What could be the « imaginary institution » of the City?

In his book “The imaginary institution of Society” the French philosopher Castoriadis wanted to explain the radical change of societies and their diversity. The social imaginary matters, and explains social change. But what is it today? The Castoriadis’s answer is mainly a criticism of the imaginary of the bureaucratic society (perfect anticipations). He hoped more autonomy. We propose this interpretation of the imaginary of the City: the main myths are personal strength, chance (here the reference is the Ulrich Beck’s book “The risk society”) and individual happiness (the reference being the works of the French philosopher Lipotevsky). We are able to explain the discrepancy between public policies (including city planning) and the real social needs. It exists because the doctrines used lag behind the “social imaginary significations”. The concerned fields are the beauty of cities, spatial segregation, women in the city, environment and drugs

Exploring population distribution and motion dynamics through mobile phone device data in selected cities – lessons learned from the UrbanAPI project

The paper discusses experiences of development and implementation of public motion explorer (PME) tool as part of the EU FP7 project urbanAPI. This tool has been applied to three EU cities with the objective to investigate population distribution dynamics and anonymous population movement patterns within urban environments as an instrument to map shapes of urban attractiveness and accessibility and as a support for transportation and infrastructure planning. The paper describes technical details of the Motion Explorer application by demonstrating the different applications for the City of Vienna, Bologna and Vitoria-Gasteiz and it discusses the results of the first round of the user evaluation using the Criteria Indicators and Metrics methodology. The initial results indicate that the application is intuitive and highly useful for city planning and provides the evidence-based information, which is either expensive or difficult to collect using other approaches

Information-analytical system for cities of Perm region spatial development managment

To date, the practice of urban planning and design in Russia is based on the principles of the Soviet planned economy, while the current economic conditions require new approaches. Perm National Research Polytechnic University together with JSC «PROGNOZ», with the financial support of the Perm Region Government during the year of 2013 is developing an integrated spatial development IT-model, which allows the bringing together of socio-economic statistics, real estate state cadastre data, mathematical, statistical and adaptive methods library integrated with GIS under one platform. The main purpose of the system is the improvement of validity of decisions taken in different urban planning types, design improvements of Land Use and Development Regulations and prioritization of the municipal budget allocation. Decision support system is based on the Prognoz Platform (PP) - a next-generation BI platform for building high-tech business applications on a turnkey basis. PP allows to visualize and analyze operational data model and forecast processes. It has its own data warehouse designer which helps to build full-featured industrial BI systems based on the Prognoz Platform. PP Integration with the state information system for urban planning allows consideration of established local and federal law requirements for the quality of the urban environment, the prevailing land use and capabilities of municipal budgets. Model is to be used for the following tasks: Analysis of the effects of the changes in the administrative-territorial division of the region; Optimization of social facilities, taking into account standards of security, transport availability, etc. on the territory; Analysis of the current and future needs of transport infrastructure development, resource security of the region; Justification of the area choice for investment projects, etc. In the first phase the analogs of software that are used to solve problems of this kind, were identified. In the second phase of the model development typology and classification of simulation objects were studied, a list of necessary calculation and performance indicators/indicative indexes were determined, an algorithm providing integration with GIS and a prototype system were created. Prototype testing was conducted for the following tasks: Optimization of social facilities, taking into account federal regulations and budgetary constraints: selection of the site for the construction of a new school in the city; Justification of the energy infrastructure development scenario by combining mining settlements of Kizelovskoe and Gremyachinskoe municipal districts of Perm Region; Land Use Plan development for new residential area in New Lyady, Perm The next step of the analysis implies specifically housing and social infrastructure development challenges arising at the local government level, for the solution of which it is expedient to use the created model

Modelling Day and Night-Time Population using a 3D Urban Model

Dasymetric methods are commonly used to redistribute or disaggregate (census) population data, using either simple binary or multi-layer models. Most models show limitations in high density built-up areas as they commonly ignore the 3D dimension (meaning buildings height) of multi-story urban environments. For example, simple dasymetric models only allocate the population counts to built-up areas, without considering differences between areas of multi-story and single-story buildings. Furthermore, such models only allow the disaggregation of ‘night-time’ population data, while for many urban applications such as transport, health or hazard, the location of ‘day-time’ population is of interest. This research presents an initial approach to model day and night-time population using as case study an Indian city (Kalyan-Dombivli). For most Indian cities, census population data is only available for wards, while day-time population data is either not available or of very poor quality. Besides census data and ancillary spatial data, this research uses a 3D urban model, extracted from Cartosat stereo-images. First, the extracted height from the stereo-image is used in combination with building footprints to disaggregate census population data at wards to ‘night-time’ population per building. Second, a classification of economically active areas is constructed based on the 3D urban model in combination with other spatial layers (e.g. transport layers) to model the day-time population. The result shows different concentration of population during day and night-time across ward boundaries as well as it confirms the potential of 3D data to disaggregate population data

The Community Gardens and Kitchens, and their Contribution to the Social Development of the Marginalised Areas in Berlin: the Case Study of Beettinchen Community Garden

Over history, food was an essential element in the cities’ establishment, and it has had a huge effect on their location, urban context, culture, economy and social network. Urbanization facilitates and improves the physical access to food due to the efficient infrastructure, however the residents of the marginalized areas have vulnerable relationships with food, in addition to other socio-economic problems. That all increases the need for alternative food systems to reduce the distance between the producer and the consumer, and contribute to food security in those marginalized areas. These community food security projects, such as the community gardens and the community kitchens, have become a growing international movement, especially in the developed countries. They have been established, involved and managed by the community members, which followed the bottom up approach. They have been used by the state and civil society as activities to develop the marginalized areas. This paper aims to understand how community kitchens and gardens can be integrated as a vital element of urban development of the marginalized areas in Berlin, through analyzing the empirical aspects including the organization and the governance of these projects, the ownership of the used land, the motivation of the people who participate in these projects and to what extent they benefit from these projects, from the social aspects. The paper presents the case study; “Beettinchen” community garden in Märkischen Viertel in Berlin. The analysis is based on literature research, interviews, study visits and observations. This paper is a part of the author’s ongoing PhD research about the community kitchens and gardens in Egypt and Germany, and how they can contribute to the urban development of the marginalized and vulnerable areas