City Children and Genderfied Neighbourhoods: The New Generation as Urban Regeneration Strategy

Former industrial cities in the West are employing gentrification as urban policy. In these policies, women and families currently play an important role as gentrification pioneers. In my analysis of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, I propose the term genderfication to understand the gender dimensions of this process. Genderfication refers to the production of space for different gender relations. I analyse Rotterdam's urban planning program for becoming a ‘child‐friendly city’, which entails replacing existing urban dwellings with new, larger and more expensive ‘family‐friendly homes’ as a strategy for urban re‐generation. Urban re‐generation supplements regeneration in the form of material and economic restructuring, and refers to the replacement of part of the current population by a new and better suited generation. The ‘child‐friendly city program’ is considered in tandem with punitive ‘youth policies’.     

Secessionist Automobility: Racism,Anti‐Urbanism,and the Politics of Automobility in Atlanta,Georgia

Automobility — the centering of society and everyday life around automobiles and their spaces — is one of the most contentious aspects of contemporary urban growth debates at the local, national, and global scale. The politics of automobility is a spatial struggle over how the city should be organized and for whom. Yet there is little research on how this struggle is unfolding, and how that politics is shaping urban space. Part of this stems from the essentialization of automobility in policy and academic discourses on cities. Moving beyond essentialization, this article will explore how contentious political struggles reveal nuanced and diverse discourses and ideologies surrounding automobility and space. Focusing on what I call ‘secessionist automobility’— using an automobile as an instrument of spatial secession — I examine Atlanta, Georgia’s contentious automobility debate. Secessionist automobility is bound with the blunt politics of race‐based secession from urban space, but also more subtle forms of spatial secession rooted in anti‐urban ideologies. Implications for local, national, and global contestation of automobility will be provided.     

Food fight! Immigrant Street Vendors,Gourmet Food Trucks and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago

Immigrant street vendors in Chicago have fought for decades without success to change the restrictive and punitive city ordinance governing their work. The failure of the immigrant street vendors stands in marked contrast to the successful efforts of gourmet food truck entrepreneurs, who within only two years convinced the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance permitting their work. The differential regulation of street vending reveals how local politicians use the rhetoric of the ‘creative’ city to justify building a city that appeals to young urban professionals, while simultaneously marginalizing the possibilities of working‐class immigrants to shape the city to their desires. This article aims to add to the literature on the politics of the creative class by demonstrating how discourses of creativity and entrepreneurialism get mobilized by competing interests, and how racial‐ethnic attitudes become integral to these discourses. The contrasting experiences of the vendors force us to ask: Why is the creativity of food truck entrepreneurs valued over the creativity of street vendors when, according to Richard Florida, creative class cities are supposed to be tolerant and immigrant‐friendly? Whose ‘creativity’ gets to be part of the ‘creative’ city? I draw on interviews with street vendors and a discourse analysis of media coverage of vending debates.     

Recentering Southeast Asian Cities

For nearly two decades now, scholars have been heralding the arrival of new urbanisms. One debate in rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asia concerns the convergence of Western and Asian urban processes, and the riposte that interaction between globalizing processes and the historical momentum of local and regional forces make for complex Asian urbanisms. In recent years, attention has been drawn to the impact of decentralization, with consequences for the reorganization of the developmental state and the growing importance of private capital and urban social movements in driving urban processes and politics. This symposium offers the fresh lens of ‘recentering’ to discuss the urbanisms emerging from decentralization and the triangulating state–capital–social movement politics of the new urbanisms. Drawing on recent discussions of Manuel Castells' (1983) The City and the Grassroots, we seek to expand the conception of urban activism not just by considering non‐Western cases in the newly democratizing states of Southeast Asia, but also by considering cities as co‐agents of activism. We see the recentering of Southeast Asian cities as referring to political actions that take the city not only as site and repository, but also reflexively as identity in itself to be fought with, for and over.     

The Forever Frontier of Urbanism: Historicizing Persian Gulf Cities

In recent years, Persian Gulf cities have become symbols of the most spectacular forms of the ‘globalization of urbanization’. Current scholarship has sought to situate these cities in transnational processes and linkages with conceptualizations of ‘the global city’ and the mechanisms of ‘worlding’. This article builds on but moves beyond this line of analysis by turning to the histories of this region and its built environment to explore the longue‐durée influence of capital and empire operating across multiple scales. From this perspective, the glittering high‐rises and manmade islands are contemporary manifestations of a century of urban forms and logics of social control emanating from company towns, the struggles of state building, and the circulation and fixing of capital. To grasp how the Persian Gulf region has been remade as a frontier for accumulation, the analysis in this article blurs the boundaries between metropole and periphery, reconceptualizing the region not as an eclectic sideshow, but as a central site for global shifts in urbanism, capitalism and architecture in the twentieth century.     

