Scalar Narratives in Bilbao: A Cultural Politics of Scales Approach to the Study of Urban Policy

In this article I explore how theoretical metaphors about the contemporary rescaling of the capitalist economy are used by local policy actors to justify an entrepreneurial urban policy. I develop a new theoretical concept (scalar narrative), suggest an analytical approach (cultural politics of scales) and give evidence of a particular case (Bilbao). The article is structured in the following way. First, I briefly review the literature on politics of scales and contribute to the debate with an approach that incorporates elements from cultural political economy and interpretative policy analysis. Within this approach I mobilize the concept of ‘scalar narrative’ that has already been suggested in the literature but not fully explored. I then put this approach into practice with a particular case study, Bilbao, a city in the north of Spain, which has recently gone through extensive urban regeneration, where I describe the appropriation of three scalar narratives by the policymakers. To show this I draw from empirical work done in Bilbao that looks at statutory and strategic planning documents as well as urban marketing literature and interviews with key informants.     

THE POLITICS OF URBAN ECOLOGY: Paul Duvigneaud and the Rise of Ecological Urbanism in Brussels during the 1970s

Today, design disciplines such as ecological urbanism aim at fusing natural and social sciences to restore the equilibrium between social and natural systems, and in extenso the urban and natural environment. But recent literature in urban political ecology and urban history has shown how this socioecological approach is generally stripped down to a merely ecological perspective, ignoring the sociopolitical side of the urban ecological project. I therefore argue that there is a need for a research programme that interrogates the history of the interaction between ecology, planning and politics. In this article I respond by developing a historical perspective on the rise of the ecosystemic approach towards the city, delving into the agency and political nature of ecological science itself. Through an in-depth historical analysis of the Brussels school of urban ecology and urban ecologist Paul Duvigneaud, I highlight how urban ecology influenced politics through its association with the regional government and vice versa to argue that ecological knowledge was used to overcome political opposition, incorporate a specific regionalist agenda and build an ecological zoning practice in urban planning policies.     

Urban Laboratories: Experiments in Reworking Cities

The notion of the ‘urban laboratory’ is increasingly striking a chord with actors involved in urban change. Is this term simply a metaphor for urban development or does it suggest urbanization by substantially different means? To answer this question, we review the work of science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have empirically investigated laboratories and practices of experimentation over the past three decades to understand the significance of these spaces of experimentation in urban contexts. Based on this overview of laboratory studies, we argue that urban laboratories and experimentation involve three key achievements — situatedness, change‐orientation and contingency — that are useful for evaluating and critiquing those practices that claim to be urban laboratories. We conclude by considering some future directions of research on urban laboratories.     

港口物流仿真实验教学有效性的探究

以厦门理工学院的港口物流管理仿真实验室为例,探讨了如何合理规划物流实验项目以及将实验教学与科研、工程和社会应用实践结合,最后提出了实验教学的几大改革理念。     

Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman

This article traces the movement of the concept of ‘defensible space’ from New York City in the 1970s, where it was developed by the Canadian architect/planner Oscar Newman, to London in the 1980s and into design interventions in British public housing in the 1990s, through British geographer Alice Coleman, who acted as an especially powerful transfer agent. In focusing on this urban design ‘concept’ on the move we contribute to existing scholarship on policy mobility and city building in a number of ways. First, we explore an instance of the movement/mobility of a planning concept in a historical period (the recent past) largely overlooked to date. Secondly, we demonstrate that this movement was the result of a disaggregated series of expert knowledge transfers and localized translations of pre‐policy expert knowledge, generated through university‐based research work and networks. We theorize this instance of urban planning mobility by way of the interlinked insights offered by the sociology of science and policy‐mobilities literatures. As this is an instance of university research shaping public policy it also offers an opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of ‘evidence‐based policy’ and the impact agenda in contemporary higher education.     

《城市园林绿化资源调查技术规程》的研制

城市园林绿化资源调查是城市园林绿化行业管理的一项基础工作,是对现行城建统计制度的重要补充和完善。文章通过研制规程,建立了城市园林绿化资源的概念,规定了调查的内容、组织方法,调查因子的定义、分类标准与调查方法,调查图斑区划,前期准备工作,外业调查,统计计算,调查质量管理,调查成果报告等技术要求,并应用于2010年开展的徐州市城市园林绿化资源调查中,取得了较好的成果。     

Popular Urbanization: Conceptualizing Urbanization Processes Beyond Informality

This article introduces the concept of popular urbanization to describe a specific urbanization process based on collective initiatives, self-organization and the activities of inhabitants. We understand popular urbanization as an urban strategy through which an urban territory is produced, transformed and appropriated by the people. This concept results from a theoretically guided and empirically grounded comparison of Mexico City, Istanbul and Lagos. Based on postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanization, we bring urbanization processes in these urban regions into conversation with each other through a multidimensional theoretical framework inspired by Henri Lefebvre focusing on material interaction, territorial regulation, and everyday experience. In this way, popular urbanization emerged as a distinct urbanization process, which we identified in all three contexts. While this process is often subsumed under the broader concept of ‘urban informality’, we suggest that it may be helpful to distinguish popular urbanization as primarily led by the people, while commodification and state agencies play minor roles. As popular urbanization unfolds in diverse ways dependent upon the wider urban context, specific political constellations and actions, it results in a variety of spatial outcomes and temporal trajectories. This is therefore a revisable and open concept. In proposing the concept of popular urbanization for further examination, we seek to contribute to the collective development of a decentered vocabulary of urbanization.     

