Work In Urban Studies Research Articles

“Searching for order at all levels”. Antonio Lima-de-Faria (July 4, 1921 – December 27, 2023)

“Searching for order at all levels”. Antonio Lima-de-Faria (July 4, 1921 – December 27, 2023)

THE INFLUENCE OF PHILANTHROPIC FOUNDATIONS ON CITY GOVERNMENT INNOVATION

AbstractIn this study I examine the role of philanthropic foundations in stimulating city government innovation. Reduced budgets and rising consumer demands are challenging organizational capacity in government, prompting government officials to recognize the need for innovation to improve policies, programmes and practices. This empirical study draws upon qualitative interviews and policy reports to generate comparative case studies on three city governments in England: Bristol, Manchester and Newcastle. It builds on work in urban studies and policy mobilities that reveals how foundations can influence urban agendas, finding that philanthropic foundations engage with city governments through three different types of collaboration: direct provision of financial resources, exchange of non‐financial resources with city governments and indirect engagements. Philanthropic foundations are blending financial resources and less tangible provision of space and time to enable city governments to experiment with new ideas, policies and ways of working. The fusion of non‐governmental resources provides city governments with the capacity to act, and city governments often use non‐governmental funding for riskier projects and for projects that may not have taken place if public funding had been used. Through these different collaborations and by deploying a suite of interventions and methods, philanthropic foundations stimulate product, service, process, conceptual and governance innovation in city governments.

Liquid urbanisms: Framing the intrinsic fluidity of the urban

AbstractCities are lived and made and constantly in a state of flux, and the same urban spaces can be used by a variety of people in very different ways. I propose the concept of ‘liquid urbanisms’ to understand these provisional uses of urban space. Liquid urbanisms are provisional places and spaces, connected through the loose and flexible networks of people and projects, that are not immediately obvious but which solidify around a certain project or topic, then become liquid again, until another time in the future. Liquid urbanisms was a helpful concept for me in my research, but also has a wider resonance in how we think about and conceptualise provisional locations in the city. Liquid urbanisms builds on and adds to work in urban studies, focusing attention on the spatial practices of urban actors at the local scale and acknowledging the importance of the temporal in understanding space and place and acknowledging the fluidity of cities. My research conducted in 2013–17 in Dublin initially looked at so‐called ‘temporary spaces’ but quickly grew to include parks, squats, art spaces, urban gardens, autonomous social centres, networking groups and direct actions. I created the conceptual framework of liquid urbanisms to be able to discuss these projects together, as empirically from my research I could see that the projects I was researching had two main shared characteristics: a looser understanding of temporality than existed in mainstream urban planning understandings of the city, and a shared network of people, places and resources, but no body of literature encompassed both of these characteristics. The focus of this article is the concept of liquid urbanisms and how the framework of liquid urbanisms can highlight the different temporalities, spatialities and networks that exist in city spaces, reminding scholars to pay attention to the diverse fluidity of cities.

Do cities enable caring-with men? An ordinary politics of urban care

This critical commentary unpacks the promise of care-full and just cities, and how men are understood as subjects of urban care. Overall, my discussion offers a generative space that forwards the situated practices of caring-with men as ordinary politics in order to fully realise the promise of a city for everyone. The main body is divided into three sections. The first section revisits the concept of care-full cities as an alternative vision of the city grounded in feminist ethics of care and justice. Here I aim to expand the discussion on men as subjects of urban care to consider the diverse performances of masculinities in relation to economic conditions, social meanings, and cultural norms which structure spaces and subjectivities of care giving/-receiving. In the second section, I conceptualise caring-with men as ordinary politics shaping the contested relations and place-making practices in the city. Here I highlight that caring-with involves transversal logics and heterogenous politics that enrich how care as a cultural value and everyday practice can be embodied, reinforced, or even neglected among certain groups of men. The last section provides a synthesis and several key reflections on the (im)possibilities of caring-with men in culturally diverse cities. The situated understandings of care giving/-receiving amongst men in the city inspire crosscurrents and interdisciplinary synthesis across bodies of work in urban studies, feminist care geographies and gender/sexuality studies. In conclusion, caring-with men as ordinary politics is a step towards encouraging situated and comparative inquiries through consolidating a hybrid praxis of global urban masculinities.

Thinking the city through work

Practices, organisations and sites of work are deeply entangled with urban development and impact on the way social interaction and spaces are experienced and constructed. Especially since the industrial revolution, spaces of work and home have been conceptually separated with boundaries drawn between the public and private sphere, between spheres of production and reproduction. Nevertheless, this divide has been subject to constant change and negotiation, with boundaries between the productive and reproductive sphere increasingly blurring—especially since the spread of digital technologies. The increasing muddying of these boundaries and what this might mean for our understanding of the urban is the central subject of this special feature. The included contributions therefore investigate how these blurring boundaries unfold in the city both on a social and spatial level in order to challenge and rethink the ways we conceptualise work in urban studies.

