Critical Urban Studies Research Articles

"Urban renewal with dancing and music"?

In 2012, an urban renewal project in Eskişehir, Turkey, was initiated with claims of “festive renewal,” challenging the theories of critical urban studies that emphasize the disruptive effects of such projects. Built on a discussion about hegemony, which deploys consent and dissent in its organization, this article ethnographically investigates the tactics and strategies of the renewal machine that mobilized and co-opted parts of the locals into the project while invoking layers of dissent, distrust, and discomfort. The article discusses how historically built political, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities were efficiently detected, reconstituted, and put into the service of the renewal machine while revealing tension and dynamism behind the “festive renewal.” It shows a fragility of hegemony that is neither a given nor a completed template.

“Urban renewal with dancing and music”?

In 2012, an urban renewal project in Eskişehir, Turkey, was initiated with claims of “festive renewal,” challenging the theories of critical urban studies that emphasize the disruptive effects of such projects. Built on a discussion about hegemony, which deploys consent and dissent in its organization, this article ethnographically investigates the tactics and strategies of the renewal machine that mobilized and co-opted parts of the locals into the project while invoking layers of dissent, distrust, and discomfort. The article discusses how historically built political, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities were efficiently detected, reconstituted, and put into the service of the renewal machine while revealing tension and dynamism behind the “festive renewal.” It shows a fragility of hegemony that is neither a given nor a completed template.

Moving past the sustainable perspectives on transport: An attempt to mobilise critical urban transport studies with the right to the city

The contemporary urban transport debate is increasingly versed in terms of “sustainable” development, placing social and environmental issues on the agenda. However, despite their heterogeneity, sustainable perspectives seldom engage with the explicitly political issues that shape the relationship between transport and urban development. In this paper, we propose to re-connect urban transport with political economic considerations, and thus to mobilise and strengthen “critical” perspectives on urban transport. We develop a framework for studying transport policies inspired by Henri Lefebvre's conceptualisation of “the right to the city”. The framework is illustrated with the empirical example of a “pedestrianisation” project in Brussels, a salient case of a “sustainable” transport policy. We demonstrate how ostensibly progressive intentions in terms of challenging local mobility paradigms do not necessarily translate into participative and transformative practices. Instead, they often embrace the established policy-makers, leave local power relations largely unaltered, support elite entrepreneurial agendas, and obfuscate the socio-spatially uneven landscapes of contemporary cities. We thus highlight the urgency of re-politicising urban transport theory and practice by seeking and revealing political economic choices, contradictions and conflicts that underpin transport policies interwoven with urban development dynamics.

Insurgent planning?

Under what conditions, planning can be transformative? While also acknowledging Critical Urban Studies’ general skepticism around the transformative power of urban planning policies, this article reflects on the possibilities of planning in facilitating enduring urban change. It does so by scrutinizing the Brazilian process of institutionalization of the notion of the Right to the City (RTTC) and its effects on the daily lives of vulnerable residents of the city of Fortaleza. Using the theorectical lenses of Insurgent Planning literature, the research offers some insights for examining the contradictory processes of rights based inclusion and material exclusion. On one side, it reveals an association of RTTC planning policies with neoliberal ideologies neutralizing the political gains of earlier urban social movements. On the other side, having residents check on the outcomes of state practices and adopting an attitude of not giving up on political confrontation, when deemed necessary, has proven an efficient way to materialize the redistribution of urban resources toward the excluded. The fidings are grounded in six years of field research on/about informal residents’ struggle for adequate living conditions in a peripheral region of the city called Grande Bom Jardim.

