Urban Question Research Articles

Rebordering South Asia: Displaced Persons and Urbanization

This article analyzes displacement in the context of three communities in South Asia: Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils in India, and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In each of these cases, refugee management emerges out of the complexities of geopolitics and humanitarianism and becomes central to urban questions of the right to move and remain in the city. Drawing on scholarship in the geopolitics of migrant (im)mobilities, refugee studies, and South Asia studies, we argue that displacement threatens the contours of belonging and citizenship across South Asian nation-states. For these reasons, the cities where the displaced live have become the locus of national unbelonging and state violence through entangled forms of securitization and urbanization. In particular, we detail the spatial and socioeconomic segregation of displaced populations in which they are subject to mundane bureaucratic violence and the role that social class plays in navigating the exclusions triggered by displacement. In the cities where the displaced settle, the displaced shape the urban economy, whereas the state applies strategies of spatial control that aim to nationalize urban space while maintaining the refugees as forever displaceable.

The performativity of the state in China’s land transformation: a case study of Dahongmen, Beijing

ABSTRACT The micropolitics involved in urbanising land is yet to be well illustrated in urban and development studies. With the case of Dahongmen in Beijing, this paper explores the governing techniques for dealing with land transformation to uncover the nature and conduct of the state in weaving together land and urban questions. Recognising the power of discourses in enacting actions, this paper focuses on two performative moments of the state in reassembling land for the urban process, corresponding to social (re)ordering and economic mechanisms respectively. Both moments are critical since new ideas, concepts, and calculative rationales are invented to reassemble land into the intermediator of the urban process, whereby the state renews its identity and authority. The state, seen from the perspective of performativity, is more like a process (with structural effects) where certain utterances are made and repeated to incorporate multiple actors in land assemblages for the urban political economy.

Book review: Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question

Book review: Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question

Memorializing monuments: State space and state rollback under neo-liberalization in Mexico

Recent contributions to urban geography have considered state space by innovatively focusing on specific cases of the city built environment. Examples could include here Karl Schlögel’s slicing through the spaces of state power in Moscow 1937 or Yuri Slezkine’s methodological cue to read the saga of the Russian Revolution across time in The House of Government. This article adds to the methodological insights of urban researchers by honing in on the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, in order to consider its role as a socially produced, conflictual and dynamically changing site in the struggle over public space and its memorialization. Since its opening in 1938, the Monument to the Revolution at Plaza de la República has been a pivotal fulcrum of state power in abetting the changing geography of state space. Equally, the site has experienced contradictions and differences stemming from socially produced space across time, in the form of periods of state crisis and, most recently, state ‘rollback’ and ‘rollout’ under neo-liberalization. This article addresses both neo-liberalizing and differential structures of feeling as they bear on the space at the Monument to the Revolution. It does so by situating the Monument to the Revolution within the urban question and how neo-liberalization has unlocked local and aesthetic meanings that have become commodified, not least through the extraction of monopoly rents. Further, the article spotlights simultaneous contemporary contestations of state power and impulses of socio-spatial struggle over difference articulated in and around Plaza de la República at the monument. In so doing, the article contributes an important pedagogical focus on both homogenizing and differential structures of feeling inscribed in spaces of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Forum: (De)centring Europe in urban communication research

ABSTRACT This special forum includes six contributions by scholars affiliated with the European Communication Research and Education (ECREA) “Media, Cities and Space” Section. It focuses on “European” urban communication research as a way to explore what matters, both critically and theoretically, in media and communication studies of the urban. As a whole, the special forum aims to “decentre” existing assumptions regarding the urban locales, critical questions, and conceptual outlooks covered in each contribution-both from pre-constituted notions of “Europeanness” and from dominant approaches to the relationship between communication, media, and the urban.

