Community gardens as third places

As the world population becomes increasingly urbanised and mobile, “third places” take on greater importance for incorporating new residents into their neighbourhood and reducing social isolation. The third place concept has been applied to a range of public space research and embraces informal public meeting places outside of home (first place) and work (second place). This article critically investigates the connection between community gardens and third place, applying a framework based on the characteristics of third places to qualitative case studies of three Australian community gardens. The article highlights the role community gardens can play as third places in alleviating some of the challenges associated with population mobility. The findings show that two of the case study community gardens exhibit all characteristics of third places facilitating informal interactions between people of the neighbourhood while one does not for reasons considered. Findings also suggest that third place community gardens act as dynamic sites of placemaking, helping to connect people to the place. Community gardens can function as third places with a communal purpose inclusive across socially diverse neighbourhoods, within and beyond the garden boundaries. The article suggests appropriate design and location features for community gardens that best facilitate third place interactions.     

Transmobilities: mobility,harassment, and violence experienced by transgender and gender nonconforming public transit riders in Portland,Oregon

This research endeavours to fill a conceptual gap in the social science literature on gender, public space, and urban mobilities by exploring how transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience public transit. Although previous research has surveyed gender minorities about harassment and discrimination in a range of environments, little is known about the quality or content of these experiences. Drawing from 25 interviews with transgender and gender nonconforming individuals in Portland, Oregon, this article finds that gender minorities experience frequent harassment while engaging with the public transit system. We articulate the concept of transmobilites to describe the ways that transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience a form of mobility that is altered, shaped, and informed by a broader cultural system that normalizes violence and harassment towards gender minorities. We conclude that gender minorities have unequal access to safe and accessible public transportation when harassment is widespread, normalized, and when policies prohibiting discrimination remain unenforced on urban public transit.     

新时期大都市公共交通发展策略研究——香港公交发展启示

优先发展公共交通是破解我国城市交通困境的唯一方法,是建立"两型"社会的科学要求,是城市可持续发展的必由之路。从香港公共交通系统发展历程、规划设计和运营管理等视角,归纳总结了其成功经验和发展趋势,即从中心区走向市域、从道路走向轨道、从线网拓展走向服务提升、从行政干预走向法制保障、从环境污染走向环境友好。并针对我国城市公交发展现状,从社会人文、城市规划、科技体制等方面提出了:以人为本、公交城市、持续发展、系统协调、科技引领、体制建设的发展策略,以期为我国城市交通的新一轮跨越式发展提供参考依据。     

An examination of the impact of neighbourhood walking environments on the likelihood of residents of dense urban areas becoming overweight or obese

With the development of urbanization in China, obesity is becoming a serious problem, and the relationship between walking environments and obesity has attracted considerable interest. Using data from questionnaires (n = 418) gathered in 2017 from eight neighbourhoods in Guangzhou, China, a typical high-density city, this study developed an Ordered Logit Model (OLM) to explore the effects of walking environments on the likelihood of residents becoming overweight or obese. The results demonstrate that body mass index (BMI) of individuals living in central urban areas is higher than those of suburban residents. After controlling for the effects of socio-economic factors, it was found that the impact of walking environments at the scale of 1-km buffer on individual BMI is the most significant. Variables of walkability, road network density, bus stop density, metro stop density, green coverage rate, and distance to the park have negative effects on BMI. Based on these findings, it is suggested that planning interventions should focus more on the areas through which residents walk in their daily travel routines. The selection of neighbourhoods surveyed and the sample size limit this study, but the conclusions do provide a scientific basis for the construction of neighbourhoods that encourage walking and decrease the probability of becoming overweight or obese.     

Neighbourhood food environments revisited: When food deserts meet food swamps

This study uses service area–based coverage and various count regression methods to assess neighbourhood-level healthy and unhealthy food environments, and food access associated with different socio-economic groups in Edmonton, Canada. We identify three types of vulnerable neighbourhoods according to different food environments: food deserts (i.e., neighbourhoods lack sufficient access to healthy foods); food swamps (i.e., neighbourhoods have excess access to unhealthy foods); and those with overlaps of food swamps and food deserts. We also identify neighbourhoods with superior access to healthy foods (i.e., food oases). Additionally, our results from regression analyses indicate: (1) child population is negatively associated with both healthy and unhealthy food resources; (2) good access to public transportation is associated with good coverage of all healthy food outlets and convenience stores; and (3) deprived neighbourhoods with higher percentages of minority populations have better coverage of both healthy and unhealthy foods in general. The results from this study can help the City of Edmonton identify the key neighbourhoods with high potential for local business and the hotspot neighbourhoods that require particular support. Tailored strategies are proposed to effectively and efficiently improve food environments with limited resources.     

