The Risks of “Techtopia”: Reviewing the Negative Lessons of Smart City Development
“Smart cities” are not always as “smart” as the term suggests, which is not often covered in the associated literatures. In what has become known as the smart city approach to urban planning, governments around the world are seeking to harness the power of information and communications technology to address major social, economic, and environmental …
Strategic Management of Tourism Destinations Based on the Austrian School Perspective
Despite various researches have been carried out on development strategies for tourism destinations, most of them are based on the resource-based view or industrial organization theory, and the tools used for strategy analysis (such as SWOT analysis, Diamond model) focus mainly on the present factor endowments and the unique tourism features offered by a destination. …
How Does Gaming Industry Influence the Economic Development of a City: Evidence from Macao
Located in Southern China, with a territory of 30.5 km2 and a population of approximately 650 thousand, Macao is a special administrative region (SAR) of China with a high degree of autonomy. In 2002, the Government of Macao SAR liberalized the gaming industry. As Macao is the only Chinese jurisdiction where casino gaming is legal, …
Architecture of Fear: Zaojing in Traditional Chinese Buildings
As a specially constructed coffered ceiling, zaojing was widely adapted in the great halls in imperial China. According to the sumptuary laws from the imperial period, zaojing is only allowed to be used in the imperial palaces and religious places. Zao literally means algae, referring to aquatic plants, while jing literally means water well. Often …
Grappling with Graffiti: Crime, Punishment, Gentrification
Graffiti is seen disparately as rank vandalism in one culture and street art in another. It is accepted, rejected, gentrified, demonized, prosecuted, commissioned and stolen. This paper examines legal and cultural issues surrounding graffiti and street art from Athens, Georgia to Athens, Greece, from New York to Paris, Rome, Singapore, Istanbul and on to Barcelona, …
Neo Imperialism vs. Context: Case Study Delhi’s Architecture and Planning (1991-2021)
India has been colonised for many centuries, from the end of the XV century by Dutch and Portuguese and later on, from the XVII to the XX centuries, mainly by French and British. The city of Delhi, in particular, has been the capital of the British Empire from 1912 to 1947. It is a fascinating …
Informal Settlements and its Regeneration Factors in Urban-Rural Continuum
A pattern of settlement has formed in urban- rural continuum, which is contradiction with ordinary urban-rural settlement and called with different names, including “Shanty town”, “Slum” and “informal settlements”. Usually these kinds of settlements understood as locational- geographical spaces, in which the life of people are not favorable from the viewpoints of government mechanism and …
New Year and Christmas Terror in European Cities: Berlin and Istanbul Attacks
Europe is facing a range of terrorist threats and attacks of a violent jihadist nature, from both networked groups and lone actors. Most of the recent terror incidents are the work of Islamic extremists, either natives or immigrants motivated by radical groups, such as the Islamic State, which have declared war on Western values. In …
Teaching and Learning Urbanism in Architecture Schools
How are approaches and tools changing to deal with critical territorial challenges, particularly risks associated with climate change, the spatial dimension of the economy and the networked metropolitan region? Are urbanists equipped to lead solutions to our society’s challenges to sustainability? Learning is a puzzling act, and the learning of a discipline like Urbanism is …
Reinventing Identity in the Changing Metropolis: Shenzhen in Chinese Female Writer Wu Jun’s Fiction
This paper focuses on the representation of Shenzhen, a very modern and rapidly urbanizing Chinese metropolis, situated in the southern part of Guangdong province, in the literary production of Chinese female writer Wu Jun, who has lived there for a long time and often chooses it as a setting for her stories, showing a deep …
The Body and Soul of the City
The living spaces of the modern individual, have transcended being mere metaphorical tools in the works of literary authors, sociologists, and philosophers, and have become sources for phenomena and concepts related to urbanity –a complex phenomenon with cultural, social, political, economic, temporal, spatial, functional, formal dimensions. The study of text types constituting the heterogeneous structure …
Landscape of Displacement: The Jewish Cemetery in Sambir, Ukraine
Landscapes tell stories. Here we will present the history and our design for the old Jewish Cemetery in Sambir, Western Ukraine, near the Polish border. The old Jewish Cemetery bears witness to the tragic murder of 2000 innocent children, men and women in 1943, under Nazi occupation, as part of the infamous Holocaust by Bullets …
Distributed Citizenship: Spatial Interventions in Public Spaces of Athens
During the last few decades, a debate on the fields of architecture and urbanism emerged, addressing the social and spatial transformations of public space. Discourse on new forms of public space came to challenge the relationship between public and private. This paper will specifically examine emergent forms of spatial impact led by the ongoing financial …
Creating Community Around Visual Arts or How do Art Worlds come to be?
Houston, Texas, USA may seem to some like an unlikely place to find one of the most important art worlds for photography in the world. How this came to be is a fascinating, sociologically rich story of passionate, visionary individuals and three core institutions: the development of the Photography Department at the Museum of Fine …
Contested Space & Playfulness, By Design
Designing and managing public space to satisfy the many who might use it is tricky, and reflects a “wicked” problem, as outlined by Rittel and Webber (1973) and Buchanan (1992). As diversities of urban publics (Iveson, 2008) grow, can we thus reframe approaches to contested space creatively, to better accommodate difference, without reducing urban wellbeing …
Exposing the Invisible Layer of Fear in an Urban Space: The Case of Beyolu, Istanbul
The city with its multiplicities of social, cultural and physical contexts and a commodity of urban economy, exposes various specificities for the urban settlement in psychological or sociocultural manners. Istanbul for instance promotes its multicultural setting at a specific geography through its socio-spatial palimpsest.This “promoted multiculturalism” is while creating an illusive catalyst of the urban …
Walking Along Pixley Street in Durban Inner City, South Africa
Nowadays the inner city of Durban, the third city of South Africa, is considered an unsafe and difficult place to live and traverse, also for short and temporary visits. Nevertheless, should a person find themselves walking along Pixley Street, they will discover a most significant and vibrant atmosphere of the city, filled with people in …
Media Representation of Urban Renewal Areas: The Case of Kadifekale, Tepecik and Tenekeli of the City of Izmir
Izmir is the third largest city in Turkey after Istanbul and Ankara. Three very old and historic districts of Izmir, Kadifekale, Tepecik and Tenekeli, are located near to the city’s central areas with inhabitants belonging to the low-income groups. Moreover, these districts have reputed to have high crime rates compared to other districts. In recent …
Fearless Cities are Cities of Communities
The architects and urban planners are fantasizing about ideal urban landscapes populated by trees and high-rise buildings emulating the hanging gardens of Babylon, solar energy, sustainability, perfect mobility and absolute security. But the reality we are living is far from all this, every day governments from different parts of the world join the deniers of …
Strangers in the Neighbourhood: Everyday Interaction Between the Refugee and Local Women
Due to the ongoing war both in Syria and Iraq, as İçduygu (2015) addresses, over 3.5 million refugees are shifting from refugee to immigrant status in Turkey, and this creates an immediate need to plan for their long-term stay and to transform Turkey from a host country to home for them. To this end, the …