This research explores the distinct places shaped by human processes and proximity to geothermal heat. It underlines the concept of elementality as critical for understanding energy, the urban, and ...everyday life. Advancing from the rematerialistion of geography it draws upon approaches to other geo urban phenomena through relational and more-than-human terms. This has emphasised networked, assembled, and processual understandings; through which a distributed agency concerning the human and non-human alike has been utilised to foreground a geologic vitality. With a focus on Reykjavík in Southwest Iceland, attention is turned to the sites of infrastructures, architectures, and human bodies. It examines the distinct materialities of Reykjavík's geothermal urban environ; their relational properties, elemental capacities, and the palpable affective sense of place that arises as the geothermal is articulated through the urban form. It engages a more-than-representational methodology: utilising video, photography, and interviews with Reykjavík's inhabitants. Field materials provide a detailed illustration of the city's emergent geothermal urban lifeworld. As 'surfacing', geothermal urbanism is revealed as a geosociotechnical process. As 'atmospheric', it is experienced as gathered, elementally infused, and palpable. As 'affective', the geothermal urban is understood as embroiled with an embodied geothermal elementality, tracking the processual and the atmospheric. These findings culminate in a necessary revision of the geothermal field from an exclusively chthonic entity; extended beyond the subterranean into the urban, and understood as atmospheric and affective. Additionally, a discrete geothermal form of geopower is identified. This advances a non-carbon geologic agency, intersecting the geological and the affective. Geothermal urbanism is established as requiring a geosociotechnical ontology, an elemental epistemology, and characterised by distinct practices of embodied dwelling.
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.
Dubai needs immediate intervention to retrofit its current development strategies with a new emphasis on sustainability. Dubai's urbanization process compromised the environment to meet economic ...goals and housing necessities for citizens. This research asks, which form-based urban design strategies can most effectively deliver greater environmental, social, and economic coherence in Dubai's neighborhood development? Two rounds of the Delphi, a structured communication technique utilizing multiple rounds of questioning, were employed to obtain experts' advice on redefining urbanism in Dubai. Findings stress that for Dubai, the most sustainable neighborhoods will feature compactness, connectivity and multiple transportation options, diversity, culturally relevant urbanism, and climate-sensitive urbanism, all integrated in the urban fabric. Results confirm that sustainability cannot be studied in abstraction from context: experts identified various obstacles that the local context presents to the implementation of these principles. Developing and successfully implementing strategies to promote sustainability in Dubai is therefore a complex process that requires a shift in government priorities and cultural norms. The article argues that planners and officials should balance the claims of social, economic, and environmental sustainability rather than allowing economic strategies and social subsidies to dwarf environmental stewardship; planners must acknowledge all three factors equally and come up with context-relevant solutions and practical compromises. Officials should create a policy environment that supports such balance, and planners and officials should work together to institute a more transparent and inclusive process for making decisions about the built environment.
•This research asks, which forms will deliver greater environmental, social, and economic coherence in Dubai's neighborhoods?•For Dubai, sustainable forms will feature compactness, connectivity, diversity, and culturally & climatically relevant urbanism.•Results confirm that sustainability cannot be studied in abstraction from context.•The article supports the thesis that urban sustainability is always context dependent.•The research does not simply list a series of formal principles; it attends to reality, practicality, and context.•Results revealed various obstacles that the local context presents to the implementation of these principles.•The article turns into strategies and recommendations on how can Dubai move toward implementing these principles?•Dubai’s planners and officials should seek a balanced compromise between social, economic, and environmental sustainability.•The article stresses that environmental stewardship must be pursued with consideration for the needs of peoples & places.
