Pub Date : 2026-02-07DOI: 10.1177/00420980251408416
Nicholas Patrick Sweeney
Devolution is argued to reduce spatial inequalities by improving policymaking, tailoring policies and thus promoting (inclusive) economic growth. To assess this argument in the English context, I study the performance of the six regions that received increased powers via Mayoral Combined Authority status in 2017 under the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act (CLGDA) 2016. Using data spanning from 2011 to 2022 and a difference-in-differences approach with heterogeneous treatment effects, I analyse the influence of the first six years of devolution on economic growth. The findings show that devolved areas did not experience faster than expected growth. Moreover, within devolved areas, already wealthy districts consistently grew faster than poorer ones. In combination, these results paint a negative picture for the influence of the CLGDA 2016 as a tool for reducing between- or within-region economic inequalities, adding to a weight of literature questioning the efficacy of devolution in England.
{"title":"Devolution and economic growth in England’s City Regions","authors":"Nicholas Patrick Sweeney","doi":"10.1177/00420980251408416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251408416","url":null,"abstract":"Devolution is argued to reduce spatial inequalities by improving policymaking, tailoring policies and thus promoting (inclusive) economic growth. To assess this argument in the English context, I study the performance of the six regions that received increased powers via Mayoral Combined Authority status in 2017 under the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act (CLGDA) 2016. Using data spanning from 2011 to 2022 and a difference-in-differences approach with heterogeneous treatment effects, I analyse the influence of the first six years of devolution on economic growth. The findings show that devolved areas did not experience faster than expected growth. Moreover, within devolved areas, already wealthy districts consistently grew faster than poorer ones. In combination, these results paint a negative picture for the influence of the CLGDA 2016 as a tool for reducing between- or within-region economic inequalities, adding to a weight of literature questioning the efficacy of devolution in England.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146138526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-05DOI: 10.1177/00420980251405777
Rebekah Plueckhahn, Constance Smith
In recent years there has been renewed enthusiasm for comparison within urban studies: a call for comparison that does away with conventional units of analysis and is more experimental. Recent directions in studies of comparative urbanism have urged urban scholars to move on from the tightly controlled comparisons of (usually) Northern cities and to think instead with variation, creativity and alternative modes of citymaking. Drawing from recent analytical directions in anthropology as well as Édouard Glissant’s ‘rhizomatic thinking’, we aim to take up the call by AbdouMaliq Simone to think through what comparison does , where and how it happens, what it sets in motion and what this means for how we understand difference. What we propose in this commentary is twofold. Firstly, we attend to how acts of comparison, and lines of connection and difference, are embedded in all kinds of processes of living, knowing and transforming the urban. Here, comparative urban research is one comparative mode among many. Secondly, we advocate thinking through the possibilities of what comparative acts give rise to, whether assemblages, ethics, materialities, socialities or politics. In doing so, situations can be brought into conversation with each other and new scholarly, analytical connections can be drawn. In seeking to understand such divergent phenomena, whatever they may be, generative analyses can be made in urban research – conceptual, material and/or theoretical – that might otherwise remain out of sight.