Geometrical Assessment of Sunlit and Shaded Area of Urban Trees Based on Aligned Orthographic Views

To quantify the ecosystem services of trees in urban environments, it is necessary to assess received direct solar radiation of each tree. While the Sky View Factor (SVF) is suitable for assessing the total incoming short- and longwave radiation fluxes, its information is limited to specific points in space. For a spatial analysis, it is necessary to sample the area for SVF. A new geometrical method, Area View Factor (AVF), for the calculation of sunlit areas is proposed. AVF is the ratio of the unhidden, projected surface of an object to the whole projected surface of an object in a complex environment. Hereby, a virtual, orthographic camera is oriented in accordance to the sun’s position in the 3D model domain. The method is implemented in the microscale model SkyHelios, utilizing efficient rendering techniques to assess AVF of all urban trees in parallel. The method was applied to Rieselfeld in Freiburg, Germany. The assessed sunlit area is compared to the SVF at the top of each tree and solar altitude angle, revealing a strong relationship between sunlit areas to solar altitude angles. This study shows that AVF is an efficient methodology to assess received direct radiation of urban trees. Based on AVF, it is possible to identify urban areas with shaded and sunlit trees, but it can also be applied to other objects in complex environments. Therefore, AVF is applicable for urban architecture or energetic research questions.

Integrating Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design into Urban Governance Actions

Food access, stability and utilisation are key dimensions of food security at an urban scale. When the majority resided in rural areas, and lived predominantly agrarian lifestyles, it made sense for the state to govern food security through national agricultural ministries, focusing predominantly on the availability dimension of food security. With the transition to a majority urban world, coupled with the food security challenges currently experienced in urban areas, specifically in Africa, these historical policy and governance structures are increasingly inadequate in responding to essential food and nutrition needs. Problematically, urban areas, and specifically urban managers, cite unfunded mandates, and absent authority, as the reasons for not engaging food and nutrition governance responses. This paper argues that this is a false position. Drawing on recent data from household food security and poverty surveys, the paper calls for new and expanded planning and design approaches at the urban scale. The paper argues that spatial planning and urban design principles and actions provide an immediate and effective means through which to engage urban food system questions. Importantly these actions are essential to the transition from the current piecemeal project responses to urban food system inadequacies. Food sensitive planning and urban design is offered as a specific approach that could assist in programming food system–related challenges at the urban scale, responding to conceptual, analytical, organisational and design related dimensions of planning, and in so doing offering a longer term, systematic response to urban food insecurity.

Exploring the functional area approach in EU urban strategies

A vast literature has investigated processes of spatial reconfiguration, contributing to the emergence of a ‘new urban question’ that not only reframes traditional urban issues but also challenges our understanding of what cities are today. Be that as it may, the ‘European city model’ still remains current, particularly with regards to the institutional role of cities as they are increasingly considered to be relevant policy actors. This urban paradox gives new emphasis to the urban regional scale and urgently calls for the two dimensions to be connected both in terms of territorial dynamics and policy formulation. This paper addresses the topic by focusing on the functional area approach promoted by the European Union regional policy discourse, and by discussing how it shapes and legitimates new spatial configurations, with implications for urban analysis and policy approaches. The paper is based on the analysis of a database which gathers nearly 1000 strategies for Sustainable Urban Development funded by the EU between 2014-2020, and features a significant number of functional areas. The analysis reveals that the functional area approach does not only apply to metropolitan areas, big cities, or Functional Urban Areas, but can also be used for different types of territories, beyond metropolitan areas. It also underscores the need for more extensive research on what spatialities and territorial arrangements emerge from this process.

Urban Questions in the Times of Coronavirus. Responding to the Crisis of Public Space

This paper is edited on the basis of intensive round-table discussions within a relatively small group of colleagues interested and involved in thinking, making and working towards quality of public space, to discuss, problematise and evaluate what is going on and to speculate on actions suitable for these times, and the times that follow. The title of the round table emphasises questions, deliberately pointing at the enigmas posed by current situation. We see it as an opportunity to get and think together in a structured brain-storming session that encourages brave and risky discussion. The “task” for all of the participants is to reflect upon practices/experiences that we are individually familiar with, those that we are witnessing these days, and - to suggest what would be the key questions /issues that need to be (re)thought and addressed in the weeks, months, perhaps years to come. The roundtable discussions were held online on 1st May 2020 – then recorded, transcribed, edited and published as a joint piece.

