Space Grabs: Colonizing the Vertical City

Much attention has been paid recently to land grabs in rural and urban areas of the global South, but relatively little attention has been paid to such activities in the third dimension—vertical space. Yet vertical space has also been increasingly colonized, as manifest in the transformation of mega-city skylines through the proliferating number and height of high-rises in both central cities and peri-urban developments. We investigate how floor area ratio policies, originally designed to control densification, have been reworked to facilitate densification through floor area uplift. Thus a tool originally developed to advance public welfare has been used to facilitate the profitability of real estate projects for developers and to benefit local governments. Taking DKI Jakarta as our case study, we sketch out the coevolution of this policy with urban regimes, focusing on the mid-2010s when compensation measures were formalized and made transparent. By using a particular project in Jakarta's central business district we show how the benefits of floor area uplift favor private sector developers over the local government. In a context of rapidly increasing land values, increasing demand for housing from an emergent middle class, and particularly the privatization of planning, this unevenness systematically favors the private sector.     

Tracing the Provenance of Urbanist Ideals: A Critical Analysis of The Quito Papers

In this essay, I undertake a critical analysis of the UN-Habitat publication, The Quito Papers. I begin by unpacking the representation within The Quito Papers of the Charter of Athens of 1941 as an outcome of CIAM IV in 1933. Here, the ways in which the authors centralize the Charter of Athens within their critique of contemporary urbanization is critically analysed. Ultimately, I argue that what emerges is a simplification of the complex intertwining of urbanization and urbanist ideals. Based on this, I situate what is presented in The Quito Papers as alternative imaginaries—centred largely on European ideals of urbanism—within the context of urban change since the 1970s. This includes a discussion of the manner in which these ideals are promoted within urbanist discourse, including the role of the authors themselves in their engagement with UN-Habitat. Finally, I situate some of the arguments contained in The Quito Papers within current debates in urban theory. I contend that the relationship between processes of urbanization and the ideals of modernist urbanism are more genealogical than direct. Furthermore, I argue that it is through this relationship that broader power dynamics and their resultant inequalities can be further examined and challenged.     

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.     

Does new urbanist neighborhood design affect neighborhood turnover?

This paper explores the extent to which new urbanist principles (e.g., compactness, mixed use, street connectivity, and open space) influenced neighborhood residential turnover in Austin, Texas, from 2009 to 2011, with a focus on micro-scale-level neighborhoods. The results of this study indicate that new urbanism principles play unique roles in turnover, most of which appear to be positive in increasing turnover, except the sidewalk and proximity to a lake. In summary, residents currently tend to reside longer in a neighborhood with typical suburban neighborhood designs, not new urbanist. Among the design principles of interest in this study, proximity to a lake proves to be the most powerful predictor, followed by distance to the CBD and dwelling density. As natural features such as lakes or hills are given conditions that are less likely to be altered by humans, we conclude that turnover tends to be sensitive to “compactness.” Thus, planners are urged to carefully consider the issue of “compactness” to successfully create stable neighborhoods.     

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.     

新都市主义与房地产郊区化——以上海市为例

从新都市主义的设计理念作为切入点,阐明了新都市主义在住区规划设计与实践中所倡导的重视生态平衡、邻里设计、构筑复合社区、文化资源保护等思想;分析了上海市房地产郊区化发展的动力作用机制;阐述了新都市主义对上海市房地产郊区化可持续发展的启示.     

MIGRANT URBANISM: Cape Verdean Djunta-mon and its Impact on the Built Environment of Cova da Moura (Lisbon)

International migrations are transforming the urban landscape in cities all around the world. In this article I address the effect of Cape Verdean migration on the built environment of Lisbon's periphery. Specifically, I analyse a traditional practice of mutual aid originating in rural Cape Verde, the djunta-mon system, as a device of migrant urbanism projected onto the urban landscape of the Cova da Moura neighbourhood. In this article, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss the role of the djunta-mon in the urban evolution of the neighbourhood from its formation in the 1970s to the present day. The data collected shows that this practice has had an important effect on the appropriation, functional delimitation and significance of the urban space by residents. The results thus point to the importance of understanding how the cultures and identities of human groups crystallize through the processes of social production of space.     

URBAN REGENERATION IN SEOUL: Alternative Urbanism or the Resilience of Neoliberal Urbanism?

Park Won-soon, the former mayor of Seoul, put forward a new vision of Seoul as a progressive city, and one of his signatures was the promotion of a new urban regeneration policy called the Seoul-type Urban Regeneration Model (SUR). It was first presented as a solution to compressed and profit-oriented urban redevelopment but evolved into an alternative model which conveyed the worlding desire of the Seoul Metropolitan Government to redefine Asian urbanism beyond developmentalism or neoliberalism. In this article, we argue that the SUR demonstrates a mixture of post-developmentalist features and the lingering impact of neoliberal rationalities. Specifically, we problematize SUR's hybrid aspirations for urban competitiveness, improved quality of life and participatory governance by articulating how the pursuit of a globally competitive city conflicts with and overrides other values and how citizen-centered governance was exploited as an efficient mechanism of neoliberal urbanism.     

‘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.