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This thematic issue puts “urban commoning” centre stage. Urban commoning constitutes the practice of sharing urban resources (space, streets, energy, and more) through principles of inclusion and cooperation. Whilst generally defined as an autonomous, bottom‐up, and most of all cooperative practice, the sphere of the commons necessarily stands in interaction with two other spheres: the state/city (“provision”) and the market (“competition”). Yet, the various interlinkages between the commons, the state/city, and the market are underexplored. Hence the rationale for this thematic issue: How does the relation between commons, states/cities, and markets play out in the urban realm? What are the possibilities and pitfalls of linking commons with states/cities and markets? In the first section of this editorial, we provide a substantiated introduction to the concept of the commons, its history, and its urban applications. In the second part, we give an overview of the issue’s contributions. Scholars, activists, and practitioners from the disciplines of urban studies, cultural studies, planning, sustainability, sociology, architecture, and philosophy delve into the uncharted territory between commons, states/cities, and markets, through case studies from the Global North and South. The first three articles delve into the politics of urban commoning while the last three articles illuminate the practice’s aesthetic dimension.

In this article I reconstruct the place narrative of the Rum community (Greeks of Turkey) in Fener, Istanbul through unrest, displacement, and gentrification, and how the urban fabric, everyday life, and encounters transformed through different phases of urban change. Fener was a neighbourhood where cultural groups coexisted with mutual respect. This environment started to deteriorate when societal unrest towards non-Muslims resulted in a city-wide assault in 1955 and a subsequent displacement of many non-Muslims from the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood decayed and later became an attractive spot for gentrifiers because of its multicultural history. This implicated a massive physical change after an unimplemented regeneration project leading to gentrification. I theorize this narrative mainly based on Whitehead’s “permanences,” the stabilities in the physical and non-physical presence of Rums in Fener and Bhabha’s “in-between temporalities” as complements of permanences, defining space-time envelopes that signify both adjustment and resilience, but also amnesia as a result of urban unrest through social and physical change. The Rum urban narrative provides a complex story of challenged community identity; therefore, it necessitates the use of several qualitative research methods: interviews with older residents, historical investigation with documentation, and personal observation. The study results show that the Rum community’s daily practices and placeworlds were lost; however, the community remembers permanences better than in-between temporalities. Linking fragmented narratives by reconstructing them fights cultural amnesia and leads to a better connection with place and past contexts.

Solidarische Stadtbewegungen greifen globale Problemlagen und damit einhergehende Fluchtbewegungen auf und explorieren Visionen für ein inklusives Zusammenleben. Dieser Beitrag gibt Einblick in Idee und Praxis von solidarischen Stadtbewegungen und reflektiert mögliche Beziehungen dieser Bewegungen und der Sozialen Arbeit im Rahmen von Popular Social Work.

Celem artykułu jest ustalenie, czy wielkość miejscowości zamieszkania ma wpływ na deklaracje odnoszące się do wyróżnionych wartości związanych z rodziną, które w istotny sposób orientują działanie człowieka i tym samym tworzą zasady życia społecznego. Tekst napisano w oparciu o wtórną analizę danych statystycznych na podstawie zintegrowanego zbioru danych European Value Study/World Value Survey 2017-2021. Rezultaty badania wskazują, że różnice istotne statystycznie pomiędzy wielkością miejscowości pojawiły się w przypadku wszystkich zmiennych dotyczących rodzicielstwa. Mieszkańcy mniejszych miejscowości okazywali się bardziej konserwatywni. Zależność istotna statystycznie nie wystąpiła w przypadku deklaracji dotyczącej zaufania do rodziny. W przypadku niektórych odpowiedzi odnoszących się do postrzegania ról płciowych pojawiły się również istotne statystycznie różnice pomiędzy mieszkańcami mniejszych i większych miejscowości. Wartości i normy są inne w zależności od kultury, w której się wychowujemy. Kontrola społeczna jest silniejsza w mniejszych miejscowościach, tam bowiem trudniej pozostać anonimowym. Badanie potwierdziło, że wielkość miejscowości zamieszkania w wielu przypadkach istotnie statystycznie różnicuje wartości Polaków związane z rodziną i właśnie mieszkańcy mniejszych miejscowości częściej okazywali się przywiązani do koncepcji bardziej tradycyjnych, konserwatywnych. The purpose of the article is to determine whether the size of the place of residence influences the declarations regarding the distinguished values related to the family. The text is based on analysis of secondary statistical data - the integrated European Value Study/World Value Survey 2017-2021. The results of the study indicate that statistically significant differences, in regards to the size of the place of residence, occurred to all variables regarding parenthood factor. Small towns inhabitants turned out to be more conservative. There was no statistically significant dependence in the context of the declaration of trust in the family. Not with all of them, but with some of the answers relating to the perception of gender roles, there were also statistically significant differences between the inhabitants of different sizes of towns. Values and norms are different depending on the culture in which we are brought up. Social control is stronger in smaller towns, as it is more difficult to remain anonymous there. The study confirmed that the size of the place of residence, in many cases, statistically significantly differentiates the values related to the polish family, and the inhabitants of smaller towns turned out to be more often committed to the more traditional, conservative values.

Für gesellschaftliche Integration und Diversifikation ist der städtische Raum von besonderer Bedeutung. Der vorliegende Beitrag hat deshalb zum Ziel, die Digitale Stadt als Forschungsfeld für die Kommunikationswissenschaft zu erschließen. Die bisherige (deutschsprachige) Erforschung des Zusammenhangs von Medien und Stadt und idealtypische Aussagen zum Verhältnis von Medien, Lokalität und Integration in Studien zu Massen- und Onlinemedien werden dazu mit dem Forschungsstand in anderen Disziplinen, wie der Humangeografie, der kritischen Soziologie und Stadtplanungsforschung, sowie der Politikwissenschaft kritisch kontrastiert. Mit Hilfe des Begriffs der georeferenziellen Digitalmedien wird der traditionelle kommunikationswissenschaftliche Medienbegriff erweitert, um aktuelle Phänomene wie die medientechnologische Durchdringung von Städten und deren Inklusions- wie Exklusionstendenzen differenzierter analysieren zu können., Urban space is particularly important for social integration and diversification. The aim of this article is therefore to open up the digital city as a research field for communication science. The previous (German) research into the relationship between media and city and ideal-typical statements on the relationship between media, locality and integration in studies on mass and online media are combined in a critical way with the state of research in other disciplines, such as human geography, critical sociology and urban planning research, and political science. With the help of the term geo-referential digital media, the traditional notion of media is expanded in order to be able to analyse current phenomena such as the media-technological penetration of cities and their inclusion and exclusion tendencies in a more differentiated manner., Jahrbuch der Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft

tPomimo jednego z najszybszych temp wzrostu gospodarczego wśród krajów Unii Europejskiej w latach 2010–2019 w Polsce nie odnotowano istotnej poprawy w zaspokajaniu potrzeb mieszkaniowych mniej zamożnych gospodarstw domowych. Zasoby mieszkań komunalnych charakteryzują się zarówno niską dostępnością jak i wysokim stopniem zużycia majątku, a także rosnącymi zaległościami czynszowymi. W obliczu nadchodzącej dekoniunktury gospodarczej wywołanej pandemią koronawirusa SARS-CoV-2, realizacja zadań własnych gmin w zakresie mieszkalnictwa ulegnie dalszemu utrudnieniu. Aby temu zapobiec autorzy prezentują szereg postulatów zmian regulacyjnych dotyczących jednostek samorządowych i instytucji centralnych, które usprawnią realizację polityk mieszkaniowych państwa w zakresie mieszkań komunalnych.

They are easily overlooked, but benches, trash bins, drinking fountains, bike stands, ashtray bins, and bollards do influence our ways of living. Street furniture can encourage or hold back behaviours, support different codes of conduct, or express the values of a society. This study is developed from the observation that the number of different roles taken on by street furniture seem to quickly increase in ways not attended to. We see new arrivals such as recycled, anti-homeless, skateboard-friendly, solar-powered, storytelling, phone-charging and event-making furniture entering public places. What are typical sociomaterial roles that these things play in urban culture of today? How do these roles matter? This article suggests a conceptualisation of three furniture roles: Carnivalesque street furniture takes part in events and temporary places. Behaviourist street furniture engages in how humans act in public. Cabinet-like street furniture makes itself heard through relocating shapes of other objects. These categories lead to two directions for further research; one concerning the institutions behind street furniture, and one concerning how street furniture shapes cities through influencing different kinds of ‘scapes.’ The aim of this article is to advance theory on an urban material culture that is evolving faster and faster. By conceptualising this deceptively innocent group of things and articulating its relations to the everyday structures of the city, I hope to provide a framework for further studies.

The curiosity of how the built environment, implicitly and explicitly, affects how citizens and users make choices in their everyday life related to climate change is on the rise. If there is a nicely designed bike lane, the choice to bike to work is much more easily taken than if the only option is a densely trafficked road. But which responsibility does the built environment have for citizens to be as climate neutral as possible and, in extension, who should it burden? Is it the individual user, the designer, the planner, the policymaker or global politics? Media is playing an important and complicated role here; it works both as a source of information and as a trigger, instigating both feelings of guilt, fear, and shame in order to set change in motion. In this article, I will discuss everyday climate-related decision-making fuelled by shame and guilt, drawing on Judith Butler’s writings on ethical obligations and narrating it with findings from a mapping study of daily transportation routes that I conducted in a middle-class suburb outside of Lund, in Sweden. There appears to be a dissonance between the relatively high knowledge about one’s responsibility concerning climate change and the limited space to manoeuvre in everyday life. Even though shame and guilt may be driving forces to make decisions, the possibility to imagine and to change needs to be expanded.

Urban Narrative works at the interface between public participation and participatory design to support collaboration processes for urban planning and design. It applies computational linguistics to interpret large format public consultation by identifying shared interests and desired qualities for urban infrastructure services and utilities. As a proof of concept, data was used from the Christchurch public engagement initiative called ‘Share an Idea,’ where public thoughts, ideas, and opinions were expressed about the future redevelopment of Christchurch after the 2011 earthquakes. The data set was analysed to identify shared interests and desired connections between institutional, communal, or personal infrastructures with the physical urban infrastructures in terms of buildings, public places, and utilities. The data has been visualised using chord charts from the D3 JavaScript open source library to illustrate the existence of connections between soft and hard urban infrastructures along with individual contributions or stories. Lastly, the analysis was used to create an infographic design brief that compares and contrasts qualitative information from public consultation with quantitative municipal statistical data on well-being.

This article was inspired by a collaborative action-research experience undertaken in Brussels by ARCH (Action Research Collective for Hospitality), aimed at further understanding the dynamics of hospitality and improving hospitality towards refugees, based on collaboration with actors of civil society. In a context of spreading policies of hostility and exclusion in Europe and the lack of arrival infrastructures for undocumented migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, the people tend to occupy public spaces of the city. Consequently, these spaces become the central nodes where civil society organizes the humanitarian aid and practices of hospitality and at the same time are places for interactional tensions and institutional violence. In other words, they become an urban stage where the tension between hospitality and exclusion is played out. Based on this research, our article proposes to take the urban consequences of hostility policies seriously by analyzing the ecology of the migrants’ world in the city. Our aim is to understand their experience of segregation and hospitality in the urban environment—and more specifically in public spaces. Public spaces are indeed the only livable spaces for people for whom no room has been made. However, what constitutes their hospitality for migrants, i.e., their capacity to be inhabited, enters into tension with the constitutive dimensions of urban publicness (like accessibility, visibility, or urbanity). Understanding the experience of hospitality in urban public spaces for those who have no other place to live is seen as a condition as well as a means to enhance their urban inclusion.

This introduction underlines some of the topics the present thematic issue focuses on, such as segregation and security, control and creativity, resistance and networking, presenting continuities and changes in urban governance and urban justice in different parts of the world. We argue that urban theory should be rethought to consider cities as fora that recentre the ‘political’ in relation to gentrification, rights to the city, justice, and alternative urbanisms. We highlight structural aspects of urban policy and planning, including the intersection of mega-development projects with disruptive acts of social dispossession and efforts to depoliticise institutional control. Simultaneously, we emphasise tactics that reinterpret hierarchical modes of governance and create initiatives for enhanced justice through claim-making, negotiation, improvisation, acts of everyday resistance and organised opposition.

