Urban Change

El Raval es hoy un gran espacio de cambio social, un territorio de creación, un laboratorio de mezcla social y cultural en la ciudad de Barcelona. El presente estudio, resultado de un encargo del Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB), tiene como objetivo analizar el proceso de transformación social, económica y simbólica del barrio del Raval, proceso que hemos querido simbolizar titulando la investigación Del Chino al Raval. O, en otras palabras, cómo en un periodo de veinte años se ha pasado del Chino, es decir, de un barrio estigmatizado, con una imagen de marginalidad y degradación, al Raval, un barrio en pleno proceso de reforma, mezclado social y culturalmente, objeto de visitas de barceloneses y extranjeros. O, para mencionar algunas producciones culturales de referencia, cómo se ha pasado del Chino de La Marge, de Mandiargues, o el Anarcoma, de Nazario, al Raval de la película Una casa de locos o al del cluster cultural de la Plaça dels Àngels.

The article discusses the concept of urban change and illustrates some models and types of urban transformations in the case of the postsocialist city. It addresses some architectural, material, symbolic and socio-cultural aspects of recent urban changes in postsocialist Eastern Europe and Romania, in a double comparison: against the socialist urbanization (and the socialist city), and against the modern Western and American city, arguing in favor of a specific, ‘postsocialist’, evolution, that has to be assessed in its own terms. It is then proposed an analysis on the key issues of privatization and access to the city, following particular evolutions of legal, economic, and cultural postsocialist formations, in the broader context of global neoliberalism. The critical interpretation of some aspects regarding the relationship between public and private in the city and the issue of urban accessibility, seen in the case of various postsocialist urban changes (public spaces and institutions, suburbanization, infrastructure, urban renewal, segregation, livability etc.), suggests thus a re-evaluation of what seem to be the dominant logic of the postsocialist city, privatization. Forms derived from this logic, such as the commodification, the touristification and the virtualization of cities are regarded as specific results of both development projects and social approaches of the urban realm, in the same time limiting and generating urban potentialities.

Cinema can capture the real. Its images can document the zeitgeist of contemporary China, its huge transformation in the last decades. Contrary to the Fifth Generation’s films –Zhang Yimou’s and Chen Kaigé’s historical and rural dramas–, the new generation of Chinese filmmakers return to the urban space,
showing the edges of the new capitalist cities. The usual landscapes of their films are shantytowns, building sites and no-man’s lands where the main characters live or work. Immigrants, bohemians, taxi drivers, pickpockets and other criminals
star in fictions that are very close to the documentary mode. Sixth Generation filmmakers such as Jia Zhang-ke, Wang Bing, Li Yang, Wang Xiaoshuai and Lou Ye, show interest in the urban conflicts of this time, and that’s the reason to also call them the Urban Generation.
In the last years two films have stood out among them. Firstly, in the documentary field, 'Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks' (Wang Bing, People’s Republic of China, 2003), an ambitious chronicle about the decline of an old industrial district in Shenyang. Director Wang Bing worked solo shooting with a digital camera for a year and a half to get almost a monument-film: nine hours divided in three parts ('Rust', 'Remnants' and 'Rails'), the visual memory of a territory. “Film this place. Soon here nothing remains”, a worker requested him directly at the beginning of the film. So now we can use those images to know what that place was like and, above all, how it was destroyed.
The other key film of the Sixth Generation could be 'Sanxia haoren' [Still Life] (Jia Zhang-ke, People’s Republic of China, 2006), a feature film shot in a real place also doomed to extinction: the town of Fengjie during its last days, before
it disappeared after being first demolished and later submerged under the waters of the Three Gorges Dam. Still Life shows different stories and characters in that setting, rescuing its last images and opening a visual reflection about the transformations
in present China.
Two years after this experience, another Jia Zhang-ke film, 'Er shi si cheng ji' [24 Hours City] (Jia Zhang-ke, People’s Republic of China, 2008), mixed fiction and documentary conventions to explain how an old weapon factory left its site to new luxury buildings. That factory summarized the Communist period, so in this film Jia recorded testimonies from the real workers, edited together with stories of fictional characters played by professional actresses. Its theme is very close to Wang Bing’s 'Tie Xi Qu', but it uses a different mise-en-scène.
All these films take a look at Chinese cities by paying attention to their conflicts and contradictions, and we can use them in order to analyse both the cities’ urban and economic transformations and also their film representation.

