Categorizing Neighborhoods: The Invention of ‘Sensitive Areas’ in France and ‘Historic Districts’ in the United States

This essay offers a reflexive return to two research projects to demonstrate the value of Bourdieu's emphasis on the symbolic for the analysis of contemporary urban transformation. Bourdieu's insistence that we track the social genesis and diffusion of spatial categories of thought and action directs us to the empirical study of the struggles between agents and organizations that promote and/or oppose these categories, as well as the political, economic and other interests animating the agents. A retracing of the parallel invention of the ‘at‐risk neighborhood’ (quartier sensible) coined for and targeted by French urban policy since the late 1980s and the emergence of ‘historic’ or ‘diverse’ neighborhoods touted by gentrifying residents, cultural organizations and real estate agents in the United States since the 1960s challenges misleading oppositions between materiality and representations that often underpin and cramp urban research.     

Why politics needs marketing

This paper examines the survey evidence for the low standing of politics, politicians and political institutions in the mind of the British public, and discusses its consequences. Present public opinion about political parties in Britain, and about politicians in general, is predominantly negative. Politicians are distrusted, to a considerably greater extent than can be explained solely by their bad press. Nor is the public very familiar with politicians or political institutions. Yet it can be shown that in general (and not only in the political field) ‘familiarity breeds favourability, not contempt’. This may be feeding through into hostility towards the entire sector—not only the strictly ‘political’, but other institutions such as public services which the public associates with politics or government. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

‘Social Mixing' or ‘Gentrification'? Contradictory Perspectives on Urban Change in the Berlin District of Neukölln

In the past two decades, the Berlin district of Neukölln has received considerable attention from politicians, planners, urban scholars and the media. This article discusses the role that the academic concepts of ‘social mixing' and ‘gentrification' play in the overlapping and partly contradictory narratives that have been employed to interpret transformations in one particular part of the district, Nord‐Neukölln. While the area is still characterized as a place of poverty and decline, it has more recently come to be known as a ‘hip place to be' among young (creative) urbanites, students and artists. Various urban players such as politicians, planners, urban sociologists, activists, interest groups and the media participate in the construction of these narratives and, in the process, adopt the concepts of social mixing and gentrification according to their respective rationales and preferences. Both concepts play a pivotal role in justifying contradictory claims and interventions. As a consequence, ‘social mixing' and ‘gentrification' are more than just analytical concepts for interpreting urban transformations; they have themselves become part of these transformations and have an impact on local developments. We conclude that urban scholarship must reflect more on its own role and positioning in the arena of urban transformation.     

Feeling like a State: Design Guidelines and the Legibility of ‘Urban Experience’ in Singapore

This article examines how ‘urban experience’ is objectified and transformed into something that is legible to the state and its experts. It conceptualizes design guidelines as a political technology where bodies of expert knowledge, emplaced in a planning bureaucracy, shape the way the built environment is produced and experienced. Using Singapore as an example of a centralized planning bureaucracy, I analyze how lighting, public art and advertisement signs are targeted to produce a total environment with normative narratives. This article makes two contributions. First, it unpacks the processes that translate different modes of legibility in an attempt to make ‘experience’ legible for planners. The political efficacy of guidelines and pre‐established bureaucratic boundaries means that planners can only intervene through a series of combinations, mediations and approximations. Thus, legibility proceeds in a way that is akin to ‘feeling around’. Second, it foregrounds the ‘middle layer of urban governance’ that is often ignored in the discipline. Guidelines represent one coordinate in a system of political technologies that is concerned with producing the norm, that substrate of urban production mechanized through a series of repetitions, gradations and classifications.     

Application and project portfolio valuation using enterprise architecture and business requirements modelling

This article describes an architecture-based approach to IT valuation. This approach offers organisations an instrument to valuate their application and project portfolios and to make well-balanced decisions about IT investments. The value of a software application is assessed in terms of its contribution to a selection of business goals. Based on such assessments, the value of different applications can be compared, and requirements for innovation, development, maintenance and phasing out can be identified. IT projects are proposed to realise the requirements. The value of each project is assessed in terms of the value it adds to one or more applications. This value can be obtained by relating the ‘as-is’ application portfolio to the ‘to-be’ portfolio that is being proposed by the project portfolio. In this way, projects can be ranked according to their added value, given a certain selection of business goals. The approach uses ArchiMate to model the relationship between software applications, business processes, services and products. In addition, two language extensions are used to model the relationship of these elements to business goals and requirements and to projects and project portfolios. The approach is illustrated using the portfolio method of Bedell and has been implemented in BiZZdesign Architect.     

