The rapidly intensifying effects of climate change on urban settlements demand that cities move to the forefront of resilience planning. Climate extremes, from heatwaves to flooding, are increasingly testing the adaptability limits of urban systems and the vulnerability of their populations. Recognizing the unique position of cities, the IPCC’s seventh assessment cycle has prioritized urban areas in its upcoming Special Report on Climate Change and Cities. The IPCC report underscores the potential of cities to act as agents of climate adaptation and provides a framework for cities to build climate-resilient systems. Cities are positioned to pioneer practical, integrative solutions that blend climate sciences with urban planning, establishing frameworks that align economic growth, health equity, environmental sustainability, social justice, and effective governance. This opinion piece explores how cities, by positioning themselves as hubs for innovation, policy reform, and community collaboration, can transform climate vulnerabilities into opportunities for community resilience and sustainability, especially by becoming more-than-human cities, setting examples on the global stage.
The comparison between EU cohesion policies on public works as a common good and Hong Kong’s policies on public-private participation to preserve and revitalise architectural heritage highlights cultural and operational differences. While Europe often adopts an inclusive approach, involving the communities mainly in the valorisation of public spaces, Hong Kong implements models more focused on public-private partnership to preserve the public real estate. Thus, the adaptive reuse of public works at the two different scales transforms public works into catalysts of prosperity for the community by preserving historical memory, but has a different impact on shared value generation, social cohesion enhancement, sustainable development promotion, and collective identity valorisation. The contribution analyses the two models (centrifugal and centripetal), focusing on objectives and implementation tools.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Julia Roizemberg Bahiana, Maria Vitória Ribeiro Gomes, Virgínia Maria Nogueira de Vasconcellos
et al.
A restauração da vegetação é considerada importante ação estrutural capaz de equilibrar as necessidades humanas e a dinâmica natural de corpos hídricos afetados pelo crescimento urbano desordenado. Tendo em vista que praticamente todos os rios já sofreram algum impacto ambiental, destaca-se não somente a importância de projetos de requalificação em rios urbanos degradados, como a necessidade de monitoramento temporal das soluções implementadas. Portanto, a pesquisa tem o objetivo de explorar o uso dos Sistemas de Informação Geográfica em um projeto de requalificação fluvial brasileiro (Projeto Pró-Tijuco, em São Paulo), de modo a investigar o sucesso da implantação do projeto paisagístico e demonstrar as possibilidades de uso da ferramenta. A metodologia de análise conta com o sensoriamento remoto sobre imagens satélite Planet, no software de geoprocessamento ArcGIS. A densidade vegetativa foi mapeada por método de classificação supervisionada e, em seguida, aplicou-se o índice NDVI. Os resultados permitiram constatar o espraiamento da vegetação associado à requalificação fluvial, bem como uma expressiva evolução da vegetação dentro do recorte temporal avaliado. Por fim, os mapeamentos exploram a importância da vegetação em projetos de requalificação fluvial, visto sua capacidade de impactar positivamente no monitoramento da qualidade do entorno urbano.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Focando no comportamento espacial de visitantes, investiga-se uma tipologia de espaço expositivo com arranjo sequencial de ambientes, denominada “galeria progressiva” (GP). Resultado de uma tese de doutoramento, propõe-se a interface entre neurociência e sintaxe espacial. Avalia-se o impacto de GPs na função atencional pela aferição da resposta de foco em visitantes em galerias virtuais. As hipóteses iniciais sobre GPs foram: campos visuais são altamente inteligíveis; leiautes deterministas levam à visitação com maior foco e o espaço impacta decisivamente na visita, sobretudo quando rotas são limitadas. São analisados leiautes hipotéticos simples, exemplares históricos e duas GPs modernas, o Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum e o Museu do Crescimento Ilimitado. Posteriormente, procede a análise de variações complexas e, finalmente, a avaliação de percursos de visitantes e captura de foco durante navegação virtual em galerias, cerne deste artigo. O “Grau de Progressividade” e o “Índice de Variação de Picos de Foco” são introduzidos, levando à relação de proximidade entre geometria espacial e respostas neurais, que pode fornecer valiosos dados para projetos curatoriais e arquitetônicos. Resultados revelaram que a coexistência de inteligibilidade, boa intervisibilidade e geometria definidora de rotas, diferente da hipótese, não levou a respostas com maior foco, apontando para o paradoxo em questão.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
