New issue out now
The second June 2024 issue (Volume 61, Issue 8) of Urban Studies Journal is now available online. Read the full issue here.
Articles include:
The urbanisation of controlled environment agriculture: Why does it matter for urban studies? by Simon Marvin, Lauren Rickards and Jonathan Rutherford
Simon Marvin, Lauren Rickards and Jonathan Rutherford’s open access debates paper shows how urban controlled environment agriculture (CEA) selectively extends existing logics of urban and rural agriculture.
Rezoning a top-notch CBD: The choreography of land-use regulation and creative destruction in Manhattan’s East Midtown by Igal Charney
Igal Charney’s paper makes the case for the connection between making land use regulatory changes and the process of destruction and redevelopment.
New articles
Reimagining the urban through agency as healing justice: Stories from Kolkata and Chicago by Ritwika Biswas and Elizabeth L. Sweet
Biswas and Sweet highlight instances of women reclaiming urban spaces in their everyday lives through varied acts of their agency while also building a sense of community agency; ultimately leading towards healing justice.
Smaller cities as sites of youth migrant incorporation by Mukta Naik
Open access research paper by Mukta Naik shows how, despite low scalar positions on account of weak governance and informalised economies, smaller cities shape varied employment opportunities and generate spatially and temporally varied mobilities for domestic migrants.
The making of a global neighbourhood in China by Fanling Cheng, Zai Liang and Tao Xu
Cheng et al identify several factors contributing to the neighbourhood’s evolution, including immigrants’ market-driven rational choice, the local government’s multi-faceted service, and the bridging role of Chinese ethnic minorities
Mapping religion, space and economic outcomes in Indian cities by Sripad Motiram and Vamsi Vakulabharanam
New study by Sripad Motiram and Vamsi Vakulabharanam uses a socio-spatial approach to analyse the intersection between religion and space in two Indian cities: Hyderabad and Mumbai.
‘Once you come, you are a Shenzhener’? Multifaceted and variegated sense of place among migrants in Shenzhen by Huimin Du
New study by Huimin Du sheds light on the complexity of sense of place and the nuances of belonging, attachment, identity, and home in contemporary Chinese urbanism.
Why mixed communities regeneration fails to improve the lives of low-income young people by Rana Khazbak
New open access article by Rana Khazbak examines the mechanisms through which the capabilities of low income young people are influenced by transforming their social housing estate into a mixed income community.
Local state leadership: State-leading groups in governing urban China by Jie Guo, Hong’ou Zhang and Yongchun Yang
Through the lens of local state leadership, this study by Jie Guo et al emphasises the heterogeneity of the state and enriches the understanding of state-led urban development.
Read the accompanying blog post here.
Places to be young: The dispossession of public space in Old Havana by Joanna Kocsis
In this open access article, Kocsis identifies how the spatial practices involved in the enactment of Old Havana’s new imaginary dispossess local youth of ‘backstage’ spaces for the work of identity formation, and changes the symbolic value of local youth to the reimagined Old Havana.
Targeting the centre and (least) poor: Evidence from urban Lahore, Pakistan by Hadia Majid and Mahvish Shami
New research by Hadia Majid and Mahvish Shami shows how electoral incentives in Pakistan are biased against programmatic public goods provision for the urban poor.
‘Lines of flight’ in city food networks: A relational approach to food systems transformation by Roberta Discetti and Diletta Acuti
In this open access paper, Roberta Discetti and Diletta Acuti are interested in ‘city food networks’ as a way in which cities are taking action to bring about positive changes in food systems.
Small is beautiful? Making sense of ‘shrinking’ homes by Phil Hubbard
In this open access critical commentary, Phil Hubbard suggests that the shrinking homes phenomenon shows the growing role of finance in the development of cities, suggestive of the way that developers are extracting maximum value from restricted urban sites in an era of planning deregulation.
Communities built on political trust: Theory and evidence from China by Yu Zeng and Shitong Qiao
Study by Yu Zeng and Shitong Qiao finds urban communities are based on political trust in authoritarian regimes, complicating the conventional view that such regimes repress civic engagement or manipulate civic organisations for social control.