Residential segregation and inequality: Considering barriers to choice in Toronto

Segregation of visible minorities has persisted throughout time in Toronto. In examining these concentrations, the literature has been heavily focused on the notion that visible minorities are choosing to live in proximity to their respective ethno-racial groups and that these are spaces of aspiration rather than marginalization in Canada. This paper raises questions about the assertion of “self-segregation” by emphasizing affordability constraints on residential choices that are often rooted in discrimination in the labour market. Census data from 2016 and an adopted neighbourhood classification scheme were used to understand the spatial patterning of visible minorities in the Toronto census metropolitan area and highlight differences in the socio-economic characteristics of visible minority dominant and white dominant census tracts. The findings invite the inference that economic opportunities play a critical role in the residential choices of visible minorities and raise concerns about the quality of life in visible minority neighbourhoods. This research contributes to our understanding of how social inequalities have impacted the socio-spatial organization of the city of Toronto.     

A Platform for Art: Infrastructural Citizenship Beyond Monumentality in Toronto’s Transit Art

The flourishing of transit art globally reflects a widespread belief in the power of aesthetic practices to promote infrastructural and civic revitalisation. This article analyses how transit art engages spaces and practices of publicness and how art explores ideas of mobility in Toronto. It argues that while arts are frequently deployed to reproduce status quo relations of power and to bolster elite and exclusionary forms of urbanisation, they can also work to challenge these. Through the notion of infrastructural citizenship, I show how arts can unsettle grounds of public space and public life and illuminate the contentious relations that cohere in public transit space. Overall, I claim that transit networks are a key platform through which the politics of public art are staged and that despite existing constraints, there are many affordances for transit art to critically intervene into neoliberal urban processes.     

Health hazards and socio-economic status: a neighbourhood cohort approach, Vancouver, 1976–2001

This paper lays the foundation for a research program concerned with the geographical patterning of environmental and population health at the urban neighbourhood scale. Based on the Vancouver metropolitan region, the aim is to better understand the role of neighbourhoods as epidemiological spaces where environmental and social characteristics combine as health processes and outcomes at the community and individual levels. With respect to procedure, this paper builds a cohort of commensurate neighbourhoods across all six census periods from 1976 to 2001, assembles neighbourhood air pollution (total particles) data, and provides an initial analysis to demonstrate how air pollution systematically and consistently maps onto neighbourhood socio-economic markers, specifically education and family status. We conclude with a discussion of how the neighbourhood cohort can be further developed to address emergent priorities in the population and environmental health literatures, namely the need for temporally matched data, a life-course approach and analyses that control for spatial scale effects.     

Unpacking Social Exclusion in Western Sydney: Exploring the Role of Place and Tenure

Over the past decade social exclusion has increasingly been positioned at the forefront of political, academic and lay discourse as the cause of disadvantage. While the definition, measurement and solutions to social exclusion remain open to debate, housing has progressively been positioned as a central variable creating neighbourhoods of exclusion. Much of this debate has positioned areas of public housing as being the most disadvantaged and socially excluded neighbourhoods. However, the multidimensionality of social exclusion brings into question the simple identification of areas of public housing as being the most excluded. By exploring six dimensions of exclusion (neighbourhood, social and civic engagement, access, crime and security, community identity and economic disadvantage) we explore the differences between areas dominated by public housing and those characterised by private market housing in terms of their scores on each of these individual dimensions of exclusion. We find that it is the experience of households with multiple dimensions of exclusion, especially locational and economic disadvantage, that differentiate areas of public housing from private housing locations.     

Geographic film as public research: re-visualizing/vitalizing a terraced landscape in the Italian Alps (Piccola terra/Small land, 2012)

This article describes an experience of geographic filmmaking carried out within a long-term research process (2000–2012) involving the terraced landscape of the Brenta Valley in the Italian Alps. The documentary Piccola terra [Small land] (2012) was co-produced by geographers and professional directors. Engaging in the recent debate on filmic geographies, the aim of this article is to discuss and show what makes a film ‘geographic’. The geographer authored a filmic interpretation of landscape which is spatially and temporally complex, open and mobile, anchored to material features and to personal stories and socio-economic contexts. Produced to support a campaign for the adoption of abandoned terraces by ‘new farmers’, the documentary Piccola terra serves as a means to engage society and produce landscape change. Geographic filmmaking as an action-, public- and social-oriented activity is discussed with reference to the so-called ‘impact agenda’. We propose a style of active engagement through filmmaking which is workable, rather than critical. In order to avoid purely auto-reflective, auto-referential academic speculation on doing filmic and public geographies, this paper, which ideally is read along with viewing of the documentary, materially enters the researched/filmed landscape, developing into a supplementary tool for the international dissemination of Piccola terra.     

