International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

Land speculation is a significant factor contributing to the displacement of poor populations in global South cities. While extensive research has examined how urban expansion increases land values—primarily focusing on state-led or real estate development projects—it often neglects the speculative and displacement dynamics occurring in peripheral areas beyond the direct reach of planned developments. This article investigates the motivations and mechanics of small-scale land speculation on the outskirts of Mandalay, Myanmar. Based on a year-long fieldwork project in a resettlement ward in peri-urban Mandalay, this article finds that land speculation thrives in auto-constructed urban peripheries not only due to general expectations of urban growth, but also because individuals perceive these areas as safe from the eviction and violence typically associated with large-scale development projects. However, local land brokers and creditors profit from these transactions by leveraging their connections and capital. At the same time, poorer residents sell their land at artificially low prices and relocate to shrinking, subdivided plots on the outskirts. This article argues that beyond large-scale development projects, small-scale land speculation also reshapes the outskirts, demonstrating logics of speculation that contribute to socioeconomic inequalities in rapidly changing urban peripheries.

Heat is a central concern for many cities whose efforts for adaptation tend to reproduce inequities. While community-led adaptation has been considered key for enhancing just outcomes, how migrants from majority world countries are in- or excluded from local visions and practices of adaptation has rarely been asked. Through participatory photography and in-depth interviews, we examine the ways through which migrant residents strive for a healthy and meaningful life in marginalized neighbourhoods, and consider the limitations they face during extreme heat. We find labour and housing precarity and limited access to public spaces of heat relief shaping heat injustice, driven by neoliberal urbanism trends and systemic racism that migrants experience in their day-to-day lives. By seeing social and spatial margins that migrants often inhabit as places where exclusion and empowerment converse, we advance a notion of vulnerability as an embodiment of intersectional injustices and a positionality from where radical adaptations emerge. We find such adaptations in the form of self-organized spaces and networks of solidarity and resistance in the city, and therefore argue that pathways of just adaptation demand revisiting and redefining adaptation to include the everyday knowledges and practices of marginalized residents to address underlying and intersecting drivers of vulnerability.

We analyze the development of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago as the product of a new kind of urban growth machine—a nonprofit-led neoliberal growth machine. Building on studies of nonprofit-led urban development as well as research on CBA-driven opposition, we reconstruct how an Obama Foundation-led growth machine was able to dominate pre-development planning, privatize public parkland and mount its own private community engagement process in ways that stymied powerful community opposition. We contend that the political resources of nonprofit foundations, especially their ability to claim a mantle of public authority and legitimacy, equip them to bypass genuinely public institutional processes and to repel even strong resistance from community actors. We argue that the array of soft political resources marshaled by the Obama Foundation—its perceived neutrality, collaborative reputation and public/private ambiguity—lend valuable assets to the task of bending participatory processes toward the political legitimation of controversial development projects. Because nonprofits are uniquely situated to deploy these political resources, the case of the OPC portends an expanding repertoire of action for growth machine actors, including the privatization of community engagement.

This essay advances the notion of coastal contact zones as heuristic lens, and develops the conceptual framework of climate preconstruction, bringing them together to better understand the challenges and realities of climate change adaptation in African coastal cities and beyond. By centring African expertise and actors while accounting for global embeddedness and historically sedimented inequalities, we can come to a more agentive, processual and just understanding of adapting cities to the climate crisis.

This article studies resistance to gentrification from a recognition theory perspective. It discusses two cases of gentrification: in the Tweebosbuurt in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and in the Quartier Maritime in Molenbeek, Belgium. Resistance to gentrification assumed different forms in these neighbourhoods. Based on a comparative case study and in order to better understand these different forms of resistance, this article identifies 15 dimensions that mediate the gentrification–resistance nexus. This list of 15 dimensions can serve as a heuristic device for the future study of the gentrification–resistance nexus in other contexts. In focusing on the types of gentrification, this article also makes a programmatic point, namely that research on the gentrification–resistance nexus should consider systematically how this relationship is mediated by the particularities of processes of gentrification.