Cities and the ‘War on Terror’

Programmes of organized, political violence have always been legitimized and sustained through complex imaginative geographies. These tend to be characterized by stark binaries of place attachment. This article argues that the discursive construction of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ since September 11th 2001 has been deeply marked by attempts to rework imaginative geographies separating the urban places of the US ‘homeland’ and those Arab cities purported to be the sources of ‘terrorist’ threats against US national interests. On the one hand, imaginative geographies of US cities have been reworked to construct them as ‘homeland’ spaces which must be re‐engineered to address supposed imperatives of ‘national security’. On the other, Arab cities have been imaginatively constructed as little more than ‘terrorist nest’ targets to soak up US military firepower. Meanwhile, the article shows how both ‘homeland’ and ‘target’ cities are increasingly being treated together as a single, integrated ‘battlespace’ within post 9/11 US military doctrine and techno‐science. The article concludes with a discussion of the central roles of urban imaginative geographies, overlaid by transnational architectures of US military technology, in sustaining the colonial territorial configurations of a hyper‐militarized US Empire.     

Locating the Urban In‐between: Tracking the Urban Politics of Infrastructure in Toronto

In the urban studies literature, urban politics is usually considered in two distinct locations: the city (often understood in quite conventional centralist ways) and the suburb (understood as spatially peripheral and politically at odds with the central city). At the metropolitan scale, the two types of urban politics are discussed in relation to one another. More recently, the metropolitan scale of urban politics has been expanded to regional dimensions. We pose the question of location of urban politics from a specific deficit in the geography of centre, suburb and metropolis. We argue that in today's regional political socio‐spatiality, politics will have to be found ‘in‐between’ the old lines of demarcation. Following Tom Sieverts' (2003) advice to look at the ‘in‐between’ cities that are neither old downtown nor new suburb but complex urban landscapes of mixed density, use and urbanity, we reveal the political vacuum that is at the heart of the urban region today. Using the politics of infrastructure in Toronto as our empirical example, we will show that vulnerabilities and risks for urban populations in that Canadian metropolis' in‐between city are co‐generated by the failure of conventional political spaces and processes to capture the connectivities threaded through those places that are in‐between the centre and exurbia.     

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.     

Thermal Eco‐cities: Green Building and Urban Thermal Metabolism

Eco‐city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the globe and are often marketed as ‘new’ urban environments focused on achieving sustainable urban living while promoting environmental–economic transitions towards a low‐carbon technological and industrial base. The article argues for the need to consider the thermal aspects of urban metabolism, while at the same time focusing on the link between individual buildings and eco‐city master plans and wider economic development strategies at a state level. In so doing, the article encourages critical analysis of eco‐city design and planning, while keeping a focus on the role of specific building structures within eco‐cities as examples of the intermeshing of what can be termed a ‘political ecology of scale’ which stretches from specific buildings' climatic characteristics, to the metabolic master plan for eco‐cities, to provincial, regional and state‐level plans for the integration of eco‐cities within wider economic and political development trajectories. The article focuses on Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, an eco‐city under construction at the time of writing.     

Spaces of Difference: Reflections from Toronto on Multiculturalism,Bourgeois Urbanism and the Possibility of Radical Urban Politics

