International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

In this article I aim to shed light on boat dwelling as an increasingly popular housing practice in the UK. I investigate the changing nature of this practice in times of housing crisis and of the connection between formal and informal approaches, and discuss how decentralized urban actors influence and safeguard their visions of housing. My investigation concentrates on three intertwined strategies boaters in Oxford use to deal with growing regularization and commodification pressures: (non)compliance, formalization and staying under the radar. My findings challenge several assumptions about housing informality in the global North and document the diverse trajectories that informal processes may take. My analysis reveals that informal and semi-formal solutions are not simply ‘tolerated’ or ‘overlooked’ by the state, but co-produced by urban dwellers through a repertoire of everyday actions and ad hoc advocacy approaches. The construction of specific trajectories of informal housing emerges at the interface of complex agendas and attitudes that go beyond the generalized roles attributed to the key urban sectors.

The remediation and redevelopment of industrially contaminated land are complex challenges for urban regions worldwide. Yet the literature on urban brownfields mostly addresses this as a technical problem through dichotomic and anthropocentric terms, contrasting the passive and negative role of the contamination as a toxic entity in the ground with the active and positive roles assigned to human actors such as planners, developers and communities. This article contests this prevalent view by tracing in detail debates concerning the remediation of three highly contaminated military-industrial brownfield sites in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region. Drawing on notions of ontological multiplicity and enactment from science and technology studies and on qualitative analysis of a vast database of planning protocols and court hearings alongside interviews with key stakeholders, we uncover how contamination is enacted in multiple ways as mobile/immobile, unified/fragmented, remediable/irremediable. Furthermore, following one of our field's inherent controversies—whether to fully map the contamination prior to planning the sites—the article highlights the attempts to regulate this multiplicity and replace it with a single coherent contamination. By acknowledging the multiple enactments of contamination, our approach offers a more nuanced understanding that could help stakeholders rethink the remediation and redevelopment of urban brownfields beyond simplistic technical solutions or neoliberal policy imperatives.

This article assesses how the agency of international advisors can provide policy recommendations that, instead of introducing urban policy initiatives for multicultural encounters, sharpen political and spatial segregation within the context of ethnic conflict. The article explores the variegated nature of neoliberalization and argues that the adoption of strategic planning and creativity discourses enables the development of a sophisticated political rationale for governing ethnic diversity. The analysis focuses on a range of advisory practices—including the role played by Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School and Richard Florida at the Creative Class Group in advising former Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat—in order to understand the dynamics of grounding imaginaries concerning a neoliberal role for the state and the depoliticization of the public sphere in a disputed city. By surveying official policy documents, journalistic interviews and two reports submitted by Porter and Florida to Barkat, the author examines how the branding of Jerusalem as a creative city involved managerial practices that classified the city's diverse population according to categories of creative and non-creative labor rather than political subjects. The adoption of such discourses facilitated a novel approach for enhancing the state-building ethno-nationalistic project while at the same time reproducing the dynamics of occupation and annexation.

Over the past few decades, the desire of residents on urban peripheries in Brazil to have their own businesses has grown. Consequently, several authors have critically pointed out the advance of neoliberal ideas among the urban popular classes. In this article I discuss the origins of this ‘entrepreneurial disposition’ and its relationship with neoliberal discourse that seeks to encourage ‘entrepreneurialism of oneself’. The analysis presented in this article is based on ethnographic research carried out among entrepreneurial workers on the outskirts of São Paulo through in-depth interviews focusing on life histories and participant observation in strategic spaces (online and in person) during 2020 and 2021. I explore adherence and opposition to and resignification of neoliberal entrepreneurial ideology from different cultural and material backgrounds by retelling the history of five entrepreneurs from three different families. I argue that rather than neoliberal ideas being an ideological conviction, they are embedded in social practices that are quite common in the periphery of São Paulo. Therefore, they should be analysed in the light of these previously existing practices and moralities. From a peripheral point of view, ethnographic analysis also allows us to examine the limits of this embeddedness and shed light on possible forms of resistance.

India continues to modernize, and the legacy of political modernity rooted in the European Enlightenment continues to reify itself in India through the performative practices of the body politic. The body politic is a totalized conceptualization of a society imagined in the form of a body, with real exclusionary effects on those without citizenship rights. This body politic is made real through performances of popular sovereignty, bureaucratic state practices and liberal democratic electoral procedures performed during urban development processes. Ethnographic accounts of politics of slum rehabilitations in Pune show that the modern body politic is indeed performatively practised, and reshaped, by the very bodies that are expected to be alienated for the making of the body politic. Bodies meet one another in different spaces and times and generate the possibility of reshaping the liberal body politic into relational and affective bodily politics. Together, bodies become both the site and the means through which political modernity is reshaped in India.