Global Urban Policymaking in Africa: A View from Angola Through the Redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda

A burgeoning literature looks into the processes and actors involved in the adoption and emulation of best practices and models of urban policy and development across the globe, often with the aim of attracting investment and making cities more competitive. With its focus on leisure, tourism and global capital, the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda, in the capital of Angola, echoes the rhetoric, policies and projects underpinning such practices. Yet, a deeper interrogation reveals that the redevelopment forms part of a predominantly inward‐looking project driven by the highest echelons of the national government and its ruling party. While these actors mimic and appropriate the language and tools of entrepreneurial cities, their aim is not necessarily to make the city more internationally competitive but to achieve domestic political legitimacy and stability. The argument presented in this article builds on McCann's ( 2013 ) call for scholars to also consider the ‘introspective’ politics of urban policy boosterism from the perspective of a context in which power is highly centralized. The article thus contributes to a growing literature that advances more adequate and provincialized theorizations of urban policy and city governance in the global South, with a particular focus on the African context.     

Urban Waterscapes: The Hydro‐Politics of Flooding in a Sinking City

The threat of flooding in cities is often compounded by political and economic decisions made on watershed management, land development and water infrastructure and provisioning. It has also become a point of conflict between cities’ objectives for development and modernization, and the struggles of marginalized residents living in low‐lying coastal and riverine areas to remain in place. Flooding takes on different forms depending on one's point of view. It is a biophysical issue, involving geology, geography, meteorology and ecology. It is one of urban governance, involving planning and maintenance of infrastructure and land use. And it is sociopolitical, involving historical social and spatial marginalization and contestation. This article, based on mixed‐methods research in Jakarta, Indonesia, traces the conceptual and physical contours of urban waterscapes across these conflicting ideas and narratives. It brings into dialogue theories of urban political ecology, landscape ecology and environmental ethnography to explore the interrelationships between biophysical and sociopolitical factors behind urban flooding. In the article the focus is on the varying materialities and scales involved, including the ecological scales of the watershed, the infrastructural scales associated with flood protection, and the urban scales of planning, governance and social activism. The article concludes with a proposition for a multidimensional approach to thinking and acting on problems of urban ecological change.     

Engineering the Financialization of Urban Entrpreneurialism: The JESSICA Urban Development Initiative in the European Union

Urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberal urban governance are assuming new forms under finance‐dominated accumulation. We examine and contribute to theorizing the mechanisms through which urban governance is financialized, taking as a case study JESSICA, one of the European Union's initiatives to implement an ‘urban sensitive’ policy for sustainable and integrated development. Like other initiatives promoting financialization, JESSICA deploys the logic of finance to select and fund urban social initiatives and development projects on the basis of their potential return on investment (ROI). Understanding this process requires placing questions of political economy—how urban governance is shaped by the broader political‐economic context—with questions of governmentality—how stakeholders are enrolled in and come to take for granted new governance initiatives. Following the multi‐scalar institutional infrastructure is crucial to understanding how this works. Taking a relational multi‐scalar approach, we trace how changes at the supranational scale filter down to shape urban policy selection and performance in Sofia, Bulgaria, where we document how ROI calculations conflict with social welfare priorities. Contrasts between the trajectory of financialization of urban governance in the European Union and the United States demonstrate how this is geographically variegated, shaped by the broader context/conjuncture within which such financialization is embedded.     

