Capitalist Urbanization Research Articles

Towards the Great Transformation: (6) Three ecologies

One of the major critical claims of this series is that the social and socio-spatial sciences, in their currently dominant form, cannot, for lack of a de-familiarising and recontexualising agenda, one that leads to an appropriate and continually tested strategy (praxis), effectively counter the normalised and naturalised forms and processes of late capitalist urbanisation, normalised by mainstream theory in the service of established power, and their extrapolation into a planetary future. Critical urban theory presents/presented a step forward but it is losing some critical momentum—hence the rise of assemblage theory—and thus purchase on present and future realities in its neglect of aspects of its own intellectual heritage, of ‘extra-scientific’ resources including the cognitive aspect of the arts/humanities and ordinary experience (‘the university of the streets’), and in its too restrictive theoretical, spatial and temporal foundations. This episode begins a recontextualisation of that agenda in the light, particularly, of Gouldner's study of Romanticism and Classicism as deep structures in sociology, and Guattari's notion of ‘three ecologies’ in relation to praxis—that is, an interacting and critical mutuality of theorised practice and practised theory.

The Vortex of Rights: ‘Right to the City’ at a Crossroads

AbstractThe right to the city concept has recently attracted a great deal of attention from radical theorists and grassroots activists of urban justice, who have embraced the notion as a means to analyze and challenge neoliberal urbanism. It has, moreover, drawn considerable attention from United Nations (UN) agencies, which have organized meetings and outlined policies to absorb the notion into their own political agendas. This wide‐ranging interest has created a conceptual vortex, pulling together discordant political projects behind the banner of the right to the city. This article analyzes such projects by reframing the right to the city concept to foreground its roots in Marxian labor theory of value. It argues that Lefebvre's formulation of the right to the city — based on the contradiction between use value and exchange value in capitalist urbanism — is invaluable for analyzing and delineating contradictory urban politics that are pulled into the vortex of the right to the city. Following Lefebvre's lead in such an analysis, however, reveals certain limitations of Lefebvre's own account. The article therefore concludes with a theoretical proposition that aims to open up space for further critical debate on the right to the city.

Towards the Great Transformation: (5) Materialisms, old and new: theory, sources, and praxis (an introduction)

One of the major critical claims of this series is that the social and socio-spatial sciences, in their currently dominant form, cannot, for lack of a de-familiarising agenda, one that leads to an appropriate and continually tested strategy (praxis), effectively counter the normalized and naturalized forms and processes of late capitalist urbanization, normalized by mainstream theory in the service of established power, and their extrapolation into a ‘planetary future’. Critical urban theory presents/presented a step forward but it is losing some critical momentum and thus purchase on present and future realities in its neglect of aspects of its own intellectual heritage, of ‘extra-scientific’ resources including the cognitive aspect of the arts/humanities and ordinary experience (‘the university of the streets’), and in its too restrictive theoretical, spatial and temporal foundations.1 It thus, to a significant extent, fails to give an adequate account, a representational and ethical/normative accounting, of ‘the great transformation’ of marketisation/capitalism as told and analysed notably by Polanyi and Marx, and to the possibilities of and its relationship to praxis for a post-marketised/capitalist great transformation. We need a purposeful reading of the full range of the lived materialities of the planet (not just abstracted away into a distinctly immaterial usage of the notion of the ‘planetary’ and, indeed, of ‘urbanization’). We need in fact a sensuous materialism, an old but still unrealized project. This, the first of two futher episodes, is a brief retrospective and prospective survey, drawing on earlier work in this series and sketching in future directions, of such a materialism (materialisms, old and new): theory, sources and praxis.

O todo da parte: urbanismo, planejamento e o processo social de construção da cidade no início do século 20

Assuming that the territory is the whole space and the city is partt here of, this article focuses on the knowledge produced as of the 19th century that eventually flows into what we will call the urban development of Modernism. This author investigates initialconceptions widely held at the beginning of the 20th centuryregarding two spatial sciences – urbanism and urban planning.This author argues that both studies are at the same timeantagonistic and complementary. The difference between them is notonly an etymological question but rather part of their nature andobjectives. This difference leads us to a series of bipolarities, such asEurope against North America and the history of urbanism againstthe history of social production of the built space. In the gap between urbanism and urban planning we can better understand the city in all its complexity.The author concludes that urbanism was markedly European ing eneral and French in particular. In turn, planning was distinctly Anglo-Saxon in general and North American in particular. However, byseeking to respond to the demands of the cities from the 19th century onward, these two areas complement each other in the study of capitalist urbanization associated with the Second Industrial Revolution.

