An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Open City

TRIALOG 136 A Journal for Planning and Building in a Global Context Vol. 1/2019 September 2020, 2020

The ‘open city’ has recently been theorised as the urban condition that best accommodates diversity, incorporates change, and fosters adaptation. In this respect, the open city can be framed as a complex system, the overall form of which cannot be predicted in advance as it is in a constant state of becoming. Although the open city, as an emergent system, cannot be designed from the top down, it needs some direction as it can also spontaneously veer towards its decline and turn into a closed system. What, then, is the role of (spatial) design in setting the conditions for the emergence of the open city and in preventing its self-destruction? By presenting two case studies, the present paper attempts to frame a design approach that can direct emergent changes without trying to formally predetermine their outcome.

2011

The paper focuses on urbanology, described by architect Bogdan Bogdanović as a method for re-valorizing and creating symbolic capital of cities, especially public and common spaces. This theoretical approach can be applied to every city, but it is of particular importance to those that are changing due to major projects/events such as the Olympic Games and the European Capital of Culture. Urbanology favors democracy, allowing local communities to participate and decide upon development of cities, and can be related to participatory budgeting. The paper notes that this approach can have a more beneficial impact on cities than the concept of creative cities, comparing both concepts to the theory of " open work " by Umberto Eco, where a city is taken as an example of an open work. It concludes that Novi Sad should carry out the candidacy for the European Capital of Culture 2021 by focusing on urbanology, commoning practices and art in public spaces.

This book occupies a critical space at the local, national and international scales debate about the ongoing process of construction of the “New Urban Agenda”. Concurrently, this book shows the profiles of a new geopolitics involving cities and nation states debating at the same time in contradictory and combined way the new directions of global urbanization. This book is presented as a continuation of the various efforts made by the Ipea in preparing Brazil to Habitat III and the wording of the Brazilian Report to the UN conference. The many efforts include the elaborating on: regional and national seminars, virtual platforms for social participation, other books, publications and reports, surveys, interviews, data bases, monitoring processes, negotiations in government and civil society, television programs, video documentaries etc. This rich and innovative route involved more than 2,500 people and, according to comparisons made with 34 other countries and as presented here in one of the chapters of this publication, qualifies as the most thorough participatory process of the New Urban Agenda development. The organization of this book, as well as the invitation of several experts and scholars contributing to this debate, are directly related to the National Seminar Habitat III “Participa Brasil,” conducted by Ipea and partners in Brasilia in early 2015. Due to the complexities involved several topics addressed at that time could not be considered by the Brazilian Report for Habitat III. Most of which are due to the intersectionality of analysis necessary for understanding, escaping or surpassing the manner of an official government report to the UN is shaped. Thus, important issues such as geopolitics between states and cities, technological innovation and its impact on international networks and deepening of democracy, as well as many other pending critical issues, justify the collaboration between scholars concerned to generate these innovative ideas and to explain the current process of urbanization. The goal was to make them accessible to a broader audience. Similarly, the search for new contributions could focus precisely on issues that require deeper analyses and references.

2016

On a black Friday, November 13th, 2015, at the Bataclan, we lost a colleague and friend, Matthieu Giroud, a geographer and urban scholar at Universite Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee. Our sadness is as deep as our anger. There is also fear, fear of the world being born after these attacks. As a tribute to Matthieu, and a continuation of the work we had started with him, we would like to say a few words about cities and the spaces to be built there.

How can productive cities be created in the face of economic, social, political and environmental mishaps in planning, management and development process? How can cities become more enjoyable, functional and innovative using city management and development theories? Theoretically the paper examines the importance of cities and impact of urbanization and globalization towards competitiveness of cities. The paper argues that; despite the huge benefits accrued to cities via globalization, most developing cities are suffering from intolerably high levels of poor infrastructure and governance. The interlinks between an array of theories and city development and management forms the focus of the paper. The paper makes its contribution by: examining and discussing the theoretical undertones for sustainable cities and concluded with a set of recommendations on what needs to be done to achieve sustainable city development and management.

