City, Culture and Society最新文献

With the introduction of social media, the production and consumption of art are changing significantly in urban environments. It has resulted in the emergence of Hybrid Art Spaces: social spaces existing both in physical space and on social media.

This paper expands the relationships between art, space and social media with concepts and spatial analyses to support the practices of exhibition designers, communication designers, as well as curators.

This paper describes both the methodology and the results obtained by processing Instagram data to explore the use of social media in art venues.

The methodology combines analytical results with new modes of visualisations, which are imagined supporting design thinking. Through the analytical results and the visualisations, the paper addresses key points in the use of social media in art venues, including the underlying mechanisms that promote viral dissemination of media in specific art venues and the possibility to discuss typologies of hybrid art venues. The case study is Singapore, with a focus on five different museums.

Highly programmed, digitally-enabled outdoor public spaces for social gathering and cultural performance are now common features of urban environments. These spaces are popular because of their low barriers to entry, and because they facilitate casual, serendipitous encounters between a range of different publics. Entering one of these spaces is to inhabit an ‘ambient’ participatory mode: multi-centred, mobile and multi-sensory, conforming neither to the formal viewing experience of ‘the audience’, nor to the casual, distracted disposition of ‘the street’. Their success in terms of widening public engagement and stimulating urban vitality has informed major policy shifts in creativity-led urban regeneration and creative place-making. However, a deeper understanding of the kind of cultural participation they shape eludes prevailing critical and evaluative frameworks. This article is based around a large-scale event celebrating India's 70th year of Independence held at Melbourne's Federation Square. We use ambience as a conceptual tool to expand common notions of cultural participation, revealing the complex socio-spatial relationships that coalesce through the event. Capturing ‘ambient participation’ reveals, in Paul Carter's (2005) terms, the potential of these networked spaces to ‘model a different kind of political community, to open up a place of meeting differently’ that exceeds the celebratory rhetoric around global mass culture, normative frameworks of multiculturalism, and romantic notions of community.

Industry development is among the key productive sectors the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) identified to attain middle-income country status. Despite multiple interventions, the sector remains underdeveloped, unable to contribute towards the desired structural transformation of the economy, while its development process has produced more challenges. Based on political economy and urban sustainability livelihood frameworks, this article examines the industrialization process and its socioeconomic outcomes in three cities - Galan, Dukem, and Bishoftu. A household survey, key informant interviews, and document review were conducted to collect the necessary data, and the information gathered was analyzed using multivariate analysis techniques. The dominant variables considered by the communities regarding the outcome of the industrialization process were generated using Principal Component Analysis (PCA1). The findings indicate that the ongoing industrialization process in the three cities has resulted in various ramifications on livelihood and sustainable development, casting doubt on the catalytic role of industrialization. Even though the proximity of the cities to the capital, Addis Ababa, has contributed to urbanization through investment expansion, the PCA2 results reveal that proximity to the primate city is adversely linked with urban development. Besieged by haphazard settlement patterns and irregularities in land administration, the emphasis on industrialization has been detrimental to the quality of the urban environment as well as to the life of residents. The article concludes that investment decisions should consider improving communities' livelihood to manage urbanization and industrialization properly; thus, macroeconomic policies, including industrial policies, should pay attention to local communities' socioeconomic activities and well-being.

With the global advancement in heritage conservation and sustainable management practices, understanding the public perception of built heritage is crucial. This paper examined the public perception of heritage buildings in the city centre of Invercargill, New Zealand, using an online survey to gather relevant information from over 600 participants.

The results showed significant support (73.8%) for Invercargill City Council (ICC)'s district plan heritage list to be narrowed down as recommended by professional heritage consultants. There was also substantial support (72.6%) for heritage recognition of some recommended 26 buildings to be removed from ICC's district plan so that ICC can focus more on conserving fewer heritage buildings with significant values in the city centre. Many participants (66.1%) believed that a well-maintained heritage building and access to local government incentives should be the critical determinants for a heritage building to stay on ICC's heritage list. In addition, open-ended responses mainly emphasised the safety concerns of earthquake-prone heritage buildings and the expensive costs of seismic upgrades, suggesting the ‘demolition and rebuild’ of irrelevant heritage buildings as a feasible solution to redeveloping Invercargill's declining city centre.

This study's findings revealed the significance of local knowledge of relevant built heritage parameters in Invercargill and its role in enhancing the usefulness of macro-level heritage projections and local built heritage conservation initiatives. These insights could serve as a starting point towards formulating a sustainable management plan for cities worldwide with ‘fast disappearing’ inner-city heritage buildings – a topic of interest for relevant built heritage conservation enthusiasts.

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.