74 Geographie, Raumordnung, Städtebau
Refine
Document Type
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
- Master's Thesis (1)
Institute
Keywords
- Kulturerbe (1)
- Urbanistik (1)
- aesthetics (1)
- art (1)
- culture (1)
- heritage (1)
- incompiuto siciliano (1)
- incompletion (1)
- modern ruins (1)
- perceptual sound localization (1)
Year of publication
- 2017 (3) (remove)
This research addresses the discourse of tourism as a tool for place-making of urban destination. Relevant to the study of place-making is the analysis of the commoditization and localization process dependent upon the appropriation of urban landscape and local cultures. In the research, localization is interpreted as the act of determining the attributes of locality, while commoditization is defined as the process by which local attributes that have commercial potential end up in becoming tourism commodity. Following this, the commoditization of intrinsic cultural value is disseminated within a branding strategy and intervention reflecting social and political relations. Therefore, the research suggests that tourism place-making has not only been constructed through the top-down regulatory body, but has been also generated through the attributes of its locality. By utilizing the critical and constructivist paradigm, the research depicts the conditions of the localization and commoditization process in establishing the base line of its realization within the symbolic economy. Thus, a qualitative case study approach was adopted. The study area of this dissertation is Palembang, as one of the capital cities in Indonesia advancing in its overall urban development. To investigate urban tourism as a tool for development strategy, it is useful to investigate the role of tourism which embodies (1) spatial transformation; how tourism gives significant impacts on urban form, and (2) the socio-cultural aspect; how neighbourhood is related to tourism industry. The findings suggest that tourism place-making involves the reciprocity of urban dynamics: cities take on tourism as a reference model of development, and tourist areas adopt the proliferation of cultural lifestyle to meet the industry’s demands.
Since the end of the 1950s, Italy has focused part of its modernization on the erection of public works. Due to corruption, mafia, and further malpractice, this form of development has occasionally failed, producing a high number of constructions that have remained unfinished for decades. In 2007, the group of artists Alterazioni Video constructed an informal survey in the form of an on-line tool open to public contributions, which revealed that there are 395 unfinished public works in Italy from which 156, approximately 39.5%, are located in Sicily alone. In view of such a statistic, Alterazioni Video opted to coin the term ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ – literally ‘Sicilian Incompletion’ – to refer to unfinished public works as a formal architectural style. This re-interpretation, which aims to convey the recovered dignity of these ‘modern ruins’, considers unfinished public works a type of heritage with the potential to represent the entirety of Italian society. Furthermore, it goes as far as to say an unfinished public work is ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ despite being located in another of the Italian regions.
This doctoral dissertation embraces the artists’ argument to develop a complete study of Incompiuto Siciliano by embedding this architectural style/artistic project within the main debates on modern ruins at present. This is important because it is expected to contribute to the revalorization and eventual recommissioning of unfinished sites by validating Incompiuto Siciliano in the realm of academia. Furthermore, this work aspires to be a worthwhile source of information for future investigations dealing with cultural interpretations of incompletion in any other context – a not unreasonable goal considering how unfinished works are one of the key urban topics after the 2008 financial crisis. Hence, this doctoral dissertation uses Incompiuto Siciliano to discuss a different perspective in each of the five chapters and, though these can be read as independent contributions, the objective is that all chapters read together, form a clear, concise, continuous unit. And so it must be said this is not a dissertation about unfinished public works in Italy; this is a dissertation about Incompiuto Siciliano as an artistic response to unfinished public works in Italy – which clearly requires an interdisciplinary analysis involving Urban Studies, Cultural Geography, Contemporary Archaeology, Critical Heritage and Visual Arts.
INTRODUCTION
The research field of sound landscape and public life, initially drew my attention during the master class of ‘Media of the Urban’, originally ‘Medien des Urbanen, which was given by Prof. Dr. Gabriele Schabacher in the 2015 summer semester. For the relevant class, I conducted an conceptual case study in Istanbul, Beyoglu District, with the intention of analysing the perception of the space by urban sound. During the summer 2015 I recorded various sounds of different spatial settings and developed the analysis by comparing the situations. By that time, I realized the inherent property of the sound as a medium for our perception in urban context.
In the 2015-2016 winter semester, I participated in the master class of the architectural project, named ‘Build Allegory’, which was given by Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Heike Büttner. The project was situated in Berlin Westkreuz, AVUS north curve, on the highway and was originally a race track from 1921. In this context, the aim of my project was to answer various questions, main of which was, how does the architectural form shape the sound of the place? And, how does the sound of the place shape the architectural from? Since the place is still serving mainly to the vehicles, although the function has differed, the sound objects and the context have remained. Through the existence of contextual references, I started with creating a computational tool for analysing the acoustic characteristics of this urban setting, which is fundamentally providing results as the sound cloud, driven from the sound ray tracing method. Regarding to this soundscape analysis method, which I developed, this computational tool assisted me to find an optimum reciprocal relation between architecture and sound.
Since I have been working on soundscape in the context of architecture, urban situations, public life and public space, I was determined to produce a comprehensive research in this field and propound the hypothesis; the existence of the reciprocity between the social behaviours in public space and the sound landscape. In which extent does this reciprocity exist? What are the effects of the public life on the sonic configurations of the space and the other way around?