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The purpose of this paper is to develop an approach to urban environment management through analysis of “urban emptiness” based on user-generated big data.

The research design is based on creating a theoretical model of urban emptiness as a multilayer phenomenon in the city space and then developing an applied approach to map its different types through user-generated and open big data from multiple online sources.

The paper provides a definition and a theoretical model of “urban emptiness” as a multilayer phenomenon integrated into the complexity of the city system and as a resource for sustainable urban development. The paper presents a methodological approach to analyse urban emptiness based on spontaneous user-generated geolocated open data emerging online. This approach is applied to the Russian city of St Petersburg with a demonstration of the data set formation based on multiple sources and an interpretation of the preliminary results.

The paper focuses on the under-researched phenomenon of urban emptiness, which leads to a certain speculation of propositions and lack of generalisability of the results. Therefore, the researchers are encouraged to further test the proposed propositions.

The paper describes urban emptiness as a resource in urban development and gives recommendations on how to account for it in sustainable urban environment management, in particular, in limiting urban sprawl.

This paper consolidates data-driven methods to create an integrated approach to urban environment management from an original standpoint – analysis of urban emptiness.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the work of Deleuze and Guattari can help place marketers to think differently about places and place brands.

This is a conceptual paper that draws together a range of resources to develop a Deleuzoguattarian approach to place marketing.

Deleuzoguattarian thinking helps place marketers to reconceptualise places as “becomings”, which in turn encourages them to look between, beneath and beyond their usual foci. The Deleuzoguattarian spirit of critical-creativity is also noted, encouraging readers to develop the ideas presented here in new directions.

This paper expands the epistemological imagination of place marketing scholars to consider the places between their place brands, the subconscious influences beneath the surface of salience and phenomena beyond the anthroposcale of everyday experience. This enriches existing conceptualisations and extends place marketing with several new areas of enquiry that can be empirically elaborated through future research.

This paper helps place marketing practitioners to consider and respond to the flows of matter–energy that influence their place brands between, beneath and beyond their intentional management practices.

This paper develops critical schools of thought within the place marketing literature, providing some suggestions about how to develop and manage more inclusive place brands. This may also have implications for activists and others seeking societal improvements.

This paper develops a Deleuzoguattarian approach to place marketing, stimulating new lines of inquiry and experimental practices.

The aim of this article is to understand the definitions, trends and gaps currently existing in the literature regarding the concept of void in the built environment.

The method used for this article is based on a bilingual narrative literature review, the authors being fluent both in French and English. The advantage of any literature review is that it allows researchers to gather and analyse existing academic literature on a specific subject. The chosen technique gives a thorough understanding of the study and helps in identifying research gaps. The literature review was sequential, online and used ScienceDirect, Scopus and Sage Knowledge as databases.

There are three main findings regarding this literature review. The first shows that the void is lacking consensus regarding its definition and attributes, yet this is unanimously considered as an existing space in the city. The second finding shows that voids are talking to our emotions and perceptions and more studies could investigate a new planning/design approach in taking this into consideration. At last, the third findings shows that there are some gaps that need to be further researched, such as the difference between Western and Eastern cultures to use voids in architecture.

In compiling 35 articles focussing on the void, this article proposes a valuable source of knowledge regarding this topic, as well as delineates new research directions.

Globalization, advanced by technologies of production and information, created seamless world markets with profound impacts on the world economy. Vast amounts of wealth have been created, but that wealth has been unequally distributed. Such inequality has meant that large numbers of young people have not been able to find the kinds of jobs and careers that provide the “goods” life extolled in a consumer society. Nor do the dominant values of rationality, neo-liberalism or secularism hold much appeal. These conditions have encouraged the emergence of a number of subcultures of transgression, identity-granting communities of meaning which provide members with a sense of community with recognition and empowerment. As many such subcultures repudiate dominant norms, we note how they resemble the medieval carnival, which Bakhtin showed was a time and place of inversion, transgression, and celebration of the grotesque. It allowed the common people encapsulate realms of agency to articulate disdain and resistance. Yet this served to reproduce the dominant system.

In much the same way, insofar as globalization is intimately tied to cities, we have seen the growing importance of cities as nodal points for global commerce as well as sites for entertainment and tourism. These factors, together with the longstanding anonymity and toleration of the city, have become focal points for the emergence of a number of oppositional subcultures. They include those who embrace extreme body modification, numerous forms of body adornment through piercings (rings, posts, studs), tattoos, and surgical modifications such as implanted horns, furrows, or split tongues. Following Simmel, adornment can be seen as a means of inclusion within a group and differentiation from others. The practitioners of extreme body modification label themselves “urban primitives,” who see themselves rejecting global modernity, the occupation-based status hierarchies of the dominant occupational system and its shallow, materialistic culture. They see themselves as a moment of the “transvaluation of values” in which Dionysian passion triumphs over Apollonian control and restraint. This is especially evident in various genital decorations in which what heretofore has been private and exposure was a matter of shame. There has been a “cultural transformation of the pubic sphere.” While such groups find community, identity and recognition, they must also be understood as a key ingredient of the city in a global age in which diversity, cosmopolitanism, and the offbeat constitute essential moments of urban ambience.

