Abstract
HISTORY/THEORY/ADMINISTRATION
10. Planning History
10-2 HISTORY OF PLANNING
41-10171
ambiguation. Arabian Sea. bureaucratic processes . municipality. sewage. toxicity.
In this essay, I focus on the remarkable process through which Mumbai’s urban administration has continued to release its sewage, largely untreated, into the Arabian Sea. I show how it does this by rendering sewage both legally and materially ambiguous. I urge an attention to the processes of legal and material ambiguation, through which ‘slow violence’ is unevenly administered in Mumbai. Building on the work of Jacqueline Best, I argue that ambiguity does not simply leave open improvised forms of technocratic administration; ambiguity also defers bureaucratic activity in particular domains, while permitting activity in others. Taken together, the municipal administration mobilizes ambiguity so as to evade rendering toxicity an actionable problem of urban living and distributed social vulnerability in the city.
41-10172
dispossession. governance planning. housing. Mumbai. restructuring processes. slum.
The city of Mumbai is engaged in large-scale urban restructuring efforts. Foundational to these is the demolition of many of the city’s informal settlements and the relocation of residents to newly built housing complexes. Often discussed in terms of dispossession, this process is also one of formalization, with spatial, economic, cultural and sociopolitical implications. This article focuses on formalization’s sociopolitical dimension, entailing the registration of residents and the establishment of formal governance provisions and new citizenship expectations. The provision of formal housing and recognized housing tenure has, designedly, been coupled with the establishment of official self-governance mechanisms leading to new civic responsibilities and reshaping the experience of citizenship among former slum dwellers. We explore these governance arrangements, the interaction between formality and informal governance processes and how these arrangements impact residents’ perspectives on citizenship. We also identify several challenges to effective self-governance and the ways in which formal and informal processes shape residents’ experiences of community life, citizenship and urban integration. While residents have benefited from some aspects of formalization (e.g. indoor plumbing and codified tenure rights), it has brought additional burdens, and the challenges of self-governance have, for many relocatees, reproduced a kind of marginalized citizenship within formal structures.
41-10173
ecological knowledge. ecosystemic approach. political ecology. urban ecology. urban history. urban planning.
Today, design disciplines such as ecological urbanism aim at fusing natural and social sciences to restore the equilibrium between social and natural systems, and in extenso the urban and natural environment. But recent literature in urban political ecology and urban history has shown how this socioecological approach is generally stripped down to a merely ecological perspective, ignoring the sociopolitical side of the urban ecological project. I therefore argue that there is a need for a research programme that interrogates the history of the interaction between ecology, planning and politics. In this article I respond by developing a historical perspective on the rise of the ecosystemic approach towards the city, delving into the agency and political nature of ecological science itself. Through an in-depth historical analysis of the Brussels school of urban ecology and urban ecologist Paul Duvigneaud, I highlight how urban ecology influenced politics through its association with the regional government and vice versa to argue that ecological knowledge was used to overcome political opposition, incorporate a specific regionalist agenda and build an ecological zoning practice in urban planning policies.
41-10174
Guåhan/Guam. imperialism. planetary urbanization. self-determination. urban networks. urban theory. urbanization.
Through this article I contribute to debates about planetary urbanization by specifying how imperialism, defined as states restricting the self-determination of other states or peoples, intersects with urbanization. While recent urban theory has explored how urbanization unfolds at scales beyond the city and in relation to global capital accumulation, it has not fully extended these insights to incorporate the central role of states and imperialism. First, I argue that doing so develops a more expansive account of extended urbanization by revealing how networks of military bases are themselves enmeshed in the production of urban networks via state policies, and that militarized sites safeguard the global capitalist economy that sustains urbanization. Secondly, I argue that imperialism changes concentrated urbanization by restricting self-determination, fomenting spatial formations that prioritize militarism, and shifting urban politics to a larger scale. I show these dynamics through a historical analysis of the US military’s strategic interest in the island of Guåhan/Guam at the end of the second world war, and then generalize from this case to consider variegated outcomes at the intersections of urbanization and imperialism. In the article I aim to more adequately explain the heterogenous ways urbanization unfolds across the contemporary world.
41-10175
land policies. land tenure. uncertainty. urban land. urbanisms.
Uncertified land abounds. The critical question is whether such land can provide security of tenure, access to finance, effective urban planning, and highest and best use. While much research contests the prospects and problems of conventional land title registration, the power of uncertified land is an issue rarely raised and, if done, hardly resolved holistically. Fundamentally still, economists, philosophers, urbanists and others continue to dispute such power, contending that certified and commodified land is the answer to urban problems. Such theoretical contests lead to the following bigger puzzles: (1) Do uncertified land tenure systems address questions of insecurity of tenure, access to finance, effective planning, and highest and best use, as claimed by the theory of ‘the commons in an age of uncertainty’? (2) Are the experiences of land title registration congruent with the theory of certified and commodified land? (3) Why do states pursue land title registration over other land policies? Thematic analysis of original data, collected between 2019 and 2023 in Bali, Indonesia, well documented as a place with an alternative land tenure system undergoing rapid commodification, helps to answer these questions. Our data seem to indicate that uncertified land can address the questions raised about security of land tenure, finance, effective planning, and highest and best use—prospects that elude certified and commodified land. The preference for the latter as the vision of land policy, we find, is rooted in political-economic structures that favour, and are reproduced by, a transnational alliance of monopolists.
10-3 HISTORY OF CITIES AND REGIONS
41-10176
ambiguation. ambivalences. bureaucratic processes . injustice. population. urban water management. violence .
In this comparative and collaborative collection of essays we work through contemporary and historical practices of governing urban waters in Philadelphia and Mumbai. Taken together, the essays in this collection argue that events of enduring harm visited upon racialized, marginalized citizens are produced through slow bureaucratic processes of aversion, ambiguation and ambivalence, perpetuated in and through regulatory regimes, water quality standards, legal discourses and everyday practices in the city. These practices entangle racialized and poorer populations in situations of durable and everyday harm and are central to the creation, maintenance and reproduction of vulnerable and disposable human and non-human life in the city.
10-4 HISTORY OF THE PROFESSION
41-10177
Hong Kong. housing. housing-welfare . Path dependency. South Korea. third-sector housing.
The third sector has recently emerged, or re-emerged, as a new housing provider for disadvantaged groups in Hong Kong and Korea, where affordable housing development has been predominantly directed by government. However, our knowledge of third-sector housing in non-Western contexts remains partial. In this article, we aim to provide, from a historical-institutionalist perspective, a comparative account of the (re-)emergence and implementation of third-sector affordable housing delivery in Hong Kong and Korea. Based on the housing-welfare regime framework, we discuss the socioeconomic and political contexts in which third-sector housing has burgeoned in the two regions, and how the relationship between the government and the third sector has moulded the implementation of third-sector housing. We highlight the significant power of the government in implementing third-sector housing and third-sector organizations’ continued complementary role to the government in supplying housing as welfare, which reflects the path-dependent nature of housing and welfare policies in the two regions. Adopting a long view to understanding history and a broader framework that reflects the socioeconomic context contributes to advancing the comparative housing literature.
11. Concepts of Planning
11-1 APPROACHES (COMPREHENSIVE/STRATEGIC/COLLABORATIVE)
41-10178
geography. heritage conservation. polyvocal approach. scholarship. urban planning. urban scholarship. vertical geographies.
The vertical turn in urban scholarship is a critique of the overly horizontal perspectives used in studying cities in academic research. This article broadens this scholarship by engaging with the ways that horizontal perspectives on urban conditions dominate not only scholarly perspectives but also professional responses to urban change. By drawing on research in the divided city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it argues for a ‘polyvocal’ approach to studying professional responses to urban conditions, one that facilitates a productive juxtaposition of those responses with city dwellers’ everyday engagements with the vertical qualities of the built environment. It also seeks to understand how vertical geographies—here, tall landmarks—in divided cities are seen as part of the complex urban realities of city dwellers in strategies of urban planning and heritage-making related to postwar reconciliation. These findings are compared with ethnographic data about how people make sense of tall landmarks in divided cities and how they experience and interpret them in relation to senses of togetherness and belonging to divided cities. By putting these two lines of research in a dialogue, the ‘polyvocal’ approach offers a way to rethink conventional strategies of urban reconciliation and taken-for-granted ways of conceptualizing cities.
41-10179
bureaucratic processes . environmental protection . Philadelphia. toxicity. violence . water supply.
In this essay I explore how regulatory standards for lead—which are designed to ensure the quality of drinking water—permit toxic harm to befall Philadelphia’s residents, especially communities of color. The bureaucratic practices of the city’s water department, I argue, render knowledge about toxic harm and risk both materially and legally illegible—not always despite, but also because of these standards. A class-action lawsuit filed against the City of Philadelphia over concerns about lead in the residents’ water supply is used to contextualize and explicate a predominant approach to environmental protection that is centered on creating standards to regulate toxic substances. As the case of Philadelphia shows, such an approach is prone to failure because ultimately the harm caused by a pollutant is only secondary to empirical questions about whether actionable thresholds are crossed and protocols breached.
41-10180
arrangement. movement building. re-arrangements. urban practices.
This final movement explores whether thinking with re-arrangements can help us account for that which is hidden, unseen or nested in the recesses and folds of urban practices. And if so, how we might then talk about and account for elusive parts of an arrangement that both exert an influence and are influenced. This essay uses sensibilities as an entry point into the intangible interactions between subjects and (re)arrangements.
41-10181
countersurveillance. Ethnographic practice. informality. Philadelphia. Race/ethnicity. surveillance. urban poverty.
Drawing upon three years of ethnographic research conducted in drug and alcohol recovery houses and treatment centers in Philadelphia, this article argues that attending to the practice of informality in the subproletariat and precarious working classes of the postindustrial US city helps elucidate the twinned legacies of informality and surveillance in racialized US urban poverty. To do so, it recuperates Bourdieu’s practice theory with the invigorating insights of Black studies on the historic legacies of racializing surveillance to theorize the practice of informality in the postindustrial US city. Ultimately, the article argues that informal practice offers a space of concealment forged through the evasion and countersurveillance of racializing surveillance in the postindustrial US city.
11-2 PLANNING THEORIES
41-10182
movement building. polyrhythms. re-arrangements. urban policy.
This movement introduces the ethos of the collective project: its conceptual and practical preoccupations. It focuses on our concern with urban processes on the cusp of change, in the midst of being re-arranged, and thus homes in on the various polyrhythms of intersections, how things come together and diverge, how possibilities open and close in urban contexts of continuously shifting horizons.
41-10183
cultural terraformers. framing . marginalization . redevelopment. terraforming strategies. urban cultural terraforming. urban redevelopment.
External forces always shape the social construction of ‘the local’. In this article we offer a framework for understanding how external players and strategies reconfigure the social and symbolic character of local culture for new investments and new populations. We aim not only to propose a theory of urban cultural processing by nonlocals—what we call ‘urban cultural terraforming’—but to identify pressure points for local groups to make claims on or even commandeer reshaping local culture. Using two cases, casino development in a deindustrialized city and state-designated cultural districts, we illustrate how ‘cultural terraformers’ use identifiable strategies (e.g. colonization of local sentiment, re-creating partnerships and respatializing) to change local culture, and how groups struggle to avoid marginalization.
41-10184
city. Colombia. gamonales. infrastructure. patron–client relationships. political infrastructures. transformation.
In this article I analyze the participation of economic patrons or gamonales in processes of city building. Like clientelistic leaders, local ‘big men’ can partake in the transformation of the living conditions of the urban poor. These individuals show an extraordinary capacity for transforming cities, their built environments and social and political infrastructures, especially in small and rapidly growing cities located in the peripheries of nation-building projects. In my research I explore the case of one patron in Granada, a rapidly urbanizing city in Colombia that received many forced migrants between 1990 and 2010, to reveal a new way in which city building and patron–client relationships co-evolve and are constituted within a space of intimate interactions between landed property and urban real estate.
41-10185
Architecture . China. hypothesis. peri-urban context. transformation. Urban–rural links.
This article engages with the emerging scholarship on experiments in urban and regional contexts to investigate an architectural experiment overseen by Wang Shu, a renowned Chinese architect, in Wencun Village, a peri-urban village on the fringe of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. In particular, we examine how architectural projects are mobilized to provide a solution to rural decline amidst deepening urban–rural integration. Architecture is supposed to generate knowledge about the relationships between built forms and positive social and cultural changes, in this case involving the revival of rural cultures and identities. Empirically, this article provides a novel study that investigates culture-based interventions into the revival of peri-urban regions in the context of intensifying urban–rural interactions. Theoretically, it contributes to the study of experiments in urban and regional contexts by, on the one hand, correcting the urban bias inherent in this corpus and arguing for the relevance of experiment to peri-urban and rural contexts. On the other hand, while this study reaffirms the importance of using relatively bounded sites of study and controlled parameters to produce plausible knowledge about regional transformation, it equally calls for attention to the contingencies and surprises that exceed and destabilize preconceived theories, epistemological frameworks and hypotheses.
41-10186
funding . geography. knowledge economy. PEAK Urban programme. research funding. Urban research.
There are a number of benefits to large-scale, multi-site, internationally funded urban research projects if they are operationalized in ways that acknowledge forms of knowledge incommensurability and allow for space to explore the commensurability of different forms of knowledge across different geographies. Such projects are especially important in the context of the precarity of research funding, as such projects can provide the space to explore new urban research avenues that may not have formed core components of the existing urban studies canon and may also bring with them significant and new funding possibilities. In this intervention I use the example of the GCRF-funded PEAK Urban programme to consider how new urban research questions related to sexuality and health were brought to the fore during the life of the programme, which offer not only new research avenues, but also potential access to significant new funding sources. Programmes such as PEAK Urban therefore have the potential to build the long-term resilience of urban research. Cutting funding to such programmes may therefore limit the efficacy of the programmes themselves and the long-term sustainability of urban scholarship.
11-5 APPLICATIONS/TECHNIQUES
41-10187
homogenous time. movement building. re-arrangements. temporal pattern.
The fourth movement explores the temporal relationship between arrangements and re-arrangements, addressing the question of how an obdurate and ‘sticky’ temporal order may give way to palpable re-arrangement of the ways in which subjects experience time. Eschewing a concern with linear homogenous time, it addresses the processes of re-arrangement by understanding the dynamics of grave events, hauntings of the past, subtly changing rhythms of everyday life, and the force of potential futures in synchrony.
41-10188
discrimination. India. Socio-natural productions. Urban Political Ecology. valorizations. waterlines.
How is water engaged in, or mobilized for, the production of social difference and indifference? This article proposes the rubric of ‘urban waterlines’ to examine the political agency of various urban waters in inscribing categories of personhood and effects of discrimination. Waterlines are conceived as material (socio-technical and historical) formations that set out to channel, contain or accelerate water, but are ultimately effected by pushbacks, overflows and outbreaks, or the subsidence and vanishing of water. They are dialectically assembled by the workings of water in two registers: first, as a variable form shaped by historically shifting valorizations of water as resource, factor of production, object of consumption, aesthetic feature, or waste; and second, as a relatively autonomous natural element that resists or exceeds these shapings. The article discusses three kinds of urban waterlines—boundaries, flows and infrastructures—using case studies from Chennai to illustrate how each is assembled through socio-natural, technological and discursive operations and works to dispossess or disadvantage specific people and places. It brings Urban Political Ecology’s analyses of water forms as historically crafted socio-natural assemblages into conversation with anthropological scholarship on how indifference is produced through the everyday workings of the state.
41-10189
authoritarian. authoritarianism. gentrification. neoliberalism.
In gentrification studies to date, authoritarianism has mainly served as a contextual backdrop to discussions of state-led gentrification. In this concluding essay I reflect on the explorations of ‘ordinary’ geographical cases of ‘everyday authoritarianism’ presented in this intervention on planetary gentrification and urban authoritarianism. The cases of Istanbul, Casablanca and Lijiang show how the complex merging of authoritarian and neoliberal is now one of the cruxes of gentrification globally.
11-6 NEGOTIATION/MEDIATION/DISPUTE RESOLUTION
41-10190
China. informality. state centrality. street businesses . temporal tactics . urban governance.
As part of China’s endeavour to modernize and internationalize its cities, it has repeatedly eliminated street markets and street vendors. But in the (post-)pandemic context, regulating street businesses inclusively turned out to be an efficient way to generate jobs that has been widely promoted. This turn reveals a new pattern in China’s urban governance that might contribute to rethinking the state–informality nexus. In this article we draw on observations and interviews in Chengdu and on critical discourse analyses of related government documents and news reports to suggest that there is an underlying logic of control that governs the state’s new tactics for regulating street businesses. We examine three tactics—performative tactics of regulation, spatial tactics of control and temporal tactics of contingency—to uncover the state’s centrality and the tactics it uses to consolidate such centrality in the name of informality. Regarding informality and state centrality as conditions for each other allows us to interrogate both the internal logic of control and its manifestations in everyday statehood. Within the informal constitution of state centrality, everyday negotiations and contestations of spatial claims eventually render the ‘ordinary state’ a hegemonic locus that shapes urban experiences and politics.
11-7 CITIZEN PARTICIPATION
41-10191
democratic innovation . local government. populist movements. public engagement. social fracture . solidarities. urban politics .
The current degree of social fracture that has attended the growing prevalence of populist movements calls into question the viability of democratic practices grounded in collective deliberation. Urban practitioners committed to democratic inclusion must confront the practical question of how to deal with a divided public. Any such effort must address longstanding and mutually reinforcing trends that have both aggravated social fragmentation and enabled the rise of populist regimes whose policies exacerbate divisiveness and inequity. These trends include economic restructuring and rising inequality, cultural division, and a post-truth trap resulting from disagreement over epistemological and ontological assumptions. We argue that, while local governments can play a role in addressing these dynamics, a more fundamental renewal of a meaningfully democratic polity depends on a capacity to help cultivate solidarity across difference. We then recast the city as a site of political encounter and experimentation that might enable both a re-examination of prevailing modes of public engagement and the emergence of solidarities and infrastructures through which populism might be challenged. Finally, we consider how a progressive urban politics of place might use populism as a point of departure for transforming urban futures.
12. Policy and Planning Administration
12-1 AGENCY DECISION MAKING
41-10192
Citizens-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC). entrepreneurship . Karachi. mobilization. urban citizenship. urbanization.
The Citizens-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) was launched in 1990 by a group of Karachi-based industrialists, with the aim of improving police performance and restoring public order in Pakistan’s major business hub. Over the years, CPLC members developed a unique informational capital as well as analytical and operational skills, which were recognized as a form of expertise by law enforcement agencies and contributed to the entrenchment of the organization into the security state. This corporate mobilization for security, understood as a form of collective action organized by entrepreneurs for the protection of their lives, properties and economic activities, imposed its writ in the city’s industrial zones. The expert system of the organization was then repurposed toward the surveillance of factory workers, the defense of industrial order and the regulation of circulatory flows across the estates. By engaging with the growing body of work on the new military urbanism through the lens of the risk-theory literature on policing, the article aims to contribute to ongoing debates about the transformations of labor relations and urban citizenship under a new regime of securitization fed by ever-thicker chains of interdependence between capital and coercion.
12-2 CITY MANAGEMENT
41-10193
bone setters. city of repair. construction. ethnographic approach. flu vaccinations. Mexico. urban dwellers.
This essay is based on long-term ethnographic research in Mexico City, and centers on a street epistemology that involves researchers immersing themselves in material street life to explore the relationships between the body, the house and the street in the constant repair of the (future) city. I assert that Mexico City is not a city dominated by planners, experts, or professional social workers, but rather a place where everyone knows that perfection is elusive and that constant repair of oneself, the city and the objects that constitute daily life make life possible here. The city is permanently under construction—populated by workers who destroy and rebuild, and by repairers of all kinds: roadside mechanics, nurses who check your blood pressure and offer flu vaccinations in the subway, herbalists who sell their medicines on the sidewalks, ‘bone setters’ who offer osteopathy services on the street, improvised pharmacies, used car part sellers, anti-flu juices producers, and cabinets for intercession with angels. In the ‘city of repair’ different yet interdependent futures are practiced. There is the future imagined and constructed by professionals seeking perfectibility and manifestations of aspirational politics. There is also the future imagined and practiced by the vast majority of urban dwellers—a pragmatic future grounded in the ‘here and now’ of constant repair and in the constant search for solutions to contingencies—an anticipatory political form.
41-10194
Extensions. extractivism. housing. Housing informality. housing values. metropolis. Urban research.
This article contributes to debates on the decentering of urban research by critically examining emergent forms of housing in the mining municipality of Canaã dos Carajás, Brazil, beyond the dominant lexicons that have emerged from the country’s metropolises. The notion of ‘beyond the metropolis’ is offered here as a geographically situated, conceptual placeholder that empirically grounds calls for dislocating urban research. I draw upon fieldwork conducted in Canaã in 2018 and 2019, after the construction of the largest open-pit mine in human history, which attracted tens of thousands of migrants and more than doubled Canaã’s population in five years, creating a severe housing crisis. By looking closely at how regional developers, local authorities, mining giant Vale as well as Amazonian majorities came up with their own ‘solutions’ to the housing problem they faced, I foreground the role of ‘extractivism’ and ‘extensions’ in driving and shaping urbanization and inhabitation—beyond the metrocentric emphasis on agglomerative dynamics driven by industrialization and rural-to-urban migration. This twofold conceptual grammar grounded in non-metropolitan Amazonia is absent from current housing debates and illustrates the generative analytical potential inherent in the move beyond the metropolis.
41-10195
construction. dimensions. future vision. institutional contexts. value systems.
In recent decades, a dominant narrative has emerged in which cities are considered the most decisive places for the future of contemporary societies. In fact, institutional production of such futures grants cities a central function in the becoming of the world. The objective of this essay is to analyze and characterize the institutional construction of future scenarios for cities based on three dimensions, or pillars, of a proposal for an institutional analysis. These dimensions are regulatory, normative and cognitive. The construction of future scenarios can be useful for cities, but it is important to recognize that they are institutional constructions that respond to the interests of individuals or groups and thus reflect visions of the present that reveal the concerns and strategic dimensions of certain actors. In this essay I analyze and characterize a corpus of 101 future scenarios for 81 cities in different countries. The results demonstrate that the future scenarios for cities are institutionalized through the development of regulatory functions, value systems and cognitive and cultural frameworks for organizations and individuals.
41-10196
COVID-19 pandemic. encroachments. movement building. policymakers. proximity.
