Urban Studies

Based on collective walks, this article explores the entangled, multi-layered temporalities of Amager Commons, and how these might offer possibilities for new relationships with urban environments. The article draws on and contributes to scholarship on arts-based, collaborative methodologies, urban nature-cultures, and more-than-human temporalities. Having been used as common farmland, a garbage dump, and a shooting ground for the military, today Amager Commons is a high biodiversity zone, located close to central Copenhagen. Increasingly put to multiple recreational uses, the Commons is also subject to urban development. While spatial politics and planning initiatives enact the Commons on a linear timeline of preservation and development, our walks enabled explorations of the Commons’ multi-layered temporalities, shaped by emergent, heterogeneous ecologies. Engaging with creative writing, sensory ethnography, memory work and two unguided tours, we develop a multi-layered, porous and polyvocal methodology to foster reciprocity and socio-environmental care for urban ecologies. The article contributes to methodologies in urban studies and cultural geography, with a focus on temporalities, urban nature-cultures and commoning. We invite you, the reader, to venture into the text and immerse yourself in it as if walking in the Commons.

This article starts from the premise that purposefully working toward shared urban definitions can foster constructive dialogue across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. Yet, the process of standardisation is inherently power-laden and requires difficult work to navigate tensions between simplicity and diversity. Drawing on a qualitative interview study, we explore how an urban standardisation effort can be organised in practice: what the role of different stakeholders is and how different forms of diversity are negotiated. To do so, we employ the revision of a subclass in the Degree of Urbanisation (DEGURBA) definition as a case study. Our findings suggest that standardisation not only involves balancing simplicity and diversity but also navigates a trade-off between open deliberation and practical feasibility. We argue that DEGURBA’s approach, where one stakeholder group establishes the overarching framework and the input of other stakeholder groups is elicited for fine-tuning, presents a pragmatic way to foster participation while maintaining feasibility. However, we also contend that prioritising open deliberation could be a valuable alternative pathway, even when such an effort would not lead to a standard definition. In that case, it is not the standard itself, but the process leading up to it that could guide productive discourse on the urban.

The article examines the dialectics between more-than-human fertility and urban development, exploring the historical case of the Berlin sewage fields. In doing so, it contributes to more-than-human urban geographies in three ways. First, it points out a current move beyond the idea of “living cities” that foregrounds the biological and temporal edges of more-than-human life. Following this, the article discusses more-than-human fertility as a so far underexplored edge of life and conceptualizes it as spatiotemporal arrangement of both living beings and non-living materialities. Finally, it introduces the concept of urban fertilityscapes and applies it to the case of the Berlin sewage fields, which from the late 19th to the late 20th century combined wastewater disposal with agricultural nutrient (re)use. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of archival documents and scientific literature, the article demonstrates how the Berlin fertilityscape unfolds across wastewater infrastructures, more-than-human metabolisms, political-economic rationalities and affective atmospheres. The findings reveal that fertilityscapes generate inherent tensions between imperatives to intensify production and the metabolic capacities of more-than-human arrangements, creating instability in which the becoming of life drives urban development just as forcefully as its non-becoming.

Critical academic engagements of smart cities are increasingly traversing boundaries of global North and South in the theorization of urban smartness. More recent tendencies present important entry points for critically discussing smart cities, partly by pointing to the exclusion of urban informality in much smart-city research. To overcome this omission, suggestions of provincializing the study of smart cities and arguments for a Southern research agenda on just smart cities have emerged. While such work emphasizes the importance of merging the study of smart cities with ordinary lives, we will build on the extant literature on the role of informality in the makings and workings of the southern city to similarly argue that informal urban settlements also subsidize the emergent smart cities in the global South. This helps us exceed the binary approach that visualizes the city as divided between sectors of privilege and inequity, but what remains unexplored is the texture of the relationship between smart urbanism and informality. In this commentary, we theorize what the smart city looks like when viewed from spaces of informality, proposing a dialectical relationship of interdependency and antagonism between smart cities and informal settlements.

Past research on neighborhood ascent—socioeconomic increases among residents and housing—focuses on residential environments, overlooking how connections beyond their boundaries influence neighborhood change. Using geocoded tweets from over 375,000 Twitter users in the 50 most populous US cities, we explore how a city’s mobility network relates to neighborhood socioeconomic (SES) ascent from 2010 to 2019—whether ascent is more likely in cities more or less structurally connected via residents’ routine travels. We find that neighborhoods located in cities with greater racially segregated mobility, particularly initially lower-SES neighborhoods, are more likely to ascend compared to those in cities where residents more frequently visit neighborhoods of different racial compositions than their own. While ascent patterns are similar across White and Hispanic neighborhoods, regardless of city type, neighborhoods with no racial majority are more likely to ascend in cities with greater segregated mobility. Black neighborhoods are least likely to ascend, underscoring how deeply entrenched racial hierarchies continue to shape neighborhood trajectories. Our results highlight broader urban dynamics structuring neighborhood ascent, revealing how stratification processes extend well beyond where people live.

Formally sanctioned interim uses have become increasingly popular in European cities. They have also become linked more closely to debates on (in-)security, however, giving rise to specialized scholarly and practitioner literatures on that linkage. This commentary critically interrogates the directions of this emergent knowledge base. It situates the literatures and ponders the clarity with which they define their core concepts of security and interim space. It also reflects on the ways they apprehend the governance of such spaces, and on the impact of temporality and termination on the security politics of such places. The commentary argues that the emergent knowledge base highlights an increasingly popular phenomenon—but also that its conceptual precision requires further sharpening, and that it ought to be developed into a considerably more holistic, empirical and critical perspective more generally.

Conventional urban planning and development praxis in Aotearoa New Zealand has fallen short of consistently providing Indigenous Māori communities the opportunity to grow and develop their culture within urban environments. In the paper, we report on reflections from our research participants about the barriers that they deduce are continuing to hinder Indigenous visibility within urban environments. We establish a conceptual framework centred on three key Indigenous concepts relevant to this kaupapa (purpose): mana motuhake (self-determination), tuakiritanga (cultural identity), and kotahitanga (collective orientation). The investigation is primarily based on kōwetewete (a conversational method) with research collaborators comprising the urban professionals and mana whenua (local tribal group) most directly involved in Indigenous urban transformation in the city of Ōtepoti Dunedin. Our research demonstrates that participants perceive that significant barriers from historical and ongoing inattentiveness, combined with strong colonial dominance of planning practices, underpin the extensive cultural marginalisation of Māori in the built environment.

This article interrogates how temporary housing in the Netherlands is shaped by informal governance. It argues such practices enable a new state-led paradigm, termed LEGO urbanism, which transforms housing from place-bound infrastructure into modular, relocatable assets. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of the Dutch flexwonen policy, the study shows how LEGO urbanism is realized through three key mechanisms: trust-based networks, discretionary flexibility, and the public absorption of private risk. By theorizing the link between modularity, temporariness, and informal governance, this work extends theories of urban informality to the Global North. It raises urgent questions about the role of the state in temporary urbanism, modularization within urban development, and the normalization of housing impermanence.

The circular economy (CE) is hailed as a novel model for urban development that proposes to deliver a more regenerative society by integrating economic, ecological and social objectives. The social pillar, however, tends to fall short in research and policy that prioritise innovation-focused growth agendas. Witnessing leading policy narratives frame social objectives as a matter of anticipated employment generation for low-skilled or ‘inactive’ workers, this article studies the case of Brussels (Belgium), where the sizeable and waste-intensive construction industry constitutes a prime example of contemporary struggles around labour market inclusion in the circular economy. Incremental sectoral shifts from material-extractive practices to recycling, reuse and repair work lead to changing labour demands that make training and re-skilling for emerging circular occupations essential. This article analyses the conditions under which circularity materialises in construction training and employment, thereby assessing its potential in remedying urban labour market mismatches through economic and spatial inclusion. Through qualitative research entailing interviews with organisations and ethnography-based observations with job seekers, we map circularity conceptualisations at different scales. Within the sector, circular construction remains material rather than profession-focused. Although social economy enterprises show grounded practices of social circularity through workforce integration, a lack of recognition of qualifications, persisting systemic barriers, and unclear professional pathways hinder the integration of these initiatives into formal training and employment systems. These barriers are reinforced by regional institutions, whose prevailing focus on worker activation and skill matching reduces on-the-ground efforts to achieve inclusive employment and results in partial reinforcement of exclusionary narratives within the circular economy.

As we continue to witness the unabating death and destruction of Palestinian lives and spaces, it would be easy to succumb to the bounds of expectations set by the dystopian world around us; however, Palestinians already offer us ways out of and through these unfolding dystopian realities. This article turns to these pathways presented and alluded to in the Palestinian speculative futures of Lyd and Palestine+100, a science fiction documentary and an anthology of speculative fiction short stories, respectively. This article argues that the ways in which these speculative imaginaries engage with the context and enduring impacts of settler colonialism offer guiding principles for building desired urban futures. The enduring nature of settler colonialism in Palestine is often understood as the ongoing Nakba; Palestinian dispossession and displacement that was part of constructing the Israeli state in 1948 continues today through legal, infrastructural, and political maneuvers. Focusing on how the producers and authors of Lyd and Palestine+100 grapple with the fragmentation and erasure of the ongoing Nakba, what emerges is how these speculative futures are intimately tied to the present, not only through the dystopian elements but more significantly in the enactments of better worlds. In its eliminatory mission, a central component of settler colonialism is to destroy the capacity to imagine an Indigenous future; however, these speculative imaginaries echo the details of desired futures already being enacted in the present.

