Years after the peaks of the COVID-19 pandemic, its impacts on urban spaces are becoming clearer. Much has been written about how COVID-19 devastated informal settlements in the Global South, where higher infection and mortality rates reflected pre-existing vulnerabilities. Yet, one critical story remains largely untold: how the pandemic unfolded in resettlement sites—spaces designed to rehouse residents from informal settlements. These sites often promise safety, stability, and upward mobility but can simultaneously perpetuate long-term vulnerabilities.

In Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, the resettlement site La Nueva Barquita offers a good opportunity to investigate these issues. Built in 2016 to rehouse over 7,000 residents from the flood-prone informal settlement La Barquita (Figure 1), the community has over 1,600 modern apartments, a high school, a hospital, sports facilities, and public spaces—amenities unavailable in the former settlement. With its clean streets and formal infrastructure, La Nueva Barquita was promoted by the central government as a statement of progress and modernity (Figure 2).

In 2022, when the pandemic eased and travel restrictions were lifted, I returned to La Nueva Barquita, where I had previously conducted research, to understand how residents navigated the unprecedented health crisis.

For residents, the relocation to La Nueva Barquita carried an implicit promise: an aspirational leap from pobre diablo (poor devil) to clase media (middle class). This move, however, proved far more complex than simply transitioning to formal housing. Although residents celebrated improved living conditions, socioeconomic challenges persisted. Over time, many turned to “informal” practices—prohibited in the new housing estate—to adapt. For example, informal vending on balconies and public spaces became widespread. Moreover, lacking designated worship spaces, residents organised rooftop prayers and meetings, defying community norms. I describe these efforts as ‘(in)formal reterritorialisation’—processes that highlight the interplay between formal rules and informal adaptations in resettlement spaces.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted (in)formal reterritorialisation. Social distancing measures curtailed community gatherings and informal economic activities; mirroring challenges documented in informal settlements. In this scenario, residents nostalgically re-evaluated their previous informal settlement as a site of opportunity and solidarity. Paradoxically, the crisis also underscored La Nueva Barquita’s advantages. Residents viewed the resettlement site’s formal infrastructure—clean streets, spacious layouts, and reduced environmental hazards—as increasing protection against the virus (Figure 3). These perceptions enhanced their sense of place attachment and belonging.

The findings from La Nueva Barquita reveal the complex and often contradictory realities of resettlement. The transition from informal to formal housing is rarely seamless; it represents a profound socio-spatial rupture requiring creative adaptation. At the same time, the pandemic intensified these dynamics, disrupting fragile social and economic ties while reawakening aspirations for upward mobility. For residents, the journey to clase media became a negotiation of resilience, informed by both the challenges of their new environment and the opportunities it offered.

Ultimately, resettlement sites like La Nueva Barquita are critical laboratories for understanding urban transformation in the Global South. As these spaces straddle the boundary between formal and informal, they compel us to rethink how cities can accommodate aspirations, adapt to crises, and foster a sense of belonging in an ever-shifting urban landscape.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.

Doughnut Economics presents a straightforward vision: shifting the goal of economic practice towards achieving a good life for all within planetary boundaries. Upon hearing or seeing the Doughnut model (see figure 1), many find this basic premise intuitive. This includes decision-makers, administrative staff, and members of civil society in various cities worldwide who have begun integrating Doughnut Economics into their work. What makes this resonance remarkable is that the traditional objective of economic growth becomes irrelevant for Doughnut Economics: The approach is agnostic to growth while it aims to recalibrate economic practice to avoid both ecological overshoot and social shortfall.

Urban scholars have long critiqued growth-based development, a critique gaining urgency amid multiple planetary crises (see recent special issues on degrowth and (radical) municipalism in this journal). Situating itself within these debates, this paper explores if and how the real-work application of Doughnut Economics’ principles and tools reduces the emphasis on growth in local development.

