International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

In this article I develop the concept of ‘darkening’, understood as a public-led process characterized by using a dark-based rhetoric that speaks to the ‘shadow’ or ‘gloomy’ status of certain informalized activities, while evoking neocolonial notions of a racialized Other and often resulting on the increased criminalization and in/visibilization of informalized (migrant) workers. By drawing comparisons between the intersectorial and multiscaled intersection of public policies, public-led strategies and dominant (institutional and media) narratives affecting three types of de facto informalized labour activities in Spain (sex work, domestic employment and informal street vending) I shed light on the link between the governance of informalized (racialized) work and the reproduction of certain moral geographies in Spanish cities. Particularly, I show how the effect of ‘darkening’ has been to make these informalized workers more clandestine (displacing them ‘into the shadows’), hence criminalizing certain labour activities in public/visible spaces based on moral and legal arguments, while permitting, tolerating or even favouring those same activities in private/less visible spaces. By addressing the underexplored symbolic/discursive dimensions of darkness, and the blurred lines between traditional categories (public/private, urban/rural), this work aims to be a relevant contribution to contemporary debates on urban/night studies.

Berlin's Tempelhofer Feld, an old airport turned into a public park, stands as a unique urban space. What it is about this simple and massive open space in the heart of a large city that makes it a near-utopian formation? This essay attempts to explore the meaning of this sociospatial entity, framing it in terms of a ‘libertopia’, to serve as a possible inspiration to envision a more free and just society. To this end, it advocates maintaining the park's current unaltered simple form against those city officials who wish to ‘develop’ the space.

In this article we investigate how school district policies in China contribute to urban segregation by focusing on educational enrolment, family selection and transformational mechanisms. We employ a mechanism-based approach to examine how the hukou system and housing policies shape parental school choices to reinforce sociospatial segregation. Suzhou, a rapidly urbanizing city where over 90% of children attend public schools, serves as a case study. Semi-structured interviews with local and migrant families reveal the significant role of school district boundaries in perpetuating educational inequality and residential sorting. Through thematic analysis we identify key drivers of segregation, including school preferences, school choice strategy, perceptions of school district segregation and educational policy attitudes within the educational system. Despite government initiatives such as the Nearby Enrolment Policy (NEP) and Score-Based Enrolment Policy (SEP) aimed at promoting equity, these mechanisms often exacerbate existing disparities. Under the concepts of ‘parentocracy’ and ‘enterprising self’, advantaged families secure housing in sought-after school districts, while disadvantaged migrant families rely on local networks for support. Low-scoring migrants face exclusion from high-quality schools, which deepens sociospatial segregation. In this research we furthermore explore the impact of Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) and the rise of ‘Xing’ branded schools within this evolving landscape.

Inspired by Gunnar Olsson, this article critiques the use of cartographic reason in the process of creating an accessible city for people with disabilities. It also borrows Gregory's ontological conceptual pair of cartography and corpography, showing the ontological transformations that occur within this pair during the practical removal of barriers to mobility in Brno, Czech Republic. The methodology employed involves semi-structured interviews with members of the city's Advisory Board for Accessibility. Our primary aim is to demonstrate how the imperative to eliminate specific barriers in the urban environment responds to the dominance of cartographic reason in planning and political decision-making. Findings indicate that this dominance often obscures the fact that what may appear as safely accessible in cartographic representations can manifest as inaccessible and hazardous corpography. However, the cartographic visualizations serve as the initial driving force behind bringing about potential improvements in corpographic accessibility. Urban space is mapped into myriad legal and political areas, which complicates accessibility. The cartography of accessibility is becoming utopian, and, through a critique of utopia, we show how a corpographic emphasis on multisensory experience can make the city more effectively accessible. We introduce the concept of a ferryman, one who facilitates navigation through urban space.

This article discusses populist rhetoric in the context of participatory urban planning. Populist rhetoric builds on emotionally charged expression and juxtapositions between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ including planners. In so doing, it poses a challenge to planners who have learned to follow the ideals of communicative planning, highlighting public, rational problem-solving and orientation toward agreement. Recently, the agonistic theory of planning has put into question these ideals, advancing a view that disagreements, passion-driven resistance and populist rhetoric can advance democratic political culture, and by extension, planning culture. If populism can advance democracy in planning, should planners then reject the idea of countering populism with consensus-oriented communicative strategies and turn to agonistically oriented theory instead? What are the pros and cons of each theory in the face of populism? How do they help planners in identifying when populism serves democracy and when it works for anti-democratic goals? The article examines these questions, illustrating the discussion with reflections on populist public feedback and planners’ response to this feedback in the Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive planning process.

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.