Negotiating Social Mix in Toronto's First Public Housing Redevelopment: Power,Space and Social Control in Don Mount Court

This article examines the experience of social interaction in Toronto's Don Mount Court community, the first socially mixed public‐housing redevelopment site in Canada. Similar to the American HOPE VI program, redevelopment involved the demolition and mixed‐income reconstruction of the community to include both public housing and new market condominiums with a neo‐traditional redesign. Based on participant observation, this article describes four struggles that emerged over the course of a series of mixed‐income community governance meetings intended to promote social inclusion. These struggles related to (1) unequal power relations in shaping local priorities; (2) the power to brand the community and define its aesthetic characteristics; (3) the power to define and use public space; and (4) power over modes of surveillance and exclusion. The findings challenge the myth that the ‘benevolent’ middle class will use their political influence and social capital to the benefit of their low‐income neighbors in mixed neighbourhoods. Instead, the research found that public‐housing tenants were often on the receiving end of antagonism. It is argued that policymakers intent on ameliorating problems related to residence in disadvantaged communities should focus on funding for social programs and transformative change, rather than on public‐housing demolition and state‐driven gentrification via mixed‐income redevelopment.     

Citizen Participation in Urban Governance in the Context of Democratization: Evidence from Low‐Income Neighbourhoods in Mexico

Participation has recently been subject to renewed attention and critique in the context of neoliberal urban governance. This is especially relevant in countries where decentralization and democratization in the context of neoliberalism have led to increased promotion of local‐level participation. This article suggests that current critiques of participation's potential for democratic citizen engagement in a neoliberal context would benefit from further reflection on how participation is implemented in contexts, particularly the global South, where neoliberalism and democracy may be understood differently. Different ‘cultures of engagement’ in specific settings suggest that understandings and practices of participation draw on different traditions, including corporatism and self‐help. This article seeks to add to the debate by exploring the socio‐spatial consequences of participation structures in low‐income neighbourhoods in a provincial Mexican city. Based on qualitative research in two low‐income neighbourhoods in Xalapa, Mexico, it examines how the provisions of the local citizen‐participation framework compare with residents' experiences of it. Formalized conceptions of participation, framed as involvement in service provision, interact with and shape residents' activities in developing their neighbourhoods. This has consequences for urban development there, including the reflection and reproduction of social and spatial marginalization.     

Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘Political Capital’ in Post‐Apartheid Johannesburg

Apart from local monographs and normative texts on community participation, research on community leadership constitutes a blind spot in urban leadership, urban politics, social movements and urban studies. This article, based on case studies in post‐apartheid Johannesburg, contributes to theorizing community leadership, or informal local political leadership, by exploring Bourdieu's concepts of ‘political capital’ and ‘double dealings’. Considering community leaders as brokers between local residents and various institutions (in South Africa, the state and the party), we examine how leaders construct their political legitimacy, both towards ‘the bottom’ (building and maintaining their constituencies), and towards ‘the top’ (seeking and sustaining recognition from fractions of the party and the state). These legitimation processes are often in tension, pulling community leaders in contradictory directions, usefully understood under Bourdieu's concept of ‘double dealings’. Community leaders are required, more than formally elected political leaders, to constantly reassert their legitimacy in multiple local public arenas due to the informal nature of their mandate and the high level of political competition between them — with destructive consequences for local polity but also the potential for increased accountability to their followers. We finally reflect on the relevance of this theoretical framework, inspired by Bourdieu, beyond South African urban politics.     

Between the Individual and the Community: Residential Patterns of the Haredi Population in Jerusalem

This article examines how different levels of internal organization are reflected in the residential patterns of different population groups. In this case, the Haredi community comprises sects and sub‐sects, whose communal identity plays a central role in everyday life and spatial organization. The residential preferences of Haredi individuals are strongly influenced by the need to live among ‘friends’ — that is, other members of the same sub‐sect. This article explores the dynamics of residential patterns in two of Jerusalem's Haredi neighbourhoods: Ramat Shlomo, a new neighbourhood on the urban periphery, and Sanhedria, an old yet attractive inner‐city neighbourhood. We reveal two segregation mechanisms: the first is top‐down determination of residence, found in relatively new neighbourhoods that are planned, built and populated with the intense involvement of community leaders; the second is the bottom‐up emergence of residential patterns typical of inner‐city neighbourhoods that have gradually developed over time.     

