Urban Revolution Research Articles

Residential segregation and perceptions of social integration in Shanghai, China

With ongoing urban revolution, Chinese cities are experiencing an influx of migrants, whose integration into urban society becomes an unprecedented challenge. Using a recent survey in Shanghai and adopting a multilevel multinomial logistic model, this paper studies perceptions of social integration, comparing local residents with migrants. While migrants and local residents have very different perceptions of social integration, both individual-level factors and community-level factors such as residential segregation shape perceptions of social integration, and they shape migrants and local residents differently. In particular, residential segregation, especially migrant population size, tends to reinforce perceptions of social exclusion, which imposes challenges on social integration.

Following the Collapse: Regeneration or Transformation of the Urban Societies?

In the field of Syrian and Mesopotamian studies we must deal with many changes affecting the urban complexity and the socio-political and economic systems. In Syria, two major regional changes have been identified: one is the collapse of the Uruk system and the beginning of the second urban revolution, the other is the end of the Early Bronze Age and the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age cultures during the late third/early second millennium B.C. The terms “transition” and “collapse” are largely used in the definition of those two historical events.Many reasons could cause the collapse of any civilization: to explain the nature of any collapse we must look at the characteristics of the period that followed it. This paper will deal with the archaeological evidence from the late third and early second millennium B.C. in northern inner Syria to illustrate, on the one hand, the reason of that collapse and, on the other hand, to show how such a collapse affected the developmental trajectories of the urban systems.

DÜNYA TARİHİ'NDE İLK ŞEHİR VE ŞEHİR DEVLETİNİN ORTAYA ÇIKIŞI ve GELİŞİMİ

Although the earliest permanent settlements based on agriculture originated in Anatolia and Levant regions neighbouring to Mesopotamia and receiving sufficient rainfall, the first cities in the world history are seen in the southern Mesopotamia. In other words, the seeds which would establish the city had emerged in the neighbouring regions, but the place where this seeds turned into cities as we today know was Mesopotamian lands. In this context, Mesopotamia, which is accepted as the cradle of civilization, has been home of the second revolution humankind achieved, which is the Urbanization Revolution. Since Mesopotamia was the region where urbanization first emerged, it is generally accepted that the emergence of the first cities in this region was independent of other cultures and was the result of a local development. It has been found that the foundations of the developments that would lead to urban life were laid in the Ubayd period. The first city in its real sense and the city life related to this concept is found in the south of Mesopotamia but only in the Uruk Period. Thus, the process of urbanised life which started in southern Mesopotamia during the Ubeyd Period in the middle of the 6th millennium BC led to an urbanised world during the Uruk Period in 4th millennium BC. This procedure then characterised the Early Dynasty period in 3rd millennium BC, which was the golden age of the city-states. In this article, the traces of the developments outlined above will be examined and how this process took place in Mesopotamia will be detailed. In this sense, the chronological framework of the essay will cover a period that starts from the 6th millennium BC when the earliest settlements emerged in Southern Mesopotamia and that reaches out the 4th millennium BC when the cities were established and finally to the 3rd millennium BC when the city-states spread. This process will be presented by foregrounding Ubeyd and Uruk settlements where the findings that characterize these developments have first been revealed.

The Urban Revolution as a Theoretical Perspective for the Study of Bulgarian History

The Urban Revolution as a Theoretical Perspective for the Study of Bulgarian History

From an emerging market to a multifaceted urban society: Urban China studies

China is undergoing an urban revolution. In 2011 more than half of the total population resided in cities and towns for the first time in history. Over the last two decades urban China scholars have actively engaged in dialogues with urbanists from different disciplines and different urban contexts. In consequence, urban China studies have embarked on a trail of rapid diversification and proliferation, moving beyond the topics of urbanisation and urban expansion to address a variety of issues echoing the latest developments in the Chinese city. Overall, urban China studies are witnessing a transition from a focus on economic development and spatial changes, to diverse social groups and the multifaceted experiences of living in rapidly changing cities. This virtual special issue (VSI) summarises the progress of urban China studies since the Economic Reform was launched in the 1970s. On the one hand, it delineates a broad picture of intellectual advancement and knowledge production in the field of urban China research. On the other hand, it identifies some emerging new themes that have not been well represented but are of potentially great significance in the comprehension and theorisation of Chinese urbanism. A total of 24 articles published in Urban Studies have been selected to represent, albeit in necessarily circumscribed form, the scope of urban China studies in this journal. They are distributed across four well-established themes: (1) globalisation and the making of global cities; (2) land and housing development; (3) urban poverty and socio-spatial inequality; (4) rural migrants and their urban experiences. We also highlight three emerging frontiers: (1) urban fragmentation, enclaves and public space; (2) consumption, middle class aestheticisation and urban culture; (3) the right to the city and urban activism. The editorial concludes by identifying some key gaps in the extant literature and some potentially productive future directions.

