Gendered Nature and Urban Culture: The Dialectics of Gated Developments in Izmir,Turkey

This article adds to recent debates on the emergence of new forms of private gated developments in Turkey that specifically target the upper middle classes. In particular, it focuses on the rise of residential gated developments along the Izmir‐Ce?me expressway to highlight how the dialectics between gender, nature and culture are reinforced in these places. The article, based on a case study of three gated developments in this region, suggests that their production is made possible through a series of dualisms between nature and culture, mobility and fixity, urban public life and gendered domesticity, urban modernity and rural parochialism, polluted city and healthy town. Based on interviews with architects, developers and residents, as well as local‐authority officials in Urla town who sanction these developments, this article argues that contradictions between different sets of dualisms form a central aspect of the processes through which these developments were designed, produced, marketed and inhabited. Taken collectively, these contradictions point broadly to the limits of gated communities in creating stable, adaptable and sustainable patterns of development in Turkey and the global South.     

Reconstituting the Possible: Lefebvre,Utopia and the Urban Question

What roles can utopia play in contemporary critical urban studies? The concept has often been treated warily, sidelined or dismissed. Recent years, however, have seen a revival of interest, as writers, activists and artists have sought openings to urban worlds that are different and better. By returning to aspects of the urban thought and practice of Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s and early 1970s, this article challenges common understandings of utopia and clarifies some of its potential uses for critical urban studies today. It explores Lefebvre's emphasis on the possible, and in particular the importance he attached to extending and realizing the possible through struggling for what seems impossible. Rather than being a free‐floating or endlessly open project, however, this engagement with the ‘possible‐impossible' emerged in critical dialogue with other currents of utopian urbanism, including prospective thought then influential in France. It was also rooted in long‐ standing concerns with the critique of everyday life and with experimentation through projects with urbanists, architects and others. By attending to these often neglected aspects of Lefebvre's utopianism, a series of provocations emerge for addressing the urban question in ways that take seriously not only what urbanization processes and urban life are but also what they could become and how they might be constituted differently.     

Ponds,Power and Institutions: The Everyday Governance of Accessing Urban Water Bodies in a Small Bengali City

While researchers in the growing field of urban political ecology have given significant attention to the fragmented hydroscape that characterizes access to drinking water in the global South, so far the (re)production of other urban waters and its related power relations have been underexplored. This article seeks to contribute to filling this gap by exploring the everyday negotiations over access to urban water bodies, in particular ponds. These are understood as a composite resource that is simultaneously water, land and public space. This analysis draws on a case study from a small city in West Bengal, India, and is based primarily on data from open interviews with different actors with a stake in urban ponds. The article demonstrates that in a context of ambiguity of the statutory governance regime and fragmented control, the (re)production of the pondscape is embedded within complex relationships of power whereby social marginalization can be offset at least momentarily by local institutions such as neighbourhood clubs and political parties.     

Experiences of Urban Militarism: Spatial Stigma,Ruins and Everyday Life

A key question in urban sociology is how people interpret the urban environment. At a time when cities are increasingly militarized, this question is particularly important for understanding how militarism impacts urban life. However, urban sociologists have not addressed how people experience militarized environments. This article turns to this question by considering the case of Lydda‐Lod, an Israeli city that has been demographically and physically transformed by war, displacement and securitization. Drawing on Wacquant's sociology of spatial stigma and adding insights from works on emotions in (post‐)conflict cities, I examine how poor Palestinians think and feel about the surveilled districts where they live within the city's broader landscape of ruins. I show how the Israeli military, security and policing agencies have collectively produced spatial stigmatization of these districts. I discuss how Palestinians respond to this spatial stigma by attaching a sense of worthlessness to their districts. However, this reproduction of spatial stigma is punctuated by expressions of care for the built environment and by a desire to revalorize collective Palestinian life in the city. I conclude by discussing how a perspective on militarized cities focused on everyday responses to militarism and attentive to marginalities enriches urban sociology and urban studies more generally.     

浅谈城市文化与城市规划、土地利用规划的关系

随着社会的经济发展,人们对精神文化的需求越来越多,而城市文化正是满足人们这种需求的最好保障。文本旨在简要阐述城市文化对宜居城市建设的作用的同时,浅略分析城市文化与城市规划、土地利用规划之间的关系。     

城市休憩空间的人性化设计

文章首先指出了当前建设的很多城市休憩空间中都没有真正对人性空间给予足够的重视,从而导致所谓的城市休憩空间利用率极低,然后通过学习与实践,提出了几点人性化空间的处理手法,希望以此能引起建筑师同行们对人性化空间更多的关注。     

Encountering Everyday Racist Practices: Sociospatial Negotiations of Immigrant Settlement in Athens,Greece

