Evolving enclave urbanism in China and its socio-spatial implications: the case of Guangzhou

Enclave urbanism has deep historical roots in China, from the earliest forms of enclave residence, i.e. the walled city and courtyard housing, to the contemporary intricate mosaic of enclaves comprising danwei (work unit) compounds, gated commodity housing estates and migrant enclaves. Yet the evolution of enclave urbanism is not simply a convergence with Western urban forms, nor is it a process of historical succession or cultural inertia. The story of enclave urbanism is far more complicated. Exploring China's evolving urban enclaves and their socio-economic implications would add much richness and diversity to the international debates on enclave urbanism. The first half of the paper discusses the evolving processes and dynamics of China's enclave urbanism, with special reference to Guangzhou. The complex dynamics of China's enclave urbanism are evolving around various socio-economic, cultural, institutional and political forces, within which institutional arrangements for urban spatial organisation and social control are playing a fundamental role. To present a fuller picture of the plural socio-spatial connotations of China's enclave urbanism, the second half of the paper unpacks the heterogeneity of urban fabrics and examines how different social groups perceive and represent the social aspects of their lives. Featuring a high degree of heterogeneity within and between different types of neighbourhoods, enclave urbanism in China has entailed a complex relationship between urban form and social fabric. In addition, for various social groups, urban enclave living is endowed with very different social meanings. In gated commodity housing estates, enclave living is an expression of a safe, high-quality and privileged lifestyle. In urban villages, it is a compromise choice involving makeshift urban living resulting from suppressed rights to the city. And, in danwei compounds, it is a lingering lifestyle to which people used to be collectively assigned with no exercise of their own choice and from which they are now emotionally estranged.     

COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION AND URBAN SEGREGATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: THE CASE OF TWO COLORED SUBURBS IN THE JOHANNESBURG REGION

In South Africa, the provision of collective consumption and urban racial segregation have always been closely connected. This article examines changes in apartheid urban policy with specific reference to two predominantly working-class colored suburbs on the periphery of Johannesburg: Eldorado Park, begun in the mid-1960s during a period of relative growth and stability, is largely an expression of socialized housing produced by an interventionist state and construction of this suburb, despite its racially exclusive character, appears to fit all too well within the theory which sees collective consumption in terms of the reproduction of labor power. However the apartheid regime, confronted by a deepening economic and political crisis, later withdrew from the provision of collective consumption, and appears to be abandoning its racist urban policies and ideology. Thus construction of Ennerdale, beginning in the mid-1970s occurred within a context of privatization and austerity. Analysis of the apparent “deracialized” and market-oriented provision of urban goods and services in Ennerdale reveals, at a local level, contradictions of South African crisis policies.     

中国大城市保障房社区的邻里效应研究——以广州市保障房周边社区为例

随着我国保障房建设速度的加快,保障房社区将对已有的城市社会空间结构带来深刻影响,其社会效应亟需深入探讨。本文以邻里效应为切入点,基于社区调研数据,采用因子分析、回归分析和质性研究方法,研究广州市保障房社区对周边社区的影响,以及这种影响的形成机制。研究发现,保障房社区并没有为周边社区带来负面的影响,也不存在"贫困同质化"的现象。然而,保障房居民与周边社区居民缺乏人际交往,其社会融合度也比较低。结果表明,提升保障房社区的社会认同度,消除不同社区居民相互间的隔阂,对构建和谐社区具有重要的意义。     

A state of suspended animation: Urban sanitation and water access in Nogales,Sonora

