Contemporary Urban Context Research Articles

Moving Esfahan toward knowledge-based urban development: the role of knowledge workers' needs

In the global knowledge economy, knowledge workers are extensively seen as the primary factors to improve the welfare and competitiveness of cities. To attract and retain such industries and workers, cities produce knowledge-based urban development strategies, and therefore such strategising has become an important development mechanism for cities and their economies. This paper aims to contribute to ongoing knowledge-based urban development (KBUD) and KBUD-related discussions that has become more popular in the academic and professional literature around the world, but not yet in Iran. The specific focus of the study is therefore on ‘the ways of attracting and retaining knowledge and innovative workers in the knowledge economy by addressing their needs and desires in the contemporary urban context’. It surveys the potentials and constraints of Esfahan to become a knowledge city. The methodology develops a comprehensive investigation and searches for useful ideas for formulating better urban planning theory in knowledge era. This paper provides an in-depth discussion on the role of urban planning for providing a suitable urban space in cities for attracting knowledge workers during which it has revealed some guiding principles that definitely open a new horizon for developing the theory and practice of knowledge-based urban development.

Informal management, interactive performance: street vendors and police in a Taipei night market

In various geopolitical contexts, a strategy of flexibility exists in the urban politics involved in governing extralegal or informal practices, yet the actual processes involved have not really been analysed. This paper is based on a case study of the informal management of street vendors in Taipei's Shilin Night Market. The city deploys a policy of loose policing of the extralegal vendors, demonstrating its will to improve the situation, and the vendors respond by performing a series of spatial routines in order to maintain their occupancy of appropriated arcades and streets. This ritualised interaction, explored here in the light of Ervin Goffman's performance theory, allows the municipality to accommodate informality within a contemporary urban context. The paper analyses the political, social and spatial significance of this informal management in order to clarify one of the ways in which modern cities can benefit from urban policies and planning strategies that support urban informality.

Configuring transformative governance to enhance resilient urban water systems

Abstract Governance reforms are required to establish adaptive and resilient urban water resource management that takes into account complexity, uncertainty and immediate and long term change. This paper details the outcomes of a qualitative, social science research project, drawing on insights from Australian urban water practitioners (n = 90) across three Australian cities to explore the effectiveness of governance reforms in the contemporary urban water context. The perceived effectiveness of current urban water governance strategies were assessed through the first application of a fit-for-purpose governance framework, which helps to assess whether the (anticipated) outcomes match the intended purposes of proposed and applied governance strategies. The research provides important insights regarding the need for a mix of centralised and decentralised, and formal and informal, governance approaches to support effective governance of water infrastructure during different stages of adapting to drought and transitioning to a water sensitive city that is resilient to immediate and gradual change. The research insights suggest that decentralised and informal governance approaches are particularly effective in early stages of transformation processes (i.e. adaptation and transition processes), whilst formal and centralised approaches become more effective during later stages of transformation. As such, we have identified a pattern of effective governance configurations during consecutive stages of transformation processes that could provide policy makers guidance in overcoming urban water governance challenges.

When Strategic Plans Fail to Lead. A Complexity Acknowledging Perspective on Decision-Making in Urban Development Projects—The Case of Kortrijk (Belgium)

Nowadays, cities formulate long-term strategies to address the challenges and opportunities they face. Numerous strategic plans or planning instruments are developed for this purpose. In this article, we would like to examine the role, impact and relevance of these types of plans in decision-making processes concerning urban development projects (UDPs) in the Flemish Region of Belgium. To what extent do strategic plans succeed in capturing and steering the complexity of spatial interventions in contemporary urban contexts? We argue that a complexity-acknowledging perspective provides a more realistic and adequate view here by seeing strategic plans as only one among many elements in the set of tangled inter- and intrastrategic processes which together determine UDPs. A comparative and qualitative case study was carried out in the city of Kortrijk. The decision-making of three UDPs was studied thoroughly. Interviewing key actors and analysing policy documents helped us to (re)construct the complex decision-making processes and to stipulate the meaning of all involved formal plans and planning tools.

