Urban Regime Research Articles

The Politics of Cartographic Calculation and Coordination: State Mapping of Human Settlements in Lima

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates a way of analysing planning governance in relation to human settlements and exposes the micro-politics at play that precipitate particular forms of planning in Lima. Adopting a socio-material perspective, it focuses on mundane institutional practices in the production, use and circulation of cartography, to reveal conflicting and competing rationalities. It uncovers the multiple ways the politics of representation play out through omission, inclusion and partial visibility of low-income settlements, as well as the production and reproduction of cartographic palimpsests, giving way to an urban governance regime that works against the normative objectives of the state.

Comparative Case Study Methods in Urban Political Development

Over the past decade there has been a concerted attempt among a growing group of authors to bring together the political science subfields of urban politics and American political development (APD). In this paper, I look at specifically how the comparative study of different cities and urban areas might contribute to this intellectual project, beginning with a brief illustrative comparison of Philadelphia and Montreal. I then place that comparison in the larger context of recent literature in postcolonialism, assemblage, and planetary urbanization, which I use to establish what I call an aggregation strategy for constructing variables—or, alternately, for denying the very existence of variables. I then suggest how my aggregation strategy could improve upon urban regime analysis, and inform new directions in studies at the intersection of urban politics and APD.

Provincialising smart urbanism in Taipei: The smart city as a strategy for urban regime transition

The appeal of revolutionising urban governance through information technologies has prompted cities across the globe to pursue smart city initiatives. The mainstream scholarship on these initiatives has mostly focused on technology and corporate-led urban development, and it also often privileges the experience of cities in the global North. Nevertheless, this mainstream understanding of the smart city may obscure emerging new power dynamics and locally contextualised processes associated with smart urban development, especially in cities at the global periphery. Inspired by post-colonial theories, this article makes the case for ‘provincialising’ smart urbanism by dislodging technology from the centre of analysis, accentuating perspectives of cities outside the locations where the smart city knowledge is traditionally produced and attending to power relationships. In our case study of Taipei, this provincialising approach helps unveil various logics, intentionalities, assemblages and power dynamics through which the smart city is employed as a political strategy to facilitate urban regime transition. We argue that the current non-affiliated Ko administration exploits the veneer of technological superiority and political neutrality of its smart city agenda to set a new growth agenda, form new development coalitions, establish new institutions and incorporate rising populist momentum into policy-making. Focusing on the politics of being smart, our findings illustrate how smart city experiments reshape power dynamics and regime formation through reorganising actors and interest groups, reconfiguring government institutions, reallocating resource distribution and, in the end, bolstering governing legitimacy.

Space Grabs: Colonizing the Vertical City

AbstractMuch attention has been paid recently to land grabs in rural and urban areas of the global South, but relatively little attention has been paid to such activities in the third dimension—vertical space. Yet vertical space has also been increasingly colonized, as manifest in the transformation of mega‐city skylines through the proliferating number and height of high‐rises in both central cities and peri‐urban developments. We investigate how floor area ratio policies, originally designed to control densification, have been reworked to facilitate densification through floor area uplift. Thus a tool originally developed to advance public welfare has been used to facilitate the profitability of real estate projects for developers and to benefit local governments. Taking DKI Jakarta as our case study, we sketch out the coevolution of this policy with urban regimes, focusing on the mid‐2010s when compensation measures were formalized and made transparent. By using a particular project in Jakarta's central business district we show how the benefits of floor area uplift favor private sector developers over the local government. In a context of rapidly increasing land values, increasing demand for housing from an emergent middle class, and particularly the privatization of planning, this unevenness systematically favors the private sector.

