Architecture,Economic Imaginaries and Urban Politics: The Office Tower as Socially Classifying Device

In recent studies on the role of architecture in urban restructuring, city marketing and the related struggles for meaning, there has been a focus on high‐profile architects and iconic architecture. In this article I wish to examine architecture and building types as ‘socially signifying devices’, in order to take more everyday buildings and their images into account as well. Using Vienna as a case study, I explore how the commercial office tower is utilized to represent the internationalization of the local economy and render new urban political‐economic strategies socially meaningful. This is done by examining recent shifts in urban policy, and the means, channels and practices of discursive and visual representation of the local office architecture. Connecting the concept of economic imaginaries from cultural political economy (CPE) with a sociological approach to building types, I argue that economic imaginaries gain in plausibility if they are discursively and visually anchored in urban space. However, it is also shown that this kind of spatialization of new economic imaginaries is constructed on a selective visual representation of buildings: the assignment of international economic activities to local office towers is revealed to be only partially true in the case of Vienna.     

Legal Technologies of Primitive Accumulation: Judicial Robbery and Dispossession‐by‐Restitution in Warsaw

Among the ‘extra‐economic means’ that facilitate primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession, the law plays a prominent role. But works on neoliberal urban restructuring rarely engage with concrete legal technologies. Analysing judicial property restitution (‘reprivatization’) in Warsaw, this article grasps the machine of accumulation by dispossession at a moment of faltering and exposes the distinctive legal technologies behind its troubleshooting. It makes three contributions to critical urban studies. First, it demonstrates how judicial systems can steal political conflicts that obstruct the cycle of accumulation by dispossession. It thus introduces the notion of ‘judicial robbery’, a non‐legislated expropriation of common property through judicial engineering that simultaneously deprives the public of political agency. Second, it shows that seemingly neutral legal technicalities, usually sheltered from political debate, can become a key locus of urban politics. Third, it examines the agency, scope and spatial patterns of ‘dispossession by restitution’, the term I use for a locally specific form of accumulation by dispossession in Warsaw. Lastly, I raise the question of political struggle against primitive accumulation. Is the judicial robbery reversible? If we can reclaim property, can we also reclaim political conflicts that have been stolen by the law?     

How does(n't) Urban Shrinkage get onto the Agenda? Experiences from Leipzig,Liverpool, Genoa and Bytom

This article discusses the question of how urban shrinkage gets onto the agenda of public‐policy agencies. It is based on a comparison of the agenda‐setting histories of four European cities, Liverpool (UK), Leipzig (Germany), Genoa (Italy) and Bytom (Poland), which have all experienced severe population losses but show very different histories with respect to how local governments reacted to them. We use the political‐science concepts of ‘systemic vs. institutional agendas’ and ‘policy windows’ as a conceptual frame to compare these experiences. The article demonstrates that shrinkage is hardly ever responded to in a comprehensive manner but rather that policies are only implemented in a piecemeal way in selected fields. Moreover, it is argued that variations in institutional contexts and political dynamics lead to considerable differences with regard to the chances of making shrinkage a matter of public intervention. Against this background, the article takes issue with the idea that urban shrinkage only needs to be ‘accepted’ by policymakers who would need to overcome their growth‐oriented cultural perceptions, as has been suggested in a number of recent writings, and calls for a more differentiated, context‐sensitive view.     

BEYOND THE TRIAGING OF NEGLECTED THINGS: Connecting Place and Participation Across an Urban System

What is the relationship between top-down governance reform and place-based participatory and deliberative spaces? In this article I argue that in Toronto, an urban system of public participation and deliberation is intimately interwoven into partisan scalar restructuring processes, as well as enduring tensions over the ways and means by which the public can have authoritative input on solving local issues. Regardless of top-down political manoeuvring, the public mobilizes in various spaces across the city, but the urban system remains disconnected and geared towards triaging. This means that the public must work autonomously across the city and within the crevices of city processes, prioritizing how to make gains on issues that they feel are important. I discuss how to move beyond this by building on deliberative systems theory and findings from interviews with local city staff and residents, and through an analysis of public deputations at the official Special Committee on Governance. Ultimately, there is a need for spatially integrated opportunities for more people to come together and assemble in different ways. Some of these will align with autonomous activities, some are liminal and woven within institutional partners, and others are more about geographical bridge building.     