Cities across the global south are seeing unprecedented levels of violence that generate intense risks and vulnerability. Such problems are often experienced most viscerally among poorer residents, thus reinforcing longstanding socio-spatial conditions of exclusion, inequality, and reduced quality of life for those most exposed to urban violence. Frequently, these problems are understood through the lens of poverty, informality, and limited employment opportunities. Yet an undertheorized and equally significant factor in the rise of urban violence derives from the shifting territorialities of governance and power, which are both cause and consequence of ongoing struggles within and between citizens and state authorities over the planning and control of urban space. This article suggests that a relatively underexplored but revealing way to understand these dynamics, and how they drive violence, is through the lens of sovereignty. Drawing on examples primarily from Mexico, and other parts of urban Latin America, I suggest that problems of urban violence derive from fragmented sovereignty, a condition built upon the emergence of alternative, competing, and at times overlapping networks of territorial authority at the scale of the city, nation, and globe. In addition to theorizing the shifting spatial correlates of sovereignty among state and non-state armed actors, and showing how these dynamics interact with urbanization patterns to produce violence, I argue that the spatial form of the city both produces and is produced by changing political and economic relations embedded in urban planning principles. That is, urban planning practices must be seen as the cause, and not merely the solution, to problems of urban violence and its deleterious effects. Using these claims to dialogue with urban planners, this essay calls for new efforts to redesign cities and urban spaces with a focus on territorial connectivities and socio-spatial integration, so as to push back against the limits of fragmented sovereignty arrangements, minimize violence, and foster inclusion and justice.

In this article, I argue that the spatial practices of the contemporary Jewish organisations in Barcelona’s medieval Jewish neighbourhood represent claims for public recognition. As a small and quite invisible minority within the diverse city population, Jewish groups increasingly claim that their presence in the city should be recognised by political authorities and ordinary citizens alike. They do so through a series of spatial practices around the medieval Jewish neighbourhood, which include (1) heritage production, (2) the renaming of streets and (3) the temporary marking of urban spaces with Jewish symbols. I have grouped these practices under the umbrella concept of ‘place-recovering strategies’ because all of them attempt to ‘recover’ the lost urban environments inhabited by their Jewish predecessors before they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By recovering I do not mean a mere passive restoring of urban spaces and places but rather a creative process in which historical narratives and myths of the past play a crucial role. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, I argue that these place-recovering strategies are part of a quest for the visibility, legitimacy and recognition of Jews.

This paper shows how changes to the appearance of a street after the revitalization process influence the perception of the street, its sensory landscape and atmosphere. The example of Cathedral Street (Ulica Tumska), the high street in Płock, an average-sized town in Poland, is used to prove that such changes may bring some unexpected results by evoking negative emotions among the residents. The results of the study conducted using focus groups show that the contemporary ambience of Cathedral Street cause negative sensations perceived in four dimensions: touchscape, seescape, soundscape, and smellscape. Those feelings seem to be even stronger taking under consideration positive memories of the street before revitalization. As a result of the negative atmosphere of Cathedral Street and the unpleasant emotions it evokes, the residents’ activities conducted on the street are reduced only to fulfilling the most necessary needs. Such conclusion results in a postulate that when designing or redesigning public spaces we should always be aware of the consequences for the ambience of the street and the need to generate positive emotions.

Decisions regarding destination choice for subsistence activities, such as employment and education, are typically taken on a medium or long-term basis. In activity-based modeling for transport research those are traditionally modeled after the allocation of daily activity plans to the individuals, with a few exceptions. This paper presents a comparison of two proceedings, namely the modeling of the destination choice for subsistence activities in advance and its traditional late modeling. Firstly, different destination choice models for employment and education were developed for the agent-based demand model TAPAS. In order to perform the comparison two scenarios were simulated: a base scenario and a scenario with a fee-based parking zone in the city center of Berlin. The results show the validity of both proceedings and their different application.

Background: It is well-established that internal migration is selective, particularly with respect to age, educational attainment, and nativity status. However, the interplay between education and immigrants’ origin remains largely unknown. Thus, it is unclear how the educational selectivity of internal migration varies by nativity status. Objective: We establish the educational selectivity of internal migrants in 12 European countries, paying attention to variation between native and foreign-born populations born in and outside the European Union. Methods: We use microdata from the European Union Labour Force Survey (2015–2019) and run a series of multivariate binomial logistic regressions to estimate the likelihood of changing NUTS-2 region of residence by educational attainment. Results: Our results confirm a positive association between tertiary education and internal migration, except for in Slovenia, Greece, and the Czech Republic. On average, completing tertiary education increases the likelihood of migrating internally by close to 3 times, compared with less than 1.5 times for secondary education. In half the countries, secondary education displays either a negative or no association with internal migration. We find evidence of a strong positive selectivity of tertiary-educated foreign-born populations, who are on average twice as likely to migrate internally than the native-born with comparable education, except in Hungary, where immigrants are less likely to migrate internally. Conclusions: By redistributing skills within a country, immigrants are integral to the effective functioning of labour markets. Contribution: This study provides new evidence on the educational selectivity of internal migration across Europe and shows that the gradient is typically stronger among the foreign-born.

Building on Henri Lefebvre’s radical concept of “right to the city,” contemporary literatures on urban citizenship critically shift the locus of citizenship from its juridical-political foundation in the sovereign state to the spatial politics of the urban inhabitants. However, while the political discourse of right to the city presents a vital vision for urban democracy in the shadow of neoliberal restructuring, its exclusive focus on democratic agency and practices can become disconnected from the everyday experiences of city life on the ground. In fact, in cities that lack longstanding/viable urban citizenship mechanisms that can deliver meaningful political participation, excluded subjects may bypass formal democratic channels to improvise their own inclusion, belonging, and rights in an informal space that the sovereign power does not recognize. Drawing on my fieldwork in the Asian restaurant industry in several multiethnic suburbs in Southern California, this article investigates how immigrant restaurant entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers engender a set of “nonexistent rights” through their everyday production and consumption of ethnic food. I name this improvisational political ensemble corporeal citizenship to describe the material, affective, and bodily dimensions of inclusion, belonging, and “rights” that immigrants actualize through their everyday participation in this suburban ethnic culinary commerce. For many immigrants operating in the global circuits of neoliberal capitalism, citizenship no longer just means what Hannah Arendt (1951) once suggested as “the right to have rights,” or what Engin Isin and Peter Nyers (2014) reformulate as “the right to claim rights,” but also the right to reinvent ways of claiming rights. I suggest such improvisation of nonexistent rights has surprising political implications for unorthodox ways of advancing democratic transformation.

