Evangelism as Life‐affirming Activity in the City

In this article I will reflect on my role as a theological educator as I seek to engage students with the missiological context and challenge of the city, particularly Sydney, Australia. The article assumes that life‐affirming evangelism in the city requires adoption of the posture of a resident stranger in the city; an appreciation for the biblical narratives of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and the contribution these make to an understanding of God's life‐affirming mission in the city; an openness to the likelihood of multiple and diverse responses to the city; and a commitment to developing life‐affirming practices that are potentially evangelistic. Finally, I reflect on urban and suburban aspiration and consider how this is best engaged by the practice and witness of life‐affirming evangelism.     

Affective dimension in cognitive maps of Barcelona and São Paulo

This paper analyses the relationship between city and affection as revealed through an investigation into the feelings and emotions of a sample of inhabitants of Barcelona and São Paulo towards their cities. A study of affection in the context of a city has its origin in the assumption that it is possible to develop an ethical‐affective rationality in the creation of spaces of both public and private interest, a dimension that can serve to optimize the action of the inhabitants of a city. The theoretical/methodological approach adopted was essentially interdisciplinary, with a basis in social psychology, as can be seen in the data‐gathering instrument. In order to assess the city's affective dimension, individual interviews were carried out and a questionnaire was applied to individuals in groups. In the latter subjects were asked to make a drawing representing their city and to answer some questions regarding this pictorial representation. The sample consisted of 200 subjects, half of whom were from Barcelona and half from São Paulo. Most were in the age range 18–35, undergraduate or graduate students, with females and residents of the metropolitan areas of the two cities studied being in the majority. The qualitative data were classified according to their meaning and content, using the categories that had been established in the pilot study, namely contrasts, insecurity, pleasantness, and belonging. A statistical analysis was then performed on the resulting categories. After being categorized, catalogued, and qualified by metaphors, the responses gave the following images: city of contrast, city of attraction, city of destruction, city of surprises, city of movement, and pleasant city. These images show feelings and emotions about Barcelona and São Paulo that act as representations. This presents the need to revise the affective dimension in the meaning structure of cognitive maps as proposed by Lynch. As a result, the new category of affective maps is therefore proposed, as being the category that expresses affective meanings and serves as an indication of the level of esteem for the city, two aspects that act as reference points for the involvement and participation of a city's inhabitants.     

中国健康城市建设的进展及理论思考

中国健康城市的建设走过了探索和实质性发展两个阶段.它以健康促进的理念为指导,以"健康社会、健康环境、健康人群"为主线,成为了当前开展健康促进的典范.健康城市能呈现实质且快速发展的势头,政府主导是其重要的特点.它既符合中国社会文化背景和现状,也是以"上游策略"来解决全人群健康问题创新性举措.中国健康城市推行的深远意义在于,它为当前公共卫生体系建设赋予了先进的内涵,与世界卫生组织倡导的"健康促进曼谷宪章"的核心精神是完全相符的,成为了引领中国公共卫生汇入国际现代公共卫生运动的领头兵.但是,它的茁壮成长仍需要有远见的政治家的呵护和支持.     

Urban inequalities? Birth outcomes across New Jersey cities

We investigated whether living in a large city endows a woman with a general level of risk for poor birth outcomes regardless of the specific city, or whether this risk varies across cities. We used individual 1989 and 1990 Vital Statistics birth and death records linked with uniform billing hospital discharge records to analyze prenatal care usage, birthweight, and newborn hospitalization costs in the six most populous cities in New Jersey: Camden, Elizabeth, Jersey City, Newark, Paterson, and Trenton. We used a multivariate framework which controlled for a number of individual socioeconomic, medical, and behavioral risk factors. We also examined whether the racial gaps in birth outcomes vary by city, and whether there are city variations in the effects of other important risk factors such as smoking and unwed motherhood. The results indicate that city of residence is an important predictor of birth outcomes, even after controlling for a number of individual level risk factors, and that the effect of race varies by city of residence. Being black reduces birthweight in the range of 136 to 196 grams and increases the probability of delivering a low birthweight baby in all cities except Camden, where there is no racial gap once individual risk factors were controlled. The results also indicate that many other risk factors have very different effects across large cities, and that it is important to take into consideration the differences between urban areas when formulating policy and targeting interventions designed to reduce poor birth outcomes.     

