Pub Date : 2025-01-16DOI: 10.1177/00420980241306087
Josh Lown
Theoretical foundations that frame gentrification often focus heavily on the material and political economy perspective. While this perspective addresses the material impacts of gentrification – cost of housing, changes in demographics, development of new housing structures – it does not address the way gentrification is experienced by long-time residents of gentrifying communities. One of the often-overlooked dimensions of gentrification is how residents’ perceptions of their continued belonging in the neighbourhood can lead to experiences of alienation. While underexplored in gentrification research, hauntology offers a theoretical framework that allows for a ‘more than material’ understanding of the relationship between personhood, place and property in neighbourhoods undergoing gentrification. Using a case study of a gentrifying neighbourhood in New England, this article describes the utility of the hauntological framework in understanding ‘more than material’ impacts of gentrification. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, alongside photovoice and walking interviews with long-time residents, this article describes how participants and residents are often haunted by the sense of individual and communal loss of their community’s future place in the neighbourhood. These ‘lost futures’ are often represented by the material changes, such as new buildings, and demographic changes, witnessed through the displacement of their neighbours, occurring in their neighbourhood. This article argues that by engaging with the framework of hauntology, researchers can better interrogate how residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods experience loss through these demographic and material changes.
{"title":"Spectres of gentrification: Towards a hauntological framework for exploring the impacts of gentrification","authors":"Josh Lown","doi":"10.1177/00420980241306087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241306087","url":null,"abstract":"Theoretical foundations that frame gentrification often focus heavily on the material and political economy perspective. While this perspective addresses the material impacts of gentrification – cost of housing, changes in demographics, development of new housing structures – it does not address the way gentrification is experienced by long-time residents of gentrifying communities. One of the often-overlooked dimensions of gentrification is how residents’ perceptions of their continued belonging in the neighbourhood can lead to experiences of alienation. While underexplored in gentrification research, hauntology offers a theoretical framework that allows for a ‘more than material’ understanding of the relationship between personhood, place and property in neighbourhoods undergoing gentrification. Using a case study of a gentrifying neighbourhood in New England, this article describes the utility of the hauntological framework in understanding ‘more than material’ impacts of gentrification. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, alongside photovoice and walking interviews with long-time residents, this article describes how participants and residents are often haunted by the sense of individual and communal loss of their community’s future place in the neighbourhood. These ‘lost futures’ are often represented by the material changes, such as new buildings, and demographic changes, witnessed through the displacement of their neighbours, occurring in their neighbourhood. This article argues that by engaging with the framework of hauntology, researchers can better interrogate how residents in gentrifying neighbourhoods experience loss through these demographic and material changes.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142987297","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 : 2025-01-16DOI: 10.1177/00420980241307532
José Rafael Nunez Collado
Extensive research has examined the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on precarious informal settlements. However, limited attention has been directed towards its implications in resettlement sites, where relocated residents from poor urban areas often experience long-term vulnerability. This article addresses this gap by investigating how the pandemic shaped ongoing post-relocation integration within a major resettlement site in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The concept of ‘(in)formal reterritorialisation’ is employed to elucidate the complex interplay between formal and informal adaptation endeavours disrupted by the health emergency. Drawing on empirical data, the article untangles how the pandemic exacerbated post-relocation disruptions to social ties and economic mobility, prompting residents to reassess informal settlements as sites of opportunity and solidarity. Conversely, during the outbreak, residents perceived the formal spatial and aesthetic conditions of the resettlement site as providing enhanced protections against the virus, bolstering their sense of belonging and place attachment. The findings underscore the intricate and often-conflicting outcomes that unfold within resettlement territories, critical sites for urban development in the Global South.
