An Ethnographic Perspective on Urban Planning in Brazil: Temporality,Diversity and Critical Urban Theory

This article provides an ethnographic perspective on urban planning by presenting the creative practices of marginalized slum residents in Recife, Northeast Brazil, who are affected by planners’ decisions. It argues that such a perspective contributes to current critical urban theory in three ways. First, while many studies of urban planning follow the temporality of the timeframe of a particular project (‘project time’), this analysis emphasizes the timeframe of the lives of the affected residents (‘people's time’). Second, it attends to diversity, taking account of the variety of affected residents and the diverse consequences of urban planning on their lives. Third, it shows how urban interventions — similar to marriage, divorce, the birth of children and the death of loved ones — are high-impact life events for the urban poor. Finally, the article assesses the engagement between ethnography and critical urban theory and argues in favour of ‘grounding’ the latter better in the analysis of actual practices and experiences.     

Policing Urban Natures: Conservation Officer Work in Ottawa and Toronto,Canada

Drawing on the results of interviews and access to information requests, we explore conservation officer work in two urban regions in one Canadian province (Ontario). Specifically, we examine the work of the federal‐level National Capital Commission (NCC) in Ottawa and the provincial‐level Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA). Applying Jessop, Brenner and Jones's model of socio‐spatial relations, we show how nature plays a different role in NCC and TRCA policing depending on the places their conservation officers work in, the kinds of territorial boundary maintenance in which they engage, the scaling of their activities in various jurisdictions, and the policing networks that they are part of. In assessing the place of nature in conservation officers' work, we contribute to debates about how the boundary between nature and the urban is produced through regulatory practices.     

Urban Redevelopment Policies on the Move: Rethinking the Geographies of Comparison,Exchange and Learning

Recent years have seen the emergence of two interrelated strands of work in the field of English‐speaking urban studies. The first has centred on rethinking notions of place along relational lines. The second centres on rethinking what an attention to the city in the world might mean for understanding the arriving at and making up of urban policy. Taking its cue from the intersection of these two strands, this article explores the forging of Edinburgh's tax increment financing (TIF) policy. It highlights how those in the city drew upon experiences from elsewhere (both relatively close to home and further afield) in assembling the policy and the particular ‘local’ politics over its translation/adoption/failed introduction. The article argues for an approach to urban policy mobility studies which is sensitive both to the ephemeral, indeterminate and open‐ended ways in which policies are arrived at and made up, and the segmented and structured contexts that inform how policies appear and reappear in multiple locations.     

Translational Global Praxis: Rethinking Methods and Modes of African Urban Research

Advancing global urbanism depends upon making Africa's cities a more dominant part of the global urban narrative. Constructing a more legitimate research agenda for African cities, however, necessitates a repositioning of conventional modes of research. To achieve intellectual and political traction in what are typical African research conditions—where human needs are great, information is poor, conditions of governance are complex and the reality is changeable—we reflect on the experiences of the African Centre for Cities where (alongside conventional use of theory, methods and data) a translational mode of working has been adopted. The notion of translational urban research praxis captures more than the idea of applied research or even co‐production, and encompasses integrating the research conception, design, execution, application and reflection—and conceiving of this set of activities as a singular research/practice process that is by its nature deeply political and locationally embedded. In this way we suggest that African urbanism can be both usefully illuminated by global theories and methods, and can simultaneously be constitutive of the reform of the ideas through which cities generally are understood.     

Urban Political Ecologies and Children's Geographies: Queering Urban Ecologies of Childhood

This article focuses on the material and discursive constructions of nature and children in the city. While dominant representations and idealizations of nature and childhood depend on the binary logic of the nature/culture and rural/urban divide, there is also a simplification and romanticization of nature in children's geographies and a lack of children and their spaces in urban political ecology. We argue that children and nature in cities need to be removed from a binary model of being and attended to in more nuanced ways in urban political ecology and children's geographies. In this regard, we suggest that both nature and children in cities need to be queered. We need to ask how the production of urban spaces (re)creates particular romantic and idealized relations with natures that reify the binaries between nature/culture, and male/female through a heteronormative framework. The purpose of this article is to bring the critical nature–society theories of urban political ecology into conversation with work in children's geographies that explores the ‘nature' of childhood, and in doing so queer the relationship between children and nature. Drawing on research on queer ecologies, and queered childhoods, we aim to provide a framework to rethink and queer both nature and children in cities.     

