Framework for the implementation of urban big screens in the public space

In the last decade, big urban screens have appeared in town squares and on building facades across the UK. The use of these screens brings new potentials and challenges for city regulators, artists, architects, urban designers, producers, broadcasters and advertisers. Dynamic moving images form new architectural material, affecting our perception and the experience of the space around us. A new form of urban space is emerging that is fundamentally different from what we have known, and it seems that we are ill-equipped to deal with and analyse it. We are just beginning to understand the opportunities for public information, art and community engagement. Most of screens at present serve mainly commercial purposes, they do not broadcast information aimed at sharing community content nor do they support public social interactions. We need to see more negotiation between commercial, public and cultural interests. The SCREAM project addresses these new challenges by looking at the physical urban spaces and the potential spaces created by the new technologies

The Port of Sheffield: Co-creation in Mobile Application Development for Place-Based Interaction with Large-Scale Urban Heritage Sites

Constructed in 1819, the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal linked the City of Sheffield with the rest of the British waterway system and brought ships into the canal basin in the city centre for the first time. Eroded by periods of rapid social, economic and technological change, the three-mile stretch of the canal site has today become a ‘forgotten’ space, hidden behind surviving industrial sheds and derelict warehouses. The city council's regeneration plans of new waterfront housing along the canal have been held up by the complexities over land ownership, use patterns and brownfield contamination. It has been suggested that the ‘sense of possibility’ of neglected sites such as the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal is what gives the urban landscape of Sheffield its unique character. This article presents our research on the development of a location-aware mobile application through a community-oriented process to deliver ‘place-based’ interaction with the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal as a large-scale urban heritage site. In collaboration with local creative practitioners, we piloted ‘The Port of Sheffield’ a mobile application that enables oral histories and memories to be overlaid onto specific geolocations along the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal. Through the data collected from public use of the application, we reflect on the effectiveness and limitation of co-creation as a methodological framework and discuss the implications of place-based mobile interaction for initiating and sustaining citizens' engagement and interpretations of the past and future of large-scale complex urban heritage sites

INNER AREAS

Inner areas, as defned in the Italy’s National Strategy (SNAI), are part of the territory that plays a central role in the cultural and social fabric of our communities, are an essential component of our society, economy, and environment. However, they are still often neglected and overlooked, resulting in deterioration, abandonment, and social exclusion.For this reason, it is crucial that the felds of architecture, restoratio and architectural history and urban and territorial planning are committed to revitalizing and enhancing inner areas. These disciplines have the knowledge, skills, and tools necessary to create sustainable and innovative solutions that can transform these territories into vibrant and liveable communities. Moreover, inner areas are an excellent laboratory for innovation in these disciplines. These areas provide a unique opportunity to experiment with new approaches and techniques that can then be applied to larger-scale urban and territorial planning projects. The challenges posed by inner areas require innovative thinking and creative solutions, making them an ideal testing ground for new ways. The papers presented in this special issue of Infolio are the result of the conference “Inner areas’ cultural, architectural and landscape heritage: study, enhancement and fruition. Potential driver for sustainable territorial development?” held in July 2022 at the University of Palermo. The conference brought together experts in the felds of architecture, restoration, and urban planning to discuss the central role of inner areas in our society and the need for innovative and sustainable solutions to revitalize and preserve them, being sometimes critical and some other prepositive. The papers explore a range of topics, including the use of technology in restoration, the importance of architectural history in urban planning and the role of community engagement in revitalization projects. The refections that emerged at the conference highlighted how inner areas are a crucial part of our territory and society, and their revitalization is essential for the well-being of our entire community and the preservation of our cultural heritage

Rhizomatic Trajectories

Topographies of the Obsolete is an artistic research project conceived in 2012 by University of Bergen Professors Neil Brownsword and Anne Helen Mydland, in collaboration with six European HEI’s and the British Ceramics Biennial. Emerging through two phases (2012-15; 2015-2020) it has to date engaged ninety-seven interdisciplinary artists, scholars, cultural commentators and students from thirteen countries. It has transformed participants’ practices, with works originating out of the initial research being celebrated on an international platform. Topographies of the Obsolete has received funding from a variety of institutions, alongside its core support from the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (2013-15 & 2015-17), whose peer review system (2015) rated it as ‘exemplary… strengthening artistic research and its scope beyond potential communities of practitioners/researchers’. Phase two has extended rhizomatic connections between individual lines of enquiry and the project’s overarching research strands to facilitate new trajectories where each partner institution has furthered discourse through an active and evolving process of investigation. This publication, the fifth in the series, draws together reflections nurtured through Topographies’ contextualising platform from both invited scholars and artists who remain connected to the project. It comprises of a range of descriptive, narrative and poetic texts which elucidate questions, contexts and methods that offer an alternative historiography of postindustrial sites and situations.publishedVersio

Performing real estate value(s): real estate developers, systems of expertise and the production of space

To date, critical work on real estate activities and the financialisation of urban development has focused mostly on investor-developer-government interactions to highlight how real estate and investors’ values, expectations and objectives are enacted through regulatory and fiscal reforms, which in turn affects how cities are built. However, less emphasis has been put on the relationship between urban expertise, real estate activities and the production of particular urban forms. Yet, the production of urban knowledge and associated city visions by specific ‘expert’ professions have been shown to influence how cities were planned and built throughout history. Using the redevelopment of King’s Cross Central (London) as a case study, this paper seeks to start addressing this gap, exploring how real estate developers shape the production and use of urban expertise in the context of planning, which in turn influences how cities are planned and built. In doing so, it posits that a renewed emphasis on the politics of expertise and the concept of performativity can help understand how real estate values permeate the built form and are performed in space. More specifically, it demonstrates the pivotal role of real estate developers in articulating and delimiting what constitutes legitimate urban expertise in decision-making regarding large-scale regeneration projects. In addition, it illustrates how the mobilization of calculative techniques and the use of narrow definitions of risks in assessing real estate projects viability and related uncertainties contribute to legitimising the design of planning instruments that enact and perform real estate values

Real Urban Images: Policy and Culture in Northern Britain

This paper explores recent attempts to re-imagine and re-brand northern British cities through processes of economic and (mainly) cultural regeneration. It analyses the creation of new contemporary urban images and presentations and compares these with the economic, social and cultural life experiences of people living in the areas. It examines the process of recharacterising former industrial conurbations as being at the cutting edge of contemporary, postmodern culture. A range of features is identified here within similar political, economic and policy contexts: deindustrialisation and regeneration driven by local business and political elites; emphasis on culture as spectacle to the exclusion of other cultural configurations; reliance on tourism and advertising, hyper consumption and leisure as determining aspects of the local economy; and the reorganisation of city population