International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

Building urban resilience in vulnerable global South settlements is a pressing twenty-first century challenge. Building urban resilience involves addressing institutional deficiencies to mobilize resources for the delivery of urban services and infrastructures. State–civil society partnerships are effective in low-capacity settings as a step forward in the consolidation of the state, and as an opportunity for the emancipation of vulnerable communities. Coproducing urban resilience requires recognizing marginalized communities (e.g. indigenous groups), their capacity for local problem solving and governance structures for community engagement. In this article, we explore a coalition of five periurban neighborhoods in Oaxaca City (Mexico), which collaborate with the state to address flooding and drought using traditional governance. We argue that, although the recognition and mobilization of traditional governance has enabled the coproduction of public services (adaptation), it has been limited in delivering radical governance transformations. Traditional governance may prevent neighborhood leaders from reaching government positions to secure further resources required for the construction of urban resilience. The article contributes to debates on coproduction, explaining how traditional governance enables the coproduction of infrastructures and service delivery, but is limited in forwarding deep societal transformations necessary for resilience building in vulnerable contexts of the global South.

The disparate distribution of energy and housing infrastructures in many megacities of the global South raises issues of equity and spatial justice, particularly for women. An intra-urban comparison helps unpack the specific socio-spatial characteristics of the gender–energy nexus, particularly in low-income neighbourhoods that represent one form of peripheral urbanization. This article contributes to the limited literature on low-income urban women's lived experiences and everyday energy practices. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines 424 questionnaire surveys and 21 semi-structured interviews with low-income women across five case study sites in Lahore, it investigates women's energy access and use in domestic and open/public spaces, and workplaces. The study reveals significant infrastructural variations and gendered inequities within and across peripheries, and in their relation to urban cores. It demonstrates how women's peripheralized energy access is both spatially defined (e.g. in the heterogeneity of infrastructure available in peripheral neighbourhoods and in relation to their spatial proximity to urban cores) and socially contingent on their intersectional identities. The intra-urban comparison reveals the complex gendered energy practices and women's subjective experiences of socio-material exclusion, underscoring the importance of moving beyond simplistic private/public dichotomies and instead adopting an intersectional lens in spatializing the gender–energy nexus when studying urban peripheries.

The Covid-19 pandemic had a varied impact on different regions in Europe, resulting in diverse policy responses from subnational governments. In this article we investigate the policy measures local and regional authorities implemented during the initial wave of the pandemic, with a focus on 28 regions and cities in the European Union (EU). We examine 317 measures in the areas of public health, social security, daily life and work, and economic recovery, using a new analytical framework based on resilience theory to categorize these measures as mitigating, compensating, circumventing or exploiting. Through this research we aim to highlight the connection between the type and frequency of measures and regional characteristics, such as the severity of the pandemic, the quality of human capital and structural factors such as digital skills and governance quality. Our findings reveal a prevalence of coping measures, specifically in terms of support for vulnerable populations, that indicate that policy responses are primarily focused on the short term. However, our study also identifies proactive measures that suggest potential long-term transformations in regions with higher levels of digital literacy, quality governance and lifelong learning opportunities. This article contributes to understanding the factors that influence regional resilience by suggesting that local and regional capacities significantly shape the nature of policy responses to crises. Additionally, in this article we emphasize the strategic importance of anticipating future crises and underscore the need for strategic intelligence and long-term thinking in regional governance.

This essay offers provocations on the possibilities and challenges of advancing ‘epistemic justice’ in urban research, with particular care for the growing ‘academic precariat’. We explore some of the institutional barriers and possibilities of doing collaborative justice-oriented work within urban and built environment scholarship, especially for those fixed-term, early career, casual academics, independent scholars or those with career breaks. To do so, we refer to and reframe three concepts that are core within academic institutions: ethics, engagement and excellence. We explore the potentials of the urban as a site of political struggles, the projective potential of urban disciplines and the university as an urban actor to offer our intentionalities—alternative pathways—through which we can reclaim the radical role of the university towards an emancipatory urban praxis.

In this article I expand contemporary political-economic analyses of housing affordability. Specifically, I engage with urban geography research around biopolitical logics within processes of housing financialization and contribute to debates of ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’ by mobilizing Sylvia Wynter's anticolonial scholarship to emphasize alternative narrations of human life emerging alongside (bio)political-economic rationales that enable the modern human, Man. In this study, which centres on three years of ethnographic research with the Focus E15 housing campaign in the East London borough of Newham, I stress the human as field of political struggle within debates around housing affordability. Situating my research in the struggle of Focus E15 campaigners against the inhuman conditions of Newham's temporary accommodation residents, I reveal how debates around housing affordability within Newham's urban development become constituted through narratives of mixed/balanced communities, the shifting of responsibilities and coproduction efforts. I argue that these debates rely on Man's narrative of homo oeconomicus, which legitimizes the expulsion of temporary accommodation residents from Newham. In contrast, I highlight how the Focus E15 Campaign imagines affordability beyond political-economic rationales, thus spatializing an alternative way of being human, homo narrans. Consequently, I foreground the human as contested grammar within urban geography research on housing affordability to move beyond Man's geographies of managed life and death.

