Critical Urban Studies Research Articles

Blinders of extreme heat adaptation: uneven urban development and the reproduction of vulnerabilities

ABSTRACT Despite its deadly nature, extreme heat has received fragmented and scattered responses in cities, often overlooking the crucial social and equity components. Dominant adaptation approaches have paid little attention to chronic socio-economic vulnerabilities to heat stress, resulting in a lack of strategic planning to address them. Building upon critical urban studies and adaptation scholarship, this article examines how the dynamics of urban climate adaptation in the Global North have sidestepped the root causes of heat vulnerability and their (re)production in past, present and future practices of uneven urban development and planning under austerity. We investigate this empirically in attending to the framing of adaptation, the instruments used and the biases they introduce in Montreal (Canada), as well the perception from planners and community groups regarding their agency in responding to extreme heat. We contribute to the literature in analysing how the urban governance of adaptation in urban planning tends to silence the social production of vulnerabilities by three intersecting processes: the biases of instruments used, the unacknowledged legacies of uneven urban development, and the lacking recognition and support for community organisations caring practices.

URBAN PLANNING PARADOXES AND SOCIOSPATIAL FRAGMENTATION: The Superblock Barcelona Case (2016–2023)

AbstractBarcelona is an interesting living laboratory for studying the role of the local scale in urban planning. Since the early stages of what is known as the Barcelona Model (1979–1994), analysis of Barcelona's urban planning based on the creation of public spaces at a local scale has become a priority. More recently, micro‐scale urban planning has become dominant in addressing global challenges such as climate change within the framework of the New Urban Age paradigm. In this article we analyse the paradoxes between the ideology (local‐centrism) and practices (tactical urbanism) of this paradigm, based on an original perspective of the Superblock Barcelona project, contrary to the criticisms levelled against this project so far, which emanate mainly from economic lobbies in Barcelona. While cities seek to tackle global‐scale climate change, urban planning is being increasingly restricted to acting at local or micro scales. These paradoxes lead to sociospatial fragmentation and denial of other urban‐phenomenon scales, such as the metropolitan/regional one. We frame this article within the critical urban studies perspective, following the planetary urbanization hypothesis. The analysis of the Superblock Barcelona project is based on the logic of ‘making cities by making less city’ and focuses on how the local scale, the districts and neighbourhoods ‘burst against the city’, questioning the very right to the city.

Mobilizing alternative urbanisms in the semiperipheral smart city agenda

ABSTRACT Within critical urban studies, this inquiry examines how mobile policies arriving in a global semiperiphery contribute to developing socially just smart city paradigms. By provincializing smart city research and expanding the North–South dichotomy by analyzing a “South of the West,” the inquiry focuses on Lisbon as a semiperipheral city. It adopts a policy mobility approach and an analytical framework of smart city paradigms, combining thematic document analysis and in-depth interviews to examine the case study. The inquiry engages with local historical transformations and temporally analyzes Lisbon’s smart city agenda representing its development phases and exploring the mobility of ideas and paradigm shifts. Due to historical challenges reflected by the peripheralization of Southern Europe, local arrangements have led to political-economic and social transformations that, as the study argues, are potentialized by policy mobilities and entail smart city paradigm shifts towards social justice. Therefore, hybridizing new and old, emerging and established urban agendas provides alternatives to replicating neoliberal policies.

Interrogating narratives of urban change: disinvestment and development in two neighborhoods in Baltimore, MD

ABSTRACT Popular press and academic narratives of neighborhood change frequently conflate the experiences of different non-white populations in working-class and poor areas, presenting them as detrimental to urban development and at risk of displacement and eviction. Such narratives provide justification for uneven disinvestment and overlook the variegated ways in which urban development strategies can be exploitative. Mislabeling urban change as gentrification and grouping multiple racial/ethnic groups can lead to inappropriate policy and misaligned forms of intervention. Building on arguments within Black geographies and critical urban studies, we seek to disentangle how Black and Latine/x populations are differently positioned in urban narratives of dis/investment. Combining archival analysis with data from the US Census, we analyze two formerly redlined neighborhoods in Baltimore whose development trajectories significantly diverged. We demonstrate that inequality is not simply due to the continued effects of historical redlining, but instead part of ongoing rounds of uneven dis/investment. We expose how racial capitalism exploits racial difference between non-white groups to extract profits. By focusing on specific neighborhoods, we enrich research interrogating how racial and ethnic hierarchies relationally shape urban change, making visible the necessity of spatially-specific contingent analyses.

