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- 2020 (3) (remove)
Smart Cities and Mobility Stations: Lessons learned from the Smarter Together in Vienna and Munich
(2020)
With an increasing urban population and urban problems arising from this unplanned growth, several projects aimed at promoting sustainable urban development have emerged. Smart mobility strategies, such as shared mobility and mobility stations, represent some of the solutions to promote changes in travel behavior. Despite its beneficial impacts, however, the implementation of such infrastructure is criticized for not contributing to current urban issues, as well as often disregarding knowledge about urban space and its functioning.
In this context, the Smarter Together, a joint research and innovation project funded through the European Union program H2020, was implemented. The project selected three lighthouse cities to test and upscale innovative solutions: Vienna, Munich, and Lyon.
This master thesis presents the main characteristics of the mobility stations systems implemented in Vienna and Munich in the scope of the project Smarter Together. Its main goal is to share what can be learned from their experiences while approaching critically the concept of smart cities. This master thesis identifies important aspects to take into account when planning, implementing, and operating mobility stations, and provides an understanding of smart cities and smart mobility that goes beyond the adoption of technology. Several methods were combined for the development of this master thesis, such as quantitative secondary data, observational studies, application of survey forms, explorative expert interviews, and literature review.
This work has demonstrated that the Smarter Together has a cutting-edge scope and contributed greatly to research and innovation, by creating living laboratories to test the application of technology in the urban environment. However, from the perspective of the mobility stations assessment, many caveats were made. In short, many lessons could be learned and are presented throughout this work aiming at contributing to the improvement of the mobility stations implemented in the project areas in Munich and Vienna, as well as for inspiring other cities in Europe and worldwide.
Space is a social product and a social producer. The main aim of this thesis is to reveal ‘the process of totalitarian city making in Pyongyang’, especially in the light of the interaction between the power and urban space.
The totalitarian city of Pyongyang was born out of modernization in the process of masses formation. During the growth of colonial capitalism and Christian liberal ideas, Pyongyang was modernized and displayed the characteristics of a modern city with industrialization and urbanization. During the introduction of Japanese colonial capitalism, peasants, women, and slaves became the first masses and urban poor, and they later transformed into the mob; their violence was finally demonstrated during the Anti-Chinese Riot.
After the 1945 independence, Kim’s regime formed the one-party state with a cry for revolution. They produced an atmosphere of imminent war to instill fear and hatred into the psyche of Pyongyang citizens. The regime eliminated all political opponents in 1967 and finally declared the totalitarian ideology in 1974. During this process, Pyongyang demonstrated two main characteristics of a totalitarian city: the space of terror and of ideology. The space of terror produces the fear of death and the space of ideology controls the thought and life of citizens.
After entry to the market, to keep Kim’s controlling power, the regime used the strategy of location exchange. The camp, market, and Foreign Currency Shop were effective tools to prepare for executives’ gifts. However, the market also produces the desire not only for consumption but also for freedom and truth; it is tearing down the foundation of the totalitarian city of Pyongyang.
This research focuses primarily on the interaction between political power and urban space. In the process of making a totalitarian city, the power produced urban space and it influenced the psyche of Pyongyang citizens. Even though this spatial transition has created the totalitarian city and helped maintain political power, it also led and produced intended or unintended social variation in Pyongyang society.
This thesis explores how cultural heritage plays a role in the development of urban identity by engaging both actively and passively with memory, i.e. remembering and forgetting. I argue that architectural heritage is a medium where specific cultural and social decisions form its way of presentation, and it reflects the values and interests of the period. By the process of remembering and forgetting, the meanings between inhabitant and object in urban environment are practiced, and the meanings are created.
To enable the research in narrative observation, cultural tourism management is chosen as the main research object, which reflects the alteration of interaction between the architectural heritage and urban identity. Identifying the role of heritage management, the definition of social resilience and the prospects of cultural heritage as a means of social resilience are addressed. Case region of the research is East Ger- many, thereby, the study examines the distinct approaches and objectives regarding heritage management under the different political systems along the German reunification process.
The framework is based on various theoretical paradigms to investigate the broad research questions: 1) What is the role of historic urban quarters in the revitalisation of East German towns? 2) How was the transition processed by cultural heritage management? 3) How did policy affect residents’ lives?
The case study is applied to macro level (city level: Gotha and Eisenach) and micro level study (object level: specific heritage sites), to analyse the performance of selective remembering and making tourist destination through giving significance to specific heritage. By means of site observations, archival research, qualitative inter- views, photographs, and discourse analysis on printed tourism materials, the study demonstrates that certain sites and characteristics of the city enable creating and focusing messages, which aids the social resilience.
Combining theory and empirical studies this thesis attempts to widen the academic discussion regarding the practice of remembering and forgetting driven by cultural heritage. The thesis argues for cultural heritage tourism as an element of social resilience and one that embraces the historic and cultural identity of the inhabitants.