Calls for greater food democracy in Europe have emerged as the limitations of urban food systems dominated by commercial organisations are documented, but little attention has been paid to how policy arrangements affect attempts to transition to more democratic food futures. This article examines food sharing initiatives—increasingly facilitated by the use of information and communication technologies—as a potential means to enhance urban food democracy, and explores the role of policy in shaping those practices in three European capital cities: Berlin, London, and Dublin. We pose two related questions: To what extent are diverse food sharing initiatives exemplars of food democracy, and to what extent do policy arrangements affect food sharing practices and the nature of any food democracy they might embody? Our empirical evidence demonstrates where the goals and impacts of food sharing initiatives align with key dimensions of food democracy. We also consider how food sharing initiatives—and any food democracy dimensions that they support—are affected by the policy environment in which they operate. The food sharing initiatives examined revealed to be agents of pro-democratic change, at least within the boundaries of their spheres of influence, despite policies rarely having their activities and aspirations in mind.

The design of cities has long ignored the flows that shape the city. Water has been the most visible one, but energy and materials were invisible and/or taken for granted. A little over 50 years ago, Abel Wolman was the first to illuminate the role of water flows in the urban fabric. It has long been a search for quantitative data while the flows were mostly seen as separated entities. The fact they invisibly formed the way the city appears has been neglected for many years. In this thematic issue the “city of flows” is seen as a design task. It aims to bring to the fore the role flows can play to be consciously used to make spatial decisions in how and where certain uses and infrastructure is located. Efficient and sustainable.

Urban communities are particularly vulnerable to the future demand for food, energy and water, and this vulnerability is further exacerbated by the onset of climate change at local. Solutions need to be found in urban spaces. This article based around urban design practice sees urban agriculture as a key facilitator of nexus thinking, needing water and energy to be productive. Working directly with Urban Living Labs, the project team will co-design new food futures through the moveable nexus, a participatory design support platform to mobilize natural and social resources by integrating multi-disciplinary knowledge and technology. The moveable nexus is co-developed incrementally through a series of design workshops moving around living labs with the engagement of stakeholders. The methodology and the platform will be shared outside the teams so that the knowledge can be mobilized locally and globally.

This article focuses on cultural and creative activities and the development of local communities. Several studies on North America, Europe and Latin America have shown that this type of activity may have a positive impact on the local economy and living environments, and in particular on the sense of territorial belonging and on relations between citizens. In this text, we propose a reading of the impact of neighborhood cultural initiatives in the context of local socio-economic development based on a set of indicators of the local cultural vitality of a neighborhood. The empirical research was carried out in Montreal, namely on two boroughs: Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie and Sud-Ouest.

In many countries, cities are expected to stimulate compact city development by the government, while at the same time develop healthier and more social sustainable cities. In Norway, national policy and planning regulation aim at stimulating a development that ensures active urban childhoods. In order to ensure this, the Planning and Building Act ensure particular participation rights for children and youth in the planning process. In this article, we will present how these rights are understood and implemented in practice. Then we will discuss how local government can enable children to participate in a meaningful way and where their input actually contributes to the plans and urban design being developed. This last discussion will be elaborated by studying a case about the Children Track Methodology. This study has been conducted in a research project evaluating the Norwegian Planning and Building Act, financed by the DEMOSREG-programme in the Norwegian Research Council. In addition, it has been financed by an extra funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Modernization.

This article sets out to describe the role of aesthetics in citizen dialogues during the upgrading of a local swimming pool in Hammarkullen, Gothenburg. The swimming pool became an important project because of its role in a larger neighbourhood renovation project that allowed the municipality to focus on citizen engagement and inclusion. The engagement process showed the importance of the local swimming pool for a marginalized group of women of Somali origin, and a decision was made to keep the swimming pool instead of demolishing it. This led to collaboration between project coordinators, the Public Art Agency, an artist and an architect. Individual qualitative interviews focusing on storytelling were undertaken with key stakeholders. The findings show that aesthetic quality mediated the communicative processes between project coordinators and citizens. Art in public space is more than just aesthetics or something to look at; art provokes a wide variety of responses and artists use a variety of means to engage with their public and creating dialogue. Yet the project managers failed to consider the creative process of the architect and her perspective on aesthetic quality and building functionality. Stakeholders take different stances to whether aesthetic quality can be a way of grounding, communicating and evolving, or whether it is a matter of beauty where the artist or architect takes the lead. While the project coordinators affirm sameness, different understandings of aesthetic quality actively negotiate social differences. Inability to consider creative practices’ work processes in relation to citizen dialogue can result in conflicts between art, architecture and governance during the transformation of a neighbourhood.

This article assesses the role of social innovation (SI) as a driver of urban transformation through the case-based analysis of an ambitious social housing urban project in the Dominican Republic, specifically in the emblematic slum La Barquita, in the heart of northern Santo Domingo. This project was led by a dedicated public body, URBE, which is in charge of the coordination of several institutions and the management of the community participation. Since La Nueva Barquita integrates dimensions regarding the satisfaction of human needs, change in social relations, and increase of citizens’ sociopolitical capabilities, it may be considered a socially innovative initiative in the territorial development discussion. The article builds first on the literature on SI by drawing attention on governance and institutional structures in specific urban contexts. Based on a series of semi-direct interviews, it then focuses on the analysis of key moments regarding the definition, implementation and evaluation of the institutional dimension of the project from its launching in 2013.

In diesem Forschungsprojekt wird untersucht, welche Vorstellungen die Menschen, die in Freiburg wohnen oder sich dauerhaft aufhalten, zu den Charakteristika der Freiburg*innen haben und für wie relevant sie diese Zuschreibungen für Ihr Lebensgefühl und ihr Leben vor Ort einschätzen. Die Forschungsfragen werden durch Überlegungen und Recherchen zu möglichen relevanten theoretischen und empirisch gewonnenen Aspekten erschlossen und durch inhaltsanalytische Auswertungen leitfadengestützer Interviews mit ausgewählten Teilen der Bevölkerung bearbeitet.

