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Winners: Sophie Leemans, Erik Van Daele, Maarten Gheysen
Year: 2023
Institution: KU Leuven
Title: Mapping the lifelines: how the design of infrastructure networks impacts on transformation in dispersed territories
Format: Journal Article
Abstract
Besides compact cities, Western Europe is characterised by low-density dispersion, resulting in a landscape with elements of both city and land. These dispersed territories offer an alternative to a traditional urban–rural dichotomy framework and have been put forward as twenty-first-century cities. However, these territories are currently facing urgent and complex socio-economic and ecological challenges. One such territory is the Eurometropolis Lille–Kortrijk–Tournai, a transnational region on the border of Belgium and France. The hypothesis is that the evolution of the Eurometropolis territory is closely intertwined with its infrastructure networks. The structure of this article is threefold. First, it describes the non-binary condition in which the Eurometropolis is situated. Second, it analyses the evolution of infrastructure networks in the Eurometropolis from the late eighteenth century to today through case studies. Third, it highlights the potential future role of infrastructure networks in providing answers to large-scale challenges. The research presented in this article demonstrates that transformation in dispersed territories is closely related to the evolution of their infrastructure networks. Moreover, infrastructure – such as waterways, railways and roads – has enabled an urban condition without urban form in the Eurometropolis dispersed territories. In the light of these findings, the article shows that the inherent nature of dispersed territories can be influenced by rethinking these infrastructures to proactively address the collective challenges at stake.
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Winner: Alison B. Snyder
Year: 2022
Institution: Pratt Institute New York
Title: The designed and the ad hoc: dynamic remakings of street space in New York City
Format: Journal Article
Abstract
Most people in the United States began to alter their decisions and actions beginning in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, when the closures and ‘pause’ on most work were established. Studying the transforming urban conditions in New York City specifically presents a lens through which to understand how we quickly adapted to new spatial conditions as measures were put in place for keeping people healthy and encouraging businesses to stay open and approachable. Immediately, the need for social distancing asked us to consider how to navigate exposure as we moved beyond the home. Necessities for businesses to survive became a priority for the city and coalesced with people’s desire for seeking ways to do things outdoors. A focus on using city streets as urban public spaces resulted. Policies such as Open Restaurants and Open Streets were developed by the Department of Transportation to mitigate pandemic circumstances and to stir dynamic and optimistic possibilities for street use. Open Restaurants called for food/drink establishments to quickly reimagine their adjacent pavement or available street space. Open Streets initiated new ways for creating pedestrian zones in previously trafficked areas. This article highlights fieldwork documentation comparing a Cluster and Line of food/drink establishments with a newly pedestrian Avenue, in connected Brooklyn neighbourhoods. Diagrams, photographs and maps document the ingenious street constructions and the observed and felt psychological or phenomenal transformations taking place. An urban interiorism grew out of the imposed formalisation of rules for movement patterns and compact constructions, while the ad hoc or serendipitous conditions allowed for other intimate conditions. Notions of ‘village cafés’ or ‘urban beaches’ evolved through myriad forms and materials inviting unusual seating configurations and interactions. Speculations on what these internal/external spatial experiences, changing identities and continued urban freedoms are teaching us are also explored through a multidisciplinary set of voices.
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Winner: Dr. Uli Linke
Year: 2021
Institution: Rochester Institute of Technology
Title: The optics of dispossession: urban precarity as political art
Format: Journal Article
Abstract
How are conditions of urban dispossession sustained and perpetuated by the way peoples on the margins of the world economy are imagined and brought to public visibility? With a focus on the works of European artists, this article explores the image-making projects whereby ghettos, shanty communities and favelas are represented as iconic lifeworlds of the poor. Competing representations of urban poverty are manufactured for public attention by aesthetic, symbolic and affective means, ranging from a romance of despair or humanitarian compassion to a nostalgic longing for premodern signs of a deprived but simpler life. In contrast to the racialised human form, which is central to iconographies of the North American Black ghetto, the shanty-town inhabitants and city builders of the Global South are typically rendered visually absent: a tropology of people’s disempowerment and dispossession. Although often encoded by a critique of intensifying inequalities, the globalised traffic in urban poverty-art relies on an image-making process that is grounded in a detachment from social life. The representations of urban dispossession tend to produce a repertoire of free-floating emblems and signs that can be variously deployed, assembled, appropriated and discarded. Such visual templates are globally consumed as works of art that can alter urban imaginaries, encourage tourism and local economic development as much as neoliberal subjectification. After analysing a range of such artistic endeavours, this article concludes by focusing attention on how an image-maker’s commitment to humanising optics of urban dispossession can transform non-representational art to become a practice of truth.
