International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

In this article I examine the micropolitics of electricity access in informal settlements in Kampala, Uganda, by drawing on field research conducted in 2022. I argue that local dynamics shape and variegate household-level experiences with electricity and urge consideration of these micropolitics for effective energy provision. My research exposes the complex power and social hierarchy of electricity access and reveals that households, despite being the end users of electricity, often do not have direct and autonomous access to the electricity grid. Landlords and informal providers mediate and gatekeep access to electricity and infrastructure, creating an asymmetrical interdependence with consumers. However, despite their centrality, these actors are largely missing in urban energy discourse and slum electrification efforts. Shared infrastructures intended to ease grid access have become artefacts of control over energy usage and are fuelling inter-household tensions, thereby curtailing the usefulness of electricity in some instances. Protracted disengagement and absence of the utility in informal settlements engenders mistrust and prejudice, which are detrimental to electricity access. These findings reveal a complex picture of electricity access in informal settlements that may inform service delivery to these communities and advance our understanding of energy infrastructures in African cities.

This article discusses the reproduction of housing as a commons in São Paulo. It analyzes the occupation of vacant real estate properties and their subsequent transformation into low-income housing in central São Paulo as instances of commoning. It examines the mechanisms through which housing commons are protected, with a particular focus on the mediating role of social movements and property claims. We draw on a combined methodology of participatory action research and semi-structured interviews to explore the dynamics between the commons as a political ideal and its practical application in the urban environment, focusing on the long-term sustainability of housing commons amid capitalist urbanization. Through the lens of two autonomous housing projects, Dandara and Marisa Letícia, we illustrate the transformation of occupied buildings into permanent housing through collective self-management. We also consider the protection of housing as commons through five processes: regularization, restoration, integration, ideation and federation. Our analysis calls for further research into the potential for creating interconnected commons ecosystems.

Compassion and the city is an unusual coupling in the urban analytic. The five essays in this Interventions collection propose compassion in the city as a form of life embedded in the conditions of the urban. Posed against the grain of extant scholarship that addresses these concerns in terms of discursive care or aid, this collection brings in five urban contexts—Dhaka, Delhi, Cairo, Jakarta and Horsens—to highlight understated nuances of how compassion might be recognized and understood within the urban condition. This introduction proposes what embedding compassion as a resolute part of the urban social infrastructure could entail and what that might imply in framing human affirmation in the face of urban suffering.

Shortly after Denmark's 2019 national elections, ‘social mixing’ became a key housing policy and urban development strategy. Aiming to end a period of neoliberal speculation, the new Social Democratic government promoted egalitarianism, civic participation and a benevolent public administration. Despite the government touting social mix as a revitalizing force for Danish cities, global data suggest that spatial proximity does not necessarily reduce social distance, as interactions between different social groups are often limited. Concurrently, more urban residents are withdrawing from traditional participatory forms such as neighborhood associations and municipal institutions, which often fail to address their concerns and accommodate their schedules. This essay questions whether the Danish version of social mixing is indeed a panacea for robust welfare urbanism. For those urban residents who may not have the resources to embody and enact the participatory ideal suggested by a welfare society, withdrawal may come to constitute a viable and often pragmatic form of care through connectedness. Paradoxically, then, compassion for the city is here articulated through deliberate and concerted strategies of moving away from major urban collectivities.

Compassion in urban settings is manifested less as a definitive practice than as a panoply of spatial and temporal orientations that lend uncertainty to the dispositions of actions and events. This is an uncertainty that can be either generative or debilitating, and it is difficult to predict which in advance. Thus, apertures and opportunities can appear beyond the consideration of eligibility or preparedness, and there can be a refusal of the terms on offer. In this way, the intersections of bodies, materials, built environments and political structures can generate unanticipated opportunities amid what otherwise seem to be innumerable foreclosures.