Coalitions, agendas, and funding in the public transport arena: exploring urban governance arrangements in two Mexican cities

ABSTRACT The paper uses qualitative analysis in the public transport arena to provide a thorough understanding of governing coalitions in Mexican cities and expand Urban Regime Analysis to the context of Mexico. The evidence suggests that Mexican urban regimes are organic-instrumental. In such regimes, private economic interests play a key role; the state government becomes the leading actor, and its collaborative management capabilities become crucial to achieving coalition goals and preserve the alliance between actors. About multilevel governance, the cases show that the differences in the party affiliations of authorities are insignificant for collaboration when an urban regime exists.

Dismantling the advertising city: Subvertising and the urban commons to come

Subvertising, a portmanteau for ‘subverting advertising’, is the illicit practice of intervening into urban advertising space, from graffiti scribbles and removed adverts, to full-blown billboard takeovers and digitally hacked adverts. In this article, I draw from 24 months of ethnography with subvertisers to suggest that a particular ideal of public space, that of a ‘regime of order’, is folded into the hegemonic spatial management of urban communication by advertising actors. This ‘regime’ relies on separating worlds from common use, that is, on what Giorgio Agamben has phrased ‘consecration’. As an operation with capacities for ‘profanation’, subvertising makes visible the ‘natural’ appearance of this urban regime, and enacts highly temporary placeholder forms for the communicative commons to come. Contributing to debates on the geographies of public space and publicness, subvertisers show that the possibility of common use does not emerge from property rights, shared value-systems or a pre-determined scope of usage. Instead, common use emerges from the deactivation of the very notions of rights, laws, identity and ends. Here I trace subvertisers’ insistence on taking seriously the charge of openness, incompatibility, contestation, excess and the dysfunctional in urban expression as sources of inspiration and (self-)transformation.

Advanced marginality and criminalization: the case of Altındağ

ABSTRACT Many studies have identified the rise of the drug trade in the inner-city slums of Ankara’s Altındağ district in the wake of post-urban transformation projects (UTPs). However, none of them has thus far discussed the surge of such organized criminal activity in relation to the wider urban policy regime of Turkey. This paper offers the concept of advanced marginality to understand the complex relations between neoliberal urban governmentality and its repercussions in local areas, which results in UTPs, the disintegration of communality, the emergence of slums, and the rise of illicit enterprises. The paper argues that the formation of organized drug trade in Altındağ following the development of UTPs is an outcome of the advanced marginality resulting from the changing urban governmentality and its deliberate neoliberal political preferences.

Governing urban sustainability transitions: urban planning regime and modes of governance

There is an increasing need for urban sustainability transitions, though empirical cases that focus on the governance of these processes over time are not plentiful. This study addresses that gap by examining the governance of an urban transition in an eco-neighbourhood in Helsinki, using the framework of a multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions and modes of governance. This study shows how the modes of governance have changed from the start of the planning in 1994–2018 and how the different dimensions of the urban planning regime have enabled or constrained a sustainability transition, based on a document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews. As for the modes of governance, hierarchical and network were most widely used. The plot assignment stipulations that contained sustainability requirements, as well as the collaborative area working group method, have been scaled up city-wide since. This study concludes that more process-focussed policy instruments are needed.

공공주도 도시재생사업의 파트너십 형성과정 : 도시레짐이론을 통한 신촌 도시재생사업 분석

공공주도 도시재생사업의 파트너십 형성과정 : 도시레짐이론을 통한 신촌 도시재생사업 분석

On whose land is the city to be built? Farmers, donors and the urban land question in Beira city, Mozambique

A new era of global interventionism in African cities is emerging, the implications of which for existing claims to urban space are poorly understood. This is particularly true for the claims of farmers. Despite being a ubiquitous feature of many African cities, urban agriculture broadly exists in a conceptual limbo between rurality and urbanity, largely invisible to urban governance and substantive scholarship. Based on the case of Beira, Mozambique, in this article we make urban agriculture empirically and conceptually visible within the context of emerging debates on the urban land question in Africa. Through a historical–political analysis, we demonstrate how urban farming has constituted a distinct feature of Beira’s urbanism, which has evolved amidst successive and contradictory state-land regimes. Moving to the present day, we demonstrate how a new urban regime has emerged out of a coalition of municipal leaders and international donors with the aim of erasing all traces of urban agriculture from the city through urban ‘development’. The findings demonstrate that there is a need for a better understanding of the manifold claims to urban space, outside of slum urbanism alone, in contemporary land rights debates. We conclude by arguing that there is a need for a substantive land rights agenda that transcends the prescriptive categories of urbanism and rurality by focusing instead on the universal land question.

