Earthquake in the city: the people yet to come

The paper starts a critical reflection on the effects of disasters on urban change. It is a compendium of the discussions, meetings and fieldworks of the research team Energie Sisma Emilia at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. The fieldwork included a one-day walking-and-photographs (April 2015) in the town centre of Mirandola. This is one of the towns that Energie Sisma Emilia chose to evaluate since it was heavily affected by the earthquakes of May 2012. The working research question concerns post-disaster city change and possible gentrification of old town centres. Migrants\u2014counted as much as one third of the resident population in our case study\u2014found a sanctuary of affordable rents in old town centre of Mirandola, prior to its reconstruction. From discourse analysis of planning documents, there is a sense that a certain imaginary city was already in place before the earthquake. If this is the case, we consider the possibility that post-disaster politics might be determinant in displacement of migrant population. The paper begins by looking at three frameworks drawn from the 'Sociology of Disasters' and by making a tempting parallel with three analytical perspectives on cities: city as a container, city of assemblages, and city as a futurity. In the central part, it opens to gentrification debate and to the multiple dimensions of urban displacement. The field notes and photographs of the walk in Mirandola are discussed at the end as very first empirical findings or, rather, initial scoping for a longitudinal research endeavour

Living labs and vacancy in the neoliberal city

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd This paper evaluates smart city (SC) initiatives in the context of re-using vacant property, focusing on the role of living labs (LL). LL utilise Lo-Fi technologies to foster local digital innovation and support community-focused civic hacking, running various kinds of workshops and engaging with local citizens to co-create digital interventions and apps aimed at 'solving’ local issues. Five approaches to LL are outlined and discussed in relation to vacancy and gentrification: pop-up initiatives, university-led activities, community organised venues/activities, citizen sensing and crowdsourcing, and tech-led regeneration initiatives. Notwithstanding the potential for generating temporary and independent spaces for transferring digital competences and increasing citizens' participation in the SC, we argue LL foster largely a form of participation framed within a model of civic stewardship for 'smart citizens’. While presented as horizontal, open, and participative, LL and civic hacking are rooted often in pragmatic and paternalistic discourses and practices related to the production of a creative economy and a technocratic version of SC. As such, by encouraging a particular kind of re-use of vacant space, LLs are used actively to bolster the Smart City discourse, as part of the more general neoliberalization of urban political economy. We discuss these approaches and issues generally, drawing on previous fieldwork and with respect to a case study of Dublin, Ireland

Cyclative cleavage via solid-phase supported stabilized sulfur ylides: synthesis of macrocyclic lactones

A new synthesis of macrolactones bearing a cyclopropyl ring condensed to the macrocycle is reported via a cyclization-release strategy making use of solid-phase supported stabilized sulfur ylides

Sniffing the city: issues of sousveillance in inner city London

This article reflects on a series of workshops run by the art/media/hacktivist collective Deptford.TV in collaboration with the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR), Goldsmiths, University of London in 2009–2010 and in 2012. The aim of the workshops was to create short films using hacked CCTV material. Participants, equipped with digital video signal receivers, were led through the city by incoming surveillance camera signals. Receivers cached surveillance camera signals making a range of city spaces visible. The material was then stored on a shared video platform and reshuffled in personal narratives and montages of the city. Hackers and media artists call it ‘sousveillance’ and frame it as a critique of the ‘panopticon society’. I argue that this practice reveals an unusually realistic portrait of inner city London and its working-class population at their everyday work. My contention is that the absence of such activities in narratives of gentrification and the presumed end of manual work make this portrait particularly valuable. The article evaluates this emerging and ethically controversial practice of video recording, asking to what extent it can become a useful tool for urban scholars, visual sociologists and media artists. In conclusion, I argue that the exercise provides moments of self-discovery for the urban stroller, who – while practicing a sort of heroic immersion in inner city London – paradoxically becomes a watcher of scenes from life fabricated at a ‘safe’ distance; a middle way between urban ethnographer and flâneur

Real-time PCR/MCA assay using fluorescence resonance energy transfer for the genotyping of resistance related DHPS-540 mutations in Plasmodium falciparum

BACKGROUND: Sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine has been abandoned as first- or second-line treatment by most African malaria endemic countries in favour of artemisinin-based combination treatments, but the drug is still used as intermittent preventive treatment during pregnancy. However, resistance to sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine has been increasing in the past few years and, although the link between molecular markers and treatment failure has not been firmly established, at least for pregnant women, it is important to monitor such markers. METHODS: This paper reports a novel sensitive, semi-quantitative and specific real-time PCR and melting curve analysis (MCA) assay using fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) for the detection of DHPS-540, an important predictor for SP resistance. FRET/MCA was evaluated using 78 clinical samples from malaria patients and compared to PCR-RFLP. RESULTS: Sixty-two samples were in perfect agreement between both assays. One sample showed a small wild type signal with FRET/MCA that indicates a polyclonal infection. Four samples were not able to generate enough material in both assays to distinguish mutant from wild-type infection, six samples gave no signal in PCR-RFLP and five samples gave no amplification in FRET/MCA. CONCLUSION: FRET/MCA is an effective tool for the identification of SNPs in drug studies and epidemiological surveys on resistance markers in general and DHPS-540 mutation in particular

How Students Comprehend Using E-readers and Traditional Text: Suggestions from the Classroom

Since Durkin's groundbreaking research on comprehension in 1978, the quality of comprehension instruction has been a core research topic in reading comprehension research circles. However, the majority of this research over the past 30-plus years has focused primarily on comprehension of print text. We know from research that skilled readers read with purpose, preview the text, activate their background knowledge, make connections between old and new information, ask questions, use strategies to fix meaning when it fails, and self-monitor their understandin

City rankings and the citizens: exposing representational and participatory gaps

Acritical reflection on the purposes, role and performance of city rankings through an holistic communicational approach is at the core of this article. Grounded on a conceptual framework that highlights the contemporary idea of the city—beyond the smart city and more as a co-intelligent, collaborative and co-creative entity, and on the performance outputs of city rankings as territorial and strategic communication tools that actually represent the state of cities, we address the citizens’ presence or contribute—as main city stakeholders—to city rankings. In order to make research tangible with a practical component, an exploratory comparative content analysis of three recognized city rankings: the CBI – City Brands Index 2017, the GCR – 2018 Global Cities Report, and the Global Liveability Index 2018—was carried out. Conclusive notes argue that in order to effectively represent cities, as they are lived, thought and built by their citizens in their everyday, city rankings must rely in more real-time, updated, people’s perception centred data, and embed more citizen participation and insights. Moreover, methodology transparency and accountability should be promoted in order to add trust value to city rankings.(undefined