International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.