Settler urbanism, emotional geographies, and Indigenous planning in Ecuadorian Amazonia

Affects and emotions serve as tools of governance in settler urbanism, facilitating colonial dispossession and control of Indigenous land. Drawing on modernist logics, housing projects in indigenous territory seek to instill fixity and urban orders on mobile Indigenous populations through the management of fear and uncertainty. Here we examine the production of emotions associated with the development of the Pañacocha Millennium Community, a public housing project in the Petroamazonas oilfields of what was once Indigenous Kichwa territory in Ecuadorian Amazonia. We draw on research in Indigenous planning, the geographies of emotion, and critical urban studies to demonstrate the emotional impacts of the imposition of colonial governmental logics of housing production in Indigenous lands. At the same time, we examine the limitations of settler urbanist governance through emotion by documenting the embodied Indigenous relations with land, housing, and mobility captured in the concept territorio cuerpo-tierra, which has led to various forms of resistance and avoidance to the housing project. The case of the Pañacocha Millennium Community illuminates the role of emotion in urban planning and settler urbanism, in particular, and contributes to emerging work in Indigenous and decolonial planning.

Plantation Technologies

In this article we investigate plantation agriculture as a technology aimed at extracting natural resources, utilising unpaid labour, and installing regulatory authority. Using the oil palm plantation territories of Johor State in Malaysia – a core zone of palm oil production, manufacturing and export – as a case study, we ask how more-than-human assemblages enabled the expansion and refinement of oil palm plantations in Malaysia and contributed to the material transformation of the territory. We also explore how plantations can be mobilised as an analytical device to study the urbanisation of territory through agro-industrial production. To explore those questions, we present three episodes of more-than-human involvement in assembling oil palm plantation territories in Johor. Through the conceptual frame of the operationalisation of territory, we bring into dialogue literature on the Plantationocene with critical urban studies and the history of urbanisation.

Why engaged critical urban research must place scholar policy activism at its core

I welcome and endorse Loretta Lees' call for a reconstituted critical urban studies tradition predicated upon polyvocal, intersectoral and co-produced research, dialogues and dialoguing and concurrent and compounding critical intelligences. In this short commentary, I make the case for placing scholar policy activism at the heart of such a tradition. I explore how and why critical urban research has come to view executive power as its arch nemesis. I argue that continued estrangement and jousting between the architects of radical praxis and those of policy practice is indefensible. I scope the contours of a new generation of policy engaged critical scholarship. We can no longer in good conscience fire missiles from inside the ivory tower and outside of the governing tent in the hope that better cities will result. If we are to be serious about ‘shaking up the city’, we will need to work with and on sources of power – to immerse ourselves in the epistemic communities which enjoy dominion over policy registers – and recalibrate the urban ‘partition of the sensible’.

Urban Theory by and for Whom? Engaged Research, Authorship and Transformation Beyond the Academy

This paper engages with Loretta Lees‘ suggestion that this journal include research collaborators beyond the academy as commentators in its urban dialogues. In it, I highlight the contortions and contradictions involved in extracting individual scholarly outputs from collaborative research, drawing on my experiences as a doctoral researcher in the UK. These challenges are intimately entangled with key questions posed by Loretta about who counts as an urban scholar or theorist, and what urban theor(ies) are – or might be – for. The difficulties involved in publishing engaged and collaborative research in academic formats contribute to its marginalision within critical urban studies, robbing the discipline of the particular understandings and possibilities it can open up. Making space for engaged dialogue beyond the academy within this journal can help to open up the production and circulation of urban knowledge to a greater diversity of perspectives and interests, creating a more hospitable environment for engaged, collaborative and activist research within the academy. Such a shift invites authors to bring their multiple subjectivities and identities into urban dialogues – as modelled by Loretta – challenging conventions designed to separate and elevate academic knowledge from the diverse others it depends upon. Extending urban dialogue to non-academic collaborators can therefore help to connect critical urban research with the communities and interests in whose name it claims to operate.

Engaged dialogue through data: For methodological pluralism in critical urban studies

This commentary builds on Loretta Lees’ concept of engaged dialogue in critical urban studies to argue for more engaged dialogue through data. This type of dialogue would entail building critical theory from a more diverse and nuanced base of information, using mixed or plural methodologies. It could mean communicating with, about and through data with public-facing tools that incorporate participatory elements through the user interface. It would also require ongoing critical interpretation of the politics and political economy of urban data.

Citizen‐rentier‐ship: Delivering the Undocumented to Labour Platforms in Paris

AbstractPlatform food delivery workers have been under much scrutiny over the last couple of years. Undocumented riders, and their recent strikes and protests in France, have not received as much attention as other issues regarding platform labour (contract work, algorithmic control, surveillance). This article follows fieldwork conducted in Paris and interviews with food couriers. Building on work by critical urban studies, migration studies and science and technology studies, this research puts forward citizen‐rentier‐ship, a tool to understand how multiple parties profit from aspects of precarious status. Interviews with undocumented couriers who worked in Paris highlight how the subletting of accounts, the complicit role of the state, the hypocrisy of employers and the interdependency with the “regularised” put undocumented couriers in hyper‐precarious situations. This article concludes that labour laws, misclassification and migration policies are at the centre of the struggles of Paris’ delivery workers and that they need changes.

