Paying for Pipes,Claiming Citizenship: Political Agency and Water Reforms at the Urban Periphery

This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of market‐oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water project mandating significant ‘beneficiary’ cash contributions from lower‐middle‐class dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city's peripheries. Drawing on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack formal water access and land tenure — groups referred to in this article as the ‘peripheralized middle class’ — consent to paying for pipes rather than resist all together despite the high cost involved. It argues that far from reflecting an internalization of a ‘willingness to pay’ or ‘stakeholder’ ethos celebrated by development practitioners today, payment for water provides an insurgent means to bargain for greater symbolic recognition, respectability and material benefits from the state. In particular, payment for pipes enables peripheral dwellers to strengthen their claims to secure land tenure in an era of exclusionary and punitive spatial policies. Payment thus comprises a terrain of contested meaning making and political struggle, at the heart of which lie the stakes of urban citizenship. In documenting the process by which property related interests and tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of reforms, this article contributes to Gramscian political‐ecological conversations on subaltern political agency and the lived character of hegemony in urban environments.     

Respectability,Roughness and ‘Race’: Neighbourhood Place Images and the Making of Working‐Class Social Distinctions in London

Housing has come to play an important role in demarcating the contours of social polarization in inner London, notably via the widening socio‐spatial divide between an impoverished working class located in council housing estates and affluent home‐owning gentrifiers. In mass media and policy discourses, the former are routinely represented as an unruly urban ‘underclass’, a representation that homogenizes council tenants and marginalizes their voices. This article aims to move beyond a narrow underclass perspective by providing an in‐depth analysis of neighbourhood place images and social identity based on interviews with white working‐class council tenants in the inner London Borough of Camden. Drawing on debates around social distinction and place, the article illustrates a complex set of neighbourhood images rooted in narratives of urban decline as well as notions of belonging and knowing people. The article examines these place images in relation to the longstanding status distinction between respectability and roughness, as well as ‘race’. In conclusion, the defensive and exclusionary elements of neighbourhood images are related to processes of social deprivation and insecurity that have affected working‐class council tenants in Camden.     

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.     

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.     

When Social Infrastructure Deficits Create Displacement Pressures: Inner City Schools and the Suburbanization of Families in Melbourne

Under advanced capitalism, gentrification converges with the post‐Keynesian ‘unhinging' of the state from the project of social reproduction, including its responsibilities for collective consumption (e.g. housing, schools). Gentrification research scrutinizes this convergence through the ongoing assault on social/affordable housing, and yet anaemic housing welfare is not its endpoint. The social contract is further fractured through the ongoing discreditation and dismantling of the full gamut of legacies of the publicly regulated Keynesian inner city, including essential social infrastructure. Focusing on public schools, as an essential site for social reproduction, this article explores how the struggle for the city under neoliberal gentrification may be emerging along additional (non‐housing) vectors. Based on a qualitative study of families' experiences of poor public education provision in central Melbourne (Australia), this article argues that the exclusionary effects of gentrification likely exceed residential encroachment as state subsidization of residents continues to yield to the subsidization of capital. In particular, this article identifies life‐stage specific, infrastructure‐related displacement pressures wrought by a state failure to provide adequate public primary schools in the ‘regeneration' of central Melbourne, and it illustrates how these pressures prompt housing strategies that unevenly divest families of the locational advantages secured in the inner city. Highlighting the role of public school deficits in the reluctant suburbanization of lesser‐resourced families assists in foregrounding state complicity in displacement dynamics and the potential for these to magnify socio‐economic, gendered and socio‐spatial inequalities across the city.     

THE DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

The demographic transition, from high to low mortality and fertility, entails several decades during which a country's dependency ratio falls, bringing a demographic dividend to which a third of East Asia's late twentieth‐century economic growth ‘miracle’ has been attributed. Can a similar miracle be expected in sub‐Saharan Africa in the next few decades, or will relentless population pressure prevent this?     

