No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Urban space of recognition: design for ethno-cultural diversity in the German Colony, Haifa
Abstract
This paper examines urban design from the socio-political concept of recognition and formulates a framework of urban space of recognition. It aims to illuminate principles of urban design that enhance the recognition of misrecognized groups in public space. Based on an analysis of a public space shared by Arabs and Jews in the mixed city of Haifa, Israel, it proposes that the framework of urban space of recognition rests upon the visual display of multiple cultures and histories as well as designing for opportunities for cross-culture learning and interaction.
This paper offers a new perspective on everyday life in an ethno-nationally mixed vertical urban setting. It focuses on the cultivation of a shared residential identity that, seemingly, can overcome the binational divide. Drawing on interviews with Jewish and Arab residents in a new middle-class high-rise complex (HRC) in Haifa, Israel, we illustrate that Arabs and Jews share many reasons for living in the HRC, reflecting similarities between these populations that are often ignored. Moreover, the physical form of the complex – including its newness and its modern, universal design – makes it a relatively neutral space free from a particular ethno-national or religious identity. Finally, while the relevant literature largely assumes that ‘anonymity’ in high-rises is a negative force, the sense of privacy it affords allows residents to manage social proximity and cultivate a philosophy of ‘live and let live’.
This book is one of the outcomes of the DIVERCITIES project. It focuses on the question of how to create social cohesion, social mobility and economic performance in today’s hyperdiversified cities. The project’s central hypothesis is that urban diversity is an asset that can inspire creativity, innovation and make cities more liveable and harmonious.
This article introduces the immersive focus group as a mixed-methods approach in planning research. Using the immersive focus group we generate genuine knowledge of both quantitative and qualitative data about the diverse and nuanced perceptions of forest landscapes in order to then extract planning decisions. The article elaborates on the deployment of focus groups in a particular venue: the immersive theater laboratory. In doing so, we hope to position the immersive focus group as a viable tool for planning research. We conclude with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach and its potential further development.
Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization provides a theoretically informed, practice-oriented account of intercultural conflict and co-existence in cities. Bollens uses a wide-ranging set of over 100 interviews with local political and community leaders to investigate how popular urban policies can trigger 'pushes from below' that help nation-states address social and political challenges. The book brings the city and the urban scale into contemporary debates about democratic transformations in ethnically diverse countries. It connects the city, on conceptual and pragmatic levels, to two leading issues of today - the existence of competing and potentially destructive nationalistic allegiances and the limitations of democracy in multinational societies. Bollens finds that cities and urbanists are not necessarily hemmed in by ethnic conflict and political gridlock, but can be proactive agents that stimulate the progress of societal normalization. The fuller potential of cities is in their ability to catalyze multinational democratization. Alternately, if cities are left unprotected and unmanaged, ethnic antagonists can fragment the city's collective interests in ways that slow down and confine the advancement of sustainable democracy. This book will be helpful to scholars, international organizations, and grassroots organizations in understanding why and how the peace-constitutive city emerges in some cases while it is misplaced and neglected in others.
Most research on ethnically and nationally contested cities posits that urban spatial segregation trends will remain decisive so long as the macro level national conflict persists, and assumes that the neoliberalization of urban space would only strengthen such trends. Over the last decade however, and despite the ever deepening national conflict, Jerusalem has seen the emergence of neoliberal spaces of consumption that serve as resilient spaces of intergroup encounter between Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab populations. In this article I will examine and compare two such neoliberal spaces in Jerusalem, and show how under certain conditions, privatized urban spaces can undermine processes of ethno-national segregation. I argue that interactions between members of the two rival groups are challenged and reshaped by neoliberal spaces and that the relocation of the ethno-national intergroup encounters to privatized spaces of consumption could represent a temporal shift to a class based encounters.