The contemporary debate on ecology is largely influenced by the theses of the French anthropologist Philippe Descola, who in his masterpiece published in 2005 “Par-delà nature et culture” describes how different cultures relate to what the West calls nature1. Nature, in this framework, is itself a cultural element differently accessible according to the way it is thought and described. This is a very important contribution and not only for European anthropology. However, one of the theses of this book is particularly problematic: the one that leads Descola to recognize in Western culture a “naturalist” attitude, that is, objectifying the rest of non-human living beings. In the West, “nature” would be unified and defined by its very absence of soul or spirit, whereas other cultures recognize a form of subjectivity in everything that lives and for this very reason are forced to think in “nature” a “cultural” plurality that the West does not perceive. The problematic aspect of this thesis is the idea that animism, the attitude that recognizes the existence of a mind or self-consciousness even outside of humanity or a small number of animals, would be impossible or a minority in Western cultures. To this hypothesis, the one that Western culture devoid of any animist sensibility, was actually already opposed a few years before the publication of Descola’s masterpiece another great European anthropologist, Alfred Gell. At the end of the last century, Gell published a masterpiece entitled “Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory”2, in which he described the cultural forms through which, even in Western culture, becomes possible to attribute agency to artifacts and objects and then practice a form of structural animism for our societies, even if irreflective and unconscious. First of all, there is a very common form of domestic and everyday animism, thanks to which we attribute personality to things: this is the case of children and their relationship with dolls and soft toys, but also of adults, every time they are surprised to talk to a car or a computer. It is, however, an ironic and metastable attitude: in this kind of behavior, often the dominant attitude is that of as if, of play, of fiction, which means that the human subject who, for example, talks to objects or places himself in front of them as if he were in front of another subject, can regularly enter and leave this kind of posture. The attribution of subjectivity is not an act that obliges us to some consequence and has no temporal continuity.
Yet there is another form of animism, deeper and more deeply rooted, in which the recognition of the subjective character of objects is neither ironic nor unstable: this is art. In Western society there is a sphere in which we are all unconsciously but invariably animists: we actually call art that cultural space in which we relate to objects as if they were subjects. It is enough to think of what happens in a museum: a museum, after all, is a warehouse full of old objects for which we have a sort of special veneration. Every day, in the “western” world, millions of people enter these enormous storerooms and come across more or less finished portions of linen cloth covered with layers of pigment, or structures of steel, marble, wood: yet, instead of seeing only geometric shapes of extended matter (as the cultural attitude that Descola calls naturalism would presuppose) they see the presence of a subject or a soul, they read opinions, or a vision of the world of someone who existed hundreds or thousands of years before. When we deal with an artistic artifact (but we could also say when we are in front of a book or a written page), we accept the idea that it contains a psychological, emotional, mental intensity that is present regardless of the non-anatomical nature of the material in which it insists. That is to say, in front of artistic objects we are all animists.
We don’t even need to go into museums to be one. We are animist even before we open our front door. The British anthropologist who founded material anthropology, Daniel Miller, published a very nice book a few years ago about the way we accumulate things at home, called “The Comfort of Things”3. He looked at some thirty apartments on one street in London and described the different ways people use objects to furnish their homes. Miller considers that this form of choices is a kind of small personal cosmology: deciding what to keep at home and what to throw away is not just an aesthetic or economic decision, it is a cosmological decision, because it involves trying to reconstruct the world differently. And vice versa, everything in the house seems to exude the personality of those who live there: things take on the same status as their subjects. From this point of view, houses are vernacular spaces of animism: places where matter is always imbued with soul and subjectivity. Home is that space in which we are used to relating to everything objective as if it were the presence of something subjective4. Once again, we are animists, without needing to be conscious of it.