The Katowice conurbation is the largest traditional economic region in Central Europe and simultaneously a complex settlement system. Yet it faces numerous problems. The article attempts to answer the questions: (1) Does the hitherto relatively uniform economic structure of the Katowice conurbation, based on mining and metallurgy, cause similar intensities of depopulation, demographic ageing and urban shrinkage in 16 neighbouring towns? (2) Is the scope of policies mitigating the effects of these processes similar? The analysis of statistical data for 1999 and 2018 and the development strategies of individual towns shows that both the trends in population changes and the policies adopted towards them differ. The severity of the negative processes varies, with the largest being in Katowice, Sosnowiec and Bytom. Most towns recognize the problem yet consider its solution through selective actions (improvement in housing conditions, development of services or launching new industrial activities). There are also towns that, although seeing problems, marginalize them in their development strategies. Only Czeladź has a multifaceted approach to this problem. The general conclusion shows a need to coordinate the policies of local governments of the entire conurbation for the benefit of multifaceted measures to mitigate depopulation, demographic ageing and urban shrinkage., Studies of Transition States and Societies, Vol 12, No 2 (2020)

This article explores 'dialectical design dialogues' as an approach to engage with ethics in everyday urban planning contexts. It starts from Paulo Freire's pedagogical view (1970/2017), in which dialogues imply the establishment of a horizontal relation between professionals and amateurs, in order to understand, question and imagine things in everyday reality, in this case, urban transformations, applied to participatory planning and enriched through David Harvey's (2000, 2009) dialectical approach. A dialectical approach to design dialogues acknowledges and renegotiates contrasts and convergences of ethical concerns specific to the reality of concrete daily life, rather than artificially presenting daily life as made of consensus or homogeneity. The article analyses an atlas as a tool to facilitate dialectical design dialogues in a case study of a low-density residential neighbourhood in the city of Genk, Belgium. It sees the production of the atlas as a collective endeavour during which planners, authorities and citizens reflect on possible futures starting from a confrontation of competing uses and perspectives of neighbourhood spaces. The article contributes to the state-of-the-art in participatory urban planning in two ways: (1) by refraining the theoretical discussion on ethics by arguing that not only the verbal discourses around designerly atlas techniques but also the techniques themselves can support urban planners in dealing more consciously with ethics (accountability, morality and authorship) throughout urban planning processes, (2) by offering a concrete practice-based example of producing an atlas that supports the participatory articulation and negotiation of dialectical inquiry of ethics through dialogues in a 'real-time' urban planning process. Our thanks to the reviewers for the critical comments which helped to improve the article, to the municipality of Genk and inhabitants of Oud-Waterschei for their essential support and participation, to the students of the urban design seminar 2018–2019 of the University of Hasselt for helping to produce the atlas and to the NGO Trage Wegen for the confidence in our participatory approach.

This article aims to understand how the introduction of blue-green solutions affects ethical concerns and expectations of an urban environment. Blue-green solutions are complementary technical solutions, introduced into urban water management, in order to deal with the impact of urbanisation and climate change. These kinds of solutions establish new affordances that have an impact on everyday life in the urban environment. This article describes how blue-green solutions become part of urban settings and how they influence the inhabitant’s perceptions, desires and matters of care concerning these settings. The article examines the interplay between blue-green technologies and the social, material and cultural context in the Augustenborg district in Malmö, Sweden. The study is based on the analysis of free-text answers to a questionnaire aimed to collect information about the interaction between blue-green solutions and everyday life in public spaces. By exploring the inhabitants’ point of view, the article then seeks to recognise the meanings and thoughts entangled with place concerning different types of blue-green solutions. We summarise the main concerns raised by the inhabitants and discuss how the implementation of blue-green solutions relates to the transformation of everyday ethicalities and matters of concern relating to the neighbourhood. We conclude that blue-green infrastructure seems to come with a new kind of sensitivity, as well as with an intensification of concerns, in an existing urban environment. This has important social repercussions, which also makes it important to study the social role and implications of blue-green technologies further.

This article approaches urban ethics through critically examining the production and reproduction of an eco-modern socio-technical imaginary of sustainable urban development in Sweden, and the conditions and obstacles this poses for a just transformation. We see that notions of ecological modernization re-present problems of urban sustainability in ways that do not challenge the predominant regime, but rather uphold unjust power relations. More particularly, through an approach inspired by critical discourse analysis, we uncover what these problem representations entail, deconstructing what we find as three cornerstones of an eco-modern imaginary that obstruct the emergence of a more ethically-engaged understanding of urban sustainability. The first concerns which scales and system boundaries are constructed as relevant, and how this results in some modes and places of production and consumption being constructed as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. The second cornerstone has to do with what resources and ways of using them (including mediating technologies) are foregrounded and constructed as more important in relation to sustainability than others. The third cornerstone concerns the construction of subjectivities, through which some types of people and practices are put forth as more efficient -and sustainable- than others. Utilizing a critical speculative design approach, we explore a selection of alternative problem representations, and finally discuss these in relation to the possibility of affording a more ethical urban design and planning practice.

Data production is becoming an emerging trend in critical urban activism. Precise and reliable public information, including spatial and environmental information, serves individual and collective ‘right to the city’ beliefs. One of the common strategies adopted by contemporary urban movements to ensure the accuracy and inclusiveness of urban data production processes are various forms of counter-mapping, which we introduce in this paper as a perspective aimed in critical evaluation of urban environmental conditions in Polish cities. By process tracing of smog alerts and urban greenery movements, we investigate the main strategies of using such tools and their effects for both particular social actors, and general urban environmental policy. We argue that the core idea of a citizen-driven collection of geographical data is strongly supported by its other features – social involvement and collective production of visualizations illustrating the scale and dynamics of particular environmental problems. In this sense, counter-mapping is aimed rather at repoliticizing urban environmental data in order to critically evaluate existing urban policy, than just to ensure greater citizen involvement in environmental decision-making.