Trauma, Memory and Landscape in Queensland

The cultural association of Queensland with a condition of imagination or unreality has a strong history. Queensland has always ‘retained much of its quality as an abstraction, an idea’, asserts Thea Astley in her famous essay on the state's identity (Astley 1976: 263). In one of the most quoted descriptions of Queensland's literary representation, Pat Buckridge draws attention to its ‘othering’, suggesting that Queensland possesses ‘a different sense of distance, different architecture, a different apprehension of time, a distinctive preoccupation with personal eccentricity, and . . . a strong sense of cultural antitheses’ (1976: 30). Rosie Scott comes closest to the concerns of this present article when she asserts that this so-called difference ‘is definitely partly to do with the landscape. In Brisbane, for instance, the rickety old wooden Queenslanders drenched in bougainvillea, the palms, the astounding number of birds even in Red Hill where I lived, the jacarandas, are all unique in Australia’ (quoted in Sheahan-Bright and Glover 2002: xv). For Vivienne Muller, Buckridge's ‘cultural antitheses’ are most clearly expressed in precisely this interpretation of Queensland as a place somewhere between imagined wilderness and paradise (2001: 72). Thus, as Gillian Whitlock suggests, such differences are primarily fictional constructs that feed ‘an image making process founded more on nationalist debates about city and bush, centre and periphery, the Southern states versus the Deep North than on any “real” sense of regionalism’ (quoted in Muller 2001: 80). Queensland, in this reading, is subject to the Orientalist discourse of an Australian national identity in which the so-called civilisation of the south-eastern urban capitals necessitates a dark ‘other’. I want to draw out this understanding of the landscape as it is imagined in Queensland women's writing. Gail Reekie (1994: 8) suggests that, ‘Women's sense of place, of region, is powerfully constructed by their marginality to History.’ These narratives do assert Queensland's ‘difference’, but as part of an articulation of psychological extremity experienced by those living on the edges of a simultaneously ideological and geographically limited space. The Queensland landscape, I argue, is thus used as both setting for and symbol of traumatic experience.

Public Ritual and Urbanization in Central Mexico: Temple and Plaza Offerings from La Laguna, Tlaxcala

Urbanization of the world's first cities involved the social integration of greater scales of community membership as well as the social differentiation of individuals along the continua of wealth, power, and occupational specialization that define urban landscapes. This article considers the causal role of public ritual in these processes during the period of incipient urbanism in central Mexico (c. 600 BC–AD 100) by examining temple and plaza offerings at La Laguna, a town within an urbanizing cultural landscape whose inhabitants participated in the transformative exchanges that resulted in urban state capitals such as Teotihuacan.

Financial artscapes: Damien Hirst, crisis and the City of London

This paper explores the entanglement of art and finance over the last decade with a particular focus on the British artist Damien Hirst and the City of London. In so doing it seeks to use the current economic and fiscal crisis in the UK to rethink links between contemporary creative activities and the motivations and mechanisms of urban capitalist economies. The paper explores not only how the art world has aped many aspects of globalised high finance but also how a symbiotic relationship has developed between finance and art in conceptual innovations, promotional strategies and transnational flows of capital, people and ideas. Art and finance have greatly benefited from a shared role in the postindustrial reshaping of inner-city landscapes and a dominant political emphasis on unregulated market relations. The paper concludes by advocating not a romanticisation of new recessionary cultural activities and formations, but greater attempts to work against the mystification and unstinting celebration of market authority and easily commodified forms of artistic practice.

