International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

Urbanization has become a core strategy for the Communist Party of China (CPC) to reinforce its authoritarian rule over China. Its roll-out is replete with tensions, however, because the extent to which urbanization can replicate spatial egalitarianism, the foundation of CPC sovereign rule following its victory in the Chinese civil war (1946–49), remains unclear. To advance research on these tensions, this article first presents a genealogy of the multiple conditions that underpinned large-scale peasant mobilization to drive landownership redistribution. Rarely discussed in urban and regional research today, the logic and implications of landownership redistribution are crucial for comprehending and conceptualizing Chinese urbanization. Specifically, the genealogical analysis demonstrates how peasant mobilization engendered a de facto CPC-peasantry social contract that consolidated CPC rule. Rather than dissolve unproblematically as the Chinese political economy evolves into an urbanizing era, this contract has engendered path-dependent effects that constrain attempts at urban-rural integration. The article then adds a fresh historical-geographical dimension to existing research on Chinese urbanization and regime durability by introducing a new research agenda to examine why contemporary peasant mobilization across China not only differs from but is also shaped by the peasant mobilization of the late 1940s.

Following South Sudan's independence in 2011, a myriad of local, regional and global actors have flocked to its capital city, Juba, to influence and benefit from the ongoing state-making process. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Juba between 2012 and 2015, this article demonstrates how urban ‘space’ in Juba is rendered into ‘place’ through everyday practices of naming that articulate urbanites’ contrasting experiences of the Sudanese civil wars, the city's tumultuous history, and their position within its—and the new nation's—present and future. This is most visible in a growing and contested Juba neighborhood that has come to be called by two different names, each tied to distinct experiences of conflict and displacement within and beyond the city. These and other namings and place-makings index historically-rooted ethno-spatial understandings of South Sudan, memories of violence, and the sense of differential access to the city's economic potential in the face of ongoing upheaval. Urban naming and place-making in Juba (and in other cities similarly impacted by conflict), it is argued, is a central domain through which urbanites disrupt official mappings and mitigate disorienting violence. These discursive practices are a vital means by which people forge stable lives and productive futures in the face of a precarious political present.

External forces always shape the social construction of ‘the local’. In this article we offer a framework for understanding how external players and strategies reconfigure the social and symbolic character of local culture for new investments and new populations. We aim not only to propose a theory of urban cultural processing by nonlocals—what we call ‘urban cultural terraforming’—but to identify pressure points for local groups to make claims on or even commandeer reshaping local culture. Using two cases, casino development in a deindustrialized city and state-designated cultural districts, we illustrate how ‘cultural terraformers’ use identifiable strategies (e.g. colonization of local sentiment, re-creating partnerships and respatializing) to change local culture, and how groups struggle to avoid marginalization.

Leisure activities, including place-based food experiences, have become central to defining urban identities and branding places. Mobile and affluent urbanites’ search for authentic and cosmopolitan experiences is increasingly guided by corporate digital media such as apps and websites that direct them to previously ignored working-class, ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods, which are being discursively and materially reconfigured to meet their needs, in turn causing the displacement of long-time residents. We examine the relationship between food and gentrification through the lens of digital media, suggesting that they play an important role in shaping urban experiences and cities. Specifically, we investigate narratives produced by popular digital food media, not least websites and apps providing restaurant ratings and reviews, and their relationship to ongoing patterns of gentrification in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and Paris. Using mixed methods that combine census data with ‘hybrid fieldwork’ in online and offline foodscapes, we identify some spatial patterns and key characteristics of food-driven gentrification, highlighting the aestheticization of everyday life and its significance in encouraging and legitimizing planetary gentrification.

Loïc Wacquant's work on the production and reproduction of socio-spatial inequalities in Chicago and La Courneuve has inspired a literature on how imaginaries of low-income, often racialized neighborhoods are spread through discourse and policy, and how residents respond to the stigmatization of their neighborhoods through internalization, deflection or resistance. While this body of scholarship has almost exclusively focused on the marginalization of urban neighborhoods, I argue in this article that the process of ‘territorial stigmatization’ analyzed by Wacquant also operates at the level of entire cities and subnational regions, with comparable political outcomes: the shifting of attention away from the structural causes of poverty onto its symptoms and, ultimately, the normalization and exacerbation of inequalities between people and places. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nevers, I analyze the stigmatizing imaginaries surrounding ‘declining medium-sized cities’ in France and how they affect residents’ experience of place. The article contributes to the debate on the internalization/contestation of territorial stigma by showcasing the efforts of Nevers residents to restrict local critical discourse to insiders. It also adds to the literature on resistance through place re-scription strategies by emphasizing the role played by the physical characteristics of place within alternative narratives.

In this article we seek to advance our understanding of unhoming in a population not previously perceived to be vulnerable to such processes. We examine the particular forms of trauma in an emergent space of urban marginality, which has arisen through the fracturing of longstanding citizen–state relations and the rupturing of habitual orientations to home in a world that had hitherto been knowable and predictable. In this article we highlight the centrality of waiting in experiences of unhoming, which act as a mechanism of domination over a group newly subject to a specific manifestation of marginality; this mechanism has particular significance for understanding the differentiated dynamics of urban displacement. In this article we utilize interviews with 31 residents of residential flats in England living in buildings affected by fire safety defects, identified following the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire disaster in London in which 72 individuals died. We argue that research on urban dispossession needs to be attentive to distinctive processes and consequences of—and resistance to—unhoming. The experiences of newly affected populations unmask the underpinning precarity and unequal power relations of housing-based urban citizenship.

This article introduces an analytic of discursive and material failure, developing a spatial grammar for analysing both the discursive framing of policies as failed and the actually existing processes and effects of failed policy. Using the case of harm reduction drug policy in Budapest, I demonstrate how a successful policy was made to fail at the local and national scales, and how that failure in turn spurred the mobility of harm reduction's implementation across scales and into the European Union's Drugs Strategy. I show how focusing on policy failure exposes the politics of making and mobilizing urban policy, and how an analysis of failure can uncover unforeseen effects of the local politics of policy mobility. Analysing failure as both discursive and material allows scholars to break down policymaking processes into the political and practical elements assembled in policy mobilization. Discursive policy failures take into consideration the framing and accounting of actions, events and processes, while analysis of material failure begins with seemingly fewer political questions because of its focus on the technical. I argue that it is in understanding the relationship between material and discursive failure that the politics of urban policy mobility becomes a central question.

Cities are critical sites for understanding, and potentially ameliorating, the effects of global ecological change, the climate emergency and natural resource depletion. Contemporary cities are sociomaterially connected through global markets, trade and transportation, placing ever-increasing demands on the natural environment and generating dangerous pollutants and emissions. Current approaches to address these environmental crises are dominated by neoliberal forms of ‘green’ urban development, carbon accounting and techno-economic solutions, which extend corporate control over cities and tend to entrench inequality. A more strategic approach for enabling ecologically sustainable and equitable urban futures is urgently needed. We present five strategies for urban ecological futures in the global North, derived from qualitative and ethnographic empirical research with international eco-communities, which open up discussions about how to tackle this challenge by acknowledging the role and potential of: (1) non-extractive community economies; (2) democratic processes of co-operative action; (3) social approaches to resource management; (4) participatory collaborative governance; and (5) urban heterogeneity and social justice. We explore the relational, contested and contextual processes through which these approaches could become embedded in urban policy and planning, thereby offering the strategic capacity required to move towards truly sustainable cities.