Stigmergic behaviour and nodal places in residential areas: Case of post-socialist city Kharkiv in Ukraine

Abstract

<jats:p>The study of urban development and regeneration of residential areas in the cities are mainly focused on the separate infrastructural systems and less how networks of infrastructural systems and their elements, as nodal places, interact with the existing living environment and its urban tissue. The central goal of the paper is to examine contemporary residential areas of low liveability with nodal places of logistics and services infrastructural networks, with an eye on existing urban policies and application of transdisciplinary concept of stigmergy in contemporary urban environment. Research objectives: (a) conceptualisation of stigmergic process in urban planning; (b) overview of socialist and post-socialist urban policies for residential areas; (c) stigmergic behaviour in the development of nodal places in residential areas. Methodology: Use of Earth Time Observation Systems for identification of urban changes of nodal places under the stigmergic behaviour in the case study residential area in post-socialist city in Ukraine; contextualization of the case study with the categories: Ideology, Institutional level, Politics, Economics, Mobile Infrastructures. Discussion and conclusion: (a) as concept, stigmergic behaviours are efficient, but work as a self-organization form; (b) urban policies should, under the stigmergic behaviours, contextualize changes, continue or prevent the process.</jats:p>

Large Housing Estates under Socialism

“…These approaches had not achieved the desired result because the inhabitants were not considered as participants of life in the living environment. The previous stages of the research also included stigmergic studies of self-organization (Chabanyuk and Fonseca 2019;Fonseca and Chabanyuk 2019) in the urban contexts of case studies of post-Soviet prefabricated housing estates in Ukraine, focusing on the formal and informal non-systematic transformations of residential function to commerce on the ground floors of multistory housing blocks, which is widespread in the large-scale housing estates of prefabricated construction in the cities of Ukraine.…”