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.     

Pricing Political Rallies

Why are political rallies free to attend? Fundraising is a central campaign activity and a perennial correlate of political victory. We argue that politicians set a zero price for rallies in order to reap a non‐pecuniary benefit: political support. An ‘allocation by waiting’ scheme selects those attendees with a lower opportunity cost of time relative to a standard ‘allocation by price’ scheme. Transactions costs mitigate Coasean bargaining by removing the secondary market, thereby altering the composition of the average rally crowd. This mechanism allows politicians to facilitate exchange with ‘general interests’: citizens who do not engage in rent seeking due to collective action costs but still stand to gain from redistributive policies.     

Strategies affecting Twitter-based networking pattern of South Korean politicians: social network analysis and exponential random graph model

This paper examines the Twitter networking pattern of “following” and “mention” relationships between South Korean politicians. The data were obtained from the Twitter profiles of Korea’s national assemblymen and the most influential political figures. We conducted social network techniques including exponential random graph model and a regression method. The results suggest that these politicians employ two different strategies to establish relationships with other politicians on Twitter. One is “following” other politicians as a social ritual based on dyadic reciprocity, and the other is to “mention” other politicians as asymmetric political support based on the public popularity of their peers on Twitter.     

Ecological Gentrification in Response to Apocalyptic Narratives of Climate Change: The Production of an Immuno-political Fantasy

Anxieties over the potential impacts of climate change, often framed in apocalyptic language, are having a profound, but little studied effect on the contemporary Western urbanscape. This article examines the ways in which current theorizations of ‘ecological gentrification’ express only half the process, describing how green space is used for social control, but not how ecology is used as a justification regime for such projects. As urbanites seek out housing and living practices that have a lower environmental impact, urban planners have responded by providing large-scale regeneration of the urbanscape. With the demand for this housing increasing, questions of inequality, displacement and dispossession arise. I ask whether apocalyptic anxiety is being enrolled in the justification regimes of these projects to make them hard to resist at the planning and implementation stages. The article shows that, in capitalizing on collective anxiety surrounding an apocalyptic future, these projects depoliticize subjects by using the empty signifier, ‘Sustainability’, leading them into an immuno-political relationship to the urbanscape. This leaves subjects feeling protected from both responsibility for, and the impacts of, climate change. Ultimately, this has the consequence of gentrification coupled with potentially worsening consumptive practices, rebound effects and the depoliticization of the environmentally conscious urbanite.     

‘Eco’ For Whom? Envisioning Eco‐urbanism in the Sino‐Singapore Tianjin Eco‐city,China

Eco‐cities have attracted international attention from governments, corporations, academics and other actors seeking to use sustainable urban planning to reduce urban environmental impacts. China has devoted significant political will and economic resources to the development of new‐build eco‐city projects, reflecting the Chinese government's goals to build a ‘harmonious society' in which environmental sustainability and social stability are mutually reinforcing. We critically analyse the case of the Sino‐Singapore Tianjin eco‐city to demonstrate that the eco‐city's ecologically modernizing visions of eco‐urbanism construct a protective environment for its residents that constrains broader consideration of social sustainability. Through analysis of the marketing and presentation of specific domestic and other spaces of the eco‐city, we examine the application of ecologically modernizing construction and technology to the design of the city. We argue that the eco‐city is discursively constructed as ecologically beneficial for its inhabitants rather than for the broader socio‐environmental landscape. Our analysis of residential spaces in Tianjin eco‐city introduces the question of what ‘eco’ means when considering the construction of eco‐urban environments for the city's residents.     

