Privatization Of Public Space Research Articles

The transition of Ghana's cooling appliance sector to a circular economy via a small wins governance framework

Air conditioning poses environmental, socioeconomic, and political challenges, especially in sub-Saharan countries such as Ghana, where almost all devices are imported. Thus far, socio-economically feasible pathways for a cooling transition to a circular economy are unclear. Drawing on qualitative interviews, field observations and survey data, this study analyses the potential of small wins governance as a pathway to sweeping system change along Ghana's air-conditioners' lifecycle. The research analyses the status quo and identifies potential small wins that could lead to transformative shifts in the cooling sector. Through a mixed-methods approach encompassing interviews, surveys, and field assessments, the study uncovers small wins at four stages of the air conditioner lifecycle, from (1) import, (2) retail & purchase, (3) usage & service, and (4) end-of-life management practices. For policymakers and practitioners, our results imply that they should (a) systematically encourage and reap small wins in public-private spaces in the short-term, e.g. changing the incentive structure for staff controlling imports of air conditioners, (b) adjust supporting policies as learning dynamics unfold over time (e.g., energy and refrigerant standards and labels, tax system), but (c) also keep pushing for big wins in the mid-term (e.g., constructions of a recycling plant for refrigerants in West Africa). The findings emphasize the need for a behavioural, consumer-oriented perspective for the pragmatic potential of small wins towards a circular economy. Overall, the study addresses significant gaps in the literature and suggests that bottom-up approaches may offer more success than attempting broad top-down system changes. The paper contributes to the wider discourse on social-ecological transitions and offers valuable insights for policymakers, industry stakeholders, and researchers aiming to foster sustainable practices in the cooling sector.

Challenges and opportunities of public space management in Mexico

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of public space management (PSM) in the Mexican context by analysing the perspectives of different governance actors. Issues in the PSM literature include ineffective political decisions, prevalence of the private sector, lack of coordination between government institutions, and a need for more effective social participation. While most PSM studies focus on European cities, empirical PSM knowledge in the Latin American context is scarce. To address this gap, this research elucidates the Mexican context by investigating and adapting a PSM framework in Mexico City and Puebla. The case study research is based on qualitative document research and interview analysis from four groups of governance actors: government officials, academics, NGOs, and architecture/urban planning firms. We found multiple PSM challenges: uncoordinated efforts in the maintenance of public space, lack of and polarisation of investment, and privatisation of public space. At the intra-governmental level, the research identified a lack of coordination between government institutions, increasing reliance on the private sector, and limited opportunities for residents to participate in PSM processes. The paper highlights missing links between existing governance actors involved in PSM and wider residents, in the pursuit of the ambitious role of achieving public space quality.

A silence meant to be heard: LIGNA’s radio ballet

This article analyzes the role of sound in the transformation of social space and organization of noncentered group action through a case study of the series of radio ballets programmed by the German artist collective LIGNA. Typically, LIGNA uses portable audio devices and wireless technology to disseminate instructions to the radio ballet participants, directing them to make synchronized body gestures but not giving them fixed movement paths or identities. This process creates a conceptualized acoustic space parallel to the physical space, challenges the regulations that come with the privatization of public spaces, and dismantles the dichotomies between inside and outside, public and private, and physical and mental. I argue that the radio ballet participants, who form a decentralized, temporary, and mobile community, can explore new possibilities for political intervention in the public sphere through silent collective performances in which sound not only serves the important function of sidestepping visual censorship and avoiding physical conflict but also provides a new methodology for reshaping the order of social space.

Residents’ Perceptions of Tourism Gentrification in Traditional Industrial Areas Using Q Methodology

Tourism gentrification in traditional industrial areas presents issues regarding the privatization of public spaces, transformation of public services to cater to tourists, erosion of community social bonds, and the commodification of regional consumption, which has far-reaching impacts on residents’ stress and their desire to relocate. This study aims to understand the impact of tourism gentrification from residents’ perspectives with a case study of the 798 Industrial Art Zone in Beijing, China. Using Q methodology, residents living in the community (N = 20) were involved in the interviews. The finalized statements (N = 26) were derived from the interviews. Based on the stress threshold theory, the results revealed four factors that influence residents’ stress: neighboring environment, community attachment, economic interest, and cultural identity. This study further proposes a framework with four dimensions (i.e., environmental, relational, economic, and emotional) to explain the relocation decision-making of residents in traditional industrial areas due to stress from interactions with migrants and visitors, and changes to the place-functions of industrial regions and communities. This study is the first to conceptualize tourism gentrification in traditional industrial areas by elucidating the residents’ stress. It provides practical guidance for policymakers and destination marketing organizations for promoting the sustainable development of industrial tourism.

Making do: young people and mobilities at home

ABSTRACT This paper investigates young people’s mobile practices of ‘making do’ as they negotiate work, study and play in the home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on Singapore, and drawing on original empirical data derived from online journaling by twenty participants, the paper elaborates on their practices of ‘making do’ when working from home. Using an interdisciplinary approach spanning youth, cultural and architectural studies, the paper considers new formations and appropriations of domestic time and space. Critically situating the home as a hybrid domestic characterised by its porous public-private space and multiple-disjunctive time, ‘making do’ is evident in a range of spatial tactics: from occupying temporary mobile spaces to altering physical spaces with objects and devices, to time-sharing, to developing practices that affirm and contest ascribed social roles. Through switching objects and roles in the hybrid domestic home, our study participants not only created new mobilities within the immobile constraints of the pandemic home, they also transformed the spatial and temporal norms of study, work and play.

Strategic Belonging: Hindu Identity and Performance in Oman

This study focuses on the multiple ways in which the Hindu community in Oman negotiates its religious identity in an Islamic country by strategically using its historic mercantile relations with the ruling families, maximising the use of public-private spaces, and creating and participating in transnational networks as ways to cope with state restrictions. Using Vertovec’s notion of ‘complexifying complex diasporas,’ this study examines how Hindus, while being publicly ‘invisible,’ have been able to possess a continuing cultural platform which is leveraged to acquire opportunities for religious performance. However, challenges to such strategic belonging have been rising rapidly with the rise of right wing Hindu ideology within and outside India. The repercussions of the establishment of a Hindu state in India on its diaspora, particularly in an officially Muslim country, are rife with challenges. Alternative strategies may have to be explored by the community to assert its identity and religious practices, as well as secure its future in Oman.

‘Soft’ privatization of public space: autonomization of outdoor retail markets in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT The last three decades reveal a burgeoning body of research that critically examines the role of private actors in the governance of public space. Contributing to this work, this paper shows how an increasing number of outdoor retail markets in the Netherlands have become typified by forms of physical and symbolic exclusion, although these outcomes are achieved by different methods and practices than direct private appropriation and provision. Through the creation of non-profit quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos), more and more local governments have delegated their responsibilities for the management and regulation of markets to trader-run organizations; a process called ‘autonomization’. Based on semi-structured interviews, participant observation and documentary research, the paper traces the main motivations behind, as well as the implications of, this process. It points to the sometimes ambivalent nature of quangos, in which a selected number of market traders stipulate what type of participation in markets is appropriate. The concept of ‘soft’ privatization is developed to denote autonomization as it does not directly exclude traders and visitors, but instead creates a particular governance regime and sense-scape that attracts certain people and excludes others.

Securing hipster leisure: park policy in gentrifying neighbourhoods

ABSTRACT In this research note, we situate the policy response of park circles enacted by the City of Toronto at Trinity Bellwoods Park in the context of urban gentrification. Rather than a public health measure, we argue that the enactment of park circles as a response to park crowding during the COVID-19 pandemic is reflective of broader processes of gentrification and operates to secure the park as a space for ‘hipster leisure.’ In so doing, park circles represent an extension of neo-liberal policy rhetoric whereby the privatization of public space and the displacement of certain populations are naturalized. Our analysis invites future critical scholarship on parks, leisure, public health, and gentrification as well as the transformations occurring within these intersections.

Applicability of the Star Model on Indian Neighborhood: Case of Malviya Nagar, South Delhi

Over the years, there have been numerous debates and explanations on privatization of public space, its inclusivity, and of course the degree of publicness such spaces offer. The distinction of pure public space is a layered progression folding the publicness into a private space. The character sketch of these pseudo-public spaces have been defined by many theorists on the basis of accessibility, control, ownership, and typology transformation that happens. This paper bestows star model for measuring the publicness of such public spaces in a neighborhood, aiming to analyze the behavioral shift that subsequently emulates. The model is deliberated to be of value for analyzing the publicness of Indian neighborhoods in a rational manner with few implications of Indian context. The study concludes unravelling the new form of public space, supposedly taking control over our cities and its related complexities in redefining the meaning of publicness.

The Food Police: The White Possessive Securitization of Winnipeg Food Spaces

Grocery shopping is one of the most necessary everyday practices when it comes to being food secure. Food security is frequently spatially imagined along two axes – access and health. I highlight the specific conditions of existence for food insecure citizens in Winnipeg to demonstrate the incommensurability of how food insecurity is imagined and intervened upon, or not, through municipal policy. Drawing on Critical Indigenous Studies scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theorizations of white possession, I establish a framework of white possessive securitization to interrogate the dynamics between policy, policing, and securitization of space that results in Indigenous people being subjected to multiple modes of policing when grocery shopping. With white possessive securitization, I trace how individual settler citizens operate as self-governing subjects to police Indigenous people in the city while carrying out the aims of white patriarchal sovereignty – to secure private property. I provide three vignettes of the intersections of municipal policy and the policing of food by focussing on municipal budgets, securitization of public-private space, and grocery stores. These vignettes delineate how policing in grocery stores interfere with Indigenous food security and are inseparable from inflated municipal policing budgets, austerity measures that reduce community services, increased surveillance, threats of violence, and the undiscriminating implementation of the rule of law by individual settler citizens who through rationalities of governmentality are the police.

Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires

Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires

Community Formation in Talent Worker Housing: The Case of Silicon Valley Talent Apartments, Shenzhen

ABSTRACT Policies to provide housing of a quality and price suitable for young talent workers have become a priority in cities such as Shenzhen that are managing the transformation to a knowledge economy. Based on qualitative data gathered through interviews and participant observation, this article examines the lived experience of talent workers and their extended families to gain an understanding of community formation in high-rise housing. Five key findings emerged from the qualitative data. Talent housing is provided through employers and many talent workers live in an extended three generation family setting. The public-private space of the gated enclosure accommodates a variety of recreational activities and opportunities for social interaction. Unlike many other high-rise rental housing complexes, there is a rich social network reminiscent of traditional danwei housing. Like most small districts in China, the complex is secured and gated, which contributes to community formation despite the challenge imposed by verticality.

Privatization of public space: stakeholder analysis in shifting the function of public space case study in Kediri city, Indonesia

Infrastructure development must take into account the needs and safety of the people living around the area where the infrastructure will be built. Kediri is one of the cities in East Java that has experienced rapid development in the last ten years. The government is the main actor because the policy on the management of public space is in government agencies. This study aims to determine the shift in the function of public space and how the interests that exist in it. Using descriptive qualitative methods with three data collection techniques, namely interviews, observations and documentation to informants consisting of the Department of Industry and Trade, the Department of Transportation, Street Vendors, and the general public. The result is a pattern of shifting the function of public space in the City of Kediri, consisting of three, namely the shift of the function of the sidewalk to a trading area, the shift of the function of the road to a parking area, the shift of the function of convenience to fulfillment of needs. In addition, there are three types of stakeholders that have been identified, namely key, primary and secondary. JEL Classification: R32, R53, R58

The Borders of Personal and Political: Argumentative Analysis of a (Possible) Sexual Harassment Case in the “#MeToo Era”

Facilitated by the widespread use of the communication tool #MeToo, the online public space has been opening up to survivor stories and is providing interpersonal emotional support to individuals with experiences of sexual harassment or violence. Witnessing the widespread and collective demand for de-stigmatised survivor-centred and empowering approaches to violence, the scholarly community has been discussing these events as the example of (feminist) counter-publics with counter-narratives, or as the “transformative politics of visibility”. This case study contemplates the reactionary forces, focusing on negotiating discursive practices which aim to resist (feminist) counter-narratives in the Slovak online environment. We wish to enrich the existing literature by drawing on the developing scholarship of discourse analysis studies in the “#MeToo era” and by looking at the argumentative strategies applied by the discussants with regards to one (potential) case of sexual harassment. We do so by proposing to treat the interpretative frameworks of the discussants as stemming from experiences with dominant media narratives, and as being built around the discursive negotiations of “public-private space” and “personalpolitical issues”, well-known to feminist theorisations of sexual harassment and violence since the 1970s.

The Reconfiguration of Urban Public–Private Spaces in the Mall: False Security, Antidemocratization, and Apoliticalization

In cities across the world, public spaces are being reconfigured, and their functions are being appropriated by private areas, such as shopping malls. The aim of the present article was to analyze this problem and, more specifically, to study shopping centers as secure spaces in cities, as well as the antidemocratic and apolitical nature of such malls. The study takes a positivist approach, beginning with the existing theoretical framework and using data from case studies to generate findings. The theoretical framework is established through a review of the literature, while the case study data are drawn from an analysis of news content from digital media and from autoethnography. The findings suggest malls are perceived as safe spaces, also in addition to being home to minor offenses, as well as a number of tragic events and crimes. Additionally, a growing number of demonstrations and political acts are being staged inside malls, which are seen as symbols of consumption and the neoliberal capitalist system. The owners and managers of shopping centers condone and permit the least conflictive acts and ban and repress the remainder, on occasions with the support of state security forces. The relocation of civic life to malls reduces the use of public spaces and erodes the value of the public sphere. The article ends by proposing public actions to reverse this process.

Urban regeneration strategies and place development in contemporary Tokyo: the case of Shibuya Station area

PurposeThis paper aims to shed light on current initiatives of urban regeneration around the Shibuya Station area within the context of contemporary Tokyo’s place development strategies. The objectives are twofold: to illustrate the characteristics of the plans and the planning approaches framing the interventions; and to identify the strategies employed to reshape the cityscape.Design/methodology/approachUsing a case study approach, this paper combines data from historical and archival research, as well as policy documents and plans. These are supplemented by data from extensive fieldwork undertaken between 2015 and 2019 to critically assess and interpret the implemented policies and the outcomes of the regeneration.FindingsThe paper provides insight into the ongoing urban regeneration around the Shibuya Station area and identifies five key themes that summarise the strategies employed to transform the urban landscape in the area. Despite the apparent success and some innovations introduced by the redevelopment project, critical issues remain–especially around the privatisation of public space and the lack of a holistic approach to sustainability.Originality/valueThe paper examines a significant and timely case of urban regeneration. By critically discussing the implications of the redevelopment around Shibuya Station in the context of Tokyo’s current place development strategies, the study highlights the importance of an inclusive notion of sustainable development and contributes to the debate around Japanese urbanism and urban regeneration.

Network governance and new philanthropy in Latin America and the Caribbean: reconfiguration of the State

This paper draws on the literature on network governance and new philanthropy to characterize and explain the increased involvement of non-State actors in education policymaking in the Dominican Republic. The study reveals, first, how network governance has intensified since 2010 through hybrid public-private spaces of agenda setting, second, how these hybrid spaces have given way to the emergence of new philanthropy, which engages directly with the State as part of its efforts to influence policymaking, and, third, that new philanthropy is evolving to include, as well, the generation of profits, both within and beyond the Dominican Republic, through the creation of an affiliated profit-seeking consulting entity. The paper concludes by arguing that future studies should bring the concepts of network governance and new philanthropy into conversation with theoretical approaches that emphasize the underlying political-economic structures within which non-State actors operate.

Salud y poder: ¿cuerpos y territorios sacrificados?

The webs of life imposed by capitalism and neoliberalism destroyed the vital supports for the reproduction of life - a culture of patriarchal rule, reflected in the ownership of goods and bodies, and the privatization of public spaces. Extractivist dynamics on common natural assets in the Global South produced diseased territories and sacrificed bodies, a logic that is also reproduced in cities in different continents and that requires us to analyze and understand this new urban extractivism and its health-body-territory relationship.

Private Lives & Unspoken Truths: How does a Right to Privacy Contribute to Violence Against Women in Pakistan?

There were two core purposes of this research project. The first was to explore the impacts of the division of space within the public-private dichotomy onto women’s experiences of domestic violence (DV) and intimate partner violence (IPV) in Pakistan. In this inquiry, emphasis was placed upon understanding the impact of the culturally produced notion of the “privacy of home” on a woman’s ability to speak about and seek legal channelsof assistance in her experiences of DV and IPV. The second purpose was to critically scrutinize Pakistan’s legal system in its ability to protect women from the violence they experience behind closed doors in the perceived “private” sphere of social life. By placing Art 14(1) of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which states, “[t]he dignity of man and, subject to law, the privacy of home, shall be inviolable,” as the focal point of my research project, I examined why Pakistan’s legal system legitimizes the division of public-private space by constitutionally protecting a right to privacy of home. Informed by such inquiries, I developed the question, “why does Pakistan’s legal system constitutionally entrench a right to privacy of home under Art 14(1), and how is such right balanced against a woman’s right to be free from violence?” This project was conducted virtually and remotely from Canada, which presented significant challenges, including the nine-hour time difference and efficient participant recruitment. Nonetheless, completing this research study was the most fruitful experience of my academic career. It expanded my knowledge of contemporary gender-based socioeconomic and legal issues facing Pakistan's women and helped me to develop a network with relevant professionals and activists working in this field.

A systematic review of gated communities and the challenge of urban transformation in African cities

Globalization and the spread of neo-liberal models of urban restructuring have resulted in the rise in gated communities worldwide, including in Africa. The on-going scholarly debate revolves around the drivers of gated communities, their impacts and implications on the planning and management of cities. To contribute to and advance scholarly debate on gated communities and the challenge of urban transformation, we used standard systematic procedures to synthesize findings from 31 peer reviewed journal articles from 1990 to 2020, that examine the phenomenon of gated communities in African cities. Despite the differences in study settings, key findings emerge from gated community studies in Africa. Majority of the reviewed studies attribute the emergence of gated communities to the rise in crime and the search for good quality living environment. Globalization also plays an important role in facilitating new market-oriented gated communities. The globalization of lifestyles of the urban elite has also found expression in African cities. Reviewed studies are critical of gated communities for promoting spatial fragmentation, privatization of public space and local governance and for propagating socio-economic inequality and urban segregation. These issues have implications for the planning and management of cities; in terms of balancing between the need for secure neighbourhoods and promoting inclusive urban societies. The systematic review makes a case for re-thinking urban models that inform the production of new urban spaces; with a view to balance between private capital interests and the need for spatial justice.