Urban Decay

Marginal places do not usually appear in pictures. Their residents have historically been deprived of representation, because they do not fit in the ideal profile of ordinary citizens. Post-modern ethnography, however, argues that the cultural other has always been within ourselves, so many people –especially artists– have understood that those marginal perspectives must be included in any work attempting to address the urban experience in all its complexity and plurality. This is the reason why many filmmakers have lately become interested in what I call places of otherness: marginal areas in which cultural others, such as immigrants, refugees, homeless, ethnic minorities and other excluded groups, can feel at home in a foreign city. This essay aims to discuss the strategies of representation of such kind of places in a particular case study: Foreign Parts (Véréna Paravel & J. P. Sniadecki, 2010), a documentary produced at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab that depicts the everyday life in an already disappeared junkyard in Queens, New York. In this film, the documentary makers embrace a sensory approach based on intersubjectivity to give voice and visibility to the residents of that place, thus updating the politics of representation of ethnographic film and participatory documentary.

Villarmea Álvarez, Iván. 2018. Places of Otherness. Strategies of Urban Representation in 'Foreign Parts'. The Apollonian 5, 124-131.

South AfricaÕs cities have experienced dramatic changes over the past decade. Cities are now home to a multiracial population, and have been transformed by new forms of economic and social interaction. For some, these changes have become a significant source of fear and anxiety. In this paper, we examine reactions to urban spatial change in the city of Durban, as expressed in local newspapers and interviews with suburban residents. We describe how the discourses of urban change in Durban have centred on the increased presence of street traders within the cityÕs public spaces, and the various ways in which the activity of street trade has disrupted long-established modernist norms governing the occupation and use of the urban space. Specifically, we offer a detailed reading of three prominent narratives within the discussion of street traders in Durban--chaos, congestion and pollution. We argue that street traders have come to embody a wide range of more deeply seated cultural anxieties, which have been brought to the fore in the context of South AfricaÕs transition. These anxieties arise from the ways in which modern understandings of order, agency and subjectivity have been called into question by material changes in the city, and have implications for the nature of citizenship and civic engagement in post-apartheid South Africa.

This chapter considers sites like Pripyat, in Chernobyl, as zones of alternative practice, especially in terms of urban exploration. At the same time, it offers a critique of such activities as a form of adventure tourism, contrasting the transformative potential of urban ruination against the commodification of the liminal.

“Posthuman Interstellar Gothic” considers posthumanism in theory and in the gothic mode with and within science fiction to chart alternative futures and exit strategies out of our Anthropic dystopia. Since the millennium, a clear trend towards encyclopaedic overviews in Gothic Studies has emerged. Precisely because the genre is still generating books such as this, everything has not been said about it. This writing proceeds on the premise that the kind of criticism that is called for right now is what is being shaped by our newest philosophers and cultural critics regards our communal futures. In the Poshhuman Interstellar Gothic, victory over the Other is no longer the battle – remedying the mess the human race has made of its home and species, is.

I read the opening lines of this book’s foreword – written by the esteemed anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2015), a widely recognized voice in globalization studies – with utter disbelief. “Th is timely book,” Appadurai (2015: xii) writes, “is sure to become a definitive work on the now growing literature on urban infrastructure”. The book is “timely,” no doubt, but “sure to become a definitive work?” How outrageously bold!?

My thanks to the following people and organisations who assisted in the production of this thesis: my home institution, The University of Technology, Sydney (UTS); the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; TfC research centre, and the department of Cultural Studies (with particular thanks to Juleigh Slater for her willingness to negotiate university bureaucracy on my behalf). I acknowledge the assistance of The ATN-DAAD Joint Research Cooperation Scheme, which provided funding for a research trip to Berlin in 2011 as part of the Colonial Entanglements project with Lars Eckstein, Anja Schwartz, and Dennis Mischke (University of Potsdam), and Dr. Andrew Hurley (UTS). Thanks also to Katrina Schlunke, who led the project at UTS, and who also provided many kinds of advice and support as a co-supervisor, colleague and course coordinator during my candidature. I am grateful to Bundesarchiv and Northwestern University Library for research support and images used in this thesis.

One of the negative effects of the high rate and pace of urbanisation in developing countries is the decay of urban centres. While this decay has eaten deep into the fabric of these settlements turning them into urban slums and ghettoes with poor infrastructure, the effects of the decay are multifarious. Despite the fact that the economy is the “life-wire” of urban centres, its untold downturn consequent upon urban decay is unimaginable because of the relationship that exists between environmental quality and economic growth. This calls for a proactive approach called urban renewal towards the creation of successful urban places. This paper, therefore, reviews urban renewal strategies and their implications on economic growth with a particular focus on Ondo State, Nigeria towards identifying the means of enhancing the sustainability of its economic proceeds. The study relied on secondary information sources and discovered that appropriate urban renewal strategies yields corresponding economic growth. The paper asserts that the urban renewal fit achieved in the state during the period 2009 to 2012 can be replicated in other states in Nigeria if similar political willpower is available. The paper recommends the participation of the public combined with appropriate strategies in urban renewal schemes for the best result and argues in conclusion that urban renewal is the only feasible solution to the current dwindling economic sector in Nigeria and other developing economies.

