Editors’ Featured Articles

Read this quarter's Editors’ Featured Articles, which are available free access on a temporary basis.

Each year, Urban Studies publishes around 180 articles advancing the field of urban knowledge. To further promote and facilitate the work of urban scholars we have now introduced Editors’ Featured Articles, which will be accessible via the Urban Studies Online website.

Editors’ Featured Articles makes popular and significant articles that have been recently published available to access for free on a temporary basis. In addition, selective papers that are not yet in print but connect with the subject matter of these articles in interesting ways will also be available on a temporary free access basis via the website. Featured articles will be updated every quarter.

Follow our Twitter account @USJ_online and subscribe to Urban Studies Online to keep informed of the latest free access articles.

Roadmaps to utopia: Tales of the smart city

Alan-Miguel Valdez, Matthew Cook, Stephen Potter

Exploring the tensions arising as the idealised smart city narratives are locally inflected and used to frame smart city projects.

Imagining the smart city through smart grids? Urban energy futures between technological experimentation and the imagined low-carbon city

Leslie Quitzow, Friederike Rohde

Quitzow and Rohde's latest article analyses how urban smart grid futures are being imagined and co-produced in the city of Berlin, Germany.

Green gentrification or 'just green enough': Do park location, size and function affect whether a place gentrifies or not?

Alessandro Rigolon, Jeremy Németh

New research from Rigolon and Németh looks at a diverse sample of 10 cities across the United States, calling into question the "just green enough" claim that small parks foster green gentrification less than larger parks.

Do the characteristics of new green space contribute to gentrification?

Seung Kyum Kim, Longfeng Wu

Kim and Wu examine the effects of new green space characteristics on multiple gentrification indicators in New York City.

Does segregation reduce socio-spatial mobility? Evidence from four European countries with different inequality and segregation contexts

Jaap Nieuwenhuis, Tiit Tammaru, Maarten van Ham, Lina Hedman, David Manley

‘The combination of high levels of income inequalities and high levels of spatial segregation tend to lead to a vicious circle of segregation for low income groups, where it is difficult to undertake upward socio-spatial mobility’.

The contingency of neighbourhood diversity: Variation of social context using mobile phone application data

Wenfei Xu

Xu explores the hypothesis that a diverse residential context does not lead to diverse social contact.