Bangladesh has a large and expanding network of international and local NGOs, present since the country's founding in 1971. The number and scope of NGOs operating within the country has expanded greatly since their initial focus on emergency and disaster relief following independence. Development literature tends to focus on the efficacy of NGOs and their interactions with the state. In this essay, I employ ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the microscale and examine how these broad, international networks of NGOs intersect with the local: small, personal acts of kindness via networks that are facilitated by the space of the city, Dhaka, as illustrated by the aftermath of the brutal murders of LGBTQ activists Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy. Immediately after the killings there was international condemnation, but domestically the government seemed reticent to hold accountable those who had committed the murders. As in-depth interviews revealed, many LGBTQ activists in Bangladesh went into hiding or left the country shortly after the murders. However, activists also described a broad network of local NGOs and individuals that ensured their safety. They included a range of local partners, such as local NGOs focused on human rights and advocacy, women's rights and public health, and even those broadly focused on development. These networks were made possible through the city as a site of compassion: a space that enabled local and international actors to come together and shield activists.

At first sight, Cairo is a cruel and harsh city, marked by extreme inequality and offering few resources for the poor. Like other metropolises, Cairo can easily numb its residents to the suffering of others. But it is also a city in which quiet, barely noticeable acts of compassion occur every day. In this essay, I focus on forms of care and compassion that are oriented towards cats. I weave together the stories of Amina, an upper-middle-class woman who set up an animal shelter at the city's outskirts, and Karim, a dervish who feeds the cats at the Sayyida Zaynab mosque every day. Through the juxtaposition, I paint a broad picture of compassion, ranging from a liberal commitment to animal rights to a form of care commanded by God. I suggest that compassion can have different origins, logics and grammars—including ones that exceed the human subject.

Relationships in the city are much about economic transactions and market exchange, as scholarship about the urban amply documents. Drawing on a film that follows the precarious possibility of sleep in Delhi, India, this essay recognizes the work of ‘sleep entrepreneurs’—ordinary people who offer sleep for a price. Vignettes from Delhi illustrate the theme of empathy in the city as it is pursued here—framed differently from dominant discourses of prescribed care in the city. Viewed as a small motif of life-affirming relationships, these transactions suggest the potential of exploring the city and the urban condition as generative of relationships that are not often analyzed.

This article provides a theoretically informed and empirically grounded analysis of the local political leadership of economic development policy. It is a small-N comparative study examining two cities in England and two in Spain: Birmingham in the Midlands and Manchester in the north-west of England, and Seville and Malaga, both in the southern region of Andalusia. Our analysis draws on the literature of political leadership styles informed by the typology of urban leadership developed by John and Cole in 1999. Our core purpose was to advance empirical knowledge of how local leadership styles affect the governance of economic development policy. We do so by identifying the decisive actors involved in the ecosystem of municipal economic development policy, the style of local political leader in each case and the impact of different local government systems in Spain and England on the governance of municipal economic development policy. Our findings point to the scope for further theoretical development of John and Cole's typology to fully capture a shared and collaborative leadership style which our research revealed as increasingly prevalent in local governance.

The city as an exclusionary place for migrants is widely established across global literatures. Global cities—and the infrastructures that animate them—share practices of surveillance and bordering, denial of public services and stratified labour markets that constrain migrants to precarious sectors. Stigma plays a crucial role in perpetuating such conditions for migrants, rendering them ‘others’ and ‘outcasts’ that taint cities. Loïc Wacquant's concept of ‘territorial stigmatization’ can be used to explain the spatial process of such exclusions. This article empirically advances the concept by illustrating the relationship between infrastructures and territorial stigmatization that forms one part of a set of multilayered stigmas, and by arguing that territorial stigma is a relational, mobile and multiscale process. Drawing from empirical research with internal migrants working in the construction sector in one of India's fastest-growing cities, Nashik in the state of Maharashtra, this article illustrates how infrastructure plays a role in processes of territorial stigmatization in three main ways. First, continued urbanization and infrastructural development perpetuate the need for stigmatized labour. Second, infrastructures (such as water, sanitation and public services) are crucial in configuring stigmatized spaces. And third, infrastructure enables migration across space and has the potential to reconfigure territorial stigmatization.