International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

On 10 October 2015, thousands of people gathered for a political rally at a public square in front of the Ankara train station in Turkey. At 10:04 a.m., two bombs planted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) struck the demonstration area, leaving behind a space ravaged by blood, cries and pain. Following the brutal attack, the space of Ankara Train Station Square changed in profound ways for survivors. Today, nearly a decade later, people continue to gather in the square on the tenth day of every month to commemorate their comrades who were assassinated in this space. In this article I draw on a rich literature on memorials and public spaces, and urban contests over delimiting and defining traumatic spaces and spatializing memory, to examine the processes and experiences of traumatic space as struggles for justice. I zoom in on one aspect of the attack’s aftermath: a design competition meant to set in motion the transformation of an urban space marked by trauma and political contestation. Through this competition, I analyse the politics of confronting atrocity and try to situate this politics within the right to memory—a crucial, if overlooked, discussion within thinking and action around the idea of the right to the city.

Large-scale infrastructure projects have become a defining feature of African urbanism. The study of the surge in infrastructure investments has largely been conducted against the backdrop of a purported ‘neoliberal global modernity’ in which cities compete to attract international investments. This article draws on the case of Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, to contend with this framing and situate large-scale infrastructure projects within national political dynamics. We argue that infrastructural projects are primarily part of presidential strategies for political survival in a highly unstable and competitive political system, and that infrastructure is a key vehicle for consolidating and legitimizing presidential power by territorializing it. We explore how infrastructure projects have been used to channel state resources to key allies of the president while simultaneously anchoring presidential rule in Malagasy history and territory, reshaping state institutions and transforming spatial and political imaginaries of the state in the process. The article thus contributes to the growing literature that links urban policymaking to national politics by proposing a fine-grained account of the intertwined processes of city- and state-making under circumstances of competitive authoritarianism.

This article explores a novel unstable form of middle-class place belonging as exemplified in London’s East Village—the former 2012 Olympics Athletes’ Village and the first neighbourhood developed at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. I conceptualize this form as ‘temporary belonging’ and engage with Bourdieu’s underutilized insights, particularly housing corporations’ ability to impose their priorities on affluent homeseekers through their unconscious complicity. This approach illuminates questions of place-production within the context of fifth-wave gentrification, characterized by the complementary roles of finance and states in restructuring urban space. Drawing on interviews with a manager and residents, alongside documentary analysis, the study reveals that the East Village’s corporate landlord employs place-production and advertising strategies that prioritize the dispositions of middle-class individuals. However, this is primarily motivated by the neighbourhood’s value as a long-term investment. Middle-class residents describe East Village as a ‘unique’ place to live. Nonetheless, their narratives of belonging carry a distinct element of temporal limitation. They experience tensions between the neighbourhood’s appeal, their household circumstances and their long-term residential aspirations. ‘Temporary belonging’ thus encapsulates their response to the conditions and constraints they encounter in the neighbourhood field, as structured by the landlord.

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have witnessed widespread sand extraction from rural sites for urban infrastructure projects, causing extensive environmental damage. Critical scholarship has theorized these sites as new extractive frontiers that facilitate the needs of green energy transitions and planetary urbanization. In this article, I offer a postcolonial decentering of this narrative by examining the commodity chain of ‘m-sand’ or manufactured sand, which binds urban infrastructures in Kochi city in Kerala, India to sand extraction sites in the rural Western Ghat mountain ecologies of southwest India. I argue that sand extraction sites are better analyzed through the lens of ‘plantation urbanism’, a concept that accounts for the failure of colonial-era Western Ghat plantation economies in the free-market era and their ensuing conversion to sand extraction sites. Plantation urbanism also foregrounds how colonial plantation logics shape the production of urban space in Kochi via sand’s commodity chain.

Aeromobilities—socio-technical systems that lock in dependence on fossil fuel-based mobilities—contribute substantially to climate change and uneven geographies. They represent paradigmatic capitalism-driven forms of metabolism, permeated by logics of efficiency and growth. While existing literature has examined resistance to airport expansion, it has overlooked opposition to the metabolic dimensions of aeromobility. Using an urban political ecology (UPE) lens, this paper explores resistance to aeromobility through the case of the Stay Grounded movement against the expansion of Barcelona airport. We analyse airport resistance as a critique of capitalism-driven metabolization of nature, emphasizing the interplay of material flows, territorial subjectivities and degrowth-inspired imaginaries in opposing aeromobilities and constructing alternative visions. Using semi-structured interviews and a review of activist materials, we illustrate how the Stay Grounded movement forged discoursive and strategic alliances that reterritorialized opposition to airport expansion by integrating critiques of carbon emissions with broader struggles over livelihoods and ecological preservation. We highlight how degrowth principles, combined with territorial and metabolic analyses, enabled resistance to transcend localized NIMBYism and articulate transformative visions of mobility and urban-nature relations. This article contributes to UPE scholarship by providing a critical example of infrastructure politics in the context of climate emergencies and degrowth debates.

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.