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Cahier #3 explores a series of concrete hackable citymaking practices in Athens, São Paulo and Shenzhen. Despite being situated on different continents and having distinct traditions and political systems, we found a number of dynamics around civic initiatives in these cities that further informed our Hackable city model.
This chapter takes a closer look at the case of Amsterdam as a particular manifestation of a film festival city. Drawing from a new dataset on festivals in the Netherlands, the data supports the view of film festivals as a highly dynamic cultural sector: Internationally acclaimed film festivals exist beside smaller festivals that are more community bound; new festivals emerge annually, and young festivals struggle to survive the three-to-five-year mark.Amsterdam holds a unique position in the Dutch film festival landscape as a third of all film festivals in the Netherlands take place in the capital city. Our data collection helps to bring parts of the city’s film infrastructure to the forefront. On the one hand, Amsterdam’s top five locations for film festival events show clear creative cities logic: The data shows just how powerful the pull of such locations is. On the other hand, we find evidence of placemaking and livable city strategies: Amsterdam’s film festivals extend into the capillaries of the city.Dedicated festival datasets may cast new perspectives on local or national festival landscapes, by revealing patterns that remain hidden in qualitative and case-study based projects. But there are also challenges to address in data-driven research on festival cultures, we name a few such as categorization of data. We conclude that such challenges can be more easily faced if more datasets, of for instance, other cities, are pursued and become available.
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Research finds that the global market value of cargo bikes will hit 2.4 billion euros by 2031. Analysts with Future Market Insights assessing the growth of cargo bikes have placed the parcel courier industry as a key buyer of electric cargo bikes, forecasting that 43 per cent of sales could go to this industry. This growth is driven by city logistics trends, particularly as studies emerge showing the high efficiency and cost saving of the cargo bike versus the delivery van. It will not solely be direct incentives that drive uptake, however. The policy that restricts motoring and emissions is expected to be a key driver for businesses that seek profitability, with three-wheeled electric cargo bikes making up nearly half the market. The advance of e-bike technology has seen a strong rise in market share for assisted cargo bikes, now accounting for a 73 per cent market share. Potentially limiting the growth is the legislation governing the output and range of electric cargo bikes (FMI, 2021).To deal with the issues of faster delivery, clean delivery (low/zero emission) and less space in dense cities, the light electric freight vehicle (LEFV) can be–and is used more and more as–an innovative solution. The way logistics in urban areas is organized is being challenged, as the global growth of cities leads to more jobs, more businesses and more residents. As a result, companies, workers, residents and visitors demand more goods and produce more waste. More space for logistics activities in and around cities is at odds with the growing need for accommodation for people living and working in cities. Book: Innovations in Transport: Success, Failure and Societal Impacts
This research contributes to understanding and shaping systems for OFMSW separation at urban Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs, such as offices, shops and service providers). Separating SMEs’ organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW) is both an opportunity and a serious challenge for the transition towards circular cities. It is an opportunity because OFMSW represents approximately 40% of the total waste mass generated by these companies. It is challenging because post-collection separation is not feasible for OFMSW. Therefore, SMEs disposing of waste should separate their solid waste so that processing the organic fraction for reuse and recycling is practical and attainable. However, these companies do not experience direct advantages from the extra efforts in separating waste, and much of the OFMSW ends up in landfills, often resulting in unnecessary GHG emissions. Therefore, governments and waste processors are looking for ways to improve the OFMSW separation degree by urban companies disposing of waste through policies for behaviour change.There are multiple types of personnel at companies disposing of waste. These co-workers act according to their values, beliefs and norms. They adapt their behaviour continuously, influenced by the physical environment, events over time and self-evaluation of their actions. Therefore, waste separation at companies can be regarded as a Socio-Technical Complex Adaptive System (STCAS). Agent-based modelling and simulation are powerful methods to help understand STCAS. Consequently, we have created an agent-based model representing the evolution of behaviour regarding waste separation at companies in the urban environment. The model aims to show public and private stakeholders involved in solid waste collection, transport and processing to what extent behaviour change policies can shape the system towards desired waste separation degrees.We have co-created the model with participants utilising literature and empirical data from a case study on the transition of the waste collection system of a business park located at a former harbour area in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. First, a conceptual model of the system and the environment was set up through participatory workshops, surveys and interviews with stakeholders, domain experts and relevant actors. Together with our case participants, five policies that affect waste separation behaviour were included in the model. To model the behaviour of each company worker’s values, beliefs and norms during the separation and disposal of OFMSW, we have used the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) Theory by Stern et al. (1999). We have collected data on waste collection behaviour and separation rates through interviews, workshops and a literature study to operationalise and validate the model.Simulation results show how combinations of behaviour profiles affect waste separation rates. Furthermore, findings show that single waste separation policies are often limitedly capable of changing the behaviour in the system. Rather, a combination of information and communication policies is needed to improve the separation of OFMSW, i.e., dissemination of a newsletter, providing personal feedback to the co-workers disposing of waste, and sharing information on the (improvement of) recycling rates.This study contributes to a better understanding of how policies can support co-workers’ pro-environmental behaviour for organic waste separation rates at SMEs. Thus, it shows policymakers how to stimulate the circular transition by actively engaging co-workers’ waste separation behaviour at SMEs. Future work will extend the model’s purpose by including households and policies supporting separating multiple waste types aimed at various R-strategies proposed by Potting et al. (2016).
