Any Labour Geographies in Urban Theory? Workers Meet Lefebvre and Harvey (Yet Again)

This paper examines the urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey to construct an urban perspective on labour geographies. Lefebvre understood work in a work–nonwork continuum beyond binarism, and Lefebvre and Harvey hailed the outpouring of working-class agency from cities. However, they may have obscured the role of labour movements in urbanisation when identifying the living-place (such as streets, neighbourhoods, or housing) as the primary seat of urban agency. Learning from labour geographers in the 1990s, I query this ambiguity to enhance the urban theory of Lefebvre and Harvey, conceive of the urban scale as the site of unfinished industrial/urban dialectics, and conceptualise labour agency as a producer of transformative continua in urbanisation. Interpreting Toyota’s factories as rescaled pivots of industrial urbanisation, I explore how Japanese labour movements challenged just-in-time production, its union form, and its work/nonwork divides, producing new urbanising continua—even planetary ones—between different transformative agencies.     

Distinctive patterns of industrial urbanisation in modern Tokyo,c. 1880–1930

Industrial growth in Japan's largest cities has followed patterns that are distinctive, and are significantly different from those that have been adduced in the recent literature on North America. This paper focuses on Tokyo, and in particular its north-eastern part, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that a process of ‘industrial urbanisation’ occurred in Japan's capital city, a process that was shaped by the existence of a large proto-industrial base and sophisticated consumer economy and characterised by dynamic but disorderly growth in factories largely supplying consumer goods to the urban market. The paper reviews the disparate, not to say confused, nature of industrial growth in Tokyo, noting the variety in factory size and products as well as production methods. Central to the argument of this paper is that industrialisation preceded attempts at urban planning and that the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation occurred concurrently, laying the base thereby for the large mixed-function districts that became a common feature of Japanese cities.     

Underurbanisation and the zero urban growth hypothesis: diverted migration in Albania

The author challenges the hypothesis "that the mode of production accounts for the specific forms of urbanisation under socialism and the slow urban growth observed...[and emphasizes instead] the effects of planning in the traditionally organised command economy." It is suggested that strict migration policy is a pivotal factor in achieving zero urban growth. "A case study focusing on patterns of diverted migration and the growth of non-urban settlements on the outskirts of the Albanian capital, Tirana, illustrates how the proposed explanations may help to re-interpret the particulars of urbanisation under orthodox socialist rule."     

关中、中原、山东半岛三城市群产业结构与分工的比较研究

采用区位商、相对专业化指数和相对多样化指数等指标定量分析了关中、中原、山东半岛三城市群的产业结构、专门化和多样化,并考察了它们与城市群发展之间的关系。通过指标计算与回归分析发现,目前三城市群总体上,相对全国而言的偏高的产业专门化和偏低的多样化,不利于城市群的发育;沿海和内地城市群的产业在发展动力方面存在着差异,沿海对产业多样化较敏感,而内陆则不显著;产业专门化不利于城市群发展,而多样化对城市群发展有一定的正向作用,但短期内作用并不明显。     

Study of the Impact of Urban Development on Surface Temperature Using Remote Sensing in Ho Chi Minh City,Southern Vietnam

Rapid urbanisation and industrialisation have resulted in sharp land cover changes. Urban change not only impacts on land cover but also on urban climate. Land surface and atmospheric modifications due to urbanisation generally lead to a modified thermal climate that is warmer than the surrounding, non-urbanised areas. In this research remote sensing technology was used to evaluate urban growth patterns and its thermal characteristics through mapping impervious surfaces and evaluating thermal infrared images. The case study was carried out in the northern part of Ho Chi Minh City, which has experienced accelerated urban development since the late 1980s. Landsat and Aster images were used to calculate variations in urban impervious surfaces from 1989 to 2006. Thermal bands were processed to obtain radiant surface temperatures for investigating the urban heat island effect associated with increasing impervious surfaces, both spatially and temporally. Impacts of urban development on surface temperature were shown by investigating the surface urban heat island effect intensity. The results show that the built-up area in the northern part of Ho Chi Minh City expanded by 6.5 times between 1989 and 2006. Urban development has altered the magnitude and pattern of the surface urban heat island, with the highest land surface temperature cores found in the industrial (greater than 45^oC) and urban areas (within 36^oC and 40^oC). In suburban and rural areas, where agricultural land still remains with full vegetation cover, the land surface temperature is usually lower. Using remote sensing, the impervious surface was extracted with overall accuracy and a Kappa coefficient for all three years greater than 96%, and the retrieved land surface temperatures with variations from in-situ measurements of less than 2^oC. The results presented here indicate that remote sensing can help to spatially monitor urban development and land surface temperature changes over the whole area and over a long period of time.     

By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014

When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega‐event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”. Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of “necessity” combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside—a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods. CPOs can be used progressively, for example to abrogate the power of slum landlords for social democratic ends, yet with the increasing urbanisation of capital they more often target marginalised neighbourhoods in the pursuit of land and property valorisation. The growing use of CPOs as an exceptional measure in urbanisation, we argue, requires urgent attention in urban political struggles and policy practice.     