Politics in the Informalizing Metropolis: Displacement,Resettlement and Unstable Negotiations in Uncivil Ahmedabad

This article documents the displacement of Baoris, an adivasi (indigenous) community living in the city of Ahmedabad, India, and their subsequent resettlement along the city's precarious urban–rural frontier. I argue that this process signals the informalization of rights and territories, representing a political regime of governing in the remaking of the contemporary Indian metropolis. Recent actions taken by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to evict Baoris from the inner city are situated within the entangled processes and politics of urban restructuring, liberalization and Hindu nationalism. The absence and erosion of democratic protections, however, has not precluded the possibility of political negotiations with the local agents of state and capital, and this article assesses the tactics that community residents have deployed in their bid to maintain claims to territory, labour and services. I end by tempering enthusiasm for the informalizing city as a site for realizing alternative forms of justice and possible democratization.     

Squatting and urban renewal: the interaction of squatter movements and strategies of urban restructuring in Berlin

Squatting as a housing strategy and as a tool of urban social movements accompanies the development of capitalist cities worldwide. We argue that the dynamics of squatter movements are directly connected to strategies of urban renewal in that movement conjunctures occur when urban regimes are in crisis. An analysis of the history of Berlin squatter movements, their political context and their effects on urban policies since the 1970s, clearly shows how massive mobilizations at the beginning of the 1980s and in the early 1990s developed in a context of transition in regimes of urban renewal. The crisis of Fordist city planning at the end of the 1970s provoked a movement of "rehab squatting" ('Instandbesetzung'), which contributed to the institutionalization of "cautious urban renewal" ('behutsame Stadterneuerung') in an important way. The second rupture in Berlin's urban renewal became apparent in 1989 and 1990, when the necessity of restoring whole inner-city districts constituted a new, budget-straining challenge for urban policymaking. Whilst in the 1980s the squatter movement became a central condition for and a political factor of the transition to "cautious urban renewal," in the 1990s large-scale squatting — mainly in the eastern parts of the city — is better understood as an alien element in times of neoliberal urban restructuring.     

THE POLITICS OF URBAN ECOLOGY: Paul Duvigneaud and the Rise of Ecological Urbanism in Brussels during the 1970s

Today, design disciplines such as ecological urbanism aim at fusing natural and social sciences to restore the equilibrium between social and natural systems, and in extenso the urban and natural environment. But recent literature in urban political ecology and urban history has shown how this socioecological approach is generally stripped down to a merely ecological perspective, ignoring the sociopolitical side of the urban ecological project. I therefore argue that there is a need for a research programme that interrogates the history of the interaction between ecology, planning and politics. In this article I respond by developing a historical perspective on the rise of the ecosystemic approach towards the city, delving into the agency and political nature of ecological science itself. Through an in-depth historical analysis of the Brussels school of urban ecology and urban ecologist Paul Duvigneaud, I highlight how urban ecology influenced politics through its association with the regional government and vice versa to argue that ecological knowledge was used to overcome political opposition, incorporate a specific regionalist agenda and build an ecological zoning practice in urban planning policies.     

Book Review Essay

Book reviewed in this article: Policy, politics and urban restructuring: Boddy, M., Lovering, J. and Basset, K. Policy, politics and urban restructuring: Buck, N., Gordon, I. and Young, K. with Ermisch, J. and Mills, L. Policy, politics and urban restructuring: Lever, W. and Moore, C. Policy, politics and urban restructuring: Robinson, F., Wren, C. and Goddard, J. Policy, politics and urban restructuring: Spencer, K., Taylor, A., Smith, B., Mawson, J., Flynn, N. and Batley, R. Policy, politics and urban restructuring: Hausner, V. and members of the ESRC Inner Cities Research Programme     

From Occupation to Recuperation: Property,Politics and Provincialization in Contemporary Madrid

Recent debates have once again engaged with the substance and meaning of urban politics within our increasingly complex and startling contemporary landscapes. Yet these debates, while giving nods in the direction of feminist and postcolonial scholarship, largely work through traditional lenses of class, labor and the dynamic workings of neoliberal capitalism. In this article, I focus on spaces of difference and their engagement with the urban to demonstrate how politics ‘happens' in locations often left off the map of both scholarship and popular imaginaries, and, crucially, how those locations can, in fact, illuminate shifting political arrangements elided by other methodologies. By juxtaposing European okupa debates with postcolonial discussions of urban informality, I trace what I argue is a new iteration of squatting within a city both ravaged by edicts of neoliberal austerity and buoyed by the efflorescence of social movements and alternative political projects. I then explicate the role of property in constituting the urban within Spain, using the concept of ‘provincialization'. In doing so, I think relationally between systems of property and emergent forms of insurgency to argue that we are witnessing an anticipatory politics that fundamentally challenges hegemonic relationships between everyday citizens and regimes of property ownership.     

‘ARE WE JUST KILLING PEOPLE?’: Centering Racial Capitalism in the Green Gentrification of the Atlanta BeltLine

In this article I argue that any analyses of the manifestations of urban natures within urban political ecology must center racial capitalism as a theoretical framework and account for how these manifestations, which rely upon the co-constitutive workings of race and nature, reproduce anti-Blackness and unequal productions of space. I engage urban frontier imaginative geographies as a lens through which to view the ongoing regimes of dispossession within the historical context of the founding of what is today known as Atlanta and the contemporary greening project of the Atlanta BeltLine. Race and nature intersect to function as instruments of power and converge in the spaces of the Atlanta BeltLine to (re)produce an urban green frontier.     

Forging a ‘new’ organizational infrastructure for Los Angeles’ progressive community

What margins of maneuverability do urban‐based progressive movements have for affecting policy outcomes in entrepreneurial and neoliberal political systems? This article provides a partial answer to this question by examining how relations developed and stabilized between actors in the different sectors (community based organizations, labor, university) of Los Angeles’ progressive community. Such relations are a necessary but not sufficient condition for affecting policy outcomes. I argue that these relations have resulted from a 20‐year process of interactions between the more innovative agents of each of the sectors. Through their repeated experimentation in building frameworks to coordinate their partnerships, I argue that a variety of complex mechanisms have taken shape that nourish relations and coordinate complex forms of collective action. Functioning as ‘relational platforms’, these coordinating mechanisms have combined to form an emergent ‘organizational infrastructure’ that facilitates both ongoing relational processes and the mobilization of collective resources in politically effective ways. Thus, by examining the organizational infrastructure that makes such a broad based ‘movement’ possible and sustainable, the article offers the reader one insight into how urban progressives have been able to build the power necessary to affect policies in one of the world's most entrepreneurial and neoliberal cities.     

Radical Intellectuals: What Happened to the New Urban Sociology?

This article is about the rise and fall of radicalism among ‘new urban sociologists’ during the 1960s and 1970s. First, I analyze the social and theoretical developments of that time and demonstrate the novelty of the questions that the new urban sociologists posed. Second, I examine the features of the practical engagements and motivations of the members of this group and show how they changed over time. Finally, I discuss the processes of institutionalization of this group. The story of the new urban sociologists is the story of members of the same generation who, dissatisfied with the development of theory in their field, developed a distinct approach to urban problems. The project that they developed combined elements of both intellectual and political projects. I consider both aspects of this project in light of Gouldner’s sociology of intellectuals, and show that de‐radicalization was a consequence of a peculiar combination of political disillusionment, theoretical triumph and a successful project of professionalization.     

Scalar Narratives in Bilbao: A Cultural Politics of Scales Approach to the Study of Urban Policy

In this article I explore how theoretical metaphors about the contemporary rescaling of the capitalist economy are used by local policy actors to justify an entrepreneurial urban policy. I develop a new theoretical concept (scalar narrative), suggest an analytical approach (cultural politics of scales) and give evidence of a particular case (Bilbao). The article is structured in the following way. First, I briefly review the literature on politics of scales and contribute to the debate with an approach that incorporates elements from cultural political economy and interpretative policy analysis. Within this approach I mobilize the concept of ‘scalar narrative’ that has already been suggested in the literature but not fully explored. I then put this approach into practice with a particular case study, Bilbao, a city in the north of Spain, which has recently gone through extensive urban regeneration, where I describe the appropriation of three scalar narratives by the policymakers. To show this I draw from empirical work done in Bilbao that looks at statutory and strategic planning documents as well as urban marketing literature and interviews with key informants.     

Governing ‘Sustainable Urban Development’ Through Self‐Build Groups and Co‐Housing: The Cases of Hamburg and Gothenburg

This article critically examines the governing of ‘sustainable urban development’ through self‐build cohousing groups in Gothenburg and Hamburg. The two case cities have been selected because both are currently involved in major urban restructuring, and have launched programmes to support self‐build groups and cohousing as part of their emphasis on promoting urban sustainable development through this process. Departing from a theoretical discussion on advanced liberal urban governance, focusing in particular on the contemporary discourse on sustainable urban development, we examine the interaction between political institutions, civil society and private actors in the construction of cohousing as a perceived novel and alternative form of housing that may contribute to fulfilling certain sustainability goals. Questions centre on the socio‐political contextualization of cohousing; concepts of sustainability; strategies of, and relations between, different actors in promoting cohousing; gentrification and segregation; and inclusion and exclusion. In conclusion we argue that, while self‐build groups can provide pockets of cohousing as an alternative to dominant forms of housing, the economic and political logics of advanced liberal urban development make even such a modest target difficult, particularly when it comes to making such housing affordable.     