The Anthropocene and anthropology

Noting a lack of consensus in the recent literature on the Anthropocene, this article considers how social anthropologists might contribute to its theorizing and dating. Empirically it draws on the author’s long-term fieldwork in Hungary. It is argued that ethnographic methods are essential for grasping subjectivities, including temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal transformation. When it comes to historical periodization, however, ethnography is obviously insufficient and proposals privileging the last half-century, or just the last quarter of a century, seem inadequate. Influential theories, which define ‘modernity’ in terms of developments emanating from the countries of the North Atlantic in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Gellner, Polanyi, Wolf), remain partial and Eurocentric. To comprehend the social preconditions of the Anthropocene in a holistic fashion (the crucial contribution of comparative anthropology), it is necessary to follow Jack Goody and trace how the urban revolutions of the Bronze Age united Eurasia through the diffusion of new forms of economy, polity and cosmology.

Mapping Informal Areas in Egypt Between the Past Interventions and Next Urban Revolution

Mapping Informal Areas in Egypt Between the Past Interventions and Next Urban Revolution

Reimagining resilience

Although Palestinian society is urbanizing at a rapid rate, the land and its people remain seeped in rural imagery and symbolism in the Palestinian self-imagination. Meanwhile, to accommodate real estate demands in Ramallah, the West Bank's cultural and political hub, an ambitious new satellite city is being built that markets itself as the ‘first planned city in Palestinian history'. I develop the position in this paper that Rawabi, situated 9 km from Ramallah in the central West Bank highlands, is a symptom of an emerging trend in which a new capitalist class is reimagining the Palestinian symbolic self-image in terms of an urban strategy that Henri Lefebvre (2003, The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 144) believed ‘can only proceed using general rules of political analysis', and that this political process relies on emulating successful Zionist models of state-building that Palestinians have observed for about a century. This reimagination transcends the existing status quo of the existential relationship between Palestinians and the land, generally understood as sumud ‘steadfastness', and brings into form a new ethics in Palestinian politics that is at once global while also particular to a distinctly colonial situation.

The demand for responsive architectural planning and production in rapidly urbanizing regions: The case of Ethiopia

Africa is considered a rapidly urbanizing continent, but it lags behind when it comes to the discourse of urbanization. According to Achille Mbembé and Sarah Nuttall, “to write the world from Africa or to write Africa into the world, or as a fragment thereof, is a compelling and perplexing task” (2004). In discourses on world affairs and, in particular, urbanization, the case of Africa often falls into a box that many might label otherness. It is only recently that the concept of otherness itself has become a point of interest for those who wish to study the urban revolution in Africa. As with any radical phenomenon, however, most academic literature paints two opposing pictures: one of despair and hopelessness, and the other of an opportunity for a more creative and responsive urban future (Cherenet Mamo, 2015, p. 17). This article attempts to underscore the latter by examining the case of Ethiopia, which is one of the least urbanized nations currently undergoing a rapid transformation.

Mortuary Rites, Economic Behaviour and the Circulation of Goods in the Transition from Village to Urban Life in Early Mesopotamia

The large-scale accumulation of goods is a widely recognized, but little studied, feature of early urbanization in Mesopotamia. Current research links the mobilization of goods in early cities to the expansion of cross-regional trade routes. A related aspect of urban growth is the virtual disappearance of intramural burials from the archaeological record. This contrasts with earlier phases where burials were incorporated into the routines of domestic life. Adapting Max Weber's insights regarding the origins of modern capitalist accumulation in changing forms of religious practice, this paper will trace the changing moral context of economic behaviour by examining long-term patterns of burial in the transition from village to urban life. The momentous social changes that accompanied the urban revolution transformed relationships between the living, the dead and the world of goods. Trajectories of accumulation reinforced by the provisioning of the deceased were reversed at the onset of urbanization, as the dead were expelled from the context of the living. The flow of commodities was now regulated by emerging forms of religious institution that fostered a culture of capital accumulation in rapidly developing urban centres.

