Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman

This article traces the movement of the concept of ‘defensible space’ from New York City in the 1970s, where it was developed by the Canadian architect/planner Oscar Newman, to London in the 1980s and into design interventions in British public housing in the 1990s, through British geographer Alice Coleman, who acted as an especially powerful transfer agent. In focusing on this urban design ‘concept’ on the move we contribute to existing scholarship on policy mobility and city building in a number of ways. First, we explore an instance of the movement/mobility of a planning concept in a historical period (the recent past) largely overlooked to date. Secondly, we demonstrate that this movement was the result of a disaggregated series of expert knowledge transfers and localized translations of pre‐policy expert knowledge, generated through university‐based research work and networks. We theorize this instance of urban planning mobility by way of the interlinked insights offered by the sociology of science and policy‐mobilities literatures. As this is an instance of university research shaping public policy it also offers an opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of ‘evidence‐based policy’ and the impact agenda in contemporary higher education.     

Geographies of Algorithmic Violence: Redlining the Smart City

City governments are embracing data-driven and algorithmic planning to tackle urban problems. Data-driven analytics have an unprecedented capacity to call urban futures into being. At the same time, they can depoliticize planning decisions. I argue that this shift calls urban studies scholars to investigate geographies of algorithmic violence—a repetitive and standardized form of violence that contributes to the racialization of space and spatialization of poverty. This article examines this broader phenomenon through the case of a proprietary market value assessment that is being used to guide development in cities across the United States. The assessment employs an algorithm that helps city officials make critical decisions about which neighborhoods to target for investment, disinvestment and public service upgrades or disconnections. I argue that the racial, infrastructural, and epistemological violence associated with this evaluation can potentially lead to a new kind of municipal redlining. The article brings insights from critical race theory into conversation with critical scholarship on algorithms by analyzing how algorithmic violence works through data-driven planning technologies to depoliticize and leverage power while further entrenching racism and inequality.     

Cracks in the Creative City: The Contradictions of Community Arts Practice

The recent flurry of research about arts‐led regeneration initiatives illuminates how contemporary arts festivals can become complicit in the production of urban inequality. But researchers rarely engage with detailed empirical examples that shed light on the contradictory role that artists sometimes play within these spectacularized events. Similar research in performance studies connects the political limits and potential of social practice arts — interventions that encourage artists and non‐artists to co‐produce work — as civic boosters strive to stage cities in order to attract investment. In this article, I explore the case study of Streetscape: Living Space at Regent Park, a participatory artistic intervention programmed in a public housing neighbourhood that is undergoing redevelopment in Toronto, Canada. Streetscape was part of the Luminato festival, an elite booster coalition‐led festival of ‘creativity’. I refer to these arts interventions to demonstrate how artists engaging in social practice arts can become complicit in naturalizing colonial gentrification processes at multiple scales. But I also reveal how artists can leverage heterogeneous arts‐led regeneration strategies to make space for ‘radical social praxis’ (Kwon, 2004), interventions that challenge hegemonic regimes. I conclude by interrogating the effectiveness of place‐based efforts in unsettling the ‘creative city’.     

Encountering Everyday Racist Practices: Sociospatial Negotiations of Immigrant Settlement in Athens,Greece

This article delineates the ways in which the context of institutional and non‐institutional racist practices, legitimated by the rise of extreme right‐wing populism and racism, affects immigrants’ everyday lives in Athens, Greece. In this research, I explored the transformations of immigrants’ settlement trajectories, coping strategies and tactics, and their bodily interactions when encountering racist violence at the local level, through extensive fieldwork in two case study areas in metropolitan Athens—Omonia and Nikaia. The article is based on previous work on encounters with difference and everyday racism, with the aim of contributing to existing scholarship by examining urban encounters with manifestations of racism in the form of violent practices, which are on a rise not only as exceptional but also as everyday lived events. I demonstrate how immigrants’ encounters with police raids and patrols, and with racist violence perpetrated by neo‐Nazi militias, transform immigrants’ daily lives in the city at the micro‐scale. These encounters have an impact not only on immigrants’ social relationships, strategies and tactics of settlement, but also on the reconstruction of urban space. My argument is that urban encounter remains an open and dynamic field for negotiation of interethnic cohabitation, as it produces both violent confrontations and sociospatial embodied opportunities for coexistence.     