Class Monopoly Rent and the Redevelopment of Portland's Pearl District

AbstractThis study examines the role of class monopoly rent in shaping the spatial form and pattern of urban redevelopment processes in the contemporary neoliberal city. Since an initial flourishing literature during the 1970s and 1980s, urban land rent theory has fallen from the analytic radar of critical urban studies since the early 1990s, with the influence of class monopoly rent often considered an aberration of how capitalist real estate markets normally operate, if not rejected. Consequently, class monopoly rent has never been systematically elaborated. Based on an empirical analysis of Portland's Pearl District, this study suggests that the influence of class monopoly rent in contemporary processes of urban redevelopment is far more pervasive than often recognised, representing a “standard institutional practice” that is endemic (rather than aberrational) to the working of neoliberal urban governing regimes, and embeds in the social and physical landscape in a multiplicity of ways.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJudit Bodnár is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She teaches classes on urban theory and history, the structure and infrastructure of global modernity, and comparative thinking. Author of Fin de Millénaire Budapest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and coeditor of Critical Urban Studies Reader (Budapest: L’Harmattan), she has most recently edited a Critical Discussion Forum on 1968 and written about Eastern Europe and 1968 as a “global moment” (“Making a Long Story Longer: Eastern Europe and 1968 as a Global Moment, Fifty Years Later,” Slavic Review 77, no. 4 [2018]: 875–80).Martin Giraudeau is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Sciences Po, in Paris, and a researcher in the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations at CNRS. He has published articles on the history of business plans, the invention of entrepreneurship, and the roles of accounting in organizations and society. He recently coedited, with Frédéric Graber, a volume on the modern history of projects: Les Projets: Une histoire politique (16e–21e siècles) (Paris: Presses des Mines, 2018).Michael McCarthy is an assistant professor of sociology at Marquette University. There he writes and teaches on the state, capitalism, and social theory. His recent book is Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal, published with Cornell University Press in 2017. The project he is currently undertaking explores the politics of public finance.Ricardo Noronha is a researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea (NOVA FCSH), where he completed a doctorate on the nationalization of the bank system during the Carnation Revolution. He is coeditor of Greves e conflitos sociais em Portugal no Século XX (Lisbon: Colibri, 2012) and author of A banca ao serviço do povo. Política e Economia durante o PREC (Lisbon: Imprensa de História Contemporânea, 2018). His research topics include political economy, social conflicts, and critical theory.Toulouse Antonin Roy is a PhD candidate in the history department at the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation examines the history of the Taiwan camphor industry and its impact on the dispossession of the island’s Indigenous peoples during the Japanese period. He holds a master’s degree in history and East Asian studies from McGill University. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 6, Number 1Spring 2019 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702608 © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Be a Little Careful: Women, Violence, and Performance in India

In this article Swati Arora analyzes a contemporary Indian feminist performance, Thoda Dhyaan Se (A Little Carefully, 2013), by framing it in the spatial ecosystem of the city of Delhi and exploring its engagement with feminist discourse and the national imaginary of India. It highlights the workings of the cultural economy of the city, which is defined by its spatial contours as well as the privileges of caste, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, and at the same time explores the heterogeneous nature of the country's feminist movement through an intersectional perspective. Swati Arora argues that the concerns raised by Thoda Dhyaan Se are limited to urban, middle-class, and upper-caste women and overlook the oppressive realities of women from non-urban, lower-class, and lower-caste backgrounds. With conversations around gender focused through campaigns like #MeToo and #TImesUp, it is important to contextualize the voices that are articulated and those that are excluded. Swati Arora is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her work exists at the intersections of theatre and performance, feminist theory, critical urban studies, post/de-colonial theory, and visual cultures. She completed her PhD at the University of Exeter and is a coconvenor of the International Federation of Theatre Research.

