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.     

Resilient Growth: Fantasy Plans and Unplanned Developments in India's Flood‐Prone Coastal Cities

Academic and policy literatures on urban climate resilience tend to emphasize ‘good planning’ as the primary means for addressing the growing risk of flooding in Asia's coastal megacities. Cities have come to rely on disaster and climate resilience plans to future‐proof their landscapes and protect vulnerable populations. Yet while data is collected, models are built and plans are drafted, environmentally destructive development practices continue unabated and often unchallenged. This article examines and seeks to explain the contradictions between a growing awareness of the risks of climate‐induced flooding in resilience plans and the continuation of development practices widely acknowledged to exacerbate those risks. It analyzes these contradictions in the context of Mumbai and Kolkata, India's largest coastal cities, which are facing the severest threats from climate‐induced flooding. Based on analyses of key resilience planning documents and both planned and unplanned developments in some of Mumbai's and Kolkata's most ecologically sensitive areas, our analysis reveals that resilience planning, promoted by the central government and international consultants, and presented in locally produced ‘fantasy plans’, fails to address the risks of climate‐change‐related flooding owing to tendencies to sidestep questions of politics, power and the distributional conflicts that shape urban development. We conclude that efforts to reduce urban flood risk would benefit from the research, methods and analytic concepts used to critically study cities, but significant gaps remain between these fields.     

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’.     

Corruption as Infrastructure: Rendering the New Saigon Global

Corruption is regularly treated as a barrier to infrastructure, development and growth. However, in Saigon, corruption itself has become an infrastructure in Vietnam's late-socialist urban transformation. This infrastructure facilitates not only growth in the form of transnational investment, property speculation and construction, but allows for different kinds of planning and development practice as well. Perceptions about corruption in Vietnam, and in Saigon specifically, shape market and planning practices that structure the terms on which interested parties from abroad and internally speculate upon and ultimately develop urban projects. This is not a static formulation of corruption. Rather, corruption and the various political and policy responses to it constantly shape how brokers, developers and financiers renegotiate how the city becomes a knowable object for investment, legible to the calculations of both risk and reward used by global investors as well as to those who enact the embedded bureaucratic, legal and political practices that create Saigon's built environment. In this article I argue that different definitions and policy responses to corruption in effect create variable ways of seeing the city (as well as modes of being seen) that have an impact on the material realities of the metropolis—the types of connections produced with transnational finance, the legal and regulatory structure under which urbanization unfolds, and the types of players, firms and officials involved.     

Scalar Narratives in Bilbao: A Cultural Politics of Scales Approach to the Study of Urban Policy

In this article I explore how theoretical metaphors about the contemporary rescaling of the capitalist economy are used by local policy actors to justify an entrepreneurial urban policy. I develop a new theoretical concept (scalar narrative), suggest an analytical approach (cultural politics of scales) and give evidence of a particular case (Bilbao). The article is structured in the following way. First, I briefly review the literature on politics of scales and contribute to the debate with an approach that incorporates elements from cultural political economy and interpretative policy analysis. Within this approach I mobilize the concept of ‘scalar narrative’ that has already been suggested in the literature but not fully explored. I then put this approach into practice with a particular case study, Bilbao, a city in the north of Spain, which has recently gone through extensive urban regeneration, where I describe the appropriation of three scalar narratives by the policymakers. To show this I draw from empirical work done in Bilbao that looks at statutory and strategic planning documents as well as urban marketing literature and interviews with key informants.     

Unveiling Urban Sprawl in the Mediterranean Region: Towards a Latent Urban Transformation?

The relationship between form and function in European Mediterranean cities has been widely addressed from various perspectives. A number of studies indicate that, until the 1980s, compactness was a key trait of several cities of the Northern Mediterranean. However, after the ‘compact growth’ period, these cities experienced patterns of urbanization that differed from their traditional trends. Since the 1990s, sprawl, coupled with population decline in the inner cities, has become the main pattern of urban development. This article explores the key features of exurban development in the Mediterranean region in order to provide material for a discussion based on the differences and similarities in the characteristics of sprawl processes originating in the US and Northern Europe. It concludes that any debate on policy responses to sprawl must be specifically formulated according to the scope, administrative level, housing and planning system, territorial and socioeconomic characteristics of the urban system under examination. It is our belief that sprawl requires site‐specific analyses and policy strategies for the region being studied if the process is to be effectively controlled.     

