The ‘sharing economy’ has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set up online platforms to link together people and un- or underutilised assets with those seeking to ...rent them for short periods of time. While cloaked under the rhetoric of ‘sharing’, the exchanges they foster are usually profit-driven. These economic activities are having profound impacts on urban environments as they disrupt traditional forms of hospitality, transport, service industry and housing. While critical debates have focused on the challenges that sharing economy activities bring to existing labour and economic practices, it is necessary to acknowledge that they also have increasingly significant impacts on planning policy and urban governance. Using the case of Airbnb in London, this article looks at how these sharing or platform economy companies are involved in encouraging governments to change existing regulations, in this case by deregulating short-term letting. This has important implications for planning enforcement. We examine how the challenges around obtaining data to enforce new regulations are being addressed by local councils who struggle to balance corporate interests with public good. Finally, we address proposals for using algorithms and big data as means of urban governance and argue that the schism between regulation and enforcement is opening up new digitally mediated spaces of informal practices in cities.
数字技术公司建立了在线平台，将人员和未利用或未充分利用的资产与希望短期出租的业主联系起来。在这一方式下， “共享经济” 己经成为城市生活中的新口号。但是，虽然有 “共享” 的修辞，这些方式培养的交流通常是由利润驱动的。这些经济活动破坏了传统的酒店、交通、服务业和住房形式，对城市环境产生了深远的影响。虽然关键的辩论集中在共享经济活动给现有劳动和经济实践带来的挑战上，但有必要承认它们对规划政策和城市治理也有越来越大的影响。本文以 Airbnb 在伦敦的运行情况为案例，探讨这些共享或平台经济公司如何参与鼓励政府改变现有的法规，在伦敦的具体案例中是放松对短租的限制。这对规划的执行具有重要意义。我们研宄了地方议会如何通过努力平衡公司利益和公共利益来克服获得数据以执行新法规的挑战。最后，我们提出使用算法和大数据作为城市治理手段的建议，认为监管与执法之间的分裂正在开辟城市非正式实践的新型数字媒介空间。
There has been resurgence in interest in both popular media and academic research on refugees as subjects of incarceration in camps and as a growing population in cities. While the urbanization of ...refugees is not new, it has become a growing concern for policy‐makers, aid agencies and scholars as the numbers of refugees moving to cities have accelerated. There has been debate over the urbanity of camps due to protracted refugee crises and increasingly, there is recognition that despite the efforts of host governments, self‐ settlement of refugees is taking place in cities. The two issues therefore make the city an important framework to interrogate the spaces of refugees. This paper attempts to show the complexity of refugee politics and socializing in camps and in cities by showing a variety of refugee spaces and practices in different parts of the world and using urban debates‐particularly urban informality to draw links between refugee spaces and cities. The aim is to debunk universalizing myths about refugees and refugee camps as subjects and spaces of bare life and bio‐politics alone. Instead it draws parallels between the urban poor and refugees to offer a perspective on the close and complex relationship cities, refugee spaces and their residents have with each other.
As an unprecedented number of people are displaced around the world, scholars continue to strive to make sense of what appear to be a series of constantly unfolding 'crises.' Drawing on research in a ...range of regions - from Latin America, to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, North America, post-Soviet regions, and South and South-East Asia - Displacement offers an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to thinking about structures, spaces, and lived experiences of displacement. The contributors engage in a historical, transnational, interdisciplinary dialogue to offer different ways of theorizing about refugees, internally displaced persons, stateless people and others that have been forcibly displaced. Representing a collective effort by sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, political scientists, historians and migration studies scholars, this volume develops new cross-regional conversations and theoretically innovative vocabularies in the work on forced displacement. It also draws forced displacement together with other contemporary issues across different disciplines such as urbanisation, race, and imperialism.
•Critically investigates informal settlements for Syrian refugees in Lebanon.•Draws attention to the grey spaces of refuge that sit between city and camp.•Uses informality as deregulation to ...interrogate the emergence and unevenness of refugee responses and spaces in Lebanon.•Offers new ways to think about refugee futures.
As fewer refugees move into formal camps, what kinds of non-camp spaces are emerging and how does that challenge the ways in which we understand the management and politics of refuge? This paper seeks to shed light on this question through an analysis of informal settlements in Lebanon. The Syrian crisis has displaced millions of people, most of whom have moved into neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. The Lebanese government, faced with a longer history of Palestinian camps and their militarization has refused to allow the establishment of official refugee camps for Syrians. As a result of this ‘no camp’ policy, Syrians are forced to either live in private rented accommodation in towns and cities throughout the country, or in informal settlements (ISes) built on private, often agricultural land. These informal settlements are built and developed through a complex assemblage of humanitarianism, hospitality, security, economic and political considerations. In this paper, I look at the physical and social spaces of informal settlements in the Bekaa Valley, Eastern Lebanon, examining how differential access to aid, support, security and tacit recognition by the state has led to variations amongst them. In doing so, I expose how an informalized response to the crisis through a system of deregulation is enabling refugee spaces to emerge that are visible, yet unrecognized, flexible, yet precarious. These spaces destabilize the city/camp dichotomy by drawing together elements of both. In engaging with debates on informality, the paper contributes to a growing critical literature on refugee geographies and seeks to expand beyond the reductive narratives of refugee camps, thereby offering insights into refugee futures in increasingly uncertain times.
