‘It's Not Going to be Suburban,It's Going to be All Urban’: Assembling Post‐suburbia in the Toronto and Chicago Regions

Urban and suburban politics are increasingly intertwined in regions that aspire to be global. Powerful actors in the Chicago and Toronto regions have mobilized regional space to brand rescaled images of the urban experience, but questions remain as to who constructs and who can access the benefits of these revised spatial identities. Local political interests have tended to be obfuscated in the regional milieu, most problematically in the spaces between the gentrified inner cities, privileged growth nodes, and the glamorized suburban subdivisions and exurban spaces beyond the city limits. This article analyses how socio‐spatial changes in post‐suburbanizing urban fringes contribute to the way regions are being reconfigured and reimagined. Guided by current debates at the intersection of assemblage theory and critical urban political economy, our analysis demonstrates how socio‐technical infrastructures, policy mobilities and political economic relations are spatially aligned, sustained and dissolved in splintering North American agglomerations. Particular attention is paid to issues of urban transportation and connectivity in uncovering multifaceted modes of suburbanism that now underlie the monistic imagery of the globalized region. Emergent regionalized topologies and territoriality blur conventional understandings of city–suburban dichotomies in extended urban areas that are now characterized by polycentric post‐suburban constellations. In terms of their substance and functionality, ‘real existing' regions are currently re‐territorialized as complex assemblages that are embedded in a neoliberalizing political economy whose politics and identities are only beginning to be revealed.     

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.     

Beyond the Urban–Suburban Divide: Urbanization and the Production of the Urban in Zurich North

Starting from current debates on ‘global suburbanism' and ‘postsuburbia', this article explores the changes that the former ‘urban periphery' of Zurich North has experienced in the last three decades. It mobilizes Henri Lefebvre's triadic concept of conceived, perceived and lived space in aid of an analysis of the profound urban transformations that can be observed. The construction of a new tramline serves as a guideline for an analysis of the implementation of new governance arrangements strengthening cross‐border cooperation between individual municipalities and new strategies of cooptation and expertise. This resulted in the production of new urban structures which led to a more densely woven and connected urban fabric primarily providing spaces for the headquarter economy and middle‐class housing. Concomitantly, great efforts have been made to create new public spaces, an urban image and even an urban atmosphere. These have proved at least partially successful, thus promoting a symbolic redefinition of the former urban periphery as a distinctively ‘urban' space. Conventional definitions and concepts no longer suffice to adequately understand such novel urban forms, leading to the conclusion that division into an ‘urban' and a ‘suburban' world is no longer a useful tool for urban analysis.     

Policing Urban Natures: Conservation Officer Work in Ottawa and Toronto,Canada

Drawing on the results of interviews and access to information requests, we explore conservation officer work in two urban regions in one Canadian province (Ontario). Specifically, we examine the work of the federal‐level National Capital Commission (NCC) in Ottawa and the provincial‐level Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA). Applying Jessop, Brenner and Jones's model of socio‐spatial relations, we show how nature plays a different role in NCC and TRCA policing depending on the places their conservation officers work in, the kinds of territorial boundary maintenance in which they engage, the scaling of their activities in various jurisdictions, and the policing networks that they are part of. In assessing the place of nature in conservation officers' work, we contribute to debates about how the boundary between nature and the urban is produced through regulatory practices.     

The Urban,Politics and Subject Formation

In contrast to more traditional debates about voting patterns, local versus state administrations, and individual rights and participatory democracy, this article addresses the question of urban politics through an analysis of subject formation. By taking subject formation as the analytical focus, research questions about ‘politics’ shift from traditional ones about local or state government and the development of consensus, for instance, to ones about the constitution of subjects who are governed and govern themselves in particular ways. Using the emergence of two increasingly commonplace subject forms in contemporary China — urban professionals and volunteers — as examples, the article considers how modes of self‐regulation become political problems and also how subjects may be of the urban as well as located in the urban. The problematizations of socialist state planning have led to new governmental rationalities and technologies that not only produced new subject positions, but also new urban spaces, landscapes, economies and lifestyles. From this view, the article is an intervention into discussions about the ‘where’ of urban politics. It also argues that it is critical to examine politics as problematization and normalization if we are to understand what is at stake in the constitution of potential ‘communities of action’.     