This article conceptualizes the Ethno-Place of Trust as a new concept for understanding and analyzing the meaning of places to an ethnic group. An Ethno-Place of Trust is defined as a place where a specific ethnic group shares or engages in social, cultural, economic, or political interests and activities, where their relations are based on trust, and where they feel safe. Ethno-Places of Trust have a set of components that together determine their existence: Shared Place, Shared Trust, Shared Perception of External Risk Shared Safety Feeling, and Shared Activities. Using this concept, the present study focuses on an emerging place of leisure for an ethnic minority and asks whether this place has the quality of an Ethno-Place of Trust. Evaluation of the empirical evidence gathered leads to the conclusion that the German Colony in Haifa has the features of an Ethno-Place of Trust for the Arab minority in Israel. Copyright © 2008, Locke Science Publishing Company, Inc. Chicago, IL, USA. All Rights Reserved.
While the recognition of marginalized social groups has become widely accepted as an important consideration for contemporary planning, the particular challenge of Indigenous recognition has barely registered in urban planning contexts. In this paper, we use a discursive and interpretive analysis of urban planning texts from Victoria, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, to illustrate how the ‘contact zone’ between Indigenous peoples and urban planning is produced and reproduced through texts. Discursive processes serve to bound and limit the recognition of Indigenous rights and interests, allowing only very small and shallow zones of contact in each place. Our findings from these cases show that these processes arise from quite different orders of discourse, and two social fields: Indigenous recognition and urban planning. The discourses present in both fields really matter for how the contact zone is persistently bounded to established territorial, political and administrative orders. In identifying these boundaries, our paper opens up new ways of thinking about, and engaging in, boundary-crossing work in planning.
Cities in general and public urban spaces in particular have re-emerged as important places where strangers from different social and cultural backgrounds interact. The growing number of intercultural encounters assumed by contemporary urban studies calls for a theoretical examination of how these encounters are conducted. In this article we therefore critically examine the interplay between cultures, strangers, performances, encounters, and urban built environments. This means bringing together the theoretical ideas of super-diversity, culture in world society, and situational places. The article argues that intercultural interactions between strangers in cities – and elsewhere – shape the cultural conditions of contemporary world society. First, super-diversity is discussed as a cultural reality of world society. Drawing on empirical evidence from psychology, intercultural interactions between strangers are then demonstrated to be part of ritualized cultural negotiations. Finally, the notion of situational places is put forward as the conceptual nexus between these cultural encounters and the urban environment. This perspective allows the integration of bodily performances between strangers, spatial and situational context, and the resulting places of encounter.
Segregation along lines of race/ethnicity and class has created multi-ethnic and rather class-homogeneous neighbourhoods in various European cities, commonly labelled as ‘disadvantaged’. Such neighbourhoods are often seen as ‘lacking’ community, as local networks are crucial for belonging and mixed neighbourhoods are too diverse to provide homogeneous identifications. However, in contrast to the understandings of the sociology of community, people might still experience ‘belonging’, yet in different ways. This article argues that we have to focus on the under-researched ‘time in-between’ (Byrne, 1978), the absent ties that Granovetter (1973) pointed to, to understand belonging, while moving away from a conception of the anonymous city and from the urban village. This article explores how absent ties affect belonging by empirically sustaining the notion of public familiarity: both recognizing and being recognized in local spaces. Using regression models on survey data from two mixed neighbourhoods in Berlin, Germany, we analyse the importance of neighbourhood use for public familiarity as well as how it relates to residents' comfort zone: people's feeling of belonging and their sense that others would intervene on their behalf. Our findings indicate that research on neighbourhoods could benefit greatly from a careful consideration of the ‘time in-between’.
