International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

The radical right in Europe is engaged in a political and cultural battle against the liberal principles defining the European Union. Nevertheless, it has to interact with liberal EU institutions to implement European policies when it controls public executives. This relationship has given rise to a limited amount of research when the issue at stake is the implementation of EU-coordinated urban policies. The scope of the current article is to investigate the phenomenon by considering the preselection and selection processes of Hungarian cities controlled by the Fidesz party competing for the 2023 European Capital of Culture title. The analysis shows that these cities and the selection panel assessing their candidacies were negotiating a cultural order for urban Hungary. This negotiation was based on a logic of ambivalence and avoidance by interacting stakeholders to ensure the selection process reached its terms as contemplated by EU regulations. The concept of a ‘boundary object’ defined in interactionist studies is used to approach how the European Capital of Culture initiative was mobilized by the radical right to secure its acceptance in the liberal EU, in spite of its political agenda being aimed at destroying the liberal EU.

Segregation and social exclusion in postwar suburban housing estates are typically addressed as problems of residential location. For decades, postwar suburbs in all corners of the world have been targeted as designated sites of punitive urban intervention, grounded in territorial stigma and normative notions of density. However, as products of political campaigns aimed at constructing networked city regions, we argue that postwar suburbs should be examined for the political work they aimed to perform: Granting or denying access to the networked city and, by extension, modern citizenship. Drawing on political and cultural geography, transport history and mobilities studies, this article forwards an infrastructural access lens to critically engage with processes of social exclusion in suburban housing ensembles. Using Stockholm as the subject of a case study, we show that transport policy and planning have historically been central in undergirding welfare politics and citizenship, offering privileged sites for exploring how processes of inclusion and exclusion have been wired onto the infrastructural grid over time. We propose a focus on infrastructural access—to where, for whom and for what subjectivity—to open up the discussion on suburban exclusion by focusing on people's ability or inability to move around the networked city rather than on where they reside.

In this article, we examine the urban commons through the concept of subjectivity. We attend to the ways in which alternative and hegemonic values are negotiated among different commoners and within individual commoners. Which challenges do commoners face as they pursue alternative values within the context of capitalist urbanization? What sorts of subjectivities do people develop by participating in the commons? How do different commoner subjectivities form, align or collide? Drawing on a study of three housing projects in the Netherlands, we show how commoners struggle to redefine hegemonic notions of work, responsibility and sharing. Our findings suggest that realizing the commons is not just about finding the right institutional configuration, but hinges on the development of alternative dispositions, affects and relations.

The national urban regeneration policy in South Korea, launched in 2013, has been hailed as a milestone in the history of the country's urban planning as it has introduced extensive measures for strengthening citizen participation in the planning process. By drawing on the perspective of post-politics and agonistic planning theorists, this article examines how citizen participation in the new urban governance has been practiced and orchestrated by a diverse array of players, including government officials, intermediary organizations, and civil society actors. The empirical analysis demonstrates that, first, the participatory planning system is controlled by the government and arranged to produce consensus while avoiding any dissensus, and second, intermediate organizations/actors are invited/trained to guide citizens to the government-defined participation practices. Therefore, the current form of participatory governance in South Korea can be seen as a form of post-politics where the political is ruled out and controlled through de-politicization measures. Building on these findings, this article discusses how the current integration of the state and civil society creates the unique dilemma of participation, and how the Korean experience can enrich the global debate on post-politics.

While critical security and urban studies have been attentive to the effects of counterterrorism and radicalization policies by looking at the militarization of urban environments and the securitization of social policies, less attention has been paid to how these policies reconfigure urban governance in Western European cities. Taking the case study of the Brussels capital region, this article examines the intertwinement of the management of the terrorist threat and urban governance to make the following contributions. First, we argue that threat management builds from geographies of urban social inequality by targeting spaces of relegation and spaces of value. Secondly, we examine how the management of threat draws upon existing logics of integration as a mode of urban governance. Spaces of relegation are integrated through exercising control and influence over the conduct of its population considered at risk of radicalization. Spaces of value, considered as vulnerable to terrorist attacks, are to be integrated through infrastructural interventions. Finally, we observe that the management of threat results in the securitization of integration by harnessing existing socio-economic inequalities. This creates a paradox: while integration aims to mitigate the effects of urban uneven development, its securitization further confines these spaces by reproducing exclusionary techniques.

Contrary to the expectations many urban scholars had after the end of socialism, it has taken almost thirty years for gentrification to become a significant urban development trend in Central and Eastern Europe. The reason for this delay is that there are massive ‘commodification gaps’—institutional barriers to the valorization of land and housing—which could only be overcome with great difficulties. In this article, which is based on an empirical study of gentrification in two second-tier cities in East Germany and Poland, we pick up on this issue and focus on policies that have affected the likelihood of gentrification. We compare two different trajectories of post-socialist gentrification, finding that the course of gentrification has been deeply embedded into the dissimilar political-economic framework of transition in East Germany and Poland. This has led to considerable differences in the timing and geography of upgrading and displacement. We distance ourselves from ‘diffusionist’ views, which portray gentrification as a generalizable trend in which post-socialist cities are ‘latecomers’, based on a model that has been pioneered in Western cities and emphasizes the specificity of gentrifications as well as their embeddedness in national, regional and local political environments.

In this article, we seek to contribute to the understanding and measurement of displacement through a dialectical mixed-methods study grounded in a dialogue between quantitative and qualitative approaches throughout the entire research process. Guided by a desire for social justice for the populations at stake, this dialogue is anchored in a social constructivist approach in which an intersectional understanding of power relations within capitalism, racism and patriarchy informs the methods used, and the interaction between them. The article examines the rent-raising renovations (‘renovictions’) in rental apartments in Kvarngärdet and Gränby, two working-class neighborhoods in Uppsala, Sweden. Intertwining ethnographic and statistical methods, we reveal how displacement affected the lives of the residents in complex ways, even though the neighborhoods were not gentrified. Our approach demonstrates how a combination of methods employed through a continuous exchange between researchers who work with different tools but share similar ontological standpoints can provide insights on displacement which cannot easily be captured. The results of the study are presented in three dimensions: the epistemological, the methodological and the empirical, concluding that a social constructivist dialectical mixed-methods approach is needed to bridge ontological gaps between methods, and to capture the intricate aspects involved in displacement processes.

Community benefits agreements (CBAs) have emerged from the accountable development movement as a widespread, most often community-initiated practice for extracting benefits from development projects at the cost of developers. Scholarship chronicling the strategies for negotiating benefits has largely concluded that a strong real estate market is needed for local communities to secure the necessary leverage to win benefits. However, there are cases when legacy cities with weak real estate markets have been successful in negotiating for community benefits. We examine 14 CBAs negotiated in Detroit to uncover lessons about the ways that cities with weaker economies and lower-profile reputations as investment-ready places may experience brokering agreements. In light of its status as a legacy city, this article uses Detroit's CBAs to explore the unique challenges in that city and the specialized strategies that emerged from organizing CBAs there. We find that Detroit faces specific challenges to realizing benefits like jobs and affordable housing due to structural issues brought on by decades of decline. We also find that Detroiters have innovated ways to extract benefits to mitigate some of the historic neglect and disinvestment in their neighborhoods through CBAs.

Urban agriculture (UA) initiatives have become a key area of research, policymaking and activism in reaction to the dominance of global for-profit supply chains that have introduced significant food-related vulnerabilities in urban areas. However, empirical evidence shows that UA initiatives encounter powerful implementation barriers imposed by the neoliberal powers that have established such supply chains. This article proposes that ‘neo-austerity urbanism’ has become a relevant political strategy that supports such barriers. It considers the case of Lisbon and is informed by an interview-based inquiry aimed at identifying the implementation barriers blocking the development of transformative UA initiatives in this city while making such initiatives an integral part of neo-austerity urbanism. Three types of barriers were identified: those derived from the envisioned urban realm; the governance system in place; and the urban agriculture model envisioned. Together, these barriers form an effective mechanism to suppress urban agriculture as an activity with transformative potential in social, environmental and economic terms.

The article investigates how the entrepreneurial strategies of cities and universities overlap by examining the strategy of French business schools to invest in offshore campuses in London, Berlin and Barcelona. Conceptualizing business schools as entrepreneurial actors that not only turn knowledge into a commodity but cities too, the study shows how French business schools use campus expansion to harness the reputation of these cities as global ‘hubs’ for finance, start-up and tech. While translating into actual efforts in realigning programs or the learning environments to the reputation of London as a ‘global city’, of Berlin as a ‘creative city’ and of Barcelona as a ‘smart city’, this strategy carries a strong rhetorical element, as it is less driven by actual demands from corporations than by ambitions to raise visibility in the eyes of fee-paying international students through uniting the institutions with appealing urban brand imaginaries. Showing how the commercial exploitation of city image constitutes a central element of business schools’ branch campus investments, the study points to the problematic articulation of a consumerist framework in the academic sphere through transnational campuses primarily conceived as spaces to consume cities (rather than to learn) and to produce consumers (rather than students).