The Economic Politics of Anti‐Displacement Struggle: Connecting Diverse and Community Economies Research with Critical Urban Studies on the Carpenters Estate, London

AbstractThis article explores the economic politics of anti‐displacement struggle, bringing into conversation critical urban studies and diverse and community economies research. It draws on my research and collaboration with a community planning group which emerged from residents’ and businesses’ struggle against displacement on the Carpenters Estate in Newham, London in 2012/13. My analysis makes visible the ways in which anti‐displacement struggle both animates and limits the production of new economic subjectivities, language, and possibilities for collective action. Ideas and tools from diverse and community economies research—lightly held and adapted for specific struggles and contexts—can help to support and strengthen these messy and fragile economic politics. The article advances diverse and community economies research on antagonism and the diversity of capitalism and contributes to re‐orienting critical urban research towards the production of economic alternatives.

Comparing Hybrid Urbanisms in the Global South: Water Delivery Configurations in Peru and Ghana

Urban development processes in the Global South (and North) are often described as characterized by formal and informal practices of different actors and their respective material realities. In critical urban studies, the disposition for this binary conception of formal and informal urbanisms has been discussed for many years. To a certain extent, these sometimes align rather problematically with contrasting notions of the “structural” versus the “everyday.” In this article, we explore an understanding of formal and informal urban practices (and respectively “structure” and “everyday”) as always interrelated, and we develop a methodology for a comparative examination of such hybrid urbanisms. In doing so, we address a missing link in the surging theoretical debate on comparative/southern urbanisms, which has rarely been substantiated by methodological explorations. The adapted concept of “delivery configurations” combines analyses of actor networks, material realities, rules and regulations, discourses, and heterogenous arrays of urban practices of negotiating these. However, bringing together local particularities and structural commonalities and exploring their interrelation only provides a basis for understanding case-specific complexities. We argue that embedding the analysis in a multi-scalar comparative framework can further its analytical rather than descriptive attributes and provide deeper insights into issues such as social inequality. To illustrate our methodological contribution, we provide first insights from a comparative research project of water delivery in different neighbourhoods in the secondary cities of Sunyani (Ghana) and Arequipa (Peru). We highlight the practical challenges of comparing diverse urban contexts and examining the rather complex relationships between infrastructure delivery, urban development, and social inequality.

Tourism-driven displacement in Naples, Italy

The contribution examines the case of Naples and the impacts of mass tourism on its historical centre. Naples is the third largest city in Italy and the first in the south. The case is presented within the framework of critical urban studies that have delved into the rise of displacement and overtourism in Southern European cities. The paper aims to contribute to the debate, deepening the case of a city that has been less considered, although it has been severely affected by tourism-driven displacement in recent times. The case is presented through quantitative data, maps and short interview excerpts. The findings suggest the need for urgent urban planning intervention in order to avoid the expulsion of inhabitants. In particular, it argues the importance of addressing the issue through land use policy.

Claiming the right to the city beyond the city: the role of agrarian social movements

ABSTRACT The Right to the City concept extends beyond cities to include broader urban-rural dialectical processes. This paper proposes that by analyzing claims to transform spaces as struggles to reshape underlying processes, it is possible to identify shared struggles between movements seeking to transform urban and agrarian spaces. The paper examines the role of agrarian social movements, such as La Via Campesina, in reconfiguring urbanization through their claim for food sovereignty. It builds on critical urban and agrarian studies to offer a process-based understanding of the commonalities between seemingly disconnected claims to reshape urban and agrarian spaces.

Teacher Activism in “Terrible Cities”: Chronicles of Agency and Resistance in Phoenix and Milwaukee

This article combines data from two research projects to examine teacher activism in two places sometimes framed as “terrible cities.” Drawing from critical place inquiry, critical urban studies, and border thinking, we analyze media discourses and interviews with two Latinx teacher activists. Our analysis shows that the focal teachers explicitly rejected colonizing global designs by engaging in context-specific and multifaceted praxis to envision and enact alternative urban placemaking. Extending teacher activism scholarship beyond global cities, we contribute to educational research on these under-documented places and add to the growing body of research that centers Latinx teacher-activists’ agency and resistance.