This article delineates the ways in which the context of institutional and non‐institutional racist practices, legitimated by the rise of extreme right‐wing populism and racism, affects immigrants’ everyday lives in Athens, Greece. In this research, I explored the transformations of immigrants’ settlement trajectories, coping strategies and tactics, and their bodily interactions when encountering racist violence at the local level, through extensive fieldwork in two case study areas in metropolitan Athens—Omonia and Nikaia. The article is based on previous work on encounters with difference and everyday racism, with the aim of contributing to existing scholarship by examining urban encounters with manifestations of racism in the form of violent practices, which are on a rise not only as exceptional but also as everyday lived events. I demonstrate how immigrants’ encounters with police raids and patrols, and with racist violence perpetrated by neo‐Nazi militias, transform immigrants’ daily lives in the city at the micro‐scale. These encounters have an impact not only on immigrants’ social relationships, strategies and tactics of settlement, but also on the reconstruction of urban space. My argument is that urban encounter remains an open and dynamic field for negotiation of interethnic cohabitation, as it produces both violent confrontations and sociospatial embodied opportunities for coexistence.     

Placing the Urban Village: A Spatial Perspective on the Development Process of Urban Villages in Contemporary China

The rapid urbanization of China since the mid‐1980s has led to the development of a new spatial category, the urban village (chengzhongcun). The dominant neoliberal urban development regime approaches urban villages as a social, spatial, economic and political problem, and as targets for aggressive redevelopment and eradication policies. In this article, I propose a spatial perspective that makes use of several theoretical ‘anchors' to analyze the influence of urban village spatiality on its development process and to explore alternatives to the dominant redevelopment model. I begin by examining the spatial conceptualization of the urban village as a non‐place, arguing that this spatial reading undergirds the redevelopment‐by‐demolition model and tends to obscure alternative conceptualizations. I then move on to propose three alternative readings of urban village space, examining it as an everyday space, a liminal space and a neighborhood. Combining these three readings with the ‘non‐place' conceptualization provides a nuanced understanding of urban villages' unique spatial attributes and social roles, by evoking spatial and social processes that take place in most urban villages across China. Taken together, these spatial readings challenge the social and spatial rigidity of dominant representations of urban villages and supply a much‐needed spatially based conceptual framework that can be used to develop new urban planning models.     

Social Power and Power Over Space: How the Bourgeoisie Reproduces itself in the City

Urban sociology has long ignored districts of wealth and privilege in cities because they harbor few ‘social problems’ and the class background of sociologists has not inclined them to venture there. In France after 1968, the continued attraction of Marxism and the sulfurous reputation of sociology conspired to make such investigation difficult. Pierre Bourdieu pioneered it with his landmark book on the bourgeoisie, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. This essay reports on two decades of research extending Bourdieu's model of social space to study the territories and strategies of the French high bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The dominant class lives in reserved upscale districts and this seclusion, resulting from the elective spatial aggregation of familial dynasties, is a fundamental characteristic of the group. Segregative isolation is strengthened by specific institutions, such as society balls and social clubs, entrusted with effecting class closure and perpetuation. But, in the greater Paris region, the best districts also attract businesses (corporate headquarters, luxury firms), and thus employment that prompts the established bourgeoisie to migrate westwards in an endless search for social exclusivity. In addition to their Paris homes, upper‐class dynasties possess family properties (a castle or a large manor house) in the provincial hinterland that serve as a basis for paternalistic forms of sociability, linking them to the local lower class via such institutions as riding to hounds. Spaces reserved by and for the high bourgeoisie are major vectors of social reproduction and, along with family and elite schools, help to train heirs suited to safeguarding and valorizing their inherited assets.     

Urban Symbolic Violence Re‐Made: Religion,Politics and Spatial Struggles in Istanbul

The symbolic and physical map of Istanbul has undergone dramatic shifts over the past four decades. Squatters—the persistent underdogs in this huge metropolis—have mounted an attack against established economic and cultural hierarchies. This challenge has transformed the structures of symbolic violence through the production of an alternative urban space (contentious neighborhoods and districts, teahouses, innovative district and street layouts, and ‘Islamic’ internal and external architecture). In the process, the meanings of urbanity and provinciality, of secularity and Islam, have been altered—and stigma, along with urban rent, has been systematically redistributed (although redistribution has been far from egalitarian). The dominant sectors ultimately absorbed the attack: squatters remained subordinated, but the terms of subordination have changed. A synthesis of Bourdieu and (a geographically revised) Gramsci sheds light on this process of challenge and absorption in and through urban space.     

城市建筑空地遗留与区位建设——以北京市为例

现代城市问题,归根到底是人与地的关系问题,疏浚和控制人口密度是当前城市发展所不容忽视的重要课题.通过实地考察和对北京市区位建设相关数据的理论分析,认为在旧城改造和新城建设中,为有效控制人口聚集的密度,当前应主要致力于:一是重视建筑高度和密度的控制,为其设定具有法律效力的底线标准;二是在遵循市场运行规律的前提下,合理划分城市区位,引导进行多核心的数量、品位、质量、规模大致相同的功能分布体的区位建设.     