New book review
Book review: Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China: Changing State–Society Relations by reviewed by Chao Xie“Beibei Tang’s Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China: Changing State-Society Relations delves into the hybrid space of urban neighbourhood governance in contemporary China.”
Read more book reviews on the Urban Studies blog.
China’s urban development has been conceptualised as a state-led, capital-driven and land-fueled process. Many studies have delved into how the state employs tactics like large-scale urban projects, infrastructure investments, ecological restoration, and land-based finance to mobilise social actors and resources towards strategic objectives (Wu, 2020). However, the structural fragmentation of China’s authoritarian system leads to increased time costs and reduced administrative efficiency in policy formulation (Lieberthal and Lampton, 1992). This conflicts with the local leadership’s goal of pursuing rapid urbanisation (Chien and Woodworth, 2018; Wu and Zhang, 2022), and hindered its aspirations for territorial consolidation (Hsing, 2010).
Arguably, in the era of decentralisation, conflicts and contradictions within the administrative system are crucial in shaping China’s urbanisation process (Catier, 2015). However, current research has predominantly concentrated on the interplay between the state and non-state actors, examining how their conflicts impede or modify the execution of government strategies, while overlooking the internal conflict and negotiation within the state. Specifically, there is a gap in understanding how local authorities leverage their resources and authority to convert decentralised power into effective control, address internal fragmentation within the state, and foster cohesive action to expedite projects of “rapid” territorialisation of cities.
We believe that understanding the process of state-led urban development in China requires attention to its unique party-state system and an understanding of the coordination of goals and relational interactions between heterogeneous state subjects. Hence, we try to ask how local leadership entrusted with governance responsibilities can translate decentralised authority into effective territorial control? Particularly, how does it use organisational capacity to discipline fragmented administrations and bring about unity of action, and how does it mobilise labour and resources to maintain the legitimacy of its rule?
We examine the urban development strategies and pro-growth politics in China from a local state leadership perspective, focusing on the power dynamics within the local state leadership under China’s fragmented authoritarian system. We notice that state leading group is an innovative governance technique intentionally designed to overcome the institutional flaws of “tiao-kuai segmentation.” It plays a critical role in fostering a common vision of “growth promotion,” aligning goals and unifying actions in the administrative system, broadening social consensus, and promoting public-private partnerships. Through the lens of local state leadership, our study reveals the heterogeneity of the state and enriches the understanding of state-led urban development. Simultaneously, using China as a methodology, we call for a reflection on the importance of focusing on conflicts within the state rather than just between state and non-state actors when exploring the “politics of urban growth.”
Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.
Latest articles on OnlineFirst
Does gentrification constrain housing markets for low-income households? Evidence from household residential mobility in the New York and San Francisco metropolitan areas by Taesoo Song and Karen Chapple
New open access study by Taesoo Song and Karen Chapple provides implications for research and policies oriented towards improving housing and neighbourhood access for low-income households in rapidly changing urban areas.
Inhabiting digital spaces: An informational right to the city for mobility justice by Dian Nostikasari, Nicole Foster, and Lauren Krake
New study by Dian Nostikasari et al asks: what are the mechanisms through which space is conceived, perceived, and lived through the lens of mobility justice?
Walls and openings: The politics of containment of informal communities in Islamabad by Faiza Moatasim
What is the interface between spaces inside and outside the walls built around low-income communities in elite neighbourhoods? How do people living inside the walls built to contain their communities engage with this infrastructure of control? Faiza Moatasim investigates in this new article.
Smart cities, virtual futures? – Interests of urban actors in mediating digital technology and urban space in Tallinn, Estonia by Olli Ilmari Jakonen
New research by Olli Jakonen explores the converging interests of urban actors in mediating digital technology adoption in urban space.
Megaprojects in austerity times: Populism, politicisation, and the breaking of the neoliberal consensus by Amparo Tarazona Vento
Through the case study of Valencia, this paper looks at how different populist discourses have been deployed to create either consent or dissent around entrepreneurial policies based on the use of megaprojects and events.
