Recentering Southeast Asian Cities

For nearly two decades now, scholars have been heralding the arrival of new urbanisms. One debate in rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asia concerns the convergence of Western and Asian urban processes, and the riposte that interaction between globalizing processes and the historical momentum of local and regional forces make for complex Asian urbanisms. In recent years, attention has been drawn to the impact of decentralization, with consequences for the reorganization of the developmental state and the growing importance of private capital and urban social movements in driving urban processes and politics. This symposium offers the fresh lens of ‘recentering’ to discuss the urbanisms emerging from decentralization and the triangulating state–capital–social movement politics of the new urbanisms. Drawing on recent discussions of Manuel Castells' (1983) The City and the Grassroots, we seek to expand the conception of urban activism not just by considering non‐Western cases in the newly democratizing states of Southeast Asia, but also by considering cities as co‐agents of activism. We see the recentering of Southeast Asian cities as referring to political actions that take the city not only as site and repository, but also reflexively as identity in itself to be fought with, for and over.     

From Frontier to Bridgehead: Cross‐border Regions and the Experience of Yunnan,China

Drawing on recent theoretical tenets regarding cross‐border regions, this article analyzes China's state spatial policies that aim to transform Yunnan from a peripheral frontier into an economic bridgehead. The purposes of the present study are threefold: to contextualize the formation of Yunnan as China's frontier; to examine why Yunnan has been strategically selected as a bridgehead to promote China's transnational economies; and to explore the central–provincial alliance as an innovative institutional arrangement and look at how this alliance can convert Yunnan into a space of exception or new state space of development. This study finds that in order to convert regional assets into real competitiveness, the Chinese state (national, provincial and local) emphasizes transnational cooperation, endeavors to maximize Yunnan's place‐specific locational advantages and promotes the differentiation of regional developmental trajectories across China's national territory. The article contributes to studies of institutional arrangements for cross‐border cooperation in a non‐Western context and sheds light on China's regional development policies in its hinterland.     

Jane Jacobs on Henry George: Progress or Poverty?

Henry George and Jane Jacobs each have devoted followers today who remain mainly outside the intellectual mainstream, both are iconic American intellectuals largely sympathetic to and quite knowledgeable about how markets work, and they each challenged the prevailing economic orthodoxies of their day. Much has been written, pro and con, on George's single tax and on Jacobs's battles with urban planners, and while I don't directly address either here, what I say does have implications for those controversies. In particular, I show how and why their views on the nature of economic progress, and of cities in that progress, fundamentally differ. I trace the difference to George's essentially classical approach to economics in contrast to Jacobs's subjectivist approach, which more radically transcends the economics of her time.     

China's Emergent City‐Region Governance: A New Form of State Spatial Selectivity through State‐orchestrated Rescaling

This article examines the emergence of city‐region governance as a specific state spatial selectivity in post‐reform China. The process has been driven by the state in response to the crisis of economic decentralization, and to vicious inter‐city competition and uncoordinated development. As part of the recentralization of state power, the development of urban clusters (chengshiqun) as interconnected city‐regions is now a salient feature of ‘new urbanization' policy. I argue in this article that the Chinese city‐region corresponds to specific logics of scale production. Economic globalization has led to the development of local economies and further created the need to foster ‘regional competitiveness'. To cope with regulatory deficit at the regional level, three mechanisms have been orchestrated by the state: administrative annexation, spatial plan preparation and regional institution building, which reflect recent upscaling in post‐reform governance.     

Thermal Eco‐cities: Green Building and Urban Thermal Metabolism

Eco‐city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the globe and are often marketed as ‘new’ urban environments focused on achieving sustainable urban living while promoting environmental–economic transitions towards a low‐carbon technological and industrial base. The article argues for the need to consider the thermal aspects of urban metabolism, while at the same time focusing on the link between individual buildings and eco‐city master plans and wider economic development strategies at a state level. In so doing, the article encourages critical analysis of eco‐city design and planning, while keeping a focus on the role of specific building structures within eco‐cities as examples of the intermeshing of what can be termed a ‘political ecology of scale’ which stretches from specific buildings' climatic characteristics, to the metabolic master plan for eco‐cities, to provincial, regional and state‐level plans for the integration of eco‐cities within wider economic and political development trajectories. The article focuses on Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, an eco‐city under construction at the time of writing.     