Power relationships and coalitions in urban renewal and heritage conservation: The Nga Tsin Wai Village in Hong Kong

Urban renewal has been predominantly driven by themes of property-led and economic profit-driven redevelopment. The immense redevelopment pressures in dense urban cities have often posed unresolved conflicts in the conservation of historic quarters, particularly vernacular buildings with local significance instead of designated monuments with outstanding heritage value. This study examines the 20-year debate over the conservation and redevelopment of Nga Tsin Wai Old Village, one of the very few remaining villages in the urban area in Hong Kong. This case vividly demonstrates the contestations between the urban redevelopment and heritage conservation regimes and the multiple power relations that exist within each coalition. By combining the urban regime theory with the growth machine thesis, this study illustrates the complex interplay of power relations and struggles amongst different actors to determine their roles and interests, exercise of power and formation of coalitions. As such, the findings of this work improve our understanding of the sequential interrelationships amongst the power struggles of different actors, the redistribution of power, the formed coalitions and the supportive institutional arrangements in the redevelopment–conservation debate, thereby minimising the imbalanced power relations between these two discourses. This study also provides insights that can aid in the formulation of land use planning policies that can also be applied to other cities that are undergoing urban renewal.

BUILD, Baltimore’s Working Poor, and Economic Citizenship in the 1990s

Abstract This essay examines the history of economic citizenship in urban America in the 1990s by focusing on Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (known more commonly by its acronym BUILD). In 1994, this “citizens power organization” of churches and congregations won the first living wage ordinance in the United States. Its response to the urban redevelopment regime of the 1980s and 1990s focused on the needs of the Baltimore poor and working-class service workers. Although BUILD was a self-described “multiracial, ecumenical, city-wide institutionally based organization,” its agenda was attentive to the way differently situated workers experienced urban decline and redevelopment. This was the case in Baltimore where African American citizens—especially African American women—constituted a significant proportion of its service-workers ranks.

DYNAMICS OF URBAN REGIMES IN CITY SPATIAL (CASE STUDY OF RECLAMATION IN JAKARTA)

Background of the study: Urban politics in city spatial tends to be related to uniting the capacity of power between actors. In the development of its dynamics, the DKI Jakarta urban regime has a different political decision, that is, some reject or terminate and also support or continue the reclamation. However, in this study, non-governmental actors namely reclamation developers dominate the actions of the urban regime's power in reclamation development. The political and economic dominance of developers is likely to determine the policies and regulations for reclamation development.
 Methodology: This article uses a qualitative research approach by analyzing problems holistically. Because this article examines one case, the writer has used a single instrumental. This article focuses on just one issue, namely the problem of the dynamics of the urban regime in urban spatial planning on the development policy of the Jakarta pantura reclamation area. Therefore, this article outlines the patterns, context, and settings of the political dynamics of the urban regime.
 Main Findings: The conclusion is that the dominance of developers tends not to make the reclamation policy effective. In this study improve the theory of the urban regime of Clarence Stone. That after the unification of power capacities between actors, urban regimes tend to face the dynamics of new regimes, namely the dominance of political and economic capacity by one of the actors in the actions of the urban regime's power.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: This article explains the dynamics of the urban regime in urban spatial planning in the Jakarta pantura reclamation area development policy. The focus of his writings is on the urban regime. Therefore, in this article, we dig deep information from the dynamics of the urban regime on the Jakarta pantura reclamation policy.