This paper explores how the ad hoc and uneven implementation and enforcement of policies in the context of the Global South particularly in situations of large-scale refugee crises creates forms of ...waiting and precarity amongst refugees. This exploration is initiated by questions about how states in the Global South manage mass displacements of people whilst adhering to the principles of non-refoulement, a customary international law forbidding countries from forcibly returning refugees to conditions that may endanger their lives. How is this complicated in situations where states are not party to the Refugee convention and where refugee crises become protracted? How does this then lead to immobilizing refugees and compelling them to wait? I focus on the practices of the Lebanese state in response to the Syrian refugee crisis that has continued on from 2011. Lebanon has changed its regulations and decisions towards the large number of Syrians living in the country over the course of the crisis whilst adhering to the principle of non-refoulement. However, the policies enacted by the government are arbitrarily implemented and enforced at different scales of governance creating legal anxieties and immobilities for Syrians in the country. I draw on the work of critical legal and political geographers to argue that the ad hoc nature of the law, creates a fragmented landscape of mobility for Syrians, exacerbating conditions of precarity and poverty and, importantly, colonizing their futures.
Refugee spaces are emerging as quintessential geographies of the modern, yet their intimate and everyday spatialities remain under‐explored. Rendered largely through geopolitical discourses, they are ...seen as biopolitical spaces where the sovereign can reduce the subject to bare life. In conceptualizing refugee spaces some scholars have argued that, although many camps grow and develop over time, they evolve their own unique form of urbanism that is still un‐urban. This article challenges this idea of the camp as space of pure biopolitics and explores the politics of space in the refugee camp using urban debates. Using case studies from the Middle East and South Asia, it looks at how the refugee spaces developed and became informalized, and how people recovered their agency through ‘producing spaces’ both physically and politically. In doing so, it draws connections between refugee camps and other spaces of urban marginality, and suggests that refugee spaces can be seen as important sites for articulating new politics.
Displaced people are increasingly living in urban areas and humanitarian organisations are rethinking their policies and practices. The 'Neighbourhood Approach'-an area-based policy model has become ...globally popular amongst humanitarians. In this paper, I trace its development in Lebanon through a Temporary Technical Committee (TTC) on Neighbourhood Upgrading. Although it failed in being taken up as a distinct policy, aspects of it are being incorporated into plans and agendas of various actors. Through a critical document analysis I interrogate how humanitarians imagine ideas of 'neighbourhood' and 'community' in urban contexts. Using the critical literature on urban policymaking and mobilities, I show how the making of the neighbourhood approach draws together people, experiences, lessons, and territories both near and far, thus complicating its provenance as local or global. I offer a glimpse into the world of urban policymaking by humanitarian organisations whilst also challenging the mainstream discussions on urban policy mobilities.
Refugee camps are cast as spaces of exception where the body of the refugee is reduced to bare life. Camps exist at the intersections of multiple layers of governance and legality and remain in a ...liminal state for generations. The focus on them as spaces of humanitarian intervention often renders them voiceless. Yet, refugees have agency—as is evident through a study of their built environments. The development of refugee camps shows the ways in which identity, politics and construction are intertwined. The process of squatting, largely seen as a technique of the urban poor to address their housing needs, can also be recast in the camps. Here, squatting not only produces shelter but is also an act of rebellion. This article will interrogate the Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut to show how squatting in camps is an attempt at constructing a nationalist identity through an act of insurgent nationalism.
The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on ...informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term 'digital informalisation' to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on rental housing, our paper unpacks the ways in which new forms of digital management of risk control access and filter populations. In contrast to progressive imaginaries of 'smart' technological mediation, practices of algorithmic redlining, biased tenant profiling and the management of risk in private tenancies and in housing welfare both introduce and extend discriminatory and exclusionary housing practices. The paper aims to contribute to research on informal housing in the Global North by examining digital mediation and its governance as key overlooked components of housing geographies beyond North and South dichotomies.
In considering how knowledge reproduces the dynamics of coloniality in Geography, scholars have looked beyond the Global North and Global South as cartographical sites, instead seeing them as ...conceptual frameworks and epistemic positions. Building on this rich work, we draw attention to specific issues obscured within it. Whilst geographical scholarship has moved to recognizing how the Global North and South bleed into each other, it frequently continues to locate scholars themselves within specific territories, labelling them of the Global North or of the Global South, thereby re‐territorializing scholars and their work and reflecting and revealing processes of racialization within the academy.
We ask how those who do not fit into neat geographical imaginations of North and South represent ways to understand and know the world? Specifically, how can we centre the idea of diaspora as part of wider geo‐ and body political projects that aim to decentre knowledge production? We bring diaspora back into debates on knowledge production to explore how their understanding of the world, rooted in hybrid and transnational ways, can enrich engagements around postcoloniality and decoloniality. We detail how such voices illuminate how racialization, coloniality and difference continue to mark how we know and teach the world. Our argument makes imperative the case for de‐territorializing scholars and scholarship.
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