International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

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.

Debates on global South urbanization have been an important focus of recent urban studies scholarship. Looking at the urban South from the point of view of the Latin American context, this article highlights a missing piece of the economic viewpoint in such debates: the instability that shapes the peripheral economies with which Southern urban dynamics interact. The article argues that this higher level of economic volatility is an important factor in many urban/sociospatial dynamics in Latin America—hence indispensable for an accurate theoretical understanding of the specificities of its cities and urban processes. The applicability of the idea for other regions of the global South is a hypothesis in need of verification and may involve important implications for current urban research. Moreover, I propose that the geographical approaches to precarity may be enhanced with the dimension of economic volatility, which is usually more intense in precarious (urban) contexts.

This article presents a surrealist urban political ecology of cannibal capitalism in the zoonotic city. It does so through an account of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, which was the worst-hit city in the world during this initial wave. Iquitos embodies multiple dimensions of zoonotic urbanization identified in the literature on this theme, including integration into planetary urban networks; expansion into extractive frontiers; and overcrowded housing in informal settlements in a context of crumbling infrastructures and deficient services. Drawing on extensive field research, I argue that the severity of the pandemic in the city nonetheless suggests the need for further conceptual and methodological contributions to this literature. In conceptual terms, the emergence of a clandestine market in oxygen, the shortage of which was responsible for the majority of the excess deaths in Iquitos, illustrates the constitutive role of cannibal capitalism in processes of zoonotic urbanization, as a necropolitical form of capital accumulation that devours the socioecological foundations of its own reproduction. In methodological terms, an ethnographic surrealism is required in order to adequately convey the bewildering chaos, grotesque absurdity and gothic horror of the collision between cannibal capitalism and Covid-19 in the zoonotic city.

After 50 years of research on urban informality, why is it that we seem unable to either clearly define this concept or move beyond it? On the one hand, urban informality is identified with ‘slums’ and substandard outcomes, on the other, with deregulated markets and neoliberal urbanism. Yet it is also identified as a self-organized urbanism that adds vitality, affordability, diversity, creativity and adaptability to the city—a form of urbanity that embodies the ‘right to the city’ and urban commoning. How are we to understand this paradox and move beyond the informal/formal as a binary distinction? If informality is more than a lack of formality, then what is informality-in-itself? The key argument here is that urban informality is the original form of urbanity—the ur-form—while formal urbanism is its necessary counterpart. Informal urbanism is not a lack of formality, but the ground from which the formal emerges. This inversion changes the way we understand the city as an in/formal assemblage. While rampant informality may seem the very antithesis of urban planning, to erase it is to kill urbanity itself. The challenge is to engage this paradox—planning for the unplanned, keeping the ur- in urban studies.

The exceptional measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic have brought great potential for reconfiguring urban governance. To examine such potential, this article presents how the pandemic crisis was managed in Chinese neighbourhoods. Following a statecraft approach and using Shanghai as a case, we show how a citywide lockdown played out on the ground as a joint product of state apparatus and citizens. Drawing on discourse analysis of interviews, policy documents, and news reports, we probe into Shanghai's contextualized neighbourhood pandemic responses, particularly by emerging neighbourhood voluntary practices in crisis management. We examine how these practices were tactically incorporated into the state's overall responses to the pandemic through co-production, co-option and mobilization. Instead of co-governance, we argue that the grassroots state orchestrates and steers community participation and volunteerism to reinforce grassroots statecraft and consolidate its role in (post-) pandemic neighbourhood governance. Through exceptional crisis management measures, the state penetrates everyday life. This process has facilitated local state-building in urban neighbourhoods, thereby manifesting, perpetuating, and expanding state-centred governance trends that were established well before the onset of Covid.

Owing to Nigeria's poor road maintenance culture, informal road menders (IRMs) have emerged who fill potholes on urban and sub-urban roads in exchange for money from road users. This article interrogates the micropolitics of this phenomenon as a relatively new means of informal livelihood within the context of the ethnography of road infrastructure, informal agency and the everyday struggle for socioeconomic survival. Conceiving informal road mending as a livelihood offers a promising lens for discussing how IRMs gain and retain access to space, navigate risks, and harness relationships with other road users and state institutions along the road. Drawing on conversations with drivers and commuters during ‘go-alongs’ in public transport and on interviews with IRMs, private car owners and state regulatory agents, the article shows how IRMs and other road users appropriate the risks and opportunities associated with potholes as socioeconomic resources through which they leverage the precarious road transport experience in the country. This contributes to the literature on the ethnography of road infrastructures and the micropolitics of informal work in urban Africa.