International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

Heritage preservation practices continue to be adopted as a tool to promote the regeneration of historic areas in China. Taking the experience of the Old Town of Lijiang (Dayan) as its starting point, this essay considers heritagization both as a process of gentrification and as an authoritarian urban practice that operates behind the regeneration process, contributing to the transformation of historic neighbourhoods into objects of display. It focuses particularly on the role played by local state actors and heritage regulations, showing how the construction and rearrangement of space as a form of ‘ordering’ serves the dominant classes, thus legitimizing the transformation of Lijiang and directly shaping people's lives. Finally, following recent accounts of gentrification led by historic preservation, the essay reflects on the ways in which heritage discourses and participatory-like practices may be deployed to legitimize gentrification and hinder various forms of resistance at the local level.

This essay presents a feminist intervention by incorporating feminist theory and ethnography into the examination of gentrification and displacement within authoritarian neoliberal urbanism. It explores the link between gentrification and the systemic crisis of social reproduction and discusses the contribution of feminist ethnography to our understanding of gendered dispossessions during state-led gentrification and displacement. The essay concludes that integrating a social reproduction lens and employing feminist ethnography not only enhances our understanding of gendered dispossessions but also reveals the potential for empowerment in marginalized communities. Making visible the material and affective injustices and daily struggles to pursue social reproduction amidst the dismantling of marginalized lives by state-led gentrification contributes to feminist praxis. Illustrative examples from a longitudinal case study on the nexus of gender and gentrification in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul, are used to support these arguments.

This study analyzes public housing residualization as a multiscalar phenomenon, providing specific details about how it happened in a Central and East European context via the marketization of the housing system, the peripheralization of ‘the social’ and the racialization of ‘unhouseables’. It employs secondary statistical data, interviews, and document analyses to examine the endemic features of global capitalism within Romania's housing regime. The study shows that the dismantlement of the state-socialist establishment has resulted in a lower social rental rate than in core capitalist countries. It observes that when the public housing stock has generally been depleted, newly established social housing is relocated to the peripheries of cities as a nonmarketable component of the dualist public housing sector. In Baia Mare, the municipality has created social housing enclaves for vulnerable groups associated with dangerous behavior by excluding them from other forms of public housing, whereas in Cluj-Napoca, it has attempted to exclude marginalized people from public housing by turning it into a site of class warfare. In both cases, the housing stock under scrutiny is associated with the racialized Roma ethnicity. The approach adopted in the study enables the residualization of public housing to be addressed across the peripheralization–racialization nexus.

Capital cities struggle with population growth that challenges existing infrastructure and affects the quality of urban life. The failure of local governments to manage urban deterioration motivates active resident groups to improve their neighborhoods, but they struggle to play a role in neighborhood governance in contexts where citizens’ engagement in public affairs is restricted. In this article we aim to understand active residents’ roles in the neighborhood governance process and how these roles unfold in a context that challenges citizen engagement in public life. We adopted a case study methodology and interviewed active residents and local officials from selected districts in Cairo, which revealed that active residents’ influence is limited mostly to neighborhood management and implementation activities. In this limited space, the role of active residents is confined to either that of the ‘fixer’ who restores existing services, or that of the struggling and intermittent ‘self-provider’, neither of whom can influence policy formulation. This study provides a structured and zoomed-out view of local activism in Cairo, offering a starting point for scholars and decision makers seeking to enhance active residents’ roles in Cairo.

This article contributes to ongoing discussions about the practice of prefigurative politics by urban social movements, and the relationship between prefiguration and other political practices. We argue that urban social movements can deploy prefigurative power in combination with other political strategies with which it is often contrasted and opposed. To demonstrate, we explore Cape Town's Reclaim the City movement that occupied several inner-city buildings to create affordable housing for low-wage Black communities—prefiguring the kind of affordable housing that they were demanding. They developed this strategy iteratively after having tried to play by the rules through litigation and mobilize through protest. When those approaches failed to shift decision makers, they tried to prefigure their goal for housing through occupation. Prefiguration offered distinctive strategic advantages: it helped demonstrate that affordable housing was possible and provided direct relief for people facing housing stress. These advantages not only engaged new participants but contributed to new affordable housing commitments from the City of Cape Town and the courts. We show how movement participants understood their prefigurative occupation as part of a constellation of people power strategies and suggest that this points towards the potential for prefiguration to be deployed pragmatically as well as ideologically by urban social movements.