Does China's carbon emissions trading policy improve the technology innovation of relevant enterprises?

China's carbon emissions trading (CET) policy aims to force relevant enterprises to implement low‐carbon technology innovation and address environmental challenges through marketization means. However, how China's CET policy may affect enterprise technology innovation and whether this effect may differ in industries remain to be further investigated. Therefore, based on the panel data of listed enterprises covered by the CET policy in China during 2009–2017, this paper employs the difference‐in‐difference (DID) and DID‐based propensity score matching models to evaluate the effect of CET on technology innovation. The empirical results indicate that the effect of China's CET on the technology innovation of related enterprises is generally not significant during the sample period, but this effect presents evident industrial heterogeneity. Specifically, among the eight CET‐covered industries, the CET policy helps to improve technology innovation for power and aviation enterprises but not in the other six industries (i.e., steel, chemical, building material, petrochemical, nonferrous metals, and paper), which implies that China's CET policy still has great potential for promoting the technology innovation of related enterprises. In addition, the central findings remain robust when the system generalized method of moment and DID‐based coarsened exact matching models are applied to consider the influence of omitted variables, unobservable confounders, and different matching methods.     

Santiago Calatrava and the ‘Power of Faith’: Global Imaginaries in Valencia

The focus of this article is on the importance of collective imaginaries for urban policy mobility, and on the agents and modes of power through which imaginaries are translated, mobilized and become materialized in specific places. Through the case study of the monumental complex of the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, designed by Valencian global architect Santiago Calatrava, I discuss Calatrava's mobilization of ideas of modernity, tradition, democratization and self‐esteem already present in the collective imaginary of the people and the politicians of post‐Franco's Spain to promote his global architecture. In this process, I argue, global imaginaries were translated into local imaginaries and vice versa as they became embodied in persons and objects, represented in this case by Calatrava's figure as a local/global architect and by the architecture of the City of Arts and Sciences. Particularly, I analyse Calatrava's use of the power of seduction, persuasion and coercion to mobilize such imaginaries in order to build his ubiquitous signature architecture in Valencia.     

Unconditional tests for association in 2 × 2 contingency tables in the total sum fixed design

The asymptotic approach and Fisher's exact approach have often been used for testing the association between two dichotomous variables. The asymptotic approach may be appropriate to use in large samples but is often criticized for being associated with unacceptable high actual type I error rates for small to medium sample sizes. Fisher's exact approach suffers from conservative type I error rates and low power. For these reasons, a number of exact unconditional approaches have been proposed, which have been seen to be generally more powerful than exact conditional counterparts. We consider the traditional unconditional approach based on maximization and compare it to our presented approach, which is based on estimation and maximization. We extend the unconditional approach based on estimation and maximization to designs with the total sum fixed. The procedures based on the Pearson chi‐square, Yates's corrected, and likelihood ratio test statistics are evaluated with regard to actual type I error rates and powers. A real example is used to illustrate the various testing procedures. The unconditional approach based on estimation and maximization performs well, having an actual level much closer to the nominal level. The Pearson chi‐square and likelihood ratio test statistics work well with this efficient unconditional approach. This approach is generally more powerful than the other p‐value calculation methods in the scenarios considered.     

我国核电产业发展政策分析

核电站建设周期长、投资大、风险大,政府政策对其发展起着决定性的影响。我国核电产业存在着发展慢、差距大、技术多样的挑战,这与核电政策的决策、运行和监督机制有关。因此,要实现我国政府提出的"统一路线、积极发展"战略,核电规划就应符合国情、具有可操作性,并逐步改革核电管理体制。     

Research in Cognition and Strategy: Reflections on Two Decades of Progress and a Look to the Future

This review of cognition in strategic management research takes as its starting point the appreciation of the seminal paper, ‘Competitive groups as cognitive communities: the case of Scottish knitwear manufacturers’, by Porac, Thomas and Baden‐Fuller on cognitive categorization of competition, published in the Journal of Management Studies only 20 years ago. In this paper, I reflect on the context in which their paper emerged, the impact it has had, and the future paths that research on cognition in strategy might take. In doing so, I highlight the challenges associated with establishing cognition as a legitimate factor in strategic management (alongside the traditional explanations of capabilities and incentives) and of showing the causal relationship between cognition and strategic outcomes. Subsequent work in cognition explored the dynamic relationship between cognition, capabilities, and incentives, and, in process models of framing, linked cognition with political action. Rather than managerial cognition becoming its own independent field, cognitive concepts have diffused throughout work in many different managerial fields, leading to a proliferation of terms, concepts, and approaches. I conclude by exploring some of the paths that research in cognition and strategy is taking in the present day – particularly those involving studies of the construction of markets and categories, each of which are themes that the work by Porac, Thomas and Baden‐Fuller brought to our attention.     

