Pub Date : 2023-06-04DOI: 10.1177/27541258231179202
D. Rogers
From the metaphor-soaked concepts of Dracula urbanism, the Vampire index, Frankenstein urbanism and zombie neoliberalism to the idea of a vampire property-holding class, conceptual metaphors are a repeating theme in urban studies. Once you are alert to their presence, conceptual metaphors seem to be everywhere, operating as key literary devices, productive interpretive tactics and critical discursive manoeuvres in the field. And if it is true that metaphor is an important conceptual device in urban studies, then the field's use of conceptual metaphor deserves our critical attention. Taking Wilson and Wyly's Dracula urbanism as a prompt, this commentary offers some speculative reflections on conceptual metaphor in urban studies, before commenting on Dracula urbanism as a concept directly. The discussion is organised around the narrative tension, explanatory power and discursive playfulness that conceptual metaphor affords in urban studies. I argue the power of conceptual metaphor comes into play at the level of analytical acuity. A good conceptual metaphor has an explanatory power that moves our understanding of an urban process, issue, etc. forward. It opens new conceptual vistas, or it brings into focus new conceptual stakes, or it paths the way for new types of empirical investigation in the field. Put simply, a good conceptual metaphor allows for a good theoretical intervention. It has productive explanatory power; it takes urban scholars somewhere beyond their initial excitement about a fancy new name for a concept. A spooky conceptual metaphor must be analytically powerful, otherwise it's just Halloween; an empty signifier dressed up as Frankenstein for a night, trick or treating for citations and attention.
{"title":"Spooky concepts and urban studies: Conceptual metaphor, narrative tension and explanatory power","authors":"D. Rogers","doi":"10.1177/27541258231179202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258231179202","url":null,"abstract":"From the metaphor-soaked concepts of Dracula urbanism, the Vampire index, Frankenstein urbanism and zombie neoliberalism to the idea of a vampire property-holding class, conceptual metaphors are a repeating theme in urban studies. Once you are alert to their presence, conceptual metaphors seem to be everywhere, operating as key literary devices, productive interpretive tactics and critical discursive manoeuvres in the field. And if it is true that metaphor is an important conceptual device in urban studies, then the field's use of conceptual metaphor deserves our critical attention. Taking Wilson and Wyly's Dracula urbanism as a prompt, this commentary offers some speculative reflections on conceptual metaphor in urban studies, before commenting on Dracula urbanism as a concept directly. The discussion is organised around the narrative tension, explanatory power and discursive playfulness that conceptual metaphor affords in urban studies. I argue the power of conceptual metaphor comes into play at the level of analytical acuity. A good conceptual metaphor has an explanatory power that moves our understanding of an urban process, issue, etc. forward. It opens new conceptual vistas, or it brings into focus new conceptual stakes, or it paths the way for new types of empirical investigation in the field. Put simply, a good conceptual metaphor allows for a good theoretical intervention. It has productive explanatory power; it takes urban scholars somewhere beyond their initial excitement about a fancy new name for a concept. A spooky conceptual metaphor must be analytically powerful, otherwise it's just Halloween; an empty signifier dressed up as Frankenstein for a night, trick or treating for citations and attention.","PeriodicalId":206933,"journal":{"name":"Dialogues in Urban Research","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125915268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-31DOI: 10.1177/27541258231179203
D. Hudalah
Extending Wilson & Wyly's concept of Dracula urbanism, I examine interactions between technological, social, and political forces in fueling global capitalists’ addiction to metropolitan expansion in urban-rural frontiers. This expansion contributes to fulfilling Lefebre's complete urbanization thesis at the planetary scale. To my understanding, building frontier technological enclaves and megaprojects on the urban-rural frontier of metropolises and megaregional intermediate places entails “destructive creation” rather than standard “creative destruction.” Crucial to their survival, global capital networks build parasitic relationships with incompetent governments. Wilson & Wyly's Dracula urbanism uses “accumulation by seduction” (and degeneration) strategies, rather than brute “accumulation by dispossession” strategies, to kill the underserved sections of the societies and jeopardize the state's capacities silently and slowly.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/27541258231159107
AbdouMaliq Simone
Jon's article is a matter of how any event, interaction, or scenario works off all that precedes and follows it, how their very conditions of possibility are posed, not simply within the personalities, histories, or situations of a given context, but in the time underway, the multiplicity of indetectable transversals of responding to the entirety of the world at a given moment, which makes itself present in an unprecedented specificity.