Privatización del espacio público verde en la era neoliberal. El Club Tequendama en Cali, Colombia

Desde finales de la década de 1980 las dinámicas de mercado que el modelo neoliberal ha incorporado en la gestión, organización y planificación de las ciudades han puesto en riesgo la permanencia del espacio público verde. Este ámbito de gran importancia para la calidad de vida ciudadana ha sido susceptible a transformaciones que vulneran el carácter de uso público de dichos lugares, lo que ha derivado en procesos de privatización, pérdida y mercantilización. En este marco, el presente artículo busca explicar, a través de un estudio de caso, cómo es privatizada un área verde pública en Cali por un reconocido Club en la década de 1990 y, con base en ello, se indaga cuáles actores y qué instrumentos promovieron la privatización del lugar. Para el análisis de este proceso se tiene como punto de partida el debate actual de los estudios urbanos críticos sobre la forma como el neoliberalismo ha moldeado las ciudades a favor de lógicas mercantiles, afectando los espacios colectivos que estructuran la ciudad, poniendo en evidencia tensiones urbanas referentes al control y usufructo del suelo urbano por cuenta, en este caso, de grupos con poder sociopolítico y económico.

Urban Intensities. The Urbanization of the Iberian Mediterranean Coast in the Light of Nighttime Satellite Images of the Earth

The contribution shares the approach of critical urban studies that have conceptualized urbanization more as a process than as a sum of spatial forms. Thus, the contribution studies the urbanization process not only from the point of view of the physical occupation of land but also considers changes in the intensity of the uses of space. To fulfill this aim, the new sources of nocturnal satellite images are particularly useful. These allow us to observe the intensity of urban uses both in terms of their distribution over space and their recurrence over time. The research focuses on the Iberian Mediterranean coast and permits the verification of the intensity of the urban uses of the space for the whole of this area and their seasonal variations throughout the year. The source of the study are the nighttime satellite images of the Earth for the 2012–2017 period from the NASA SNPP satellite equipped with the VIIRS-DNB instrument. By establishing a threshold of urban light the research shows that those districts with the greatest extensions of urban light do not necessarily correspond with the most densely populated areas. Similarly the absence of urban light does not necessarily indicate the absence of urban uses. Finally, the variations of intensity of light prove to be a good indicator of seasonal variations of activity in tourist areas.

Refugiados urbanos: política, polícia e resistência nas fronteiras da cidade

Resumo Mais da metade dos refugiados no mundo encontra-se nas cidades. Como os debates críticos sobre a questão urbana dialogam com as temáticas recorrentes do campo de estudos sobre refúgio? Esse artigo busca promover um movimento preliminar de mapeamento de duas leituras prevalentes da questão dos refugiados urbanos, notadamente atreladas aos temas de proteção e às práticas de fronteirização e de resistência. De um lado, discute-se a cidade e o refúgio como experiências fortemente controladas e disciplinadas por aparatos institucionais, entendidas assim como dinâmicas de 'policiamento'. De outro, lê-se o urbano e a experiência do refúgio como espaços de transformação e de afirmação subjetiva da liberdade, delimitadas por processos de politização. A partir de exemplos, o artigo denota as possibilidades abertas pela inserção do urbano como dimensão central da condição refugiada contemporânea.

Social sustainability as a challenge for urban scholars

Urban sustainability is an increasingly popular term used by scientists and policymakers from all disciplines, increasingly without any reference to the tradition of critical urban studies. It is often observed that the social pillar is missing, if sustainability is understood via the ‘three-legged stool’ concept encompassing social, economic and environmental dimensions. With a few notable exceptions, there appears to be a lack of interest also within urban scholarship to use the term ‘social sustainability’ to address this gap, although critical urban scholars are productive in the critique of sustainability as a social and political construct. Drawing on the idea of a politics of knowledge, this paper points to political, institutional and conceptual factors that have limited the purchase of social sustainability in research. These factors are rooted in sustainability being predominantly understood as an environmental concern, and a culture that may marginalise research subscribing to a post-positivist epistemology. This article asks whether the social pillar of sustainability could offer a discursive and symbolic tool for researchers to make the case for a critical urban epistemology in interdisciplinary research environments.

