Nearly three decades of research have identified evidence of commercial institutions and exchange at cities throughout Mesoamerica. This introduction examines three major areas of investigation for ...commercial institutions in ancient Mesoamerican cities: marketplaces and urban geography; currencies, standards and credit; and the social dimensions of urban commerce. It discusses the different ways in which the contributing authors examine different commercial economies of ancient Mesoamerica through the prism of its urban centers, and the potential of this approach for further archaeological research.
Urban political ecology III Heynen, Nik
Progress in human geography,
06/2018, Letnik:
42, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important ...political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-centered prospects. These intellectual threads in conversation with the broader Marxist roots of UPE, and other second-generation variants, including what I have previously called abolition ecology, combine to at once show the ongoing promises of heterodox UPE and at the same time contribute more broadly beyond the realm of UPE.
As demand for e-commerce surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, investors began pouring billions into start-ups promising to accelerate digitization and automation in small-margin, winner-take-all ...sectors, such as retail, grocery, and dining. I examine two business models that feature prominently in this swell of financial optimism: dark stores and ghost kitchens. Both sacrifice consumer-facing real estate to create logistical spaces for online order fulfillment, and both are predicted to become permanent fixtures of the post-pandemic economic landscape. However, few have commented on the consequences of this future-in-the-making or who is likely to suffer them. The essay therefore anticipates how “going dark” may impact consumers, workers, and urban geographies. I argue that going dark represents a new threshold in the spatial materialities and financial imaginary of platform urbanism, what I call the logistical-urban frontier. I theorize how this frontier threatens historically disenfranchised urban communities, and I conclude the essay with a reflection on the conflicted temporalities of logistical speculation.
Due to the rapid expansion of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries ordained lockdowns, establishing different restrictions on people's mobility. Exploring to what extent these measures have been ...effective is critical in order to better respond to similar future scenarios. This article uses anonymous mobile phone data to study the impact of the Spanish lockdown on the daily dynamics of the Madrid metropolitan area (Spain). The analysis has been carried out for a reference week prior to the lockdown and during several weeks of the lockdown in which different restrictions were in place. During these weeks, population distribution is compared during the day and at night and presence profiles are obtained throughout the day for each type of land use. In addition, a spatial multiple regression analysis is carried out to determine the impact of the different land uses on the local population. The results in the reference week, pre-COVID-19, show how the population in activity areas increases in each time slot on a specific day and how in residential areas it decreases. However, during the lockdown, activity areas cease to attract population during the day and the residential areas therefore no longer show a decrease. Only basic essential commercial activities, or others that require the presence of workers (industrial or logistics) maintain some activity during lockdown.
•Mobile phone data have a great potential for analysing the effectiveness of the restrictions on mobility, implemented to contain COVID-19 spread.•Mobile phone data analysis brings the possibility of evaluating the impact of different measures with high spatio-temporal resolution.•There is a close link between the presence of people and the spatial distribution of the different land uses.•It is possible to identify and monitor areas with more or less activity during the COVID-19 lockdown than in a normal week.
The concept of informality has been largely dismissed in discussions about urban mobility in the global North. To address this, we explore the case of the navettes, informal vans that operate in the ...unlikely and unfriendly formal transport landscape of Brussels. Relying on qualitative fieldwork, we examine their economic model, low profitability, labour conditions, and the conflicts and legal struggles over their regulatory endorsement. By approaching the navettes as informal urban mobility practice in the global North, we attempt to bridge geographical and conceptual divides between research into urban informality and critical perspectives on urban transport and mobilities. We thereby deconstruct the dominant framing of informality as a “Third World” problem by showing that a range of supposed “negative externalities” of flexible transport are not necessarily addressed by the State’s regulatory and administrative capacity. Drawing on informality literature from global South and East, we argue that in Northern cities such as Brussels, where precarious transport workers like the navettes drivers are ignored and criminalised, while corporate “digitalised”, “shared” and “circular” mobility solutions are endorsed, (in)formality is a site of conflicts over what is considered (un)fair, (un)just and (il)legitimate. As as result, we demonstrate how diverse experiences and theorisations of informal mobility in the global South and East can inform inquiries into transport practices in the global North.
