International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

Bangladesh has a large and expanding network of international and local NGOs, present since the country's founding in 1971. The number and scope of NGOs operating within the country has expanded greatly since their initial focus on emergency and disaster relief following independence. Development literature tends to focus on the efficacy of NGOs and their interactions with the state. In this essay, I employ ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the microscale and examine how these broad, international networks of NGOs intersect with the local: small, personal acts of kindness via networks that are facilitated by the space of the city, Dhaka, as illustrated by the aftermath of the brutal murders of LGBTQ activists Xulhaz Mannan and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy. Immediately after the killings there was international condemnation, but domestically the government seemed reticent to hold accountable those who had committed the murders. As in-depth interviews revealed, many LGBTQ activists in Bangladesh went into hiding or left the country shortly after the murders. However, activists also described a broad network of local NGOs and individuals that ensured their safety. They included a range of local partners, such as local NGOs focused on human rights and advocacy, women's rights and public health, and even those broadly focused on development. These networks were made possible through the city as a site of compassion: a space that enabled local and international actors to come together and shield activists.

At first sight, Cairo is a cruel and harsh city, marked by extreme inequality and offering few resources for the poor. Like other metropolises, Cairo can easily numb its residents to the suffering of others. But it is also a city in which quiet, barely noticeable acts of compassion occur every day. In this essay, I focus on forms of care and compassion that are oriented towards cats. I weave together the stories of Amina, an upper-middle-class woman who set up an animal shelter at the city's outskirts, and Karim, a dervish who feeds the cats at the Sayyida Zaynab mosque every day. Through the juxtaposition, I paint a broad picture of compassion, ranging from a liberal commitment to animal rights to a form of care commanded by God. I suggest that compassion can have different origins, logics and grammars—including ones that exceed the human subject.

Relationships in the city are much about economic transactions and market exchange, as scholarship about the urban amply documents. Drawing on a film that follows the precarious possibility of sleep in Delhi, India, this essay recognizes the work of ‘sleep entrepreneurs’—ordinary people who offer sleep for a price. Vignettes from Delhi illustrate the theme of empathy in the city as it is pursued here—framed differently from dominant discourses of prescribed care in the city. Viewed as a small motif of life-affirming relationships, these transactions suggest the potential of exploring the city and the urban condition as generative of relationships that are not often analyzed.

This article provides a theoretically informed and empirically grounded analysis of the local political leadership of economic development policy. It is a small-N comparative study examining two cities in England and two in Spain: Birmingham in the Midlands and Manchester in the north-west of England, and Seville and Malaga, both in the southern region of Andalusia. Our analysis draws on the literature of political leadership styles informed by the typology of urban leadership developed by John and Cole in 1999. Our core purpose was to advance empirical knowledge of how local leadership styles affect the governance of economic development policy. We do so by identifying the decisive actors involved in the ecosystem of municipal economic development policy, the style of local political leader in each case and the impact of different local government systems in Spain and England on the governance of municipal economic development policy. Our findings point to the scope for further theoretical development of John and Cole's typology to fully capture a shared and collaborative leadership style which our research revealed as increasingly prevalent in local governance.

The city as an exclusionary place for migrants is widely established across global literatures. Global cities—and the infrastructures that animate them—share practices of surveillance and bordering, denial of public services and stratified labour markets that constrain migrants to precarious sectors. Stigma plays a crucial role in perpetuating such conditions for migrants, rendering them ‘others’ and ‘outcasts’ that taint cities. Loïc Wacquant's concept of ‘territorial stigmatization’ can be used to explain the spatial process of such exclusions. This article empirically advances the concept by illustrating the relationship between infrastructures and territorial stigmatization that forms one part of a set of multilayered stigmas, and by arguing that territorial stigma is a relational, mobile and multiscale process. Drawing from empirical research with internal migrants working in the construction sector in one of India's fastest-growing cities, Nashik in the state of Maharashtra, this article illustrates how infrastructure plays a role in processes of territorial stigmatization in three main ways. First, continued urbanization and infrastructural development perpetuate the need for stigmatized labour. Second, infrastructures (such as water, sanitation and public services) are crucial in configuring stigmatized spaces. And third, infrastructure enables migration across space and has the potential to reconfigure territorial stigmatization.

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.