Browsing by Subject "Public space"
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Item Creating the vilest places on Earth : public resource, crime and the social geography of Buenos Aires, 1880-1920(2010-05) Bates, Juandrea Marie; Garfield, Seth, 1967-; Twinam, AnnThis Master’s Report explores how the social geography of Buenos Aires transformed between 1887 and 1910 and how these changes affected the city’s development. It argues that despite the state’s purported willingness to provide security and sanitation services to its citizenry, changing settlement patterns and expanding democratic participation led to the unequal distribution of public resources and the decay of neighborhoods in the south and west of the city. It argues that as public works removed inexpensive housing in the city’s downtown and transportation networks linked the city’s peripheries closer to the nucleus, members of the middle class and elites increasingly congregated in center and north of the city. Buenos Aires’ neighborhoods became segregated increasingly along class lines and patronage networks broke down. Members of the working class, now concentrated in their own neighborhoods, were unable gain the same resources. Inequality in the allocation of government benefits created clear physical and cultural barriers between rich and poor segments of the city. Unequal access to security forces played an especially important role in stigmatizing poor regions. While the police department vigilantly protected safety, private property and order in some parts of the city, they did not provide enough officers to complete the same tasks in others. Crime went unchecked in poorer regions. The municipal government published statistics and commentary on crime in the southern and western districts of the capital. This imagery cast the area’s residents as threats to public safety and sanitation that the state should control and maintain segregated rather than aid. By casting them as a threatening “other,” city officials denied inhabitants of poor neighborhoods’ future claims to public resources.Item Ideologies of the everyday : public space, new urbanism, and the political unconscious of bus rapid transit(2012-12) Zigmund, Stephen Michael; Mueller, Elizabeth J.; Sletto, BjornThis research uses the recent development of bus rapid transit (BRT) on Cleveland, Ohio’s Euclid Avenue corridor as a case-study to explore the links between public transit, public space, and urban planning. Using Fredric Jameson’s (1981) method of textual analysis from The Political Unconscious, I explore the ways the BRT provides access to a buried class consciousness in the city as well as a “symbolic resolution” between conflicting agendas of development and equity. Contextualizing the new spaces of the BRT using a synthesis of Jameson’s (1984) theorization of postmodernism, Mike Davis’ (1990) militarization of public space, and Michel de Certeau’s (1984) spatial practices, I discuss the ways these spaces are remade by individual users as a vital public space despite the BRT’s embedded market ideology and repressive security apparatus. Additionally, I explore what BRT’s ‘ideology of form’ can tell us about the ideology of the dominant paradigm of planning today, New Urbanism, and use it as departure for a closing discussion of Utopian desires in planning.Item Narratives of home: home-making practices and political violence in a Kurdish border town in Turkey(2011-05) Ozcan, Omer, M.A.; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-; Stewart, Kathleen CThis essay analyzes a series of home narratives I gathered in Yüksekova (Gever in Kurdish) district of Hakkari (Colemêrg), a small Kurdish town located on the Iraqi-Turkish border. This essay presents and discusses the ways in which people have been struggling to create, maintain, and talk about their homes during and after a series of violent moments that have marked the local time-space of Yüksekova over the last century. Drawing an ethnographic picture of survival and home-making practices, I will trace the changing semantics of home and the social/spatial relationships and cultural imaginaries associated with it. To this end, I will focus on home-making in three violent moments in the cultural and political history of the town that are most emphasized in the narratives I gathered: 1) The massacre and deportation of Armenian and other non-Muslim peoples of Hakkari in 1915 that turned the region into a home only for Muslim Kurds 2) the destruction of homes as rural Kurds of Hakkari were displaced as a part of the recent counterinsurgency warfare against Kurdish guerillas; and 3) the struggles of people to make homes in Yüksekova. Informed by a body of literature on space that defines space meaningfully only in and through social relations, this paper aims to take an ethnographic look at home as a space that is situated in human agency and practices and which is open to change as it is shaped and reshaped as part of the dynamism of social, political and daily life.Item Regulating transgressions/ transgressing regulations : graffiti, street art and muralism in Bogotá, Colombia(2016-05) Ortiz Van Meerbeke, Gabriel; Sletto, Bjørn; Lara, Fernado LThis thesis attempts to capture the complexities of the urban art scene in Bogotá, Colombia. From 2011 to 2015, Gustavo Petro, the major of Bogotá, implemented Decreto 75, a decree that broke with the usual repressive approach towards street art and instead encouraged the production of “responsible and artistic graffiti”. By critically assessing the scope and breadth of this innovative legal framework, this thesis shows the inherent contradictions stemming from any attempt to regulate a transgression. This