International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

This article addresses a critical gap in extant theorizing of urban transformations by focusing on the political and temporal dimensions of how innovations emerge, develop and become institutionalized into alternative systems of the everyday such as social centres, community gardens or urban commons. Going beyond current approaches, we offer a new understanding of innovations as sociopolitical practices: sets of resourced activities aiming to reshape urban spaces to achieve social and political ends locally. Developing an original theorization of such practices, we identify and differentiate between three sets of activities designed to meet local needs: assembling innovations—identifying and employing a wide variety of local resources within a neighbourhood; extending innovations—broadening the scope of initiatives and making them last; and, institutionalizing innovations, anchoring them in a more formalized structure. Sociopolitical innovations require sustained practices whereby situated agents pragmatically push for change over time. While the ongoing development of systems of the everyday may have limited immediate transformative impact, the reshaping of local resources prefigures an alternative which breaks from, yet is embedded in, everyday urban life. Our theorizing is underpinned by an international qualitative study of neighbourhoods in four European cities: Amsterdam, Birmingham, Copenhagen and Glasgow.

This article examines the role of insurgency in scaling up the co-production of housing. Co-production has gained in popularity in the past 15 years as both a set of practices and an intellectual framing for analyzing urbanization in the global South. Discussions of co-production have largely emphasized the cooperative nature of the approach, asserting that a mostly non-confrontational politics has proven effective at reshaping urban governance in ways that better meet the needs of the urban poor. However, recent analyses have identified conflict versus confrontation as a key tension in co-production, especially as co-productive programs seek to go to scale. I contribute to these discussions by analyzing a well-known case of large-scale co-production, Thailand's Baan Mankong program, to understand the roles of insurgent versus cooperative community networks in the program's trajectory. I conclude that a more insurgent network opens up new land, resources and avenues for political participation. A more cooperative network then renders many of these interventions broadly politically acceptable to those in power. The two networks thus exist in a dialectic that has enabled the program's scaling up. I argue that research into co-production should pay more attention to the importance of confrontational tactics by community networks.

Uncertified land abounds. The critical question is whether such land can provide security of tenure, access to finance, effective urban planning, and highest and best use. While much research contests the prospects and problems of conventional land title registration, the power of uncertified land is an issue rarely raised and, if done, hardly resolved holistically. Fundamentally still, economists, philosophers, urbanists and others continue to dispute such power, contending that certified and commodified land is the answer to urban problems. Such theoretical contests lead to the following bigger puzzles: (1) Do uncertified land tenure systems address questions of insecurity of tenure, access to finance, effective planning, and highest and best use, as claimed by the theory of ‘the commons in an age of uncertainty’? (2) Are the experiences of land title registration congruent with the theory of certified and commodified land? (3) Why do states pursue land title registration over other land policies? Thematic analysis of original data, collected between 2019 and 2023 in Bali, Indonesia, well documented as a place with an alternative land tenure system undergoing rapid commodification, helps to answer these questions. Our data seem to indicate that uncertified land can address the questions raised about security of land tenure, finance, effective planning, and highest and best use—prospects that elude certified and commodified land. The preference for the latter as the vision of land policy, we find, is rooted in political-economic structures that favour, and are reproduced by, a transnational alliance of monopolists.

In this article I look into the weakening state of housing justice in India, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and increased state violence. I ask how and why housing rights in India have mostly remained limited in their approach without being able to demand broader access to the city through right to the city discourse. In trying to find answers to this question, I examine housing rights activism in India historically. I show how, while some movements and campaigns organically began to make such broader claims without even invoking the term ‘right to the city’, these efforts were short-lived and those spaces were taken up by policymakers and courts. In this article I trace how a relative absence of a political language and movements’ growing proximity to the policy world has shaped a very particular trajectory of housing rights in India. Within the context of this relative absence of a right to the city discourse even quiet encroachments of the poor have failed to claim their moral right to the city. In this moment, as the Indian state takes a more hostile turn towards the poor and to civil-society organizations, I argue that it may be time to rethink ways of bringing back housing to the centre of political struggles in India.