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Winner: Dr. Allan W. Shearer
Year: 2020
Institution: University of Austin, Texas
Title: Roleplaying to Improve Resilience
Format: Journal Article
Abstract
This article presents an approach to improve urban resilience by examining crisis dynamics through a role-playing game. The set of exploratory exercises extend the Archaria 2035 scenario and geographic information system model, which was developed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to advance concepts that support military operations. Participants (graduate students) worked in teams to identify and map critical relationships related to health, safety and welfare through a modified version of the Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, Information (PMESII) framework. Next, each participant was given a one-page stakeholder profile that specified motives, kinds and degrees of influence, and connections to other stakeholders. This information was used to create maps that showed how each character understood the city. Crisis event details were revealed a day-and-a-half before the game. NATO staff contributed to the event by presenting courses of action to restore security and order. Participants gave opinions on how their characters might act during the event and react to the proposed military operations. Conversations created temporary collaborations among some stakeholders but also conflicts among others that could create additional problems. A post-game assignment asked participants to write memos on specific policies and plans that would reduce vulnerability to the crisis. As a matter of pedagogy, results the demonstrate the value of role-playing to consider multiple perspectives and second- and third-order effects of a crisis. Specifically, connecting gameplay conversations and results back to initial ideas about health, safety and welfare contributed to reconsiderations of assumptions about contingent relationships.
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Winner: Dr. Todd Levon Brown
Year: 2019
Institution: City University New York
Title: Racialized Architectural Space: A Critical Understanding of its Production, Perception and Evaluation
Format: Journal Article
Abstract
Academic inquiry into the concept of space as racialized can be traced back to at least as far as the turn of the twentieth century with sociologist W. E. B. Dubois’ promulgation of the “color-line” theory. More recently, numerous postmodern scholars from a variety of fields have elucidated the various ways in which physical space (i.e., the built environment), as a social product, embodies racialized ideologies exhibited and reproduced by segregation, economics and other social practices. The dialogue on race and space has primarily been limited to the urban scales of city, neighborhood, community and street. Socio-spatial research that centers around race rarely addresses this phenomenon at the scale of architecture – the individual building or a particular development. Such a failure to critically examine the role of the architectural product in the creation and reproduction of socio-spatial and socio-racial inequality yields the field of architectural practice exempt and blameless in its tangible contribution to the psychosocial and geospatial marginalization of communities of color, as in, for example, the case of gentrification. This paper attempts to illustrate the fact that architecture, like all of the built physical environment, is not ahistorical, apolitical – and certainly not race neutral – but, as a social product, is also understood clearly within these contexts, and its psychological and social impacts and outcomes must be examined with a racially critical lens, particularly in heterogeneous urban communities.
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Winners: Dr. Michael Saker & Dr. Jordan Frith
Year: 2018
Institutions: City, University of London & University of North Texas
Title: Locative Media and Sociability: Using Location-Based Social Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life
Format: Journal Article
Abstract
Foursquare was a mobile social networking application that enabled people to share location with friends in the form of “check-ins.” The visualization of surrounding known social connections as well as unknown others has the potential to impact how people coordinate social encounters and forge new social ties. While many studies have explored mobile phones and sociability, there is a lack of empirical research examining location-based social network’s (LSBNs) from a sociability perspective. Drawing on a dataset of original qualitative research with a range of Foursquare users, the paper examines the application in the context of social coordination and sociability in three ways. First, the paper explores if Foursquare is used to organize certain social encounters, and if so, why. Second, the paper examines the visualization of surrounding social connections and whether this leads to “serendipitous encounters.” Lastly, the paper examines whether the use of Foursquare can produce new social relationships.
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Acknowledgement:
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AMPS would like to thank and acknowledge the work and insights offered by its academic peer reviewers and awards committee in the selection process for this award.
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