International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

After 50 years of research on urban informality, why is it that we seem unable to either clearly define this concept or move beyond it? On the one hand, urban informality is identified with ‘slums’ and substandard outcomes, on the other, with deregulated markets and neoliberal urbanism. Yet it is also identified as a self-organized urbanism that adds vitality, affordability, diversity, creativity and adaptability to the city—a form of urbanity that embodies the ‘right to the city’ and urban commoning. How are we to understand this paradox and move beyond the informal/formal as a binary distinction? If informality is more than a lack of formality, then what is informality-in-itself? The key argument here is that urban informality is the original form of urbanity—the ur-form—while formal urbanism is its necessary counterpart. Informal urbanism is not a lack of formality, but the ground from which the formal emerges. This inversion changes the way we understand the city as an in/formal assemblage. While rampant informality may seem the very antithesis of urban planning, to erase it is to kill urbanity itself. The challenge is to engage this paradox—planning for the unplanned, keeping the ur- in urban studies.

The exceptional measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic have brought great potential for reconfiguring urban governance. To examine such potential, this article presents how the pandemic crisis was managed in Chinese neighbourhoods. Following a statecraft approach and using Shanghai as a case, we show how a citywide lockdown played out on the ground as a joint product of state apparatus and citizens. Drawing on discourse analysis of interviews, policy documents, and news reports, we probe into Shanghai's contextualized neighbourhood pandemic responses, particularly by emerging neighbourhood voluntary practices in crisis management. We examine how these practices were tactically incorporated into the state's overall responses to the pandemic through co-production, co-option and mobilization. Instead of co-governance, we argue that the grassroots state orchestrates and steers community participation and volunteerism to reinforce grassroots statecraft and consolidate its role in (post-) pandemic neighbourhood governance. Through exceptional crisis management measures, the state penetrates everyday life. This process has facilitated local state-building in urban neighbourhoods, thereby manifesting, perpetuating, and expanding state-centred governance trends that were established well before the onset of Covid.

Owing to Nigeria's poor road maintenance culture, informal road menders (IRMs) have emerged who fill potholes on urban and sub-urban roads in exchange for money from road users. This article interrogates the micropolitics of this phenomenon as a relatively new means of informal livelihood within the context of the ethnography of road infrastructure, informal agency and the everyday struggle for socioeconomic survival. Conceiving informal road mending as a livelihood offers a promising lens for discussing how IRMs gain and retain access to space, navigate risks, and harness relationships with other road users and state institutions along the road. Drawing on conversations with drivers and commuters during ‘go-alongs’ in public transport and on interviews with IRMs, private car owners and state regulatory agents, the article shows how IRMs and other road users appropriate the risks and opportunities associated with potholes as socioeconomic resources through which they leverage the precarious road transport experience in the country. This contributes to the literature on the ethnography of road infrastructures and the micropolitics of informal work in urban Africa.

This article contributes to research on racialized dispossession through the lens of popular responses to local/global conjunctures of urban financial speculation. How has a predominantly Black immigrant community, Little Haiti, confronted a surging variant of Miami's history of racialized dispossession—corporate mega-real estate speculation—since 2008's global financial crisis? I examine Little Haiti's confrontation with the proposed Magic City Innovation District, which is, in fact, no more than a large-scale, mixed-use commercial venture. Greater Miami's conjuncture undermined the community's capacity to resist or effectively negotiate with Magic City's partnership in three ways: a real estate hegemonic metropolis devoid of potent allies; the near absence of neighborhood-resident resistance leadership in a working-poor immigrant community; and a political fracture within Greater Miami's Haitian collective responses over the politics of patronage and accommodative versus contentious bargaining. By enveloping patronage practices within speculative imaginaries of inclusive, tech-led neighborhood and metropolitan prosperity, Magic City's partnership and local government reinforced that fracture and politically marginalized both the accommodative and contentious factions. I conclude by considering the dilemma of disenfranchised communities today when confronting racialized speculative intrusions. The article's empirical content draws primarily on my collaborative-community activism, city commission planning sessions and official documentation.

This article provides a critical reassessment of the role of the state in processes of neighborhood change in Hong Kong, based on mixed-methods research conducted in the rapidly changing Sai Ying Pun neighborhood. We argue that common narratives of ‘state-led’ processes of neighborhood change often overstate, oversimplify or unduly assume the influence of state agencies, especially the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) and other ‘usual suspects’, obscuring the complex ways that states facilitate and compel the actions and agendas of other actors. By elaborating implications of several specific forms of state action, especially a 2010 amendment to Hong Kong's Land (Compulsory Sale for Redevelopment) Ordinance, we demonstrate that the state in Hong Kong plays many different roles in facilitating neighborhood transformation, creating an uneven geography of state intervention dependent on locally specific factors such as the particularities of architecture, housing types and residential density in different urban areas as well as existing configurations of policy, legislation and infrastructure. These many articulations of the state are of strategic value to a variety of elite interests, from property developers to wealthy residents and international consumers, whose distinct and competing agendas could hardly be so well served by a less dynamic state.

