Search results

The study examines socio-spatial appropriations in dwellings of Cairo, which were undertaken to expand dwellings affordances and accommodate new utilitarian demands during lockdown. The study questions whether those appropriations impacted dwellers' conceptions of dwellers' dwellings and scrutinizes how those appropriations could feedback the design of dwellings post-pandemic.

The research adopted a mixed-method approach and was constructed over two phases as follows: first, in-depth interviews with 20 participants to acquire qualitative data about the adopted appropriation strategies and the subsequent actualized affordances and second, an online quantitative survey answered by 133 respondents to quantify the frequency of the adopted appropriation strategies and test the relationship between appropriations and mental conceptions of dwellings.

The study identifies five main appropriation strategies undertaken by dwellers and builds upon them to recommend favorable design features of dwellings post-pandemic. Those are: securing unscripted spaces, reviving dormant spaces, space compartmentalization, temporal programing of space and space esthetic personalization. The study also affirms a relationship between undertaking appropriations and improved mental conceptions of dwellings. Finally, the study suggests recommendations for space use optimization which could be deployed in existing dwellings and could ultimately be considered for designing post-pandemic dwellings.

The originality of this study lies in the study's opportune documentation and analysis of such an exceptional condition. Thus far, very few studies have tackled socio-spatial practices in dwellings during lockdown, let alone the impact of the pandemic on the design of future dwellings.

This paper aims to provide an empirical analysis of residents’ perceptions and attitudes in the city of Aveiro, Portugal, regarding the appropriation of public spaces by tourists. An analysis of how the perceptions of this appropriation influence residents’ attitudes (RA) towards tourists, and even restructuring of space considering RA, is also presented. It is intended to do this based on a theoretical framework where tourism socio-cultural impacts on urban destinations are analysed with a focus on appropriation processes. Attitudes of residents are also examined.

A questionnaire survey (N = 301) was carried out with residents of the city of Aveiro, using a cluster sampling approach. The aim of the empirical study is to use multiple linear regression analyses to assess the extent to which the residents’ perceptions of tourists’ appropriation of public spaces influence the attitudes of the former towards the latter.

The results show that, overall, the residents consider that tourism has more positive than negative impacts. However, it can be observed that residents already perceive some negative impacts of tourism regarding the appropriation of space. Concerning RA, these tend to be more positive than negative. It can also be observed that various perceptions of appropriation of space significantly influence these attitudes. The paper ends with some guidelines for designing policies and strategies for tourism development that promote better use of public spaces by tourists.

Considering the limited empirical research on perceptions of appropriation of tourism space, the study carried out in this paper analyses the impact of a comprehensive set of residents’ perceptions regarding the appropriation of public space by tourists on various types of attitudes of residents towards tourists.

This paper introduces two methodological innovations for qualitative research. We apply these innovations to holistically understand youth peer cultures and improve participant-driven qualitative methodology.

It moves the methodological frontier forward by blending technology with the “go-along” approach used by ethnographers to prioritize participants’ perspectives and experiences within their socio-cultural contexts.

We introduce the youth-centered and participant-driven virtual tours, including a neighborhood tour using Google Maps designed to explore how youth navigate their socio-spatial environments (n = 64; 10–17 year-olds; 2013) and a social media tour designed to explore how youth navigate their networked publics (n = 50; 10–17 year-olds; 2013), both in relation to their local peer cultures.

Applicable to a wide range of research populations, the Google Maps tour and the social media tour give the qualitative researcher additional tools to conduct participant-driven research into youths’ socio-cultural worlds. These two innovations help to address challenges in youth research as well as qualitative research more broadly. We find, for example, that the “go-along” aspect of the virtual tour minimizes the perceived threat of the researcher’s adult status and brings youth participants’ perspectives and experiences to the center of inquiry in the study of local peer cultures.

Post-war Italy faced a transition from industrial reconstruction to a phase of mature capitalism characterised by massive internal migrations towards the north of the country. A rapid urbanisation process created large dysfunctional areas at the periphery of the main re-industrialising cities like Milan, Genoa and Turin. In particular Milan has been defined as the capital of the Italian economic miracle (Foot, 2001). But during the 1950s Milan's extended industrial areas were subjected to main socio-spatial transformations: from being a mix of industrial and rural communities just after the war, the peripheries of Milan turned into deprived areas lacking basic services and infrastructure during the 1970s, when social conflicts were increasingly rising. From 1968 to 1977 Milan was also one of the main stages of a cultural revolution that in Italy uniquely assumed deep political implications by undermining the fundamental institutions of the state (Balestrini & Moroni, 1988).

