Cultural Shifts
The Movement of Immovables: Travelling Concepts and Material Translations in Urban Housing Policy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carola Fricke
In recent years, urban policies and planning concepts have become more mobile, moving between cities and national contexts. Going beyond ‘orthodox’ understandings of policy transfer, the travelling of urban concepts can be understood as immaterial flows of ideas and their translation into material concreteness. Urban housing policies form a particularly interesting intersection between urbanization’s socio-political dimension – expressed in the immaterial movement of ideas and concepts – and its physical implications – expressed in immovable goods such as buildings and housing infrastructures. Thereby, urban housing projects are often restricted by local and national building policies, regulations, and zoning. That said, external relations, learning, and connectedness of cities can innovate local housing practices. The paper explores dynamic geographies of urban housing policies and their material implications in the city of Freiburg, Germany. While Freiburg is often cited as a forerunner of exporting urban sustainability, this analysis primarily investigates the extent to which Freiburg’s housing projects can be understood as local translations of travelling concepts.
Urban Shopping Morphologies in Transition: A Critical Typology of the Synergies between Main Street, Suburban Mall, and Power Centre
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fujie Rao
In this paper, the complex transformations of urban shopping morphologies are explored. Since the mid-twentieth century there are three clearly-identified shifts in urban retail development: the decay and revitalisation of the main street, the rise and fall of the suburban mall, and the fast expansion of big box retailing culminating in the emergence of power centre - a cluster of big boxes lining a central car park. These well-documented retail changes, however, are largely a tip of the iceberg, as there are much more transformations emerging from the synergy between different retail types. In the literature there are mainly two kinds of synergies, including ‘co-functioning’ where each type adds to the whole while remaining identifiably different, and ‘mutation’ in which one type learns from another and becomes more and more similar to it. A few examples involving more complex morphological transformations are categorised into the ‘complex synergy’. Our understanding of these retail synergies is at an early age when their urban forms are rarely investigated between multiple cities and the car-based retail type is largely excluded. These research gaps are tackled through a morphological typology of the synergies between the main street, suburban mall, and power centre, based on 100 cases worldwide. This typology reveals utterly complex spatial transformations of urban shopping: most cases (sixty-seven) unexpectedly fall into the ‘complex synergy’ bracket where they diverge into forty-two recombinant types. In sum, retail synergies are emergent properties where a wide range of morphological experiments flourish at multi-scales.
Mutual Influences of Material and Immaterial Flows: The Case of Traditions at Selected Examples Within Swedish Folk Music Culture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Franz-Benjamin Mocnik
Space and time both shape how we disseminate information in the context of tradition. As a result of incorporating knowledge, ideas, and points of view of other people into our own lifes, information is passed on and traditions emerge. This process is strongly influenced by the context of society and the environment. Society has undergone major changes in the last three centuries. Urbanization has changed both rural and urban life. Trade networks have diversified, from classical trade routes to individualized transport in the twenty-first century. Humankind strives to overcome the limitations and restraints that are imposed by the environment. These changes manifest themselves in the way tradition is shaped. We discuss how physical flows, foremost trade networks and trips of individual people, have facilitated the dissemination of information at the example of Swedish folk music and its relation to folk music in other parts of Europe. While tradition can be explained in terms of society and the environment, influences on musical traditions are often the result of individuals, who trade and communicate. The entanglement of physical movement in space and time and the propagation of information can, at least in some cases, be traced on the individual level, which opens the possibility to uncover some of the principles that guide the emergende and persistence of tradition in the geographical context. The presentation discusses such principles, aligned with examples of mutual influences of material and immaterial flows within Swedish folk music and across European folk music traditions.