Debating the Urban, the Rural and the Foreign: Łódź in the Polish Urban Discourse of Late Russian Poland

The article scrutinizes the Polish-speaking debate over industrial modernity regarding Łodź, a multi-ethnic textile factory hub on the over-industrialized Western fringe of the Russian Empire. I collate external and internal voices expressed in the press regarding modernity, urbanity and the status of the city within the national public sphere to reveal assumptions about the urban and the rural which underpinned cultural criticism targeting the industrial hotbed and attempts at self-assertion on the part of local elites. A specific developmental trajectory of rapid and barely regulated industrial growth, an ethnically mixed population, and high social polarization secured a highly ambiguous perception of this city. Warsaw-centered elites produced a specific mode of accusation against urbanity, denying its very existence in a place that could not be easily integrated into Polish, nationalistically colored, modern aspirations. From a broader perspective, the presented analysis maps the binary structure of the rural vs. the urban on the larger field of debate over modernity, the “urban question,” citizenship and national self-assertion.

Martin Amis’s “State of England” within the Lefebvrean Socio-Spatial Context

Shedding light on the complicated relationship between space and the human being who goes beyond the physical boundaries of space, Henri Lefebvre made a breakthrough with his critical approach to the urban question through his concept of the “triad of space”, including “perceived space”, referring to the physically perceptible dimension of space; “conceived space”, where the dominant ideologies are operated; and “lived space”, which is peculiar to every inhabitant on the basis of their background. He argued that space is in an incessant process of production, estranging inhabitants in their lived spaces in multicultural and capitalist countries. He posited that “fetishistic concrete abstractions” provide them with romantic domination to cover their alienation and involve them in social relationships in perceived space. England and the protagonist, Big Mal, in Martin Amis’s “State of England” (1998) stand as exemplars for the aforementioned issue. The postmodernist author fictionalizes a lower-class English man’s everyday life in the late twentieth-century England through Mal. It is set in a school garden on a sports day; however, it also portrays Mal’s lived spaces at home, the car park of a bar and even Burger King. In the present study, a Lefebvrean socio-spatial inquiry is employed for scrutinizing England’s urban identity in Amis’s story under question, within the context of capitalism. In this regard, the study indicates that England, undergoing various transformations in the 1990s, is a space of hegemony. In each part of this urban space, Mal oscillates between perceived and conceived spaces and becomes involved in the grindstone of lived space by means of some fetishistic concrete abstractions albeit his alienation. Ultimately, the study concludes that England as a whole is a politicized space which stretches throughout space-time and is always in the process of production by capitalist ideology, influencing everyday lives, especially of lower-class people and the next generation.

A Bottom-Up and Top-Down Participatory Approach to Planning and Designing Local Urban Development: Evidence from an Urban University Center

The urban area is characterized by different urban ecosystems that interact with different institutional levels, including different stakeholders and decision-makers, such as public administrations and governments. This can create many institutional conflicts in planning and designing the urban space. It would arguably be ideal for an urban area to be planned like a socio-ecological system where the urban ecosystem and institutional levels interact with each other in a multi-scale analysis. This work embraces a planning process that aims at being applied to a multi-institutional level approach that is able to match different visions and stakeholders' needs, combining bottom-up and top-down participation approaches. At the urban scale, the use of this approach is sometimes criticized because it appears to increase conflicts between the different stakeholders. Starting from a case study in the Municipality of Lecce, South Italy, we apply a top-down and bottom-up participation approach to overcome conflicts at the institutional levels in the use of the urban space in the Plan of the Urban University Center. The bottom-up participation action analyzes the vision of people that frequent the urban context. After that, we share this vision in direct comparison with decision-makers to develop the planning and design solutions. The final result is a draft of the hypothetical Plan of the Urban University Center. In this way, the bottom-up and top-down approaches are useful to match the need of the community that uses the area with the vision of urban space development of decision-makers, reducing the conflicts that can arise between different institutional levels. In this study, it also emerges that the urban question is not green areas vs. new buildings, but it is important to focus on the social use of the space to develop human well-being. With the right transition of information and knowledge between different institutional levels, the bottom-up and top-down approaches help develop an operative effective transdisciplinary urban plan and design. Therefore, public participation with bottom-up and top-down approaches is not a tool to obtain maximum consensus, but mainly a moment of confrontation to better address social issues in urban planning and design.