Urban Regimes in Russia’s Northern Cities: Testing a Concept in a New Environment

At a time when urbanization represents a major trend in human history and when the majority of the world’s population lives in an urban environment, the urban regime theory, developed by Clarence Stone in the 1980s, offers an insightful framework for discussing how urban stakeholders are compelled to work together to achieve their goals. While research on urban regimes has historically focused mainly on democratic contexts, this article argues that it is time to use urban regime theory in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries in order to better understand how urban politics develop. With growing urban activism and huge territorial contrasts, Russia offers a good case study for testing the notion of “urban regime.” This article focuses on three cities in Russia’s Far North—Murmansk, Norilsk, and Yakutsk—that face common sustainability challenges in Arctic or subarctic conditions; it delves into the mechanisms of their urban regimes and categorizes them by type: instrumental, organic, and symbolic.

Extensive and intensive properties of aerosol over distinct environments: Influence of anthropogenic emissions and meteorology

An analysis of extensive (scattering, βsca and absorption, βabs coefficients) and intensive (single scattering albedo -SSA, Ångström exponent - α, backscatter fraction - b, and asymmetry parameter - g) properties of aerosols are simultaneously examined for the first time over a source region; urban environment - Ahmedabad, and background site; a high altitude remote location - Gurushikhar over western India revealed significant diurnal, monthly and seasonal variations. βsca and βabs over Ahmedabad are always higher by a factor of 3–5 than Gurushikhar. βsca corrected for variation in relative humidity shows maximum change (>50%) during August, thereby, emphasizing the importance of RH correction on aerosol scattering. SSA is lower over Ahmedabad due to the dominance of absorbing aerosols from the anthropogenic emissions. The annual mean βsca, βabs, SSA, α, and g are found to be 235 ± 128 Mm−1, 64 ± 40 Mm−1, 0.81 ± 0.03, 0.60 ± 0.03 respectively over Ahmedabad, whereas these values are 78 ± 31 Mm−1, 12 ± 6 Mm−1, 0.87 ± 0.04, 1.19 ± 0.31, and 0.61 ± 0.02 respectively over Gurushikhar. A comparison reveals that among the urban regimes Ahmedabad SSA is higher than Delhi, and among the high-altitude locations Gurushikhar SSA is higher than Mukteshwar, and lower than Nainital SSA. The interannual variability in aerosol properties is estimated to be less significant (<10%) over the high altitude region when compared to the source region, thereby, suggesting that the extensive and intensive aerosol properties over the high-altitude remote location can be classified as regional representative background.

“Let’s Get Ready to Crumble”: Black Municipal Leadership and Public Housing Transformation in the United States

U.S. cities transform public housing. Black municipal leadership (BML) may influence the scale and character of public housing removal and redevelopment. Informed by the “Black urban regime” literature, this study assesses whether presence and duration of BML, coupled with other factors, explains variation in public housing transformation for a sample of large cities. Its findings suggest that, controlling for other factors, BML is associated with moderately greater scales of public housing removal in the 1990s and 2000s, but BML is not associated with the “rate of return” by former public housing residents or new residence by public housing eligible households in Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) communities as of 2016. The findings invite further research on the intraracial dynamics and policy consequences of BML. They build, too, on public housing transformation scholarship, raising new questions about how municipal politics shape public housing and other sites of subsidized residence for low-income denizens of cities.

