Link to the publication: https://archidoct.scholasticahq.com/article/118893-rhythm-matters-how-rhythm-analysis-bridges-architecture-and-sociology
Collection
(14)
Rhythm publications
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Article
Rhythm Matters! How Rhythm Analysis Bridges Architecture and Sociology
By bringing the social dynamics in cities to the surface, rhythm analysis offers novel insights into the spatio-temporal notions that characterise urban life and experiences. The research presented in this contribution proposes a rhythm analysis framework for bridging architecture and social sciences to facilitate design interventions that are fine-tuned to the social context in cities. The results identify three aspects of city rhythms: (1) rhythms in the outdoor spaces and around the buildings, conceptualised as “rhythm zones”, (2) rhythms in the care services offered by societal organisations that are hosted in public and semi-public buildings, conceptualised as “rhythm-scapes” and (3) rhythms of ordinary activities that shape the urban social life and interactions, conceptualised as “rhythm spheres”. Each aspect includes different methods for analysing and documenting rhythms, enabling novel possibilities for spatial practices. Focusing on the dynamic quality of physical urban spaces, relations between actors and institutions and interactions between communities creates a bridge between academic research and spatial practice at a level of analysis of the urban social life that is straightforward, replicable and inventive.
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Article
When the Rhythm Zones Meet
This study explores the issue of trash around two high-rise apartment blocks in Amsterdam Zuidoost by focusing on city rhythms. Building upon the notion of “patterns of relationship” by Christopher Alexander, the ethnographic research reveals that rhythms formulate five different groupings, which are conceptualised as “rhythm zones.” In the various ways the rhythm zones correspond to each other around the buildings, trash emerges differently. The study establishes that identifying such zones allows for a better understanding of the social phenomena in the urban environment, creating the potential to improve the design of urban spaces.
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Article
Cities and infectious diseases: Assessing the exposure of pedestrians to virus transmission along city streets
As cities resume life in public space, they face the difficult task of retaining outdoor activity while decreasing exposure to airborne viruses, such as the novel coronavirus. Even though the transmission risk is higher in indoor spaces, recent evidence suggests that physical contact outdoors also contributes to an increased virus exposure. Given that streets constitute the largest percentage of public space in cities, there is an increasing need to prioritise their use to minimise transmission risk. However, city officials currently lack the assessment tools to achieve this. This article evaluates the extent to which street segments are associated with spatiotemporal variations of potential exposures of pedestrians to virus transmission. We develop a multi-component risk score that considers both urban form and human activity along streets over time, including (a) an assessment of pedestrian infrastructure according to the average width of pavements, (b) a measure of accessibility for each street based on its position in the street network, (c) an activity exposure score that identifies places along streets where exposure could be higher and (d) an estimate of the number of pedestrians that will pass through each street during weekdays and weekends. We use Amsterdam in the Netherlands as a case study to illustrate how our score could be used to assess the exposure of pedestrians to virus transmission along streets. Our approach can be replicated in other cities facing a similar challenge of bringing life back to the streets while minimising transmission risks.
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Collection
Changing Rhythms During the Pandemic in Amsterdam Zuidoost (2022)
Rhythms are part of many aspects of urban life. How do changes in rhythms affect people's daily experiences?
The cities are organised and characterised by the day and night, seasons, work/school days and weekends, holidays, weekly markets, rush hours, lunchtimes, and many more.
However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the city rhythms were disturbed. For the spread of an airborne disease, the main characteristics of rhythms, bringing people together in space and time in different periodicities and durations, have been problematic. While the lockdown can be seen as an intervention in the city rhythms, it did not recognise the rhythmic quality of urban life. It demanded many daily activities to be on hold, spread out, scaled down and controlled, affecting family life, different forms of communities, public spaces and work and school environments, as well as the mobility and movement of people within neighbourhoods, cities, and countries. As a result, the COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic social consequences, leaving many unemployed, increasing loneliness, and creating difficulties within households.
How did such changes in rhythms affect the daily experiences of people? Which rhythms are we talking about anyway when we mention this, and how can we study them? Perhaps the pandemic, the lockdown, and how the virus affected all of us can teach us something new about the essential rhythms in our lives. -
Article
City Rhythm: An Approach to Urban Rhythm Analysis
This chapter explores rhythm as a dynamic in the social and cultural domain. By executing different case studies in which qualitative methodologies from architecture and the social sciences are used, a methodology for rhythm analysis is constructed. In the case studies, it is found that the rhythm analysis functions as boundary object in conversations with stakeholders for identifying new solutions spaces for specific social issues. The case studies also identify three rhythm dynamics that are significant to the social domain: tuning, matching and balancing rhythm.
