International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

In this essay I reflect upon the challenges of conducting critical urban research from the global South, where profound inequalities and limited resources shape our work and where, at the same time, academics are often called upon for help by communities, social movements and governments alike. Drawing from experiences during my research in Latin America, I explore the complexities of engaging with marginalized communities, whose aspirations sometimes defy traditional critiques of urban interventions, with states and governments that are often less monolithic than we think, and with businesses that are sometimes willing to listen. I advocate for research that not only critiques inequalities but also identifies pathways toward alternatives that reduce them. In so doing, I argue for taking knowledge produced in the South—and specifically knowledge from problem solving—as foundational to theory rather than as peripheral case studies. While it can be risky, engaging with governments, communities and organizations offers opportunities to make social science both critical and actionable. This essay calls for reflexive, inclusive scholarship that embraces the complexities of inequality and the possibilities for change.

Henry George advocated for capturing land value increases for public ends. The active approach of public authorities organizing and financing land development can help capture higher land value increases, as Hartman and Spit indicate. However, this approach hardly happens in developing countries, where the coalition of private developers and local officials and weak state capacity perpetuate a passive approach: private developers mainly finance and organize land development and capture land value increases. In terms of ‘land finance’ practice, China became an outlier in developing countries following the active approach. While China’s land finance is iconic in its rapid urbanization, few studies examine its formation. In this study I analyse how China’s land development was transformed from the passive to its current active mode. I argue that the Chinese central government’s policymaking dismantled the self-reinforcement of the passive approach and created new rules that are vital for the transformation to the active mode. Given China’s new economic and sociodemographic situation, I propose that the Chinese central government continue to support the Georgist value capture idea and design new frameworks to capture value increases in property reselling and redevelopment. In this article I also suggest that the Chinese government appropriate more land revenue for social spending such as senior care and child benefits.

The global governance of urban greenspaces increasingly recognizes the importance of citizen and NGO involvement, since top-down management often fails to address non-governmental stakeholders’ diverse perceptions, preferences and demands. Research on public service co-production and environmental stewardship emphasizes the role of internal and extrinsic motivations in facilitating co-production, but overlooks value-driven and organizational motivations. This article explores why and how citizens and NGOs develop a sense of commonality and co-produce urban greenspaces. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews with engaged citizens, NGOs and government representatives in Beijing, China. The findings reveal that NGOs and citizens were motivated by the interplay of value-based and agency-based factors. Altruistic and biospheric values, attachments to greenspaces and a sense of responsibility enhanced the perceived salience of these issues and motivated citizens and NGOs to co-produce. In addition, NGOs viewed co-production as a strategy to achieve environmental management goals requiring government support and agreement. Low efficacy did not deter participation; instead, citizens and NGOs sought greater resources, power and influence in decision-making related to greenspace planning and management through co-production. These findings suggest that policy innovations should foster environmental values and a sense of responsibility, empower citizens to increase efficacy, and integrate environmentally-oriented perspectives into greenspace planning and management.

This article explores how local advocacy coalitions create and apply narrative strategies to justify the introduction of smart solutions within the domain of urban public services. Using the Narrative Policy Framework, we analyze digital transformation projects in the field of social policy, public safety and waste management introduced in three Polish cities. We deconstruct the narratives surrounding these projects, and uncover the underlying political and normative goals. Our findings show that digital projects are framed not merely as technical innovations but rather as strategic stories of change, with policy actors presenting desirable futures and featuring specific heroes, villains and victims. Despite limited evidence related to the impact of smart projects on improving service management and delivery, these narratives remain important tools for generating stakeholders’ support. The research highlights the interplay between smart urbanism, local politics and digital governance, emphasizing the importance of storytelling in legitimizing technological shifts.

This article builds on recent interventions into the study of planetary urbanization that call for greater interaction with the multiple social struggles and standpoints that embed this process. To do so, we advocate for academic engagement between planetary urbanization and the concept of the ‘construction state’. This is a term used in Japan and South Korea to describe an alliance between development corporations and the state, one whose expansionary logic accords with the notions of planetary and extended urbanization and acts as a co-constitutive, regional driver of it. To better situate this concept, and to highlight the social struggles that inform it, we examine the politics of greenbelt deregulation and the expanding real estate-led urbanization in the Seoul Metropolitan Region in recent decades. We show how the construction state and its supply-centrism played a key part in the ‘explosive’ process of greenbelt development and examine the dynamics of the struggles that activists waged against it. By doing so, we contribute to ongoing debates about planetary urbanization as an open totality of processes, stress the importance of a situated approach that foregrounds the diverse practices and struggles that shape it and encourage communication between critical standpoints.

