International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

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.

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.