Popular Urbanization: Conceptualizing Urbanization Processes Beyond Informality

This article introduces the concept of popular urbanization to describe a specific urbanization process based on collective initiatives, self-organization and the activities of inhabitants. We understand popular urbanization as an urban strategy through which an urban territory is produced, transformed and appropriated by the people. This concept results from a theoretically guided and empirically grounded comparison of Mexico City, Istanbul and Lagos. Based on postcolonial critiques of urban theory and on the epistemologies of planetary urbanization, we bring urbanization processes in these urban regions into conversation with each other through a multidimensional theoretical framework inspired by Henri Lefebvre focusing on material interaction, territorial regulation, and everyday experience. In this way, popular urbanization emerged as a distinct urbanization process, which we identified in all three contexts. While this process is often subsumed under the broader concept of ‘urban informality’, we suggest that it may be helpful to distinguish popular urbanization as primarily led by the people, while commodification and state agencies play minor roles. As popular urbanization unfolds in diverse ways dependent upon the wider urban context, specific political constellations and actions, it results in a variety of spatial outcomes and temporal trajectories. This is therefore a revisable and open concept. In proposing the concept of popular urbanization for further examination, we seek to contribute to the collective development of a decentered vocabulary of urbanization.     

Understanding Urban Processes in Flint,Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively

Ananya Roy introduces the concept ‘subaltern urbanism’ in her 2011 article ‘Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism’. She challenges researchers to move beyond existing epistemological and methodological limits, and offers four concepts which, taken together, serve as a useful starting point for understanding and representing subaltern urban space. In this article I argue that instead of a deductive approach that begins with an a priori identification of slums as subaltern urban space, an inductive approach of identifying subaltern urban space would expand the concept and show that subaltern urbanism exists in the global North. I present original research to show that Flint, Michigan, can be considered subaltern urban space. In the final section of the article I argue that this inductive approach to subaltern urbanism can foster comparative research across the North‐South divide, and generate the transfer of knowledge from South to North.     

论城市化进程中的低端需求——以城市摊贩问题为例

城市摊贩问题已经成为近年来城市管理中十分棘手的问题.对城市化进程中的人口流动趋势以及城市定位的问题进行分析得出,摊贩问题的出现,一方面反应了城市中有一个庞大的低端需求群体,另一方面说明城市常常忽视这种需求,将城市现代化与高端化等同.大量流动人口的涌现有利于城市竞争力的发展,加上城市中原有的低收入人群,使得城市必须保留一个能够满足这些人口消费的市场.城市化不是以排斥低端收入的人群为代价,而是要为低端需求留有充分的生存和发展的空间.     

可持续城市化:发展视野中的批判

可持续城市化发展在共同的发展理念遮蔽下存在着重大的内在差异,从发展哲学的整体性研究视野出发,我们通过对可持续城市化发展理念内在分歧的反思揭示出可持续城市化发展理念分歧的理论基础;进一步指出,当今世界城市可持续发展浪潮的实质是资本城市化;在中国实施城市的科学发展必须走自己的道路,要以城市的新现代性引领中国特色的可持续城市化发展道路.     

Urban Political Ecology Beyond Methodological Cityism

The concept of planetary urbanization has emerged in recent years amongst neo‐Lefebvrian urban scholars who see urbanization as a process taking place at all spatial scales. This article analyses recent critiques of the urban political ecology (UPE) literature which argue that much of the work in the field has been guilty of focusing exclusively on the traditional bounded city unit rather than urbanization as a process. In response, the article reviews various strands of the UPE literature which have (always) moved beyond ‘the city’ to consider the various metabolisms and circulations of humans and non‐humans connecting cities with places outside of their borders at a variety of scales. Furthermore, it suggests how these approaches can productively work with the insights of the planetary urbanization literature, in considering both the changing nature of urbanization and also the socio‐ecological and political implications of these changes. Finally, the article suggests how the methodological approach of the ‘site multiple’ and its focus on everyday practices and lived experiences can be useful for researching diverse urban phenomena and their more‐than‐urban connections.     

Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism

Urban political ecology (UPE), an offshoot of political ecology that emerged in the late 1990s, has had two major impacts on critical urban studies: it has introduced critical political ecology to urban settings, and it has provided a framework for retheorizing the city as a product of metabolic processes of socionatural transformation. However, there was another goal in early UPE programmatic statements that has largely fallen by the wayside: to mobilize a Lefebvrian theoretical framework to trouble traditional distinctions between urban/rural and society/nature by exploring urbanization as a global process. Instead of following this potentially fruitful path, UPE has become bogged down in ‘methodological cityism’––an overwhelming analytical and empirical focus on the traditional city to the exclusion of other aspects of contemporary urbanization processes. Thus UPE's Lefebvrian promise, of a research program that could work across traditional disciplinary divisions and provide insights into a new era of planetary urbanization, has remained unfulfilled. In this article we trace UPE's history to show how it arrived at its present predicament, and offer some thoughts on a research agenda for a political ecology not of the city but of urbanization.     