Art, design and architecture are, in this sense, immense archives and repositories of collective animism that educate us to see subjects where anyone else sees only objects; they accustom us to confer agentivity on any portion of matter, to relate to the world as if it were populated by souls different from our own. In the gaze of these three forms of knowledge, matter is endowed with a spiritual life that is the same as that which allows us to be conscious, sentient and self-reflective. This is why the ecological problem must be transformed into an aesthetic problem. A great Australian eco-feminist who lived in the last century, Val Plumwood, had identified the main reason for the ecological crisis with the absence of animism or “panpsychism” in Western culture: it is because we are unable to recognize the subjectivity of plants, animals and bacteria that we are guilty of genocide on a planetary scale5. The solution, according to Plumvood, would be to disperse the creativity and agentivity, that theology has attributed only to God and his copy – the human species – to all the inhabitants of the earth, allowing to consider evolution itself as «the proof of the existence of a mind present in nature, of the intelligence that implies the elaboration and differentiation of species». It would therefore be a matter of extending to nature the supplementary animism with which art, architecture and design require ourselves to relate to our own artifacts.
Yet the analysis of these unconscious forms of animism or “european” panpsychism does not end here. In fact, in these cases we are dealing with positions that allow us to relate socially to matter as if it were endowed with agentivity and subjectivity, without constructing a real ontology. But there are other examples, more radical, in which, even if unconsciously, a form of ontological animism has been achieved. Bruno Latour had suggested some years ago that even science is an immense reservoir of unconscious animism. Applying to scientific laboratories the method that ethnography of the last century applied to non-European societies without writing, Latour realized that science, precisely where it keeps repeating that there is an ontological divide between subjects and objects, never stops transgressing this division. Scientists cannot help but relate to machines and matter as if they were subjects: they attribute to them the ability to act but also the ability to speak. We do the same every time we think that the thermometer “tells us” our temperature. Thus, Pasteur’s great revolution was more political than purely ontological: it was more a question of recognizing the political agentiveness of microbes than of discovering their mere existence. Science does not cease to ontologically constitute its objects into subjects, even if it claims exactly the opposite. More generally, if European modernity affirms a fundamental metaphysical division (a constitution in Latour’s words) between subjects and objects, it does not cease to confuse the two categories and make objects live in the manner of subjects. In some way we have always been animists6. That is, we should stop linking the animist attitude to a specific culture or era: it is a universal attitude that is proper to any living being.
Latour’s insight is however important for another reason. If science always does the opposite of what it says, that is, if, while claiming to relate to what it studies as objects, it actually treats them as if they were subjects, then we must read any scientific paper as if it were a huge exercise in ethnography of the non-human. Whether it be botany or zoology, virology or electronics, computer science or physics, everything we have grouped under the somewhat claudicant rubric of natural science is nothing but an investigation of the behavior of subjects who do not share our form. Often, exactly like the anthropologists of the last century, we have pretended to derive universal rules from their behavior; yet beyond the conclusions, we should grasp in this literature only an exercise of falsetto in which ethnography does its best not to appear as such, but a sort of ventriloquism of the non-human by interposed person.