China's Urban Speed Machine: The Politics of Speed and Time in a Period of Rapid Urban Growth

China's urban transformation since 1978 is notable for both its scale and speed. Focusing on the dimension of speed, we propose the concept of the ‘urban speed machine’ to assess its role in shaping the politics and political economy of Chinese urbanization. We argue that in China speed must not be understood merely by means of measurable outcomes of change, but rather that speed is an essential and vital element embedded within China's specific processes and mechanisms driving urban growth. In this sense, speed is constantly at the forefront of local cadres’ considerations, since moving fast to achieve urban growth is an expression of political imperatives and pervasive city‐based accumulation strategies. The Chinese urban speed machine, as we conceive it, mainly involves three state‐dominated institutional arenas: the Communist party's personnel review system, the planning mechanism and local finance. We also discuss regional variability vis‐à‐vis the nature of speed in urbanization and in the differing responses to problems of fast‐city growth in recent years. This article's core contributions are to clarify the paramount importance of speed in the political economy of urban growth and illuminate a relational understanding of the politics of speed in China's urban change.     

San Francisco Through Bogotá’s Eyes: Leveraging Urban Policy Change through the Circulation of Media Objects

This article connects two emerging debates in urban studies—the need to pay more attention to the role of nonhuman actors in urban planning and the ways in which media objects affect urban politics and planning—by examining how a video on Bogotá’s car‐free Ciclovía program facilitated the adoption and implementation of a similar program in San Francisco. The analysis shows that media objects have the capacity to act as fulcrums in processes of leveraging urban policy change owing to their potential to alter urban governance structures. The article analyzes the digital storytelling and ‘eye‐opening’ practices through which the video enabled policy changes to be implemented in San Francisco, while also tracing the local and transnational actors, networks and agendas that were involved in the production and circulation of the video through digital archival research and multi‐sited fieldwork. In doing so, it shows the active role that media objects play in shaping urban policymaking processes and provides an example of a relational methodology for studying the digital materialities through which urban policy ideas increasingly circulate.     

Theorizing the Politicizing City

This introductory symposium article develops a framework for an urban political reading and a theorization of urban uprisings. We argue that there is a need to foreground the notion of the urban political as central to the theoretical and practical demands of urban research today. First, we revisit critical urban theory in light of recent urban insurrections and point out a lack of sustained theoretical engagement with the political. Second, based on this critique, we argue for what we call a ‘re‐centring of the urban political' to rethink urban theory in ways that consider the city as a site of political encounter, interruption and experimentation, even when, or perhaps especially when, these ways fall outside institutional forms or lack the organizational form or legitimacy of social movements. Thus, we attempt to place politics at the heart of radical urban political theory and practice today in order to make sense of urban subjects, events and claims that elude established government practices and institutionalized structures.     

德国城市建设中的公众参与

公众参与作为德国法律和政治制度在城市建设领域的重要体现,贯穿于德国城市建设的每一个环节,其中最集中体现在城市规划和城镇更新中.通过对德国城市规划法律法规的研究,系统地介绍了德国城市规划公众参与的工作阶段和工作方法,以及在城镇更新中的公众参与措施和社会规划.     

Fragmentation in Urban Movements: The Role of Urban Planning Processes

Urban plans and projects that aim to initiate the redevelopment and gentrification of urban areas create social and ecological pressures on urban environments and thereby stimulate urban movements. These movements have a lifespan, which evolves in interaction with planning authorities under local or central governments and may be marked by institutionalization and co‐optation, as well as fragmentation among the people involved in them. Fragmentations are usually based on conflicting individual and collective interests, but may also be the result of different political perspectives in groups. This article is based on a case study conducted in two adjacent gecekondu neighbourhoods of Istanbul, Gülsuyu and Gülensu, where urban politics have played an important role in efforts to resist plans for urban transformation. It shows that fragmentations are very likely to occur in urban movements during planning processes in a neoliberal era, owing to the different perspectives in the movement on what the just city is.     