Urban Vigilantism: A Study of Anti‐Terror Law,Politics and Policing in Istanbul

Focusing on the case of young socialist vigilantes who were arrested and imprisoned as ‘terrorists’ in 2007, this article illustrates how vigilantism in working‐class neighbourhoods of Istanbul with a high Alevi population evolved from an unarmed, public and participatory form of vigilantism to an armed one, and discusses the role of the anti‐terror law in this transformation. The article illustrates the ways in which the anti‐terror law, by narrowing the space for civil politics, paved the way for youth engagement in violent forms of extra‐legal security practice in spaces occupied by the historically stigmatized working‐class Alevi population. The article also argues that, over the last decade, Turkey’s ruling elites have used the anti‐terror law to wage a war against the oppositional politics conducted by the country’s historically stigmatized populations (such as Kurds and Alevis). Not only has this war put politically active and respected local figures from these communities behind bars, it also ‘polices’ (à la Rancière) these communities. Accordingly, the article illustrates how the law that considers attempts at self‐governance as a threat to state sovereignty effectively intervenes in local politics and space, leading to the reconfiguration of political space at the local level.     

Ethnic Disparities in Neighbourhood Selection: Understanding the Role of Income

Resurgent fears that segregation could undermine the cohesion, prosperity and security of British society require re‐examining how ethnicity and economic resources interact to structure the types of neighbourhoods people relocate to when they move. This article uses the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study and 2011 census data to assess how ethnicity and income intersect to stratify the ethnic and socio‐economic composition of the neighbourhoods people move to in England and Wales. The results suggest that greater access to resources allows people from most ethnic groups to act on shared residential preferences by moving to more advantaged locales. Furthermore, higher incomes accelerate ethnic deconcentration by carrying Asians into neighbourhoods with a greater share of White Britons. However, there is also considerable inertia and ethnic inequality in neighbourhood destinations. The geography of local opportunity structures constrains the types of neighbourhood people relocate to and ethnic minorities tend to move to less advantaged neighbourhoods than their White British peers. Although Britain is not ‘sleepwalking to segregation’, there are persistent ethnic and socio‐economic disparities in neighbourhood outcomes.     

Cooperative Islands in Capitalist Waters: Limited‐equity Housing Cooperatives,Urban Renewal and Gentrification

Improving the habitat of residents in central‐city neighbourhoods without simultaneously gentrifying these is becoming a pressing dilemma in right‐to‐housing and right‐to‐the‐city agendas, both in the global North and the global South. This article explores what possibilities limited‐equity housing cooperativism can bring to the table. Insights are drawn from two urban ‘renewal’ processes in which limited‐equity housing cooperatives have played an important role: in Vesterbro (Copenhagen) and Ciudad Vieja (Montevideo). The article analyses the everyday politics within and around these cooperatives through a broader institutional and political‐economy lens. This approach sheds light on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that operate within these cooperatives, as well as on the processes through which they have been directly and indirectly implicated in the displacement of low‐income neighbours. Despite providing a grassroots housing alternative for local ‘non‐owners’, individual cooperatives participate in, and are vulnerable to, urban transformations that traverse multiple scales. They are inserted, moreover, within wide‐ranging unequal social structures that the cooperative's formal equality has limited tools to offset. The ways in which cooperatives interlink as a sector and how this sector relates to the state are two key dimensions to be considered in challenging capitalist‐space economies.     

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.     

False promises of co-production in neighbourhood regeneration: the case of Dutch community enterprises

Many European countries are implementing austerity measures alongside trends of welfare state retrenchment. Entrepreneurial forms of active citizenship are considered as a new form of public management to fill gaps left by spending cuts and to continue neighbourhood regeneration. Inspired by British practices, Dutch citizens are trying to set up community enterprises (CEs) to provide services or other benefits for residents in deprived neighbourhoods. Based on a qualitative panel study, this article reveals supportive responses but also resistance from local governments and housing associations. Within a positive policy discourse on co-production, institutional responses often encompass forms of ‘counter-production’ that hold CEs in full uncertainty about crucial conditions for their business.     

