Con este artículo visual proponemos que, en la actualidad, hemos abandonado nuestra condición de animales sociales para adoptar un gregarismo desvinculado, propiciado por tecnologías que conectan en tiempo real pero disgregan espacialmente. Esta individualización erosiona la coexistencia con otras especies y nos aleja de aquel pasado en que nos concebíamos como animales políticos. En este marco, la memoria emerge como herramienta esencial: aunque parece individual, se configura en marcos colectivos y en relación con cuerpos, prácticas y territorios. Cuando se despoja de esa interacción social —como sucede al museificarla— pierde su sentido compartido y se vacía de contenido, reducida a fragmentos sin vínculo crítico con la temporalidad. Frente a ello, desde el Sur Global, las memorias colectivas se manifiestan como campos epistémicos complejos que confrontan los modelos lineales de progreso. Lejos de ser residuos del pasado, permiten imaginar futuros posibles y sostienen la cultura, el pensamiento crítico y la creación como prácticas vivas y relacionales.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Anthropology
A smart city is essential for sustainable urban development. In addition to citizen engagement, a smart city enables connected infrastructure, data-driven decision making and smart mobility. For most of these features, network data plays a critical role, particularly from public Wi-Fi infrastructures, where cities can benefit from optimized services such as public transport management and the safety and efficiency of large events. One of the biggest concerns in developing a smart city is using secure and private data. This is particularly relevant in the case of Wi-Fi network data, where sensitive information can be collected. This paper specifically addresses the problem of sharing secure data to enhance the quality of the Wi-Fi network in a city. Despite the high importance of this type of data, related work focuses on improving the safety of mobility patterns, targeting only the protection of MAC addresses. On the opposite side, we provide a practical methodology for safeguarding all attributes in real Wi-Fi network data. This study was developed in collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of legal experts, data custodians and technical privacy specialists, resulting in high-quality data. On top of that, we show how to integrate the legal considerations for secure data sharing. Our approach promotes data-driven innovation and privacy awareness in the context of smart city initiatives, which have been tested in a real scenario.
Are there multiple equilibria in the spatial economy? This paper develops a unified framework that integrates systems of cities and regional models to address this question within a general geographic space. A key feature is the endogenous formation of commuting areas linking a continuum of residential locations to a finite set of potential business districts. Using tools from computational geometry and shape optimization, we derive sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of spatial equilibria. For plausible parameter values, urban location is indeterminate, but, conditional on an urban system, city sizes are uniquely determined. The framework reconciles seemingly conflicting empirical findings on the role of geography and scale economies in shaping the spatial economy.
This contribution aims to offer a reflection on the main pedagogical and organisational profiles of Italian climatic holiday camps at the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on three Milanese experiences: two of them, the Cura Climatica Gratuita ai Fanciulli Gracili, alunni delle scuole elementari comunali di Milano (for the pupils of municipal elementary schools in Milan), and the Colonie climatiche autunnali per fanciulli e fanciulle (for boys and girls), have as an emblematic connecting element the figure of the doctor and philanthropist Malachia De Cristoforis (1832–1915), a protagonist of the lively international debate on holiday camps taking place in those years; the third experience, the cure climatiche organised for the young guests of the Martinitt Orphanage, although a somewhat peculiar initiative in terms of the type of beneficiaries, shares some important traits with the previous ones, including the philanthropic character and the centrality attributed to immersion in nature, an element that ideally places the camps in the track of a centuries-old pedagogical reflection.
Architectural drawing and design, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
In the last decade, urban creativity has manifested itself in many proximity spaces, in particular, among its visual expressions, with the ‘new muralism’ (unlike ‘graffiti writing’ and ‘street art’). This has corresponded with an often-desired resignification of public spaces that has affected the geographically, politically and linguistically more marginal territories. In such uncertain areas, networks of meaning have developed, i.e., homogeneous spaces which, simultaneously or diachronically, have begun to concentrate a plurality of works in relation to the territory to which they belong and the community. This phenomenon has been investigated in the following work, which proposes the definition of urban creativity systems. The work also deepens, among the many case studies, the urban creativity program for the social called “Parco dei Murales” conceived and promoted by INWARD - National Observatory on Urban Creativity, launched in collaboration with the resident community in a social housing complex in the Ponticelli district in Naples.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Neave O'Clery, Juan Chaparro, Andres Gomez-Lievano
et al.
What drives formal employment creation in developing cities? We find that larger cities, home to an abundant set of complex industries, employ a larger share of their working age population in formal jobs. We propose a hypothesis to explain this pattern, arguing that it is the organised nature of formal firms, whereby workers with complementary skills are coordinated in teams, that enables larger cities to create more formal employment. From this perspective, the growth of formal employment is dependent on the ability of a city to build on existing skills to enter new complex industries. To test our hypothesis, we construct a variable which captures the skill-proximity of cities' current industrial base to new complex industries, termed 'complexity potential'. Our main result is that complexity potential is robustly associated with subsequent growth of the formal employment rate in Colombian cities.
