Being Good Parents or Being Good Citizens: Dilemmas and Contradictions of Urban Families in Middle‐Class Enclaves and Mixed Neighbourhoods in Germany

In recent years, cities have become ever more attractive to middle‐class families. On the one hand, middle‐class families tend to withdraw into (often newly built) socially homogeneous middle‐class neighbourhoods. On the other hand, they are also known to move into inner‐city and socially mixed areas, thus triggering processes of gentrification. Academic literature has often denounced these housing choices as being either ‘separatist’ or ‘revanchist’, more broadly categorized as strategies of ‘middle‐class disaffiliation’. Although there is a grain of truth in these interpretations, the reality is certainly more complicated. In our research on middle‐class parents’ housing and neighbourhood choices as well as their patterns of neighbourhood use, carried out in each of the two types of residential area mentioned above, we have only very rarely found an explicit desire to draw boundaries that exclude those ‘beneath’ them. We rather argue that the housing choices and neighbourhood‐related activities of middle‐class family households are heavily influenced by the specific dilemmas the interviewees face as (working) urban parents. While a significant number of respondents worry about the social sustainability, justice and cohesion of urban society, they are also concerned about the future prospects of their children. Many find it difficult to reconcile these conflicting normative demands under the prevailing circumstances.     

Your Life Chances Affect Where You Live: A Critique of the ‘Cottage Industry’ of Neighbourhood Effects Research

This article advances a critique of the ‘neighbourhood effects’ genre in urban studies, by arguing that an acceptance of the ‘where you live affects your life chances’ thesis, however well‐intentioned, misses the key structural question of why people live where they do in cities. By examining the structural factors that give rise to differential life chances and the inequalities they produce, and by inverting the neighbourhood effects thesis to: your life chances affect where you live, the problem becomes one of understanding life chances via a theory of capital accumulation and class struggle in cities. Such a theory provides an understanding of the injustices inherent in letting the market (buttressed by the state) be the force that determines the cost of housing and therefore being the major determinant of where people live. The article draws on Marxist urban theory to contend that the residential mobility programs advocated by neighbourhood effects proponents stand on shaky ground, for if it is true that ‘neighbourhood effects’ exceed what would be predicted by poverty alone, moving the poor to a richer place would only eliminate that incremental difference, without addressing the capitalist institutional arrangements that create poverty.     

The long-term unemployed,informal economic activity and the ‘underclass’ in Belfast: rejecting or reinstating the work ethic

The notion of an ‘underclass’ existing outside the realm of mainstream society continues to hold sway among journalists and policy-makers. While there are many new contenders for inclusion among the underclass, one of the most enduring group of participants is the long-term unemployed. Work-shy individuals, seemingly content to live on welfare benefits, are regarded as placing themselves outside the boundaries of mainstream economic and social life and passing a host of negative characteristics on to their children. The possibility that some of this group might defraud the welfare benefit system through working while claiming benefits adds further weight to negative images about the characteristics of ‘underclass’ members. The aim of this paper is to challenge some of these common assumptions by examining the ways in which unemployed people in an economically depressed locality in West Belfast relied on informal economic activity to help meet their material needs. Such activity has implications for the underclass debate because, rather than demonstrating commitment to some alternative set of values, informal economic activity drew participants into the wider economy and demonstrated adherence to mainstream values. Moreover, often the debate on social security abuse focuses on the supply side of the issue and is remarkably silent about the demand side of the equation. ‘Doing-the-double’ (working while claiming benefits) was not simply an individual response to unemployment and inadequate welfare benefits but was linked to changes in the labour needs of employers in the wider economy.     

The Politics of Place: Place‐making versus Densification in Toronto's Tower Neighbourhoods

Toronto's Tower Neighbourhood Renewal (TR) programme is a municipal government initiative tackling aging high‐rise apartment building clusters in need of physical upgrades. One strategy for a more vibrant future for those clusters is densification or new infill housing. The main argument of the essay is that the unique urban structure of Toronto's inner suburbs challenges the implementation of TR's densification strategy. The proximity of many residents occupying privately owned single‐family homes close to the tower neighbourhoods has implications for the governance of TR in Toronto. Having created place‐frames firmly linked to their own identities as single‐family homeowners, these residents reject an encroachment of the ‘urban' (through higher residential densities) and of the ‘Other' (through a potential increase in low‐income, immigrant and visible minority tower renters). A 2011 design charrette in the Toronto neighbourhood of Weston serves as a case study, exemplifying the tensions between neighbourhood resident place‐frames and the goals of the TR project. This essay is based on an analysis of public policy documents and public participation reports, as well as notes from direct observation during the Weston 2021 Design Charrette.     