Between passion and reason

CITY has always been a forum for passionate urban scholarship. But what role do the passions play in urbanization(s) today? And should we even make room in urban scholarship for such a volatile part of the human condition? Across the vast breadth of contemporary urban scholarship, today we find deeply paradoxical answers to these questions. So much contemporary urbanization is explained as being confined and codified by free-market rationalities [Peck 2013. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press]. With increasing force, these rationalities are then mobilized in technological innovations that have the power to condition the perception and behavior of citizens [Wyly and Dhillon 2018. “Planetary Kantsaywhere.” City 22 (1): 130–151]. Our casino capitalist, smart cities therefore seem bent on pursuing and installing the whatever-the-cost perverse urban rationalities of climate catastrophe [Madden 2019. “Editorial: City of Emergency.” City 23 (3): 281–284]. And yet, this unreasonable rationality is now producing symptomatic populisms that are distinctly passionate. Few cities have been immune to popular sentiments that have rejected appeals to reason, free market or not [Rossi 2018. “The Populist Eruption and the Urban Question.” Urban Geography 39 (9): 1425–1430]. Many citizens seem sick of the incessant compulsion to reason, they simply want their desires realized. How then should critical urban scholarship approach the current confluence of (free market) rationality and (populist) passion? This contribution examines this question via the political philosophy of David Hume. Isaiah Berlin is said to have claimed of Hume that ‘No man has influenced the history of philosophy to a deeper or more disturbing degree.’ Hume’s arguments about the primacy of passions can help us to understand how the remnants of neoliberal rationalities cohabit today’s cities with various populisms. More importantly, Hume might also offer insights into how critical scholarship can have progressive purchase in such turbulent times.

De/re-densification

In this article, I set out an approach to cities and urbanisation through a relational geography of urban density. While density has long been central to the urban question, I argue for a focus on the relationship between densification, de-densification, and re-densification as basis for understanding urban transformations and futures. A focus on the relational geographies of de/re-densification entails attending to three vital inter-related processes: urban transformation, sociospatial inequality, and ecological crisis. Taken together, this demands a critical approach to the framing and operation of de/re-densification geographies. I reflect on the implications for a politics of density.

Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis

Infrastructure is critical to the ways in which urban inequality is produced and experienced. Across US post-industrial contexts urban infrastructures are decaying, causing problems to the capacity of various systems to deliver essential resource flows for social reproduction. This paper examines the US pipeline crisis to understand why, how and with what effects infrastructure has undergone a process of physical decay, concentrated across inner-city areas. It uses a case study of Camden, New Jersey, a poor city in which infrastructure has undergone decades of neglect, privatisation and under-maintenance. This decay has created difficulties in sustaining a safe, universal and fully functioning infrastructure. To understand these dynamics, the paper advances an urban political ecology approach to examining these infrastructural geographies. It makes three key contributions. First, it considers how to conceptualise decay and its effect on the urban circulations that have been enabled/disabled by infrastructure through the notion of unbounding. Second, given the highly segregated infrastructural experiences between a black city and white suburbs, the paper draws on recent geographic scholarship on racial capitalism, emphasising the role of race in the governing of infrastructure and in accounting for Camden’s conditions of decay. Third, the paper advances a relational theorisation that draws on concepts emanating from urban political ecology and associated research on infrastructure in cities of the global South. With the reported, widespread decay of infrastructures in global North, post-industrial contexts, a relational theorisation can draw on long-established vocabularies that challenge where we locate the ‘infrastructural South’ and prompt new political urban questions.

Housing for the greatest number: Casablanca’s under-appreciated public housing developments

ABSTRACT In the context of today’s increasing acceptance of Casablanca’s twentieth century architecture as ‘cultural heritage’, this paper assesses the value of the projects providing ‘housing for the masses’ which were put into effect by Michel Ecochard and his team at the beginning of the 1950s, especially at Carrières Centrales in Hay Mohammedi. Truly an icon of modern architecture, this under-recognised project – significantly transformed by its occupants – now paradoxically arouses the curiosity of a large number of student architects and other specialists. This essay is an attempt to reflect that interest by showing how this many-faceted project is worthy of being considered as ‘cultural heritage’. It deals first with the project’s founding principles and the debates within CIAM that it provoked. Then the paper looks at the transformation and adaptations made to the project by its inhabitants acting within their particular socio-political context. Finally, we show the influence of the Carrières Centrales project on later housing projects within Morocco as well as internationally, including the lessons it can bring to bear on more recent urban questions.