Geographers have started studying residential (housing) and commercial real estate (offices, retail, leisure) at the intersection of financial and urban geographies to understand how the built ...environment – chunky and spatially fixed – has been turned into a (quasi-)financial asset – ‘unitized’ and liquid – through a range of regulatory and socio-technical changes and constructions. The financialization of real estate is not limited to the rise in household debt, mortgage securitization and international investment in office markets, but increasingly also affects rental housing: private equity, hedge funds and REITs buy up large portfolios of social and private rented housing, while housing associations use derivatives and other financial instruments. This report surveys the most recent research on finance, real estate and housing.
The smart city as a “digital turn” in critical urban geography has gone largely unnoticed in postcolonial urbanism. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of new forms of ...postcolonial citizenship at the intersection of digital and urban publics. In particular, I investigate the production of a “smart citizen” in India's 100 smart cities challenge – a state‐run inter‐urban competition that seeks to transform 100 existing cities through ICT‐driven urbanism. By examining the publicly available documents and online citizen consultations as well as observations of stakeholder workshops in four of the proposed smart cities, I illustrate how a global technocratic imaginary of “smart citizenship” exists alongside its vernacular translation of a “chatur citizen” – a politically engaged citizen rooted in multiple publics and spatialities. This takes place through three key processes – enumerations, performances and breaches. Enumerations are coercions by the state of an urban population that has so far been largely hidden from analogue technologies of governance and governmentality. Articulations are the performances of smart citizenship across digital and material domains that ironically extend historic social inequalities from the urban to the digital realm. Finally, breaches are the ruptures of the impenetrable technocratic walls around the global smart city, which provides a window into alternative and possible futures of postcolonial citizenship in India. Through these three processes, I argue that subaltern citizenship in the postcolony exists not in opposition, but across urban and digital citizenships. I conclude by offering the potential of a future postcolonial citizen who opens up entangled performances of compliance and connivance, authority and insecurity, visibility and indiscernibility across political, social, urban and digital publics.
The platform is a flexible spatial arrangement that does not have a fixed territory but rather draws on other territorialized networks to actualize in urban form. The capacity for the platform to act ...occurs through its ability to articulate together more or less territorialized urban elements. It implies a reorganization of urban operations (such as transport, housing, and so on) not through new physical infrastructures, but instead through novel technologies of coordination of those already existing. At present, discussion of platforms in cities is dominated by the platform as company, which generates private value from the coordination of differently networked actors. However, appreciating the urban geography of the platform as a flexible spatial arrangement indicates that platforms can hold much promise for the organization of cities but requires a more equitable distribution of the value generated by coordination of urban actors.
Urban geographers have been pursuing divergent theoretical projects. Some have pushed urban theory to become ageographical, the goal being to search out and explain of a globally omnipotent ...urbanization process. Others have moved in a different direction, seeking to detail how singular constellations of processes produce only particular urban places. This theoretical divergence has led some to question whether middle-range urban theories continue to have purchase today. This paper seeks to contribute to this attempt to rekindle an interest in middle-range urban theory by examining the relevance of Karl Popper’s situational analysis to how we understand contemporary urbanization.
Urban political ecology I Heynen, Nik
Progress in human geography,
08/2014, Letnik:
38, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
It has been over 15 years since the term ‘urban political ecology’ (UPE) was coined. While still often not incorporated into larger discussion of political ecology, its growing visibility in the ...published literature suggests that it has gone beyond an emerging theoretical lens to one that has fully emerged. This report characterizes the current literature that explicitly utilizes the language of UPE, discusses its theoretical evolution that is now seeing a second wave, as well as catalogs some of the new arenas through which the sub-field has offered novel insights into the socionatural unevenness of cities. A central contribution of this survey is to illustrate the myriad articulations of how urban environmental and social change co-determine each other and how these metabolic processes offer insights into creative pathways toward more democratic urban environmental politics.
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