Shaping the periphery:: Emergent architectures in Latin America

In an age that has become interested in urban issues at the planetary scale, it is advantageous for architectural design research to bridge the micro, meso and macro scales of the built environment. This article addresses the macro by comparing metrics of global urbanization, and then outlines the disparities between ‘the urban condition(s)' found in North and South America. A more nuanced description of the uneven conditions of geographical development found in formal and informal constructions in Latin America sheds light on the context of this study, which sets the stage for a presentation of research that investigates several socially disjointed environments that represent the spatiotemporal conditions present in much of the contemporary Latin American urban landscape. This work has involved the participation of undergraduate students, graduate architecture students and faculty at Universidad Piloto de Colombia. The design research addresses the conditions of the emergent conditions of Latin American cities through participatory action research. Aspects of this research have been introduced into a design research studio setting where students have mapped the urban conditions and levels of forced displacement. Over the past 4 years, a network of private and public institutions and a NGO have worked with a vulnerable community located at the southern periphery of Bogota, Colombia to articulate alternative visions for future development than what has been scripted by the local planning department. The physical transformation of several strategic points of their neighborhood has begun through processes of ‘autoconstruccion'. This paper outlines these processes and the observed impact that the transformation of the built environment has fostered in the community

Shaping the periphery:: Emergent architectures in Latin America

In an age that has become interested in urban issues at the planetary scale, it is advantageous for architectural design research to bridge the micro, meso and macro scales of the built environment. This article addresses the macro by comparing metrics of global urbanization, and then outlines the disparities between ‘the urban condition(s)' found in North and South America. A more nuanced description of the uneven conditions of geographical development found in formal and informal constructions in Latin America sheds light on the context of this study, which sets the stage for a presentation of research that investigates several socially disjointed environments that represent the spatiotemporal conditions present in much of the contemporary Latin American urban landscape. This work has involved the participation of undergraduate students, graduate architecture students and faculty at Universidad Piloto de Colombia. The design research addresses the conditions of the emergent conditions of Latin American cities through participatory action research. Aspects of this research have been introduced into a design research studio setting where students have mapped the urban conditions and levels of forced displacement. Over the past 4 years, a network of private and public institutions and a NGO have worked with a vulnerable community located at the southern periphery of Bogota, Colombia to articulate alternative visions for future development than what has been scripted by the local planning department. The physical transformation of several strategic points of their neighborhood has begun through processes of ‘autoconstruccion'. This paper outlines these processes and the observed impact that the transformation of the built environment has fostered in the community

Ambivalent insurgencies: citizenship, land politics and development in Hanoi and its periurban fringe

This article examines the Vietnamese state’s ambivalence towards insurgent assertions of urban citizenship in and around Hanoi. In the 1980s and 1990s, it tolerated the lawbreaking construction of self-built housing in the city centre and eventually extended self-builders land use rights for their extralegal claims. In the 2000s and 2010s, however, the state violently cracked down on periurban villagers using insurgent strategies to resist the expropriation of their agricultural land for master-planned real estate developments. I suggest that the insurgency of self-builders precipitated a regime of graduated land use rights wherein the informal, extralegal claims of self-builders have been more respected than the formal, legal claims of periurban villagers. I ultimately argue that the state’s ambivalent responses to insurgency result from its pursuit of a materially shifting ideology of developmentalism. I also find that the success of insurgency derives from how the interests of citizens, the local state and the national state align and realign with one another

Minimal cones on hypercubes

It is shown that in dimension greater than 4, the minimal area hypersurface separating the faces of a hypercube is the cone over the edges of the hypercube. This constrasts with the cases of two and three dimensions, where the cone is not minimal. For example, a soap film on a cubical frame has a small rounded square in the center. In dimensions over 6, the cone is minimal even if the area separating opposite faces is given zero weight. The proof uses the maximal flow problem that is dual to the minimal surface problem

Prevalence of Listeria Monocytogenes in a Bovine Associated Environment

Listeria monocytogenes has emerged into the realm of disease causing bacteria as a pathogen of public health importance. Its opportunistic and ubiquitous nature has led to an ever increasing number of case reports implicating this organism in human and animal disease. Following its discovery Listeria has been observed in many countries from the tropics to the arctic (6). In addition to human subjects, Listeria has been found with a very wide host range which includes 37 mammals, 17 fowls, ticks, fish, crustaceans, silage, soil, dust, slaughter house waste, stream water, sewage and mud

Instability of the wet cube cone soap film

A dry conical soap film on a cubical frame is well known not to be stable. Recent experimental evidence seems to indicate that adding liquid to form Plateau borders stabilizes the conical film, perhaps to arbitrarily low liquid volumes. This paper presents numerical simulation evidence that the wet cone is unstable for low enough liquid volume, with the critical volume fraction being about 0.000274

The Surface Evolver

The Surface Evolver is a computer program that minimizes the energy of a surface subject to constraints. The surface is represented as a simplicial complex. The energy can include surface tension, gravity, and other forms. Constraints can be geometrical constraints on vertex positions or constraints on integrated quantities such as body volumes. The minimization is done by evolving the surface down the energy gradient. This paper describes the mathematical model used and the operations available to interactively modify the surface

Dense Regular Packings of Irregular Non-Convex Particles

We present a new numerical scheme to study systems of non-convex, irregular, and punctured particles in an efficient manner. We employ this method to analyze regular packings of odd-shaped bodies, not only from a nanoparticle but also both from a computational geometry perspective. Besides determining close-packed structures for many shapes, we also discover a new denser configuration for Truncated Tetrahedra. Moreover, we consider recently synthesized nanoparticles and colloids, where we focus on the excluded volume interactions, to show the applicability of our method in the investigation of their crystal structures and phase behavior. Extensions to the presented scheme include the incorporation of soft particle-particle interactions, the study of quasicrystalline systems, and random packings.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure