City Children and Genderfied Neighbourhoods: The New Generation as Urban Regeneration Strategy

Former industrial cities in the West are employing gentrification as urban policy. In these policies, women and families currently play an important role as gentrification pioneers. In my analysis of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, I propose the term genderfication to understand the gender dimensions of this process. Genderfication refers to the production of space for different gender relations. I analyse Rotterdam's urban planning program for becoming a ‘child‐friendly city’, which entails replacing existing urban dwellings with new, larger and more expensive ‘family‐friendly homes’ as a strategy for urban re‐generation. Urban re‐generation supplements regeneration in the form of material and economic restructuring, and refers to the replacement of part of the current population by a new and better suited generation. The ‘child‐friendly city program’ is considered in tandem with punitive ‘youth policies’.     

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.     

Cacao Capitalism and Extended Urbanization: On the Contradictory Origins of Bounded Urbanism in Nineteenth‐century Coastal Ecuador

This article challenges both contemporary and classic urban theory by analyzing the historical case of coastal Ecuador. Working from primary and secondary sources, I track the urbanization of coastal Ecuador during the long nineteenth century, when cacao exports determined not only the economic wellbeing of the city of Guayaquil, but of the entire tropical lowland region. I argue that this extended urban geography was both experienced and practiced as an unbounded economic and cultural region. As the value of cacao exports skyrocketed, capitalists in the city invested in infrastructural projects and financial instruments, divorcing money‐making from cacao production. After the Gran Incendio (great fire) of 1896, the city was rebuilt according to the ideals of modern liberal planning that further separated the city from the country symbolically, despite their continued material interconnection. This work suggests that long histories of capitalist urbanization provide material and theoretical support for critiquing bounded urban theory both past and present, by moving beyond the city and highlighting the processes undergirding spatial production under capitalist social relations. Likewise, this historical case study argues that city‐centrism, rather than being constituted epistemologically, was tied to liberal notions of the urban based on nineteenth‐century ideologies of modernization and progress.     

Economic Rationality Meets Celebrity Urbanology: Exploring Edward Glaeser's City

This article presents a critique of the popular and public‐policy work of Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, which has been constructed at the nexus of neoclassical economic rationality and celebrity urbanology. Widely recognized as one of the world's leading urbanists, Glaeser has combined a high‐flying academic career with public‐policy engagement and extensive work as a newspaper columnist and media commentator, enabled by a longstanding affiliation with the Manhattan Institute, a leading conservative think tank. The critique is pointed, but seeks to exceed argumentum ad hominem by calling attention to sociopolitical and institutional factors that have facilitated the accelerated diffusion and enlarged dominion of this model (and mode) of microeconomically rationalized urbanism, including the production of new forms of intellectual marketing, the construction of colonizing variants of urban‐economic expertise, and the ongoing rearticulation and creeping consolidation of market‐centric policy norms. The article argues that a distinctive form of urban‐economic orthodoxy is under construction, based on a potent fusion of scientific reasoning and pop presentation, combining ideologically disciplined applications of neoclassical economics with dissemination in the register of the ‘freakonomics' franchise. Edward Glaeser's intellectual accomplishments have been significant, but the ‘Glaeser effect' is more than a story of individual scholarly endeavor, calling for more than a merely ‘internal' critique. Its conformity to Manhattan Institute principles testifies to a telling consistency of ideological purpose, contributing as it does to a sustained effort to rationalize and normalize lean and limited modes of neoliberal urban governance, fortified by microeconomic reason.     

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.     

‘Post‐Third‐World City' or Neoliberal ‘City of Exception'? Rio de Janeiro in the Olympic Era

This article considers processes of urban development within the context of mega‐event preparations in Rio de Janeiro. We begin with a brief overview of these development processes, highlighting their connections to political and economic change in recent years. Proponents of these mega‐event‐led initiatives argue that Rio is undergoing a period of inclusive growth and integration: a perspective we call here a ‘post‐Third‐World city' narrative of urban renewal. Critics, however, contend that urban officials are harnessing mega‐events (e.g. the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games) to push forward a neoliberal agenda of socially unjust policies benefiting the interests of capital and marginalizing the city's poor and especially its favelas (i.e. the ‘city‐of‐exception' thesis). In this article we explore the insights of these two perspectives and consider why they have grown popular in recent years. Though we side generally with the city‐of‐exception thesis, we argue that important geographic and historical particularities must also be accounted for. Without carefully situating analytical perspectives empirically—in particular, cases in which theoretical models are drawn from European and North American contexts—urban researchers risk concealing more than they reveal in analyses of rapidly developing countries like Brazil.     

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.     

How Portugal Became an ‘Unplanned Country’: A Critique of Scholarship on Portuguese Urban Development and Planning

In this article, I seek to expose how scholars came to construct the idea that Portugal is an ‘unplanned country’— a product of disorderly growth. While urban scholarship has now challenged the hegemonic view of spatial order as a proxy for modernity, development and progress, Portuguese scholarship has remained largely impervious to these debates as it consistently offers a view of the Portuguese city as ‘not quite yet’ modern and civilized. Based on a review of accounts by key authors recognized for their prominence and contribution to contemporary Portuguese scholarship, I argue that rather than being a constitutive fact of or truth about the Portuguese urban condition, the ‘unplanned country’ operates as an intellectual and discursive construct that organizes the experience of modernity, urban growth and social transformation throughout the twentieth century. The article discusses how Portuguese scholarship constructs the ‘unplanned country’ idea through insufficient engagement with relevant research and debates in urban studies and is based on several empirical shortcomings. The article concludes by offering a preliminary research agenda to address these imbalances. I suggest that such efforts could enhance the relevance and contribution of the Portuguese urban experience to recent calls for epistemological renewal in urban theory production. Cet article explique comment les chercheurs ont bâti l'idée que le Portugal est un ‘pays sans planification’, le résultat d'une croissance confuse. La recherche urbaine a désormais bousculé la vision hégémonique de l'ordre spatial comme indicateur de modernité, de développement et de progrès, mais la plupart des auteurs portugais sont restés hermétiques à ces débats, puisqu'ils dépeignent systématiquement la ville portugaise comme ‘pas encore tout à fait’ moderne et civilisée. En analysant les travaux d'auteurs déterminants, reconnus pour leur importance et leur contribution à la recherche portugaise contemporaine, cette étude préconise que, loin d'être un fait constitutif ou une vérité pour la situation urbaine portugaise, le ‘pays sans planification’ agit comme une notion intellectuelle et rhétorique qui structure l'expérience de modernité, de croissance et de transformation sociale au cours du XX^e siècle. L'idée de ‘pays sans planification’ est née d'un manque d'implication dans la recherche et dans les débats pertinents en sciences urbaines, ainsi que de plusieurs erreurs empiriques à la base de certaines démonstrations. La conclusion propose un programme d'études préliminaires pour remédier à ces anomalies. Ces travaux pourraient renforcer l'intérêt et l'apport de l'expérience urbaine portugaise dans le cadre de récents appels à un renouveau épistémologique dans la production de théories urbaines.     

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.     

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.     

Epilogue—from ‘Gray Space' to Equal ‘Metrozenship'? Reflections On Urban Citizenship

This epilogue provides an overview and critique of the articles in this symposium, and an invitation to rethink, conceptually and empirically, our urban future. Using examples from cities in Israel/Palestine, it links the articles to the main currents in the literature on urban citizenship and ‘right to the city'. It draws attention to several voids in current debates, particularly around the rapid growth of urban informality and the changing nature of globalizing urban regimes. The epilogue introduces the notions of ‘gray spacing' to account for recent transformations in these regimes and the rise of ‘defensive urban citizenship' under conditions of neoliberal economy and persisting nationalism. It argues for the rethinking of the struggle for urban democracy in terms of ‘metrozenship' as a foundation for renewed critical research and political transformation.     

