Urban Frontier Research Articles

Convivial encounters in the city. On welcoming the other

ABSTRACT The urban is a site of diversity, multiplicity and conviviality under threat from commercialization, not least through tourism. The dominant socio-spatial logic of capitalism has urbanized its extractive practices capturing value from the urban and social fabric and its affective and communicative values. This monetizing of everyday life through all manners of platform capitalism embedded in ubiquitous connectivity will erode urban cultural diversity. As a counter measure the paper discusses the theoretical contours of urban conviviality and will conceptually explore how to re-story the urban fostering such conviviality, engaging with the most recent tourism policy of the city of Amsterdam. Conviviality mediated through a vibrant urban fabric can make for spaces of alterity and reinstate use-value as central to our economic systems. Countering thereby capitalist monoculture of urbanity, urban design animated by care and responsiveness can foster multiplicity and conviviality. Applied to the tourism encounter and a reoriented understanding of hospitality allows for tourism animated by autonomy and creativity, personal interdependence and redistributive justice, contributing to the momentum needed to overturn the deadening urban frontier of capital accumulation.

Militias going rogue: Social dilemmas and coercive brokerage in Rio de Janeiro's urban frontier

AbstractExamining Rio de Janeiro's milícias (‘militias’) through the ‘coercive brokerage’ concept can reveal how they are central to how states and markets function. By tracing their emergence through moments of political and economic rupture, this article reveals how milícias responded to the social dilemmas of marginalised populations. Drawing from archival documentation, interviews, and ethnographic fieldnotes, this article argues that by brokering solutions to collective action problems and attempting to level‐up inequalities, milícias gained access to the political system and were able to shape the urban political economy. However, their coercive force also stimulated fresh contradictions, leading to a new set of structural, symbolic, and physical violences.

Honolulu’s colonial legacy of marginalization: A cycle of emergency and urban development

Relying heavily on newspaper archives, this article explores the ‘first rough draft’ of Honolulu’s early urban frontier to rescue the spectacle of environmental and emergency management in the early twentieth-century town of Kakaʻako. Analysing the interdependent discursive and material processes in response to public health crisis – viewed here serving as a continuation of colonialism – I show how Kakaʻako existed as a release valve for detritus as part of a dialectical process towards development. Spaces like Kakaʻako proved central to the partitioning of urban space, serving as receptacles of bio-sociocultural waste. This article details how cycles of emergency cordoned-off spaces utilized to contain, discipline or assimilate certain groups, provoking the development and evacuation of that which is judged as unfit and unworthy while engendering the notion of profitability as a necessary precondition to inhabiting city space.

CONCEPTUALIZING AFRICAN URBAN PERIPHERIES

AbstractRecent years have seen a rising interest in peri‐urban spaces, urban frontiers and new suburbanisms, including in African contexts. However, given the scale of urban growth and the extreme diversity of formations emerging on the geographical edges of African city‐regions, a deeper understanding is needed of the drivers of peripheral urbanisms and the lived experiences of urban change in these spaces. Based on a comparative research project in South Africa and Ethiopia, this article draws out the epistemologies of researching African urban peripheries and presents a new conceptual framework. It offers a language for interpreting processes of peripheral development and change, highlighting five distinct but overlapping logics which we term speculative, vanguard, auto‐constructed, transitioning and inherited. Rather than describing bounded peripheral spaces, we argue that these logics can co‐exist, hybridize and bleed into each other in different ways in specific places and at different temporal junctures. Centring our methodological practices of comparative analysis, and privileging the voices of those living in urban peripheries, the article employs critical readings of urban scholarship before exploring how these five logics illuminate the complex processes of urban peripheral evolution and transformation. Formulating these logics helps to fill a lacuna in urban conceptualization with potential relevance beyond African contexts.

