Geographies of Urban Politics: Pathways,Intersections, Interventions

This paper deals with urban political geographies and, most particularly, with political economy perspectives on urban politics. It offers an account that narrates what I see as influential pathways and intersections, theoretical debates, and methodological developments that have shaped contemporary urban political geographies in this vein since the 1970s, including: the ‘new urban politics’, intersections with postmodernism, and postcolonialism; urban neoliberalism and the contingency of urban politics; and, most recently, poststructural political economy and the notion of assemblage. This leads me to trace the implications of the shift in understanding from urban political geography to geographies of urban politics, and the growing emphasis on practice, contingency, relationality, and assemblage that accompany this shift. I conclude with reflections on new directions, new productive questions and tensions, and on the knowledge politics of how we do and might do contemporary urban political geographies.     

Theorising 'Difference' in Aotearoa/New Zealand {1}

This paper discusses theoretical and political tensions that emerged for me as a result of exploring the implications of 'positionality'. The discussion is set in debates about the differences within and between women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Many New Zealand feminists, both Maori and Pakeha, have become concerned with the task of establishing an autonomous existence premised on unique identities. While recognising the political imperative that informs this politics and theorising, my own work has led me to theoretical understandings about the constitution of identities that could easily be construed as antagonistic to local aspirations. My dilemma, therefore, is how to produce feminist theory that compromises neither political or intellectual credibility. Positionality, I argue, involves not just positioning in a theoretical and ideological place, but also in a geographical location and, by implication, the politics of that place.     

Reification and the Dictatorship of the Water Meter

In this paper, I seek to gain an understanding of the power that water meters are able to acquire in regulating the daily rhythms of life in the South African city of Durban. In doing so, I put Georg Lukács's writings on reification to work. Lukács's theorisation of the phenomenon of reification captures the twin processes of encroaching formal rationalisation and commodity fetishism. Charting the history of the introduction of water meters and the rise in power of associated infrastructures, I seek to put a historical geographical materialist imagination to work. Thus, I develop a relational ontology of the urban waterscape before seeking to identify lines of struggle that might challenge the dictatorship of the water meter and move towards radically democratic technologies for a more equitable distribution of water.     

Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City

The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit's “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman's proposal to build the world's largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community‐based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization.     

The Right to the City and Critical Reflections on China's Property Rights Activism

Wholesale clearance and eviction that typify China's urban development have often resulted in discontents among urban residents, giving rise to what critics refer to as property rights activism. This paper is an attempt to critically revisit the existing debates on the property rights activism in China. The paper refers to the perspective of the “right to the city” to examine whose rights count in China's urban development contexts and proposes a cross‐class alliance that engages both migrants and local citizens. The alliance itself will have substantial political implications, overcoming the limited level of rights awareness that mainly rests on distributional justice in China. The discussions are supported by an analysis of empirical data from the author's field research in Guangzhou, which examines how local and non‐local (migrant) residents view nail‐households resisting demolition and forced eviction.     

Retheorizing urban geography: mutual relationships between English- and German-speaking communities

This paper takes a comparative look at urban geography in the German- and English-speaking academic communities, based on a critical reflection of publication activities, sub-disciplinary discourses and conceptual developments. It is argued that Anglophone discourses tend to embed urban research into a broad range of conceptual and theoretical frameworks, whereas many writings in German-speaking urban geography are committed to pursuing empirical studies and applied research, thereby producing planning studies and policy recommendations; only recently, studies inspired by the cultural turn have evolved that are also addressing urban topics. In both language communities, a certain body of geographical work can be detected that deals with core urban themes without evolving from a distinct ‘urban geography’ community. In this context, a mutual trans-national dialogue between cultural, social and urban geographies is considered helpful for better linking the two different language and academic communities. Accordingly, the paper provides suggestions on how to reconceptualize urban geography at the intersections of recent debates in both language contexts by highlighting specific theoretical approaches, policy linkages and methodologies.     

Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”

This introduction to the translation of Henri Lefebvre's 1956 essay “The theory of ground rent and rural Sociology” moves through three stages. First, it suggests that Anglophone appropriations of Lefebvre have tended to focus too much on his urban writings, at the expense of understanding his early work on rural sociology, and failing to recognise how his urban focus emerged as a result of his interest in rural–urban transformation. Second, it provides a summary of his wider work on rural questions, including his unfinished work on a major treatise of rural sociology; and outlines the key themes of the present essay in relation to these other projects. Third, it connects Lefebvre's issues to wider debates in political economy and geography about aspects of the rural, land and ground rent, not least including the work of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui.     

A feminist geographic analysis of perceptions of food and health in Ugandan cities

Abstract

This article contributes to a feminist geographic analysis of how urban food and health environments and non-communicable disease experience may be being constructed, and contested, by healthcare professionals (local elites) in two secondary Ugandan cities (Mbale and Mbarara). I use thematic and group interaction analysis of focus group data to explore material and discursive representations. Findings make explicit how healthcare professionals had a tendency to prescribe highly classed and gendered assumptions of bodies and behaviours in places and in daily practices. The work supports the discomfort some have felt concerning claims of an African nutrition transition, and is relevant to debates regarding double burden malnutrition. I argue that a feministic analysis, and an intersectional appreciation of people in places, is advantageous to food and health-related research and policy-making. Results uncover and deconstruct a dominant patriarchal tendency towards blaming women for obesity. Yet findings also exemplify the co-constructed and malleable nature of knowledge and understandings, and this offers encouragement.     

Entrepreneurial Urbanism After the Crisis: Ireland's “Bad Bank” and the Redevelopment of Dublin's Docklands

The development of Dublin's Docklands was paradigmatic of the speculative storm that overwhelmed the Irish economy between the late 1990s and the crisis of 2008. It also served as a textbook case of entrepreneurial urbanism, with the development agency driving private‐led development on a former industrial and waterfront site. Following the crash, however, the key actors have been decimated: the development agency itself, the developers and the banks. This article traces the re‐emergence of Docklands development in order to analyse post‐crisis urban development. I argue that the latest phase of development reproduces key aspects of entrepreneurial urbanism, but also includes novel aspects. In particular, the National Asset Management Agency, a “bad bank” set up to rescue the financial sector, emerges as a major force. The article contributes to debates on urban development after the crash, and the specific relationship between post‐crisis entrepreneurial urbanism and financialization.     

Sovereignty,Risk and Biotechnology: Zambia's 2002 GM Controversy in Retrospect

The southern African food crisis of 2002 led to one of the most significant controversies over the use of genetically modified (GM) crops in the developing world to date. Zambia's staunch opposition to GM food aid during the crisis is still frequently used as a reference point in debates over GM seed technology in agricultural development, and the morality of advanced biotechnology. This article re‐examines the controversy and its contemporary relevance using oral history interviews with key scientists, policy makers and development practitioners engaged in debates and decision‐making processes in Zambia in 2002, alongside a review of discourses in the Zambian press. The author argues that, rather than different perceptions of health and environmental risks derived from GM crops, it was questions of sovereign regulatory control of technology in a context of diminished state capacity — and the decline in the Zambian state's capacity for agricultural science research in particular — that played a central role in shaping anti‐GM attitudes. In addition, trust in the arguments of GM advocates was diminished by communication efforts which treated Zambian scientists and policy elites as a lay rather than an expert audience.     

Tackling Social Exclusion: The Role of Social Capital in Urban Regeneration on Merseyside — From Mistrust to Trust?

In recent years community involvement and increasingly social capital have become central themes in debates and policies surrounding urban regeneration. This paper attempts to contribute to these debates by reviewing the role of social capital in the context of a major regeneration initiative, namely the European Union-sponsored Objective One Programme, currently underway on Merseyside. The paper argues that it is important to show how social capital is formed through the 'scaling-up' of local associational relationships, networks and institutions, to wider power structures and relations. Trust amongst participants is central to this process. Two areas on Merseyside are used as case studies to illustrate the argument. The paper concludes that the active development of trust and the social relationships surrounding it needs to be central to the process of urban regeneration.     

Anthropological theory and engagement: A zero‐sum game? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Engagement with pressing social and political issues is often presented as a threat to the elaboration of sophisticated anthropological theory that needs to be protected from such concerns in order to flourish. However the history of anthropological theory demonstrates that some of the discipline's most important contributions have tended to arise as a result of its proponents' desire to engage in such debates. Although we cannot reproduce the cultural models of a previous generation of anthropologists, the future elaboration of ground‐breaking anthropological theory depends upon a rediscovery of such engaged work that does not posit engagement versus theoretical development as a zero‐sum game.     

“Elephants for Want of Towns”: Archaeological Perspectives on West African Cities and Their Hinterlands

Sub-Saharan Africa has long been seen as lacking the potential for autochthonous urban development, and Near Eastern and European contact provided ready explanations for the emergence of precolonial cities across the continent. In the past few decades, the pace of archaeological work on African cities has accelerated, and archaeologists have increasingly deployed a functional model of the city, in which cities are defined in relation to broader hinterlands rather than particular traits. As a result, deeply rooted urban traditions have been identified in all corners of the continent. Despite the antiquity of urban traditions across Africa, however, long-distance forces clearly had wide-reaching impacts on urban developmental trajectories, and proponents of the functional model have yet to explain the specific role of long-distance forces in the process of urbanization. This review examines how multiscalar forces shaped urban trajectories in West Africa, specifically. I examine how local political entrepreneurs took advantage of the opportunities provided by local, interregional, and global forces, resulting in a heterogeneous set of urban traditions across West Africa, ranging from trading entrepôts to regional capitals. Throughout I emphasize how local agency articulated with multiscalar social and economic forces, transforming the nature of regional integration, economic specialization, and the materialization of social difference, defining qualities of urban life.     

Women's ecological oral histories of recycling and development in coastal Yucatán

This article addresses the formation of the Chen Kole ‘Lob women's recycling cooperative and its relationship to urbanization, plastics consumption, and the exclusionary spaces of conservation-as-development in coastal Yucatán, Mexico. Increasing amounts of plastic containers and other nonorganic garbage contaminate backyards, protected wetlands and marine areas, and individual homes located in low-lying floodable areas. However, in this region, the majority of sponsored economic development programs are directed at managing men's activities in sustainable fishing and ecotourism within natural protected areas. Both women's work and urban issues such as recycling and waste management have frequently been excluded from state policies and development practice. I draw from oral histories of women's experience in the home, in conservation space, and as participants in grassroots plastics recycling to underscore what motivated women to become involved in recycling and garbage cleanup, and how women came to be considered local professionals who maintain clean spaces. These histories underscore the links between gendered work, urban practices, and conservation-as-development, and how women's urban recycling work affects social differences and ecological decline within vulnerable coastal areas.     

A Lineal City in the Pampas: Politics,Materialization and Revolution in Wladimiro Acosta's Vision for Buenos Aires

Abstract: Critics of modern architectural utopias have referred to the notions of construction and politics as irreconcilable elements of an unsurpassable antinomy. By studying Wladimiro Acosta's attempt to interrupt the unfolding of the capitalist urban process in Buenos Aires through an integral revision of the Spanish block, I explore the political potential embedded in the instance of materialization and highlight construction's involvement in the transformation of the prevailing forms of urban appearance. I argue that Acosta's proposal for a lineal city contains important theoretical and architectural reflections on how to conceive construction as a constitutive element of urban politics. In a contemporary urban scenario, where the production of the city's material and infrastructural landscape seems increasingly detached from democratic control, revisiting historical examples that position the notions of construction and emancipation as part of a single political prism may prove to be indispensable.     