{"title":"Ihnji Jon's Bubble Clash: Identity, Environment, and Politics in a Multicultural Suburb","authors":"AbdouMaliq Simone","doi":"10.1177/27541258231159107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258231159107","url":null,"abstract":"Jon's article is a matter of how any event, interaction, or scenario works off all that precedes and follows it, how their very conditions of possibility are posed, not simply within the personalities, histories, or situations of a given context, but in the time underway, the multiplicity of indetectable transversals of responding to the entirety of the world at a given moment, which makes itself present in an unprecedented specificity.","PeriodicalId":206933,"journal":{"name":"Dialogues in Urban Research","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134431866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/27541258231160440
AJ Kim
In a departure from historic understandings of immigrant settlement in North America, and the traditional Global City, a cluster of suburban immigrant enclaves in metropolitan Atlanta are highly representative of immigration and migration trends, worldwide. While a post-Trump and authentically “purple” Georgia continues to debate anti-immigrant measures, Asian and Latino households and businesses array themselves in linear fashion along metro Atlanta's ubiquitous highway corridors, and local politics in Atlanta suburbs like Norcross, Doraville, and Clarkston advertise efforts to welcome and integrate immigrant populations. However, each city is also primarily interested in generating higher property taxes and offering increased units of upper-class to luxury housing for a select few. The immigrant suburb still wants boxes, upon boxes, in yellow, pink, and blue.
{"title":"Dreamscapes and Monsters, from “Little Boxes” to “Multicultural Suburbs”","authors":"AJ Kim","doi":"10.1177/27541258231160440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258231160440","url":null,"abstract":"In a departure from historic understandings of immigrant settlement in North America, and the traditional Global City, a cluster of suburban immigrant enclaves in metropolitan Atlanta are highly representative of immigration and migration trends, worldwide. While a post-Trump and authentically “purple” Georgia continues to debate anti-immigrant measures, Asian and Latino households and businesses array themselves in linear fashion along metro Atlanta's ubiquitous highway corridors, and local politics in Atlanta suburbs like Norcross, Doraville, and Clarkston advertise efforts to welcome and integrate immigrant populations. However, each city is also primarily interested in generating higher property taxes and offering increased units of upper-class to luxury housing for a select few. The immigrant suburb still wants boxes, upon boxes, in yellow, pink, and blue.","PeriodicalId":206933,"journal":{"name":"Dialogues in Urban Research","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121453108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/27541258231156533
J. MacLeavy
Reflecting on Ihnji Jon's contention that urban conflicts emerge from the ‘different conceptualisations of temporality’ that groups of residents hold, this paper considers how urban practitioners might productively engage with time as a situated experience. Specifically, it considers the methodological techniques, forms of collaboration and modes of engagement that enable a focus on the entanglements of past, present and future times which underpin different ways of thinking about urban issues and generate new possibilities for building solidarity in the process. Orientating research enquiries towards non-linear and relational conceptions of time unsettles traditional forms of problem-solving in which historically set goals are prioritised over the exploration of different ideas and trajectories as a means of enacting new urban realities. This requires a commitment to a distinctive way of working in which new ideas, meanings and effects are seen to emerge slowly from a creative and collaborative process of academic engagement, which runs counter to expectations of quick and time-limited interventions in both academia and urban policy and politics.