Coming to Terms with London: Middle‐class Communities in a Global City

In this article we contrast the experience of middle‐class life in two areas of South London. We hypothesize that different sections of the middle class will live in different areas. Whilst these differences partly reflect economic capabilities and occupational divisions (such as public versus private employment sector, professionals versus managers), we suggest these divisions are becoming more complex. We develop a threefold model based on the work of Savage et al. (1992) and hypothesize that each group will tend to live in different and distinct areas of the city. In our comparison of two areas in which we have completed fieldwork (Telegraph Hill and Brixton), we are able to show very different accommodations to metropolitan life which provides initial support for our hypothesis. We characterize middle‐class life in Brixton as being essentially unstable, which is largely compensated for by the frisson of living in a cosmopolitan and mixed area. Telegraph Hill is a more stable area, with residents building a long‐term relationship with the area and forming substantial social networks with other residents; it, however, lacks the cultural infrastructure of Brixton. We argue that ‘circuits of education’ are of prime importance for middle‐class families living in London: in comparison to Brixton, our respondents in Telegraph Hill have developed sophisticated educational strategies which have enabled them to come to terms with living in London. Cet article compare la vie des classes moyennes dans deux quartiers du sud de Londres. Par hypothèse, il considère qu'au sein de ces classes, des catégories différentes vivront dans des quartiers différents. Si ces divergences traduisent en partie des capacités financières et des disparités professionnelles (ex.: entre secteur public et secteur privé, professions libérales et cadres), elles se font aussi plus complexes. L'article présente un modèle en trois parties basé sur le travail de Savage et al. (1992), en présumant que chaque groupe aura tendance à vivre dans un quartier spécifique de la ville. En opposant deux zones où le travail sur le terrain est terminé (Telegraph Hill et Brixton), il est possible de montrer des adaptations très variées à la vie métropolitaine, celles‐ci offrant une première contribution à l'hypothèse de l'étude. La vie des classes moyennes à Brixton peut se définir comme étant essentiellement instable, caractéristique largement compensée par le frisson d'une existence dans un quartier hétéroclite et cosmopolite. Telegraph Hill est une zone plus stable, les résidents établissant un lien durable avec le quartier et constituant entre eux de solides réseaux sociaux; il lui manque toutefois l'infrastructure culturelle de Brixton. L'article expose que les ‘circuits éducatifs’ sont primordiaux pour les familles des classes moyennes vivant à Londres: par comparaison à Brixton, les résidents de Telegraph Hill ont mis au point des stratégies d'éducation élaborées qui leur ont permis de s'accommoder de la vie londonienne.     

The Effectiveness of Single‐Sex Schools through Out‐of‐School Activities: Evidence from South Korea

Students’ out‐of‐school activities and time use can play a crucial role in facilitating the effect of schools on students’ achievement. Using data from Seoul, South Korea, where students are randomly assigned into schools, we show that when single‐sex schools improve students’ test performance, their effect is positive on students’ time spent on study‐related out‐of‐school activities. Our results indicate that out‐of‐school activities explain roughly 21%–30% of the effect of single‐sex schooling on test performance.     

Charter Schools and Urban Regimes in Neoliberal Context: Making Workers and New Spaces in Metropolitan Atlanta

In this article, we demonstrate the neoliberalism and multiscalar economic perspective of the charter school movement in Atlanta, Georgia, through examination of news articles and editorials about charter schools in the Atlanta Journal‐Constitution from 1998 to 2004. We posit three interrelated dynamics which explain the editorial board’s interest in charter schools as part of a broader urban regime agenda. First, charter schools represent part of a neoliberal shift in education that parallels shifts in urban governance, emphasizing flexibility, public–private partnerships, and ‘market’‐oriented consumer choice and accountability. Second, the newspaper is issuing a challenge to educational structures, to adopt more neoliberal policies and shed a bureaucratic, liberal governance framework. Finally, we find critical evidence that the charter school movement draws on a multiscalar discourse which simultaneously references responsiveness to local, neighborhood needs, and at the same time highlights the economic imperatives of a global, competitive city to differentially skill students/workers in order to capture mobile and fractured (global) capital.     

Thank you to Reviewers 2013

Abstract

Drawing on Parkin's [Marxism and class theory: A bourgeois critique. London: Tavistock Publications] concept of dual closure, this paper examines the attempt to secure the regulation of the accountancy profession in post-unification Italy. The state's establishment of a class of ‘expert accountants’ in 1865 represented an imperfect closure of the profession. In consequence, a chain of closure attempts ensued. These ventures involved shifting constructions of dominant and subordinate occupational groups and the deployment of diverse strategies to achieve usurpationary and exclusionary forms of closure. The study reveals that the achievement of state regulation of the profession in 1906 reflected the successful pursuit of usurpationary closure by a subordinated group within the accountancy field. However, it also points to the failure of the profession's efforts to make incursions into the jurisdictions of higher status occupations, especially lawyers, who wielded considerable sociopolitical power in newly unified Italy. Consistent with the findings of previous studies, the paper confirms the complexity and uncertain outcomes of closure projects in the accountancy profession.     