Dynamics of Land Surface Temperature in Response to Land‐Use/Cover Change

In this study, we employed Geographical Information Systems and remote sensing techniques to investigate the impact of land‐use/cover change on land surface temperature (LST) in a rapidly urbanisation city, Kunming in south‐west China. Spatial patterns of LST and land use for 1992 and 2006 were derived from Landsat images to examine how LST responded to urban growth. Remote sensing indices were used to quantify land‐use types and employed as explanatory variables in LST modelling. The geographically weighted regression (GWR), a location dependent model, was performed to explore the influences of the spatially varied land‐use conditions on the LST patterns. Results revealed that rapid urbanisation in Kunming altered the local thermal environment, particularly in increasing the LST in the zone surrounding the urban core. Remote sensing indices demonstrated that water and vegetation played an important role in mitigating the urban heat island effect, while built‐up and barren land accounted for the increase in LST. The GWR improved the goodness‐of‐fit for LST modelling and provided insights into the spatially varied relationship between LST and land‐use conditions.     

Regional contrasts in the growth of Canadian cities

Summary

As a result of the growth of the last five decades, Canadian cities have advanced from a subordinate to a dominant position in the population pattern and the economic life of the Dominion. Their rates of growth, moreover, faithfully reflect major changes in the settlement of the regions of which they are a part. In addition, they are significant as measuring the progress of urbanisation on the poleward margin of the urban area of North America.     

The urbanisation of Java, 2000–2010: towards ‘the island of mega-urban regions’

The mega-urbanisation process in Java is reflected in the spatial patterns of urban population growth between 2000 and 2010, although there has been a small deceleration in the rate of growth recently. This process is also clearly indicated in the significant increase in the number of urban localities, which reflects in situ urbanisation and rural–urban transformation in Java. Most districts and cities located adjacent to large cities experienced much higher population growth rates, compared to the core areas in cities. The formation of urban belts with a mix of economic activities connecting large cities is greatly expanding, while the small and medium cities, those with population sizes between 100,000 to one million, have tended to stagnate as their role and functions as centres of socio-economic activities are taken over by the large cities. Java’s mega-urbanisation appears unstoppable, and is largely uncontrolled at the present time. It is a daunting challenge for the central and local governments to manage the spatial urban growth in Java in the near future.     

Time,Waste, and the City: The Rise of the Environmental Industry

In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service‐based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial past, cleaning up the waste left over from long‐departed manufacturing sectors. Returning to David Harvey's earlier work on the urban process, this paper develops a theory of waste switching that situates EGS within a larger renegotiation of space and time across city landscapes. This theory is fleshed out in case studies of the EGS industry in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee, where new cycles of accumulation have been built on refuse, toxins, and dead labour. These “toxi‐cities” and their cleanup challenge traditional conceptions of urbanisation as spatially—but also temporally—bounded.     

Animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation

Abstract

Urban animals and their political ecologies constitute an arena of geographical scholarship that has intensified in recent years. Yet, little headway has been made in terms of understanding how sentient creatures inhabit and negotiate dynamic, metabolic environments. Focusing on urban macaques in Indian cities, the paper develops a conversation between geography and ethology. Firstly, the conversation provides insights into what urbanisation might entail for animals. Secondly, it assays ways in which non-human knowledges enable rethinking what expertise counts in urban governance. Thirdly, the conversation foregrounds other spatial topologies of the urban that become evident when animals’ lifeworlds are taken into account. The paper advances efforts to animate urban political ecology in registers yet inattentive to non-human lifeworlds. It concludes by reflecting upon the purchase of such etho-geographical conversations generate for political ecologies of urbanisation.     

Geomorphology and the sand and gravel industry of west Central Scotland

The countryside around towns is under increasing pressure for development as a result of the centrifugal forces which have characterised the capitalist urbanisation process in the post‐war era. Conflict between pro‐growth and anti‐growth interests is now endemic in many peri‐urban areas. This paper identifies the principal agents involved in the production of the built environment in the urban fringe and presents a detailed analysis of how divergent interests interact to determine the nature of the fringe environment. The research informs academic debate on rural land conversion and provides guidance for decision‐makers charged with management of the urban fringe.     

Population pressure,political institutions,and protests: A multilevel analysis of protest events in African cities

Why do some of Africa's urban areas experience higher rates of protest incidence than others? Numerous authors have highlighted the role of urbanisation and democratisation in determining cross-national variation in the rates of urban protest. Yet understanding has been hindered by failures to measure mechanisms at the appropriate spatial scale, analyse a sufficiently representative sample of urban centres, de-confound local and country-level factors, and consider what it is about specific urban centres that shapes variation in protest incidence. This paper presents new evidence on the determinants of protests in African urban centres by linking georeferenced data on urban settlements from the Urban Centres Database to the location of protest events taken from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset. Fitting a series of multilevel regression models with cross-level effects, we simultaneously estimate variation in protest incidence as a function of local- and country-level factors and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that variation in protest incidence between urban centres can be explained by a combination of local-specific and country-level contextual factors including population size and growth, regime type, civil society capacity, and whether an urban centre is politically significant. These findings advance our understanding of how political and demographic factors interact and influence protest incidence in urban Africa.     