Who Builds Cities in China? How Urban Investment and Development Companies Have Transformed Shanghai

While there is general acceptance that urban governance in China is entrepreneurial in nature, little has been written about the precise ways in which Chinese cities implement entrepreneurial policies. In this article we argue that the primary agents of urban entrepreneurialism in China are urban investment and development companies (UIDCs), known in Chinese as chengtou for short. We start by defining UIDCs as a category of state-owned enterprise, but one that is wholly owned by local (often city) governments. We note that in the literature UIDCs are generally recognized for their involvement in raising funds for projects and piling up hidden debts, but their multiple roles in urban development tend to be neglected. We introduce here four UIDCs that have been largely responsible for the transformation of Shanghai into a modern city spearheading Chinese state entrepreneurialism, and in doing so we delineate the full range of the activities of these urban business empires. We argue in particular that they represent a corporate involvement by the state in urban development—the state presenting itself in the guise of a market player, a corporate entity able to raise funds and act as if it were a private company. UIDCs are the driving force behind China's urban entrepreneurialism and are without a clear parallel elsewhere.     

Urban Redevelopment Policies on the Move: Rethinking the Geographies of Comparison,Exchange and Learning

Recent years have seen the emergence of two interrelated strands of work in the field of English‐speaking urban studies. The first has centred on rethinking notions of place along relational lines. The second centres on rethinking what an attention to the city in the world might mean for understanding the arriving at and making up of urban policy. Taking its cue from the intersection of these two strands, this article explores the forging of Edinburgh's tax increment financing (TIF) policy. It highlights how those in the city drew upon experiences from elsewhere (both relatively close to home and further afield) in assembling the policy and the particular ‘local’ politics over its translation/adoption/failed introduction. The article argues for an approach to urban policy mobility studies which is sensitive both to the ephemeral, indeterminate and open‐ended ways in which policies are arrived at and made up, and the segmented and structured contexts that inform how policies appear and reappear in multiple locations.     

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.     

Urban Distinctions: Class,Culture and Sociability in the City of Porto

This essay employs Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice and the methodology of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to extend the mapping of the dynamic relations between class and culture presented in Bourdieu's Distinction to encompass urban space, drawing on data from a multi‐method research project on the city of Porto, Portugal. We present a detailed analysis of the formation and structure of local social space and show its relevance for the study of the (re)production of urban lifestyles. Differences in the volume and composition of the capital of city residents are identified and shown to underpin the relations between social positions, dispositions and position takings in various realms of cultural consumption. Meaningful configurations of ‘lifestyle modalities’ have clear roots in the city's social space, which in Portugal, as in France, can be interpreted in terms of distinction, pretension and necessity.     

Neoliberalization of Istanbul's Nightlife: Beer or Champagne?

This article shows how the transformation of Istanbul's entertainment industry and of Beyo?lu, Istanbul's oldest, largest and the most diverse entertainment district, represents and reproduces spatial and economic divisions in the city. We argue that these differences also become compounded and intertwined with distinctions in consumption and taste. Taking a simultaneous look at the spatial, economic and symbolic transformations of the entertainment industry enables us to understand how and why these intense divisions emerge, and what kind of contestations, rationalizations and resistance strategies are at work in this transformation. A major contribution of this article is to document and discuss the political economy of the process of urban transformation in the city through the lens of the entertainment industry, providing an interesting case of ‘neoliberalism on the ground'. Examining the neoliberalization of nightlife in a relatively understudied context, Istanbul, also reveals that its segmentation and spatial inequality are not just determined by political economy but are also constitutive of it. By adding the concept of ‘image consumption' and taste distinctions into the analysis, the article also uncovers the symbolic nature of the ongoing transformations. Finally, exploring Beyo?lu as a district in transition with persistent contestations contributes, in turn, to the right to the city debate.     