Experiences of Urban Militarism: Spatial Stigma,Ruins and Everyday Life

A key question in urban sociology is how people interpret the urban environment. At a time when cities are increasingly militarized, this question is particularly important for understanding how militarism impacts urban life. However, urban sociologists have not addressed how people experience militarized environments. This article turns to this question by considering the case of Lydda‐Lod, an Israeli city that has been demographically and physically transformed by war, displacement and securitization. Drawing on Wacquant's sociology of spatial stigma and adding insights from works on emotions in (post‐)conflict cities, I examine how poor Palestinians think and feel about the surveilled districts where they live within the city's broader landscape of ruins. I show how the Israeli military, security and policing agencies have collectively produced spatial stigmatization of these districts. I discuss how Palestinians respond to this spatial stigma by attaching a sense of worthlessness to their districts. However, this reproduction of spatial stigma is punctuated by expressions of care for the built environment and by a desire to revalorize collective Palestinian life in the city. I conclude by discussing how a perspective on militarized cities focused on everyday responses to militarism and attentive to marginalities enriches urban sociology and urban studies more generally.     

Idioms of Accumulation: Corporate Accumulation by Dispossession in Urban Zimbabwe

David Harvey's notion of ‘accumulation by dispossession' has inspired a wide range of studies in different places. But it has hardly registered in the area of urban land grabbing in Africa and what the role of local capital has been in these processes. In this article, I use archival data, field observations and insights from key informant interviews in Harare to examine how the 1990s neoliberalism and the post‐1999 Zimbabwe crisis created new opportunities for accumulation of wealth through the irregular and fraudulent transfer of public urban land into private hands, including those of reputable corporate institutions. I provide a summary of the literature on contemporary land grabbing, raising questions about and providing new insights for a comparative understanding of the transformative role and nature of the state, postcolonial African cities, anti‐capitalist struggles, and the status and meaning of planning in different settings.     

Times and Spaces of Homeless Regulation in Japan, 1950s–2000s: Historical and Contemporary Analysis

Since the late 1970s, Atlantic Fordism has seen rising homelessness and ghettoization as the ‘new urban poverty’ (NUP) (Mingione, 1996). Despite some similarities, the NUP in Japan has a unique rhythm and spatial pattern. In order to explore Japanese NUP, this article develops an interpretation of Japan's strategies to regulate poverty and homelessness during the last 50 years, paying particular attention to the spatial consequences of such strategies within major Japanese cities. First, I theorize long‐term economic growth patterns as a basic parameter of poverty and homelessness regulation and present a periodization of Japanese trends since the 1950s. Second, I analyze poverty in Japan and the transformation of national strategies of spatial regulation in the 1990s, when homelessness grew. Third, I examine the multi‐scalar processes through which new regulatory spaces of homelessness were produced in the 1990s and 2000s, when failures of post‐bubble crisis management ballooned in Japan. I argue that, through a dialectic between national/local rule‐setting and homelessness, the Japanese state fragmented the dominant scale of poverty regulation, rescaled the site of homeless regulation and contained homelessness in relatively autonomized cities. I conclude that, from the 1990s until the late 2000s, Japan's homelessness and its contradictions tended to be transferred to the spheres of urban workfare and urban policing, which I call new regulatory spaces of homelessness, that lie around the fringes of national social rights.     

中国城市扩张的财政激励——基于1998～2009年我国省级面板数据的实证分析

基于我国1998～2009年的省级面板数据,运用广义矩估计法(GMM),实证分析了财政分权、转移支付与当前地方政府城市扩张之间的关系。研究表明:"中国式"的财政分权体制是造成城市快速扩张的重要原因,而现有的财政转移支付并不能有效逆转这种趋势,改革现有的财政体制与政府治理体制才是解决问题的根本之道。研究还表明,我国的财政分权与转移支付效应存在明显的地区差异和跨时差异。同时,财政分权与转移支付对城市扩张存在着相互影响,转移支付的增加会降低财政分权的效应,财政分权度的提高也会减缓转移支付的作用。     

LAND MARKETS AND THE EFFECT OF REGULATION ON FORMAL-SECTOR DEVELOPMENT IN URBAN INDONESIA

Until recently, urban land and housing markets in Indonesia seemed to function well. Informal-sector development provided low-income housing affordably. Through government programs, formal-sector developers could build housing for all but the poor. Since 1989, however, daily conversation pictures land speculation as rampant and formal-sector housing as rising beyond the means of the middle class. Newspapers carry stories of conflicts between small landowners and large developers with government officials in between. This article investigates this situation by addressing two related questions: are urban land prices rising “too fast?”; how do land regulations and development practices affect costs, and who pays these costs? The article includes quantitative estimates of urban land prices, changes in urban land supply, movement of land through the permitting process, and the effect of development regulations on costs. Data come from a literature survey and interviews of some of the largest formal-sector developers in Indonesia. A principal finding concerns a development regulation called a “location permit” and the “social function” of land in Indonesian law. Although helpful as a means of assembling land in Indonesia's highly fragmented land markets, location permits allow formal-sector developers to hold land off the market and pay low prices to small landowners. Ultimately, the “social function” of land under Indonesian law holds down the price formal-sector developers pay for land, but not at the price at which they sell their product. The article concludes by proposing reforms to the regulatory process.     