{"title":"Comparison in motion: Anthropologies of connection and difference in urban research","authors":"Rebekah Plueckhahn, Constance Smith","doi":"10.1177/00420980251405777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251405777","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years there has been renewed enthusiasm for comparison within urban studies: a call for comparison that does away with conventional units of analysis and is more experimental. Recent directions in studies of comparative urbanism have urged urban scholars to move on from the tightly controlled comparisons of (usually) Northern cities and to think instead with variation, creativity and alternative modes of citymaking. Drawing from recent analytical directions in anthropology as well as Édouard Glissant’s ‘rhizomatic thinking’, we aim to take up the call by AbdouMaliq Simone to think through what comparison <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">does</jats:italic> , where and how it happens, what it sets in motion and what this means for how we understand difference. What we propose in this commentary is twofold. Firstly, we attend to how acts of comparison, and lines of connection and difference, are embedded in all kinds of processes of living, knowing and transforming the urban. Here, comparative urban research is one comparative mode among many. Secondly, we advocate thinking through the possibilities of what comparative acts give rise to, whether assemblages, ethics, materialities, socialities or politics. In doing so, situations can be brought into conversation with each other and new scholarly, analytical connections can be drawn. In seeking to understand such divergent phenomena, whatever they may be, generative analyses can be made in urban research – conceptual, material and/or theoretical – that might otherwise remain out of sight.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146122007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-05DOI: 10.1177/00420980251398376
Morag Rose, Dee Heddon, Clare Qualmann, Harry Wilson, Maggie O’Neill
This article discusses the impact of Covid-19 on disabled people’s experiences of walking in the UK, using survey and interview data from the project Walking Publics/Walking Arts: Walking, Wellbeing and Community During Covid-19 . Built environments are often encountered by disabled people as hostile and exclusionary. Our research identifies ways that this inequality was significantly magnified during the pandemic, including through overcrowded public spaces, increased street furniture and lack of facilities. Alongside attending to everyday walking experiences, we draw upon creative walking tactics and the work of walking artists, which enable imaginative encounters at multiple scales. These demonstrate how creativity can iterate alternative trajectories which embed accessible infrastructures and facilitate different ways of encountering, moving through and being in the city.
{"title":"Cripping desire lines: Disabled people, creative walking and the right to walk the city","authors":"Morag Rose, Dee Heddon, Clare Qualmann, Harry Wilson, Maggie O’Neill","doi":"10.1177/00420980251398376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251398376","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the impact of Covid-19 on disabled people’s experiences of walking in the UK, using survey and interview data from the project <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">Walking Publics/Walking Arts: Walking, Wellbeing and Community During Covid-19</jats:italic> . Built environments are often encountered by disabled people as hostile and exclusionary. Our research identifies ways that this inequality was significantly magnified during the pandemic, including through overcrowded public spaces, increased street furniture and lack of facilities. Alongside attending to everyday walking experiences, we draw upon creative walking tactics and the work of walking artists, which enable imaginative encounters at multiple scales. These demonstrate how creativity can iterate alternative trajectories which embed accessible infrastructures and facilitate different ways of encountering, moving through and being in the city.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146122006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-03DOI: 10.1177/00420980251405782
Allaeddine Fenchouch
While academic research on the mechanisms of production of the built environment has often focused on large-scale real estate projects in alliance with public authorities, the nature and scale of micro-projects and small-scale investors are rarely explored. This article proposes to examine the ‘ordinary fabric of the city’ through these micro real estate projects, which oscillate between formal and informal practices, based on a qualitative study conducted with mainly resident investors and small-scale developers in a peripheral municipality of the Algerian capital, Algiers. Our starting point is the hypothesis that urban production is increasingly moving towards more insecure and unpredictable cities as a result of private initiatives that are less visible, but nonetheless decisive in urban transformation. The study examines the conditions under which these investments emerge, in undervalued urban spaces and in a partially or wholly informal context. It also focuses on the bricolage of the ordinary fabric, analyses forms of ‘tactics’ used by actors to mimic legality, takes into account the conflictual aspects of emerging projects and bears witness to the emergence of a quasi-informal property market. The findings point to a strong potential for policy to formalise informal practices. The results also indicate that a significant part of the city depends on free market mechanisms that are partially free of constraints, where non-conforming transactions and constructions shape a mixed urbanisation.