From Occupying Plazas to Recuperating Housing: Insurgent Practices in Spain

Urban insurgencies have spread across the globe like wildfire in recent years. The indignado plaza occupations in Spain are often cited as beacons of popular and widespread dissent. This article argues that urban insurgencies with the highest emancipatory potential in Spain today are found in the practices of the housing rights movement—the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, or Platform for Mortgage‐affected People)—that mainly entail blocking evictions and occupying empty bank‐owned housing. I elaborate on the notion of insurgent practice by examining how insurgency has been considered in relationship to citizenship, planning and public space. I propose insurgent practice as a way of articulating how people attempt to enact equality in everyday life and engage explicitly with socio‐spatial and political questions related to an emancipatory democratic politics. Based on a detailed analysis of two of the PAH's insurgent housing practices, I posit that recuperating empty bank‐owned housing with and for evicted families has the highest and most significant emancipatory potential, as it disrupts the core dynamics of urban capital accumulation and enacts equality for evicted households by directly contesting financial rent‐extraction mechanisms at multiple levels. In closing, I outline some conclusions that emerge from the Spanish housing case and from the concept of insurgent practice and urban politicizing practice in general.     

The Only Way Is Up? Ordinary Topologies of Ramallah

This article seeks to conceptualize and value some of the quotidian geographies responsible for contemporary forms of urban change. The starting point for the argument is an attempt to account for recent urban change in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, particularly the proliferation of apartment buildings, using emerging work on verticality. It is argued that work on verticality focuses empirically on prominent cities and spaces of violent conflict, invokes the vertical as politically suspect and offers a theorization of space that is topographical in nature. Consequently, accounts of verticality have produced narratives that obscure topological spatial relations. This article seeks to make space for such topologies, which it is argued are crucial to producing urban and political life itself in many contexts. The concept of ordinary topologies is proposed as a means of attending to the complex and undervalued practices that are thought to be normal (but not static) and common within and across intensive or qualitative spatio‐temporal relations. This approach is fleshed out through a discussion of changing topographic–topological landscapes in Ramallah. In particular, it is argued that the increasingly verticalized landscape of the city, embodied in rapidly proliferating apartment buildings, must be understood in relation to frequent journeys to other places and changing family relations.     

Facilitative Leadership and the Challenge of Renewing Local Democracy in Italy

Participatory arrangements have become a popular way of addressing modern challenges of urban governance but in practice face several constraints and can trigger deep tensions. Facilitative leadership can play a crucial role in enabling collaboration among local stakeholders despite plural and often conflictual interests. Surprisingly, this style of leadership has received limited attention within debates linking urban governance and participatory democracy. We summarize the main insights of the literature on facilitative leadership and empirically develop them in the context of participatory urban governance by comparing recent participatory processes in two Italian cities. Whereas in one city facilitative leadership gradually emerged and successfully transformed a deep conflict into consensual proposals, in the other city, participatory planning further exacerbated pre‐existing antagonism, and local democratic culture was only later slowly reinvigorated through bottom‐up initiative. These diverging pathways explain how facilitative leadership is: (1) important for making things happen; (2) best understood as situated practices; (3) an emergent property of the practices and interactions of a number of local actors and (4) a democratic capacity for dealing with continuous challenges. Key to this style of leadership is understanding participatory urban governance as an ongoing democratic process.     

深圳规划制度改革——从近期建设规划到近期建设规划年度实施计划

我国普遍存在的规划编制与规划管理的脱节,已严重影响到规划先导统筹与主导作用的发挥,对创新规划实施机制、促进规划编制和规划管理的结合提出迫切要求,近期建设规划年度实施计划作为规划领域的制度创新,在推动“目标规划”向“行动规划”的转变,在创新规划实施机制、强化规划的刚性和先导性、促进规划的滚动编制与适时调校和指导规划管理运...     