Discontent in the world city of Singapore by Gordon Kuo Siong Tan, Jessie PH Poon and Orlando Woods
This paper by Tan et al contributes to thematic diversity by integrating the ‘left behind’ and world cities literatures through the lens of discontent.
New book reviews on Urban Blog
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reviewed by Arthur Acolin “Vitiello mobilises materials from in-depth interviews and archives to allow readers to better understand the experience of individuals arriving from countries including Vietnam, Guatemala, Iraq, Liberia and Mexico, and the sanctuary they seek and find to varying degrees in Philadelphia.” |
Read more book reviews on the Urban Studies blog.
Urban Studies Best Article 2023
The editors are pleased to announce that two of the shortlisted papers have been selected as joint winners of the Urban Studies Best Article for 2023. Our congratulations to the authors: Anthony Miro Born, for The long shadow of territorial stigma: Upward social mobility and the symbolic baggage of the old neighbourhood; and Japhy Wilson, for Apocalyptic urban surrealism in the city at the end of the world.
The long shadow of territorial stigma: Upward social mobility and the symbolic baggage of the old neighbourhood
Anthony Miro Born
Urban Studies 60(3): 537–553.
Apocalyptic urban surrealism in the city at the end of the world
Japhy Wilson
Urban Studies 60(4): 718–733.
Seven other articles were shortlisted by the editors:
‘My neighbourhood is fuzzy, not hard and fast’: Individual and contextual associations with perceived residential neighbourhood boundaries among ageing Americans
Jessica Finlay, Joy Jang, Michael Esposito, Leslie McClure, Suzanne Judd and Philippa Clarke
Urban Studies 60(1): 85–108.
Citizen security and urban commuting in Latin America
José Ignacio Giménez-Nadal, Lucía Echeverría and Alberto Molina
Urban Studies 60(13): 2585–2611.
Capital’s welfare dependency: Market failure, stalled regeneration and state subsidy in Glasgow and Edinburgh
Neil Gray and Hamish Kallin
Urban Studies 60(6): 1031–1047.
Towards a modest imaginary? Sanitation in Kampala beyond the modern infrastructure ideal
Mary Lawhon, Gloria Nsangi Nakyagaba and Timos Karpouzoglou
Urban Studies 60(1): 146–165.
Impacts of political fragmentation on inclusive economic resilience: Examining American metropolitan areas after the Great Recession
Soomi Lee and Shu Wang
Urban Studies 60(1): 26–45.
Using natural language processing to construct a National Zoning and Land Use Database
Matthew Mleczko and Matthew Desmond
Urban Studies 60(13): 2564–2584.
Income polarisation, expenditure and the Australian urban middle class
Ilan Wiesel, Julia de Bruyn, Jordy Meekes and Sangeetha Chandrashekeran
Urban Studies 60(14): 2779–2798.
These articles along with the other seven shortlisted papers are currently free to view. The full announcement can be found here.
Latest articles on OnlineFirst
Green in their own way: Pragmatic and progressive means for cities to overcome institutional barriers to sustainability by Ana Gonzalez and Christof Brandtner
Drawing on in-depth interviews with sustainability managers, Ana Gonzalez and Christof Brandtner show that cities express different symbolic and material resource needs as well as means to acquire them.
New book reviews on Urban Blog
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Book review: Atlas of Informal Settlement: Understanding Self-Organized Urban Design reviewed by Faiza Moatasim “With over a billion people living and working in informal settlements, this book offers an important understanding of how self-organised spaces take shape over time and how we may utilise and anticipate the productive capacities of informal settlements to guide future urban growth.” |
Read more book reviews on the Urban Studies blog.
Latest articles on OnlineFirst
Automatic for the people? Problematising the potential of digital planning by Ruth Potts, Alex Lord and John Sturzaker
Study by Ruth Potts et al addresses the need to problematise digital planning and presents a conceptual framework examining different levels in planning systems at which specific risks of digital planning may occur.
Read the accompanying blog post here.