Short-term rentals as a new urban frontier – evidence from European cities

Papers in this special issue offer a wide range of political economy and sociological perspectives to explain the development and impacts of short-term rentals (STRs) in European cities. Empirically, they provide insights regarding STR providers, socio-spatial impacts, and regulation. Authors reveal the professionalization of the sector vis-à-vis the connection between STRs and the wider financialization of housing. STRs are predominantly supplied by professional property managers as well as by middle-class individuals for which renting on digital platforms is their main professional activity. Furthermore, the increasing professionalization of hosts and the intrinsic competition among them is largely stimulated by the business model of digital platforms which has progressively favoured professional operators. Understanding how STRs are shaped by platform capitalism helps to explain the socio-spatial impacts of this market as well as why current regulations have not mitigated such impacts. In terms of impacts, contributions to this special issue document processes of displacement, gentrification, and how the penetration of visitors in neighbourhoods is experienced by residents as a process of loss and dispossession. However, due to the lobbying campaigns of professional operators and industry players, regulation has led to the legitimization of this new market rather than to the limitation of the activity. Therefore, the special issue challenges the use of a ‘sharing economy' and ‘peer-to-peer platforms’ as analytical categories, and, instead, provides evidence of why the STR market should be seen as part of the wider expansion of platform capitalism, consolidating the neoliberal and financialized urban paradigm.

Land speculation by villagers: Territorialities of accumulation and exclusion in peri-urban China

Speculation in land and real estate has become a chief means of revenue generation in cities across the world. The literature on speculative urbanism has discussed how the advent of land markets transformed government strategies and created new partnerships between state and capital for rent extraction. Far less attention, however, has been paid to grassroots practices of speculation among residents of peri-urban and rural areas, whose neighbourhoods are often dramatically transformed by the rapid appreciation in land prices brought about by urbanization. Based on fieldwork in a Chinese urban village, this paper demonstrates how land commodification gave rise to competitive territorialization and forms of "intimate exclusion" within the community. The boom in property prices amplified inequalities between villagers, as those with greater access to capital, authority and social networks were better positioned to reap gains from the market while those without land rights were excluded. The desire to capitalize on market gains furthermore sharpened intra-community conflicts, creating tensions between neighbours and family members over issues of ownership and distribution. By focusing on everyday practices of territorialization at the neighbourhood level, this paper sheds light on how land speculation and rentiership could contribute to deepened differentiation at the urban frontier.

Dispossession and the militarised developer state: financialisation and class power on the agrarian–urban frontier of Islamabad, Pakistan

Pakistan’s capital Islamabad is one of the country’s fastest growing cities, the labouring poor comprising the majority of its residents. Many migrants from rural hinterlands and war-ravaged regions reside in informal squatter settlements on the city’s rapidly expanding agrarian–urban frontier. In recent years, violent demolitions of these settlements, known as katchi abadis, have increased in accordance with the growing demand for land as a financial asset in the form of gated housing schemes. Islamabad is a microcosm of contemporary processes of urbanisation across both Global North and South. Dispossession of both rural and urban working-class communities to make way for for-profit real estate development is an increasingly common practice in many countries, reflecting systemic transformation in the logic of global capitalism towards ‘financialisation’. Our case study engages the theoretical literature on financialisation and real estate along with recent empirical work on dialectical processes of development and dispossession in the Global South. In Islamabad, a ‘militarised developer state’ featuring civil and military bureaucracies, private contractors and city development authorities props up the dominant land-use paradigm, which deeply exacerbates urban land inequality and fuels both construction and destruction of katchi abadis which house a large segment of the city’s working-class population.

UNCERTAIN GROUNDS: Cartographic Negotiation and Digitized Property on the Urban Frontier

AbstractBased on ethnographic research with cadastral land surveyors and revenue bureaucrats in Gurgaon, North India, this article examines how the desire to etch out and impose digitized private property titles on India's urban frontier is mediated by the shifting socio‐materiality of bureaucratic work. The article argues that bureaucratic uncertainty structures the commodification of rural land in Gurgaon, and explores how digital technologies, designed to produce clarity, are being wielded by powerful groups to flexibly settle property claims. The bureaucratic office and cadastral survey are sites where competing actors 'work' land's intrinsic pliability, mobilize conflicting documentation, manipulate bureaucratic materials and navigate unmapped property claims in pursuit of territorial claims. In this context, much heralded digital property governance systems, the article argues, are not about producing clarity but rather capturing the conditions of uncertainty. Exploring the practices of surveyors and bureaucrats as they encounter land's shifting materiality and work with its multiple, conflicting representations, reveals the ways in which digitized property systems remain materially bound and always socially mediated, contested and secured.

Ritual performances and collective violence in divided cities – The riots in Belfast (1886) and Jerusalem (1929)

This article explores the interrelation of violence, space, and public rituals in Belfast and Jerusalem. With the image of being cities of violence, contested by two groups that compete for political and spatial hegemony, Belfast and Jerusalem are also characterised as divided, both on a material and symbolic level. The roots of this division can be traced back to the era of the British Empire, especially to the riots in Belfast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the uprisings in Jerusalem during the British Mandate of Palestine. In the wider context of British imperial policies of differentiation along religious lines and urban separation, communal identities were strengthened, and processes of residential segregation were accelerated, thereby creating urban frontiers. On the basis of historical sources, particularly reports by Royal Commissions of Inquiry that were set up to investigate the riots in Belfast and Jerusalem, this paper analyses how violent urban geographies were created in both cities in different but also remarkably similar ways. Down to the present day, public religious and political rituals, often combined with nationalist and militarist elements, are a crucial part of periodic manifestations of collective violence in these cities. Practices of appropriation of space and a temporary redrawing of borders and boundaries are dominant features of these rituals. Religious ceremonies, street parades, funeral processions or political demonstrations take place at contested sites or are led through areas “belonging” to the “other” group. The analysis shows that these ritual practices contributed greatly in transforming parts of the cities into urban spaces characterised by exclusion and imbued with memories of violence. This paper concludes that ritual performances in public space have a strong impact on the production and shaping of collective violence during riots.

Environmental impact assessment of agro-services symbiosis in semiarid urban frontier territories. Case study of Mendoza (Argentina)

In the next 10 years, cities will house 60% of the world's population, where in agro-urban frontier territories, mainly in semiarid regions, problems associated with land use and water distribution will arise. Therefore, a model of growth that contemplates the lowest use of resources must be proposed. The aim of this study is to determine the environmental impact of the use of resources in agro-services frontier territories of semiarid regions in three urban growth scenarios, linear and circular systems. The study is focused on Luján de Cuyo in Mendoza, Argentina. Through a life cycle assessment, environmental performance was evaluated for the current scenario and the three proposed ones. In addition, an ecoefficiency analysis was performed in relation to climate change and water consumption and the cost of surface uses, as well as an assessment according to the multifunctionality of surface use. Scenario 1 is a linear diffuse urban system, scenario 2 a circular water agro-urban system, and scenario 2 green plus energy a circular water and energy agro-urban system. The outcomes illustrate that scenario 2 green plus energy has the least environmental impacts. Compared to the linear scenario, both circular scenarios show a substantial reduction in water consumption (38–40%) and marine eutrophication (32–47%) and curtail freshwater eutrophication impacts. Furthermore, household energy impacts are reduced by 39% in scenario 2 green plus energy with photovoltaic panel implementation, and maximum ecoefficiency in response to climate change is reached. Additionally, the impacts of scenario 2 green plus energy are more than 42% less than those of scenario 1 in terms of the multifunctionality of surface use. This study shows that it is possible to achieve more sustainable semiarid urban frontier territories with local water and regional energy circularity.

Property, Citizenship, and Invisible Dispossession in Myanmar’s Urban Frontier

ABSTRACT Myanmar’s systematic dispossession of religious and ethnic minorities is well-documented as a tool for counterinsurgency through territorialisation. However, the specific contours of the relationship between minorities, territorialisation, and urban dispossession remain underexplored. The article argues that legislative changes linking identity, property, and belonging led to widescale invisible dispossession of minorities, through the mechanisms of law, citizenship and bureaucracy. Such dispossession gave birth to multiple urban frontiers – temporal spaces that break down existing property relations and create new ones through territorialisation. This article explores one such moment in Myanmar’s largest city and former capital, Yangon, through the lens of Islamic pious endowments, or waqf. By positioning Yangon’s post-1988 landscape as an urban frontier, the article shows how legislative changes serve to actively create frontiers in urban centres through legal dispossession and the transformation of property relations. The article develops the concept of the urban frontier as inextricably tied to territorialisation and dispossession, positing that a frontier, as a spatialized moment in time, can exist at geographical centres as well as peripheries.