Over more than two years, I engaged in regular discussions with individuals from Tomelilla and Bad Nauheim—two small cities pioneering the use of Doughnut Economics in local governance. Together with the staff members leading this work in both cities, we traced the ups and downs, successes and failures, strategies, and tactics of implementing Doughnut Economics. Their accomplishments within a short period were remarkable: Tomelilla’s largest investment in decades—a new school—is on track to be developed based on Doughnut principles. Bad Nauheim conducted a public participation process that incorporated Doughnut Economics at various stages to design specific sustainability measures. And these are just the most prominent examples.

However, conversations with decision-makers and senior staff revealed that there isn’t one singular Doughnut model but many, most of which still incorporate an element of growth. The Doughnut visions in Tomelilla and Bad Nauheim were thus varied and not as straightforward in shifting economic goals as the framework conceptualized by Kate Raworth would suggest.

Three key aspects emerged that made working with the Doughnut both versatile (to frame it positively) and challenging (from a growth-critical perspective). First, the concept of growth itself is ambiguous and unclear to many. With multiple meanings and connotations coexisting, the objective of GDP growth often reemerges in discussions and visions. Second, as a result, growth reinserts itself into the Doughnut framework—sometimes as a socio-economic foundation—thereby remaining a legitimate goal. Third, and perhaps most significantly, existing dependencies on economic growth continue to challenge municipal leaders and employees. Concerns about recession are well-founded but often accepted as a given rather than questioned.

As evident, growth remains too entrenched to be simply ignored. Recognizing the strategic importance of delicate communication around the Doughnut, the paper suggests a series of steps towards a deeper commitment to overcoming growth-based development. It proposes framing this around a ‘secularization’ of growth: subjecting it to empirical scrutiny to help dispel the ‘almost religious’ reverence surrounding growth (Raworth, 2017: 245) rather than contenting with now knowing (i.e. growth agnosticism). To steer practical engagements with Doughnut Economics toward post-growth, it is crucial to create pathways for making growth a subject of everyday urban politics, challenging its deep entrenchment as a naturalized necessity.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.

The Urban Studies editorial office will be closed for the festive season from Monday 23rd December and will reopen on Friday 3rd January.

You can still submit your manuscript for consideration on ScholarOne and we will process it after the festive break. In the meantime please explore our website for the latest News; check out our current Call for Papers; preview our forthcoming Special Issues; listen to our Podcast; browse new papers on OnlineFirst and keep an eye out for our January issue!

We would like to extend our thanks to all of our contributors and supporters over the past year and we look forward to bringing you exciting new updates in 2025.

Achieving carbon neutrality is a profound economic and social systemic transformation, deepening the low-carbon transition will not only promote the low-carbon development of China’s economy, but also have a remarkable impact on social issues such as fairness and income in China. Based on data from 279 prefecture-level cities in China, this study calculates the income inequality index of China’s cities using nighttime light data at the district and county levels, and empirically estimates the impact of China’s Low Carbon City Pilot Policy (LCPP) on income inequality using the difference-in-differences model.  

The key contributions of this study are as follows: First, we accurately measure income inequality in cities based on the unique dataset constructed by nighttime light data. Second, through sufficient theoretical model construction and derivation, this study presents an in-depth discussion of the theoretical mechanism of the impact of LCPP on income inequality from two perspectives: demand-side skill-biased technological progress (SBTP) and supply-side upgrading of labour skill structure (ULSS).

The study shows that the LCPP can significantly reduce income inequality in cities; it affects cities’ income inequality through the SBTP and the ULSS, but the mitigating effect of the LCPP on income inequality is mainly due to its improving effect on ULSS. Moreover, we show that the impact of the policy on income inequality is heterogeneous across geographic locations, resource endowment, and labour skills, and further research shows that the policy improves the welfare of residents.

Our findings provide useful implications for promoting low-carbon transformation and fair income distribution.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.

