Building from Scratch: New Cities,Privatized Urbanism and the Spatial Restructuring of Johannesburg after Apartheid

By the start of the twenty‐first century, the once dominant historical downtown core of Johannesburg had lost its privileged status as the center of business and commercial activities, the metropolitan landscape having been restructured into an assemblage of sprawling, rival edge cities. Real estate developers have recently unveiled ambitious plans to build two completely new cities from scratch: Waterfall City and Lanseria Airport City (formerly called Cradle City) are master‐planned, holistically designed ‘satellite cities’ built on vacant land. While incorporating features found in earlier city‐building efforts, these two new self‐contained, privately‐managed cities operate outside the administrative reach of public authority and thus exemplify the global trend toward privatized urbanism. Waterfall City, located on land that has been owned by the same extended family for nearly 100 years, is spearheaded by a single corporate entity. Lanseria Airport City/Cradle City is a planned ‘aerotropolis’ surrounding the existing Lanseria airport at the northwest corner of the Johannesburg metropole. These two new private cities differ from earlier large‐scale urban projects because everything from basic infrastructure (including utilities, sewerage, and the installation and maintenance of roadways), landscaping, security services, the regulation of common spaces, and selling and branding the city are firmly in the hands of private profit‐making corporate entities and outside the mandate of public authorities.     

Cities within the City: Do‐It‐Yourself Urbanism and the Right to the City

In many cities around the world we are presently witnessing the growth of, and interest in, a range of micro‐spatial urban practices that are reshaping urban spaces. These practices include actions such as: guerrilla and community gardening; housing and retail cooperatives; flash mobbing and other shock tactics; social economies and bartering schemes; ‘empty spaces’ movements to occupy abandoned buildings for a range of purposes; subcultural practices like graffiti/street art, skateboarding and parkour; and more. This article asks: to what extent do such practices constitute a new form of urban politics that might give birth to a more just and democratic city? In answering this question, the article considers these so‐called ‘do‐it‐yourself urbanisms’ from the perspective of the ‘right to the city’. After critically assessing that concept, the article argues that in order for do‐it‐yourself urbanist practices to generate a wider politics of the city through the appropriation of urban space, they also need to assert new forms of authority in the city based on the equality of urban inhabitants. This claim is illustrated through an analysis of the do‐it‐yourself practices of Sydney‐based activist collective BUGA UP and the New York and Madrid Street Advertising Takeovers.     

Decentralizing Indonesian City Spaces as New ‘Centers’

Since the introduction of regional autonomy legislation in 1999, Indonesia has embarked on the world's biggest experiment with democratic decentralization. The intertwined processes of democratization and decentralization have dismantled Indonesia's centralized authoritarian system and reordered its governmental structures. These conjoined processes have set in motion conditions for the transformation of a number of Indonesia's secondary cities into regional ‘centers’ through the influx of new peoples, funding and ways of interacting within localized contexts and with the outside world. In this article I consider Indonesia's decentralization processes through the lens of the city, focusing on three key areas in the rising profile and development of urban centers. First, I look at the framing of Indonesian cities within contemporary urban discourses to highlight the array of urban spaces that coexist in the era of decentralization. Second, I describe how Indonesia's decentralization laws have structurally privileged cities by bypassing the provincial level and devolving most state powers directly to sub‐provincial administrations. Third, I explore how Indonesian cities compete and cooperate over limited state resources under the decentralized system and why some cities have been able to reinvent themselves as new centers in planning, practice and innovation, and why others continue to lag behind.     

