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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.

The article presents preliminary results and qualitative analysis obtained from the doctoral research provisory entitled “How do Brazilian ‘battlers’ reside?”, which is in progress at the Institute for European Urban Studies, Bauhaus Univer-sity Weimar. It critically discusses the contradictions of the production of residences in Brazil made by an emerging so-cial group, lately called the Brazilian new middle class. For the last ten years, a number of government policies have provoked a general improvement of the purchasing power of the poor. Between those who completely depend on the government to survive and the upper middle class, there is a wide (about 100 million people) and economically stable lower middle group, which has found its own ways of dealing with its demand for housing. The conventional models of planning, building and buying are not suitable for their technical, financial and personal needs. Therefore, they are con-currently planners, constructors and residents, building and renovating their own properties themselves, but still with very limited education and technical knowledge and restricted access to good building materials and constructive ele-ments, formal technicians, architects or engineers. On the one hand, the result is an informal and more or less autono-mous self-production, with all sorts of technical problems and very interesting and creative spatial solutions to every-day domestic situations. On the other hand, the repercussions for urban space are questionable: although basic infrastructure conditions have improved, building densities are high and green areas are few. Lower middle class neigh-bourhoods present a restricted collective everyday life. They look like storage spaces for manpower; people who live to work in order to be able to consume—and build—what they could not before. One question is, to what extent the lat-est economic rise of Brazil has really resulted in social development for lower middle income families in the private sphere regarding their residences, and in the collective sphere, regarding the neighbourhoods they inhabit and the ur-ban space in general.

Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit den Auswirkungen des Baus von neuen Stadtautobahnen in Santiago de Chile. Ziel der Studie ist, die Veränderungen im Segregationsmuster der Hauptstadt Chiles, die durch den Bau dieser Autobahnen entstanden sind, zu beschreiben. Die Arbeit betrachtet die Entstehung von Segregationsmustern als kulturell-historisches Phänomen urbaner Bedeutung, weswegen die Entwicklung der Stadt Santiago und deren Segregationsmuster nicht nur aus der Perspektive der Stadtsoziologie und der Stadtgeographie, sondern auch aus einer historischen Perspektive analysiert wird. Dabei liegt der Schwerpunkt der Arbeit auf der Wechselbeziehung zwischen Verkehrsinfrastruktur und sozial-räumlicher Verteilung der verschiedenen sozialen Gruppen. Die Entstehung der neuen Stadtautobahnen in Santiago de Chile lässt sich nur durch eine mehrdimensionale Betrachtung erklären. Diese Bauten und die besondere Art in der sie gebaut und betrieben werden, konnten nur durch die Einführung von Konzessionsmechanismen innerhalb einer neoliberalen Markwirtschaft entstehen. In diesem sozial-ökonomischer Rahmen, bei dem die Bürger lediglich als potenzielle Kunden betrachtet werden, sind die Infrastrukturbauten – darunter auch die Stadtautobahnen – maßgeschneiderte Produkte für eine Minderheit. Dieses Konzept hat gravierende Folgen für das Sozialgefüge der Stadt Santiago. Die Folgen der Einführung der Stadtautobahnen auf das Segregationsmuster und das Sozialgefüge der Hauptstadt Chiles werden anhand zweier Fallstudien veranschaulicht. Mittels einer mehrschichtigen qualitativen Methodik werden die Auswirkungen des Baus von Stadtautobahnen im Armenviertel »Santo Tomás« des südlichen Stadtbezirk »La Pintana« und im elitären »Condominio La Reserva« im nördlichen Ausdehnungsgebiet »Chacabuco« analysiert. Anschließend wird ein neues Beschreibungsmodell für die lateinamerikanische Stadt vorgeschlagen; das »symbiotische Stadtmodell« stützt sich zum größten Teil auf den Ausbau des Autobahnnetzes.

As human thought was developing, likewise, the technology used for illumination was growing. But a haul through history, reviewing its pages and analyzing it, inherently brings up old and new question, like: Is it possible to alter negatively the image of historic buildings and monuments through inadequate lighting to the degree of distorting the perception that people have of the work? and if so, what are the causes that generate it? Do the light designers take into consideration criteria to protect not only historic buildings and monuments, but also the environment? What are the consequences that may generate the inadequate lighting of urban heritage to the environment? What are the factors to consider for a proper illumination of urban heritage? The answers to these questions will help lay the foundation for proper illumination of the urban heritage, avoiding at the maximum the light pollution and the effects that it generates, seeking a balance and harmonious reconciliation between the technology, urban heritage and environment, taking as a framework and the case study the urban heritage of a city from the colonial era in southern Mexico, with pre-Hispanic roots and where today you can still see through its streets and buildings an atmosphere of mysticism reflection of their folklore and traditions, this city is known as Chiapa de Corzo, Chiapas.