In this article I look into the weakening state of housing justice in India, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and increased state violence. I ask how and why housing rights in India have mostly remained limited in their approach without being able to demand broader access to the city through right to the city discourse. In trying to find answers to this question, I examine housing rights activism in India historically. I show how, while some movements and campaigns organically began to make such broader claims without even invoking the term ‘right to the city’, these efforts were short-lived and those spaces were taken up by policymakers and courts. In this article I trace how a relative absence of a political language and movements’ growing proximity to the policy world has shaped a very particular trajectory of housing rights in India. Within the context of this relative absence of a right to the city discourse even quiet encroachments of the poor have failed to claim their moral right to the city. In this moment, as the Indian state takes a more hostile turn towards the poor and to civil-society organizations, I argue that it may be time to rethink ways of bringing back housing to the centre of political struggles in India.
41-10197
advisory practices. Creative Class Group. creativity. depoliticization. depoliticization. policy analysis . strategic planning. Urban mobilities.
This article assesses how the agency of international advisors can provide policy recommendations that, instead of introducing urban policy initiatives for multicultural encounters, sharpen political and spatial segregation within the context of ethnic conflict. The article explores the variegated nature of neoliberalization and argues that the adoption of strategic planning and creativity discourses enables the development of a sophisticated political rationale for governing ethnic diversity. The analysis focuses on a range of advisory practices—including the role played by Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School and Richard Florida at the Creative Class Group in advising former Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat—in order to understand the dynamics of grounding imaginaries concerning a neoliberal role for the state and the depoliticization of the public sphere in a disputed city. By surveying official policy documents, journalistic interviews and two reports submitted by Porter and Florida to Barkat, the author examines how the branding of Jerusalem as a creative city involved managerial practices that classified the city’s diverse population according to categories of creative and non-creative labor rather than political subjects. The adoption of such discourses facilitated a novel approach for enhancing the state-building ethno-nationalistic project while at the same time reproducing the dynamics of occupation and annexation.
41-10198
China. land-based accumulation. megaprojects. Temporal analyses. urban development. urbanization.
This article examines the hitherto overlooked temporal politics and resultant injustice in theorizing urban transformations in China. Through a micro-level, in-depth case study of the lifespan of Guangling New City, it unravels the complex and at times conflicting ways in which different temporal dimensions of this mega project were manipulated, exploited and experienced. In particular, it unravels the organization of, and the divisions within, the dominant elites and illustrates how their conflicting and changing interests in time shaped the trajectory of the new city project. Residents caught up in the urbanization process were not completely opposed to the dominant temporalities of the project. Some of them partially submitted to its promises and visions; others gained a marginal degree of control over the temporalities. Both outcomes contradictorily reproduced their submission to dominant interests and power in the urban development game. Time thus played a critical role in enabling and sustaining land-based accumulation, despite the injustice involved. On this basis, this article calls for a more grounded approach to bring out the messy and contradictory temporal politics of urban development in order to improve the planning and delivery of megaprojects.
12-3 FISCAL PLANNING/BUDGETING
41-10199
Global North. Global South. informality. Market Trade. marketplaces. trading.
Studies of marketplaces in the global North have often conceptualized markets as important public spaces of social encounter and conviviality where visitors, regardless of race, age, class or gender, feel they have an equal right to be. Yet comparatively little has been written about how inclusive European marketplaces are for the traders who (want to) work there. In this article we argue that the common conception of marketplaces as accessible to everyone, and as vehicles of socioeconomic mobility, is oversimplistic and romanticized. We draw on empirical data from marketplaces in four European countries to focus on the more or less informal ways in which markets are regulated by managers and traders themselves, and on the exclusionary and inclusionary effects of this process that may ultimately determine traders’ access to and success in these markets. This article not only challenges dominant conceptions of marketplaces as accessible and inclusive, but also addresses prevalent stereotypes about economic practices in the global North and assumptions about the ways in which these differ from practices in the global South.
12-4 POLICY ANALYSIS
41-10200
coalitional moments . coalitional moments . LGBTQ2S. municipalities . scalar arrhythmia. social inclusion policy.
LGBTQ2S municipal governance is a contentious policy domain that is often publicly framed as ‘morality’ or ‘niche’ politics, yet urban sexuality scholars have shown its fundamental dissonance and incommensurability across spatial scales. Within polycentric city-regions aspiring to ‘progressiveness’, LGBTQ2S-supportive municipal social inclusion policy is further subject to arrhythmic diffusion. In this article we introduce the neologism of scalar arrhythmia (a biomedical metaphor that parallels the pace of diffusion with the irregularities of a heartbeat) in conjunction with scale-contingent coalitional moments (spatiotemporal junctures that bring people together to enact social change) to advance an urban social justice agenda. We argue that the analytical vantage point of scalar arrhythmia reveals differences in the longitudinal temporal (a)synchronicities of peripheral municipal inclusion policy diffusion and locates transformative scale-contingent coalitional moments. Through an analysis of the interplay of diffusion processes and mechanisms across the adjacent peripheral municipalities of Burnaby, New Westminster and Surrey in Canada’s Vancouver city-region, we demonstrate provincial–municipal hierarchical ‘coercion’, core–periphery metropolitan relocation ‘imitation’ and municipal inter-peripheral contagious ‘competition’. While peripheral patterns of scalar arrhythmia rupture Vancouver’s illusive progressive regionalism, the concept offers civic leaders an inventorying opportunity that redirects attention away from cursory LGBTQ2S policy performances towards substantive policy integrations and local innovations.
41-10201
cosmopolitan. Digital media . Displacement. gentrification. mixed methods. neighborhoods . place-based food experiences.
Leisure activities, including place-based food experiences, have become central to defining urban identities and branding places. Mobile and affluent urbanites’ search for authentic and cosmopolitan experiences is increasingly guided by corporate digital media such as apps and websites that direct them to previously ignored working-class, ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods, which are being discursively and materially reconfigured to meet their needs, in turn causing the displacement of long-time residents. We examine the relationship between food and gentrification through the lens of digital media, suggesting that they play an important role in shaping urban experiences and cities. Specifically, we investigate narratives produced by popular digital food media, not least websites and apps providing restaurant ratings and reviews, and their relationship to ongoing patterns of gentrification in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and Paris. Using mixed methods that combine census data with ‘hybrid fieldwork’ in online and offline foodscapes, we identify some spatial patterns and key characteristics of food-driven gentrification, highlighting the aestheticization of everyday life and its significance in encouraging and legitimizing planetary gentrification.
41-10202
Global South. informal housing market. product variety . proliferation .
Housing informality in wealthy contexts is an overlooked phenomenon, particularly in the global South. This article addresses the role of public institutions in the production of housing informality among the wealthy. For this purpose, it analyses the operation of public institutions in relation to the proliferation of luxurious villas in the eastern hills of Bogotá. Three villas were selected as archetypes of informal urbanization among the elite in the eastern hills, and their stories—or informality pathways—were reconstructed through interviews, maps and policy documents. The article aims to unveil how public institutions have contributed to the creation of informal spaces, often in collusion with private entities. Specifically, public institutions demonstrated conflicting internal agencies and multi-level fragmentation, resulting in flexible regulations tailored to fit the construction practices of the elite. These characteristics were instrumental in establishing spaces of exception for the wealthy in the eastern hills of Bogotá and will likely be mirrored in other informal settlements in the global South.
41-10203
budgetary process. collaboration. innovation. organizational capacity. philanthropic foundations.
In this study I examine the role of philanthropic foundations in stimulating city government innovation. Reduced budgets and rising consumer demands are challenging organizational capacity in government, prompting government officials to recognize the need for innovation to improve policies, programmes and practices. This empirical study draws upon qualitative interviews and policy reports to generate comparative case studies on three city governments in England: Bristol, Manchester and Newcastle. It builds on work in urban studies and policy mobilities that reveals how foundations can influence urban agendas, finding that philanthropic foundations engage with city governments through three different types of collaboration: direct provision of financial resources, exchange of non-financial resources with city governments and indirect engagements. Philanthropic foundations are blending financial resources and less tangible provision of space and time to enable city governments to experiment with new ideas, policies and ways of working. The fusion of non-governmental resources provides city governments with the capacity to act, and city governments often use non-governmental funding for riskier projects and for projects that may not have taken place if public funding had been used. Through these different collaborations and by deploying a suite of interventions and methods, philanthropic foundations stimulate product, service, process, conceptual and governance innovation in city governments.
41-10204
accessibility. Global South. housing. informality. Policy comparison. policy learning. policymakers.
Informal settlement growth in various countries has led to distinctive actions that enhance low-income populations’ accessibility to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services. This trend indicates the need for comparative studies between countries and cities to understand the factors that lead to policy learning opportunities. We conducted an experimental comparison between Accra, Ghana, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, to understand, first, how policies on informal settlements have been formed, and secondly, what inquiries should be made to address housing informality in the global South. A comparison shows that these cities/countries have shared moments of neoliberalization and that their poor residents have experienced similar struggles regarding housing availability and the pursuit of extensive governmental interventions. Therefore, their experiences are worth examining. Our comparison indicates that first, Buenos Aires/Argentina has adopted more inclusive policies regarding informal dwellers than Accra/Ghana, and secondly, that diversifying housing solutions are an inevitable dynamic in cities/countries experiencing a surge in housing pressure across classes, races and geographies. In this article we articulate how the governments of these countries have dealt with these challenges and conceptualize the coproduction needs of housing informality in developing countries. We encourage policymakers facing informality in the South to respond to the questions we raise about facilitating policy learning.
12-5 POLITICS AND PLANNING
41-10205
empowerment. inhabitation. political mobilization. social depotentiation. spatio-temporal evolution.
In this article I question notions of urban liminality by foregrounding the temporal, spatial and experiential dimensions underpinning their formations. I focus on liminal practices of inhabitation in the context of a housing squat in Rome, Italy, by investigating how a permanent housing deprivation condition, once politically organized in a squatted building, can anchor processes of empowerment and political mobilization. To do so, I put forward a rereading of liminality, not necessarily as a temporary state but rather as a more comprehensive spatial–temporal assemblage, by offering a tripartite reading of liminal conditions in their spatial, temporal and experiential dimensions. My goal is to offer an analysis of urban and housing liminality that transcends totalizing narratives of exceptionality, temporariness or straightforward annihilation, advancing instead a more nuanced reading—where liminality can be seen either as a vehicle for social depotentiation or as the grounds for collective forms of emancipatory practices.
41-10206
conceptualization. conflicts. pluralistic approach. urban politics. urban scholarship. violence .
In this article we introduce a pragmatist interpretation of agonistic pluralism and develop this into an analytical framework that is applied to the analysis of urban conflicts. In the article, we take stock of contemporary critical and radical urban scholarship, our aim being twofold. First, we substantiate Chantal Mouffe’s notion of agonistic pluralism with tools from French pragmatic sociology. We suggest that, in a democracy, plurality emerges both as a plurality of conflict manifested in the variety of possible ways to identify injustices, and formulate and justify claims in public struggles, and a plurality of commonality, manifested in different logics by which a ‘we’ can be formed and action coordinated so as to solve issues without resorting to physical violence. Secondly, by applying the developed conceptualization of plurality to an ongoing urban conflict concerning an airport, we showcase the value of the approach for identifying and analyzing different forms and phases of actually existing political conflicts, and for recognizing their meaning for democracy.
41-10207
analytical framework. Coordinadora Regional de Autoridades Comunitarias – Policia Comunitaria (CRAC-PC). Hegemony. informality. security . transformation.
The article builds an analytical framework to study the relation between security and informality and the extent to which it contributes to producing hegemony in local politics. By emphasizing a processual understanding of hegemony, the article develops a twofold argument: (1) structurally powerful actors with well-established links to state institutions carry out informal practices just as well as those often perceived to be at the ’margins’ of the state; and (2) subaltern groups are capable of transforming their society while also inadvertently reproducing hegemonic security practices. The analytical framework is unpacked through two Mexican cases: the Coordinadora Regional de Autoridades Comunitarias – Policia Comunitaria (CRAC-PC) in Guerrero State and neighbourhood vigilantism in Oaxaca City. The CRAC-PC case shows that procedures in which hegemony is challenged involve actors resorting to state institutions (law, judiciary) coupled by paralegal institutions that enhance placemaking of rural indigenous communities. The Oaxacan case shows how communities challenge state actors through a series of practices that bring people together into networks that put into question the hegemonic organization of in/security at city level. The analytical framework helps to break the dichotomization of formality and informality and to clarify how informality is practised in struggles both for and against hegemony.
41-10208
categorical fallacy. empirical validation. laissez-faire liberalism. liberalism. neoliberalism. power politics. YIMBYism.
he upsurge in anti-regulatory rhetoric known as YIMBYism has deep historical roots in laissez-faire liberalism. Contemporary YIMBYism lacks empirical validation; embraces a categorical fallacy; embodies moral failure; exemplifies the arrogance of policy expertise; reveals the maturation of neoliberalism; and provides an object lesson in the dominance of power politics in the production of truth in the contemporary moment.
41-10209
Atlanta BeltLine. dispossession. gentrification. geography. green growth. political ecology. racial capitalism.
In this article I argue that any analyses of the manifestations of urban natures within urban political ecology must center racial capitalism as a theoretical framework and account for how these manifestations, which rely upon the co-constitutive workings of race and nature, reproduce anti-Blackness and unequal productions of space. I engage urban frontier imaginative geographies as a lens through which to view the ongoing regimes of dispossession within the historical context of the founding of what is today known as Atlanta and the contemporary greening project of the Atlanta BeltLine. Race and nature intersect to function as instruments of power and converge in the spaces of the Atlanta BeltLine to (re)produce an urban green frontier.
41-10210
border cities. borders/bordering. China. cross-border trade. entrepreneurialism. national security.
How to balance policy experimentation for economic development with border control for national security is an issue that remains unresolved. Addressing this question, the article analyzes policy experimentation in Chinese border cities and how such experimentation is territorially reflected in and promoted through border control—a selective process that involves both softening and hardening the border. The case study is Ruili in Yunnan province, a border city adjacent to northern Myanmar’s Shan and Kachin states. With the approval of higher-level governments, Ruili has already begun experimenting with policies to promote cross-border trade. One key initiative has been to move customs clearance away from the border to customs checkpoints within the city, giving rise to a special situation of ‘inside territory and outside customs’. However, this neoliberal policy of trade facilitation also generates new administrative loopholes which facilitate two-way smuggling across the border. Border control provides the conditions through which border cities experiment with new policies in trade, investment and manufacturing, while enforcing sovereign power against clandestine business under the guise of national security. This article contributes to our understanding of the theoretical synergies between urban entrepreneurism and border politics by developing a territorially sensitive reading of the implementation of experimental policies for economic development.
41-10211
infrastructural violence. infrastructure. political economy. resilience. Resistance. theorization.
The rise of the global supply chain has intensified the circulation of goods and capital across the world. While the body of literature on the politics and political-economy aspects of logistical expansion has grown, little attention has been given to understanding how coastal fishers’ communities interact with the ongoing development of mega infrastructure. I argue that it is essential to place spatial and temporal specificity at the centre of analysis to further understanding of everyday resistance and resilience. In this article, I use a case study of the Port development in Jakarta to argue that renegotiating and reworking space and place amid the development of the mega port is a form of nonviolent everyday resistance and resilience that operates under, but also against, the capitalist political-economy configuration. I focus on everyday resistance, particularly Asef Bayat’s concept of quiet encroachment, and resilience literature to demonstrate the development and contested usage of micro and temporary infrastructures, both at household and community levels, as a material example of how diverse groups in communities exercise their agency and power, and express everyday resistance and resilience differently. Through this article, I aim to contribute to the broader literature on a situated political urban ecology, particularly on everyday resistance and resilience in postcolonial urbanism.
41-10212
China. Czech Republic. governance. leadership. political frameworks . shrinkage. United States.
Although the phenomenon of shrinking cities is a global one, policy responses can vary considerably depending on context. This article examines the initiatives of government agencies in a variety of contexts and finds that cities adopt different strategies to manage the problems of shrinkage. Specifically, the article presents an international comparison of three shrinking cities: Fu Xin in China, New Bedford in the USA, and Ústí nad Labem in the Czech Republic. These three cases, which present three distinctive political frameworks (namely, centralism, localism and indirect centralism), have responded to the issue differently but experienced similarly insufficient policy outcomes. We observed that the political agenda-setting for shrinking cities involved more than simply choosing to ignore, deny or accept the problem, and focused instead on how the local governments opted to recognize their problems, assembled the political willpower and leadership to address them, and gave shape to the policy choices that created a specific narrative for their city. From a comparative perspective, we argue that cities cannot manage their shrinkage without support from other levels of government. In other words, a successful response to urban shrinkage requires multilevel governance to contextualize the locally-based phenomenon, de-contextualize the role of multilevel politics, and re-contextualize the set of policies and actions that can be utilized.
13. Planning Law and Legislation
13-1 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
41-10213
adaptation. cultural manufacturers. Displacement. gentrification. Melbourne. resilience. San Francisco. urban restructuring.
Recent urban scholarship shows how zoning and real estate dynamics shape ongoing processes of gentrification and deindustrialization. While studies demonstrate the impact of planning and property market pressures on the arts, less research has examined their effect on urban manufacturers in gentrifying industrial districts. Given the differential impact of zoning and real estate pressures, our research focuses specifically on how ‘cultural manufacturers’ negotiate changing land use patterns in gentrifying urban industrial areas in San Francisco and Melbourne. Our findings show how cultural manufacturers develop flexible workspace arrangements, business models and professional networks to negotiate urban restructuring and avoid displacement. Though innovative, these survival strategies provide limited ability to navigate structural barriers. Here, the presence of intermediary organizations can help coordinate a strategic response to industrial gentrification and indifferent planning policy. In our research we highlight the everyday practices of adaptation and collective action in an under-researched cultural sector to provide a counterweight to macro-scale transitional narratives. While cities have deindustrialized owing to technological and competitive pressures, to focus exclusively on this misses a range of resilience practices that have sustained manufacturers in restructuring cities.
41-10214
Displacement. Dispossession. empowerment. ethnographic analysis. gentrification. Social Reproduction.
This essay presents a feminist intervention by incorporating feminist theory and ethnography into the examination of gentrification and displacement within authoritarian neoliberal urbanism. It explores the link between gentrification and the systemic crisis of social reproduction and discusses the contribution of feminist ethnography to our understanding of gendered dispossessions during state-led gentrification and displacement. The essay concludes that integrating a social reproduction lens and employing feminist ethnography not only enhances our understanding of gendered dispossessions but also reveals the potential for empowerment in marginalized communities. Making visible the material and affective injustices and daily struggles to pursue social reproduction amidst the dismantling of marginalized lives by state-led gentrification contributes to feminist praxis. Illustrative examples from a longitudinal case study on the nexus of gender and gentrification in Tarlabasi, Istanbul, are used to support these arguments.
41-10215
black communities. Cape Town. decision-makers. housing. political processes. prefigurative politics .
This article contributes to ongoing discussions about the practice of prefigurative politics by urban social movements, and the relationship between prefiguration and other political practices. We argue that urban social movements can deploy prefigurative power in combination with other political strategies with which it is often contrasted and opposed. To demonstrate, we explore Cape Town’s Reclaim the City movement that occupied several inner-city buildings to create affordable housing for low-wage Black communities—prefiguring the kind of affordable housing that they were demanding. They developed this strategy iteratively after having tried to play by the rules through litigation and mobilize through protest. When those approaches failed to shift decision makers, they tried to prefigure their goal for housing through occupation. Prefiguration offered distinctive strategic advantages: it helped demonstrate that affordable housing was possible and provided direct relief for people facing housing stress. These advantages not only engaged new participants but contributed to new affordable housing commitments from the City of Cape Town and the courts. We show how movement participants understood their prefigurative occupation as part of a constellation of people power strategies and suggest that this points towards the potential for prefiguration to be deployed pragmatically as well as ideologically by urban social movements.
41-10216
inter-relationality. resistance. Rio de Janeiro . transformation. urban theory. urbanization.
In this article, I examine the definition of resistance given by a favela woman from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—Lucia Cabral—and its epistemological potential for urban theory. From a feminist, postcolonial and decolonial point of view, I argue that Lucia’s definition of resistance entails an insightful framework to understand urban transformations, because she shifts the question of ‘what they are’ to ‘where they stream from’. I build on my situated position and inter-relationality with Lucia to argue that, first, urban transformations, which I here refer to as forms of urbanization, can and often do come from the favela; secondly, that these forms of urbanization derive from situated and translocated-ing Amefrican epistemologies; and thirdly, that women’s bodies constitute, in many cases, the very basis of urban futurities in the favelas. I look into embodied forms of urbanization to conclude that it is possible to see, feel, sense and nurture forms of future-thinking and -building that I here call Amefrican futurities, for they emerge from the specific subjectivities and praxis of women living in the favelas.
13-2 LAND USE CONTROLS
41-10217
non-citizens. non-equivalent relations. South Pacific city . urban land. urban space.
In this article I describe how a permanent underclass is being inadvertently created in a South Pacific city. I use Descola’s idea of equivalence in human relations to explain urban tenure and evictions in the postcolonial South Pacific city of Port Vila. Vanuatu is a nation of 82 islands. Its archipelagic geography segregates most people’s autochthonous lands, preventing ready access to the national capital. Port Vila, then, is a city of non-citizens of the urban space: by accident of birth, a small number of people now control the land where virtually all poor migrants to the capital will live. This article describes how two non-equivalent relations—production and protection—feature prominently in the ways that people talk about tenure insecurity. In sum, these non-equivalent relations form the basis of how people relate to each other in terms of urban land occupancy. The pervasiveness of non-equivalence indicates a fundamental difference between denizens of Pacific cities, whose urban policies will need to adapt to account for its presence. A right to the city may look different in places where non-equivalence is at the very stamba (foundation) of how the city is made.
41-10218
Cape Sidero. dispossession. exceptional land. gap. hypothesis. landscape. monopolistic quality. redevelopment.
To explain the continuous hold of a single touristic real estate investor over the greater part of Crete’s easternmost peninsula, Cape Sidero, for a period of over thirty years, this article examines the production of rent gaps on ‘exceptional’ rural land through increasing potential rent rather than a falling capitalized rent. I examine Neil Smith’s ‘alternative’ rent gap hypothesis as it applies to two main factors: the production of and sustained control over land of monopolistic quality, which has no fixed value and is resistant to depreciation; and the dramatic neoliberal reworking of land markets through institutional and legislative changes, which produce legally ‘exceptional’ spaces. I employ the conceptual lens of the rent gap to examine how opening up a rent gap on ‘exceptional land’ based solely on the promise of (re)development can be a sufficient driver of land dispossession. Simply sustaining this promise can perpetuate land with monopolistic quality as a site of rent-generating possibility, and while this process might never lead to (re)development, it can result in the submersion of the landscape into a captive, limbo state, stealing its future.