Microcitizenships: Fractious Forms of Urban Belonging after Argentine Neoliberalism

AbstractTo explain cross‐class spatial relations in ‘post‐neoliberal’ Buenos Aires, this article develops the notion of microcitizenships, defined as group‐specific quasi‐legal relationships with the local state, entailing both recognition and service provision in order to grant exclusive yet temporary rights to particularized legitimate uses of urban space. This conceptualization contrasts in particular with prominent theorizations of liberal, insurgent and flexible citizenship. Microcitizenships capture the newly fractious, rather than merely fragmented, nature of social rights after the adoption of more inclusive and nationalist discourses in the recovery period following the neoliberal crisis of 2001–02. Argentina has been an icon of both neoliberal and post‐neoliberal globalization, making its capital city ideal for the study of changing forms of belonging in the new political–economic context. Taking three central neighborhoods redeveloped in the neoliberal period (1989–2001) which were landmarks of fragmentation, I find they are now characterized by clashes among groups negotiating very different claims of legitimate presence in the same sites. I use ethnographic and interview‐based evidence to outline three types of conflicting membership: ‘excessive’, ‘weekend’ and ‘transposable’ citizens. All employ post‐neoliberal idioms but invoke legitimizations specifically from disparate geographic scales to stake their claims. Thus, amid inclusionary rhetoric, ironically there are microcitizenships that embody spatio‐temporally circumscribed, precarious and especially fractious forms of belonging in the city. Closing considerations address how this concept resonates with a range of contemporary urban contexts.RésuméCet article explique les rapports spatiaux entre classes dans le Buenos Aires ‘post‐néolibéral’. Pour ce faire, il utilise la notion de micro‐citoyennetés, définie comme les relations quasi‐juridiques qu’un groupe spécifique entretient avec l'État local, ce qui suppose à la fois une reconnaissance et la fourniture de services afin que puissent être octroyés des droits exclusifs, mais temporaires, à un usage légitime et particularisé de l'espace urbain. Ce concept diffère notamment des principales théorisations de la citoyenneté libérale, ‘insurgée’ et ‘flexible’. Les micro‐citoyennetés restituent la dissension – plus que la simple fragmentation – qui caractérise les droits sociaux après que des discours prônant l’inclusion et le nationalisme ont été adoptés lors du redressement qui a suivi la crise du néolibéralisme de 2001–2002. L'Argentine a été une icône de la mondialisation néolibérale et post‐néolibérale, faisant de sa capitale un cas idéal pour étudier les formes évolutives d'appartenance dans le nouveau contexte politico‐économique. L'étude de trois quartiers du centre, réaménagés et symboliques de la fragmentation à l'époque néolibérale (1989–2001), révèle qu'ils se caractérisent à présent par des heurts entre groupes négociant des revendications très différentes d’une présence légitime dans des lieux identiques. Des éléments ethnographiques et issus d'entretiens permettent de déterminer trois types d’appartenance antagonistes: citoyens ‘sans bornes’, ‘pour le week‐end’ et ‘transposables’. Tous sont de style post‐néolibéral, mais invoquent des échelons géographiques différents pour justifier leur légitimité et leurs demandes. Ainsi, au milieu d'une rhétorique d'inclusion, on trouve paradoxalement des micro‐citoyennetés qui incarnent des formes d’appartenance à la ville qui sont à la fois circonscrites sur un plan spatio‐temporel, précaires et particulièrement acrimonieuses. Pour finir, sont abordées les manières dont ce concept s’accorde avec divers contextes urbains contemporains.