This article explores various forms of archives—such as institutions, collections, records and cities—as urban commons. It highlights the importance of community and institutional collaboration in curating archives to promote learning, discovery and well-being through grassroots initiatives, transforming archives and their urban settings into repositories of collective memories and significant landmarks for their communities. The Pionta complex in Arezzo, a former mental asylum covering approximately 25 hectares and encompassing historical buildings, an urban park and archaeological remains, holds considerable sociocultural, architectural and landscape value. Parts of it are used by the University of Siena and the local health authority (ASL), while the remaining area is a public space owned by the municipality and province, but underutilized because of the stigma of its historical connotations and lack of reclamation interest. This article presents three collective archival practices aimed at regenerating Pionta’s urban life, altering negative perceptions of the heritage site and activating hidden narratives as living urban archives to enhance creativity, social learning, empowerment and community welfare. These practices demonstrate commons-based archive management and informal placemaking, are collaboratively designed and implemented by diverse community members, and provide insights into managing negatively perceived heritage sites.

In post-industrial cities in decline, what happens to leftover spaces after abandonment? This question lies at the root of trying to make sense of entrenched distress in neighborhoods in deindustrializing Detroit, a city struggling for more than five decades with disinvestment, job losses, population shrinkage, a collapsed housing market, abandoned properties and dysfunctional public services. Located on the west side of Detroit, Brightmoor and Delray are two neighborhoods that share common features of distress. Despite what might look like similarly neglected landscapes, the leftover spaces in these neighborhoods have not suffered the same fate, and what is happening has in fact diverged along alternative pathways. Making use of a relational comparison enables us to excavate beneath the level of appearances to expose entrenched differences. This investigation constructs layered profiles of these neighborhoods to counteract the erroneous misunderstandings that suggest that processes of decline put in motion by vacancy and abandonment have only produced lifeless voids where nothing happens, or empty slates where anything can happen. Rather, the uneven trajectories of urban decline in Brightmoor and Delray have left behind unanticipated residues that embed themselves in the social fabric of these neighborhoods, complicating conventional approaches to market-led stabilization and sustainable recovery.

In this article I draw on the embodied experience of driving into potholes and on bumpy roads in Hyderabad to show how pockmarked roads become a terrain on which political sensibilities are shaped. Drawing on ethnographic material collected over six years, I analyze how potholes shape driving dispositions in a city that is attempting to brand itself as ‘world class’. I show that far from being merely physical interruptions on the surface of the road, potholes engender political subjectivities in three ways: one, they generate, sustain and institutionalize narratives of state corruption; two, through their capacity to hurt, injure and even kill certain motoring bodies, potholes enable an experience of inequality in the register of pain and risk; and three, potholes spawn citizen engagement and claims-making. Through a discussion of these three processes, I consider how and why the banal pothole becomes an aperture through which to view the desires, discomforts and disappointments of urban life in India. Ultimately, I argue that driving is a key mode of experiencing urban inequality, and that road surfaces are generative of politics in and of the city.

This essay explores how contemporary urban infrastructure is being conceptually and operationally extended into new domains. Across five key arenas—elemental, care, more-than-human, cyber-physical and the neurotechnical—we trace how infrastructures are no longer confined to traditional networked systems but instead permeate and co-compose atmospheres, bodies, ecologies and cognition. These extensions reconfigure what infrastructure is and does, operating as agents of socio-technical modulation under conditions of planetary crisis. We argue that these emergent infrastructural forms constitute a significant shift, where the capacity to live, sense, feel and adapt is increasingly subject to infrastructural capture, stratification and control. The essay reflects on the risks of conceptual overreach while asserting that a more expansive understanding of infrastructure is necessary to grasp contemporary urban governance. We conclude by proposing a renewed research agenda for urban infrastructure studies that is interdisciplinary, ethically attuned and responsive to the operationalization of life itself under conditions of turbulence and inequality.

While the emergence of social class is usually associated with relations of production or patterns of consumption, this article argues for centring mobility in class analysis, especially within rapidly growing cities. It focuses on the peripheries of Addis Ababa, where Africa’s most remarkable state-led housing programme has produced wrenching sociospatial change. As a wide spectrum of households are sucked or expelled into these peripheries, new constellations have emerged in which varying experiences of residential mobility and everyday physical movement are redrawing lines of difference beyond categories of owner and tenant, rich and poor, formal and informal. We draw on interviews and solicited diaries from residents in various housing types within peripheral neighbourhoods. Deploying the prisms of ‘displaceability’ and ‘motility’ (the potential to be mobile), we argue that agency and confidence regarding one’s mobility—the degree to which moving or staying put is a realization of aspiration rather than force—is contributing to class formation, including by sharpening relational differentiation within the urban middle class. As well as shedding light on the reconstitution of class in urban Ethiopia, the article addresses an important gap regarding the role that mobility plays in social class dynamics in contexts of rapid urban growth and transformation.