Demolishing the Present to Sell off the Future? The Emergence of ‘Financialized Municipal Entrepreneurialism’ in London

This article introduces a new mode of urban entrepreneurialism in London through a study of the state‐executed, speculative development and financialization of public land. In response to an intensifying housing crisis and austerity‐imposed fiscal constraints, municipalities in London are devising entrepreneurial solutions to deliver more housing. Among these ‘solutions’ can be found the early signs of the state‐executed financialization of public housing in the UK with the use of speculative council‐owned special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that replace existing public housing stock with mixed‐tenure developments, creating ambiguous public/private tenancies that function as homes and the basis for liquid financial assets. Drawing together parallel literatures on the financialization of urban governance and housing, and combining these with original empirical research, we situate these developments in contrast to earlier modes of governance, identifying a distinct mode of entrepreneurial governance in London: financialized municipal entrepreneurialism. The local state is no longer merely the enabler—limited to providing strategic oversight of the private sector—but financializes its practice in a reimagined commercialized interventionism, as property speculator. This article concludes that while the architects of this new mode of entrepreneurialism extol the increased capacity and control it provides, any such gains must be set against longer‐term financial, democratic and political risks.     

‘The City of Our Dream’: Owambe Urbanism and Low‐income Women's Resistance in Ibadan,Nigeria

Ibadan, Nigeria, has been an outlier in the ranking of world‐class cities. But in the past seven years, amidst the circulating Africa Rising narrative, Ibadan has embarked on what I call an Afropolitan Imagineering project of owambe urbanism. Afropolitan Imagineering refers to the production of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world‐class and cosmopolitan. Owambe urbanism is a spatio‐temporal neoliberal project concerning destination, arrival and place‐making, which promises a shared and happy future for all urban dwellers. I argue that this promise of happiness is challenged by low‐income women who are cognizant that a shared and happy future is impossible when little effort is made to address social inequality in the present. They thus refuse to be ‘good’ citizens and invoke an alternative urban futurity through their embodied and imagined resistance.     

Between the Individual and the Community: Residential Patterns of the Haredi Population in Jerusalem

This article examines how different levels of internal organization are reflected in the residential patterns of different population groups. In this case, the Haredi community comprises sects and sub‐sects, whose communal identity plays a central role in everyday life and spatial organization. The residential preferences of Haredi individuals are strongly influenced by the need to live among ‘friends’ — that is, other members of the same sub‐sect. This article explores the dynamics of residential patterns in two of Jerusalem's Haredi neighbourhoods: Ramat Shlomo, a new neighbourhood on the urban periphery, and Sanhedria, an old yet attractive inner‐city neighbourhood. We reveal two segregation mechanisms: the first is top‐down determination of residence, found in relatively new neighbourhoods that are planned, built and populated with the intense involvement of community leaders; the second is the bottom‐up emergence of residential patterns typical of inner‐city neighbourhoods that have gradually developed over time.     

Relating a City's History and Geography with Bourdieu: One Hundred Years of Spatial Distinction in Tel Aviv

This article advances a conceptualization of spatial distinction that, following Bourdieu, relates principles of division in ‘social space’ with formations of segregation in urban space. It applies this interpretive framework to concisely narrate the one hundred years' history of spatial distinction in Tel Aviv. Analyzing five moments in the city's development, it focuses on a dominant principle of distinction in each period and its ensuing segregations: predominantly ethno‐national (Jewish–Arab) distinction that established Tel Aviv in opposition to Jaffa at the turn of the twentieth century; nuanced ethno‐class distinction that shaped the city's rapid growth in the 1920s–30s and created an elaborate socio‐spatial hierarchy of neighborhoods; institutionalized distinction that governed the collective supply of housing in the 1930s–40s, evolving into a complex system of housing classifications; ‘distinction‐by‐distance’ through exclusive suburbanization and the emergence of a metropolitan scale of distinction in the 1950s–70s; and a ‘back‐to‐the‐center’ strategy of distinction by way of gentrification in the 1980s–90s and within gated residential enclaves at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. Through this concise history, various principles, mechanisms and scales of spatial distinction are elaborated upon, as a way to think about the socially constructed, historically contingent and continuously changing divisions and segregations in cities.     