Blinded like a state? Urban sanitation,improvement and high modernism in contemporary Myanmar

This article explores urban sanitation in the city of Mandalay, upper Myanmar, as an entry point to better understand the issue of improvement in the country in the current era of political change. Based upon qualitative data gathered in Mandalay between 2015 and 2018, the article focuses on the state's ways of seeing urban improvement after 2016, when the National League for Democracy government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi took office. The article builds upon James Scott's work on statecraft to frame the analysis, and it uses this framework to argue that a localized form of authoritarian high modernism is emerging and shaping urban improvement in Mandalay today. The case is noteworthy as high modernism in Mandalay is not associated with attempts to render the city more legible; on the contrary improvement seems to be carried out by a state unwilling, or unable, to see and thus being blinded. The article develops this argument to make a twofold contribution, to discussions on statecraft and the “failure of development” in contemporary Myanmar from the perspective of political geography; and to debates on states' ways of seeing and the practice of improvement in postcolonial contexts.     

On the edge: A tale of skaters and urban governance

The 'problem' of skating has been conflated with a 'problem' with young people in public spaces, reflecting a rise in fear of crime from the mid-twentieth century and referencing more general questions about public space and citizenship. My task in this paper is to highlight some of the tensions between skating and urban governance in Franklin Square, Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania in Australia. This task is indebted to ideas about governance and citizenship advanced by Nikolas Rose; about the proper city as conceived by Michel de Certeau; and about fortress strategies and species of spaces promulgated by Stephen Flusty. Franklin Square functions in two ways in this work. First, its examination encourages consideration of local cases. Second, it can be deployed as a heuristic device through which to explore the edges of public space and citizenship. The essay is intended to make two contributions to social and cultural geography, one enlarging on some well-rehearsed debates about situated and contested socio-spatial relations in what I hope are innovative ways, the other unsettling particular strategies that place skaters 'on the edge' and yet draw them into particular domains of citizenship via specific practices of urban governance.     

Narratives of Modernity,Masculinity, and Citizenship Amid Crisis in Abidjan's Sorbonne

In this article I relate prominent depictions of the African urban crisis, particularly informality, and its implications for masculine subjectivity in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Drawing on five months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2008 and 2009, I consider the Sorbonne, a nationalist space in Abidjan, where partisans of former President Laurent Gbagbo contested the crisis narrative and their place in it. Literally and ideologically, Sorbonne orators and spectators moved themselves and their country from the periphery to the urban and global core.     

Towards an Energy Politics In‐Against‐and‐Beyond the State: Berlin's Struggle for Energy Democracy

Social movements in struggle around energy are currently developing an imaginary of “energy democracy” to signify the emancipatory energy transitions they desire. Deploying a scholar‐activist perspective, this paper contributes to debates around the concretisation of the energy democracy imaginary by exploring the relationship of energy democracy movements to the state. To do so, I focus on the experiences of the Berliner Energietisch campaign, which in 2013 forced (and lost) a referendum aiming to extend—and democratise—the local state's role in Berlin's energy governance. Drawing on relational theories of the state, I argue that it is productive to read Berliner Energietisch as enacting an energy politics in‐against‐and‐beyond the state. In making this argument, I draw out implications for theoretical and strategic debates around the commons and the state.     

Global flows and everyday violence in urban space: The port-city of Buenaventura,Colombia

Buenaventura, Colombia's rapidly expanding Pacific port, is simultaneously a city of violence. Focusing the linkages between local violence and the port economy, this contribution explores the role the port's global interconnections play for Buenaventura as a site of violence. In which ways does everyday violence shape urban spatial practices, particularly movement? How do every day coping strategies, reacting to a violent context, produce urban space? I suggest an analysis that links the production of urban space through everyday practices to the notion of violence as inherent to urban power relations on the one, and to the role of global flows of goods in urban space on the other hand. The main argument is that, global interconnections through the port are not decoupled from, but rather constitute a condition for violence in Buenaventura, particularly in neighbourhoods next to port terminals. This urban space is constituted both by daily violence and by stretching along global supply chains. Both violence and the secured, off-access port spaces shape, transform and limit inhabitants' mobility, while they enable global flows. I identify coping strategies such as mapping safe spaces, accompaniment, adaptation of movement to zig-zag patterns, and organised spatial strategies. The article contributes to recent debates on violence and the everyday, and urban space shaped by violent global-local encounters.