Seeing Like a City‐State: Behavioural Planning and Governance in Egypt's First Affordable Gated Community

Haram City is Egypt's first ‘affordable’ gated community, hosting both aspirational middle‐class homeowners and resettled poor urban residents. Amidst legal ambiguity during Egypt's 2011–2013 revolutionary period, the management team of this public–private partnership was tasked with creating a ‘fully self‐sufficient’ city. While Haram City is the product of top‐down ‘seeing like a state’ master planning (Scott, 1998 ), the day‐to‐day resolution of class vulnerabilities and disputes over ‘reasonableness’ in city life requires forms of interpersonal adjudication otherwise addressed through local urban law—‘seeing like a city’ (Valverde, 2011 ). This article uses ethnography of management techniques aiming to ‘upgrade behaviour’ to theorize that a private entity, in a strategically indeterminate relationship with the state, reconciles future‐oriented planning and storied prejudices by merging two visions of governance. Imitating the repertoire of urban law, managers plan the very realm of bottom‐up decision making. They then adapt top‐down urban planning to bottom‐up dispute resolution to spatially consolidate the ‘consensual’ outcomes of a rigged game. Evoking both colonial Egyptian vagrancy laws and neoliberal paternalist welfare, ‘seeing like a city‐state’ governance amounts to authoritarianism that conceals itself within custom, appearing neutral so as to plan streets, codes and inner lives at once.     

‘Gentrification Without Displacement' and the Consequent Loss of Place: The Effects of Class Transition on Low‐income Residents of Secure Housing in Gentrifying Areas

The increasingly disputed concept of gentrification‐induced displacement is combining with the argument that the poor benefit from social mix to produce a theoretical case for ‘positive gentrification'. The notion that new middle‐class residents not only attract more investment but bring opportunities for ‘upward social mobility' to low‐income people who manage to stay in gentrifying areas has become policy orthodoxy. While there are scholarly challenges to the extent of these benefits, the disadvantages of imposed social mix on low‐income communities even where they are not physically displaced remain under‐researched. This article helps to fill this gap by reporting on research into the experience of long‐term low‐income residents of gentrifying neighbourhoods who managed to stay put. The research explores notions of social mix, place and displacement among residents of secure community housing in Melbourne, Australia (the equivalent of small‐scale social housing in Europe and North America) with the object of establishing whether the absence of physical displacement is sufficient to ameliorate gentrification's negative impacts. The findings demonstrate that transformations in shops and meeting places, and in the nature of local social structure and government interventions, cause a sense of loss of place even without physical displacement.     

Class Formation and Localism in an Emerging Bureaucracy: British Bank Workers, 1880–1960

This article uses a case study of the spatial and career mobility of bank workers from Lloyds, a leading British bank, to explore the relationship between class formation and spatial mobility. The article argues against the idea that the large‐scale concentration and bureaucratization of the British banking industry in the early years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a mobile middle‐class spiralist or cosmopolitan. We use archival data from Lloyds Bank to argue that the emergence of Lloyds as a large‐scale national bank involved a compromise with localized interests rather than a detachment of the bank from local concerns. We use data on the career histories of a representative sample of male bank employees to argue that spatial mobility was organized largely within regions and helped to consolidate the prospects of rural bank workers. We argue that London emerged as a distinctive ‘hub’ for banking careers, with significant amounts of movement to and from London from all regions. We therefore demonstrate how localized and rural cultures were sedimented within a large, national bureaucracy, and that a genuine ‘spiralist’ structure did not emerge. En s’appuyant sur une étude de cas relative à la mobilité géographique et professionnelle du personnel de la Lloyds, l’une des premières banques britanniques, cet article examine le lien entre la formation d’une classe et la mobilité spatiale. Il combat l’idée que la concentration et la bureaucratisation à grande échelle du secteur bancaire britannique au début du XXe siècle a fait na? tre une classe moyenne mobile en spirale ou cosmopolite. Les données d’archives de la Lloyds révèlent que son développement en tant que grande banque nationale s’est accompagné d’un compromis avec les intér? ts locaux plutôt que d’une indifférence à l’égard de ces préoccupations. Les informations sur les carrières d’un échantillon représentatif d’employés de banque masculins permettent d’établir que la mobilité géographique a été organisée largement au plan régional, contribuant à consolider les perspectives des employés en zone rurale. Londres est apparu comme un ‘pôle’ particulier dans les carrières bancaires, avec un nombre considérable de mutations vers et de la capitale à partir de toutes les régions. L’article montre ainsi comment des cultures locales et rurales se sont sédimentées au sein d’une importante bureaucratie nationale et qu’aucune structure ‘en spirale’ pure n’en est issue.     

Mumbai’s Mysterious Middle Class

Mumbai forms the décor to an interesting set of relationships among economic liberalization, globalization, class restructuring and an unprecedented housing construction boom. The much talked about new Indian middle class is primarily an urban phenomenon and seems nowhere more salient than in India’s commercial capital and largest city. This article seeks to undo some of the mysteries that surround the new middle class: how it can be empirically defined, whether and how it is growing, how class restructuring in Mumbai conforms (or not) to Western arguments about social polarization, and how any such class restructuring can best be explained. The empirical analysis employs existing data from various sources on income and consumption in Mumbai (and India at large) and reports on selected findings from a recent survey by the author on housing, class and upward mobility among households in newly constructed homes in Greater Mumbai. Data on the distribution of household incomes show that the upper‐middle income classes have grown relative to the total, that the lower‐middle income classes have shrunk, and that the ranks of the poor have expanded slightly. Survey data among new home buyers in Mumbai suggest little upward mobility. Discourse about the ‘new middle class’ tends to focus on consumption rather than income and additional findings indicate that much of the growth in consumption is credit‐based.     

