ABSTRACT Among the many issues that have been discussed under the scholarship of entrepreneurial state, the place of and strategies to mobilize, a shadow state apparatus have so far received little attention. It is particularly relevant from state practices in the Global South. This article gives an account of shadow practices that an entrepreneurial state undertakes in its attempt to deliver a smart city project. It documents a host of practices that essentially blur the boundaries of the formal and shadow state to smoothen business deals and take the neoliberal agendas of the entrepreneurial state forward. The article demonstrates that these shadow practices by formal state actors take place due to the demands of the entrepreneurial zeal of the state, a key facet of neoliberalism. The article contributes toward the scholarship by bringing into focus the salience of caste and kin networks in the quotidian operations of the shadow state.

ABSTRACT This study investigates the “shadow of gentrification;” that is, it examines the applicability of the concept of gentrification beyond the typical context of the global city and attempts to advance its understanding in the Global East. This topic is approached by analyzing the role of rental housing in art-led neighborhood change in Osaka’s inner city, an area shaped during Japan’s developmental period. Three characteristics of housing that facilitates art-led neighborhood change – physical features, economic conditions, and tenure type – were identified, along which the renovation work conducted by artists in Osaka’s inner city, was analyzed. The results show that the developmental inner city provides only poor conditions for gentrification driven by artists. To enable a better understanding of neighborhood change in the Global East, this study suggests overcoming the concept of gentrification by focusing on other forms of neighborhood change, and highlighting breaks instead of continuities in the local political economy.

ABSTRACT This research investigates how the public university engages in China's speculative urbanism by establishing and operationalizing the university-healthcare nexus through both real estate and healthcare businesses. Drawing on open company data and expert interviews, the organizational structure of public and private actors in the university-healthcare nexus of the Peking University Healthcare City was unfold as a case study. Findings reveal that the university-healthcare nexus was established by Peking University and its subsidiary private companies. The nexus enables speculative urban development by aligning stakeholders' interests, branding healthcare businesses, and camouflaging profit-driven real estate development. This research thus brings an alternative perspective to understanding the relationship between public and private institutions and the critical role of universities in China's urbanization process. Since the research is based on an individual case study, future comparative studies could help test the scalability of the implications.

ABSTRACT The urban infrastructure literature has explored how infrastructure is tied to the politics of citizenship: states’ use of infrastructure to include/exclude populations and marginalized populations’ use of infrastructure to claim fuller citizenship. Often, this literature focuses on the relationship between governments and city dwellers, neglecting the role of other actors, like NGOs and philanthropic organizations, that influence infrastructural citizenship. A hallmark of neoliberalism in the Global North has been the transfer of responsibilities from the state to the non-profit sector, increasing these organizations’ power to shape urban citizenship. This paper examines how non-profit organizations participate in the politics of infrastructural citizenship by analyzing their role in providing emergency water infrastructure following the Flint Water Crisis. This process has been contradictory: the actions of these organizations have served as a lifeline in the face of state-enacted infrastructural violence, but also incorporate new inequalities into the infrastructural citizenship of Flint residents.

ABSTRACT This Urban Pulse entry examines Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build up to ten so-called Freedom Cities on federally owned land if re-elected. Similar to new cities being built around the world, Freedom Cities would be selected through a competitive bidding process and aim to overcome perceived crises in present-day urbanism. However, this essay provides a close read of the Freedom Cities proposal to examine how the idea of a new city provides a means for Trump and his movement to envision a society shaped by specific settler-colonial and far-right political visions emergent within the current American political-cultural moment. As such, the Freedom Cities proposal affords a rare window into the radicalization of the Trumpian movement in 2023.

ABSTRACT Green gentrification occurs when urban greening/sustainability interventions become implicated in neighbourhood upgrading and displacement of existing residents. However, current emphasis on urban sustainability in planning/policy agendas, coupled with political-economic factors producing uneven development, lead us to ask whether all gentrifying areas experience greening. Our descriptive analysis identified gentrifying areas in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto (Canada), from 1996–2006 and 2006–2016, and determined the extent to which various greening interventions (parks, cycle lanes, community gardens, LEED-certified buildings, and rapid-rail transit) were introduced before, during, and after gentrification. Greening frequently occurred before and/or during, and after, gentrification. Our results indicate greening is common in gentrifying areas throughout the gentrification process, suggesting the need for a broader understanding of the relationship(s) between urban greening and gentrification. We outline a future research agenda to examine greening across gentrifying areas and further understand how these two processes shape each other in the remaking of neighborhoods/cities.

ABSTRACT This article reports on an urbanization process that can be described as injected urbanism. While conventional Northern theoretical perspectives capture an important role for one-way rural-to-urban migration of households in urban growth processes, injected urbanism centers on circular labor migration of individuals and remittances flows as crucial drivers of urban growth. Injected urbanism is incipient by nature and geographically specific to predominantly rural regions. Through a ten-point conceptual-analytical framework, I illustrate how this process unfolds in India. Injected urbanism, or locally distinctive versions thereof, can likely be found across broader geographies in the Global South, especially in areas where there is a structural employment shift out of agriculture, few local employment alternatives, and little household out-migration. The article engages with current core theoretical debates in urban geography and furthers the development of postmodern/postcolonial urban viewpoints.

ABSTRACT This article contributes to scholarship on housing financialization and core–periphery relations by exploring the role of transnational institutional investors in housing production in Lisbon. Using a “follow-the-money” approach, I trace current investments into large-scale housing developments, finding a dominance of capital-rich institutional actors originating primarily in core economies. The resulting developments are largely build-to-sell projects, which are framed as a necessary response to existing housing demands. I argue that such investment reflects and reinforces subordinate financialization through housing, as Lisbon’s status as a city of the semi-periphery dependent on outside investment provides fertile ground for investors to build projects to fit their criteria. This in turn produces uneven development on the urban scale. Using an independently-built database of projects and investors along with qualitative methods, the paper connects global relations of financial subordination to housing development, and adds to our understanding of institutional investors – increasingly powerful actors in real estate.

ABSTRACT Over the last decade, scholarship on China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road, has burgeoned. However, it is only recently that analysis has interrogated the BRI as a driver of global urban transformation. In this paper, we advance an in-depth review of literature generated since 2013 that has critically examined relations between the BRI and urban-scale processes. Based on a categorization of studies into three areas, staging of the urban BRI, the building of BRI cities and living in BRI cities, we suggest that the urban is integral to the scope and impacts of the initiative. As the BRI goes into its second decade, we argue that BRI’s infrastructural spaces can be seen as new landscapes where novel kinds of urbanization are emerging, influencing patterns of socio-spatial contestation, and demanding new narratives of social change to make sense of cityscapes and urban futures worldwide.

ABSTRACT China’s shift from a socialist to a market economy has resulted in deindustrialization and the emergence of industrial heritage. Despite extensive research on state-led (re)development, limited knowledge exists on the changing role of state work-units (SWUs). Based on the case of Dahua 1935, the research reveals how the top-down production of art districts reshapes traditional work-unit urbanism. It also offers new insights into the gentrification of industrial neighborhoods under the combined forces of the state, SWUs, and private developers. The research finds that the gentrification of industrial neighborhoods cannot be fully captured by either art/artist-led gentrification or state-led gentrification. The changing role of Dahua company from a social provider in pre-reform China to an entrepreneurial and predatory organization in post-reform China has contributed to the remarkable urban transformation. The tension between socialist legacies and capitalist modes of urban (re)development poses a challenge to sustainable industrial heritage-led redevelopment in China.