With its hilly terrain and fast-paced growth, Nogales, Sonora, located on the US-Mexico border, is an extremely challenging place for sanitation and potable water provision wherein access to basic services is highly uneven. The labor demands of maquiladoras (typically, foreign-owned assembly plants) draw a steady influx of newcomers to the city, many of whom must turn to land “invasion” to create spaces for affordable housing. With tacit government approval, invasions occur on inexpensive, often topographically precarious land. Officials tend to frame these spaces as “illegal,” and, by extension, those who inhabit them, as existing outside the realm of formal governance. Despite such views, in this paper we understand the distinctions drawn between so-called formal and informal urban governance to unfold along two key axes: regularization of informal land titles and piped water and sanitation. We show how colonia residents feel caught in a state of suspended animation between hope for full urban service provision and trepidation that it will ever reach them. This ambiguity is visible in residents' and government officials' interactions with each other and the public services landscape, and in the unevenness of services provision. We critique the claim that such ambiguousness reflects an instrumental approach within official planning. Instead, we draw from state theory within political geography and political ecology to show how ‘the state’ is an emergent effect of the processes of inclusion and exclusion, an effect constantly destabilized by Nogales's precarious physical geography and uneven urban services grid. Reconceptualizing authority and ambiguity holds quite different implications for the struggle for urban services provision.     

Neoliberalism and the Aestheticization of New Middle‐Class Landscapes

Abstract: If according to Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic 1990:28), the aesthetic is from the start “a contradictory, double‐edged concept”, how are seemingly innocent acts of viewing and consuming aesthetically pleasing landscapes implicated in the neoliberal politics of urban restructuring? Using contemporary Shanghai as a case study, this paper critically examines the role of the aesthetic in the politics of exclusion and urban segregation in post‐Socialist Shanghai where the restructuring and commodification of erstwhile public welfare housing have led to the rapid development of private “middle‐class” gated enclaves. A central objective of this paper is to excavate the underlying cultural politics of neoliberalism and demonstrate how the aestheticization of urban spaces in Shanghai has become increasingly intertwined with and accentuated by neoliberal ideologies and exclusionary practices in the city. Imbricated in the pristine neighborhoods of Shanghai's gated communities are the fault lines of social division and class distinction that are rapidly transforming urban China.     

'GOOD' AND 'REAL' PLACES: A GEOGRAPHICAL-MORAL CRITIQUE OF TERRITORIAL PLACE-MAKING

As a spatial strategy to control people by controlling access to space, gated communities are territorial place-making devices par excellence. While gated communities often conjure up images of extreme urban inequality and social–spatial segregation, relatively few works have actually engaged in more normative analysis and debates on these contentious urban forms. Addressing this lacuna, this paper will critically examine the geographical-moral dimensions of gated communities by adopting Sack's (2003) theoretical framework on 'good' and 'real' places. Specifically, the paper seeks to underscore the geographical-moral significance of place by considering gated communities as a key site for the critical reflection on the moral content of urban development driven by ideologies of privatism and neoliberal market logic.     

The programme local d'habitat: preparing a housing strategy for Lille

By the end of the 1970s, the French government had begun to realize that the large‐scale provision of social housing had created as many problems as it had solved. Social exclusion, unemployment and racial tension appeared to be particularly concentrated in the peripheral housing estates that had been the result of the housing policy of the 1960s. In the 1990s, the government developed the programme local d'habitat (PLH; local housing programme) as a means of creating an integrated housing policy across the whole of a given urban area. This article looks at the origins and evolution of the PLH, and presents the programme in the context of local administration and the structures in place for the provision and improvement of housing. It then turns to the application of the PLH to the communauté urbaine of Lille. It boks at the problems to be addressed within the Lille conurbation and the way the PLH responded to them. The article concludes with a reflection on why the PLH has not proceeded and what may be learnt from this apparent failure.     

Campgrounds as service hubs for the marginally housed

The service hub concept is strongly associated with deprived areas of North American inner cities, where agglomerations of low‐cost housing and service providers form a space of survival for marginalised populations. In this paper, we contend that service hubs can take other forms, including as small‐scale sites of housing and service provision, informally networked across an urban region. We develop this argument with reference to suburban campgrounds in Auckland, New Zealand—a city experiencing a severe housing affordability crisis. Both individually and collectively, campgrounds enable vulnerable households, as well as tourists, to inhabit an increasingly exclusionary urban environment. Drawing on interviews with 24 resident campers and eight managers, we highlight the role of campgrounds in supporting residents through the provision of informal housing and on‐site services. This provision also benefits the facilities' owners and managers, by creating a year‐round rental income stream. We find that campgrounds are critically important for those whose lives are rendered precarious by the housing market.     

