Translational Global Praxis: Rethinking Methods and Modes of African Urban Research

Advancing global urbanism depends upon making Africa's cities a more dominant part of the global urban narrative. Constructing a more legitimate research agenda for African cities, however, necessitates a repositioning of conventional modes of research. To achieve intellectual and political traction in what are typical African research conditions—where human needs are great, information is poor, conditions of governance are complex and the reality is changeable—we reflect on the experiences of the African Centre for Cities where (alongside conventional use of theory, methods and data) a translational mode of working has been adopted. The notion of translational urban research praxis captures more than the idea of applied research or even co‐production, and encompasses integrating the research conception, design, execution, application and reflection—and conceiving of this set of activities as a singular research/practice process that is by its nature deeply political and locationally embedded. In this way we suggest that African urbanism can be both usefully illuminated by global theories and methods, and can simultaneously be constitutive of the reform of the ideas through which cities generally are understood.     

Fungible Space: Competition and Volatility in the Global Logistics Network

This article examines an emerging form of interspatial competition premised on attracting cargo traffic and value‐added logistics activities. Against the backdrop of economic globalization and the revolution in logistics, place‐based actors are increasingly vying to insert their localities into transnational supply chains. I explore the causes, conditions and consequences of this burgeoning growth strategy through a study of the dynamics surrounding the expansion of the Panama Canal, opened to shipping traffic in June 2016, and the consequent battle among North American ports to attract a new generation of oversized container vessels. The spatial practices of mobile actors in the logistics industry, I argue, represent the leading edge of capitalism's tendency to render places interchangeable—a condition I call fungible space. The abstract logic of spatial substitution, however, can never fully escape the concrete qualities of particular places, which form the very conditions of interchangeability itself. This dialectic of spatial fungibility and geographic specificity has intensified rivalries for volatile commodity flows and made logistics‐oriented development a particularly risky growth strategy for cities. What is at stake in these speculative ventures is the welfare of vulnerable communities and workers, who disproportionately bear the costs and risks of supply‐chain volatility.     

Postcolonializing Berlin and The Fabrication of The Urban

Postcolonializing Berlin is an experiment in rethinking (Western) cities from the South. It embraces conceptual innovations from thinkers in African, Latin American and Asian urban studies to complicate the stories we tell about contemporary Berlin. My argument proceeds in four steps. I begin by asking what makes the North–South division in urban studies so problematic, and what needs to happen to shake up those categories. Then I share some of my own trials and errors in looking at Berlin‐Neukölln through the lens of ‘the South', before offering an alternative frame, which I call ‘urban fabricating', as a way of inquiring into and perceiving changing urban settings. In the final part, gambling parlours in Berlin‐Neukölln move into focus, where different forms of fabrication are at work: the regeneration officials' vision for the future of the neighbourhood, the inspectors' improvisations on the casino law, and the casino owners' ways of muddling through at the edges of the law. Rather than searching for the one new theory to shake up urban studies, fabricating is, I suggest, an unagitated approach to the actual processes through which cities are made.     

上海市河道治理与城市防洪的分析研究

上海市是我国重要的经济文化中心,人口密度极大,同时,上海市地处中国长江入海口,地理位置非常特殊。上海市又是经常遭遇水患的城市,本文就上海市河道治理与城市防洪做了简要分析研究,并提出了自己的观点。     

The Political Economy of Urban Ruins: Redeveloping Shanghai

This essay analyzes the political economy of the urban ruins captured in Greg Girard's photo album Phantom Shanghai. Rather than being marginal, irrelevant or merely objects for nostalgia, the ruins of buildings produced by real estate speculation offer crucial insights into the workings of the urban political economy and reflect wider trends of urban governance. Examining how building ruins come about in the first place and how they are represented in visual media can help us better understand the processes of urbanization and place making, and the central role of destruction in contemporary Chinese urbanism. This essay illustrates this point by analyzing the economic function, political legitimation and cultural significance of demolitions and ruins in urban China.     