The ambivalence of diversity and the politics of urban renaissance: the case of youth in downtown Portland,Maine

In this article the ambivalence of public policy responses to diversity on the street are documented empirically through a detailed case study of the marginalization of youth from the downtown public spaces of Portland, Maine, USA. Urban planners, architects and property developers have become increasingly concerned with improving the quality of urban life and the public spaces on which it depends. They argue that urban revitalization initiatives must embrace diversity — cultural and economic, as well as functional and spatial. This diversity of different ‘diversities’ is often under‐theorized, as are the benefits of, and relationships among, social and cultural diversity, economic diversification, mixed‐use and multi‐purpose zoning, political pluralism, and democratic public space. It is my contention that this ambivalence is not simply a smokescreen for vested commercial interests, but also provides opportunities for expressing alternative visions of what diversity and the city itself should be. Looking specifically at youth, I explore a relatively underexamined aspect of inner‐city diversity. While there is a relatively well‐developed literature about the contested place of low‐income groups, racial minorities and the homeless in urban redevelopment initiatives, youth have largely been ignored. Dans cet article, l'ambivalence des réponses que la politique publique apporte à la diversité de la rue fait l'objet de données empiriques grâce à une étude de cas détaillée sur la marginalisation de la jeunesse dans les espaces publics du centre‐ville de Portland, dans le Maine (Etats‐Unis). Urbanistes, architectes et promoteurs se soucient de plus en plus d'améliorer la qualité de la vie urbaine et les espaces publics dont celleci dépend. Selon eux, les initiatives de revitalisation urbaine doivent englober la diversité, tant culturelle et économique, que fonctionnelle et spatiale. Cette diversité de plusieurs ‘diversités’ est peu théorisée, pas plus que les avantages et rapports mutuels de la pluralité culturelle et sociale, de la diversification économique, d'un zonage plurifonctionnel et polyvalent, du pluralisme politique et de l'espace public démocratique. L'article soutient que cette ambivalence, loin d'être un simple paravent pour droits acquis commerciaux, crée des possibilités d'exprimer d'autres visions de ce qu'une diversité et la ville elle‐même devraient être. Concernant les jeunes, il explore un aspect plutôt négligé de la diversité des centres‐villes: alors qu'il existe une littérature relativement élaborée sur la place contestée des groupes à faibles revenus, des minorités raciales et des sans‐abri dans les initiatives de réaménagement urbain, la jeunesse a été largement ignorée.     

Licensing,Popular Practices and Public Spaces: An Inquiry via the Geographies of Street Food Vending

The socio‐legal technology of licensing is one of the primary tools governments use to manage spaces and practices deemed risky or threatening to public order. Licensing requirements thus play a crucial role in shaping routine experiences in public space as well as the trajectories of emerging forms of public life. Yet licensing laws have largely been ignored in critical urban scholarship: too often concerned with the interpretation and critique of popular practices and public spaces, the mundane operations of urban governance are often left to practitioners and policy researchers. This article demonstrates how paying closer attention to licensure can provide valuable and unexpected insights into matters of social equality, urban amenity and economic opportunity. It does so through a comparative inquiry into practices of street food vending in New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Drawing on ethnographic study and interviews, the article demonstrates how licensing can be involved in the production of quite peculiar and unjust geographies of practice, but also how shifts in popular culture can force a reconsideration of taken‐for‐ granted laws. In conclusion, it is argued that a focus on licensing offers a productive pathway for new forms of critical urban research and provides a potential point of leverage in efforts to configure better and more democratic forms of urban public life.     

