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This article engages with the role of what one might tentatively call “secondary” urban spaces, in that while they are public, they are not the most vibrant, populated, or active places. These are not the spaces envisioned in many project illustrations. They are not full of people and activity. They are however a crucial part of a wider texture of urban situations, and important to extending our understanding of seclusion, solitude, and tranquility beyond distant parks and recreation areas. My aim here is to understand the emergence of these spaces in-between; those that are close to the vibrant streets and are embedded in city centers yet which offer a respite from the most bustling urbanity. These spaces, I will argue, more easily allow for the kinds of interactions that can lead to bridging and bonding with the unknown, in addition to the important everyday encounters that occur on central streets and squares. Using qualitative methods which build on Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, the discussion will draw on observations of the syntactic properties that condition, enable, and characterize such spaces, and address a series of concepts, including capacity, insulation, sequencing, and interface. A better understanding of such places, it is argued, not only allows a richer set of tools for working with urban design and planning, but offers possibilities for more resilient planning in terms of generating social relations, the emergence of communities, and for cities to manage and withstand extraordinary conditions. QC 20220110

This paper presents a hybrid approach between scale-space theory and deep learning, where a deep learning architecture is constructed by coupling parameterized scale-space operations in cascade. By sharing the learnt parameters between multiple scale channels, and by using the transformation properties of the scale-space primitives under scaling transformations, the resulting network becomes provably scale covariant. By in addition performing max pooling over the multiple scale channels, a resulting network architecture for image classification also becomes provably scale invariant. We investigate the performance of such networks on the MNISTLargeScale dataset, which contains rescaled images from original MNIST over a factor of 4 concerning training data and over a factor of 16 concerning testing data. It is demonstrated that the resulting approach allows for scale generalization, enabling good performance for classifying patterns at scales not present in the training data. Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures

The Ai Music Generation Challenge 2020 had three objectives: 1) to promote meaningful approaches to evaluating artificial intelligence (Ai) applied to music;2) to see how music Ai research can benefit from considering traditional music, and how traditional music might benefit from music Ai research; and 3)to facilitate discussions about the ethics of music Ai research applied to traditional music practices.There were six participants and a benchmark in the challenge, each competing to build an artificial system that generates the most plausible double jigs, as judged against the 365 published in solved'', but that the evaluation of such systems can be done in meaningful ways.The article ends by reflecting on the challenge and considering the coming 2021 challenge.

Present and future urbanization together with climate change and other uncertainties make urban quality of life a critical issue, and one that will need constant attention and deliberation. Across cities and contexts, urban ecosystems in the form of green and blue infrastructure, have the potential to contribute to human well-being as well as supporting biodiversity, and to do so under diverse conditions. However, the realization of this potential depends not only on the green and blue infrastructure itself, the well-being benefits are outcomes of the structures and processes of the entire urban system. Drawing on theory and insights from social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) research and resilience assessments, we describe how a systemic understanding of the generation and delivery of green and blue infrastructure benefits may inform cross-sectoral strategies and interventions for building resilience around this particular aspect of human well-being. Connecting SETS to non-academic discourse and practice, we describe the urban system in terms of three systemic controlling variables: infrastructure, institutions, and the perceptions of individual beneficiaries, which we call filters, and how these can be used in different participatory processes to assess and build resilience around green and blue infrastructure and its benefits. To ground the conceptual and theoretical framework in real world complexity and make it operational in practice we discuss three case studies applying the framework in Barcelona, Halle, and Stockholm. All cases share the same general three-step process but their individual combinations of methods and adaptions of the filters framework are designed to fit with three necessarily unique collaborative, transdisciplinary processes. The cases are discussed in terms of outcomes and output, the ways they made use of the conceptual framework, and the challenges they faced. This exploratory work points to a new way of engaging with urban resilience—the strength of the approach is that it is not limited to the identification of specific interventions or policy options, nor trying to prevent change; rather it focuses on how to move with change and build resilience through constant balancing of different types of SETS change. Our study reinforces the growing understanding of how well-being benefits positioned as emergent outcomes of internal SETS interactions offers leverage for mainstreaming green and blue infrastructure throughout diverse governance processes and sectors.

