International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

Since the 1980s and 1990s, art has played a pivotal role in urban planning, especially when instrumentalized within large-scale urban renewal operations. This instrumentalization has been broadly linked to public policy schemes and public–private partnerships, often involving the implementation of spectacular cultural centers positioned as flagships for revamping entire urban brands. While large-scale arts-led urban planning still endures, today we observe a new phenomenon in the instrumentalization of art within city-making: the sponsorship of temporary artworks at the construction sites of private real estate developments for speculative and (self)marketing purposes. This article questions how this new phenomenon differs from the 1980s–90s model and how it relates to controversial planning trends of temporary urbanism/tactical urbanism. The article uses the A-Fence street-art project by developer Covivio in Berlin to illustrate how temporary artwashing during construction can revitalize a small urban area cheaply and independently while programming land speculation and gentrification following private interests. It shows how developers, in response to the vilification of the real estate sector amid Berlin’s rampant housing shortage, strategically exploit artists’ labor to revamp their own image through digital marketing, and reveals contemporary interplays between private business marketing and city marketing.

Recent research questions the relevance of urban industrial zoning in the context of industry change and competitive property markets, but overlooks the place-based variation and complexities that define contemporary industrial districts. Drawing on comparative case study research in Melbourne, Australia, this article explores the changing character of industrial zones and the relationship between zoning, industrial gentrification and agglomeration. We highlight how zoning context and regulations enable both classic processes of agglomeration and industrial gentrification. Industrial activity persists and may simultaneously benefit from and compete with knowledge and creative industries and specialized manufacturers that serve gentrifying local markets. Our findings provide important insights into the different conditions and challenges involved in contemporary industrial zoning, and emphasize the need for industrial land use policy that better responds to contemporary conditions.

In this article we show that in Southeast Asia, smart city development has become a type of digital urban transformation that is not targeted towards any particular territorial formation or settlement. Instead, development-oriented states in the region leverage the smart city rhetoric as a nationwide branding strategy to leapfrog development stages. Such smart city policies are infused with a scalar logic—which we call ‘scalar flexing’—that captures the enmeshing of local and national scales, causing local-scale smart city initiatives to be stretched across wide-ranging, national-scale urban transformation agendas. We examine the nationwide 100 smart cities policies adopted in Indonesia and Thailand, as well as local-scale smart city development in Banyuwangi regency and Chiang Mai University Campus, which are part of the selected 100 smart cities in the two countries. Leveraging insights from smart city initiatives across these scales, we argue that the rescaling of ‘smart city-ness’ needs to be analysed through the framing of ‘developing-ness’, where national development plays a critical role in shaping how smart cities are defined, implemented and experienced.

Is the city good or bad for climate? You would think we would know. Stories abound in newspaper op-eds, policymaker commentaries and climate reports about the presumed environmental benefits of cities. For critical urban theorists the goodness and greenness of the city is not always so evident, but so far critical urban theory seems unable to shift the emerging consensus about the state of the city at the possible end of the planet. I examine urban theory in a space and time of planetary boundaries. Bringing critical urban theory into dialog with ideas from ecological economics and land change science about urbanization and a not-boundless planet, I show that foundational ideas about cities have been externalizing, not only as processes but also as concepts. Paying closer attention to the nature of socionatural change and critical urban theorists’ own theoretical precepts, I probe the limitations and possibilities of particular urban theoretical frameworks to take on problems of planetary nature. I end with a proposition for a meshwork of urban frameworks—interfaces between urban frameworks and other ways of seeing processes of planetary significance—and a view on the political stakes of a better way to see city and planet.

Throughout the United States, the growth-focused policies of local governments have caused disruption and displacement in previously neglected and marginalized minority-dominated areas. Some communities have responded to these threats by embracing defensive development, proactively engaging in the economic regeneration of their neighborhoods to resist outsider-led gentrification. A largely unexplored question in this literature is how can non-resident stakeholders derail defensive development? Using data gathered through a qualitative case study of a historically Black and Bahamian neighborhood’s plan to secure a revenue-generating Wawa gas station, I found that the conversion of a community school to a magnet program posed challenges to defensive development. My findings reveal that because non-residents developed a sense of attachment to the school, they felt entitled to influence decisions about the area surrounding it. As school choice becomes increasingly popular, I argue that community-based organizers, policy makers and researchers need to consider how parents could potentially disrupt the neighborhoods in which their children attend school, not only in stymieing defensive development but also affecting other local land use decisions.