Clichés of Urban Doom: The Dystopian Politics of Metaphors for the Unequal City – a View from Brussels

Drawing on evidence from the city of Brussels, it will be argued that much of today's urban governance discourses and practices contributes to anti‐urban ‘clichés of urban doom’ and betrays middle‐class, ethnocentric, sexist and racist prejudices about urban societies. Mainstream conceptions of urban problems and policies are modernist, white, patriarchal, heterosexual, nuclear family‐minded, middle‐class and suburban. Mainstream urban planning metaphors contribute to, instead of help to eliminate, sexist and racist urban politics. The uncritical use of concepts such as ‘polarization’, ‘exclusion’ or ‘poverty’ accords with the quest for urban purification by dominant groups in society, who seek to minimalize the urban experience of heterogeneity, otherness, diversity and urban unpredictability. The main contribution of this paper will be in trying to make clear how some key metaphors in contemporary urban planning disempower the already disempowered and in fact contribute to conservative urban politics, even when they are not intended to. Á partir du cas de Bruxelles, l'article démontre que les discours et pratiques actuels en matière de gouvernance urbaine participent, pour la plupart, aux clichés anti‐urbains sur ‘la ville en perdition’, tout en révélant des préjugés racistes, sexistes, ethnocentriques et bourgeois à l'égard des sociétés urbaines. Les principaux courants conceptuels des politiques et problèmes urbains sont de source moderniste, blanche, patriarcale, hétérosexuelle, favorable à la famille nucléaire, bourgeoise et suburbaine. Loin de s'en débarrasser, les grandes métaphores de l'urbanisme contribuent à une politique de la ville sexiste et raciste. L'utilisation sommaire de concepts tels que polarisation, exclusion ou pauvreté s'inscrit dans l'entreprise de purification urbaine des groupes sociétaux dominants qui cherchent à restreindre l'expérience d'hétérogénéité, de différence, de diversité et d'incertitude du cercle urbain. Cet article s'efforce surtout d'expliquer comment certaines images‐clés de l'urbanisme moderne privent de toute influence ceux qui n'en ont déjà aucune, et favorisent en fait une politique urbaine conservatrice, même involontairement.     

On the Real Effect of Financial Pressure: Evidence From Firm‐Level Employment During the Euro‐Area Crisis

Using a large panel of mainly unquoted euro‐area firms over the period 2003–2011, this paper examines the impact of financial pressure on firms’ employment. The analysis finds evidence that financial pressure negatively affects firms’ employment decisions. This effect is stronger during the euro area‐crisis (2010–2011), especially for firms in the periphery compared to their counterparts in non‐periphery European economies. When we introduce firm‐level heterogeneity, we show that financial pressure appears to be both statistically and quantitatively more important for bank‐dependent, small and privately held firms operating in periphery economies during the crisis.     

Herbert A. Simon on What Ails Business Schools: More than ‘A Problem in Organizational Design’

We critically examine Herbert Simon's 1967 essay, ‘The business school: a problem in organizational design’. We consider this essay within the context of Simon's key ideas about organizations, particularly those closely associated with the ‘Carnegie perspective’ on organizations and how they influenced the reinvention of American business schools in the post‐Second World War era, and were deeply influenced by the post‐War context and also were appropriated by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations to reform business school teaching and research. We argue that management educators misappropriated Simon's concept of an intellectually robust and relevant research and educational agenda for business schools that has in part contributed to the intellectual stasis that now characterizes business education research and its capacity to inform management practice.     

Conformist innovation: an institutional logics perspective on how HR executives construct business school reputations

In this paper, we explore whether Legge’s classic 1970s criticism of human resource (HR) executives as ‘conformist innovators’ is still relevant. Drawing on institutional logics, we analyse HR managers’ rationales for choosing particular university business schools to provide senior executive development. Our mixed-methods study demonstrates that senior HR managers socially construct and enact business school reputations by drawing on strategic rationales. These rationales are embedded in societal, field and organizational logics, especially the extant reputational rankings of international business schools and an ‘ideal’ template of elite business schools. We find that these rationales, and the decisions they evince, tend to confirm the traditional picture of conformist innovation among HR executives. We discuss the implications for the reputation of HR as a profession, their employers and business schools.