Fighting for the global catwalk: formalizing public life in Castlefield (Manchester) and diluting public life in el Raval (Barcelona)

Increasingly cities are using regeneration strategies to revive their economy and to give a facelift to their physical environment to compete on a global catwalk. As urban environments change, their sensuous geography is also altered. This article argues that the transformation of sensescapes has been a neglected dimension of urban politics that needs to be analysed. By focusing on two inner‐city neighbourhoods, el Raval in Barcelona and Castlefield in Manchester, I examine how power expresses itself in the sensuous reorganization of public space, thus shaping public life. I first develop a theoretical framework around the concept of ‘socially embedded aesthetics’ to uncover sensuous‐material and social spatializations of power. I then compare and contrast the key discourses in interviews held with planners and politicians driving the regeneration process. Supported by my own ethnographic observations two aspects are analysed: firstly, the physical reorganization of the neighbourhoods shaped by the strategy of accessibility and ‘designer heritage aesthetic’; secondly, the envisaged public life that the transformation of public places is expected to support. The research unveils similar sensuous ideological frameworks in the regeneration of both these areas: processes that foster the inclusion of commercially profitable experiences in public places and the exclusion of marginal ones or those that do not fit into the conceived vision of official agents.     

Back to Little Havana: Controlling Gentrification in the Heart of Cuban Miami

In this article we examine the nature and implementation of governing strategies to control the gentrification of Little Havana, the symbolic heart of Cuban Miami. We ask how Cuban American power relations at the neighborhood level operate to ‘produce’ the citizen best suited to fulfill and help reproduce policies and practices of ‘securing’ in order to gentrify Little Havana. Based on long‐term ethnographic research in Little Havana and Miami, our analysis reveals how governance operates through neighborhood‐level intermediaries and interpersonal relations. We apply Foucault's ‘pastoral power’ to Miami's Cuban exile community in order to explain how the ‘Cuban‐ness’ and ‘Latin‐ness’ of governing relations and the personification of political power are crucial to socio‐spatial control in Little Havana. Elites shape the conduct of individuals in order to achieve strategic goals in the name of community interest. Residents are key partners in the relational ensemble that governs and disciplines the neighborhood comprised mostly of low‐income, Central‐American immigrants.     

Remaking Equality: Community Governance and the Politics of Exclusion in Bogota's Public Spaces

Bogota's public space policy is often credited with promoting inclusionary principles. In this article, I explore critically the content of Bogota's articulation of equality in public space policy. In so doing, I present a critical view of the work Bogota's insistence on equality does to mediate class relations in the city, relying on deeply held conceptions of both social extremes. This results in the construction of a version of social harmony in public space that at once depoliticizes the claims to public space of subjects such as street vendors and the homeless and claims a new role for the middle class in the city. The analysis focuses on two examples of community governance schemes, documenting the logics and methods used by communities to implement official visions of equality and justify the exclusion of street vendors and homeless people from the area. By looking at the articulation of these exclusions in local class politics through seemingly inclusionary rhetoric, the article accounts for ‘post‐revanchist’ turns in contemporary urban policy, while anchoring its production in local processes of community governance.     

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.     

Street Performance,Public Space,and the Boundaries of Urban Desirability: The Case of Living Statues in Barcelona

How do cities determine who has the right to station themselves in iconic public spaces? This article explores this question by analyzing the evolution of Barcelona's approach to regulating street performance, with a particular focus on regulations pertaining to ‘living statues’. Although most buskers have been expelled from the Ramblas, one of the city's most emblematic walkways, living statues remain permitted on the promenade. This, I argue, is due to the general embrace of statues as part of local tradition and their integration within city‐branding campaigns, as well as their own organizing and boundary work. As the image Barcelona seeks to cultivate has changed, however, the right of statues to station themselves in public space has become ever more tenuous. My findings speak to broader questions regarding how cities determine the boundaries of ‘urban desirability’, as well as why and how such boundaries change over time. They also elucidate the strategies that groups located at the margins employ in attempting to position themselves favorably in relation to such boundaries. More generally, they highlight how current approaches to analyzing urban inclusion and exclusion may benefit from a more sustained engagement with the burgeoning social scientific literature on symbolic boundaries.     