41-10219
Global South. governance. Plurality. South Africa. spatial structure. urban land.
Property as a legal assemblage works to produce and imagine space according to a dominant set of norms and principles, thereby casting an imagined projection into multiple worlds. This unduly narrows the lens through which governance actors perceive and mediate competing claims to urban space. In this article we engage this feature of property in the context of contestation over urban land in Durban, an intensely plural city of the global South. We focus on three sets of spatial practices that are, in different ways, in tension with municipal governance objectives in Durban to probe how social actors interface with property law through divergent logics and lexicons. We argue that a more hybrid legal conception of property is required to enable just and normatively hybrid governance of these (often competing) claims.
41-10220
decolonial planning. Displacement. Ethnographic practice. geography. Indigeneity. Taiwan. urbanisms.
The city is often understood as the antithesis of Indigeneity. In Taiwan, a settler colony where the Han Chinese have colonized Austronesian Indigenous peoples, dominant understandings and representations situate Indigenous vibrancy outside large cities such as Taipei and Kaohsiung, despite the large-scale urbanization of Indigenous peoples over the past several decades. This essay is based on long-term ethnographic research in Taipei and explores how urbanized Indigenous people in the Taiwanese metropolis persist in claiming the city’s space, land and ecology despite both cartographic and physical displacements of their presence. It maps out emerging Indigenous and decolonial urbanisms in Taiwan, discussing the work of Indigenous artists and the spatial and ecological practices of urban Indigenous community residents.
41-10221
Belo Horizonte. housing. informality. land development. land management. mixed-methods approach. urbanization. working-class families.
Recent decades have seen a rising interest in the peripheral nature of urbanization processes. While research has put the spotlight on large-scale, transnational and financialized real estate actors, less attention has been paid to informal land developers. Addressing that knowledge gap, this article underscores the key role of land developers in informal urbanization through a case study of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. A mixed-methods approach provides new evidence of the widespread, variegated and spatially uneven development of irregular and clandestine subdivisions over the last two decades, revealing a heterogeneous landscape of informal developers. The study shows that informal development has been shifting from the typical popular and peripheral subdivision, which provided precarious yet affordable housing for working-class families, to new forms of speculative investment for the middle and upper classes, such as country homes and gated communities in peri-urban and rural areas. I argue that this shift is explained by both national and local changing regulatory frameworks and processes of economic restructuring, urban neoliberalism and housing financialization in the periphery. In light of this, I propose the notion of ‘property-led informality’ to refer to a regime of informal urbanization increasingly dominated by commodified, rentiership and speculative land dynamics in the sprawling metropolises of the global South.
13-5 SOCIAL POLICY LAW
41-10222
geography. hyper-diversity. ideology. political behavior. power dynamics. social practices.
Queens is the most diverse county in the country and much of its diversity comes from relatively recent immigration. It is therefore exactly the kind of place that a variety of theorists have argued cannot have ‘a public’ through which questions of politics, plans and policies can be discussed and debated. In this article we explore the potential for a public in such spaces of hyper-diversity and do so through the lens of electoral politics and the state. A set of findings emerges from this research. First, the hyper-diversity in Queens does not change the reality that much of what is happening is the very typical and mundane ‘drama’ of power politics in a city. Secondly, in that mundane competition for power, racial and ethnic differentiation are not preexisting forces of nature that determine political behavior, but are co-constituted with political, economic and social processes that often play out in ideology and geography (neighborhood). Finally, this leads us away from views of ‘the public’ that implicitly accept or assume either a fixity of its identity or an essential set of characteristics in its constitution.
41-10223
charter-cities model. Hong Kong. mobilization. Multiplication. neoliberalization. policy making.
In this article we trace mobilizations of the Hong Kong ‘model’ through mutating policy networks to highlight connections made by (and around) Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Romer, as a roving policy advocate for charter cities and as an ‘economist in the wild’. Frustrated in practice but politically resilient, the idea of charter cities recycles the notion of territorial enclaves founded on ‘empty’ land and governed in accordance with purified market rules. Typically indexed to a stereotypical reading of Hong Kong, this model repurposes the tabula-rasa conceit of ‘startup’ urbanization, yoked to a neoliberal vision of ‘islands’ of experimentation. Via an account of the faltering mobilities of the charter-cities model, the article explores the reciprocating circuits and recurring motifs that connect Romer’s expertise as a prominent economist with expedient abstractions of the Hong Kong ‘model’, with the reproduction of ideologically selective policy networks, and ultimately, with the troubled frontiers of charter-city policy development. It culminates in an examination of the protracted effort to build a ‘Hong Kong of the Caribbean’ in Honduras, where grandiose acts of policymaking projection and developmental hubris meet a repeating history of governmental corruption, corporate opportunism and banana republicanism.
41-10224
Conservative Party. depoliticization. Labour Party . Land valuation. private property. rentierization. value capture policy.
In England, when land is granted planning permission its value increases dramatically. Historically, the question of who is entitled to this ‘betterment value’ uplift has been one of the central debates in national politics. However, from the 1980s to 2008, betterment value capture policy became depoliticized. This article seeks to understand how that came about. Focusing on the parliamentary sphere, it proposes that depoliticization took place across three ‘faces’. First, economic interests: rising home-ownership and the broader rentierization of the economy strengthened support for house price inflation and private property rights, thus shrinking the space for political debate around these issues. Second, institutions: under Section 106 and the viability regime, the governance of betterment value capture became fragmented, incorporating an array of unelected ‘experts’, models and rules which worked to reduce the discretion of elected local planning authorities. Third, discourse: from the 1980s onwards, the Labour Party’s discourse around betterment value capture converged with that of the Conservative Party. This convergence was partly driven by ideational changes in the Labour Party and in the discipline of economics. Taken together, these three faces help explain why betterment value capture policy moved away from the realm of contestation and contingency and towards that of fate and necessity.
41-10225
long-term institutions. population. Social distinctions . urban space .
This article examines the perspectives of long-term residents in response to the influx of newcomers in two neighbourhoods in Warsaw, Poland. It addresses the crucial, yet understudied, impact of spatial changes on the local population and the diverse ways in which residents negotiate this changing urban context. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework and its subsequent reinterpretations in the field of urban studies, the article explores the extent to which the narratives constructed by the long-standing residents refer to categories of social class and correspond to their class position. The central question is whether spatial changes lead them to ‘internalize their inferiority’ (Savage, 2008: 161), or if they possess resources that can be mobilized to navigate conflicts arising from urban transitions. Through individual and group interviews with residents from two districts in Warsaw, this research sheds light on how the symbolic divisions between ‘us’ (long-term residents) and ‘them’ (newcomers) are framed. It demonstrates how nativity is transformed into capital, providing the possibility for symbolic dominance. Consequently, it not only enriches understanding of the social distinctions that are made within evolving cities but also underscores the ongoing relevance of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework for the study of urban space.
41-10226
dispossession. exclusion. geography. Mumbai. scholarship. social inclusion policy. vulnerability.
A rich seam of waste scholarship already addresses the exclusion faced by informal waste workers as cities in the global South undergo spatial transformations to become ‘world class’. However, less attention has been paid to how state practices have reproduced inequalities within and across waste picker communities. Drawing upon eleven months of ethnographic research at Mumbai’s Deonar dump site, this article maps the practices through which waste workers have responded to their exclusion following a massive fire in 2016. It demonstrates that social exclusion is experienced differently by different members of the community and calls for a greater focus on heterogeneity amongst waste workers. Multi-dimensional vulnerabilities manifest through these workers’ deal-making strategies, while simultaneously mirroring the conditions of marginality produced by the state. The article contributes to debates on marginality by employing the lens of erasure to show how exclusion relies on the optics of visibility and invisibility. By unpicking the hierarchical structure within one waste worker organization, the article argues that the state-led mandate for garbage-free cities in India disproportionately affects those located at the margins of marginalized groups.
41-10227
Baan Mankong program. co-production . co-productive programs. political frameworks . urban governance. urbanization.
This article examines the role of insurgency in scaling up the co-production of housing. Co-production has gained in popularity in the past 15 years as both a set of practices and an intellectual framing for analyzing urbanization in the global South. Discussions of co-production have largely emphasized the cooperative nature of the approach, asserting that a mostly non-confrontational politics has proven effective at reshaping urban governance in ways that better meet the needs of the urban poor. However, recent analyses have identified conflict versus confrontation as a key tension in co-production, especially as co-productive programs seek to go to scale. I contribute to these discussions by analyzing a well-known case of large-scale co-production, Thailand’s Baan Mankong program, to understand the roles of insurgent versus cooperative community networks in the program’s trajectory. I conclude that a more insurgent network opens up new land, resources and avenues for political participation. A more cooperative network then renders many of these interventions broadly politically acceptable to those in power. The two networks thus exist in a dialectic that has enabled the program’s scaling up. I argue that research into co-production should pay more attention to the importance of confrontational tactics by community networks.
14. Planning and Society
14-2 DISCRIMINATION/DESEGREGATION/INTEGRATION
41-10228
India. middle-class. migrants. neo-urban contexts. social class distinction. sociospatial segregation.
In this article I examine the simultaneous expansion of urban sprawl and influx of middle-class migrants in the context of Gurugram, India, to highlight how physical and social space plays an integral role in shaping class distinction among the migrant middle classes. I make a case for social class, generally, and migrant middle classes in neo-urban contexts, specifically, to be understood as a sociospatial category. My arguments build primarily on Bourdieu’s argument that both physical and social space operates on similar principles of reciprocal externality of positions in the context of social class distinction. I highlight how the migrant middle classes formulate and consolidate their social class distinction against competing claims over sociospatial dominance of the local ancestral agrarian community in neo-urban Gurugram, India. My findings highlight how existing local sociopolitical fractures interact with global capitalist circuits of capital to shape the sociospatial context in which social class distinction is formulated. The article allows for grounding theorizations of social class to accommodate local sociopolitical and sociospatial dynamics.
14-3 SPECIAL POPULATIONS/SOCIAL WELFARE
41-10229
Black lesbians . Black Lives Matter. Black Power Movement. Geocoding. Mapping . solidarities. urban movement.
This study traces how Black lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area made a place for themselves in the world at the end of the twentieth century, after the decline of the Black Power Movement and before the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Geocoding and analyzing the content of a Black lesbian journal in the San Francisco Bay Area that had global distribution, the author examines how the placemaking of Black lesbians remade them as cultural-political subjects, expanded their networks, and inspired them to reimagine their relations with the earth. As they crafted cultural spaces across the African diaspora, they faced threats—most notably, street violence, harsh policing and ecological degradation—yet they also experienced joyful interactions with each other, with allies and with nature. The belief grew in their cultural spaces that their liberation required world transformation and that they could change the world. This research, providing a frame for studying the interaction between the making of cultural spaces and the formation of political solidarities, contributes to urban movements research, critical environmental justice studies, and Black feminist/LGBTQ+ research.
14-4 URBAN SOCIOLOGY
41-10230
conversation. Indigenous urbanism. settler-colonial structures. social relations. urbanisms.
Indigenous urbanism is an analytic and vital experience that captures everyday life and extreme moments of conflict in settler colonies. While highly localized, Indigenous urbanism/s are comparable across time and space. Delivered from different parts of the world, the essays in this collection highlight that Indigenous urbanism is politically, socially and culturally significant not only for Indigenous peoples in cities, but also for urban settlers and non-Indigenous people of color. While Indigenous urbanisms are foregrounded by settler-colonial structures and processes, they also underscore the unresolved nature of social relations in cities, and indeed, the unsettled character of the city itself. This introduction briefly sketches the themes and scope of each essay and draws them into conversation. Taken together, this collection illustrates the relational—rather than reactionary—character of Indigenous urbanisms as structure, in and of the (settler) city. Indigenous urbanisms shape cities by engaging with broader categories of human relations, intimate connections, conflict and resistance.
41-10231
crisis-centric approach. critique of value. social relations. urbanization.
In this article I present the concept of the ‘peripheral condition’ in the context of theoretical discussion on planetary urbanization. Inspired by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s interpretation of urbanization, which draws from Lefebvre’s oeuvre, I suggest taking into consideration Robert Kurz’s key insights about the internal contradiction of capital. In this study I seek to integrate the ‘critique of value’ theory’s crisis-centric approach into the literature on planetary urbanization, as it allows us to move beyond accounts that focus on extensive urbanization through operational landscapes and instead encompass the social relations that accompany it. Consequently, I argue that this comprehension reveals the periphery-form as a relevant idea to qualify discussions on planetary urbanization once an ever-growing population faces situations of precarity that were previously considered restricted to the peripheries. Hence, I suggest that planetary urbanization cannot be fully understood without considering its dark side, the peripheral condition.
41-10232
knowledge connectivity. movement building. navigation systems. re-arrangements. uncertainty. urban opportunity.
The third movement explores how (re)arrangements are made and re-worked as people navigate fractured, ever-shifting landscapes of urban opportunity, conflict and uncertainty. Drawing on fieldwork in Paris, Mogadishu and Abidjan, we point to the fragile, collective and anticipatory knowledges accumulated during navigations, and to how these knowledges become contained within and (re)constitute embodied archives.
41-10233
colonialism. dialectical relationship. Indigeneity. Indigenous urbanism. liberatory. urban theory. urbanization.
In Canada, the terms Indigeneity and urbanity have been configured by colonialism and are often understood as antithetical. Given the baggage these terms carry, conceptualizing Indigenous urbanism in a manner that does not replicate the same problems these categories suggest is an important intellectual task for both urban and Indigenous studies. In this essay, I propose that Indigenous urbanism might be best understood as an analytic that highlights a dialectical relationship between Indigeneity and urbanism, marking both concepts as constantly in flux and open to contestation. Indigenous urbanism marks urban space as potentially both liberatory and oppressive, and as the basis for a liberatory research agenda.
41-10234
commodifying space. Global South. implementation program. informality. zoning practices .
This article presents a poststructuralist analysis of zoning practices and their implementation in the global South, critically analysing the development of two parallel housing processes arising as a consequence of zoning: informality and customary land use management systems in peri-urban settlements. Using a Bourdieusian analysis, the article evaluates the tension between zoning and informality in which zoning furthers special interests and creates highly unequal power relations by commodifying space and marginalizing the urban poor. In response, pro-poor forms of counter-conduct such as inclusionary zoning and informality serve to alter the perspective of normative planning and create alternative spaces that generate agency for the urban poor. This raises questions regarding the nature of current zoning practices in terms of social justice and distributive ethics.
41-10235
North America. platformization. public–private partnerships. strategic planning.
After their widespread legalization, ridehailing companies Uber and Lyft soon embarked on a new stage of their respective business models: the initiation of a wave of strategic partnerships with local and regional transit agencies across the North American continent. This article accounts for this trend by putting forward the concept of the public–private ridehail partnership (PPRP). It aims to render visible the PPRP as a variously contradictory attempt to splice Uber and Lyft’s platform-based business models with the existing social and physical realities of North American post-suburban space. While conceived as a strategic response to pressing sub- and exurban problems such as low physical densities, widespread car centrism and extensive transit undersupply, the PPRP, as I argue, is neither able to adequately address these dilemmas nor to ultimately resolve them. Rather, the PPRP latches onto old—and sets in motion new—powerful dynamics of heightened uneven development and continued urban entrepreneurialism. Each of these two dynamics is explored through empirical analyses of two recent PPRPs in the Toronto city region: the Lyft–Metrolinx pilot carried out between July and December 2019; and Uber’s ongoing partnership with the town of Innisfil, located about 80 km north of downtown Toronto.
41-10236
climate emergency. Eco-community strategies. global markets. Global North. natural resource depletion. urban ecology.
Cities are critical sites for understanding, and potentially ameliorating, the effects of global ecological change, the climate emergency and natural resource depletion. Contemporary cities are sociomaterially connected through global markets, trade and transportation, placing ever-increasing demands on the natural environment and generating dangerous pollutants and emissions. Current approaches to address these environmental crises are dominated by neoliberal forms of ‘green’ urban development, carbon accounting and techno-economic solutions, which extend corporate control over cities and tend to entrench inequality. A more strategic approach for enabling ecologically sustainable and equitable urban futures is urgently needed. We present five strategies for urban ecological futures in the global North, derived from qualitative and ethnographic empirical research with international eco-communities, which open up discussions about how to tackle this challenge by acknowledging the role and potential of: (1) non-extractive community economies; (2) democratic processes of co-operative action; (3) social approaches to resource management; (4) participatory collaborative governance; and (5) urban heterogeneity and social justice. We explore the relational, contested and contextual processes through which these approaches could become embedded in urban policy and planning, thereby offering the strategic capacity required to move towards truly sustainable cities.
14-7 HEALTH/EDUCATION/SOCIAL SERVICES
41-10237
COVID-19 pandemic. epidemiological dimensions. health. political ecology. topological approach. urbanization. zoonotic diseases.
In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic this article takes a longer view of the evolving relationship between urbanization and the range of zoonotic diseases that have spread from animals to humans. I suggest that the existing interpretation of epidemiological transitions remains overly Eurocentric and requires a more nuanced conception of global environmental history. Similarly, the conceptualization of urban space within these teleological schemas has relied on a narrow range of examples and has failed to fully engage with networked dimensions to urbanization. At an analytical level I consider the potential for extending the conceptual framework offered by urban political ecology to take greater account of the epidemiological dimensions to contemporary urbanization and its associated pandemic imaginary. I examine how contemporary health threats intersect with complex patterns of environmental change, including the destruction of biodiversity (and trade in live animals), the co-evolutionary dynamics of viruses and other pathogens, and wider dimensions to the global technosphere, including food production, infrastructure networks, and the shifting topographies of peri- or ex-urban contact zones.
41-10238
pedagogy. self-build settlements. slum. solidarities. Southern urbanism. urban learning. urbanisation.
Learning from the pedagogical potentials of Southern city-making practices is imperative to foster emancipatory urban learning settings. However, the ways in which urban learning spaces beyond professional settings operate and how Southern urbanism practices constitute new critical pedagogies are poorly understood. We draw on research about urban learning on ‘slum upgrading’ in the city of Medellín (Colombia), a benchmark in dealing in tandem with informality and urban violence, to analyze the pedagogical potentials of convites. Convites are an essential sociospatial mechanism of self-build settlements rooted in solidarity networks that initiate collective action and celebration through public cooking. This practice of makeshift community kitchens led by women became the backbone of the response to the scarcities caused by the pandemic in self-built neighborhoods in Latin America. In this article we ask what Southern urbanism and critical pedagogy can learn from convites. We then analyze the ways in which convites combine community kitchens as learning environments, the use of collective storytelling as a learning device, and collective action through networked solidarities. We argue that critical urban pedagogy is a situated pedagogy derived from everyday relations of place, body and materiality infused by memory and articulated by storytelling.
14-8 PLANNING AND GENDER/RACE/ETHNICITY
41-10239
discrimination. dynamic process . Race/ethnicity. Roma. stigmatization. urban development.
Roma discrimination and stigmatization in Europe are well-documented, with urban scholars emphasizing pervasive prejudices and stereotypes alongside negative policy outcomes. However, the focus on Roma marginality has tended to centre on punitive state and urban governance to the neglect of everyday urban relations. In this article we focus on the micro manifestations of stigmatization—racialized urban encounters—and their neglected longer-term affects for Roma in Czechia and Romania. Ethnographic research and in-depth qualitative interviews with Roma respondents expose a complex, dynamic and multi-layered response to stigmatization that challenges the simplistic binary of resistance versus the internalization of stigma. The concept of fragmented habitus is deployed in capturing this dynamic process and providing a nuanced representation of the urban inhabitation of a long-term stigmatized and racialized position, beyond generic ‘Otherness’. We argue for more attention to the specificities and complexities of everyday relations and their affects in capturing the interdependence between urban encounters, the longer-term construction of Roma inferiority, and the heterogeneous, dynamic and ambivalent ways in which Roma inhabit their racialized urban position.
41-10240
coda. human valuation. Mumbai. Philadelphia. racialization. urban injustice. wetland.
In this coda to the intervention on slow violence and the administration of urban injustice I reflect on the role of racialization—broadly defined—in creating deeply unequal and risk-laden wetland ecologies. I identify ‘racial ecologies’ and ‘ambivalence’ as two key concepts tying together wetland politics across the contexts of Philadelphia and Mumbai. While the concept of ‘racial ecologies’ underscores how systems of human valuation (including racism, casteism and religious discrimination) are ordered through ecological and property valuation, the concept of ‘ambivalence’ stresses the materiality and strategic governing logic which underpins wetland ecologies.
41-10241
municipalities . public housing. racialization. residualization. Roma. social housing. unhouseables.
This study analyzes public housing residualization as a multiscalar phenomenon, providing specific details about how it happened in a Central and East European context via the marketization of the housing system, the peripheralization of ‘the social’ and the racialization of ‘unhouseables’. It employs secondary statistical data, interviews, and document analyses to examine the endemic features of global capitalism within Romania’s housing regime. The study shows that the dismantlement of the state-socialist establishment has resulted in a lower social rental rate than in core capitalist countries. It observes that when the public housing stock has generally been depleted, newly established social housing is relocated to the peripheries of cities as a nonmarketable component of the dualist public housing sector. In Baia Mare, the municipality has created social housing enclaves for vulnerable groups associated with dangerous behavior by excluding them from other forms of public housing, whereas in Cluj-Napoca, it has attempted to exclude marginalized people from public housing by turning it into a site of class warfare. In both cases, the housing stock under scrutiny is associated with the racialized Roma ethnicity. The approach adopted in the study enables the residualization of public housing to be addressed across the peripheralization–racialization nexus.
15. Development Planning
15-1 COMMUNITY AND NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT
41-10242
Detroit. gentrification. neighborhoods. older adults. scholarship. social media.
Very little research has focused on how age factors into gentrification processes and how place branding helps drive gentrification. Scholarship on gentrification has engaged with the ways that race and class intersect to marginalize long-time residents politically and economically in the context of gentrification, but rarely analyzes the important role that age plays in exclusion, or how it is represented materially in the branding of changing neighborhoods. To address this gap, this article aims to present a better understanding of how age plays into representation in new developments through the branding of downtown Detroit as a young, hip place to live, work and play. The article outlines how older adults are excluded from the reimagining of the ‘new Detroit’ using a content analysis of media articles, social media, promotional materials and downtown redevelopment strategies. This analysis showed limited representation of older adults in new developments, activities and public spaces downtown. Instead, images focused on younger people, young families and young professionals enjoying downtown amenities, often highlighting their perceived economic contributions. Biased representations of changing neighborhoods create barriers to developing an age-friendly city. These findings inform the article’s recommendations directed at planners and developers on how older adults can be better accommodated and included in the development boom of downtown Detroit.
