. In this paper, the focus is on urban design controls and their impacts on housing transitions in China by first analysing common housing typologies as well as their challenges and issues and common practices of urban design for housing projects across major cities of China. This paper argues in favour of alternative routes before concluding on the importance of detailed design and new possibilities for revised and re-evaluated urban design controls. This paper offers a set of analytical views on positive and negative impacts of urban design controls on contemporary urban housing in China. It also adds to existing research focused on urban housing transitions in China and directly linked to sectors of urban planning and urban design. This study concludes with possibilities for new directions, focused on: development of low- to midrise urban housing typology, compact urban development, and avoidance of gated community development.

Modernity and Compromise: The Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Warsaw and its Designer Władysław Pieńkowski

Ikonotheka ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 169-197
Author(s):  
Wojciech M. Głowacki
Keyword(s):  
Architectural Design ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Ecclesiastical Architecture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Religious Nature ◽  
The Church

Despite the considerable influence he exerted on post-war church architecture in Poland, the designer Władysław Pieńkowski (1907–1991) is today an altogether forgotten figure. The current paper outlines his biography and his early oeuvre; this is because his experience in designing office blocks and industrial plants gained while working under the supervision of the most outstanding Polish architects of the mid-20th century, was to be of key importance to his later, independent designs for ecclesiastical buildings. The paper focuses on a particularly important work, one which in many ways constitutes a breakthrough in the architect’s career, namely the church of St. Michael the Archangel in the Mokotów district of Warsaw. This was the first entirely new church to be erected in the capital of Poland after the year 1945. Its construction depended on the dynamic changes in the balance of political forces. The church could be built owing to the support of the PAX Association circle, including the direct involvement of Bolesław Piasecki. In spite of their patronage, however, construction works were repeatedly halted and extended over several years, and the architectural design had to be reworked. The paper contains an analysis of three fundamental designs for the church, now held in the St. Michael the Archangel parish archive and in the architect’s records preserved by his heirs. The first design dates from the period of 1948/9–1951, the subsequent one from the year 1954, and the final one from 1956–1961. The evolution of the design moved from the initial continuation of forms typical of the pre-war Modernised Revivalism, through a peculiar reference to Socialist Realism, to rigorous Modernism. The church of St. Michael the Archangel became Pieńkowski’s testing ground; there, he tried out several solutions which he would consistently utilise in the subsequent years of his career, e.g. the large-scale application of prefabricated elements in both the construction and the decoration of the edifice. The construction of this church was concurrent with important events of a political (the Thaw) and religious nature (the Second Vatican Council). Tracing the history of the design for the Warsaw church and clarifying its connections with contemporaneous church architecture in Poland and in Western Europe made it possible to present the key problems faced by the Polish designers of ecclesiastical architecture in the first decades of the People’s Republic of Poland.

scholarly journals Discovering place-informative scenes and objects using social media photos

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 181375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fan Zhang ◽  
Bolei Zhou ◽  
Carlo Ratti ◽  
Yu Liu
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Scenes ◽  
Visual Knowledge ◽  
Historical Architecture ◽  
Police Cars ◽  
The City

Understanding the visual discrepancy and heterogeneity of different places is of great interest to architectural design, urban design and tourism planning. However, previous studies have been limited by the lack of adequate data and efficient methods to quantify the visual aspects of a place. This work proposes a data-driven framework to explore the place-informative scenes and objects by employing deep convolutional neural network to learn and measure the visual knowledge of place appearance automatically from a massive dataset of photos and imagery. Based on the proposed framework, we compare the visual similarity and visual distinctiveness of 18 cities worldwide using millions of geo-tagged photos obtained from social media. As a result, we identify the visual cues of each city that distinguish that city from others: other than landmarks, a large number of historical architecture, religious sites, unique urban scenes, along with some unusual natural landscapes have been identified as the most place-informative elements. In terms of the city-informative objects, taking vehicles as an example, we find that the taxis, police cars and ambulances are the most place-informative objects. The results of this work are inspiring for various fields—providing insights on what large-scale geo-tagged data can achieve in understanding place formalization and urban design.

