Search results

Wangjing is a large residential cluster located at the intersection of the Fourth Ring Road and the airport expressway in the northeast part of Beijing. The area is a “suburb” according to official statistics and academic accounts, which often classify urban areas beyond the historical old city as suburbs. Due to its proximity to the airport and major expressways, Wangjing has developed quickly since the late 1990s. As more high-rise luxury apartment buildings get built, the area's population has reached 150,000 as of 2010, including more than 30,000 foreign expatriates living here amid Chinese urban professionals. Across the airport expressway from Wangjing is the 798 Factory, a hip arts quarter developed within a former electronics factory built in the 1950s. Looking for large studio space, a few artists moved into the Bauhaus-style workshops here in the late 1990s, and quickly bookstores, coffee shops, and galleries followed suit. By 2005, the 798 Factory had become the center of the contemporary Chinese art scene and home to many prestigious international galleries. Outside the factory compound is a working-class neighborhood developed in the 1950s to house workers at the nearby factories and their families. The living conditions here have not changed much for decades, with some families still sharing common kitchens and bathrooms with their neighbors in dilapidated apartment buildings. To the west side of Wangjing, after about a 15-minute drive along the Fourth Ring Road, one reaches the Olympic Park, a brand-new area of parks, stadiums, five-star hotels, golf courses, and exclusive gated communities of villas – all developed in the short period before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Beyond the Fifth Ring Road, one can see many “urban villages,” former agricultural villages that have become populated by migrant workers with low-paid jobs – taxi drivers, construction workers, waiters, nannies, security guards, and street vendors. Unable to afford to live in the central city, migrant workers rent rooms from local peasants at the city's edge. Many of these villages are to be demolished soon to make space for commercial property development, and the migrant worker tenants will have to move to another village farther away from the city.

Urban tourism in megacities is a rather recent research topic. There is a dearth of literature on urban tourism in Indian megacities, especially Mumbai. Though much research has looked into slum tourism activities, other urban tourism aspects have been kept aside. The chapter aims to present a different perspective of leisure tourism in Mumbai. After introducing some contextual background information on the city, the chapter examines critically official tourism communication and policies by tackling the spatiality of tourism and the geographical clusters in the city. It attempts to understand the consumption patterns of various tourists' groups and looks into recent tourism developments.

Contemporary urban change is predominantly driven by migration and capital accumulation, with associated urban (re-)development projects – such as new-build gentrification – typically favouring the middle classes. Low-income residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods are often said to be displaced from their homes, either directly or indirectly, or to experience a loss of sense of place induced by the physical and social changes to the area. With the latter in mind, we investigate the perceived opportunities and threats of urban renewal experienced by stay-put communities in the wake of new developments and demonstrate how a loss of sense of place occurs via conflict between neighbours affected by the change. Our focus on transnational spaces comprising co-migrant Kurdish/Turkish communities in the two cities of Istanbul (Turkey) and Vienna (Austria) reveals not only how profoundly the impacts of neighbour conflict are felt as once-close and supportive neighbourly ties are severed but also how well-established neighbourly norms and obligations in transnational spaces accentuate the conflict in the first place. Moral codes that require neighbours to look after one another, along with local power dynamics of support in return for loyalty, set expectations that neighbours will take each other’s side when needed. Our findings reveal that the situatedness of residents to the development projects (in terms of proximity, residential tenure and openness to change) causes neighbours to take opposing sides and that the conflicts generated are accentuated by the perceived failure of neighbours to meet their neighbourly obligations. The result is a loss of sense of place and belonging for all residents – not just those detrimentally impacted by the development – wrought by rising hostility and avoidance among neighbours, and an overall weakening of neighbourly ties.

Since early 2020, the world has faced a pandemic that has caused a disruption in our lives, the likes of which have never been seen before. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we live, work, communicate, socialize, travel and even plan our future life. The lockdowns and civilian and travel restrictions imposed by countries worldwide have drastically affected citizens' daily routines and mobility. In consequence, all sectors are currently struggling with an unprecedented crisis, as health-related concerns have substantial effects on travel industry at the local, national and global level. The current increase in mortality rate caused by the new coronavirus has affected individuals' risk and safety perceptions and consequently their travel behaviour.

A quantitative research methodology using an online questionnaire was implemented in Portugal, and a sample composed of 1900 answers collected during one year allowed to analyze the impact that the current pandemic has on people's safety and risk perceptions and how it is affecting their daily life and travel behaviours and their willingness to accept civilian and travel restrictions. The results confirmed that the pandemic had a strong impact on Portuguese residents' safety perceptions and their travel and tourism plans. Also, it was possible to conclude that those perceptions have changed over the course of three pandemic waves.

The discussion focuses on the kind of implications this situation may have for tourism destination management and marketing. Study limitations and guidelines for future research are also forwarded.