Policing authoritarian neoliberalism in South London

In pointing out the exclusionary and nondemocratic reconceptualization of states following the financial and Eurozone crises, research by geographers and critical political economists on authoritarian neoliberalism (AN) has shed light on key state transformations. Exploring the criminalization of council estates and the policing of three austerity-ridden south London districts, this article contributes to efforts to expand the concept of AN further by centering questions of violence and physical state power in the form of discourses and practices of (criminal) punishment and policing. Building on qualitative work with local young people and interviews with former police officers, community leaders and activists, I demonstrate the spatial dimension of AN and the role of policing logic and mechanisms for its administration in south London. I argue that through post-crisis austerity measures and long-term mechanisms of criminalization, young people perceive their home neighborhoods as insecure and alter how they navigate them. Further, I show that spaces of inclusion and welfare, such as social housing estates and schools, have been reimagined as sites of exclusion and punishment, often administered by police.     

Tackling Social Exclusion

Abstract

The opening words of the 1999 report of the government's Social Exclusion Unit, Bringing Britain Together announced that it met its remit to report to the Prime Minister on how to: ‘develop integrated and sustainable approaches to the problems of the worst housing estates, including crime, drugs, unemployment, community breakdown, and bad schools etc.’ In other words the Social Exclusion Unit was instructed to take a problem-solving approach to the issue. This approach meant that the development of an inclusive society would be understood implicitly in terms of dealing with those areas that are perceived as problems. This seems to suggest that social exclusion ‘just happens’ to people who ‘suffer from’ a collection of problems. The agent or agents of this exclusion are rendered invisible by the very linguistic structure of the definition. This paper argues that it is vital to envisage the agents and victims of exclusion and to describe it in terms of the relationship of face to face. A critique drawing upon the insights of Emmanuel Levinas would refuse to allow us to reduce the otherness of the socially excluded to a project defined in the terms of those who exercise power in social relations. Nor would it allow a definition of social exclusion in terms of it being either ‘their’ problem or the consequence of some impersonal force. A theological critique might lead us to argue that the whole project of problem solving when applied to persons is in and of itself highly suspect. Thus the paper concludes by considering what shape might develop from the bringing of insights from philosophical and theological discourses to this perception of social exclusion. It seeks to argue for a radical passivity before the face of the Other (that is in this case those who live in urban housing estates) arguing that those who engage with social exclusion, the ‘name’ that has been given to this face, are first summoned by the Other to a relationship of total responsibility which rejects the reductionist project of the controlling ‘I’.     

Questioning the Rhetoric of Social Mix: Courteous Community or Hidden Hostility?

This paper explores the increasingly important role of ‘social mix’ in the management practices of the NSW Department of Housing. Social mix is a policy response to the many perceived social, cultural and economic problems related to the concentration of public tenants within larger housing estates. Social mix involves the integration and assimilation of public housing tenants into areas dominated by private home ownership and private rental. Such policies are based upon the belief that social mix has the ability to alter many of these problems simply through the presence of a ‘community’. However, this paper questions the normative construction of homeowners as possessing a ‘community’ which, by implication, will be passed on to public tenants. Through an in‐depth case‐study, it is shown that ‘community’, as constructed by social mix policy rhetoric, may in fact further disadvantage public tenants through processes of othering, stigmatisation and oppression, which operate outside these traditional understandings of community. In addition, this research shows that, rather than increased community integration, it is the physical function of neighbourhood and its direct role in service provision which is the most advantageous constituent of social mix for public housing tenants.     