Becoming public: public pedagogy,citizenship and the public sphere

This paper explores the question what kind of educational work can be done in attempts to reclaim or reinvigorate the public sphere. Through a discussion of the intersection of public sphere and public space, it engages with the work of Hannah Arendt in order to outline a conception of the public sphere as a space for civic action based on distance and the conservation of a degree strangeness rather than on commonality and common identity. The discussion of the educational work that can be done to support the public quality of common spaces and places focuses on three interpretations of the idea of public pedagogy: that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy for the public, that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy of the public and that of public pedagogy as the enactment of a concern for the public quality of human togetherness. The latter form of public pedagogy neither teaches nor erases the political by bringing it under a regime of learning, but rather opens up the possibility for forms of human togetherness through which freedom can appear, that is forms of human togetherness which contribute to the ‘becoming public’ of spaces and places.     

公交站点可达性测度及其在停车分区中的应用

考虑公交与小汽车方式间的可达性差异,提出了依据公交服务水平调控小汽车可达性的停车分区思路,以期实现对小汽车方式的合理限制,支持城市公交优先发展。首先根据居民出行对不同类型公交站点具有不同可达性需求,将以需求点为圆心、站点时空可接近距离为半径的覆盖范围作为基本分析单元,构建基于微观个体时空约束下的公交站点可达性测度模型。其次借助ArcGIS,以昆明市公交网络数据为基础,对站点可达性空间分布特征进行可视化分析,所得结果与城市用地开发整体特征相吻合,验证了模型的合理性。最后以公交可达性水平为主要依据划分停车供给分区,从而对不同分区停车泊位供给的科学配置提供支撑。     

Excessive rightsizing? The interdependence of public school closures and population shrinkage

Shrinking cities have, by definition, lost population. Rightsizing is a strategic planning approach to mitigate the challenges of population loss by adjusting a municipality's services, amenities, or even footprint to fit a new demographic reality. While studies have documented the unacceptability and ineptitude of municipality-driven rightsizing, public school closures have proliferated and quietly become a noteworthy material manifestation of population change. However, as public schools are widely considered to be a foundational component of community cohesion, identity, and prosperity, it begs the question of whether their closure may accelerate the decline feedback mechanisms already present in many shrinking cities. Our study examines public school closures in Ontario, Canada, from 2011 to 2016 to determine the relationship between municipal population trajectories and size and public school closures, and to explore the prevalence of school closures and the community context in shrinking Ontario municipalities. We find that public school closures occurred disproportionately in shrinking and smaller municipalities. Furthermore, public school closure prevalence is associated with low income, low ethnoracial diversity, and low educational attainment.     

Citizen participation,community resilience and crisis-management policy

This article presents two arguments. The first relates to the relevance of citizen participation vis-à-vis the design and implementation of public policy. More specifically, the article empirically demonstrates how a model of community decentralisation can have a number of practical benefits for crisis-management policy. The second argument relates to a question that has come to characterise studies of citizen participation in public policy. Why is it that there is so much rhetoric in support of participation but so little action in terms of the day-to-day realities of policy implementation? We place this question in a crisis-management context so that we might ask: why is it that crisis-management systems built around the principles of community resilience continue to fail on these very grounds? We find our answer to this question in state-centric governance settings which devolve authority, but do not relinquish it.

本文提出两个观点。第一个观点涉及公民参与对于公共政策设计和实施的意义。具体地说,本文用实证的方法说明社区分权模式如何对危机管理政策产生一系列实际效益。第二个观点涉及公民参与公共政策的问题：为什么对公民参与口头上不吝支持,而日常政策的实施上却不见动静？这个问题可以放在危机管理的语境中重新提问：为什么围绕着社区弹性原则的危机管理体系仍以这样的理由失效？我们的答案是：以政府为中心的治理环境虽然转移但并未放弃权威。     

Placing the second generation: A case study of Toronto

We examine the social mobility of the second generation in the Toronto metropolitan area by analyzing whether the adult children of immigrants live in more affluent and desirable neighbourhoods than the first generation. Using 2016 census microdata, we compare the social characteristics of census tracts where immigrants and the second and third-plus (3+) generations concentrate. The index of dissimilarity indicates the degree of residential separation among generations and for five ethno-racial second-generation groups: Chinese, South Asian, Black, Southern European, and Northern and Western European. The empirical findings show that the neighbourhoods where the first generation is over-represented are less affluent than those where the second and 3+ generations concentrate, with the largest improvements in social status occurring between the first and second generations. Although they frequently live in more distant suburban neighbourhoods than the first generation, the second generation still tends to live in inner and outer suburbs more than the exurban 3+ generation. For the second generation, the degree of residential concentration varies across ethno-racial groups with persistent segregation marking the residential locations of racial minorities. The findings highlight the variegated geographies and social mobility of the second generation in Canada's largest metropolitan area.     

