Evolving Cities
Convivial Greenstreet Motivations and Values: A Philadelphia Case Study View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ken Tamminga
This paper extends on research that we shared in 2023. We use the term convivial greenstreets (CGs) in reference to yardless city streets that accommodate a higher-than-normal level of gardening by a diversity of residents, set within the interstitial spaces along sidewalks and building facades. Our investigation has already suggested that CGs may be associated with environmental and social benefits, including enhancing the livability of cities at the local neighborhood scale. Recently, we have begun examining the socio-psychological aspects of CG gardening and interactions between gardeners and passersby. What is emerging is a picture of the beneficial and growing contributions of CGs to life in the city—in this case in the Philadelphia neighborhoods of Fishtown and Fitler Square. Respondents to our detailed survey questionnaire (n=25) were solidly in favor of robust greenstreet activities in their neighborhoods, with gardener-respondents explaining their motivations and values as key drivers of this informal, and often quite intimate, form of city-making. We conclude by highlighting those responses that called for policies and programs that would help support this particularly expressive and sustainable type of makeshift urbanism.
Neighbourhood Walking, the Built Environment, and Social Life View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Troy Glover, Sina Kuzuoglu
What is the relationship between urban form and neighbourhood sociability? This question guided a research project aimed at investigating how attributes of the built environment influence relationalities of urban inhabitants during neighbourhood walks. To this end, the paper draws on three sources of qualitative data from neighbourhood walkers in Southwestern Ontario, Canada: (1) “walking diaries” in which participants took note of their walking routes, the people they observed on their walks, and other details of their walking experiences; (2) maps of their neighbourhoods that outlined the boundaries of their self-identified neighbourhoods, their routine walking routes, and the people they recognized during their neighbourhood walks; and (3) one-on-one interviews during which participants provided crucial context and meaning to the maps and their walking experiences. Findings reveal that unexpected or previously unknown changes to participants’ neighbourhoods, including neighbour-led and/or city-led (i.e., administrative) changes or improvements to the neighbourhood (temporary or otherwise), drew participants’ attention and altered their routine walking experiences (often in good ways) to ultimately change the way participants perceived their neighbourhoods, walking routes, and neighbours. Though not all such experiences took place in conceived or perceived social settings, they nevertheless represent lived spaces that had an indispensable role in facilitating neighbourly interactions—sometimes leading to stronger community connections.
Informality, Heterotopia, and the A-sociality of Smart Cities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Harris Mark Breslow
I argue that one function of the infrastructure of smart cities is the delimitation of the production of new forms of sociability and the ensuing curtailment of the articulation of new forms of identity. One feature of the smart city has been the limitation of the process of informality (Breslow, 2021; Roy, 2011). One aspect of the containment of informality is the limitation of the dialectical interplay between strategies of the production of place, which channel and discipline movement and behaviour, and the motive tactics of space, which contest the politics of the production of place (de Certeau, 1984). The dialectical interplay that underpins informality is productive of heterotopic spaces, which exist in an existential relationship between the informal and the heterotopic, and which are sites where new forms of sociability, subjectivity, and identity are emergent phenomena of the informal. Smart cities, in their discipline and containment of the informal also delimit the existence of the heterotopic, and thus the articulation of new forms of sociability, subjectivity, and identity. I argue that we see informality through the dialectical interplay described by de Certeau as the spatial resistance to, and contestation of, the strategies of space within the context of globalisation. Globalization, has enabled an unprecedented flow of people around the world, thus engendering the production of informal practices and heterotopic spaces that disrupt the production of what have heretofore been understood as “traditional” regimes of sociability and forms of identity.
