International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

The growing role of cities in international relations and their impact on nation-states have been unprecedented in recent decades. What has yet to be revealed is the part that city councils play in this process. In this essay we examine whether city councils are active participants or are dominated by mayors and classify the tools they have at their disposal to exert influence in cities’ international cooperation. Our research methods include desk research of strategy documents and multiple case studies. We obtained our information primarily from the respective city councils and via interviews with the international affairs officers of these cities. Our conclusion is that the role of city councils in creating and scrutinizing international cooperation is relatively narrow and that the activities of cities as a whole are determined mainly by their mayors’ leadership and perceptions of international cooperation.

Class is crucial for understanding why sustainability has become so much more popular at the urban than at other scales. The urban scale is where the capitalist class can most easily colour their investments ‘green’ without confronting the overall power of fossil capital. Urban sustainability has therefore become the limited answer to a question that should really be posed at other geographical scales. In this article I analyse the intersections between class and geographical scale to examine and criticize the class character of the sustainable city. I use a stratification approach to identify the irony of people with high carbon footprints tending to live in the ‘greenest’ cities or city districts. This is class in the sustainable city. A Marxist understanding—not least one emphasizing the capitalist class as a class—can help us grasp the class character of urban sustainability. This latter approach helps us identify how class produces urban sustainability.

The article addresses the role that communities played in managing the social and health crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic in two Chilean cities. Chile is an interesting case study owing to its intense and prolonged confinement measures, which focused heavily on individuals and households. Using key concepts such as communitarian weavings and care infrastructures, this research delves into the experiences of two neighborhoods in Talca and Concepción, employing qualitative methods, participant observation techniques and interviews with key actors to explore the everyday nature of community care ties and infrastructures. The findings reveal that, despite state restrictions, people experienced confinement in close physical proximity within their neighborhoods. Four key observations emerged: first, people adapted their actions to respond flexibly to existing and new needs; second, physical spaces such as streets, squares and local businesses became vital interaction venues; third, communitarian weavings were partially (re)constructed virtually; and fourth, these weavings adjusted their actions to meet contextual demands, generating new common goods that addressed community needs. Lastly, care infrastructures complemented or replaced the state's inaction and the formal market. This illustrates that communitarian weavings demonstrated the flexibility to function effectively in diverse scenarios, both with and without state support.

Free-ranging cats are widely tolerated in cities, and animal welfare organizations increasingly allow for ‘trap, neuter and release’ (TNR) of unowned cats. We show, using the example of a university campus adjacent to a national park in a large metropole, that this has implications for cosmopolitics over biodiversity on the urban edge. A camera trap survey showed cats were the most abundant medium/large mammal species, and that some individuals hunted within the protected area and competed with other native predators. Despite concerns from ecologists and biologists (who favoured a precautionary approach to cat management), university policymakers favoured the status quo (supporting colonies of TNR'd cats), noting that cats were useful for pest rodent control and that no extinction threats to native wildlife were evident. This outcome, we suggest, reflects the long-standing multi-species assemblage of humans, rodents and cats, and the appreciation of cats as rodent hunters and pets. It also points to the limits of ecological information in resolving cosmopolitics over which species should be allowed to flourish. Yet the study also shows that systematic data collection and photographic evidence can help render animal lives visible (including cats, their predators and competitors) and assist in policy deliberation.

This article examines the meaning of local contexts in the formation of young adults’ life trajectories and horizons of opportunities in southern Stockholm. Our investigation draws on latent class analysis (LCA) of people aged 25–59 years, which reveals typical latent life courses among the individuals. The local setting mapped with typical life courses is interpreted as an indication of habitus, further examined in interviews with young adults 17 to 19 years old and about to finish upper secondary school who actively consider different life plans. By combining Bourdieu's and Wacquant's social theories with Massey's conceptualization of space and place, our analysis illuminates four spatial processes of habitus formation: (1) broader social structures, where southern Stockholm is polarized in accordance with affluence and vulnerability; (2) symbolic images and perceptions that make school locations attractive or invisible; (3) young adults’ meetings and non-meetings-up that take place within and in between school, home and leisure activities; and (4) the different ‘layers’ of local settings, where social networks are interlinked differently to national organizations and institutions and provide young people with different horizons of opportunity. The combination of theories facilitates a mixed-methods approach that contributes to neighbourhood studies by uncovering multiple ways ‘place’ is embedded in the formation of trajectories.