Results of the case studies are then contextualised by different rhythm theories that are relevant for the urban context: as variation in a pattern, as territory, as force for engagement and factor for trade-offs for trust. Rhythm has long been a topic of interest, though arguably this becomes more explicit over the twentieth century, with rhythm being referenced and studied in Europe in a variety of fields (Crespi 2014). This chapter draws insights from the writings of contemporary academics working on rhythm in order to explore the possibility of bringing rhythm analysis into practice in today's urban contexts. It is found that in the literature there is a gap in formulating a methodology for rhythm analysis that can be validated and falsified. As a result, based on case studies and rhythm theory, a methodology for urban rhythm analysis is formulated.The book where the article is published can be purchased through the link: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-rhythm-and-critique.html
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Collection
Podcast: We Are Rhythm
Rhythm is of all times and everywhere around us. In the moon and the stars, in ebb and flow, in trams, buses and traffic lights, at home and at school, on the internet and in your telephone. Rhythm is a force that helps us to be healthy, to carry on and to feel good.
In this collection you will find both the Dutch-language publication Wij Zijn Ritme (the translated and adapted version of 'Tuning to Rhythm, Cahier3') and the podcast that goes with it. In the publication and the podcast you will find the (visual) stories of researchers from science and the arts about their experience with rhythm in a rapidly changing world.This podcast is part of the Values for Survival research program, the Amsterdam parallel program of the Dutch contribution to the 17th Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.
The research program is Commissioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut and is orchestrated by Caroline Nevejan, Chief Science Officer of the City of Amsterdam.
The cover of the podcast is made by Huda Abifares, who is also responsible for the editorial design of all publications within Values for Survival.
The production of the podcast is done by Mart Jeninga of Podcast Studio Amsterdam.
Find all episodes of this podcast here:
app.springcast.fmYou can find this podcast also on:
Spotify, Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts -
Collection
Cahier 3: Values for Survival, Tuning to Rhythm (English)
Cahier 3 is all about Rhythm. From rhythm of breath and heartbeat, to the rhythm of recurring seasons and growing plants, to rhythm in music and dance to; rhythm appears to be something that connects people with one another and with nature. When we face major challenges in the world, we can hold on to rhythm. Rhythm makes us resilient, because it is always there. We can fall back on it when we need to. And when we tune to rhythm afresh, it is possible to imagine again.
So, when we integrate social and ecological dynamics (explored in Cahier 1 and 2), rhythm is a force that connects different spheres. Rhythm relates to the magic of direct aesthetic experience. Rhythm holds the network together and defines what happens next. Musicians, crafts people, dancers, surfers, biologists or psychologists have in depth knowledge about rhythm without even formulating it.
For this third Cahier, Caroline Nevejan (Chief Science Officer and principle investigator of Values for Survival) together with designer Huda AbiFarès, asked various researchers with different backgrounds to write a story about rhythm as they notice this dynamic in their field of expertise. They were asked to tell the story for children of about 11 years old. Every author’s story was then given to an experienced visual artist to illustrate and tell the story visually as well. As result the Cahier 3 offers a special and beautiful insight in the force of rhythm. Tuning to rhythm emerges as the Value for Survival we need.
All chapters in this Cahier start with a painting by Simon Gawronski.
(Click on 'more information' to find a link to NAi Booksellers, where you can buy a hard-copy of this cahier) -
Article
Tides of Tourism
In this track we investigate tourism as a spatio-temporal phenomenon, with its own daily, weekly, seasonal and yearly rhythms, which are guided and governed as flows and tides. Rhythms, like tides, are temporal and spatial compositions; in an urban context they also gain a policy dimension. Conceptualizing tourism via these frames of reference provides for a reconsideration of the ontologies which surround demographics (that is, the tourist and the local), regulations (local and regional scales), and spatial usages and distributions, while rhythm interventions choreograph how these urban practices intersect. Our exploration takes place in Amsterdam, Venice and Glasgow: cities that have been adapted to tidal rhythms throughout the centuries. The first two cities are faced with overflowing tourism, and have adopted different management approaches, while the latter is looking for ways to invite tourism to enrich the economy of the city. Through the lens of speculative rhythm interventions, our research examines how tourism might be better orchestrated in various urban contexts.