IDENTITARIAN MOVEMENTS IN THE TOURISTIC CITY: The Marketing of Hate in Verona

Verona is known as the touristic city of Romeo and Juliet, but its position as a strategic node in the rising identitarian movement goes unnoticed to the thousands of tourists visiting the city every day. This article articulates the historical centre of Verona as a public space in which far-right and populist right groups seek to construct an exclusionary territorial identity that draws on white supremacy, northern pride and Catholic fundamentalism, which manifest themselves in practices of bordering and territorialization. I argue that the city's perfectly preserved heritage and its assumed authenticity are not only utilized to construct the ideal protagonists of city life, but also that such territorial themes of defending the ‘native homeland’ and its traditions are marketed to the outside world by constructing a ‘model’ city for a growing transnational movement. In this study, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and in-depth interviews, I investigate the mechanisms through which certain historical centres are showcased to build an identitarian network through everyday practices of boundary-drawing and the marketing of a territorial anti-modernist nostalgia.     

全球价值链:世界城市网络研究的新视角

城市网络是城市存在的空间范式,它在空间尺度上可划分为世界城市网络和区域城市网络。其中,世界城市网络研究经历了世界城市、世界城市等级体系、世界城市网络三个阶段;区域城市网络则包括巨型城市区、全球城市区域、城市群等研究领域。世界城市网络所运用的生产者服务业分析方法中的单一中心城市模式与区域城市网络的封闭模式相互割裂,不能合理解释当代世界城市体系的空间格局及内在关系。全球价值链可将世界城市网络与区域城市网络有效融合,是研究不同功能城市所组成的多元世界城市网络模式的分析工具。     

Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities

In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.     

It's Just the City after All!

Long a site for incessant worry, revision or redemption, it is unclear what the ‘city' is today. Yet, in face of the near‐apocalyptic readjustments potentiated by human‐engineered global warming, there is an exigency about getting cities to function right. It is no wonder, then, that contemporary theories of cities and urbanization attempt to restore some common sense, to get to the heart of critical matters in a world where urbanization disrupts once‐normative assumptions about the nature of territory, scale and politics. But what is the nature of that ‘common sense'? How does one engage the very concrete efforts that constructed the city, with all the layers of physical and cultural memory that new regimes usually attempt to cover up, and all that the city does not show, either because its inhabitants are prohibited from paying attention or because whatever is considered normative or spectacular in city life has to get rid of the messy labor and politics that brought it about? Invoking blackness as an analytical method, these questions are addressed through thinking about how long histories of urban practices deployed by black residents of cities across the world might challenge and reinvent the sense of an urban commons.

相似文献   

世界城市的涵义及其对中国城市发展的启示

从界定世界城市的概念入手 ,认为“世界城市”是指一种“世界城市地位” ,它既是个体概念 ,也是群体概念 ,既强调不同城市的共性 ,也重视城市间的差异。在此基础上 ,综合有关文献提出判别世界城市的指标体系 ,此后对全球化进程中世界城市的发展趋势进行了探讨 ,并综合对世界城市涵义的理解 ,提出中国发展世界城市的相应建议。     

世界城市判别指标体系及北京的努力方向

准确判别世界城市的等级体系具有重要意义.本文将城际联系纳入研究视角,构建了基于城市个体与城际联系双重标准的世界城市综合判别方法,并提出相应的指标体系.本文通过指标的测算,比较分析了世界39个著名城市的发展水平,并针对北京建设世界城市过程中的主要问题,提出相关的结论与建议.     

中国优秀旅游城市体系分析

利用城市体系研究的相关理论和方法,对中国优秀旅游城市体系的等级规模结构和空间结构进行了研究与分析,旨在借此透视以中国优秀旅游城市为代表的中国旅游城市体系的宏观结构;分析得到的有别于一般城市体系的、针对旅游职能的特殊类型城市体系的研究结果,将有助于我国旅游城市的宏观结构调整,促进我国城市旅游的整体发展.     

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.     

西部城市化新城市策略及促成方式

西部城市化可以有新的战略思考,可以考虑不依赖大城市、中等城市发展的策略,在新创城市方面利用工业推进法、人口拉动法、资金拉动法、大城市边缘渗透扩展法以及其他可作为新城市生长点的因素,譬如特有的自然旅游条件、特有的风土人情、特殊事件等,来实现城市化的突破.     