Machinic Assemblages of Publicness

This article discusses the concept of publicness through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic thinking. Centring on the case of the Bearpit, a roundabout and public space in the city of Bristol (UK), I examine recent shifts and transformations in public culture and narrate the ways in which relatively small interventions facilitate new connections and organize public assemblages. The article makes four main contributions. First, it develops an approach to the study of publicness that highlights the interactions of machinic assemblages of material and immaterial component parts. Second, it suggests that specific forms of publicness are mediated by bright objects which stitch together and organize ecologies of connected machines. Third, it outlines publicness as a dynamic, plastic social form. Finally, it argues that the struggles for a compassionate public culture in the Bearpit are not necessarily set on a fixed trajectory toward co‐optation or a return to revanchism, but rather are part of an incessant process of unfolding and becoming public where the concerns and contestations of publicness are made visible.     

‘Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Lower Your Carbon Footprint!’ — Urban Laboratories and the Governance of Low‐Carbon Futures

The increasing threat of climate change has created a pressing need for cities to lower their carbon footprints. Urban laboratories are emerging in numerous cities around the world as a strategy for local governments to partner with public and private property owners to reduce carbon emissions, while simultaneously stimulating economic growth. In this article, we use insights from laboratory studies to analyse the notion of urban laboratories as they relate to experimental governance, the carbonization agenda and the transition to low‐carbon economies. We present a case study of the Oxford Road corridor in Manchester in the UK that is emerging as a low‐carbon urban laboratory, with important policy implications for the city's future. The corridor is a bounded space where a public‐private partnership comprised of the City Council, two universities and other large property owners is redeveloping the physical infrastructure and installing monitoring equipment to create a recursive feedback loop intended to facilitate adaptive learning. This low‐carbon urban laboratory represents a classic sustainable development formula for coupling environmental protection with economic growth, using innovation and partnership as principal drivers. However, it also has significant implications in reworking the interplay of knowledge production and local governance, while reinforcing spatial differentiation and uneven participation in urban development.     

Reassembling Lesseps Square,Rethinking Barcelona: A More‐than‐Human Approach

This article discusses the great paradox of the planning of public spaces in Barcelona. While for years the city's residents, politicians and experts have been steeped in democratizing, participatory discourses, the interminable controversies almost all the council's initiatives in the streets and squares of Barcelona have aroused are evidence of a clear short‐circuit. Somehow this participatory‐democratic consensus has run up against a collective discord which, in my view, indicates the incapacity of the current channels and mechanisms of citizen participation to truly give shape to a more democratic city, one which does not block dissent or stand in the way of the possible. I discuss this short‐circuit through a case study, the Lesseps Square controversy, including a methodological and epistemological debate which, in order to study how the square was reassembled in practice after the participatory remodeling process, puts forward an actor‐network‐theory‐inspired approach to the study of public space. I argue that Barcelona, a city whose public institutions are deeply committed to creating channels for residents to participate in public processes, is at the same time enacting a closure of its public spaces. My contention here is that the urban environment is already distributed (in Rancière's sense) before it is given over to participation, and that this prevents the emergence of a (more‐than‐human) demos that could redistribute public space by taking account of innumerable unrepresented parties.     

Which model of technology transfer for nanotechnology? A comparison with biotech and microelectronics

Nanotechnologies are often presented as breakthrough innovations, where technology transfer and knowledge-bridging will play a pivotal role in the industrial dynamics. This article investigates the model of knowledge transfer in the nanotechnologies in depth, by comparing it with the models of two recently emerged technologies: biotech and microelectronics. Our results show that the nanotechnology transfer model is very different from that involved in biotechnology evolution: while small–medium firms play a valuable technology-bringing role, the central function of “translating” new knowledge between public research and industry is carried by the larger firms, just as it was in the early stages of the microelectronics sector. These results suggest that specific policy initiatives to facilitate biotech's transfer are inappropriate to boost the diffusion of nanotechnology.     

Government and governance: The value of project management in the public sector

Governance is an emerging theme that has been associated in the public sector with a real political need to satisfy stakeholders by demonstrating accountability and transparency while effectively implementing policy. Many initiatives relating to governance are generated by a need for improvement of organizational performance and ability to implement and adapt to change. These generally take the form of projects and programs encouraging a variety of project management implementations in the public sector. This article reports on examination of the expectations and realization of value from investment in project management in four Australian public‐sector organizations with particular reference to the government context, the perspective of public value management (PVM), and the support that project management provides in meeting the demands of public‐sector governance.     