Experience is conceptualised in both academic and policy circles as a more-or-less direct effect of the design of the built environment. Drawing on findings from a research project that investigated people’s everyday experiences of designed urban environments in two UK towns, this paper suggests at least two reasons why sensory encounters between individuals and built environments cannot in fact be understood entirely as a consequence of the design features of those environments. Drawing from empirical analysis based on surveys, ethnographic ‘walk-alongs’ and photo-elicitation interviews, we argue that distinct senses of place do depend on the sensory experiencing of built environments. However, that experiencing is significantly mediated in two ways. First, it is mediated by bodily mobility: in particular, the walking practices specific to a particular built environment. Secondly, sensory experiences are intimately intertwined with perceptual memories that mediate the present moment of experience in various ways: by multiplying, judging and dulling the sensory encounter. In conclusion, it is argued that work on sensory urban experiencing needs to address more fully the diversity and paradoxes produced by different forms of mobility through, and perceptual memories of, built environments.
Social scientists have begun engaging with participants ‘on the move’ in a variety of ways. This paper presents the results of a pilot study, which deployed a qualitative GIS technique to analyse the effectiveness of walked interviews in capturing data relating to people’s understanding of place. We give an account of the walking interview exploring two issues: the relationship between what people say and where they say it; and qualitative and quantitative differences between data generated by walking and sedentary interviews. Our results indicate that the data generated through walking interviews are profoundly informed by the landscapes in which they take place, emphasising the importance of environmental features in shaping discussions. We also demonstrate a measureable difference between walking and sedentary techniques in the production of rich place narratives both in terms of their quantity and spatial specificity to the study area. The paper concludes by acknowledging that a technocentric analysis of place runs the risk of emphasising locational above humanistic elements, but argues that, done sensitively, a qualitative GIS approach offers great potential for engaging planners and policy makers with the importance of local connections to place.
Urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg defines a third place as a place of refuge other than the home or workplace where people can regularly visit and commune with friends, neighbors, coworkers, and even strangers. Because little is known about the place-based physical qualities of third places that support sociability and place attachment, this article examines how four urban design characteristics distinguish third-place businesses from other businesses on the Main Street. The article discusses a study conducted at Main Streets in two cities and one town in Massachusetts. As part of the study, visual surveys measured urban design qualities of businesses on the Main Streets, and interviews helped determine user perceptions. The findings suggest that third places are relatively high in both personalization (distinctiveness, recognizability) and permeability to the street, but seating and shelter provisions are perhaps the most crucial urban design characteristics that contribute to sociability on the Main Street.
Safety and security are essential components of urban public space management, particularly since September 11, 2001. Although security is necessary for creating spaces the public will use, making it a top priority is often criticized for restricting social interaction, constraining individual liberties, and unjustly excluding certain populations. This study examines legal, design, and policy tools used to exert social and behavioral control in publicly accessible urban spaces. Based on a review of the relevant literature and extensive site visits to spaces in New York City, we create an index that uses 20 separate indicators in four broad categories to quantify the degree to which the use of a space is controlled. Since comparable instruments do not exist, we propose our index be used to evaluate publicly accessible spaces. We suggest several potential applications useful in planning practice and for testing theories about public space.
This article examines the contribution of the concepts trust and risk to our understanding of place meaning as people perceive it, and compares the meanings of a place to two different ethnic groups: Arabs and Jews in Israel. The empirical quantitative study was conducted among 210 Arab and Jewish adults who visited the renovated German Colony, a leisure place of restaurants and bars, in Haifa in August 2003. Arab and Jewish participants attributed the following conceptions to the German Colony: a place of trust, safety, good qualities, friendships, and an ethnic minority place. The Arab participants provided four more distinctive conceptions: privacy, trust within their group, unprecedented place, and culturally shared activities. The Jewish participants added a place of a specific class. The study suggests that concepts of trust and risk and their entailments are helpful for further elaborating research questions and hypotheses. The framework could applied to compare meanings of place among different ethnic groups, and comparison along class and gender lines, etc.
Over the past two decades, municipal governments across the United States have adopted novel social control techniques including off-limits orders, parks exclusion laws, and other applications of trespass law. These new tools are used to exclude the socially marginal from contested public spaces. These new social control techniques fuse criminal and civil legal authority and are touted as `alternatives' to arrest and incarceration. Ironically, these new techniques nonetheless increase the number of behaviors and people defined as criminal and subject to formal social control. This article describes these legal innovations and considers their origins and theoretical implications. We argue that recognition of law's constitutive effects helps to explain the origins and nature of the urban social control innovations described here.
In this paper we offer a critical analysis of ethnic relations in an Israeli 'mixed city'. Similar to other sites shaped by the logics of settling ethnonationalism and capitalism, the 'mixed city' is characterized by stark patterns of segregation between a dominant majority and a subordinate minority, as well as by ethnoclass fragmentation within each group. 'Mixed' spaces are both excep- tional and involuntary, often resulting from the process of ethnicization prevalent in contested urban spaces. We theorize this setting as an 'urban ethnocracy', where a dominant group appropriates the city apparatus to buttress its domination and expansion. In such settings, conspicuous tensions accom- pany the interaction between the city's economic and ethnoterritorial logics, producing sites of conflict and instability, and essentializing group identities and ethnic geographies. Empirically, the paper focuses on the city of Lod or Lydda, Israel, where the production of contested urban space has been linked to the construction of an exclusionary Israeli-Jewish national identity and to the establish- ment of hierarchical ethnic citizenship. Like other previously Arab cities, Lod has been the target of a concerted strategy of Judaization, which has formed the city's central planning goal since the late 1940s. We analyze in detail various aspects and sites of the Judaization process, and of the ensuing urban conflicts. We point to the chronic instability of urban ethnocracies, and to the need of planning to rise above narrow ethnocentric considerations in order for the 'mixed city' to prosper as the home for all communities.
Public art and cultural events have often been enlisted to represent the socio-cultural diversity of cities, to upgrade a city's status and boost its economy by promoting internal and external tourism. What are the consequences of such efforts in an ethno-nationally contested city? Discourse analysis and ethnographic encounters situate the annual Holiday of Holidays festival in the Israeli-Palestinian neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas as integral to Haifa's strategy to promote itself as a site of coexistence. The neighbourhood serves the entire city in that its ‘Arab’ urban space has become its emblem of coexistence. This manipulation of the area by the municipality is, however, not reinforced by urban regeneration and heritage management of the local Palestinian community. However, coexistence discourse is also employed by the residents themselves, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of the role of urban space in advertising the city as well as of concepts of local identity and citizenship.
This article defines a new concept, ‘Space of risk’, as a lived space that has low levels of trust among different urban groups; where people feel vulnerable and defenseless against terrorizing, urban clashes and riots. Based on a qualitative study, the article examines this concept in the city of Nazareth, which has been in turmoil since the introduction of a plan for a plaza. The article concludes that the reasons that may strongly contribute to the production of spaces of risk are: lack of the right to the city for urban inhabitants; the hegemony of the state over the city through ‘ethnocratic’ urban policies; the hegemony of global forces and neo-liberal agendas over the locale; deficient local politics; absence of communicative planning procedures; and contradictions between planners conception of the place and the way inhabitants conceive and experience it in their daily life practices. As planning has the power of creating and triggering risks in cities, the article suggests some practical ways for planners to avoid the production of spaces of risk through new techniques of collaborative planning.