北京世界城市指标体系的构建与测评

城市的世界地位来自于其总体实力和网络地位的总合,同时城市世界地位的巩固和维持也离不开必要的支撑条件,因此北京世界城市指标体系共包括总体实力、网络地位和支撑条件三个评价维度.这个指标体系的特色是判别标准和建设路径的统一,世界城市与"三个北京"的有机统一,以及超越了传统国际城市和城市竞争力指标体系.实际测评结果显示.北京在...     

Decentralization is Dead,Long Live Decentralization! Capital City Reform and Political Rights in Kampala,Uganda

African cities are currently experiencing some of the highest population growth rates in the world. Accompanying this growth is constant and continuing pressure on national and local governments to develop political and institutional structures that respond to the multiple demands this demographic change provokes in relation to service delivery, economic development and social wellbeing. In response to these challenges, national governments are reviewing the political and administrative structures of their capital cities, sometimes recentralizing authority. This article examines the reforms to Kampala, capital city of Uganda. The article explains how the national government gradually created the legal conditions necessary to take over the capital city directly, and the political rhetoric and conflict that ensued. We argue that while Kampala had deep internal problems and fared poorly in service delivery, matters were exacerbated by the national government's historical indifference to the city. Moreover, past service delivery failures offered an easy rationale for recentralizing authority. We demonstrate that this recentralization was a well‐planned effort by the central government to regain political control of the capital city. This article illustrates how the national government's recentralization of authority in Kampala is a significant departure from its longstanding policy of democratic decentralization.     

Seeing Like a Theorist

Warren Magnusson sees a problem endemic to political thought and practice: we see the world in ways that presume and reaffirm the necessity of a sovereign territorial state, on pain of violent disorder in its absence. The solution is to ‘see like a city’, shaking off the dualism of sovereignty versus anarchy and finding a richer space of political possibilities. I admire and applaud Magnusson's critical efforts to challenge dominant categories and illuminate possibilities, but these aims rest uneasily with his polemical contrast between sovereignty and cities.     

Controlling Mobility and Regulation in Urban Space: Muslim Pilgrims to Mecca in Colonial Bombay, 1880–1914

The meanings and practices of space shape how cities are understood and governed. This article argues that space is central to understandings of mobility and practices of regulation in the city. Undertaking an analysis of the regulation of Muslim pilgrims (Hajis) in colonial Bombay (Mumbai) from 1880 to 1914, this article explores urban governance discourses around race, religion and public health at a variety of scales. It investigates the way that Hajis were problematized through these discourses, and targeted as threats to elite power and prosperity in the specific context of Bombay as a global shipping and economic hub. I conclude that elite conceptions of the city shape the governance of problematized bodies in ways which reinforce the meanings and politics of mobility and space. Elite understandings of movement and the city itself shape the practices and targets of urban regulation and control.     

上海世博会后长三角城市群的功能提升

2010年上海世博会后,长三角城市群将成为世界第六大城市群的全球功能活跃于世界经济舞台。由此,长三角城市群地区应从三个方面提升功能:一是核心城市上海的高端国际化功能,二是长三角城市群地区的深度一体化功能,三是长三角城市群向长江下游延伸的空间拓展功能。三个功能的提升互为关联,开拓长三角城市群科学发展的新路径。     

Beyond the Global City Concept and the Myth of ‘Command and Control’

The article argues that the lack of convincing empirical evidence for the global economy as being subject to ‘command and control’ results from that contention being a neo‐Marxist myth. First, imagining the global economy as being subject to ‘highly concentrated command’ through the function of some major cities as ‘strategic sites’ for the production of ‘command and control’ is traced back through several neo‐Marxist authors to narrate its genesis, and to argue that the lack of evidence for that proposition is a consequence of those antecedents envisioning capitalism as a totalizing structure, thus making the assumption that it is subject to control and coordination from a distance. Second, Taylor's interlocking world city network model is forensically examined to explain that it is fallacious because it is a structuralism that, bedevilled by a sorites paradox, contains the further problem of containing no credible evidence for the existence of ‘command centres’. Finally, the article moves beyond neo‐Marxism's key concepts by juxtaposing their assumptions with ethnographic results from social studies of finance, a manoeuvre which forges an understanding of cities as socio‐technical assemblages and eventful multiplicities, beyond, inter alia, the baseless assumption that the global economy is subject to ‘command and control’.     