Uneven Urbanisation: Connecting Flows of Water to Flows of Labour and Capital Through Jakarta's Flood Infrastructure

This article analyses processes of uneven urbanisation by looking at flood infrastructure. Combining the conceptual frameworks of uneven development with the political ecology of urbanisation, we use flood infrastructure as a methodological device to trace the processes through which unevenness occurs within, but also far beyond, the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. We do this to show how the development of flood infrastructure in Jakarta is shaped by the logic of capitalism through mutually implicated tendencies of socionatural differentiation and equalisation. These processes render waters, resources and labour as similar across places and times to produce different spaces for different populations, within and beyond city boundaries. This theorisation reveals how the urban inequalities (re)produced by flood infrastructure are intimately linked to inequalities (re)produced through the urbanisation of the non‐city.     

The effects of ageing and urbanisation on China’s future rural and urban populations

This paper estimates China’s future population and labour force by developing a novel forecasting model for population. It combines information about age-specific parameters on fertility and mortality for both rural and urban areas using information about rural–urban migration and the transformation of rural areas into urban ones. This model takes into account the effects of urbanisation on changes in the age structure of the Chinese population; and provides separate projections on the rural and urban populations. Our findings show that (i) the shares of people aged 65 and over, in China’s rural and urban populations, will double between 2010 and 2030; this implies that the ageing problem in rural areas will continue to be more serious than in urban areas; (ii) the rural labour force will shrink by 45 per cent, between 2010 and 2030, while the urban labour force will grow by 34 per cent; and (iii) China’s urbanisation rate will increase to 71 per cent by 2030.     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

城市文化产业园区建设的区位因素分析

随着文化产业在我国的发展,城市文化产业园区的建设在各地日益兴起。本文在探讨文化产业园的概念、内涵、类型及目前我国发展现状的基础上,对城市文化产业园区在建设过程中的区位因素进行了探讨分析。认为现阶段影响我国城市文化产业园区建设的主要区位因素为:文化资源禀赋、制度因素、信息技术、人才智力资源。最后讨论了城市文化产业园区区位选址中应注意的问题。     

城市和区域产业发展分析的增长商测度

区域产业分析的常用测度之一是区位商,该测度用于一个地理单元（如北京市）中某种行业在全部行业中的比重与特定区域（如全中国）的同种行业比重做比较。然而,区位商是一个静态概念,不能反映一种行业的相对增长幅度或者变化速度。基于数学中"商"的概念和理论地理学中测度构造的一般方法,本文定义了一个行业增长商测度,用于比较一个子区域中某种行业的增长幅度与特定地理区域中同一行业增长幅度,数值越大表明一个子区域的某种行业相对于特定区域的同种行业的增速越快、增幅越大。进一步地,定义了一个区域增长商,用于比较某种行业的相对增幅与全部行业的平均增幅,数值越大表明某种行业在全部行业中的增速越快。采用信阳实例说明了增长商分析的应用方法。作为参照,定义、对比并讨论了区位熵和增长熵测度。增长商是一个动态的测度,简明易懂,在区域产业分析中可以与区位商功能互补,在未来的主导产业选择中可能发挥一定作用。     

长江中游城市群空间结构的经济绩效影响研究

近年来,城市群成为我国新型城镇化的空间主体,研究城市群空间结构具有重要意义。但现有文献大多从人口维度对城市群空间结构进行分析,缺乏多维视角,其结论的参考价值有限。本文以长江中游城市群为研究对象,运用2006-2015年长江中游城市群内部三大城市群的面板数据,通过位序规模法则以及空间基尼系数,从人口与产业两方面对城市群空间结构进行测度,并进一步研究了城市群空间结构对其经济绩效的影响。结果表明,在控制了其他影响因素之后,人口呈多中心分布,产业呈单中心分布对长江中游城市群的经济绩效有显著的促进作用;资本投入、基础设施建设、政府干预、产业结构和人口规模均是影响长江中游城市群经济绩效的关键因素。未来长江中游城市群可运用人口引导产业流动,以推进多中心的发展进程。     

Measurement of Urban Fringe Sprawl in Nanjing between 1984 and 2010 Using Multidimensional Indicators

Due to the global increases in urbanisation rates, urban sprawl has become a worldwide issue. In China, the development of rural areas has been affected by urban expansion and adjustments of metropolitan areas by administrative divisions that have led to losses in agricultural lands and ecosystem services. There is the ‘paradoxical’ desire for governments to promote rural development and protect land resources. Urban fringe sprawl is a prominent issue in the process of rural development. Identifying and measuring sprawl at the urban fringe could assist policymakers to either encourage or discourage this phenomenon. This paper demonstrates use of multidimensional indicators to effectively measure urban fringe sprawl by remote sensing, in addition to demographic and socio‐economic data. Using integrated indicators observed in the recent Chinese development context, urban fringe sprawl was measured comprehensively for Jiangning, a district in the city of Nanjing, China. This study indicates that Jiangning is sprawling rapidly. The results also show that the multidimensional indicator approach could provide decision support to create effective long‐term land‐use planning policies for controlling urban sprawl patterns.