Autistic cities: critical urbanism and the politics of neurodiversity

Autism and neurodiversity are key topics in current public debate and in the social sciences. A vast multidisciplinary literature has explored spatial dimensions of neurodiversity, particularly by analyzing autistic experiences in private and public spaces and the design of autistic-friendly environments. Building on this literature and by presenting my personal experience as the father of an autistic child, this paper explores connections between critical urban studies and the social and political dimensions of neurodiversity. Focusing on different meanings, positions, and discourses shaping autistic experiences and neurodivergent identities in the capitalist city, the paper draws on the notions of ‘queering’ and ‘cripping’ autism. Lastly, the paper presents four tentative propositions about autistic cities, with two goals in mind: imagining more just, liveable and empowering cities, and suggesting that critical urban studies can themselves be stimulated by the encounter with neurodiversities.

A critical organizational history of city margins in the Global South

PurposeThe city of Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará in the north-east of Brazil, presents a paradox as a present-day tourist destination, while also marked by features and processes characteristic of cities in the Global South, such as high levels of social inequality with fragmented urban margins and vulnerabilities. This research problematizes the idea of “historical ruins” proposed by Walter Benjamin as a viable way to understand how the organization process of today's city margins can be “denaturalized” by the past. The objective of this research is to assess how the urban margins of the city were organized as a history of resistance.Design/methodology/approachIn theoretical terms, this research links critical urban studies with critical approaches to organizational history (COH) based on Walter Benjamin's philosophical concepts of “ruins” and “progress”. The historical and archival methodology, consisting of 193 documents, suggests the existence of a philosophical–historical nexus that helps explain the spatial fragmentation of the city, and especially the urban margins in the western region of Fortaleza.FindingsThe Benjaminian notion of “historical ruins” has been exemplified by the Brazilian government practices confining migrants fleeing drought in internment camps on the margins of the city of Fortaleza in three waves beginning in 1877, 1915 and 1932 respectively. The effects of such confinement policies put into practice in the name of “progress” influenced the organization of large urban spaces on the city's margins, whereas on the other hand, the analyses advanced in this research reflect on alternatives to re-frame the history of the organization of the margins of Fortaleza through a set of practices of resistance.Originality/valueBased on the concept of “denaturalization”, and through re-activation of the memory of a circumstantial past, the gaze of the “ruins”, as represented by the belief in “progress” addressed in official reports of government confinement policies, spaces of resistance have emerged where new possibilities for the future of the city can be imagined.

Bad or worse? Applying critical theory to explore the impacts of Payatas dumpsite closure on the former waste pickers.

Numerous garbage dumpsites worldwide have been closed down to address the safety, health and environmental hazards facing waste pickers, such as potential landsides, diseases and pollution. As a result, the environment surrounding the (former) waste pickers may have been safer and cleaner. While the closure of garbage dumpsites may be an act of social justice to protect waste pickers, however, in some cases, the incomes and living standards of former waste pickers who continue to reside at these sites have been aggravated. Drawing on critical theory, and using observations and interviews, this case study examined the post-dumpsite-closure situation of Payatas in the Philippines. This study augments previous research on critical urban and regional studies through the presentation of a meta-critical theory by expanding, critiquing and reconceptualizing critical theory to address the problematic post-dumpsite situation created through the closure of the dumpsite.

Entrenched provisionality

This article explores practices of community-based energy justice activists in Johannesburg. Against the background of municipal corporatization of electricity delivery in the wake of the postapartheid state’s neoliberal policy turn, residents of the urban periphery organize to ward off cost-recovery measures and illegally (re)connect to the grid. Informed by theories of critical urban studies on the South, this article situates activists’ practices historically and discusses the limits of their strategic claims with a view to their inextricable relation to the state.

Dance with Glauthoritarian Urbanization: An Entrepreneurial Megacity in the Making through the Lenses of Civic Organizations

How do formal civic organizations shape—and how are they shaped by—the making and transformation of urban space? Place-oriented civil society research emphasizes the central role of civic organizations in producing and changing unequal political and economic orders of cities but largely ignores the intercity connections and competitions that contribute to these local civic dynamics in a global capitalist system. Critical urban studies, in contrast, recognizes the influences of global capitalism and local city boosterism on city development but overlooks the paradoxical roles of formal civic organizations. Bringing the two scholarly camps in dialogue, this article explores how formal civic organizations are situated in entrepreneurial city-making in the Global South, when city governments promote their competitive advantage by boosting “social innovation” through nonprofits. Drawing on survey, interview, and social media data from a random sample of nonprofits in Shenzhen, China, our preliminary results highlight that the Shenzhen municipal government’s agenda to promote both global capitalism and authoritarian rules have shaped the urban spaces where nonprofits form and operate. In turn, nonprofits mediate the negotiations between the local state, market, and urban residents to create, transform, and reinvent unequal physical, social, and digital urban space in this Silicon Valley of China.