Vestiges of Desegregation: Superintendent Perspectives on Educational Inequality and (Dis)Integration in the Post–Civil Rights Era

The purpose of this article is to extend the growing counternarrative in education research concerning the negative consequences of school desegregation and its implications for urban education, educational leadership, and policy reform in the post—Civil Rights Era. Guided by qualitative and historical research methods, this article presents the perspectives of eight retired Black school superintendents concerning the goal of integration during the civil rights movement and its disintegration in contemporary urban contexts. Findings reveal that despite desegregation efforts, schools and school systems have never truly integrated and now face a 21st-century brand of educational inequality, what I describe in this article as vestiges of desegregation, which further undermine the educational opportunities and experiences of those students school desegregation efforts were arguably intended to serve.

Working from the Violent Centre: Survival Sex Work and Urban Aboriginality in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed

From the early 1970s until 2002, at least fifty-nine women--more than half of whom were Aboriginal, (1) and many of whom were street-level sex workers--disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown East Side. Their disappearances from within this small neighbourhood in what has been labelled Canada's poorest postal code were treated with little interest by Vancouver police and municipal officials for two and a half decades. In February 2002, a recently-formed joint RCMP-city police task force charged a Port Coquitlam farmer with the murder of seven of the missing women. At the time of writing, Robert Pickton has been convicted of murdering six of the missing women: Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin, Brenda Wolfe, Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, and Andrea Joesbury. Pickton's lawyers are appealing this conviction; if they fail, federal prosecutors will not try Pickton for the pending twenty additional counts of first-degree murder--a decision not without significant public controversy. To date, however, many of the disappeared women are yet to be accounted for. As the Vancouver investigation has unfolded (and as upwards of twenty more women are now missing from the same Vancouver streets), (2) a number of other serial kidnap and murder cases involving poor, racialized, and/or street-level sex workers have made headlines, particularly in Western Canada. In Edmonton, an RCMP and Edmonton police task force was formed in 2003 to investigate eighty-three cases, dating back to 1982, of murdered and disappeared women. A serial killer murdered four First Nations women and was suspected of killing at least three others in Saskatoon in the early 1990s. In addition, there have been a series of disappearances and violent murders in Winnipeg that police have only begun to investigate. Cases like these fuel the efforts of groups who struggle to combat the social, political, and economic forces that contribute to increasing extreme violence against sex workers in Canada. Although many of these groups regularly underscore the high number of First Nations women involved in the survival sex trade, (3) as well as the overrepresentation of Indigenous women among kidnap, assault, and murder victims in Canada, sex worker activism in Canada remains primarily a white enterprise. Even the briefest consideration of North America's colonial history provides many reasons why Indigenous women are overrepresented in inner-city populations of women who trade sex for dollar amounts which barely provide sustenance or to fund debilitating addictions. Such analyses also highlight a number of reasons for divisions between sex worker activists who work from a labour activist and/or communal human rights position and activists who foreground the role of state-sanctioned racism and colonial violence in populating the survival sex industry. The latter of these social movements--including the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC), the Aboriginal Women's Action Network (AWAN), the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF, which funds, among other significant initiatives, a shelter for First Nations women in downtown Montreal), and the NWAC-affiliated research group Sisters in Spirit--emphasizes the combined effects of class bias, misogyny, and culturally ingrained racism in the assault, rape, and murder of many survival sex workers. These organizations and the anti-violence, anti-poverty, and anti-racism initiatives with which they are involved thus insist that Indigenous sex workers suffer and die because they are Aboriginal women whose already precarious cultural status too often becomes difficult to navigate and survive in contemporary urban contexts. Significantly, however, representatives from groups like these often assert that prostitution causes rape, poverty, and violence for Aboriginal women. For example, in 2007, AWAN released a statement opposing the legalization of brothels in Vancouver (proposed in anticipation of the 2010 Olympics). In this statement, AWAN argues that [p]rostitution is inherently violent, [and is] merely an extension of the violence that most prostituted women experience as children. …