Germany’s Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City. By Kristin Poling. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. 256 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $50.00.

Germany’s Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City. By Kristin Poling. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. 256 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $50.00.

Semiotics and the Suburbs

Semiotics and the Suburbs

Forest-linked livelihoods in a globalized world.

Forests have re-taken centre stage in global conversations about sustainability, climate and biodiversity. Here, we use a horizon scanning approach to identify five large-scale trends that are likely to have substantial medium- and long-term effects on forests and forest livelihoods: forest megadisturbances; changing rural demographics; the rise of the middle-class in low- and middle-income countries; increased availability, access and use of digital technologies; and large-scale infrastructure development. These trends represent human and environmental processes that are exceptionally large in geographical extent and magnitude, and difficult to reverse. They are creating new agricultural and urban frontiers, changing existing rural landscapes and practices, opening spaces for novel conservation priorities and facilitating an unprecedented development of monitoring and evaluation platforms that can be used by local communities, civil society organizations, governments and international donors. Understanding these larger-scale dynamics is key to support not only the critical role of forests in meeting livelihood aspirations locally, but also a range of other sustainability challenges more globally. We argue that a better understanding of these trends and the identification of levers for change requires that the research community not only continue to build on case studies that have dominated research efforts so far, but place a greater emphasis on causality and causal mechanisms, and generate a deeper understanding of how local, national and international geographical scales interact.

Jiehebuor suburb? Towards a translational turn in urban studies

AbstractEngaging with reflections on improper urban vocabularies, this article proposes a translational turn to foreground dialogues—rather than equivalences—between languages. Drawing on the philosophies of language and hermeneutics, I adopt ‘the fusion of horizons’ as an alternative perspective to redefine translation where different languages encounter each other. To better capture global urban experiences, we should recognise the role of translation that exposes us to strangeness and alterity. This point is elaborated with heterogeneous names of the urban frontier, which inform us how and how far appropriating gaps/distances can initiate creative and unexpected dialogues for more global urban studies.

Под знаком дезурбанизации: взлет и падение советского проекта Новосибирской региональной агломерации


 
 
 
 Статья акцентирует внимание на способах и «механике» работы с проблематикой городского территориального развития в советский период на примере Новосибирска, крупнейшего города на востоке России. Объектом исследования становится проект Приобского промышленного района, пространственно- экономической проекцией формирования которого в 1950–1960-х гг. должна была стать Новосибирская региональная агломерация. Метод исследования построен на сравнительно-типологическом анализе сопоставления структур пространственного развития.
 Показано, что преимущественным источником роста численности населения городских центров Сибири стала внутрирегиональная (внутрисибирская) миграция. Путем сравнительного анализа выявлена схожесть процессов, связанных с ограничением темпов роста городского населения, инициированных союзными и региональными властями на рубеже 1950–1960-х гг. В случае реализации проект Приобского промышленного района создавал устойчивые предпосылки к созданию Новосибирской региональной агломерации, со стабилизацией расчетной численности Новосибирска на уровне 1,2–1,3 млн человек.
 Опорными центрами формирующейся региональной агломерации становились специализированные субцентры (“specialized subcentres” в типологии узлов полицентрической формы развития урбанистических кластеров Питера Холла) или новые пригородные пространства (“emerging exurban realms” в концепции типов «городских миров» Роберта Лэнга и Джона Холла), представляющие собой порядка десяти областных городов и поселков. Рассматривая проблематику через призму концепта детерриторизации и ретерриторизации как способов пространственного взаимодействия в поле чрезвычайно подвижного городского фронтира, можно увидеть, что роль основных акторов процесса отводилась предприятиям — производственным объединениям. Именно эти индустриальные мини-конгломераты через ведомственную вертикаль и становятся конструкторами социо-экономических полей (в представлении категорий физического и социального пространства Пьера Бурдье) полицентричной сети так и не реализованного проекта Новосибирской региональной агломерации.
 