{"title":"Possibilities of urban research: Temporal difference and the politics of the future","authors":"J. MacLeavy","doi":"10.1177/27541258231156533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/27541258231156533","url":null,"abstract":"Reflecting on Ihnji Jon's contention that urban conflicts emerge from the ‘different conceptualisations of temporality’ that groups of residents hold, this paper considers how urban practitioners might productively engage with time as a situated experience. Specifically, it considers the methodological techniques, forms of collaboration and modes of engagement that enable a focus on the entanglements of past, present and future times which underpin different ways of thinking about urban issues and generate new possibilities for building solidarity in the process. Orientating research enquiries towards non-linear and relational conceptions of time unsettles traditional forms of problem-solving in which historically set goals are prioritised over the exploration of different ideas and trajectories as a means of enacting new urban realities. This requires a commitment to a distinctive way of working in which new ideas, meanings and effects are seen to emerge slowly from a creative and collaborative process of academic engagement, which runs counter to expectations of quick and time-limited interventions in both academia and urban policy and politics.","PeriodicalId":206933,"journal":{"name":"Dialogues in Urban Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122533217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/27541258231156799
Ernesto López-Morales
The rent gap idea comes from neoclassical economics. Neil Smith explained that the Potential Ground Rent (PGR) is equivalent to the ‘best and highest’ land use value that any private developer recognizes and aims to internalize. However, like Marx, Ricardo, George, Haïla, and even Milton Friedman, Smith considered this gap as unearned valorization, made up of external factors, State infrastructure, FARs, upzoning, and so on. Furthermore, for him, making the PGR value profitable makes homes unaffordable to those who do not hold enough power to use or circulate in opportunity areas under the newly imposed market prices and rules and hence suffer displacement. Losing access to central spaces is not accidental nor natural but deliberate, only made possible by developers’ and property owners’ choices to extract the maximum PGR. When Smith claims the rent gap is not economic but political theory, it is an urgent invitation to the urban grassroots to act, resist, and bargain for cash or locational compensation because the PGR extraction means the privatization of a social good (the land rent), is an evident policy failure, and violates the right to the city. Smith passed away too early to witness the current global rentierization of land and housing economies (Christophers, 2019) by a new form of planetary feudalism. Finance and real estate barons take over substantial shares of land and housing investments while the middle classes live on the rest of the real estate available amidst growing financial instability. By 1979, Smith saw neighborhood-type gentrification as explaining the working of capitalism at the time. He took the neighborhood as a ‘witness place,’ as late anthropologist Angela Giglia (2022) would have probably commented. If by the 1970s, dominant theories of consumer sovereignty in postindustrial Anglo societies were not explaining the other half of gentrification, Neil Smith came to fill this void. However, currently, the rent gap theory explains beyond the neighborhood boundaries: let us accept that any housing policy which is ignorant of a form of land rent-value extraction would resolve little. The latter proves the relevance of Smith’s simple rent gap theory to understanding the urban and housing system, even for those who do not cite him or ignore his work. Further, Clark and Pissin (2020) rightly point out that the rent gap exists without gentrification. Ultimately, the rent gap questions political, economic, and – now we know (Wyly, this issue) – moral justifications for internalizing valorized land rent by a few privileged agents. The rent gap supersedes gentrification: there are density rent gaps in high-rise redevelopments of both New York and Santiago (Fisher et al., 2022, Vergara & Aguirre, 2020), Airbnb rent gaps (Wachsmuth and Weisler, 2018), transnational rent gaps (Hayes and Zaban, 2020), and rent gaps coming from the commodified
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Pub Date : 2023-02-22DOI: 10.1177/27541258231159127
Ihnji Jon
In response to the thoughtful and generous commentaries of Simone, MacLeavy, Kim, and Lake in my paper “Bubble Clash,” I lay out three considerations for social inquiry and knowledge production. First, learning from MacIntyre’s discussion of Jane Austen, whose stories exemplify an imaginative moral inquiry in which different rationalities and virtues collide, I highlight the role of stories in moral progress in which our sensitivity and responsiveness to people and things are increased. Second, I expand on Simone’s and MacLeavy’s notion of contingent materialities that mandate storytellers’ work to be always in progress and “in the middle.” I connect this line of thought with Kim’s “dreamscapes” of the municipalities in Georgia where the past, present, and future are being spatially materialized, the examples of which include the continuing legacies of institutional anti-Blackness concurrently existing with immigrants’ growing physical predominance in “White-fled” areas. Finally, I return to Lake’s pragmatism and its emphasis on moral inquiry. No matter how complex, ungraspable, and perturbing the world may seem, the wisdom of pragmatism invites us to start from questioning the purpose of our writing act: why do we write and for whom do we write?