外来务工女性刻板印象威胁的应对策略与认同管理

为了探讨外来务工女性群体刻板印象威胁的应对策略和认同管理,从天津市WX社区通过滚雪球抽样方法选取124名外来务工女性作为被试,采用问卷调查的形式,测查了外来务工女性群体刻板印象应对策略和认同管理模式,尤其考察了认同基线水平、认同融合、否定策略和榜样策略对于应对和认同管理的有效性。结果表明：（1）外来务工女性群体具有双重认同趋势;具有较高城市认同融合的外来务工女性群体具有显著的认同维护倾向;（2）不同印象管理水平的外来务工女性对否定策略的使用差异性很小,反而是刻板印象威胁的长期性和暴露性是引发否定策略的重要因素;（3）角色榜样成功的应得性对外来务工女性城市认同感的提高具有积极效应;（4）城市务工年数和收入成为这一群体城市认同的主要影响因素。     

Population size and suicide in U.S. cities: a static and dynamic exploration

The relationship between city population size and suicide rates rarely has been examined directly, though scholars often assume such a relationship exists based on studies of the association between suicide rates and urbanization (percent of the population living in cities) in various social contexts. In an effort to determine the basic association between suicide rates and city population size, we analyze data for four time points, 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990, using a random sample of U.S. cities with 10,000 or more population in 1960. In addition, we conduct a time series analysis of change in population size and change in suicide rates over a two decade period. Results indicate that an association between population and suicide is atypical, and even when observed is highly sensitive to methodological specifications. The results call into question the notion that larger city population size is conducive to suicide as well as the assumption that studies of suicide and urbanization can substitute for studies of suicide and city population size.     

What is a City?

Cities are mysteriously attractive. The more we get used to being citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to identify ourselves with a city. Moreover, this need seems in no way distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us changes continuously: new buildings rise, new restaurants open, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures… Cities seem to vindicate Heraclitus’s dictum: you cannot step twice into the same river; you cannot walk twice through the same city. But, as with the river, we want and need to say that it is the same city we are walking through every day. It is always different, but numerically self-identical. How is that possible? What sort of mysterious thing is a city? The answer, I submit, is that cities aren’t things. They are processes. Like rivers, cities unfold in time just as they extend in space, by having different temporal parts for each time at which they exist. And walking though one part and then again through another is, literally, walking through the same whole.

     

The Arts and the Future City

The framework in which, better than in any other, cultural complexity becomes clear as a network of perspectives is the city: it is here that the greatest variety of subcultures, together with the widest range of contrasting modalities, seems able to handle its meaning. The city is at the same time an active place of cultural production and a passive and active place of memory keeping. It fuels styles and models of sensitivity also, and especially, through art and architecture. Therefore, it becomes itself a cultural model able to orient taste, but also to continually disorient it through agency. Starting from the revitalization of the cultural capital of the cities, art can play the important role of cultural magnet by catalyzing moods and emotions, conveying otherwise chaotic needs and languages, promoting new tolerance and social and cultural integration. However, in the meantime, from a secluded and distinct place that organizes the use of cultural and artistic products within recognizable boundaries, the city is becoming an undifferentiated place, a city-beyond, scattered and/or boundless. Characterized by the undifferentiated and the mutant, the uncertain and the liquid, the deformable and the relative, the space of art perception will be rethought within and without the city.     

Editorial: Newman and Ecclesiology

Jerusalem is at the centre of Christian culture – the place of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection and the place of Pentecost – and the image of Jerusalem is fundamental to any Christian vision of the Church and the Kingdom. There was an earthly city and one in heaven; and since the temple was inseparable from the city, temple imagery – the Garden of Eden, the Holy Wisdom, the Messiah – appears in Christian hymns about Jerusalem. In the centuries preceding the advent of Christianity, both city and temple had become corrupt, so when Jesus cleansed the temple and prophesied the destruction of the city, many people would have applauded him. The harlot city that burned in the Book of Revelation was Jerusalem, and when the emperor Constantine built the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, he was building a Christian temple, replacing not the one destroyed in 70 CE, but the original temple of Solomon.     