This paper considers a scenario in city navigation: an AI agent is provided with language descriptions of the goal location with respect to some well-known landmarks; By only observing the scene around, including recognizing landmarks and road network connections, the agent has to make decisions to navigate to the goal location without instructions. This problem is very challenging, because it requires agent to establish self-position and acquire spatial representation of complex urban environment, where landmarks are often invisible. In the absence of navigation instructions, such abilities are vital for the agent to make high-quality decisions in long-range city navigation. With the emergent reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), a tempting baseline is to prompt LLMs to "react" on each observation and make decisions accordingly. However, this baseline has very poor performance that the agent often repeatedly visits same locations and make short-sighted, inconsistent decisions. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel agentic workflow featured by its abilities to perceive, reflect and plan. Specifically, we find LLaVA-7B can be fine-tuned to perceive the direction and distance of landmarks with sufficient accuracy for city navigation. Moreover, reflection is achieved through a memory mechanism, where past experiences are stored and can be retrieved with current perception for effective decision argumentation. Planning uses reflection results to produce long-term plans, which can avoid short-sighted decisions in long-range navigation. We show the designed workflow significantly improves navigation ability of the LLM agent compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.
El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las transformaciones en los sistemas de financiación de vivienda entre la creación de las corporaciones de ahorro y vivienda (CAV) en 1972 y la crisis hipotecaria de 1999, desde la perspectiva de las transformaciones en la forma de acumulación de capital en Colombia. Para ello, en la primera parte del documento se esboza brevemente el papel del Estado en el proceso de acumulación originaria de capital en el sector de la construcción a través de instituciones públicas de fomento y crédito hipotecario. En la segunda parte, se aborda la relación entre el agotamiento prematuro del proceso industrializador en Colombia y la conformación monopólica del sector capitalista de producción de vivienda, sellada por la aparición de las CAV y la Unidad de Poder Adquisitivo Constante (UPAC), a comienzos de los años setenta. En la última sección, se estudia el significado económico del programa de subsidios a la demanda, la liquidación de organismos públicos como el Instituto de Crédito Territorial (ICT) y el Banco Central Hipotecario (BCH) y la crisis hipotecaria de finales de los años noventa.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Este trabajo argumenta que Thomas Robert Malthus, con su An essay on the principle of population (Ensayo sobre el principio de la población), publicado en 1798, y Charles R. Darwin, con la publicación en 1859 de On the origin of species by means of natural selection (El origen de las especies mediante la selección natural), nos previnieron de los riesgos que se avecinaban para la supervivencia de las especies, incluida la especie humana, Homo sapiens, y nos enseñaron con sus criterios educativos que la educación era una herramienta indispensable para llevar una forma de vida que nos alejaría del desastre. Desde que Darwin publicó el Origen de las especies, su teoría fue introducida en las aulas inglesas y poco después se fue enseñando en los distintos países. En España, los conceptos darwinistas se incluyeron por primera vez en un libro de texto de ciencias naturales para la segunda enseñanza en el año 1867 y, a partir de entonces, la enseñanza de la teoría de la evolución fue muy heterogénea. Dado que las ideas de Darwin afectan a todos los campos del saber, tanto científicos como sociales y humanísticos, este artículo propone que su enseñanza se presta a ser implementada con una metodología interdisciplinar y en edades tempranas, para que la población pueda adquirir desde los primeros niveles educativos una visión holística y multidisciplinar de la vida.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Anthropology
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) can potentially improve urban living by reducing accidents, increasing transportation accessibility and equity, and decreasing emissions. Realizing these promises requires the innovations of AV driving behaviors, city plans and infrastructure, and traffic and transportation policies to join forces. However, the complex interdependencies among AV, city, and policy design issues can hinder their innovation. We argue the path towards better AV cities is not a process of matching city designs and policies with AVs' technological innovations, but a process of iterative prototyping of all three simultaneously: Innovations can happen step-wise as the knot of AV, city, and policy design loosens and tightens, unwinds and reties. In this paper, we ask: How can innovators innovate AVs, city environments, and policies simultaneously and productively toward better AV cities? The paper has two parts. First, we map out the interconnections among the many AV, city, and policy design decisions, based on a literature review spanning HCI/HRI, transportation science, urban studies, law and policy, operations research, economy, and philosophy. This map can help innovators identify design constraints and opportunities across the traditional AV/city/policy design disciplinary bounds. Second, we review the respective methods for AV, city, and policy design, and identify key barriers in combining them: (1) Organizational barriers to AV-city-policy design collaboration, (2) computational barriers to multi-granularity AV-city-policy simulation, and (3) different assumptions and goals in joint AV-city-policy optimization. We discuss two broad approaches that can potentially address these challenges, namely, "low-fidelity integrative City-AV-Policy Simulation (iCAPS)" and "participatory design optimization".
