City, Culture and Society最新文献

The 21st Century has seen the emergence and subsequent crisis of the Creative City paradigm in which the broad scope of culture and heritage for urban branding has been shown. Valencia's case has been paradigmatic in showing the potential and negative effects of this strategy, which entered into crisis and constituted one of the critical elements of the strategy of the Conservative local government (1991–2015). With the change of government to a left coalition in 2015, the transformation of a policy based on ‘white elephants’ shifted to one based on the production of International Events and centres to boost the city's strengths within the international framework. Although great events and infrastructures were ditched for a more participatory, sustainable approach, international bodies such as UNESCO consider the city still adopts a ‘Creative City’ strategy. In the new neo-Creative City paradigm, the development strategy focuses on creating value from the bottom up, drawing on the material heritage and the creative fabric to this end. The strategy remains focused on promoting the city as an international brand, on the self-promotion of the local government as a tool of legitimacy, and top-down governance.

Malaysia has received an increasing number of migrant labourers yearly due to growing labour market demands. Consequently, the migrant settlements have increased in number, with the settlements often located within the local community's neighbourhood. The location of these settlements has raised a few concerns among affected local communities. In Penang, the second-highest migration city in Malaysia, the local government has taken measures to address these concerns by preparing the Centralised Accommodation Transit (CAT). The CAT is a settlement built for migrant labourers in an effort to segregate them from the local populace in response to the Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) attitude among the local communities. However, the motive behind the NIMBY phenomenon is unclear and needs further investigation. This research investigates the local community's perception towards migrant labour settlements and examines the factors that contribute to the NIMBY attitude towards migrant labour settlements. By adopting and extending the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) framework with an additional variable, “Concern”, this study conducted a survey and a total of 410 questionnaires were collected and analysed by using the PLS-SEM method. The findings confirm that Concern significantly impacts a local community's acceptance towards migrant labour settlements, followed by Perceived Behavioural Control and Attitude. In contrast, Subjective Norms have weak empirical support. The major concern among the local community is crime and safety issues, followed by property devaluation, cultural differences, poor appearances, and hygiene. This study provides the state government with a crucial insight into the local community's concerns about migrant labour settlements. It shows ways to enhance public acceptance of future developments of migrant labour settlements.

Urban scholars have consistently demonstrated how cultural consumption and production have long shaped (and have been shaped by) the cityscape. However, less is known about the impacts of digitization and residential segregation on the distribution of cultural spaces over time. Because of this, scholars lack a testable theory of the spatio-cultural impact of digitization. To address this, I examine the distribution of music retailers, one of the first cultural sectors to be threatened by digitization. I ask: what changes in the failure, founding, and persistence of record stores coincide with larger changes in demographics and music formats? The findings suggest that the distribution of cultural spaces of consumption has indeed been shaped by digitization, but through the mechanism of increasing risks associated with opening new stores. But previous technological changes in concert with racial segregation also led to the loss of these cultural spaces in predominantly Black neighborhoods as well.

Shenzhen, the first Special Economic Zone established in 1979 in southern China, has transformed from a global electronics manufacturing hub and counterfeiting capital into a UNESCO City of Design within the span of four decades. This article examines three digital-imaging practices that emanate from the city to explore the city's multiple connections to globalization from above and globalization from below. The first is the 2004 narrative film The World, directed by Jia Zhang-ke (often known as a Sixth-Generation Chinese auteur) and based in part on lead actress Zhao Tao's experience working in Shenzhen's Window of the World theme park. The second is Shenzhen-based company Transsion's design of smart phones for the African market, which have roots in the city's Shanzhai (i.e. “knockoff”) mobile phone sector. The third is large-scale light shows around the city in 2018–2019 that turn the facades of high-rises into electronic screens, featuring LED-light imageries generated by algorithms. Utilizing digital media to illuminate Shenzhen as a networked place in the world, these relational place-making practices simultaneously engage with and reveal the contradictions of transparency as a normative ideal upheld by global tech giants and Euro-American governments. Together, they provide a distinctive window to discern China's cultural and political dilemmas in the 21st century.

Social participation is recognized as a key tool in conducting urban regeneration projects. However, in the current era of environmental change, the literature often refers to the need to address the perception of participatory regeneration in the context of sustainability orientation. This paper aims to identify the potential role of community participation in sustainable urban regeneration processes of small-scale spaces. A qualitative approach was adopted in the research whereby individual interviews and field observations were conducted. The main research questions posed were: What are the challenges to community participation in sustainable urban regeneration processes in courtyard-related projects, and how should community participation be organized to facilitate the transition towards more sustainable urban regeneration? The results present an identification of the most important challenges while also indicating their place in the participation process, and suggestions for methods which can be used as potential solutions. This paper suggests the use of a participatory process cycle involving local communities and focusing on degraded residential areas, such as urban courtyards, which are to be regenerated towards social and environmental sustainability.