China's Belt and Road Initiative and the emerging geographies of global urbanisation

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is heralded as the largest investment in infrastructure in history and is expected to re‐shape the geographies of urbanisation in the coming decades. In this paper we review the burgeoning, yet still embryonic literature on the BRI. Our aim is to move beyond currently dominant framings of the BRI as a geopolitical or economic strategy that tend to overlook the complex embeddedness of infrastructure. Drawing on theories of planetary urbanisation, we argue that the BRI constitutes a form of urbanisation that is bound up with the socio‐spatial and ecological restructuring of global capitalism. We illustrate this by mapping and analysing energy projects under the BRI. Overall, we outline a research agenda on the BRI that calls for (1) a more nuanced analysis of its spatial and scalar politics; (2) approaching the BRI as a distinctly urban question; and (3) a disruption of the dominant China‐centric discussions through critical in‐depth case‐study analysis.

The urban question in the context of the “double world”

Once the principle of the inseparability of the material world and cyber territory has been admitted, the question put to the urban planner is being transformed. The transition from the representation of two separate worlds - the physical on the one hand and the digital on the other - to a representation of a “double world” in the sense of the indivisible inter-connection of the physical and the digital, leads to a change of paradigm in abstraction and representation. By accepting the principle of considering the material world and the cyber territory (and not cyberspace) as an indivisible whole, we come up to realize that the urban question changes. If, in the past, our thoughts and studies were aimed at seeking a common world that we should discover and maintain, the modern world is not presumed to belong exclusively in the material reality. The planner’s work, therefore, should certainly take into account this interconnection, the discontinuous, fragmentary involvement, of matter and information. However, this phenomenon is not new since the symbolic dimension of cities, architecture and space in general has always closely interwoven representation and the real world. The difference is that there was then a connection with a particular territory or a national identity. Today, this ancient territorial reference is weakening, although there are signs of reversion to it. Based on these observations, the paper will discuss the evolution of the urban question under the assumption of the indivisible “double world” and the augmented territories.

From the social to the urban question: the pedagogical role of participatory arts practices in cities in transformation

ABSTRACT Within social work, participatory arts practices have increasingly been put forward as a (new) pedagogical project that creates opportunities to deal with the challenges and complexities of living together in a changing and increasingly plural urban society. The aim of this article is to explore how and why participatory art was assigned this pedagogical role. First, we situate the current debate on participatory art in relation to urban living in its historical and socio-political context. Second, we uncover the claims concerning the role(s) of participatory art in an urban context by conducting a systematic literature review. Our inductive analysis of 35 relevant studies reveals that these practices are attributed overly optimistic, wide-ranging and at the same time mystifying ‘urban’ qualities, by which the connection with underlying social and/or political questions becomes obscured. In positioning participatory art critically in the face of current urban challenges, we underline the necessity to reaffirm the core social pedagogical project these practices were mandated for and to demystify the claims made on their behalf.

Uneven incorporation: Volumetric transitions in peri-urban China's conservation zones

A central feature of China's “green” development plan has been the creation of conservation zones across the peri-urban fringes of major cities. In these conservation zones, rural land and housing are being unevenly incorporated into urban space, leading to a diverse set of experiences for dislocated villagers. In this paper, I develop a volumetric approach to analyze the spatial politics of agricultural and urban transitions in China's conservation zones. I advance theories of vertical and volumetric space, which consider relations across heights, depths, and surfaces, through attention to the temporalities and everyday experiences of volumes. My volumetric approach provides a foundation for delineating how the uneven valuation and compensation of rural land and housing shapes social differentiation, as well as how villagers navigate and experience rural-urban transitions. Furthermore, I argue that a volumetric account of three-dimensional space exposes the interconnections between agrarian and urban questions, which are usually considered discretely. The central contribution of this paper, therefore, is to reorient the agrarian and urban questions in relation to one another across horizontal, vertical, and temporal axes.