Towards Critical Resilience: Learning from the History of Post-Trauma Urbanism

As we begin a conference entitled “History Urbanism Resilience,” I see my role as articulating some of the ways that the concept of “resilience” contributes to the history of urbanism—and to explore how the history of urbanism helps complexify our understanding of resilience. Resilience as a term has become both increasingly ubiquitous and increasingly contested. My remarks today will both explain this and, ultimately, defend the value of the concept--as long as we approach it critically. A first observation: putting the word “Resilience” in the title of the IPHS conference seems to have worked. The word appears in the names of 12 different conference sessions, and 35 separate papers use the word in their titles. So, either “resilience” is an inspiring frame for our thinking, or many of us are just extremely dutiful--or strategically adept--at providing conference organizers with what we think they want to hear. I suspect that there is some of each at work here. More importantly, this combination of utility and malleability accounts for much of the burgeoning appeal that the term “resilience” seems to have. Are we all talking about the same thing? Probably not, though there is certainly some reasonable degree of commonality. A quick perusal of the titles in the IPHS conference program suggests that we are, collectively, applying the idea of resilience to architecture, communities, and metropolitan form, and that it is applied in many contexts of social, environmental and political change, frequently including sudden disruptions caused by disasters or warfare.In the spring of 2002, following on the 9/11 attacks in the United States, a colleague and I ran a semester-long colloquium that we called “The Resilient City: Trauma, Recovery, and Remembrance.” We wanted to look back at a variety of traumatic urban events from around the world to see how governments and their citizens had responded. How did recovery from traumatic events get conceptualized and how did these events get memorialized? Did it matter whether the cause was earthquakes or floods or wars or terrorist attacks? In other words, what could we learn from the history of post-traumatic urbanism that might help us conceptualize what might happen post- 9/11? My colleague Tom Campanella and I commissioned a series of papers exploring how cities (and their citizens) had historically recovered from sudden traumatic events—not just from terrorism, but from other abrupt events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and wars. We quickly learned that, while it was possible to chart something called “disaster recovery,” that concept was hardly straightforward. In the past 200 years, virtually every large city in the world that experienced a disaster or war seems to have been rebuilt, no matter how extreme the level of destruction or loss of life

Designing national identity : recent capitols in the post-colonial world

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1988.Bibliography: v. 2, leaves 345-361.While all buildings are a product of social and cultural conditions, the architecture of national capitals raises especially complicated questions about power and identity. The architecture of a national capitol, as the seat of government within a national capital, is often a continuation of politics by other means. Part One provides an overview of the "capital city" as a concept, drawing a distinction between "evolved" capitals and "designed " capitals. It investigates the social and geopolitical reasons that under lie the choice of location of several designed capitals built during the last two hundred years. In analyzing each city, the focus is on the relationship between the "capitol" and the rest of the capital. This discussion concludes with an analysis of two ongoing projects-- Abuja, Nigeria and Dodoma, Tanzania-- where the design of new capitals is intimately connected to the search for a post-colonial "national identity." Part Two begins with this concept of "national identity," and stresses that what is put forth by government leaders and their architects as "n ational" most often contains significant biases towards preserving or advancing the hegemony of a politically ascendant group . In cases where an entire new capital is not commissioned, much of these biases can get channeled into the design of a new capitol complex instead. "National Identity," when given architectural representation in a building designed to house a national legislature, is a product of these preferences. Moreover, what is termed "n ational identity" is also closely tied to both "international" identity and to the personal identities of the architects and sponsoring politicians. These issues are discussed in relation to four recently-completed capitol complexes, in Papua New Guinea, Kuwait, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Each national assembly building is a monumental edifice for a fledgling institution. Each has been designed to symbolize a highly plural post-colonial state, but reveals both subnational and supranational strains. Part Three compares and contrasts the spatial and iconographical treatment of cultural pluralism and democratic institutions in each of the four case studies, stressing the limitations of buildings that are either too literal or too abstract. It emphasizes that designers should recognize that these buildings play an ever-changing political role , and that they be conscious of the gap between their clients' (and their own) hegemonic preferences and the more inclusive promises implied by a building that is called a "national" assembly. It stresses that designers be aware of the ways that architectural idealizations may be used not to anticipate some more perfect future order but to mask the severe abuses of power in the present. It concludes with a discussion about how to improve the design of capitols, and offers suggestions for further research.by Lawrence J. Vale.M.S

Urban Visual Intelligence: Studying Cities with AI and Street-level Imagery

The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing how people move, sense, and interact with cities. This paper reviews the literature on the appearance and function of cities to illustrate how visual information has been used to understand them. A conceptual framework, Urban Visual Intelligence, is introduced to systematically elaborate on how new image data sources and AI techniques are reshaping the way researchers perceive and measure cities, enabling the study of the physical environment and its interactions with socioeconomic environments at various scales. The paper argues that these new approaches enable researchers to revisit the classic urban theories and themes, and potentially help cities create environments that are more in line with human behaviors and aspirations in the digital age