This paper proposes a new theoretical perspective for understanding urban social spaces and their interrelations. In an effort to understand these multifaceted, complex relations, an inquiry committed to a flat ontology was deployed. Accordingly, we draw our theorization on the Lacanian ontological lack, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Laclau and Mouffe’s discursivity of social reality. Thus, we propose that urban social spaces are discursive and real entities with real and sensual qualities and constituted through specific relations. They are located within discursive social relations, where each urban social space has a “differential position” in an urban system of relations. Each urban social space has an “identity,” defined by its specific mixture of social groups and its specific real and sensual qualities. These qualities construct a sensual object with a specific sensual identity within the web of different urban social spaces. Therefore, urban social spaces are being made through multiple interrelations and are constituted through their location in a nexus of positions. The proposed framework that captures the interrelations among urban social spaces is based on three interrelated logics: the logic of difference, the logic of equivalence, and the fantasmatic logic. Understanding the relations of urban social spaces through these logics offers multifaceted social, political, psychological, and spatial illumination, details, and a more nuanced and flexible investigation of the formation and change of these spaces. Hereby, the city is conceived as comprised of spatiotemporal configurations where social spaces have social and political relations ranging from harshly antagonistic to inclusive and equivalent. This proposed framework informs both sociological and political realms of planning theory. It provides planning theory with new perspectives for understanding the city as a web of interrelated social spaces. Furthermore, it allows a more critical understanding of urban reality by illuminating inequality, injustice, antagonism, and the formulation of “otherness.”
Superkilen is a much-lauded contemporary urban public space that has been widely photographed and the subject of public talks, articles, interviews, short films, books and awards, including the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016. Although it was designed to improve social cohesion in the multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Nørrebro, it remains largely unresearched in how well its built form contributes to this goal. This paper provides an empirical examination of how the built form of Superkilen enables and constrains intercultural encounter. The paper begins with an exploration of literature on encounter in public spaces, and the agency of built form in mediating such interactions. The paper then presents three key findings based on ethnographic fieldwork using actor-network theory. This paper is critical of the design concept behind Superkilen, claiming that it privileged spatial representation above spatial practice. However, the findings also show how such encounters can be triangulated, shaped and programmed. It is hoped these findings will better inform urban designers in shaping public space for intercultural encounters in Western cities.
This article unpacks the relations that exist between the planning institution and urban residents by examining processes of self-organization in planning. Approaching self-organization with the lens of assemblage, the article proposes three categories or patterns of self-organization of different urban actors and portrays how they act in different forms to induce urban change. The three self-organization categories are as follows: (1) self-organization by the disenfranchised for basic rights, (2) self-organization by the ordinary for community interests, and (3) self-organization by the powerful for economic gains. In these different forms of self-organization, power and agency are differentially constituted by the relations between the residents, the planning institution, and the physical space. Moreover, the impacts of these actions on the urban space vary. Nevertheless, there are also some resemblances between groups and actions that are commonly dissociated. Unpacking different manifestations of self-organization in urban planning proposes a more relational interpretation that emphasizes the inextricable and overlapping relations of formal and informal planning and of top-down and bottom-up planning, and surfaces a different understanding of urban power relations.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1473095218764225
This chapter focuses on the issues in current city planning and rebuilding. It describes the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding. The chapter shows how cities work in real life, because this is the only way to learn what principles of planning and what practices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality in cities, and what practices and principles will deaden these attributes. In trying to explain the underlying order of cities, the author uses a preponderance of examples from New York. The most important thread of influence starts, more or less, with Ebenezer Howard, an English court reporter for whom planning was an avocation. Howard's influence on American city planning converged on the city from two directions: from town and regional planners on the one hand, and from architects on the other.
When fear and anxiety circulate in public spaces of diverse western cities, heightened surveillance can provide a sense of safety and comfort. These measures of surveillance that target bodies that are ‘out of place’, however, are limited in animating public spaces. This paper focuses on Darwin, a small but rapidly growing north Australian city where the visibility of Aboriginal people from Greater Darwin/regional communities and migrant newcomers from countries in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East often circulates fear and anxiety and deadens public spaces. I argue that playful events or spontaneous multisensory encounters of humans, non-humans and material things, however, have the potential to animate these public spaces. The paper focuses on these events in a Drop-in open-air café-community garden-Op shop in a culturally diverse northern suburb of Darwin. It suggests that the vibrancy of matter and the vitality of non-human forms of life can inform how we co-inhabit cities of difference and unsettle policies of social cohesion that focus on integration into a dominant white majority culture.
