This paper explores the emerging new master-planned city-building trend on the African continent. Situating our research within urban policy mobilities literature, we investigate the ‘Africa rising’ ...narrative and representation of Africa as a ‘last development frontier’ and ‘last piece of cake’, an imaginary that provides fertile ground for the construction of new cities. Building upon research on the practices of ‘seduction’ that facilitate urban policy circulation, we argue for the relevance of critically examining elite stakeholder rhetoric to understand the relative ease with which the new city development model is being promoted in Africa. We investigate the enablers, advocates and boosters of new cities, represented mainly by states, corporations, non-profits and consultants to render visible the complex networks of relations and private interests that support and enable the creation and circulation of the new cities model in Africa. We also analyse the pervasive ‘right to development’ argument among African elites, which precludes criticism of new city ventures and circulates problematic assumptions about modernity and development. We conclude by discussing how stakeholder rhetoric limits the range of urban visions that are put into circulation and mobilized for Africa’s urban future.
本文探讨了非洲大陆正在出现的新的总体规划城市建设趋势。将我们的研究置于城市政策流动性文献中，我们探讨“非洲崛起”的叙述，和将非洲视为“最后的发展前沿”和“最后一块蛋糕”的叙述，这是一个为新城市建设提供肥沃土壤的想象。在研究促进城市政策传播的“诱导”实践的基础上，我们认为，批判性地探讨精英利益相关者的言论是一种适当的做法，可以了解非洲新城市发展模式推广的相对容易程度。我们调查新城市的赋能者、倡导者和推动者，他们主要由国家、企业、非营利组织和顾问组成。我们这样做是为了凸显支持和促进非洲新城市模式的创建和传播、复杂的关系和私人利益网络。我们还分析了非洲精英中普遍存在的“发展权”论点，这些论点排除了对新城市建设的批评，并传播有关现代性和发展的、有问题的假设。最后，我们讨论了利益相关者的言论如何限制了城市愿景的范围，这些愿景被传播，并被作为建设非洲城市未来的动员工具。
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2.
New cities: Power, profit, and prestige Moser, Sarah; Côté‐Roy, Laurence
Geography compass,
January 2021, 2021-01-00, 20210101, Volume:
15, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In the past 2 decades, over 150 new cities built from scratch have been launched in more than 40 countries. As this trend has intensified in recent years, scholarship on new city projects has ...expanded significantly in exciting new directions. There is now a conceptually robust and empirically vibrant body of scholarship that critically examines new city projects around the world. This article provides an overview of an emerging subfield and introduces important new approaches to understanding the proliferation of these urban mega‐developments, and how the study of new cities can yield insights into both international urban, economic, cultural, and political trends, and specific local dynamics. In this article, we highlight the key contributions and insights from recent scholarship on new city projects and map out areas for future research.
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper explores Morocco's ambitions to become a city-building "expert" in Africa through Zenata Eco-City, a project being built near Casablanca as part of Morocco's national new city-building ...strategy. Despite being in early stages of construction, Zenata's builders enthusiastically promote the future city as an urban model for Africa and have begun to export it long before the project's completion. Building on urban policy mobilities literature and research on emergent new city models, we examine Zenata as an example of "fast model-making", and analyze how authority is constructed for a model based on ideas rather than on a completed city. We explore the process of policy research and "learning" used to create and legitimize the model and investigate how promotional strategies to export it produce narratives about the city's success and the expertise of its developers. We raise concerns about Zenata's fast model and the circulation of expertise without content.
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•Morocco is among the most active countries in building new cities from scratch.•19 new cities are underway as part of an ambitious national city-building strategy.•We unpack forms of inherent ...messiness in the ‘cohesive’ national strategy.•We probe the strategy’s ‘useful fuzziness’ and consequences of its ambiguity.•We raise problems of accountability, transparency, and incoherence of the strategy.
Morocco is one of the most active countries in the world in building new cities from scratch. Nineteen new cities are presently underway across the kingdom as part of a national city-building strategy, launched to manage uncontrolled urbanization and to support economic growth. Morocco’s city building is illustrative of the global trend in which states are creating urban mega-projects as part of national development strategies, but also reflects the unique local forces shaping new city building in the kingdom. This article provides the first overview of Morocco’s new city strategy and projects, which we contextualize within the kingdom’s recent extensive urban investments shaped by economic liberalism and persistent state authoritarianism. While new city building in Morocco is driven by the state and presented as a cohesive strategy in official discourse, it is characterized by ambiguity and confusion, introduced through the ‘hybrid’ role of city-building actors, an undefined policy status, and a lack of coordination among new city projects underway. By critically analyzing the national strategy’s forms of ambiguity, we examine the state’s modes of speculative interventions that maintain a ‘useful fuzziness’, raising issues of accountability, transparency, and disconnect in national development visions.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Over the past decade, new master-planned cities have been increasingly adopted worldwide as a strategy for economic growth. This paper reflects on new cities built from scratch as a field of study, ...and the particular methodological considerations associated with conducting research in and on new cities, structured around four key themes. First, we discuss the inherently global and transnational character of new cities as a specific challenge that shapes our approach to studying them. Second, we examine challenges of accessing people and information in rapidly developing private and high-profile ventures. Third, we address power dynamics and positionality in new city projects that are globally concentrated in "closed," non-democratic contexts. Fourth, we draw attention to the unique logistical constraints and challenges of doing field research in new cities under construction and outline the disparate experiences of site visits, where varying degrees of control and surveillance impact research activities.