Urban motorways as spaces of possibility: Urban interstices and everyday practices around a motorway in Sardinia by Martina Loi
New study by Martina Loi explores the hypothesis that urban interstices around urban motorways could be intended as spaces of creative, political, and performative possibilities not responding to planning and market logic.
Re-learning culture in cities beyond the West by Violante Torre
Drawing on an ethnography of the street “Avenida 26” in Bogotá, Colombia, Violante Torre shows that informal cultural practices in the middle of segregation and urban violence can hardly be grasped through the current framing of culture in cities in this open access paper.
The role of analytical models and their circulation in urban studies and policy by Clémentine Cottineau, Michael Batty, Itzhak Benenson, Justin Delloye, Erez Hatna, Denise Pumain, Somwrita Sarkar, Cécile Tannier and Rūta Ubarevičienė
In this open access article, Cottineau et al show that despite their analytical nature, highly mobile models share characteristics relating to creators’ and intermediaries’ biographies, institutional context and the traditional markers of power relations.
Read the accompanying blog post here.
Moving through Toronto’s PATH: Assembling private urban governance by Debra Mackinnon, Stefan Treffers and Randy K Lippert
This open access article is part of the forthcoming Special Issue: The New Private Urban Governance: Vestiges, Ventures, and Visibility.
Mackinnon et al explore Toronto’s urban PATH, a 30km network of underground pedestrian tunnels and elevated walkways that connect shopping areas, residential towers, mass transit and downtown destinations.
Using and building analytical models of cities over a certain time, you start noticing two trends. First, some models are taken for granted, which means that the Schelling model of segregation is systematically called to use for basic segregation simulations, the rank-size curve – to analyse city size distribution, and so on. Second, and because of the familiarity that such models have acquired over time in the field of urban studies, the assumptions on which they rely can become obscured, distant and unquestioned when we apply them to particular case studies, leading to dubious results, questionable conclusions and contentious policy recommendations. For instance, simplifications made for the sake of computational speed, equation solvability or model readability can lead to a change of results when relaxed, and therefore not apply to empirical case study (think about the linear city of economic geography, the costless nature of residential moves in Schelling’s model, etc.). Additionally, some assumptions are very context-dependent despite the canonical nature of the model and therefore cannot/should not apply everywhere. This is the case for Alonso’s monocentric city model, which assumes individual ubiquitous transport and the valuation of living space over other aspects of housing, an assumption very suited for the motorised urban society in which the model was developed, but by far not a universal one. Although the movement of decolonisation of knowledge seems to have gained momentum in urban theory and policy analysis, the domain of analytical urban models seems to lag behind.
We therefore set ourselves to review a canonical set of analytical urban models in a series of seminars and to compare their circulation across the fields of urban studies and urban policies, in order to disentangle the elements of the models which pertain to contextual contingencies from those which constitute essential features of the models. In this paper, we borrow the theoretical framework of the policy mobilities literature and focus on the circulation of analytical models. Our innovative take lies in the reflexive assessment of analytical urban models, by analytical modellers and practitioners involved in the field as creators and intermediaries of the models’ circulation.
We think that this exercise is important because analytical urban models are needed to understand, plan and manage cities around the world. These models are becoming modular and complex, assembled from reusable building blocks. Canonical models are the most obvious candidates for such building blocks, being simple and robust. However, their assumptions need to be known, assessed, selected and evaluated so that essential features can be distinguished from contingent elements of their context of production.
Read the full open access article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.
Cities, and the planning thereof, have increasingly adopted digital technologies over the last thirty years. Over this time, digital technologies have developed, rapidly evolving from being large, static, and simplistic, to smaller, mobile, interactive, and connected hardware and software. The ever-improving availability of data and enhanced software capabilities have driven a greater interest in how to use such advancements to improve the quality of planning decisions and the capacity of planners. Whilst the great hope of advocates for digital planning is that it will speed up the decision-making process, open-up processes and replace those mythological recalcitrant planners, our research finds grounds to believe precisely the opposite may prevail.
