While historical geographers contributed to colonial projects as surveyors, explorers and map‐makers, since the 1990s they have contributed to the critical analysis of the imaginary and material ...geographies of empire. However, as the only example of Asian‐led colonialism, the study of Japanese colonialism has not received anywhere near the same degree of scholarly attention as western colonialism, especially in the English‐speaking literature. This study summarizes the historical geographies on both Japanese colonialism and colonial cities in Japanese Empire, arguing the vulnerable status of Japanese colonial cities in postcolonial urbanism, and concludes with a discussion of the particularities of Japanese colonialism. It argues that there is plenty of space for geographical research in the Japanese colonial context. Japan's colonial cities have special characteristics and should receive more attention in post‐colonial urbanism as it in line with the urban scholar's call for ordinary cities in global south. It is hoped that this review can be a complete summary of relevant research and will provide useful references for future geographers to comparatively research Japanese colonialism.
This paper revisits the ‘geography of gentrification’ thinking through the literature on comparative urbanism. I argue that given the ‘mega-gentrification’ affecting many cities in the Global South ...gentrification researchers need to adopt a postcolonial approach taking on board critiques around developmentalism, categorization and universalism. In addition they need to draw on recent work on the mobilities and assemblages of urban policies/policy-making in order to explore if, and how, gentrification has travelled from the Global North to the Global South.
In recent years, informal and unauthorised amateur urban design solutions have become an urban trend in the global North. These Do-It-Yourself (DIY) urbanism actions can be playful commentaries, ...critical interventions or functional improvements to urban spaces. In general, DIY urbanism tries to make urban everyday life better, but it is not always considered a political act. This paper presents an ethnographic case study of a DIY skatepark building in Tampere, Finland, and describes a group of skaters' political subjectivisation and how they learned hands-on to influence urban governance. After the city's failed skatepark plan, the skaters turned their discontent into a tactical spatial appropriation, a DIY skatepark, and later shifted their mode of politics to strategic claim-making. By doing so, the skaters became not only skilled skatepark builders, but also an organised association promoting skateboarding and influencing urban development and culture. This paper argues that DIY urbanism has transformative potential to act as a catalyst for bottom-up change in a contemporary city.
This paper locates itself within comparative urbanism by employing the concept of 'tracing' as the starting point through which to think across a range of urban experiences. It first reflects on the ...historical development of comparative urbanism in particular considering the way in which contemporary understandings have been shaped by this long record of debate. From there, the paper refines its focus to 'tracing' as one method of actually doing comparative urbanism. Putting this theoretical argument into action, the paper then experiments with three approaches to 'tracing' in Johannesburg: the 'trace' - a YouTube video, the 'process of tracing' - a public lecture by an international urban expert, and the 'pathways of tracing' - a network of cities, each of which exhibits a method of actually doing comparative urbanism. These terminologies represent a fine-tuned analysis of 'tracing' as both a conceptual framework and a process for actually doing comparative urbanism.
This paper engages with a recent set of critical arguments concerning the 'post-crisis city' and the political economy of 'austerity urbanism'. The focus of the discussion is on practical ...interventions in the vacant and disused spaces of recessionary cities, and in particular on temporary designs and provisional uses. In this way, it opens a further line of argument about urbanism under conditions of austerity, alongside analyses of the formal politics of austerity or the possibilities of urban activism in these settings. Its concern is with forms of urban intervention that re-work orthodoxies of urban development as usual: in particular the timescales that inform conventional development models; the understandings of use around which sites are planned and designed; and the ways in which value is realized through the production of urban spaces. The argument centres on European contexts of austerity urbanism, drawing on critical examples of urban design and occupation in the region's largest economies. Such urban strategies are concerned with a politics and a practice of small incursions in material spaces that seek to create a kind of 'durability through the temporary'.