‘We Can Always Go Back Home’: critical lessons in helping to safeguard and promote the Singing and Praying Bands living tradition

Abstract

The article examines the process of promoting, with a view to safeguarding, the centuries-old Singing and Praying Bands living tradition, an African American musical and spiritual expression that is distinctive to the Chesapeake Bay region of the US. Discussed within the context of US public folklore, the process is understood as a co-intervention, representing an active partnership between the Bands’ community and public folklorists (including the authors) in attempting to reach new members as a means of keeping it alive. The article underscores the need for ‘bottom-up’ approaches in safeguarding living cultural traditions, bringing to light the potential strengths of public folklore work and the benefits its theories and methodologies can bring to the intangible cultural heritage discourse. Moreover, it analyses how community agency has been exercised, and community needs accommodated, through the dialogue-driven, collaborative intervention process. It also investigates how a nuanced view of ‘authenticity’ has been shaped, with regard to changes the living tradition has undergone, and is currently understood by those who embody it.     

Cultivating belonging: refugees,urban gardens,and placemaking in the Midwest,U.S.A.

In the aftermath of failed urban renewal projects and the decline of central cities, community gardens have become increasingly popular in urban planning, public health, and environmental circles. However, gardens still occupy a tenuous and contradictory position in the city. While urban gardens are bounded spaces, they are also dynamic places where different understandings of (agri)culture, land use, and belonging are enacted and contested. In this paper, we identify three distinct ways in which gardens in a small Midwestern city are used and experienced by refugee gardeners and local officials: the material garden, the imagined garden, and the community’s garden. The material garden, embodied in the biophysical aspects of the soil, seeds, and resources needed to cultivate plants, shapes what can grow in the garden and the transformations by refugee agricultural practices. While planners tend to see urban gardens as temporary spaces that can promote limited pathways of migrant incorporation, gardeners practice, and imagine gardening differently through social, cultural, and economic interactions. We argue that these practices challenge traditional understandings of nature and urban planning, and can promote inclusive understandings of agriculture, cities, and sustainability, embodied in the ideal of the community’s garden.     

Engaging territorio cuerpo-tierra through body and community mapping: a methodology for making communities safer

We propose a new way of collectively creating data about gender violence through active participation and mapping women’s bodies and communities. We see this process of data creation, self-awareness and action as inherently linked to the native concept territorio cuerpo-tierra, the landscape of bodies-lands. The concept erases Western notions separating bodies and land and helps to decenter the public–private divide, which is an important obstacle to eliminating violence against women. Drawing on data from our work with Mexican women in the, U.S. and Mexico, we illuminate the continuity of women’s individual bodily experience of violence and collective spatial knowledge of community safety. We conclude that the process and outcomes of body and community mapping linking bodies and land, afford planners the prospect of engaging as partners and co-actants with community members in the goal of making places safe for women.     

Obscenity,Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India

Abstract:

In the 1850s, the British “discovered” a community of transgender eunuch performers, the hijras, and legislated for their surveillance and control under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in 1871. This article examines how the British dealt with transgender colonial subjects and the implications for our understanding of colonial masculinities. In particular, I analyse colonial attempts to erase hijras as a visible socio-cultural category and gender identity in public space through the prohibition of their performances and feminine dress. This case study demonstrates, first, how masculinity intersected with a broad range of colonial projects, agendas and anxieties. Focusing on the problematic presence of cross-dressing and performing hijras in public space, I examine how colonial attempts to order public space and reinforce political borders dovetailed with discourses of masculinity, obscenity and contagion. Second, I argue that attempts to discipline masculinity and obscenity were uneven in practice, meaning the CTA had varying localised impacts upon hijras. The lack of interest of some British officials in regulating hijras, inadequate policing resources, and pragmatic compromises opened up gaps in surveillance that hijras grasped and expanded, frustrating colonial attempts to transform their bodies and behaviours.     

When open data and data activism meet: An analysis of civic participation in Cape Town,South Africa

Municipal open data projects are motivated by a desire to democratize data access and knowledge production, strengthen transparency, and advance cities socially and economically. However, their effects and implications are insufficiently analyzed. This paper examines civic engagement in open data in Cape Town, South Africa, the continent's first municipal-level open data initiative. Findings reveal how local civil society organizations have been driving engagement with municipal open data as part of their recent turn towards technology and data-driven forms of public engagement and activism. This analysis highlights the important role of the “smart civil society organization”—occupying a position between the smart city and smart citizen—that is developing significant capacity to produce and share data about the city's informal settlements with stakeholders in government, the private sector, and wider society. Minimal engagement with or recognition of civil society efforts illustrates the limits to the city's philosophy of data openness, which is largely restricted to releasing selected government datasets to the public. The notion of “bi-directional open data” is developed here to characterize emerging possibilities for data openness between governments and the public. This may be particularly relevant for cities like Cape Town with a highly active, capable, and data-literate civil society.