我国城市基础设施外资利用的政策建议

文章论述了我国城市基础设施建设中外资利用现状及存在问题 ,提出了相关的政策建议。     

Experimental Infrastructure: Experiences in Bicycling in Quito,Ecuador

Bicycling infrastructure has flourished across Latin American cities as urban activists who cycle have pressed municipalities to grant space on the streets. This article analyzes the ways urban cyclists use and create bicycling infrastructure in the city of Quito, Ecuador. It uses an ethnographic approach to understand how infrastructure is systematically produced through various relationships with human actors and non‐human phenomena. The article starts from the perspective of the ethnographer moving within the assemblage of the feminist bicycle collective Carishina en Bici. The ethnographer drew on feminist science and technology studies (STS) approaches to cultivate everyday relationships of ‘care' to become a moving part of an infrastructural assemblage. The study of infrastructure entails carefully choosing research relationships that result in intra‐action, or the coming together of the subjects and objects of a study to produce infrastructure. The article uses the term experimental infrastructure to reveal the procedures of studying and analyzing the political dynamics that result from bicycling infrastructure. It draws on 15 months of fieldwork in Quito, Ecuador, and participatory photo travel diaries of cyclists to demonstrate how bicycling infrastructure is a point of intersection as well as an active site for making democratic claims to the Andean city.     

Interweaving the Fabric of Urban Infrastructure: Senegalese City‐making in Rio de Janeiro

This article reveals how newcomers weave their own threads into the fabric of urban infrastructure. Entangling their own with other urban assemblages, newcomers generate multi‐layered dynamics situationally in order to render possible the lives to which they aspire. They forge openings where there seemed none before and keep negative potentialities in check. To offer an ethnography of how the Senegalese presence in Rio de Janeiro has grown dynamically between 2014 and 2019, I draw analytical strength from the double meaning of agencement: the action of interweaving varied socio‐material components—agencer—so that they work together well, and the resulting assemblage of social and material components. Two case studies act as a starting point: how Senegalese came to inhabit an urban architectural landmark and how they regularize their residence status. Their transformative power of city‐making is generated both through the mutual intertwining of a dahira, a religious group of Senegalese migrants, and a diasporic Senegalese association and through the ways in which the Senegalese interweave themselves and their institutionalized collective forms with ever more socio‐material components of the urban space. Beyond the better‐known transnational embeddedness of the Senegalese, their complex infrastructuring practices upon arrival become constitutive of new urban realities, moulding the city fabric of which they are becoming part.     

Toward The Networked City? Translating Technological ideals and Planning Models in Water and Sanitation Systems in Dar es Salaam

One of the most influential ideals for constructing and managing cities and infrastructures worldwide is that of the ‘networked city'. This ideal refers to the technological design and morphology of cities integrated and ordered by infrastructure networks and to a specific model in the operation, use and planning of infrastructures. Engineers, planners and public health officials have aspired to align with this circulating ideal of urban modernity, hygiene and rationalization of nature in (re)producing cities worldwide. Like many cities in the global South, Dar es Salaam cannot be characterized by universal access to centralized water and sewerage networks. While formal institutions, planning documents and strategies reflect significations, as well as organizational and planning models of a networked city, its urban environments are shaped by hybrid arrangements manifesting unequal access to water and sanitation services. We build on postcolonial critique in urban studies and science and technology studies to inquire into this contradiction by addressing the translation of the ideal of the networked city in Dar es Salaam. Our objective is to uncover the negotiations over the translation of this hegemonic model, and to delineate the scope of creativity in reinventing alternative urban modernities that defy simplistic notions of technology transfer.     

Breaking With Neoliberalization by Restricting The Housing Market: Novel Urban Policies and the Case of Hamburg

Hamburg currently exemplifies the departure from a straightforward neoliberal urban track. The city's neoliberal path only moved into full swing in the first decade of the 2000s. During this period, urban development was primarily subject to property market mechanisms—with projects being granted to the highest bidder—prompting effects such as rapidly rising rents, deepened social segregation and increased property‐led displacement. Since 2009, however, the city's entrepreneurial urban policy encountered comprehensive resistance movements that eventually led to the rediscovery of a political will for a new housing policy and interventionist policy instruments. This article focuses on the turning point of neoliberal policies and examines the wider scope of the contemporary urban agenda in Hamburg. We first conceptualize potential limits of the neoliberal city in general and then discuss three momentous local policy experiments—the International Building Exhibition, promising ‘improvement without displacement'; the rediscovery of housing regulations through the ‘Social Preservation Statute'; and the ‘Alliance for Housing', aiming to tackle the housing shortage. We discuss these approaches as funding, regulation, and actor‐based approaches to limiting the neoliberal city.     