浅谈城市社区文化建设的重要性

城市社区文化建设是社区建设的重要组成部分,是构建和谐社区的重要内容。本文就社区文化建设的重要性进行了阐述,对目前社区文化建设中存在的问题进行了分析,从而提出了加强城市社区文化建设应采用的有效途径,以推进社区文化健康发展,日益繁荣。     

浅议高校班级文化构建中的思想和学风建设

高校班级文化构建中的思想建设和学风建设是班级工作的两个重要方面,在构建和谐校园环境、营造优质学习氛围、引导学生健康成长成才的过程中发挥着重大作用。     

How Portugal Became an ‘Unplanned Country’: A Critique of Scholarship on Portuguese Urban Development and Planning

In this article, I seek to expose how scholars came to construct the idea that Portugal is an ‘unplanned country’— a product of disorderly growth. While urban scholarship has now challenged the hegemonic view of spatial order as a proxy for modernity, development and progress, Portuguese scholarship has remained largely impervious to these debates as it consistently offers a view of the Portuguese city as ‘not quite yet’ modern and civilized. Based on a review of accounts by key authors recognized for their prominence and contribution to contemporary Portuguese scholarship, I argue that rather than being a constitutive fact of or truth about the Portuguese urban condition, the ‘unplanned country’ operates as an intellectual and discursive construct that organizes the experience of modernity, urban growth and social transformation throughout the twentieth century. The article discusses how Portuguese scholarship constructs the ‘unplanned country’ idea through insufficient engagement with relevant research and debates in urban studies and is based on several empirical shortcomings. The article concludes by offering a preliminary research agenda to address these imbalances. I suggest that such efforts could enhance the relevance and contribution of the Portuguese urban experience to recent calls for epistemological renewal in urban theory production. Cet article explique comment les chercheurs ont bâti l'idée que le Portugal est un ‘pays sans planification’, le résultat d'une croissance confuse. La recherche urbaine a désormais bousculé la vision hégémonique de l'ordre spatial comme indicateur de modernité, de développement et de progrès, mais la plupart des auteurs portugais sont restés hermétiques à ces débats, puisqu'ils dépeignent systématiquement la ville portugaise comme ‘pas encore tout à fait’ moderne et civilisée. En analysant les travaux d'auteurs déterminants, reconnus pour leur importance et leur contribution à la recherche portugaise contemporaine, cette étude préconise que, loin d'être un fait constitutif ou une vérité pour la situation urbaine portugaise, le ‘pays sans planification’ agit comme une notion intellectuelle et rhétorique qui structure l'expérience de modernité, de croissance et de transformation sociale au cours du XX^e siècle. L'idée de ‘pays sans planification’ est née d'un manque d'implication dans la recherche et dans les débats pertinents en sciences urbaines, ainsi que de plusieurs erreurs empiriques à la base de certaines démonstrations. La conclusion propose un programme d'études préliminaires pour remédier à ces anomalies. Ces travaux pourraient renforcer l'intérêt et l'apport de l'expérience urbaine portugaise dans le cadre de récents appels à un renouveau épistémologique dans la production de théories urbaines.     

Living With Stigma: Spatial and Social Divisions in a Danish City

Inspired by Bourdieu's theory of homology between social, mental and spatial structures, this essay dissects the relationship between spatial and social divisions in the Danish city of Aalborg using varied data from official statistics, surveys, qualitative interviews and field observations. Spatial divisions reflect differences in the objective distribution of economic and cultural capital, and are accompanied by symbolic divisions in residents’ minds. Some nuances are, however, added to Bourdieu's homology argument, as there are discrepancies between objective distributions and mental schemes, such that the latter exaggerate and dramatize the former. The neighbourhood of Aalborg East is subjected to this symbolic exaggeration in the form of spatial stigma or territorial stigmatization. An analysis of residents’ strategies for coping with spatial stigma furthermore provides an illustration of Wacquant's claim that this stigmatization can be met with a range of socially patterned responses ranging from acceptance or indifference to recalcitrance.     

Emerging Cultural Capital in the City: Profiling London and Brussels

This essay examines how the contemporary city is being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which new and emerging modes of cultural capital are being forged. Drawing inspiration from the links Bourdieu draws between physical and social space, we use comprehensive quantitative surveys from Belgium and the UK to explore the accelerating interplay between large urban centres and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We show a close association between urban sites and the location of residents with new kinds of emerging cultural capital. This appreciation allows us to understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in growing tension with their suburban and rural hinterlands. This process is simultaneously cultural, economic, social and political and marks a remaking of the nature of cultural hierarchy and cultural capital itself, away from the older model of the Kantian aesthetic, as elaborated by Bourdieu in Distinction, which venerates a ‘highbrow’ aesthetic removed from everyday life, towards ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital that valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of contemporary cultural activity.