Making ‘Global Sydney’: Spatial Imaginaries,Worlding and Strategic Plans

This article critically examines the expression of global spatial imaginaries in urban policy and planning. Following recent calls to understand how the global is ‘made up' in and through cities, we argue for the usefulness of Roy and Ong's concept of ‘worlding’. By analysing how strategic spatial plans envisage ‘Global Sydney’, the article reveals a constitutive spatial imaginary informed by the articulation of three interrelated elements: global city standards, comparative techniques and extra‐local policy models. Unpacking how cities are selectively worlded through spatial imaginaries, the article advances an approach to urban globality as actively cultivated and differentially produced.     

CITIES AND THEIR GURUS: The Role of Superstar Consultants in Post-political Urban Governance

While consultants have crept into various aspects of municipal governance, a selected few have transcended the others reaching the status of urban gurus. Although consultants are often perceived as depoliticizing urban affairs, research shows that the urban guru often instigates politicization. Research on urban gurus does thus highlight distinctions between gurus and ‘lay’ consultants, but it has paid insufficient attention to describing how, through their interaction with cities, politicization occurs. Moreover, the literature often portrays this interaction as an authority relationship in which the guru is superior, while in fact cities play an important role in bestowing ‘guru’ status. Using fieldwork, I examine the long-term interaction between Richard Florida and the City of Toronto, explaining how Florida's elevation to guru status by being brought to Toronto ended with him self-describing as ‘persona non-grata’. To explain the anomaly of this interaction and the way in which gurus instigate politicization, I differentiate between consultants’ ‘substance’ and ‘process’ roles in policy formulation processes. I show that, regarding substance, the guru offers a policy paradigm rather than policy instruments and, regarding process, their strength is in performing ideas rather than pulling strings behind the scenes—in both respects making the policy process more public and contested.     

MIGRANT URBANISM: Cape Verdean Djunta-mon and its Impact on the Built Environment of Cova da Moura (Lisbon)

International migrations are transforming the urban landscape in cities all around the world. In this article I address the effect of Cape Verdean migration on the built environment of Lisbon's periphery. Specifically, I analyse a traditional practice of mutual aid originating in rural Cape Verde, the djunta-mon system, as a device of migrant urbanism projected onto the urban landscape of the Cova da Moura neighbourhood. In this article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss the role of the djunta-mon in the urban evolution of the neighbourhood from its formation in the 1970s to the present day. The data collected shows that this practice has had an important effect on the appropriation, functional delimitation and significance of the urban space by residents. The results thus point to the importance of understanding how the cultures and identities of human groups crystallize through the processes of social production of space.     

Street Performance,Public Space,and the Boundaries of Urban Desirability: The Case of Living Statues in Barcelona

How do cities determine who has the right to station themselves in iconic public spaces? This article explores this question by analyzing the evolution of Barcelona's approach to regulating street performance, with a particular focus on regulations pertaining to ‘living statues’. Although most buskers have been expelled from the Ramblas, one of the city's most emblematic walkways, living statues remain permitted on the promenade. This, I argue, is due to the general embrace of statues as part of local tradition and their integration within city‐branding campaigns, as well as their own organizing and boundary work. As the image Barcelona seeks to cultivate has changed, however, the right of statues to station themselves in public space has become ever more tenuous. My findings speak to broader questions regarding how cities determine the boundaries of ‘urban desirability’, as well as why and how such boundaries change over time. They also elucidate the strategies that groups located at the margins employ in attempting to position themselves favorably in relation to such boundaries. More generally, they highlight how current approaches to analyzing urban inclusion and exclusion may benefit from a more sustained engagement with the burgeoning social scientific literature on symbolic boundaries.     

Citizen Participation in Urban Governance in the Context of Democratization: Evidence from Low‐Income Neighbourhoods in Mexico

Participation has recently been subject to renewed attention and critique in the context of neoliberal urban governance. This is especially relevant in countries where decentralization and democratization in the context of neoliberalism have led to increased promotion of local‐level participation. This article suggests that current critiques of participation's potential for democratic citizen engagement in a neoliberal context would benefit from further reflection on how participation is implemented in contexts, particularly the global South, where neoliberalism and democracy may be understood differently. Different ‘cultures of engagement’ in specific settings suggest that understandings and practices of participation draw on different traditions, including corporatism and self‐help. This article seeks to add to the debate by exploring the socio‐spatial consequences of participation structures in low‐income neighbourhoods in a provincial Mexican city. Based on qualitative research in two low‐income neighbourhoods in Xalapa, Mexico, it examines how the provisions of the local citizen‐participation framework compare with residents' experiences of it. Formalized conceptions of participation, framed as involvement in service provision, interact with and shape residents' activities in developing their neighbourhoods. This has consequences for urban development there, including the reflection and reproduction of social and spatial marginalization.     

