International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.