Privatization | EPFL Graph Search

Privatization (also privatisation in British English) can mean several different things, most commonly referring to moving something from the public sector into the private sector. It is also sometimes used as a synonym for deregulation when a heavily regulated private company or industry becomes less regulated. Government functions and services may also be privatised (which may also be known as "franchising" or "out-sourcing"); in this case, private entities are tasked with the implementation of government programs or performance of government services that had previously been the purview of state-run agencies. Some examples include revenue collection, law enforcement, water supply, and prison management. Another definition is that privatization is the sale of a state-owned enterprise or municipally owned corporation to private investors; in this case shares may be traded in the public market for the first time, or for the first time since an enterprise's previous nationalization. Th

Working with extreme urban density: Hong Kong. A prototype of mixed-use building in Hong Kong

Wing-Chung Cheung, Joana Varela

Urban sprawl, a solution to house fast-growing metropolitan populations, dilutes the substance of cities and generates extensive uniformly built fabrics lacking structural poles of attraction. Hong Kong is one of the seldom exceptions of this general tendency. Constrained by its geographic conditions and its historical background, the city has remained compact and reached elevated levels of density. This extreme concentration of population and its impact upon urban form constitute an excellent laboratory to experiment new forms of density. Furthermore, Hong Kong becomes even more relevant as it is a development model for its emerging Chinese neighbours. Our intention is to maintain and enhance density in the urbanized areas and to improve the living environment in the denser cores of the city. The main challenges are to provide more public spaces and to ensure equal light and spatial qualities for everyone. To achieve this objective, the project must find an architectural solution that proposes a new interpretation of the standard Hong Kong tower. Firstly, we would like to avoid the urban barrier created by the common podium typology, by making the latter more permeable and public. Secondly, the density of Hong Kong encourages the existence of a mixed-use building, combining various functions and allowing for the cohabitation of public and private programs. Consequently the various programs can be located optimally in the building according to factors such as light, view, orientation and connection.

2008

Policy, program and project in social housing of the welfare state: A comparative analysis of postwar Mediterranean models in translation of existenzminimum

Sila Karatas Basoglu

About 20 years after CIAM 2, themes of minimum dwelling for working class were put into large-scale practice for building welfare state and social democracy in all countries that participated in the Marshall Plan and postwar phenomena of transnational and local development. Spread in response to housing shortage in war-devastated European countries by reconstruction programs, but advanced within regional planning strategies to industrialize and populate rural territories by development programs, social housing programs of welfare states adopted existenzminimum in realization of workers’ habitats at peripheries of modern cities. These programs had similarities in terms of policies and governance, financial and organizational models, tenancy and ownership systems, planning and land use strategies, population and density patterns, settlement morphologies and architectural typologies as well as roles of policy-maker, planner, architect and community in postwar habitat development. While embracing Taylorist and Fordist planning, design and construction methods to maximize economic and spatial efficiency and revitalize construction economy through prefabrication of housing as well as promoting peripheral urban development, they redefined economic and hygienic dwelling. Sticking to rational urbanization in garden suburbs though, individualized middle class welfare within preindustrial patterns of community life superseded collectivized working class welfare of industrial domestic life. Yet, postwar social housing represents long-disappeared public practice for participatory and sustainable housing, and face privatization and gentrification by neoliberal urban practices. On that note, this proposal aims to comparatively analyse social housing programs introduced by welfare states of France, Italy, Greece and Turkey as the Mediterranean countries participated in the Marshall Plan and performed large-scale housing in planned industrial city-regions. It suggests an interdisciplinary portrayal of their schemata in housing production in terms of policy, program and project to trace their translation of urban, architectural and societal narrative of existenzminimum especially when bottom-up initiatives reclaim social housing against current housing crisis.

2019

Violences, sécurités et territoires

Charlotte Boisteau

The phenomenon of urban violence and the resulting sense of insecurity are at the very heart of contemporary urban dynamics. In order to respond to the growing public demand for security, various public, private, and community measures contribute to the new urban policies of large cities. This new configuration that comprises security enforcement operates as a "meta-game", in which numerous global economic and civil society actors, such as private security companies and neighborhood communities, are called upon to participate. With regard to security, the principle of governance implies a loss of the State's monopoly of legitimate violence. We have therefore evolved from a regulatory mode, based on disciplinary institutions, to the political inclusion of actors, concepts and means of providing security that jeopardize governability: we no longer know who governs who and the physical and social urban landscapes have been modified. By focusing on urban development practices that aim to physically resolve insecurity problems and perceptions in cities, our objective is to analyze the extent to which the governance system of security has led to a radical and significant transformation of cities and the practices of its inhabitants, notably through the reinforcement of spatial and social fragmentations. Unequal participation is a reflection of unequal access to public space, and vice versa. The city is leaning towards a global and hegemonic model of public space, where the routine enforcement of order is imperative through the use of appropriate planning policies. We question the degree of publicity of public spaces and the democratic management of urban territories. The "generic" city seeks to eliminate or hide anomic behavior. However, violence adapts to specific forms of urban territories, with the form of the city determining their substance. Consequently, violence should be interpreted as a reaction triggered by the way in which society is organized. Instead of reducing urban violence, the use of security planning in urban areas often territorializes it. A geography of violence reflects the geography of security. With the transition from governmentality to governance in the security field, society has also evolved from fragmentation to greater segregation of urban areas. Efforts must be made by public authorities to reconfigure their structures in order to respond, by themselves, to the public demand for security. To avoid the transition from conflict to violence, the anomie in the city must be reconsidered and urban risks resolved within a framework of inter-sectorality.