‘Social Mixing' or ‘Gentrification'? Contradictory Perspectives on Urban Change in the Berlin District of Neukölln

In the past two decades, the Berlin district of Neukölln has received considerable attention from politicians, planners, urban scholars and the media. This article discusses the role that the academic concepts of ‘social mixing' and ‘gentrification' play in the overlapping and partly contradictory narratives that have been employed to interpret transformations in one particular part of the district, Nord‐Neukölln. While the area is still characterized as a place of poverty and decline, it has more recently come to be known as a ‘hip place to be' among young (creative) urbanites, students and artists. Various urban players such as politicians, planners, urban sociologists, activists, interest groups and the media participate in the construction of these narratives and, in the process, adopt the concepts of social mixing and gentrification according to their respective rationales and preferences. Both concepts play a pivotal role in justifying contradictory claims and interventions. As a consequence, ‘social mixing' and ‘gentrification' are more than just analytical concepts for interpreting urban transformations; they have themselves become part of these transformations and have an impact on local developments. We conclude that urban scholarship must reflect more on its own role and positioning in the arena of urban transformation.     

Low‐Carbon Gentrification: When Climate Change Encounters Residential Displacement

This article focuses on the emergence of ‘low‐carbon’ gentrification as a distinct urban phenomenon, a process that we see as the outcome of efforts to change the social and spatial composition of urban districts under the pretext of responding to climate change and energy efficiency imperatives. The article develops a conceptual framework for scrutinizing low‐carbon gentrification, predicated upon insights from literatures on ecological gentrification and displacement. It documents the existence of an ‘eco‐social paradox’ associated with new patterns of socio‐spatial segregation and energy efficiency retrofits. We interrogate the discursive and policy frameworks, socio‐spatial implications and political contestations of low‐carbon gentrification. Evidence is drawn from case study research in an inner‐city district of the Polish city of Gdańsk, where such processes have been unfolding since 2006 due to the implementation of a targeted urban regeneration programme. This investigation is positioned within a wider analysis of secondary written sources about similar developments in other geographical contexts across Europe and North America, where anecdotal evidence suggests that low‐carbon gentrification may be widespread and common.     

Spaces of the Expelled as Spaces of the Urban Commons? Analysing the Re‐emergence of Squatting Initiatives in Rome

Asserting the need to acknowledge the role of the current crisis and austerity politics in fostering the re‐emergence of squatting initiatives in Rome, this article brings together the literature on squatting as an urban social movement, notably Martínez López's holistic approach, with a political economy perspective analysing the current stage of ‘late neoliberalism’. In so doing, I use the conceptualization of ‘expulsions’ developed by Sassen to show how emerging squatting initiatives in Rome represent the ‘spaces of the expelled’. Focusing on the case of Communia in San Lorenzo neighbourhood, the article shows how Martínez López's approach is able to account for the rapid success and support enjoyed by Communia, going as it does beyond the ‘single‐issue’ perspective that has dominated much of the squatting literature. Indeed, the main claims addressed by Communia activists concern a plurality of issues grouped around the concept of urban commons, as both a practice and a goal. Methodologically, the article is the result of 18 months of fieldwork based on an activist/participatory action research (PAR) approach, comprising participant observation/observant participation, in‐depth interviews and questionnaires.     

Controlling the Urban Fabric: The Complex Game of Distance and Proximity in European Upper‐Middle‐Class Residential Strategies

This article presents an open discussion of the processes of urban secession and gentrification in contemporary European cities, arguing that intergroup social dynamics in urban spaces are generally more complex than either extreme mutual avoidance or the colonization of neighbourhoods by the wealthiest groups. We analyse the residential strategies of urban upper‐middle class managers in various European metropolitan areas through in‐depth semi‐structured interviews to argue that these groups develop complex strategies of proximity and distance in relation to other social groups. The development of these ‘partial exit’ strategies takes place through specific combinations of practices that allow groups to select the dimensions they are willing to share with other social groups, and those in which they prefer a more segregated social environment for themselves and their families. The responses of our interviewees were consistently more nuanced and complex than suggested by a simplistic theory about their drive to withdraw from society, forcing us to develop more sophisticated conceptual frameworks to account for the growing prevalence of multi‐layered identities and spheres of reference and solidarity, specific combinations of elective segregation and local involvement, and more active patterns of mobility combined with local embeddedness.     