And it is through this point of observation that the world becomes animated: there is no need to penetrate further into the matter of this world, there is no need to add discoveries to what we know, there is no need, above all, to deny inanely a culture in order to invoke in a simplistic way the conversion to another culture. It is enough to observe differently the knowledge that surrounds us and grasp in them their own reality: the knowledge that surrounds us will also become deposits of animism that will allow us to recognize the presence of subjects where we used to see only objects.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
This paper contextualizes Abuja’s planning history (Nigeria, 1979-1981) and Palmas (Brazil, 1989), considering networks of knowledge, travelling ideas, and the planners’ tool-kit. It analyses these new capital cities’ layouts through a more global reading of planning history. It argues that their plans, created out of political and economic imperatives and entrusted with transformative expectations, did not abandon the hegemonic modernist models in post-modernist, post-colonial times, regardless of the planners’ backgrounds. Global ideas concealed cultural sensibilities in both cases as local and foreign professionals developed comparable planning proposals in equivalent responses to the international frameworks.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Andréa Da Rosa Sampaio, Guilherme Meirelles Mesquita de Mattos
O avanço dos recursos tecnológicos na era digital tem favorecido os estudos urbanos em termos de ferramentas e metodologias cada vez mais apuradas para a compreensão dos fenômenos contemporâneos, dentre elas as técnicas de geoprocessamento em plataformas SIG (Sistemas de Informação Geográfica). A ampliação desmesurada de informação para os estudos urbanos suscita uma reflexão sobre instrumentos metodológicos na era digital. Partindo do pressuposto que a cidade contemporânea é histórica, e portanto, um acúmulo materializado de idealizações passadas, busca-se evidenciar a relevância da análise morfológica e do instrumental da história urbana potencializado por tecnologias digitais, para a compreensão da cidade contemporânea em sua complexidade, reconhecendo sua historicidade, a partir de seu processo urbano. Para demonstrar o potencial da articulação entre a cartografia digital em plataforma SIG e as abordagens clássicas da morfologia urbana, adota-se como objeto empírico a Área Central da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, selecionando casos de áreas tensionadas pelos vestígios de projetos realizados no século XX, para refletir sobre as possibilidades da cartografia digital na decodificação do emaranhado de projetos e desígnios que deram origem ao palimpsesto urbano que estrutura a Área Central Carioca.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Open space is an important element of an urban area as well as to its urban community. It is often a public space whose inherent functions are to accommodate both recreation and relaxation related activities. The provision of public open space is fundamental, not only for these roles but also as part of significant deed in the development of urban character. Taking Taman Indonesia Kaya of Kota Semarang of Java Island in Indonesia, as its case study, this paper goes back to 47 years ago, when this public space was re-made up. Prior to its make-over, this park had been named after Taman Minister Supeno. The park was often associated with negative images which were rather unfortunate, considering its location in the heart of Semarang’s Town Centre. This study aims to examine in depth the basic elements of Taman Indonesia Kaya as a public space. This research implements a qualitative research method supported by field observation and literature review. The transformation of Taman Indonesia Kaya has indeed provided a significant change in its physical quality, which in turn has brought continuous improvement to its capacity to serve public needs. This includes the provision of spatial elements of public space that deliver comfort, relaxation, passive and active engagements, as well as discovery. Although each of these attributes may not be endowed with an individual physical element, the overall functions associated with Taman Indonesia Kaya as a public space is maintained.
Keywords: Taman Indonesia Kaya; open space; public space
Abstrak
Ruang terbuka sebagai salah satu elemen perancangan kota menjadi bagian penting dalam kehidupan masyarakat dalam perannya sebagai ruang rekreasi dan relaksasi. Dengan demikian pemenuhan persyaratan utama sebuah ruang terbuka publik menjadi satu hal yang harus terpenuhi agar ruang tersebut mampu mewadahi aktivitas masyarakat, berkarakter dan berfungsi sebagaimana mestinya. Sejak awal pembangunannya 47 tahun silam, sebelum nama Taman Indonesia Kaya disematkan, Taman Menteri Supeno merupakan salah satu taman kota yang identik dengan citra negatif. Kondisi tersebut sangat disayangkan mengingat lokasinya berada pada jantung Kota Semarang. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengkaji kriteria ruang terbuka publik berdasarkan kebutuhan pengguna Taman Indonesia Kaya. Dengan demikian, penelitian ini akan memberikan manfaat berupa gagasan baru dalam peningkatan kualitas Taman Indonesia Kaya melalui pemenuhan kebutuhan dasar pengguna taman. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian kualitatif yang mendeskripsikan fenomena pada lokasi studi berdasarkan observasi langsung dan studi literatur. Transformasi Taman Menteri Supeno menjadi Taman Indonesia Kaya memberikan perubahan signifikan bagi kualitas fisik ruang terbuka publik yang berdampak pada peningkatan image taman. Kriteria dasar kebutuhan pengguna di ruang terbuka publik; comfort, relaxation, passive engagement, active engagement, dan discovery secara umum telah terpenuhi pada Taman Indonesia Kaya. Meskipun pada area tertentu ditemukan adanya overlapping dua hingga tiga kriteria, kondisi tersebut tidak merubah fungsi utama taman sebagai ruang terbuka publik.
