The challenges of planning in the unequal cities. "Urban poverty workshop" for innovating urban planners education path

The recent shift from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals scored a point of no return in the international debate on development, stating that the separation between the rich part and the poor part of the population is no longer with the North and the South of the world, but between nearby areas in always more highly polarized contexts. In this framework, a deeper knowledge of the spatial dimension of poverty and of its spatial implications is required; especially in the Italian Faculty of Architecture where urban design and plan-making are frequently still considered "the real core" of the discipline with the general under-evaluation of the wicked problems. On the contrary, in the United States, thanks to the passionate work of Ananya Roy, this knowledge found its place, first in the university program at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development of UC Berkeley, and then in Los Angeles, being highly appreciated both by students, scholars and NGOs. According to this awareness, the first workshop "Urban Poverty. The praxis of planning in unequal cities" organized in September 2016 at the Sapienza’s Faculty of Architecture in Rome, gave the opportunity for discussing and testing theory and practices of urban research and city planning with issues of poverty, in particular regards of western cities and the city of Rome. This first experiment offered the opportunity to think about the interdisciplinary and/or international teaching aimed at preparing students for today’s and tomorrow’s planning challenges in the unequal cities

Challenges and tricky words. A stronger role for planners

In the last 20 years, a deliberate strategy of impoverishment of local governments argued the imperative need of: a) involving at all (public) costs, the private sector through the “trojan horse” of governance (Miraftab 2004); b) designing big and shortsighted urban projects (frequently destroying public resources and ignoring public needs) through the mantra of the urban and territorial competition. As it has been already noted, “by elevating Governance above Government, and Economics above Politics, the globalpolicy undermined nation- and state-building capacities in many Countries” (Demmers, Jilberto, Hogenboom, 2004). Moreover, through the rhetoric on pluralism, the neo-liberal governance has contributed to shrink and destroy the relevanceof public interest. In fact, behind the 'screen' of governance and the representation of an amorphous citizenship and a notqualified of diffuse interests, the deployment of capitalism has prevailed. This legitimized the partial and strongest interests into shaping the public agenda within the polarized inequalities. In thisframework, the paper will give some suggestions and advices for rethinking current problems, and trying to deal with them,by starting by the critical evaluation of some words we use. Moreover, by focusing on the ethic of responsibility andaccountability of planners (and for most of us as planning scholars), the paper argues that a stronger role for planners andplanning scholars has to do with our own field of responsibility (such as professionals/practitioners/scholars), andmoreover with our commitment in building and using new theories and research approaches at least to: a) incorporate the ‘others’/minorities by considering furthermore the interaction between capitalism accumulation in space and the minorities (Yiftachel 2013); b) improve critical urban theories mixing with place-based planning and research practices (Campbell 2012; 2014), by applying different approaches; c) co-produce (Watson 2014) a public model of development, being aware of the oligopolistic elites and extractive institutions (Acemouglou, Robinson, 2012)

The Walking Brain: factors influencing human gait

Human walking is a standardized, repeatable and rhythmic locomotor act, with biomechanical patterns reported as roughly common to all healthy individuals. However, some gait patterns could be affected by cognitive, social and cultural factors. This mini-review aims at investigating top-down related differences in walking healthy patterns due to the above factors. The reviewed literature reported that socio-economic factors are at the basis of differences in pedestrian walking speed, related to the pace of life: faster speed was found in industrialized countries than in developing ones. Furthermore, it was suggested that the ancient division between men and women in hunters and gatherers, respectively, could be at the basis of gender visual differences and, in turn, in upper body movements during walking, with women walking with a more stable head. Interestingly, changes in gait speed did not affect cortical resources needed for spatial cognition, whereas a cognitive task may affect the gait speed. The most reliable parameters, poorly affected by psycho-social factors, resulted the symmetry of limb movements and the ratio between stance and swing duration. The latter was found close to the irrational number called golden ratio, providing a fractal structure to human gait cycle. Both these parameters are at the basis of the harmony of human walking, a feature maintained also in presence of top-down driven gait modifications

Testing high resolution SD ADC’s by using the noise transfer function

A new solution to improve the testability of high resolution SD Analogue to Digital Converters (SD ADC’s) using the quantizer input as test node is described. The theoretical basis for the technique is discussed and results from high level simulations for a 16 bit, 4th order, audio ADC are presented. The analysis demonstrates the potential to reduce the computational effort associated with test response analysis versus conventional techniques