{"title":"From ‘poor devil’ to middle class? Navigating resettlement and (in)formal reterritorialisation under COVID-19","authors":"José Rafael Nunez Collado","doi":"10.1177/00420980241307532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241307532","url":null,"abstract":"Extensive research has examined the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on precarious informal settlements. However, limited attention has been directed towards its implications in resettlement sites, where relocated residents from poor urban areas often experience long-term vulnerability. This article addresses this gap by investigating how the pandemic shaped ongoing post-relocation integration within a major resettlement site in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The concept of ‘(in)formal reterritorialisation’ is employed to elucidate the complex interplay between formal and informal adaptation endeavours disrupted by the health emergency. Drawing on empirical data, the article untangles how the pandemic exacerbated post-relocation disruptions to social ties and economic mobility, prompting residents to reassess informal settlements as sites of opportunity and solidarity. Conversely, during the outbreak, residents perceived the formal spatial and aesthetic conditions of the resettlement site as providing enhanced protections against the virus, bolstering their sense of belonging and place attachment. The findings underscore the intricate and often-conflicting outcomes that unfold within resettlement territories, critical sites for urban development in the Global South.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142987350","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 : 2025-01-10DOI: 10.1177/00420980241309830
Gábor Patkós
{"title":"Book review: Urban Culture and the Modern City: Hungarian Case Studies","authors":"Gábor Patkós","doi":"10.1177/00420980241309830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241309830","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142961397","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 : 2025-01-09DOI: 10.1177/00420980241299674
Ranabir Samaddar, Susannah Bunce, Chiara Camponeschi, David Wilson, S Harris Ali, Creighton Connolly, Roger Keil
{"title":"Book review forum: Pandemic urbanism: Infectious diseases on a planet of cities","authors":"Ranabir Samaddar, Susannah Bunce, Chiara Camponeschi, David Wilson, S Harris Ali, Creighton Connolly, Roger Keil","doi":"10.1177/00420980241299674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241299674","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142940213","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 : 2025-01-09DOI: 10.1177/00420980241304938
Luce Beeckmans
This article conceptualises Afro-Christian churches as vectors for the circulation of spatial knowledge. Scholarship on the ‘reverse mission’ of Afro-Christian churches to Europe emphasises their emplacement in global cities. Yet, during the last decades, new religious geographies have been produced, resulting in a dense, trans-urban network of Afro-Christian churches in Europe, covering not only global cities but also – and more dominantly – midsized cities. This article argues that along this emerging polycentric, trans-urban network of Afro-Christian churches place-making practices are exchanged that impact on and interconnect urban landscapes globally. Referring to recent advances in policy transfer literature, this phenomenon is conceptualised as a ‘mobile urbanism from below’. Apart from discussing the Afro-Christian place-making practices that are circulated by mundane transfer agents and the emergence of a ‘transnational vernacular’ that (invisibly) regenerates ‘the surrounds’ of cities worldwide from below, the article demonstrates how this ‘mobile urbanism from below’ has significant implications for the (subjective) scalar repositioning of cities. By developing the notion ‘mobile urbanism from below’, this article illustrates how (the spatialities and materialities of) European cities are made in relation to cities elsewhere and questions Eurocentric views within urban studies from within Europe itself.
{"title":"Mobile urbanism from below: Afro-Christian churches as place-makers and scale-makers in European midsized cities","authors":"Luce Beeckmans","doi":"10.1177/00420980241304938","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241304938","url":null,"abstract":"This article conceptualises Afro-Christian churches as vectors for the circulation of spatial knowledge. Scholarship on the ‘reverse mission’ of Afro-Christian churches to Europe emphasises their emplacement in global cities. Yet, during the last decades, new religious geographies have been produced, resulting in a dense, trans-urban network of Afro-Christian churches in Europe, covering not only global cities but also – and more dominantly – midsized cities. This article argues that along this emerging polycentric, trans-urban network of Afro-Christian churches place-making practices are exchanged that impact on and interconnect urban landscapes globally. Referring to recent advances in policy transfer literature, this phenomenon is conceptualised as a ‘mobile urbanism from below’. Apart from discussing the Afro-Christian place-making practices that are circulated by mundane transfer agents and the emergence of a ‘transnational vernacular’ that (invisibly) regenerates ‘the surrounds’ of cities worldwide from below, the article demonstrates how this ‘mobile urbanism from below’ has significant implications for the (subjective) scalar repositioning of cities. By developing the notion ‘mobile urbanism from below’, this article illustrates how (the spatialities and materialities of) European cities are made in relation to cities elsewhere and questions Eurocentric views within urban studies from within Europe itself.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"118 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142940214","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 : 2025-01-09DOI: 10.1177/00420980241303626
Mădălina Mezaroş, Antoine Paccoud, Loretta Lees
This article introduces the notion of the ‘gentrification regime’, which we believe is better able to capture the diversity of gentrification trajectories than the more macro-level notions of gentrification ‘waves’ or ‘stages’. We define a ‘gentrification regime’ as a specific set of relations between producers and consumers of housing made possible by a particular policy and financial context. Empirically, this article tracks the shift from a gentrification regime in which social upscaling is linked to increases in ownership to one that foregrounds the development of the private rental sector. To evidence this shift, we use the full set of property transactions linked to the production and the sale of apartments in the city of Dudelange in Luxembourg between 1970 and 2019 to reconstruct the trajectories of residential projects. We observe the replacement of local developers, responsible for a construction boom in the early 1990s, by national-level developers focusing on locally supported flagship projects targeting investor demand, itself stimulated by national fiscal policies. We witness an investor interest for both new and existing housing, signalling an increased pressure on the housing market, which seems to lead to an incipient (cross-border) exclusionary displacement. The article thus shows that national-level fiscal policy, and not only the deregulation of the private rental sector, can create value gaps that trigger a shift to buy-to-let gentrification. The notion of ‘gentrification regime’ is thus shown to provide a new way to understand the locally and temporally specific processes underlying the diversity of gentrification dynamics we see today.
