Insofar as the production of space is intimately bound up with the bodily senses, it would be reasonable to posit that the politics of space is also at the same time a politics of the senses. In this ...context, the theoretical remit of this paper is to extend our analysis of the role of the senses in theorising a visceral politics of urban exclusion. Using the case study of a middle-class neighbourhood or xiaoqu in Shanghai, the paper interrogates how class-based sensory 'othering' is deployed to preserve and regulate the socio-metabolic environment of the neighbourhood sensorium and justify urban exclusion. Such revanchist (sensory) urbanism, however, is irreducible to the cultural politics of neoliberalism, but also deeply implicated in actually existing metabolic inequalities in contemporary urban China. In particular, those whose metabolic needs are devalued are often stigmatised and cast as 'sensorial others' with repulsive sensory and metabolic bodily practices that are at odds with the urban middle-class. By bringing together critical literature on sensory urbanism and urban metabolism, a key contribution of this paper is to advance the theorisation of visceral micro-politics of urban exclusion that is experienced and 'sensed' through everyday metabolic inequalities in urban China.
Calls for better municipal waste management practices that are in line with the principles of ‘circular economy’ and ‘circular cities’ abound in many parts of the world including Thailand. Our ...research aimed to understand how waste pickers in Bangkok currently operate as key actors in the recycling economy, given the lack of state funding and infrastructure for operationalizing circularity, using a situated urban political ecology (SUPE) approach. We conducted surveys and walk-along interviews with waste pickers in two districts of the city. This was supplemented by desk reviews and key informant interviews. Mainly, walking with waste pickers in their daily work routes threw light on the embodiment of waste metabolisms and everyday practices in accessing and metabolizing waste. We find how waste economies were sustained despite policy neglect through fluid relationships between humans and non-humans that operate within a messy, contested urban space. Negative affect and corporeal harm characterized such a metabolism. Characterization of power in urban political ecology can be strengthened by locating diffuse forms in which power is enacted and by looking at the political dimensions of affect. Unexpected alliances between actors posited counter-narratives to powerful instruments of regulation and global waste flows. Through the results presented in this paper, we call for UPE scholars to draw from (a) embodied and situated processes and practices in the transformations of socio-natures and (b) spatio-sensorial methods that can trace circulations and metabolisms of socio-natures. We suggest that such a SUPE can underpin grounded projects of bettering human-environment relationships in the age of planetary crisis.
•A situated urban political ecology resists top-down characterisations of power and presents complex and diverse narratives of the “winners and losers” of socio-natural transformations.•Plastic recycling economies in Bangkok are sustained by fluid relationships between humans and non-humans that operate within a messy, contested urban space.•Emotions and embodiment characterize the metabolism of wastes.•Walk-along interviews, as a spatio-sensorial tool, enabled a situated understanding of the embodiment of waste flows.•Through an amalgamation of embodied and situated urban political ecologies, UPE can underpin grounded projects of bettering human-environment relationships in the age of planetary crisis.
In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring-an intensification in the encroachment of the neoliberal project into ...the agendas of local governments. In the specific case of Italy, which faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, "smart city" policies became one of the foundational political technologies for the implementation of austerity measures. In this paper, I analyse how the smart city provided a lexicon for urban austerity through a series of different sites and vehicles of policymaking, from practitioners to companies and other institutions. I argue that smart city discourses and practices functioned as a political technology that was effective in justifying cost containment measures and supporting the shift to pro-innovation public expenditures. Yet, at the same time, the smart city techno-utopian vocabulary created spaces where other meanings and, potentially, alternative political outcomes were made possible by diverse alignments of knowledge and expertise.
This article is concerned with masterplan implementation and with exploring, via recourse to case studies, slippages between masterplanning principles, policies, and practices. Framed by a growing ...body of sustainable urbanism literature we analyse evidence from five masterplanned communities in the UK and Australia to comparatively explore how some key theoretical principles are translated into placemaking in inner urban, suburban, outer urban and semi-rural contexts. We observe varying degrees of disjuncture between masterplanning principles and the urban form envisioned by, and realized through, actual masterplanning proposals and implementation. We postulate that various degrees of slippage at each stage from proposals to practices have occurred which can affect capacity to meet principles of sustainable urbanism. Analysis of the five cases demonstrates where some potential "tripping-up" points lie in the masterplanning process, hinting at broader impediments to delivering masterplanning that is more closely aligned to sustainable urbanism principles in future.
Abstract
The urban waterfronts of submerged heritage cities offer great opportunities and space for bringing nature into cities, they provide inspiration for closer relationships between nature, ...heritage sites and society. On the other hand, these urban waterfronts suffer from disconnection between nature and culture in heritage conservation practices. This disconnection has negatively impacted not only on the heritage sites, but also on ecosystems, citizens’ health, and wellbeing. Biophilic urbanism is an approach that seeks to integrate nature into urban waterfront spaces, creating healthier and more liveable cities. This paper aims to fill the gap between nature and cultural in conservation practices by adopting the concept of biophilic urbanism, which provides a valuable tool for conservation the urban waterfronts of submerged heritage cities, in addition to the balance conservation with development and create more resilient waterfront communities. The paper examines case studies of urban waterfronts in (Zadar, Croatia), (Baia, Italy), and (Abo Qir, Egypt). The results indicate the necessity of modifying Abo Qir’s urban waterfront development plan to incorporate indicators of Biophilic urbanism. This adjustment is crucial in order to ensure that future generations inherit healthy and vital living spaces, in addition to preserve Abo Qir’s significant submerged heritage cities.