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.     

Locating the Urban In‐between: Tracking the Urban Politics of Infrastructure in Toronto

In the urban studies literature, urban politics is usually considered in two distinct locations: the city (often understood in quite conventional centralist ways) and the suburb (understood as spatially peripheral and politically at odds with the central city). At the metropolitan scale, the two types of urban politics are discussed in relation to one another. More recently, the metropolitan scale of urban politics has been expanded to regional dimensions. We pose the question of location of urban politics from a specific deficit in the geography of centre, suburb and metropolis. We argue that in today's regional political socio‐spatiality, politics will have to be found ‘in‐between’ the old lines of demarcation. Following Tom Sieverts' (2003) advice to look at the ‘in‐between’ cities that are neither old downtown nor new suburb but complex urban landscapes of mixed density, use and urbanity, we reveal the political vacuum that is at the heart of the urban region today. Using the politics of infrastructure in Toronto as our empirical example, we will show that vulnerabilities and risks for urban populations in that Canadian metropolis' in‐between city are co‐generated by the failure of conventional political spaces and processes to capture the connectivities threaded through those places that are in‐between the centre and exurbia.     

Transport impacts of government employment decentralization in an Australian city – Testing scenarios using transport simulation

Australia's largest cities are more mono-centric than most US cities and may be over-centralising, particularly in terms of office employment. Government worker relocation programs are being employed with policy debate over what should be an ideal urban structure including in terms of travel behaviour. The paper explores research approaches to explore transport impacts of employment decentralization. A review shows the results of: surveys of workers moved to suburban locations; longitudinal analyses of transport and land use changes in city-regions using cross-sectional census or HTS data; comparative analysis of urban structure variables across cities using similar datasets; combinations of longitudinal and comparative research; and, scenario-based modelling approaches. A modelling framework is then developed to appraise the possible transport impacts of decentralization in Brisbane. To test the possibilities further, two decentralization scenarios modelled and compared. Decentralization mostly to middle-suburban locations better addresses jobs-housing balance and maximises proposed new public transport services, producing good transport outcomes. However, decentralization to outer-suburban locations in Brisbane exacerbates the propensity for decentralization to increase travel distances, especially by car.     

Contesting Sustainability: ‘SMART Growth’ and the Redevelopment of Austin's Eastside

The compatibility between an agenda for sustainable urban development and the neoliberal economic restructuring of urban space has been observed within cities in developed countries across the globe. From providing economic support to local ‘green’ industries to creating bike lanes, municipalities develop sustainability strategies that are designed to boost their competitive advantage. Moreover, municipalities are responding to demands from popular social movements and national governments that seek to reconfigure societal relationships with the natural environment in cities. Cities are increasingly understood not as part of the ecological crisis but as part of the solution, or as places where alternative patterns of sustainable consumption and new socially and ecologically responsible industries can be developed. Over the last decade in Austin, environmental sustainability has become an uncontested paradigm that has progressively shaped the city's urban space and policy. Two competing conceptualizations of the environment, so‐called ‘environmental’ and ‘just’ sustainability groups, are explored in this article. I demonstrate how the notion of environmental sustainability has been selectively incorporated into the hegemonic vision of Austin's strategic growth plan. I argue that the dominance of this conceptualization is best understood by asking what counts as the ‘environment’ for environmentalists, and understanding the unstated assumptions about the environment shared by the business community and environmentalists.     

‘Policies in Motion’, Urban Management and State Restructuring: The Trans‐Local Expansion of Business Improvement Districts

This article examines the ways in which business improvement districts are being introduced into UK cities. In advancing this analysis, the focus here is on the means through which one or two Manhattan business improvement districts have been constructed as ‘models’ of urban management, taken out of their particular local/regional and national contexts and introduced into a diverse set of local political economic contexts in UK cities and towns. Examining the way business improvement districts have become a policy in motion, the article sketches out the emergence of entrepreneurial urban governance arrangements in the UK as part of the state's changing spatiality in the industrialized economies of Western Europe and North America. I argue that these changes make UK cities and towns increasingly receptive to the business improvement district model of downtown management. Seeking to move beyond the sometimes rather one‐sided representations of policies that find themselves on the move, the article seeks to connect the ‘exporting’ and ‘importing’ zones of policy transfer, arguing for an open and permeable conceptualization of these places. It draws on work in Manhattan, New York to unpack the nature of the political–economic relations that business improvement districts were part of, before moving on to examine the dynamics of policy transfer and the early days of the introduction of this downtown ‘model’ into UK cities.