Grabbed Urban Landscapes: Socio‐spatial Tensions in Green Infrastructure Planning in Medellín

Cities confronted with unsustainable development and climatic changes are increasingly turning to green infrastructure as an approach for growth and climate risk management. In this context, recent scholarly attention has been paid to gentrification, real‐estate speculation and resident displacement in the context of sustainability and green planning in the global North. Yet we know little about the environmental‐justice implications of green infrastructure planning in the context of self‐built settlements of the global South. To what extent do green infrastructure interventions produce or exacerbate urban socio‐spatial inequities in self‐built settlements? Through the analysis of a greenbelt project, an emblematic case of green infrastructure planning in Medellín, we argue that, as the Municipality of Medellín is containing and beautifying low‐income neighborhoods through grabbing part of their territories and turning them into green landscapes of privilege and pleasure, communities are becoming dispossessed of their greatest assets—location, land and social capital. In the process, community land is transformed into a new form of aesthetically controlled and ordered nature for the middle and upper classes and for tourists. By contrast, communities’ planning alternatives reveal how green planning can better address growth and climate risks in tandem with equitable community development.     

Financialization,Urban Governance and the Planning System: Utilizing ‘Development Viability’ as a Policy Narrative for the Liberalization of Ireland's Post‐Crash Planning System

Drawing upon the Irish case, this article explores the interaction between the financialized economy and the urban planning system. While considerable scholarship has examined the financialization of real estate, it remains unclear how planning systems are being repurposed to facilitate a finance‐led regime of urban growth or how the ‘real estate–financial complex’ seeks to enact planning policy transformations that support its interests. This article explores how such actors have advanced the concept of ‘financial viability of development’ as a means of influencing the post‐crisis re‐regulation of Irish planning policy. This group has argued that housing construction in post‐crash Ireland is unviable given the high development finance costs, onerous planning gain contributions and the lack of development certainty in the planning process. As such, housing construction has been at an all‐time‐low, leading to a new crisis in affordable housing provision. In response, a complicit state has further liberalized the planning system, introducing an array of policies that are evermore facilitative of development interests. Empirical findings, based on interviews with developers, lobbyists and planners, emphasize the importance of informal access to policymakers, the wielding of ‘expert knowledge’ and media management to co‐opt the state into adopting financial viability within planning policymaking.     

A Smooth Ride? From Industrial to Creative Urbanism in Oshawa,Ontario

In mainstream media, policy circles and academic scholarship, economic discourses have highlighted the importance of knowledge, creativity and innovation for generating economic growth. This has been translated into an urban planning and policy agenda which favours the establishment of research parks, innovation clusters, and especially universities along with amenities to attract creative‐class workers. In much of this literature universities are invested with an almost magical power to spur economic growth, and the benign language of ‘transition’ is used suggesting a rather seamless progression from one urban economic engine to another. Through analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews related to the establishment of a new university in Oshawa, Ontario, this case study seeks to challenge the straightforward relationship that is assumed to exist between universities and local economic development. Like other lagging regions across the OECD attempting to repair their economies through creative and knowledge urbanism, Oshawa's recent achievements are tempered by growing concerns about poverty, homelessness and inequality. Planners and policymakers that mistake the complexities of economic restructuring for a smooth ‘urban transition’ put their cities and citizens at risk of creating new problems out of efforts to improve local conditions.     