Fighting for First Amendment rights is as popular a pastime as ever, but just because you can get on your soapbox doesn't mean anyone will be there to listen. Town squares have emptied out as shoppers decamp for the megamalls; gated communities keep pesky signature gathering activists away; even most internet chatrooms are run by the major media companies. Brave New Neighborhood sconsiders what can be done to protect and revitalize our public spaces.
In a world of increasing mobility, how people of different cultures live together is a key issue of our age, especially for those responsible for planning and running cities. New thinking is needed on how diverse communities can cooperate in productive harmony instead of leading parallel or antagonistic lives. Policy is often dominated by mitigating the perceived negative effects of diversity, and little thought is given to how a ?diversity dividend? or increased innovative capacity might be achieved. The Intercultural City, based on numerous case studies worldwide, analyses the links between urban change and cultural diversity. It draws on original research in the US, Europe, Australasia and the UK. It critiques past and current policy and introduces new conceptual frameworks. It provides significant and practical advice for readers, with new insights and tools for practitioners such as the ?intercultural lens?, ?indicators of openness?, ?urban cultural literacy? and ?ten steps to an Intercultural City?. Published with Comedia.
This paper contributes to the recent interest by geographers on urban diversity and encounters and is motivated by the significance of living with difference in grounded, prosaic ways. I situate co-existence with strange others in shared public spaces through the interrogation of fleeting, prosaic ways people manage such diversity in their everyday encounters. Drawing on ethnographic data based on Singapore's neighbourhood of Jurong West, I expand on a politics of diversity that acknowledges distance, limitations and ambivalence among people who are personally unknown to one another. I develop the notion of the familiar stranger as a way to interrogate the potentials and limitations of coexisting with difference, where positive and strained relations can occur simultaneously. Rather than demanding cohesion and integration, I argue that a far more open form of coexistence would acknowledge these kinds of sociality that do not force people to engage beyond the present precisely so that diversity can become unremarkable and everyday. In this sense, this paper argues for a non-prescriptive way of understanding coexisting with difference where exchanges of ambivalent and fleeting nature can pave the way for a politics of breathable diversity.
Situating itself in encounter and public space debates and borrowing from non-representational theory approaches, this paper uses data from the authors' 2-year Economic and Social Research Council research project to consider how local urban parks can work as sites of routine encounter, mixity, and place belonging. The paper explores how parks as green public spaces are important as sites of inclusive openness while the materiality of parks is a key dynamic in affective encounter processes. Parks can work as animators of social interactions, participatory practices, and place affinities across ethnic and cultural difference. The paper concludes that the concept of convivial encounter can be extended to incorporate the concept of elective practices – choosing to be in shared public space can generate connective sensibilities that are not necessarily contingent on exchange. In using parks as a lens to examine localities and diversity, the paper critically reflects on research practices for understanding and describing heterogeneous formations of multiculture and outlines how the project's research design and the fieldwork methods sought to carefully and appropriately undertake research with complexly different places and populations Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Increasing scholarly attention is being paid to urban encounters with ‘difference’. Much of this work to-date has focused on incidental encounters in various spatial settings from the market to the café. Here, a number of commentators have observed that fleeting, unintended encounters, where diverse people rub along together as a consequence of accidental proximity, do not necessarily produce ‘meaningful contact’. That is contact which breaks down prejudices and translates beyond the moment to produce a more general respect for others. This paper contributes to these debates by focusing instead on purposeful organised activities (‘The Project’) to bring two different groups together intentionally who would not normally have the opportunity for sustained engagement through a case study of an interfaith (Muslim and Jewish) youth cricket project in a large UK city. Here, we use the concept of the ‘contact zone’ to evaluate the effectiveness of this project. The findings highlight three critical processes which contribute to generating meaningful contact. First, it is important to establish space where participants from different groups can safely explore their differences together. Second, it is necessary to create space to establish shared interests: here through the game of cricket. Both are factors which require significant resourcing, in particular to enable a professional facilitator to manage what can be, or become, conflictual encounters and the expression of potentially negative emotions. Third, banal sociality also matters. It was time spent ‘hanging out’ alongside, instead of in, the purposeful activities when the participants identified their own natural affinities and found particular shared identity positions which contributed to destabilising the significance of differences beyond those The Project sought to address. These findings have clear relevance for future policy initiatives to develop interfaith relations.