{"title":"A ‘gentrification regime’ change: The fiscal roots of buy-to-let gentrification in Dudelange, Luxembourg","authors":"Mădălina Mezaroş, Antoine Paccoud, Loretta Lees","doi":"10.1177/00420980241303626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241303626","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces the notion of the ‘gentrification regime’, which we believe is better able to capture the diversity of gentrification trajectories than the more macro-level notions of gentrification ‘waves’ or ‘stages’. We define a ‘gentrification regime’ as a specific set of relations between producers and consumers of housing made possible by a particular policy and financial context. Empirically, this article tracks the shift from a gentrification regime in which social upscaling is linked to increases in ownership to one that foregrounds the development of the private rental sector. To evidence this shift, we use the full set of property transactions linked to the production and the sale of apartments in the city of Dudelange in Luxembourg between 1970 and 2019 to reconstruct the trajectories of residential projects. We observe the replacement of local developers, responsible for a construction boom in the early 1990s, by national-level developers focusing on locally supported flagship projects targeting investor demand, itself stimulated by national fiscal policies. We witness an investor interest for both new and existing housing, signalling an increased pressure on the housing market, which seems to lead to an incipient (cross-border) exclusionary displacement. The article thus shows that national-level fiscal policy, and not only the deregulation of the private rental sector, can create value gaps that trigger a shift to buy-to-let gentrification. The notion of ‘gentrification regime’ is thus shown to provide a new way to understand the locally and temporally specific processes underlying the diversity of gentrification dynamics we see today.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142940212","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 : 2025-01-07DOI: 10.1177/00420980241298095
Taylor Davey
The current emphasis on data-driven urban climate governance, while not a new project, is nevertheless evolving as part of a new calculative politics shaped by a net zero agenda. This urban project is realised via the development of calculative infrastructures that deploy more robust measurement fields through which urban action can be made directly relevant to global climate targets. A key premise is that it is possible to project the global scientific concept of net zero onto the ground as a territorial target, which in turn relies on the technical work of balancing emissions. I argue that this often materialises as a reductive governance project based on the accountability of public actors to new carbon balance sheets, wholly detached from a more systemic transition politics. This critical commentary begins by introducing net zero as an urban agenda and explores how calculative infrastructures offer the means of making a consolidated international agenda actionable as an urban territorial governance project. I examine the urban carbon inventory protocol as the foundation to other calculative work and discuss three subsequent infrastructure projects: reporting frameworks and platforms, scenario planning tools and carbon budgets. This calculative project promises a long-term pathway to decarbonisation but is based on a narrow lens that misjudges the more systemic transformation that must take place. The commentary concludes by considering how (or if) net zero as a political framework could support a more radical transition politics.