Large-scale, state-subsidized housing programmes have experienced a renaissance in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but provoke justified concerns about whether they miss their target groups. Unaffordability, lack of choice, peripheral locations and under-serviced sites are common problems. Ultimately, many subsidized units are not occupied by their intended recipients. Most authors see this as a form of gentrification or downward-raiding, whereby higher income groups displace housing recipients towards poor-quality housing elsewhere. However, most research fails to include the perspectives of those who do not occupy or who vacate their units, mainly because of the methodological challenges of locating these people. Consequently, little information exists about the secondary residential mobility of the ‘missing people’ of state-subsidized housing programmes. Where do they move to, why do they leave? This comparative study of three of the most significant housing programmes in Africa analysed 101 housing pathways of such people in the capital regions of Ethiopia, Morocco and South Africa. Rejecting a unilateral notion of displacement, I suggest a new conceptual perspective that sees people who do not occupy their allotted housing units as active subjects reconfiguring supply-driven, shelter-centric housing policy according to their own needs, while also being affected by (severe) financial constraints.

‘Motility’ has become a highly influential concept in global mobility and migration studies in the two decades since it emerged in this journal. The call to centralize sociospatial mobility as a form of individual capital gave motility a particular and enduring significance in the wider mobilities turn. Yet efforts to operationalize motility at scale through a quantitative approach remain elusive. In this article I employ a Bourdieusian methodology and nationally representative data from a pan-European project on transnational mobility to address this knowledge gap. Mobility capital is strongly allied to pre-existing structural inequalities within and across generations. However, it can also be seen to operate as an extension of other cultural variants of capital, but one that is still mediated by the nation-state, regardless of background or class trajectory. These findings underscore the urgent need to broaden understandings of ‘soft assets’ such as transnational mobility to spotlight its capacity to generate insidious and novel forms of capital and its potential, therefore, to leverage other forms of advantage in an ostensibly more meritocratic world. Concomitantly, they also underline the increasing relevance and value of motility as an explanatory framework in approaching contemporary global inequalities.

The goal of this research is to understand the spaces Dharavi’s inhabitants require to sustain existing socioeconomic systems and how future redevelopment in the area can facilitate their inclusion. In India, livelihoods are directly linked to identity, as religion or caste often define the trades that individuals practise. Mumbai is the country’s financial capital, and Dharavi is its most famous informal settlement, with internationally reputed commercial enterprises reflecting such socioeconomic patterns. In this article I therefore examine how identity—created through factors such as religion, caste, occupation, language and ethnicity—is interlinked with space in the settlements’ hybrid fabric. I use a case study of a leather manufacturing complex to exemplify this correlation. Interviews with the business owner were combined with fieldwork to document the unit’s establishment in the settlement and its current production processes. Based on these data, essential spaces were identified and methods of integrating them into the upcoming redevelopment project were explored through the lens of hybridity. The research is relevant not just for the redevelopment of informal settlements in Mumbai but also for promoting inclusive urban development that caters to the vast range of user requirements, from the level of the individual to that of cities across the globe.

In South Korea, urban agriculture (UA) was formalized through national legislation in 2011 and has since become widespread in cities across the country. More than ten years after the passage of the Act on Development and Support of Urban Agriculture, there is still little research examining the sociopolitical context in which UA is practiced and governed, especially outside the capital city of Seoul. In this article we draw on three ethnographic case studies of urban community gardens in Daejeon, South Korea, to advance understanding of the actors and motivations shaping Korean UA. In this study we utilize the concept of everyday governance and urban political ecology theories to illustrate how UA serves as a platform for civil society groups, the national government and local governments, to advance their political and sociocultural goals, which interact in both tension and harmony. We argue that whereas national UA legislation was passed to advance top-down sustainable development goals, local actors challenge the functions of UA and ideas of expertise through their practice. By focusing on the motivations of urban gardeners and their everyday practices, the study described in this article contributes to ongoing literature situating UA within the context of neoliberal governance and grassroots ambitions in the city.

This article investigates the wilful destruction of Ennore Creek, a littoral wetland system in north Chennai, Tamil Nadu, by a series of shifting statist good city imaginaries expressed in plans, research reports, environmental impact assessments, government orders and court judgements. We show that these media built a powerful scaffold of legally sanctioned and scientifically backed good city narratives that reformulated the creek as a sacrificial zone for sustainable development, economic growth and logistical urbanism. Framed through the analytic of the littoral, we interrogate these developmentalist narratives and the technologies they used to contain or dispossess the fluid materiality of the creek. We then develop the idea of amphibious activism to describe the actions of backwater fishers to care for and resist the further degradation of their life world. We suggest that their activism expresses what Michel Foucault called a practice of liberty. It could not free them from the sets of relations in which they were embedded, but it enabled them to imagine and enact another way of life within them.