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Pub Date : 2023-02-16DOI: 10.1177/27541258231156801
W. S. Shaw
I first met Neil Smith after my first and probably most disastrous conference presentation in the mid-1990s, in Boston (USA). In the epoch before PowerPoint, I experienced a technology-fail, and an out-of-body sensation as my examples, captured on photographic slides to be projected on a large screen, flew out of the slide-carousel and landed willy-nilly in the crowd. Neil came up to me later and offered to show me around Manhattan’s lower east side to compare the racialized experiences of gentrification with my inner Sydney case study—he was not fazed by my presentation disaster. He had latched onto my take on whiteness in the revanchist city. Several years later, Smith agreed to examine my doctoral thesis. However, a year after its dispatch, he deemed my thesis to be ‘too cultural’ to assess. To me, cultures of white privilege encroaching on an inner-city Aboriginal community were embedded within the revanchist city. He clearly did not agree. Smith, and his work, has certainly challenged and enlightened many of us but one concept—the rent gap—has not been the cause of much consternation. To me, and many others, it is a reasonably simple observation of the underpinning mechanism of gentrification: where potential rents far exceed actual rents paid for property. This creates precarity for renters, including community welfare services, and potential capital gain for property owners if they can afford rising rates and taxes that come with increased property values. Many cannot. Yet in those heady days of neo-Marxist critique, real-world issues were often couched in densely expressed and sometimes aggressive ways of arguing, often cleverly embedded in layers of detail. This complexification was for the few to extoll. For me, particularly then, this intellectual elitism seemed off the mark—I had just come out of community-based activism, working with young homeless and ‘at risk’ people. I saw the rent gap in action, glaringly operating in the service of capital. Of far more interest to me was how revanchism operated within the process of gentrification. I could not see why ‘the cultural’was not part of the politics of capital. I wondered why gentrification could not be conceived of as both economic and cultural. How best should we further a social justice agenda? Surely theory should be flexible and, if need be, promiscuously fluid (cf Gibson-Graham, 1996). Perhaps I am ‘intellectually lazy’ (Wyly, current volume).
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Pub Date : 2023-02-16DOI: 10.1177/27541258231156798
D. Ley
Elvin Wyly’s record of innovative and analytically tight research on contemporary American urbanisation has addressed in particular the injustices of gentrification, and of discrimination and predatory mortgage financing abusing class, gender and racial vulnerabilities. His work has also pioneered a politically progressive application of quantitative methods. This significant corpus has recently spread its wings to encounter new socio-economic formations of the digital age, including social networking and cognitive-cultural capitalism with their circuits of contact and influencers in cyber space (Wyly, 2013). The solid ground of neighbourhoods and census tracts has been joined by virtual and