This essay engages the depiction of the influence of environment and nature on industrialization in the long poem Paterson, by William Carlos Williams. Topics mentioned include the relation between poetry and the physical environment, the tension and interaction between the rural and urban settings and their elements of wilderness, the river, the mountain, and the city, and the critical analysis of the human.

Photographs of abandoned homes, decaying towns and industrial ruins swarm the Internet. They also fill the glossy pages of art books and popular magazine issues, and are increasingly appropriating more prominent spaces in scholarly publication on modern decay and abandonment. While its popularity speaks to its attractiveness, this proliferating ruin imagery has also become the target of harsh criticism from both concerned scholars and people affected by ruination. To them much of this is little but "ruin porn": a superficial and one-eyed portrayal of urban decay that turns social and material misery into something seductive and aesthetically pleasing. This article takes a different position. Speaking from an archaeological perspective, and especially the archaeology of the contemporary past, it argues that the new engagement with ruin photography rather calls for a reconsideration and appreciation of the role of photography; not merely as a means of documentation but also as an interactive and attentive way to approach things themselves. By scrutinizing what the critics have claimed to be the fallacies of the image (its selectivity, timelessness, superficiality and tendency to aestheticize), and by emphasizing ruin photography as an engagement with things, the article aims to show that it is precisely the alleged shortcomings that make photography a valuable method in a new approach to things and ruins.

The population of Detroit has been steadily declining since the 1950s, but the imaginaries that shape the city are in constant transformation, changing with each successive government or regeneration initiative. Since 2010, downtown Detroit has been targeted by blight removal projects, real-estate speculation and redevelopment plans. These growth-oriented imaginaries shape the ways in which place is perceived and encountered – materially and conceptually – often responding to ruin and decay with erasures and evictions that play out through cultural geographies of precarity, simultaneously disappearing and reproducing conditions of inequality. The changes in the city are reflected in my own experiences of Detroit in 2009 and 2015, using walking and driving methods to support grounded and emplaced encounters with the ‘unbecoming’ ruins in the city. The city of 2009 is being replaced – in imagination, and in reality – by a new way of thinking about Detroit, which asks us to imagine differently, to positively re-envision the future possibilities for growth and change. This article interrogates the different imaginaries of regeneration in the city and considers, through urban ruins, places that are absent from the new way of thinking Detroit. Through Berlant’s ‘precarity’ and Massey’s ‘emplacement’, this discussion reveals a complex process of unbecoming that is typified in the unstable material, cultural and historical geographies that structure the experience of place in Detroit.

First published as:
Opper, A. If Roads Could Talk. 2021. In Volume 7 (of 7 volumes): Southern Africa: Between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans: 384-387. In Meuser,P and Dalbai, A(Eds). Architectural Guide: Sub-Saharan Africa. Berlin: Dom publishers. ISBN: 978-3-86922-087-1

RESUMEN/
Mucho énfasis se ha puesto en discutir las ruinas en su condición de sustantivo, como un escenario, resultado o producto cuya imagen presente contrasta con su forma pretérita. Tomando un camino diferente, este artículo discute las particularidades de la ruina como parte del proceso inevitable de ‘ruinación’, que afecta sin distinción a todo el entorno construido, logrando, en última instancia, que lo edificado pierda la organización de sus partes, su función original y sus significados. Buscando ampliar el campo de sentido asociado a este concepto, se sugiere revisar las estrategias clásicas de representación que favorecen su objetualización, monumentalización o estetización, y promover representaciones que tengan por objeto la ruina como resultado siempre cambiante de un proceso de permanente deterioro. Para ejemplificar este giro metodológico y conceptual, se discute material producido por el proyecto Esto es Talca, iniciativa que busca capturar, en series fotográficas, el avance del tiempo sobre el entorno construido.

ABSTRACT/
Much emphasis has been given to discussing ruins in their fundamental and independent nature, as a scenario, result or output whose image in the present is in contrast with its past shape. Taking a different route, this paper discusses the particular aspects of ruins as part of the inevitable ‘ruination’ process which has an impact on the entire built environment without distinction, ultimately pushing buildings to lose the organization of their parts, original functions and meanings. Seeking to expand the field of meanings associated to this concept, a suggestion is made to review typical representation strategies that favor its objectification, monumentalizing or aestheticization, and to promote representations that conceive ruins as an ever changing result of endless decaying. As an example of this methodological and conceptual shift, the discussion focuses on the material resulting from the project This is Talca, which aims at capturing the course of time on the built environment with photographic series.