41-10243
Accommodation . bureaucratic processes . Burkina Faso. governance. implementation program. institutionalization. resistance. urban governance.
A comprehensive zoning plan has been under way for more than a decade for an urban informal settlement in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. In this article I explore the narratives and strategies of its residents in response to the impending restructuring, suggesting that the continual postponements of the zoning plan’s implementation may be understood as constituting an elusive form of urban governance that relegates strategies of both resistance and accommodation to formal governance to the sphere of micro-politics at the level of the neighbourhood. Urban governance is thus approached here neither as a set of formal policies nor through the day-to-day workings of the state bureaucracy, but as a much less tangible form of urban governance that is best studied through its perceivable effects instead of its stated intentions or institutionalized techniques. In the relative absence of the state in the everyday lives of urban residents, the main effects of the workings of the state bureaucracy in this context seem to be to discourage citizen involvement and to slow official procedures to a halt. I argue that the force with which impending evictions and yet-to-be-implemented urban zoning shape residents’ outlook and opportunities for negotiation and mobilization constitutes a form of governance through inaction.
41-10244
authoritarian. Displacement. neighborhoods. neighborhoods . social structures . Spain. stigmatization.
Neoliberal urban interventions are perceived as authoritarian by the people affected—regardless of whether they are implemented by an autocrat, a dynastic king or an elected government—because they are supported by narratives designed and imposed from outside which contrast with local perceptions of space and social life. Fieldwork reports from two displacement processes implemented by an authoritarian state—Morocco—are compared with similar observations in two allegedly ‘democratic’ countries—Italy and Spain. In all cases, the residents respond with counter-narratives that highlight the importance of local social structures based on strong personal ties and the collective use of resources that enable them to survive neglect and stigmatization. A common trope is the idea of a ‘big family’ of neighbours struggling against a state that refuses to acknowledge the dignity and value of local social life, thus betraying and alienating its own citizens.
41-10245
community resistance. mobilization. politics of slums. resistance. Rio de Janeiro. slum.
Between 2010 and 2016, over 65,000 slum dwellers were forcibly evicted in Rio de Janeiro. This article compares three cases of anti-eviction resistance over this period. While the three case study communities were all relatively successful in contesting evictions, the outcomes (material, social, political-symbolic) of their mobilizations were different. To understand how and why, we examine and compare the structures and processes of mobilization in these three communities and show how they found different openings and limitations in the changing political opportunity structure. We distinguish three distinct ‘moments’ or opportunity structures in Rio de Janeiro’s urban governance between 2010 and 2016. We term these the City of Exception, the City in Revolt and the City in Crisis. The analytical and theoretical framework of contentious politics helps us draw together and expand on two dominant narratives in scholars’ approach to slum evictions: on the one hand a top-down perspective of the ‘city against slum dwellers’; on the other a bottom-up perspective of ‘slum dwellers against the city’. In this article we test the usefulness of our expanded framework—contentious politics of slums—for understanding the organization and outcomes of community resistance against evictions, and discuss its relevance for research on the politics of slums in the global South.
41-10246
China. deterritorialization . migrants. resettlement . Reterritorialization. state-led community building. two-stage process.
Resettlement thus far has been conceptualized as a large-scale form of displacement taking place within a short timeframe. In this article I attempt to reinterpret resettlement as a two-stage process involving both the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of residents by shedding light on the processes and challenges involved in rebuilding the sense of community of residents after resettlement. I draw on the case of a relocation settlement in Shanghai and find that the Chinese state is heavily involved in reterritorializing residents because it needs to consolidate its influence at the grassroots level and address the practical necessity of assisting tens of millions of resettled residents who lack access to essential amenities and services. The state uses a mechanism I describe as state-led community building in its attempt to rebuild the sense of community of resettled residents in a way that also renders residents more governable. In practice, this involves increasing the number and power of resettlement committees and promoting resident volunteering and participation through community organizations and events. State-led community building works relatively well in the case of retired urban residents, but fails to attract other resident groups, including rural and working migrant residents.
15-2 SMALL TOWN/RURAL DEVELOPMENT
41-10247
blocos. capitalism. city planning. Luanda. modernization. proliferation . urban development. urbanisms.
In this article we portray and unpack the fabric of urban expansion in contemporary Luanda. In doing so, we examine interdependencies and complementarities between the organization of oil extraction off the coast of Angola, the emergence of particular modalities of modernist city planning for the expansion of its capital city, and the proliferation of cement blocks in the making of new urban forms throughout its burgeoning peripheries. By showing how urban development has unfolded through the interconnected realization of multiple kinds of systematizing blocks—namely oil blocks, city blocks and cement blocks—we analyse key material components in the production of new markets and urban spaces in the Angolan capital. By tracing forms of capitalism and modularity in the making of contemporary Luanda, we develop the concept of blocos urbanism to draw attention to modes of standardization and the production of legibility in contemporary processes of urbanization. Through this study, we aim to contribute to the conceptual apparatus for deciphering our global urban condition.
41-10248
affordability. housing density. redevelopment. segregation. urban redevelopment. YIMBYism.
Using examples from Chicago, this intervention questions some of the basic assumptions of the YIMBY movement about housing density, supply, and affordability and argues instead that the push to build at higher densities in certain profitable areas of the city is a legacy of the city’s historic and continued segregation.
41-10249
conceptualization. Ethnographic practice. India. Modernity. political modernity. rehabilitation. slum. urban development.
India continues to modernize, and the legacy of political modernity rooted in the European Enlightenment continues to reify itself in India through the performative practices of the body politic. The body politic is a totalized conceptualization of a society imagined in the form of a body, with real exclusionary effects on those without citizenship rights. This body politic is made real through performances of popular sovereignty, bureaucratic state practices and liberal democratic electoral procedures performed during urban development processes. Ethnographic accounts of politics of slum rehabilitations in Pune show that the modern body politic is indeed performatively practised, and reshaped, by the very bodies that are expected to be alienated for the making of the body politic. Bodies meet one another in different spaces and times and generate the possibility of reshaping the liberal body politic into relational and affective bodily politics. Together, bodies become both the site and the means through which political modernity is reshaped in India.
41-10250
Asylum policy. borders/bordering. exclusion. inclusion. neoliberalization. political dynamics. refugees.
Taking London as the research context, this article aims to explore the positioning of civil society actors in bordering the differential inclusion/exclusion of asylum seekers and refugees. To do this, and understanding borders/bordering as spaces and social institutions, the article investigates the ways in which civil society actors intervene against bordering, with a particular focus on the labour market and housing. The empirical analysis illustrates that civil society actors seek to open up new spaces of inclusion and new subject positions for refugees and asylum seekers other than those imposed by established bordering processes. However, the capacity of civil society actors to contest the differential inclusion/exclusion enacted in bordering remains limited in the face of constraints produced by neoliberalization and existing political dynamics. More importantly, civil society actors are likely to align themselves with established bordering processes and structures, thus reproducing the differential exclusion/inclusion of asylum seekers and refugees.
41-10251
Africa. algorithmic suturing. business model (BM). Motorcycles. Nairobi-based startups. Urban Africa. urban fractures .
The ‘last mile’ is not only a powerful metaphor of contemporary life, but also the tangible site of a challenge, whether for governments wanting to reach their citizens or companies wanting to reach their customers. In urban Africa this challenge is compounded by the fragmented material condition of cities. As a result, a growing number of tech companies have been compelled by the possibility of creating digital platforms that address the unique logistical configurations of African cities, often enrolling informal systems such as motorcycle taxis to address spatial and economic fragmentation. Through the perspective of three Nairobi-based startups that incorporate motorcycle taxis into their last-mile platforms, this article illustrates how processes of ‘algorithmic suturing’ knit together the loose ends of splintered urban networks thanks to platform business models that visualize the last mile as a site of optimization. In parallel with common understandings of suturing within African infrastructure debates which foreground makeshift practices of the urban poor, this article argues that algorithmic suturing is a speculative endeavour through which urban fractures are made legible as sites of value. By stitching together city fragments, these platforms envision large data-driven urban economies which interface with informal mobility networks and the shifting urban demographic of the lower-middle class.
15-3 REGIONAL PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT
41-10252
Accommodation . Asylum policy. expulsion. Gothenburg. housing. refugees.
From September to November 2015, more than 100,000 people applied for asylum in Sweden. Societal solidarity was unmistakable during this period, but six months later, when the refugees were to be accommodated, the situation had changed. In this analysis of imaginaries of migrants as strangers I scrutinize the city of Gothenburg’s plan to build 1,000 temporary housing units to accommodate refugees. The project failed, resulting in only 57 units being built. In this article I analyse the societal imaginations the project revealed, including those embedded in political and public conflicts of opinion. In an attempt to understand why people sometimes refuse to share social space, I draw on a combination of Sara Ahmed’s theories on the figure of ‘the stranger’ and Julia Kristeva’s theories on how the stranger emanates from an ontological lack. I also outline in the article how different techniques of expulsion can be used to create spatial and temporal estrangement. In the subsequent analysis I demonstrate how practices of exclusion worked to expel migrants from urban development plans in the city of Gothenburg. The conclusion emphasizes the urgent need to scrutinize imaginaries among majority populations, and draws attention to the fact that the ‘foreigner is within us’.
41-10253
colonization. decision-making process. mobilization. modernization. self-determination. South Korea. Top-dong Movement. urban development.
The Top-dong Movement was an extensive residents’ resistance mobilization against the Top-dong Public Water Reclamation project in the late 1980s in Jeju, South Korea. Starting as a local female divers’ struggle for subsistence, the Top-dong Movement grew into a collective action to reveal the illegalities of the project, demand that profits should be fairly shared and assert self-determination. State-led development of Jeju in the post-Korean war period functioned to render the island an extractive periphery during South Korea’s capitalist modernization. Within that context, the Top-dong reclamation project exemplifies how urban development projects create colonial conditions in local communities by dispossessing them of land and the means of subsistence, commodifying public resources and extracting profits. Jeju islanders reacted by claiming specific rights: female divers’ collective rights to public water and the means of livelihood against dispossession; local residents’ rights to control developmental profits against extraction; and islanders’ rights to participate in decision-making processes against exclusion. Bridging Lefebvre’s two concepts—colonization and the right to the city, this article argues that the historically situated, place-based right to the city movement revealed the colonization involved in urban development and performed practices of decolonization.
METHODOLOGY/QUANTITATIVE/ECONOMIC/QUALITATIVE
20. Methodology
20-4 RESEARCH METHODS
41-10254
COVID-19 pandemic. funding . Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). PEAK Urban programme. Urban research.
The nature of research funding shapes knowledge outcomes, especially for urban research that is conducted in multiple sites and over multiple years. Recent unplanned cuts in the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) grants, alongside the rupture caused by Covid-19, created ethical and procedural issues for completing the PEAK Urban programme. Building on durable partnerships, setting principles for the reduced fund distribution and adjusting modes of working enabled PEAK Urban to navigate the fiscal disruption—but the difficult episode highlights lessons for the ethical organization of global urban research under conditions of uncertainty.
41-10255
China. gentrification. heritagization. re-arrangements. regeneration projects. transformation. transformation.
Heritage preservation practices continue to be adopted as a tool to promote the regeneration of historic areas in China. Taking the experience of the Old Town of Lijiang (Dayan) as its starting point, this essay considers heritagization both as a process of gentrification and as an authoritarian urban practice that operates behind the regeneration process, contributing to the transformation of historic neighbourhoods into objects of display. It focuses particularly on the role played by local state actors and heritage regulations, showing how the construction and rearrangement of space as a form of ‘ordering’ serves the dominant classes, thus legitimizing the transformation of Lijiang and directly shaping people’s lives. Finally, following recent accounts of gentrification led by historic preservation, the essay reflects on the ways in which heritage discourses and participatory-like practices may be deployed to legitimize gentrification and hinder various forms of resistance at the local level.
41-10256
empirical evidence . governance. innovation. knowledge production. urban imaginary. urban labs.
In the field of city-governance urban labs are being constructed as experimental spaces of knowledge production, innovation and urban governance. This perspective is mirrored in the majority of the literature engaging with the urban lab. However, empirical evidence shows that ‘urban labs’ are also constituted through imaginative work practices that remain unexplored in theory and practice. In order to address this gap and to delineate how these spaces matter for urban governance, this article critically examines urban lab projects in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. We approach the initiatives under study from the perspective of the urban imaginary, which is shaped through three types of imaginative work—branding, dreaming and assimilating. These imaginative practices reveal how the process of constructing and practising the urban lab has political implications for the city. This point is important, as it brings up questions about urban governance and participation, such as who has access to, and who is allowed to imagine and experiment in, the city? In this way we connect the literature on urban imaginaries to debates on participation and experimental urban governance in the urban lab.
41-10257
decolonizing. funding . global research projects. India. Northern/Western-centric frames. research funding. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) .
In this paper I focus on the substantial research funding cuts announced by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in March 2021 to examine the process of funding for and participation in global research projects for researchers based in Southern institutions. I focus here on three key aspects of participating in global research projects: first, the structures through which these grants are created—the programmatic frameworks or other imperatives that confine and limit this work to Northern/Western-centric frames; secondly, the precarity of these grants and the work that they generate; and, thirdly, the increasingly output-related and time-bound nature of work in light of limited support. I argue that the effects of these are felt disproportionately by those located in the global South and are therefore worth considering as part of larger debates centred on democratizing and decolonizing knowledge networks.
41-10258
capitalism. development. housing. Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY). YIMBY.
A laissez-faire Yes-In-My-Back-Yard (YIMBY)-ism is not a solution to Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY)-ism; rather it represents the other side of the coin of capitalist development. YIMBYism reproduces the ‘Housing Question’ as Engels posed it, by shifting housing problems across time and space, and in their form. Until YIMBYism contains a critique of capitalist uneven development, it will not fundamentally address the causes of housing problems.
21. Population
21-1 DEMOGRAPHY
41-10259
Auroville . cityness. settlement’s development. Social Effects . Social work . vis-à-vis architecture.
This article focuses on the planned community of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, India, founded in 1968. Building on critical readings of the settlement that have drawn attention to the power imbalance in its relationships with surrounding villages, the article delineates the ways that a geographical imagination of cityness has been a key component of the settlement’s development and the forms of neo-coloniality in which it has been implicated. Drawing on archival and published sources as well as ethnographic research, the article discusses three ways in which the settlement performs a sense of its own ‘cityness-to-come’: first, the architectural discourse and planning rationality central to Auroville’s identity; second, its agonistic public sphere vis-à-vis architecture and planning, and third, its ethos of learning and evolution, and the settlement’s developmental teleology. In so doing, the article shows how ‘the city’ conceived as a textual and spatial promise, as well as a utopian aspiration, works ideologically to constitute the settlement itself, but also to precipitate social effects and uneven power relationships with village communities in this region. To sum up, this article develops an argument about the neo-colonial social work done by ‘the city’ conceived as text.
21-2 POPULATION PLANNING
41-10260
colonialism. Detroit. Dispossession. Indigeneity. Indigenous peoples. race. Settler-Colonial Urbanisms.
The connection between Indigeneity and urban spaces remains on the margins of urban studies and Indigenous studies, even as the majority of Indigenous people in the United States live in cities. Scholars have recently begun to think about the connection between settler colonialism and racial capitalism and the urban. In this essay I examine how the dispossession of Indigenous peoples has shaped modern urban development and, importantly, how Indigenous peoples and culture have contributed to reclaiming and challenging urban dispossession through their engagement with Black people and culture. In this essay I use a few examples of Indigenous expressive culture in Detroit, Michigan, during the Emergency Management Era and urban Indigenous youth activism, to urge for us to move beyond simply demonstrating that Indigenous peoples live in urban contexts. Instead, I call for an urban Indigenous studies that explores the connections between dispossession and the possibilities of a radical Indigenous resurgence in cities, and describe how this can be done through solidarity with African Americans in a predominantly Black city.
41-10261
China. entrepreneurialism. municipalities . people-oriented urbanization. statecraft. urban planning. Urbanism\Architecture Biennale (UABB). urbanization.
In this article I build on scholarship that calls for attention to the interventionist role of the municipality in steering development beyond growth to introduce the situated planning experiment as a mechanism through which municipalities practice socially engaged statecraft. The situated planning experiment foregrounds place-based innovative planning practices that incorporate the participation of citizen intellectuals who act as advocates for marginalized groups in China. I frame the Shenzhen Urbanism\Architecture Biennale (UABB) as a situated planning experiment, tracing its influence on the municipality’s shift in approach to planning for urban village redevelopment. I show how the UABB is leveraged as an instrument for the municipality to connect social and economic objectives in development and how it presents differentiated opportunities for migrant residents to make viable urban lives. The article offers one possibility for theorizing the changing relationship between municipal entrepreneurialism and urban planning and critically evaluates the potential for socially engaged municipal statecraft, considering the Xi regime’s focus on people-oriented urbanization. It represents one way in which studies of municipal statecraft can consider the variegated logics and forms of emerging post-growth state programmes and politics.
21-4 MIGRATION
41-10262
Cape Verdean. Cova da Moura. landscape. migrants. neighborhoods . urbanisms.
International migrations are transforming the urban landscape in cities all around the world. In this article I address the effect of Cape Verdean migration on the built environment of Lisbon’s periphery. Specifically, I analyse a traditional practice of mutual aid originating in rural Cape Verde, the djunta-mon system, as a device of migrant urbanism projected onto the urban landscape of the Cova da Moura neighbourhood. In this article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss the role of the djunta-mon in the urban evolution of the neighbourhood from its formation in the 1970s to the present day. The data collected shows that this practice has had an important effect on the appropriation, functional delimitation and significance of the urban space by residents. The results thus point to the importance of understanding how the cultures and identities of human groups crystallize through the processes of social production of space.
41-10263
accumulation. autocorrelation. land dynamics. migrants. mini-city . Mumbai. urbanization.
In this article we look beyond dispossession by exclusionary urbanization to highlight the complex articulation of migration histories, speculative accumulation, translocal livelihoods and political practices that make up a mini-city in Mumbai’s periphery. We think from Mumbai’s periphery as a site from where theory can be made to argue that existing frameworks of peripheral urbanization are territorially fixed, and that there is a need to expand beyond a focus on land dynamics to a discussion on migration, translocal residence and livelihoods. We propose three extensions. First, we argue that peripheral urbanization must expand to include multiple temporalities and agencies that play out in line with orientations toward permanence but also temporariness. Second, we stretch the idea of autoconstruction beyond the material realm to focus on autoconstructed alliances as a central component of participating in the capitalist commodification of land but also exceeding it. Third, in a situation where residents inhabit both temporariness and permanence, they collectively produce place as simultaneously way station and place-in-the-making. We conclude the article by reflecting on what a peripheral urbanization reconfigured for mobility and temporariness means for social justice and inclusion of the (migrant) working poor in the city.
41-10264
dispersal approach. governance. migrants. Path dependency. refugees. repatriates. small-scale segregation. smart city.
Based on qualitative long-term fieldwork conducted in a peripherally located small town in East Germany, this article compares the dispersal of repatriates from the former Soviet Union with that of recent refugee arrivals. It shows that in this small town the dispersal and local governance of refugees builds on previous approaches to dealing with repatriates. Such approaches repeatedly result in cycles of localized distribution and subsequent small-scale segregation, short-term integration activities, the detachment of both groups from the town and, finally, migrants’ subsequent outmigration and relocation to other (mostly larger) cities. To make sense of this path dependency in terms of its specific patterns and characteristics, and to explore the relationships between dispersal, local policy framings, and in- and outmigration to and from small towns, I apply a studying through dispersal approach. This approach reveals that dispersal is an important factor in making and unmaking local migration policies. It can turn small towns into productive sites for migration governance, often transforming them into mere waiting zones and transit spaces. This not only continues migrants’ experiences of displacement but also impacts on the image of the small town, where migrants themselves may not want to reside permanently.
41-10265
Latin America. scholarship. socio-cultural change. Southern urbanisms. transgressing. urban citizenship.
Bridging critical heritage studies with insurgent planning theory, this article proposes the notion of ‘insurgent heritage’ to discuss heritage preservation’s role in constructing urban citizenship in Latin America. Critical heritage scholars have pointed to the European dominant heritage discourse deployed worldwide that excludes subordinated voices in the production of heritage. The research has also illuminated alternative understandings of preservation that sit outside of or opposed to the state and the cultural elites’ concept of what should or should not be preserved. My use of insurgent heritage adds another layer of nuance to this body of work. It promotes a pluriversal perspective by building on Southern urbanisms, Latin American social collective action, and feminist scholarship. Inspired by ethnographic work with heritage grassroots organizations in Chile, this line of argument shows that communities’ local knowledge pushes against the practice of heritage preservation and planning by only sanctioned experts. Instead, by transgressing false dichotomies of informal and formal arenas of politics, insurgent heritage proposes multiple perspectives to envision alternative futures. It reframes grassroots heritage as a sociocultural process mediated by the interplay of memory-work and the specifics of place as an ethical form of place-based care that highlights the cultural dimension of citizenship.
22. Economics
22-1 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH
41-10266
Chicago. construction. neighborhoods . socio-spatial inequities. stigmatization. territorial stigmatization. urban neighbourhoods.
Loïc Wacquant’s work on the production and reproduction of socio-spatial inequalities in Chicago and La Courneuve has inspired a literature on how imaginaries of low-income, often racialized neighborhoods are spread through discourse and policy, and how residents respond to the stigmatization of their neighborhoods through internalization, deflection or resistance. While this body of scholarship has almost exclusively focused on the marginalization of urban neighborhoods, I argue in this article that the process of ‘territorial stigmatization’ analyzed by Wacquant also operates at the level of entire cities and subnational regions, with comparable political outcomes: the shifting of attention away from the structural causes of poverty onto its symptoms and, ultimately, the normalization and exacerbation of inequalities between people and places. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nevers, I analyze the stigmatizing imaginaries surrounding ‘declining medium-sized cities’ in France and how they affect residents’ experience of place. The article contributes to the debate on the internalization/contestation of territorial stigma by showcasing the efforts of Nevers residents to restrict local critical discourse to insiders. It also adds to the literature on resistance through place re-scription strategies by emphasizing the role played by the physical characteristics of place within alternative narratives.
41-10267
bibliometric analysis . collaboration. Colombia. development. economic growth. funding . research funding.
In this paper I analyse how the gradual reduction of research funds in Colombia can interrupt a key process in the generation of solutions to global urban problems. I draw on a bibliometric analysis to show that research funding flowing from North to South has created collaborations between researchers from North and South that have led to a better and more comprehensive understanding of the challenges facing cities around the world. To conclude, I propose four options to counteract these trends towards lower research funding.