Developing,designing and managing mixed tenure estates: implementing planning gain legislation in the Republic of Ireland1

This article reports the results of research on the implementation of recent legislation which enables Irish local authorities to require that up to 20% of new residential developments must be employed for social housing and for “affordable housing” for sale at below market value to low income households. The legislation will mean that most new residential developments will include several housing tenures. A survey of the number of mixed tenure estates constructed prior to its enactment indicates that, that without this legislation, few estates of this type would have been constructed in urban areas. Furthermore case studies of existing mixed tenure estates indicate that the prospects that this legislation can be successfully implemented are good. Opposition to tenure mixing among home buyers is less than some interest groups have claimed; there is little conflict between the residents of the different tenures in these estates and social housing managers and property developers hold similar views on the most appropriate design of these estates. However successful implementation of the legislation will require some reforms to arrangements for the planning and management of the developments subject to its provisions.     

Financial Exclusion in Rural and Remote New South Wales,Australia: a Geography of Bank Branch Rationalisation, 1981–98

The provision of financial services in rural Australia is a significant public policy issue, reflected in the high level of media and political interest in the recent spate of branch closures. There are, however, many aspects of the current debate regarding the delivery of financial services to rural communities that are, at best, less than ideal and, at worst, erroneous. Using telephone directories for New South Wales, non‐metropolitan bank branch listings for the period 1981 to 1998 were collated. A recategorisation of these data according to the Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Areas classification reveals, amidst a spatial realignment of financial service provision, that rural and remote New South Wales have been disproportionately affected by a relatively recent and concerted withdrawal of services. The research demonstrates that corporate‐level responses to increased competition within the financial system are significantly more important in deciding rural access to banking services than local and regional population trends. Indeed, two‐thirds of rural localities that have lost branches had experienced healthy population growth during the study period. In the wake of the post‐deregulation reconfiguration of the bank branch network, the socio‐economic marginalisation of rural communities is being compounded, a process of ‘financial exclusion’ recognised in other parts of the developed world.     

Third-world development: urbanizing for the future

This article reviews some issues reflected in the 1996 UN Habitat II agenda and recent research on urbanization. The themes of the 1996 Habitat conference were urban development, urban poverty, and governance, civil society, and social capital. It is expected that over 50% of total world population will live in cities in the year 2000. Cities are viewed both as engines of economic growth and centers of severe economic, environmental, and social problems. There is some disagreement about whether cities are rational economic structures or what the World Bank's urban agenda is and its relationship with macroeconomic policy. Discussions of global urban issues are criticized for their neglect of issues of equity and poverty, cultural diversity, and identity and representation. Habitat II also stressed urban sustainability. There is growing recognition that urban management involves more than the "Brown Agenda" of environmental and physical aspects of urban growth. Recent studies identify how politics and power affect people's access to basic urban services. Urban economic activity can also contribute to environmental problems. Urban growth affects the provision of health services. Although there is not a consensus on the role of cities in expanding economic and social development and the best management practices, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that urban processes are varied throughout the developing world. The links between urban and rural areas differentiate cities and expose the need to understand the role of intermediate urban areas surrounding and between larger cities. Poverty has become increasingly urbanized, but the extent of poverty is unknown. Habitat II was an unprecedented effort to engage nongovernment groups, local government staff, trade unions, and the private sector and to emphasize community participation. Networks of trust and reciprocity are key to solving poverty, inequality, and disempowerment problems.     

南京市社区服务设施可达性的空间格局与低收入社区空间剥夺研究

社区服务设施的空间可达性事关城市公共资源分配的社会公平与公正,是反映城市居民生活质量的重要标志。以南京市居住用地作为基本分析单元,对南京市的教育、医疗、商业和公园绿地四大类社区服务设施的空间可达性进行分析;并通过对相关低收入社区的实地调研,研究城市边缘区低收入群体的服务设施空间剥夺问题。研究表明：南京市四类服务设施的可达性水平均呈现出由城市中心区向郊区衰减的空间分异格局;较低的社区服务设施可达性不仅直接造成低收入社区居民对社区服务设施较低的满意度,导致其空间剥夺感的产生,还极大地阻碍着社区归属感的形成,导致社区居民强烈的迁居欲望,在他们较低的支付能力下进一步加剧其空间剥夺感。政府未来在规划面向低收入群体的保障性社区时,更应注重相关服务配套设施建设,做到社会与空间的公正性。     