Cracks in the Creative City: The Contradictions of Community Arts Practice

The recent flurry of research about arts‐led regeneration initiatives illuminates how contemporary arts festivals can become complicit in the production of urban inequality. But researchers rarely engage with detailed empirical examples that shed light on the contradictory role that artists sometimes play within these spectacularized events. Similar research in performance studies connects the political limits and potential of social practice arts — interventions that encourage artists and non‐artists to co‐produce work — as civic boosters strive to stage cities in order to attract investment. In this article, I explore the case study of Streetscape: Living Space at Regent Park, a participatory artistic intervention programmed in a public housing neighbourhood that is undergoing redevelopment in Toronto, Canada. Streetscape was part of the Luminato festival, an elite booster coalition‐led festival of ‘creativity’. I refer to these arts interventions to demonstrate how artists engaging in social practice arts can become complicit in naturalizing colonial gentrification processes at multiple scales. But I also reveal how artists can leverage heterogeneous arts‐led regeneration strategies to make space for ‘radical social praxis’ (Kwon, 2004), interventions that challenge hegemonic regimes. I conclude by interrogating the effectiveness of place‐based efforts in unsettling the ‘creative city’.     

Bricks,Mortar, Memories: Neighbourhood and Networks in Collective Acts of Remembering

How is place‐making as a tool for the formation of social identities related to categories, networks and categorical networks? How do people use the built environment and hence, following Massey, create places in space? Such questions are asked to reverse the usual way of looking at urban neighbourhoods. The neighbourhood in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, where the ethnographic research for this article was conducted, is not taken for granted. The symbolic meanings and practical uses the neighbourhood has today and has had over the past 75 years are discussed in relation to class and social networks. Local networks, grounded in everyday activities, provided a sense of class‐based familiarity when the shipbuilding industry (1900–60) reigned. This did not necessarily produce communities as people imagined them, but it did produce quite local, and categorical, networks. However, such catnets on the local level can no longer be taken for granted, if they ever could. This article addresses how elderly people within a neighbourhood use the built environment to: (1) produce new local networks (by using local facilities as meeting points) and new social identifications with others; (2) imagine a community by developing a sense of ‘localness’ rather than ‘class’ as a shared category, although they have a similar class position; and (3) produce collective memories and, in the process of this production, format the neighbourhood symbolically. In doing so, they reduce the multi‐layered identities of earlier times to a one‐dimensional memory of the working‐class community which is equated with the neighbourhood. This enables this group of elderly people to make sense of their contemporary, changing social environment. Comment la fabrication d’un lieu peut‐elle façonner des identités sociales liées à des catégories, des réseaux et des réseaux catégoriques? Comment les gens utilisent‐ils l’environnement bâti, créant ainsi des lieux dans l’espace – si l’on en croit Massey? En posant ces questions, on inverse la manière courante d’observer les quartiers urbains. Le quartier de Rotterdam où a été réalisée l’étude ethnographique pour cet article n’est pas puis au tant que tel: les sens symboliques et les usages pratiques qu’il a aujourd’hui et a eu durant les 75 dernières années sont examinés en fonction des classes et des réseaux sociaux. Les réseaux locaux, fondés sur le quotidien, ont créé une certaine familiarité fondée sur les classes à l’époque florissante de l’industrie navale (1900–60); sans produire forcément des communautés telles qu’on les imagine, il en a résulté des réseaux très locaux et sectoriels. Cependant, ces ‘sectorieux’ locaux ne peuvent plus ? tre considérés comme naturels, s’ils ne l’ont jamais été. L’article montre comment les personnes âgées d’un quartier exploitent l’environnement bâti: premièrement, pour créer de nouveaux réseaux locaux (en utilisant les implantations existantes comme points de rencontre) et de nouvelles identifications sociales avec autrui; deuxièmement, pour imaginer une communauté partageant une catégorie basée sur la ‘localité’ plutocirc;t que la ‘classe’, m? me si elles sont d’une position de classe similaire; troisièmement, pour générer des souvenirs communs et, ce faisant, donner au quartier une configuration symbolique. Elles ramènent ainsi les identités antérieures, qui comportaient plusieurs niveaux, à une mémoire à une dimension de la communauté ouvrière, laquelle équivaut au quartier. C’est ce qui permet à ce groupe de personnes âgées de comprendre son environnement social contemporain en évolution.     

Desegregation and Integration as Linked or Distinct? Evidence from a Previously ‘White’ Suburb in Post‐apartheid Cape Town

This article analyses whether the physical desegregation of a residential neighbourhood ultimately facilitates the social integration of its residents. Desegregation is measured quantitatively (i.e. using census data for a suburb in which no single race comprises more than 50% and at least one other racial group comprises 25%), and social integration is assessed qualitatively using indicators such as friendship, common local identity, sharing local facilities and involvement in local institutions. Essentially this research is concerned with whether labelling a suburb ‘desegregated’ is a superficial term that whilst implying racial mixing actually masks social segregation; and also whether assumptions that urban policies of desegregation ultimately facilitate social integration are accurate. This desegregation/integration nexus is explored by examining the lives of residents of a desegregated Cape Town neighbourhood. South Africa provides a timely context because the legacy of apartheid’s spatial and social design continues to dominate the urban scene despite policy efforts to promote both desegregation and integration.     

