Latest Updates on Urban Studies

New Special Issue out now

Transcending (in)formal urbanism the February 2019 (Volume 56 Issue 3) Special Issue of Urban Studies is now available online here.

Articles include:

A culture of informality by Néstor García Canclini

Is bribery the new social contract?

Knowing urban informalities by Colin Marx, Emily Kelling

How do Anglo-phone urban scholars know urban informalities? 

Electricity services always in the making: Informality and the work of infrastructure maintenance and repair in an African city by Idalina Baptista

How utilities engage with ‘informality’ to produce access to ‘formal’ electricity networks through everyday processes of maintenance and repair 

Read the full table of contents here.

Latest articles on OnlineFirst

Urban resilience in the making? The governance of critical infrastructures in German cities by Jochen Monstadt and Martin Schmidt

This article is part of the forthcoming Special issue: Interfacing infrastructure in cities: Politics and spatialities of the urban nexus

Monstadt and Schmidt argue that the governance of critical infrastructures involves considerable challenges: it overarches different, often fragmented, policy domains and territories and institutionally unbundled utility (sub-)domains.

Flows in formation: The global-urban networks of climate change adaptation by Kian Goh

This article is part of the forthcoming Special issue: Why does everyone think cities can save the planet?

Goh traces the multiscalar connections through which capital, knowledge, and influence flow in urban climate change adaptation: the global links of Dutch water expertise, and tracing relationships within and between Rotterdam New York and Jakarta.

The financialising local growth machine in Chicago by Stephanie Farmer, Chris D. Poulos

This article is part of the forthcoming Special issue: Funding, financing and governing urban infrastructures

Palmer and Poulos analyse how global financial firms and actors work in partnership with World Business Chicago, to shape planning processes and orchestrate a more mature institutional-regulatory infrastructure investment environment.

State-rescaling and re-designing the material city-region: Tensions of disruption and continuity in articulating the future of Greater Manchester by Mike Hodson, Andrew McMeekin, Julie Froud, Michael Moran

Hodson, McMeekin, Froud and Moran focus on Greater Manchester as exemplar of devolution to explore how the state takes a critical role in the re-design of city-regions to make them amenable to international competition and secure strategic investments.

The nexus between innovation and wellbeing across the EU space: What role for urbanisation? by Camilla Lenzi and Giovanni Perucca

Technology-intensive innovation, like patents, yields its wellbeing benefits only in the most urbanised regions, while the impact of less technology-intensive innovation, like trademarks, is undifferentiated across space technology.

Read the blog here

Suburban status and neighbourhood change by Whitney Airgood-Obrycki

Despite discussion around suburban decline and poverty, suburban neighbourhoods in US metropolises ‘maintained a higher status than the city, were more likely to recover from reduced status, and had higher frequencies of status improvement’ argues Airgood-Obrycki.

Melbourne’s vertical expansion and the political economies of high-rise residential development by Megan Nethercote

This article draws on heterodox political economy and critical geography to analyse Melbourne’s major high-rise development since the financial crisis as a radical yet poorly understood departure from the city’s patterns of suburban development. 

Reconfiguring urban governance in an age of rising city networks: A research agenda Critical Commentary by Kathryn Davidson, Lars Coenen, Michele Acuto and Brendan Gleeson

Critical Commentary proposes a research agenda on reconfiguring urban governance centred on three themes: the political economy of ‘new-gen’ networks; the knowledge dynamics in city networks; the implications of city networks for traditional institutions.

Book reviews now available on Urban Blog

Double book review – The Nocturnal City Authored by Robert Shaw and reviewed by Casper Laing Ebbensgaard and Ilse van Liempt “The Nocturnal City is a much needed and timely appeal to take seriously those darkened and dimly lit hours that play a huge but somewhat unrecognised importance to planetary life.”