Webinar: Exploring Urban Policy Futures Through an International Comparative Lens

In an era marked by ongoing environmental, economic, political, social, and cultural challenges, urban policy-making has emerged as a critical arena for addressing these complex and interwoven issues. Over the past two decades, policy mobility research has introduced valuable frameworks for analysing urban future-making towards each of these challenges, including concepts such as assemblages, model cities, policy boosterism, network formation, inter-referencing, and scalar narratives. However, significant empirical and theoretical gaps remain in understanding the variations and dynamics that shape how ideas spread and are adopted. Empirically, current policy mobility research often relies on limited case studies, offering deep insights about local translation but overlooking broader patterns across cases. Theoretically, the literature often emphasises the trajectory and mobility of policy ideas rather than the comparative social space these processes generate among cities.

We invite you to join a webinar to delve into these gaps and explore innovative methodological and theoretical approaches to urban policymaking. Following the webinar, we plan to craft a formal proposal for a special issue for Urban Studies Journal inspired by this approach.

Who Should Attend?

This webinar is open to scholars interested in urban studies, policy-making, computational text analysis, and the future of cities.

Date and Process

To ensure a collaborative and productive process, we invite interested contributors to submit abstracts and letters of intent by 27 January 2025. These submissions will help shape the themes and goals of the Special Issue.

The webinar will take place on 26 February 2025, where we will discuss the submissions, refine the thematic and methodological focus, and outline the framework for the Special Issue. The discussions will inform the final proposal, which we will submit shortly thereafter.

If the proposal is accepted, a second webinar will be held where contributors can present drafts of their papers for further development and feedback.

We particularly encourage contributions that address the empirical and theoretical challenges in urban policy-mobility, with a focus on methods such as computational text analysis, and theoretical explorations of policy fields and ecologies.

Further information

For more details and brainstorming, please contact:

Noga Keidar: nogakeidar@tauex.tau.ac.il

Dan Silver: dan.silver@utoronto.ca

My interest in the topic of this paper arose during a field investigation I commenced more than a decade ago. A social anthropologist by training, I was intrigued by the disparity between two inner-city urban squares in Oslo, Norway in terms of number and types of strangers’ interactions. Differences in urban context, management regimes, and overall neighbourhood profiles were clearly significant. However, I soon realised that a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms required a more comprehensive study. What began as a broad investigation of public-space use as part of a master’s thesis in urbanism, narrowed in the subsequent PhD research to focus particularly on what leading urban scholar Richard Sennett has termed ‘the essence of urbanity’, namely accidental interaction among strangers. In total, the ethnographic fieldwork was scattered over the period from late 2012 to early 2020, the most intense period being 2016–2018.

Drawing on this fieldwork, the paper examines the occurrence of peaceful chance interactions among strangers in ‘new’, privately owned and managed public space. The ‘new’ public space of the study sits at the up-market, mixed-use Tjuvholmen precinct, a part of Oslo’s high-profile Fjord City development; the ‘traditional’ space against which it is contrasted, is located in a diverse and partly gentrified low and middle-income neighbourhood further east.

By ‘new’ versus ‘traditional’ I do not mean recent versus old. I mean a new versus a traditional type of public space, a more controlled and curated versus a more open and inclusive everyday type of public space. As ideal types, ‘new’ public space is privately owned and managed, in contrast to publicly owned and variously but mostly publicly managed ‘traditional’ public space

The investigation revealed that while shorter and also longer verbal interaction was a regular feature of the examined ‘traditional’ public space, it was more episodic and seasonal in the ‘new’ one, reflecting many versus few ‘contact-supporting circumstances’: ‘openings persons’, ‘exposed persons’ and ‘mutual openness’. More than urban form and physical-spatial features, this had to do with differences in users and uses connected to the sites’ management regimes and overall social profile. In particular, it had to do with what was allowed in the ‘traditional’ space – of activities that intrinsically entailed addressing and being available to unknown others – and not in the ‘new’, more rigorously governed one. Common activities in the first site, activities with which market traders, street vendors, magazine sellers, beggars, street musicians, recruiters and petitioners, activists and demonstrators are associated, were practically non-existent in the ‘new’ one, they were either forbidden or strongly curbed. Under any circumstances, they would require a license or approval from the owner or the management company.   