{"title":"Real estate dynamics and ordinary urban fabric in Algiers: Tactical adaptation, anticipation and land transformations","authors":"Allaeddine Fenchouch","doi":"10.1177/00420980251405782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251405782","url":null,"abstract":"While academic research on the mechanisms of production of the built environment has often focused on large-scale real estate projects in alliance with public authorities, the nature and scale of micro-projects and small-scale investors are rarely explored. This article proposes to examine the ‘ordinary fabric of the city’ through these micro real estate projects, which oscillate between formal and informal practices, based on a qualitative study conducted with mainly resident investors and small-scale developers in a peripheral municipality of the Algerian capital, Algiers. Our starting point is the hypothesis that urban production is increasingly moving towards more insecure and unpredictable cities as a result of private initiatives that are less visible, but nonetheless decisive in urban transformation. The study examines the conditions under which these investments emerge, in undervalued urban spaces and in a partially or wholly informal context. It also focuses on the bricolage of the ordinary fabric, analyses forms of ‘tactics’ used by actors to mimic legality, takes into account the conflictual aspects of emerging projects and bears witness to the emergence of a quasi-informal property market. The findings point to a strong potential for policy to formalise informal practices. The results also indicate that a significant part of the city depends on free market mechanisms that are partially free of constraints, where non-conforming transactions and constructions shape a mixed urbanisation.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"108 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146115666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-03DOI: 10.1177/00420980251410862
Sihyun Choi
This study examines intergenerational wealth transfer and class reproduction strategies centered on Gangnam housing, drawing from in-depth interviews with senior residents and their adult children. The senior upper-middle class residents of Gangnam, who acquired residential properties early during the district’s development and accumulated significant wealth, engage in class reproduction by transferring assets—primarily Gangnam real estate—to their adult children. This practice emerges as a response to rising labor market insecurity and increasing housing market polarization, which make it difficult for their children to secure residency in Gangnam independently. This article makes three key arguments. First, it emphasizes that class reproduction strategies extend beyond young adulthood, continuing over the life course into middle age. Second, it highlights that intergenerational wealth transfer requires persistent collaboration and sustained efforts between generations. Third, it argues that family strategies aimed exclusively at sharing scarce urban resources, such as Gangnam’s high-priced real estate, exemplify class- and space-based social closure, thereby functioning as a mechanism that perpetuates social inequality.
{"title":"Intergenerational housing strategies and social closure in Gangnam","authors":"Sihyun Choi","doi":"10.1177/00420980251410862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251410862","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines intergenerational wealth transfer and class reproduction strategies centered on Gangnam housing, drawing from in-depth interviews with senior residents and their adult children. The senior upper-middle class residents of Gangnam, who acquired residential properties early during the district’s development and accumulated significant wealth, engage in class reproduction by transferring assets—primarily Gangnam real estate—to their adult children. This practice emerges as a response to rising labor market insecurity and increasing housing market polarization, which make it difficult for their children to secure residency in Gangnam independently. This article makes three key arguments. First, it emphasizes that class reproduction strategies extend beyond young adulthood, continuing over the life course into middle age. Second, it highlights that intergenerational wealth transfer requires persistent collaboration and sustained efforts between generations. Third, it argues that family strategies aimed exclusively at sharing scarce urban resources, such as Gangnam’s high-priced real estate, exemplify class- and space-based social closure, thereby functioning as a mechanism that perpetuates social inequality.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146115667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-03DOI: 10.1177/00420980251408379
Lora A. Phillips
Scholarly debates about a right to the city in the Global North have largely neglected the potential role of housing type and tenure in shaping displacement risk and socio-demographic disparities therein. Yet, past scholarship demonstrates that mobile home residents face a heighted risk of dispossession relative to residents of other dwelling types. Leveraging microdata from Canada’s 2021 Census of Population, I elucidate who would lose their right to the city if urban mobile home residents were displaced. First, I use latent class analysis to identify two distinct clusters of urban mobile home residents, each containing approximately 50% of Canada’s urban mobile home population, but whose socio-demographic characteristics differ along key dimensions of social vulnerability. Next, I conduct a series of logistic regression models to simulate between-cluster variation in the likelihood of displacement if mobile home dispossession were to occur. Results demonstrate significant variation in the likelihood of displacement across clusters, suggesting that the urban mobile home residents at the greatest risk of displacement are lower-income, white, older adults who are not in the labor force and who live alone. By bringing scholarly debates about a right to the city into conversation with the literature on mobile homes, I underscore the key role of dwelling type and tenure in shaping urban citizenship in Canada.