Drawing on some results of a broader research project, this paper aims to discuss the relation between urban design and creative dynamics in cultural districts. Appropriation and production of public spaces in three ‘creative quarters’ are analyzed, through a photographic approach, covering material aspects, human appropriation and symbolic dimensions in these areas. Discussing the boundaries of public spaces and their relevance for creative activity (through the conviviality and sociability they promote), it is argued that urban design characteristics and specific place morphologies significantly influence the appropriation of these areas and the development of specific creative dynamics.
The social ties between the residents of urban neighbourhoods are in decline due to changing work patterns, increased mobility and developments in communications. Neighbourhood open spaces, and green spaces in particular, provide opportunities for social interactions that may help the residents to establish recognition and develop relationships. This paper investigates the contribution of local parks to the development of social ties in inner-city neighbourhoods. Combining quantitative methods (questionnaire survey) with a qualitative approach (focus group discussions), the research was carried out in three inner-city neighbourhoods in Greater Manchester, UK, characterised by different levels of material deprivation and ethnic diversity. The social survey explored the associations between the respondents' visits to local parks and the number of friends and acquaintances they had. The findings suggest that local parks may support the development of social ties in inner-city areas. Associations were found between the quality of the parks, the character of visits. and the extent of social ties in the neighbourhood. The study concludes that for inner-city parks to realise their full potential in supporting social interactions and developing social ties, they need to be well-maintained and provide good recreational facilities. The development of social ties was also found to be considerably affected by the characteristics of the individuals and the neighbourhood.
Public space plays an important role in sustaining the public realm. There is a renewed interest in public space with a growing belief that while modern societies no longer depend on the town square or the piazza for basic needs, good public space is required for the social and psychological health of modern communities. New public spaces are emerging around the world and old public space typologies are being retrofitted to contemporary needs. Good public space is responsive, democratic and meaningful. However, few comprehensive instruments exist to measure the quality of public space. Based on an extensive review of literature and empirical work, this paper creates a public space index to assess the quality of public space by empirically evaluating its inclusiveness, meaningfulness, safety, comfort and pleasurability. Four public spaces in downtown Tampa, Florida, are examined using the index and several applications for public space planners, designers and managers are suggested.
Living with people who differ—racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically—is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. In this thought-provoking book, Richard Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be done about it.
Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate. In Together he explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Divided into three parts, the book addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. The author warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature.
In the interview Butler introduces a far broader range of thinkers dealing with the issues relating to the concept of recognition than the existing mainstream focus on the work of Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, and Charles Taylor. Butler specifically points out that ‘recognition’ becomes a problem for those who have been expelled from the structures and vocabularies of political representation. To Butler, there are schemes of recognition that determine who will be regarded as a subject worthy of recognition. She terms this ‘differential distribution of recognizability’. The scene of recognition is set by the existing norms and powers, and the subject does not operate independently of what can become an object of recognition. On the other hand, she also points out that without substantial forms of recognition, our lives are at risk. Butler also relates the schemes of recognition to the act of critique. She does so by explaining that the schemes of recognition that establish who will and will not be ‘recognizable’ always have to be considered critically. According to Butler, the task of critique involves establishing a distance from any naturalized version of those contingent and exclusionary schemes – in other words, establishing a reflective distance to the scenes of recognition. Critique becomes a way of challenging the foreclosure of ‘reality’.
