International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

This article explores the role that green gentrification plays in exacerbating racial tensions within historically marginalized urban communities benefiting from new environmental amenities such as parks, gardens, waterfront restoration and greenways. Building on extensive qualitative data from three cities in Europe (Amsterdam, Vienna, Lyon) and four cities in the United States (Washington, Austin, Atlanta, Cleveland), we use thematic analysis and grounded theory to examine the complex relationship between historical environmental and racial injustices and current racial green inequities produced by the green city agenda. Our analysis also offers insights into the main differences in how community members articulate concerns and demands over racial issues related to green gentrification in Europe versus North America. Results show that urban greening—and green gentrification specifically—can create ‘compounded environmental racisms’ by worsening racial environmental injustices and further perpetrating green racialized displacement, re-segregation and exclusion. The latter is produced by the racial inequities embedded in green infrastructure projects and the related unequal access to environmental benefits, affordable housing, political rights and place-making. Moreover, we find that settler colonial practices combined with persisting exposure to toxins and re-segregation in the United States together with neocolonial spatial and social practices in Europe shape how racialized community members perceive and interact with new green amenities.

Shadow trading is a common activity along state borders. Its omnipresence is puzzling because border checkpoints are highly regulated spaces that are heavily gated and securitized. Most studies attribute such a paradox to ineffective border control and corruption. However, this line of argument overlooks the peculiar nature of border and checkpoint governance. We explore this phenomenon with a case study of the Sino-Kazakh border where shadow traders negotiate their passage every day. We find that border crossing is a highly organized activity dictated by informal yet specific and meticulous rules that are enforced by various state and non-state actors. Together, they constitute a kind of gray governance that is thoroughly entwined with the formal regime. It is a kind of technology of rule that enables the state to selectively enforce formal and informal rules so as to accommodate the conflicting goals of border control.

This study traces how Black lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area made a place for themselves in the world at the end of the twentieth century, after the decline of the Black Power Movement and before the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Geocoding and analyzing the content of a Black lesbian journal in the San Francisco Bay Area that had global distribution, the author examines how the placemaking of Black lesbians remade them as cultural-political subjects, expanded their networks, and inspired them to reimagine their relations with the earth. As they crafted cultural spaces across the African diaspora, they faced threats—most notably, street violence, harsh policing and ecological degradation—yet they also experienced joyful interactions with each other, with allies and with nature. The belief grew in their cultural spaces that their liberation required world transformation and that they could change the world. This research, providing a frame for studying the interaction between the making of cultural spaces and the formation of political solidarities, contributes to urban movements research, critical environmental justice studies, and Black feminist/LGBTQ+ research.

In this article, I examine the definition of resistance given by a favela woman from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—Lucia Cabral—and its epistemological potential for urban theory. From a feminist, postcolonial and decolonial point of view, I argue that Lucia's definition of resistance entails an insightful framework to understand urban transformations, because she shifts the question of ‘what they are’ to ‘where they stream from’. I build on my situated position and inter-relationality with Lucia to argue that, first, urban transformations, which I here refer to as forms of urbanization, can and often do come from the favela; secondly, that these forms of urbanization derive from situated and translocated-ing Amefrican epistemologies; and thirdly, that women's bodies constitute, in many cases, the very basis of urban futurities in the favelas. I look into embodied forms of urbanization to conclude that it is possible to see, feel, sense and nurture forms of future-thinking and -building that I here call Amefrican futurities, for they emerge from the specific subjectivities and praxis of women living in the favelas.

It is well established that urban community gardens (UCGs) can either challenge or reinforce neoliberal urbanism. This duality is especially evident among UCGs that sell garden harvests for income generation. In this article I therefore examine UCGs in low-income areas of Cape Town, South Africa, to understand how they might sell their harvests while countering the neoliberal food system in cities of the global South. I draw on qualitative fieldwork, including observations and semi-structured interviews with UCG representatives and civil society actors. Most harvests are currently sold to high-end venues through intermediary actors in civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). However, this approach disregards the local community's socioeconomic conditions and undermines community gardens’ nutritional objectives. Yet, under specific scenarios, the sale of garden harvests could mitigate the persistent food injustice in Cape Town's low-income areas. In this article I introduce a model for harvest sales that advances sustainable urban agriculture and fosters food justice in neoliberal cities in the global South.

This article explores the governance of risk in financialization through the entry of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and other investment funds into specialized supported housing in England. Supported housing is a form of care accommodation intended to enable vulnerable groups such as people with learning disabilities to live more independently. Since 2014, investors have targeted the sector, developing a leaseback model that has encountered controversy due to unsustainable rents and the near bankruptcy of at least one housing association. The article unpacks these dynamics by asking how financialization has generated risk through the imposition of a ‘care fix’ in the sector, drawing on qualitative data including interviews, financial and media reports, and court and regulatory documents. In answering this question, it argues that the contradiction between housing's role as a private commodity and as a collective means of social reproduction generates tensions that suggest potential limits to financialization.

Pollution in the environment emerges as a legal and technical object on the one hand, and as a repository of social and cultural beliefs on the other. What happens when we trouble the idea that these belong to different domains and think about seemingly divergent meanings of pollution together? In this article, I draw from anti-caste and anti-racist work to explore this question. Extending critical urban scholarship on environmental politics, I attend to formations of caste and religion alongside judicial and political discourse on preventing pollution to the river Ganga in North India. In our present moment, on the banks of the sacred river, extremist leaders mobilize regulations to target minoritized Muslim and Dalit communities in Kanpur's leather industry. I argue that the roots of these actions lie in an environmental petition from the mid-1980s which transformed urban environmental governance in North India, as the court decoupled questions of environmental protection from economic and social justice. I suggest that the analytic of regional racial formations helps us grapple with uneven socio-spatial landscapes in postcolonial cities and sharpens our understanding of environmental injustices by moving beyond fixed categories of difference.

In this article I question notions of urban liminality by foregrounding the temporal, spatial and experiential dimensions underpinning their formations. I focus on liminal practices of inhabitation in the context of a housing squat in Rome, Italy, by investigating how a permanent housing deprivation condition, once politically organized in a squatted building, can anchor processes of empowerment and political mobilization. To do so, I put forward a rereading of liminality, not necessarily as a temporary state but rather as a more comprehensive spatial–temporal assemblage, by offering a tripartite reading of liminal conditions in their spatial, temporal and experiential dimensions. My goal is to offer an analysis of urban and housing liminality that transcends totalizing narratives of exceptionality, temporariness or straightforward annihilation, advancing instead a more nuanced reading—where liminality can be seen either as a vehicle for social depotentiation or as the grounds for collective forms of emancipatory practices.

This article contributes to debates on the decentering of urban research by critically examining emergent forms of housing in the mining municipality of Canaã dos Carajás, Brazil, beyond the dominant lexicons that have emerged from the country's metropolises. The notion of ‘beyond the metropolis’ is offered here as a geographically situated, conceptual placeholder that empirically grounds calls for dislocating urban research. I draw upon fieldwork conducted in Canaã in 2018 and 2019, after the construction of the largest open-pit mine in human history, which attracted tens of thousands of migrants and more than doubled Canaã's population in five years, creating a severe housing crisis. By looking closely at how regional developers, local authorities, mining giant Vale as well as Amazonian majorities came up with their own ‘solutions’ to the housing problem they faced, I foreground the role of ‘extractivism’ and ‘extensions’ in driving and shaping urbanization and inhabitation—beyond the metrocentric emphasis on agglomerative dynamics driven by industrialization and rural-to-urban migration. This twofold conceptual grammar grounded in non-metropolitan Amazonia is absent from current housing debates and illustrates the generative analytical potential inherent in the move beyond the metropolis.