Doing Research with Young People: Participatory Research and the Rituals of Collective Work

This is an exciting juncture at which to bear witness to the growing, multidisciplinary support for youth participation and more inclusive collaborative research practices in geography and the social sciences. Participatory action research and practice offers a promising new framework for researchers who are committed to social justice and change. The multiple benefits of engaging the perspectives of young people in research have served to challenge social exclusion, redistribute power within the research process and build the capacity of young people to analyze and transform their own lives and become partners in the building of more sound, democratic, communities. In this paper, I offer a broad overview of the principles of participatory research and reflect on my own experience of doing a participatory action research project with young people. Specifically, I will discuss a ‘collective praxis approach’ (a set of rituals and practices for sharing power within the research process), the role of the facilitator, and the processes of collective data analysis.     

Pathways of confinement: the legal constitution of carceral spaces in France’s social housing estates

This paper analyzes the enactment and evolution of article L.126 of the Code of Construction and Housing (CCH) in France and demonstrates the careful ways lawmakers have redefined ‘common areas’ in social housing estates as carceral spaces. It argues that such transformation has inserted these areas into a ‘carceral continuum’ that facilitates the arrest, prosecution and confinement of young people ‘hanging out’ in ‘common areas’. Drawing on the work of legal geographers on the co-constitutive relationship of law and space, and urban and carceral geographers exploring the criminalization of urban space and the extension of the carceral state, the paper illustrates how the pathways of confinement are legally constituted. The legal process documented here seeks to highlight the law’s meaning-making capacity and the complex legal practices – by actors and institutions located at multiple scales – which significantly condition urban practices and relationships. The analysis suggests, finally, that law’s constitutive power has limits that are brought to the fore by anti-police violence struggles. Pathways of confinement are, thus, fragile networks dependent upon the ongoing enactments, discourses, and practices by lawmakers and law-enforcers.     

企业主义视角下大城市保障房建设的策略选择及其社会空间后果

城市企业主义是理解地方政府行为与城市空间变迁的重要政治经济视角,在中国推进经济全球化和住房市场化的背景下,企业化的地方政府,特别是大城市政府,在保障房的建设实践中往往采取偏向性的策略选择。本文着重讨论企业主义视角下大城市政府保障房建设的策略选择及其社会空间后果。研究发现,大城市政府主要通过实施保障房政策的异化和保障房住区的边远化策略,来履行其住房保障职责。然而,这种选择性策略带来的直接的社会空间后果是低收入群体的边缘化,具体表现为外来务工人员等在保障政策上的边缘化,以及保障房居民在社会空间上的边缘化。文章进一步指出,保障房应回归其保障本位,以满足低收入群体的真实需求。     

Experiences of ‘Community’ in a Gated Residential Estate

Gated residential estates have become common features of the landscapes of cities around the world. The proliferation of these estates has attracted significant critical attention from urban scholars who have focused in particular on their contribution to urban segregation. Many commentators also question the possibility and existence of the neighbourhood‐based community that is promised to potential residents by estates developers. They argue that it cannot be delivered primarily because meaningful community does not form in circumstances of privatism. In this paper, we examine what community means to the residents of Macquarie Links, a gated residential estate in the Australian city of Sydney. To this end, the paper traces the interplay of contradictions that define the expectation and experience of community and argues that rather than being in conflict, the experience of community for many in this gated estate is actually underpinned by the structures of private governance that define the estate. In other words, not only is community said to exist in this neighbourhood, but also it is not homogeneity and everyday neighbouring that are pivotal but the governance structure of the estate.     

对城市人口分布与商业网点布局相关性的探讨

城市是人口和各种社会经济活动高度集聚的地域。满足人民的需要是城市商服、金融、文卫等项事业布局的基本原则。近几年来,笔者结合土地管理体制改革进行了人口分布与多种城市用地配置关系的探讨。本文是对天津市区人口分布与商业网点布局既互相吸引又在一定程度上互相排斥的关系的分析阐述。