Between straitjacket and possibility: Energy initiatives and the politics of regulation

Following critiques that scholarship on socio-technical transitions was overly normative and emptied of politics, a burgeoning stream of literature has begun offering understandings of transition that are more informed by politics. Whilst fruitful, there is a tendency in some of this work to constitute politics as the background or contextual frame in which socio-technical change unfolds, rather than as a process central to its emergence. Collaterally, relatively little attention has been given to how politics emerges in the everyday practices and struggles of energy initiatives. Engaging with recent work in urban studies, this paper explores how political processes unfold on the ground. We argue that one key site for this emergent politics is the institutional and regulatory arrangements that energy initiatives must navigate in carving out their activities. We do not address these simply as an externalised array of norms and procedures that variously impose upon and impede the efforts of energy initiatives. Instead, we explore how initiatives’ trajectories are shaped by and entangled with the institutional and regulatory landscapes in which they operate. What we call politics emerges in and is exposed through initiatives’ everyday efforts to negotiate and respond to regulatory strictures and opportunities. We explore the regulatory conditions that influence the everyday practices of three differently scaled energy initiatives in Scotland, Spain and Germany, each of which is variously involved in the generation, distribution and sale of energy. Our paper considers not only the ways that institutional arrangements generate obstacles for renewable energy innovation, but also how they may open up certain – albeit limited – possibilities for action, in some cases with larger ramifications for how the production and distribution of energy are governed. However, we note that where such possibilities arise, they are heavily determined by the terms set by existing institutional and regulatory frameworks, pointing to the limited scope for crafting new kinds of energy politics under current conditions.

Mobile transitions: Exploring synergies for urban sustainability research

Urban sustainability approaches focusing on a wide range of topics such as infrastructure and mobility, green construction and neighbourhood planning, or urban nature and green amenities have attracted scholarly interest for over three decades. Recent debates on the role of cities in climate change mitigation have triggered new attempts to conceptually and methodologically grasp the cross-sectorial and cross-level interplay of enrolled actors. Within these debates, urban and economic geographers have increasingly adopted co-evolutionary approaches such as the social studies of technology (SST or ‘transition studies’). Their plea for more spatial sensitivity of the transition approach has led to promising proposals to adapt geographic perspectives to case studies on urban sustainability. This paper advocates engagement with recent work in urban studies, specifically policy mobility, to explore conceptual and methodological synergies. It emphasises four strengths of an integrated approach: (1) a broadened understanding of innovations that emphasises not only processes of knowledge generation but also of knowledge transfer through (2) processes of learning, adaptation and mutation, (3) a relational understanding of the origin and dissemination of innovations focused on the complex nature of cities and (4) the importance of individual actors as agents of change and analytical scale that highlights social processes of innovation. The notion of urban assemblages further allows the operationalisation of both the relational embeddedness of local policies as well as their cross-sectoral actor constellations.

Tribal modern: branding new nations in the Arab Gulf

TRIBAL MODERN: BRANDING NEW NATIONS IN THE ARAB GULF miria m cooke Berkeley: Universit y of California Press, 2014 (214 pages, notes, references, index) $25.65 (paper)Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in Arab Gulf is latest of a growing body of work seeking to explain rapid transformations of Arab Gulf states and their emergence as regional and global actors over past decade. This scholarship has been dominated by historical studies drawing on British archives, state-centric studies of political legitimation, rentierstate theory, and more recent work in urban studies and spatial theory. In a departure from these trends, miriam cooke locates Gulf Arab modernity not in material transformation but in cultural production. As a study of contemporary Gulf Arab art, literature, and poetry, Tribal Modern is a welcome addition to an expanding field. It also stands out as a work focused on Qatar, least studied of Gulf states, where cooke did much of fieldwork on which book is based.At its outset, Tribal Modern argues against equation of with primitive and non-Western, exemplified by debate over a 1980s MoMA exhibit titled Primitivism in Modern Art, which juxtaposed Western modernist and non-Western works of art. Even critics of exhibition's binary premise, she notes, reproduced binaries of West/ other and tribal/modern. More commonly, cooke criticizes tendency of Gulf observers and expatriates to assume that Gulf Arabs must constantly negotiate contradictory demands of tradition and modernity. Instead, she argues, and are mutually constitutive and lived simultaneously. Here cooke employs Qur'anic term barzakh, variously described as signifying undiluted convergence (10), the simultaneous process of mixing and separation, (13), and a liminal metaphysical space between life and hereafter and also physical space between sweet and salt water (71). This last definition, drawn from Qur'an, probably describes Gulf near Bahrain, where pearl divers found freshwater springs on Gulf floor, and salt and fresh waters mingled. Cooke's interpretation of barzakh is less literal; she wants reader to think of Gulf Arab societies as inhabiting a barzakh space where and converge but remain undiluted. This barzakh forms core of national brands that Gulf states employ to legitimize themselves in eyes of foreigners and citizens alike. In this way, barzakh and tribal modern are one way to get past tradition/modernity binary that still characterize much of scholarly and popular debate on Gulf societies.Cooke begins book with a description of Gulf's cosmopolitan pre-oil past, in which it was a critical node in Western Indian Ocean commercial networks and a borderless, stateless center of world's pearling industry. The marginalizing of this polyglot world in contemporary Gulf memory is necessary precondition for emergence of cooke's tribal modern. The decline of pearling, rise of oil, and subsequent spectacular transformations of Gulf cities led to a massive influx of foreign workers and new forms of cultural and economic exclusion. The emergence of states meant that citizens began to identify themselves along national lines, in process downplaying or denying cosmopolitan heritage of recent past. New discourses of local rootedness and cultural authenticity-exemplified, in cooke's analysis, by Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, which was long banned in Gulf countries-justify citizens' claims to oil-generated wealth distributed by state.Chapters two through four analyze nexus between tribe and nation as categories of belonging among Gulf Arabs, and how they have become racialized through genetic research on origins. The tribe and nation exist in tension with each other, as cooke explores through her study of marriage practices. …