Debate on Margaret Kohn's The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth

This interventions forum presents a debate on Margaret Kohn's The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth. Four contributors from different disciplinary backgrounds discuss and critique Kohn's book, which offers an exploration of the political in an age of modern urbanism. Building on theories of solidarism and social rights, Kohn puts forth a set of new arguments about how the city might be a more governable commonwealth. Her book lays bare some of the great contradictions inherent in questions of the distribution of wealth and space in the metropolis. It builds on classical and current political theory and philosophy, theories of justice, and debates on gentrification and social mobility. The reviewers appreciate the great contribution the book is making to current debates in urban politics, geography and law, but they also point to significant areas for further debate along various lines as laid out by the author. Kohn concludes the debate with a response to the critical interventions.     

Sister Communities: Rejecting Labels of Informality and Peripherality in Vanuatu

Some labels have dire consequences. This article takes issue with the labels commonly used to describe the physical and social location of communities living on the edge of Port Vila, Vanuatu—labels that position communities for eviction by entrenching tropes of informality and peripherality into how they are seen and represented. Such terms include informal, settlement, informal settlement, squatter and peri-urban. Based on interviews with around 100 people and two years of ethnographic engagement with urban communities in Port Vila, Vanuatu, I critique the language of policy against the lived experience of those at the urban edge. I use Bourdieu's articulation of power as an accumulation of symbolic capital that enables one to speak the world into being. I conclude that the language of policies and plans is reflective of a dominant discourse in urban studies and international aid, and non-reflective of the experience and identities of people living at the urban edge. My interviewees and interlocutors maintain their identities as sister communities—as places grounded in the formality of customary tenure, and as part of the city rather than outside it.     

‘Tuning Out' or ‘Tuning in'? Mobile Music Listening and Intensified Encounters with the City

Mobile music listening has become an increasingly pervasive part of urban life. Yet it represents an area of enquiry with which urban studies scholars have yet to engage meaningfully. This essay considers the role of mobile music devices in creating new sonic, emotional and social interactions with and within the city. While academic work in this area has emphasized the use of these devices as a ‘tuning out' of the physicality of the city, we suggest that they might also be used as part of a ‘tuning in' that enhances the meaning and intensity of engagements with the city. In making this case, the essay considers two areas of academic enquiry that highlight the use of mobile music devices in intensified engagements with the city: first, recent writing on the sonic ecologies of the city that emphasize ‘city sounds' as part of the urban experience; and secondly, recent advances in the field of urban computing that provide technologies for location‐aware music exchanges and mediated social interactions. The essay emphasizes mobile music listening as one area of critical enquiry that can help develop our understanding of the ways in which the pervasiveness of mobile devices is recalibrating the experience of urban spatiality.     

The Limits to Artist‐Led Regeneration: Creative Brownfields in the Cities of High Culture

Despite the burgeoning literature on creative cities, seldom explored is the context of cities rich in cultural capital but more orthodox in their approach to preserving the autonomy of culture. This article discusses the status of artistic spaces occupying abandoned industrial premises (‘creative brownfields') in historic cities that traditionally shape their policies around prestigious cultural institutions (‘cities of high culture'). Based on comparative insights from St Petersburg and Lausanne, the article explores the relations and tensions between mainstream cultural governance and creative brownfields. While there is no lack of creative brownfields in these cities, their wider urban impact is found to be marginal; moreover, these sites represent dispersed instances of temporary occupations rather than situated clusters of creative actors. More than coincidental, this (lack of) spatialization is argued to result from a particular governmentality—that of high culture—which disregards, rather than promotes, spaces of alternative cultural governance. The article conceptualizes creative brownfields in cities of high culture as the ‘soft infrastructure' of cultural production, in contrast with those in ‘creative cities' as the ‘hard infrastructure' of urban production. The article also calls for a recognition of the local context of regulation and accumulation in understanding the cultural/urban interplay.