Secessionist Automobility: Racism,Anti‐Urbanism,and the Politics of Automobility in Atlanta,Georgia

Automobility — the centering of society and everyday life around automobiles and their spaces — is one of the most contentious aspects of contemporary urban growth debates at the local, national, and global scale. The politics of automobility is a spatial struggle over how the city should be organized and for whom. Yet there is little research on how this struggle is unfolding, and how that politics is shaping urban space. Part of this stems from the essentialization of automobility in policy and academic discourses on cities. Moving beyond essentialization, this article will explore how contentious political struggles reveal nuanced and diverse discourses and ideologies surrounding automobility and space. Focusing on what I call ‘secessionist automobility’— using an automobile as an instrument of spatial secession — I examine Atlanta, Georgia’s contentious automobility debate. Secessionist automobility is bound with the blunt politics of race‐based secession from urban space, but also more subtle forms of spatial secession rooted in anti‐urban ideologies. Implications for local, national, and global contestation of automobility will be provided.     

‘One‐Man Handled’: Fragmented Power and Political Entrepreneurship in Globalizing Mumbai

This article considers the fractured nature of state power in contemporary Mumbai. Based on a case study of the ongoing Dharavi Redevelopment Project, a 2‐billion US dollar initiative to redevelop Mumbai's most infamous ‘slum’ settlement as a mixed‐use, mixed‐income township, it details the new state strategies emerging to support urban development efforts in India today. Identifying the structural weaknesses that have traditionally hindered development planning in Mumbai, it describes how a private developer, acting as a political entrepreneur, has worked to consolidate the authority and resources necessary to overcome these institutional gaps and structural weaknesses. Situating the analysis in theories of state restructuring, this case sheds light on how the local Indian state is responding to the pressures associated with neoliberal globalization and competitive urbanism. While a growing literature in this area has offered important insights into emerging configurations of power, it remains overly focused on the role of NGOs in these efforts, failing to provide an adequate analysis of alliances between the state and other private actors. This article attempts to address this gap with an in‐depth examination of the political entrepreneur as a site of institutionalized, but ultimately incomplete, power in globalizing Mumbai.     

RESILIENCE AND ADAPTATION IN GENTRIFYING URBAN INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTS: The Experience of Cultural Manufacturers in San Francisco and Melbourne

Recent urban scholarship shows how zoning and real estate dynamics shape ongoing processes of gentrification and deindustrialization. While studies demonstrate the impact of planning and property market pressures on the arts, less research has examined their effect on urban manufacturers in gentrifying industrial districts. Given the differential impact of zoning and real estate pressures, our research focuses specifically on how ‘cultural manufacturers’ negotiate changing land use patterns in gentrifying urban industrial areas in San Francisco and Melbourne. Our findings show how cultural manufacturers develop flexible workspace arrangements, business models and professional networks to negotiate urban restructuring and avoid displacement. Though innovative, these survival strategies provide limited ability to navigate structural barriers. Here, the presence of intermediary organizations can help coordinate a strategic response to industrial gentrification and indifferent planning policy. In our research we highlight the everyday practices of adaptation and collective action in an under-researched cultural sector to provide a counterweight to macro-scale transitional narratives. While cities have deindustrialized owing to technological and competitive pressures, to focus exclusively on this misses a range of resilience practices that have sustained manufacturers in restructuring cities.     

转型期城市竞争力提升与城市空间重构

城市空间重构是目前我国城市发展处于快速转型期中所出现的普遍现象,它既表现为自发的空间重组,更表现为应对竞争日益激烈的发展环境而采取的种种主动策略.在中国转型时期,城市竞争力与城市空间重构已经构成一对内在关系密切的理论与实践命题,城市空间重构已经成为提升竞争力的有效手段之一.本文在此命题基础上提出了基于空间重构提升城市竞争力的策略.     

Is This What The Democratic City Looks Like? Local Democracy,Housing Rights and Homeownership in the Portuguese Context

This article analyses the creation of a normative framework for the democratic city during the regime change in Portugal in 1975—the answers that were given to the question, ‘What should a city be like in a democratic regime?’ While I critically discuss post‐democracy and its use of post‐foundational contributions, I review the post‐revolution Portuguese constitutional debate, contending that the call for democratization brought by urban popular organizations was answered with a political compromise that exchanged expectations of a participatory city for a commitment to a social rights city, enhanced with a promise of homeownership for urban popular segments. In light of this, in this article I question post‐democratic proposals, arguing that when this approach implicitly establishes equivalence between democracy and ‘the political’, it has difficulties in interpreting how the grammar of democracy is ‘organized’ in conflictual and contingent processes of democratic institutionalization. As an alternative, I contend that a critical debate concerning democracy and the urban must address how democratic expectations of emancipation have been translated into institutions and rights through interwoven and situated processes of politicization and depoliticization that allow both politicization of the urban and the production of consent .