A threatened sense of safety in public spaces is a problem for liveable communities. For better public policies, this study investigates multi-dimensional and multi-scalar aspects of gendered perceived safety and strategies by women and men in daily public spaces.

A face-to-face survey with 40 men and 50 women in a public space (Izmir, Turkey) is deployed. Descriptive statistics and regression analysis compare participants' perceptions of and strategies for safety across the city, neighbourhood and the study site.

Their experienced-based familiarities in public places increase women's perceived safety. As safety strategies, different place-based and gendered-preconditions appear for women and men going “outside” especially “alone” (i.e. unaccompanied). Reaffirming female vulnerability in public places, gendered preconditions include individuals' attributes. Of place-based preconditions, crowd and police are significant mechanisms for safety but emphasized differently by women and men. Housewives' female companionship in the study site develops a class- and gender-based claim for a safe place away from their underserved neighbourhood.

Gendered- and place preconditions for women's safety can inform design policies about surveillance and permeability of public spaces. Lack of data about class-based differences about perceived safety is a limitation.

Among a few, it takes perceived safety as performative acts with learned strategies across (rather than momentary perceptions in) socio-spatial spaces and provides a research framework that considers such acts with individual and spatial dimensions across multiple socio-spatial scales.

The highly contagious coronavirus and the rapid spread of COVID-19 disease have generated a global public health crisis, which is being addressed at various local and global scales through social distancing measures and guidelines. This is coupled with debates about the nature of living and working patterns through intensive utilisation of information and telecommunication technologies, leading to the social and institutional acceptability of these patterns as the “new normal”. The primary objective of this article is to instigate a discourse about the potential contribution of architecture and urban design and planning in generating knowledge that responds to pressing questions about future considerations of post pandemic architecture and urbanism. Methodologically, the discussion is based on a trans-disciplinary framework, which is utilised for conceptual analysis and is operationalized by identifying and discoursing design and planning implications. The article underscores relevant factors; originates insights for areas where future research will be critically needed, through key areas: a) Issues related to urban dynamics are delineated from the perspective of urban and human geography, urban design and planning, and transportation engineering; b) Questions that pertain to socio-spatial implications and urban space/ urban life dialectics stem from the field of environmental psychology; and c) Deliberations about new environments that accommodate new living/working styles supervene from ethnographical and anthropological perspectives. The article concludes with an outlook that captures key aspects of the needed synergy between architectural and urban education, research, and practice and public health in a post pandemic virtual and global world.

According to the Colombian Labour Ministry, in 2015, 750,000 persons officially worked as household employees. Ninety-eight per cent of these employees are women who tend to live in Bogotá’s (southern) urban fringe and travel to the city’s wealthier north on a daily basis. Yet public transportation in the Colombian capital is subject to stratification. Besides overcrowding and delays, petty crime and sexual harassment, fringe areas remain underserved. Based on ethnographic data, in this chapter, the authors discuss findings from a 3-year research project on female household employees’ subjective experience of space. Specifically, the authors explore their capacity (motility) to be mobile. This perspective breaks with the limits of bounded categories such as ‘urban’, ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘class’, to highlight their situational and spatial mutability. Moreover, an investigation of motility includes people’s potential to move as well as their subjective experiences of mobility. The research shows how gender intersects with local labour regimes and infrastructure to negatively affect women’s mobility. Urban stratification is not only a question of locale of residence and access to services, but importantly (re)produced in the household employees’ subjective experience of their daily commute, which they describe as suffering. In their limited spare time, female household employees abstain from travelling, effectively curbing their active appropriation of urban space. The research thus illuminates how spatial, social and economic dimensions mutually interact to impact on the women’s lives and possibilities.