Amidst the debates on the death or resurgence of public spaces emerges a significant question: how could public spaces that function at different urban scales and cater for diverse collective needs be provided? This article explores the roles and potentials of temporary public spaces in meeting diverse challenges related to the supply and use of urban open spaces. Positioning temporary public spaces within the literature on non-conventional public spaces is conducted with the purpose of identifying those spaces' characteristics. The proposed definition of temporary public spaces is based on their dynamic status of use-rights. Moreover, a conceptual framework based on urban land economics and bid rent theory is used to explain how such spaces transform under the exchange of temporary use-rights to activate vacant urban lots for public activities. This conceptual framework is applied in the case of a grass root approach to the supply of temporary public spaces. The context is Beirut, a city that has lost its public spaces due to wars and is trying to reintroduce them through different supply mechanisms. The examples illustrate how homogeneous urban spaces are identified over time and converted into heterogeneous and lively temporary public spaces. These contribute towards conviviality in a highly fragmented and multi-cultural society and animate everyday urban life.

Baudelaire (1863) and Benjamin (1983) used the term flaneur to denote a modern man who could evocatively describe social life in urban areas. A flaneur was poetically to describe the ephemeral nature of modern urban life, but without acting as a consumer. Here I approach Las Vegas from the perspective of a flaneur, and discuss the possibilities in that city for flanerie today. I introduce the concept pseudo-flanerie, and apply it to postmodern tourism. In Las Vegas, pseudo-flaneurs wander from one impersonation of a city/culture/era to another, stroll from one game to another, and move from one presentation of self to another. However, surveillance, social control, and the organizing principles of capitalism structure each. I also discuss pseudo-flanerie in Las Vegas in terms of temporality, morality, and consumption practices. I find that the flaneur’s traditionally anti-consumer stance has been endangered in tourist cities like Las Vegas, where mock cities have commodified city-like experiences to tourists who ultimately pay to engage in practices traditionally associated with flaneurs. A postmodern tourist environment like Las Vegas, therefore, creates the conditions for the pseudo-flaneur to emerge.

Most people live in cities and work in offices, two contexts offering many lifestyle-related and environmental health risks. To advance their health, this paper aims to introduce an analogy between urban design and facility design to explore whether health-directed design interventions in cities and facilities are related and to look for applicable cross-overs and opportunities to develop the facility management (FM) profession on the urban level.

The principles of abductive reasoning as a first phase of scientific investigation were followed, by introducing a new idea and attentively observing phenomena in the communities of FM and urban design. The method was desk research, in the context of discovery.

Many possible cross-overs exist which offer opportunities for urban planners and facility managers to reinforce each other and interesting market opportunities for the further development of urban FM. However, more systematic research is needed on efficacious and effective interventions. Furthermore, experiences and capacities of the FM sector should be unlocked and applied within a city context, as the knowledge and experiences of facility managers and urban planners can create synergy.

The findings are directly applicable to facility and urban design practices and to FM education by involving students in city design practices.

Cross-overs between facilities and cities are new and can inspire both facility managers and urban planners to work together more closely for the benefit of citizens and employees.

This survey of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a benchmark for the transformations of the Anthropocene, is a provisional exercise in applied social theory. Like multiple processes of desertification that are accelerating in and around Las Vegas, this study is provisional, as it follows Las Vegas as a discrete place whose desertifying qualities are spreading far beyond Nevada, regionally, nationally, globally, and virulently so. Las Vegas, Las Vegas Valley, Mohave Desert, and Colorado River Basin are biopolitical spaces and geophysical places that iteratively replicate the psycho-social contradictions of people in search of sustainable lifestyles in global spaces rocked by ecological catastrophe, and which is open to critical scrutiny. The study more closely examines how systems of organized growth tied to commercial degradation, urban demography, military development, and nuclear devastation drive desertification in this region as well as elsewhere. Like the planet’s other sprawling cities, Las Vegas is an integral component in the globalizing neoliberal omnipolitanization of the Earth’s surface. The neoliberal logic of “winner takes all” also is reflected in the metrometabolic exchanges of these extraordinary urban formations. The rampant overdevelopment of a vast urban simulation, featuring multiple ruinations of its own built and natural landscapes, may give many Las Vegans, and probably most Vegas visitors, their most fundamental sense of place.