No Place like Home: Rooming Houses in Contemporary Urban Context

In this paper we connect existing work on rooming houses to literature dealing with the meaningful nature of ‘home’ and its impact on individuals' health and social well-being. We then examine the extent to which rooming houses provide low-income tenants with ‘homes’, drawing from in-depth interviews with rooming-house tenants living in Hamilton, a city of 450 000 people in southern Ontario, Canada. Our analysis raises concerns about the capacity of rooming houses to provide affordable and stable accommodation. Poor living conditions and poor relations with rooming-house landlords worked directly against the capacity of rooms to offer private, controllable spaces and a degree of ontological security. Analysis also raised concerns about rooming houses as sites for social relations. Many respondents saw rooming houses as unpredictable and sometimes unhealthy social spaces, forcing them to seek other environments to cultivate and sustain relationships with friends and family. In general, respondents' experiences point to the shortcomings of rooming houses as ‘home’ environments, with implications for the health and social lives of the tenant population. Conceptual and policy implications are discussed in conclusion.

Planning a Prosperous Sydney: The challenges of planning urban development in the new urban context

Since their post-war inception, Sydney's metropolitan plans have tended to be overtaken by the social, economic and environmental conditions they have had to confront. The depth and scope of Sydney's recent urban transformation threatens again to overtake metropolitan planning capacity creating, in the context of competitive globalisation, a potentially significant market disadvantage for the city, not to mention poor urban development outcomes. This paper reviews Sydney's post-war metropolitan planning strategies, examining the social and economic contexts and the policy paradigms in which they have been framed, in order to draw out the lessons to be learned from their successes and failures. We argue that future success in planning urban development will rely on richly informed and fine-grained understanding of the complex spatial outcomes of Sydney's ever-deeper global integration. Only such fine-grained understanding can empower metropolitan planning to be responsive to the evolving challenges of managing development in the contemporary urban context.

La rue, espace réservé : voituriers et vigiles dans les nouvelles zones de loisirs à Beyrouth

New actors are emerging as new leisure areas develop in post-war Beirut. Car parkers look after the vehicles of customers of bars and restaurants while private security guards protect the newly rebuild CBD. Besides their official functions, these actors seem to exercise a permanent controlling influence over public spaces. Their simple presence on the streets provides a permanent reminder of the kind of population which comes to these areas as well as the social rules that this population is expected to abide by. This continued presence of private actors in charge of public spaces is not new in Beirut ; on the contrary/ it reflects policies of social control apparent before and during the war. However, by adapting these measures to the contemporary urban leasure context, Beirut seems to demonstrate its willingness to modernise. Security norms found increasingly in world cities are applied efficiently, going beyond the social demand for security and creating an important social and cultural segregation.