VERTICAL GEOGRAPHIES,POLYVOCALITY AND THE EVERYDAY IN A DIVIDED CITY

The vertical turn in urban scholarship is a critique of the overly horizontal perspectives used in studying cities in academic research. This article broadens this scholarship by engaging with the ways that horizontal perspectives on urban conditions dominate not only scholarly perspectives but also professional responses to urban change. By drawing on research in the divided city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it argues for a ‘polyvocal’ approach to studying professional responses to urban conditions, one that facilitates a productive juxtaposition of those responses with city dwellers’ everyday engagements with the vertical qualities of the built environment. It also seeks to understand how vertical geographies—here, tall landmarks—in divided cities are seen as part of the complex urban realities of city dwellers in strategies of urban planning and heritage-making related to postwar reconciliation. These findings are compared with ethnographic data about how people make sense of tall landmarks in divided cities and how they experience and interpret them in relation to senses of togetherness and belonging to divided cities. By putting these two lines of research in a dialogue, the ‘polyvocal' approach offers a way to rethink conventional strategies of urban reconciliation and taken-for-granted ways of conceptualizing cities.     

Skill development in reverse mentoring: Motivational processes of mentors and learners

Building on Murphy's (2012) model of reverse mentoring, we examine the psychological processes that contribute to skill development in initiatives where knowledge is transferred from younger to older individuals. We employ a sample of younger mentors (n = 457) and older learners (n = 293) participating in a digital skills initiative to test parallel moderated mediation models. Our findings show extrinsic motivation plays a dominant role in the development of younger groups' mentoring skills, while older learners' digital skills development is primarily driven by intrinsic motivation. We also find positive affect and self‐efficacy can serve as personal resources in this context, but only for mentors. Taken together, our results suggest motivational processes in reverse mentoring unfold differently for the two groups involved in the exchange. Recommendations for human resource practice, including specific guidelines for developing intergenerational learning initiatives, are discussed.     

Publics and their Problems: Notes on the Remaking of the South Bank,London

Cities are full of disputes about organizing public life. These disputes are important for deciding how spaces get used, and they are integral to how publics form and develop. In all sorts of ways they define the potentialities of urban public life. This article tells the story of the Southbank Centre's plans to redevelop their central London site, and Long Live Southbank's protest of these plans to save their skateable space. Through this detailed case study the article develops a distinctive conceptual apparatus for making sense of public disputes. Drawing links between Deweyan pragmatism and assemblage theory, the article explores how publics were drawn together as assemblages of humans and non‐humans with the capacity to act and argue. It follows the arguments that each side made—and the justifications underpinning them—to explore the different ideas of public‐ness that were at stake in the disagreement. This also helps highlight the space for cooperation that existed. The article emphasizes the part affect played in shaping the dispute; recognizing its role in public reasoning, and in how people get pulled into different publics. This is a story not only of disputation, but of how a corner of London expanded its public‐ness.     

Gradual information diffusion and contrarian strategies

Various rational and behavioral models have been proposed to explain contrarian portfolio returns. In this article, I test the gradual information diffusion model of Hong and Stein [Hong, H., & Stein J. C. (1999). A unified theory of underreaction, momentum trading, and overreaction in asset markets. Journal of Finance, 54, 2143–2184]. Specifically, I study contrarian strategies based on past long-term returns and fundamental value-to-price ratios. Using ex post returns as a proxy for expected returns and size-controlled analyst coverage as a proxy for the rate of information diffusion, I show that contrarian portfolio returns decline monotonically with increasing rates of information diffusion. These results are consistent with the predictions of the Hong and Stein model. In addition, I show that analyst coverage is more important among glamour than value stocks, supporting the view that investors are more prone to decision biases when it comes to pricing hard-to-value glamour stocks for which information is relatively more ambiguous.     