World cities in poor countries: conclusions from case studies of the principal regional and global players

This is a brief report on a study of world cities in the under‐researched poor countries. Whereas previous work has focused rather haphazardly on one or a few cities beyond the West, this is the first study to systematically cover such ‘second‐tier’ world cities. Fourteen leading authorities from diverse backgrounds bring their expertise to bear on twelve world cities across four continents. Alongside the economic, they consider the political and cultural role these cities play within their regions and at the global level. The study leads to three principal conclusions: (1) these cities are extraordinarily diverse; (2) the city centers have become elite enclaves; and (3) along with the forces of globalization, the state and popular movements are important actors. These findings indicate the need for research that moves beyond the focus on globalization to take into account the multiple forces shaping world cities. And they demonstrate the benefits of overcoming an ethnocentrism in urban studies that privileges Western cities as locales of study and sources of generalization. Ce compte rendu résume une étude sur les grandes villes mondiales situées dans les pays pauvres délaissés par les recherches. Tandis que les travaux précédents s'étaient consacrés, plutôt au hasard, à quelques grandes villes hors d'Occident, cette étude est la première à couvrir systématiquement les villes mondiales ‘de second ordre’. Quatorze auteurs éminents d'appartenances diverses apportent leur expertise à l'égard de douze grandes villes mondiales réparties sur quatre continents. Ces chercheurs s'intéressent non seulement à la fonction économique, mais aussi aux rôles politique et culturel de ces villes au niveau régional et international. Trois conclusions majeures se dégagent: ces villes sont extraordinairement diverses, les centres‐villes sont devenus des enclaves pour élites et, parallèlement aux poussées de la mondialisation, l'État et les mouvements populaires sont des acteurs importants. Ces résultats montrent la nécessité de réaliser des recherches qui dépassent le seul plan de la mondialisation pour tenir compte des forces multiples qui façonnent les villes mondiales. De plus, ils prouvent qu'il vaut mieux s'émanciper de l'ethnocentrisme des études urbaines, lequel privilégie les villes occidentales comme sites d'étude et sources de généralisation.     

Producing Localized Commodity Frontiers at the End of Cheap Nature: An Analysis of Eco‐scalar Carbon Fixes and their Consequences

There is no single ‘great’ commodity frontier whose exploitation under current socio‐technical conditions could fuel capital accumulation at the global scale. According to Jason Moore, this represents the ‘end of Cheap Nature’ and signals a terminal crisis for capitalism as we know it. In this article we complicate this assertion by showing how, in the context of global environmental governance frameworks of carbon control, a diverse range of actors situated at multiple scales are intensifying the use of cities and their hinterlands for the production/transgression of localized commodity frontiers. We draw on scholarship on uneven geographical development, state‐led restructuring and eco‐scalar fixes to present two case studies from different segments of the carbon cycle in the global South. The first case demonstrates how the introduction of waste‐to‐energy technology in Delhi facilitated the generation of ‘carbon credits’ while waste matter itself became a commodity. The second discusses attempts by the Brazilian state of Amazonas (Amazônia) aspiring to shift from rainforest exploitation to financialized conservation supported by the ‘green global city’ functions of metropolitan Manaus. These cases demonstrate that although the global carbon‐control regime may enable accumulation, implementation remains speculative, and localized commodity frontiers provoke social resistances that jeopardize their durability.