Our paper titled ‘Automatic for the people? Problematising the potential of digital planning’ explores digital planning, explicitly questioning some of the optimistic claims made on its behalf. To do so, it presents a conceptual framework that builds on the work of McCampbell et al (2021) to reflect upon the promises and potential pitfalls of greater use of digital technology within and beyond planning practice. Our framework examines the risks associated with adopting technology into the planning system at three different scales with a focus on individuals, software design and usage choices, and the planning system.
Digital inclusion and exclusion in relation to planning is perhaps most tangible at the individual scale, as we consider who has access to digital technologies and planning processes, and the factors influencing individual citizens’ engagement with digital planning systems. It is well established that digital technologies are not uniformly used or accessible, but it is important to remember that this goes beyond the (evidence driven) assumption that older people are less likely to engage digitally and recognise that younger people are increasingly disengaged from some digital platforms.
At the next scale “up”, that of choices around technologies to use and the design of those technologies, there are tensions here related to data and how that data represents the world. Over recent years, discussions around artificial intelligence (AI) have gone from the realms of science fiction to being part of day-to-day life. Risks related to AI are manifold, but in our paper we focus specifically on how the “black box” nature of how the algorithms and data collection methods which inform AI, and related “PropTech”, systems are developed. Communities affected by decisions driven by such systems are rarely consulted upon these matters, so the inherent biases within them are not subjected to challenge.
The implications of the preceding two scales for planning systems and practices are significant. One is that as complexity increases, so do anxieties about reliability of data, and the need for greater levels of regulation and governance structures to address such concerns. A second is the danger that the nascent infusion of digital technologies into planning could result in traditional power asymmetries being amplified, particularly that between well-resourced and well-organised commercial entities and a diffuse, under-resourced ‘public interest’.
There is little doubt that technology can be used to make planning more democratic, to open up engagement, to build public trust in planning institutions, and to strengthen the legitimacy of planning decisions. The inverse, however, is true – every choice made in relation to the digitisation of planning, as with the profession more widely, is a trade-off, with unequal distribution of costs and benefits. It is vital that planning scholars and practitioners recognise this and take steps to address it in their research and practice.
Read the full open access article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.
New issue out now
The May 2024 issue (Volume 61, Issue 6) of Urban Studies Journal is now available online. Read the full issue here.
Articles include:
Reimagining Urban Living Labs: Enter the Urban Drama Lab Debates Paper by Cecilie Sachs Olsen and Merlijn van Hulst
Cecilie Sachs Olsen and Merlijn van Hulst expand current debates concerning Urban Living Labs by contrasting and comparing them with knowledge and practices developed in the field of theatre and performance in this open access Debates Paper.
Character contradiction: The exclusionary nature of preservationist planning restrictions by Rachel Gallagher, Thomas Jason Sigler and Yan Liu
In this open access study, Rachel Gallagher et al analyse land use conversion of almost 6000 lots in Brisbane, Australia.
Latest articles on OnlineFirst
Unbundling tenure security and demand for property rights: Evidence from urban Tanzania by Martina Manara and Tanner Regan
Manara and Regan explore how landholders experience urban land conflict revealing how different stages of regularisation address specific concerns and aspirations to tenure security in this open access article.
Read the accompanying blog post here.
Child-friendly urban practices as emergent place-based neoliberal subjectivation? by Carmen Perez-del-Pulgar, Isabelle Anguelovski and James JT Connolly
Drawing on empirical research conducted in Amsterdam, Vienna, and Bristol in 2019, Carmen Perez-del-Pulgar et al compare and contrast how plans reorganise children’s urban social space across different neoliberalising contexts.
Episodic populist backlashes against urban climate actions Critical Commentary by Mahir Yazar
This open access critical commentary by Mahir Yazar examines how episodic populist backlashes manifest on an urban scale and highlights the need for urban scholars to pay more attention to the phenomenon.
‘Adopt your city’: Post-political geographies and politics of urban philanthropy during austerity by Matina Kapsali
New open access article by Matina Kapsali brings a renewed, more enmeshed understanding of post-political urban governance through an analysis of the novel philanthrocapitalist regime that emerged in European cities in the context of the recent intersecting crises.