By framing the displacement of people fleeing war, persecution and violence as a short-term problem, refugee camps have emerged to offer temporary accommodations and services to displaced refugees. In Bangladesh, refugee camps were built in Cox's Bazar and Bhasan Char in recent years to house Rohingya refugees escaping from state-sponsored persecution by Myanmar. Constructed in two very different geographic contexts—mainland and island—yet intended to address the same refugee problem, the two camps reveal different built environments intended to instill different feelings of permanence and impermanence to affect control over refugees’ lives. We argue that planning and design thus serve as strategic biopolitical instruments by controlling and perpetually redefining the production and manifestation of (im)permanence in both sensual and tactile terms. The geographic locations of the refugee camps vis-à-vis their distance from the host country population function as an important driver of planning decisions. However, as these cases demonstrate, the biopolitics of exclusion are inherently incomplete, transforming camps into emerging, negotiated, and fluid campscapes. By providing a comparative analysis of the biotechnology of exclusion through the politics of (im)permanence in mainland versus island settings, we contribute to the understanding of the role of planning in reproducing spatial boundaries for social control.

The hegemony of neoliberal and austerity policies, which became further entrenched within the continuum of crises unfolding in the past 30 years, has provided ample opportunities for corporate actors and foundations to gain an increasingly decisive role in aspects of social and political life and governance. In several crisis-afflicted cities, local and global philanthropic and philanthrocapitalist foundations became key stakeholders in urban development and governance, as well as in restructuring the terrain of urban policies and decision making. This article explores the growing influence that philanthrocapitalist foundations have acquired in the city of Athens in the past 15 years of entangled crises. By focusing on urban projects leveraged or implemented by these foundations in Athens, we trace the philanthrocapitalist urban landscape of the city and explore the transformations it prompts, not only in the ‘image of the city’, but also in urban governance and urban and political imaginaries. This emerging urban landscape is diverse and multiscalar, consisting of interventions in urban governance, developing or promoting landmark projects and implementing a multitude of small-scale projects dispersed over neighbourhoods. It reflects the omnipresence of philanthrocapitalism in the city's affairs and raises questions about the impact that this recent transformation might have.

This article re-examines the history of the UK Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) between 1966 and 1975. Using archival materials and interviews, the article details the role of the CES in attempts to ‘modernize’ urban and regional research and working relationships between the academy and government. The CES is probably best known, by readers of this journal, as the initial editorial base for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) and for its role in incubating radical urbanism. However, as we show, these activities sat alongside important early developments in both computational social science and radical experiments in the use of the social sciences in policymaking, in ways that have, hitherto, not been well understood. The article is not intended as an exercise in nostalgia but, rather, one that gestures towards what Mark Fisher termed a ‘hauntological’ form of analysis; to quote Fisher, ‘[w]hen the present has given up on the future’ there is value in listening ‘for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past’.

Emerging urban studies scholarship has shown how cities are not fraught with one single crisis but are in a state of polycrisis, with the global South's experience of polycrisis differing significantly in how the crises originate and in the strategies employed to deal with them. Urban Bengal's polycrisis originates in imaginations of the urban in London in the eighteenth century, but has taken on a different shape as inhabitants find modes of survival. Today, in the broader context of the climate change crisis affecting the twin cities of Bengal, this article explores the Howrah–Kolkata relation and lack of peripheral centrality that has generated a sense of polycrisis in Bengal. I begin by contextualizing rain in the twin cities and its change to ‘unnatural’ for the periphery observed in recent years. I trace an aqueous history of the region and the growing socio-economic inequalities between them. I take the Urban Howrah and Park Street neighbourhoods from Howrah and Kolkata respectively to locate the sense of the polycrisis that inhabitants have been experiencing and dealing with. Here, I use class and gender as two frames to map issues of mobility, insecurities, solidarities and the infrastructural access necessary for survival in the urban. I conclude by arguing for a reworking of the twin cities’ relations by centralizing peripheries like Howrah, both to lessen the polycrisis affecting both and the urban pressure on the core—Kolkata.

The contemporary urban system in the United States is characterized by the historic dominance of a few metropolitan regions often termed ‘superstar cities’, while the national political environment is increasingly polarized along urban–rural lines. Furthermore, both inter-urban and intra-urban difference in the US are deeply racialized, a fact that suffuses both critical and reactionary discourses which seek to explain and address differences in the conditions of cities and neighborhoods. We contend the dominant urban economic paradigm in the US concerned with the level of the urban system seems primed to produce recommendations that exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, these issues. Undertaking a critical discourse analysis of national urban economic policy recommendations, with a particular focus on the work of prominent economist Ed Glaeser, we argue economists abuse the spatial equilibrium models dominant within this field in service of constructing recommendations for urban triage that betray an urbicidal logic. Facially dispassionate and racially neutral recommendations that conclude the state should not invest in improving life conditions for residents of declining urban regions, other than to facilitate their outmigration, both rely on and reproduce latent racialized and stigmatizing discourses about the viability of subordinated and racialized urban places.