Ecological infrastructure and urban agriculture are enacting a green resurgence in cities. In the global South, however, ecological infrastructure is often premised on erasing already existing informal agricultural practices (green informalities) and leads to the displacement of marginalized urban dwellers. How, then, can ecological infrastructure be calibrated with the specific realities of the global South's green informalities? What other socially just modalities of infrastructure can be learned from the vantage point of informal settlements? Past urban scholarship has documented the crucial role of urban agriculture in addressing food insecurity and poverty in the global South, yet the symbolic, collective and political dimensions of agricultural practices are absent from these accounts. Drawing from critical urban scholarship and feminist political ecology, and based on engaged research with a collective of urban farmers facing eviction, I argue that green informalities bring together dwellers and plants in an intimate entanglement in the everyday gendered politics of endurability and collective power-building at the settlement level. The article illustrates that the informal economic and political practices that constitute these green informalities are crucial for understanding grassroots practices vis-à-vis urban environments. Recognizing the political and affective dimensions of green informalities can move urban studies and governance towards a situated appreciation of informal urban agriculture as socially just ecological infrastructure that centers justice and dweller agency.

The rise of the global supply chain has intensified the circulation of goods and capital across the world. While the body of literature on the politics and political-economy aspects of logistical expansion has grown, little attention has been given to understanding how coastal fishers’ communities interact with the ongoing development of mega infrastructure. I argue that it is essential to place spatial and temporal specificity at the centre of analysis to further understanding of everyday resistance and resilience. In this article, I use a case study of the Port development in Jakarta to argue that renegotiating and reworking space and place amid the development of the mega port is a form of nonviolent everyday resistance and resilience that operates under, but also against, the capitalist political-economy configuration. I focus on everyday resistance, particularly Asef Bayat's concept of quiet encroachment, and resilience literature to demonstrate the development and contested usage of micro and temporary infrastructures, both at household and community levels, as a material example of how diverse groups in communities exercise their agency and power, and express everyday resistance and resilience differently. Through this article, I aim to contribute to the broader literature on a situated political urban ecology, particularly on everyday resistance and resilience in postcolonial urbanism.

Focusing on the nexus of climate and housing policy, this article analyzes the socio-spatial consequences of urban climate mitigation policies and the resultant need to broaden the concept of climate justice. By using the example of energy retrofitting in a low-income district in Kiel, Germany, the article examines cities’ dependence on real estate companies to reach low-carbon goals in a privatized housing market and the (potential) need to provide incentives for investment. As the case study shows, this can lead to a highly sensitive confluence of climate policy, private real estate investment and neighborhood development policy, which leads to a higher financial burden as well as the potential displacement and further political marginalization of current tenants. In light of these results, the article argues for the application of a climate justice frame in analyses of urban climate policies that integrates housing justice with spatial justice. Specifically, it calls for the right to climate-just housing; that is, for the right to affordable housing to be connected with the right to energy-efficient housing in one's own neighborhood. This implies the right to information and to urban space as political space, which in turn means the politicization of the targets, strategies and, not least, spaces of urban climate policy.

Neoliberal urban interventions are perceived as authoritarian by the people affected—regardless of whether they are implemented by an autocrat, a dynastic king or an elected government—because they are supported by narratives designed and imposed from outside which contrast with local perceptions of space and social life. Fieldwork reports from two displacement processes implemented by an authoritarian state—Morocco—are compared with similar observations in two allegedly ‘democratic’ countries—Italy and Spain. In all cases, the residents respond with counter-narratives that highlight the importance of local social structures based on strong personal ties and the collective use of resources that enable them to survive neglect and stigmatization. A common trope is the idea of a ‘big family’ of neighbours struggling against a state that refuses to acknowledge the dignity and value of local social life, thus betraying and alienating its own citizens.

In gentrification studies to date, authoritarianism has mainly served as a contextual backdrop to discussions of state-led gentrification. In this concluding essay I reflect on the explorations of ‘ordinary’ geographical cases of ‘everyday authoritarianism’ presented in this intervention on planetary gentrification and urban authoritarianism. The cases of Istanbul, Casablanca and Lijiang show how the complex merging of authoritarian and neoliberal is now one of the cruxes of gentrification globally.

This collection of interventions unites academics hailing from Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the United States, reintroducing discussions on authoritarian state tactics and coercion into urban renewal dialogues within urban studies. During our discussions, it became apparent that urban authoritarian tactics are crucial in contemporary state-led gentrification efforts. In this introduction to the series, we aim to merge research on authoritarian measures within neoliberalism with the literature concerning urban transformation and gentrification. By doing so, we bring urban studies into wider discussions regarding the overarching trend of authoritarianism on a global scale within sociology, political economy and international studies.