Floods pose significant threats in the United States, and the National Flood Insurance Program uses Special Flood Hazard Area (SFHA) designations to guide regulations intended to reduce flood damage. Yet the effect of SFHA regulation on housing markets is difficult to identify because floodplain status is correlated with flood risk and unobserved amenities. This study estimates SFHA policy effects on assessed housing values by combining parcel-level flood risk data, property-level housing information, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) SFHA boundaries in Texas. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design, we compare single-family homes just inside and just outside invariant SFHA boundaries to better separate local policy effects from flood risk and other confounding factors. Relative to a standard hedonic model, the RD analysis yields different estimates. The hedonic model suggests lower assessed values for coastal-county properties inside floodplains and no significant effect inland. In contrast, the RD estimates show no significant boundary effect in coastal counties and about a 2% assessed-value premium for homes inside SFHAs in inland counties. These findings suggest that assessed valuations do not consistently capitalize flood-zone designation and associated regulations, although they do not necessarily imply the same pattern for transaction prices.

Community gardens are often projected as alternatives to individualism, neoliberalism and social acceleration. We interrogate these imaginaries through the practicalities of gardening, particularly gardeners’ relationships with soil, by focusing on the disjunctive temporalities of community gardens in Poland. Specifically, we explore how these gardens promote ‘forced cultivation’, understood as culturally and politically motivated interferences with ecological temporalities. Through this agricultural metaphor, we explore three faces of acceleration in community gardens: catching up with the West, out-of-sync institutional temporality and sped-up soil cultivation. The findings show that in most gardens, a linear historicity of modernisation is perpetuated; project temporalities often clash with the rhythms of vegetation, and soil is invisibilised and imported from elsewhere in order to deliver some of the promises gardens make. Our analysis of community gardens’ timescape reveals the paradoxical mechanisms whereby productivist anthropocentric logics colonise the very processes that were meant to counteract them.

This article examines the environmental justice implications of warehouse location policies in Fortaleza, Brazil, through spatial analysis techniques. By employing local indicators of spatial association and spatial clustering methods, the research investigates the relationship between warehouse distribution and socio-economic inequalities. The study reveals that the public policies led to a disproportionate concentration of logistics facilities in low Human Development Index areas, exacerbating transportation-related externalities. These policies have contributed to a spatial mismatch where vulnerable communities are more exposed to environmental burdens. The accessibility index, calculated using exploratory factor analysis, highlights significant inequities in urban freight infrastructure. The study underscores the necessity of reforming land-use and zoning regulations to ensure a fairer distribution of logistics facilities, aligning them with principles of environmental justice and sustainable development. By integrating spatial accessibility indicators into policy frameworks, this research advocates for inclusive urban planning strategies that mitigate the socio-environmental impacts on marginalised communities and address transport disparities through equitable policies.

Situated in interdisciplinary literatures on climate urbanism and future making, this article examines the multi-sited case of climate-corporate futuring in contemporary global urban climate governance. Drawing on a dataset of five workshops on climate resilience organized by two globally facing urban think tanks, the article analyzes critically the contingent and frustrated process by which global in urban climate governance sought to construct “best practice” and manufacture climate commonsense for the world of cities. Such a multi-sited endeavor of co-producing consensus across space is argued to be a methodological and defensive maneuver as professionals seek to adapt to, and capitalize on, climate-changing urban futures. Fleshing out such authoritative geographies of climate knowledge in interurban space reveals the process by which liberal-corporate alliances dominant in transnational climate networks seek to foreclose, from the inside out, more just urban climate futures. They do so by operating across and beyond cities, in stark contrast to extant research that remains trained on the city. It reveals, ultimately, the spatial and institutionalized consolidation of a particular splice of elite financialized coastal urbanism made to stand in for the 21st-century world of cities.

This paper repositions the indoor–outdoor threshold as a neglected yet vital site of climate governance in urban studies. Examining how infrastructure modulates air, temperature, and comfort, it develops the concept of hybrid urban socio-natures as spatial assemblages formed by climate control technologies that dissolve traditional distinctions between inside and outside. Drawing on political ecology, science and technology studies, and critical urban geography, the paper proposes a typology of three governance modes, reversion, extension and inversion, that reveal how cities selectively reorganise thermal boundaries. Through comparative analysis of New York, Toronto, Ahmedabad and Medellín, it demonstrates how comfort becomes an infrastructural capacity that is unevenly governed, creating new geographies of thermal privilege and exclusion. The paper contends that modulating the indoor–outdoor boundary is a distinct aspect of urban atmospheric governance, in which comfort and exposure are politically contested. The paper highlights this boundary as a domain of infrastructural and social struggle and opens new avenues for urban climate research, placing questions of comfort and thermal justice at the core of urban studies.