Reconstructing maps from text

Previous research has demonstrated that Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) are capable of reconstructing maps from news corpora (Louwerse & Zwaan, 2009) and novels (Louwerse & Benesh, 2012). The capacity for reproducing maps is surprising since DSMs notoriously lack perceptual grounding. In this paper we investigate the statistical sources required in language to infer maps, and the resulting constraints placed on mechanisms of semantic representation. Study 1 brings word co-occurrence under experimental control to demonstrate that standard DSMs cannot reproduce maps when word co-occurrence is uniform. Specifically, standard DSMs require that direct co-occurrences between city names in a corpus mirror the proximity between the city locations in the map in order to successfully reconstruct the spatial map. Study 2 presents an instance-based DSM that is capable of reconstructing maps independent of the frequency of co-occurrence of city names.     

聊城市汉族正常人血清骨钙素参考值的研究

建立聊城市汉族正常人血清骨钙素水平的参考值。利用化学发光免疫分析法对聊城市162例汉族体检健康者血清骨钙素（BGP）水平进行检测,检测范围0．2ng／ml-100ng／ml。结果聊城市汉族正常人血清骨钙素水平的参考值为5．21±0．73ng／ml。首次报道了聊城市汉族正常人血清骨钙素参考值,为骨病骨代谢研究提供一项新的...     

Can Community Indicators Live Up to Their Expectations? The Case of the Flemish City Monitor for Livable and Sustainable Urban Development

The City Monitor is a policy instrument and has been used to measure the state of 13 Flemish cities in 2004, 2006 and 2008. The community indicators of the City Monitor provide feedback on the evolution of a multitude of phenomena, and so they represent an opportunity for policy learning about the livability and sustainability of those cities. Indicators simplify the representation of societal problems and in that sense they are helping the communication between city authorities and their stakeholders. In this article we also focus on two innovative characteristics of the co-design methodology of the City Monitor. First of all, indicators were constructed on the basis of a normative vision about urban sustainability. We argue that a sustainability framework can give value added to map vital signs of the quality of life in Flemish cities. Secondly, the City Monitor was being developed with the participation of about 200 experts, coming from city governments and other administrations, civil society and academic world. It is our argument that the participatory approach fosters the use of community indicators and generates interesting side effects. As a third argument, we indicate the importance of the attitude of city authority people for its implementation within the city organisation. The City Monitor is certainly meant as an input for urban policy debate about the quality of life in the major Flemish cities. Does it live up to its expectations? And will the vision and indicators on urban sustainability stir up the debate about urban sustainable development?     

Unintentional Residence and the Right to Vote

Democratic theory offers robust resources in order to defend the claim that noncitizens are, in many cases, entitled to the right to vote in their place of residence, regardless of their citizenship. On this, Avner de Shalit and I are in broad agreement. But the route we take to justify this right rests on substantially different argumentation: whereas I believe that residence is necessary and sufficient to justify the right to vote at the municipal and, more controversially, at the national level, de Shalit believes that noncitizens must also intend to reside in a city over the longer term in order to merit the right to vote on city matters. I will argue that this focus on intention is dangerous for the most vulnerable of city dwellers, who are most in need of the right to vote, even if only at the city level. In particular, I argue that the only way that the right to vote can play its protective role is if it is available to migrants on the basis of residence, regardless of their stated intention.     

An Applied Mereology of the City: Unifying Science and Philosophy for Urban Planning

Based on their research showing that growing cities follow basic principles, two theoretical physicists, Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West, call for researchers and professionals to contribute to a grand theory of urban sustainability. In their research, they develop a ‘science of the city’ to help urban planners address problems that arise from population increases. Although they provide valuable insights for understanding urban sustainability issues, they do not give planners a manageable way to approach such problems. I argue that developing an applied mereology to understand the concept of ‘city identity’ gives planners a theoretical device for addressing urban affairs, including ethical concerns. In turn, I devise a model of city identity to show how a ‘philosophy of the city’ contributes to a grand theory of urban sustainability.     