Justifying Redevelopment ‘Failures' Within Urban ‘Success Stories': Dispute,Compromise, and a New Test of Urbanity

Large‐scale waterfront redevelopment projects, an urban development phenomenon that originated in the 1970s, are attractive to a growing suite of cities worldwide. But why? These mega‐projects are full of pitfalls, broken promises, cost overruns, disappointments and are often accused of promoting inequality. In this article, we consider the specific case of Melbourne's Docklands, which local popular opinion has roundly judged a failure despite the countervailing judgment of success in the revival of ‘liveability' of the adjacent Melbourne central business district. We use the Docklands case to illustrate the utility of a ‘critical pragmatic' framework of analysis to get behind dominant explanations of the demands of the urban growth machine and postmodern neoliberal capitalism. Without denying the existence of these dynamics, nor their hegemony, we nevertheless explicate how a critical pragmatic analysis can reveal the social dynamics driving the judgments and justifications offered by actors in urban redevelopment. A pragmatic analysis of these dynamics of argument and action at critical moments in the long process of an urban redevelopment can reveal new kinds of compromises and tests by which these projects are judged. In other words, what counts as failure and as success in the work of city building will shift, depending on what actors do and how they talk about it, and on how well these actions and justifications hold up to public challenges about the true character of a successful city. By gauging how these challenges are constituted and settled, we can better understand the evolution of the urban value proposition, and the new notion of justice grounded in urbanity that is emerging at the urban redevelopment frontier.     

Re‐reading Castells: Indifference or Irrelevance Twenty Years On?

This essay considers the relevance of The City and the Grassroots to contemporary debates within critical urban analysis. It argues that the book addresses many of the same empirical topics as more recent scholarship, but that shifts in the kinds of questions asked about those topics may make the book seem less relevant to contemporary debates. In particular, Castells’ attempt to abstract from local experience to understand the process of political and social change in something specifically ‘urban’ may be at odds with the goals of contemporary research and of researchers outside Europe, many of whom attempt to provide a differentiated analysis attuned to context and the positionality of agents within social movements. So, while the book makes important contributions to theoretical and empirical arguments because of its deep and rich comparative analysis, intellectual debates and approaches over the past 20 years may have shifted focus.     

How Subordinate Financialization Shapes Urban Development: The Rise and Fall of Warsaw's Służewiec Business District

This article studies the development of Warsaw's S?u?ewiec neighbourhood, Poland's largest business district, as a case of real estate financialization. We argue that the neighbourhood's chaotic ‘de‐contextualized’ growth was shaped by Poland's semi‐peripheral position in the global economy on the one hand—enabling a process of subordinate financialization—and legacies of state socialism on the other. In so doing, we mobilize research on peripheral financialization and global economic hierarchies, and studies of post‐socialism to enhance debates about real estate financialization. Commercial real estate—and office development in particular—is a crucial domain in which contemporary core–periphery structures are produced and negotiated. A key function of subordinate financialization is to absorb globally mobile capital—the product of financialization in the core. The case of S?u?ewiec shows that only by considering the interplay of global hierarchies (Poland's position as capital absorbent), local dynamics (fragmented urban development, which was characterized by competition among these unequal municipalities, with local growth coalitions in some municipalities, but not in others) and specific historical legacies (Warsaw's socialist‐time functional organization and its transformation, which weakened the city) can we fully understand the specific dynamics that shape real estate financialization in different places.     

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.     

The growth of sociological theories

A critical appraisal of Wagner and Berger's framework for analyzing the growth of sociological theories calls for more precise criteria for identifying theoretical continuity. We propose a structuralist theory of science as an alternative framework. Our rational reconstruction of selected theories in the family of social psychological balance theories shows that Wagner and Berger's key concepts have counterparts in the exact formalism of structuralism. Overall, our results support Wagner and Berger's main thesis: the growth of theoretical knowledge in sociology is not rare but simply hidden by mistaken assumptions about the nature of theoretical activity.     

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.     

Debating the State in Private Housing Neighborhoods: The Governance of Homeowners' Associations in Urban Shanghai

This article examines the transformation of state power in urban China by investigating how the state governs a newly emerging type of neighborhood organization connected with housing privatization, the homeowners' association (HA). Based on a series of extensive field research visits in Shanghai from 2006 to 2012, it analyzes the contradictory rationales behind HA policies in Shanghai, and elaborates the debates between state actors and non‐state actors on the boundary of state intervention. It finds that the state in Shanghai has engaged multiple goals in its governance of the HAs: regularizing the real estate market, promoting self‐organization at the neighborhood level, and channeling homeowners' participation in urban politics. The neoliberal rationality of governing through subjects' autonomy and a tradition of the socialist discourse on party leadership co‐exist in the state's toolkit for governance. But the state's capacity to coordinate these different governing techniques varies across fields. I highlight the dilemma a non‐liberal state confronts in cultivating self‐organizing and self‐responsible individuals. This contrasts with some of the studies on ‘China's neoliberal state’, which argue that the bureaucratic system has been resilient in coping with the contradictions and imbalances inherent in neoliberalism.     