Biographical Narratives of Encounter: The Significance of Mobility and Emplacement in Shaping Attitudes towards Difference.

This paper is located within work in urban studies about the significance of contact with difference as a means for reducing prejudice and achieving social change. Recent approaches, influenced by theories of affect, have emphasised non-conscious everyday negotiations of difference in the city. In this paper it is argued that such approaches lose sight of the significance of the subject: of the reflective judgements of ‘others’ made by individuals; of our ability to make decisions around the control of our feelings and identifications; and of the significance of personal pasts and collective histories in shaping the ways we perceive and react to encounters. Rather, this paper uses a biographical approach focusing on interviewees’ narratives of encounter. Through its attention to processes of mobility and emplacement, it contributes to debates about when contact with difference matters by highlighting the importance of everyday social normativities in the production of moral dispositions.

Between abstraction and complexity

Theoretical, conceptual and methodological choices must be framed in relation to concrete explanatory and interpretive dilemmas, not ontological foundations. In engaging with the limits and possibilities of recent assemblage-based work in urban studies, our concern has been to help forge new analytical tools for deciphering emerging patterns of planetary urbanization, which have unsettled the coherence and viability of earlier intellectual frameworks. As urbanization is changing, so too must urban theory change, and it must do so in ways that provide critical purchase on emergent sociospatial divisions, conflicts, struggles and transformations at all spatial scales and across divergent places and territories. To this end, responding to several strands of the debate on assemblage urbanism that has unfolded in previous issues of City, here we clarify our meta-theoretical stance, address several methodological questions and reiterate our arguments regarding the importance of a reinvigorated geopolitical economy of planetary urbanization. We insist on the importance of abstraction as a necessary methodological moment in any reflexive approach to urban knowledge formation.

Cities in Shade: Urban Geography and the Uses of Noir

This paper historicizes American cities after the Second World War through the rich motif of noir literature and film. But, in doing so, the paper is also a critical consideration of noir's work in urban studies. Noir has been drawn, often usefully but also unfortunately, away from its referents, from the terrain that it most directly summons but also from the spaces in which its contradictions are most apparent. Moving from a discussion of the distractions of Chinatown to contextual themes such as mobility and ruin, the paper links noir criticism and noir texts with broader debates in postwar urbanism and modernism. As just part of these discourses, noir not only is irreducible to certain essences, but can potentially perform the opposite role, challenging conventions of urban understanding and practice. The result would be a more detailed and subtle account of modernism's American geographies.

Towards an Understanding of the Gender Division of Urban Space

The paper contains a critical review of urban theory and of some current work in urban studies on ‘women's issues’. It is argued that the nature of the changing interrelationships between production and reproduction, as part of a single inseparable process that varies across space and over time, should be the key focus for a feminist urban studies. Ways in which an understanding of these changing relationships can add to the analysis of housing policy in postwar Britain are outlined. The principal aim of the paper is advocacy, and the plea is for feminist theory and feminist analysis. It is beginning to be accepted that urban studies, by ignoring gender divisions, is neglecting an important structuring element of urban space and urban processes. Recognition of the significance of gender divisions, however, must not lead to an insistence on analysis focusing solely on women and women's behaviour. Thus the object of feminist research should not be women alone, but rather the structure of social relations that contributes to female oppression, this involving confrontation with the theoretical issues raised by an analysis of patriarchy (a term used here to refer to temporally and spatially specific relations between men and women, rather than to the oppression of all women in all forms of society). Despite the advances already made in integrating women's lives into urban studies, a large number of the studies about women and the urban environment are ultimately unsatisfactory. Their foci stop short at the description and analysis of women's behaviour only. However, this is not to denigrate the very real function they serve in bringing gender differences to the research forefront. After a review of the literature on gender differences in the organisation, use, and conception of urban space, a more specific focus for a feminist urban studies is outlined, with an example of how this might be applied to the historical analysis of postwar housing policy in Britain.