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Article
Regionalization of Social Interactions and Points-of-Interest Location Prediction With Geosocial Data
Traditional methods for studying the activity dynamics of people and their social interactions in cities require time-consuming and resource-intensive observations and surveys. Dynamic online trails from geosocial networks (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, Flickr etc.) have been increasingly used as proxies for human activity, focusing on mobility behavior, spatial interaction, and social connectivity, among others. Social media records incorporate geo-tags, timestamps, textual components, user-profile attributes and points-of-interest (POI) features, which respectively address spatial, temporal, topical, demographic, and contextual dimensions of human activity. While the information contained in social media data is complex and high-dimensional, there is a lack of studies exploiting the combined potential of their information layers. This article introduces a framework that considers multiple dimensions (i.e. spatial, temporal, topical, and demographic) of information from social media data, and combines Geo-Self-Organizing Maps (GeoSOMs) in conjunction with contiguity-constrained hierarchical clustering, to identify homogeneous regions of social interaction in cities and, subsequently, estimate appropriate locations for new POIs. Drawing on the discovered regions, we build a Factorization Machine-based model to estimate appropriate locations for new POIs in different urban contexts. Using geo-referenced Twitter records and Foursquare data from Amsterdam, Boston, and Jakarta, we evaluate the potential of machine learning techniques in discovering knowledge about the geography of social dynamics from unstructured and high-dimensional social web data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the discovered homogeneous regions are significant predictors of new POI locations.
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Article
City Rhythm, Logbook of an Exploration
City Rhythm research explored the potential of using rhythm analyses in the physical world and in the data domain for enhancing social safety in neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Rhythm in the physical world happens both in space as well as in time. Rhythm in data can connect to location (instead of persons), thus circumventing the issue of privacy. The two approaches create the chance to address significant social issues and how they develop in specific times and places. Founded in the social sciences, humanities, arts and computer science, the interdisciplinary research team also included civil servants of six cities in the Netherlands who engaged throughout the research. With the help of students, nine case studies are carried out. In conclusion to the one year exploratory study, City Rhythm indicates that rhythm analyses, in the physical world as well as in the related data domain, offer a potential new approach for policymaking.
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Article
Social Glass: A Platform for Urban Analytics and Decision-making Through Heterogeneous Social Data (2018)
This demo presents Social Glass, a novel web-based platform that supports the analysis, valorisation, integration, and vi- sualisation of large-scale and heterogeneous urban data in the domains of city planning and decision-making. The platform systematically combines publicly available social datasets from municipalities together with social media stre- ams (e.g. Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare) and resources from knowledge repositories. It further enables the map- ping of demographic information, human movement pat- terns, place popularity, traffic conditions, as well as citizens’ and visitors’ opinions and preferences with regard to spe- cific venues in the city. Social Glass will be demonstrated through several real-world case studies, that exemplify the framework’s conceptual properties, and its potential value as a solution for urban analytics and city-scale event moni- toring and assessment.
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Collection
2015 - 2016 Data Rhythms in Amsterdam
In 2016 the Amsterdam municipality asked a group of its creative civil servants to come up with ideas for making the city 'more balanced'. One of the initiative was to make an exhibition on the Rhythm in different Amsterdam movements. It was shown on the Rokin. Here are the panels of this exhibition.
The data analyses and visualisations are made by Alessandro Bozon and Achilles Psylidis at the Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan Solutions and Delft University of Technology in 2015-2016.Hier zie je de resultaten van dit onderzoek: Stad in balans
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Article
MSc Thesis TU Delft - Building a Housing Block with Rhythm in Addis Ababa
The rhythm analysis can be performed by using many different methods, in various urban areas or non-urban contexts, and by different actors. This article will talk about the experience with rhythm analysis during my masters studies in architecture, which was the consulted method for defining a critical view on the numerous problems in rapidly developing urban environments. The context of the presented rhythm analysis was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where fascinated by the colorful life of the informal settlements and their contrast with the newly developed areas, an attempt of looking at this reality in an objective view was performed.
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Article
Witnessing You & being-here.net
How are trust and truth established in a networked world? What actually happens when one is witness to another? On this study-site 44 authors contribute reflections and experience on how a world full of media changes our lives. This research took place between 2008 - 2012.
Artists, academics and professionals from a variety of disciplines, address these issues by reflecting on their own practice. To be able to enjoy this research environment, one needs to take time.
See http://www.being-here.net/
This site publishes reflections form scientist, artists, professionals and students about their work. Scientists reflect on their research, professionals reflect on their practice, artists reflect on their artwork, students present their designs. Apart form the authors, many people have contributed to this website.
Principle investigator: Caroline Nevejan
On the 23rd of January 2013, the book Witnessing You, On Trust and Truth in a Networked World, was launched.