{"title":"Mobile home residents’ tenuous right to the city: Uniform or varied?","authors":"Lora A. Phillips","doi":"10.1177/00420980251408379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251408379","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarly debates about a right to the city in the Global North have largely neglected the potential role of housing type and tenure in shaping displacement risk and socio-demographic disparities therein. Yet, past scholarship demonstrates that mobile home residents face a heighted risk of dispossession relative to residents of other dwelling types. Leveraging microdata from Canada’s 2021 Census of Population, I elucidate who would lose their right to the city if urban mobile home residents were displaced. First, I use latent class analysis to identify two distinct clusters of urban mobile home residents, each containing approximately 50% of Canada’s urban mobile home population, but whose socio-demographic characteristics differ along key dimensions of social vulnerability. Next, I conduct a series of logistic regression models to simulate between-cluster variation in the likelihood of displacement if mobile home dispossession were to occur. Results demonstrate significant variation in the likelihood of displacement across clusters, suggesting that the urban mobile home residents at the greatest risk of displacement are lower-income, white, older adults who are not in the labor force and who live alone. By bringing scholarly debates about a right to the city into conversation with the literature on mobile homes, I underscore the key role of dwelling type and tenure in shaping urban citizenship in Canada.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146115665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-02-03DOI: 10.1177/00420980251413498
Daniel Muñoz
This article examines how disabled people become part of public transport infrastructure through embodied and interactional practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and video analysis of journeys in Santiago de Chile, it explores how disabled users co-produce the system’s functioning—anchoring themselves in carriages, navigating ticketing processes, or coordinating alighting from buses. Challenging dominant framings of accessibility as material provision or personal independence, the article emphasizes the relational and distributed nature of disability and mobility. It draws on critical infrastructure studies, disability studies, and ethnomethodology to conceptualize public transport as a “coming-together” of bodies and materialities. Rather than merely revealing breakdowns or failure, the analysis foregrounds the everyday labor of care, coordination, and adjustment through which infrastructure is sustained. Disabled people’s embodied practices are shown to be infrastructural in themselves—constitutive of what allows the system to function. This perspective calls for a shift in how urban mobility is conceptualized and designed: not as a neutral system serving passive users but as an interdependent accomplishment involving human bodies, materials, and social relations. The article argues for recognition of this labor, and for planning approaches that value, rather than seek to eliminate, embodied interdependence as part of more just, inclusive urban transport.
{"title":"An infrastructure of embodied practices: How disabled people become part of public transport in Santiago de Chile","authors":"Daniel Muñoz","doi":"10.1177/00420980251413498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251413498","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how disabled people become part of public transport infrastructure through embodied and interactional practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and video analysis of journeys in Santiago de Chile, it explores how disabled users co-produce the system’s functioning—anchoring themselves in carriages, navigating ticketing processes, or coordinating alighting from buses. Challenging dominant framings of accessibility as material provision or personal independence, the article emphasizes the relational and distributed nature of disability and mobility. It draws on critical infrastructure studies, disability studies, and ethnomethodology to conceptualize public transport as a “coming-together” of bodies and materialities. Rather than merely revealing breakdowns or failure, the analysis foregrounds the everyday labor of care, coordination, and adjustment through which infrastructure is sustained. Disabled people’s embodied practices are shown to be infrastructural in themselves—constitutive of what allows the system to function. This perspective calls for a shift in how urban mobility is conceptualized and designed: not as a neutral system serving passive users but as an interdependent accomplishment involving human bodies, materials, and social relations. The article argues for recognition of this labor, and for planning approaches that value, rather than seek to eliminate, embodied interdependence as part of more just, inclusive urban transport.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"176 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146115668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-01-31DOI: 10.1177/00420980251408585