Dance and Martial Arts in Timor Leste: The Performance of Resilience in a Post-Conflict Environment

This paper is an ethnographic study of dance traditions and martial arts training in rural upland mountain communities and the urban capital, Dili, in Timor Leste, and how ‘speaking beyond trauma’ is articulated through body movements. It explores the relationship between individual body movement and socio-political–ecological movements, both at the level of the local (rural villages) and the global (global governance outfits). It examines the intersection/s between indigenous traditional Timorese dances (such as soro tais, sau batar, foti raba, likurai, bidu, tebedai, tebe-tebe and other dances) and external ideational influences brought in by the presence of UN Peacekeeping and Police and international aid workers (including aikido martial arts). What do dance traditions tell us about the resilience of cultural identity in a post-war, post-revolutionary, post-conflict environment? What kinds of impact do external ideational influences, including martial arts forms, have on local communities? How are gender systems and gender relations in the community transformed? It suggests that embodiment and local knowledges formed through practices and regimens of bodily discipline, grace and physical training (such as in ritual, martial arts and performing arts, for example), can complement and/or challenge abstract theoretical writings on ‘embodying peace’ in post-war countries.

Une action publique hybride ? Retour sur l’institutionnalisation d’un partenariat public-privé, JCDecaux à Lyon (1965–2005)

The work of JCDecaux in Lyon is analyzed on the basis of interactions between the company and local authorities. Through the relations gradually established with the Lyon Urban Community, created in 1969, the firm JCDecaux had a part in setting up the urban agglomeration. The continuity in the relations between these two parties is used to investigate how the institutions are reworked that organize modern societies. Public institutions help structure the market and construct models of urban capitalism, while private companies help work out the framework for public authorities’ actions. This joint construction leads to ever more interactions and reinforces the interdependence that tends to legitimate a hybrid form of public/private action.

Struggling for the Right to the (Creative) City in Berlin and Hamburg: New Urban Social Movements, New ‘Spaces of Hope’?

AbstractIn cities across the globe there is mounting evidence of growing mobilization by members of the so‐called ‘creative class’ in urban social movements, defending particular urban spaces and influencing urban development. This essay discusses the meaning of such developments with reference to the hypothesis made by David Harvey inSpaces of Capitalabout the increasing mobilization of cultural producers in oppositional movements in an era of wholesale instrumentalization of culture and ‘creativity’ in contemporary processes of capitalist urbanization. After briefly reviewing recent scholarly contributions on the transformations of urban social movements, as well as Harvey's hypothesis about the potential role of cultural producers in mobilizations for the construction of ‘spaces of hope’, the essay describes two specific urban protests that have occurred in Berlin and Hamburg in recent years: the fight for Berlin's waterfront in the Media Spree area, and the conflict centred on the Gängeviertel in Hamburg. In both protests artists, cultural producers and creative milieux have played a prominent role. The essay analyses the composition, agenda, contribution and contradictions of the coalitions behind the protests, discussing whether such movements represent the seeds of new types of coalitions with a wide‐ranging agenda for urban change. The essay finally proposes a future research agenda on the role of artists, cultural producers and the ‘creative class’ in urban social movements across the globe.RésuméDans les villes à travers le monde, on constate une mobilisation croissante des membres de la classe dite ‘créative’ dans des mouvements sociaux urbains afin de défendre certains espaces de la ville ou d'influencer l'urbanisme. La signification de ces évolutions est analysée en référence à l'hypothèse qu'a formulée David Harvey dansSpaces of Capitalsur la mobilisation accrue des producteurs culturels dans des mouvements contestataire à l'ère de l'instrumentalisation massive de la culture et de la ‘créativité’ dans les processus contemporains d'urbanisation capitaliste. Après une courte étude des récentes contributions sur les transformations des mouvements sociaux urbains et de l'hypothèse d'Harvey sur le rôle potentiel des producteurs culturels dans les mobilisations en vue d'élaborer des ‘espaces d'espoir’, deux contestations urbaines qui ont eu lieu ces dernières années à Berlin et Hambourg sont présentées: le combat pour les quais de Berlin dans le projet Media Spree et le conflit centré sur le Gängeviertel hambourgeois. Dans les deux cas, artistes, producteurs culturels et milieux créatifs ont joué un rôle déterminant. Cet essai analyse la composition, le programme, la contribution et les contradictions des coalitions qui soutiennent les contestations, tout en cherchant à savoir si ces mouvements sont les germes de nouveaux types de coalitions dont l'agenda se diversifie en faveur du changement urbain. Pour finir, un programme de recherches est proposé sur le rôle des artistes, des producteurs culturels et de la ‘classe créative’ dans les mouvements sociaux urbains à travers le monde.