 
 

Reterritorialization practices and strategies of campesinos in the urban frontier of Bogotá, Colombia

Much of the research on urbanization has focused on how rural populations move to cities for work opportunities. This paper takes a different perspective on the relations between rural populations and urbanization. The livelihoods of rural dwellers on the outskirts of the city of Bogotá in Colombia are increasingly affected by the expansion of urban activities and infrastructure. Therefore, urbanization takes place in the areas of residence of the rural populations; these people do not migrate to the city but, rather, the city migrates to them. Consequently, rural ways of life face growing competition from the production of commodities and services on the urban-rural fringe, including quarrying and landfills serving the needs of industries and urban populations. We explore how rural populations and their livelihoods have transformed as a response to these urban dynamics and the expansion of the city. We focus on the strategies that the rural populations employ to deal with the physical and socio-ecological impacts of this change. The defense of peri-urban livelihoods through these strategies is simultaneously social and spatial and has been partially successful. However, increasing social and environmental inequality, including worsening access to land, water and vital ecological functions, tends to lead to a general reduction in the quality of life in the urban frontier.

State, Security, and People along Urban Frontiers: Juxtapositions of Identity and Authority in Quetta

Quetta is a postcolonial city in Pakistan on the frontiers of global warfare where terrorism—as an extreme or extraordinary condition—is juxtaposed alongside “ordinary” urban social and political dynamics. This combination shapes the nature of and relationships between space, state, and citizens. Unprecedented violence, targeted at the city’s Hazara population, coexists and combines with inefficiencies and informalities in urban governance to create the ultimate juxtacity: one where state institutions engage in power struggles among themselves as security and administration fail, where individually motivated state agents try to work within the constraints of an inefficient political system, where policing involves both public distrust and a constant threat to life, and where life as a Hazara includes both elaborate security arrangements for trips outside Hazara areas and insecurity even inside people’s homes. Identity—religious and ethnic—assumes center-stage in contentious local politics even as activists devise creative and unifying yet disruptive strategies to exert pressure and achieve political goals. The paper studies how these strategies transform and/or reinforce complex juxtapositions of state authority, public space, and grassroots organization.

Rescaling China’s rural–urban frontier: Exception as norm in the access to development

This article examines how zoning – awarding exceptional status to selected sites – has been used as a governance tool to regulate access to land made available through land-use changes on the outskirts of Chengdu between 2007 and 2018. By studying these claims to exceptional status and the implementation of associated policies at the local level, the article seeks to demonstrate how zoning reconfigures power locally. The article argues that zoning delivers fast, socially controllable urbanization. The boundaries enforced through zoning offer less-privileged areas unique political and economic opportunities. Since zoning carries many advantages and is ultimately governed by the state, its implementation enforces state authority.

‘Who is really gonna benefit?’: The punk habitus in the downtown Edmonton field

The new home of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Edmonton Oilers opened in 2016. This publicly financed, CAD 613.7 million arena was built in downtown Edmonton, Alberta. The arena and its broader entertainment district were designed to ‘revitalize’ Edmonton’s inner city that was already home to the majority of the city’s homeless population. The spatial transformation of Edmonton’s inner city was an example of what geographer Neil Smith referred to as ‘The New Urban Frontier’. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this article explores how the local music community reacted to downtown gentrification through songs by punk bands Latcho Drom, Rebuild/Repair and Audio/Rocketry, along with rapper Cadence Weapon. This article assesses a series of reactions ranging from supportive and promotional to critical and resistive. By showing how musicians engaged in the debate over development, this article creates a template for assessing processes of gentrification, through the relationship between professional sport, media and music. It analyses the role of cultural production in the continued process of gentrification, future developments in cities and who belongs in the new urban landscape. In doing so, this article suggests the embodiment of a punk habitus by agents negotiating various fields in Edmonton and beyond.