This paper aims to analyze and understand the contemporary Italian approach to urban development and regeneration, which is structured around the category of decaying periphery.
Inspired by the works of Michel Foucault, Henry Lefebvre, and Lois Waquant, the analysis of the discourses on urban regeneration takes into account the Urban Agenda of the EU, the urban policies promoted by the Italian government, and the ways in which the Municipality of Brescia (Northern Italy) is applying them in three specific neighborhoods of this city. Then, the analysis takes into account the ways in which the residents of this area (re)produce, negotiate, and contest the discourses on urban (im)properness; these processes produce specific effects on the conceptualizations, perceptions, and experiences of these spaces in the every-day life urban interactions.

This paper suggests that the Italian approach of regeneration, and its local application in the decaying periphery of Brescia, sustain institutional forms of territorial stigmatization, framing the historical transition from the industrial to the post-industrial socioeconomic system through class, gender, and racially polarized urban representations and narratives.

The Slender Man made his first appearance in 2009 on the Something Awful Forums website, where participants competed to take ordinary photographs and create eerie images by doctoring the photos. Seen lurking in the background of a playground full of children, the faceless, multi-armed, and freakishly tall figure wearing a dark business suit was the creation of Eric Knudsen (also known as “Victor Surge”). Like Frankenstein’s creature, Knudsen’s monster soon exceeded its creator’s control and took on a life of its own. The character began popping up in online “creepypasta” stories, in online artwork, and in several Web-based video series. What accounts for The Slender Man’s meteoric success as a Web meme? The Slender Man is a liminal figure who flourishes in: (1) the space between chaotic nature and orderly culture; (2) the space between folkloric traditions (The Grim Reaper) and quasi-scientific popular culture (The Men in Black); and (3) the space between relatively stable 20th century technologies (industrialization) and evolving 21st century technologies (digital media). The Slender Man is a boogeyman for the Information Age, one who embodies primal fears (death) and modern horrors (being ground up by impersonal industrialization) as well as postmodern paranoia (“they” are watching us through the technologies we use every day).

Rather than viewing neighbourhood decline as a natural process resulting from the in-flow of low-income households, this study uses a socio-spatial approach that looks at the structuration of neighbourhood decline by emphasising the power of agents/actors, linking the structure of the real estate industry to the development of the neighbourhood. Landlords and banks are not merely automata of the price mechanism that steer the natural operation of the market, but should be seen as intentionally and unintentionally restructuring the local real estate market and thus possibly producing, or contributing to, processes of neighbourhood decline. This paper presents the Tarwewijk (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) as a case study of neighbourhood decline. Attention is paid to the social and physical decline of the neighbourhood, drug dealing, undocumented immigrants and processes impacting the housing market such as speculation, blockbusting, milking and redlining. It is argued that the retreat of 'formal' actors, such as banks and bona fide landlords, stimulates the rise of the underworld in both the housing and drugs markets.

Beyond the glamour of Cairo history lies a different side of the city that unravels the unique beauty of urban decay. Al-Hattaba, a UNESCO heritage area, is caught in between these narrations of beauty and decay; the beautiful home whose inhabitants want to keep and grow, and the formally enlisted dangerous informal space subject to eviction and demolition.
Al-Hattaba embraces the beauty of its rich and diverse history, growing through time. It beholds moments of prosperity, failure, change, beauty, and loss.
Urban decay photography is used to interpret al-Hattaba’s controversy and explore the bonds between time and memory. We take the reader through a visual journey in al-Hattaba.
It constitutes a photo-sequence that considers al-Hattaba in reflection of its background context, the Citadel of Saladin; historic and residential buildings, some abandoned and attempts of local renovation. This urban setting reflects a rich visual diversity that witnessed its changes through time. We argue that the essence of al-Hattaba’s beauty is in its urban decay. It is a space that will never fail to amaze its visitors with its hidden beauty.

The population of Detroit has been steadily declining since the 1950s, but the imaginaries that shape the city are in constant transformation, changing with each successive government or regeneration initiative. Since 2010, downtown Detroit has been targeted by blight removal projects, real-estate speculation and redevelopment plans. These growth-oriented imaginaries shape the ways in which place is perceived and encountered – materially and conceptually – often responding to ruin and decay with erasures and evictions that play out through cultural geographies of precarity, simultaneously disappearing and reproducing conditions of inequality. The changes in the city are reflected in my own experiences of Detroit in 2009 and 2015, using walking and driving methods to support grounded and emplaced encounters with the ‘unbecoming’ ruins in the city. The city of 2009 is being replaced – in imagination, and in reality – by a new way of thinking about Detroit, which asks us to imagine dif...

