Urban Geography Research Articles

Making the mos(s)t of nature? Cleantech, smart nature-based solutions, and the ‘rendering investable’ of urban moss

This article examines the ways in which ‘nature-based solutions’ (NBS) to urban environmental problems are contributing to a re-imagining of the forms and roles of vegetal life in cities. Specifically, we examine the versions of nature that are being produced within a subset of nature-based solutions described as ‘smart’ – that is, those involving the enrolment of non-human lifeforms into digital infrastructures comprising sensors, data flows and automated support systems. Whilst NBS are often celebrated for opening up cities to lively ecological processes – thereby contributing to more convivial, ‘more-than-human’ forms of urbanism – their smart incarnations are becoming a playground for entrepreneurial and financial actors seeking new ways to enclose, commodify and derive profit from non-human life in cities. To explicate this argument, we examine the case of a proprietary ‘nature-based solution’ to urban air pollution developed and sold to local authorities and corporate actors by a European cleantech start-up, predicated on optimising the air-filtering capacities of moss. Our analysis proceeds in three stages. First, we draw on scholarship on the bioeconomy to show how the commodification of moss in this case is predicated on discursive arguments which depict moss as at once inherently productive and regenerative, but also fragile and scarce in urban environments. Secondly, we show how this smart NBS is rendered investable through the enrolment of moss into a carefully designed digital apparatus, which purports to stabilise and optimise its air purifying work, thereby making its contributions to urban air quality continuous, consistent and calculable. Finally, building on an assessment of the entanglement of this example with specific urban geographies and modes of urban governance, we critically reflect on the role that smart NBS in general might yet play in either reinforcing or disrupting prevailing dynamics of privatisation, enclosure and green gentrification in cities.

Clinical profile and etiological spectrum of patients presenting with corneal hydrops over a 12-year period.

To describe the demographics, clinical characteristics, and management of corneal hydrops in patients presenting to a multi-tier ophthalmology hospital network in India. Cross-sectional hospital-based study. Of the total of 3,140,941 new patients presenting between October 2010 and March 2022, patients with a clinical diagnosis of corneal hydrops in at least one eye were included in the study. All the data was collected using an electronic medical record system. 1291 eyes of 1110 patients were diagnosed with corneal hydrops and included in the study and 961 patients (83.69%) had a unilateral affliction. Corneal hydrops was noted to be significantly more common in males (62.43%) and adults (62.7%). The most common age group at presentation was during the second decade of life with 472 (42.52%) patients. They were more commonly from the higher socio-economic status (77.3%) and from the urban geography (44.23%). In the 1291 eyes, 567 (43.92%) eyes had a visual impairment of blindness (> 20/400-20/1200) followed by moderate visual impairment (> 20/70-20/200) in 166 (12.86%) eyes. Overall, the most common etiology was keratoconus in 1,082 (83.81%) eyes followed by primary congenital glaucoma (PCG) in 91 (7.05%) eyes. Surgical intervention to hasten the recovery of hydrops was performed in 7.82% of eyes with ectasia and as a definite management in 7.05% eyes with PCG. Visual rehabilitation was with contact lenses in 29.1% eyes and keratoplasty in 13.94% eyes. Corneal hydrops is predominantly unilateral and is more common in males. Keratoconus was the commonest etiological condition; however, the risk of hydrops was highest in keratoglobus, followed by PMD. Most affected age was the second decade of life and visual impairment was severe in majority (60%). A surgical intervention was performed in a third of the cases.

Poverty porn or poverty planning? Slum photography and the politics of spatial representation

This forum article critically examines the politics of visual representation in urban informality, interrogating the genealogies and contemporary manifestations of what we term the “slum gaze.” Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist visual studies, and critical urban geography, we trace how colonial visualities continue to shape aesthetic constructions of urban marginality through “poverty porn” and spectacles of abjection. We argue that dominant visual regimes not only reflect but actively produce urban informality as a pathologized state of being, rationalizing dispossessive planning interventions while obscuring subaltern spatial knowledges and practices. The article unpacks the contradictory role of visuality in urban planning and policymaking, where GIS mappings and documentary photography paradoxically render informal settlements simultaneously hyper-visible and illegible to state bureaucracies. Against reductive visual grammars inherited from colonial modernity, we advocate for participatory visual methodologies that amplify resident-driven representational practices. By centering community-based visual epistemologies, we gesture toward more emancipatory modes of seeing and narrating the heterogeneous spaces of urban informality. Ultimately, this intervention calls for a paradigmatic shift in how urban scholars and practitioners engage visually with marginalized communities. We contend that cultivating critical visual literacies attuned to the politics of representation is essential for imagining and enacting more just urban futures. This requires moving beyond simplistic denunciations of “poverty porn” toward a praxis of critical visuality that unsettles universalizing gazes while legitimizing plural ways of seeing, knowing, and inhabiting the city.

Culture goes East: Mapping the shifting geographies of urban cultural capital through major cultural buildings

Culture has become a major component of policies to put cities on the global map. This article traces the shifting geographies of urban cultural capital using the lens of major cultural buildings, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which cities often mobilise to compete for attention, reputation, tourists and investment. Based on a custom-built database containing 438 major cultural buildings opened worldwide between 1990 and 2019, this article finds a strong growth in the number and total cost of these buildings throughout the three decades, far exceeding global GDP growth. What is more, there is a geographical shift from the established cities of high culture in North America and Western Europe towards Asia, with a particular concentration in China and the Gulf region. The growth of investment in culture and its fast-changing urban geographies urge a more profound integration of culture in urban studies and a deeper consideration of the role of cultural capital in making global cities.

Urban geography I: Conceptualisation with and beyond the global-local dialectic

In this report, I explore recent work in urban geography to reflect on one of its pervasive ‘thought-infrastructures’: the global-local dialectic. This dialectic features as a prominent force in how we debate, write, and teach cities and urbanization. My aim is not to argue against this dialectic, but to call for greater reflection on it and the work it does, including its increasing resolution through forms of ‘missing middle’. I suggest that de-centring the global-local dialectic may allow greater space for other ways of thinking, writing, and teaching urban geographies – other thought-infrastructures – and set out examples.

How does geographical environment affect residents' perception of social justice: An empirical study from low-income communities in Beijing

With the transition to a market-oriented economic system and the transformation of social structure, urban society has undergone significant spatial differentiation, leading to a deepening divide between the rich and the poor. This has caused issues like social exclusion and spatial isolation to become increasingly prominent, which in turn, limit the harmonious and orderly development of cities. As Beijing's goal to become a “world-class harmonious and livable city” accelerates, there has been a growing focus on ensuring social justice satisfaction for residents in low-income communities. This focus has translated into more attention being paid to spatial equity in residents' living environments. Employing a mixed-methods approach with multi-level regressions to understand the nuanced interplay between urban geography and social equity, where depend variable was subjective questionary from low-income communities in Beijing (2017), the independent variables were geographical factors. Using research data from typical low-income communities in Beijing (2017), our study integrated theories from geography and sociology to examine the spatial equity of the living environment. We then empirically analyzed the impact of geographical environment and objective conditions on residents' perception of social equity in low-income communities. Our findings indicate that there are significant differences in the level of social justice perception among residents across different types of communities. The upscale community with better community environment is not consistent with the evaluation of higher perceived justice. Furthermore, service facilities, employment accessibility, and built environment all influence individual satisfaction with social justice to varying degrees. There is also a moderating effect of living environment satisfaction on social justice perception in low-income communities, with residents' socioeconomic attributes influencing their level of social justice satisfaction. This research contributes to the broader understanding of spatial equity in urban development, highlighting the pivotal role of geographical factors in shaping perceptions of social justice. These insights are crucial for policymakers and urban planners striving for more equitable urban development in rapidly growing cities.

Urbanization, relational space, and practicing Muslim ethnicity in Western China

ABSTRACT In recent decades, market reforms, inter-regional mobility, and urbanization have shaped Muslim groups’ social practices, simultaneously encouraging the development of Islamic places (and reinforcing Muslim identity), promoting intermingling with other ethnic groups (and promoting assimilation), and occasionally creating inter-ethnic class solidarity and mutual respect. By the mid-2010s, in western China’s Xining City, the resulting social fluidity stemming from these transformations was being constrained by both community social pressures and state security practices. Furthermore, Sinocentric urbanization discourse was influencing intra-group debates about what, and how, Muslim practices could belong in the city. This discourse affected mundane boundary-marking practices; its relative devaluation of ethnic urban spaces shaped what Muslims considered excessively ‘traditional’ or acceptably modern. Drawing from theories in urban geography, I argue that analyses of relational spaces that include mobility, urban redevelopment, and lived experiences are key to understanding how urban Muslims are adapting to contemporary PRC governance strategies.

The new informality? The financialization of informal housing as a parasitic relation (2023) Plenary Commentary

ABSTRACT This paper responds to Raquel Rolnik's Urban Geography Plenary Lecture, delivered at the 2023 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, titled “The Empire Strikes Back.” Rolnik's essay introduces the idea that a “new informality” has begun in Latin American cities. She uses this concept to understand how financial innovations like digital platforms and state-backed rental assistance programs draw informal housing into bankable debt relations without needing to convert them into cadastral property. This paper uses Marx's distinction between formal and real subsumption, and Gidwani's theorization of the parasitism of capital, to reframe Rolnik's provocative argument via the noncapital–capital relation. It then raises three questions about the empirical “next steps” of research into the financialization of informal housing that need to be explored to understand the novelty of financialization in the global South. These pertain to (i) the normative logics governing racialized and other forms of difference upon which financialization feeds and depends, (ii) the scale at which financial innovations should be studied and the presumed coherence “high finance” should be granted as an analytical category, and (iii) the fictions used to generate and sustain political buy-in for financial capital's attempt to subsume/consume informal lifeworlds.

An Interdisciplinary Survey on Origin-destination Flows Modeling: Theory and Techniques

Origin-destination (OD) flow modeling is an extensively researched subject across multiple disciplines, such as the investigation of travel demand in transportation and spatial interaction modeling in geography. However, researchers from different fields tend to employ their own unique research paradigms and lack interdisciplinary communication, preventing the cross-fertilization of knowledge and the development of novel solutions to challenges. This article presents a systematic interdisciplinary survey that comprehensively and holistically scrutinizes OD flows from utilizing fundamental theory to studying the mechanism of population mobility and solving practical problems with engineering techniques, such as computational models. Specifically, regional economics, urban geography, and sociophysics are adept at employing theoretical research methods to explore the underlying mechanisms of OD flows. They have developed three influential theoretical models: the gravity model, the intervening opportunities model, and the radiation model. These models specifically focus on examining the fundamental influences of distance, opportunities, and population on OD flows, respectively. In the meantime, fields such as transportation, urban planning, and computer science primarily focus on addressing four practical problems: OD prediction, OD construction, OD estimation, and OD forecasting. Advanced computational models, such as deep learning models, have gradually been introduced to address these problems more effectively. We have constructed the benchmarks for these four problems at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/OD_benckmark. Finally, based on the existing research, this survey summarizes current challenges and outlines future directions for this topic. Through this survey, we aim to break down the barriers between disciplines in OD flow related research, fostering interdisciplinary perspectives and modes of thinking.

An analytical framework to understand the problematization of urban (historical) animals

Despite being common, the problematization of animals is ill-understood and undertheorized in urban geography. Being problematized has significant implications for animals: not only in how they are subjected to violent disciplinary practices but also in how they are made epistemically visible (or not) as urban subjects. That is, problematization objectifies animals and can contribute to their physical and epistemic in/visibility in cities. One effect of problematization is that it makes some animals visible to the historical record as problems. Consequently, scholars often write urban histories and analyses that reconstitute these animals as problematic objects, failing to recognize that problematization involves multispecies power relations that animals experience. This article offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the problematization of urban animals. It requires understanding problematization as a sociospatial and historical process in which animals come to be discursively constituted as problems in urban regulation, and materially managed as such through disciplinary practices that frequently rely on material and spatial interventions. I argue that a spatial awareness is essential to telling multispecies histories and geographies that attempt to grapple with problematization as a process as well as its impacts on the experiences of animals.

The Economic History & Urban Geography of Race Relations in Detroit: Movement of Capital, White Resistance and Immobility of Black Labor

Detroit's intertwined history of deindustrialization and racial segregation is often explored separately. In The Origins of the Urban Crises (1996), Thomas Sugrue examines post-WWII job losses and housing discrimination without elucidating why and how the city came to experience the abrupt flight of capital in that period. Conversely, Murray and Schwartz's Wrecked (2019) details the catalysts for Detroit's deindustrialization but neglects its impact on the African-American community. This paper aims to bridge these perspectives by utilizing various secondary sources and archival evidence to analyze how concurrent discrimination and economic decline have maintained the persistent segregation between Detroit and its suburbs.

A new theorization of non-binary urban geographies: introducing the ‘urban grotesque’

ABSTRACT This article introduces the ‘urban grotesque’ as a novel theoretical lens to explore non-binary urban representations, using the Lokmacı/Ledra Street Buffer Zone in Nicosia, Cyprus, as a case study. Situated in a city divided by conflict, the Buffer Zone serves as a living laboratory for examining the complex interplay of memory, identity, and place beyond traditional binary frameworks. Through a rich tapestry of empirical observations and qualitative urban ethnography, the study traces the Buffer Zone’s transformation from a symbol of division to a vibrant place of non-binary urban representation. It highlights transformative events and movements that challenge binary norms and foster a sense of belonging and inclusivity, illustrating the fluid nature of urban places shaped by an array of social practices and experiences. The ‘urban grotesque’, inspired by Bakhtin’s conception of transformation and ambivalence, emerges as a pivotal framework for understanding the essence of non-binary urban geographies. This perspective not only bridges the theoretical and empirical but also enriches our perception of urban places as realms of endless becoming, inviting us to see beyond dichotomies. Ultimately, this study promotes an inclusive, dynamic comprehension of urban places in conflict zones, highlighting non-binary perspectives to enrich urban environments.

Networked mobility and temporal spaces: Cycling as jugaad in post-pandemic Kolkata

The wider shifts in the conditions of mobility wrought by the pandemic, on the one hand, invoke anxieties around the ideas of health and wellness; and on the other hand, occasion the use a variety of health apps meant to carve out niche ‘safe spaces’. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with leisure cyclists in Kolkata, in this article, we demonstrate how app-enhanced cycling practices, primarily intended as a wellness activity during the pandemic, manifest certain ‘temporal spaces’ – quasi-virtual spaces, as extension of the online/digital-offline/material continuum, connected to locally contingent data environments – through tactical use of jugaad. In this scheme, individual practices of mobility eventually yield solidarities – digitally-mediated ‘networked publics’ – wherein human agencies, technological materialities and socio-political relationalities imbricate toward reconfiguring urban geographies. This phenomenon of informal place-making leverages the affordances of the very digital apparatus that, during the pandemic, has often underpinned the statist techniques of surveillance on mobilities.

‘Is this the city of beauty?’: facilitating critical student subjectivities through a creative place-based urban geography workshop in Florence, Italy

ABSTRACT The way that the relationship between university students and the city is conceptualised in geographic literature is strongly determined by the studentification debate, which risks subjectifying students in redundant and unilateral ways. This paper suggests that geographic education and its spatialities can inform this debate with an alternative subjectification, by emphasising the students’ capacity to construct their own criticism on the urban phenomena that they experience. It draws empirically from a place-based workshop conducted within a master’s programme at the University of Florence, which aimed at exploring the students’ sense of place through creative methods. Life charts, mental maps, urban diaries and short films, analysed together with textual material, showcase the complexity of sense of place: for students, visuality and affect contribute significantly to their feeling of alienation and its expression, but at the same time become instrumental to negotiating it by seeking a sense of belonging in the touristified and spectacularized city. When approached as “revealed” and “claimed” space, the spatialities creatively produced through the films prove that geographic education is capable of fostering the shaping of students as critical subjectivities, thus restoring the problematic subjectification performed by the studentification debate.

Urban geography in crisis times: insights from a feminist project

Urban geography in crisis times: insights from a feminist project

Holding space for strangeness: in favor of critical utopianism in urban geography

Abstract. What could urban geographers continue to learn and unlearn from critical utopianism and emancipatory futurities? This contribution seeks to recover transformative academic practices and work towards didactics of speculative estrangement. Specifically, I propose to draw on science and speculative fiction literature to support the revision of established geographical imaginations and epistemologies in a higher-education context.

Cartographies of infrastructural imaginations: mapping ecological utopias and dystopias in the Global South

This article provides the reader with a theoretical framework and a method of representing cities called cartographies of infrastructural imaginations. The study employs mapping methods from the fields of architecture, urban geography and visual cultures. The research inquires about the role of cartography in the analysis of discourses that define policies of water supply, food distribution and land-use regulation, which are three environmental challenges in cities. How can we identify and situate the urban actors that attend to such challenges in cities from the Global South? The research is empirically grounded in Mexico City, Shanghai and Bangalore, urban settlements with a history of colonial occupation in previous centuries. Their foreign interventions still shape urban imaginaries of these cities. The method of blending photographic analysis with maps aims to offer objective precision of geographical data and subjective street-level views of local stories. The intention is to understand where the infrastructural ideas come from, and how imaginaries flow to communicate visions about the development of the city. A central task here is to frame how power structures interact and represent their interests via utopian and dystopian narratives.

Place identity: a generative AI’s perspective

Do cities have a collective identity? The latest advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI) models have enabled the creation of realistic representations learned from vast amounts of data. In this study, we test the potential of generative AI as the source of textual and visual information in capturing the place identity of cities assessed by filtered descriptions and images. We asked questions on the place identity of 64 global cities to two generative AI models, ChatGPT and DALL·E2. Furthermore, given the ethical concerns surrounding the trustworthiness of generative AI, we examined whether the results were consistent with real urban settings. In particular, we measured similarity between text and image outputs with Wikipedia data and images searched from Google, respectively, and compared across cases to identify how unique the generated outputs were for each city. Our results indicate that generative models have the potential to capture the salient characteristics of cities that make them distinguishable. This study is among the first attempts to explore the capabilities of generative AI in simulating the built environment in regard to place-specific meanings. It contributes to urban design and geography literature by fostering research opportunities with generative AI and discussing potential limitations for future studies.

Contours of Racial Capitalism, Urban Geography, and Infrastructure

ABSTRACTRacial capitalism has received much attention within the social sciences over the past few decades, including fields such as urban geography and infrastructural studies. This state of the field identifies key contributions, highlights the latest developments, draws attention to limitations, and points to future directions. Given the concept's multiple iterations and lineages beyond Cedric Robinson's framework, there is a risk racial capitalism might become an empty signifier if more work is not done by scholars to define their points of departure, clarify the concept's theoretical reach, and expand empirical contributions beyond the U.S. heartland. To advance the racial capitalism body of work, current scholarship suggests theoretical conversations with postcolonial theory, decolonial thought, Indigenous studies, and feminist approaches. There is also a need to engage not only with other variants of racial capitalism, but also with earlier scholarship that investigates the interplay between race/racialization and space.

Welcome to Greenville South Carolina: Urban Geography of Place

Welcome to Greenville South Carolina: Urban Geography of Place