Demand for goods/services has increased in Latin America due to urbanization, leading to a complex delivery system and increased logistical activities. In Quito, the Historic Center and La Mariscal are two zones that face logistical challenges. The objective of this chapter is to analyze the commercial logistic activities related to loading and unloading goods in these zones. To address this urban freight problem, this chapter proposes a solution through the calculation of the optimal number and location of loading and unloading bays in each zone based on actual commercial activity data. First, a delivery survey was completed in each zone regarding frequency and amount of deliveries. Then, based on the data obtained, an optimization model is proposed to determine the optimal number and location of loading and unloading bays. Finally, a simulation model of the delivery process is performed to readjust the bay’s optimal number. A total number of 75 and 98 bays were calculated to serve the total shopping district of a representative square kilometer (km²) of the Historic Center and La Mariscal. This solution aims to minimize the delivery time and the distance for deliveries, improve urban freight transportation, and reduce traffic. This study could be used as a baseline and guide for further research in urban logistics, especially in Latin America, where urban logistics is still under study. This chapter is part of a Research Project of Urban Logistics in Quito, led by Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), in association with the Megacity Logistics Lab of MIT.

With the increasing urbanization rates in emerging countries such as the ones in Latin America and the Caribbean, urban logistics solutions and initiatives are widely needed. Urban planners often consider only passenger transportation and leave freight transportation unattended, thus increasing externalities and degrading the transportation of goods. This chapter presents three urban logistics solutions, which intend to tackle problems related to urbanization and last mile delivery operations challenges by evaluating location models for loading and unloading bays, urban transfer centers location models, and freight trip generation models. The presented solutions were proposed by several researchers of the Institute of Innovation in Productivity and Logistics CATENA-USFQ over the last four years and remain theoretical at the moment. However, we present estimated results of potential implementations in three districts of Quito: Historic Center, Entertainment District, and Corporate District. This chapter not only presents the mentioned urban logistics solutions in Quito but also gives an overview of the followed methodology, which can be replicated in countries and cities of similar characteristics of the region.

This chapter examines megaproject design and planning in two “shrinking cities” – Philadelphia, PA and Detroit, MI – and concludes that megaproject “metastasis,” or repeated expansions into surrounding urban fabrics, is promoting the reduction of downtown into a series of self-contained enclaves. While political coalitions are constructing megaprojects, or large public works and/or single buildings, in cities around the world, in the United States, single-building megaprojects motivated by “growth coalitions” of public and private development actors have proliferated in downtowns since 1990. The urban design impacts of these megaprojects on the surrounding urban fabric have been little studied. Data on the institutional history, physical expansion, and relationship of the megaprojects to the urban fabric is combined with a qualitative analysis of megaproject theory and its application to the American condition, as well as to the political economy of development in American shrinking cities. The chapter concludes that megaprojects such as convention centers and casinos tend to expand inexorably once they are introduced into the American downtown. This metastasis results in the destruction of existing older buildings and street networks, the consolidation of street blocks into ever-larger superblocks, and the eventual physical restructuring of downtowns into enclaves of older fabric amidst clusters of megaproject superblocks. Applying Jacobs’ (1992) theory of “moral hybrids” between “commerce and politics” to megaproject metastasis, the chapter argues that while megaprojects may be inevitable in American downtowns, they should be sited away from active, small-scale urban fabrics to reduce the negative impacts of future metastases. The chapter takes a design-oriented perspective on a phenomenon that is almost always understood from a political economy perspective alone. Megaprojects are significant physical entities, and the chapter clarifies their physical impacts on the urban fabric while indicating urban design policy directions to reduce these impacts in future.

The landscape of European cities is by no means homogeneous. Nonetheless, the same type of conflict has repeatedly occurred in different places in the last few years: From Seville to Vienna, from Cologne to St. Petersburg, planned high-rise buildings for inner city districts have provoked fervent arguments and debates. Whether and how European cities should integrate more high-rise buildings is a highly controversial question. This chapter focuses on strategies of vertical construction and related debates about the cityscape in both Paris and Vienna. By studying the urban constellations of Paris and Vienna, it can be shown that what may look comparable at first glance is the outcome of highly different strategies and histories.

Although both cities define themselves to a wide degree with reference to historic structures, the image of tall buildings varies drastically in these cities, which correlates with these cities’ diverse histories and hence experiences with high-rise buildings. Path dependencies and the ways individual cities receive international trends are crucial to understanding processes of urbanization. Based on in-depth interviews with various urban actors and other relevant qualitative data, this chapter aims to demonstrate that a city’s high-rise strategy cannot be attributed to any single factor; rather, it is the result of a complex interplay between various aspects and actors, which crucially includes present and past struggles over cityscapes and therefore over urban spaces.