Axel Honneth makes initial and promising steps towards what could be called a two-level account of recognition, according to which the normatively substantial forms of recognition represent various manners in which the primordial acquaintedness with others is expressed. It will be argued that Honneth's promising approach must be revised in regard to the issue of intentionality, which may be achieved by reference to earlier critical theorists such as Adorno and Arendt. With such a foundation, critical theory can enter into new fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
In this Progress in Human Geography annual lecture I reflect on geographical contributions to academic and policy debates about how we might forge civic culture out of difference. In doing so I begin by tracing a set of disparate geographical writings — about the micro-publics of everyday life, cosmopolitanism hospitality, and new urban citizenship — that have sought to understand the role of shared space in providing the opportunity for encounter between `strangers'. This literature is considered in the light of an older tradition of work about `the contact hypothesis' from psychology. Then, employing original empirical material, I critically reflect on the notion of `meaningful contact' to explore the paradoxical gap that emerges in geographies of encounter between values and practices. In the conclusion I argue for the need for geographers to pay more attention to sociospatial inequalities and the insecurities they breed, and to unpacking the complex and intersecting ways in which power operates.
Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 22-40
In recent years, the critique of poststructuralism, itself loquacious, has held that the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding undermines the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself. Critics have argued that the various critical reconsiderations of the subject, including those that do away with the theory of the subject altogether, cannot provide the basis for an account of responsibility, that if we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start, it will be impossible to ground a notion of personal or social responsibility on the basis of such a view. I would like to try to rebut this view in what follows, and to show how a theory of subject-formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can work in the service of a conception of ethics and, indeed, of responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that it is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.
In all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other—in its singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that—but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening. This opening calls into question the limits of established regimes of truth, where a certain risking of the self becomes, as Levinas claims, the sign of virtue [see Foucault]. Whether or not the Other is singular, the Other is recognized and confers recognition through a set of norms that govern recognizability. So whereas the Other may be singular, if not radically personal, the norms are to some extent impersonal and indifferent, and they introduce a disorientation of perspective for the subject in the midst of recognition as an encounter. For if I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But in the moment that I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not singlehandedly make them, then I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer. In a sense, I submit to a norm of recognition when I offer recognition to you, so that I am both subjected to that norm and the agency of its use.
As Hegel would have it, recognition cannot be unilaterally given. In the moment that I give it, I am potentially given it, and the form by which I offer it is one that potentially is given to me. In this sense, one might say, I can never offer it, in the Hegelian sense, as a pure offering, since I am receiving it, at least potentially and structurally, in the moment, in the act, of giving. We might ask, as Levinas surely has, what kind of gift this is that returns to me so quickly, that never really leaves my hands. Is it the case that recognition consists, as it does for Hegel, in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that the Other is structured in the same way that I am, and I recognize that the Other also makes, or can make, this very recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps an encounter with alterity here that is not reducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity? On the one hand, the Hegelian Other is always found outside, or at least it is first found outside, and only later recognized to be constitutive. This has led critics of Hegel to conclude that the Hegelian subject...
This paper examines relevant characteristics of the ‘contested city’ and the concept of ‘public space’ in that problematic context. It offers an appraisal of the historical and contemporary role of urban design in shaping social space and interrogates the feasibility of using urban design to facilitate more integrated cityscapes. It presents detailed case studies of two ‘contested cities’, Nicosia and Belfast, based on content analysis of policy and planning documents, extensive site analyses in both places, interviews and seminar discussions with policy makers, planners, community and civic leaders. The paper comprises four dimensions—conceptual, descriptive, analytical and prescriptive—and in its final section identifies core values and relevant policies for the potential achievement of shared space in contested cities.
Planners in the USA and other Western European countries are faced with the dilemma of how to deal with the demands of an increasingly multicultural population. This problem has become more acute as the number of immigrants from non-European countries has grown in the last several decades. This paper examines how this demographic shift impacts on planning practice. Two planning practice issues are examined; historic preservation and housing for ethno-cultural groups. The paper discusses why these two issues and other emerging demands of ethno-cultural groups matter to planners. A suggestion is made for changing the culture of planning and planning processes to recognize plurality as points of departure in planning practice.