‘One‐Man Handled’: Fragmented Power and Political Entrepreneurship in Globalizing Mumbai

This article considers the fractured nature of state power in contemporary Mumbai. Based on a case study of the ongoing Dharavi Redevelopment Project, a 2‐billion US dollar initiative to redevelop Mumbai's most infamous ‘slum’ settlement as a mixed‐use, mixed‐income township, it details the new state strategies emerging to support urban development efforts in India today. Identifying the structural weaknesses that have traditionally hindered development planning in Mumbai, it describes how a private developer, acting as a political entrepreneur, has worked to consolidate the authority and resources necessary to overcome these institutional gaps and structural weaknesses. Situating the analysis in theories of state restructuring, this case sheds light on how the local Indian state is responding to the pressures associated with neoliberal globalization and competitive urbanism. While a growing literature in this area has offered important insights into emerging configurations of power, it remains overly focused on the role of NGOs in these efforts, failing to provide an adequate analysis of alliances between the state and other private actors. This article attempts to address this gap with an in‐depth examination of the political entrepreneur as a site of institutionalized, but ultimately incomplete, power in globalizing Mumbai.     

Analysing Place and Place‐making: Urbanization in Suburban Oslo

Despite developments within planning theory challenging the ideal of the rational master plan it may be argued that there is still use for the production of knowledge through analysis in planning. However, the cultural complexity of today's planning contexts, and a move towards governance and entrepreneurial policies, makes it difficult to make places, to achieve social welfare and sustainability. Traditionally, the analysis of places has been done by architects and planners focusing on physical form, having an essentialist perspective of place resembling the theory of genius loci. In Norway, the planning authorities refined this methodology in the 1990s. This approach is, however, not in tune with a progressive view of places as multiple and dynamic social constructions, and may be accused of ‘symbolic violence’. If one is to take this view seriously and still be able to make plans, planning must also be based on other types of knowledge. In this article I argue for a socio‐cultural approach to reveal social representations and practices that make a place. I use the case of place‐making in Sandvika, a suburban ‘minicity’ outside Oslo, as an example of how a constructivist understanding differs from and may supplement an essentialist approach.     

Transnational Corporations and Urban Development

Transnational corporations (TNCs) in Africa play significant roles in controlling utilities, privately appropriating common resources, and planning urban space. On the one hand, the extralegal powers of TNCs are legitimized with patronizing discourses about the incompetence of African nations in managing their own affairs and with the specter of a “resource curse” that supposedly immobilizes the self‐governing capacities of Africans. On the other hand, TNCs arrogate to themselves statutory municipal power, ignore or manipulate various channels of accountability, and privately appropriate sociallycreated rents. Some critics of TNCs propose a withdrawal from globalization or greater regulation to limit the power of TNCs. But protectionist or isolationist approaches are entirely mistaken and further undermine the social management of the commons in Africa. Instead, Africans should seek directly to break the chains of monopoly and oligopoly, especially over natural resources. They should also strive to use land for the common good and to systematically build social states in Africa to overcome subservience to TNCs. While previous attempts at autonomous development in Africa have sometimes led to military action by former colonizers and current neo‐colonial imperialists, recent evidence from Africa suggests that such a strategy might succeed now. This article proposes to extend the politics of urban reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the United States to contemporary Africa. In doing so, it shows how African cities today are working to create local capacity by municipalizing services that have been privatized, such as distribution of water. Despite many obstacles posed by TNCs and their home governments, Africans are making great strides to overcome the enduring legacies of colonialism.     

The Engineer and The Plumber: Mediating Mumbai's Conflicting Infrastructural Imaginaries

Two decades ago, the rules governing the provision of piped municipal water supply in Mumbai became linked to the policy frameworks governing eligibility for a property titling scheme. This article outlines the ideological basis and practical implications of the shift, as well as the contradictions of the new regulatory regime. The article demonstrates how these contradictions have been mediated by the material and practical knowledge, embodied expertise, local authority and wide‐ranging socio‐political work of two sets of actors: municipal water engineers and a cast of characters known locally as ‘plumbers’. The social, political and hydraulic imaginaries animating the work of ‘plumbing’ are bound up with a temporal and spatial imaginary distinctly at odds with the network‐flow conception of hydraulic engineering within which the work of water supply planning and distribution in Mumbai is conceptualized, materialized and institutionalized. The hydraulic and legal contradictions of these clashing infrastructural idioms––of flow and event––have rendered the regulatory framework highly unstable. These contradictions eventually erupted in Mumbai's waterscape, leaving the city's water infrastructures suspended in a highly politicized state of limbo between dueling infrastructural imaginaries.