ethereal spaces bearing invisible but palpable power. The work has ascended to the metaphysical in exploring the concept of the noösphere, the product of an evolutionary theory of consciousness developed by the theologian Teilhard de Chardin. And now there is an additional dimension, deep history. The present is a palimpsest, lives are ‘the tips of stems, endlessly twisting themselves down in the realms of times past’ (Wyly, 2023, quoting Torsten Hägerstrand). The geographical landscape is a surface to be excavated for the sometimesviolent origins of even inert contemporary spaces. In this complex project Wyly has immersed himself in a century-old discourse of evolutionary change, arguing how such doctrines as social Darwinism and eugenics continue to shape the competitive contours of today’s geography (Wyly, 2021) and urban geographies (Wyly, 2019, 2022). The interlocutors in this discourse would not easily recognise each other, as they occupy a transdisciplinary space without roaming limits. Voices ricochet, collide, and trade glancing blows across a virtual pinball machine of citations. Examples fall over each other in the parade of land use cases and personalities as we peer through the Vancouver portal toward the end of the paper. What are the dangers of this abbreviation of cases and sources? Are more complex positions/persons/ places overly simplified? Is this an ironic undercutting or a mimicry of modernity’s fast pace and short sound bite? What can be the epistemological, even moral, damage of the suffix-ism that we all use to collapse diversity and nuance into an enforced homogeneity? Wyly is reflexive enough to recognise the dangers in such strategies: ‘It’s risky to tear out a few textual fragments from the complex, diverse lived experiences and situated knowledges of Deloria, Jacobs, Smith, Hartshorne, Schulman, Marx, Kant, and Einstein and then to hope for coherence after tossing everything into an epistemological Vegematic’ (Wyly, 2023). Arguably, such a shared confinement, fixed by the author, might be warranted by the shifting multidimensionality of the present described alliteratively as, ‘New combinatorics of calculation, cognition, and capital accumulation’ (Wyly, 2023). What indeed could be more relevant today than a scholarly mashup? In
埃尔文·威利对当代美国城市化的创新和严密的分析研究记录，特别关注了中产阶级化的不公正，歧视和掠夺性抵押贷款融资滥用阶级，性别和种族脆弱性。他的工作还开创了定量方法在政治上的进步应用。这个重要的语料库最近展开了它的翅膀，以遇到数字时代的新的社会经济形态，包括社交网络和认知文化资本主义及其在网络空间中的联系和影响(Wyly, 2013)。社区和人口普查区的坚实基础已经被虚拟和空灵的空间所加入，这些空间承载着无形但明显的力量。这部作品在探索noösphere的概念方面已经上升到形而上学，noösphere是神学家德查丹(Teilhard de Chardin)提出的意识进化理论的产物。现在还有一个额外的维度，深厚的历史。现在是一个重写本，生命是“茎尖，在过去的时代无止境地扭曲自己”(Wyly, 2023，引用Torsten Hägerstrand)。地理景观是一个需要挖掘的表面，有时甚至是惰性当代空间的暴力起源。在这个复杂的项目中，Wyly沉浸在一个有百年历史的进化变化话语中，争论社会达尔文主义和优生学等学说如何继续塑造当今地理学(Wyly, 2021)和城市地理学(Wyly, 2019, 2022)的竞争轮廓。在这个话语中的对话者不会轻易认出对方，因为他们占据了一个没有漫游限制的跨学科空间。声音在引文的虚拟弹球机中弹跳、碰撞和交换。当我们浏览温哥华门户网站时，在文章的最后，在土地使用案例和个性的游行中，例子比比皆是。这种病例和来源的缩写有什么危险?更复杂的位置/人员/地点是否过于简单化了?这是一种讽刺的削弱，还是对现代快节奏和简短声音的模仿?我们都用后缀主义将多样性和细微差别分解为强制的同质性，这种后缀主义在认识论上，甚至道德上，会造成什么损害?威利的反身性足以认识到这种策略的危险:“从德洛丽亚、雅各布、史密斯、哈特霍恩、舒尔曼、马克思、康德和爱因斯坦的复杂、多样的生活经历和情境知识中撕下一些文本片段，然后把所有东西都扔进认识论的Vegematic中，希望得到连贯性，这是有风险的”(威利，2023)。可以说，这种由作者确定的共同限制，可能会被当前不断变化的多维度所保证，这种多维度被头韵地描述为“计算、认知和资本积累的新组合”(Wyly, 2023)。在今天，还有什么比学术混搭更有意义呢?在这样一个世界里，我的手表具有电子产品商店的功能，还可以在多个平台上召唤行星上的其他产品，对重新配置的类别的一些识别可能是有必要的。此外，在Wyly最近的论文中
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