China's Urban Speed Machine: The Politics of Speed and Time in a Period of Rapid Urban Growth

China's urban transformation since 1978 is notable for both its scale and speed. Focusing on the dimension of speed, we propose the concept of the ‘urban speed machine’ to assess its role in shaping the politics and political economy of Chinese urbanization. We argue that in China speed must not be understood merely by means of measurable outcomes of change, but rather that speed is an essential and vital element embedded within China's specific processes and mechanisms driving urban growth. In this sense, speed is constantly at the forefront of local cadres’ considerations, since moving fast to achieve urban growth is an expression of political imperatives and pervasive city‐based accumulation strategies. The Chinese urban speed machine, as we conceive it, mainly involves three state‐dominated institutional arenas: the Communist party's personnel review system, the planning mechanism and local finance. We also discuss regional variability vis‐à‐vis the nature of speed in urbanization and in the differing responses to problems of fast‐city growth in recent years. This article's core contributions are to clarify the paramount importance of speed in the political economy of urban growth and illuminate a relational understanding of the politics of speed in China's urban change.     

城市基础设施投资主体多元化

改革开放以来，城市化进程加快，迫切需要增加对城市基础设施建设资金的投入。政府作为城市基础设施单一的投资主体早已不适应时代发展的需要。因此，迫切需要加大城市基础设施投资体制的改革力度，发展，完善投资主体多元化制度，分析了政府在投资主体多元化的多重角色。同时探讨了城市基础设施投资主体多元化的实施对策和要注意的问题。     

The Tunisian Revolution: Neoliberalism,Urban Contentious Politics and the Right to the City

This article engages in the debate on urban contentious politics by returning to the Tunisian revolution. In the article, I chart movements provoked by neoliberal restructurings, and show how these ultimately came together to form a mass movement demanding radical political change. I first describe the socio‐spatial roots of the Tunisian revolution to understand its dynamics. Based on the chronology of the unfolding events I sketch the classes, social groups and movements that coalesced against authoritarian rule in early 2011. Although the Tunisian revolution started in rural environments, I focus more specifically on the role of urban social movements in the uprising to link questions of urbanism to what were clearly national revolts. Secondly, I outline the scope of neoliberal reforms in Tunisia by looking at the impact of these reforms to chart the resulting emergence of contentious politics in response to the increasing violence that characterized all levels of economic life during this period. I also consider the resulting uneven development and the changing relations between the state and the different social classes. This enables me to reflect on the politicization of the city with the aim of opening up new opportunities for engaging with a more comparative and cosmopolitan theory about cities around the world.     

Urban Waterscapes: The Hydro‐Politics of Flooding in a Sinking City

The threat of flooding in cities is often compounded by political and economic decisions made on watershed management, land development and water infrastructure and provisioning. It has also become a point of conflict between cities’ objectives for development and modernization, and the struggles of marginalized residents living in low‐lying coastal and riverine areas to remain in place. Flooding takes on different forms depending on one's point of view. It is a biophysical issue, involving geology, geography, meteorology and ecology. It is one of urban governance, involving planning and maintenance of infrastructure and land use. And it is sociopolitical, involving historical social and spatial marginalization and contestation. This article, based on mixed‐methods research in Jakarta, Indonesia, traces the conceptual and physical contours of urban waterscapes across these conflicting ideas and narratives. It brings into dialogue theories of urban political ecology, landscape ecology and environmental ethnography to explore the interrelationships between biophysical and sociopolitical factors behind urban flooding. In the article the focus is on the varying materialities and scales involved, including the ecological scales of the watershed, the infrastructural scales associated with flood protection, and the urban scales of planning, governance and social activism. The article concludes with a proposition for a multidimensional approach to thinking and acting on problems of urban ecological change.     

