Reconfiguring Belonging in the Suburban US South: Diversity, ‘Merit’ and the Persistence of White Privilege

In the past few decades, a diverse body of scholarship has complicated the image of American suburbs as spaces of white, middle‐class homogeneity. Revisionist suburban histories and accounts of African American and immigrant suburbanization have drawn attention to the longstanding presence of non‐white others in US suburbs. Yet despite diversification, white privilege remains deeply entrenched in suburbia. This article explores the shifting character of white privilege in the US — especially in the US South — and asks how whites interpret diversity and identify those with whom they are, or are not, willing to share their privileges. This article uses the results of a pilot study in a subdivision near Columbia, South Carolina, to explore how white suburbanites articulate belonging in neighborhood space. This discussion highlights the ways in which respondents reject the pre‐civil‐rights order marked by overt racial discrimination, but also reveals the ways in which they evaluate the relative merit of minority groups and identify certain differences as unacceptable. While limited in scope, this study encourages scholars to further explore the ways in which shifting configurations of race become intertwined with processes of contemporary suburban change.     

‘Many Rivers to Cross’: Suburban Densification and the Social Status Quo in Greater Lyon

Urban research often considers densification from the perspective of sustainable development and social mix. This essay focuses instead on the social and political stakes involved in densification through the example of a large French metropolitan area. It shows that the densification policies put in place in the Lyon agglomeration cannot be said to succeed in breaking down the historical segregation between its residential and affluent western suburbs (banlieues) and its industrial and working‐class eastern ones. The political manoeuvres executed by the institutions implementing densification, and the search for consensus characterizing France's intercommunalities, block any possibility of redistributing functions and social classes at the metropolitan scale, and hence of ending the social specialization of Lyon's suburbs. Moreover, municipalities subjected to pressure from suburban areas carefully assess the profile of residents selected to occupy new housing units—i.e. individuals already residing in the commune in the case of western suburbs, and middle‐class individuals hailing from the eastern part of the agglomeration in the case of eastern suburbs. Densification does not foster social mix at the metropolitan scale, neither does it improve the housing conditions of disadvantaged populations.     

论远城区在武汉东湖国家自主创新示范区建设中的发展路径

远城区是武汉东湖国家自主创新示范区建设的有机组成部分。通过分析现状,在把握远城区角色定位的基础上,提出了远城区在武汉东湖国家自主创新示范区建设中的方法路径、机制设计、产业发展定与体系融合的基本思路。     

北京郊区创意农业发展趋势及对策研究

本文从创意农业的起源与概念出发,分析和比较与都市农业、休闲农业的异同,明确创意农业的内涵,总结北京郊区创意农业的主要类型,分析北京郊区创意农业中存在的主要问题,提出了加快创意农业发展的建议。     

大城市郊区农业资源利用面临的困境与出路--以北京市平谷区为例

加入WTO以后，我国大城市郊区农业面临着诸多挑战。本文以北京市平谷区为例，在对现阶段我国大城市郊区农业资源利用取得的成功经验和面临困境两方面进行初步分析的基础上，提出大城市郊区农业应当积极进行农业产业结构调整，扶持农业产业化的发展，突出郊区农业对大城市的生态服务功能，发展都市观光休闲农业和出口创汇农业，以实现对农业资源的高效可持续利用。最后提出了实现土地合理流转、推动农业科技进步和进行农产品市场培育是大城市郊区农业发展的根本保障措施。     

The Politics of Post‐Suburban Densification in Canada and France

This debate specifically focuses on densification as a particular dimension of (post‐) suburbanization. In the introduction, we discuss densification, along with ‘compactness' and ‘intensification', conceptual terms that have become buzzwords within urban planning. Objectives associated with these tend to be presented in the literature within a normative framework, structured by a critique of the negative effects attributed to sprawl. The perspective here is different. It is not normative but critical, and articulated around the analysis of political and social issues, related to the transformation of wider metropolitan space. Three main themes are developed: (1) the politics of densification (the environmental arguments favouring densification are highly plastic, and are thus often used to defend projects or initiatives which are actually determined by other agendas); (2) why morphology matters (a similar number of houses or square metres can be established in many different ways, and those different ways have political and social meaning); (3) the diversity of suburban densification regimes (it is not only the landscapes of the suburbs that are diverse, but also the local bodies governing them—between the small residential municipalities of the Paris periurbs and the large inner suburbs of Toronto lies a broad spectrum).