经济适用房理性增长评价

理性增长(smart growth)是城市发展的基本理念,经济适用房的理性增长是城市发展的重要内容。文章结合理性增长理论,构建了经济适用房评价指标,用AHP方法对各要素进行评价,综合判定具体项目规划设计的科学性及可持续性。以期为我国经济适用房发展决策提供科学依据。     

SOCIALLY ENGAGED MUNICIPAL STATECRAFT IN URBAN CHINA? The Shenzhen Biennale as Situated Planning Experiment

In this article I build on scholarship that calls for attention to the interventionist role of the municipality in steering development beyond growth to introduce the situated planning experiment as a mechanism through which municipalities practice socially engaged statecraft. The situated planning experiment foregrounds place-based innovative planning practices that incorporate the participation of citizen intellectuals who act as advocates for marginalized groups in China. I frame the Shenzhen Urbanism\Architecture Biennale (UABB) as a situated planning experiment, tracing its influence on the municipality's shift in approach to planning for urban village redevelopment. I show how the UABB is leveraged as an instrument for the municipality to connect social and economic objectives in development and how it presents differentiated opportunities for migrant residents to make viable urban lives. The article offers one possibility for theorizing the changing relationship between municipal entrepreneurialism and urban planning and critically evaluates the potential for socially engaged municipal statecraft, considering the Xi regime's focus on people-oriented urbanization. It represents one way in which studies of municipal statecraft can consider the variegated logics and forms of emerging post-growth state programmes and politics.     

北京市科普资源开发与共享现状及对策研究

一个国家的科普能力，集中表现为国家向公众提供科普产品和服务的综合实力。而科普资源既是科普工作的基础和工具，也是提升科普能力的重要因素。伴随着公民科学素质建设的推进，以及科学发展现在全社会的树立和落实，怎样提高科普资源的利用效率，建立共建共享平台的长效机制，使科普资源真正服务于公众并见到实效，已成为我国当前乃至今后一个时期科普事业发展中最关键、也最具基础性的工作之一。本研究旨在总结科普资源科学发展的经验，发现影响和制约其发展的问题，探讨科普资源共建共享的科学方法，为北京市的科普资源开发和共享工作提供决策依据。     

城市规划管理中的交易费用

当代经济学研究注重交易费用在经济发展与社会制度设计中所起的作用.而作为社会制度的一部分,城市规划管理对城市开发有重要的影响,科学的城市规划管理应当注重经济学理论的指导作用.在介绍交易费用相关的基本理论基础上,结合美国城市规划管理实践,对城市规划管理中可能存在的交易费用及其影响进行分析研究,并对我国目前的规划管理实践进行思考,提出适应经济发展,尽量降低城市规划管理中的各种交易费用,以提高社会的总效用.     

城市规划中应重视的要点论述

城市总体规划的科学与否,在很大程度上影响着城市土地价格。同时在城市规划上要注重地质灾害的因素,我国是地质灾害多发的国家,地质灾害种类多、分布广、活动频繁、危害重,是世界上地质灾害最为严重的国家之一。从多年的实践中了解到,对于地质灾害的防治必须要以防为主,治为辅的方针,不断提高对地质灾害的评估和对症下药的作用。     

Decentralizing Indonesian City Spaces as New ‘Centers’

Since the introduction of regional autonomy legislation in 1999, Indonesia has embarked on the world's biggest experiment with democratic decentralization. The intertwined processes of democratization and decentralization have dismantled Indonesia's centralized authoritarian system and reordered its governmental structures. These conjoined processes have set in motion conditions for the transformation of a number of Indonesia's secondary cities into regional ‘centers’ through the influx of new peoples, funding and ways of interacting within localized contexts and with the outside world. In this article I consider Indonesia's decentralization processes through the lens of the city, focusing on three key areas in the rising profile and development of urban centers. First, I look at the framing of Indonesian cities within contemporary urban discourses to highlight the array of urban spaces that coexist in the era of decentralization. Second, I describe how Indonesia's decentralization laws have structurally privileged cities by bypassing the provincial level and devolving most state powers directly to sub‐provincial administrations. Third, I explore how Indonesian cities compete and cooperate over limited state resources under the decentralized system and why some cities have been able to reinvent themselves as new centers in planning, practice and innovation, and why others continue to lag behind.     

浅谈地理信息系统(GIS)及其在城市交通规划中的应用

GIS地理信息系统是以地理空间数据库为基础,在计算机软硬件的支持下,运用系统工程和信息科学的理论,科学管理和综合分析具有空间内涵的地理数据,以提供管理、决策等所需信息的技术系统。近年来GIS技术正逐渐应用到城市交通规划中来,并发挥出日益重要的作用。     

国外城市规划指标的特点及启示——以美、英、法、德、日等国规划案例为例

科学的城市规划一定要有科学的规划指标体系作为保障.论文通过分析关、美、法、德、日等国外发达国家城市规划个素指标体系的构成、分类、内容及作用,总结上述国家城市规划指标体系内容的主要特点,以供我国现阶段城市规划指标体系的完善及城市规划工作借鉴.