The recent touristification of the historic downtown quarters of many European cities is not without its social, spatial and economic impacts. In turn, many global cities show a lack of efficient tools in tackling and addressing the negative impacts derived from touristification. Facing this, some scholars have importantly examined the interplay between tourism, gen-trification and urban change. However, we urban studies scholars have not yet admitted the existence of serious limitations regarding our current theoretical, conceptual and methodo-logical approach in exploring the Tourist City. In this paper we argue that the rapid and intense touristification of central areas of post-industrial cities across the world requires a new breakthrough approach in order to understand the process of urban touristication in all its complexity. That is why we argue that what many scholars sometimes erroneously call 'tourism gentrification' need to go beyond the 'classical' approach used to explore how urban touristification affects the social, cultural and urban fabric of our cities.

Land cover analysis and land use transformations, which are mainly associated with population growth, are considered as essential elements for studying the relationship between population growth, land use conversions and environmental consequences. Most cities of the world are becoming urbanized with every passing day and human induced land cover changes are modifying the pattern of land use in urban areas. Currently, Pakistan is standing at an influential place with regard to the size of its population, occupying sixth position among the world countries. Almost all its administrative entities have experienced unprecedented population growth throughout its entire life. Its urban areas are expanding more rapidly than their rural counterparts due to both by natural increase and by rural-urban migration. Study area for the current research, Bahawalpur is one of the fastest growing cities of Pakistan ranking twelfth among the cities of Punjab Province. This study aims at to examine the historical population growth of the city since last fifty years correlated with changing land use pattern and urban area expansion. Study is based on secondary data analysis using urban expansion indices for measuring the rate of urban change with increasing population growth. Application of regression model also verifies the increasing rate of urban area with population size and indicates an alarming situation for urban and city planners. Trend of urban growth in Bahawalpur shows that city is moving promptly towards highly urbanized cities of Pakistan. Its unprecedented and unplanned expansion may cause serious urban problems. Thus, it needs a serious look and attention of city planners. This study can also be helpful in providing some base line information.

Barcelona’s process of gentrification during the last decades has eradicated many spaces related to the marginal from its landscape. Political authorities have used such events as the 1992 Olympic Games to conceal real estate operations that resulted in the destruction of this environment and the expulsion of its inhabitants. It is almost impossible to find traces of these places on the surface of the city, but its image still survives through film, photography and painting.
This paper aims to recover both the landscapes of these spaces and explanations for their extinction by employing cinema sources. A first example would be 'Los Tarantos' (Francisco Rovira-Beleta, 1963), a Gypsy musical shot during Franco’s dictatorship. Others would be 'En construcción' (José Luis Guerín, 2001) and 'De nens' (Joaquim Jordà, 2003), two documentaries that register the post-Olympic gentrification of the neighbourhood known as ‘the Raval’.

Este artículo tiene como objeto realizar un análisis textual de la película 'LosTarantos', dirigida por Francisco Rovira-Beleta en 1963, tomándola como testimonio histórico para conocer la imagen que registró de la ciudad de Barcelona en el momento
de su rodaje. Más en concreto, el trabajo se centra en la representación de las chabolas del Somorrostro y de Montjuïc, dos barrios periféricos marginales habitados por
personas de etnia gitana. La idea es contrastar la información urbanística y sociológica que contiene la película con otra clase de fuentes documentales, explorando la utilidad que puede tener el cine como documento audiovisual específico para conocer el paisaje arquitectónico del pasado. Además, el texto incluye también algunos apuntes sobre la imagen antropológica que transmite 'Los Tarantos' de los gitanos y sobre las distintas
opiniones críticas que mereció desde el momento de su estreno.

Samarkand, located along the Silk Road, has a history that is often confused with a fabled image of the East. This book, however, deals with a real city, narrating the changes that took place while it was part of the USSR and in the period following, all the way up to the present. In Samarkand, the passage between these two eras reflects the broader transformation that affected Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian countries, which were internal colonies, first of Russia and then of the Soviet Union, before becoming independent states. Step by step, the reader enters the city, its various districts, private homes, public places, and hears the stories of diverse individuals and families.
Based on archival records, interviews and photographs, the book traces the changes in cultures and ways of life in Samarkand over this period, and investigates the tensions of the post-Soviet years. The Russians vanished from the city they had colonised or guided through the years of Soviet “modernisation”, as did many populations that had been deported there during the Second World War, and various local minor- ities. The city experienced a period of profound crisis, was transformed in terms of the composition of its population, constructed a new national image, rewrote its history and finally emerged ready to receive tourists with their cameras.