The Twenty‐First‐Century Quest for Feminism and the Global Urban

The purpose of this essay is to initiate a conversation about the production and analysis of knowledge on women and the urban. Starting with a brief overview of how women have been addressed in the field of urban studies, I turn to their treatment in works by critical urban scholars, revealing how women fall away from urban theories. The dismissal of women from theory construction and the impact on women's lives of the imbrication of the gendered subject into neoliberal discourses about the city adds urgency to a feminist intervention. A feminist analytic requires the promotion of a new kind of global urban studies that takes seriously women's struggles, strategies and everyday desires.     

Securing Urban Frontiers: A View from Yangon,Myanmar

This article examines how variegated local and transnational interactions are reconfiguring Myanmar's largest city of Yangon. We do this through an analytical focus on frontiers and an empirical focus on how these are secured, drawing on interviews at two Security Expos and street-level observations in Yangon conducted over three years. Yangon thereby becomes a site for critical reflections about complex and multiple imbrications of frontiers, security and the urban with implications for how these may be conceptualized elsewhere.     

Creating accountability through HR analytics – An audit society perspective

This paper introduces an accountability-based perspective of the effects of implementing HR analytics. Considering central arguments about HR analytics' potential to transform HRM and using research on the audit society and concepts from critical accounting research, we develop a framework that analyzes the emergence of three forms of accountability in HRM: accountability through exposure, design, and connectivity. The paper contributes to research on HR analytics by identifying three forms of accountability in HRM that result from implementing HR analytics and by determining how they influence how HRM is understood, how HR practices are augmented, and how HRM's status in organizations can be improved.     

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.     

What Do Cities Have to Do with Democracy?

The relationship between urbanization and democratization remains under‐theorized and under‐researched. Radical urban theory has undergone a veritable normative turn, registered in debates about the right to the city, spatial justice and the just city, while critical conceptualizations of neoliberalism present ‘democracy’ as the preferred remedy for injustice. However, these lines of thought remain reluctant to venture too far down the path of political philosophy. The relationship between urban politics and the dynamics of democratization remains under‐theorized as a result. It is argued that this relationship can be usefully understood by drawing on lessons from avowedly normative styles of political theorizing, specifically post‐Habermasian strands of critical theory. Taking this tradition seriously helps one to notice that discussions of urbanization, democracy, injustice and rights in geography, urban studies and related fields invoke an implicit but unthematized democratic norm, that of all‐affected interests. In contemporary critical theory, this norm is conceptualized as a worldly register of political demands. It is argued that the conceptual disaggregation of component values of democracy undertaken through the ‘spatial turn’ in recent critical theory reorients the analysis of the democratic potentials of urban politics around the investigation of the multiple forms of agency which urbanized processes perform in generating, recognizing and acting upon issues of shared concern.     

‘There are Really Two Cities Here’: Fragmented Urban Citizenship In Tel Aviv

The inflow of African migrants into Tel Aviv's southern neighborhoods has aroused much resentment from long‐term residents. Contesting the uneven burden sharing, which exacerbates already poor conditions at the local level, southern residents have aimed their grievances at municipal and national policymakers as well as the city's more affluent northern residents. In analyzing the contestation, this article challenges traditional conceptions of migrants as the binary opposition to residents of the host city, intruders on the shared and socio‐culturally homogenous urban arena. We build on recent theorizations of urban citizenship as an agency‐centered process to think through the ways in which city residents articulate their identities relationally and hierarchically against new and old ‘others’ and argue that international newcomers have destabilized long‐conceived social relations. Using narratives of long‐term southern residents, we illustrate how the uneven geographies of African migrants' settlement in Tel Aviv have (re)set in motion a process of urban citizenship formation by southern residents, thereby adding new layers of contention to what was already a highly stratified realm.     

Social Sciences and Urban Studies: Goodbye to Paradigms?

The development of urban studies during the 1960s and 1970s was an offshoot of mainstream social sciences which, at least in Latin America, were formulated from a critical standpoint based largely on a renovated Marxism and the rise of the structuralisms. Now that this framework's apparently solid base has come under question in the so‐called ‘paradigm crisis', what is the outlook for urban studies and, in general, for the critical social sciences? This article poses a series of ideas which hopefully will contribute to a discussion on these and other aspects of a theoretical debate which cannot be ignored by urban researchers.