{"title":"Calculative infrastructures of net zero urban governance: A transformative science-based agenda or reductive territorial project?","authors":"Taylor Davey","doi":"10.1177/00420980241298095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241298095","url":null,"abstract":"The current emphasis on data-driven urban climate governance, while not a new project, is nevertheless evolving as part of a new calculative politics shaped by a net zero agenda. This urban project is realised via the development of calculative infrastructures that deploy more robust measurement fields through which urban action can be made directly relevant to global climate targets. A key premise is that it is possible to project the global scientific concept of net zero onto the ground as a territorial target, which in turn relies on the technical work of balancing emissions. I argue that this often materialises as a reductive governance project based on the accountability of public actors to new carbon balance sheets, wholly detached from a more systemic transition politics. This critical commentary begins by introducing net zero as an urban agenda and explores how calculative infrastructures offer the means of making a consolidated international agenda actionable as an urban territorial governance project. I examine the urban carbon inventory protocol as the foundation to other calculative work and discuss three subsequent infrastructure projects: reporting frameworks and platforms, scenario planning tools and carbon budgets. This calculative project promises a long-term pathway to decarbonisation but is based on a narrow lens that misjudges the more systemic transformation that must take place. The commentary concludes by considering how (or if) net zero as a political framework could support a more radical transition politics.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142935696","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 : 2025-01-02DOI: 10.1177/00420980241301641
Fatima Tassadiq, Jonathan Silver, Yannis Kallianos, Prince K Guma
Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation processes. This article engages with this paradigm shift to critically interrogate the term corridor and its various usages and dynamics, considering its analytical purchase and socio-spatial dynamic for urban studies. We provide a genealogical reading of the term corridor, examining its usage and conceptualisation in different contexts, to ask what these different interpretations and analytical functions of the corridor can offer to urban studies today. Through this critical review, we assert that the meaning and usage of corridors are permeated by heterogeneity and multiplicity that define their current dynamic. This leads us to problematise their linear delineations across space (and time). Thereafter, we offer a typology of different corridors, which helps us to address its analytical valence for urban studies and social science. We conclude by setting out four research directions in scholarship that offer a platform to develop further research imperatives and debates in relation to the growing urban corridorisation and its effects on urbanities, cities and everyday life.
{"title":"The unending corridor: Critical approaches to the politics, logics and socio-technics of urban corridorisation","authors":"Fatima Tassadiq, Jonathan Silver, Yannis Kallianos, Prince K Guma","doi":"10.1177/00420980241301641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241301641","url":null,"abstract":"Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation processes. This article engages with this paradigm shift to critically interrogate the term corridor and its various usages and dynamics, considering its analytical purchase and socio-spatial dynamic for urban studies. We provide a genealogical reading of the term corridor, examining its usage and conceptualisation in different contexts, to ask what these different interpretations and analytical functions of the corridor can offer to urban studies today. Through this critical review, we assert that the meaning and usage of corridors are permeated by heterogeneity and multiplicity that define their current dynamic. This leads us to problematise their linear delineations across space (and time). Thereafter, we offer a typology of different corridors, which helps us to address its analytical valence for urban studies and social science. We conclude by setting out four research directions in scholarship that offer a platform to develop further research imperatives and debates in relation to the growing urban corridorisation and its effects on urbanities, cities and everyday life.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142917072","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 : 2025-01-02DOI: 10.1177/00420980241300417
Gabriele D’Adda, Joanna Kusiak
Corporate landlords have emerged as a new powerful actor of the housing crisis. Fuelled by financialised capital and operating simultaneously at a global and local scale, they have increased pressure on the housing markets. Urban social movements and tenants’ unions are reorganising through news strategies to adapt to new challenges. These include combining resistance on the streets with a strategic use of the law. This paper analyses the legal strategies employed by social movements in Barcelona/Catalonia and Berlin, which include promoting new legislation and creatively utilising existing legal frameworks to introduce forms of rent control and re-municipalisation of social and public housing and to force corporate landlords to offer social rents to vulnerable families instead of evicting them. In Catalonia, we focus on two laws developed by social movements and passed by the Catalan Parliament and Government: Law 24/2015, which introduced mechanisms to avoid evictions, deal with over-indebtedness problems and expand the public housing stock. Law 11/2020, which created a form of rent control, applied to several Catalan cities. In Berlin, we focus on the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen, DWE, which proposed the use of Art. 15 of the German Constitution to ‘socialize’ (i.e. to expropriate and re-municipalise) housing owned by corporate landlords. Focusing on these case studies we intend to critically investigate the impact and results of these new laws and policies. Through this analysis, we aim to contribute to academic and activist debates on the effectiveness, potential and limits of legal strategies for progressive urban change.
{"title":"Striking back with the law: Legal struggles against corporate landlords in Barcelona and Berlin","authors":"Gabriele D’Adda, Joanna Kusiak","doi":"10.1177/00420980241300417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241300417","url":null,"abstract":"Corporate landlords have emerged as a new powerful actor of the housing crisis. Fuelled by financialised capital and operating simultaneously at a global and local scale, they have increased pressure on the housing markets. Urban social movements and tenants’ unions are reorganising through news strategies to adapt to new challenges. These include combining resistance on the streets with a strategic use of the law. This paper analyses the legal strategies employed by social movements in Barcelona/Catalonia and Berlin, which include promoting new legislation and creatively utilising existing legal frameworks to introduce forms of rent control and re-municipalisation of social and public housing and to force corporate landlords to offer social rents to vulnerable families instead of evicting them. In Catalonia, we focus on two laws developed by social movements and passed by the Catalan Parliament and Government: Law 24/2015, which introduced mechanisms to avoid evictions, deal with over-indebtedness problems and expand the public housing stock. Law 11/2020, which created a form of rent control, applied to several Catalan cities. In Berlin, we focus on the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen, DWE, which proposed the use of Art. 15 of the German Constitution to ‘socialize’ (i.e. to expropriate and re-municipalise) housing owned by corporate landlords. Focusing on these case studies we intend to critically investigate the impact and results of these new laws and policies. Through this analysis, we aim to contribute to academic and activist debates on the effectiveness, potential and limits of legal strategies for progressive urban change.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142917073","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 : 2024-12-30DOI: 10.1177/00420980241301664
Ana Muniz
Focusing specifically on sanitation services in Los Angeles (LA) City, I examine (1) how various stakeholders socially construct and mobilise around breakdowns in public infrastructure and (2) how technology is used, both practically and politically, to address breakdowns. Through an archival analysis of six years of LA City Council documents and proceedings, supplemented by interviews with four key informants, I demonstrate how, in 2014 Los Angeles, media and political actors constructed a perceived crisis in trash services. In responding to claims of inadequate and biassed services, City sanitation officials blamed technological glitches and deceptive data. To address the crisis, the sanitation department developed a database to track neighbourhood cleanliness and strategically deploy sanitation workers to the areas most in need. Despite local politicians’ and sanitation officials’ presentation of technological innovation as a panacea, the database had little effect and was deactivated after three years. The failure of the database is attributed to two dynamics: first, inverted development wherein LASAN prematurely developed and deployed digital technology before a strong analogue foundation had been established to make the technology functional and efficient; and second, LASAN utilised the cleanliness indexing database as a form of mediatised stopgap technology. Although the database ultimately proved to be of little practical use, LASAN’s public relations strategy around the database effectively intervened in a political crisis and reinforced the agency’s power.
{"title":"Cleaning up Los Angeles: The construction and non-resolution of a sanitation infrastructure crisis","authors":"Ana Muniz","doi":"10.1177/00420980241301664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241301664","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing specifically on sanitation services in Los Angeles (LA) City, I examine (1) how various stakeholders socially construct and mobilise around breakdowns in public infrastructure and (2) how technology is used, both practically and politically, to address breakdowns. Through an archival analysis of six years of LA City Council documents and proceedings, supplemented by interviews with four key informants, I demonstrate how, in 2014 Los Angeles, media and political actors constructed a perceived crisis in trash services. In responding to claims of inadequate and biassed services, City sanitation officials blamed technological glitches and deceptive data. To address the crisis, the sanitation department developed a database to track neighbourhood cleanliness and strategically deploy sanitation workers to the areas most in need. Despite local politicians’ and sanitation officials’ presentation of technological innovation as a panacea, the database had little effect and was deactivated after three years. The failure of the database is attributed to two dynamics: first, inverted development wherein LASAN prematurely developed and deployed digital technology before a strong analogue foundation had been established to make the technology functional and efficient; and second, LASAN utilised the cleanliness indexing database as a form of mediatised stopgap technology. Although the database ultimately proved to be of little practical use, LASAN’s public relations strategy around the database effectively intervened in a political crisis and reinforced the agency’s power.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142901892","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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