Bangkok is a tropical metropolis subject to many human and nonhuman transformations. While Covid-19 raged, the city's mix of precarity and oppression gave rise to a youth protest movement that opposed the junta government and sought to intervene in Thai politics-as-usual. At the same time, a rewilding experiment aimed at undoing environmental damage quietly was unfolding in Benjakitti Urban Forest Park. We draw on science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and urban theory to elicit the events of both park and protests as ongoing experiments in rewilding Bangkok on more-than-human terrain. Both involve overlapping critical zones, where encounters between many beings and practices of worlding shape an uncommons and create problems of coexistence. Such problems call for cosmoecological diplomacy, understood as the art of giving collective shape to a more-than-human cosmos yet to arrive.

The third sector has recently emerged, or re-emerged, as a new housing provider for disadvantaged groups in Hong Kong and Korea, where affordable housing development has been predominantly directed by government. However, our knowledge of third-sector housing in non-Western contexts remains partial. In this article, we aim to provide, from a historical-institutionalist perspective, a comparative account of the (re-)emergence and implementation of third-sector affordable housing delivery in Hong Kong and Korea. Based on the housing-welfare regime framework, we discuss the socioeconomic and political contexts in which third-sector housing has burgeoned in the two regions, and how the relationship between the government and the third sector has moulded the implementation of third-sector housing. We highlight the significant power of the government in implementing third-sector housing and third-sector organizations’ continued complementary role to the government in supplying housing as welfare, which reflects the path-dependent nature of housing and welfare policies in the two regions. Adopting a long view to understanding history and a broader framework that reflects the socioeconomic context contributes to advancing the comparative housing literature.

This article examines how the urban fabric of Lagos is being transformed by neo-Pentecostal forms of Christian religiosity—a transformation not only of inner, ‘private’ lives but also of urban infrastructures and their provision. Neo-Pentecostal churches in Lagos now provide a range of infrastructures such as roads, bridges, electricity, water, healthcare, plus banking and educational facilities as well as a range of residential options. Church emblems are common features of the Lagos streetscape and can be found on buildings, vehicles and advertisement hoardings. In addition to their symbolic, moral and aesthetic register, Pentecostal urban infrastructures can be understood as a response to the crisis of social reproduction in Lagos, within the context of a postcolonial state that has adopted a position of entrenched neoliberalism. Critical questions remain, however, regarding whose interests are served by this arrangement. The article aims to understand (1) the ontological status of neo-Pentecostal infrastructures, taking seriously the production and delivery of material infrastructures that are understood by some users to also be spiritual; and (2) the novel relations between church, state, market and citizen articulated by these infrastructures. Our arguments are based on qualitative data collected in Lagos between 2018 and 2022.

In this article I examine the simultaneous expansion of urban sprawl and influx of middle-class migrants in the context of Gurugram, India, to highlight how physical and social space plays an integral role in shaping class distinction among the migrant middle classes. I make a case for social class, generally, and migrant middle classes in neo-urban contexts, specifically, to be understood as a sociospatial category. My arguments build primarily on Bourdieu's argument that both physical and social space operates on similar principles of reciprocal externality of positions in the context of social class distinction. I highlight how the migrant middle classes formulate and consolidate their social class distinction against competing claims over sociospatial dominance of the local ancestral agrarian community in neo-urban Gurugram, India. My findings highlight how existing local sociopolitical fractures interact with global capitalist circuits of capital to shape the sociospatial context in which social class distinction is formulated. The article allows for grounding theorizations of social class to accommodate local sociopolitical and sociospatial dynamics.

In Turkey, as in many Mediterranean countries, the Covid-19 pandemic enhanced the mobility of the country's affluent classes to coastal towns. Many decided to settle there permanently, either by making their second homes their main residences, or by purchasing or renting new property. This has created severe social, infrastructural and environmental problems in these towns because of transformed demographics, a largely unregulated construction boom, increased renovation activities and an unprecedented rise in real-estate and consumer-goods prices. In this article we contextualize these problems in relation to the Justice and Development Party's neoliberal policies of urban governance and rescaling in the past 15 years. The government, having given the construction sector the main role in Turkey's economic development, subsequently granted it new spatial opportunities through the authoritarian and centralized allocation of urban and rural land. Coastal towns have been the target of unregulated urban growth and predatory construction in this process and have thus provided new spatial development prospects. Local governmental reform in 2012, which introduced radical urban rescaling and weakened district municipalities’ planning and regulation capacities, further intensified the process. These factors have had a severe impact on coastal towns and their middle-income residents, who face new mobility pressures.