Nightlife economic activity has emerged as a key strategy in the regeneration of historical quarters. The case of the Bairro Alto district (Lisbon) exhibits a more gradual and distinct development caused by the marginal and transgressive practices of nightlife visitors, who have resisted its gentrification for decades. Some areas in the Bairro Alto (specially the upper side) have maintained their dangerous character and marginalisation for several years, even after the 2008 urban reform programme. It is only recently, with the growing presence of Erasmus students in Bairro Alto, that the upper side has finally become safe and sanitised through leisure activities. In this article, the interplay of several social actors (foreign students, municipal authorities, night-time entrepreneurs and Erasmus organisers) explains the process of place-making regarding the new Erasmus Corner. The spatial colonisation of this spot has accelerated social cleansing of the upper side of the neighbourhood, concluding the district’s night-time pacification.

This paper studies the influence of great contemporary Expositions on the transformation of cities and of territories, developing some aspects we consider relevant of these events: their growing relevance in urban contemporary politics and the urban and architectural project as creator of the regeneration of abandoned or obsolete areas. Against the short duration of these events, the positive and negative effects, like the definition of new urban and territorial domains, the modernization of infrastructures and services, the impulse of private stakeholders toward building lands and the consolidation of City-Brand in tourism nets among others, have a much longer duration, and depend on the urban context, on the public and private stakeholders and on organizational agreements. We study the evolution of Expo '92 in Seville, Expo '98 in Lisbon and the Swiss Expo 02, very different in their conception and context, and that results explanatory of actual methodologies and models, and of the results according with their adaptation to the urban and citizens' needs. The relation between event and urban renewal allow us to study the theme of urban transformation strategies and the theme of the new image of the city and the territory after the event.

El paisajismo psicogeográfico es una modalidad del paisajismo documental que representa el espacio en términos de lugar de memoria, ya sea este un emplazamiento histórico o simplemente un espacio vivido. Los documentales que adoptan este enfoque tratan de expresar los efectos emocionales del territorio en el sujeto –que puede ser el espectador, el cineasta o un personaje- a través de la combinación de una puesta en escena observacional con un comentario expositivo, reflexivo o performativo. La película que va a ser analizada en esta comunicación, Thames Film (William Raban, 1986), combina el registro objetivo del paisaje de la desembocadura del río Támesis a mediados de los años ochenta con su interpretación histórica y sociológica, ofreciendo así un relato crítico del cambio urbano en Londres a lo largo de su historia.

Abstract Desertification is an issue of environmental concern in Nigeria, particularly the northern part of the country. This study examines land cover changes related to the process of desertification in the states along the northern boundary of Nigeria (Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Jigawa, Yobe, and Borno) and the implications on the Lake Chad Basin. A time series of Landsat imagery at a spatial resolution of 30 m was used over the period from 1984 to 2016. The imageries were subjected to maximum likelihood classification for the purpose of extracting the land cover and analysing the change. Also, the areal extent of vegetation cover within the 32-year period was calculated annually. Using Pearson's correlation analysis, the relationship between the vegetation cover and rainfall was assessed as well as temperature and population density. Results show that 45,945.08 km2 of vegetation cover was lost within the study area including the Lake Chad area between 1984 and 2016. The annual rate of change varied across the different feature classes; the built-up area had the highest rate of increase of 13.68% and 2.65%, from 1984 to 2000 and 2000–2016 respectively. Bare-land increased at the rate of 0.96% and 0.28% from 1984 to 2000 and 2000–2016 respectively while vegetation had the highest rate of decrease of 2.18% and 2.02% from 1984 to 2000 and 2000–2016 respectively. A pattern of vegetation loss was observed as a large expanse of vegetation cover was lost across the north-west and the north-east regions including the Lake Chad area. It was also shown that the magnitude of vegetation cover correlated negatively with temperature and population density but with no significant correlation with the rainfall. The study recommends that the Federal Government should ensure the full implementation of the Great Green Wall project which is aimed at mitigating the rapid sprawl of natural land degradation processes and desertification in the northern boundary states.

ABSTRACT:
This thesis deals with a traditional historic fabric where the architectural values and characteristics are damaged and started to get lost. The case study is examined in detail; tried to reveal its earlier phases as much as the traces and the documents permitted to follow the process of change; then evaluated with a comparative study to put forward the values, problems and potentials. The aim is to reach to a synthesis and agreement between past and present, so as to develop conservation, rehabilitation and renewal decisions and principles for the survival of the historic pattern within the framework of the valid planning decisions.