The Creative Night-Time Leisure Economy of Informal Drinking Venues

In response to debates on emergent and rogue forms of urbanism that are reshaping the African city, this article examines the night-time leisure economy as one particular social context in which the tensions and opposition between regulation/deregulation and informality play out. This article shows how ideas that centre on Northern entertainment spaces and drinking venues (bound with policy initiatives to reposition the city) have come to inform policy initiatives to regulate working-class public spaces in South African cities with the objective of controlling unruliness. Through a case study of informal and illegal drinking venues in Sweet Home Farm, a slum settlement in Cape Town, we provide an insight into the ways in which people seek to reclaim social space and impose their own vision of the creative city. The article demonstrates that while illegal drinking venues can be imagined as ‘unruly, unpredictable, surprising [and] confounding’, they are characterized by a responsive agility to the social, cultural and physical environment. We argue that the capacity and tenacity of informal drinking venues to adapt to regulatory pressures present a range of possibilities for reimaging the night-time leisure economy in ways that are inclusive of the poor and conducive to negotiation.     

Urban Vigilantism: A Study of Anti‐Terror Law,Politics and Policing in Istanbul

Focusing on the case of young socialist vigilantes who were arrested and imprisoned as ‘terrorists’ in 2007, this article illustrates how vigilantism in working‐class neighbourhoods of Istanbul with a high Alevi population evolved from an unarmed, public and participatory form of vigilantism to an armed one, and discusses the role of the anti‐terror law in this transformation. The article illustrates the ways in which the anti‐terror law, by narrowing the space for civil politics, paved the way for youth engagement in violent forms of extra‐legal security practice in spaces occupied by the historically stigmatized working‐class Alevi population. The article also argues that, over the last decade, Turkey’s ruling elites have used the anti‐terror law to wage a war against the oppositional politics conducted by the country’s historically stigmatized populations (such as Kurds and Alevis). Not only has this war put politically active and respected local figures from these communities behind bars, it also ‘polices’ (à la Rancière) these communities. Accordingly, the article illustrates how the law that considers attempts at self‐governance as a threat to state sovereignty effectively intervenes in local politics and space, leading to the reconfiguration of political space at the local level.     

PLURALITY IN URBAN POLITICS: Conflict and Commonality in Mouffe and Thévenot

In this article we introduce a pragmatist interpretation of agonistic pluralism and develop this into an analytical framework that is applied to the analysis of urban conflicts. In the article, we take stock of contemporary critical and radical urban scholarship, our aim being twofold. First, we substantiate Chantal Mouffe's notion of agonistic pluralism with tools from French pragmatic sociology. We suggest that, in a democracy, plurality emerges both as a plurality of conflict manifested in the variety of possible ways to identify injustices, and formulate and justify claims in public struggles, and a plurality of commonality, manifested in different logics by which a ‘we’ can be formed and action coordinated so as to solve issues without resorting to physical violence. Secondly, by applying the developed conceptualization of plurality to an ongoing urban conflict concerning an airport, we showcase the value of the approach for identifying and analyzing different forms and phases of actually existing political conflicts, and for recognizing their meaning for democracy.     

Remaking Equality: Community Governance and the Politics of Exclusion in Bogota's Public Spaces

Bogota's public space policy is often credited with promoting inclusionary principles. In this article, I explore critically the content of Bogota's articulation of equality in public space policy. In so doing, I present a critical view of the work Bogota's insistence on equality does to mediate class relations in the city, relying on deeply held conceptions of both social extremes. This results in the construction of a version of social harmony in public space that at once depoliticizes the claims to public space of subjects such as street vendors and the homeless and claims a new role for the middle class in the city. The analysis focuses on two examples of community governance schemes, documenting the logics and methods used by communities to implement official visions of equality and justify the exclusion of street vendors and homeless people from the area. By looking at the articulation of these exclusions in local class politics through seemingly inclusionary rhetoric, the article accounts for ‘post‐revanchist’ turns in contemporary urban policy, while anchoring its production in local processes of community governance.     

Lifting wages and conditions of atypical employees in Denmark—the role of social partners and sectoral social dialogue

The article focuses on IR‐institutions and atypical employment in three sectors in Denmark. It demonstrates that industrial cleaning with precariousness being widespread shows most social partner responses followed by construction and then hospitals with fewest responses and problems. Despite these social dialogue initiatives, cross‐sectoral variations of precariousness continue to exist.