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This paper presents a mixed methodology to map and analyse the spatial connectivity of the everyday pathways that link the doorway of an individual's home–work locations to the local main commercial street. These pathways include public streets, semi-private lanes, alleys and stairs.

Pathways within different morphological areas in Hanoi, Vietnam, are used as examples to illustrate the development and application of the methodology. The methodology, adapted from Conzenian, typological, and space syntax methods, combined with observations and interviews, seeks to overcome several identified limitations of each of these approaches for understanding pedestrians' horizontal and vertical movement patterns within urban settings.

Analytical diagrams of pathways are developed on figure-ground maps of the neighbourhoods and three-dimensional projections of circulation spaces within buildings. Scatter plots are used to analyse the distribution of collected samples according to their business types and distances to local main streets. Field observations and interviews with homeowners revealed the critical influence of the pathways' spatial characteristics on home-based businesses' operations.

The methods developed here are potentially useful for urban morphologists and urban designers in decoding the intricacies of informal urban settings and understanding their socio-economic significance for users.

In port cities with declining industries, waterfront redevelopment is one major part of the competitive agenda. The increasing economic importance of service, leisure, and tourism industries created an opportunity to reuse urban waterfront areas no longer considered profitable. Parque das Nações in Lisbon is a product of such a process: It’s a newly built mixed-use waterfront neighborhood, planned, and developed, first and foremost, to be the site of Expo ’98. This former industrial and port area has been emerging in the last 15 years as a “showcase” for Lisbon: a piece of the competitive strategy of the Portuguese capital. Its public spaces are an important part of that strategy and have been managed in order to remain particularly safe and clean.

On one hand, Parque das Nações is a socially homogenous elite residential neighborhood, on the other hand, it is emerging as a new metropolitan centrality characterized by an intense mobility and by an increasing concentration of urbanites carrying on work and leisure related activities. It is the coexistence of these two complementary and contradictory dynamics that shapes the interactive logic of public life in the area.

This chapter explores the use, appropriation, and interaction patterns afforded by the public spaces of Parque das Nações. I discard both the idealized conception of public spaces that characterizes them as havens of diversity and accessibility and the more contemporary idea of public spaces as empty spaces that no longer promote encounters with others, serving exclusively as marketing tools for real-estate developers. Instead, I argue that the production of urban areas such as Parque das Nações is a socially unequal process resulting in excessively planned and controlled public spaces. However, when they attract different populations for different reasons, these spaces might foster unexpected, emergent, or even transgressive uses and interactions that promote public space vitality.

The “unplannable” is a welcomed exception to the formal order of urban planning. This opinion article explores some examples of informal urbanism and discusses its ambiguous relationship to public space and unplanned activities in the city. The informal sector offers important lessons about the adaptive use of space and its social role. The article examines the ways specific groups appropriate informal spaces and how this can add to a city’s entrepreneurship and success. The characteristics of informal, interstitial spaces within the contemporary city, and the numerous creative ways in which these temporarily used spaces are appropriated, challenge the prevalent critical discourse about our understanding of authorised public space, formal place-making and social order within the city in relation to these informal spaces.

The text discusses various cases from Chile, the US and China that illustrate the dilemma of the relationship between informality and public/private space today. One could say that informality is a deregulated self-help system that redefines relationships with the formal. Temporary or permanent spatial appropriation has behavioural, economic and cultural dimensions, and forms of the informalare not always immediately obvious: they are not mentioned in building codes and can often be subversive or unexpected, emerging in the grey area between legal and illegal activities.

Much remains unknown about how young children orient to computational objects and how we as learning scientists can orient to young children as computational thinkers. While some research exists on how children learn programming, very little has been written about how they learn the technical skills needed to operate technologies or to fix breakdowns that occur in the code or the machine. The purpose of this study is to explore how children perform technical knowledge in tangible programming environments.

The current study examines the organization of young children’s technical knowledge in the context of a design-based study of Kindergarteners learning to code using robot coding toys, where groups of children collaboratively debugged programs. The authors conducted iterative rounds of qualitative coding of video recordings in kindergarten classrooms and interaction analysis of children using coding robots.

The authors found that as children repaired bugs at the level of the program and at the level of the physical apparatus, they were performing essential technical knowledge; the authors focus on how demonstrating technical knowledge was organized pedagogically and collectively achieved.

Drawing broadly from studies of the social organization of technical work in professional settings, we argue that technical knowledge is easy to overlook but essential for learning to repair programs. The authors suggest how tangible programming environments represent pedagogically important contexts for dis-embedding young children’s essential technical knowledge from the more abstract knowledge of programming.

ANOTHER New Year affords another opportunity to wish our readers at home and abroad, serving with the Armed Forces or doing their work of maintaining the home front, the best of fortune in the most hopeful time ahead. We have come through much anxiety but, if the truth is told, 1942 was a year when the worst prophecies with which it opened proved to be false. It is hardly imaginable that the peril in which we stood two years ago, then colossal and present, should have become something which, however formidable, now seems manageable.

Peters and Waterman brought the concept of excellence into the conscious practice of organizations during the early 1980s. Theory has timidly followed afterwards. However, the concept existed before and it is broadly used nowadays. This article attempts to synthesize the evolution of excellence, especially in the last 20 years, during which time some legitimate counter developments have shown important limits for these “excellence stages”. Those counter developments tend to be enlightening but have often brought about confusion. Where could excellence be tomorrow and what should organizations do about it? Concludes from this analysis that: deep conceptual work is necessary; the importance of implementation is often mentioned in the literature but not addressed in detail; the idea of sustainability may need further development, especially concerning a clear separation between the socio‐ecological and the competitive advantage perspectives; the different excellence approaches have not looked deeply into the differences between large and small enterprises, public and private sectors, and the organization itself and its components.