What explains the lack of what Mike Davis famously called ‘magical urbanism’— referring to the increasingly influential and potentially radical role played by Latino immigrants in US politics — in such diverse Canadian cities as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver? This article points out how the Canadian legacy of multiculturalism constitutes one key cause of the failure of left urban politics in Canada to produce yet anything approaching the promise of ‘magical urbanism’ south of the border, especially by underlining how this bulwark of liberal ideology lends itself so readily to some resilient variations of bourgeois urbanism — including the commodification of difference, most recently under the auspices of Richard Florida's ‘creative class’. Against the pluralism of the food court and the shopping mall, both in its official multicultural and seemingly oppositional ‘hybrid’ forms, are radical approaches to difference in the city still possible — in Canada or elsewhere? The authors argue that the concepts of ‘maximal’ and ‘produced’ (vis‐à‐vis ‘minimal’ and ‘induced’) difference and the politics of ‘the right to the city’ elaborated by Henri Lefebvre — in conjunction with the reflections on subaltern experiences of difference by critics such as Himani Bannerji and Ambalavanar Sivanandan — indeed provide a starting point for radical urban politics. Comment expliquer, dans des villes canadiennes aussi différentes que Toronto, Montréal ou Vancouver, l’absence de ce que Mike Davis a appelé‘l’urbanisme magique’ en parlant du rôle de plus en plus influent, voire radical, des immigrants latinoaméricain dans la politique des États‐unis? L’héritage canadien du multiculturalisme explique d’abord pourquoi la politique urbaine de gauche n’a encore rien pu produire au Canada qui s’approcherait de la promesse d’un ‘urbanisme magique’ comme au sud de la frontière. L’article souligne notamment comment ce rempart d’idéologie libérale se prête si facilement à quelques variantes résistantes d’urbanisme bourgeois, dont la banalisation de la différence, tout récemment sous les auspices de la ‘classe créative’ de Richard Florida. Face au pluralisme de l’aire de restauration et du centre commercial, tous deux sous des formes ‘hybrides’ multiculturelles et aparemment contradictoires, des approches radicales de la différence dans la ville sont‐elles encore possibles, au Canada ou ailleurs? Les concepts de différence ‘maximale’ et ‘produite’ (par opposition à‘minimale’ et ‘induite’) et la politique du ‘droit à la ville’ conçue par Henri Lefebvre — alliés aux réflexions sur des expériences de différence subalternes émanant de critiques tels que Himani Bannerji et Ambalavanar Sivanandan — offrent indubitablement un point de départ pour une politique urbaine radicale.     

The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political

Historically, the urban was the condition of possibility for the political, but the symbiosis of the two has been concealed by the rise of the state and the concomitant development of the social sciences. The effort to recover the connection by denoting a separate domain of ‘urban politics’ is self‐defeating, because it re‐instantiates an ontology of the political that consigns the urban to the domain of ‘low’ politics. The dominant ontology suggests that ‘high’ politics — the most serious politics or politics proper — is always in the domain of states and empires, and that everything else is subject to it. This view is constantly reaffirmed by the political theory that underpins the state system and the modern social sciences. Nevertheless, a different ontology of the political is always already implicit in the concept of the city, understood as a local phenomenon and a global way of life. To see the political through the city is to notice how proximate diversity stimulates self‐organization and self‐government, generates politics in and between authorities in different registers, and defers the sovereignty claims it produces. On this view, the urban is neither high nor low, but is instead the very form of the political, encompassing states and empires as much as anything else.     

Cracks in the Creative City: The Contradictions of Community Arts Practice

The recent flurry of research about arts‐led regeneration initiatives illuminates how contemporary arts festivals can become complicit in the production of urban inequality. But researchers rarely engage with detailed empirical examples that shed light on the contradictory role that artists sometimes play within these spectacularized events. Similar research in performance studies connects the political limits and potential of social practice arts — interventions that encourage artists and non‐artists to co‐produce work — as civic boosters strive to stage cities in order to attract investment. In this article, I explore the case study of Streetscape: Living Space at Regent Park, a participatory artistic intervention programmed in a public housing neighbourhood that is undergoing redevelopment in Toronto, Canada. Streetscape was part of the Luminato festival, an elite booster coalition‐led festival of ‘creativity’. I refer to these arts interventions to demonstrate how artists engaging in social practice arts can become complicit in naturalizing colonial gentrification processes at multiple scales. But I also reveal how artists can leverage heterogeneous arts‐led regeneration strategies to make space for ‘radical social praxis’ (Kwon, 2004), interventions that challenge hegemonic regimes. I conclude by interrogating the effectiveness of place‐based efforts in unsettling the ‘creative city’.     

