| 1. |
- Dis, Asli Tepecik, et al.
(författare)
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Reframing Kiruna's Relocation-Spatial Production or a Sustainable Transformation?
- 2021
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Ingår i: Sustainability. - : MDPI. - 2071-1050. ; 13:7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Due to the expansion of nearby mining operations, the city of Kiruna, an arctic city in Sweden, has been undergoing a massive urban transformation, led by the mining company, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag (LKAB), which is the largest iron ore producer in the EU. This paper explores this relocation in a three-sphere transformation framework that has sustainability as the outcome (practical sphere), and analyses it as a socio-spatial transformation process, including political decisions as its driving forces (political sphere), to examine how this outcome and decisions represent individual and collective values (personal sphere). The analysis of three spheres is used as a tool to understand how and why Kiruna's urban transformation is deemed to be sustainable, as it claims, and which it is being globally acknowledged for. Methods include analysis of Kiruna's new master plan, media representations, and interviews with key actors of the project, who include municipal planners; the mining company's planning developers; consultants, as the designers of 'Kiruna 4-ever' and the new city center; as well as the city's residents. The analysis is a critique of the approaches that fit this project into either the critique of market-led spatial production, or as an example of best practice, based on its participatory processes. Results indicate that although Kiruna's relocation is claimed to be a transformation of collective values, practical and technical transformations were dominant, which represents only partial responses in the framework. Therefore, a multi-voice narrative challenges the sustainability of Kiruna's transformation.
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| 2. |
- Karimnia, Elahe, et al.
(författare)
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Appropriation of Public Space : A dialectical approach in designing publicness
- 2020
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Ingår i: Companion to Public Space. - New York : Routledge, 2020. : Routledge.
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Publicness is a crucial concept in urban design practice that provides a critical though constructive backdrop to approaches and strategies that go beyond simply designing ‘public space.’ Planning and building public spaces are among the objectives of urban design projects, while the publicness of spaces is shaped as the aftermath of larger development strategies. Over the last decade, we have witnessed the socio-cultural potential of public spaces through tremendous efforts by activists, practitioners as well as scholars. Scholarly research (mainly in the social sciences) has addressed the multidimensionality and complexity of the publicness of urban spaces, questioning the production of pseudo-public places as an urban design outcome. Addressing the question ‘Whose public space?’ casts a negative light on urban design practice for its contribution to systematic exclusions from public spaces (Madanipour 1995, 2010). The publicness of urban spaces is subject to change through the everyday spatial practices that reflect the importance of expanding the notion of ‘design’ as a process, and embracing the multiplicity of spaces, actors/actions as well as unintended consequences as a driving force in the design process.In this chapter, we intend to build a deeper understanding of the challenges embedded in spatial production process, and in the required shift in urban design practice when designing publicness. We argue that producing publicness is not a linear process of applying experts’ knowledge and approaches conceived in a positivist mode. Publicness is in fact not an outcome of any specific stage of the urban design process; rather, publicness emerges out of a series of purposeful strategies and actions enabled or delimited by public spaces in everyday practice.The potentials of public space, as infrastructure for social activities, cultural production, and political expression, have been highlighted, specifically over the last decade, in various academic conferences, educational programs, and even policy-making platforms. However, we still lack multi-disciplinary knowledge of these potentials in and for practice (Carmona 2014). A dialectical approach suggests that urban design knowledge can evolve through practice: applying the knowledges of everyday practices, such as the way public space is appropriated, lets urban designers redefine the problems encountered in both practice and design (Inam 2011). Appropriations reveal that public space is a medium and a catalyst where various actors, together with their aspirations, needs, and conflicts, participate in producing publicness.This chapter concerns the complex processes of producing publicness. The first argument of this chapter concerns how publicness as an abstract ‘intention’ is translated through urban development processes. We discuss the limitations of spatial production, which is usually driven by political and economic intentions and territorial strategies and is known as the intention–outcome gap in urban design. Urban design is often subject to criticism for the gap (Foroughmand Araabi 2017; 2018) arising from the antithesis between a substantive–descriptive understanding of publicness and a normative–prescriptive design of public spaces, with urban design traditionally considered responsible for the latter (Moudon 1992). This argument calls for a deeper understanding of the contribution of practice to capital creation (i.e. neoliberal practices of urban design).The second argument highlights the appropriations by which space becomes public in action, and the sets of efforts by those whose regular presence, togetherness, and encounters contest the intended publicness. Appropriation is discussed in light of Lefebvre’s concept of ‘trial by space,’ to address everyone’s right and intention to practice their being in space, resulting in levels of territorial adaptation and domination that accordingly transform the publicness of space. The third argument of this chapter treats the implications of appropriations as creative conflicts that can identify and challenge the assumptions of urban design practice. Such an approach recommends a multi-scale and consequence-based framework for designing not only space but also the conditions under which publicness emerges. This represents a shift towards creative urban practices going beyond publicness as intention and public space as outcome.
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| 3. |
- KARIMNIA, ELAHE, 1980-
(författare)
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Producing Publicness : Investigating the Dialectics of Unintended Consequences in Urban Design - Practices in Stockholm and Malmö
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The creation of public space is intended to contribute to the civic infrastructure of a city. The conventional dichotomy of intentions versus outcomes in urban design practice posits that, while intentions represent more abstract thinking about the various facets of publicness, outcomes are the manifest realizations of those intentions in public spaces. This study grounds itself in an exploration of this intention-outcome gap to examine how urban design facilitates the production of publicness, by means of which public spaces can enable appropriations, i.e., the practices of togetherness, encounters, and expressions of different publics. Analysing the appropriations as unintended consequences is about the planning and design process, by which publicness is produced through larger strategies; and, the process of use, by which publicness is socially experienced and contested.This research applies a comparative case study approach, as examples of brownfield developments and producing ‘city-like’ (stadsmässighet) urban environments in two practices in Sweden: the Liljeholmstorget Transit Hub in Stockholm and the Western Harbour Waterfront in Malmö. The Liljeholmstorget examines negotiations of land uses and trade-offs with private actors, and its publicness addresses informal togetherness and passive encounters in relation to collective routines of commuting and consumption. The Western Harbour Waterfront reveals a determined process to promote the city’s economic growth and image; planned for the well-being of a specific type of public, which was later contested by unexpected users and their unplanned expressions.Comparative analysis demonstrates appropriations as welcome phenomena in urban design because they emphasize the dynamic and contingent characteristics of publicness.
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