Urban decay | EPFL Graph Search

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Urban decay (also known as urban rot, urban death or urban blight) is the sociological process by which a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. There is no single process that leads to urban decay. Urban decay can include the following aspects: Industrialization Deindustrialization Gentrification Population decline or overpopulation Counterurbanization Economic Restructuring Multiculturalism Abandoned buildings or infrastructure High local unemployment Increased poverty Fragmented families Low overall living standards or quality of life Political disenfranchisement Crime (e.g., gang activity, corruption, and drug-related crime) Large and/or less regulated populations of urban wildlife (e.g., abandoned pets, feral animals, and semi-feral animals) Elevated levels of pollution (e.g., air pollution, noise pollution, water pollution, and light pollution) Desolate cityscape known as greyfield land or urban prairie Since the 1970s and 1980s, urban decay has been a phenomenon associated with some Western cities, especially in North America and parts of Europe. Cities have experienced population flights to the suburbs and exurb commuter towns; often in the form of white flight. Another characteristic of urban decay is blight – the visual, psychological, and physical effects of living among empty lots, buildings, and condemned houses. Urban decay is often the result of inter-related socio-economic issues, including urban planning decisions, economic deprivation of the local populace, the construction of freeways and railroad lines that bypass or run through the area, depopulation by suburbanization of peripheral lands, real estate neighborhood redlining, and immigration restrictions. During the Industrial Revolution, many people moved from rural areas to cities for employment in the manufacturing industry, thus causing urban populations to boom. Subsequent economic change left many cities economically vulnerable.

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The properties of efficient solar cells fabricated with triple-cation perovskite placed between a mesoporous titania layer and a spiro-OMeTAD layer are studied by using devices either prepared under water-free drybox conditions or fabricated under ambient room humidity. The morphological studies indicate that the content of unreacted PbI2 phase in the perovskite structure is much higher near the interface with titania than near the interface with spiro-OMeTAD. The stationary emission spectra and transient bleach peaks of perovskites show additional long-wavelength features close to the titania side. Time-resolved techniques ranging from femtoseconds to seconds reveal further differences in charge dynamics at both interfaces. The population decay is significantly faster at the titania side than at the spiro-OMeTAD side for the cells prepared under ambient conditions. An increased hole injection rate correlates with higher photocurrent seen in the devices prepared under drybox conditions. The charge recombination loss on the millisecond time scale is found to be slower at the interface with titania than at the interface with spiro-OMeTAD. The ideality factor of the cells is found to increase with increasing DMSO content in the precursor solution, indicating a change in recombination mechanism from bulk to surface recombination. We also found that the charge dynamics are not uniform within the whole perovskite layer. This feature has significant implications for understanding the operation and optimizing the performance of solar devices based on mixed cation perovskites.

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Reading the Brussels Palimpsest in the History of the Nouveau Plan de Bruxelles Industriel (1910)

This article restores the dialogical link between the Nouveau Plan de Bruxelles Industriel avec ses Suburbains, published on the occasion of the 1910 Industrial Exhibition (Verwest, Vanderoost, & Xhardez, 1910a), and the Inventaire Visuel de L’architecture Industrielle de L’agglomération de Bruxelles, produced by Maurice Culot and the team at the Archives d’Architecture Moderne (AAM) between 1980–1982 (Culot & the AMM, 1980 1982). These two kinds of spatialised visual inventories of places dedicated to production brings out a layer of the Brussels palimpsest filled with information that goes beyond the categories of permanence, persistence and disappearance raised by André Corboz and Alain Leveillé’s cartographic implementation of the palimpsest theory in the Atlas du Territoire Genevois (Corboz, 1993). This article compares palimpsest theory as applied to Geneva to the practice of inventory in Brussels. We propose visualising a lisuel layer intended as a visual reading revealed through a process of description, extraction, classification and juxtaposition. This process of visual analysis helps construct a typology of manufacturing production whose traces are embedded in urban space. It shows how a cartographic document informs the 1910 urban project and how local manufacturing companies contributed to its implementation. The contribution of this cartographic investigation is threefold. It concerns forms of manufacturing companies, forms of living, and production of urban space in 1910 Brussels. The Brussels Industrial Exhibition and the spatial story of Louis De Waele’s public works company reveals two patterns of relationships between industrial production and the transformation of urban space.

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