This article compares the ruins of Detroit and Namibia, focusing on the ways that previously dominant white groups use those ruins. In both cases ruined buildings appeal to these groups as particularly evocative objects. While the ruin seems always to signify transience, mortality and historicity, its more specific meanings are semantically underdetermined, varying by historical context and social group. Many white suburbanites use Detroit's industrial ruins to nourish their nostalgic longing for the city's golden era of Fordist prosperity. This does not seem to entail any confusion of past and present, however. The nostalgic object is unambiguously perceived as historical. By contrast, German-Namibians use colonial ruins to satisfy and perpetuate a sense of melancholia that simultaneously denies and acknowledges the end of German colonial power. Both forms of consciousness prefer ruins that are gradually being reassimilated into nature to the restored heritage sites of the tourist industry.

Nowadays, some areas of Southern Italy appear to be «resistant to development». They are complex realities, which have also been affected by the current economic crisis: an example is Taranto, a city that has been «declining» for many years. The aim of this paper is to identify the narratives that underlie the policies implemented in the city, trying to highlight their ideological character as it emerges from the press and the discourse of citizens. These narratives speak about pollution, demographic shrinkage, the industrial crisis, social distress, urban decay and political corruption. The challenge, therefore, is to deconstruct the decline in order to build new narratives, changing the way to approach the critical issues, and trying to reconstruct «development needs» from the bottom, in this way contributing to an improvement of the quality of the urban environment.

The imminent demolition of the Airds shopping mall, writes local historian and author IAN WILLIS, is a sad indictment of the dreams of many and the ultimate demise of the 1970s Macarthur Growth Centre project.
The shopping mall is an example of urban decay in the middle of our local suburbia.
It is a failure of modernism and the town planning utopia of city-based decision-makers.
The decay at Airds is not unusual and is symbolic of larger trends in global retailing.

One of the negative effects of the high rate and pace of urbanisation in developing countries is the decay of urban centres. While this decay has eaten deep into the fabric of these settlements turning them into urban slums and ghettoes with poor infrastructure, the effects of the decay are multifarious. Despite the fact that the economy is the “life-wire” of urban centres, its untold downturn consequent upon urban decay is unimaginable because of the relationship that exists between environmental quality and economic growth. This calls for a proactive approach called urban renewal towards the creation of successful urban places. This paper, therefore, reviews urban renewal strategies and their implications on economic growth with a particular focus on Ondo State, Nigeria towards identifying the means of enhancing the sustainability of its economic proceeds. The study relied on secondary information sources and discovered that appropriate urban renewal strategies yields correspondin...

Transporting readers from derelict homesteads to imperiled harbors, postindustrial ruins to Cold War test sites, Curated Decay presents an unparalleled provocation to conventional thinking on the conservation of cultural heritage. Caitlin DeSilvey proposes rethinking the care of certain vulnerable sites in terms of ecology and entropy, and explains how we must adopt an ethical stance that allows us to collaborate with—rather than defend against—natural processes. Curated Decay chronicles DeSilvey’s travels to places where experiments in curated ruination and creative collapse are under way, or under consideration. It uses case studies from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to explore how objects and structures produce meaning not only in their preservation and persistence, but also in their decay and disintegration. Through accessible and engaging discussion of specific places and their stories, it traces how cultural memory is generated in encounters with ephemeral artifacts and architectures. An interdisciplinary reframing of the concept of the ruin that combines historical and philosophical depth with attentive storytelling, Curated Decay represents the first attempt to apply new theories of materiality and ecology to the concerns of critical heritage studies. Chapter 1 fulltext available here: https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/37065

Vulnerability of cities to environmental hazards in countries with high-risk environments has become a significant challenge ahead of urbanology, engineering management, and urban planning. One of these dangers threatening many cities around the world including our country is earthquake. Necessity to reduce vulnerability to earthquakes was considered as one of the main purposes of spatial planning, urban planning, and urban design. Tehran, as the capital city of Iran with an important and critical situation, has a large zone of distressed areas most of which are located on a major fault and are considered as a serious threat to the city and its inhabitants. Therefore, it was necessary to study of vulnerabilities in old neighborhood of Imamzade-Hasan. The purpose of this study was to develop strategies for organizing these textures and to reduce their vulnerability to earthquakes using SWOT model and QSPM matrix. It is an applied-strategic research conducted by a descriptive-analytical method. In addition to several library studies, it has also taken advantage of a survey. To collect and evaluate information of the survey, Delphi technique, questionnaires, and interviews with experts and officials have been used. The findings suggest that the worn-out urban fabric of Imamzade-Hasan neighborhood needs to be pushed out of the status quo, that is, its weaknesses should be recognized, and its threats need to be addressed. Several strategies such as renovation and improvement programs, special attention on crisis management, creation of a central agency to regulate programs related to rusty textures, establishment of appropriate contexts for increasing economic activities in the neighborhood, providing infrastructure to attract investments to modernize the neighborhood, and increasing green open spaces were identified as the high priority strategies, and implementation of reconstruction and renovation programs for providing adequately wide roads necessary for ensuring improved mid-and post-crisis services was determined as the most effective strategy for addressing the problems of this neighborhood.