Contesting Sustainability: ‘SMART Growth’ and the Redevelopment of Austin's Eastside

The compatibility between an agenda for sustainable urban development and the neoliberal economic restructuring of urban space has been observed within cities in developed countries across the globe. From providing economic support to local ‘green’ industries to creating bike lanes, municipalities develop sustainability strategies that are designed to boost their competitive advantage. Moreover, municipalities are responding to demands from popular social movements and national governments that seek to reconfigure societal relationships with the natural environment in cities. Cities are increasingly understood not as part of the ecological crisis but as part of the solution, or as places where alternative patterns of sustainable consumption and new socially and ecologically responsible industries can be developed. Over the last decade in Austin, environmental sustainability has become an uncontested paradigm that has progressively shaped the city's urban space and policy. Two competing conceptualizations of the environment, so‐called ‘environmental’ and ‘just’ sustainability groups, are explored in this article. I demonstrate how the notion of environmental sustainability has been selectively incorporated into the hegemonic vision of Austin's strategic growth plan. I argue that the dominance of this conceptualization is best understood by asking what counts as the ‘environment’ for environmentalists, and understanding the unstated assumptions about the environment shared by the business community and environmentalists.     

Dubai in the ‘Middle’

In the early 2000s, Dubai seemed the apotheosis of the global city model. Lauded as an embodiment of globalist ideals, or harshly criticized as a representation of the dangers of contemporary urbanism, it was clearly under the spotlight. Then, like the concept of the ‘global city’ itself, it disappeared from the headlines, to be subject only to sporadic and cynical attention. Today some are heralding a ‘return’ of Dubai from the anonymity of the middle ground of global city hierarchies and rankings. What is often forgotten, however, is that urbanism in Dubai did not stop. On the contrary, Dubai's continuous ‘worlding’ offers a productive opportunity for the encounter of ‘global’ and ‘ordinary’ modes of urban analysis. By unpacking the construction of a global Dubai, this article advocates greater sensitivity to the multiscalar politics that shape its continuity. Stepping beyond rumours of crisis and decline, it aims to connect the global fortunes and everyday processes that jointly characterize the development of global cities. ‘Global’ and ‘ordinary’ urbanism, it argues, are but two registers of how we could, in Warren Magnusson's words, ‘see like a city’.     

It's Just the City after All!

Long a site for incessant worry, revision or redemption, it is unclear what the ‘city' is today. Yet, in face of the near‐apocalyptic readjustments potentiated by human‐engineered global warming, there is an exigency about getting cities to function right. It is no wonder, then, that contemporary theories of cities and urbanization attempt to restore some common sense, to get to the heart of critical matters in a world where urbanization disrupts once‐normative assumptions about the nature of territory, scale and politics. But what is the nature of that ‘common sense'? How does one engage the very concrete efforts that constructed the city, with all the layers of physical and cultural memory that new regimes usually attempt to cover up, and all that the city does not show, either because its inhabitants are prohibited from paying attention or because whatever is considered normative or spectacular in city life has to get rid of the messy labor and politics that brought it about? Invoking blackness as an analytical method, these questions are addressed through thinking about how long histories of urban practices deployed by black residents of cities across the world might challenge and reinvent the sense of an urban commons.

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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.     

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.     

Making ‘Global Sydney’: Spatial Imaginaries,Worlding and Strategic Plans

This article critically examines the expression of global spatial imaginaries in urban policy and planning. Following recent calls to understand how the global is ‘made up' in and through cities, we argue for the usefulness of Roy and Ong's concept of ‘worlding’. By analysing how strategic spatial plans envisage ‘Global Sydney’, the article reveals a constitutive spatial imaginary informed by the articulation of three interrelated elements: global city standards, comparative techniques and extra‐local policy models. Unpacking how cities are selectively worlded through spatial imaginaries, the article advances an approach to urban globality as actively cultivated and differentially produced.     

Solidarity in Climate/Immigrant Justice Direct Action: Lessons from Movements in the US South

In October of 2012, youth organizers from the immigrant justice and climate change resistance movements in the southeastern US metropolitan region of Atlanta, Georgia, coordinated a direct action tactic framed by a unified narrative justifying collaboration between immigrant and climate justice activists on equal terms. In a continuing collaborative relationship, these organizers embraced mutually strategic narratives rooted in local civil rights history, but rejected common ‘global climate justice’ narratives used to frame social and environmental collaborative organizing. We examine the departure from ‘global climate justice’ narratives, which was exemplified by coalition building in Georgia, to argue that scholarship articulating ‘global climate justice’ as a new context for integrating social and environmental movements must anticipate barriers to these solidarities, especially historical, regional and racialized dynamics of power among organizations engaged in these developing alliances. Based on an investigation of strategic alliances between anti‐racist, immigrant justice organizers and climate change activists in the metropolitan areas of Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, we argue that climate justice narratives in both activism and scholarship would benefit from more attention to the particular political and cultural geographies in which diverse forms of climate justice organizing can take hold.