Hip‐hop and Urban Studies

How can urban studies research engage fruitfully with hip‐hop? This contribution responds to the essays by David Beer and Martin Lamotte on ‘street music’, urban ethnography and ghettoized communities. It discusses how a social science engagement with hip‐hop texts might differ from cultural studies approaches, and how the study of hip‐hop culture can contribute to social movements studies. The essay argues that academics can utilize this form of ‘urban’ culture in various ways when undertaking urban research, teaching urban studies and engaging a broader public in academic research.     

Hip‐Hop as Urban and Regional Research: Encountering an Insider's Ethnography of City Life

This essay suggests that hip‐hop music may reasonably be thought of as a form of urban and regional research. The essay draws upon a recently published book by hip‐hop artist Jay‐Z, which provides biographical information alongside translations of the lyrical content of his works, to show that hip‐hop is full of insider ethnographic insights into urban life. This, it is argued, can be thought of as an answer to Daryl Martin's call for a more ‘poetic urbanism’, an urbanism that captures the material, sensory and emotional aspects of the city. The essay uses Jay‐Z's text to illustrate the type of insights and ideas that we might obtain from hip‐hop, giving some specific examples of these insights and concluding with some reflections upon this alternative insider account of city life — and how it might provide us with opportunities for expanding our repertoire.     

‘Street Music’, Urban Ethnography and Ghettoized Communities

Hip‐hop is a definitively urban movement, born in the crisis of the Fordist city and rooted in the 1970s street culture of poor and working‐class African Americans and Latinos in New York City. Engaging with the contributions of Beer and Lamotte, this essay addresses two questions. Firstly, can we understand hip‐hop as a politics of resistance, a social movement rooted in a claim on urban space and a practice of urban citizenship? And secondly, is hip hop, and particularly rap music, a form of urban and regional research? I argue that as a primarily artistic movement and black expressive culture (subject to commercial imperatives), hip‐hop has a layered and complex relationship with the social, political and spatial fabric of urban America. The complexity of this relationship renders problematic attempts to understand hip‐hop as urban ethnography or as a resistance politics. I conclude by discussing the potential of an engagement between hip‐hop and critical urban studies.     

Strategies for Comparative Urbanism: Post‐socialism as a De‐territorialized Concept

The aim of this article is to critically assess the study of post‐socialist cities with respect to comparative urbanism. Even though comparative urbanism has challenged the division of the world into largely incommensurable regional containers, where some regions are sources of theory while others remain in the periphery of thinking, post‐socialist cities have remained doubly excluded: neither centre nor periphery, neither mainstream nor part of the critique. This article introduces three ways in which post‐socialism has and could be perceived: as a container, as a condition and as a de‐territorialized concept. It is argued here that seeing post‐socialism as a de‐territorialized concept that would apply to particular aspects of cities and societies rather than territorialized units in general would allow cities regularly seen as post‐socialist to be incorporated into global urban theorizing, while distinctive local histories and experiences still remain analytically present. The article cautions researchers against area‐based imaginations of urban theorization, instead arguing in favour of an approach that sees cities first and foremost as ordinary while some aspects could be claimed to be post‐socialist. Tallinn is used here as a site from which to draw examples for this mainly literature‐based conceptual analysis.     

‘The City of Our Dream’: Owambe Urbanism and Low‐income Women's Resistance in Ibadan,Nigeria

Ibadan, Nigeria, has been an outlier in the ranking of world‐class cities. But in the past seven years, amidst the circulating Africa Rising narrative, Ibadan has embarked on what I call an Afropolitan Imagineering project of owambe urbanism. Afropolitan Imagineering refers to the production of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world‐class and cosmopolitan. Owambe urbanism is a spatio‐temporal neoliberal project concerning destination, arrival and place‐making, which promises a shared and happy future for all urban dwellers. I argue that this promise of happiness is challenged by low‐income women who are cognizant that a shared and happy future is impossible when little effort is made to address social inequality in the present. They thus refuse to be ‘good’ citizens and invoke an alternative urban futurity through their embodied and imagined resistance.     

Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban

In response to the growing interest in ways to take forward an agenda for a more global urban studies, this essay advocates a comparative approach to theory building which can help to develop new understandings of the expanding and diverse world of cities and urbanization processes, building theory from different contexts, resonating with a diversity of urban outcomes but being respectful of the limits of always located insights. The essay is inspired by the potential of the comparative imagination but, mindful of the limitations of formal comparative methods, which in a quasi‐scientific format can drastically restrict the scope of comparing, it outlines ways to reformat comparative methods in order to put them to work more effectively for a more global urban studies. The essay proposes a new typology for comparative methods based on the vernacular practices of urban comparison, tracing these through the archives of comparative urbanism. It also suggests some lines of philosophical reflection for reframing the scope and style of theorizing. New repertoires of comparativism are indicated which support the possibility of a revisable urban theory, starting from anywhere.     