Technological Transitions, Industrial Innovations and the Marching Chinese Urban Revolution: An Interview with Jerry Ku and Philip Vernon of E‐Grow, Shanghai

How scalable are current manufacturing and production techniques? What might their application be in the mass‐customised city? Specialist material fabricator E‐Grow is based in Shanghai, from where it has collaborated with premier cutting‐edge architects such as Gehry Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects and Morphosis on the delivery internationally of unique building parts. To find out more about the innovative work that E‐Grow are undertaking in the field of computer‐controlled material production, Guest‐Editor Tom Verebes interviewed its CEO Jerry Ku and design engineer Philip Vernon.

Producing and consuming China’s new urban space: State, market and society

The extant literature on urban China is preoccupied by concerns over the production and usage/consumption of urban space in relation to the dualistic state–market or state–society relation. This special issue presents a collection of carefully selected papers to counter-balance the skewed tendency observed in current urban China studies. We argue that the growth and spatiality of China’s new urbanism can be better understood by a critical analysis of how the state, market, and society interact in the processes of producing and consuming urban spaces in a rapidly changing global and local context. We propose that contemporary Chinese urban processes and experiences can be demonstrated holistically and realistically by placing due attention on both the production and consumption of China’s new urban spaces and the resulting contestations and contradictions. Our collective effort to examine how China’s state–market–society triad plays out in the production and consumption of urban spaces has yielded significant insights to advance ongoing enquiry in urbanising China in response to the advocacy for a decentring theorisation of the urban revolutions taking a perspective inclusive of the voices from the global south.

Neocolonial Urbanism? La Rénovation Urbaine in Paris

AbstractThis paper analyses the programme of redeveloping housing estates in France overseen by the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Under this programme social housing reconstruction is undertaken in a nationally coordinated fashion in order to “valorize”, “secure” and socially “mix” estates. The paper highlights the political and neo‐colonial aspects of this programme and the wider state spatial strategies it is part of. Redevelopment projects not only further gentrifying land‐rent valorization, state rescaling and territorially stigmatizing symbolic violence; they also reorganize territorial relations of domination in multiple, also racialized, neo‐colonial and partly hegemonic ways. In a longer view, they respond to the “urban revolution” of 1968 (Garnier) and to the “anti‐colonial revolution” of independence and anti‐racist movements (Khiari). The paper builds on a framework that articulates marxist (Lefebvrean) and anti‐colonial (Fanonian) lineages while drawing on research on the neo‐colonial aspects of the French state.

Introduction: Urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism

This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current ‘urban century’ in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban development around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multifaceted contestations of global urbanism that take place in and around cities, ranging from urban street demonstrations and occupations (such as those riveting the world in early 2011 when these papers were written) to the quotidian actions of those pursuing politics and livelihoods that subvert the norms of mainstream global urbanism. It also highlights conceptual revolutions, referencing the ongoing challenge of reconceptualising urban theory from the South – not simply as a hemispheric location or geopolitical category but an epistemological stance, staged from many different locations but always fraught with the differentials of power and the weight of historical geographies. Drawing on the insights of scholars writing from, and not just about, such locations, a further iteration in this ‘southern’ turn of urban theorising is proposed. This spatio-temporal conjunctural approach emphasises how the specificity of cities – their existence as entities that are at once singular and universal – emerges from spatio-temporal dynamics, connectivities and horizontal and vertical relations. Practically, such scholarship entails taking the field seriously through collaborative work that is multi-sited, engages people along the spectrum of academics and activists, and is presented before and scrutinised by multiple publics.

Urban revolution and Chinese contemporary art: A total revolution of the senses

Urban transformation in China has been hailed as a revolution. The pace and scale of change as well as the grand narrative of transformation have been characterized in terms of superlatives – the tallest skyscrapers, the largest shopping malls, the longest bridges and highways, the fastest trains – testifying to the teleology and progress of China’s dream of prosperity. However, behind the sleek and glittering façade lies a story of exclusion, violence, dispossession, and destruction – the ruins of a civilization. This article engages with this side of the story by exploring the dialectic between urban transformation and the parallel development of the visual arts, which has created new regimes of visibility and new hierarchies of representation. In new and large cities alike, the visual arts have been manifesting affections that permeate the contemporary world, creating new possibilities for ‘distributing the sensible’. This article focuses on the artworks produced by Zhang Dali, Dai Guangyu and Jin Feng, whose subject matter involves common people, and it engages with three crucial discursive formations: violence, socio-economic inequality, and utopian dreams. These artists are producing a ‘history from below’ (to borrow E. P. Thompson’s expression): rescuing the common people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. They are making ordinary people assume the importance of the extraordinary. From the point of view of aesthetics, they are enacting a total revolution of the senses and, in Rancière’s words, making ‘heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals’.