The paper focuses on an experiment in researching and teaching design carried out at the Architecture of Interiors Design Studio at the Polytechnic School of Architecture in Milan. The studio addressed the theme of sacred space, understood as a dwellable place, and able to welcome its users in the fulfillment of gestures that express its most profound being. The hypothesis underlying the experiment is that the design of sacred space causes students to move beyond some contingent themes and to focus their design attention on the project of a hospitable form capable of accommodating the gesture of the person who dwells in it. It also calls into question the issue of worship spaces, not only as a problem of space for one specific religion to be juxtaposed or composed with those of other religions, but as a problem of space, or better a "system of spaces" on which religions can look out and experience together their specificity and each other's differences. The experience demonstrated an interest in the theme for students in architecture who could experience the possibility of understanding the coexistence of these spaces that, while traditionally radically different, retain a unified foundation capable, if grasped, of bringing together other gestures. Its outcomes are of value beyond the specifics of the sacred space project and allowed, from our point of view, to effectively practice some cross-cutting architectural themes that are valid regardless of the subject.
Architectural drawing and design, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Este ensaio parte de alguns conceitos de cidade apresentados por alguns estudiosos (Mumford, Benveniste, Rapoport, Heidegger, Volli) para compreender a sua fenomenologia. A seguir elabora-se o conceito de textualização da cidade especialmente a partir de Lotman e Hjelmslev. A erradicação de Itueta (Minas Gerais-BR) e a remodelação de West End (Boston-USA) são analisadas como exemplos de mudanças radicais nas textualizações urbanas e seus efeitos sobre seus moradores. Os efeitos culturais, sociológicos e psicológicos das mudanças – luto, patologias, desconforto – são discutidos, demonstrando como a cidade também é o resultado de um texto – escrita e testemunho – que estabelece relações profundamente significativas para a vida de seus moradores.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Sandro M. Reia, P. Suresh C. Rao, Marc Barthelemy
et al.
We show here that population growth, resolved at the county level, is spatially heterogeneous both among and within the U.S. metropolitan statistical areas. Our analysis of data for over 3,100 U.S. counties reveals that annual population flows, resulting from domestic migration during the 2015 - 2019 period, are much larger than natural demographic growth, and are primarily responsible for this heterogeneous growth. More precisely, we show that intra-city flows are generally along a negative population density gradient, while inter-city flows are concentrated in high-density core areas. Intra-city flows are anisotropic and generally directed towards external counties of cities, driving asymmetrical urban sprawl. Such domestic migration dynamics are also responsible for tempering local population shocks by redistributing inflows within a given city. This "spill-over" effect leads to a smoother population dynamics at the county level, in contrast to that observed at the city level. Understanding the spatial structure of domestic migration flows is a key ingredient for analyzing their drivers and consequences, thus representing a crucial knowledge for urban policy makers and planners.
Seth Karten, Aravind Sivaramakrishnan, Edgar Granados
et al.
This paper aims to improve the path quality and computational efficiency of kinodynamic planners used for vehicular systems. It proposes a learning framework for identifying promising controls during the expansion process of sampling-based motion planners for systems with dynamics. Offline, the learning process is trained to return the highest-quality control that reaches a local goal state (i.e., a waypoint) in the absence of obstacles from an input difference vector between its current state and a local goal state. The data generation scheme provides bounds on the target dispersion and uses state space pruning to ensure high-quality controls. By focusing on the system's dynamics, this process is data efficient and takes place once for a dynamical system, so that it can be used for different environments with modular expansion functions. This work integrates the proposed learning process with a) an exploratory expansion function that generates waypoints with biased coverage over the reachable space, and b) proposes an exploitative expansion function for mobile robots, which generates waypoints using medial axis information. This paper evaluates the learning process and the corresponding planners for a first and second-order differential drive systems. The results show that the proposed integration of learning and planning can produce better quality paths than kinodynamic planning with random controls in fewer iterations and computation time.
Characterizing the structure of cities constitutes an important task since the identification of similar cities can promote sharing of respective experiences. In the present work, we consider 20 European cities from 5 respective countries and with comparable populations, each of which characterized in terms of four topological as well as one geometrical feature. These cities are then mapped into respective networks by considering their pairwise similarity as gauged by the coincidence methodology, which consists of combining the Jaccard and interiority indices. The methodology incorporates a parameter alpha that can control the relative contribution of features with the same or opposite signs to the overall similarity. Interestingly, the maximum modularity cities network is obtained for a non-standard parameter configuration, showing that it could not be obtained were not for the adoption of the parameter alpha. The network with maximum modularity presents four communities that can be directly related to four of the five considered countries, corroborating not only the effectiveness of the adopted features and similarity methodology, but also indicating a surprising tendency of the cities from a same country of being similar, while differing from cities from other countries. The coincidence methodology was then applied in order to investigate the effect of several features combinations on the respectively obtained networks, leading to a highly modular features network containing four main communities that can be understood as the main possible models for the considered cities.