‘Arriving At’ Urban Policies: The Topological Spaces of Urban Policy Mobility

Spatial vocabularies are stretched to their limits by the complexities of policy mobilities. Using the example of city‐wide strategic policymaking in Johannesburg, this essay argues for an enrichment of our vocabularies for appreciating how wider circuits of urban policy shape localized policy outcomes. Rather than tracing policies until they arrive somewhere, a more nuanced spatiality of policy mobility emerges when considering how policies are 'arrived at'. Thus policy influences can, for example, be ephemeral and recursive, international but already present in localities, have many simultaneous origins, and be folded into a relatively amorphous but specific policy blend. Drawing on John Allen's account of topological space, the essay indicates how both a more subtle spatiality and a more open politics of policy formation would emerge from turning the analysis of policy mobilities on its head in this way.     

‘McJobs’, ‘good jobs’ and skills: job‐seekers' attitudes to low‐skilled service work

This article focuses on unemployed job‐seekers' attitudes towards entry‐level jobs in three areas of the service sector – retail, hospitality and call‐centre work. The article examines whether job‐seekers are reluctant to pursue these opportunities, and provides an analysis of the motives of those ruling out service work. A range of potential barriers is discussed, including the extent to which job‐seekers perceive the service economy as offering only so‐called ‘McJobs’– low‐skilled, low‐paid jobs with few opportunities for development. However, the article also focuses on perceived skills mismatches, with some job‐seekers arguably over‐qualified for entry‐level service jobs, while others consider themselves to lack the necessary ‘soft’ skills. The analysis is based on interviews with 220 unemployed people in Glasgow. The article concludes that policy action may be required to encourage job seekers to consider a broader range of vacancies and to provide tailored training in partnership with service employers. On the demand side, service employers must address the need for entry‐level positions that offer realistic salaries, decent work conditions and opportunities for progression and development.     

The ‘Urban Age’ in Question

Foreboding declarations about contemporary urban trends pervade early twenty‐first century academic, political and journalistic discourse. Among the most widely recited is the claim that we now live in an ‘urban age’ because, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population today purportedly lives within cities. Across otherwise diverse discursive, ideological and locational contexts, the urban age thesis has become a form of doxic common sense around which questions regarding the contemporary global urban condition are framed. This article argues that, despite its long history and its increasingly widespread influence, the urban age thesis is a flawed basis on which to conceptualize world urbanization patterns: it is empirically untenable (a statistical artifact) and theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception). This critique is framed against the background of postwar attempts to measure the world's urban population, the main methodological and theoretical conundrums of which remain fundamentally unresolved in early twenty‐first century urban age discourse. The article concludes by outlining a series of methodological perspectives for an alternative understanding of the contemporary global urban condition.     

Feeling like a State: Design Guidelines and the Legibility of ‘Urban Experience’ in Singapore

This article examines how ‘urban experience’ is objectified and transformed into something that is legible to the state and its experts. It conceptualizes design guidelines as a political technology where bodies of expert knowledge, emplaced in a planning bureaucracy, shape the way the built environment is produced and experienced. Using Singapore as an example of a centralized planning bureaucracy, I analyze how lighting, public art and advertisement signs are targeted to produce a total environment with normative narratives. This article makes two contributions. First, it unpacks the processes that translate different modes of legibility in an attempt to make ‘experience’ legible for planners. The political efficacy of guidelines and pre‐established bureaucratic boundaries means that planners can only intervene through a series of combinations, mediations and approximations. Thus, legibility proceeds in a way that is akin to ‘feeling around’. Second, it foregrounds the ‘middle layer of urban governance’ that is often ignored in the discipline. Guidelines represent one coordinate in a system of political technologies that is concerned with producing the norm, that substrate of urban production mechanized through a series of repetitions, gradations and classifications.     

The ‘science’ and ‘practice’ of HRM in small firms

This paper looks at the ‘science’ and ‘practice’ of human resource management in small firms. While there is growing evidence that the practice of human resource management in small firms is characterized by informality, there is less evidence about the science, or explaining why this is the case. We look to writing on strategic human resource management, which has at its heart the resource based view of the firm, for possibilities offered to understanding the science of human resource management in small firms.     

Planning Gentrification and the ‘Absent’ State in Athens

In times of austerity, gentrification is promoted as a prime investment opportunity capable of reviving stagnating local economies. In Athens, pro‐gentrification policies (using English slogans like ‘Re‐launch Athens’ and ‘Re‐activate Athens’) have become increasingly defined in their targeting of specific areas. Moreover, planning in Greece is characterized by spontaneity, fragmentation and tolerance of speculation, specifically favouring the gentrification process. In many cases, the state's ‘absence’ after promulgation of regeneration projects acts as a clear strategy for inner‐city gentrification. After discussing the emergent relations between state policies on urban intervention and gentrification in the post‐crash era, this article will focus on the peculiarities of the Greek planning system and how these have led to the gentrification of an inner‐city area called Metaxourgio.     