El eje de análisis principal de los cuatro trabajos que conforman este dossier es recuperar las principales características de los procesos socioeconómicos y territoriales que se generan en las ...ciudades latinoamericanas, los cuales han acrecentado las profundas desigualdades urbanas en el siglo XXI. En todos ellos se analizan actores sociales locales y procesos originales, con distintas ciudades de Latinoamérica como referentes urbanos, y se presenta un conjunto de hallazgos que enriquecen la comprensión de las llamadas "desigualdades urbanas".1 En particular, se confrontan las profundas transformaciones del espacio urbano, en el marco de las políticas económicas neoliberales adoptadas por diferentes ámbitos de gobierno, y las formas de lucha y resistencia, que desde una resignificación y apelación colectiva al derecho a la ciudad plantean la posibilidad de impulsar un modelo de ciudad económica, social, ambiental y culturalmente sustentable.
En las dos últimas décadas del siglo XX el incremento de las distancias sociales fue tal que Jean-Paul Fitoussi y Pierre Rosanvallon (1997) acuñaron la idea de que estábamos en presencia de una nueva ...era: la era de la desigualdad. A las desigualdades estructurales resultantes de la segmentación de los mercados laborales y la asignación desigual de recompensas, se sumó la importancia de las desigualdades dinámicas, en tanto situaciones que dejaban de ser transitorias y representaban diferencias intracategoriales. El debilitamiento del modelo de trabajo asalariado, el incremento del desempleo, la precarización y los bajos salarios se consideran condiciones desventajosas, sobre todo para las mujeres, y a ello se suman las dificultades para acceder a los servicios de salud y la vivienda, los equipamientos públicos, el transporte o los servicios financieros que deben enfrentar en su vida cotidiana diferentes segmentos de la clase trabajadora. Esto llevó a poner el acento en las dimensiones no económicas de la desigualdad e incorporar a esta misma matriz conceptual la noción de exclusión social desarrollada también por la sociología francesa (Ziccardi, 2008). Más aún, en la actualidad la investigación social ha extendido el análisis a los procesos de discriminación institucional de que son objeto los sectores populares, procesos que refuerzan la segregación espacial y el confinamiento de aquellos grupos que se encuentran en situaciones particularmente desventajosas.
Advancing global urbanism depends upon making Africa's cities a more dominant part of the global urban narrative. Constructing a more legitimate research agenda for African cities, however, ...necessitates a repositioning of conventional modes of research. To achieve intellectual and political traction in what are typical African research conditions—where human needs are great, information is poor, conditions of governance are complex and the reality is changeable—we reflect on the experiences of the African Centre for Cities where (alongside conventional use of theory, methods and data) a translational mode of working has been adopted. The notion of translational urban research praxis captures more than the idea of applied research or even co‐production, and encompasses integrating the research conception, design, execution, application and reflection—and conceiving of this set of activities as a singular research/practice process that is by its nature deeply political and locationally embedded. In this way we suggest that African urbanism can be both usefully illuminated by global theories and methods, and can simultaneously be constitutive of the reform of the ideas through which cities generally are understood.
Over the last decade, Smart City has increasingly become a popular urban policy approach of cities in both the Global North and Global South. Such approaches focus on digital and technology-driven ...urban innovation and are often considered to be a universal solution to varied urban issues in different cities. How Smart City policies operate in contemporary cities is being examined in the emerging, but still underdeveloped, academic field 'smart urbanism'. The considerable consequences of Smart City strategies call for critical engagement with the rationale, methods, target group and implications of Smart City approaches in different urban contexts. The aim of this paper is to further such critical engagement by distilling dimensions absent in current smart urbanism. We do so by exploring both the academic field of critical urbanism and smart urbanism and through that develop our contributions to the smart urbanism debate from existing theoretical and conceptual approaches within critical urbanism. We distilled three dimensions that require further development to facilitate a comprehensive analysis of what Smart City policies mean for contemporary urban life: (1) the acknowledgement that the urban is not confined to the administrative boundaries of a city; (2) the importance of local social-economic, cultural-political and environmental contingencies in analysing the development, implementation and effects of Smart City policies; and (3) the social-political construction of both the urban problems Smart City policies aim to solve and the considered solutions. As such, we argue that there is a lack of consideration for 'the urbanism' in smart urbanism.
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