The cities we live in today are the aggregate of distinctive spaces where everyday interaction among people is limited between homogenous areas. This paper is a brief research on the ‘in-between’ areas of these bounded distinctive spaces, the concept of urban borders and the idea of edge conditions in contemporary cities. The paper will focus mainly on a traditional border in port cities, the waterfront. In the last part I will examine Thessaloniki’s latest waterfront intervention, ‘Nea Paralia’ as an illustration of a conventional edge condition and argue if the recent redevelopment addressed the issue of the edge by integrating the waterfront into the urban fabric.
Definition of Borders
Borders are multidimensional entities in urban space. In contemporary cities, borders are not only a spatial feature but also a functional, social, economic and political characteristic as well. Borders are phenomena with great complexity, a transition space, performing in different scales, layers and networks.
One of the most challenging aspects of borders in terms of urbanism is their ambiguity as they can function either by separating or by linking urban areas. They create edges in urban space which, as R. Sennett points out, they can be either manifested as borders or boundaries (R. Sennett, 2010). Sennett argues that borders are interactive zones in urban context, permeable and porous and can be seen as living edges which make exchange possible between social and economic groups. On the other hand, he claims that boundaries are limits, static territories in cities, where exchange is diminished, isolation is promoted and which tend to become dead edges (Sennett, 2010).
Even though borders provide structure and identity to the cit...
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...Castro, R. (2001) Ανάπλαση της νέας παραλίας Θεσσαλονίκης, διαγωνισμός για τη σύνταξη προκαταρκτικής μελέτης, Θεσσαλονίκη
Rogers R., Power A. (2000) Cities for a small country Faber and Faber limited.
Sennett, R. (2010) Boundaries and Borders In: Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic Living in the endless city Phaidon p.324-331
Sortikos, G. (1997), Project Manager of the Organization ‘Thessaloniki Cultural Capital of Greece ‘97’, Εξέλιξη και διάρθρωση της πόλης, από το τεύχος προκήρυξης του διεθνή διαγωνισμού για την "Ανάδειξη του θαλάσσιου Μετώπου της Θεσσαλονίκης», p.29
The European Magazine and London Review, (1802) Vol:42 p.206
Kostopoulou S. (2013) ‘On the Revitalized Waterfront: Creative Milieu for Creative Tourism’, part of the issue Cities Waterfront Infrastructure
www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability website accessed on December 15th, 2013
Kennedy, John W. "Cuba’s next revolution: how Christians are reshaping Castro’s Communist stronghold." Christianity Today. 42.1 (1998): 18-33.
Winston Churchill once said “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” (Churchill). When he said this he was coining a term that would be used in history books decades later. He was of course referring to the complete separation of one major city into two smaller separately governed cities by the Berlin Wall. In China Mieville's novel, The City and The City, we see a similar situation in which the two fictional and completely opposite cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma are separated by a wall. Not a physical wall but an ideological wall; one that is so ingrained into the existence of the cities themselves that it might as well be physical made of brick and mortar. I believe that Mieville is using these two cities and the wall between them as a symbol for the Cold War and the chaos created by the Berlin Wall.
White, Robert E. 2013. "After Chávez, a Chance to Rethink Relations With Cuba". The New
This essay has detailed several examples of how social order is made and remade on City Road and the everyday challenges that social order faces. Firstly, it begins with identifying how social order is challenged and how people perceive social order and moves on to look at both formal and informal ways of making and remaking social order. The essay concludes by identifying the expectations of how people should behave and the consequences when disorder occurs, continuing the making and remaking of
―"Religious Repression in Cuba / Juan Clark, Ph.D. - Cuba News / Noticias - CubaNet News."
The creation of borders and boundaries has been around since the beginning of civilization. The division of property and possessions among individuals establishes a sense of self-worth. The erection of fences and walls keeps property separate. Walls also serve as a means of separating worlds. Modern society demands the creation, and maintenance of these boundaries. In his poems, “The Tuft of Flowers,'; and “Mending Wall,'; Robert Frost explores the role that walls play in our lives. He examines how the lives of men are both separated, and drawn together by walls.
Overall Thomas King’s “Borders” is a great story and every must read it. The author successfully sends an important message through the protagonist’s character that our identity, our culture, our traditions comes above all and we should back it no matter what. King auspiciously wrote the story by giving the readers a refreshing yet fruitful time to spend on reading this great story “Borders” through the innocent eyes of the young
Borders are an important part of any nation. They allow nations to govern and enforce laws
It has been given due priority in urban design and planning for promoting social cohesion as a constituent concept of the sense of belonging and community values through ethnic mixing to deal with challenges of multiculturalism in the West especially in England and Canada. The limitation of social cohesion to deal with multicultural challenges has led to contemporary planning imaginations that emphasize the meaningful engagements among different cultures. In the multicultural context, although contemporary planning imaginations do not directly refer to the role of public space at the level of local living per se, it nevertheless consider the significance of socio-physical setting public space provides for 'meaningful intercultural interactions' (Sennet, 1994), ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’ (Donald, 1999) and, as settings for ‘active civic engagements with clearly defined goal’ (Sandercock 2003). Trying to deal with the problematic of contested nature of public space in multicultural context, these imaginations in a way argue for the active civil engagements in public space through broad social participation with clearly defined goal for promoting social and civic solidarity by maintaining the meaningful distance or unassimilated otherness to live together
The concept of place, home and community is a transnational and trans-community concept. Human places have just recently been given political boundaries. Previously, human boundaries were determined the same way that animal, plant, and ecosystem boundaries were defined. They were defined by ecology and they were defined by geography of region and hemisphere.
...ity in Classical Athens. New York, NY: Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation (USA) in Collaboration with the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, 2008. Print.
Again, this section will give a working definition of the “urban question’. To fully compare the political economy and ecological perspectives a description of the “urban question” allows the reader to better understand the divergent schools of thought. For Social Science scholars, from a variety of disciplines, the “urban question” asks how space and the urban or city are related (The City Reader, 2009). The perspective that guides the ecological and the social spatial-dialect schools of thought asks the “urban question” in separate distinct terminology. Respected scholars from the ecological mode of thinking, like Burgess, Wirth and others view society and space from the rationale that geographical scope determines society (The City Reader, 2009). The “urban question” that results from the ecological paradigm sees the relationship between the city (space) as influencing the behaviors of individuals or society in the city. On the other hand...
Chaffey, J. (1994). The challenge of urbanisation. In M. Naish & S. Warn (Eds.), Core geography (pp. 138-146). London: Longman.
Introduction One of the mainly electrifying essentials of contemporary times is the urbanisation of the globe. For sociological reasons, a city is a relatively great, crowded and lasting community of diverse individuals. In metropolitan areas, urban sociology is the sociological research of life, human interaction and their role in the growth of society. Modern urban sociology is created from the work of sociologists such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel who put forward the economic, social and intellectual development of urbanisation and its consequences. The aim of this essay is to explain what life is like in the ‘big metropolis’, both objectively and subjectively.
Sociologist … explained that open pattern of suburb is because of seeking environment free noise, dirt and overcrowding that are in the centre of cities. He gave examples of these cities as St. John’s wood, Richmond, Hampstead in London. Chestnut Hill and Germantown in Philadelphia. He added that suburban are only for the rich and high class. This plays into the hands of the critical perspectives that, “Cities are not so much the product of a quasi-natural “ecological” unfolding of social differentiation and succession, but of a dynamic of capital investment and disinvestment. City space is acted on primarily as a commodity that is bought and sold for profit, “(Little & McGivern, 2013, p.616).