From Public Familiarity to Comfort Zone: The Relevance of Absent Ties for Belonging in Berlin's Mixed Neighbourhoods

Segregation along lines of race/ethnicity and class has created multi‐ethnic and rather class‐homogeneous neighbourhoods in various European cities, commonly labelled as ‘disadvantaged’. Such neighbourhoods are often seen as ‘lacking’ community, as local networks are crucial for belonging and mixed neighbourhoods are too diverse to provide homogeneous identifications. However, in contrast to the understandings of the sociology of community, people might still experience ‘belonging’, yet in different ways. This article argues that we have to focus on the under‐researched ‘time in‐between’ (Byrne, 1978), the absent ties that Granovetter (1973) pointed to, to understand belonging, while moving away from a conception of the anonymous city and from the urban village. This article explores how absent ties affect belonging by empirically sustaining the notion of public familiarity: both recognizing and being recognized in local spaces. Using regression models on survey data from two mixed neighbourhoods in Berlin, Germany, we analyse the importance of neighbourhood use for public familiarity as well as how it relates to residents' comfort zone: people's feeling of belonging and their sense that others would intervene on their behalf. Our findings indicate that research on neighbourhoods could benefit greatly from a careful consideration of the ‘time in‐between’.     

Living on the Edge: Lessons from the Peri‐urban Village

The idea of an urban renaissance — based on a celebration of city life and its possibilities — is timely given half of the world's population now resides in urban areas. Yet, as appealing as this prospect may be, both in principle and planning theory, it remains at odds with the desires of many residents who seek ‘lifestyle living’ in low‐density suburban or ex‐urban settings. This article presents the results of a qualitative investigation of what it means to ‘live on the edge’ in a peri‐urban village, as understood by residents living in those settings. These results are evaluated in light of phenomenological literature on authentic and inauthentic places, and the myriad reasons so‐called amenity migrants choose the peri‐urban village as their preferred residential location. The results of in‐depth interviews with 28 residents are presented as a four‐part typology of ‘active’ lifestylers and those searching for community, and ‘passive’ speculators and those seeking a civilized society. Though prior work suggests people are attracted to the peri‐urban village for its bio‐physical environmental features, this research suggests socioeconomic factors and opportunities for active place‐making experiences are as, if not more, important.     

Building,Marketing and Living in an Islamic Gated Community: Novel Configurations of Class and Religion in Istanbul

This article analyses the development and marketing of Islamic gated communities in Basaksehir, Istanbul. It demonstrates how a blueprint of public–private urban development was appropriated by middle‐class Islamists. The gated communities in Basaksehir—which, at the outset, were not explicitly religious—gradually became attractive to religious actors searching for enclosed urban enclaves where Islamic communities would be protected against perceived moral‐urban threats. While urban‐religious enclaves appear to bear similarities to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the rise of contemporary Islamic gated communities should be understood in light of the recent coming to power of the Islamist Turkish government. In cooperation with this government, housing development agencies approached Islamic investors to find capital for their public–private housing projects. One of the results of this form of urban development is that, contrary to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the Islamic gated communities are homogenous in terms of economic class, catering specifically to the Islamic middle classes. Moreover, people who invest in Basaksehir desire an urban‐religious lifestyle that differs from the ‘traditional' religious lifestyle experienced in ‘traditional' Islamic neighbourhoods. The specific urban‐religious configuration generates a new type of Islam that better fits middle‐class values and a middle‐class lifestyle.     

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’.     

Space and Identity in Resistance against Neoliberal Urban Planning in Turkey

This article highlights the role of collective identity and space in the emergence of social resistance within a neoliberal context. It argues that the attempted eviction of residents from their established neighbourhoods through public planning projects generates resistance against the reappropriation of these spaces and has encouraged new forms of resistance among inhabitants in several neighbourhoods. I particularly emphasize that planning projects often displace particular populations by force, principally minority communities, in order to confine them to new resettlement areas far from their customary living places, which has a socioeconomic impact on people's identity, everyday life and social solidarity. The article is based on empirical research in two neighbourhoods in Istanbul — 1 May?s and Sulukule — to analyse practices of resistance of inhabitants in everyday life and examine how this resistance shapes their identity and daily life.     

