Legitimating Business Improvement Districts in Johannesburg: A discursive perspective on urban regeneration and policy transfer

Texte intégral à l'adresse : http://eur.sagepub.com/content/19/2/181.full.pdf+htmlInternational audienceThis article considers the transfer of the Business Improvement District concept to South Africa from a discursive perspective. It examines the ways in which the private sector (property and business owners) has justified the adoption of the model and how it has moulded the concept to Johannesburg's inner city. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, this paper focuses on legitimation strategies, locating them within broader social practices and power relations within the framework of urban revitalization policies implemented after the democratic transition. By focusing on legitimation strategies, and more particularly on their linguistic and semiotic aspects at the micro level, the article shows how the analysis of language use, particularly through a socio-cognitive approach (Van Dijk, 2009), can contribute to uncovering the opinions, attitudes, ideologies, norms and values of social actors. It can also offer insights into a local reinterpretation of a globally circulating model. The comparative analysis of two case studies highlights changing assumptions and attitudes, at least in local rhetoric, and demonstrates how the imported model has been reshaped not only by different discourses associated with various social practices but also by changing policy demands. By considering discourse as an instrument of the social construction of reality as well as an instrument of power and control, the chosen approach also underlines the way in which inequalities are reproduced and maintained in Johannesburg

Renouvellement urbain et revalorisation des espaces publics dans un City Improvement District du centre ville de Johannesburg

International audienc

City strategies and urban « models »: an economic and geopolitical approach to inter-city relations

This issue examines city strategies through the international circulation of « urban models ». This theme, which cuts across several disciplines, has been the object of renewed interest over the last few years, more specifically in French and English-language geography and urban studies. We include talks and discussions that were presented at the multi-disciplinary seminar « Circulation des références urbaines et assemblages locaux » [« Circulation of urban references and local combinations »..

RC2S: A Cognitive Remediation Program to Improve Social Cognition in Schizophrenia and Related Disorders

In people with psychiatric disorders, particularly those suffering from schizophrenia and related illnesses, pronounced difficulties in social interactions are a key manifestation. These difficulties can be partly explained by impairments in social cognition, defined as the ability to understand oneself and others in the social world, which includes abilities such as emotion recognition, theory of mind (ToM), attributional style, and social perception and knowledge. The impact of several kinds of interventions on social cognition has been studied recently. The best outcomes in the area of social cognition in schizophrenia are those obtained by way of cognitive remediation programs. New strategies and programs in this line are currently being developed, such as RC2S (cognitive remediation of social cognition) in Lyon, France. Considering that the social cognitive deficits experienced by patients with schizophrenia are very diverse, and that the main objective of social cognitive remediation programs is to improve patients’ functioning in their daily social life, RC2S was developed as an individualized and flexible program that allows patients to practice social interaction in a realistic environment through the use of virtual reality techniques. In the RC2S program, the patient’s goal is to assist a character named Tom in various social situations. The underlying idea for the patient is to acquire cognitive strategies for analyzing social context and emotional information in order to understand other characters’ mental states and to help Tom manage his social interactions. In this paper, we begin by presenting some data regarding the social cognitive impairments found in schizophrenia and related disorders, and we describe how these deficits are targeted by social cognitive remediation. Then we present the RC2S program and discuss the advantages of computer-based simulation to improve social cognition and social functioning in people with psychiatric disorders

Spatial knowledge management and participatory governance: rethinking the trajectories of urban, socio-economic and environmental change and the politics of 'sustainability' in southern cities

This paper presents the analytical framework developed iteratively by the research team of the Chance2Sustain (C2S) research project between 2010 and July 2014, in order to answer the main research question which was posed at the outset of the research, namely : how can spatial knowledge management (SKM) and participatory governance contribute to sustainable urban development ? To answer this question, the C2S project was designed to undertake comparative empirical research in 10 cities in four fast-growing countries of the South to understand the role of SKM and participatory processes in facing the challenges in a number of strategic domains of urban development ; those of economic growth, social inequality and vulnerability, and environmental governance. In each city, there were researchers from both the North and South working together in the five domains of economic growth through megaprojects ; social mobilisation and social exclusion in sub-standard settlements ; environmental governance with the focus on water-related issues ; spatial knowledge management; and fiscal decentralisation and participatory city budgeting

Beyond the Boundaries:Addressing social and spatial inequality with digitally based mobility? The case of Cape Town, South Africa

Over the last decade, the Smart City concept has increasingly become a popular urban policy approach of cities across the globe, including in Africa. Smart city approaches are often based on idealized, utopian visions of the future, digital and technology-driven urban innovation as well as on new data analytics (Kitchin 2014). They are also considered as universal solution to varied urbanpolicy problems in different cities, however, they do not take sufficiently into account lived experiences, ordinary urban places and needs, issues of marginalisation and exclusion (Slavova and Okwechine, 2016; McFarlane and Söderström 2017). How Smart City policies operate in contemporary cities is being examined in the emerging, but still underdeveloped, academic field of‘smart urbanism’