CONTESTED URBANISM · Contested Cities Revisited: a multidisciplinary, multi-scale analysis of urban space

Contested Cities Revisited: a multidisciplinary, multi-scale analysis of urban space

The rapid urbanization of our world is one of the greatest societal transformations of the 21st century, bringing with it new opportunities and challenges. Presently, as a result of mounting global urban protest and violence, there are significant debates as to the role of the welfare state, urban planning, and urban space as such, in addressing the challenges of social and spatial inequalities in cities. The Contested Urbanism project concluded that all cities can be seen as sites of contestation, rather than treating places which have experienced war and violence as exceptions. The proposed project’s meta-objectives were twofold, first; from a theoretical perspective the starting point of the project was that rather than limiting the 'extreme divided’ city label to a selected number of places, there is an increasing need to broaden the category itself in order to deepen the understanding of contested urbanism across the spectrum. The theoretical angle of the research asked to what extent is ethno-nationalism a growing characteristic of urban segregation, whereby ‘extreme divided cities’ are an intensified case of an increasingly common phenomenon? Secondly, the project constructed an innovative interdisciplinary research method connecting the long overdue qualitative and quantitative divide within urban segregation research. A diversity of methods were used, reflecting the necessarily interdisciplinary aspect of the research and its multilevel analysis, ranging from the use of the latest cutting edge space syntax technology, via the textual and visual contents of plans, to the lived meanings of urban spatial and social segregation during field work in Israel and Sweden. The empirical objective of the research was to focus on two nations with diverse forms of 'contested cities', Sweden and Israel; with an in-depth analysis of city case studies with high levels of ethnic minorities. Using space syntax network analysis methods it was empirically demonstrated that in the case of Jerusalem, access to public transport is multi-dimensional: as well as providing access to resources, it shapes opportunities for spatial mobility that may either overcome or reinforce area-based housing segregation. In Stockholm, on the other hand, the empirical findings showed that the city’s spatial configuration has resulted in constraints on access to public transport and consequentially, on limitations on the mobility of the city’s diverse immigrant populations, who are situated a poorly-connected urban periphery. Coupled with a high level of social deprivation amongst new immigrants, the result is a multi-dimensional spatial segregation process, potentially reinforcing ethnic and socio-economic area-based housing segregation within Stockholm. The project has led to the production of new state-of-the-art approaches to the conceptualization of urban segregation as a set of interrelated 'actions' and 'actors' and the notion of urban segregation as a multi-level, mediated process focusing not only on spatial and social conditions as separate aspects but as a combination. This has resulted in an interdisciplinary picture of urban segregation and mobility constituting a novel approach to analysing segregation that tends to focus on mostly static aspects of urban settlements.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз