Platforms in the urban environment are fundamentally unaccountable. They present themselves as too big to control, too new to regulate, and too innovative to stifle, and remain un-democratic, and ...usually distant, organizations with no interest in promoting local voices or investing in local priorities. This paper argues that platforms control urban interactions whilst remaining unaccountable through a strategic deployment of 'conjunctural geographies' - a way of being simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the space-times they mediate. These conjunctural geographies, however, render platforms vulnerable. The ephemeral nature of platforms means we can avoid them, circumvent them and replicate them; their material nature suggests points of regulation and resistance. The paper closes by pointing to three broad strategies -regulate, replicate, and resist - which can be deployed to build alternate platform futures. Each of which is built on understanding the simultaneously embedded and disembedded ways in which platforms occupy their conjunctural geographies.
Long a subject of study in the global South, the topic of citizen-driven, bottom-up, non-professionally produced urbanism has received increasing attention in professional and academic planning ...circles of the global North. This newfound focus on informal urbanism in the North is a welcome development, but, taken as a whole, Northern literature concerning informality is characterized by conceptual imprecision and an indeterminate analysis of the politics of informal actions and actors. As such, it fails to provide meaningful guidance to planners concerned with urban poverty, social justice, equity, and inclusion. This article attempts to resolve some of these problems by focusing on one key area of conceptual slippage in the literature: the failure to differentiate between informality born of desire and that born of need. This results in a flattened analysis of the political ramifications of informal actions and the political subjectivity of informal actors. In this article, I review the existing literature in order to point out some of these shortcomings. I then suggest that planners in the North have much to learn about informal urbanism from their counterparts working in and on Southern cities. I attempt to reconcile these two bodies of literature, arguing that Southern theory can help Northern planners develop a more nuanced, politically sophisticated approach to informal urbanism.
In many cities around the world we are presently witnessing the growth of, and interest in, a range of micro‐spatial urban practices that are reshaping urban spaces. These practices include actions ...such as: guerrilla and community gardening; housing and retail cooperatives; flash mobbing and other shock tactics; social economies and bartering schemes; ‘empty spaces’ movements to occupy abandoned buildings for a range of purposes; subcultural practices like graffiti/street art, skateboarding and parkour; and more. This article asks: to what extent do such practices constitute a new form of urban politics that might give birth to a more just and democratic city? In answering this question, the article considers these so‐called ‘do‐it‐yourself urbanisms’ from the perspective of the ‘right to the city’. After critically assessing that concept, the article argues that in order for do‐it‐yourself urbanist practices to generate a wider politics of the city through the appropriation of urban space, they also need to assert new forms of authority in the city based on the equality of urban inhabitants. This claim is illustrated through an analysis of the do‐it‐yourself practices of Sydney‐based activist collective BUGA UP and the New York and Madrid Street Advertising Takeovers.
Austerity budgeting in the public sector, selectively targeting the social state, is a long-established trait of neoliberal governance, but it has been enforced with renewed systemic intensity in the ...period since the Wall Street crash of 2008. The paper develops the argument that these conditions are defining a new operational matrix for urban politics. Examining some of the leading and bleeding edges of austerity's 'extreme economy' in the USA, the paper seeks to locate these developments in the context of mutating processes of neoliberal urbanism, commenting on some of its social and spatial consequences.
English monastic towns have traditionally been characterised in terms of robust lordship and violent town-abbey relations. While recent secondary literature has expressed some reservations, the ...premise is still widely accepted. Through a case study of Reading, with comparisons to other towns, this thesis re-evaluates the portrayal, arguing that violent clashes were the exception rather than the rule. Yet monasteries did practise a particularly robust form of lordship, with a multiplicity of factors reinforcing their power: vast wealth and estates, exceptional control of the judiciary, influence in both spiritual and temporal affairs, and a close relationship with the Crown. Among these, political connections were particularly crucial in reinforcing abbey privileges when they came under question. Monastic power was robust but not immune to change. Through developing their own links to the royal court in the later fifteenth century, the inhabitants of Reading were able to make some inroads into the abbey's authority. This thesis takes a comprehensive look at the political, economic, religious, and cultural life in a late medieval and Tudor community. It demonstrates the interconnectedness of all these facets of urban life, each with implications for the others. Methodologically, the study combines traditional historical approaches with social network analysis to study the sources from a new perspective. Originating in the social sciences and rarely applied to pre-modern societies, the latter is used to reassess claims of a rise in urban oligarchy. The analysis reveals a difference between the civic elite's projected image and the realities of day-to-day life. After the Dissolution, the burgesses forged an image of elevated status to support their ambition for self-government. Yet in multiple aspects of everyday urban life, members of the elite continued to interact with lower-status members of society.
Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated ...in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.
As urban actors engage in climate action, their projects - from urban greening to changes in urban energy systems - reshape not just the urban built environment but also the organization of social ...life. This new climate urbanism invites to reimagine what it means to be urban in a climate-changed world. We propose the articulation of climate urbanism as a critical theory that both exposes the production of further inequalities associated with urban responses to climate change and provides new radical forms of practice for more progressive urban futures under climate change.
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