Technifying Public Space and Publicizing Infrastructures: Exploring New Urban Political Ecologies through the Square of General Vara del Rey

The aim of this article is to explore new ways of integrating technology, nature and infrastructures into urban public spaces. This is done through a case study, the design of General Vara del Rey, which is offered here as a model to explore a novel urban political ecology that calls into question dominant definitions of public spaces as self‐contained sites operating independently of natural and infrastructural spaces. Through the double movement of ‘the technification of public space’ and ‘the publicization of infrastructures’, the square aims to rethink the political ecology of urban public spaces by enabling the effective incorporation and participation of infrastructural and natural elements as active actors into the public and political life of the community. It is argued that the transformation of infrastructures into fully visible, public and political agents provides a useful model to address the growing proliferation of infrastructural and technological elements onto contemporary urban surfaces and to open up the possibility of new forms of civic participation and engagement.     

Between the Individual and the Community: Residential Patterns of the Haredi Population in Jerusalem

This article examines how different levels of internal organization are reflected in the residential patterns of different population groups. In this case, the Haredi community comprises sects and sub‐sects, whose communal identity plays a central role in everyday life and spatial organization. The residential preferences of Haredi individuals are strongly influenced by the need to live among ‘friends’ — that is, other members of the same sub‐sect. This article explores the dynamics of residential patterns in two of Jerusalem's Haredi neighbourhoods: Ramat Shlomo, a new neighbourhood on the urban periphery, and Sanhedria, an old yet attractive inner‐city neighbourhood. We reveal two segregation mechanisms: the first is top‐down determination of residence, found in relatively new neighbourhoods that are planned, built and populated with the intense involvement of community leaders; the second is the bottom‐up emergence of residential patterns typical of inner‐city neighbourhoods that have gradually developed over time.     

Power Relations and Social Mix in Metropolitan Neighbourhoods in North America and Europe: Moving Beyond Gentrification?

Research on spatial segregation has suggested that social mix may be a temporary phase in class displacement, where relations between different groups are at best divided or ‘tectonic’, for instance in England. Political and policy discourses, by contrast, tend to uncritically valorize social mix as a means to breaking up concentrations of poverty and providing neighbourhoods with a middle‐class voice. In the literature, little attention has been paid to power dynamics in socially mixed neighbourhoods and the implications this may have for understanding theory and policy. The five articles that make up this symposium address the ways in which social and ethnic groups interact in major cities in Europe and North America and, as the title suggests, this involves taking into account power relations, domination and negotiation between the different groups. There is a need to connect the experience of the deployment of power within neighbourhoods (and between them) with the discussions of power mechanisms at work in wider urban processes.     

Negotiating Social Mix in Toronto's First Public Housing Redevelopment: Power,Space and Social Control in Don Mount Court

This article examines the experience of social interaction in Toronto's Don Mount Court community, the first socially mixed public‐housing redevelopment site in Canada. Similar to the American HOPE VI program, redevelopment involved the demolition and mixed‐income reconstruction of the community to include both public housing and new market condominiums with a neo‐traditional redesign. Based on participant observation, this article describes four struggles that emerged over the course of a series of mixed‐income community governance meetings intended to promote social inclusion. These struggles related to (1) unequal power relations in shaping local priorities; (2) the power to brand the community and define its aesthetic characteristics; (3) the power to define and use public space; and (4) power over modes of surveillance and exclusion. The findings challenge the myth that the ‘benevolent’ middle class will use their political influence and social capital to the benefit of their low‐income neighbors in mixed neighbourhoods. Instead, the research found that public‐housing tenants were often on the receiving end of antagonism. It is argued that policymakers intent on ameliorating problems related to residence in disadvantaged communities should focus on funding for social programs and transformative change, rather than on public‐housing demolition and state‐driven gentrification via mixed‐income redevelopment.     

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.     

Cities in Contemporary Capitalism

This article outlines essential concepts of the political economy approach of urban research and offers critical modifications and clarifications to some of its contentions concerning the functioning of cities as ‘strategic places’ of capital accumulation. The interrelations between contemporary capitalism and urban economic development are discussed at the scale of a transnationally extended urban system. Based on the general context of the global economic downturn, I focus on the role of cities in distinct circuits of capital, the switching of capital flows within the urban system and the different functional roles of cities within the world city network that interconnects cities both in the global North and South. I call into question the established focus of urban economic research on the role of cities as financial and service centres, arguing that cities might redirect their economic development trajectories towards ‘real economy’ activities, in contrast to relying on the disastrous development model of finance‐dominated capitalism.     