Avoiding the ‘SoHo Effect’ in Baltimore: Neighborhood Revitalization and Arts and Entertainment Districts

This article investigates how state‐sponsored ‘arts and cultural districts' and ‘creative placemaking' revitalization strategies affect urban neighborhoods, using the Station North Arts & Entertainment (A&E) District in Baltimore, Maryland (USA) as a case study. Through ethnographic participatory methods and 39 qualitative interviews, we studied the activities and attitudes of various stakeholders within Station North. Since its designation as an arts and entertainment district in 2002, a number of public–private partnerships have helped increase home values in Station North, suggesting that the ‘branding' of Station North has been successful. While the institutions involved in the district, including community development corporations and local universities, are careful to insist that they do not want to displace low‐income residents, many interviewees expressed concerns that these institutions exert influence outweighing that of longtime residents. While a certain level of gentrification has occurred with the arrival of new residents, we argue that the people who are most likely to be displaced from the arts and entertainment district in the future are, paradoxically, artists, especially those who wish to buy homes and settle in the district. After discussing the case of Station North, we consider broader implications of the use of arts for urban revitalization.     

The Business School ‘Business’: Some Lessons from the US Experience*

US business schools dominate the business school landscape, particularly for the MBA degree. This fact has caused schools in other countries to imitate the US schools as a model for business education. But US business schools face a number of problems, many of them a result of offering a value proposition that primarily emphasizes the career‐enhancing, salary‐increasing aspects of business education as contrasted with the idea of organizational management as a profession to be pursued out of a sense of intrinsic interest or even service. We document some of the problems confronting US business schools and show how many of these arise from a combination of a market‐like orientation to education coupled with an absence of a professional ethos. In this tale, there are some lessons for educational organizations both in the US and elsewhere that are interested in learning from the US experience.     

‘Old age’ and Ageism in Urban Research: The Case of Fear of Crime

A critique has recently been made of research and theory on ageing in spatial research, arguing for the development of approaches which are informed by critical theoretical perspectives. Perhaps the most significant of these is the recognition that ‘old age’ is culturally constructed. This paper illustrates the value of such an approach with reference to understanding of fear of crime. It is suggested that many difficulties with past research result from epistemological problems, including ageism. A number of assumptions about elderly people and crime can be contested if scrutiny is informed by humanistic, feminist and social constructionist perspectives. Drawing on in depth interviews with elderly people, some of the problems and prospects of work on old age are discussed. Age is only one dimension by which people situate themselves and are situated by others in relation to the risk of crime. Local contexts, life course experiences and other social identities are involved in the constitution of fear for each individual. While the role of ageing can be understood within a framework of power relations, its positive as well as negative impacts on reactions to crime require representation. Similar analysis could profitably be developed in other areas of urban research.     

Governing ‘Sustainable Urban Development’ Through Self‐Build Groups and Co‐Housing: The Cases of Hamburg and Gothenburg

This article critically examines the governing of ‘sustainable urban development’ through self‐build cohousing groups in Gothenburg and Hamburg. The two case cities have been selected because both are currently involved in major urban restructuring, and have launched programmes to support self‐build groups and cohousing as part of their emphasis on promoting urban sustainable development through this process. Departing from a theoretical discussion on advanced liberal urban governance, focusing in particular on the contemporary discourse on sustainable urban development, we examine the interaction between political institutions, civil society and private actors in the construction of cohousing as a perceived novel and alternative form of housing that may contribute to fulfilling certain sustainability goals. Questions centre on the socio‐political contextualization of cohousing; concepts of sustainability; strategies of, and relations between, different actors in promoting cohousing; gentrification and segregation; and inclusion and exclusion. In conclusion we argue that, while self‐build groups can provide pockets of cohousing as an alternative to dominant forms of housing, the economic and political logics of advanced liberal urban development make even such a modest target difficult, particularly when it comes to making such housing affordable.     

‘Stop Being a Tourist!’ New Dynamics of Urban Tourism in Berlin‐Kreuzberg

Berlin is witnessing a massive tourism boom, and parts of it can be described as ‘new urban tourism’, which shows a preference for off the beaten track areas and ‘authentic’ experiences of the city. This form of tourism seems especially salient in Kreuzberg. It is here that an openly articulated critique of tourism attracted national attention in 2011 and has not ceased to do so since. This article aims to better understand the conflictive potential of (new urban) tourism in Kreuzberg. We argue that the readily expressed negative attitudes against tourists and the easily accepted link between tourism and gentrification have to be explained against the backdrop of certain housing‐market dynamics. Rising rents and a diminution in the number of flats available for rent are fuelling fears of gentrification in Kreuzberg, while the interest shown in new urban tourism and the comparatively low‐priced real‐estate market in Berlin result in a growing number of holiday flats. Although adding only slightly to the tightening of the housing market, holiday flats render complex processes of neighborhood change visible and further sustain an already prevalent tourism critique.