scholarly journals Verticality and Conflicting Identities in the Contemporary Chinese City: The Urban Development of Suzhou Industrial Park

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Raffaele Pernice
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Industrial Park ◽  
Chinese Cities ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
High Rise ◽  
Residential Communities ◽  
The City

The unprecedented pace of urbanization and modernization of China in the last three decades has led to a huge restructuring of the pre-existent urban fabrics and the progressive reshaping of the city form, its inner structure and urban landscape, by promoting the growth of many new high-rise residential superblocks and suburban commercial, industrial, and business districts built around major Chinese cities. Famous for the UNESCO protected urban gardens, Suzhou has over 2,500 years of history. Like in many Chinese cities, the low-rise urban landscape of the old city clashes visually with the verticality of the contemporary built environment, especially evident in the new residential urban zones of Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP). Focusing on four selected case studies of large-scale housing projects in SIP, the paper explores how these new residential communities have engaged the themes of verticality and high-density living to create extensive constellations of modern but uniform high-rise urban communities. It also considers how and comment about the contradictions within this acontextual modern urban landscape, which mirror to some extent a larger trend in Chinese and other East Asian cities, in a phase of exceptional urban development and economic growth at the turn of the 21st century.

Anti-Jewish Incidents in the Lublin Region in the Early Years after World War II

2008 ◽  
pp. 177-205
Author(s):  
Adam Kopciowski
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Early Years ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Ritual Murder ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
Post War ◽  
Anti Jewish

In the early years following World War II, the Lublin region was one of the most important centres of Jewish life. At the same time, during 1944-1946 it was the scene of anti-Jewish incidents: from anti-Semitic propaganda, accusation of ritual murder, economic boycott, to cases of individual or collective murder. The wave of anti-Jewish that lasted until autumn of 1946 resulted in a lengthy and, no doubt incomplete, list of 118 murdered Jews. Escalating anti-Jewish violence in the immediate post-war years was one of the main factors, albeit not the only one, to affect the demography (mass emigration) and the socio-political condition of the Jewish population in the Lublin region

Scheming

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seán Damer
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Housing Policy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Local Council ◽  
Housing Scheme ◽  
Post War ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Voice ◽  
House Building

This book seeks to explain how the Corporation of Glasgow, in its large-scale council house-building programme in the inter- and post-war years, came to reproduce a hierarchical Victorian class structure. The three tiers of housing scheme which it constructed – Ordinary, Intermediate, and Slum-Clearance – effectively signified First, Second and Third Class. This came about because the Corporation uncritically reproduced the offensive and patriarchal attitudes of the Victorian bourgeoisie towards the working-class. The book shows how this worked out on the ground in Glasgow, and describes the attitudes of both authoritarian housing officials, and council tenants. This is the first time the voice of Glasgow’s council tenants has been heard. The conclusion is that local council housing policy was driven by unapologetic considerations of social class.

The Early Years of Republic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar
Keyword(s):  
Educational Development ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Modern Education ◽  
British Raj ◽  
University Development ◽  
Regulatory Policies ◽  
Education In India ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The University

The chapter is a prologue to the main narrative of the book. It offers an evaluation of Macaulay’s minute which paved the way for introduction of modern education in India, the idea of National System Of Education which dominated Indian thinking on education for over sixty years from the Partition of Bengal (1905) to the Kothari Commission (1964), and the division of responsibility between the Central and Provincial Governments for educational development during British Raj. It offers a succinct account of the key recommendations of the landmark Sarjent Committee on Post-War Educational Development, the Radhakrishnan Commission on University Development, and the Mudaliar Commission on Secondary Education, of the drafting history of the provisions relating to education in the Constitution, the spectacular expansion of access after Independence, the evolution of regulatory policies and institutions like the University Grants Commission (UGC), and of the delicate compromise over language policy.