The Urban Unbound: London's Politics and the 2012 Olympic Games

Global events such as London's 2012 Olympic Games raise questions about the ways in which embedded political arrangements take their shape from relationships that stretch across and beyond urban boundaries. In this article, the urban politics that we wish to capture is not one that is merely located in the city, but rather one that has to constantly take into account the mediated demands folded (as it were) into the urban arena. In the first part of the article, the corporate politics of an Olympic‐related urban regeneration are outlined and then considered, first as a staged setting for interaction, a kind of placeless political engagement, and then as a more embedded spatial politics that takes into account the leverage of networked groups acting within and beyond the city. Following that, we explore the politics of regeneration when campaign groups and alternative coalitions of interest raise their own political demands by drawing on references outside of their immediate urban area and attempt to steer political dialogue in ways that extend the reach of urban politics. The urban politics at stake in this context, we argue, appears to work more through topology than a series of mapped connections; through actors registering their presence in ways that often dissolve the tension between inside and outside rather than define it in terms of separate political spaces.     

A Small Entrepreneurial City in Action: Policy Mobility,Urban Entrepreneurialism,and Politics of Scale in Jiyuan,China

This research details the mundane practices of policy mobility and entrepreneurial endeavour in Jiyuan in relation to the city's changing administrative position, and is one of the first attempts at understanding how entrepreneurial policies are mobilized, mutated and diffused in a small inland Chinese city. We interpret Jiyuan's evolving development strategies and trajectory through two interrelated conceptual lenses—policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism—bridged by an analysis of the politics of scale. Over the past three decades, governance strategies in Jiyuan have evolved from policy imitation, during the germination of urban entrepreneurialism, to policy mutation and diffusion, under the amplification of entrepreneurialism, as the city has moved up the administrative levels and urban hierarchy. Policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism in Jiyuan, involving a multi‐scalar process, are being shaped by the interactions between the city, the region, the central state and global capital under the confluence of globalization and marketization. The ‘successful’ story of a small entrepreneurial city tells a new tale that can inform wider contexts by painting a fuller portrait of the evolution of an entrepreneurial city across different scales and time and bringing cities hitherto ‘off the map’ back into the picture of urban entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of globalization.     

Reconstructing Urban Politics with a Bourdieusian Framework: The Case of Local Low‐Income Housing Policy

This research aimed to reconstruct a local urban politics and develop a meso–micro‐level model of urban politics through a case study, drawing on a Bourdieusian relational framework. To this end, it investigated the case of local low‐income housing policy — inclusionary zoning — in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. It historicized the path of the local low‐income policy issue through document analysis and qualitative media content analysis. Through multiple analyses, the study revealed that urban politics consists of complex interlinkages among stakeholders with shared values or interests from different social domains, created in order to dominate the policy issue. The study further investigated, on the basis of Bourdieu's concepts of capital and habitus, what elicited different political strategies from key community leaders.     

How Culture and Economy Meet in South Korea: The Politics of Cultural Economy in Culture‐led Urban Regeneration

This article investigates the ways in which cultural economy is formed through negotiation and interaction between local actors in the case of culture‐led regeneration in Gwangju, South Korea. It looks at the dynamics between the bureaucrats' pursuit of economic growth in the city and the efforts of civil society to maintain a strong political spirit throughout the regeneration process. Through in‐depth interviews with various participants and archival analysis, the politics of cultural economy are examined in relation to the Gwangju Biennale and the City of Culture project. The findings show that in these two cases bureaucrats were the dominant force, a tendency that instrumentalized culture. They also illustrate that this dominance brought about resistance from civil society. However, in the process of both engaging in conflict and working with each other, the different discourses of economic growth and cultural meaning were integrated, and in the process mutual learning and adaptation took place among members of the two groups. Civil society also faced cleavages resulting from different approaches to how to collaborate with the bureaucrats and its ensuing self‐reflection on communicative value enhanced its rehabilitation. The article argues that the politics of cultural economy is dynamic, involving processes of renegotiation, adaptation and self‐realization. It also offers the possibility of a new arena for the public sphere. Civil society plays a critical role in the integration of culture and economy.     