41-10268
border checkpoints. formal regime. Gray governance. shadow banking. Sino-Kazakh border.
Shadow trading is a common activity along state borders. Its omnipresence is puzzling because border checkpoints are highly regulated spaces that are heavily gated and securitized. Most studies attribute such a paradox to ineffective border control and corruption. However, this line of argument overlooks the peculiar nature of border and checkpoint governance. We explore this phenomenon with a case study of the Sino-Kazakh border where shadow traders negotiate their passage every day. We find that border crossing is a highly organized activity dictated by informal yet specific and meticulous rules that are enforced by various state and non-state actors. Together, they constitute a kind of gray governance that is thoroughly entwined with the formal regime. It is a kind of technology of rule that enables the state to selectively enforce formal and informal rules so as to accommodate the conflicting goals of border control.
22-2 ECONOMIC DECLINE/RESTRUCTURING
41-10269
colonization. gentrification. socio-political effects. vis-à-vis architecture.
In this article we point to the intersection between political settlement movements, religion and economic gentrification by identifying a new type of gentrifier who has settled in Israel’s mixed cities: the nationalist gentrifier. Against the background of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, experienced as a deep crisis in the Zionist-religious settlement movement, new urban sites of spatial and sociopolitical action emerged. On the basis of interviews, residential participant observation and document analysis, we detail the geographical and sociological context in which nationalist gentrifiers operate in the mixed city of Jaffa and their perceptions and motivations for settlement. Drawing on recent gentrification literature, we show how these actors strategically activate the profiles of the ‘conqueror gentrifier’, the ‘colonizing gentrifier’ and the ‘competitor gentrifier’ vis-à-vis different local communities. The new nationalist gentrifiers are distinguished from both the secular liberal gentrifiers and the religious settler movement beyond the Green Line. This sociological hybrid configuration reflects processes of privatization and commodification of space as well as trends of nationalist radicalization prevalent in contemporary Jewish society in Israel. It should also prompt scholars to critically examine both the ethnonational and economic drivers of expansion projects in contested urban spaces.
41-10270
accumulation. circular economy (CE). Hong Kong. political ecology. urban development. valorizations. waste valorization.
The concept of the circular economy has gained significant political momentum because it offers policymakers a viable approach to tackling resource depletion, reducing waste and promoting economic development all at the same time. Current research, however, only focuses on the technological feasibility of this model, overlooking circularity’s inherent contradiction: namely, that it valorizes waste rather than reducing it. This article tackles this limit by questioning the role of the state in what we describe as ‘waste valorization’. It interrogates the urban political ecology of construction and demolition waste, the largest stream of inert materials in the world. It analyses CDW’s geographies and economic position in urban development and the shifting rationales by which it is governed. To do this, it compares historical shifts in how CDW has been regulated in Hong Kong and Rotterdam. The article shows that waste is no longer an abject residual of urbanization, but a driver of urban development and a burgeoning sphere of accumulation in ecological capitalism.
22-4 PUBLIC FINANCE AND TAXATION
41-10271
Cosmoecology. COVID-19 pandemic. environmental damage. more-than-human. science and technology studies (STS).
Bangkok is a tropical metropolis subject to many human and nonhuman transformations. While Covid-19 raged, the city’s mix of precarity and oppression gave rise to a youth protest movement that opposed the junta government and sought to intervene in Thai politics-as-usual. At the same time, a rewilding experiment aimed at undoing environmental damage quietly was unfolding in Benjakitti Urban Forest Park. We draw on science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and urban theory to elicit the events of both park and protests as ongoing experiments in rewilding Bangkok on more-than-human terrain. Both involve overlapping critical zones, where encounters between many beings and practices of worlding shape an uncommons and create problems of coexistence. Such problems call for cosmoecological diplomacy, understood as the art of giving collective shape to a more-than-human cosmos yet to arrive.
22-6 SPATIAL ANALYSIS/MODELS
41-10272
Barcelona. Global South. socio-spatial inequities. Superblock Barcelona. urban planning.
Barcelona is an interesting living laboratory for studying the role of the local scale in urban planning. Since the early stages of what is known as the Barcelona Model (1979–1994), analysis of Barcelona’s urban planning based on the creation of public spaces at a local scale has become a priority. More recently, micro-scale urban planning has become dominant in addressing global challenges such as climate change within the framework of the New Urban Age paradigm. In this article we analyse the paradoxes between the ideology (local-centrism) and practices (tactical urbanism) of this paradigm, based on an original perspective of the Superblock Barcelona project, contrary to the criticisms levelled against this project so far, which emanate mainly from economic lobbies in Barcelona. While cities seek to tackle global-scale climate change, urban planning is being increasingly restricted to acting at local or micro scales. These paradoxes lead to sociospatial fragmentation and denial of other urban-phenomenon scales, such as the metropolitan/regional one. We frame this article within the critical urban studies perspective, following the planetary urbanization hypothesis. The analysis of the Superblock Barcelona project is based on the logic of ‘making cities by making less city’ and focuses on how the local scale, the districts and neighbourhoods ‘burst against the city’, questioning the very right to the city.
41-10273
environmental governance. environmental politics. Ganga. India. pollution. race. sociospatial segregation. urban scholarship.
Pollution in the environment emerges as a legal and technical object on the one hand, and as a repository of social and cultural beliefs on the other. What happens when we trouble the idea that these belong to different domains and think about seemingly divergent meanings of pollution together? In this article, I draw from anti-caste and anti-racist work to explore this question. Extending critical urban scholarship on environmental politics, I attend to formations of caste and religion alongside judicial and political discourse on preventing pollution to the river Ganga in North India. In our present moment, on the banks of the sacred river, extremist leaders mobilize regulations to target minoritized Muslim and Dalit communities in Kanpur’s leather industry. I argue that the roots of these actions lie in an environmental petition from the mid-1980s which transformed urban environmental governance in North India, as the court decoupled questions of environmental protection from economic and social justice. I suggest that the analytic of regional racial formations helps us grapple with uneven socio-spatial landscapes in postcolonial cities and sharpens our understanding of environmental injustices by moving beyond fixed categories of difference.
41-10274
aesthetic-political regimes. colonialism. golf-focused gated community. green growth. India. spatial purification. spatial segregation.
This article investigates the politics of the design of a golf-focused gated community in Gurgaon, India. It considers the aesthetic uses of golf and architecture that go into the production of a purified urban environment to explore the relationship between urban development, environmental aesthetics and spatial purification in contemporary India. I demonstrate how an architectural focus on golf reproduces the ‘distribution of the sensible’ by attempting to delimit the field of view: who and what is seen, and what an individual can or cannot see. I show how golf is political—deeply connected to and inseparable from legacies of colonial environmental and spatial purification and exclusion, as well as contemporary aesthetic-political regimes that justify spatial segregation, cleansing, and the protection of beautiful environments away from the urban poor. The aesthetic emphasis on a beautified, green and empty environment that characterizes the production of golf highlights the aesthetic terms on which environmental selves are imagined and how environmental images are constructed. This is an aesthetic premised on the creation of shared viewership combined with the power to be(long) in a place where one can be with others but not mixed up with them.
22-8 WELFARE ECONOMICS
41-10275
asset management companies (AMCs). financial crisis. homeownership. operational infrastructures. real estate investment trusts (REITs). Spain.
The 2008 global financial crisis prompted a tectonic shift in the Spanish model, which was based on a debt-driven homeownership society. In the aftermath of the financial crash, the restructuring of the real estate and financial market through intervention of the Spanish government has been a privileged object of urban analysis, with scholars researching the role of the Management Company for Assets Arising from Bank Reorganization (SAREB) and Spanish real estate investment trusts (REITs) in deleveraging the overhang of nonperforming mortgages from banks. This focus has nonetheless led to neglect of the central role of privately funded asset management companies (AMCs) in Spain, which have not figured highly in urban discussions about post-2008-financial-crisis housing restructuring. In this article, which emanates from a larger study examining the re-setting of relations between real estate and financial actors in Spain, I argue that research should pay more attention to the role of privately funded AMCs. I contend that AMCs function as the operational infrastructures of financialization on behalf of investment funds, as they transform nonperforming mortgages into income-producing assets in the housing sector. Analyses of the role of AMCs also help us better understand the role of Spanish REITs owned by investment funds. Through a detailed examination of the Spanish institutional structure that links housing with financial channels, and by introducing the key role of AMCs at the nexus of such a link, in this article I outline the operations of the emerging housing/financial complex in Spain in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
41-10276
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) . education reform. financialization. local government. recursive austerity. urban governance.
Our fiscal analysis of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) from 1990 to 2018 contributes to a growing scholarship on the financialization of urban governance. We advance the concept of ‘recursive austerity’ to show how devolution and cuts at higher scales push local governments into the hands of both growth and debt machines. The use of short-term and variable-rate debt to pay for capital projects causes entrepreneurial and austerity strategies to chafe against their limitations and contradictions, which begets more austerity and structural dependence on credit markets. Faced with deficits, CPS undertook crippling austerity measures, such as staffing cuts, pension holidays and school closures, which disproportionately harmed Black students, households, teachers and neighborhoods. We explain how CPS moved from a voluntary high-leverage strategy to finance capital projects to endemic debt dependency, characterized by habitual borrowing to refinance old loans and sustain operations. We argue that CPS’s debt trap and recurring budget ‘crises’ are the outcomes of the fiscal management decisions it made with investment banks and the City of Chicago, and not only the result of secular trends such as declining enrollments.
41-10277
cultural commodification. culture-led regeneration. monopolistic quality. Nostalgia. Urban regeneration.
Nostalgia has become an important aspect of culture-led urban regeneration in advanced cities. Chinese cities have also experienced this tendency because many local states have used nostalgia as an instrument to brand their cities and promote business opportunities. However, culture-led regeneration has resulted in the dilemma of cultural commodification and branding bubbles, as this approach is subordinate to capital circulation and property revitalization. We translate the Marxist idea of monopoly rent proposed by David Harvey into culture-led regeneration by focusing on the influence of urban nostalgia on the production of the built environment and place distinctiveness for capital accumulation. Against the background of national capital in the Republic of China and its current fervor for culture-led regeneration in what is known as the ‘Republican style’, in this article we explore the case of Nanjing 1912 to examine how urban cultural monopoly rent is produced through the project, and scrutinize its dilemma of over-replication. Although nostalgia is associated with culture, creativity and history, Nanjing 1912’s regeneration is underpinned by economic revenue and by investors experiencing branding bubbles as they tried to upscale the 1912 brand to Nanjing and its neighboring cities.
PHYSICAL/ENVIRONMENTAL
30. Housing and Real Estate
30-1 HOUSING/REAL ESTATE POLICY
41-10278
ad hoc advocacy. formal–informal boundaries. Global North. housing crisis . informality. regularization model. trajectories.
In this article I aim to shed light on boat dwelling as an increasingly popular housing practice in the UK. I investigate the changing nature of this practice in times of housing crisis and of the connection between formal and informal approaches, and discuss how decentralized urban actors influence and safeguard their visions of housing. My investigation concentrates on three intertwined strategies boaters in Oxford use to deal with growing regularization and commodification pressures: (non)compliance, formalization and staying under the radar. My findings challenge several assumptions about housing informality in the global North and document the diverse trajectories that informal processes may take. My analysis reveals that informal and semi-formal solutions are not simply ‘tolerated’ or ‘overlooked’ by the state, but co-produced by urban dwellers through a repertoire of everyday actions and ad hoc advocacy approaches. The construction of specific trajectories of informal housing emerges at the interface of complex agendas and attitudes that go beyond the generalized roles attributed to the key urban sectors.
41-10279
Canada. housing. Keynesianism. pro-housing. racial capitalism. United States. urban development. YIMBYism.
In this introductory essay, we provide an overview and theoretical context for this Intervention of seven critical reflections on the recent ‘pro-housing’ movement YIMBYism (‘Yes in My Backyard’). In cities across the United States and Canada, YIMBYism has become important in local debates about housing and land use; some key North American urban centers are the focus of the commentaries included here. On the whole, academic discussions of YIMBYism have remained focused on local and place-specific narratives. In this introduction we discuss the essays in this Intervention and resituate the discussion towards a more macro-level urban theoretical framework, specifically examining the ongoing restructuring of urban neoliberalism, racial capitalism and hyper-urbanization. We argue that YIMBYism reflects unresolved tensions in the current urban housing crisis that can be seen as connected to the ongoing dismantling of the remnants of Keynesianism and the intensification of neoliberalism and uneven urban development. We note that these shifts relate to how racism and patriarchy suffuse changing regimes of capitalist orders, especially in housing markets and residential geographies. The Intervention as a whole suggests that the YIMBY movement deserves more research attention as a force in the ongoing unfolding of neoliberal urbanism.
41-10280
climate mitigation. climate policy. housing policies. politicization. socio-spatial inequities.
Focusing on the nexus of climate and housing policy, this article analyzes the socio-spatial consequences of urban climate mitigation policies and the resultant need to broaden the concept of climate justice. By using the example of energy retrofitting in a low-income district in Kiel, Germany, the article examines cities’ dependence on real estate companies to reach low-carbon goals in a privatized housing market and the (potential) need to provide incentives for investment. As the case study shows, this can lead to a highly sensitive confluence of climate policy, private real estate investment and neighborhood development policy, which leads to a higher financial burden as well as the potential displacement and further political marginalization of current tenants. In light of these results, the article argues for the application of a climate justice frame in analyses of urban climate policies that integrates housing justice with spatial justice. Specifically, it calls for the right to climate-just housing; that is, for the right to affordable housing to be connected with the right to energy-efficient housing in one’s own neighborhood. This implies the right to information and to urban space as political space, which in turn means the politicization of the targets, strategies and, not least, spaces of urban climate policy.
30-2 CONSTRUCTION/MAINTENANCE/HOUSING AND BUILDING CODES
41-10281
black communities. housing supply. lower-value properties. pro-development. pro-growth ethos. race. YIMBY.
YIMBY proponents typically demand deregulating zoning to allow for increasing housing density through pro-development market-oriented means. Their insistence is guided by the assumption that an increase in housing supply will result in lower housing prices and, subsequently, more affordable housing units. We contend that even without zoning, market speculation in land, not housing supply, determines the future of affordable housing. Moreover, a pro-growth ethos that exists among elites, regardless of race or ethnicity, sustains land speculation and fuels the affordable-housing crisis. Using secondary sources to explore the impact of no zoning, as well as the dominant private-property paradigm and pro-growth ethos in Houston, Texas, the case of Acres Homes illuminates the nascent response for social control and ownership of land as a form of resistance to market-based development that displaces lower-income households and Black communities. Deregulating the market curtails equity and restrains the resistance necessary to bring about cultural and structural changes that will end the affordable housing crisis.
30-3 HOUSING/REAL ESTATE FINANCE AND VALUE
41-10282
Accommodation . financialization. housing. qualitative data. quantitative data. real estate investment trusts (REITs). transformation.
This article explores the governance of risk in financialization through the entry of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and other investment funds into specialized supported housing in England. Supported housing is a form of care accommodation intended to enable vulnerable groups such as people with learning disabilities to live more independently. Since 2014, investors have targeted the sector, developing a leaseback model that has encountered controversy due to unsustainable rents and the near bankruptcy of at least one housing association. The article unpacks these dynamics by asking how financialization has generated risk through the imposition of a ‘care fix’ in the sector, drawing on qualitative data including interviews, financial and media reports, and court and regulatory documents. In answering this question, it argues that the contradiction between housing’s role as a private commodity and as a collective means of social reproduction generates tensions that suggest potential limits to financialization.
41-10283
commercialization. gentrification. property values. spatial inequality. Tokyo West Creative Industry Cluster (TWCIC). urban regeneration.
Inner-city areas function as incubators of creative industries in metropolitan cities. The areas adjacent to Tokyo’s city center also play an important role as a location for small to medium-sized creative industries. First, against this background, this article explores the relationship between the characteristics of locations of creative industries and Tokyo’s built environment. Aside from the city center itself, where the creative industries’ major customers are located, the authors observed a creative industry cluster to the west of the city center. We named this area the Tokyo West Creative Industry Cluster (TWCIC) and found that a ‘live–work’-style cluster has developed there, which functions as an incubation place for creative industries. Second, by conducting a case study on urban regeneration in progress in the Shibuya Station area, a core area of the TWCIC, we further examine how gentrification caused by property-led urban regeneration is now threatening the TWCIC. The article concludes that commercialization and purification will eventually widen spatial inequality and lead to the loss of the unique culture of tolerance and freedom that has hitherto nurtured the creative culture in TWCIC. Consequently, fundamental changes are required in property-led creative city policies.
41-10284
democratization. Ethnographic practice. financialization. Municipal bonds. North America. public decision-making.
Municipal bonds are a financial instrument once largely limited to North America. Today, they are appearing in international development reports as a novel best-practice for closing the world’s infrastructure funding gap and for promoting democracy. Critics of financialization have argued that municipal bonds have had the opposite effect: they have deepened austerity, ceded control of democratic municipalities to the global financial industry, and depoliticized public decision-making. Yet in this article, I observe a relationship between democracy, politics and finance which contrasts with the now common uses of ‘financialization’ popularized by critical scholars in Euro-American universities. I argue that, elsewhere in the world, capital markets have come to be understood as an important element of democratization. To make this argument, I develop the concept of ‘financial publics’—a group of strangers participating in a reflexive and reciprocal style of address through which they negotiate their financial relationships with one another. Using this concept, I analyze data drawn from over two years of ethnographic research on one of the most noteworthy experiments in municipal finance in the global South: the City of Dakar’s failed attempt to issue the first ever municipal bond on the Regional Stock Exchange of West Africa.
41-10285
Brazil . financialization. housing. lower-middle-income housing. Mexico. South-South comparative analysis. urban development.
After defaulting on their foreign-debt obligations in the 1980s, several Latin American countries had to restructure their economies to boost market-led growth. Some of the ensuing housing reforms promoted mortgage expansion and mass housing production. Mexico was among the first countries to follow this logic, and in a particularly aggressive manner. Credit liberalization allowed a handful of real estate firms to experience massive expansions in their operations in the 2000s as they were able to build lower-middle-income housing at an accelerated rate by accessing public, pension and private equity funds. Brazil eventually appropriated some aspects of the Mexican housing model, but not others. In the late 2000s, Brazil began providing deep subsidies to low-income households to connect the private supply of housing with a publicly subsidized demand. This article discusses, challenges and moves beyond prior analyses of these processes by contrasting the two countries’ housing finance models and examining the more recent (2010s) evolution and normative shifts in their housing and urban development policy agendas. Despite the direct policy transfer between the two contexts, the South-South comparative analysis presented in the article highlights the fluctuating and unstable nature of financialization processes given the varied inclination of national governments to manage, promote or restrict them, or to contain or accentuate capitalist crises and their implications.
30-4 HOME OWNERSHIP/RENTAL HOUSING
41-10286
anti-eviction campaigns. blocklisting. coalitions. data politics. landlords. tenant screening. tenant-based housing assistance.
In this article I place tenant screening data grabbing practices in tension with the ongoing work of housing justice-based tool making. While the tenant screening industry has spent decades amassing eviction data to facilitate the blocklisting of tenants with prior eviction records and thereby reifying racial capitalist geographies, housing organizers today rely on some of this same data to illuminate evictor networks and organize anti-eviction campaigns. This has been particularly important in the wake of corporate landlordism in which evictions are executed through opaque shell companies. Tenant-made tools attempt to undo this uneven landscape in which landlords own troves of data about tenants, but in which tenants don’t even know their own landlords’ names. While opening up all eviction data to the public might appear to be an antidote, doing so can also provide screening companies with even more data to use in blocklisting. In my examination of this conjuncture, I forge the analytic of dis/possessory data politics to map out the violence of tenant screening data predation while also problematizing the technoliberal impulse to open up all eviction data. Yet dis/possessory data politics also attest to care and coalition work marked by practices of possession beyond logics of theft, banishment and techno solutionism.
30-5 HOUSING REHABILITATION
41-10287
developmental idealism. Eviction. Home remaking. homemaking. housing. modernization. post-eviction . trajectories.
This article explores the contours of modernization in the unmaking and remaking of homes among evicted and resettled families in highrise housing. We examine the trajectories of forced eviction by drawing upon interviews with 17 individuals from nine evicted families who have transitioned from living in informal settlements to highrise social housing (rusunawa) in Jakarta. Drawing on two strands of literature—‘developmental idealism and the family’ from population studies and the critical geographies of ‘homemaking’—we argue that the demolition of houses is but an initial event in a long, quiet and subtle, yet profoundly defining, process of ‘upgrading’ families as part of ‘improving’ society, according to developmental logic. The disciplining of the urban poor does not end with the demolition of their houses, but rather continues as part of the fulfilment of shelter. This article attends to the slow unravelling of home hidden and embedded in post-eviction everyday lives, which are often overlooked because of the overt and violent brutality of forced eviction. While eviction can be seen as the violent visual expression of developmentalism, we argue that the relocation in rusunawa is where this ideal permeates into daily domestic life, making mundane activities a battleground for different ideals of ‘home’.
30-6 HOUSING FOR SPECIAL POPULATIONS
41-10288
coalitions. land development. land-development code (LDC). low-income housing. neighborhoods. race. YIMBYism.
Recently, debates about the future of Austin’s housing policies have been reshaped by the rise of a vocal group of well-organized and self-styled YIMBYs. In particular, this group has been important in the restructuring of political coalitions that both support and oppose the Urbanist elements contained in the ongoing land-development code (LDC) reform effort, especially the realignment of mainstream environmentalists. One significant stake in this effort is the fate of neighborhoods closest to the central business district, historically home to lower-income people of color. We show how the political configuration of the two coalitions represents a major reshaping of longstanding political alignments in Austin and suggest that stalwart alliances are giving way to new ones, both here and elsewhere; yet, these realignments hold little promise for addressing issues of equity, despite the fact that addressing racial inequalities has been a central concern in debates over the LDC on both sides. We note the increasing limits of growth machine theory in accounting for this change for two reasons: (1) changing attitudes among mainstream environmentalists towards Austin’s urban redevelopment; (2) the persistence of racial and class differences in shaping the unevenness of Austin’s future neighborhood development.
31. Energy
31-3 ENERGY CONSERVATION
41-10289
geography. geography. hydropower-related biodiversity. Transnational energy infrastructure.