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’.     

A Clash Of Subcultures? Questioning Queer–Muslim Antagonisms in the Neoliberal City

This article explores the framing of conflicts over public space as they unfold in a climate of neoliberal urban transformation in contemporary Germany. Examining how the alleged concerns of a ‘queer community’ have been pitted against the alleged moral agenda of Muslim immigrants in the country, examples of conflicts over ‘queer’ public leisure spaces in Berlin will give insights into how different cultural minority positions are mobilized against each other in the context of both urban and national citizenship debates that are marked by a neoliberal re‐evaluation of diversities and inequalities.     

Playing with the Rules of the Game: Social Innovation for Urban Transformation

Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with neoliberal ideas, conventional notions of innovation—like its capitalocentric counterparts, enterprise and entrepreneurialism—may promise higher productivity, global competitiveness and technological progress but do not fundamentally change the ‘rules of the game’. In contrast, an emerging field reimagines social innovation as disruptive change in social relations and institutional configurations. This article explores the conceptual and political differences within this pre‐paradigmatic field, and argues for a more transformative understanding of social innovation. Building on the work of David Graeber, I mobilize the novel constructs of ‘play’ and ‘games’ to advance our understanding of the contradictory process of institutionalizing social innovation for urban transformation. This is illustrated through a case study of Liverpool, where diverse approaches to innovation are employed in attempts to resolve longstanding socio‐economic problems. Dominant market‐ and state‐led economic development policies—likened to a ‘regeneration game’—are contrasted with more experimental, creative, democratic and potentially more effective forms of social innovation, seeking urban change through playing with the rules of the game. I conclude by considering how the play–game dialectic illuminates and reframes the way transformative social innovation might be cultivated by urban policy, the contradictions this entails, and possible ways forward.     

Creative Cities,Graffiti and Culture-Led Development in South Africa: Dlala Indima (‘Play Your Part’)

Creative cities and culture-led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite-centric economic development agendas tend to trump ‘civic creativity’ ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture-led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as a catalyst for economic and property development. Public art commissioning processes tend to focus on decorative projects as part of urban upgrading, which are often associated with ensuing gentrification and displacement of the urban poor. In contrast to focusing on these kinds of regeneration strategies, this article investigates Dlala Indima, a hip-hop-led graffiti project in a rural township in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This article situates graffiti as a critical social and spatial practice to argue that this case challenges normative cultural planning paradigms. Dlala Indima's work is an alternative approach to cultural development by and for young people who are usually marginalized by the mainstream practice of culture-led economic development. The project challenges dominant creative cities and culture-led development discourses in three ways: first, it challenges the normative processes of regeneration; secondly, it grounds participatory practice; and finally, it shifts participation from ‘tyranny to transformation’ through the ubuntu of hip-hop, the notion of ubuntu being based on the communitarian notion of ‘ubuntu, ngubuntu ngabantu’—‘I am because you are’.     

City of Rents: The limits to the Barcelona model of urban competitiveness

The turn towards the knowledge‐based economy and creative strategies to enhance urban competitiveness within it has been well documented. Yet too little has been said to date about the transformation of land use for new productive activities, and the contradictions inherent to this process. Our case study is Barcelona, an erstwhile ‘model’ for urban regeneration which has sought to transform itself into a global knowledge city since 2000. Through the lens of Marxian value theory, and Harvey's writing on urban monopoly rents especially, we show how the 22@Barcelona project — conceived with received wisdom about the determinants of urban knowledge‐based competitiveness in mind — amounted to an exercise in the capture of monopoly rents, driven by the compulsion of public sector institutions, financiers and developers to pursue rental profit‐maximizing opportunities through the mobilization of land as a financial asset.     