Cities within the City: Do‐It‐Yourself Urbanism and the Right to the City

In many cities around the world we are presently witnessing the growth of, and interest in, a range of micro‐spatial urban practices that are reshaping urban spaces. These practices include actions such as: guerrilla and community gardening; housing and retail cooperatives; flash mobbing and other shock tactics; social economies and bartering schemes; ‘empty spaces’ movements to occupy abandoned buildings for a range of purposes; subcultural practices like graffiti/street art, skateboarding and parkour; and more. This article asks: to what extent do such practices constitute a new form of urban politics that might give birth to a more just and democratic city? In answering this question, the article considers these so‐called ‘do‐it‐yourself urbanisms’ from the perspective of the ‘right to the city’. After critically assessing that concept, the article argues that in order for do‐it‐yourself urbanist practices to generate a wider politics of the city through the appropriation of urban space, they also need to assert new forms of authority in the city based on the equality of urban inhabitants. This claim is illustrated through an analysis of the do‐it‐yourself practices of Sydney‐based activist collective BUGA UP and the New York and Madrid Street Advertising Takeovers.     

When Conflict Strikes: Contesting Neoliberal Urbanism outside Participatory Structures in Inner‐city Dublin

This article examines how community representatives from a disadvantaged neighbourhood engage with neoliberal urban governance structures and assess the power afforded to them. It seeks to understand how community groups manage the challenges they face in times of neoliberal urbanism. This study follows calls to pay greater attention to the existence of imaginaries other than neoliberal ones, examining community actions and discourses surrounding the Historic Area Rejuvenation Project (HARP) area in Dublin, a project aimed at stimulating private property development and investment. The case highlights tensions between the pursuit of community‐based and collaborative urban regeneration and the increased legitimacy of neoliberalism as a guiding principle of public policy. It confirms the existence of resistance movements and the importance of local and national contexts in explaining the outcomes of contestation. Despite participative structures established by the local authority, the views and interests of local community activists were ignored and excluded. Furthermore, in contrast to trends towards co‐option within participative structures, the community actively resisted the imposition of neoliberal plans. Overall, while they had little success in influencing the plans or mindsets of the local authority, they did succeed in delaying the process until the project became unviable as a result of the economic crisis.     

Understanding Urban Processes in Flint,Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively

Ananya Roy introduces the concept ‘subaltern urbanism’ in her 2011 article ‘Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism’. She challenges researchers to move beyond existing epistemological and methodological limits, and offers four concepts which, taken together, serve as a useful starting point for understanding and representing subaltern urban space. In this article I argue that instead of a deductive approach that begins with an a priori identification of slums as subaltern urban space, an inductive approach of identifying subaltern urban space would expand the concept and show that subaltern urbanism exists in the global North. I present original research to show that Flint, Michigan, can be considered subaltern urban space. In the final section of the article I argue that this inductive approach to subaltern urbanism can foster comparative research across the North‐South divide, and generate the transfer of knowledge from South to North.     

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere: The Kiev Park of Memory and Post‐Soviet Urbanism in Context

The reappraisal of the post‐Soviet landscape is in danger of overlooking two of its most important elements: firstly, the mass modernist housing that was more extensive here than probably anywhere else; and secondly, the post‐1989 capitalist context of property speculation, office development and decay. These routinely missed landscapes constitute the very things travelled through on the way to utopian, if ruined, monuments, such as those documented in Frédéric Chaubin's CCCP — Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed. When visited, the surroundings of these structures turn out to be at least as interesting as the photogenic modernist monument itself. This essay is an account of a visit to one of the most architecturally contemporary of these structures — the Park of Memory crematoria in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, designed by Abraham Miletsky in 1974. In Chaubin's photographs, the curling concrete volumes of the Park's central crematoria are flamboyant, fantastical and self‐referential, the very ‘iconic’ architecture that many post‐Soviet capitals would like to have in order to attract tourists. There is a lot more going on in the surrounding city than what is typically recorded in its visual representations, however, as discussed in this essay. Such monuments are not mute, and cannot be severed from their surroundings.     

