International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

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.

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.