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Over a dozen countries in Africa are currently constructing more than 70 new cities from scratch. There has been a recent surge of scholarship on the role of Chinese investors in urban projects in ...Africa, particularly as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative. However, there are other powerful foreign actors from emerging economies engaged in new city building, including state-owned companies, that have received little scholarly attention to date, leaving a broader research gap on the implications of their growing role in contemporary African urbanism. In this article, we highlight some of these uncharted foreign actors and the urban models they are circulating and propose three directions for future research on: the mechanisms through which foreign actors have become powerful players in new city building in Africa; the types of urban models they are introducing and their local adaptations; and the geopolitics of foreign interventions in urban mega-developments across Africa.
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The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classified the phenylurea herbicide Diuron (C
9
H
10
Cl
2
N
2
O) as possibly carcinogenic to humans. This research is focused on the adsorbent ...performances of a Algerian sodium Montmorillonite (Mont-Na), for the removal of Diuron in aqueous solutions. The material is characterised before and after processing using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), specific surface area (S
BET
) and thermal analysis (TGA/DTA). The tests were firstly realised at 25°C and pH = 6.3. Until 61 hours of experiment, no removal was obtained in this case. After that, the experiments were carried out on Mont-Na at high temperature and medium pH (T = 45°C, pH = 6.3) and then at ambient temperature and basic pH (T = 25°C, pH = 11). The removal was increased from 74% to 91%, respectively. The equilibrium is reached after 5 hours and the adsorption capacity is between 0.74 mg/g at 45°C and 0.91 mg/g at pH = 11. The kinetic modelling shows that the pseudo-first order describes the experimental data of the Diuron adsorption on Mont-Na and the equilibrium data are modelled perfectly by applying the Elovich model. The thermodynamic quantities indicate that the adsorption process on Mont-Na at pH = 6.3 is spontaneous (ΔG < 0) and endothermic (ΔH = 31.80 kJ.mol
−1
). In conclusion, under the operating conditions used, local Mont-Na proved to be an excellent material for the adsorption of Diuron in aqueous solutions. That could be very promising for sewage treatment.
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Over the past two decades, ‘smart’ urban mega-developments built from scratch have proliferated across the Global South. More recently, similar techno-utopian enclaves are being planned in North ...America, including Union Point, a smart city project south of Boston announced in 2017. We use the case of Union Point to think through why public and private actors with conventionally competing interests, including local governments, international technology companies, and real estate developers, are collaborating enthusiastically to create smart mega-developments. This alignment of interests in the use of ‘tech’ to engineer the ‘city of the future’, and the pervasive idealism, entrepreneurialism, and ‘high-risk, high-rewards’ attitudes that enable ‘instant’ smart mega-developments, is characterized by what we term ‘unicorn planning’. This article connects Union Point to the global phenomenon of tabula rasa smart city developments and suggests that Union Point reproduces problems of earlier smart city experiments built from scratch in the Middle East and Asia. We critically examine local officials' susceptibility to being seduced by smart city rhetoric, and highlight their troubling willingness to cede public land, power, citizen privacy, and data governance to corporate actors in their entrepreneurial quest to create an instant ‘tech’ hub.
•In the past decade smart urban mega-developments have proliferated globally.•Techno-utopian enclaves are being planned in North America, including Union Point.•Union Point demonstrates why and how local governments are seduced by smart cities.•We develop the term ‘unicorn planning’ to understand the enthusiasm for smart cities.•Unicorn planning refers to Silicon Valley-style techno-utopianism in urban planning.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The performance of nickel, ruthenium, and nickel‐ruthenium impregnated on cerium oxide catalysts was tested in the methanation of carbon dioxide reaction. The nickel and ruthenium contents were 4 and ...0.4 wt%, respectively. The properties of the catalysts were studied using elementary analysis, Brunauer‐Emmet‐Teller specific surface area measurements, X‐ray diffraction, temperature programmed reduction, temperature programmed desorption, H2 chemisorption and transmission electron microscopy. The results showed that the addition of ruthenium improves the catalytic performance by promoting the dispersion of nickel species over the surface of the cerium oxide support. The ruthenium‐nickel combination produced a stable catalyst that did not show any deactivation even after 75 hours on‐stream. At high feed gas total pressures (5 and 10 bar), the catalytic conversions of CO2 were close to the thermodynamic equilibrium values with a 100 % selectivity towards CH4 formation.
Unique combination, outstanding catalytic performance: We report the synthesis of an interesting Ru−Ni/CeO2 catalyst by simple impregnation method. It displayed outstanding catalytic activity for CO2 methanation under different feed pressures, which is associated with a synergistic effect between ruthenium and nickel on the surface of cerium oxide. The catalyst is stable for long time on stream and promising for practical applications.
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