analysis is based on a review of official documents published by the Secretaría de Cultura, Recreación y Deporte (Bogotá’s Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Sport) and the Instituto Distrital de las Artes (Bogotá’s Art Institute), as well as an interview with a city official who was instrumental in drafting Decreto 75. The study also draws on ethnographic methods and 20 semi-structured interviews with graffiti writers, street artists, and muralists to document their lived experience and critically assess how they responded to this new legal framework. In doing so, this thesis shows how even flexible regulations will be transgressed. This study contributes to research on the politics of urban art and provides important insights for urban planners who seek to understand the important role of street art in the social production of public spaces.Item Shaping informality in the free market city : a comparative spatial analysis of street vending policies in Lima and Bogotá(2012-12) Aliaga Linares, Lissette, 1977-; Roberts, Bryan R., 1939-; Ward, Peter M., 1951-; Auyero, Javier; Villarreal, Andres; Pullum, Thomas W; Matthews, Stephen AIn addition to labor market factors, the informal economy in Latin America is explained as a product of a weak state capacity to enforce regulation and a networked and resourceful community that enables self-sustained economic activities. Theoretically,informal self-employment flourishes where these conditions prevail. However, as urban renewal advances and business chains expand thorough the city, street trade, one of the most typical informal occupations is persecuted more aggressively, questioning its legitimacy as a spatial practice and source of employment for the urban poor. This dissertation examines the changes in the conception of street trade as a subject of policy, by analyzing closely how current transformations in the urban structure, ideologies of urban development and planning have impacted in the way policy makers intervene in public space and have redefined practices of street trade. It compares the cities of Bogotá and Lima, contributing respectively, to the understanding of progressive and neoliberal styles of urban planning. Using a mixed methods research design, it articulates citywide trends with local conditions and individual experiences, following three stages of analysis: (1) A comparative policy analysis based on a descriptive analysis of its evolution across scales and a spatial analysis of the local variability of enforcement patterns, identifying not only vendors’ agglomeration factors but also where enforcement matches the expansion of large retailers; (2) a comparative analysis based on public officials interviews of current rationales behind placemaking strategies at the city and local level; and (3) a comparative analysis of street vendors spatial practices as well as economic and political choices given the different city policy frameworks and their exposure to distinctive enforcement patterns as identified in the spatial analysis. The findings of this study provide a baseline for further theorization of the role of spatial dimension as it relates to the informal sector. The systematic comprehension of the relationship between city regulation of space and its actual use aims to contribute to a more integrative approach to policy making seeking to ensure that regulation and commercial growth complement and do not burden opportunities for self-employment among the urban poor.Item A shareable city : an analysis of shareable land use approaches in Austin and San Francisco(2014-05) Christensen, Aubrie May; Wilson, Barbara B. (Barbara Brown)Inspired by the recent rise in interest surrounding the Sharing Economy, this report seeks to provide insight into the potential for sharing in cities. I focus my attention on land; as one of the scarcest resources in urban areas land holds some of the greatest potential for sharing. I strive to develop an awareness of the challenges against and opportunities for shareable approaches to land use and development of city-owned land. Through interviews and archival research I explore a variety of projects, programs and initiatives in Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA. Based on my findings I provide suggestions for the City of Austin in developing a more shareable approach to land use and development.Item The production of an urban revolution: tactics, police and public space in Cairo’s uprising(2011-05) Gaber, Sherief A.; Dooling, Sarah; Getman, Julius G.The following thesis presents a narrative of the uprisings that took place in Cairo, Egypt between 25 January, 2011 and 11 February, 2011 as they relate to notions of cities, the state and citizenship in spatial terms. I do so by looking at different series of events that took place during those 18 days of revolution: spatial tactics that protestors used against police, popular committees set up by neighborhoods to defend the streets after the withdrawal of the Egyptian police, the sudden participation of nonpolitical actors and groups, and ultimately the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square and the production of public space and new notions of citizenship that occurred within the square during this period. These various narratives are used to argue that sovereignty is ultimately very spatially limited (ontologically, not necessarily territorially), how the "informal" city and modes of urban existence produced not just resistance to the state but were transformed into tools of provocation and insurrection, and how public space—devalorized and heavily policed by the Egyptian state—was produced through the actions of protestors occupying Tahrir Square.