This article explores the complex connections between gentrification, heritage and othering in Amsterdam Oost, a district shaped by intertwined (post)colonial and (post)migrant histories. It does so by examining two temporary heritage-making initiatives coordinated by the nearby ethnographic Tropenmuseum to celebrate the rich immigration history of the area. Building on the notion of ‘gentrification consciousness’ (Sze, 2010), we draw attention to the ambivalent position of the museum towards gentrification in Amsterdam Oost, and how this ambivalence may contribute to the unfolding of neoliberal urban redevelopment in the area. The projects at the centre of our analysis promote a positive and edifying representation of local diversity as an asset to be protected, celebrated, and valorized; yet they also mobilize problematic colonial tropes that are instrumental in transforming the area into a space of aestheticized multicultural urbanity attractive to a Dutch middle class with an increasingly cosmopolitan outlook. While scholarship on heritage-led gentrification and cosmopolitan urbanism has amply discussed how local governments, developers and newcomers alike strategically mobilize ethnic heritage discourses and practices to trigger or sustain gentrification, our study reveals heritage institutions as emergent subjectivities in neoliberal urban politics and problematizes their growing imbrication within processes of gentrification.

Urban development ties in closely with climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, little is known about how climate policy objectives are incorporated into municipal land policies. Addressing this knowledge gap, we draw from the literature on policy integration and policy design to propose a framework for conceptualizing the ways in which policy objectives driven by climate concerns are incorporated into land policy. This framework incorporates three dimensions: (1) the alignment and prioritization of climate policy objectives in land policy; (2) the concreteness of the final integrated policy design; and (3) the commitment to promoting the objectives set through choices of policy instruments. We apply this framework to explore the level of integration in 30 highly populated municipalities in Finland. We identify three levels of climate policy objective integration within this sample, with only three municipalities demonstrating high integration. Our findings suggest that raising the level of climate policy integration into land policy may require institutional support.

In this article I examine the emergence of digital nomads as the ‘new creative class’ in urban marketing strategies that highlight these workers’ technological proficiency and hypermobility and blur the lines between work, leisure and travel in a globalized digital context. I explore the evolution of neoliberal urban marketing strategies and entrepreneurial urbanism—where cities compete to attract this mobile, knowledge and tech-savvy workforce, challenging traditional workspaces and altering the socio-economic landscape of cities. First, I review the widely criticized concepts of ‘creative class’ and ‘creative cities’. I then examine the literature on digital nomadism and the need for a spatial and urban studies perspective. Finally, I propose new critical research questions around the sociospatial impact of digital nomad politics in cities. In summary, this article posits that digital nomadism is an aspirational rhetorical concept based on technological skills and global mobility, representing a new strategy in urban marketing and competition and a new challenge for urban scholars.

Convenience stores are essential facilities for older people living in cities, but there is a lack of discussion about the relation thereof to care for older people. An emerging phenomenon in Japan, one of the countries with the most rapidly aging population, is that convenience stores are also becoming a form of care infrastructure. In this article, I focus on this phenomenon in a time of care crisis by examining convenience stores in Tokyo, Japan, through the framework of care infrastructure. I combine descriptive statistics, government and corporate reports with interviews with 15 older adults in Tokyo to assess the potential and challenges of convenience stores as entities that contribute to their care. The findings of my study indicate that convenience stores may contribute to the care of older people because of their proximity, multifunctionality, sociality and sheltering nature, while challenges relate to affordability, equity and fairness. In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions regarding opportunities for and challenges to expanding care in aging cities by rethinking the potential of convenience stores as social and physical infrastructure.

This article examines the transformation of urban referencing in Taipei City after democratization, using policy mobility theories and case study research methods to ‘follow policy changes’ over three decades. It argues that geopolitical considerations in the 1990s prompted Taipei to adopt the global city discourse as a political strategy, subsequently leading to the implementation of neoliberal urban policies. These policies encouraged property-led development and housing speculation, exacerbating housing affordability issues. Amidst these challenges, a progressive bottom-up social housing movement emerged in 2010, drawing inspiration from the Dutch model. However, this process of policy mobility is selective, with Amsterdam serving more as an inspirational benchmark than a direct model for replication. Neoliberalism hinders both Dutch and Taiwanese social housing policies from achieving housing justice. This case study of Taiwan's post-democratization urban development will also contribute to the literature on urban developmentalism.