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Over half of the world’s population lives in urban settlements and, according to the UN, that figure could rise to 60 % by 2030. Rapid urbanisation can present new opportunities, but also challenges including growing social division, violence and unrest – particularly in cities where segregation along ethno-nationalist lines is growing.
The EU-funded Contested Urbanism project is helping urban and transport planners to understand the social and spatial inequalities arising from these ‘contested’ urban settings. The researchers developed rich models to map where divisions occur in cities, taking into account different socio-economic, ethnic, religious and racial factors.
Models tell the story
The lead researchers at the centre of the project, funded through the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship programme, were Jonathan Rokem and Laura Vaughan, both from University College London’s Space Syntax Lab, Bartlett School of Architecture.
They examined the effect of national-level planning by comparing political and welfare policies in Sweden and Israel. They also investigated how individual perception, local communities and civil society shape these processes.
The analysis looked very closely at public transport in Jerusalem and Stockholm, measuring the likely impact of transport planning on end-users from different ethnic and social backgrounds.
This resulted in a new tool for modelling transport vulnerability and strategic policymaking in cities that factors in mobility, accessibility and the potential for cross-group encounters.
Contested Urbanism’s multi-angle picture of urban segregation and mobility has prompted valuable debate in academic and policymaking circles. The project highlights that issues of mobility and presence in public space are important for understanding segregation — in contrast to a more static, residential-based approach traditionally found in urban studies and planning literature.
The team produced a film, ‘Learning from Jerusalem’, to analyse some of the main changes in Jerusalem’s recent history. The film uses ‘space syntax’ methods – graph-based mathematical analysis of networks. It captures the city’s shifting borders, politics, demography, religion, planning and public transport.
The project’s results are supported by several scientific publications in journals such as Urban Studies, Interventions in Urban Geopolitics, and a contribution to the ‘Jerusalem’ section of Wiley-Blackwell’s 2018 Encyclopaedia of Urban and Regional Studies.