Engineering Cities: Mediating Materialities,Infrastructural Imaginaries and Shifting Regimes of Urban Expertise

This symposium opens up new critical insights and analytical perspectives into the relationships between power, politics, materiality and urban engineering. In so doing it demonstrates the central role of engineers in the production and negotiation of everyday life in the city. In contrast to the technocratic exercise engineering often professes to be, the contributors to this symposium argue that the assembling and choreography of cities through the myriad techniques, routines, standards and visions of engineers is inextricably bound up with broader socio‐cultural, material and political urban dynamics and processes. This necessitates investigating the multiple and competing social imaginations, forms of knowledge and regimes of expertise associated with urban engineering. The symposium's five articles, straddling disciplinary backgrounds in geography, anthropology, engineering and history, focus analytical and empirical attention on the figure of the engineer and on the work of engineering in the cities of Paris, Mumbai, Singapore and London. Engineering, we suggest, is a diagnostic for probing the shifting forms of mediation that animate and inhabit contemporary dynamics of urban change. The symposium thus opens up a new avenue for cross‐disciplinary and transregional research for urban studies while also suggesting innovative ways of conceptualizing urban transformation and contestation.     

Gendered Nature and Urban Culture: The Dialectics of Gated Developments in Izmir,Turkey

This article adds to recent debates on the emergence of new forms of private gated developments in Turkey that specifically target the upper middle classes. In particular, it focuses on the rise of residential gated developments along the Izmir‐Ce?me expressway to highlight how the dialectics between gender, nature and culture are reinforced in these places. The article, based on a case study of three gated developments in this region, suggests that their production is made possible through a series of dualisms between nature and culture, mobility and fixity, urban public life and gendered domesticity, urban modernity and rural parochialism, polluted city and healthy town. Based on interviews with architects, developers and residents, as well as local‐authority officials in Urla town who sanction these developments, this article argues that contradictions between different sets of dualisms form a central aspect of the processes through which these developments were designed, produced, marketed and inhabited. Taken collectively, these contradictions point broadly to the limits of gated communities in creating stable, adaptable and sustainable patterns of development in Turkey and the global South.     

State Theory from the Street Altar: The Muscles,the Saint and the Amparo

This article identifies traces of the state in three urban neighborhoods of Mexico City. Instead of asking what is the state, where is it located or what does it do, the question posed here is: what are the effects of state practices at the street level? By ethnographically and visually describing how protection is performed, the article argues that the state is not only ‘somewhere’ in specific functions, actors or institutions; it also manifests materialized effects produced by a web of conflict‐ridden relations. Discussion about the state in the global South generally revolves around its failures and informality. The proposal here is that, by analyzing the state from the standpoint of urban space, the focus is on how protection is performed and by means of which operations, relations, objects and actors—not whether the state works or not, or whether actors are formal or informal. Based on ongoing ethnographic work and a collaboration with two visual artists in Mexico City, the article analyzes three protective processes: the ‘muscles’ (involving actors including police officers, gang leaders, fathers and husbands), the ‘saint’ (involving caring for representations of various saints and participation in other clientelistic chains of fidelity) and the ‘amparo’ (a form of application of the rule of law in a personalized manner for the redress of interpersonal conflicts). These are three sets of practices that have been embedded in Mexico's history of state formation since the days of colonization.     

Urban Poverty,Segregation and Social Networks in São Paulo and Salvador,Brazil

General consensus exists concerning the relevance of networks and space in poverty situations, despite a considerable dispute on the prominence of each element. While social‐support and poverty debates highlight the joint importance of space and networks, the research agenda on contemporary communities suggests that networks have recently started replacing space in social integration. These debates mainly consider networks and ties normatively and are restricted to the global North, hampering the formulation of comparative interpretations and more theoretical conclusions. This article discusses the relationship between space, sociability and poverty, based on research results on networks of poor individuals in two major Brazilian metropolises—Salvador and São Paulo. Research indicates the existence of great heterogeneity in the networks of poor individuals, although with substantial differences, on average, to middle‐class individuals. Certain types of networks and sociability are systematically associated with better living conditions, employment and income. Additionally, network mobilization by individuals presents important regularities associated with social mechanisms, understood as regular patterns that trigger or cause certain results. These mechanisms explain to a great extent the heterogeneity of networks, and mediate the individual's access to opportunities and everyday assistance. They therefore contribute decisively to the production (and reproduction) of urban poverty.     

