City, Culture and Society最新文献

Efficient parking management is essential for enhancing customer experience, mobility, accessibility, and overall quality of life in urban areas. In recent years, parking analytics have emerged as valuable tools for understanding drivers’ behavior and developing data-driven management strategies. However, the application of these tools is often hindered by the complexity of data extraction, transformation, loading and analysis. Additionally, the implementation of these tools can be time-consuming and costly, further limiting their practical use for operators and urban authorities. To address this issue, this paper presents the development of a Business Intelligence tool specifically designed to facilitate parking management through the automated flow of transaction data between collection, processing, and analysis systems. The tool provides easy-to-use analytical capabilities that allow parking managers to analyze parking transaction data, identify trends and patterns, and make informed decisions about parking management quickly and easily. The cost-effective implementation of this tool presents a valuable solution for managing on-street parking in urban areas. This study highlights the potential of Business Intelligence tools for parking management and contributes to improving the effectiveness of parking management.

The paper attempts to provide a critique of the premise of territoriality in creative cities. A validated hypothesis in the literature on economic geography is that the density and “territoriality” of members of the so-called "creative class" influence the volume of creative goods and services produced in cities. This hypothesis gave rise to several sub-related themes, such as the premise that cities are, par excellence, a place where middleground spaces emerge because of place-based activities located in close-knit communities imbued with creativity and innovation commons. In line with this argument, recent studies have yielded an analytic framework to explain the dissemination of creativity through the so-called “middleground” spaces in cities: places, spaces, projects, and events. This framework presupposes the dissemination of creativity from the physical place to a cognitively constructed space. We revise this argument by suggesting that post-digitalized forms of creation and dissemination of knowledge often blur the boundaries between place and space (which we characterize in this paper as domains of “the local” and “the digital”). By mediating creativity through digital platforms, agents are also capable of outreaching different localities and creating ties that are not subsumed to close-knit communities. As such, our framework incorporates a “digital middleground” space into this existing “middleground” framework, thereby extending the scope of creativity in cities to digitally dispersed forms of exchange. We theorize that contemporary forms of creativity unfold openly, virtually, and non-hierarchically yet are imbued by local concerns such as the ones channeled by crowdfunding communities, which we use as an example in our discussions. Our paper contributes to a better understanding of the increasingly digitalized “urban” spaces and the impossibility of pursuing a dichotomous digital-local divide. We expect that scholars will consider the possibility for creativity to manifest not only in territorial-based middlegrounds, but also in online communities where creativity unfolds dispersedly.

With a focus on local government's role in participatory cultural governance, this paper argues two points. First, self- and critical reflexivity of institutional brokers is important to community-wide capacity building for participatory cultural governance. Second, this reflexivity can be enabled through slow, inquiry-based collaboration between practitioners and researchers. The paper presents the experiences of a practitioner-researcher collaboration between a local authority arts officer and a cultural policy scholar in the development of a place-based local arts development programme taking place from 2017 to 2019 in Dublin, Ireland. The paper surfaces how efforts to promote greater participation in local decision-making require acts of reflexivity as core to the repertoire of capacity building for enabling participatory cultural governance practice in local public arts administration. Three interrelated factors are determined to have helped enable this reflexivity: (1) the arts officer's openness to engage in collaborative processes that (2) emphasised reflection and learning and were supported by (3) the presence of an embedded researcher with mutual interest, beliefs and experience or knowledge of the institutional context. Limitations in the study highlight areas for further research regarding the affective nature of practitioner-researcher collaborations and the potential of promoting reflexive practice in processes aimed at promoting participatory governance.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out in early 2020, has disrupted China's population mobility on which its cities depend. Especially, during the two years of the pandemic, female migrant laborers have been taking the risk of becoming the surplus population in an unstable and hyper-competitive job market. Such circumstance has led their images and urban engagement to be finitely recorded by the narrative that emerged based on the pandemic -- outbreak narrative in Priscilla Wald's term (2008), serving as an essential archive to examine Chinese women labor and urban history during the COVID-19. Taking an article narrating the vagrancy of a female migrant worker -- Ah Fen in Shanghai as a threshold, this paper explores China's gendered migrancy and female migrant communities during the COVID-19. By tracing China's COVID-19-related outbreak narratives through literary analysis, this paper reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic has flooded more migrant workers, especially female laborers, into the gig economy and this new urban engagement pattern has made migrant women's mobility higher and encouraged them to rebuild migrant communities in the city. However, the high mobility and fragmented urban distribution, in turn, have strengthened their roles as “infected strangers” in the outbreak narrative, particularly in the context of China's strict differentiated quarantine governance. This research, initiated by literary analysis, on the one hand, draws a dynamic map of capital and population flow during the pandemic era, while on the other hand, exposes the injustice among different classes, genders, and ages in urban China enlarged by the virus.