Reaction to R. Andrés Guzmán’s “From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses ”

Reaction to R. Andrés Guzmán’s “From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses ”

From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses

From Highways to High-Rises: The Urbanization of Capital, Consciousness and Labor Struggle in Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses

Emergy-based urban dynamic modeling of long-run resource consumption, economic growth and environmental impact: conceptual considerations and calibration

Abstract This paper describes the development of a forecasting model, named the emergy-based urban dynamic model capable of accurately simulating the observed resource consumption, economic growth and environmental impact of Beijing. This model differs from previous urban emergy models by monitoring the negative effects to human well-being and ecosystem integrity in the developing urban system. A fresh perspective focuses on urban comprehensive performance linking such impacts to a supply-side environmental cost evaluation (including ecological service supply, ecological and economic losses and investment for treatment). In this introductory paper, we present the conceptual considerations of the most important components of the emergy-based urban dynamic model: the urban assets, lands, capitals, population, water resources, economic and environmental loss. Each subsystem in this model will enrich the feedback dynamics, policy levers and post-scenario analyses. Statistical Information and calibration are also considered in this dynamic emergy accounting. This study advances the temporal dynamic principles of emergy accounting through integrating upstream and downstream evaluation methods to quantify the environmental impact by addressing specific damages to human health and ecosystem's integrity and by linking such impacts to a supply-side environmental cost evaluation.

Creativity, urban regeneration and sustainability/ The Bordeaux case study

Competitive cities are currently working on how to improve the interaction between culture, regeneration building, economic development and social renewal in order to achieve more comprehensive development. It is a question not only of boosting the economies of culture but also producing new economies, starting from cultural capital, understood as an element of the expression of place identity, and as forming a system together with other types of urban capital. In this context, new alternative strategies and urban policies should be considered. Indeed, creativity is found not only in the typical characteristics of the entrepreneurial spirit but also in forms such as the dissemination of behaviour that is favourable to cultural exchange as well as the enhancement of lifestyle diversity. Starting from these premises, this paper aims to investigate the concept of the creative city/ who the drivers are, the factors that condition creativity in cities, and how they stimulate sustainable urban regeneration and innovation. Within the framework of cultural clusters, the case study of Bordeaux is illustrated. The urban transformation offered by the ‘Bordeaux les deux rives’ project and the other pilot projects are Bordeaux’s driving force for planning and producing new social, cultural and economic change, which enhances the city’s image.

Waiting for War (and other Strategies to Stop Gentrification): The Case of Ras Beirut

Analyses of gentrification have found a wide variety of causes and strong evidence that it leads to residential displacement. Insofar then that gentrification can be seen as a problem, there is an alarming need to develop appropriate solutions. Most researchers have only tacitly offered possible strategies for limiting gentrification. Moreover, most of these solutions rely on market-based approaches, which seek to manipulate conditions that appear to cause or limit gentrification, rather than aiming at its foundations. Researchers and policy makers have thus failed to address the root cause of the phenomenon—capitalist urbanization. This paper uses the case of gentrification in Beirut to illustrate the dangers of market-based approaches to studying and confronting gentrification. It concludes that we can stop gentrification by removing housing from the ironclad grip of capitalist commodification and exchange.

A formação de um espaço de civilidade em Natal [RN], Praça Augusto Severo (1845-1913)

Durante o século XIX a centralidade de Natal foi ameaçada por outros entrepostos comerciais, surgidos para contornar os obstáculos naturais que dificultavam o escoamento da produção da província do Rio Grande do Norte pela capital. Chega-se a conjecturar a mudança da capital em 1873 ao se buscar novas soluções para esse embate. No final do século XIX um novo ciclo de investimentos se esboça. Ele é marcado pela introdução de um novo meio de transporte que alterava drasticamente a escala espaço-temporal. Esse equipamento marcava a chegada da modernidade nas intervenções territoriais, em que as redes urbanas ganhavam um caráter cada vez mais deliberativo. As novas políticas territoriais eram claramente orientadas para a centralização dos fluxos na capital.Seja para aperfeiçoar os lucros de uma ferrovia particular, ou para obedecer a um plano nacional de fortalecimento das capitais portuárias o objetivo era o mesmo: concentrar em um único ponto – a capital – os meios de transporte. O controle do território deixou marcos físicos muito visíveis na Capital. Este trabalho tem por objetivo demonstrar como essas políticas territoriais se evidenciaram no espaço urbano da capital do Rio Grande do Norte, contribuindo para construir uma nova centralidade na cidade, que se firmou posteriormente como seu principal espaço de representação da civilidade.

THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE LANDMARKS: PLACING AN ICONIC BUILDING IN A HIERARCHICAL CLASIFICATION SYSTEM / ŠIUOLAIKINĖS ARCHITEKTŪROS ORIENTYRAI: IKONIŠKI PASTATAI HIERARCHINĖS KLASIFIKACIJOS SISTEMOJE

Cultural, technological, economic and social phenomena are changing the meaning and importance of different cityscape elements. The article focuses on contemporary architecture landmarks and architectural iconicity. It suggests the hierarchical classification of contemporary architectural landmarks, considering the global urban tendencies and capitalist globalization. The contemporary architectural icons are treated as urban landmarks of international importance. The dominants of cities spatial structure are recognized as other important their hierarchical type. The importance of distinguishing buildings and distinguishing urban details is limited in terms of territory, view and time.

Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia * By SYLVA FRISK

Few would deny that the veil, worn by Muslim women as a symbol of modesty, has today become an immensely controversial issue. Whether between traditionalists and feminists or liberals and conservatives, the veil and what it represents (or is perceived to represent) has inspired heated debate in academic and public policy circles throughout the world. Is the Muslim female's headdress a symbol of oppression by male-dominated interpretations of religious strictures, an assertion of religiosity and religious identity, or a liberating return to a more ‘pure’ interpretation of Islam? The search for answers to these fundamental questions has given rise to a veritable cottage industry of literature that purports to investigate and interrogate the doctrinal, discursive, and sociological dimensions of women's roles in Muslim society. In Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia, Sylva Frisk wades carefully into the waters of the debate. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out in Kuala Lumpur, the urban capital of Malaysia, home to approximately 16.5 million Muslims, Frisk examines the role of women in Malaysia as both recipients and agents of the state's Islamization process. She notes a tendency within the feminist literature to either showcase women as victims of circumstances or equate all sorts of agency as deliberate acts of resistance against male dominance in religion. In order to correct this, Frisk calls for a generative notion of agency, where religious commitments of women are taken interpretively away from the themes of resistance or subordination as a point of entry, and are assessed in relation to how women as agents express their piety and religiosity. In Frisk's own words, the objective of the book is ‘to investigate how Malay women have come to understand themselves: as religious/pious subjects, or rather as gendered subjects, since the construction of the self also involves a construction of gendered identity’ (p. 5).

The 1972 Munich Olympics and the making of modern Germany

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. Urban, State, and National Capital: Buying, Paying for, and Selling the Games 3. The Legacy of Berlin 1936 and the German Past: Problems and Possibilities 4. Germany on the Drawing Board: Architecture, Design, and Ceremony 5. After 1968: 1972 and the Youth of the World 6. East versus West: German-German Sporting Tensions from Hallstein to Ostpolitik 7. The End of the Games: Germany, the Middle East, and the Terrorist Attack 8. Conclusion: Olympic Legacies Notes Bibliography Index

The Rationalization of Space and Time: Dodoma and Socialist Modernity

The categories of space and time are crucial variables in the constitution of what many scholars deem as modernity. However, due to the almost exclusive interpretation of space and time as components of a modernity coupled with global capitalism (Harvey, Jameson), discussions of a socialist space and time as a construction of an alternate modernity during the 60s and 70s—in particular across the Third World—have been neglected. Julius Nyerere’s project of collectivation, or ujamaa, in Tanzania during this period is a prime example of an attempt to develop the nation state outside of the capitalist format. While it would be interesting to explore the connections Nyerere had with other socialist Third World countries like China within the international context and their attempts at nation building, this paper will focus on an analysis of the Tanzanian government’s decision in 1973 to move the capital of the country from the Eastern port city of Dar es Salaam, to the more centrally located Dodoma. The questions of primary importance are: How did moving the Tanzanian capital from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma in 1973 embody Nyerere’s vision of socialist African development? Or more specifically, how did the socialist urban planning of Dodoma fit into the greater project of ujamaa and rural development? And finally, how was the planned construction of a new urban capital an attempt at a definition of socialist space and time?