Regional Culture and Urban Agriculturalists of Mexico City

Keywords: rural economy, urban economy, urbanization, Mexico, agriculture, technology, labour IntroductionThe need for innovative and coherent research centered on the relationship between human activity and environment has increased as ecological problems intensify worldwide. Particularly, the processes that occur dynamically in modern societies are testing the vulnerability of social groups to respond to economic, environmental and cultural changes. Anthropologists have used the spatial dimension of cultural processes in studying developmental transitions in societies. The construction of theoretical schemes for regional studies has been useful to elucidate relationships among cultural systems, economic changes and ecological processes (Altamirano and Hirabayashi, 1991; Halperin, 1989; Hilhorst, 1990; Orlove, 1980).The theoretical and practical issues of regional studies may illuminate the economic and ecological variations which allow us to evaluate particular hypotheses concerning sociocultural change, space and time in local populations (Ellen, 1979; Van Young, 1992). An examination of cultural systems must include the overlapping of the infinite number of continually generating cultural systems and the constantly changing hierarchical relationships between them, which result from differential access to a wide variety of regional resources. Regional territory is the space of discourse that serves as a domain and an object of economic relationships, political practices and cultural systems, where the systems of interconnections are thought of as a hierarchy (Lomnitz-Adler, 1991). Thus, this interdependent system itself has been based on systems of unequal exchange of goods, labour, resources and capital.It is common to think of Mexico City only as a macro urban settlement with monumental problems pushing its population toward major environmental and economic crisis. However, if one approaches this ancient city from the south, patches of rural landscapes can be seen within its urban hinterland. This is notable in the vegetable and ornamental flower growing area of Xochimilco and the corn-cactus belt of Milpa Alta, which still convey a classic rural environment. The social reality of these regions is demonstrated in the interplay between the segments of rural society that are connected to both the family-based agrarian system and the urban wage economy.Agricultural production in both Xochimilco and Milpa Alta face essentially the same problem in maintaining agronomic and economic strategies near or within urban concentrations. Today, urban agriculturalists can earn wages in factories, work for governmental institutions, sell agricultural products at urban markets or cultivate ancient agricultural land as typical peasants. Urban agriculturalists' understanding of the regional landscape, the dynamics of Mexico City, the state, national and international economics and politics, religion, community, family, friends and self is mediated by cultural systems, which are reproduced by agricultural practices and urban routines, knowledge, language and identities of a particular regional setting.Urban agriculturalists of Mexico City are principally sojourners who traverse regional frontiers as easily as they traverse the conceptual boundaries fabricated by social scientists. The cultural orientation of these urban-rural scenarios and their social structure is ambiguous and contradictory from the perspective of most theoretical frameworks. To study the nature of the urban agriculture framework of Mexico City requires the depiction of distinctive types of social organization and cultural systems. This requires an elucidation of the regional realm more thoroughly than other studies of contemporary urban agriculture contexts (Mougeot, 2000; Smit et al., 1996), which have originated from either the perspective of urban studies or that of agricultural technology. Perhaps because conventional sociohistorical analysis depends on a clear demarcation of agrarian and industrial societies, few studies have been able to capture the dynamic interplay and complex characteristics of the urban agriculturalists' social life. …

Gifting and receiving: Anglo-Indian charity and its beneficiaries in Madras

This article attempts to further the study of gifting in India by examining both the donors and recipients of charity in a contemporary urban context. Considering the case of Anglo-Indians in Madras, many of whom have been the objects of philanthropy since the colonial period, it explores various dimensions of this activity today. For one thing, it notes the highly personalised character of charity, which contributes to the definition and realisation of a moral community of benefactors and their beneficiaries. For another, it seeks to demonstrate how the relief of poverty is a vital ingredient in the definition of Anglo-Indian leadership—as of leadership in India generally—and occupies a significant place in the discourse of community politics. Finally, it seeks to take account of the recipients of philanthropy, exploring some of the ways in which the ideologies and practices surrounding almsgiving bothfragment and unite the poor in their distress, and asks how those in a relationship of almost total economic subjection attempt to assert some control over the conditions of their dependency.

Race, Gender, and Educational Leadership: Perspectives From African American Principals

African American elementary school principals in an urban district were interviewed about the impact of their race and gender statuses on their views of themselves in their administrative roles. The data were examined within the historical framework of roles African American principals have played, and the contemporary social conditions under which they work. Race and gender statuses were important in shaping these principals' social constructions of their roles as administrators and their views of their mission vis-a-vis their students. Furthennore, race and gender were integrated in these respondents' self-perceptions. The responses obtained in this study were related to historical accounts of African American administrators and illustrated similarities in role perceptions across time and the necessity to respond to contemporary urban contexts.

Global cities: real‐time … and Byzantine

What should we think of the global city as an information or virtual city? It has quickly and easily become a received idea. The advocates of the new virtual urbanism try to impress us with the social and political potential of ‘real‐time’ cities and ‘electronic spaces’. They tell us how new technological systems can radically transform urban life and experience. But, Kevin Robins asks, what kind of vision or Utopia is this? Is it in fact one of regimented identities rather than one of the free flow of a diversity of identities? What sense does it make? And how does it correspond to the realities of global transformation in contemporary urban contexts?