Ecosocialization or Countermodernization? Reviewing the Shifting ‘Storylines’ of Transport Planning

In recent decades, in most western countries, conventional transport planning has encountered growing social opposition from environmentalists and increasing scientific criticism on the grounds of its unsustainability. In some places, including the United Kingdom, the assumptions, beliefs and values (‘storylines’) about transport have shifted to some degree away from the car in favour of public and slow forms of transport. The article elaborates a concept of ‘ecosocialization’ to describe and explain the various reform pressures that have sought to reorient transport planning away from car‐dominated approaches. We use this concept in preference to the more familiar one of ‘ecological modernization’ in order to foreground the influence of embedded value systems and habits, as well as institutions and rules, on key pathways of social development. Whilst these reformist pressures and their consequences have been evident for decades, it is also apparent that in other contexts, after moments of subordination to alternative policy settings, conventional car‐dominated transport planning has reasserted its pre‐eminence. Our article explores the shifting discourses and practices of transport planning in three national policy settings, charting the contest between critiques of car‐dominated approaches and those ‘countermodernizing’ forces, especially road building institutions, that have resisted this ‘ecosocialization’.     

Radical Intellectuals: What Happened to the New Urban Sociology?

This article is about the rise and fall of radicalism among ‘new urban sociologists’ during the 1960s and 1970s. First, I analyze the social and theoretical developments of that time and demonstrate the novelty of the questions that the new urban sociologists posed. Second, I examine the features of the practical engagements and motivations of the members of this group and show how they changed over time. Finally, I discuss the processes of institutionalization of this group. The story of the new urban sociologists is the story of members of the same generation who, dissatisfied with the development of theory in their field, developed a distinct approach to urban problems. The project that they developed combined elements of both intellectual and political projects. I consider both aspects of this project in light of Gouldner’s sociology of intellectuals, and show that de‐radicalization was a consequence of a peculiar combination of political disillusionment, theoretical triumph and a successful project of professionalization.     

Creating whole life value proxemics in construction projects

Whole life value is introduced as a concept for evaluating construction projects, which extends beyond the more typical use of optimized (equilibrium) utility preferences. By linking value and sustainability the concept allows for the consideration of ‘price‐less’ evaluations within the construction project process. As an industry exposed perhaps more than any other to issues of public space and environmental impact, construction is being driven towards the use of complex, multi‐issue consultations with stakeholders within which whole life value can operate as a contextual limit. By investigating traditional cost–benefit analysis routes, and then what are called ‘aspects of sustainability’, an argument is advanced for these consultations to be ongoing rather than one‐off events. As such, they are to concern themselves with the framework of relationships (proxemics) by which distinct evaluations might be articulated and understood through the project process, rather than just how one arrives at a consensus of opinion. It is argued that the concept of value can only be applied fully to any project if consideration has been given to the ambience and context of stakeholder relations and attitudes as opposed to just the prevailing opinions. The virtue of such stakeholder involvement lies not in its ‘rubber stamping’ a separate process of activity, but in ensuring value is realized across asset life through a focus on attaining and sustaining conditions for the reflective articulation of need. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment     

‘We have never been Post-modern’: On the Search of Management Accounting Theory

This paper considers the value that aldermen in Dutch municipalities, who are elected politicians, attach to quantitative output information. The paper especially focuses on the way in which aldermen evaluate the performances of their professional top managers. In the paper the Hopwood evaluation styles, which originally refer to the private sector, are further developed for the public sector. Exploratory field research was conducted in the municipalities of Groningen, Leeuwarden and The Hague. The research shows that the aldermen paid much attention to a manager's activities and the organization's operations and relatively little to outputs. Aldermen did not use an ‘output-constrained’ or an ‘outcome-conscious’ evaluation style. Rather, most of the politicians evaluated the performances of their top managers in a style that is here called an ‘operations-conscious style’. This evaluation style focuses on the activities of managers and the processes of their organization. Quantitative output information plays some part in this evaluation style, but the main question is whether a manager acts as a good ‘facilitator’, i.e. ensures that his organization is functioning well. Besides, important criteria are the way in which a manager deals with short-term problems and with the politicians' opinions and personal wishes.     

How to Mend a Fragmented City: a Critique of ‘Infrastructural Solidarity'

Cities in Latin America in particular have been investing in new transportation networks such as bicycle systems, metros and bus rapid transit (BRT) technologies in recent years. These infrastructures are promoted as cures for trenchant social and spatial divisions as much as for traffic gridlock and vehicular pollution. This article unpacks the theory that infrastructures might mend cities that have been fragmented into disparate parts by uneven capitalist development. I argue that this ‘infrastructural solidarity' thesis relies on a troubled imagination—shared across urban design and strands of urban theory—that infrastructures are static, formal arrangements that concretize relations and enforce social cohesion or fragmentation. This article draws on qualitative research on the TransMilenio BRT system in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as on the work of Bruno Latour, suggesting that the political life of infrastructure is better revealed when such systems are understood as dense knots of shifting relations with complex temporalities. Arguments for the value of this type of actor‐network theory (ANT) reading often skew towards the esoteric, but the TransMilenio case shows how sorting through infrastructural ontologies actually matters in terms of how urbanists—academic and practicing—conceive of and work towards just and functional cities.     