Between 1860 and 1945, the Chinese port city of Tianjin was the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions, functioning side by side. Rogaski defined it as a ‘hyper-colony’, a term which reflects Tianjin's socio-political intricacies and the multiple colonial discourses of power and space. This essay focuses on the transformation of the Tianjin cityscape during the last 150 years, and aims at connecting the hyper-colonial socio-spatial forms with the processes of post-colonial identity construction. Tianjin is currently undergoing a massive renovation program: its transmogrifying cityscape unveils multiple layers of ‘globalizing’ spatialities and temporalities, throwing into relief processes of power and capital accumulation, which operate via the urban regeneration's experiment. This study uses an ‘interconnected history’ approach and traces the interweaving ‘worlding’ nodes of today's Tianjin back to the global connections established in the city during the hyper-colonial period. What emerges is Tianjin's simultaneous tendency towards ‘world-class-ness’ and ‘China-class-ness’.

This paper explores social resilience through the lenses of migration. It specifically studies the role of community architects in building socially resilient refugee camps which are human settlements characterized by a transient and heterogeneous community with unique vulnerabilities. These settlements are managed through exceptional governance arrangements between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic humanitarian organizations.

Empirical evidences are drawn from the Office of Displaced Designers (ODD), a design-focused creative integration organization active on Lesvos island. During one-month ethnographic research with ODD, empirical data were harvested through an extensive review of project archive materials including transcripts and audio files of interviews with project participants and collaborators conducted by ODD, architectural drawings and teaching materials, photo and video archives and administrative documents. The ethnographic research was complemented with semi-structured interviews with the founding members and former volunteers and partners of ODD; key site visits to the Moria Hotspot and the surrounding Olive Groves; as well as a desk study on European Union (EU) policies and legislative papers and legal information regarding the asylum seeker application procedure in Europe and Greece.

Reflecting on the potential and limitations of community architects in building socially resilient refugee camps, the paper concludes that in order for community architects to make long lasting improvements they must think holistically and design flexible structural solutions for the entire camp, leverage existing expertise within communities and assist other organizations through administrative, financial and design consultancy support. Community architects are also expected to take active roles in forming pro-equity governance structures and steering pro-resilient humanitarian trajectories by acting as mediators, lobbying their partners, advocating for inclusive practices and social spaces and documenting their projects to build an evidence base across practices and contexts and to strengthen their voice as a collective of community architects.

The role of community architects in building socially resilient human settlements in post-disaster place-based recovery processes has been widely discussed in the disaster scholarship. These studies have primarily emphasized permanent and in situ reconstruction efforts in disaster-affected areas. What remains limitedly discussed is the resilience-building potential of community architects in extraterritorial temporary human settlements characterized by displacement and temporality such as in refugee camps. In light of these observations, the aim of this paper is to push the boundaries of knowledge on post-crisis recovery by re-approaching the notion of social resilience from a migratory perspective and revealing the potential and limitations of community architects in fostering socially resilient refugee camps in new (national) territories.

This paper aims to examine people's strategies to regain control over the socio-spatial organisation of their villages and transform their agency-built houses in culturally meaningful places post-disaster. In the aftermath of a disaster, building processes are often taken over by external agencies whose approach towards reconstruction is governed by considerations such as safety, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and – in some cases – also by an explicit will to trigger social transformations. As a result, reconstruction often entails dramatic changes in settlement location and morphologies, housing designs, building materials and construction processes.

Based on an ongoing interdisciplinary empirical research project focusing on communities’ patterns of adaptation to post-disaster relocated settlements in India, the paper examines people’s strategies to regain control over the socio-spatial organisation of their villages and to transform their agency-built houses in culturally meaningful places.

The paper shows that people are not passive recipients of external agencies’ often culturally insensitive project and that they have the capacity to transform externally imposed notions of appropriate housing to meet their cultural- and livelihood-specific needs. Based on a micro-level case study of a village in Gujarat, it is argued that underestimating communities’ capacity to rebuild their own houses and villages and the failure to recognise the inherent functionality of local housing and building culture often entail not only missing the opportunity to enhance their resilience but also, in some cases, may lead to increasing their vulnerability.

This paper presents a rare example of longitudinal research, calling attention to the long-term impacts of post-disaster reconstruction. It is of particular interest to scholars and humanitarian agencies concerned about the social consequences of relocation and reconstruction after natural disasters.