Urban Politics as the Unfolding of Social Relations in Place: The Case of Sexually Transmitted Disease Investigation in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Gay Seattle

Recent debates in urban politics stress the need to broaden conceptions of what counts as urban politics, as well as of where they take place. This means shifting attention to include more quotidian and prosaic social relations, including those taking place in spaces of civil society. We answer this call with a case study of the relations between an emerging gay male community in mid‐twentieth‐century Seattle, USA and the local public health department’s disease investigators (DIs). We focus on both the biopolitics and cultural politics of the investigation process, from the perspectives of both DIs and gay men. We point out certain tensions and paradoxes in these processes as a form of governmentality, and interpret them through a ‘noir’ cultural lens that is consistent with a notion of urban politics as the unfolding of social relations in place. We conclude by stressing how our findings and framework can augment urban political inquiry both intellectually and empirically.     

The (Re)Making of Polycentricity in China's Planning Discourse: The Case of Tianjin

Polycentricity is promoted as an ideal urban form to achieve sustainable and balanced development, and it has been widely adopted by planners in China, especially in large cities. However, the rhetoric about polycentricity has rarely been interrogated in planning research in terms of scales, contextuality, power and rationality. To fill this gap, we carried out a Foucauldian discourse analysis in our research to interpret the nature of polycentric practice in City Master Plans, using Tianjin as a case study. Through an analysis of how the discourse of polycentricity is being deployed in planning documents, we develop two principal arguments in this article. First, the conceptual substance of polycentricity evolved alongside the urban transition process in China, and its discursive practice involved multiple scales and spatial elements. Secondly, rather than being mere technocratic practice, the production and legitimation of distinct discourses of polycentricity is an articulation of multi-scalar power involving various stakeholders, which is disguised and justified by the planning profession.     

Critical Urban Theory versus Critical Urban Studies: A Review Debate

Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the key observations. Peter Marcuse then offers his assessment of Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, which is reciprocated by a commentary on Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City by Jonathan Davies, David Imbroscio and Warren Magnusson.     

Informalization of the State: Reflections from an Urban World of Translations

The project of globalizing informality requires the circulation of concepts and theories from the ‘South’ to the ‘North’. It also relies on intertextuality and exchanges across languages and sites of academic production. This essay is a reaction to the collection of papers presented in this forum. It argues for more academic conversations between languages and cities in order to contribute to a general state theory.     

Urban Citizenship,the Right to the City and Politics of Disability in Istanbul

Since the late 1990s, the ‘urban citizenship’ literature has accentuated the burgeoning potential of the city as host to more democratic interpretations of citizenship. A more recent literature highlighted the ‘local trap’ in such assumptions, arguing that the local cannot exist outside of neoliberalization. This article examines some of the recent institutional transformations in Istanbul's local government and seeks to understand where these might be situated in this discussion. Three institutions dealing with disability are scrutinized with regard to their power dynamics, discourses and practices. The argument is that, although superficially such developments seem to represent some of the tendencies highlighted by the urban citizenship literature (in terms of their scale, timing and appeal to a group previously excluded from modern citizenship), deeper analysis shows that these often promote charity‐ rather than rights‐based approaches. This is because the push factors in the emergence of these institutions are not the urban struggles on the part of the disability community, but rather the ruling party's populism, the impact of supranational agencies and the demands of non‐disabled residents at district level. Each of the three institutions examined is shaped primarily by one factor, leading to differing degrees of charity‐ and rights‐based practices. Arguments concerning the prospects of more democratic interpretations of citizenship at local level need to consider experiences in diverse settings.     

The Situations of Urban Inquiry: Thinking Problematically about the City

In the context of debates about the epistemological and ontological coherence of concepts of critical urban studies, we argue that urban concepts should be conceptualized problematically. We do so by aligning Michel Foucault's genealogical work on problematization with John Dewey's pragmatist understanding of problem formation and responsiveness. This approach brings into view the degree to which debates about urban futures are shaped by a variety of critical perspectives that extend beyond the academy and activism. We elaborate this argument through examples of global urban policy formation and practices of neighbourhood change. Approaching urban concepts problematically suggests a move away from the idea of critique as a form of scholastic correction towards an appreciation of the contested fields of practice in and through which critical understandings of urban problems emerge.