Housing migrants in Chinese cities: current status and policy design

China is experiencing an unprecedented urban revolution, with massive rural-to-urban migration. Owing to the discriminatory hukou system, millions of migrants are excluded from accessing subsidized housing and suffer severe housing poverty. How to provide decent and affordable housing to migrants is an unprecedented challenge in China. In this paper we aim to scrutinize the current migrant housing provision system and migrants' housing conditions, and provide policy recommendations for a theoretically informed and empirically grounded migrant housing provision system. On the basis of both a conceptual analysis of migrant housing provision during rapid urbanization and an empirical study of migrant housing provision in China, we argue for a government-led multiagent migrant housing provision system with the government, employers, and the formal and informal housing markets together providing a diverse stock of migrant housing. Related reforms in the land system and public finance system are recommended to ensure the sustainability of the migrant housing provision system.

Invisible migrant enclaves in Chinese cities: Underground living in Beijing, China

China is experiencing an urban revolution, powered in part by hundreds of millions of migrant workers. Faced with institutionalised discrimination in the housing system and the lack of housing affordability, migrants have turned to virtually uninhabitable spaces such as basements and civil air defence shelters for housing. With hundreds of thousands of people living in crowded and dark basements, an invisible migrant enclave exists underneath the modern city of Beijing. We argue that in Chinese cities, housing has been adopted as an institution to exclude and marginalise migrants, through: (a) defining migrants as an inferior social class through the Hukou system and denying their rights to entitlements including housing; (b) abnormalising migrants through various derogatory naming and categorisations to legitimise exclusion; and (c) purifying and controlling migrant spaces to achieve exclusion and marginalisation. The forced popularity of basement renting reflects the reality that housing has become an institution of exclusion and marginalisation. It embodies vertical spatial marginalisation, with exacerbated contrasts between basement tenants and urban residents, heightened fear of the ‘other’, even more derogatory naming, and the government’s more aggressive clean-up of their spaces. We call for reforms and policy changes to ensure decent and affordable housing for basement tenants and migrants in general.

Review: Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

Review: <i>Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution</i>

Where is an author?

If you're reading these words on a digital device, we are not alone: our encounter as author and reader is taking/making place in and through an uneven, evolutionary planetary digital infrastructure of cognitive production, measurement and monetization. Five and a half millennia after symbolic discourses of literacy and authorship co-evolved with the first urban revolution, the material, embodied phenomenological encounters of planetary urbanization have arrived at the precise moment of explosive contingency in the scalar nexus between cities and literacy. ‘What is an author?’, Foucault asked in a brilliant lecture in Paris in February 1969. Today, if we put Foucault's question into an intertextual dialogue with contemporary critical urban theory as well as earlier elements of Comte, Marx and Kant, we gain fresh insight into the ways reading and writing are being reconstituted through partially automated constellations of quantification and commodification of human consciousness. Foucault's genealogy of the ‘author function’ has become an increasingly contested and lucrative circuit of accumulation as Marx's concept of the ‘general intellect’ has materialized through the transnational urban networks of what is now widely described as ‘cognitive capitalism'. The growth and evolutionary adaptation of socially networked cultures of reading, viewing, sharing and writing are now performing a new neo-Kantian time-space construction of sense perception in a planetary version of Harvey's ‘urbanization of consciousness', putting individual authors into constitutive conversation with global knowledges once imagined by Comte as the ‘Great Being’ of collective intergenerational inheritance of post-theistic human knowledge.

Murder and the whole city

Henri Lefebvre's The Urban Revolution makes a claim for the importance of seeing the whole urban form in our analyses of cities. He argues that we too often get trapped into a view of the urban that prioritises “fragments” of the city to the detriment of their critical understanding in terms of the whole urban condition. This essay takes the technique of the “murder rate” as one such fragmentary reading of the urban, a technique which has the potential to see the city as a whole, but which most often works reductively to particularise violent neighbourhoods for correction and intervention. Taking the city of Cape Town as its example, the essay argues that for murder to be properly understood, the murder rate should be the starting point of accounting for the distribution of violence across the whole city, including the histories of the production of that distribution, and not as a way to pathologise the township as a place of particular and specific violence.