Chance interaction is considered a defining feature of urbanity, and its demise in ‘new’ public spaces of the neoliberal city is widely lamented in the literature. While the paper’s findings are hardly surprising, the more fundamental mechanisms at play have rarely been substantiated and conceived. The paper’s originality lies in the ethnographic documentation and conceptualisation of basic ‘contact-supporting circumstances’ that shed light on and nuance how a ‘new’ public space differs from an ordinary, everyday one with regards to chance interactions.

Herein, the study points to an important shift in urban governance and planning since the 1980s. A market-led notion of attractiveness in the physical and social environment takes centre stage in prestigious urban developments, at the expense of the disordered exchanges of everyday life.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.

In the spring 2021 we set out to interview urban planners and people working in similar positions in municipally owned corporations in the Swedish town of Norrköping, which has been working on scattered projects of smartification over the past decade. This was part of a larger interdisciplinary project on citizen engagement in smart technology development. Given the hype and techno-optimism often surrounding smart cities, we expected to hear stories about how the municipality is planning to implement smart technology, and how Norrköping in the near future will become a smart city. However, at first the interviews were disappointing. Despite the many ‘smart’ technologies being considered or implemented, nobody wanted to talk about ‘smart’ technologies or cities. It felt like a failure. Going back to the project team and reporting on this disappointment, however, made us start noticing interesting things in the material. Many of the interviewees had interesting ideas of what makes cities smart that did not fit with the general depiction of top-down actors buying into corporate narratives of monolithic ‘smart’ city technologies and their uniform implementation and adaptation. Rather, most of the interviewees talked about the horizontal tensions of achieving truly smart technologies to fit into existing infrastructures, time frames and governance logics of municipal work. Thus, we try to tease these tensions apart, to gain a deeper understanding of employees within the municipality and municipally owned corporations’ attitudes towards smartification and what they mean for smart city development in ordinary cities.

Staying with the trouble, or the tensions in this case, we took the points where these horizontal tensions converge as the focus of our analysis. We found that the tensions converged around issues such as the different time frames that the municipally owned waste management company operate at compared to the subcontracted waste collector and how this provided an obstacle to implement new technologies to make waste management more efficient, something which the municipally owned company needed to work around. Another tension cut across the responsibilities of the municipality in terms of daily service delivery versus long-term development and efficiency, where the visibility, and political potency, of the day-to-day could sometimes outcompete the ability to keep the eyes on the horizon/on the long-term goals. A third tension converged around infrastructure and the need to engage multiple stakeholders in order to find ways forward in transforming/adapting old infrastructures to new necessities, such as electrification of good transport, which need to involve stakeholders at various scales ranging from the EU regulation and funding, to national level investment, to regional and local planning agencies, but also private sector actors such as those developing and constructing electric goods and those that are expected to buy them. Getting all these stakeholders together to work towards the same goals is a monumental task. These three examples complicate the linear, technology-development, future-oriented discourse often associated with smart cities.

While smart city development is often portrayed as a struggle/tension between top-down or bottom-up, we thus found that there are many horizontal tensions that play out between actors that would often be characterised as top-down actors. We thus need to pay attention also to these tensions and struggles of interstitial actors to understand why and how smartification of cities is piece-meal, ad hoc, resisted and move forward unevenly across space and time. This attention needs to extend to how collaboration and regulation as well as the intermingling of public and private interests and sectoral composition and functioning of different infrastructures influences smartification, and thus the future sustainability in our cities.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.

Gated communities and business improvement districts are by now well-known forms of private urban governance. Our special issue on the New Private Urban Governance (or PUG) unearths other forms, spaces, and practices. The latter include everything from tourist sites to special architectures to underground pedestrian labyrinths to climate gating to hi-tech surveillance systems. The contributing authors from around the world examine PUG’s evolving means in global cities like Sao Paulo, Toronto, Washington, DC, and Guangzhou, thus overcoming the tendency to focus on PUG in the North or from North-centric perspectives.

