PLANNING AND GOVERNANCE IN A POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXT: A Historical Institutionalist Approach to Land Use Planning in Morocco

This study is concerned with the way colonial land use planning practices have persisted within local institutional structures in the former French colony of Morocco. We use a historical institutionalist approach to reevaluate Morocco's land use planning history and identify key feedback mechanisms that support the continuity of colonial practices within the Moroccan planning institutional structure. We used institutional mappings to identify key actors involved in planning and examined the formal power relations between them. Interviews were used to discuss the effect of informal interactions on the development of land use plans. We argue that aspects of French colonial planning that persisted within the Moroccan local institutional structure have created constraints for Moroccan land use planning. We focus in particular on how a centralist formalization of planning institutions has hampered the effectiveness of decentralization reforms and explain how institutional patterns deriving from the French paternalist approach to colonial rule have persisted in the form of a duality in modern planning structures. Finally, we argue that this path dependence has been strengthened by the creation of the derogation system as a potential way out for actors who are most capable of inducing change.     

INDIGENOUS URBANISM AS AN ANALYTIC: Towards Indigenous Urban Theory

In Canada, the terms Indigeneity and urbanity have been configured by colonialism and are often understood as antithetical. Given the baggage these terms carry, conceptualizing Indigenous urbanism in a manner that does not replicate the same problems these categories suggest is an important intellectual task for both urban and Indigenous studies. In this essay, I propose that Indigenous urbanism might be best understood as an analytic that highlights a dialectical relationship between Indigeneity and urbanism, marking both concepts as constantly in flux and open to contestation. Indigenous urbanism marks urban space as potentially both liberatory and oppressive, and as the basis for a liberatory research agenda.     

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.     

URBAN REGENERATION IN SEOUL: Alternative Urbanism or the Resilience of Neoliberal Urbanism?

Park Won-soon, the former mayor of Seoul, put forward a new vision of Seoul as a progressive city, and one of his signatures was the promotion of a new urban regeneration policy called the Seoul-type Urban Regeneration Model (SUR). It was first presented as a solution to compressed and profit-oriented urban redevelopment but evolved into an alternative model which conveyed the worlding desire of the Seoul Metropolitan Government to redefine Asian urbanism beyond developmentalism or neoliberalism. In this article, we argue that the SUR demonstrates a mixture of post-developmentalist features and the lingering impact of neoliberal rationalities. Specifically, we problematize SUR's hybrid aspirations for urban competitiveness, improved quality of life and participatory governance by articulating how the pursuit of a globally competitive city conflicts with and overrides other values and how citizen-centered governance was exploited as an efficient mechanism of neoliberal urbanism.