Shifting Space
Legal Frameworks, Informal Networks, Intercity Trade, and Flows of People and Goods between Cities of the Southern African Development Community
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marius Pieterse
This paper grapples with the manner in which the law perceives, and deals with, formal and informal economic interactions and flows between cities, as manifested also through formal and informal intercity trade. Its geographic focus is the cities of the SADC region in sub-Saharan Africa, which are characterised, to differing extents, by poverty, inequality, informality, and high levels of circular migration (including, but not limited to, migrant labour). Questions being investigated include: What are the realities of intercity trade in SADC? To what extent does national, regional, and constitutional systems and international trade laws recognise, reflect, and enable these realities? How, if at all, do legal frameworks deal with the vast informal trade networks in the region? Overall, is the law equipping cities to deal with tremendous shifts in economic power and responsibility towards the urban?
The Transformative Possibilities of Animating Public Space in Practice and Imagination
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Troy Glover
This research focuses on how the animation of public space—“the deliberate, usually temporary, employment of festivals, events, programmed activities, or pop-up leisure to transform, enliven, and/or alter public spaces and stage urban life” (Glover, 2015, p. 96)—represents not only a physical transformation to the built environment, but a social transformation that enables urban inhabitants to lay claim to their right to the city. In doing so, it demonstrates ways that groups are making new demands on the uses of urban public space by defending and/or extending opportunities for leisure in political environments where a community-centred and participatory public sphere is increasingly being eroded. Even so, while the insurgent possibilities associated with animation practices make the transformation of public space a potentially emancipatory practice through the complex re-coding of social space, the same practices can just as easily devolve into newer, albeit different, forms of discriminatory practices that privilege the exclusivity of group membership by restricting the flow of users, thereby constricting public space instead of loosening it. These and other related themes are discussed in this study.
Sense of Place in an Ethnic Frontier : Arab-Bedouin and Road 31
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Arnon Ben Israel
In this paper we integrate a theoretical theme with a description of idiographic reality in the Israeli Negev. First we argue that roads, routes, paths and the like are places in the full sense of this term, as are settlements; they are spaces that people tend to load with meanings and significance. Although this argument may sound trivial to the popular ear, it somehow undermines the instrumentalist and technologist bias which have characterized the traditional scientific geographic discourse of roads as spatial entities. We demonstrate this theoretical argument by exploring several layers of meanings that have been constructed by the Arab-Bedouin who reside along Road 31 in the Negev region. Images, memories, emotions and concepts– all are entwined by Road 31 in Bedouin's sense of place drawing a mental range whose poles are; death, disaster, and discrimination at one edge and social encounters and sense of history, continuation and belonging at the other. A $0.5 billion reconstruction project has recently changed Road 31's landscape while deepening ethnic exclusion in the region.
Peripheral Planning Policies and the Question of Public Space
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lucy Lynch
Public space plays a crucial role in the social, cultural, and political functioning of cities. As peripheral cities outpace the growth of central cities in Canada, it is important to ask how existing, new, and future public spaces are managed and/or developed in these intensifying peripheral areas. To answer this we can begin by looking at the ways in which “public space” is defined and envisioned at the local planning policy level. Using the City of Toronto as a benchmark for comparison, this study addresses the question of public space in the periphery through the textual analysis of local planning policies and design guidelines of the rapidly growing municipalities of Brampton, Vaughan and Innisfil, all of which are located in Toronto’s surrounding region. As these three municipalities are transformed by new development the language and directives of their local planning policies have spatial implications worth examining. Understanding where public space currently fits into existing local policy frameworks provides the opportunity for critique and future improvement.