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.     

Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities

In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.     

The Economic Impacts of a Terrorist Attack on the Downtown Los Angeles Financial District

Abstract

This paper summarizes a study on the economic impacts of a radiological bomb attack on a major office building in downtown Los Angeles financial district. A radiological bomb will generate effects within an extensive radiation plume that is divided into two zones with varying evacuation times: an Inner Zone with a 1-year evacuation and an Outer Zone with only a 1-month evacuation time. An up-to-date version of a Garin–Lowry-style regional input–output model called SCPM 2005 is employed to simulate household and firm relocation in three scenarios. The impact analysis focuses on business interruption effects only.

Impact économique d'une attaque terroriste sur le quartier financier du centre de Los Angeles

Résumé Cet article concerne une étude sur l'impact économique d'une attaque par bombe radiologique sur un immeuble de bureaux dans le quartier financier du centre de Los Angeles. Une bombe radiologique engendre des effets au cæur d'un vaste panache radioactif, qui est divisé en deux zones possédant des durées d’évacuation différentes. La durée d’évacuation est d'un an dans la zone interne, et d'un mois seulement dans la zone externe. Trois scénarios de délocalisation de ménages et d'entreprises sont simulés grâce à l'utilisation d'une version actuelle d'un modèle régional intrants-extrants de type Garin–Lowry, appelé SCPM 2005. L'analyse de l'impact se concentre uniquement sur les effets de l'interruption du commerce.

El impacto económico de un ataque terrorista en el distrito financiero del centro de Los Ángeles

Résumén?Este trabajo resume un estudio sobre el impacto económico de un ataque de bomba radiológico en un importante edificio de oficinas en el distrito financiero del centro de Los Ángeles. Una bomba radiológica generará efectos dentro de una pluma radioactiva extensiva, dividida en dos zonas con diferentes tiempos de evacuación: una zona interna con un período de evacuación de un año y una zona externa con un período de evacuación de sólo un mes. Se emplea una versión actualizada de un modelo estilo Garin–Lowry, de entrada-salida regional llamado SCPM 2005, para simular la relocalización de viviendas y firmas en tres escenarios. El análisis del impacto sólo se enfoca en los efectos de la interrupción del

     

From London to Los Angeles: a comparison of local labour market processes in the US and UK film industries

Addressing the issue of the embeddedness of labour markets, this paper compares the processes of finding employment in the film industry within two local labour markets. Drawing on studies of freelance film crews in London (UK) and Los Angeles (US), the paper concludes that the importance of social networks in job mobility in both contexts is a consequence of common production structures. However, common labour market practice varies in each geographical space as industry processes and structures are mediated by local institutional contexts.     

Provincializing Critical Urban Theory: Extending the Ecosystem of Possibilities

Advocating a provincialization of critical urban theory, we seek to move beyond current polarizations and disputes over the basis of urban theory, creating space to take seriously the possibility that no single theory suffices to account for the variegated nature of urbanization and cities across the world. Such provincialization requires a serious engagement with both mainstream and critical Anglophone urban theory, challenging the seeming naturalness of knowledge claims through rigorous theoretical and empirical scrutiny from the standpoint of peripheral perspectives located outside the core. This entails recognizing the existence of a shifting ecosystem of critical urban theories, putting these into even‐handed critical conversation with one another. The collective resilience of urban theory will be dependent upon ongoing engagement across such diversity. At the heart of such an ecosystem are shifts in practice, seeking a new comparative analytic that destabilizes the universalism of the dominant norm, against which all other exemplars are to be compared, with the imperative of taking the field seriously.     

Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary

This article argues that the theoretical invisibility of non-privatized land tenures constitutes a failure of the urban imaginary, which restricts the ability to forge less commodified urban futures. The article explicates two attributes of non-privatized land—fungibility and combinatoriality—that produce an urban land nexus capable of fostering pro-poor agglomeration economies and generating socialities that exceed the model of the separative self that is hegemonic in more propertied settings. Fungibility, it shows, externalizes supportive economies of production and reproduction into surrounding neighborhoods by shifting the boundaries and terms of usufruct without cadastral oversight or regulation. Combinatoriality—a hybrid formulation of combined territories and combined territorialities—describes overlapping forms of access to land or demarcations of legitimate land use, either competitive or reciprocal. Together, these two attributes of non-privatized land systems produce a propinquity requirement for economic production, or a social density and liveliness more limited in privatized land markets. Through a diagnostic analogy with the simple reproduction squeeze characteristic of subsistence agrarian settings, it charts how an urban spatial reproduction squeeze—felt globally in dense, rising-rent environments across the global North and South—generates subsistence needs that mixed-tenure environments are uniquely capable of fulfilling and that can provide inspiration for radical housing struggles elsewhere.     

上海国际航运中心战略定位对城市道路规划建设的影响分析

本文通过对上海港集装箱增长与上海公路通车里程增长之间关系的分析,指出在上海国际航运中心战略定位中必须重视上海港未来集装箱吞吐量飞速增长对城市道路规划建设所带来的压力,并提出了用集装箱公路系数来测定未来集装箱吞吐量可能对道路交通形成的压力的方法。     

上海城市开发中的规划控制与区位选择

以城市开发中一个最基本的影响开发决策与规划管理的要素--区位(开发选址)作为研究的楔入点,通过对上海城市开发中区位选择表征和机制的分析,揭示目前上海城市开发中所存在的深层次矛盾,并在城市开发的运作过程中寻找问题的症结,提出城市规划在这个方面可能有的改进和控制方法.     

Writing Across Contexts: Urban Informality and the State in Tallinn,Bafatá and Berlin

Urban research has long related informality to a lack of state capacity or a failure of institutions. This assumption not only fails to account for the heterogeneous institutional relations in which informality is embedded, but has also created a dividing line between states. Whereas some states are understood to manage urban development through functioning institutions, others, in this view, fail to regulate. To deconstruct such understandings, this article explores informal practices through a multi‐sited individualizing comparison between three case studies of water governance, parking regulation and dwelling regimes in Bafatá (Guinea‐Bissau), Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), respectively. Our approach to understanding informality starts from the negotiation and contestation of order between differently positioned actors in the continuous making of states. From this point of view, informality is inherent in the architecture of states––emerging through legal systems, embedded in negotiations between and within institutions, and based on conflicts between state regulations and prevailing norms. Tracing how order takes shape though negotiation, improvisation, co‐production and translation not only highlights how informality constitutes a modus operandi in the everyday workings of the state in all three cases, but also provides a way to talk across these cases, i.e. to bring them together in one frame of analysis and overcome their presumed incommensurability.     

从城市公共服务标准化实践看GB／T24421．2的适用性

GB／T24421是国内第一个针对服务业组织标准化全过程的系列标准。在北京东城区国家级城市公共服务标准化示范区的建设中,以GB／T24421．2—2009《服务业组织标准化工作指南第2部分：标准体系》等为依据开展了13个示范项目标准体系建设工作,检验了GB／T24421．2的适用性,发现该标准在术语定义、体系结构等方面存在若干值得商榷之处,提出了改进建议。     

我国旧城改造的空间生产研究——以上海新天地为例

旧城改造是我国当前城市空间重构的重要方式。运用空间生产理论,以上海新天地为例总结了旧城改造的空间生产过程,结论是:旧城改造过程由动机、行为和结果构成,政府、开发商和居民三方以各自利益为导向都具有对旧城进行改造的动机;政府和开发商占据决策和行为的主导地位,决定城市空间的功能定位和物质形态;其结果引发城市空间使用者的置换和空间社会关系的变化。