Comparative Urbanism and the ‘Asian City': Implications for Research and Theory

While voices in the comparative urbanism literature call for researchers to approach comparison with more experimental and critical methodologies, there remains no consensus on how to design and realize these studies. This essay examines the implications of comparative urbanism for researching the ‘Asian City'. Given the critique of existing modes of comparison embedded in recent calls for a new comparative urbanism, researchers are faced with a number of pressing questions: How do we approach this ‘regional' topic in a way that both resists categorizing the ‘Asian City' as an exotic ‘other', elevating it onto a mythical pedestal, yet appreciates its differences, localisms and unique ‘cosmopolitan vernacular' (Clifford, 1997; Werbner and Modood, 1997)? This essay thus highlights the multiple challenges of applying the comparative lens to the ‘Asian City', arguing that broader conceptualizations of the ‘Asian City' help to address the dangers in isolating Asian research into its own canon of parochial urban theory and offering a greater diversity of possibilities for justifying case selection in comparative approaches. In doing so, we hope that this essay responds to the comparative turn by illuminating to some extent its inherent complexity and methodological challenges.     

Building from Scratch: New Cities,Privatized Urbanism and the Spatial Restructuring of Johannesburg after Apartheid

By the start of the twenty‐first century, the once dominant historical downtown core of Johannesburg had lost its privileged status as the center of business and commercial activities, the metropolitan landscape having been restructured into an assemblage of sprawling, rival edge cities. Real estate developers have recently unveiled ambitious plans to build two completely new cities from scratch: Waterfall City and Lanseria Airport City (formerly called Cradle City) are master‐planned, holistically designed ‘satellite cities’ built on vacant land. While incorporating features found in earlier city‐building efforts, these two new self‐contained, privately‐managed cities operate outside the administrative reach of public authority and thus exemplify the global trend toward privatized urbanism. Waterfall City, located on land that has been owned by the same extended family for nearly 100 years, is spearheaded by a single corporate entity. Lanseria Airport City/Cradle City is a planned ‘aerotropolis’ surrounding the existing Lanseria airport at the northwest corner of the Johannesburg metropole. These two new private cities differ from earlier large‐scale urban projects because everything from basic infrastructure (including utilities, sewerage, and the installation and maintenance of roadways), landscaping, security services, the regulation of common spaces, and selling and branding the city are firmly in the hands of private profit‐making corporate entities and outside the mandate of public authorities.     

Elite Compacts in Africa: The Role of Area‐based Management in the New Governmentality of the Durban City‐region

Through reflection on the practical post‐apartheid (re)alignment of competing rationalities across the Greater Durban urban region, this essay teases out the interface between traditional and modern settlement management systems, and explores how governance cleavages are being renegotiated and mediated. It is suggested that, in building an integrated method of operating across the fragmented city‐regional scale and navigating the competing interests involved, the practice of African urbanism is being defined. Without making any claims for what may or may not be uniquely African city‐regional dynamics at the boundaries of tradition and modernity, what is clear from the Durban case is that both conventional city‐regional literature and new city‐regional ideas have glossed over the complexity of finding solutions to tensions between poor communities, urban managers, elected local authorities and the traditional rural elites of the functional city‐regions of Africa.     

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.     

Food Deserts and Real‐Estate‐Led Social Policy

Since the early 2000s in the United States, food deserts—neighborhoods in which households have limited geographic access to full‐service supermarkets or grocery stores— have become conceptually central in public policy research on food security. Analyzing this phenomenon from a ‘policy mobility’ perspective, this article traces the food desert's emergence in policy discourse, locating it within an entrepreneurial social policy paradigm that privileges real estate development over direct economic relief. In the context of property‐led anti‐poverty efforts, the identification and mapping of food deserts catalyzes a logic that leads to subsidy to grocery store development in low‐income areas (or ‘fresh food financing’), while at the same time officials are cutting programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), which directly supplements household food budgets. The article contributes to widening critical discussion of the food desert paradigm and the policy interventions with which it is associated. It calls on urban researchers and practitioners to reframe discussions of food access and nutrition around the shortage of basic income and a need for higher wage floors.     

The High‐Rise Home: Verticality as Practice in London

This article investigates the relationship between verticality and home. It develops the idea of ‘verticality as practice'. This appreciates verticality not as something that takes place in three‐dimensional landscapes, but as the outcome of everyday practical activity. Examining a modernist high‐rise estate, the Aylesbury Estate in London, the article identifies and examines a range of vertical practices, illustrating how they are intertwined with home. Vertical practices, such as those associated with the view, help to make a unique and special home, becoming intensely meaningful to residents. However, they also unmake dimensions of home when they interact with the estate's marginality.