Weeds,Pheasants and Wild Dogs: Resituating the Ecological Paradigm in Postindustrial Detroit

The Chicago School of urban sociology has been criticized for its over‐reliance on organic and ecological metaphors. We propose that a useful updated integration of urban sociology and ecology could be achieved with the aid of complementary concepts, such as patch dynamics and assemblage, from both fields. In this exploratory article, we draw on more than 50 qualitative interviews conducted with residents of three different Detroit neighborhoods, together with field observations, photographs and documentary evidence, to examine both actual and metaphorical references to the natural world. We consider allusions to ‘drug infestation’ as well as other references to territorialization processes and associations with plants and animals that emerged out of our interviews and interactions with neighborhood residents. In conclusion, we maintain that social science may have much to learn from contemporary ecological research, and that a resituated ecological paradigm would challenge and benefit contemporary urban research.     

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.     

Embedded Enclaves: Cultural Mimicry and Urban Social Exclusion in Iran

This article argues that symbolic boundaries and their spatial manifestation into embedded enclaves have become new forms of urban social exclusion. Based on participant observation and interviews among lower‐ and middle‐/upper‐class residents in the city of Sari, Iran, the article analyzes how the poor's physical circulations in the city and their performances of class and status have led to an elite backlash, as the latter find more refined markers of social separation in an effort to bolster their own exclusivity. Social distancing through the denigration of the poor and the construction of embedded enclaves brings to the fore the class tensions that are temporarily masked by the urban poor's spatial practices and cultural mimicry. As an advanced form of codified status inequality, embedded enclaves rely on the poor's citywide circulations and on increasing inter‐class interactions in order to communicate difference. Embedded—rather than cordoned off—in prominent areas of the city, such enclaves function as a reminder to the poor of all they cannot have. The upsurge of such establishments in the wake of Iran's shifting economic environment represents an attempt to shore up social position and restore the status quo.     

Experiences of Urban Militarism: Spatial Stigma,Ruins and Everyday Life

A key question in urban sociology is how people interpret the urban environment. At a time when cities are increasingly militarized, this question is particularly important for understanding how militarism impacts urban life. However, urban sociologists have not addressed how people experience militarized environments. This article turns to this question by considering the case of Lydda‐Lod, an Israeli city that has been demographically and physically transformed by war, displacement and securitization. Drawing on Wacquant's sociology of spatial stigma and adding insights from works on emotions in (post‐)conflict cities, I examine how poor Palestinians think and feel about the surveilled districts where they live within the city's broader landscape of ruins. I show how the Israeli military, security and policing agencies have collectively produced spatial stigmatization of these districts. I discuss how Palestinians respond to this spatial stigma by attaching a sense of worthlessness to their districts. However, this reproduction of spatial stigma is punctuated by expressions of care for the built environment and by a desire to revalorize collective Palestinian life in the city. I conclude by discussing how a perspective on militarized cities focused on everyday responses to militarism and attentive to marginalities enriches urban sociology and urban studies more generally.     

CLAIMING SPACE,LAND AND ECOLOGY: Mapping Geographies of Indigenous and Decolonial Urbanisms in Taipei

The city is often understood as the antithesis of Indigeneity. In Taiwan, a settler colony where the Han Chinese have colonized Austronesian Indigenous peoples, dominant understandings and representations situate Indigenous vibrancy outside large cities such as Taipei and Kaohsiung, despite the large-scale urbanization of Indigenous peoples over the past several decades. This essay is based on long-term ethnographic research in Taipei and explores how urbanized Indigenous people in the Taiwanese metropolis persist in claiming the city's space, land and ecology despite both cartographic and physical displacements of their presence. It maps out emerging Indigenous and decolonial urbanisms in Taiwan, discussing the work of Indigenous artists and the spatial and ecological practices of urban Indigenous community residents.     

Reconstituting the Possible: Lefebvre,Utopia and the Urban Question

What roles can utopia play in contemporary critical urban studies? The concept has often been treated warily, sidelined or dismissed. Recent years, however, have seen a revival of interest, as writers, activists and artists have sought openings to urban worlds that are different and better. By returning to aspects of the urban thought and practice of Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s and early 1970s, this article challenges common understandings of utopia and clarifies some of its potential uses for critical urban studies today. It explores Lefebvre's emphasis on the possible, and in particular the importance he attached to extending and realizing the possible through struggling for what seems impossible. Rather than being a free‐floating or endlessly open project, however, this engagement with the ‘possible‐impossible' emerged in critical dialogue with other currents of utopian urbanism, including prospective thought then influential in France. It was also rooted in long‐ standing concerns with the critique of everyday life and with experimentation through projects with urbanists, architects and others. By attending to these often neglected aspects of Lefebvre's utopianism, a series of provocations emerge for addressing the urban question in ways that take seriously not only what urbanization processes and urban life are but also what they could become and how they might be constituted differently.