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Isabel Löfgren takes us to the Stockholm high-rise suburbs to show us how art projects and transnational media intermingle with the multicultural urban reality. In this book, she discusses the architecture of her project Satellitstaden, where her artistic interventions with the satellite dishes on façades highlight the voices of its inhabitants through participatory and co-generative artistic processes. In these peripheries, satellite subjects emerge, orbiting around multiple identifications, foregrounding the notion of spatial justice, the subaltern and the importance of grassroots movements.The book outlines a philosophy of hospitality in response to the turn in Europe against refugees, which Löfgren considers to be a crisis of hospitality, not a crisis of migration. Löfgren discusses the ethics that govern the relationship between guest and host, the self and Other. Who has the right to belong? On what terms? She argues for a hospitable turn in art, urban planning and media, in which guest-host relationships are performed, mediated and problematized.We urgently need to re-imagine the ethics of hospitality and habitability for the near future. The 2020 pandemic forces us to reassess our philosophy and practice of human contact, re-engineering how we relate to the Other, and what hospitality means in the face of a global halt.Isabel Löfgren is a Swedish-Brazilian artist, researcher and educator based in Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro. She is currently working at the Media and Communication Studies Department at Södertörn University in Sweden, next to her artistic practice. Her research interests include cultural politics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of diaspora in the fields of contemporary art, media philosophy, and media activism.
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Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain have in recent years been presented as a new general-purpose technology that could underlie many aspects of social and economic life, including civics and urban governance. In an urban context, over the past few years, a number of actors have started to explore the application of distributed ledgers in amongst others smart city services as well as in blockchain for good and urban commons-projects. DLTs could become the administrative backbones of such projects, as the technology can be set-up as an administration, management and allocation tool for urban resources. With the addition of smart contracts, DLTs can further automate the processing of data and execution of decisions in urban resource management through algorithmic governance. This means that the technological set-up and design of such DLT based systems could have large implications for the ways urban resources are governed. Positive contributions are expected to be made toward (local) democracy, transparent governance, decentralization, and citizen empowerment. We argue that to fully scrutinize the implications for urban governance, a critical analysis of distributed ledger technologies is necessary. In this contribution, we explore the lens of “the city as a license” for such a critical analysis. Through this lens, the city is framed as a “rights-management-system,” operated through DLT technology. Building upon Lefebvrian a right to the city-discourses, such an approach allows to ask important questions about the implications of DLTs for the democratic governance of cities in an open, inclusive urban culture. Through a technological exploration combined with a speculative approach, and guided by our interest in the rights management and agency that blockchains have been claimed to provide to their users, we trace six important issues: quantification; blockchain as a normative apparatus; the complicated relationship between transparency and accountability; the centralizing forces that act on blockchains; the degrees to which algorithmic rules can embed democratic law-making and enforcing; and finally, the limits of blockchain's trustlessness.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain have in recent years been presented as a new general-purpose technology that could underlie many aspects of social and economic life, including civics and urban governance. In an urban context, over the past few years, a number of actors have started to explore the application of distributed ledgers in amongst others smart city services as well as in blockchain for good and urban commons-projects. DLTs could become the administrative backbones of such projects, as the technology can be set-up as an administration, management and allocation tool for urban resources. With the addition of smart contracts, DLTs can further automate the processing of data and execution of decisions in urban resource management through algorithmic governance. This means that the technological set-up and design of such DLT based systems could have large implications for the ways urban resources are governed. Positive contributions are expected to be made toward (local) democracy, transparent governance, decentralization, and citizen empowerment. We argue that to fully scrutinize the implications for urban governance, a critical analysis of distributed ledger technologies is necessary. In this contribution, we explore the lens of “the city as a license” for such a critical analysis. Through this lens, the city is framed as a “rights-management-system,” operated through DLT technology. Building upon Lefebvrian a right to the city-discourses, such an approach allows to ask important questions about the implications of DLTs for the democratic governance of cities in an open, inclusive urban culture. Through a technological exploration combined with a speculative approach, and guided by our interest in the rights management and agency that blockchains have been claimed to provide to their users, we trace six important issues: quantification; blockchain as a normative apparatus; the complicated relationship between transparency and accountability; the centralizing forces that act on blockchains; the degrees to which algorithmic rules can embed democratic law-making and enforcing; and finally, the limits of blockchain's trustlessness.
The phenomena of urbanization and climate change interact with the growing number of older people living in cities. One of the effects of climate change is an increased riverine flooding hazard, and when floods occur this has a severe impact on human lives and comes with vast economic losses. Flood resilience management procedures should be supported by a combination of complex social and environmental vulnerability assessments. Therefore, new methodologies and tools should be developed for this purpose. One way to achieve such inclusive procedures is by incorporating a social vulnerability evaluation methodology for environmental and flood resilience assessment. These are illustrated for application in the Polish city of Wrocław. Socio-environmental vulnerability mapping, based on spatial analyses using the poverty risk index, data on the ageing population, as well as the distribution of the areas vulnerable to floods, was conducted with use of a location intelligence system combining Geographic Information System (GIS) and Business Intelligence (BI) tools. The new methodology allows for the identification of areas populated by social groups that are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of flooding. C 2018 SETAC Original Publication: Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:592–597. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ieam.4077
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