Jenseits von schwäbischen Spätzlemanufakturen und kiezigen Kneipen – polit-ökonomische Perspektiven auf Gentrifizierung

Within public discourse, many journalists and other opinion makers often blame students, artists and hipsters as driving forces behind the displacement of working class households. Contrary to these popular explanation patterns, the essay argues that gentrification is a class struggle between those at risk of displacement and the agents of capital. To understand this struggle and the deeper causes of gentrification, critical urban studies offer a range of much more conclusive theoretical approaches and concepts – such as the rent gap theory, David Harvey’s urban political economy, and the neoliberalization of housing provision – to explain displacement processes, to reveal the fundamental social power relations, and to suggest strategies for resistance and political alternatives.

Placing Transport Workers on the Agenda: The Conflicting Logics of Governing Mobility on Bishkek's Marshrutkas

AbstractTransport workers are conspicuously absent from both mobilities and urban studies literature. This paper therefore starts out with a double critique. First, transport workers, primarily drivers, are largely disregarded in mobilities and urban transport research. Second, the literature we find on transport workers—mostly based in empirical settings in the global South—remains outside recent and ongoing debates in critical urban transport studies. Providing empirical insights from post‐Soviet Central Asia, this paper strives to close these gaps and delve into the struggles and cleavages that structure informal transport workers’ positions and livelihoods. We argue that the diverse and contradictory logics that govern urban mobility affect the livelihoods and working conditions of informal transport workers, as well as their choices and motivations. These, in turn, significantly shape mobility provision, in terms of urban transport's (lack of) affordability, accessibility, convenience and safety.

Foreign in a domestic sense: Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and paradoxes in critical urban studies

The 2017 Puerto Rican debt crisis is as instructive as it is sad, reflective of the familiar pressures of late modern capitalism (namely neoliberalisation, financialisation, crisis, and austerity) as well as its own unique dynamics percolating through four hundred years of colonialism and a century of legal subjugation to Washington, DC. Neither one-off explanations of fiscal crisis nor casual conflation with other cases suffice to adequately account for this, or any other, public sector debt crises. Puerto Rico is both foreign and domestic, it is neither state nor municipality but its bonds are treated as such, it reflects larger trends and is circumscribed by its own unique history, subtle economic explanations are matched by bald, large-P politics. Analytical conundrums such as these are confounding and lead to perennial, potentially circular and irresolvable, debate in the critical urban studies literature. This paper explores whether the possibility of using the philosophical notion of paradox – a situation where sound reasoning leads to incomplete, unsatisfying, or unexpected results or consequences – and Zeno’s famous paradoxes in particular, can serve as allegorical heuristics capable of provoking new theories, expectations, or assumptions in urban studies.

University-led innovation in and for peripheral urban areas: new approaches in Naples, Italy and Newark, NJ, US

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on the spatial development problem of university-led innovation in peripheral urban areas. Highlighting issues of proximity, uneven geographic development, and multi-scalar urban governance as weaknesses of the regional innovation systems literature, we provide a novel synthesis of regional economics, innovation policy, and critical urban studies to assess the development roles of universities in concrete contexts. A comparative investigation of Naples and Newark, NJ captures the functional operation of regional innovation and urban development as a contested product of discourses, technologies (material and governance), and territorial arrangements. Our analysis demonstrates the significance of multi-scalar relationships in structuring innovation policy and practice in peripheral urban areas. The architecture of innovation is not simply rolled out into pre-determined spatial containers in places lacking established ‘institutional thickness’ or urban centrality. The spatial development of university-led innovation is a social product: material and governance infrastructures are essential components of the urban fabric and are essential to its co-constitution. Universities are shown to contribute differing resources dependent on their institutional strategic goals and the capacities and spatial imaginaries afforded to them by their situation in broader territorial governance regimes. We conclude by drawing comparative lessons and identifying directions for future research.

Debating planetary urbanization: For an engaged pluralism

This essay reflects on recent debates around planetary urbanization, many of which have been articulated through dismissive caricatures of the core epistemological orientations, conceptual proposals, methodological tactics, and substantive arguments that underpin this emergent approach to the urban question. Following consideration of some of the most prevalent misrepresentations of this work within this special issue, I build upon Barnes and Sheppard’s (2010) concept of “engaged pluralism” to suggest more productive possibilities for dialogue among critical urban researchers whose agendas are too often viewed as incommensurable or antagonistic rather than as interconnected and, potentially, allied. The essay concludes by outlining nine research questions whose more sustained exploration could more productively connect studies of planetary urbanization to several fruitful lines of inquiry that have been explored within postcolonial, feminist and queer-theoretical strands of urban studies. While questions of positionality necessarily lie at the heart of any critical approach to urban theory and research, so too does the search for intellectual and political common ground that might help orient, animate and advance the shared, if constitutively heterodox, project(s) of critical urban studies.

Encounters with the centaur state: Advanced urban marginality and the practices and ethics of welfare sanctions regimes

This article examines the relationships between advanced urban marginality and new forms of state craft to regulate marginalised populations, specifically Wacquant’s concept of the centaur state and the use of conditionality mechanisms in the British welfare state. The article empirically explores the experiences and perspectives of welfare practitioners and subjects. It finds some evidence of an inculcation of elite narratives and understandings of urban marginality and incidences of antagonism. However, the orientations and ethical frameworks of those deploying or subject to processes of sanctioning within reconfigured welfare regimes are more differentiated and ambiguous than both governmental discourse and critical urban studies often suggest.

The sacred and urban transformation in Durban: Open-air temples of the Nazareth Baptist church

AbstractThis paper discusses urban spatial transformation in Durban with specific focus on the ubiquitous “open-air” temples in public open spaces, office, and industrial sites. It borrows from a number of insights to try and shed light on this phenomenon. Concepts of “Insurgent planning” and “loose space,” understood as ingraining existing hitherto officially unacknowledged land uses, and/or introducing new identities and practices into the urban fabric; and “loose space” that occur where the designated use seems no longer relevant, or where different land uses are tolerated simultaneously, respectively, were relied upon to generate some insights on the phenomenon. The paper seeks to make a contribution to a growing body of literature on critical urban studies by drawing attention to other ways of conceiving and engaging urban space. Arguing that predominant planning theories are inadequate to account for the diversity of urban experiences, the paper explores alternative theoretical frameworks that speak...

Locating the global financial crisis: variegated neoliberalization in four European cities

ABSTRACTLocating the global financial crisis: variegated neoliberalization in four European cities. Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper looks at the variegated impact of the 2008 global financial crisis and the different ways in which local strategic actors imagined and responded to it through a comparative study of Barcelona, Brussels, Leeds and Turin. Drawing on cultural political economy, we see crisis moments as fertile territory for the analysis of variegation in urban neoliberalization processes as they can break path dependencies and open up alternatives. Inspired by the comparative turn in critical urban studies, our case studies are not offered as representative samples but as dense sites to explore the various interpretations and uses of the crisis, particularly at the elite level. This analysis suggests considerable variegation in how the crisis was both felt and interpreted locally across the four cities. The local elites did not regard this as a crisis of or in their own urban growth models, but as something external. However, as the global financial crisis morphed into national sovereign debt crises and austerity programmes, the experience in each city has been relatively similar. The paper concludes by emphasizing the continuity function of specific local actors through the processes of meaning-making in which they engage, something that existing work on variegated neoliberalization has so far overlooked.

Interrogating urban crisis: Cities in the governance and contestation of austerity

The meaning of ‘urban crisis’, and its applications in concrete struggles to govern and contest austerity urbanism, remains under-specified analytically and poorly understood empirically. This paper addresses the lacuna by opening up the concept of urban crisis to critical scrutiny. It begins by exploring how urban ‘crisis-talk’ tends to over-extend the concept in ways that can render it shallow or meaningless. The paper looks, second, at different applications of the terminology of ‘crisis’, disclosing key framings and problematics. In the spirit of critical urban studies, it focuses, third, on practices of crisis-resistance and crisis-making. The paper concludes by summarising the six urban crisis framings linked to six urban problematics, in order to inform future studies of austerity urbanism and assist in developing more reflexive approaches to the concept.