Corporate City and Urban Regime Focusing on Pohang Development Cases in the 1970s and 1980s

Corporate City and Urban Regime Focusing on Pohang Development Cases in the 1970s and 1980s

Le amministrative 2019 a Firenze e le cifre del PD

The 2019 municipal elections in Florence confirm the electoral success of the Democratic Party and the Mayor, Dario Nardella. The center-right candidate, Ubaldo Bocci, an entrepreneur and member of local catholic associations, collected 25% of the votes. The Five Star Movement, with Roberto De Blasi as mayoral candidate, and the left candidate Antonella Bundu got about 7% of the electoral preferences each.In which areas of the city did the PD win? Is it possible establish a causal relation between voting behaviour, the neighbourhood and sociodemographic variables? To answer these questions, the article examines the electoral results through a geographical approach, based on the 72 «elementary areas» of Florence and other variables provided by ISTAT. This analysis identifies four macro-areas, distinguished for the different combinations of the presence of the political parties. Overall, the preferences collected by the PD, more than 50%, make difficult to found a link between the vote and the social background.In order to understand the electoral success of the PD and of local politicians other factors, like political culture or specific contextual features, have to be taken into consideration. Indeed, from a qualitative perspective, this contribution suggests to consider Florence as a «urban regime», composed by several actors who share interests and visions about the growth of the city.

Prawo do miasta i zarządzanie miejskimi przestrzeniami przez nieformalne grupy i gangi młodzieżowe w świetle koncepcji reżimów miejskich

&lt;p&gt;Celem niniejszego artykułu była próba udzielenia odpowiedzi na pytanie o kwestię, którą po raz pierwszy w literaturze poruszył Henri Lefebvre, mianowicie o to, kto ma prawo do miasta. W tym celu autorka sięgnęła do teorii reżimów miejskich oraz zeszła głęboko w przestrzenie, o których oficjalne grupy interesów w mieście jeśli myślą, to jedynie w kontekście wykluczenia i pozbycia się lub w procesie gentryfikacji wykorzystania do własnych celów. Okazuje się, że oprócz tych oficjalnych grup istnieją w mieście bardzo aktywne grupy, choć ich aktywność często ma miejsce na granicy prawa lub jest z nim niezgodna. Pomimo tego faktu odgrywają one ważną rolę w rozgrywających się na terenie miast grach o wpływy oraz uważają, że mają pełne prawo do miasta, z którym się mocno utożsamiają, którego przestrzenią zarządzają i o którego przestrzeń walczą, kierując się zasadami drugiego życia miasta. Zasady te wbrew powszechnym opiniom pełnią ważną funkcję dotyczącą bezpieczeństwa miejskich przestrzeni.&lt;/p&gt;

The State of Smart Cities in China: The Case of Shenzhen

China is at the midpoint of its urbanisation—the largest scale in human history. The recent smart city movement is influencing the discourse and practice of China’s urbanisation, with numerous cities claiming to build smart cities and/or adopting some forms of smart city strategies and initiatives. A so-called ‘latecomer’s advantage’ is being exploited to advance their pursuit for a smart city status, not only to catch up with overseas counterparts, but to overtake them and become international leaders. This local-level enthusiasm strikes a chord with the central government’s strategy of building an ‘innovative nation’ to drive its economic transformation towards a knowledge economy. This converging central-local interest is creating a ‘smart city mania’ across the nation, which, however, has not received due attention in the international literature, and thus deserves critical examination and reflection to inform policy debates. To address this gap, this study investigates the state of smart cities in China, based on a case study of Shenzhen, China’s fastest-growing, experimental city. Shenzhen grew from a fishing village into an international metropolis in 40 years, and has now won a nickname of ‘China’s Silicon Valley’ or ‘China’s smartest city’. This study analyses the state of Chinese smart cities and the pursuit for a smart Shenzhen from the perspectives of the smart city as a concept, as an urban development paradigm, and as an urban regime, drawing upon the international smart city literature. It concludes that a technology-centric approach to smart cities in China, as illustrated by the Shenzhen case, have advanced innovation capacity and economic growth through capitalising on a ‘latecomer’s advantage’. However, this ‘latecomer’s advantage’ may translate into a ‘latecomer’s disadvantage’ for this approach’s lack of institutional adaptation, and for its insufficient attention to social and environmental problems covered under the shiny economic boom. This latecomer’s disadvantage is likely to impact the long-term sustainability of Chinese cities.