2014

This third volume of the International Geographical Union Young Scholars Committee focuses on the theme of transforming cities in a range of international contexts from Europe to Japan. The individual chapters focus on particular dimensions of that transformation – governance, social, cultural and economic drawing on on-going research from all of the scholars included. Key concepts such as urban and regional development, agents of change, urban structure and regeneration are examined. While the focus is on particular case studies, we believe these issues are of importance more generally and hope they provide a resource and contribute to a better understanding of cities and urban processes in comparative perspective.

In this paper, I propose to set out some thoughts about theory and research on global urbanism. I use this term for convenience's sake, because no single concept sufficiently describes how our understanding of cities and space is actually being shaped by a turn in world events that began more than a generation ago, when new technologies in communication and transport were becoming available that would allow for the first-ever coordination of a global system production and markets in something approximating real time. By the late 1970s, corporate capital in the capitalist West was in a serious crisis of accumulation that led not only to the search for lower-cost production sites "off-shore" but also to an extraordinary concentration of capital, as smaller corporations were bought out and merged with dinosaur-sized conglomerates. The visible results were both, a shift of many production facilities abroad and de-industrialization at home. Thus was born the idea of a post-...

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2002

There are a large number of cities around the world which do not register on intellectual maps that chart the rise and fall of global and world cities. They don't fall into either of these categories, and they probably never will-but many managers of these cities would like them to. Some of these cities find themselves interpreted instead through the lens of developmentalism, an approach which broadly understands these places to be lacking in the qualities of city-ness, and which is concerned to improve capacities of governance, service provision and productivity. Such an approach supports some of the more alarmist responses to mega-cities, which are more commonly identified in poorer countries. But for many smaller cities, even the category mega-city is irrelevant. My concerns in this article extend beyond the poor fit of these popular categories, though. I would like to suggest that these widely circulating approaches to contemporary urbanization-global and world cities, together with the persistent use of the category 'third-world city'-impose substantial limitations on imagining or planning the futures of cities around the world. Part of the adverse worldly impact of these urban theories is, I argue, a consequence of the geographical division of urban studies between urban theory, broadly focused on the West, and development studies, focused on places that were once called 'third-world cities'. This division might simply be an innocent acknowledgement of difference (Szelenyi, 1996). However, apart from the value-laden historical meaning of these categorical ascriptions, the persistent alignment of a 'theory'/'development' dualism with the 'West'/'third world' division in urban studies, suggests otherwise. 1 One of the consequences of these overlapping dualisms, is that understandings of city-ness have come to rest on the (usually unstated) experiences of a relatively small group of (mostly western) cities, and cities outside of the West are assessed in terms of this pre-given

Every now and again, the emperor must be disrobed. Disciplinary debates – shaped by the clothes of a thousand emperors past – become stale, and detached from the empiri- cal realities they purport to describe. Over the past two decades, AbdouMaliq Simone, among a number of poststructural scholars, has dutifully disrobed the field of urban studies, preparing the ground for a new vocabulary of urbanism that is better able to convey the dissonant realities of emerging city life in the Global South. Gone are the confident and well-worn concepts of ‘gentri- fication’, ‘entrepreneurship’, and ‘public space’. In their place stand an array of chal- lenging and often indeterminate notions, including those of ‘secretion’, ‘resonance’ and ‘re-description’, which reflect the unfold- ing paradoxes of urban life in the majority world.

This paper is a theoretical reexamination of the traditional concept of the city in the context of urbanization processes that exceed it. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of new variations on the city concept, as well as calls to discard it altogether. I argue that both options are inadequate. The city has generally been understood as a category of analysis—a moment in urbanization processes—but might now be better understood as a category of practice: an ideological representation of urbanization processes. I substantiate this claim through an examination of three tropes of the traditional city which in material terms have been superseded in recent decades in the Global North but retain their force as ideological representations of contemporary urban spatial practice: the opposition between city and country, the city as a self-contained system, and the city as an ideal type.