Jennifer Candipan, Noli Brazil
Past research on neighborhood ascent—socioeconomic increases among residents and housing—focuses on residential environments, overlooking how connections beyond their boundaries influence neighborhood change. Using geocoded tweets from over 375,000 Twitter users in the 50 most populous US cities, we explore how a city’s mobility network relates to neighborhood socioeconomic (SES) ascent from 2010 to 2019—whether ascent is more likely in cities more or less structurally connected via residents’ routine travels. We find that neighborhoods located in cities with greater racially segregated mobility, particularly initially lower-SES neighborhoods, are more likely to ascend compared to those in cities where residents more frequently visit neighborhoods of different racial compositions than their own. While ascent patterns are similar across White and Hispanic neighborhoods, regardless of city type, neighborhoods with no racial majority are more likely to ascend in cities with greater segregated mobility. Black neighborhoods are least likely to ascend, underscoring how deeply entrenched racial hierarchies continue to shape neighborhood trajectories. Our results highlight broader urban dynamics structuring neighborhood ascent, revealing how stratification processes extend well beyond where people live.
{"title":"Race, segregated urban mobility, and socioeconomic ascent: A neighborhood network approach","authors":"Jennifer Candipan, Noli Brazil","doi":"10.1177/00420980251408585","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251408585","url":null,"abstract":"Past research on neighborhood ascent—socioeconomic increases among residents and housing—focuses on residential environments, overlooking how connections beyond their boundaries influence neighborhood change. Using geocoded tweets from over 375,000 Twitter users in the 50 most populous US cities, we explore how a city’s mobility network relates to neighborhood socioeconomic (SES) ascent from 2010 to 2019—whether ascent is more likely in cities more or less structurally connected via residents’ routine travels. We find that neighborhoods located in cities with greater racially segregated mobility, particularly initially lower-SES neighborhoods, are more likely to ascend compared to those in cities where residents more frequently visit neighborhoods of different racial compositions than their own. While ascent patterns are similar across White and Hispanic neighborhoods, regardless of city type, neighborhoods with no racial majority are more likely to ascend in cities with greater segregated mobility. Black neighborhoods are least likely to ascend, underscoring how deeply entrenched racial hierarchies continue to shape neighborhood trajectories. Our results highlight broader urban dynamics structuring neighborhood ascent, revealing how stratification processes extend well beyond where people live.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146098204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-01-31DOI: 10.1177/00420980251410816
Andrés Luque-Ayala, Marijn Nieuwenhuis
This intervention outlines a new way of thinking about the growing entanglements between fire and urban life in the Anthropocene, calling for a dialogue between urban studies and elemental geographies as a conceptual lens that addresses the changing nature of nature in contemporary urban worlds. As wildfires increasingly impact cities—destroying infrastructure and property, displacing populations, and altering air quality across vast distances—fire emerges not only as risk and hazard but also as an elemental force reshaping the city’s political, material, and conceptual foundations. Our aim is twofold. First, we open a debate on an emerging urban condition of the Anthropocene where fire assumes a reinvigorated presence. Second, exploring analytical pathways for re-thinking cities on fire, we discuss connections between urban studies and elemental geographies—a growing subfield of cultural and political geography which engages with the elements as a way of thinking with Earth’s materialities. The resurgence of fire in the city, we contend, signals the growing presence of “elemental exposures” resulting from global environmental change and Anthropogenic climate and ecological emergencies. Following a review of fire scholarship within urban studies, we suggest an elemental rethinking of fire—not as a spatially distant or exceptional event but as a shared, co-constitutive, agentic, and persistent presence demanding collective responsibility and adaptation as well as novel ways of conceptualizing city–nature relationships. The resulting urban pyropolitics frames cities as dynamic, more-than-human sites of climate transformation and vulnerability, highlighting the unequal distribution of elemental exposure in the Anthropocene city and its racialized, gendered, and classed dimensions.