In this article I develop the concept of ‘darkening’, understood as a public-led process characterized by using a dark-based rhetoric that speaks to the ‘shadow’ or ‘gloomy’ status of certain informalized activities, while evoking neocolonial notions of a racialized Other and often resulting on the increased criminalization and in/visibilization of informalized (migrant) workers. By drawing comparisons between the intersectorial and multiscaled intersection of public policies, public-led strategies and dominant (institutional and media) narratives affecting three types of de facto informalized labour activities in Spain (sex work, domestic employment and informal street vending) I shed light on the link between the governance of informalized (racialized) work and the reproduction of certain moral geographies in Spanish cities. Particularly, I show how the effect of ‘darkening’ has been to make these informalized workers more clandestine (displacing them ‘into the shadows’), hence criminalizing certain labour activities in public/visible spaces based on moral and legal arguments, while permitting, tolerating or even favouring those same activities in private/less visible spaces. By addressing the underexplored symbolic/discursive dimensions of darkness, and the blurred lines between traditional categories (public/private, urban/rural), this work aims to be a relevant contribution to contemporary debates on urban/night studies.

Berlin's Tempelhofer Feld, an old airport turned into a public park, stands as a unique urban space. What it is about this simple and massive open space in the heart of a large city that makes it a near-utopian formation? This essay attempts to explore the meaning of this sociospatial entity, framing it in terms of a ‘libertopia’, to serve as a possible inspiration to envision a more free and just society. To this end, it advocates maintaining the park's current unaltered simple form against those city officials who wish to ‘develop’ the space.

In this article we investigate how school district policies in China contribute to urban segregation by focusing on educational enrolment, family selection and transformational mechanisms. We employ a mechanism-based approach to examine how the hukou system and housing policies shape parental school choices to reinforce sociospatial segregation. Suzhou, a rapidly urbanizing city where over 90% of children attend public schools, serves as a case study. Semi-structured interviews with local and migrant families reveal the significant role of school district boundaries in perpetuating educational inequality and residential sorting. Through thematic analysis we identify key drivers of segregation, including school preferences, school choice strategy, perceptions of school district segregation and educational policy attitudes within the educational system. Despite government initiatives such as the Nearby Enrolment Policy (NEP) and Score-Based Enrolment Policy (SEP) aimed at promoting equity, these mechanisms often exacerbate existing disparities. Under the concepts of ‘parentocracy’ and ‘enterprising self’, advantaged families secure housing in sought-after school districts, while disadvantaged migrant families rely on local networks for support. Low-scoring migrants face exclusion from high-quality schools, which deepens sociospatial segregation. In this research we furthermore explore the impact of Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) and the rise of ‘Xing’ branded schools within this evolving landscape.

Inspired by Gunnar Olsson, this article critiques the use of cartographic reason in the process of creating an accessible city for people with disabilities. It also borrows Gregory's ontological conceptual pair of cartography and corpography, showing the ontological transformations that occur within this pair during the practical removal of barriers to mobility in Brno, Czech Republic. The methodology employed involves semi-structured interviews with members of the city's Advisory Board for Accessibility. Our primary aim is to demonstrate how the imperative to eliminate specific barriers in the urban environment responds to the dominance of cartographic reason in planning and political decision-making. Findings indicate that this dominance often obscures the fact that what may appear as safely accessible in cartographic representations can manifest as inaccessible and hazardous corpography. However, the cartographic visualizations serve as the initial driving force behind bringing about potential improvements in corpographic accessibility. Urban space is mapped into myriad legal and political areas, which complicates accessibility. The cartography of accessibility is becoming utopian, and, through a critique of utopia, we show how a corpographic emphasis on multisensory experience can make the city more effectively accessible. We introduce the concept of a ferryman, one who facilitates navigation through urban space.

This article discusses populist rhetoric in the context of participatory urban planning. Populist rhetoric builds on emotionally charged expression and juxtapositions between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ including planners. In so doing, it poses a challenge to planners who have learned to follow the ideals of communicative planning, highlighting public, rational problem-solving and orientation toward agreement. Recently, the agonistic theory of planning has put into question these ideals, advancing a view that disagreements, passion-driven resistance and populist rhetoric can advance democratic political culture, and by extension, planning culture. If populism can advance democracy in planning, should planners then reject the idea of countering populism with consensus-oriented communicative strategies and turn to agonistically oriented theory instead? What are the pros and cons of each theory in the face of populism? How do they help planners in identifying when populism serves democracy and when it works for anti-democratic goals? The article examines these questions, illustrating the discussion with reflections on populist public feedback and planners’ response to this feedback in the Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive planning process.