A vast proportion of the urban fabric is a transient space, characterized by the movement of people within the city. Flows are driven by sets of motivations (going to work, running errands, grabbing lunch, etc.) and those patterns show purpose. The path in-between those points is irrelevant and purely a

This paper compares the ruins of Detroit and Namibia, focusing on the ways that formerly hegemonic white groups use those objects. In both cases ruined buildings appeal to these groups as particularly evocative objects. While the ruin seems always to signify transience, mortality, and historicity, its more specific meanings are semantically underdetermined, varying by historical context and social group. Many white suburbanites use Detroit’s industrial ruins to nourish their nostalgic longing for the city’s golden era of Fordist prosperity. This does not seem to entail any confusion of past and present, however. The nostalgic object is unambiguously perceived as historical. By contrast, German-Namibians use colonial ruins to satisfy and perpetuate a sense of melancholia that simultaneously denies and acknowledges the end of German colonial power. Both forms of consciousness prefer ruins that are gradually being reassimilated into nature to the restored heritage sites of the tourist industry.

Résumé: Cette contribution traite différents aspects de l’évolution d’Ostie du milieu du 3ème au 5ème siècle, tout en
s’interrogeant sur les questions des possibilités de justification archéologique, de la perception et la pertinence de
l’innovation urbanistique tout comme sur la manière de la transformation de l’infrastructure. Trois aspects sont traités:
„modèles de décadence“ traditionnels (I), les locaux privés (II.1) ainsi que les lieux et bâtiments publics (II.2). Il peut être
démontré que ces domaines ont été reconstitués après des catastrophes d’écroulement de la fin du 3ème siècle, mais qu’ils
sont à mettre en évidence avec des réorganisations majeures et urbaines sur le plan de quartiers entiers.

In recent years, geographers and related social scientists have worked intensively against the fetishisation of ruins. The ruin fetish is widely considered as being problematic, because it does not allow us to face the complex reality of processes of ruination and instead turns the ruin into an object with a fixed meaning and transcendental value. This paper supplements this current state of research via the fetish concepts of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Lacan, who both grasp fetishisation through the inscription of fantasy into an object. This fantasy is not inherently bound to the fetish object, but persists depending solely on our standpoint to it. The paper elaborates on the ruin having to be perceived from a certain distance to obtain a status as fetish object by turning into a nostalgic rem(a)inder of loss. While the fetishist maintains a distance to the fetish object, the explorative view of ruins, dismissively coined as “ruin porn,” is distinguished by its manner of getting as close as possible to it. Ruin porn is therefore not, as it is often stated, the most recent peak of the ruin fetish, but rather a way of losing sight of the ruin's aura, a way of turning the fetish object into a pile of waste. Artists, on the other hand, bear witness to something that lies beyond the factual givenness of the ruin and thus reintroduce the fetish back into it. Shifting between these ways of fetishising, defetishising, and refetishising ruins, the paper investigates the conditions of the ruin fetish and ultimately calls for a more serious engagement with fantasies as a way of getting with the ruin fetish instead of getting over it.

The city ages like every live system which originates and develops in time. Its parts age and perish as well; its shapes, its places and its buildings. This form of decay however can constitute a dynamic process with a particularly interesting aesthetic perspective and can lead to a new whole of meanings and symbolism. Decay’s place within the city’s physical boundaries- its topos- is the urban ruin. Through the concepts of city, place, urban ruin and collective memory which are being studied, this article attempts to approach the urban ruin as an active- within its inactivity- part of the urban experience and a potential host for society’s collective memory.

This chapter considers sites like Pripyat, in Chernobyl, as zones of alternative practice, especially in terms of urban exploration. At the same time, it offers a critique of such activities as a form of adventure tourism, contrasting the transformative potential of urban ruination against the commodification of the liminal.