Keywords: Hacibayram, Damaged Historic Urban Fabric, Process of Change, Conservation, Rehabilitation, Renewal
ÖZET:
Bu çalışma, mimari değer ve özellikleri zedelenmiş ve kaybolmaya yüz tutmuş bir geleneksel tarihi dokuyu ele almaktadır. Önce, çalışma alanında varolan veriler detaylı olarak incelenirken, değişim sürecini takip edebilmek için alanın önceki aşamaları da, gözlem ve ulaşılabilen dokümanlar ışığında ortaya konmakta, ardından karşılaştırmalı çalışma ile varolan ve yokolmuş değerler, bugünkü problem ve potansiyeller belirlenmeye çalışılmaktadır. Amaç, geçmişle bugün arasında bir sentez ve uzlaşmaya varmak, böylece tarihi dokunun kurtarılması için geçerli planlama kararları çerçevesinde gerekli koruma, sağlıklaştırma ve yenileme prensip ve kararlarını geliştirmektir.

Keywords: Hacıbayram, Zedelenmiş Tarihsel Kent Dokusu, Değişim Süreci, Koruma, Sağlıklaştırma, Yenileme

The paper aims to explore the nature of economic impacts of globalization on urban environment at Dhaka City in Bangladesh. It has highlighted the city of Dhaka as the urbanization of the whole country is interlinked with the intense development of the city. The paper is based on data collected through surveys of population censuses and relevant studies. It reveals that the historical process of urban development of Dhaka City presents various trends based on its political development. The rapid urbanization of the city since its emergence as the capital of an independent state is due mainly to massive migration of rural population. The paper also reveals that significant change of economic condition and standard of living. Most of the city dwellers are settled mostly in slums and squatter settlements and are living below the poverty lines as the rapid urban growth of the city is not commensurate with overall development. The paper, however, argues that the experience of environment...

Desertification is an issue of environmental concern in Nigeria, particularly the northern part of the country. This study examines land cover changes related to the process of desertification in the states along the northern boundary of Nigeria (Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Jigawa, Yobe, and Borno) and the implications on the Lake Chad Basin. A time series of Landsat imagery at a spatial resolution of 30 m was used over the period from 1984 to 2016. The imageries were subjected to maximum likelihood classification for the purpose of extracting the land cover and analysing the change. Also, the areal extent of vegetation cover within the 32-year period was calculated annually. Using Pearson's correlation analysis, the relationship between the vegetation cover and rainfall was assessed as well as temperature and population density. Results show that 45,945.08 km2 of vegetation cover was lost within the study area including the Lake Chad area between 1984 and 2016. The annual rate of...

Desertification is an issue of environmental concern in Nigeria, particularly the northern part of the country. This study examines land cover changes related to the process of desertification in the states along the northern boundary of Nigeria (Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Jigawa, Yobe, and Borno) and the implications on the Lake Chad Basin. A time series of Landsat imagery at a spatial resolution of 30 m was used over the period from 1984 to 2016. The imageries were subjected to maximum likelihood classification for the purpose of extracting the land cover and analysing the change. Also, the areal extent of vegetation cover within the 32-year period was calculated annually. Using Pearson's correlation analysis, the relationship between the vegetation cover and rainfall was assessed as well as temperature and population density. Results show that 45,945.08 km2 of vegetation cover was lost within the study area including the Lake Chad area between 1984 and 2016. The annual rate of...

Film images testify to the real appearance of the past, or at least its aesthetic, through old films or archival footage. However, the meaning of an image is never transparent but part of a cultural discourse to be interpreted. Therefore, cinema offers two possible historical readings: firstly as repository of authentic visual traces of the past, and secondly as representation that reveals the zeitgeist of a period. Classic documentaries tried to deal with historical issues in an objective way, but the evolution of the genre placed subjectivity at the centre of discourse. This paradigm shift explains why memory and identity are two of the main topics of post-modern documentaries, such as some 'urban autobiographies' that recall the emotional experience of missing cityscapes: 'Roger and Me' (Michael Moore, USA, 1989), 'My Winnipeg' (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2007) and 'Of Time and the City' (Terence Davies, UK, 2008). These films share a similar subjective approach to portraying the decline of industrial towns through personal memories, despite their belonging to three different subgenres: the performative political documentary, the essay film and the self-fiction. The analysis of their formal devices can be very useful to reflect on our contemporary systems of historical representation.