In this critical commentary we propose a research agenda that supports the scaled development of “sufficiency shared housing,” or housing options built for the sharing of functional space in a way that lowers total resource consumption. While research from multiple contexts shows that shared housing options are generally popular, they remain niche market options, at best. Drawing from the specific cases of co-housing and co-living in North America and Europe, we argue that shared housing options will remain inaccessible, exploitative, and/or vulnerable to rebound effects without more structured guidance from the public sector in the form of planning, design guidelines, and revised building standards. We thus conclude by outlining a research agenda that supports proactive and positive guidance from the public sector by 1) testing and dispelling myths about shared housing being morally aberrant or unpopular, 2) offering specific design guidance, 3) testing and validating shared housing as a low-impact “sufficiency” option, and 4) scanning the emerging policy landscape.

This article explores methodological approaches to reading personal photographic archives through the concept of “seeing with,” a practice of collaborative interpretation that challenges individual mastery of visual materials. Working with Roberto Monte-Mór’s 1980s–2000s documentation of Amazonian frontiers, originally linked to his theories on extended urbanization, we demonstrate how collaborative viewing sessions can reveal what theoretical frameworks initially obscured. Through transfluence and transvisualization, concepts drawing on quilombola epistemologies, the research shows how photographs contain multiple temporal layers and spatial logics. Rather than documenting modernity’s arrival in the jungle, these images also reveal urban-nature practices: the persistence of river-based mobilities, palm architecture, and environmental knowledge within industrial capitalism. The methodology foregrounds relational research practices with personal archives, the ethics of seeing with rather than looking at, and how changing interpretive frameworks make previously invisible presences visible in existing collections.

Tromsø is commonly represented as an inclusive and culturally diverse city, yet this narrative obscures how Indigenous Sámi presence is rendered conditional and public displays of ‘Sáminess’ risk being met with sanctions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines Tromsø as a settler urban space and argues that the discourse of Nordic exceptionalism produces a distinctive mode of settler urbanism, where symbolic inclusion masks ongoing colonial structures. I show how Norwegianization endures, how tourism reproduces emblematic depictions of Sámi identity, and how racism continues to shape everyday encounters. At the same time, Sámi interlocutors actively contest these narratives by asserting visibility, reclaiming language, and challenging dominant representations. Interpreting these actions through the concept of survivance foregrounds Sámi urban belonging as the result of sustained Sámi efforts rather than inherent Norwegian inclusivity. The article contributes to debates on Indigenous urbanism by highlighting the specific workings of Nordic settler urbanism.

In recent decades, urban natures have provided salient entry points to examine the socio-ecological transformations of cities. These changes are often highly diversified because of site-specific evolutionary and historical peculiarities – complicating catch-all attempts to both theorise about and plan for urban natures. Nevertheless, urban nature scholarship and municipal planning’s overriding focus on the spatiality of cities often overlooks these diverse cycles, rhythms and trajectories that comprise urban green spaces. To remedy this, we argue for an approach that takes the full breadth of urban nature temporalities into consideration, in practice as well as in theory. To this end, we consider the temporalities of urban natures, in their wider pluralistic, polyvocal and multiple forms. We do so through a multi-sited ethnographic study of divergent more-than-human temporalities in the redevelopment of informal green spaces in two post-industrial European cities. Specifically, we look to the regeneration of abandoned and decaying riparian zones in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Turin, Italy, as fruitful sites for exploring how diverse temporalities expose the tensions between municipal planning imperatives and more-than-human relations. Drawing on the work of philosopher Chantal Mouffe, we develop the concept of agonistic temporalities to theorise these confrontations as inherently pluralistic and productive for the politics of planning the more-than-human city.

A significant body of literature has demonstrated how urban revitalisation policies and market-oriented housing policies facilitate new-build gentrification in large-scale redevelopment projects. This study takes sustainable urban development as the point of departure and adopts a broader spatial perspective. I investigate how housing construction and densification policies influence ongoing gentrification processes at a metropolitan scale in Oslo, Norway, and I argue that socio-economic changes induced by densification can be characterised as state-led new-build gentrification. The analysis draws on population-wide register data from 2004 to 2022, supplemented by a unique dataset on densification policies. From descriptive statistics, mapping, and fixed-effects regression analysis, my findings reveal three key points: First, market-rate housing construction has a significant gentrifying effect in affordable neighbourhoods, especially in the inner city. Second, policies for urban transformation strengthen the gentrifying effect of new housing and facilitate an outward diffusion of gentrification into inner suburbs. Third, directing market-rate residential developments toward central urban areas reinforces centralisation of affluence and suburbanisation of poverty. The article provides policy-relevant documentation on how compact urban growth policies, combined with neoliberal housing strategies, underpin gentrification in affordable neighbourhoods.