This article proposes an analytical–methodological approach to understand this historical conjuncture of speculative urbanism in which global finance capital plays an increasingly important role in ...urban transformation. Whereas the scholarship on urban financialization makes sharp distinctions between what occurs in the global North and the South, portraying the process in the South as one of subordination or peripheralization and in the North as mature and stable (although volatile), this article seeks to demonstrate that the North–South divide is less effective as an explanatory power. Instead, it presents an analytical approach that is attuned to the relentless dynamism and inter-scalar hyper-mobility of finance capital working across the postcolonial map—in other words, a relational–conjunctural approach. The article suggests the method of “following the financial strategy” by analyzing urban forms and projects as processes constituted by the nexus of practices in finance and city planning. It looks closely at finance’s use of inter-scalar financial tools (such as arbitrage, interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and currency hedges) across borders, sectors, infrastructures, and conditions, as mediated by national and international state actors. The value of this analytical–methodological approach will be illustrated through notable financial transactions occurring in and across cities to emphasize their speculative and financial characteristics—specifically highlighting investments traversing cities of Spain, the USA, and India. The focus here is on financial strategies emerging from the detritus of the 2008 global financial crisis and shaped by the expanding discursive-material formation of speculative urbanism.
Taking as its focus the not-so-special case of Detroit, which recently experienced the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history, this article explores the financialization of American urban ...governance in both conceptual and concrete terms. The financially mediated restructuring of Detroit, through the imposition of emergency management by the state of Michigan and subsequently through the federal bankruptcy code, has been portrayed as an extreme event, with deep roots in histories of deindustrialization, racial exclusion, and suburban flight. It is not to downplay the significance of this experience to suggest, however, that the Detroit case also represents an ordinary crisis of a faltering regime of financialized urbanism. Compounding a shift toward entrepreneurial urban governance, cities now find themselves in an operating environment that has been constitutively financialized. Bondholder-value disciplines have become systemic in reach, along with an amplified role for financial gatekeepers like credit rating agencies; technocratic forms of financial management have been spreading and deepening, both in supposedly normal times and under externally imposed emergency measures; and in some cities the routinized play of growth-machine politics is being eclipsed by a new generation of debt-machine dynamics. While the ultimate focus of this article is on Detroit, its chief concern is with the framing of the city's storied financial crisis-theoretically and then institutionally.
City governments are embracing data‐driven and algorithmic planning to tackle urban problems. Data‐driven analytics have an unprecedented capacity to call urban futures into being. At the same time, ...they can depoliticize planning decisions. I argue that this shift calls urban studies scholars to investigate geographies of algorithmic violence—a repetitive and standardized form of violence that contributes to the racialization of space and spatialization of poverty. This article examines this broader phenomenon through the case of a proprietary market value assessment that is being used to guide development in cities across the United States. The assessment employs an algorithm that helps city officials make critical decisions about which neighborhoods to target for investment, disinvestment and public service upgrades or disconnections. I argue that the racial, infrastructural, and epistemological violence associated with this evaluation can potentially lead to a new kind of municipal redlining. The article brings insights from critical race theory into conversation with critical scholarship on algorithms by analyzing how algorithmic violence works through data‐driven planning technologies to depoliticize and leverage power while further entrenching racism and inequality.
Everyday urbanism, a bottom-up planning approach, exemplifies the discourse in current planning practice through the lens of critical urbanism. This study uses morphological mapping, observation, and ...open- and closed-ended questionnaire responses to identify factors that facilitate everyday urbanism in a neighborhood in Abu Dhabi and offer an action plan for putting everyday urbanism into practice. Findings indicate that everyday urbanism is facilitated by both formal planning and bottom-up interventions. Planning education and practice should teach, train, and encourage people-centered planning in a context-sensitive way that adapts to the social and cultural needs of the community.
This paper makes a case for viewing vacancy as “precarious property” (Blomley 2020; Antipode 521:36–57), i.e. less a material object defined by absence of use than the property relation (understood ...as a bundle of social, economic, legal, and political relationships) put under strain by the visibility of non‐use. Focusing on Dublin's temporary urbanism moment (2008–2017), the paper has two aims. Firstly, it gives a critical account of this recent urban history of experimentation, documenting how the possibilities of the period following the crash were (fore)closed through governmental interventions. Secondly, the empirical case is used to make a wider conceptual argument about the conjunctural role that vacancy plays in urbanisation and urban politics, developing three main arguments: that vacancy is a vulnerable axis within the ownership model of property; that claims to vacancy are articulated in conjunctural and contextual ways; and that vacancy epitomises the dual nature of precarity.
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