What and where is ‘the asylum’ today? To what extent do mental healthcare facilities stand out as clearly bounded entities in the modern urban landscape, perhaps reflecting their history as deliberately set-apart and then often stigmatised places? To what extent have they maybe become less obtrusive, more sunk into and interacting with their urban surroundings? What issues of urban ethics are at stake: concerning who/what is starkly demarcated in the city, perhaps subjected to exclusionary logics and pressures, or more sensitively integrated into the city, planned for inclusion and co-dwelling? These questions underscore our article, rooted in an in-depth case study of Gartnavel Royal Hospital, Glasgow, opened as a ‘lunatic asylum’ on its present, originally greenfield, site in the 1840s and remaining open today surrounded by dense urban expansion. Building from the ‘voices’ of patients, staff and others familiar with the site, we discuss the sense of this asylum as ‘other’ to, as ‘outside’ of, or merely ’beside’ the urban fabric. Drawing from concepts of ‘orientations’ (Ahmed, 2006), sites as spatial constructions (Burns & Kahn, 2005), the power of borders and boundaries (Haselsberger, 2014; Sennett, 2018), issues of site, stigma and related urban ethical matters will be foregrounded. Where are the boundaries that divide the hospital campus from the urban context? What are the material signifiers, the cultural associations or the emotional attachments that continue to set the boundaries? Or, in practice, do boundaries melt into messier, overlapping, intersecting border zones, textured by diverse, sometimes contradictory, bordering practices? And, if so, what are the implications? open access GART-PSYSPAC: discourse, dwelling, doing

In this paper we document and reflect on an ongoing co-design process of a new urban space, by the name L200, located in a very central and precious location in Zurich. L200 has the characteristics of an urban node at the confluence of many networks, a hub like railway stations provide these days but at a different spatial scale, acting as a much needed infrastructure for various commoning activities, among others. L200 is designed as a hybrid space, hosting a DIY digital platform, which is being co-created as a commons itself through a long-term participatory process and provides a building block for an alternative, bottom-up, vision to the “smart city”. In terms of participatory design, we experiment with, and advocate for, a structured laissez-faire methodology that frames both the physical and digital space as interconnected common infrastructures that the members of the association are free to use “as if it was their own” for limited periods of time. This participation through action approach allows for needs, ideas, and interventions to manifest naturally without any pressure or expectations. This means that the corresponding research for producing tools, methodologies, and designs need to advance in a slower than usual pace, and integrate many perspectives that use different languages and have different priorities. This slow design process allows for various forms of peer learning to occur. The paper lays out the overall L200 project in its full complexity through the dual role assumed by the authors, as researchers and activists, highlighting specific decisions, actions, and methodologies that contribute to the on-going research on infrastructuring the commons.

Der Beitrag stellt fünf gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Fachkomplexe vor, die Stadt und deren Entwicklung als eigenen Reflexions- und Forschungsgegenstand in ihr wissenschaftliches Handlungsfeld aufgenommen haben. Die Soziologie dient dabei als Referenzrahmen. Für die zur Diskussion stehenden benachbarten wissenschaftlichen Handlungsfelder werden Überschneidungen bzw. Anknüpfungspunkte zur Stadtsoziologie entlang ursprünglicher Fragestellungen und aktueller Problematisierung von Stadt vorgestellt.

International audience; After a long period of interest of religious plurality in the nation-state, the sociology of religion, with the impulse of the sociology of migration, has turned its attention to the city. This local level allows us to understand the issues of diversity governance. This article takes advantage of the literature on the governance of migration to apply it to the governance of religious diversity. Using data from the National Congregations Study and available data on Geneva, this article will first show how past responses to the emergence of diversity determine the path for future decisions. To this top-down regulation of religion responds one or more bottom-up strategies of religious communities to find legitimacy in a constraining environment. Based on the unit of the religious community, this study on Geneva provides a historical case of the evolution of diversity. This historical perspective provides the consistency of the current governance of religious diversity, illuminating the struggle for recognition of the minority groups.

For over a decade, the explosion of various forms of urban activism has been observed: so- called urban social movements or the right to the city (RTTC) movements actively participate in the realm of non-institutional politics. This trend has been observed both world-wide and in Europe, particularly in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Poland is also a clear example of this tendency. The paper presented aims to achieve two goals. First of all, it is based on desk research and offers a broad literature overview, indicating the main directions and results in urban activism research in Poland of the last 10 years. Recalling and discussing the broadest possible body of literature, with particular emphasis on Polish-language references, should be useful for international readers and researchers. Secondly, the paper attempts to synthesize these current research results, including the authors own research results, identifying the complexity of the field of urban activism. As a result, it points to various entities using the RTTC slogan in their social struggles, consequently identifying two main types of RTTC activism: radical and middle-class (petite bourgeoisie?) movements.

In 2013, Glasgow City Council received significant funding to develop innovative smart city applications, including the delivery of new electronic public services and the co-production of governance. This case study examines the processes that underpin the ways in which the ‘Future City Glasgow programme’ delivered ‘smart governance’, in the context of a regenerating post-industrial city. We assess the contribution of smart city technologies and data collection and monitoring processes designed to facilitate citizen engagement and sustainable governance practices. The Future City Glasgow programme ran from 2013‒2015, and included the Open Glasgow project, and ‘Demonstrator Projects’ of: Energy Efficiency; Intelligent Street Lighting; Active Travel; and, Integrated Social Transport. Opportunities arose from these demonstrators for developing co-production and legacy initiatives. The case study provides insight into the ways in which citizens and local communities in Glasgow have been engaged in governance processes. This engagement has taken place via traditional and innovative smart city technologies, and in particular in relation to policy formulation, service design and delivery. It finds that the co-creation of governance is shaped by vested interests, that engagement is fragmented and partial, but at the same time new technologies, social media and shared learning opportunities offer innovative new ways for some citizens to influence local governance.

This article explores the current ‘place’ of e-government in realizing public value in the context of what seems to be an emerging platform urbanism. It highlights a complex platform-based urban ecosystem encompassing private and public organisations and citizens. This ‘mainstreaming’ of e-government practices puts demands on cities and governments to reconsider their own role in ‘city making’ so as to achieve meaningful public oversight. The point of departure is the operationalization of this ‘place’ by conceptualizing participation and (multi-sided) platformisation as a framework to draw attention to the dynamic domain of e-governance where shifts can be seen in market structures, infrastructures, and changing forms of governance, and which may challenge the public interest. This is illustrated by an exploration of the social traffic and navigation application Waze.

