City, Culture and Society最新文献

Fiscal decentralisation has been an important tool for local governance and development for many countries in Africa, in the last five decades. In many African countries, decentralized governance was adopted as a way of expanding grassroots participation and generating local resources for development without a consensus on ways to mobilize revenues by local governments. After over three decades of Ghana's decentralisation reforms, it is becoming apparent that local government units in strategic locations have peculiar advantages as well as challenges in mobilising local revenue. Using the Awutu-Senya East Municipal Area, this study explores the locational dynamics of Peri-urban municipalities in mobilising internally generated fund (IGF). The study adopted qualitative methods, including review of financial reports of the Municipal Assembly, interviews of key informants, officials of the finance department and revenue mobilisation unit; selected contracted revenue collectors and operators of local businesses. The study revealed locational influencers of revenue mobilisation to include increasing property values due to rapid peri-urban growth; upsurge of satellite businesses; creations of new municipal areas and leakages in internal revenue mobilisation, due to continuously changing boundaries. While the study resonates with emerging literature on local revenue mobilisation, it departs in its re-examination of geographical advantages and setbacks.

Culture’s role in sustaining urban development is recognised in this Special Issue and yet the urban setting is not an island of cultural development, but rather merges into suburban, rural and remote areas where the significance of cultural activity and the local actors can be overlooked by the urban observer and funder. In Australia, communities outside of capital cities differ significantly from each other, with community arts and cultural development efforts operating at various scales, to address unique local issues, through diverse artforms and ways of working. Funders with different processes, priorities, and relationships with funding recipients support this activity and can play a role in limiting or enabling community-determined responses to complex local issues.

This article explores a case study where adoption of an online outcomes focussed cultural activity planning and evaluation platform unexpectedly contributed to a deepening of trust between a city-based corporate funder and a regional arts producer working in a suburban area of the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia. Interviews with stakeholders revealed that the platform, together with the trust that it helped to cultivate, supported a creative, responsive, and flexible community arts and cultural development project that achieved cultural and social outcomes for local young people considered disadvantaged while working towards the funder’s global goal to enable social equity.

The case study suggests that when funders are removed from the contexts where activities will be delivered, a trusting relationship spanning geographic and socio-cultural divides can encourage mutually beneficial collaboration, reduce rigidity to allow an emergent strategy, and achieve impactful community-determined arts and cultural activity.

This paper examines the intimate relationship among gender, religion, and the urban with a special focus on Muslim women in Delhi, India. Drawing on interviews conducted with young, middle-class, unmarried Muslim women, this paper demonstrates that Muslim women's lived experiences of religion and gender are often complex and situated at the intersections of embodied spatial practices of religion, gender and urban-ness. Predominant understanding of Indian Muslim women focuses on their gendered religious enactments such as purdah (veiling), oppression by Muslim men, and their need to be ‘rescued’ from Islamic systems of oppression. However, these narratives do not fully capture the complexity of Muslim women's embodied experiences and encounters with the urban. In turn, this paper investigates how Muslim women's experiences of the urban unfold at the interstices of gendered and religious geographies of the self, families/faith community, and the city in everyday life and exceptional contexts. I argue that the intersection of gender, religion and the city is nuanced, ad-hoc, and paradoxically shift and change within the historical socio-spatial urban context of Delhi.

This case study is concerned with the arrival and impact of private art museum Mona in Tasmania, examining how the local creative community perceives its impact and how it influences the broader cultural landscape. The museum represents a larger trend where affluent individuals establish prestigious private museums with significant global reach. This study has found Mona to be a highly personal endeavour, providing influential networks in support of the owner's personal and business objectives. It highlights the perception that the museum has had a transformative impact on Tasmania, particularly in adding a sophisticated dimension to the state's cultural visage and a new vibrancy that is thought to resonate strongly with tourists. Previous scholarship has shown that private museums operate in a different context and play by different rules to their public counterparts and this study has shown this to be true in identifying problems with how to govern Mona and the local creative scene trying to negotiate a place within this changing context. Mona has brought credibility to the arts, but set high expectations for the local arts scene, creating entry barriers for young artists and challenging arts institutions with more limited resources.

This ethnographic research examines the interplay between perceived Islamic regulatory regime and cosmopolitan space through the experiences of a group of well-educated young Chinese female Muslim converts in Hong Kong, where Islam largely evokes imaginaries of ethnic minorities and “otherness.” As Chinese Muslim converts transition from the ethnic majority to an ethnic minority within the Muslim minority, which is predominantly comprised of Indonesian, South Asian, and African migrants, they navigate the challenges of being both insiders and outsiders. Moreover, Muslim-majority societies are often stereotypically perceived as being incompatible with gender equality and modernity. By focusing on the intersections of gender and ethnicity, this article argues that these women embody and represent regulatory enclosure and cosmopolitan identities simultaneously, necessitating continuous negotiations and contestations. They identify themselves as members of both the local and global Islamic communities, as well as modern, independent females in a cosmopolitan city. Through an exploration of their strategic creation of Islamic practices in response to different situations, this article sheds light on how the gendered, ethnicized body negotiates regulatory enclosure and cosmopolitanism, and how Islam is dynamically constituted and re-constituted locally in response to constantly evolving challenges.