This article describes the specific issues faced by the Ottawa Culture Research Group (OCRG) as it sought to develop cultural indicators for Ottawa, Canada. It examines this effort in the light of conceptual and collaborative challenges in developing indicators of culture and sustainability and how these challenges have been addressed in cities elsewhere. In focusing on the collaborative relationships among the various partners in the OCRG, the article highlights the difficulties of integrating cultural measures of sustainable development within urban administration and governance when the partners have differing priorities and are dependent on multiple and unstable sources of support. It ends with several conclusions about the practices and resources required to sustain measurement initiatives that address both tangible and intangible aspects of culture’s role in the sustainability of cities.

Fiscal decentralisation has been an important tool for local governance and development for many countries in Africa, in the last five decades. In many African countries, decentralized governance was adopted as a way of expanding grassroots participation and generating local resources for development without a consensus on ways to mobilize revenues by local governments. After over three decades of Ghana's decentralisation reforms, it is becoming apparent that local government units in strategic locations have peculiar advantages as well as challenges in mobilising local revenue. Using the Awutu-Senya East Municipal Area, this study explores the locational dynamics of Peri-urban municipalities in mobilising internally generated fund (IGF). The study adopted qualitative methods, including review of financial reports of the Municipal Assembly, interviews of key informants, officials of the finance department and revenue mobilisation unit; selected contracted revenue collectors and operators of local businesses. The study revealed locational influencers of revenue mobilisation to include increasing property values due to rapid peri-urban growth; upsurge of satellite businesses; creations of new municipal areas and leakages in internal revenue mobilisation, due to continuously changing boundaries. While the study resonates with emerging literature on local revenue mobilisation, it departs in its re-examination of geographical advantages and setbacks.

Culture’s role in sustaining urban development is recognised in this Special Issue and yet the urban setting is not an island of cultural development, but rather merges into suburban, rural and remote areas where the significance of cultural activity and the local actors can be overlooked by the urban observer and funder. In Australia, communities outside of capital cities differ significantly from each other, with community arts and cultural development efforts operating at various scales, to address unique local issues, through diverse artforms and ways of working. Funders with different processes, priorities, and relationships with funding recipients support this activity and can play a role in limiting or enabling community-determined responses to complex local issues.

This article explores a case study where adoption of an online outcomes focussed cultural activity planning and evaluation platform unexpectedly contributed to a deepening of trust between a city-based corporate funder and a regional arts producer working in a suburban area of the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia. Interviews with stakeholders revealed that the platform, together with the trust that it helped to cultivate, supported a creative, responsive, and flexible community arts and cultural development project that achieved cultural and social outcomes for local young people considered disadvantaged while working towards the funder’s global goal to enable social equity.

The case study suggests that when funders are removed from the contexts where activities will be delivered, a trusting relationship spanning geographic and socio-cultural divides can encourage mutually beneficial collaboration, reduce rigidity to allow an emergent strategy, and achieve impactful community-determined arts and cultural activity.

This paper examines the intimate relationship among gender, religion, and the urban with a special focus on Muslim women in Delhi, India. Drawing on interviews conducted with young, middle-class, unmarried Muslim women, this paper demonstrates that Muslim women's lived experiences of religion and gender are often complex and situated at the intersections of embodied spatial practices of religion, gender and urban-ness. Predominant understanding of Indian Muslim women focuses on their gendered religious enactments such as purdah (veiling), oppression by Muslim men, and their need to be ‘rescued’ from Islamic systems of oppression. However, these narratives do not fully capture the complexity of Muslim women's embodied experiences and encounters with the urban. In turn, this paper investigates how Muslim women's experiences of the urban unfold at the interstices of gendered and religious geographies of the self, families/faith community, and the city in everyday life and exceptional contexts. I argue that the intersection of gender, religion and the city is nuanced, ad-hoc, and paradoxically shift and change within the historical socio-spatial urban context of Delhi.

This case study is concerned with the arrival and impact of private art museum Mona in Tasmania, examining how the local creative community perceives its impact and how it influences the broader cultural landscape. The museum represents a larger trend where affluent individuals establish prestigious private museums with significant global reach. This study has found Mona to be a highly personal endeavour, providing influential networks in support of the owner's personal and business objectives. It highlights the perception that the museum has had a transformative impact on Tasmania, particularly in adding a sophisticated dimension to the state's cultural visage and a new vibrancy that is thought to resonate strongly with tourists. Previous scholarship has shown that private museums operate in a different context and play by different rules to their public counterparts and this study has shown this to be true in identifying problems with how to govern Mona and the local creative scene trying to negotiate a place within this changing context. Mona has brought credibility to the arts, but set high expectations for the local arts scene, creating entry barriers for young artists and challenging arts institutions with more limited resources.