Market access has been widely used as a measure of agglomeration spillovers in models that seek to explain productivity, economic or population growth at the city level. Most results have shown that having higher market access is beneficial to these outcomes. These results, both theoretical and empirical, have been obtained in a context of population growth. This article examines the impact that market access has on a system of cities that has suffered a negative population shock. An extended version of the Brezis and Krugman (1997) model of life cycle of cities predicts that a system of cities experiencing population loss will see a relative reorganization of its population from small to larger cities, and that higher market potential will make this movement stronger. We test these predictions with a comprehensive sample of cities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We find that having higher market access - when operating in an environment of population decline - is detrimental to city population growth. This result is robust to different measures of market access that use population. Alternative measures that use economic size rather population are tested, and the result weaker. A possible explanation is that using NLs restricts the sample to only using larger cities.

Although housing prices and the lack of real income growth are cited as the main factors behind the housing affordability problem, it has been proven that land use regulations have some responsibility as well. Indices have been the most common indicator used to characterize the stringency of local land use regulations; however, these studies focus primarily on those most stringent regulatory environments, and therefore there is no evidence of the validity of such indices in areas regarded as less stringent. In response to this lack of evidence, using a unique data set this article presents an index characterizing local regulatory environments in a well-known less stringent regulatory environment: the Houston-Galveston Area in Texas. This index proves to be a valid measure capable of capturing the multi-dimensional nature of land use regulations. The analysis of the index and statistical correlations validate the use of indices to characterize metropolitan land use regulations.

In this article we describe some innovative methods for observing the possible impacts of roads, junctions and pathways (movement infrastructures), on community life in terms of their affordances and hindrances for social connectivity. In seeking to observe these impacts, we combined a range of visualization research methods, based on qualitative points-data mapping, graphic representation and urban morphological analysis at local and global geographic scales. Our overall aim in this study was to develop exploratory methods for combining and visualizing various kinds of data that relate to urban community formations in contrasting urban contexts. We focused our enquiry on the perspectives of adolescents in two urban contexts: Liverpool, UK, and Medellín, Colombia. While they contrast in their geo-political and cultural characteristics, these two cities each present polarized socio-economic inequalities across distinctive spatial patterns. We found that adolescents in these cities offer generally localized, pedestrian perspectives of their local areas, and unique insights into the opportunities and challenges for place-making in their local community spaces. We gathered the communities' local perspectives through map-making workshops, in which participants used given iconographic symbols to select and weight the social and structural assets that they deemed to be significant features of their community spaces. We then sampled and visualized these selective points data to observe ways in which local community assets relate to infrastructural affordances for movement (in terms of network integration). This analysis was based on the theory and method of Space Syntax, which provides a model of affordances for movement across the urban network over various scales of network configuration. In particular, we sought to determine how city-scale movement infrastructures interact with local-scale infrastructures, and to develop methods for observing ways in which these interactions have positive or negative consequences for community formations.

Zusammenfassung Henri Lefebvre ist heute primar fur eine bestimmte Periode seines Schaffens bekannt, als Theoretiker des Raums und der Urbanisierung. Weite Teile seines Werkes auserhalb dieser Periode bleiben hingegen unbeachtet. Der vorliegende Beitrag argumentiert, dass Lefebvres Schriften zu Stadt und Raum nur im Kontext seiner lebenslangen, an Marx angelehnten Beschaftigung mit Entfremdung und den Potenzialen menschlicher Praxis richtig zu erfassen sind. Der von Lefebvre diagnostizierte abstrakte Raum ist eine sozio-raumliche Ausformung des Entfremdungsphanomens in kapitalistischen Gesellschaften. Explizit in diesem Kontext konzipiert Lefebvre sein Recht auf die Stadt: als kollektives demokratisches Recht. Erst durch eine praktische Ausubung dieses Rechts konnen sich Potenziale des menschlichen Gemeinwesens demokratisch entfalten. ----- Bibliographie : Illigens, Sebastian: Henri Lefebvre: Entfremdung und das Recht auf die Stadt, Soziologiemagazin, 2-2017, S. 37-53. https://doi.org/10.3224/soz.v10i2.04

This paper aims at demonstrating how countries' dependency on natural resources plays a crucial role in urban concentration. The Zipf's Curve Elasticity is estimated for a group of countries and related to a set of indicators of unilateral transferences. Results show that in comparison to others, countries with higher urban concentration explained by higher Zipf's Curve Elasticity have a higher percentage of income coming from natural resources and education expenditures whereas public spending in health and outflow of Foreign Direct Investment seem to have spatial redistribution effects. Summing up, there are signs that the spatial allocation of property rights over natural resources and related rents influences urban concentration.

African cities are experiencing uncontrolled expansion. The focus of this paper is to evaluate the impact of urban expansion on landuse types of Akure for the period of 1972 to 2009 . In analyzing the u rban expansion of the cit y, 1972 MSS, 1986 Landsat Thematic TM and Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM + ) images for 2002 and 2009 satellite image captured from googleearth website were used in a post classification comparison analysis to map the spatial dynamics of landuse / land cover changes and identify the urban expansion of Akure. Questionnaire was also used to determine the factors responsible for the expansion of Akure. The findings showed a rapid expansion in the built-up are a of Akure from 1.00% in 1972 to 2.46% in 1986, 2.46% in1986 to 3.90% in 2002 with an annual growth rate of 10.63% and 3.66% due to increasing population of Akure within these periods respectively. Prediction made showed that the built-up of A kure would expand to 2.66 % in 2022 . Th e study recommends review of the outdated 1980 master plan and development control mechanism that will guide the rapid expansion that had been accompanied by loss of vegetation in Akure.

Source at http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/up.v4i1.1713. Sustainable cites require the capacity to live with difference. In a world of increased mobility and migration, our cities become more and more diversified. While national discourses on diversity are often problem-focused, social initiatives are emerging in diverse cities addressing the positive potential of the city as a cross-cultural meeting place. In Norway, such initiatives have increased in number since “the refugee crisis” in 2015, and we see creative approaches arising from civil society, the voluntary sector, private companies, and local governments aiming to facilitate encounters with difference. This article explores innovative integration initiatives in cities in the north, emphasizing how difference might be negotiated, engendering new forms of engagement and responsibility. Cities are seen as sites of experiments, where new relations across difference are developed. Framing encounters as emergent, transitory, fragile, yet hopeful, we discuss the transformative powers of such initiatives for planning in diverse cities.