Pipelines and refineries, hydropower dams, and solar and wind power projects feeding into emerging transnational energy networks make up the thrust of a new push for infrastructural expansion in the global South. This article argues that understanding the effects of this expansion requires attending to the multiple elsewheres of transnational energy projects in various states of realization. By this we mean accounting for the ways in which these projects are financed, planned, contested, contracted, built, transformed and withheld at multiple, sometimes connected and sometimes disparate, sites across the globe. Focusing on the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), the Central American Electric Interconnection System (SIEPAC) and the Mediterranean Electricity Ring (MedRing), our research shows that such projects are ‘global’ not only in their physical reach and forging of connections between disparate and expansive geographies, but also in the ways they bring into being new, transnational or global publics.
31-4 ENERGY RESOURCES/ALTERNATIVES
41-10290
Africa. artisanal and small-scale (ASM) mining sites . large-scale (LSM) mining sites. mining-related industries. urbanization.
This article focuses on the urbanizing impact of the post-millennial mineral boom at artisanal and small-scale (ASM) or large-scale (LSM) mining sites in three mineral-rich countries, involving gold in Ghana, diamonds in Angola, and both minerals in Tanzania. The focus is on comparing the agency of miners and other residents migrating to, settling in, and making the mining site habitable. Their mobility and settlement patterns reveal an urbanization trend marked by population agglomeration and expanding labour complexity, taking distinct forms at the rush and mature stages of gold and diamond ASM and LSM sites. Citing data from household surveys conducted at 12 mining sites, we trace how ‘mineralized urbanization’ propels in-migration, rising localized purchasing power, and proliferating service sector and trade activities, fuelling both urban demographic and economic change along the mining extraction trajectory. LSM and ASM generate synergies as well as detractive forces, depending on the size, age and history of the mining settlement development. What emerges is the differential development of households and settlements through strategic economic manoeuvring and the rough and tumble of happenstance, underlined by a compelling, albeit fluctuating, trajectory of non-renewable mineralized urbanization.
41-10291
authoritarian. gentrification. global urbanism. Latin America. neoliberalization. United States.
This collection of interventions unites academics hailing from Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the United States, reintroducing discussions on authoritarian state tactics and coercion into urban renewal dialogues within urban studies. During our discussions, it became apparent that urban authoritarian tactics are crucial in contemporary state-led gentrification efforts. In this introduction to the series, we aim to merge research on authoritarian measures within neoliberalism with the literature concerning urban transformation and gentrification. By doing so, we bring urban studies into wider discussions regarding the overarching trend of authoritarianism on a global scale within sociology, political economy and international studies.
41-10292
bureaucratic processes . discretionary implementation. human rights approach . Mumbai. municipal water. socio-material relationships. water supply.
Mumbai’s informal settlements have a long history of being denied formal access to water. While previous research has shown how settlers barely manage to survive by extracting water in the blurred spaces between formal and informal provision and through complex socio-material relationships, here we narrate a story of the local struggle to claim formal access to municipal water connections using a fundamental human rights approach. By critically looking at the historical practices of the state in setting obscure standards that denied access to municipal water, we show how the local grassroots movement and its legal battle to establish a fundamental right to water also culminated in an ambiguous and differential standard being set by a court verdict. We argue that the precedence of creating multiple standards and their discretionary implementation is leveraged as a site for distributing and sustaining harm in which the social relations of domination influence not only everyday bureaucratic practices, but also the judicial process itself. While we critically investigate the instrumentality of a human rights approach in demanding new standards for access to water, borrowing from Koonan, we conclude by questioning the very process of legalizing differential understandings of such fundamental rights.
41-10293
policymaking . post-socialism. post-socialist framework. state-socialist system. urban affairs. urbanization.
More than three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post-socialist framework prevalent in the academic world is raising more and more questions. The three most serious doubts have to do with: (1) the time that has elapsed since the collapse of the state-socialist system, which means that local urbanization has been influenced by factors other than just this period; (2) the unclear geographical boundaries of the post-socialist world; (3) the questionable way of defining certain issues as rooted in post-socialism. The aim of the article is to describe the impact of the state-socialist experience on the current state of urban affairs and related policies, using the opinions of practitioners instead of those of academic researchers or document analysis, and five cities as examples: Leipzig, Germany; Krakow and Warsaw, Poland; Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine. It seems that today we should rather speak of diluted post-socialist experiences that parallel in a more indirect way processes rooted in the pre-socialist past and non-socialist events in the post-1989–91 period modulated by various critical junctures and external factors specific to individual cases. The data sources used include a review of the literature and the author’s own field research conducted in 2021 and 2022.
31-5 ENERGY IMPACTS
41-10294
energy supply. landscape. local energy. political geography. renewable energy. subnational territories. territoriality.
The interdependent development of subnational territories and energy transitions deserves greater attention. Territories demarcate spheres of influence, order relations of energy supply and demand, and offer opportunities and restrictions for local energy autonomy. Nevertheless, territorial perspectives on urban and regional energy transitions are conceptually underdeveloped. Drawing from political geography, this article presents a conceptual framework for understanding how subnational territories shape energy transitions and vice versa. This territorial perspective offers critical insights for research into the (urban) materiality of renewables, energy landscapes and uneven development. First, many cities will rely on renewable energy supply from rural territories to become carbon neutral, due to the low power densities of renewables. Second, governance actors mobilize territorial practices to create and disrupt relations between different energy landscapes. Finally, territorial boundaries are resources in governance processes and structuring elements of uneven development. I use the framework to analyze a case study of a wind energy conflict in three municipalities next to Berlin, which illustrates how Berlin’s government asserts its territorial priorities and creates renewable energy hinterlands in a process I conceptualize as hinterlandization.
31-6 ENERGY SYSTEMS PLANNING
41-10295
Brazil . entrepreneurial disposition. entrepreneurialism. ethnographic approach. neoliberalism. resistance. social practices. strategic spaces .
Over the past few decades, the desire of residents on urban peripheries in Brazil to have their own businesses has grown. Consequently, several authors have critically pointed out the advance of neoliberal ideas among the urban popular classes. In this article I discuss the origins of this ‘entrepreneurial disposition’ and its relationship with neoliberal discourse that seeks to encourage ‘entrepreneurialism of oneself’. The analysis presented in this article is based on ethnographic research carried out among entrepreneurial workers on the outskirts of São Paulo through in-depth interviews focusing on life histories and participant observation in strategic spaces (online and in person) during 2020 and 2021. I explore adherence and opposition to and resignification of neoliberal entrepreneurial ideology from different cultural and material backgrounds by retelling the history of five entrepreneurs from three different families. I argue that rather than neoliberal ideas being an ideological conviction, they are embedded in social practices that are quite common in the periphery of São Paulo. Therefore, they should be analysed in the light of these previously existing practices and moralities. From a peripheral point of view, ethnographic analysis also allows us to examine the limits of this embeddedness and shed light on possible forms of resistance.
32. Environment
32-1 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
41-10296
neighbourhood governance. population. public governance. self-provider. socio-ecological systems.
Capital cities struggle with population growth that challenges existing infrastructure and affects the quality of urban life. The failure of local governments to manage urban deterioration motivates active resident groups to improve their neighborhoods, but they struggle to play a role in neighborhood governance in contexts where citizens’ engagement in public affairs is restricted. In this article we aim to understand active residents’ roles in the neighborhood governance process and how these roles unfold in a context that challenges citizen engagement in public life. We adopted a case study methodology and interviewed active residents and local officials from selected districts in Cairo, which revealed that active residents’ influence is limited mostly to neighborhood management and implementation activities. In this limited space, the role of active residents is confined to either that of the ‘fixer’ who restores existing services, or that of the struggling and intermittent ‘self-provider’, neither of whom can influence policy formulation. This study provides a structured and zoomed-out view of local activism in Cairo, offering a starting point for scholars and decision makers seeking to enhance active residents’ roles in Cairo.
41-10297
ambivalences. Environmental protection law. governance. political processes. slum. urban governance. violence .
We argue that state agencies in Mumbai involved in urban environmental governance, specifically river governance, have made real estate and property urbanism more durable amidst the crisis of rising waters through the performance of ambivalent governance. This ‘ambivalencing’ entails government agencies enacting differential practices selectively across and within two interfaces which characterize the governance of flood threat: environmental protection and real estate development (protection vs. development) on the one hand; and informality (elite informalities vs. survival informalities) on the other. We show how ambivalencing as a modality of political power distributes socio-material and discursive harm by being strong in real estate development and slum displacement and weak in protecting the environment and the city’s poor. Ambivalent governance regimes draw on new political logics, where we see the language of protection serve the motive of growth on the one hand, while replaying older inequities by serving as an instrument of dispossession on the other. State-led informalities—facilitated through formal plans and laws alongside informal agreements to suspend laws or tolerate violations—are central to this governance regime. We conclude with a reflection on the need to grasp the modalities of ambivalent governance and assemble a counter-politics to reclaim environmental protection by anchoring it to notions of justice for the vulnerable, both human and non-human.
41-10298
citizen-led gardens. formal–informal boundaries. Mexico. public space. top-down management. urban gardening. urban public spaces.
In recent years, a growing number of citizen-led gardens have appeared in the urban public spaces of large cities across the world. While many of these projects are initially launched informally without any support from the state, they gradually become integrated into the social fabric of the city. To understand the evolution of the formal–informal boundaries of the practice, we argue that we should be paying attention to the specific institutional contexts that frame gardeners’ interactions with public authorities. Drawing from a study of citizen-led gardens in Mexico City, we show that informal urban gardening becomes a disconnected-from-the-state practice. On the one hand, the Mexico City government has shown a growing interest in regulating urban agriculture. On the other hand, gardeners are increasingly trying to find their own ways to formalize and perennate their practice. We suggest that this disconnection between gardeners and the state is best explained by the weakness of the institutional context in which their interactions take place. A top-down policymaking process, along with the incapacity and unwillingness of the multi-leveled city government to implement policies effectively, reinforces norms of mistrust and generates low expectations among gardeners as they interact with local authorities.
32-2 ENVIRONMENTAL MODELING
41-10299
anti-immigration. globalization. green populism. metropolization. populism. right-wing movements. Swiss People’s Party (SVP).
Switzerland is an interesting laboratory for studying right-wing populism. Populist movements, notably the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), have undergone momentous development over the last few decades based on anti-immigration and anti-European discourses. This transformation has been commonly associated with an ethno-nationalistic reaction against the globalization process and the defense of Swiss economic, political and cultural specificities. Based on an analysis of popular immigration initiatives in 2014, this essay identifies the rapid and intense metropolization of Switzerland as a correlative factor explaining the success of populist narratives in that country. The analysis shows that the strong and omnipresent metropolization process within a limited territory has created a fertile breeding ground for right-wing populism in terms of urban development, housing scarcity, traffic, infrastructure development, energy consumption, pollution and transformation of the landscape. Thus the conventional nationalistic and identitarian narratives characterizing right-wing movements can progressively combine with concerns and arguments associated with environmental discourse. This process of updating right-wing populist narratives on the basis of environmental concerns can evolve under different modalities and in different contexts, leading to the emergence of a ‘green populism’.
41-10300
citizen–state relations . dispossession. population. trauma. urban dispossession. urban marginality.
In this article we seek to advance our understanding of unhoming in a population not previously perceived to be vulnerable to such processes. We examine the particular forms of trauma in an emergent space of urban marginality, which has arisen through the fracturing of longstanding citizen–state relations and the rupturing of habitual orientations to home in a world that had hitherto been knowable and predictable. In this article we highlight the centrality of waiting in experiences of unhoming, which act as a mechanism of domination over a group newly subject to a specific manifestation of marginality; this mechanism has particular significance for understanding the differentiated dynamics of urban displacement. In this article we utilize interviews with 31 residents of residential flats in England living in buildings affected by fire safety defects, identified following the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire disaster in London in which 72 individuals died. We argue that research on urban dispossession needs to be attentive to distinctive processes and consequences of—and resistance to—unhoming. The experiences of newly affected populations unmask the underpinning precarity and unequal power relations of housing-based urban citizenship.
41-10301
anticipatory hope (AH). depression. hope. Leipzig. mobilization. post shrinkage depression (PSD). urban restructuring.
In this article, which is based on an empirical analysis of neoliberal restructuring in Leipzig, East Germany, I describe how the study of affective atmospheres adds to our understanding of urban restructuring, showing how collective moods affect (de)mobilization, contestation and the regulation of urban political economy to shed light on the relation between institutional, political and social processes. I demonstrate the relevance of affect for power relations, political interactions beyond rationality, and the rhythms and temporalities of urban restructuring, as exemplified by two prominent atmospheres that characterize Leipzig—post shrinkage depression (PSD) and anticipatory hope (AH).
41-10302
environment and sustainability. governance. petromodernity. poverty. Schuylkill River. urban water management.
This essay zooms in on an unloved stretch of Philadelphia’s tidal Schuylkill River, long home to the largest petroleum refinery on the United States’ East Coast, the cradle of petromodernity. In the aftermath of the refinery’s spectacular explosion in 2019, city officials were confronted by the data poverty in this sacrifice zone where many residents live in analog poverty. The essay contributes to our understanding of urban waters in two ways. First, it uncovers the shape and texture of the sacrifices made to dry out and urbanize wetlands, exploring how and by whom this former marshland has been made into what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls a ‘forgotten place’. Second, it presents a set of interrelated community-based participatory research projects designed to document the inhabitants’ lived experiences—glaringly absent from existing environmental data collected across different levels of governance and largely missing from the historical record. The essay explores embodied research methods and storytelling as tools to build and sustain academic–community alliances.
41-10303
capital switching. construction. Displacement. displacement pressure. Rentierism. switching. value systems.
Harvey’s (1978) switching theory has been widely used to theorize investments in the built environment. Crucially, in switching theory no distinction has been made between investments in the construction of the newly built environment and investments into the existing built environment. The distinction between these two types of switching is key to unveiling the relations between how value is produced, rents are extracted and interest payments are made as investments flow with the real estate sector, and the implications that such switching has for displacement. I discuss the distinction between different types of switching and the implications thereof by analysing the ebb and flow of investments in Spanish real estate from 2000 to 2007 and from 2014 to 2018. On the one hand, I claim that the two switching waves were qualitatively different in so far as capital was fixed in the built environment through the construction of new buildings between 2000 and 2007, whereas from 2014 to 2018 capital was fixed in existing buildings. In the first switching phase, value was produced and land rents were extracted, whereas the second switching phase was characterized mainly by rent extraction. On the other hand, the first switching moment entailed an increase in housing provision, whereas the second switching moment led to widespread displacement of the population.
32-3 ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING
41-10304
China. coal stigma. construction. cultural heritage. demolition . sociospatial transformation .
Datong has for decades been known as China’s ‘coal capital’. In 2008 Mayor Geng Yanbo redeveloped Datong’s city centre in order to hide the coal stigma and redefine the city’s identity based on its cultural heritage as a centre for Buddhist historical sites and ancient architecture. The project was interrupted in 2013 when the mayor was promoted to another city. In parallel, the coal industry was impacted by restructuring, falling prices, and stricter environmental policies. The interrupted project opened a liminal space between demolition and construction. This article studies unfinishedness and ruination in Datong after the construction boom by following the last residents living within the interrupted project. Drawing on fieldwork carried out between 2015 and 2019 that records the discourses and socio-spatial practices of the last remaining residents, stuck between chai (demolition) and qian (relocation), it sheds light on their urban experiences as city dwellers in a landscape of ruins and unfinished architecture. The suspension of urban construction affects both these residents’ representations of the urban space and their ambivalent feelings towards the past, present and future, opening new perspectives for research on the urbanity of booms and busts in Chinese cities.
41-10305
concatenations . face-to-face violent interactions. high-poverty squatter . violence .
Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines face-to-face violent interactions in a high-poverty squatter settlement in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Delving into the situational interactions and biographies of those who simultaneously exercise and suffer violence—victims and perpetrators—we illustrate in fine-grained detail the concatenations of violence and their political dimensions. Violent concatenations are political in a twofold sense: (1) they are shaped by state (legal and illegal) interventions, and (2) they are understood by both victims and perpetrators as being caused by state actors either directly (in the form of police repression) or clandestinely (in the form of collusion with criminals).
41-10306
China. deinstitutionalization. economic purposes. reconstruction processes. spatial restructurings.
Transformation of regional identities by administrative spatial restructurings has been relatively little studied, particularly in the context of regional deinstitutionalization. This article develops further a theoretical and conceptual framework of regional identities in spatial restructurings by discussing how deinstitutionalized ‘phantom’ regions with ‘penumbral’ borders beget more hybrid spatial identities. Empirically, the focus is on the Huizhou region in China: we study the changes in regional identity generated by several spatial de- and reconstruction processes. Underlining hybridity, we show that, although regional identity is shifting away from territorial belonging to Huizhou in some parts of the region (e.g. Wuyuan County), cultural identification with the Huizhou region remains strong even after a long period of administrative separation. Relatedly, we point out that deinstitutionalization in the Huizhou region has not been exhaustive and its regional identity is being increasingly reconstructed in a utilitarian manner for economic purposes. Despite (and partly because of) this, a sense of regional belonging has been maintained. Regional identities associated with Huizhou are relational and, more precisely, hybrid, as they are connected to regions that are neither fully institutionalized nor deinstitutionalized but appear as multilayered palimpsests that are being transformed through processes of constant making and remaking.
41-10307
community. COVID-19 pandemic. mobilization. planning . populism. Rio de Janeiro.
Given the growing importance of populism in cities both empirically and in scholarly discourse, planning is increasingly grappling with this ‘unsettling era’, focusing on how to respond to these times. This opening provides an opportunity to re-engage with the idea of insurgent planning—practices that are counter-hegemonic, transgressive, and imaginative—within populist contexts. I explore the case of mobilizations by community communicators in Complexo da Maré, a set of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the spread of COVID-19 in 2020. In contrast to these mobilizations, Brazil’s federal right-wing populist government failed to attend to the needs of favela residents. Through the case of Maré’s communicators, I highlight the need for planning to account for the role of insurgent planning as a response to populist contexts in cities of the global South.
41-10308
bureaucratic processes . communication design. India. spatial planning. Yamuna riverfront development plan.
In this essay I analyse the Yamuna riverfront development plan, India’s second-most ambitious riverfront plan after Sabarmati. It constructs a future vision for the Yamuna and aims to integrate it with the city’s economy and popular culture. I explore the logic and mechanisms of this futurity with a specific focus on bureaucratic practices and negotiations between the relevant actors. I argue that the logic of the construction of future scenarios lies in the practices of here and now, which are often overshadowed by the grand promises of the spatial plan. I show how un/doing of the future takes place when this plan of the riverfront is revisited repeatedly within different institutional and communication frameworks.
41-10309
governance. public participation. restructuring processes. top-down management. urban system.
What is the relationship between top-down governance reform and place-based participatory and deliberative spaces? In this article I argue that in Toronto, an urban system of public participation and deliberation is intimately interwoven into partisan scalar restructuring processes, as well as enduring tensions over the ways and means by which the public can have authoritative input on solving local issues. Regardless of top-down political manoeuvring, the public mobilizes in various spaces across the city, but the urban system remains disconnected and geared towards triaging. This means that the public must work autonomously across the city and within the crevices of city processes, prioritizing how to make gains on issues that they feel are important. I discuss how to move beyond this by building on deliberative systems theory and findings from interviews with local city staff and residents, and through an analysis of public deputations at the official Special Committee on Governance. Ultimately, there is a need for spatially integrated opportunities for more people to come together and assemble in different ways. Some of these will align with autonomous activities, some are liminal and woven within institutional partners, and others are more about geographical bridge building.
41-10310
English-language media outlets. Global North. Global South. policy making. sustainability. urban planning.
This article explores the referencing of urban planning best practices focused on fostering more ‘sustainable’ and ‘livable’ cities by decision makers within the global South. Specifically, I illustrate the role of English-language media outlets in influencing the policy-making process, thereby encouraging local decision makers to adopt some urban planning best practice policies and programs over others. I argue that the media outlets that are commonly drawn on to identify best practices remain located within the global North, obscuring opportunities to conceptualize urban planning from within the context of the South. To theorize my arguments, I position myself within the government department of the Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City, or LabCDMX) in Mexico City, a local nexus for best practice adoption. I make the case that decision makers frequently use best practices reported on in the English-language media, such as blogs and newspapers, including The New York Times and CityLab. I conclude by suggesting that the North continues to influence Southern decision makers during the policy-making process, regardless of whether these best practices originated in cities within the North or the South.
32-5 ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY/POLLUTION
41-10311
global climate finance (GCF) . Groy. social relations. techno-capitalist vision. urban vision. World Bank.
Of late, the trope of the green, smart and climate-resilient city has dominated imaginations of urban futures across the globe. Less visible perhaps, but arguably of equal social impact, global climate finance (GCF) agendas have asserted themselves as the only imaginable pathway to do and undo such futures in effective ways. Based on a document analysis of recent GCF reports, this contribution unpicks the mechanisms of ‘futuring’ advanced in this process of agenda setting, and sketches its inherent imaginaries of a model future city. We borrow from John Berger’s city of Troy and call this city Groy. Groy is a metaphor for green growth; it is the World Bank’s fantasy project: a techno-capitalist vision of prosperity, the bank’s donor darling and its best practice case. In rendering this fantasy into a fictional city, we explore how future visions of urban GCF initiatives shape cities today to allow for a sustained critique of that future and, in consequence, a rethinking of present times. Our analysis builds on the work of futurists Ben Anderson and John Urry, and an emerging debate that seeks to postcolonialize climate finance, to demand thinking about definancialization beyond regulation as a sociopolitical process of opening up the future for other imaginations.
41-10312
botanical gardens . Gardens by the Bay. land development. National Parks Board. Singapore. technopolitics. terraforming strategies.
This article examines the development of Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, a parkland and botanical gardens complex on a reclaimed land platform which opened in 2012. It provides three readings of the development based on different types of technopolitical governance. First, it discusses the significance of the location of the Gardens on one of Singapore’s reclaimed land platforms, part of the ‘terraforming’ strategies of the government’s land development process. Second, it situates the project within the state’s complex botanical relationship with colonial and postcolonial knowledge circuits, and suggests that this is part of the governance challenge of ‘acclimatizing’ to the tropical climate. Third, it suggests that the Gardens are part of an ‘exhibitionary complex’ based on engaging publics with the state’s ability to harness science to provide a controlled, ordered polity. To illustrate this, the article brings together the political discourse of two Singaporean prime ministers with a discussion of the architectural design and environmental engineering of the project, and the curatorial practices of the state’s National Parks Board. The article demonstrates the complex interplay of environmental, architectural and botanical engineering with state strategies of both citizen engagement and tourist attraction, and the importance of the practice of exhibition within urban megaprojects.