The Ordinary City Trap Smith, Richard G
Environment and planning. A,
10/2013, Letnik:
45, Številka:
10
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The paper is a critique of a critique; it explains why the most salient and influential critiques of the neo-Marxist world city and global city concepts, made by those arguing to further ...postcolonialize urban studies through such suppositions that all cities are ‘ordinary’, are misguided. First, it is explained how the charges of economism and ethnocentrism against the world city and global city concepts are ignoratio elenchi: They do not even begin to address or critique their neo-Marxist argument that, across the difference and diversity of the world's cities, a few major cities have the necessary economic specialization and therefore extraordinary function of commanding and controlling neoliberal globalization. Second, the error made by advocates of ordinary cities of supposing that world-systems analysis and the world city concept are forms of developmentalism is understood as the source for a wider postcolonial mistake of conflating the neo-Marxist world city and global city literatures with the very neoliberal practices toward urban development that they have long attempted to disclose and counter. Finally, the charges against the world city and global city concepts as paradigmatic, peripheralizing, and normative are also rebutted, not only to highlight how those critiques are consequentialist and dependent on the respective charges of economism, ethnocentrism, and developmentalism having veracity, but to demonstrate how an acceptance of the ordinary cities argument for an idiographic, provincial, nominalist, and comparative approach to urban studies, as an alternative to the two neo-Marxist concepts, is only to fall into the trap of making the mistake of confusing evidence of absence for absence of evidence.
•LUDs risk resulting in residents struggling to develop place identity/attachment.•Discourses associated with entrepreneurial urbanism can result in image-reality gaps.•Ørestad, Copenhagen failed to ...become the cosmopolitan metropole it was intended to.•Image-reality gaps resulted in experiences of transition and opposition in Ørestad.
This paper explores the lived space of entrepreneurial urbanism in Ørestad, a 1990s mega-project still under development on the edge of Copenhagen. Drawing upon in-depth interviews, interactive map-making and critical discourse analysis, it shows that imaginaries of urban competition, place branding and cosmopolitanism have only superficially been internalized by residents as part of their lived space in Ørestad, even revealing contradictory everyday practices and experiences. Rather than the cosmopolitan metropole and connected city space it was conceived to become, the district is experienced as a disconnected housing satellite without much street life, as a stepping stone to something better by reducing home to exchange value, and as an area with a community based in opposition. A sense of place identity and place attachment does exist for many Ørestaders but it is born out of ‘do-it-yourself mentality’ and reaction to a sense of ephemerality. The lived space of entrepreneurial urbanism in Ørestad can only partly be understood by what the district is, but much more by what it is not – i.e. by what it lacks from the perspective of its residents.
This paper addresses methodological approaches to comparative urban geography and the consequences of such approaches. It demonstrates three ways by which an imaginative comparison can be constructed ...and employed: letting the sites speak to one another, repeated instance analysis, and tracing. Successfully employing these methods requires adopting comparison as both an implicit ethos and explicit approach during data collection and analysis, answering “why is it different here?” Reflecting on the impact of utilising comparative approaches, I argue that comparative urbanism helps balance the unique and ubiquitous conclusions from research, and forces researchers to question the norms or assumptions they hold from doing singular case study research, which in turn foregrounds the situational nature of urban governance in analysis. In the specifics of this paper, it also helps uncover assumptions around the power of state and reveals (some) global elite urban networks.
This paper addresses methodological approaches to comparative urban geography and the consequences of such approaches. It demonstrates three ways by which an imaginative comparison can be constructed and employed: letting the sites speak to one another, repeated instance analysis, and tracing. Successfully employing these methods requires adopting comparison as both an implicit ethos and explicit approach during data collection and analysis, answering "why is it different here?"
Enclave urbanism – the privatisation of land for housing, technology, and commercial purposes – is gaining currency among scholars as a notion for explaining contemporary spatial restructuring. ...However, existing scholarship tends to over-emphasise enclave urbanism as a universal phenomenon that has negative consequences for certain groups in society. Recently, there are calls for more contextual and empirical analyses of the ramifications of enclave urbanism. Drawing on assemblage thinking (AT) to analyse enclave urbanism in Ghana’s Greater Accra Region (GAR), this paper argues that enclavism is a process that de/territorialises space through the active composition of multiple objects and actors. By decentering the binaries of elite and underclass and winners and losers in analysing the socio-spatial impacts of urban enclaves in GAR, the paper suggests that the socio-spatial effects of enclave urbanism are not pregiven but are produced through the nature of assemblages that the actors enter and re/constitute. In terms of land use policy and planning, more needs to be done by local governments in GAR to protect highly suitable agricultural lands and mitigate the negative impacts of urban enclaves on access to land by the vulnerable.
•We examine the spatial distribution and consequences of urban enclaves in Ghana’s Greater Accra Region (GAR).•Majority of the urban enclaves are located at the suburban and peripheral zones.•Both the elite and vulnerable are benefitting from the production of urban enclaves in GAR.•New cities do not only embody bounded physical forms, but the emergence of social relations.•More needs to be done to protect highly suitable agricultural lands in GAR.
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