Urbanization and the City Image in Lowry at Tate Britain: Towards a Critique of Cultural Cityism

This article explores cultural cityism at a time when a more expansive, ‘planetary’ urbanization is argued to have superseded ‘the city’ as the dominant urban form. It takes an essentially Lefebvrian problematic and works this through an examination of one aspect of contemporary metropolitan culture, the L.S. Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain, held in the summer of 2013. The article scrutinizes the juxtaposition of Lowry's images of the industrial city with the image of ‘global’, corporate London provided by Tate Britain itself. The exhibition is presented as evidence of Lefebvre's argument that although the urban core has imploded and exploded, through images the city ‘can perpetuate itself, survive its conditions’. Taking stock also of the preponderance of city images in culture more widely, it is argued such images make a fetish of the city, producing also an ‘urban pastoral’ that obscures the defining characteristics of urban life today. Finally, Benjamin's concept of the ‘dialectical image’ and Rancière's notion of the ‘sentence image’ are invoked to capture the flashing together of past and present city images and the opportunities for critical reflection this constellation presents.     

Seeing Like a City‐State: Behavioural Planning and Governance in Egypt's First Affordable Gated Community

Haram City is Egypt's first ‘affordable’ gated community, hosting both aspirational middle‐class homeowners and resettled poor urban residents. Amidst legal ambiguity during Egypt's 2011–2013 revolutionary period, the management team of this public–private partnership was tasked with creating a ‘fully self‐sufficient’ city. While Haram City is the product of top‐down ‘seeing like a state’ master planning (Scott, 1998 ), the day‐to‐day resolution of class vulnerabilities and disputes over ‘reasonableness’ in city life requires forms of interpersonal adjudication otherwise addressed through local urban law—‘seeing like a city’ (Valverde, 2011 ). This article uses ethnography of management techniques aiming to ‘upgrade behaviour’ to theorize that a private entity, in a strategically indeterminate relationship with the state, reconciles future‐oriented planning and storied prejudices by merging two visions of governance. Imitating the repertoire of urban law, managers plan the very realm of bottom‐up decision making. They then adapt top‐down urban planning to bottom‐up dispute resolution to spatially consolidate the ‘consensual’ outcomes of a rigged game. Evoking both colonial Egyptian vagrancy laws and neoliberal paternalist welfare, ‘seeing like a city‐state’ governance amounts to authoritarianism that conceals itself within custom, appearing neutral so as to plan streets, codes and inner lives at once.     

Planning Gentrification and the ‘Absent’ State in Athens

In times of austerity, gentrification is promoted as a prime investment opportunity capable of reviving stagnating local economies. In Athens, pro‐gentrification policies (using English slogans like ‘Re‐launch Athens’ and ‘Re‐activate Athens’) have become increasingly defined in their targeting of specific areas. Moreover, planning in Greece is characterized by spontaneity, fragmentation and tolerance of speculation, specifically favouring the gentrification process. In many cases, the state's ‘absence’ after promulgation of regeneration projects acts as a clear strategy for inner‐city gentrification. After discussing the emergent relations between state policies on urban intervention and gentrification in the post‐crash era, this article will focus on the peculiarities of the Greek planning system and how these have led to the gentrification of an inner‐city area called Metaxourgio.     

Urban Governance and the ‘European City’: Ideals and Realities in Dublin,Ireland

Throughout recent decades, a significant amount of attention has been given to the notion of the ‘European city’ within policy formation and academic enquiry. From one perspective, the ideal of the ‘European city’ is presented as a densely developed urban area with a focus on quality public transport and a more balanced social structure. More recently, however, the particular elements of the ‘European city’ associated with pedestrianized public space, urban design and image‐making strategies have become central features of entrepreneurial urban policies throughout Europe. This article undertakes an examination of the notion of the ‘European city’ in urban change in Dublin since the 1990s. Specifically, the article illustrates the degree to which a wholly positive spin on the urban design and image‐making elements of the ‘European city’ in Dublin has served as a thin veil for the desired transformation of Dublin according to neoliberal principles.