scholarly journals Světlana: Partisans and Power in Post-War Czechoslovakia

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-31
Author(s):  
Mira Markham
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Rural Region ◽  
Local Dynamics ◽  
Resistance Network ◽  
Official Ideology ◽  
Post War

After the renewal of national independence in 1945 former anti-fascist partisans were among the Czechoslovak Communist Party's most reliable and radical allies. Nevertheless, following the communist coup of 1948, a group of partisans in the rural region of Moravian Wallachia began to mobilise wartime networks and tactics against the consolidating party dictatorship, establishing the Světlana resistance network. Simultaneously, state authorities also drew on partisan practices to reconstitute opposition and resistance in this region as evidence of an international conspiracy that could be understood and prosecuted within the framework of official ideology and propaganda. This article analyses the case of Světlana to examine the politics of people's democracy in Czechoslovakia and explore local dynamics of resistance and repression during the early years of the communist regime.

scholarly journals Resource allocation in the Covid-19 health crisis: are Covid-19 preventive measures consistent with the Rule of Rescue?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian W. März ◽  
Søren Holm ◽  
Michael Schlander
Keyword(s):  
Resource Allocation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Risk Groups ◽  
Healthcare Resources ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Rule Of Rescue ◽  
Post War ◽  
Vaccination Campaigns ◽  
N95 Respirators

AbstractThe Covid-19 pandemic has led to a health crisis of a scale unprecedented in post-war Europe. In response, a large amount of healthcare resources have been redirected to Covid-19 preventive measures, for instance population-wide vaccination campaigns, large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing, and the large-scale distribution of protective equipment (e.g., N95 respirators) to high-risk groups and hospitals and nursing homes. Despite the importance of these measures in epidemiological and economic terms, health economists and medical ethicists have been relatively silent about the ethical rationales underlying the large-scale allocation of healthcare resources to these measures. The present paper seeks to encourage this debate by demonstrating how the resource allocation to Covid-19 preventive measures can be understood through the paradigm of the Rule of Rescue, without claiming that the Rule of Rescue is the sole rationale of resource allocation in the Covid-19 pandemic.

scholarly journals Application of Biomimetics to Architectural and Urban Design: A Review across Scales

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (23) ◽  
pp. 9813 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuta Uchiyama ◽  
Eduardo Blanco ◽  
Ryo Kohsaka
Keyword(s):  
Urban Design ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
Sustainable Society ◽  
Types Of Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Shed Light

Application of biomimetics has expanded progressively to other fields in recent years, including urban and architectural design, scaling up from materials to a larger scale. Besides its contribution to design and functionality through a long evolutionary process, the philosophy of biomimetics contributes to a sustainable society at the conceptual level. The aim of this review is to shed light on trends in the application of biomimetics to architectural and urban design, in order to identify potential issues and successes resulting from implementation. In the application of biomimetics to architectural design, parts of individual “organisms”, including their form and surface structure, are frequently mimicked, whereas in urban design, on a larger scale, biomimetics is applied to mimic whole ecosystems. The overall trends of the reviewed research indicate future research necessity in the field of on biomimetic application in architectural and urban design, including Biophilia and Material. As for the scale of the applications, the urban-scale research is limited and it is a promising research which can facilitate the social implementation of biomimetics. As for facilitating methods of applications, it is instrumental to utilize different types of knowledge, such as traditional knowledge, and providing scientific clarification of functions and systems based on reviews. Thus, interdisciplinary research is required additionally to reach such goals.

scholarly journals Biomimetic Urban and Architectural Design: Illustrating and Leveraging Relationships between Ecosystem Services

Biomimetics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Maibritt Pedersen Zari
Keyword(s):  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Published Data ◽  
Ecological Knowledge ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Spatial Design ◽  
Key Barrier

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.

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