32-6 CATASTROPHES/DISASTERS/EMERGENCIES
41-10313
coronavirus . Covid relief. social media. student-centred design.
Building on qualitative interviews, this article brings into view how New Delhi university students organized improvised forms of Covid relief during the Delta coronavirus wave in the spring of 2021. Responding to a lack of care due to state negligence and a breakdown of public and private healthcare infrastructure, students coordinated access to crucial resources such as masks, other personal protective equipment and even oxygen through the use of social media, existing social networks, and practices developed in earlier moments of organizing. Using the lenses of improvisation, rehearsal and repair, this article documents how students improvised informal Covid relief. Conceptually, the article offers the framework of transposition to look at how improvisational capacity in a social network was shifted from one crisis to the next.
41-10314
climate change. colonialism. disasters. planning implementation. post-disaster. pre-disaster. race. violence .
Disasters are often, outside disaster studies, viewed as singularities. This characterization of disaster disallows analysis of racial violence and dispossession structurally instituted across multiple disasters. As a result, repeatedly poor pre-disaster and post-disaster planning is leveraged to displace and disenfranchise marginalized communities. With climate change, disasters are projected to become more intense and frequent, necessitating a serious inquiry into inequalities occurring across repeated disasters. This essay uses theories of colonialism and coloniality from Puerto Rico to examine how colonialism operates through repeated disaster, in this case hurricanes. Building off of research on environmental colonialism in Puerto Rico, the concept of disaster colonialism is proposed to explain how procedural vulnerability is deepened through disasters and subsequently leveraged to deepen coloniality. To illustrate the utility of this term, a brief overview of Puerto Rico’s environmental history with hurricanes is examined through the lens of disaster colonialism. Ultimately, the commentary poses three questions to planners relative to the concept of disaster colonialism.
32-7 SUSTAINABILITY
41-10315
accountability. colonial-style inequalities. discrimination. environmental justice. political innovation. sustainability.
Environmental justice principles are widespread at national and global levels of transition discourse, but this is sometimes irrelevant to marginalized communities. To address this issue, we apply environmental justice theory to a participatory postcolonial urban case study where poverty, unemployment and inequality continue to incentivize unregulated exploitation of vulnerable environments and people. It is unclear how national legislation can provide for indiscriminate access to environments that promote wellbeing in complex postcolonial communities, where xenophobic and economic discrimination reproduces colonial-style inequalities. To resist this injustice, the combination of academic and ordinary expressions of critique that confront regressive praxis and orthodoxies becomes a valuable and constructive political innovation for transitions. Empirical results suggest that enfranchising the most vulnerable proponents of transformation could advance their political capital to advocate for themselves, formulate and enculturate decolonized visions of urban sustainability, demand governmental and commercial accountability and foster urban reform that is relevant to them.
41-10316
civil society organizations (CSOs). COVID-19 pandemic. Global South. non-governmental organizations (NGOs). urban community gardens (UCGs).
It is well established that urban community gardens (UCGs) can either challenge or reinforce neoliberal urbanism. This duality is especially evident among UCGs that sell garden harvests for income generation. In this article I therefore examine UCGs in low-income areas of Cape Town, South Africa, to understand how they might sell their harvests while countering the neoliberal food system in cities of the global South. I draw on qualitative fieldwork, including observations and semi-structured interviews with UCG representatives and civil society actors. Most harvests are currently sold to high-end venues through intermediary actors in civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). However, this approach disregards the local community’s socioeconomic conditions and undermines community gardens’ nutritional objectives. Yet, under specific scenarios, the sale of garden harvests could mitigate the persistent food injustice in Cape Town’s low-income areas. In this article I introduce a model for harvest sales that advances sustainable urban agriculture and fosters food justice in neoliberal cities in the global South.
41-10317
Bethnal Green. neighborhoods . social sustainability. tripartite framework. urban neighbourhoods. urban planning.
The growing significance of neighbourhoods in the urban planning discipline, alongside increasing attention to the social dimension of sustainable communities and societies, has brought to the fore the need to conceptualize socially sustainable neighbourhoods. In this article we reflect critically on the concept of socially sustainable neighbourhoods in two areas, namely definition and operationalization. We then propose a tripartite framework for measuring social sustainability of urban neighbourhoods, which combines the three elements of neighbourhood, neighbouring and neighbours. This framework is tested, examined and discussed for the case of Bethnal Green, London. We then integrate our findings into a social sustainability enhancement index, which encompasses practical recommendations to promote the social sustainability of Bethnal Green. We conclude this article by highlighting the research and policy implications of the proposed framework, and making suggestions for improving the methodology of future research.
33. Physical Elements of Planning
33-1 INFRASTRUCTURE/COMMUNITY FACILITIES
41-10318
Barcelona. COVID-19 pandemic. territoriality. urban land. urbanisms.
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the food and grocery delivery sector became a multibillion-dollar industry, making riders with squared backpacks visible in our urban landscapes. We explore the role of quick delivery platforms in spatial production—and especially the strategies platforms employed and the tactics of platform workers in relation to this production. By adopting a Lefebvrian perspective, we introduce the concepts of ‘strategies of spatial abstraction’ and ‘spatial tactics of resistance’. We argue that strategies of platforms such as territorialization and digital Taylorism homogenize spatial relations, while platform workers use tactics to resist and to negotiate their everyday lives mediated by platforms. We draw on vignettes from Barcelona and Berlin to illustrate the spatial implications of these strategies and tactics. Territorialization anchors platforms to urban locations through physical infrastructure, while digital Taylorism utilizes algorithms to standardize spatial practices. These strategies contain contradictions: territorialization reduces worker atomization, while digital Taylorism catalyzes worker resistance tactics, especially logistical resistance around the platforms’ dark stores and warehouses. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on platform urbanism, revealing the complex and often contradictory nature of platform-mediated production of urban space.
41-10319
ecological infrastructure. Global South. green informalities. informality. political processes. urban agriculture . urban scholarship.
Ecological infrastructure and urban agriculture are enacting a green resurgence in cities. In the global South, however, ecological infrastructure is often premised on erasing already existing informal agricultural practices (green informalities) and leads to the displacement of marginalized urban dwellers. How, then, can ecological infrastructure be calibrated with the specific realities of the global South’s green informalities? What other socially just modalities of infrastructure can be learned from the vantage point of informal settlements? Past urban scholarship has documented the crucial role of urban agriculture in addressing food insecurity and poverty in the global South, yet the symbolic, collective and political dimensions of agricultural practices are absent from these accounts. Drawing from critical urban scholarship and feminist political ecology, and based on engaged research with a collective of urban farmers facing eviction, I argue that green informalities bring together dwellers and plants in an intimate entanglement in the everyday gendered politics of endurability and collective power-building at the settlement level. The article illustrates that the informal economic and political practices that constitute these green informalities are crucial for understanding grassroots practices vis-à-vis urban environments. Recognizing the political and affective dimensions of green informalities can move urban studies and governance towards a situated appreciation of informal urban agriculture as socially just ecological infrastructure that centers justice and dweller agency.
41-10320
Environmental racisms. exclusion. gentrification. green infrastructure. racial inequality . re-segregation. urban greening.
This article explores the role that green gentrification plays in exacerbating racial tensions within historically marginalized urban communities benefiting from new environmental amenities such as parks, gardens, waterfront restoration and greenways. Building on extensive qualitative data from three cities in Europe (Amsterdam, Vienna, Lyon) and four cities in the United States (Washington, Austin, Atlanta, Cleveland), we use thematic analysis and grounded theory to examine the complex relationship between historical environmental and racial injustices and current racial green inequities produced by the green city agenda. Our analysis also offers insights into the main differences in how community members articulate concerns and demands over racial issues related to green gentrification in Europe versus North America. Results show that urban greening—and green gentrification specifically—can create ‘compounded environmental racisms’ by worsening racial environmental injustices and further perpetrating green racialized displacement, re-segregation and exclusion. The latter is produced by the racial inequities embedded in green infrastructure projects and the related unequal access to environmental benefits, affordable housing, political rights and place-making. Moreover, we find that settler colonial practices combined with persisting exposure to toxins and re-segregation in the United States together with neocolonial spatial and social practices in Europe shape how racialized community members perceive and interact with new green amenities.
41-10321
California. infrastructure-led development. recycle from waste. reusing. technopolitics. wastewater.
This article follows the flow of wastewater in Los Angeles, California, from upstream treatment plants to the Pacific Ocean, to explore struggles over reconfigurations of urban wastewater flows for new policy ambitions in recycling and reuse. We show how ambitious infrastructure visions of circular urban resource management have gained force since California’s most recent drought (2011-17) but clash with incumbent gravity-fed water and sewer systems, political economy and urban geographies. Engineers navigate these path dependencies through incremental technical improvements of existing infrastructures to increase wastewater recycling. These interventions largely reproduce given infrastructure configurations and urban geographies of water and wastewater while marginalizing other voices in struggles over water circularity and stymying critical debate about more progressive change. We argue that novel infrastructural practices are deeply political and normative and can be explained by four dimensions of the ‘technopolitics’ of wastewater restructuring in Los Angeles: materiality and inherited topologies of infrastructures; circularity discourses; entrenched knowledge cultures; and institutional orders of infrastructure management and public control mechanisms of infrastructure investments and tariffs. We conclude by discussing how these four dimensions of an emerging technopolitical regime of wastewater recycling expand concepts of power that explain urban metabolic change.
41-10322
infrastructure. Lagos. Neo-Pentecostal churches. neoliberalism. social reproduction . urban infrastructure.
This article examines how the urban fabric of Lagos is being transformed by neo-Pentecostal forms of Christian religiosity—a transformation not only of inner, ‘private’ lives but also of urban infrastructures and their provision. Neo-Pentecostal churches in Lagos now provide a range of infrastructures such as roads, bridges, electricity, water, healthcare, plus banking and educational facilities as well as a range of residential options. Church emblems are common features of the Lagos streetscape and can be found on buildings, vehicles and advertisement hoardings. In addition to their symbolic, moral and aesthetic register, Pentecostal urban infrastructures can be understood as a response to the crisis of social reproduction in Lagos, within the context of a postcolonial state that has adopted a position of entrenched neoliberalism. Critical questions remain, however, regarding whose interests are served by this arrangement. The article aims to understand (1) the ontological status of neo-Pentecostal infrastructures, taking seriously the production and delivery of material infrastructures that are understood by some users to also be spiritual; and (2) the novel relations between church, state, market and citizen articulated by these infrastructures. Our arguments are based on qualitative data collected in Lagos between 2018 and 2022.
41-10323
citizenship. city–citizen relationships. contingency. infrastructure. mobility. pluralization. urbanisms.
This article examines the unsanctioned installation of infrastructure for walking and cycling as a site of possibility. In contrast to accounts of everyday urbanism that see in these kinds of interventions possibilities for a politics in which the state subsides, I find instead an effort to reclaim the state for more progressive purposes. I focus on groups calling themselves transformation agencies and departments of transformation to argue that DIY infrastructure is deployed on city streets not as an effort to subvert or supplant city authorities, but instead as prefigurative performances of city–citizen relationships ‘as if’ they were otherwise. Exploiting the plurality and contingency of the state and its legal forms, objects are installed to show how quickly things could be different, and sometimes they succeed in prompting significant shifts. Through guerrilla paint and pop-up posts, transformation agencies work prefiguratively to imagine and enact forms of citizenship that are not centred on automobility.
33-2 LAND USE/SITE PLANNING STANDARDS
41-10324
Global South. governance. Heterogeneity analyses. land tenure. megacities. urban growth.
Residents of informal settlements worldwide face challenges defending their land tenure. In contexts with overlapping systems of governance these challenges are even more complex and claims to land tenure more precarious. How do heterogeneous systems of governance, a characteristic of some global South megacities, affect evictions? This article presents an in-depth case study of the informal Otodo Gbame waterfront settlement’s struggle to defend its customary land tenure through multiple authorities in Lagos, Nigeria. The analysis reveals how a heterogeneous system of governance disempowers citizens by obscuring the locus of power and creating confusion when communities make claims on the state. Communities find themselves claiming rights to the city that receive varying degrees of recognition from the many authorities within the heterogeneous system. In Lagos, the state weaponizes this heterogeneous system in pursuit of modern development and urban growth.
41-10325
conflicts. Displacement. Ethnographic practice. place-makings. South Sudan. state-making process. violence .
Following South Sudan’s independence in 2011, a myriad of local, regional and global actors have flocked to its capital city, Juba, to influence and benefit from the ongoing state-making process. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Juba between 2012 and 2015, this article demonstrates how urban ‘space’ in Juba is rendered into ‘place’ through everyday practices of naming that articulate urbanites’ contrasting experiences of the Sudanese civil wars, the city’s tumultuous history, and their position within its—and the new nation’s—present and future. This is most visible in a growing and contested Juba neighborhood that has come to be called by two different names, each tied to distinct experiences of conflict and displacement within and beyond the city. These and other namings and place-makings index historically-rooted ethno-spatial understandings of South Sudan, memories of violence, and the sense of differential access to the city’s economic potential in the face of ongoing upheaval. Urban naming and place-making in Juba (and in other cities similarly impacted by conflict), it is argued, is a central domain through which urbanites disrupt official mappings and mitigate disorienting violence. These discursive practices are a vital means by which people forge stable lives and productive futures in the face of a precarious political present.
41-10326
colonialism. decentralization. derogation system. history. land use. Morocco. planning process .
This study is concerned with the way colonial land use planning practices have persisted within local institutional structures in the former French colony of Morocco. We use a historical institutionalist approach to reevaluate Morocco’s land use planning history and identify key feedback mechanisms that support the continuity of colonial practices within the Moroccan planning institutional structure. We used institutional mappings to identify key actors involved in planning and examined the formal power relations between them. Interviews were used to discuss the effect of informal interactions on the development of land use plans. We argue that aspects of French colonial planning that persisted within the Moroccan local institutional structure have created constraints for Moroccan land use planning. We focus in particular on how a centralist formalization of planning institutions has hampered the effectiveness of decentralization reforms and explain how institutional patterns deriving from the French paternalist approach to colonial rule have persisted in the form of a duality in modern planning structures. Finally, we argue that this path dependence has been strengthened by the creation of the derogation system as a potential way out for actors who are most capable of inducing change.
41-10327
accumulation. empty urban land. Ethnographic practice. peri-urban zone. urban market values. urbanization.
Debates over the ontology of contemporary urbanization have questioned the notion of a meaningful ‘outside’ to the urban and have called for greater attention to the socially contested construction of urban subjects and space. Ethnographic study of informal peri-urban agriculture in the rapidly urbanizing city of Chongqing in Southwest China allows for a critical examination of the everyday ecologies and economies of planetary urbanization. The state-led expansion of Chongqing since the early 2000s has created a peri-urban zone consisting of large areas of undeveloped land awaiting construction, which is utilized informally by displaced ‘urbanized’ peasants and migrant workers. The use of this ‘empty’ urban land for agriculture reveals informal practices and displaced subjects which are variously positioned as ‘outside’ or ‘within’ urban systems and values. The undeveloped land remains ecologically entangled with urban processes and is the site of a contested commoning of space which is regarded as external to urban market values. Theorizing from the kongdi (empty land) launches a novel understanding of under-studied urbanizing spaces which are positioned ambiguously outside urban governance, are under threat of rapid enclosure within urban regimes of accumulation, and spatialize the negotiation of the boundaries and meaning of the urban itself.
33-3 PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
41-10328
consumer-goods prices. COVID-19 pandemic. infrastructure. mobility. neoliberalism. real estate. renovation. Turkey.
In Turkey, as in many Mediterranean countries, the Covid-19 pandemic enhanced the mobility of the country’s affluent classes to coastal towns. Many decided to settle there permanently, either by making their second homes their main residences, or by purchasing or renting new property. This has created severe social, infrastructural and environmental problems in these towns because of transformed demographics, a largely unregulated construction boom, increased renovation activities and an unprecedented rise in real-estate and consumer-goods prices. In this article we contextualize these problems in relation to the Justice and Development Party’s neoliberal policies of urban governance and rescaling in the past 15 years. The government, having given the construction sector the main role in Turkey’s economic development, subsequently granted it new spatial opportunities through the authoritarian and centralized allocation of urban and rural land. Coastal towns have been the target of unregulated urban growth and predatory construction in this process and have thus provided new spatial development prospects. Local governmental reform in 2012, which introduced radical urban rescaling and weakened district municipalities’ planning and regulation capacities, further intensified the process. These factors have had a severe impact on coastal towns and their middle-income residents, who face new mobility pressures.
33-4 GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS
41-10329
antagonism. cross-national regionalism. nationalism. Power geometries . Radical-right populism. Regionalism.
Radical-right populism has become a structural political phenomenon in the European Union in recent years. This ideology, the core principle of which is based on a nurtured antagonism between the ‘people’ and the ‘elite’, combined with a parallel promotion of authoritarian and nativist ideas, is generally associated with the nation state and its core territorial ideology: nationalism. However, populism can also be scaled at the regional level, within or across European state borders. This article, which is based on critical discourse analysis, aims to investigate what might constitute the meaning of cross-national regionalism according to a radical-right populist leader in Europe. More precisely, my objective is to research the antagonism this type of leader can structure to organize territorial, symbolic and institutional claims associated with a specific cross-national region. This research is based on the discourse Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán produced in relation to the Visegrád region. My analysis helps to reveal the types of power geometries articulated by populist leaders beyond state borders.
34. Transportation and Communication
34-1 TRANSPORTATION POLICY
41-10330
China. Communist Party of China (CPC). landowner. mobilization. Researcher perceptions. spatial egalitarianism. urbanization.
Urbanization has become a core strategy for the Communist Party of China (CPC) to reinforce its authoritarian rule over China. Its roll-out is replete with tensions, however, because the extent to which urbanization can replicate spatial egalitarianism, the foundation of CPC sovereign rule following its victory in the Chinese civil war (1946–49), remains unclear. To advance research on these tensions, this article first presents a genealogy of the multiple conditions that underpinned large-scale peasant mobilization to drive landownership redistribution. Rarely discussed in urban and regional research today, the logic and implications of landownership redistribution are crucial for comprehending and conceptualizing Chinese urbanization. Specifically, the genealogical analysis demonstrates how peasant mobilization engendered a de facto CPC-peasantry social contract that consolidated CPC rule. Rather than dissolve unproblematically as the Chinese political economy evolves into an urbanizing era, this contract has engendered path-dependent effects that constrain attempts at urban-rural integration. The article then adds a fresh historical-geographical dimension to existing research on Chinese urbanization and regime durability by introducing a new research agenda to examine why contemporary peasant mobilization across China not only differs from but is also shaped by the peasant mobilization of the late 1940s.
34-2 TRANSPORTATION MODELING
41-10331
immigration. mobilization. policymaking . power dynamics. urban citizenship.
During the late 2010s, pro-immigrant activists in the politically progressive municipality of Mayville, California (pseudonym) mounted a campaign to enact a radically egalitarian sanctuary city policy (“sanctuary for all”) that would have changed the boundaries of urban citizenship. The campaign crafted compelling and resonant mobilization frames, constructed a broad and diverse coalition, won the support of large majorities of the public, and targeted elected officials who were all supportive of the rights of immigrant residents. Such conditions, according to literature on immigration politics and urban citizenship, should have resulted in success, but this was not entirely the case. Elected officials did open the policymaking process in response to pressure from activists, but a far-reaching policy never emerged. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this article develops the concept of the ‘bureaucratic field’ to explain how the distinctive and relatively autonomous power dynamics of a municipality shapes policy outcomes (despite advantages in the political field). The article concludes that without a robust theory of the bureaucratic field, contemporary theorists of social movements and urban citizenship cannot explain the disparity between highly advantageous conditions in progressive political fields and the paucity of transformative policy outcomes.
34-3 TRANSPORTATION PLANNING
41-10332
bicycle-taxis . capitalism. household data . infrastructure. motorbike-taxis. neighborhoods . public transport. transport planning.
Since the 1940s, the people of the neighbourhoods (kampungs) around Surabaya’s derelict Ngagel industrial estate have made a living by repurposing the remains of what was once one of Asia’s most modern road, rail and industry networks. The remains—in the form of leftover fuel, labour and factory parts—are used to rebuild and repair improvised transport vehicles like bicycle-taxis (becak), minibuses (bemo) and motorbike-taxis (ojek). The repurposing happens at the limits of a capital-intensive heavy infrastructure of factories, trams and buses. The limits are those points where such infrastructure fails and a household-funded mosquito-fleet of light vehicles succeeds. Repurposing gives those who do it a right to infrastructure by providing the city with much-needed public transport. In Surabaya, public transport begins at its limits through the improvisations of people who live in the productive remains of capital-intensive heavy infrastructure. These people live in Surabaya’s deindustrialized urban core, where life is made in the ruins of infrastructure through the breaking-down of it, the reworking of it, the right to it, and the leakage of it—the means through which rank-and-file people rather than states and corporations forge infrastructure.
34-5 AUTOMOBILES/HIGHWAY/TRAFFIC ENGINEERING
41-10333
governance. institutionalization. material-discursive practices. metropolization. reconceptualization.
This article identifies a set of practices through which multiple actors, from the European Commission to local governments, perform the concept of the metropolitan region. It specifically investigates the practices and actions which brought this concept into being in the Prague metropolitan region of Czechia. We uncover how the meanings associated with the concept of the metropolitan region evolved through material-discursive practices constitutive of regional institutionalization. The article unpacks five practices which lie behind the initial stages of regional institutionalization: advocacy, framing, customization, implementation and evaluation. It contributes to both the conceptualization and practical knowledge of metropolitan development, planning and institutionalization in three ways. First, in suggesting a set of institutionalization practices, it redirects attention towards what actors do. Second, it highlights the role of materiality mutually intertwined with discursive elements. Finally, it documents how the intersection of multiple governance levels provides key actors with the resources needed to engage in the reconceptualization and institutionalization of the metropolitan region.
34-7 TRANSPORTATION ECONOMICS
41-10334
construction cost and revenu. crossroad. Ethnographic practice. Reframing. social movements.
Across Indian cities, daily wagers gather every morning at large intersections or crossroads (nakas) where they seek work for the day from small construction contractors. In the satellite city of Navi Mumbai (New Mumbai), some of these daily wagers are reconstituting themselves into a class of ‘disadvantaged, crossroad workers’. This article provides an ethnographic narration of how class is experienced, constituted and asserted at a street crossroad. Through the space of the naka, daily wagers combine their different experiences of caste, religious and regional disadvantage into a collective identity of crossroad workers. As a collective, they seek and gain recognition as workers by the state, even if their everyday terms of work continue to be largely unprotected by law. While such reframing of disadvantage has long been part of social movements in western India, their contemporary politics is conditioned by workers’ alienation from new town-making projects, where they are seen as temporary labor migrants and must contend with landed, socio-politically dominant groups vying for control over the city. This article contributes to growing scholarship on the resocialization of labour movements, as both work and class organizing change dramatically, particularly in contentious urban spaces like Navi Mumbai.