珠江三角洲城市边缘聚落的城市化

分析了珠三角城市化过程中城市边缘聚落的形态类别、一般演进过程和发展趋势,提出其分阶段城市化演进的范型,试图揭示制度变迁与城市边缘区形态的互动关系,并从城市规划角度提出若干对策和建议.     

LIVING ON THE MARGINS: The Socio-spatial Representation of Urban Internally Displaced Persons in Ethiopia

In cities in the global South, internally displaced persons (IDPs) often end up in marginalized places created by uneven processes of urbanization. While IDPs experience similar disadvantages to the urban poor living in these places, they face additional vulnerabilities related to their displacement. Building on insights from urban studies and forced migration studies, we argue in this article that a multidimensional understanding of urban marginality is a useful analytical lens with which to examine the conditions of urban IDPs. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in Kersa and Sululta IDP settlements of Ethiopia, this study reveals how IDPs experience similar spatial, social and symbolic marginality in different urban contexts. Our findings show the relational manifestation of segregation, social distance and stigmatization that impede IDPs’ access to urban space and services. This study also highlights how these dimensions of marginality interact and reproduce an additional layer of marginality. Our research suggests the need for inclusive urban governance in which IDPs contribute to and benefit from urbanization as citizens.     

论新型城镇化过程中的产城统筹问题

当前,产业发展与城市建设的脱节现象日益明显,这在城市新区建设和工业园区的发展中表现得尤为突出。我国工业化尚未完成,城市化发展正处于关键阶段,在新一轮新型工业化和新型城镇化的过程中,应当注重产业发展与城市建设的有机结合,实现"双轮驱动"的良性发展。     

Slumdog cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism

This article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. It seeks to understand and transform the ways in which the cities of the global South are studied and represented in urban research, and to some extent in popular discourse. As such, the article is primarily concerned with a formation of ideas - "subaltern urbanism" - which undertakes the theorization of the megacity and its subaltern spaces and subaltern classes. Of these, the ubiquitous ‘slum’ is the most prominent. Writing against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the slum, subaltern urbanism provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, self-organization and politics. This is a vital and even radical challenge to dominant narratives of the megacity. However, this article is concerned with the limits of and alternatives to subaltern urbanism. It thus highlights emergent analytical strategies, utilizing theoretical categories that transcend the familiar metonyms of underdevelopment such as the megacity, the slum, mass politics and the habitus of the dispossessed. Instead, four categories are discussed — peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception and gray spaces. Informed by the urbanism of the global South, these categories break with ontological and topological understandings of subaltern subjects and subaltern spaces.     

The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory

There has been a growing debate in recent decades about the range and substance of urban theory. The debate has been marked by many different claims about the nature of cities, including declarations that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, that the urban scale can no longer be separated from the global scale, and that urban theory hitherto has been deeply vitiated by its almost exclusive concentration on the cities of the global North. This article offers some points of clarification of claims like these. All cities can be understood in terms of a theoretical framework that combines two main processes, namely, the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions. This same framework can be used to identify many different varieties of cities, and to distinguish intrinsically urban phenomena from the rest of social reality. The discussion thus identifies the common dimensions of all cities without, on the one hand, exaggerating the scope of urban theory, or on the other hand, asserting that every individual city is an irreducible special case.     

Animating the Urban Vortex: New Sociological Urgencies

The current era of global urbanization is defined by a convergence of economic and political crises requiring urgent sociological reflection on the meaning of the ‘urban' today. This article responds to the current rethinking of worldwide processes of urbanization sparked off by Brenner, and Brenner and Schmid, arguing for a renewed sociological approach to urban formations that probes beyond the economic logic of urban ‘de‐territorialization', towards the capricious life‐worlds and forms of planetary organization that define the urban. We pursue a theory of the ‘urban vortex' to capture the maelstrom of disorienting crises since 2008, and explicate the social formations implicated in the construction, materialization and practice of power and transgression in cities today. Our aim is to consider what forms of social change emerge in volatile, intense and centralized dynamics (the urban vortex), and how this might relate to arrangements of interconnectivity, particularity and variegation (the planetary). The article highlights three prominent processes of urban social formation: accumulation, stratification and hyper‐diversity—reinstating the need to theorize the centrality of the city within the formations of twenty‐first century capitalism.     

德国的城市化模式

德国的城市化采用了以大城市为核心、建立互补共生的区域城市圈的模式。在城市圈内,大中小城市均衡发展,中小城市是城市体系中的主体。德国的这种城市化模式保证了低房价,减少了居民上下班通勤时间和成本,完善了中小城市的基础设施和公共服务,降低了城市居民的生活成本,保持和发展了各城市独特的城市文化,形成和发展了多样化的旅游业。     

基于空间事件的城市精神塑造策略

在都市化的进程中,如何超越土地增长的模式?以伦敦为例,论文给出了一种可能性:基于时空的事件经营模式,即利用现有的各种城市公共空间融入丰富多彩的文化活动,促进邻里交往与城市精神的塑造.指出中国的城市建设不能仅仅忙于物质空间的现代化生产,而忽略城市精神的塑造;需要充分利用好每一个现有的都市空间,使其发挥更好的文化磁性、共享...     

中国城市空间格局的演变

中国的城市化进程始于建国初期,由于受到国家区域发展战略的影响,呈现出明显的阶段性。以此为依据将建国以来中国的城市化历程划分为四个阶段,研究了各阶段城市空间格局的变迁。研究发现,从建国初期到改革开放之前,西部地区新增城市数量和城市化速度高于中东部地区,东部地区的城市化速度最慢;从改革开放之后到本世纪初,东部地区经历了城市化的快速发展,中国城市发展的总体格局呈现出东部快于中西部、南部快于北部的发展特征。     

SUSTAINABLE URBANIZATION: NEEDED POLICY CHANGES FOR INDIA

This paper is concerned with two questions: what is it that is unsustainable about the process of urbanization and growth of cities in developing countries?; and why do countries persist with strategies that are evidently unsustainable? Making use of data from India, which today has the second largest urban population in the world, and taking note of increasing global concern for sustainable urbanization, this paper points out that the developing countries have to move beyond a general acceptance of the concept to see it being put into practice.     

论失地农民城市化进程中的社会保障体系构建

城市化是中国走向现代化的必然趋势,在城市扩张的过程中征占农村土地的力度越来越大,失地农民越来越多,失地农民市民化已成为推进城市化的瓶颈。因此,文章提出建立新型社会保障体系是解决失地农民进入城市门槛的对策构想。     

Worlding Water Supply: Thinking Beyond the Network in Jakarta

This article draws on scholarship in Southern theory to ‘world’ the study of water’s urbanization. This means complicating scholarship by widening the focus beyond the application of Northern norms to engage with complex and diverse practices in Southern cities. For water’s urbanization, this means focusing on what water supply is for the majority: neither the centralized piped‐water network nor its absence, but the range of practices and technologies that unite people, nature and artefacts in a complex socio‐ecological politics of water. Drawing on scholarship from Southern urbanisms, urban political ecology, and science and technology studies, we illustrate how expanding water’s urbanization to include more than networked infrastructure in Jakarta draws attention to the importance of ecological connections between piped water, groundwater, wastewater and floodwater. Thinking beyond the network requires deeper engagement with the ecological connections between the diverse flows of water in and around urban environments. These produce distinct forms of fragmentation that are missed when analysis is limited to piped‐water supply. The emphasis on ecological connections between flows of water and power seeks to draw attention back to the importance of the uneven exposure to environmental hazards in cities in which neither water nor nature are wholly contained by infrastructure.     

城市化进程中的“地方镶嵌”与“网络镶嵌”

以地方响应作为中介,将全球化、城市化之间的互动作用联系起来,试图建立一个相对完善的机制分析框架,从城市和农村两个空间维度来解释全球化影响下的中国沿海地区城市化发展机制。结合对昆山和玉环两个不同全球化路径的案例探讨,从制度创新与政策投入、全球生产网络与治理、产业升级与新型城市化道路、城乡统筹与城镇化四个方面进行了理论论证。     

我国城市化战略取向研究——兼论自贡市大城市化的目标定位

本文在我国已经开展城市化的基础上进一步深入探讨了城市的概念、功能与发展史,特别是对城市的十二大基本功能和两大延伸功能进行了界定,提升了对城市的认知度;分析了我国城市化的国际国内环境条件及其战略意义,在总结城市化经验的基础上,对我国城市化战略的调整进行了设想,从宏观和微观两个层面阐述了新的战略方案,并构建了战略的发展路径;最后,拟定了自贡市大城市化的建设目标与发展对策。