Local Venturing as Compassion Organizing in the Aftermath of a Natural Disaster: The Role of Localness and Community in Reducing Suffering

In contrast to models of compassion within existing organizations, this grounded theory study examines how ventures emerge relying on localness and community in direct response to ‘opportunities’ to alleviate suffering in the aftermath of a natural disaster. While a natural disaster is a surprising disruptive event devastating a local community, that local community is nested within a broader community, which can be a source of abundant resources. Ventures created in the aftermath of a natural disaster, given local knowledge and unencumbered by pre‐existing systems, procedures, and capabilities, are highly effective at connecting the broader community with the local community through customizing resources to meet victims' needs and to quickly delivering these resources to alleviate suffering.     

‘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.     

The Political Management of Change in Urban Retailing

This article deals with changing relations between retailing and the town. It focuses on the implications of changes that have arisen over the last thirty years and on the processes that have generated such transformations – or, to be more precise, on the role that policies may have played in the way change is conducted. The analysis examines the trend towards homogenization, on the world scale, of the way towns are being reconfigured: the development that locates large stores in distended, mono‐functional, off‐centre zones; the reshaping of neighbourhoods, which now tend to be defined solely by the notion of accessibility; town‐centre crisis and the selective rehabilitation of some town centres; and the decay of public spaces. It goes on to express reservations about the use of the term ‘Americanization’ to describe this movement, and then attempts to evaluate how far national laws and local administrations are likely to produce significant spatial, social and cultural differences. To achieve these aims, it adopts an approach that compares situations and practices from one country to another (in Europe and in North America), as well as from one town to another.     

Neighbourhood Spatial Order,the Local Economy and Firm Mobility in Urban Areas of the Netherlands

Urban residential neighbourhoods in the Netherlands increasingly function as incubation zones for small‐scale businesses. Despite this development, little is known about whether and how the local production environment in these neighbourhoods shapes firm mobility behaviour. This article studies how two aspects of the local production environment — the built neighbourhood environment and zoning regulations — affect firm mobility of small‐scale businesses in urban residential neighbourhoods. To achieve this aim, we contrast two sets of urban neighbourhoods, pre‐ and post‐second world war neighbourhoods with a comparable low socio‐economic profile, but with distinct built environments and zoning regulations. We combine quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse available trade register data from the Dutch regional Chambers of Commerce, study neighbourhood zoning regulations, and conduct focus‐group and individual interviews with neighbourhood experts and entrepreneurs. The local built environment and its regulations appear to have a small but significant effect on the firm mobility behaviour of entrepreneurs in the neighbourhoods studied. Relocation intentions are higher among entrepreneurs in post‐war than in pre‐war neighbourhoods, which may (in part) be attributed to less favourable local institutional settings for businesses, but actual firm mobility does not differ between these neighbourhoods.     

Writing on the Wall: Street Art in Graffiti‐free Singapore

The legalization of graffiti in many cities has impacted urban landscapes and the way artists and the public view graffiti, street art and the city as well. This article considers the genesis, process and consequences of legal walls programmes firstly by introducing and differentiating the key terms ‘graffiti’, ‘street art’ and ‘legal walls’, then by examining an empirical case, that of Singapore. Renowned as a graffiti‐averse and litter‐free city, Singapore's recent about‐turn in legalizing illicit art forms illustrates changing government perspectives on creativity and legality in the country. Why the government has effected this change, how artists and members of the public have responded to it and the resultant art forms are critically explored. The conclusion reflects on four key lessons from Singapore for cities in general.     

The Politics of Place: Place‐making versus Densification in Toronto's Tower Neighbourhoods

Toronto's Tower Neighbourhood Renewal (TR) programme is a municipal government initiative tackling aging high‐rise apartment building clusters in need of physical upgrades. One strategy for a more vibrant future for those clusters is densification or new infill housing. The main argument of the essay is that the unique urban structure of Toronto's inner suburbs challenges the implementation of TR's densification strategy. The proximity of many residents occupying privately owned single‐family homes close to the tower neighbourhoods has implications for the governance of TR in Toronto. Having created place‐frames firmly linked to their own identities as single‐family homeowners, these residents reject an encroachment of the ‘urban' (through higher residential densities) and of the ‘Other' (through a potential increase in low‐income, immigrant and visible minority tower renters). A 2011 design charrette in the Toronto neighbourhood of Weston serves as a case study, exemplifying the tensions between neighbourhood resident place‐frames and the goals of the TR project. This essay is based on an analysis of public policy documents and public participation reports, as well as notes from direct observation during the Weston 2021 Design Charrette.