{"title":"Cities on fire: Towards an elemental urbanism in the Anthropocene","authors":"Andrés Luque-Ayala, Marijn Nieuwenhuis","doi":"10.1177/00420980251410816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251410816","url":null,"abstract":"This intervention outlines a new way of thinking about the growing entanglements between fire and urban life in the Anthropocene, calling for a dialogue between urban studies and elemental geographies as a conceptual lens that addresses the changing nature of nature in contemporary urban worlds. As wildfires increasingly impact cities—destroying infrastructure and property, displacing populations, and altering air quality across vast distances—fire emerges not only as risk and hazard but also as an elemental force reshaping the city’s political, material, and conceptual foundations. Our aim is twofold. First, we open a debate on an emerging urban condition of the Anthropocene where fire assumes a reinvigorated presence. Second, exploring analytical pathways for re-thinking cities on fire, we discuss connections between urban studies and elemental geographies—a growing subfield of cultural and political geography which engages with the elements as a way of thinking with Earth’s materialities. The resurgence of fire in the city, we contend, signals the growing presence of “elemental exposures” resulting from global environmental change and Anthropogenic climate and ecological emergencies. Following a review of fire scholarship within urban studies, we suggest an elemental rethinking of fire—not as a spatially distant or exceptional event but as a shared, co-constitutive, agentic, and persistent presence demanding collective responsibility and adaptation as well as novel ways of conceptualizing city–nature relationships. The resulting urban pyropolitics frames cities as dynamic, more-than-human sites of climate transformation and vulnerability, highlighting the unequal distribution of elemental exposure in the Anthropocene city and its racialized, gendered, and classed dimensions.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"79 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146098203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-01-31DOI: 10.1177/00420980251398997
Manuel A. Santana Palacios
This paper capitalizes on the opening of Bogotá’s first urban gondola, locally known as TransMiCable, to examine the socially embedded character that shapes the adaptation of informal transportation markets to urban change. Drawing on GPS-assisted route mapping techniques, field observations, and semi-structured interviews with community leaders, informal transportation providers, and planners, findings reveal that the informal transportation market expanded following the opening of TransMiCable. New route associations were formed to connect the sprawling periphery with TransMiCable, and others reoriented their service toward the project. These adaptations were shaped by a complex interplay of social dynamics, including negotiations involving informal transportation, cooperative heads, neighborhood organizations, and the state, as well as a historical process of informal land development that continues to push the urban fringe outward. While informal transportation undeniably fills service gaps left by conventional public transit, as other scholars have long argued, this study underscores the social dynamics that, together with peripheral urbanization processes, shape how these markets emerge, adapt, and persist in cities in the Global South.
{"title":"Navigating the urban fringe: Socially embedded adaptation of informal transportation amid Bogotá’s urban gondola investment","authors":"Manuel A. Santana Palacios","doi":"10.1177/00420980251398997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251398997","url":null,"abstract":"This paper capitalizes on the opening of Bogotá’s first urban gondola, locally known as TransMiCable, to examine the socially embedded character that shapes the adaptation of informal transportation markets to urban change. Drawing on GPS-assisted route mapping techniques, field observations, and semi-structured interviews with community leaders, informal transportation providers, and planners, findings reveal that the informal transportation market expanded following the opening of TransMiCable. New route associations were formed to connect the sprawling periphery with TransMiCable, and others reoriented their service toward the project. These adaptations were shaped by a complex interplay of social dynamics, including negotiations involving informal transportation, cooperative heads, neighborhood organizations, and the state, as well as a historical process of informal land development that continues to push the urban fringe outward. While informal transportation undeniably fills service gaps left by conventional public transit, as other scholars have long argued, this study underscores the social dynamics that, together with peripheral urbanization processes, shape how these markets emerge, adapt, and persist in cities in the Global South.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"95 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146098206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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