From the mid-1990s, Zimbabwe experienced an escalated economic decline epitomised by de-industrialisation, depressed job and livelihood opportunities and increased aggregate poverty prevalence. This culminated in the growth of street vending, dominated by illegal and unlicensed hawking. Using a mixed methods approach, the study interrogates the response of the government of Zimbabwe to street vending. The study reveals that street vending in Zimbabwe cities is anarchical and thrive on chaotic governance. This presents a locus of conflict between the state's measures of maintaining public order and governability and the citizens' efforts to sustain livelihoods. The presence of exclusionary neo-liberal municipal by-laws have relegated street vendors from the mainstream economy. Military assisted violent evictions, confiscation of wares, torture, arrest and detention of vendors forms part of government's response strategies. The study recommends reform of by-laws and urban planning to entrench vending into the mainstream economy.

Since Richard Florida's theory of the Creative Class was first introduced, many related studies of creativity have been undertaken regarding analyzing the key features and predictors of the knowledge economy. Though the notion of the Creative Class has been popular for over two decades, not many studies have analyzed Creative Class in Japan. The objective of this paper is to analyze the spatial distribution of the Super Creative Class in the Greater Tokyo Area (GTA) to better understand the key predictors that drive the spatial distribution of the Super Creative Class. Based on data from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, the spatial distribution of the Super Creative Class seemed highly uneven for the 138 cities and wards of the GTA with significant concentrations in Kawasaki, Tokyo and Tsukuba. A stepwise regression analysis revealed that 60 percent of the spatial distribution in the Super Creative Class by place of work could be best explained by the share of the labor pool. On the other hand, 73 percent of distribution of Super Creative Class by place of residence could be explained by a more traditional human capital predictor. Since a key component of the Super Creative Class differs markedly by place of work and place of residence, it seems geography is a major factor in explaining the distribution of Super Creative Class in the GTA.

This study argues for the significance of the network governance model in bottom-up cultural district development aimed at neighborhood revitalization. This study, employing a multi-level policy design framework in a case study of the Gordon Square Arts District in Cleveland, Ohio, found that having a formalized governance structure and ongoing technical assistance empowered local arts organizations to succeed in advocating and bargaining for their organizational interests and needs as well as the broader needs of their community. Both network governance and technical assistance created more opportunities to achieve a relatively balanced power of cultural and non-cultural actors in decision-making on policy objectives, mechanisms, implementation tools, and solutions against the issue of marginalization caused by displacement via market-driven overdevelopment.

This article analyses the Creative Class localisation and its determinants in the peri-urban areas of Northern Italy.

Florida's hypothesis on the localisation patterns of the creative class, based on the famous 3Ts (Talent, Technology and Tolerance), has been largely debated and sometimes discredited due to the shaky conceptual foundations of some of the variables on which it is based (e.g. the Gay Index) or the excessive focus on urban areas, which gave rise to worrying implications in terms of deepening socio-economic inequalities between urban and non-urban territories.

This paper seeks to deal with some of these limitations by reconsidering Florida's determinants as well as using new innovative means to define them. It also extends the analysis to a yet unexplored territory, the peri-urban areas, which occupies a third of the European territory and attracts creative people whilst still being closely integrated with urban economies.

These new hypotheses have been tested specifically by PCA and spatial regression models to the peri-urban municipalities in the regions of Northern Italy, the most creative regions in Italy. Here, the creative class results unevenly distributed as is greater in the municipalities closest to the urban centres and decreases in the ones furthest away. Its presence is strongly associated with socio-economic determinants (public expenditure, presence of creative and non-creative firms, volunteering), less to cultural amenities and technology. Tolerance has more controversial appealing affects.

The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage contributes to heritage conservation, leveraging on the heritage potential to enable sustainable development and enhance urban livability. Yet, it is seldom applied as intervention. This research furthers the knowledge on the challenges to the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage. Through the case study of Salerno (Italy) and a participatory methodology, this research organized a stakeholder engagement workshop, facilitating the interaction of stakeholders—representing the public, private, civic, and knowledge sectors, while using a theoretical framework based on the six steps of the UNESCO Historic Urban Landscape approach to adopt a multi-scale perspective. The content analysis of the data reveals 55 themes encompassing challenges and solutions. These themes are presented in a general overview, followed by an in-depth reporting of the five most discussed themes, i.e. knowledge production and management, participation, valorization, approaches, and cooperation. Besides the contribution to science, this research also offers an overview of challenges and possible solutions for prospective stakeholders in the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage, informing future decision- and policy-making activities towards greater sustainable development within the built environment.