Kata kunci: Taman Indonesia Kaya; ruang terbuka; ruang publik
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Philadelphia and Baltimore, close economic rivals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had strikingly different processes of planning, patterns of growth, and resulting urban characters. This article examines these aspects of the two cities and elucidates them with travelers’ comments and urban views of the period and the aesthetic theory underlying these viewpoints.
The Landscape Education for Democracy project emerged at a particular time in society. Sustainable development is being redefined in terms of its ability to be socially just and transformative, and the project partners wanted to ensure that design and planning education addressed this demand by integrating discussions of democracy, social justice, participation, co-creation, and strategic thinking into the educational experience of young professional and future leaders in the profession. As any Participant Action Research project, the goals and ambitions were clearly stated from the beginning, as was a framework for assessing progress toward the first co-created course for and about landscape democracy.
Architectural drawing and design, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
The complex mobility in Semarang city requires the efficient and effective provision and services of public transportation. Due to the condition of public transportation services is not proper, so it requires the presence of online transportation. Online transportation services have a flexibility (in routes and time) and it seems the society has their own private vehicles. Online transportation prices is more expensive than private vehicles or public transportation. But it provides flexibility and convenience as one of the alternative transportation mode.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Building construction
Francesca Calace, Valeria De Troia, Silvana Milella
et al.
The critical considerations on Bari’s coast here presented stem from the attempt to address the topic of coastal planning under a holistic and landscape oriented approach. The thesis underlying this approach is that also in the context of the Municipal Coastal Plan tool, that considers only the management discipline of narrow state-owned coastal areas, it is possible to create a sustainable territorial project that addresses both environmental and socio-economic dynamics. This paper firstly presents a critical description of the regional normative and planning framework and it reports the coastal landscape history with relation to the period between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. After that, the paper reads the costal landscape as divided in “coastal contexts” and, finally, it defines some strategies for local coastal planning.
Architecture, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Untoro Nugroho, Agung Sutarto, Fenty Endradew
et al.
Brebes is one of the districts traversed by the road north coast. Congestion on roads pantura frequent because this road is a national road along the coast of the island of Java. Long road pantura Brebes 32.8 Km. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the capacity of roads pantura Brebes based on the volume of traffic there and know how big the relationship between the ratio of volume per capacity and traffic jams that occur on the road north coast Brebes. This research was conducted along the northern coast Brebes district. The data used are the characteristics data, inventory data path, the data traffic volume and vehicle speed data. Analysis was conducted on the Analysis of Traffic Volume, capacity analysis segment, analysis of vehicle speed, intersection capacity analysis, the analysis of the degree of saturation, analysis level of service redesign and analysis of road.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Building construction
El presente trabajo reconstruye la configuración urbana del barrio Puerto Madero (Buenos Aires), bajo el proyecto de renovación y rehabilitación, haciendo especial énfasis en la retórica del patrimonio, asociada a la recuperación del espacio público. El propósito es dar cuenta del proceso de transformación urbana que se convirtió en emblema del urbanismo neoliberal, en Buenos Aires y en su área metropolitana, señalando los cambios en las políticas de planificación, de gestión del suelo urbano y de sus evidentes efectos en el territorio. Con el objetivo de reflexionar sobre la construcción social del espacio público en la capital argentina, se planteó una investigación de corte cualitativo, partiendo del caso particular del barrio porteño.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology