International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

Why does seemingly innocent wanghong (online celebrity) consumption—recording appreciation for a place and sharing photos of it on social media platforms—cause neighbourhood changes and instigate exclusionary pressures called ‘fashionable people phobia’? Following a critical analysis of this trend in Dongshankou, Guangzhou, I argue that a new urban aestheticization process is under way in the digital age, revealing the emergence of a new cultural class in China. This phenomenon is a product of China's domestic digital ecosystem, which produces preferred forms of new urban aesthetics through the power of digital platforms in virtual space, resulting in conflicting cultural representations of Dongshankou in virtual and urban spaces. Due to the interrelated dynamics of digital and urban spaces, the urban transformation of Dongshankou manifests as a new form of urban development mediated by digital technologies rather than gentrification. My argument is based on a comparative analysis of gentrification and the ‘fashionable people phobia’ phenomenon, which found that the exclusionary pressures are based more on cultural questions around aesthetics than on socioeconomic status change—a result of China's middle-class identity being represented by cultural tastes that depoliticize the importance of social classes.

In this article I examine a participatory planning initiative in contemporary Berlin to propose a theoretical reflection on the entanglements between race and urban futures in the German capital. The promoters of the planning initiative aimed to solve the problem of drug dealing in an inner-city park. Motivated by no economic interests or concerns, they framed the problem they aimed to solve as the long-time residents’ dread of the figure of ‘the dealer’. The initiative ultimately gained broad consensus among residents, civil society and state institutions alike within an ‘affective economy’, which I call a ‘dread economy’. Such an ‘economy’, as I show, functioned as a cover-up device for race to remain the unspoken rationale of the initiative. Against the backdrop of Berlin's liberal and progressive (self-)image, I phenomenologically interrogate the conditions under which racial conceptions could be the rationale of a popular planning initiative. I argue that the ‘dread economy’ went unnoticed—and was therefore effective—because it was predicated on a counterintuitive combination of cultural tropes belonging to two seemingly unrelated forms of racism—anti-Black racism and anti-Jewish racism. I then extend my argument by analysing three cases of twenty-first-century Berlin planning, in which various racial conceptions quietly shaped citywide planning visions. In my conclusion, I call for further critical analysis of relational articulations of race in shaping European urban futures, and for comparative research with settler-colonial and postcolonial urban regions where different (combinations of) racial conceptions may structure dominant visions of the future.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork within the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), this article illustrates the ‘field of fixing’, a brokerage structure that operates alongside Mumbai's urban bureaucracy. Scholars of Southern urbanism have extensively written about the role of informalized state action in producing an unequal cityscape. Exploring a disaggregated view of this state space in the megacity of Mumbai, this article turns attention instead to the ‘paralegal’ or the ‘field of fixing’, a liminal space between the state, market and society dictating access to the city in postcolonial India. The expert fixers in this space manipulate and maintain the real estate industry's relationship with Mumbai's urban bureaucracy. This article highlights the practices of six such fixers—the follow-up boy, the watcher, the paper expert, the regulation expert, the regulation strategy expert and the liaisoning architect by following the movement of files seeking bureaucratic approvals for land development in Mumbai, elucidating a predatory politics that ensures the success of real-estate developers in the megacity.

Infrastructure is commonly perceived through the interpretive monopoly of hegemonic frames of modernity, leading to the frequent oversight of everyday infrastructures. Extensive capital-intensive infrastructures that are fully integrated and have paled into the background of everyday life are commonly dismissed, criticized, or misconstrued as deteriorating, incongruous, and in need of repair and reinforcement to ‘measure up’. Similarly, ordinary and hybrid techno-popular infrastructures are frequently demeaned as alternative, informal, secondary, less modern and not belonging. In an era where preference and priority are given to shiny new things and innovations, everyday infrastructures are seldom acknowledged as substantive modes of operation in their own right. This article advocates a shift in perspective. Drawing illustrative cases from eastern Africa, I examine everyday infrastructures as critical sites of reference for analyzing, theorizing, and organizing the urban. Rather than starting from a preconceived notion of modernity, I examine everyday infrastructures on their own terms. I propose a series of registers—incomplete relationalities, mundane temporalities and heterogeneous modernities—to stimulate a reappraisal of how we view, read and think about infrastructure. Accordingly, I reiterate the need to reorient the foundational parameters of infrastructure, advocating for a decentered and heterodox perspective that emphasizes infrastructural plurality, multiplicity and inherent incompleteness.

This collaborative essay provides a methodological reflection and a list of recommendations on the opportunities, uncertainties and limitations faced when researching state spaces in India, Mexico and Kenya. Drawing on recent fieldwork across these countries, we illuminate the complexities and challenges inherent in studying state institutions and their roles in territorial governance and urban management. Our analysis is informed by 12 months of combined remote and in-person research, during which we employed ethnographic immersion and in-depth interviews to explore the interplay between digitalization and state power. We offer collective reflections along three main lines. First, we address the elusive nature of the state, highlighting the challenges of gaining trust from elite government officers and the significance of engaging with nonstate actors who mediate relationships between citizens and bureaucratic entities. Second, we underscore the importance of critically reflecting on the researcher's positionality and identity, particularly when working in culturally unfamiliar settings. Third, we advocate for the value of maintaining openness to multidisciplinary dialog and emphasize the importance of engaging with anticolonial and feminist methodological approaches. We believe these insights and lessons will be valuable to other scholars and practitioners investigating the dynamics of state power in the digital age.

Bloomberg Philanthropies—the philanthropic organization of multibillionaire, CEO and former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg—has become a palpably influential node in global networks of urban policy knowledge generation and mobility. This article examines the formative conditions, scope and operations of Bloomberg's philanthropically funded complex of urban policy influence. It begins by outlining Bloomberg Philanthropies' ecosystem of urban initiatives, which offer funding, technical support and entry into communities of practice for city government partners. It then traces the styling of Bloomberg's New York City mayoralty into a symbol-turned-model of effective administration and its alignment with Bloomberg Philanthropies' efforts to address the ‘crisis of capacity’ in city government. From there, the article analyses the formation of partnerships between Bloomberg Philanthropies and city governments. We show how Bloomberg Philanthropies occupies a powerful meta-governmental position: as a city-administration-at-large, it orchestrates a global-institutional field that promotes and resources the implementation of technocratic, superficially pre-political ‘best process’. But its relevance depends on harmonizing its agenda with the current desires and practical possibilities of city government. We argue that these asymmetric but interdependent relationships are important for understanding Bloomberg's global mayoralty and the general practice of philanthropic meta-governance it exemplifies.

Density is critical to cities, but how might we conceive and research its role in urban development? We argue that a conceptualization of the ‘density dialectic’ offers a productive response. Drawing on research on urban development in Tower Hamlets (London's densest borough), we identify the tensions and contradictions of current densification approaches. A dialectical approach illuminates those tensions, examines the range of actors, processes and social, economic and environmental concerns that become enrolled, and identifies how densification operates to accommodate its changing relations and contradictions. In a context of rapid and intense urban development, we draw on interviews with planners to show how ‘gentle’ and ‘hard’ visions of density connect, conflate and collide as the borough looks to meet challenging housing targets alongside social and environmental objectives.

Data centers, the material backbone of smart cities, power the digital economy and advanced digital services. Metaphors of ‘the cloud’ and ‘cloud computing’ obscure the massive computing and storage infrastructures, the resource flows and the land uses they mediate. To date, smart city research and policies have been concerned less with the materiality of enabling data infrastructures than with the material effects of increased datafication and digitalization of urban services. Only recently has urban data infrastructures’ rapidly expanding spatial and environmental footprint pushed their materialities to the forefront of public and academic controversies. Building on recent research on cloud geographies and ecologies, this article traces the politicization and emerging regulation around data centers in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, the self-proclaimed ‘digital gateway to Europe’. Here, after years of unconditional political support and regulatory passivity, a cascade of policy reforms has been introduced to confine data center growth. Nevertheless, severe urban governance challenges remain in mitigating data centers’ massive electricity, resource and land demands, and in exploiting their residual heat. We thus advocate broader dialogue across the affected policy fields and broader publics about which political objectives merit prioritizing given the constraints of available electricity and land.

The mobilization of boatmen of the Nishad community on the riverfront of Varanasi, also known as Banaras, against the introduction of a cruise service between September 2018 and the initial months of 2019 reveals the confluence of forces such as Hindu nationalism and the neoliberal pursuit of a world-class aesthetic, which articulate themselves in the urban developments in Banaras. These include the smart cities mission at the level of the city, which has a cruise service among its constituent world-class practices, and the protest at the ghat (the riverfront steps that lead to the Ganga river) by the Nishads—the community of fishermen and boatmen in Varanasi, India—at a community level. Meanwhile, at the national and global level, the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government has been trying to transform and showcase the city of Banaras as a world-class city with a Hindu nationalist flavour since 2014. The article shows how different dimensions of Henri Lefebvre's dialectic of the production of space undergo changes through state interventions that are seemingly limited to one dimension, that of conceived space or representation of space.

This article contributes to ongoing debates on Southern urbanisms by arguing that taking money seriously—as a practical, moral and material issue and as an integral part of the production of infrastructures—can offer us new insights into the urban experience among the racialized poor in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using an ethnographic methodology, I explore ‘fare money’ stories shared by poor black poets, revealing the ways they invent new socialities—ways of living and being—and reshape everyday formations of urban collective lives. I argue that the experience of obtaining transportation tickets among the racialized poor is necessarily a collective one. In their case, transportation usages are anything but stable or uniform. They involve transitory negotiations and calculated mobilization of relations, the conversion of money, moralities, timing and knowledge of infrastructural spatialities. Moreover, everyday practices to enact fare money engender values and order, positioning it as a materiality that mediates between the legal, illegal, formal and informal, all of which are intertwined in the production of infrastructures. This analysis reveals the quality of an urban experience that is persistently precarious, multifaceted and unstable.