International Journal of Urban and Regional Research最新文献

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.

In this article I describe how a permanent underclass is being inadvertently created in a South Pacific city. I use Descola's idea of equivalence in human relations to explain urban tenure and evictions in the postcolonial South Pacific city of Port Vila. Vanuatu is a nation of 82 islands. Its archipelagic geography segregates most people's autochthonous lands, preventing ready access to the national capital. Port Vila, then, is a city of non-citizens of the urban space: by accident of birth, a small number of people now control the land where virtually all poor migrants to the capital will live. This article describes how two non-equivalent relations—production and protection—feature prominently in the ways that people talk about tenure insecurity. In sum, these non-equivalent relations form the basis of how people relate to each other in terms of urban land occupancy. The pervasiveness of non-equivalence indicates a fundamental difference between denizens of Pacific cities, whose urban policies will need to adapt to account for its presence. A right to the city may look different in places where non-equivalence is at the very stamba (foundation) of how the city is made.

Property as a legal assemblage works to produce and imagine space according to a dominant set of norms and principles, thereby casting an imagined projection into multiple worlds. This unduly narrows the lens through which governance actors perceive and mediate competing claims to urban space. In this article we engage this feature of property in the context of contestation over urban land in Durban, an intensely plural city of the global South. We focus on three sets of spatial practices that are, in different ways, in tension with municipal governance objectives in Durban to probe how social actors interface with property law through divergent logics and lexicons. We argue that a more hybrid legal conception of property is required to enable just and normatively hybrid governance of these (often competing) claims.

Today, many cities in post-industrial societies are strongholds of left and progressive political forces. Almost 100 years ago, left parties had instituted municipal socialism in several European cities. In this article, we compare these two periods of left urban rule by focusing on the long-term changes over the last 120 years in the socio-demographic profile of urban left elites in four major Swiss cities. Our analysis of left elected representatives at six key dates highlights the main differences between the municipal socialists of the interwar period and the new urban left that rules contemporary cities. The former are members of the working class, blue-collar workers without university education, while the latter are members of the upper-middle class, highly educated sociocultural professionals. The results of our analysis contribute to a better understanding of the sociological composition of urban left-progressive political forces, an aspect that is somewhat neglected in recent research on the urban left. We discuss the potential political implications and further research avenues for contemporary debates in urban studies, in terms of urban policy priorities and political mobilization.

In this article we portray and unpack the fabric of urban expansion in contemporary Luanda. In doing so, we examine interdependencies and complementarities between the organization of oil extraction off the coast of Angola, the emergence of particular modalities of modernist city planning for the expansion of its capital city, and the proliferation of cement blocks in the making of new urban forms throughout its burgeoning peripheries. By showing how urban development has unfolded through the interconnected realization of multiple kinds of systematizing blocks—namely oil blocks, city blocks and cement blocks—we analyse key material components in the production of new markets and urban spaces in the Angolan capital. By tracing forms of capitalism and modularity in the making of contemporary Luanda, we develop the concept of blocos urbanism to draw attention to modes of standardization and the production of legibility in contemporary processes of urbanization. Through this study, we aim to contribute to the conceptual apparatus for deciphering our global urban condition.

A rich seam of waste scholarship already addresses the exclusion faced by informal waste workers as cities in the global South undergo spatial transformations to become ‘world class’. However, less attention has been paid to how state practices have reproduced inequalities within and across waste picker communities. Drawing upon eleven months of ethnographic research at Mumbai's Deonar dump site, this article maps the practices through which waste workers have responded to their exclusion following a massive fire in 2016. It demonstrates that social exclusion is experienced differently by different members of the community and calls for a greater focus on heterogeneity amongst waste workers. Multi-dimensional vulnerabilities manifest through these workers’ deal-making strategies, while simultaneously mirroring the conditions of marginality produced by the state. The article contributes to debates on marginality by employing the lens of erasure to show how exclusion relies on the optics of visibility and invisibility. By unpicking the hierarchical structure within one waste worker organization, the article argues that the state-led mandate for garbage-free cities in India disproportionately affects those located at the margins of marginalized groups.