International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

Bloomberg Philanthropies—the philanthropic organization of multibillionaire, CEO and former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg—has become a palpably influential node in global networks of urban policy knowledge generation and mobility. This article examines the formative conditions, scope and operations of Bloomberg's philanthropically funded complex of urban policy influence. It begins by outlining Bloomberg Philanthropies' ecosystem of urban initiatives, which offer funding, technical support and entry into communities of practice for city government partners. It then traces the styling of Bloomberg's New York City mayoralty into a symbol-turned-model of effective administration and its alignment with Bloomberg Philanthropies' efforts to address the ‘crisis of capacity’ in city government. From there, the article analyses the formation of partnerships between Bloomberg Philanthropies and city governments. We show how Bloomberg Philanthropies occupies a powerful meta-governmental position: as a city-administration-at-large, it orchestrates a global-institutional field that promotes and resources the implementation of technocratic, superficially pre-political ‘best process’. But its relevance depends on harmonizing its agenda with the current desires and practical possibilities of city government. We argue that these asymmetric but interdependent relationships are important for understanding Bloomberg's global mayoralty and the general practice of philanthropic meta-governance it exemplifies.

Density is critical to cities, but how might we conceive and research its role in urban development? We argue that a conceptualization of the ‘density dialectic’ offers a productive response. Drawing on research on urban development in Tower Hamlets (London's densest borough), we identify the tensions and contradictions of current densification approaches. A dialectical approach illuminates those tensions, examines the range of actors, processes and social, economic and environmental concerns that become enrolled, and identifies how densification operates to accommodate its changing relations and contradictions. In a context of rapid and intense urban development, we draw on interviews with planners to show how ‘gentle’ and ‘hard’ visions of density connect, conflate and collide as the borough looks to meet challenging housing targets alongside social and environmental objectives.

Data centers, the material backbone of smart cities, power the digital economy and advanced digital services. Metaphors of ‘the cloud’ and ‘cloud computing’ obscure the massive computing and storage infrastructures, the resource flows and the land uses they mediate. To date, smart city research and policies have been concerned less with the materiality of enabling data infrastructures than with the material effects of increased datafication and digitalization of urban services. Only recently has urban data infrastructures’ rapidly expanding spatial and environmental footprint pushed their materialities to the forefront of public and academic controversies. Building on recent research on cloud geographies and ecologies, this article traces the politicization and emerging regulation around data centers in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, the self-proclaimed ‘digital gateway to Europe’. Here, after years of unconditional political support and regulatory passivity, a cascade of policy reforms has been introduced to confine data center growth. Nevertheless, severe urban governance challenges remain in mitigating data centers’ massive electricity, resource and land demands, and in exploiting their residual heat. We thus advocate broader dialogue across the affected policy fields and broader publics about which political objectives merit prioritizing given the constraints of available electricity and land.

The mobilization of boatmen of the Nishad community on the riverfront of Varanasi, also known as Banaras, against the introduction of a cruise service between September 2018 and the initial months of 2019 reveals the confluence of forces such as Hindu nationalism and the neoliberal pursuit of a world-class aesthetic, which articulate themselves in the urban developments in Banaras. These include the smart cities mission at the level of the city, which has a cruise service among its constituent world-class practices, and the protest at the ghat (the riverfront steps that lead to the Ganga river) by the Nishads—the community of fishermen and boatmen in Varanasi, India—at a community level. Meanwhile, at the national and global level, the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government has been trying to transform and showcase the city of Banaras as a world-class city with a Hindu nationalist flavour since 2014. The article shows how different dimensions of Henri Lefebvre's dialectic of the production of space undergo changes through state interventions that are seemingly limited to one dimension, that of conceived space or representation of space.

This article contributes to ongoing debates on Southern urbanisms by arguing that taking money seriously—as a practical, moral and material issue and as an integral part of the production of infrastructures—can offer us new insights into the urban experience among the racialized poor in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using an ethnographic methodology, I explore ‘fare money’ stories shared by poor black poets, revealing the ways they invent new socialities—ways of living and being—and reshape everyday formations of urban collective lives. I argue that the experience of obtaining transportation tickets among the racialized poor is necessarily a collective one. In their case, transportation usages are anything but stable or uniform. They involve transitory negotiations and calculated mobilization of relations, the conversion of money, moralities, timing and knowledge of infrastructural spatialities. Moreover, everyday practices to enact fare money engender values and order, positioning it as a materiality that mediates between the legal, illegal, formal and informal, all of which are intertwined in the production of infrastructures. This analysis reveals the quality of an urban experience that is persistently precarious, multifaceted and unstable.

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.