Um es gleich vorwegzunehmen: Eine immerhin denkbare
Plünderung Alarichs läßt sich in Ostia, der Hafenstadt
Roms, anhand der archäologischen Evidenz weder
verifizieren noch letztendlich entkräften. Dies ist vor
allem ein Problem der archäologischen Methoden, die
keine ausreichend genauen Datierungen von Einsturzbefunden
zulassen.
Hier kann allerdings gezeigt werden, daß Einsturzbefunde
seit dem späten 3. Jh. vor allem in der ersten
Hälfte des 5. Jhs. tatsächlich besonders konzentriert
vorkamen, wobei dem Brand und Einsturz vieler Bauten
eine umfangreiche Bewältigung dieser Einsturzkatastrophen
gefolgt war. Neben dem Verfall aus mangelnder
Gebäudewartung sowie dem plötzlich erfolgten
Einsturz aufgrund externer Auslöser ist aber auch der
geplante und sehr selektive Abriß bestimmter Bauten
zur Materialgewinnung in dieser Zeit mehr denn jemals
zuvor nachweisbar. Die urbane Topographie des 5. Jhs.
unterscheidet sich in vielen Aspekten von jener des 2.–
4. Jhs.; bestehen blieb hingegen der Wille, das Stadtbild
neuen Gegebenheiten wie Abwanderung und Leerstand
anzupassen sowie der Anspruch, repräsentativ ausgestattete
öffentliche Profanbauten weiter zu unterhalten.
Das unterscheidet den Betrachtungszeitraum bis zur
Mitte des 5. Jhs., möglicherweise sogar noch bis ins letzte
Viertel des 5. Jhs., grundlegend von der Entwicklung
der Folgezeit des 6. und 7. Jhs.

“A city is both a dream and a reality”; Italian writer Italo Calvino stated in his book invisible cities that“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” According to Calvino, the image of the city is not as positive as it seems to be, since it is a place of integration and interbreeding, of blooming and relegation, and of operation and dysfunction.
Throughout history in places as diverse as ancient Persia, China and Muslim Spain, there have been societies that have attempted to negotiate and achieve advantage from differences. The west too must face up to the paradox that its reverence for its own liberal secularism born out of the enlightenment can breed its own fundamentalism. Celebrating diversity among people enriches the society and enlightens it, and obviously thinking about difference as an obstacle would be creating a paradox made out of diversity deficit in the presence of a cultural variety. The inability of people to embrace this amazing variety of ethnic groups and to share a physical public space is the dominant reality of today’s and past American history, and this incessant non-acceptance implied a non-adaptive mode of cultural diversity. As the society continues to develop and expand, this reality becomes worse and worse and a cultural void within groups of people and individuals keeps occurring. The pause needs to occur and remembrance should happen, the past should be questioned, the present reevaluated and the
future redefined. It is a time for architecture to intervene, react, help and reflect sorrows and bring questions to resolutions.

Key words: Urban Diaspora, urban decay, diversity revalorization, cross-cultural awareness-sensitivity, space of reflection-remembrance, hybrid intercultural design, tolerance through architecture.

Promotion of new needs of urban life due to urban growth, has disrupted the old and modern parts of cities. structure of old  neighborhoods around central core of the cities has been unable to respond to the needs of contemporary life and it seems necessary to adopt an efficient method before the ancient urban fabric becomes a crisis, The new urbanism movement is a new approach for interfering with old and worn urban texture. The purpose of this research is to analyze the dimensions of urban decay and presenting strategies for sustainable regeneration of Sardozak neighborhood with regard to the principles of the new urbanism approach and then determining the priority of these strategies for planning this neighborhood. The research method is descriptive-analytic. In order to analyze the data related to urban decline, the hierarchical analysis model was used to weigh indices and information layers. Using the weighted overlay model, the final map of the urban decline was produced. A combination of SWOT and network analysis (ANP) was also used for strategic planning. The results show that 75.2% of the neighborhood is in a high and very high level of physical deprivation and 27% of the neighborhood is in high and very high socioeconomic decline. Also in the strategic planning for Sardozak neighborhood with regard to new urbanism movement, (Wo) strategies with 0.315 weight will be the priority and after that (WT) strategies with weight 0.292, (ST) strategies with the weight of 0.209 and the (SO) strategies with weight 0.182 are the next priorities.

On the 8th of December 2008, the Christmas tree at Syntagma square caught fire during a street protest. During the same evening, a new upscale shopping center was launched at the northern suburbs of the city. Visitors crowded the new mall while the central square at Syntagma was full of young people protesting for the murder of a 16-year-old schoolboy by a policeman. That was a critical moment in the recent history of Athens. ...

This article examines a number of representations of abandoned cities in film, and contemplates these as images and depictions of dead and decaying urban spaces. Using Richard Sennett’s assertions regarding circulation within the city streets as a starting point, the article builds upon the concept of the anthropomorphised, urban organism as one which decays in the absence of human movement (Sennett, 2002: 255-281). The lack of social circulation through the city’s veins necessitates discourse regarding Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, and indeed the role of consumerism in a forsaken landscape (Benjamin, 1973). Themes such as the natural and the unnatural, which seemingly permeate the cinema of empty space with unremitting consistency, are thoroughly explored, and textually scrutinised. The dead organism is left to feed the natural environment which surrounds and encroaches upon it, while remaining, in essence, a synthetic form. The natural state of the city is an unnatural state for nature, and so the converse is equally true. The use of indoor and outdoor space within the decaying metropolis is also considered, and the potential for an inversion between public and private spaces is observed. This article is concerned with the aesthetic communication of these thematic considerations.

