International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

Contrary to the expectations many urban scholars had after the end of socialism, it has taken almost thirty years for gentrification to become a significant urban development trend in Central and Eastern Europe. The reason for this delay is that there are massive ‘commodification gaps’—institutional barriers to the valorization of land and housing—which could only be overcome with great difficulties. In this article, which is based on an empirical study of gentrification in two second-tier cities in East Germany and Poland, we pick up on this issue and focus on policies that have affected the likelihood of gentrification. We compare two different trajectories of post-socialist gentrification, finding that the course of gentrification has been deeply embedded into the dissimilar political-economic framework of transition in East Germany and Poland. This has led to considerable differences in the timing and geography of upgrading and displacement. We distance ourselves from ‘diffusionist’ views, which portray gentrification as a generalizable trend in which post-socialist cities are ‘latecomers’, based on a model that has been pioneered in Western cities and emphasizes the specificity of gentrifications as well as their embeddedness in national, regional and local political environments.

In this article, we seek to contribute to the understanding and measurement of displacement through a dialectical mixed-methods study grounded in a dialogue between quantitative and qualitative approaches throughout the entire research process. Guided by a desire for social justice for the populations at stake, this dialogue is anchored in a social constructivist approach in which an intersectional understanding of power relations within capitalism, racism and patriarchy informs the methods used, and the interaction between them. The article examines the rent-raising renovations (‘renovictions’) in rental apartments in Kvarngärdet and Gränby, two working-class neighborhoods in Uppsala, Sweden. Intertwining ethnographic and statistical methods, we reveal how displacement affected the lives of the residents in complex ways, even though the neighborhoods were not gentrified. Our approach demonstrates how a combination of methods employed through a continuous exchange between researchers who work with different tools but share similar ontological standpoints can provide insights on displacement which cannot easily be captured. The results of the study are presented in three dimensions: the epistemological, the methodological and the empirical, concluding that a social constructivist dialectical mixed-methods approach is needed to bridge ontological gaps between methods, and to capture the intricate aspects involved in displacement processes.

Community benefits agreements (CBAs) have emerged from the accountable development movement as a widespread, most often community-initiated practice for extracting benefits from development projects at the cost of developers. Scholarship chronicling the strategies for negotiating benefits has largely concluded that a strong real estate market is needed for local communities to secure the necessary leverage to win benefits. However, there are cases when legacy cities with weak real estate markets have been successful in negotiating for community benefits. We examine 14 CBAs negotiated in Detroit to uncover lessons about the ways that cities with weaker economies and lower-profile reputations as investment-ready places may experience brokering agreements. In light of its status as a legacy city, this article uses Detroit's CBAs to explore the unique challenges in that city and the specialized strategies that emerged from organizing CBAs there. We find that Detroit faces specific challenges to realizing benefits like jobs and affordable housing due to structural issues brought on by decades of decline. We also find that Detroiters have innovated ways to extract benefits to mitigate some of the historic neglect and disinvestment in their neighborhoods through CBAs.

Urban agriculture (UA) initiatives have become a key area of research, policymaking and activism in reaction to the dominance of global for-profit supply chains that have introduced significant food-related vulnerabilities in urban areas. However, empirical evidence shows that UA initiatives encounter powerful implementation barriers imposed by the neoliberal powers that have established such supply chains. This article proposes that ‘neo-austerity urbanism’ has become a relevant political strategy that supports such barriers. It considers the case of Lisbon and is informed by an interview-based inquiry aimed at identifying the implementation barriers blocking the development of transformative UA initiatives in this city while making such initiatives an integral part of neo-austerity urbanism. Three types of barriers were identified: those derived from the envisioned urban realm; the governance system in place; and the urban agriculture model envisioned. Together, these barriers form an effective mechanism to suppress urban agriculture as an activity with transformative potential in social, environmental and economic terms.

The article investigates how the entrepreneurial strategies of cities and universities overlap by examining the strategy of French business schools to invest in offshore campuses in London, Berlin and Barcelona. Conceptualizing business schools as entrepreneurial actors that not only turn knowledge into a commodity but cities too, the study shows how French business schools use campus expansion to harness the reputation of these cities as global ‘hubs’ for finance, start-up and tech. While translating into actual efforts in realigning programs or the learning environments to the reputation of London as a ‘global city’, of Berlin as a ‘creative city’ and of Barcelona as a ‘smart city’, this strategy carries a strong rhetorical element, as it is less driven by actual demands from corporations than by ambitions to raise visibility in the eyes of fee-paying international students through uniting the institutions with appealing urban brand imaginaries. Showing how the commercial exploitation of city image constitutes a central element of business schools’ branch campus investments, the study points to the problematic articulation of a consumerist framework in the academic sphere through transnational campuses primarily conceived as spaces to consume cities (rather than to learn) and to produce consumers (rather than students).

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.