Urban studies scholars and sociologists of sport have critically examined the production and consumption of world-class sports spectacles that are constitutive elements of urban growth agendas and broader accumulation processes by dispossession. This multi-year community-based research project goes behind the spectacle, exploring the uneven impacts of Rogers Place, a $613.7 million (CAD), publicly financed hockey arena and its associated entertainment district on city-centre communities in Edmonton, Alberta—an area with a sizeable Indigenous urban street community. In doing so, we bring together critical sport and urban geography scholarship and work by Indigenous Studies scholars who have examined how Indigenous peoples in Western Canadian Prairie cities navigate the white possessive logics of settler colonial urbanism and the state-sponsored gentrification of their communities and land. Our analysis challenges common-sense ideas about the community-wide benefits of sport-related gentrification and pervasive beliefs that settler colonialism is an event of the past that occurred entirely outside of cities. We also highlight the aspirations of city-centre residents to continue living in their shared urban homespaces and to collectively envision other futures that are neither based on the violent practices of sport-driven gentrification nor its associated forms of genocidal inclusion.

This article explores peri-urbanization through the lens of extractivism from a critical political-economic perspective. Our analytical framework sheds new light on peri-urbanization. We examine the uneven nature of the process, unpack its growth engine and highlight its shortcomings. By shifting the focus from the demand to the supply of peri-urban housing, our approach overcomes the limitations of a traditional analysis based on land rent. Peri-urbanization is thus considered in the light of resource exploitation (namely land), by a coalition of public and private stakeholders, whose methods include accumulation by dispossession. Land and modest homebuyers are the resources exploited by the coalition to extract solid value. Simultaneously, sprawl is the engine that provides a continuous supply of cheap land to sustain the process. However, when this coalition captures value from the urbanization of agricultural land (and the creditworthiness of precarious homebuyers), the resulting irreparable soil artificialization impedes future redevelopments. By drawing on two case studies of this type of ‘cheap sprawl’ and by bridging the traditional North–South divide, this article provides empirical evidence to show that peri-urban extractivism is just that: a predatory system. Not only does it keep peripheral areas in a state of ‘nondevelopment’, it also takes a serious toll on the environment.

The theorization of urban sustainability transition is built upon some taken-for-granted analytical coordinates between old vis-à-vis new, past and future, and legacy against innovation. This research identifies an intriguing practice of ‘panhuo’ (盘活 or revitalization) in China's ongoing urban regeneration that involves strategic agents’ leveraging socialist legacy elements to retrofit housing infrastructure. To analyze the temporal non-linearity within the transition process, we introduce an alternative conceptual framework of ‘living’ legacy to reveal the dialectical and mutually constitutive relationship between the past, the present and the future. Focused on the northeastern city of Shenyang—a leading industrial hub in the socialist era—and its recent practice of retrospective elevator installation in pre-2000 residential buildings, this article illustrates how legacy elements of socialist state work-unit housing are resuscitated by both policymakers and urban residents to facilitate the installation exercise, and how this legacy-based approach leads to uneven results mirroring the social hierarchies under the socialist regime. The findings of this research call for a reconsideration of the dynamics of infrastructure retrofit to go beyond the conventional linear conception of time and the techno-futurist notion of innovation. The study also highlights the significance of local historical contexts in shaping the pathways as well as the (un)just outcomes of urban sustainability transition.

The informal settlement of land is the predominant mode of urban development in the global South, yet residents continue to face forced eviction, which threatens their lives and livelihoods. Monitoring the demolition of informal settlement has been a thorny problem, with on-the-ground monitoring being resource intensive and often intermittent. This is an initial report on the use of a new methodology using interpretative mapping of satellite imagery to document trends in the eviction rate of cities in the global South. This intervention examines current approaches to monitoring urban displacement and discusses the methodological opportunities and challenges of a complementary approach combining satellite imagery with on-the-ground enumerations. Through preliminary use of this methodology on a sample of 30 cities in the global South, it is found that over the past two decades, evictions increased in the period 2003–10, after which eviction initially decreased, but subsequently levelled off past 2015.