A Missing Citizen? Issue Based Citizenship in City-Regional Planning

City regions are significant sites of economic development, policymaking, and everyday living. Yet in many countries they are weakly institutionalized and therefore lack established democratic practices. This article is based on a study exploring citizen participation in city-regional planning in Finland, where traditional participatory means have largely failed to invite and involve citizens. The analysis approaches city regions relationally, as evolving processes with a changing spatial shape and scope. Through the notion of lived citizenship, including the dimensions of status, practices and acts, the article reveals how the dominant ideas of citizenship in city-regional planning hide from view elements that are significant for citizen participation. Whereas people's rights to participation can largely be fulfilled on a territorial basis in municipalities and states through legal membership in political communities, in the context of weakly institutionalized city-regional planning such status-based forms of participation are typically not available. This vagueness has created an image of a missing city-regional citizenry, which the article sets out to challenge and rework through the notion of issue-based participation as lived citizenship.     

从目标规划到过程规划--城市规划的技术特征与政策特征

城市规划的功能正从作为城市未来空间构架向政策形成与实施工具的方向转变,城市规划的成果也逐渐由科学蓝图的形式向政策法规的形式转变,随着经济体制与政治体制改革的不断深入,政府对城市发展与建设的影响也逐渐由计划经济体制下的以目标引导为主转向市场体制下的以政策控制为主,在规划文本中,以对规划实施过程进行控制的强制性条文相对于以目标预测和蓝图描绘为主的引导性条文而言将显得越来越重要.本文从对城市规划的技术特征与政策特征两方面的深入分析,提出了城市规划工作由"目标规划"向"过程规划"转换的必要性与紧迫性.     

城市规划原则和方针执行难原因分析

从法制、城市建设投资和经济学的角度,分析了近年来我国城市规划原则和方针执行难问题的症结所在,提出了关于执行和落实城市规划原则和方针的思考和建议.     

The Politics of Property in Planning: Hezbollah's Reconstruction of Haret Hreik (Beirut,Lebanon) as Case Study

This research looks at post‐2006‐war reconstruction of the southern suburbs of Beirut under the auspices of Hezbollah (the Islamic resistance movement in Lebanon). The project was widely acclaimed as an alternative to current neoliberal planning practices in the Middle East and beyond. Based on a critical reading of the conception of property issues in this planning project, the article argues that this reconstruction presents a new geometry or alternative to the mainstream configuration of neoliberal urbanism, rather than a departure from its precepts. The reason for this is that the adopted language of property corresponds closely with the conception of property advocated by neoliberal planning, one that enshrines private, individual ownership as sacred and desirable and that works to strengthen its model in the city. I further argue that the ‘neoliberal planning regime’ within which Hezbollah's urban intervention occurs is not accidental; rather, it is necessary for the party's control of this space's future and for consolidating its territory in the city. It is hence expected that Hezbollah's planning in the city will produce the same decried effects as neoliberal planning elsewhere in the city rather than usher an innovative, progressive model of planning.     

城市边缘区大型公共设施的规划

本文从大型公共设施在边缘区发展的影响因素入手 ,借鉴、分析国外的经验和教训 ,研究大型公共设施的建设与城市演变的关系 ,提出大型公共设施的建设应从城市发展战略、城市交通体系与政策、城市经济与环境以及城市建筑设计等多角度进行综合一体化规划设计 ,并以此促进城市重要建设项目的规划选址、规模布局、建筑计划等工作程序进一步规范和完善     

Where is Urban Politics?

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in‐between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus.