Review: Jean-Paul Bled, Franz Ferdinand: Der eigensinnige Thronfolger
Review by: John Deak
The Journal of Modern History, Volume 87, Issue 2, Page 488-490, June 2015.
Archiv für Juni 2015
Building sustainable cities: tools for developing new building practices?
Urban professionals have a widespread interest in sustainable cities and the use of assessment tools to monitor performance. Much of the research on such assessment tools focuses on gauging their differences and similarities. Scholars give insufficient attention to what the tools ‘do’ to those who use them and to how this affects building practices. Drawing on insights from actor-network theory and an empirical study of two Danish urban development competitions in which design teams were required to use a sustainability assessment tool, the analysis shows how this artefact mediated interaction among different professionals and initiated iterative, dialogical processes that affected building practices. The analysis emphasizes a number of aspects that the construction and urban development literature often overlook: such tools can facilitate and mediate knowledge creation and flow, but the entanglement of relationships, the assemblages, in which the designers are situated conditions the outcome.
Tracking the global urbanists
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fglob.12084
Transnational building practices: knowledge mobility and the inescapable market
Architecture and urban planning have always been subject to, and affected by, processes of transnational cultural exchange and professional networking. Yet, the modes and geographies of knowledge mobility in urban development have matured in the last two decades, with various forces resulting in forms of transnational learning that are faster, more frequent and have more impact. The articles in this special issue provide an important contribution to understanding this maturation, and highlight the particular ways in which knowledge and practice relating to building design move from place to place. In this introductory article, we develop an analysis of how transnational building practices come to be. We highlight the way that transnational building practices can both deepen our knowledge of the constitution of knowledge mobility, and exemplify the profound tensions that result from the clash between the structuring logic of international markets and the need to adapt global ideas to local contexts. Thus, in addition to de-naturalizing mobility and teasing out how movement is manufactured, we draw attention to the way that the inescapable relationships between buildings and markets determine the trajectories and effects of transnational knowledge networks. This opening up of the political economy of mobility, we believe, is one of the most pertinent issues in relation to considerations of mobility more broadly.
Circulating knowledge, marketization and norm-making: international developers and construction firms in Eastern Europe since 2000
In this article, I explore how international actors in the development of real estate projects affect building practices in local markets. The focus is on the dynamics of interaction and exchange of knowledge between the disciplines of architecture and construction. Using the German ECE group and its expansion in the region as a case study, I look at shopping centre development in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) over the past two decades. I seek to show that the implementation of globally circulated design and planning solutions relies heavily on the particular construction practices and technologies available in a local market. I also argue that the role of marketization in diffusing building practices in the construction sector is as powerful as the work of global architects. Nonetheless, judging from the existing links and feedback between architectural practices and the construction industry, there is a definite need for further research to bridge the gap between analysis of knowledge mobility within the field of urban studies on the one hand and construction studies research on the other.
Communities of practice and transnational standards: changing building practices in Warsaw’s commercial property sector
In 1989, Warsaw’s office market became part of the global property market with a growing transparency. This process of integration is attributable to an increasing level of professionalism of its agents. Our main interest here is in the introduction of international design and building norms. We argue that, in the interplay between global and local property professionals, new institutional arrangements emerge that lead to the establishment of international norms and standards. Moreover, because they reduce information asymmetries on a global scale, these international property consultants, whom we can regard as ‘market-making intermediaries’, are key actors in the creation of these new institutional arrangements. Property consultants, as part of global communities of practice (CoPs), are at the core of establishing a joint understanding of requirements in real estate practice. Regular communication with one another about the challenges, norms, specifications and demands in the professional management of office property helps to develop shared practices.
Sustainable urbanism in the age of Photoshop: images, experiences and the role of learning through inhabiting the international travels of a planning model
Learning is one of the critical processes in enabling the international mobility of urban planning and policy ideas. A particularly effective form of learning in this context is an immersive, sensory approach we can describe as ‘inhabiting’. This article illustrates the role that inhabiting plays in facilitating the mobility of the planning model of sustainable urbanism. To do so, it draws on research carried out in the industry of international private sector architects, planners and engineering consultants, sometimes called the Global Intelligence Corps (GIC). In the article, I illustrate how the GIC use inhabiting, drawing on visual media and personal experience to encourage their clients to incorporate sustainable urban planning and design proposals into large urban development projects. These explorations demonstrate the value of research methodologies that focus on the everyday practices and social interactions through which people mobilize ideas.
Local variants of mobile sustainable building assessment models: the marketization and constrained mutation of BREEAM ES
The globalization of sustainable building assessment models is now a familiar topic, as are related debates about the degrees of local sensitivity of such models. The contribution of this article is to examine empirically the way marketization affects the mutation of models as they travel, and the implications of this for local sensitivity. By marketization, we mean the effects when both a market for models emerges, and the adoption of a model acts as a means for an organization or city to gain competitive advantage over rivals. Using the case of one sustainable building assessment model, the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Model (BREEAM), and its movement from the UK to Spain and transformation into BREEAM ES, the article reveals the important ways that marketization can constrain mutation. Using Callon’s ideas about translation, we show that the model was translated in a way designed to minimize adaptations to local context in order to maximize the comparability of buildings assessed using BREEAM ES with buildings assessed using other variants of the BREEAM model. This suggests, we claim, that marketization is a significant reason for the outcomes of the mobility of BREEAM being the opposite of that observed in many previous studies where a model’s name stays the same but its content and the practice of implementation varies.
Los Angeles Pentecostals: The Dislocation of a People and the Birth of a Movement
By examining the geographical, economic, religious, and social changes experienced by those who became Pentecostals, and by comparing the religious and cultural backgrounds of native and migrant Angelinos in the 1920s and 1930s with the Pentecostal me…
The limits of empire: European imperial formations in early modern world history. Essays in honour of Geoffrey Parker
10.1080/13507486.2015.1034990<br/>Jesus Bohorquez