In last two decades, the misuse of the word participation as a nice adding to the title of most urban projects in Iran has become customary and habitual. Most of these projects would not even begin to measure up to the actual meaning of this word and even if they claim that they do, it is hardly possible to evaluate their work as there could be loads of misunderstanding in what they would define an absolutely qualitative concept like participation and how should it be measured. Considering the abundant of the incorrect use of the term participational Urban Renovation and its Ambiguous meaning due to the vastness of scope, this paper is aiming to create a framework that can qualify participatory aspect of urban redevelopment projects and calculate it to a quantitative value which would be shown in percentages. This framework can be extremely helpful in creating a measurement of real participation in urban renovation projects, and work against non-participatory actions in these projects. In this paper, first, there is an elaboration of participation and explanation of the process of participational Urban Renovation. We emphasize the importance and the necessity of public involvement in these projects and explain how this constant public participation translates into a process of Renovation and introduces The Step-Wise-Logic of the LUDA Regeneration Process. This process is a set of tasks and related activities for diagnosis of the urban distress, visioning the desired future by engaging and involving stakeholders, programming this vision, implementation of the program, and monitoring the success of the program. In the next part of the literature review, the variations of involvement in these regeneration programs are discussed; and classifications of such participation is represented based on the participation ladders from Arnstein’s first ladder in 1969 to the more recent ladders. Arnestein’s participation ladder focuses on three main levels which are Nonparticipation, Tokenism, and Citizen Power or Partnership. On the other hand, other researchers have also organized various participation procedures according to the degree of public involvement, varying from the public right-to-know to public partnership in decision-making. They also recognize that the nature of participation can change over time, and different engagement approaches may be more suitable for various stages of this process. After discussing participation processes based on the participation Ladders, We developed a chart to compare the ladders and match the levels of participation that they represent, while trying to be as discreet as possible not to ignore the differences between them but to strengthen the very core of each level by finding new participatory instruments that could be defined within each step. The goal of Combining these various approaches in form of a chart was that the combination could provide a more comprehensive picture of the degree of participation that was actually occurring rather than each one of them individually. In the developed chart, the rows represent the scope of participation, and the columns include participatory tools and methods which are graded by their importance based on three primary levels of Arnstein’s ladder itself. Therefore, the rows of this chart include three main levels of Nonparticipation, Tokenism, and Citizen Power, and three sub-levels for each level. The four columns of this table include the participatory instruments and methods represented in four different main approaches, including UNDP’s, and also Dorcey, Wiedemann & Femers, Conner, and Pimbert & Pretty›s views on the subject. For example, the Arnstein’s highest level of participation, called “citizen control,” in which citizens have full power to plan, make decisions and manage is parallel to the “self-management” level in UNDP’s approach which indicates the interactions of stakeholders in learning processes, which optimizes the well-being of all concerned. This row of the chart is also level to “self-mobilization/ active participation” and “on-going interactions” in other approaches. Another example could be the last row of this table, which represents the lowest degree of participation or non-participation, and is level to manipulation, informing, and passive participation; and is characterized by one-way communication with stakeholders, with neither channel or feedback nor power for negotiation. In this paper, to use this chart as a framework for evaluating the case study, we changed adapted it for evaluation of an actual urban Renovation project by assigning colors and hatches to each step of the renovation process and showing the methods of public participation which were used in each step by different colors. The steps of Urban Renovation were defined according to The Step-Wise-Logic of the LUDA Regeneration Process, as explain before. Therefore, we have considered participation acts in these steps, and assigned colors and hatches for presenting each of them, which include “participation in Diagnosis,” “participation in Visioning,” “participation in Programming,” “participation in Implementation”, and “Participation in Monitoring.” The case study of this paper is “the special Renovation project of SHAHID KHOOB-BAKHT’S neighborhood” and this project was defined by “The Urban Renovation Organization of Tehran City”, as a pattern to be followed by other urban redevelopment projects as well; and therefore, it was imperative to evaluate the level of real participation that this pattern made possible. By reviewing the existing data and formally published reports on this project, we extracted the participatory tools and methods which were used during various steps of this project and developed the adapted version of the explained table for it. Then the number of colored or hatched cells for each step of the project was multiplied by the previously assigned grades and the final results which will evaluate the general rate of participation by percentage were calculated. The results show that in the case of this particular project, the most degree of participation occurred in the programming step and this participation belonged to the “citizen control” and the “tokenism” types of participation in general and specifically to the sub-types of partnership, consultation and informing, which are placed on the 4th, the 5th, and the 6th level of the table. The results also showed that there were moderate degrees of participation in the visioning and the implementation steps of the project, at the “tokenism” level and the “consultation” sub-level of participation. It was apparent that involvement of stakeholders in the monitoring and the diagnosis of this project was non-existent. This is especially alarming because it shows that the residents are not held responsible for supervising the process of the project nor surveilling the vitality of their neighborhood as a thriving community. Improving the levels of resident involvement in the monitoring and diagnosis steps could ensure that the decaying cycle of urban fabric would eventually slow down as the residents would get much more sensitive to the quality of space in their neighborhood. The general rate of participation in this project is measured to be 65.4 percent, which shows that considering all the obstacles that this project had to overcome – legal, financial, social obstacles, etc. - as a new experiment, there is hope for the other projects which are following this project’s particular process as a pattern.