This is a work concerned with the increasing processes of social exclusion in cities nowadays. In approaching this phenomenon, the research highlights how people interact with their institutional environments. This is also, perhaps centrally, an investigation into the possibility to engage an individual perspective to understand the transformation in urban experience, which is orienting society to new uses and forms of exclusion. Following the perspective deployed by the so-called “sociology of individuals” in French sociology or “reengagement of agency” in the Anglo-Saxon world; I claim that individuals as well as collectives are gaining increasing power to question and re-organize institutions. This re-organization, in the case of socio-urban institutions, is no guarantee for major levels in integration, cohesion, and equality. Unfortunately, social institutions are becoming hard in its exclusionary capabilities under people intervention during the last four decades. I believe that urban sociology is a field of struggle between different perspectives competing to “make sense” of social phenomena in cities. The orientation supported in this research is just one on many and it follows the roots of people and their life experiences within cities and how they influence the processes that shape the city. The last formulation is possibly not the clearest, because as we all know, references to “inhabitants” are presented in every variant of urban sociology. Nevertheless, there are not many variants focusing on peoples’ capability to influence institutional environments and by this way affecting the urban condition in which they find themselves. The particular institution selected for this study is the “School”. This thesis is organized around two parts: part one includes the conceptual framework, methodological approach, and historical contextualization; part two describes three case studies produced to analyse the forms of and the relations between individuals and school institution. Part one starts from a premise: within the context of declining welfare State in the case of industrialized countries, an important part of urban studies focuses on economic and spatial restructuration. Confronted with the same situation, a part of social sciences shifts to the individuals’ agency and social uncertainty. This research is embedded in the last theoretical description presented above, thus, because it tries to observe urban processes from the perspective of the individual and outside of developed economies. In this sense, Latin America represents a fundamental reference because urban conditions are historically marked by weak institutional arrangements to integrating people and large levels of marginality and exclusion among population. In this scenario individuals’ practices around inclusion-exclusion have an essential meaning in everyday life. Part two offers three study cases in which the relation between individuals and school institutions has been analyzed for the Metropolitan area of Santiago de Chile (MAS). Using different methodological resources an exhaustive account on three levels is presented: i) geo-referencing State intervention in public policies connected with neighborhood and schools to understand the form and extent of socio-urban exclusion in MAS, ii) narrative biographies applied to parents with children attending primary school, in order to reconstruct the familiar process of school selection and describing its impacts on the stabilization of school as an exclusionary device, and iii) autoethnography to describe in detail the temporal dimension involved in stabilizing actions which reinforces social mechanisms of urban integration-exclusion during the last three decades in Chile. A key argument advanced by this research proposes that: the way in which the idea of integration is enacted by people in their biographical careers imprints changes on the institutional orientation and by this way, contributes to the reorganization urban life. The high level of social exclusion in Santiago de Chile is not accountable without considering transformation in all socio-urban institutions, especially the school. No family considers social integration with people from a low social, economical or cultural background as relevant orientation for school selection. This particularity of the Chilean social reality is not derivable from any big capitalistic or modernization processes impacting our cities. Within the light of the thesis findings, I conclude that socio-urban institutions logics must be reassessment under the influences of people actions and representations. I also propose a consideration to major complementarities between urban studies and urban-institutions analysis. The school institutions is not just a sectorial field reserved to the researcher in education, on the contrary, it represent a key entrance to address people’s experience in their institutional urban environments. The re-emergence of social and urban movements in 2010, under the “Arab Spring” or the “Chilean Student Movements”, is not only a demonstration in the public space as result of major global trends. These situations are in essence, for this research, individuals gathering together and calling for recognition and autonomy inside institutional environment that tends to reject them. Similar situation was the focus of the Latin American urban sociology research, within the focus on grassroots and urban social movements at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. In both cases, socio-urban institutions, unaware of recognition requirements claimed by inhabitants, are not beyond individual or collective reach. My main concern is to show that socio-urban institutions are constantly re-shaped as a result of individual action, what makes the difference, is the spirit that we all, socially, imprint on the logics of our socio-urban institutions, moving them to inclusion or exclusion.