Springer Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, 2017

Description Introduction: Urbanization is said to be the hallmark of the contemporary era. The majority of people, as itis widely stated, now live in cities (UN2014). Cities are variously seen to epitomize the peaks and troughs of development, house and provide playgrounds to the wealthiest elites, and, in their vast sprawls, contain the majority of humanity. More generally, the global future of humanity, as far as one can be described, is now widely under-stood and presented as an urban future. A future of cities and their successes and failures that is tied into global processes, social, economic, cultural, and environmental. These processes are often, also, political and enmeshed in globalization. While cities are increasingly seen to create transnational networks and alliances, they also become islands differentiated from their regions in political as well as economic terms. Cities, and the processes that influence them, are broadly understood as now caught up in increasingly global flows of capital and culture that dislodge them, at least partially, from the politics of the nation-state. This presents new forms of territory and politics beyond and alongside the state, both in the sense of politics as contests of interest and in the more nuanced sense of politics as differing ideals of social organization, rule, and imagining, as defined above. This is always, however, a manifestly partial account, because cities are not constant, or able to be bounded, or defined consistently, across time and space. From within, cities are lived and known in disparate ways. As such, statements and frameworks that describe cities in the above terms risk conflating vastly different contexts through the label of the city. These frameworks and understandings of the city, in turn, inform policy and governance and are increasingly global. Accordingly they wield great power in both influencing the direction of cities, through globally circulating policy approaches, and in defining what is counted as valid and desirable. As such the politics of describing cities must also be engaged. The field of spatial approaches to cities, globalization, and their politics, while certainly established as of crucial relevance across a range of academic and practice domains, is not a discipline containing a discrete body of knowledge or theory. Indeed the hallmark of many spatial approaches is that they necessarily bring together interdisciplinary perspectives. As such, like the processes and contexts engaged, scholarship in this area is hotly debated and contested and is rapidly emerging. It is also extremely extensive. In order to address this topic adequately, yetwithin the scope of this chapter, the following text introduces a diverse set of recent work at this juncture and explains important current debates and scholarship at the nexus of cities, globalization, and politics. These contain contestation and rarely lend themselves to singular dis-courses, overarching frameworks, or straightforward conclusions. However, as geographer Doreen Massey asserts,“an insistence on complexity leaves open more opportunities for politics”(2007, p. 11), and it is in this spirit that the following text introduces the topic.

Open Philosophy, 2020

In recent years, the philosophical interest in urban issues has developed into a vibrant interdisciplinary field of its own. The development is linked to the obvious consequences of the broad global phenomenon of urbanization but also due to the increasing interest in practical and multidisciplinary approaches within different branches of philosophy. Philosophy of the City as a field of contemporary thought is open to heterogeneous topics, yet at the same time, it has already proven to break disciplinary barriers and bring different, previously distant branches of philosophy together to study urban issues. Joining forces in understanding the particular challenges of the urban lifeform seems indeed necessary since many of the issues require a flexible and problem-based approach. The increase in the philosophical interest in cities is of course not unique as parallel development is taking place in many other fields. One could even state, that philosophy is a latecomer, since urban studies have been developed more systematically already since the 1960s. There are many reasons as to why modern philosophy did not show interest in cities until relatively late, such as its linguistic and analytical emphasis. The focus of traditional Western philosophy on universal issues and immutable ideas has not helped either in developing an especially well-equipped methodology to encounter urban issues. Reasons for the omission have stemmed also from the fast industrial and subsequent postindustrial development of cities globally: the city as an “object” of study has been in such a flux that pinning down its features and prominent phenomena for any meaningful reflection must have seemed like a daunting task for philosophers of past generations.