با توجه به ساد هانگاری و رواج اشتباه در استفاده از واژه ی مشارکتی بودن و ابهام ناشی از دامنه ی مفهومی گسترده ی آن، این مقاله ؛ به ایجاد چارچوبی جهت بررسی میزان مشارکتی بودن طر حهای نوسازی بافت فرسوده م یپردازد.بنابراین در ابتدا به طبق هبندی مشارکت ب رمبنای نظریات نردبا نهای مشارکتی و مقایسه تطبیقی آنها در قالب جدول پرداخته ومؤلفه ها و ابزارهای مورد استفاده در هریک را، جهت قابل استفاده شدن در ارزیابی میزان مشارکتی بودن مشخص م یکند. این مقاله به ارائه ی جدولی مطابق با منتخبی از نردبانه ای مشارکتی که تناسب مفهومی بیشتری با حوزه ی شهرسازی دارند می پردازد، که تبیی نگر رابطه ی میان ابزارهای مشارکتی و سطوح مشارکت است. در این جدول، قلمروهای مشارکت )پل ههای نردبانهای مشارکتی( در سطور جدول، و روشها و ابزار مشارکت در ستو نهای جدول قرار گرفته اند و به هر پله ضری ب اهمیت معینی، مطابق با نظریات نردبانهای مشارکتی اختصاص یافت هاست. سپس بر اساس مراحل فرایند مرحله ای که هر یک از ابزار مشارکتی در آن استفاده شده، از طریق اختصاص رنگ و هاشور مورد تأ کید قرار ،LUDA نوسازی1 گرفت هاست. این جدول برای هر طرح به صورت جدا گانه تهیه م یشود و از طریق ادغام آن با جدول ضریب اهمیت سطوح مشارکت، چارچوبی جهت ارزیابی میزان مشارکتی بودن فرآیند نوسازی هر طرح ایجاد می نماید. و ابزارهای استفاده شده در طرح آن در هر یک از » طرح ویژه نوسازی محله شهید خو ببخت « در پایان با بررسی تئوریک 65 درصد محاسبه شده / مراحل فرایند نوسازی، جدول مربوط به آن تدوین شده و میزان مشارکتی بودن طرح در تئوری، 4 است و بیشترین سطح مشارکت در این طرح، به ترتیب در مراحل برنامه ریزی، اجرا و چش ماندازسازی دیده می شود. همچنین میزان مشارکتی نبودن یا مشارکت عوام فریبانه این طرح در تئوری، صفر درصد ارزیابی شده است.

Photographs of abandoned homes, decaying towns and industrial ruins swarm the Internet. They also fill the glossy pages of art books and popular magazine issues, and are increasingly appropriating more prominent spaces in scholarly publication on modern decay and abandonment. While its popularity speaks to its attractiveness, this proliferating ruin imagery has also become the target of harsh criticism from both concerned scholars and people affected by ruination. To them much of this is little but "ruin porn": a superficial and one-eyed portrayal of urban decay that turns social and material misery into something seductive and aesthetically pleasing. This article takes a different position. Speaking from an archaeological perspective, and especially the archaeology of the contemporary past, it argues that the new engagement with ruin photography rather calls for a reconsideration and appreciation of the role of photography; not merely as a means of documentation but also as an interactive and attentive way to approach things themselves. By scrutinizing what the critics have claimed to be the fallacies of the image (its selectivity, timelessness, superficiality and tendency to aestheticize), and by emphasizing ruin photography as an engagement with things, the article aims to show that it is precisely the alleged shortcomings that make photography a valuable method in a new approach to things and ruins.

Souvent dépeintes comme le terreau du populisme, les villes en déclin sont également des espaces d'expérimentation d'alternatives au néolibéralisme. Dans ces villes, les politiques de développement renouvellent l'action publique en rompant avec le dogme de la croissance.