Due in part to the influence of neo-liberalism, it is perhaps less than surprising that these PUG forms continue to grow in scope and influence, leading to profound transformations of the urban landscape. Yet, rather than completely new, the authors show that these private ventures often come with elements from the past. They reveal too their detrimental effects, including racial and class-based exclusion, exploitation, confusion and waste, sometimes at public expense.

Our special issue is based on themes of vestiges, ventures, and visibility that we think define the new PUG and expose its workings in new ways. Our theme of vestiges reflects the idea that PUG forms rely and build upon, rather than fully replace, earlier, more public governance practices, logics, and spaces. Ventures shows the private and market-oriented thrust of urban governance heavily dependent on the protection and extraction of value and the intensifying financialization of urban life.Private governing ventures have certainly reshaped how cities are managed, organized, and experienced. Visibility highlights how governing technologies make visible both PUG and the politics of space.

The articles in this issue also point us to necessary methodological innovations, as PUG practices become more hidden and complex. Scholarship must include attention to contestation and solidarities, resistances, and alternatives to new PUG forms that reproduce hypervisibility, intensified control, displacements, and dispossessions. Attending conferences and intentional walking consistent with urban ethnographies, are only some illustrated possibilities. These methods expose the multiple and infrastructural practices as well as improvisation, incrementalism, and political mobilization.

Beyond these themes, and while our special issue answers recent calls in urban studies for more scrutiny of urban governance, there is still more research to be done on wider PUG contexts. As PUG continues to mutate and adapt to shifting and uneven landscapes, critical governance studies of the urban remain paramount. By examining the little, uneven, and broad aspects of PUG, our contributors highlight the edges and convergence of these forms, actors, and practices. Echoing the calls from contributors, pathways forward and alternatives uncovered must be rooted in social, racial, environmental, digital, and community-driven justice.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.

Our fourth call in our Critical and Conceptual Advances in Urban Studies Call for Papers is now open: The Urbanisation of Conflict and Conflict Urbanisation.

In this inaugural call for papers in the The Urbanisation of Conflict and Conflict Urbanisation series, which focuses on armed conflict, the Journal invites both empirical and conceptual papers on the urbanisation of conflict and conflict-driven urbanisation. Submissions should emphasise innovation in urban research and offer a clear, substantive contribution to global urban studies debates is essential.

The deadline for submission of abstracts for prioritised assessment is Friday 10 January 2025.

The deadline for paper submissions is Monday 30 June 2025.

Further details including submission guidelines and a list of suggested topics can be found here.

We appreciate your interest and are excited to receive your contributions, which will help advance the dialogue on understanding the urbanisation of conflict and conflict urbanisation.

Condominiums in urban China are shaped by multiple forces including the state actors, the market agents and homeowners’ organisations (HOA). Unlike the private neighbourhood governance models in the West, HOAs in China have limited power in self-administration as the essential legal, social, and political support for their development is lacking. As a result, the condominium system in China suffers from more political intervention by the local state and economic exploitation by property management agents than that in the Western context.

It is against this backdrop that the self-governance campaign, which was initiated by some housing activism leaders in urban China comes to attention. Presented as a mode of direct employment of property management staff by HOAs (bypassing an external property management company), self-governance is also known as partnership management or direct labour management mode. In urban China, this mode transcends the mere promotion of an alternate property management approach. It signifies homeowners’ explicit quest to reclaim the power in governing their condominium, which poses a challenge to both the political intervention by the local state and economic exploitation by property management agents. More importantly, the campaign has been actively promoted by a group of dedicated advocates as a cross-city movement in which homeowners’ “right-defending” actions have been actively involved. This further complicates the political dimension of condo-isation in China.

Utilising a strategic action field perspective, our paper provides an in-depth analysis of how homeowners’ organisations, market agents, and state actors shape condo-isation in China. We first identify the strategic action fields that are involved in condominium governance in urban China. After that, we analyse the impacts of condominium self-governance on the dynamic interaction within and between these fields. With extensive interviews with housing activists and grassroots local officials, we find that the self-governance campaign not only further complicates the interplay among the grassroots state field, the market field, and the condominium field but also brings more risks to housing activism as it has built a close connection with the civil field in China.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.