From feminism to FemInc.ism: On the uneasy relationship between feminism,entrepreneurship and the Nordic welfare state

Feminism in the Nordic countries was primarily formulated in terms of ‘state feminism’. The women’s movement cooperated with feminist government officials and politicians, resulting in societies that can be considered to be the most gender-equal societies in the world. Historically, the state provided for a large publicly-financed welfare sector which made it possible for many women to combine work and family through the state’s implementation of family-friendly policies, while simultaneously providing employment opportunities for many women. However, since the financial crisis of the 1990s, there has been a political change influenced by neo-liberal thought, in which politicians have handed over the welfare state’s responsibilities to the market, and, instead, the politicians have encouraged entrepreneurship, not least among women. Further to this development, there has been a change in emphasis from entrepreneurship (understood as starting and running a business) to entrepreneurialism which, in addition to a belief in the efficacy of market forces, also contains a social dimension where individuals are supposed to be flexible and exercise choice. In this article, we ask whether this entails a change in the feminist project in the Nordic countries, and if so, what the likely consequences are for this project, both in practice and in research. In order to answer this question, we reviewed existing Nordic research on women’s entrepreneurship and examined how this body of work conceptualizes entrepreneurship, gender, the state, and equality. We also considered whether any trends could be identified. We relate our findings to recent changes in government policy and conclude that the current discourse on entrepreneurship challenges, and possibly weakens, state feminism, but we also conclude that this discourse may also provide space for new forms of feminist action, in market terms. We coin the term FemInc.ism to denote feminist action through enterprise and we discuss a number of important challenges that research on this phenomenon is faced with.     

Effects of people-centred factors on enterprise resource planning implementation project success: empirical evidence from Sri Lanka

Extant literature suggests people-centred factors as one of the major areas influencing enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation project success. Yet, to date, few empirical studies attempted to validate the link between people-centred factors and ERP implementation project success. The purpose of this study is to empirically identify people-centred factors that are critical to ERP implementation projects in Sri Lanka. The study develops and empirically validates a framework for people-centred factors that influence the success of ERP implementation projects. Survey research methodology was used and collected data from 74 ERP implementation projects in Sri Lanka. The people-centred factors of ‘project team competence’, ‘rewards’ and ‘communication and change’ were found to predict significantly the ERP implementation project success.     

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.     

Planning rapid transit networks

Rapid transit construction projects are major endeavours that require long-term planning by several players, including politicians, urban planners, engineers, management consultants, and citizen groups. Traditionally, operations research methods have not played a major role at the planning level but several tools developed in recent years can assist the decision process and help produce tentative network designs that can be submitted to the planners for further evaluation. This article reviews some indices for the quality of a rapid transit network, as well as mathematical models and heuristics that can be used to design networks.     

Linear Parks and the Political Ecologies of Permeability: Environmental displacement in São Paulo,Brazil

This article considers the politics of resettlement within ongoing efforts to construct the Tietê River Valley Park (Parque Várzeas do Tietê), a linear park that upon completion will be the largest linear park in the world. Located in the eastern periphery of São Paulo, Brazil, the proposed project uses riverbank naturalization to dampen floodpeaks and bring green space to underserved populations. Due to the presence of low‐income neighborhoods on the river's edge, however, the project calls for the removal of roughly 40,000 people. Drawing from urban political ecology and contemporary concerns about environmentally induced displacement, I consider the conflicts over resettlement that mark the project. I analyze the project itself and situate it within a regional context defined by autoconstruction, regularized flooding, and insecure tenure. I argue that despite claims that the project will yield less risky lives for displaced residents, the form through which the project is being developed actually puts displaced residents in heightened situations of risk. I consider how communities have organized to resist displacement, and call for an approach to governance in peripheral landscapes that takes seriously the histories of collective infrastructural provisioning and autoconstructed housing that have marked them for decades.