Citizen Participation in Urban Governance in the Context of Democratization: Evidence from Low‐Income Neighbourhoods in Mexico

Participation has recently been subject to renewed attention and critique in the context of neoliberal urban governance. This is especially relevant in countries where decentralization and democratization in the context of neoliberalism have led to increased promotion of local‐level participation. This article suggests that current critiques of participation's potential for democratic citizen engagement in a neoliberal context would benefit from further reflection on how participation is implemented in contexts, particularly the global South, where neoliberalism and democracy may be understood differently. Different ‘cultures of engagement’ in specific settings suggest that understandings and practices of participation draw on different traditions, including corporatism and self‐help. This article seeks to add to the debate by exploring the socio‐spatial consequences of participation structures in low‐income neighbourhoods in a provincial Mexican city. Based on qualitative research in two low‐income neighbourhoods in Xalapa, Mexico, it examines how the provisions of the local citizen‐participation framework compare with residents' experiences of it. Formalized conceptions of participation, framed as involvement in service provision, interact with and shape residents' activities in developing their neighbourhoods. This has consequences for urban development there, including the reflection and reproduction of social and spatial marginalization.     

Being Good Parents or Being Good Citizens: Dilemmas and Contradictions of Urban Families in Middle‐Class Enclaves and Mixed Neighbourhoods in Germany

In recent years, cities have become ever more attractive to middle‐class families. On the one hand, middle‐class families tend to withdraw into (often newly built) socially homogeneous middle‐class neighbourhoods. On the other hand, they are also known to move into inner‐city and socially mixed areas, thus triggering processes of gentrification. Academic literature has often denounced these housing choices as being either ‘separatist’ or ‘revanchist’, more broadly categorized as strategies of ‘middle‐class disaffiliation’. Although there is a grain of truth in these interpretations, the reality is certainly more complicated. In our research on middle‐class parents’ housing and neighbourhood choices as well as their patterns of neighbourhood use, carried out in each of the two types of residential area mentioned above, we have only very rarely found an explicit desire to draw boundaries that exclude those ‘beneath’ them. We rather argue that the housing choices and neighbourhood‐related activities of middle‐class family households are heavily influenced by the specific dilemmas the interviewees face as (working) urban parents. While a significant number of respondents worry about the social sustainability, justice and cohesion of urban society, they are also concerned about the future prospects of their children. Many find it difficult to reconcile these conflicting normative demands under the prevailing circumstances.     

Don't Plan! The Use of the Notion of ‘Culture’ in Transforming Obsolete Industrial Space

How is the notion of ‘culture’ understood and used in planning the transformation of obsolete industrial space? This article analyses the evidence from a current planning project in Suvilahti, Helsinki. It shows that ‘culture’ is imagined and employed as an instrument capable of producing difference in urban space. The transformation of the Cable Factory in Helsinki and the subsequent consensus on the importance of ‘culture’ are shown to have influenced the planning of Suvilahti. On the one hand, planning is being carried out with a deliberate minimization of planning interventions and the promotion of the spontaneous, non‐planned practices of cultural producers: the future Suvilahti is imagined as a ‘cultural enclave’ and its community is characterized as a ‘living organism’. On the other, ‘culture’ is planned in terms of its supposedly positive effects on urban space. Planners do not want to interfere with the non‐planned character of ‘cultural production’, yet at the same time they express certainty about cultural production's positive spatial and socioeconomic effects. The transformation of Suvilahti is playing an important part in the large‐scale planning project to redevelop the old industrial harbour in Kalasatama, Helsinki. The changes in the nature of planning are analysed under the concept of cultural governmentality.     

The Politics of Place: Place‐making versus Densification in Toronto's Tower Neighbourhoods

Toronto's Tower Neighbourhood Renewal (TR) programme is a municipal government initiative tackling aging high‐rise apartment building clusters in need of physical upgrades. One strategy for a more vibrant future for those clusters is densification or new infill housing. The main argument of the essay is that the unique urban structure of Toronto's inner suburbs challenges the implementation of TR's densification strategy. The proximity of many residents occupying privately owned single‐family homes close to the tower neighbourhoods has implications for the governance of TR in Toronto. Having created place‐frames firmly linked to their own identities as single‐family homeowners, these residents reject an encroachment of the ‘urban' (through higher residential densities) and of the ‘Other' (through a potential increase in low‐income, immigrant and visible minority tower renters). A 2011 design charrette in the Toronto neighbourhood of Weston serves as a case study, exemplifying the tensions between neighbourhood resident place‐frames and the goals of the TR project. This essay is based on an analysis of public policy documents and public participation reports, as well as notes from direct observation during the Weston 2021 Design Charrette.