Open Urban Studies and Demography Journal

Quality Living Environment: a Public or Private a Matter
Nowadays, one of the most important questions is the quality of living environment. The development of quality living environment deals with a conflict between publicity and privacy: who is responsible for creating quality living environment, where is the line between publicity and privacy, how the balance between publicity and privacy should be achieved? The article discusses modern-day issues and different opinions about publicity – privacy, from a viewpoint of creating quality living environment.
Recent Trends and Remaining Limitations in Urban Microclimate Models
Problems such as natural ventilation, pollutant dispersion, changes in wind environments, and urban heat islands are gaining increasing prominence in both public concern and research.
Public Spaces and Private Spaces Open to the Public: Spatial Planning and Development Using Urban Design Guidelines
The continuing growth of urban populations has intensified the need for cities to provide conditions for a healthy and creative way of life, work, and leisure activities. From the aspect of spatial planning in cities, the key is to have a public space network of sufficient scope and quality. “In addition to public space, which is public in terms of ownership and use, private space open to the public is important” [1], i.e. space that is “privately owned, but in public use.
Multimodal Nodes: Multimodal Nodes as a Potential for Multilevel Interconnectivity and Sustainable Development
The research is based on studying trends that can be read as models of behavior of a contemporary city. The overall area of a city is characterized by a complex dynamics of physical and non-physical space, manifested through networks on different levels.
Influencing Urban Mobility Through Public Engagement Process: Traditional and Digital Methods for Public Participation in Urban Design
The purpose of this article is to show how we can influence urban mobility through public participation. On the one hand, this article focuses on exploring opinions of the public and professionals’ opinions regarding public participation.
Forgetting the City: Tactics of Transformation of the City in Motion
We conceive the city not only as a material creation but also as a collective memory created in time and through time. While the material aspect is susceptible to continuous changes, the conceptual aspect is the one that permanently reconstructs the image of the city.

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Editor's Choice

Who Engages in Undeclared Work in Urban Europe? A Critical Evaluation of the Marginality Thesis

Colin C. Williams, Ioana A. Horodnic

The view that undeclared work is undertaken by marginalised populations (i.e., those groups relatively excluded from the formal labour market) is a core assumption of not only modernisation theory, which holds that undeclared work is conducted by and for marginal population at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, but also political economy theory, which views contemporary capitalism to outsource and subcontract production to the undeclared economy where marginalised populations conduct such work as a survival strategy. Until now however, few extensive evaluations of the validity of this marginality thesis have been conducted in relation to urban environments. To fill this gap, this paper reports data from a 2013 cross-national survey of urban populations in 28 European member states. Using multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, this reveals that although some marginalised groups in urban Europe (those having difficulties paying their household bills and younger age groups) are significantly more likely to participate in undeclared work, others are not (the unemployed) and yet others (women and urban dwellers in less affluent European regions) are significantly less likely to participate. The outcome is a more variegated theorisation of which marginal groups participate in undeclared work in urban areas and the need for policy towards the undeclared economy to address this more nuanced understanding.

January 31, 2017