Urban experiments, living labs and testbeds have emerged as influential approaches to governing cities around the world. Experimental governance allows stakeholders to trial possible futures and to embrace creativity and innovation in the pursuit of sustainability goals. Experiments are often conducted through triple helix partnerships that favour informal and distributed actions. This is a significant departure from traditional urban development processes that are informed by well-defined processes executed by public authorities to ensure the public good and are legitimated by citizens. In this paper, we investigate this tension between experimental governance and public sector legitimacy by focusing on experimental practices in two Swedish municipalities, Stockholm and Gothenburg. We gathered data through a desk-based study, participant observations and semi-structured interviews with municipal actors to investigate the input, throughput and output legitimacy of municipalities in experimental governance. The findings indicate that municipalities emphasise actions and results from experiments, while de-emphasising reflection and attention to democratic procedures and protection of the public good. The focus on legitimacy reveals the fragmented and instrumental practices of experimental governance and a deficit in organizational capacity with potential detrimental impacts on legitimacy. QC 20220427

This focus section aims to identify, conceptualize, and understand the emerging geographies of rural crime, in particularthose of globalized rural crime, and evaluate their impact on different rural places. Contributions to this focus sectionreflect an interdisciplinary array of fields from geography, economy, and criminology to rural studies, fully engaged withpertinent theories and state-of-the-art literature. The focus section also critically examines how security and policing ofrural areas is delivered by existing and emerging agencies, drawing from evidence from different country contexts inBrazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. QC 20220117

This article introduces the special issue ?Brazilian Criminology in the 21st Century? that is composed of seven studies of contemporary security problems and related public security initiatives in Brazil. They are multidisciplinary contributions employing a large variety of methods, written by researchers based on Brazilian universities or research executed in cooperation with international colleagues. This is a unique and valuable reference source for researchers interested in Brazilian and Latin American security challenges as well as attempts to address them. By recognizing current barriers in knowledge production and sharing, the special issue calls for the creation of new opportunities for joint knowledge from the ?criminologies? of the Global South and those from the Global North, befitting an inclusive global criminology worthy of the 21st century. QC 20220117

Worldwide, cities are implementing circular economy (CE) strategies to reduce the resources they consume and their environmental impact. However, the evidence of the intended and unintended social consequences of the transition to “circular cities” is scattered. The lack of a coherent overview of the evidence on the subject can hinder effective decision-making in policy and practice. This study examines the extent to which the current literature addresses the social impacts that a transition to a CE produces in cities. We used a methodological approach related to systematic mapping to collate the evidence published over the past decade globally. The study finds that social impacts have rarely been considered in studies of circular cities, and where they have been discussed, the scope has been quite limited, only covering employment (mostly of informal sector workers) and governance practices. This scoping review highlights the need to further analyse and integrate social impact considerations into decision-making connected to transitions towards circular cities. QC 20211101

Funding Information: Funding: The work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 FET Open project TERAmeasure (grant agreement No 862788), by the “International Research Agendas” program of the Foundation for Polish Science co-financed by the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund (No. MAB/2018/9), by the statutory sources of the Department of Structural Materials, Military University of Technology (project no. UGB 22–846/2021/WAT) and by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (project no. FSRR-2020-0004), (Igor S. Nefedov). A. Krajewska was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP). Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Thin layers of silver nanowires are commonly studied for transparent electronics. However, reports of their terahertz (THz) properties are scarce. Here, we present the electrical and optical properties of thin silver nanowire layers with increasing densities at THz frequencies. We demonstrate that the absorbance, transmittance and reflectance of the metal nanowire layers in the frequency range of 0.2 THz to 1.3 THz is non-monotonic and depends on the nanowire dimensions and filling factor. We also present and validate a theoretical approach describing well the experimental results and allowing the fitting of the THz response of the nanowire layers by a Drude–Smith model of conductivity. Our results pave the way toward the application of silver nanowires as a prospective material for transparent and conductive coatings, and printable antennas operating in the terahertz range—significant for future wireless communication devices. Peer reviewed

What does an anthropologist’s archive look like? Where is it located? And is the anthropology of archives important for the understanding of anthropological thinking today? Here we answer these questions by analysing the various life histories of the archival fragments of one of the most puzzling and influential anthropologists in the history of Russian and Soviet anthropology: Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff (1887–1939). Shirokogoroff is credited as being one of the authors of the etnos theory — one of the main instruments of identity politics in Russia, China, Germany and also, in part, Japan and South Africa. The transnational life histories of Shirokogoroff and his wife Elizaveta [Elizabeth] Nikolaevna (1884–1943), and of their ideas, suggests a conception of the archive not as a single whole, but instead as a collection of forgotten, hidden, obliterated, or, on the other hand, scrupulously preserved fragments. These fragments are not centred in one place or organized around any one reading, but they nevertheless represent “partial connections”. Moreover, as we can see today with hindsight, none of these archival fragments lay inert. They have been intertwined in local political and social ontologies. Our text has an autoethnograpic quality. While illustrating separate episodes from the life of the Shirokogoroffs we also will tell of our search for the manuscripts through which we were forced onto strange paths and encounters. These greatly deepened our understanding both of the life of documents and their material links to the lives of researchers. Our article is an attempt to illustrate this complex picture which, in the end, will allow us to conclude that we have only just begun to understand the workings of the anthropologist’s archive in the history of anthropological thought. QC 20220530