[en] The isolation of third world scientists from the modes of production and from the culture of their countries seems to be related to the alienation of the urban culture of these countries from their respective rural backgrounds. It is suggested that this alienation may be overcome by directly interfacing modern science and technology to the corresponding elements in their rural culture through the process of education. (author)

[en] Most of the world’s population lives in urban areas (54%). Near 42% of the global urban population live in cities with more than 1 million inhabitants, where problems associated with urban sprawl such as informal settlement, social-economic changes, environmental degradation and deficient high-capacity transport (HCT) systems are common. Meanwhile, urbanization and its associated transportation infrastructure define the relationship between city and countryside, between the city’s inner core and the periphery, between the citizen and his right to move. This article discusses and presents an overview about the relationship between the planning and extension of HCT systems and urban planning, (in the figure of the floor-area ratio - FAR- prescribed in regulations). The methodological approach consists of drawing a conceptual framework and studying 33 different cities of metropolitan areas on five continents. It’s noticed that areas in cities with a high construction potential but with an insufficient HCT negatively influence in urban mobility and hence the right to the city. We consider right to the city the various social and fundamental rights that, among others, includes the right to public transportation. Therefore there’s a real need of an integrated approach of community participation, FAR distribution, urban planning and transportation planning and so that urbanization, inevitable these days, takes place in a fair and harmonious way. (Author)

[en] Since the twentieth century, local governments in different cities of Latin America started implementing neoliberal urban policies with the aim of configuring economically productive cities. Cities seek to improve their location factor by attracting visitors and investors. This led to a change, from the logic urban government administration to the entrepreneurial city. One of the most significant consequences of this urban policy is that public spaces become more selective. They are turned into new centralities, oriented at sectors of high-income, locally and internationally, which leads to the deepening of socio-economic polarization, giving rise to fragmented and unequal cities. The production of a certain space takes places by the urban policies as well as by the local actors. Public space is one of the places where the tension between these two scales is carried out. This tension arises from the conflict about which actors are responsible for the implementation of new parameters of who uses and consumes the public space and how. This article addresses the configuration of public spaces in two case studies in Latin America: The construction of the Boulevard Naciones Unidas in Quito, and the urban intervention in the neighborhood of La Boca in Buenos Aires.

[en] Urban space could be considered as a social-technological formation resulting an exchange network made of goods, services and people. Currently, urban spaces are not only to be considered as containers of the digital infrastructure which further allows such flows of capital, but as the very product of those digital media leveraging such infrastructure: social networks, blogs, geo-location platforms and so on. Such media are crossbreeds of a new productive relationship within space. Hypothesis consist in this media play a role in contemporary processes of spatial production, as those qualities performed all over a resulting space should be equally rendered all over these media. The data sets analyzed capture the volume of online conversations overtime related to the pop-up mall Boxpark shoreditch. Such public space is located at the Shoreditch Metro Station, in the Hackney Borough of South east London. This media including the multitude of use values attached to space via crowd sourcing.

[en] The new century is characterized by the innovation of new paradigms, it is necessary to fare through unexplored ways of interpreting urban public space not only as a wide open space with greenery, apt for the common use, even for those who are homeless but as a space of physical, economic and social reproduction; a space of recreation, holding memory and collective symbols; a space where social struggle occurs. Such an adventure implies the development and the pairing of a diverse set of concepts, methods and knowledge; emphasizing on the issues that are waiting to be solved rather than on the disciplinary boundaries that may well diminish the solving possibilities at hand. The social nature of urban public space, and the challenges posed by critically reviewing both public policy making and the different practices of agents within the construction process of urban public space, provide researchers with subjects, new issues and reflection spaces waiting to be solved in the post society.

[en] Science has still to be understood by millions of Asians if their countries are to modernize and develop. But the difficulties of interpreting science and technology for the public are great, particularly in countries with large rural components, as in Asia. Here, illiteracy rates are often high and there are few opportunities for direct contact with modern science and technology. Yet it is precisely in these areas where the need for the application of modern science and technology may be the greatest. The mass media have always been identified as the best means of bringing about public understanding of science and technology

[en] Full text: Obesity and NIDDM are common in the Third Age and increasing in Cuba. Among the lifestyle changes associated with increased prevalence of obesity and its related disorders, diet and activity patterns are prime candidates. The transition to this lifestyle model may induce a decrease in the energy needs. There is an urgent need for tools which have been validated for measuring diet and physical activity in nutritional studies in the developing world, but also a more urgent need for reference values for the total energy requirements of healthy elderly people. Regular physical activity reduces the likelihood to develop diseases that characterize the metabolic cardiovascular syndrome. With the purpose of estimating the energy requirements, a group of 48 elderly people aged 61-74 years living in a rural mountain community was submitted to a medical, epidemiological, dietary and biochemical study of the nutritional status. Glucose intolerance was diagnosed in 40% and arterial hypertension was present in 23 % of them. Ten subjects without signs or symptoms of the metabolic cardiovascular syndrome were submitted to a measurement of the total energy expenditure by the doubly labelled water method. PAL values of 2.13 and 1.77 were measured for men and women, values which were significantly higher that the recommended value of 1.51 for elderly subjects. The total energy expenditure The estimation of energy requirements by the energy intake or by the factorial method using the physical activity questionnaires generated values, which were 11% and 30% lower than the values obtained by the DLW method. The value of 1.51xBMR for the estimation of the energy requirements of elderly subjects living in rural areas and submitted to higher levels of physical activity seems to be sub estimated. (author)

[en] This article the places of urban life are analyzed through the concept of relational public space, reconsidering public space not just as a theme, but a field of generating abstract scientific knowledge from everyday life. It seeks to expand our scientific perspective from single perspectives to co-research, the latter understood as learning process between cultures and disciplines. Transferring this to another level, means leaving the statics of monolithic disciplinary arguments and heading towards the dialectical investigation of relations between (two or more) perspectives, in this way linking back the theoretical dialogue and the interpreted public space which have been generated in the course of the project. We will reflect on the potentials of relational public spaces to stimulate learning processes in academia itself via participatory action research. After having established a link directed at co-research between Europe and Latin America, we are interested in the epistemological potentials that public spaces might bear for scientific learning experiences between cultures and disciplines, simulating heterogeneous social spaces and spatial practices in the lived public spaces of universities. That way our objectives to propose an action and reflection approach to actively change the mental production of public space.

[en] Complexity is a property inherent to urban space. Public spaces - as components of urban space-reveal nowadays an evolving and variable complexity; which is directly related to the different ways of perceiving, conceiving, producing and consuming such spaces. Public spaces are, basically, made of a multiplicity of places. Places, in turn, are form-content syntheses and reveal the complex fabric of relationships underlying urban space. Thus, once the concept of place informs different observation, analysis and action modes over the urban environment - and specially, over the public space- it offers new alternatives, taking into account that such places are means of materialization of social, cultural, economic and political exchange. In an attempt of disclosing the dialectic relationship nature-society within public space, we make use of the Place concept as an analytical category towards interpreting materiality and immaterially in the processes of production and consumption of public urban space; besides grasping the importance of their complexity in regards to public policies' formulation and to the role played by those in such processes.

No abstract available