This article presents a systematic literature review on urban heritage. It analyses (a) how urban heritage is conceptualized and interpreted in academic research, (b) urban heritage management modes. This literature review interprets urban heritage as a resource, collective memory, and space. It categorizes urban heritage management practice into six management modes according to stakeholders' collaboration levels: community-led, expert-coordinated, government-led, conflict-resolution, and privatization. These modes are analyzed based on different political regimes. The review observes five approaches to conceptualizing urban heritage: researching people's perspectives towards urban heritage, framing urban heritage, tracing the process of urban heritage forming, reviewing international policies and charters, and exploring the functions of urban heritage. Finally, for the future research agenda, the article recommends a focus on the following themes: the causal relations between factors and effects of adopting different urban heritage modes, researching community engagement and interactions between different levels of government, and analyzing conflict-resolution processes systematically.

The far right has now entered into the mainstream politics of nearly every European country, yet we have confirmed little about the social context in which far-right parties thrive. While most of the literature assumes that far-right sympathies are driven by economic or cultural grievance, this paper looks to cities and contact theory. Recent advances suggest that even indirect or vicarious intergroup contact can reduce prejudice toward out-groups such as migrants. Urban theorists, as well, have long argued that urban design can influence social outcomes by promoting or discouraging interaction between residents. This paper applies this literature to the rise of the far right, which often scapegoats out-groups in its rhetoric. Using data from 73 cities in Spain, we find that residents of cities rich in continuous urban fabric—which promotes contact—are less likely to consider voting for the far right but that this relationship is weaker in highly segregated cities.

This study investigates the impact of the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) Wrocław 2016 on the growth of creative industries in the city. The research involved surveying managers of local enterprises in Wrocław's creative sectors, focusing on their opinions regarding the expected benefits of the ECoC and its potential influence on the companies' economic development in the future.

The findings indicate that most respondents believed the ECoC positively impacted local development by fostering new artistic endeavours and promoting local entertainment companies. They also perceived significant economic effects, including increased demand for cultural goods and services and increased spending on culture and entertainment. Instead, opinions on company development were primarily influenced by the long-term investment climate that involves multiple factors. The ECoC indirectly contributed to this climate by redirecting local policies towards further cultural expansion, creating a more welcoming environment for cultural industries, and triggering spillover effects in this sector.

Thus, the study argues that the ECoC title is not a direct catalyst for developing cultural industries in Wrocław. Rather, it represents the culmination of a long-term strategy to establish the city as a cultural hub, effectively enhancing this sector of the local economy.

It is widely recognized that Cape Town remains a segregated city, with an affluent elite minority around the central business district and surrounding suburbs, and where the majority of its around four million residents live in the sprawl that makes up the rest of the city. Much of the focus of municipalities has been on how infrastructure can enable just and sustainable urban transitions, and we argue that heritage, seen as a core socio-cultural, material and metaphysical infrastructure, can play a role in this too. The value of working collectively, collaborating inclusively, and co-producing constructively, is now widely accepted as useful tactics for approaching policy making and implementation in local contexts. This article reflects on our (the authors) collaboration, paying particular attention to the co-production of a policy framing note entitled ‘Heritage sustainability and urban development: Valuing tangible and intangible heritage as drivers of placemaking’. We argue that there is a necessary and urgent shift from heritage protection and conservation to heritage justice located within a ‘southerning’ and intersectional feminist approach to action-oriented scholarship. We reflect on our approach to collaboration as deploying caring and care-full tactics of official activism within the City of Cape Town. Ultimately, we propose that these qualities of coproduction, rooted in a shared politics of heritage-based urban justice and sustainability can strengthen how heritage can be mobilized for action in municipalities.

In recent times, there has been a global emergence of tactical and temporary urban interventions as a novel approach to enhancing local neighborhoods with minimal risks. These interventions include various activities in the built environment, such as street art, pop-up shops, urban festivals, gardening, and seasonal markets. This trend has garnered the attention of both scholars and policymakers due to its growing popularity. The academic literature often refers to these interventions as tactical urbanism (TU), pop-up urbanism, temporary urbanism, DIY urbanism, and guerrilla urbanism. This paper examines temporary urban interventions as urban catalysts to further explore their potential in enhancing urban spaces in a Middle Eastern context, focusing on Amman, Jordan. The study employs purposeful critical sampling, semi-structured interviews, and the Urban Catalyst model to identify and categorize the implementation mechanisms of several interventions into tactics and strategies. The research findings suggest a potential outline for strategic and tactical implementation approaches that may support the understanding of the interventions by practitioners, policymakers, and tacticians. The study concludes by highlighting actions that actors can take to manage, experiment with, and utilize tactical and temporary interventions in Amman.