Eric Pfromm beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, was eine lebenswerte Stadt ist und wie sie gestaltet sein bzw. werden muss, um dem sich stetig wandelnden, globalisierten und flexibilisierten Leben gerecht zu werden. Die Konzeptualisierung eines solchen Lebensraums fängt seiner Meinung nach beim Planen und Bauen von Wohnraum in der Stadt an und mündet im Designen von öffentlichem Stadtraum. Dies wird Stadtplaner sowie Designer vor immense Herausforderungen stellen. Eric Pfromm deals with the question of what a city worth living in is and how it will have to be designed in order to adjust adequately to constantly changing, globalised and dynamic life. In his opinion, the conceptualization of an environment like that starts with the planning and building of living space in the city and necessitates the design of public urban space. This, he predicts, will pose immense challenges to urban planners and designers.

Although there is extensive literature on State migration policies and NGO activities, there are few studies on the common struggles between refugees and local activists. This article aims to fill this research gap by focusing on the impact of the transnational No Border camp that took place in Thessaloniki in 2016. The border region of northern Greece, with its capital Thessaloniki, is at the heart of the so-called refugee crisis and it is marked by a large number of solidarity initiatives. After the sealing of the “Balkan corridor”, the Greek State relocated thousands of refugees into isolated and inappropriate camps on the outskirts of Thessaloniki. Numerous local and international initiatives, with the participation of refugees from the camps, self-organized a transnational No Border camp in the city center that challenged State policies. By claiming the right to the city, activists from all over Europe, together with refugees, built direct-democratic assemblies and organized a multitude of direct actions, demonstrations, and squats that marked the city’s social body with spatial disobedience and transnational commoning practices. Here, activism emerges as an important field of research and this article aims to contribute to activists’ literature on migration studies after 2015. The article is based on militant research and inspired by the Lefebvrian right to the city, the autonomy of migration, and common space approaches. The right to the city refers to the rights to freedom, socialization, and habitation, but also to the right to reinvent and change the city. It was recently enhanced by approaches on common spaces and the way these highlight the production of spaces based on solidarity, mutual help, common care, and direct democracy. The main findings of this study point to how the struggle of migrants when crossing physical and social borders inspires local solidarity movements for global networking and opens up new possibilities to reimagine and reinvent transnational common spaces.

Mit ihrem Buch "Ethnografie urbaner Territorien" bietet Monika Streule eine Forschungsarbeit, die Anstöße für eine transdisziplinäre Stadtforschung gibt und sich komplexen Verhältnissen widmet. Mit einem Set von ethnografischen und kartografischen Methoden analysiert sie Urbanisierungsprozesse der Megametropole Mexiko-Stadt und regt dazu an, Stadtforschung nicht nur reflektiert und kritisch zu denken, sondern auch innovativ vorzugehen. In diesem Essay findet daher insbesondere eine Auseinandersetzung mit ihren methodischen und methodologischen Herangehensweisen statt. In her book "Ethnography of Urban Territories", Monika Streule offers useful ideas and advice for transdisciplinary studies that are concerned with the complex conditions most often found in cities. She develops a tool box containing ethnographic and cartographic methods that are used to analyze urbanization processes in the mega metropolis Mexico-City. She encourages us to not only think of urban research more reflectively and critically, but also more innovatively. Therefore, in this article, the methodological approach in general and the used methods in particular will be discussed more thoroughly.

Auf der Basis einer Sekundärauswertung qualitativer Studien zu stadtregionalen Wanderungsprozessen in der Metropolregion Hamburg seit 1998 fokussiert dieser Beitrag Motive, Prozesse und Rahmenbedingungen städtischen Wohnens. Sie manifestieren sich in vergleichenden Bewertungen städtischen und suburbanen Wohnens sowie in Hintergründen der Präferenzen für urbane Wohnstandorte. Diese Informationen ergänzen das Spektrum möglicher Erklärungen für Reurbanisierung um Aspekte des sozialen Handelns von Wohnenden. On the basis of a secondary analysis of qualitative investigations of urban regional migration processes in the Metropolitan Region of Hamburg since 1998, this paper focuses on the motives, processes and parameters of urban living. These manifest themselves in comparative evaluations of urban and suburban living, and also in the backgrounds of preferences for urban residential locations. This information extends the spectrum of possible explanations for reurbanisation with factors related to the social behaviour of residents.

Source at http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/up.v4i1.1950. This issue discusses the concept of social innovation (SI) as a potentially transformative factor in urban planning and local development. SI represents an alternative to economic and technology-oriented approaches to urban development, such as that of ‘smart cities’, ‘creative cities’, etc. This is thanks to the emphasis SI puts on human agency and the empowerment of local communities and citizens to be actively involved in transforming their urban environments. Urban planning could benefit greatly from devoting more attention to SI when addressing the diverse urban problems of today, such as social exclusion, urban segregation, citizen participation and integration, or environmental protection, many of them addressed in the articles gathered in this volume.

The article aims to provide an initial insight into if and how urban metabolism perspectives and approaches may strengthen accountability in urban environmental strategic planning. It argues that many of the challenges in governing urban environmental flows successfully result from accountability gaps in strategic planning. The aim of the research is to test the assumption that urban metabolism perspectives and approaches strengthen accountability in urban environmental strategic planning. Applying a four-pillar accountability analysis to the strategic climate and resource plans of New York and Zurich, two cities which put environmental sustainability high on their political agenda, the study traces the role of urban metabolism perspectives and approaches and discusses the benefits these may have for accountable strategic planning with a focus on carbon and material flows. The interim results show on the one hand that implicit urban metabolism approaches are vital for both cities’ strategic planning and that they contribute to strengthened accountability in all four pillars of the analysis: responsibility, transparency, assessment and participation. On the other hand, the analysis highlights further potential benefits of urban metabolism perspectives and approaches in urban strategic climate and resource planning.