34-10 COMMUNICATIONS
41-10335
ethnographic approach. identitarian movement. native homeland. public space. territoriality. tourism.
Verona is known as the touristic city of Romeo and Juliet, but its position as a strategic node in the rising identitarian movement goes unnoticed to the thousands of tourists visiting the city every day. This article articulates the historical centre of Verona as a public space in which far-right and populist right groups seek to construct an exclusionary territorial identity that draws on white supremacy, northern pride and Catholic fundamentalism, which manifest themselves in practices of bordering and territorialization. I argue that the city’s perfectly preserved heritage and its assumed authenticity are not only utilized to construct the ideal protagonists of city life, but also that such territorial themes of defending the ‘native homeland’ and its traditions are marketed to the outside world by constructing a ‘model’ city for a growing transnational movement. In this study, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and in-depth interviews, I investigate the mechanisms through which certain historical centres are showcased to build an identitarian network through everyday practices of boundary-drawing and the marketing of a territorial anti-modernist nostalgia.
35. Architecture and Urban Design
35-1 URBAN DESIGN
41-10336
Africa. City of Light. dispossession. Ghana. large-scale land acquisition processes. pluralization. sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) . urbanization.
The rapid expansion of African cities has created both housing deficits and a pluralization of urban orders, including the growth of slum settlements. With an ever-increasing middle class, urban sub-Saharan Africa is now also characterized by large-scale land acquisition processes linked to the construction of wholly private and increasingly enclaved cities. This article maps the impacts of the Appolonia City of Light project—a privately built enclaved city catering to the housing needs of a rapidly growing middle class in Ghana. Building on field research and exploring various dimensions of the development marketed as ‘The City of Light’, we highlight how the project has dramatically altered social relations and resulted in dispossession rippling through nearby local communities. We therefore argue that, instead of merely focusing on the actual physical spaces of private developments or turning attention to often phantasmagoric and utopic visions of the future, research should be directed at changes in the immediate surroundings of urban developments. We highlight the problematic land acquisition inherent to such enclaved developments and demonstrate how these intrinsically constitute assemblages of livelihoods and exemplify dynamics of appropriation, dispossession and commodification.
41-10337
blue-collar workers . left-progressive political forces. municipal socialists. socio-demographic profile. sociocultural process . upper-middle class.
Today, many cities in post-industrial societies are strongholds of left and progressive political forces. Almost 100 years ago, left parties had instituted municipal socialism in several European cities. In this article, we compare these two periods of left urban rule by focusing on the long-term changes over the last 120 years in the socio-demographic profile of urban left elites in four major Swiss cities. Our analysis of left elected representatives at six key dates highlights the main differences between the municipal socialists of the interwar period and the new urban left that rules contemporary cities. The former are members of the working class, blue-collar workers without university education, while the latter are members of the upper-middle class, highly educated sociocultural professionals. The results of our analysis contribute to a better understanding of the sociological composition of urban left-progressive political forces, an aspect that is somewhat neglected in recent research on the urban left. We discuss the potential political implications and further research avenues for contemporary debates in urban studies, in terms of urban policy priorities and political mobilization.
41-10338
anti-hegemonic structure. colonization. de-urbanization. Israel. Palestine. urbanisms.
This essay puts forward a theoretical framework for Palestinian Indigenous urbanism. It argues that the specific and diverse expressions of this urbanism are partly an outcome of the fact that Palestinian cities—as a modern urban form—predate the Zionist settler colonization of Palestine. We centre the longue durée of Palestinian urbanism as a constitutive mode for contemporary experiences of Palestinian citizens in Israel and link it to Israel’s persistent attempts to erase the urban landscapes of Palestine, symbolically and materially. We discuss how the de-urbanization of Historic Palestinian cities in Israel since the beginning of the Nakba has drastically changed the urban and rural landscapes of these cities, ultimately leading Palestinians to adapt, develop and create new forms of urbanism in and around cities. Although Palestinians live in very different types of cities today, Palestinian urbanism broadly manifests as a presence of the absence, namely as the recursion of pre-1948 urban life. Thus, in this essay we provide a new lens through which to understand Indigenous urbanism as a recursive and relational anti-hegemonic structure that predates and can outlive settler-colonial violence.
41-10339
Kastamonu city. popularity. urban environment. Urban experiences.
Urban experiences are increasing in popularity every day. In these experiences sensory elements are significant, and a review of the urban environment, in which visual perceptions have prevailed in the past, would demonstrate that other senses are important as well. As Le Corbusier remarked, urban experiences can be achieved by walking with a wide perspective. In the present study scent walks were conducted to reveal the significance of the scent factor in urban experience. As a result of these walks, the existing scents in Kastamonu city, the role of the scents in urban memory, and their effects on individuals were determined, thus emphasizing the significance of scents for urban planning and design.
41-10340
de-politicization strategies. dull compulsion. entrepreneurialism. neoliberalism. public–private partnerships.
Among a number of proposals regarding ‘late’ forms of urban neoliberalism, it has recently been argued that urban entreprenurialism has become ‘common sense’ or even ‘dull compulsion’. In this article, we contribute to this discussion by exploring the structural conditions and local strategies for normalizing city-centre-oriented urban entrepreneurialism in a Swedish context. In doing so, we return to an important but sometimes overlooked aspect of David Harvey’s original concept: the delicate act of organizing urban entrepreneurialism across public and private spheres of the local polity. From this perspective, the act of making urban entrepreneurialism normal is far from ‘dull compulsion’. Drawing on longitudinal case studies of two different public-private partnerships related to city centre development in the two largest Swedish cities, we highlight the active use of sly, or cunning, de-politicization strategies among local elite actors. Our analysis leads to the more general claim that we should expect similar sly de-politicization strategies to be necessary for normalizing urban entrepreneurialism in political contexts characterized by relatively strong local authorities, and in relation to spaces and topics of interest to many and diverse actors.
41-10341
consultants . gurus. municipalities . persona non-grata. policy formulation. politicization. urban governance.
While consultants have crept into various aspects of municipal governance, a selected few have transcended the others reaching the status of urban gurus. Although consultants are often perceived as depoliticizing urban affairs, research shows that the urban guru often instigates politicization. Research on urban gurus does thus highlight distinctions between gurus and ‘lay’ consultants, but it has paid insufficient attention to describing how, through their interaction with cities, politicization occurs. Moreover, the literature often portrays this interaction as an authority relationship in which the guru is superior, while in fact cities play an important role in bestowing ‘guru’ status. Using fieldwork, I examine the long-term interaction between Richard Florida and the City of Toronto, explaining how Florida’s elevation to guru status by being brought to Toronto ended with him self-describing as ‘persona non-grata’. To explain the anomaly of this interaction and the way in which gurus instigate politicization, I differentiate between consultants’ ‘substance’ and ‘process’ roles in policy formulation processes. I show that, regarding substance, the guru offers a policy paradigm rather than policy instruments and, regarding process, their strength is in performing ideas rather than pulling strings behind the scenes—in both respects making the policy process more public and contested.
41-10342
Aotearoa. colonialism. decolonial planning. geography. Indigeneity. New Zealand. symposium. Urban design.
Imagining decolonized cities creates space to explore how urban places could strip away colonial dominance and restore the ability of Indigenous people to live, know and be. In this essay, we describe one attempt to create such space. While working in Porirua in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ran an urban design competition, hosted workshops with young people and held a symposium. Through all three phases we drew on utopian thinking to imagine beyond the current constraints of urban form in Aotearoa New Zealand to consider how cities might reflect the diverse realities of Maori. While this approach is an attempt at generating hopeful geographies, it also sat in tension with (post)colonial realities, such as racist attempts by white people to claim Indigeneity, and the ongoing need for land to be returned to Indigenous people. We argue that envisioning how cities might be decolonized is useful and needs to be rooted in the particular politics of place, but this imagining needs to be paired with action to confront persistent colonialism.
41-10343
Art Festival. Global South. one-off celebration. social infrastructure. youth-led urban movement.
The fate of the Jardim Colombo favela in São Paulo changed with the birth of a youth-led urban movement during the first art festival held in 2018. Planned and delivered in one month, the festival gathered dozens of volunteers and hundreds of residents to dream together about transforming a dumping site into a park for the community. The excitement of this initial action soon materialized into a self-aware social infrastructure ready to face future and unexpected challenges—including a pandemic, to which the young leaders in Jardim Colombo would respond with creativity, preventing devastating health outcomes. Drawing on three months of fieldwork and an ongoing relationship with the community leaders, I explore how this one-off celebration turned into an urban movement that is pursuing increasingly ambitious social and material goals. Sustained by four pillars—youth, women, creativity and planning—I present this story as a deployment of celebratory insurgency strategically engaging in festive practices to subtly push its counter-hegemonic political agenda in relation to cultural and identity matters. I argue that framing this creative approach as a planned urban celebration may inspire other planning initiatives seeking social justice in the peripheries of cities across the global South.
41-10344
neoliberalism. regeneration projects. resilience. Seoul. Seoul-type Urban Regeneration Model (SUR). Urban regeneration. urbanisms.
Park Won-soon, the former mayor of Seoul, put forward a new vision of Seoul as a progressive city, and one of his signatures was the promotion of a new urban regeneration policy called the Seoul-type Urban Regeneration Model (SUR). It was first presented as a solution to compressed and profit-oriented urban redevelopment but evolved into an alternative model which conveyed the worlding desire of the Seoul Metropolitan Government to redefine Asian urbanism beyond developmentalism or neoliberalism. In this article, we argue that the SUR demonstrates a mixture of post-developmentalist features and the lingering impact of neoliberal rationalities. Specifically, we problematize SUR’s hybrid aspirations for urban competitiveness, improved quality of life and participatory governance by articulating how the pursuit of a globally competitive city conflicts with and overrides other values and how citizen-centered governance was exploited as an efficient mechanism of neoliberal urbanism.
35-2 HISTORIC PRESERVATION
41-10345
Budapest. discursive space. Mobile Policy. policy failure. policymaking . urban policy.
This article introduces an analytic of discursive and material failure, developing a spatial grammar for analysing both the discursive framing of policies as failed and the actually existing processes and effects of failed policy. Using the case of harm reduction drug policy in Budapest, I demonstrate how a successful policy was made to fail at the local and national scales, and how that failure in turn spurred the mobility of harm reduction’s implementation across scales and into the European Union’s Drugs Strategy. I show how focusing on policy failure exposes the politics of making and mobilizing urban policy, and how an analysis of failure can uncover unforeseen effects of the local politics of policy mobility. Analysing failure as both discursive and material allows scholars to break down policymaking processes into the political and practical elements assembled in policy mobilization. Discursive policy failures take into consideration the framing and accounting of actions, events and processes, while analysis of material failure begins with seemingly fewer political questions because of its focus on the technical. I argue that it is in understanding the relationship between material and discursive failure that the politics of urban policy mobility becomes a central question.
35-3 VISUAL FORM
41-10346
future vision. GDP. geography. Malaysia. megaprojects. Vision 2020.
In 1991, the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, announced Vision 2020 to make the country ‘fully developed’ by that year. Launched during a period of rapid economic growth, Vision 2020 legitimized Mahathir’s developmental penchant for spectacular urban megaprojects and ambitious technological experimentation. While hopes of reaching Vision 2020’s crude GDP targets were dashed even before the end of the 1990s (largely as a result of the Asian financial crisis), and Mahathir stepped down from office in 2003, the year 2020 retained significance as a horizon of expectation for a generation of Malaysians. In this Interventions essay I look back at three decades of Vision 2020 from the temporal vantage point of 2020. The lead-up to that year saw political, popular and artistic retrospection on Vision 2020, spurred in part by nonagenarian Mahathir’s return to power. Contextually, ‘Where is the future?’ articulates unrealized technological and developmental expectations from peak Vision 2020. Conceptually, the essay offers a critical geography of political futures past—demonstrating the constitutive spatiality of future expectations and the diverse ways in which elite developmental visions are engaged in life geographies, spaces of experience and representational practices.
35-7 ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL SYSTEMS
41-10347
brick-and-mortar financial services . financial ecology. institutionalization. place-based exclusion. urban neighbourhoods.
Access to safe and affordable financial services is essential to the economic well-being of individual households and entire urban neighborhoods. However, prior research raises concerns about spatial inequities in the distribution of brick-and-mortar financial services offerings—either mainstream financial institutions or alternative ‘fringe’ financial service providers—and the resulting implications for financial inclusion and social justice. This study uses a novel method to identify fringe financial ecologies that captures the recent tandem processes of abandonment by mainstream financial institutions and the proliferation of alternative financial service providers. We explore how fringe financial ecologies potentially overlap existing inequalities of race, class and subprime mortgage lending in two US metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, California, and Miami, Florida. Our results raise concerns that communities of color, low-income neighborhoods and otherwise vulnerable segments of the population are disproportionately at risk of both financial exclusion and predatory targeting. We find that fringe financial ecologies are associated with a high prevalence of subprime mortgage lending. The results advance an understanding of financial ecologies that raises awareness about place-based financial exclusion as a form of systemic racism in the broader context of the national reckoning with racial justice in the US.
36. Environmenal Psychology/Environment, Behavior, and Society
36-1 ENVIRONMENTAL PERCEPTION/COGNITION
41-10348
conceptualization. cumulative effects. pluralization. sociomaterial entanglements. South Asia. Urban climate .
This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. We look analytically and linguistically from this region to engage the terms ‘mahaul’, ‘mausam’ and ‘aab-o-hawa’ as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory and embodied registers. Gathered together, the stories scaffold a perspective on climate that connects concerns about broader structural conditions (mahaul); local and lived experiences in different temporal registers (mausam) and sociomaterial entanglements that demand new ways of knowing nature (aab-o-hawa). An expansive yet grounded conceptualization allows us to narrate individual cases and local climate stories in their multiplicity and difference, rather than through cumulative effects across much wider geographies. This essay on South Asian urban climates provides an analytical frame based on shared colonial history, and geographies connecting experiences of climate across fraught geopolitical borders. These diverse South Asian urbanisms provide evidence of a range of environmental vulnerabilities, while seeking possibilities in already existing climates—in the seas and airs that reorient the experience of land and atmosphere, in centering marginalized voices, in historical remnants to read contemporary urban change, in exploring planning agency grounded in local politics, and from the position of partial knowledge that being within urban climates entails.
36-2 ENVIRONMENTAL AESTHETICS/MEANING
41-10349
contamination. Multiplication. Qualitative analysis . redevelopment. stakeholders. Tel Aviv.
The remediation and redevelopment of industrially contaminated land are complex challenges for urban regions worldwide. Yet the literature on urban brownfields mostly addresses this as a technical problem through dichotomic and anthropocentric terms, contrasting the passive and negative role of the contamination as a toxic entity in the ground with the active and positive roles assigned to human actors such as planners, developers and communities. This article contests this prevalent view by tracing in detail debates concerning the remediation of three highly contaminated military-industrial brownfield sites in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region. Drawing on notions of ontological multiplicity and enactment from science and technology studies and on qualitative analysis of a vast database of planning protocols and court hearings alongside interviews with key stakeholders, we uncover how contamination is enacted in multiple ways as mobile/immobile, unified/fragmented, remediable/irremediable. Furthermore, following one of our field’s inherent controversies—whether to fully map the contamination prior to planning the sites—the article highlights the attempts to regulate this multiplicity and replace it with a single coherent contamination. By acknowledging the multiple enactments of contamination, our approach offers a more nuanced understanding that could help stakeholders rethink the remediation and redevelopment of urban brownfields beyond simplistic technical solutions or neoliberal policy imperatives.
41-10350
China. governance. policymakers. private–public partnerships. theorization. urban governance. urbanisms.
In this article I examine recent theoretical and empirical exchanges around partnership-based urban governance between North Atlantic and Chinese academics and policymakers. I argue that the latest wave of de jure private–public partnerships in urban China reflects an ongoing process of governance rescaling beyond conventional entrepreneurial urbanism theory. I propose an analytical framework that foregrounds successive experimental partnerships as tensions between institutional continuity and change arising from rescaling. In this study I examine variegated actually existing partnerships in Jiyuan, China, to identify generalizable ideal types of partnership-driven governance rescaling. I conclude by suggesting to enhance the theorization of entrepreneurial urbanism by specifying a partnership-scale nexus, and assert that variegated partnerships in China have rewritten the rule but not the law of partnership.
36-3 ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDE/AWARENESS/VALUES
41-10351
Formalization. governance planning. government data . impositional arrangement. re-arrangements. Re-signification.
The second movement considers (re)arrangements as projects of formalization that seek to impose and even fix a form to spaces historically constructed as marginal. This impositional arrangement operates as a governmental desire to fix a form by re-signifying both subjects and spaces.
36-4 SOCIO-SPATIAL FACTORS
41-10352
aggregation. city-making . global cities. industrialisation. neoliberalism. South Asia.
Since 1991, Bangalore has seen spectacular redevelopment through the political hegemony of real estate, IT and parastatals in local urban governance. The global city literature has demonstrated how gentrification and real estate redevelopment have been at the heart of such neoliberal urban transformation. Yet, the literature’s roots in notions of ‘post-industrial’ cities obscure a view of how industry remains a key part of contemporary global cities. The persistence of the Peenya Industrial Area, one of South Asia’s largest industrial areas today, reflects the negotiated, partial, contested and uneven character of the neoliberal urban project. Peenya demonstrates how obdurate inherited urban industrial geographies continue to shape the dynamics of world city-making. Established in the heyday of Bangalore’s postcolonial public sector industrialization, Peenya employs over 180,000 workers in 8,236 manufacturing firms, even today. How does such vast industrial space persist within the core of a global city? I draw on interviews and qualitative field research to argue that Peenya’s resilience is rooted in the complexity of private land aggregation and state-sponsored industrial relocation within an interwoven geography of tiny, legally fluid land holdings with variegated tenure regimes as well as the challenge of re-signifying space in a region with obdurate industrial imaginaries.
41-10353
architectural design qualities. epistemologies . Government Policy. prognostications . spatial analytics. spatial model. Temporal analyses.
The concept of the future, its prognostications and its applications increasingly shapes present social worlds. From government policy to architectural design, from preemptive everyday practices to interventionist counter-cultural projects, imaginations of the future take concrete form and enjoy a powerful purpose. In this intervention we ask: How is the future invented, planned, renounced and researched? Specifically, how do we analyse the entanglement of temporal and spatial logics against the enveloping imperative of ‘future as crisis’? What is the role of methodology, collaboration and engagement in shaping debates about the future, and how do we research different futures as well as different positionalities within the future? Rather than taking a prescriptive approach, we consider future epistemologies as well as concrete future practices and the ways in which multiple notions of futurity might overlap. Additionally, we consider the standpoint from which different futures are imagined or renounced, and the ways in which entanglements of past, present and future might reflect a struggle on different social fields. Finally, we complicate some of the distinctions that researchers draw between the practices of imagining, planning and producing future scenarios as exclusionary, and modes of navigating and shaping futures that are embedded in everyday lives.
41-10354
innovation. local needs. local resources. Sociopolitical construction. urban space . urban transformation.
This article addresses a critical gap in extant theorizing of urban transformations by focusing on the political and temporal dimensions of how innovations emerge, develop and become institutionalized into alternative systems of the everyday such as social centres, community gardens or urban commons. Going beyond current approaches, we offer a new understanding of innovations as sociopolitical practices: sets of resourced activities aiming to reshape urban spaces to achieve social and political ends locally. Developing an original theorization of such practices, we identify and differentiate between three sets of activities designed to meet local needs: assembling innovations—identifying and employing a wide variety of local resources within a neighbourhood; extending innovations—broadening the scope of initiatives and making them last; and, institutionalizing innovations, anchoring them in a more formalized structure. Sociopolitical innovations require sustained practices whereby situated agents pragmatically push for change over time. While the ongoing development of systems of the everyday may have limited immediate transformative impact, the reshaping of local resources prefigures an alternative which breaks from, yet is embedded in, everyday urban life. Our theorizing is underpinned by an international qualitative study of neighbourhoods in four European cities: Amsterdam, Birmingham, Copenhagen and Glasgow.
41-10355
Ethnographic practice. internally displaced persons (IDPs). Marginality. stigmatization. urban governance. urbanization. vulnerability analysis.
In cities in the global South, internally displaced persons (IDPs) often end up in marginalized places created by uneven processes of urbanization. While IDPs experience similar disadvantages to the urban poor living in these places, they face additional vulnerabilities related to their displacement. Building on insights from urban studies and forced migration studies, we argue in this article that a multidimensional understanding of urban marginality is a useful analytical lens with which to examine the conditions of urban IDPs. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in Kersa and Sululta IDP settlements of Ethiopia, this study reveals how IDPs experience similar spatial, social and symbolic marginality in different urban contexts. Our findings show the relational manifestation of segregation, social distance and stigmatization that impede IDPs’ access to urban space and services. This study also highlights how these dimensions of marginality interact and reproduce an additional layer of marginality. Our research suggests the need for inclusive urban governance in which IDPs contribute to and benefit from urbanization as citizens.
41-10356
co-evolution. gentrification. housing supply. Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY). socio-cultural change. trickle-down filtering theory. YIMBY.
The growth of ‘Yes In My Back Yard’ (YIMBY) activism seems at first a simple story of a new social movement led by a new generation frustrated with the housing supply shortages created by decades of Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) conservative spatial privilege and exclusion. Yet YIMBY/NIMBY dialectics reflect more fundamental transformations of intergenerational inequalities between past and present amidst today’s multiple scales of intensifying competition in urban life. YIMBY movements, therefore, must be understood as part of the long history of gentrification and the current, accelerating co-evolution of socio-cultural change and the circulation of capital. YIMBY activism reflects a complex hybrid of a previous century’s axioms of trickle-down filtering theory and contemporary progressive moral-ethical discourses of dynamic, diversifying lived experiences of intersectionality at the scales of individuals, families, communities, nations, and cultures. As intensified urban competition co-evolves with diverse, recombinant axes of Western/non-Western and colonial/decolonial relations of space and time, localized economic rent gaps become transnational, transhistorical moral rent gaps constituted through competing claims for inclusion into the inherent exclusivity of capitalizable property rights. YIMBY activism reveals the evolutionary frontiers of escalating competition legitimating itself on a gentrifying urban planet.