Going Home

Today marks two months since the city was in flames. What happened here is important to me partly because, “Los Angeles is my city.” I am a native son, born 52 years ago in the Queen of Angels Hospital. I carry in me both the pride and the inferiority that go with being from L.A.     

(Re)Building an Image for a City: Is A Landmark Enough? Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum, 10 Years Together1

The new global economic scenario has driven cities to urban entrepreneurialism and to a holistic marketing approach to define and manage successful redevelopment projects. Positioning in the chosen target market requires an image and a brand to communicate the city values, the assets that make her unique and better than her competitors. Urban design based on iconic buildings is one of the models of the culture‐led regeneration programs that are being developed to re‐image the city, to make her an attractive tourist destination. The present study analyzed the image and perception of Bilbao 10 years after the opening of the Guggenheim Museum, and concluded that more than the spectacular landmark should be considered to create a new image.     

The use of recognition information and additional cues in inferences from memory

Goldstein and Gigerenzer's (2002) "Recognition Heuristic" (RH) was tested for its empirical validity in an experimental paradigm with induced recognition of objects. RH claims that upon inferring which of two objects (e.g., cities) scores higher on a criterion (e.g., city size), a recognized object will be chosen over an unrecognized one, if the recognition is a valid predictor of the criterion without considering additional object information. Trying to avoid potential shortcomings of former studies, we (a) used the city population task, (b) provided additional cue information only for recognized cities, and (c) had participants draw inferences from memory. Participants learned city names and additional information about some cities. They also learned that recognition and the additional information were valid predictors of the criterion "city size". In a subsequent decision phase, the additional information about the cities in memory strongly affected the inferences, suggesting that recognition information is clearly integrated into judgments, but by no means in a non-compensatory fashion that would dominate every other cue.     

Cities and Immigration: A Reply

In my book, Cities and Immigration, I suggest shifting responsibilities for the integration of immigrants from the state to the city level. The articles in this issue challenge some of my suggestions. I discuss these challenges with regard to three questions: should a city enjoy greater autonomy to decide who, and how many, immigrants should settle within its borders? Should immigrants enjoy local voting rights even before naturalization? And is there a morally preferable model for integrating immigrants into the city?     

Part and Whole in Aristotle‘s Political Philosophy

It is often held that according to Aristotle the city is a natural organism. One major reason for this organic interpretation is no doubt that Aristotle describes the relationship between the individual and the city as a part-whole relationship, seemingly the same relationship that holds between the parts of a natural organism and the organism itself. Moreover, some scholars (most notably Jonathan Barnes) believe this view of the city led Aristotle to accept an implicit totalitarianism. I argue, however, that an investigation of the various ways Aristotle describes parts and wholes reveals that for Aristotle the city has a unity (and thus a nature) quite different from that of a natural organism.     

Sharing cathartic stories online: The internet as a means of expression following a crisis event

This research looks at the way that stories were shared online following the magnitude 7.1 and 6.3 earthquakes that hit Canterbury, New Zealand in September 2010 and February 2011. The earthquakes left the city of Christchurch with massive structural, infrastructural and emotional damage as well as leading to 185 deaths. The ground movement was the highest ever recorded to have hit a major city. Four years on, the city is beginning to recover. This research looks at the way in which technology was used as one tool to promote community resilience amongst those affected by the earthquakes and reflects the growing awareness of the contribution that consumer behaviour research can make to disaster research and studies of resilience. Several online tools, social media and online communities, were used by residents in order to cope with the ordeal. We demonstrate that the Internet not only provided a major source of practical information, but also may have facilitated an emotional bond to others in the city and beyond thereby contributing to increased personal and community resilience. We show that the need to share and express one's self following a major crisis event was clearly evident with the volumes of stories submitted, especially when physical travel was impractical or restricted by the authorities. The implications for theories of catharsis and the use of online media during crises are discussed. Policy recommendations regarding the use of online media are also provided as an aid in the victims' emotional recovery from a major crisis. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.