Responses to Economic Games of Cooperation and Conflict in Squirrel Monkeys (Saimiri boliviensis)

Games from experimental economics have provided insights into the evolutionary roots of social decision making in primates and other species. Multiple primate species’ abilities to cooperate, coordinate and anti-coordinate have been tested utilizing variants of these simple games. Past research, however, has focused on species known to cooperate and coordinate in the wild. To begin to address the degree to which cooperation and coordination may be a general ability that manifests in specific contexts, the present study assessed the decisions of squirrel monkeys (Saimiri boliviensis; N = 10), a species not known for their cooperative behavior in these games. Pairs of monkeys were presented with the Assurance Game (a coordination game), the Hawk-Dove Game (an anti-coordination game) and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (a cooperation game with a temptation to defect). We then compared squirrel monkeys’ performance to existing data on capuchin monkeys (Sapajus [Cebus] apella), a closely related species that routinely cooperates, to determine what, if any, differences in decision making emerged. Some pairs of both species found the payoff-dominant Nash Equilibrium (NE) in the coordination game, but failed to find the NE in subsequent games. Our results suggest that, like capuchins, squirrel monkeys coordinate their behavior with others, suggesting that such mutual outcomes occur in at least some contexts, even in species that do not routinely cooperate

Effectiveness and efficiency of methods of dialysis therapy for end-stage renal disease : a review

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Gravitational Lensing Simulations I : Covariance Matrices and Halo Catalogues

Gravitational lensing surveys have now become large and precise enough that the interpretation of the lensing signal has to take into account an increasing number of theoretical limitations and observational biases. Since the lensing signal is the strongest at small angular scales, only numerical simulations can reproduce faithfully the non-linear dynamics and secondary effects at play. This work is the first of a series in which all gravitational lensing corrections known so far will be implemented in the same set of simulations, using realistic mock catalogues and non-Gaussian statistics. In this first paper, we present the TCS simulation suite and compute basic statistics such as the second and third order convergence and shear correlation functions. These simple tests set the range of validity of our simulations, which are resolving most of the signals at the sub-arc minute level (or $\ell \sim 10^4$). We also compute the non-Gaussian covariance matrix of several statistical estimators, including many that are used in the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS). From the same realizations, we construct halo catalogues, computing a series of properties that are required by most galaxy population algorithms. These simulation products are publicly available for download.Comment: 19 pages, 19 figures. This version matches the accepted MNRAS manuscript. It also includes a web address to download the weak lensing simulation product

A standardized kinesin nomenclature

In recent years the kinesin superfamily has become so large that several different naming schemes have emerged, leading to confusion and miscommunication. Here, we set forth a standardized kinesin nomenclature based on 14 family designations. The scheme unifies all previous phylogenies and nomenclature proposals, while allowing individual sequence names to remain the same, and for expansion to occur as new sequences are discovered

MAPping out distribution routes for kinesin couriers

In the crowded environment of eukaryotic cells, diffusion is an inefficient distribution mechanism for cellular components. Long-distance active transport is required and is performed by molecular motors including kinesins. Furthermore, in highly polarized, compartmentalized and plastic cells such as neurons, regulatory mechanisms are required to ensure appropriate spatio-temporal delivery of neuronal components. The kinesin machinery has diversified into a large number of kinesin motor proteins as well as adaptor proteins that are associated with subsets of cargo. However, many mechanisms contribute to the correct delivery of these cargos to their target domains. One mechanism is through motor recognition of subdomain-specific microtubule (MT) tracks, sign-posted by different tubulin isoforms, tubulin post-translational modifications (PTMs), tubulin GTPase activity and MT associated proteins (MAPs). With neurons as a model system, a critical review of these regulatory mechanisms is presented here, with particular focus on the emerging contribution of compartmentalised MAPs. Overall, we conclude that – especially for axonal cargo – alterations to the MT track can influence transport, although in vivo, it is likely that multiple track-based effects act synergistically to ensure accurate cargo distribution

Listening to tropical forest soils

Acoustic monitoring has proven to be an effective tool for monitoring biotic soundscapes in the marine, terrestrial, and aquatic realms. Recently it has been suggested that it could also be an effective method for monitoring soil soundscapes, but has been used in very few studies, primarily in temperate and polar regions. We present the first study of soil soundscapes using passive acoustic monitoring in tropical forests, using a novel analytical pipeline allowing for the use of in-situ recording of soundscapes with minimal soil disturbance. We found significant differences in acoustic index values between burnt and unburnt forests and the first indications of a diel cycle in soil soundscapes. These promising results and methodological advances highlight the potential of passive acoustic monitoring for large-scale and long-term monitoring of soil biodiversity. We use the results to discuss research priorities, including relating soil biophony to community structure and ecosystem function, and the use of appropriate hardware and analytical techniques