Welcome to the club! An exploratory study of service accessibility in commodity housing estates in Guangzhou,China

In post-reform China, gated commodity housing estates play a crucial role in the provision of urban services. Such collective service provision is criticized in the urban studies literature, because ‘club goods’ are thought to exclude people that do not live in gated communities. This paper reflects on the global relevance of that argument with an exploratory study in Guangzhou, China. We argue that access to collective services is structured in local social practices, involving diverse actors and specific rules and resources. Discussions on the exclusionary effects of service provision through gated communities should therefore focus on the characteristics of these practices of access in specific cities. Employing this perspective, the paper shows that in Guangzhou at least two mechanisms partly ease the exclusion of non-residents from club goods. On the one hand, municipal government maintains a considerable role in service management, mediating exclusion from services for people who do not live in commodity housing estates. On the other hand, generally the management of services is separated from housing estate management, and service providers try to increase profits through service provision to non-residents. We discuss the consequences of such mediations for an adjusted research agenda on service provision by gated communities.     

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.     

Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care

What would it mean to think about cities marked by past structures of violence and exclusion as wounded but also as environments that offer its residents care? My current book in progress, Wounded Cities, focuses on creative practices and politics in Bogotá, Cape Town, Berlin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke, cities in which settlement clearances have produced spaces so steeped in oppression that the geographies of displacement continue to structure urban social relations. Precisely in and through these ‘wounded cities’, residents, artists, educators, and activists reconsider the meanings of the ‘right to the city’ and to theorizing the city more broadly. Drawing upon ethnographic research and theories from postcolonial theory, social psychiatry, social ecology, feminist political theory, and art theory, I introduce my concepts of ‘wounded city’, ‘memory-work’, and a ‘place-based ethics of care’ to retheorize urban politics. Artists and residents in wounded cities encourage political forms of witnessing to respect those who have gone before, attend to past injustices that continue to haunt contemporary cities, and create experimental communities to imagine different urban futures. I argue that a deeper appreciation of the lived, place-based experiences of inhabitants of most cities would enable planners, policy makers, and urban theorists to consider more ethical and sustainable forms of urban change than those that continue to legitimate disciplinary forms of governmentality.     

Unpacking Social Exclusion in Western Sydney: Exploring the Role of Place and Tenure

Over the past decade social exclusion has increasingly been positioned at the forefront of political, academic and lay discourse as the cause of disadvantage. While the definition, measurement and solutions to social exclusion remain open to debate, housing has progressively been positioned as a central variable creating neighbourhoods of exclusion. Much of this debate has positioned areas of public housing as being the most disadvantaged and socially excluded neighbourhoods. However, the multidimensionality of social exclusion brings into question the simple identification of areas of public housing as being the most excluded. By exploring six dimensions of exclusion (neighbourhood, social and civic engagement, access, crime and security, community identity and economic disadvantage) we explore the differences between areas dominated by public housing and those characterised by private market housing in terms of their scores on each of these individual dimensions of exclusion. We find that it is the experience of households with multiple dimensions of exclusion, especially locational and economic disadvantage, that differentiate areas of public housing from private housing locations.     

Critique as delight,theory as praxis,mucking in

In this commentary, I call for a regenerative approach to critique, a ‘good judgment’ through which academics might nurture the capacity to name and undermine racist, patriarchal, colonising, and homophobic practices, while working relationally to create new worlds. Drawing from Eva Sedgwick's critique of ‘paranoid theory’ and taking inspiration from post‐colonial, feminist, and anti‐racist social movements and research collectives, I consider what it might mean to be an academic who ‘mucks in’, who is not afraid of putting her hands in the dung, and who moves reflexively towards, rather than away from, difficult questions and risky engagements.     

Editorial: Social Spirituality: Monastic Cell or Hectic Street?

Abstract

What makes theology political? Is it the social location of the author, the sources drawn upon, or the content of the argument? Each of these three possibilities is theologically significant, but a little reflection proves none of them decisive in claiming the adjective ‘political’ for a theology. The ‘material production’ of theological works cannot, by itself, render one theology political and another apolitical; for all theological works share a similar ‘social location’ given the similar socio-economic reality of publishing. Whether or not theology is political, or adequately political, cannot finally be determined by material production, the authors' social location or the content of the argument per se. Such forms of apodictic reasoning cannot distinguish apolitical from political theology. It can only be a function of practical reasoning. It alone can advance the current stalemate among persons that theology should be characterized as ‘church’, ‘confessional’, ‘sectarian’, ‘liberatory’, ‘political’ or ‘public’. I argue that the best we can do to adjudicate these differences is to engage in, as Charles Taylor has so aptly put it, practical ad hominem arguments.     

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Critique of Nationalism

Abstract

This paper argues that Han Urs von Balthasar’s work contains a thorough critique of nationalism that is rooted in theological categories. First, it examines the bases of this critique in Balthasar’s theology of history and in his thought on biblical Israel. Then, it outlines four categories of actors included in Balthasar’s notion of a theological drama: Christ, the individual, humanity, and the Church. Both implicitly and explicitly, these four categories displace the nation from the realm of theologically-significant history. Thus, the paper contends, there is a clear and compelling theological rejection of nationalistic ideology running throughout key aspects of Balthasar’s thought.     

Chancellors,Presidents and Speakers: Presiding Officers in the Scottish Parliament before the Restoration*

As a unicameral assembly for most of its history, the Scottish parliament was presided over by the chief officer of state, the chancellor. Before 1603, he presided in the presence of the monarch, who was an active participant in parliaments, in contrast to the custom in England. After the union of the crowns, the chancellor presided in the presence of the monarch's representative, the king's commissioner. As with the Speaker and the lord chancellor in the English parliament, it was customary for him to operate as an agent of the crown. He also presided over the drafting committee, the lords of the articles. During parliamentary sessions, there were also semi-formal deliberative meetings of the individual estates (prelates, nobles, burgesses and, from 1592, ‘barons’, that is, lairds sitting as commissioners of the shires), each presided over by one of their own number. The Covenanting revolution of 1638 led to radical procedural reform. This included replacing the chancellor with an elected ‘president’ (Latin preses), chosen by the membership at the beginning of each session. With separate meetings of the estates becoming a formal part of parliament's procedures, there was an elected president for each estate, sometimes referred to as ‘Speakers’ for they would speak for their estates in plenary sessions of parliament.     

Fictions and artifices

This article is in part a critique of Laura Nader's position on the three jihads (as published in AT 31,4). The author argues that Nader's critique of the privileges afforded to Zionism, specifically the failure to prosecute foreign British‐Jewish enlistees who served in the Israel Defence Forces program (Mahal), under the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 is misconstrued in Law. It further maintains that Nader's obfuscation of the term jihad as a ‘catch all’ in the framework of Jewish Christian and Islamic war ethics (‘holy war’) ignores the independent development and uniqueness of these phenomena which are necessarily historically and substantively distinct. The prevalence of metaphorical language, notably the modern use and abuse of the terms ‘jihad’ and ‘crusade’, denigrates the agency of medieval Christians and Muslims at the same time as it exculpates the agency of man today.     

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.     

Cultures of Border Control: Schengen & the Evolution of European Frontiers

This paper traces, and is the traces of, a collective project to render a neighbourhood queer. It is a project that emerges from queer social relations. Academic research and knowledge generation are approached collaboratively by working with queer-identified residents from west-central neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada who volunteered with the Queer West ShOUT Youth Program. Within the context of two participant-facilitated discussion events, we discursively and artistically investigate queer world-making in the neighbourhood of West Queen West. Through collective mental mapping and photovoice renderings we interpret the queering of urban space as a queer utopian impulse. We critically examine the ‘concrete utopia’ of Queer West Village and question its resonance in the lives of ShOUT volunteers. Theoretically inspired by Muñoz, our ‘a/r/tographic’ mode of inquiry and critical praxis are a rendering of ‘queer futurity.’ We draw on our past to critique our lived present so as to imagine future potentialities. We do so in order to argue that it is vital that the queerness we individually and collectively strive for at the spatial scale of the neighbourhood, such as the process of place-making itself, is grounded in material experience yet remains provisional and an ideality that motivates us.     

Exclusive Visions? Representations of Family,Work and Gender in the Work of the British Social Exclusion Unit

The Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) of the British Government is a recent and innovative response to social problems in the UK. Through an examination of selected publications of the SEU, the article highlights some of the representations of family, work and gender which provide the discursive context in which the SEU operates and to which it, in turn, contributes. The article suggests that perspectives found in the post-1945 welfare state continue to influence approaches to problems of exclusion. Whilst there are areas in which current political thinking shows evidence of sensitivity to the social recomposition that has attended economic restructuring since 1970, it is argued that there remain tendencies within SEU discussions which reinforce a more nostalgic constitution of work, family and gender relations. Consequently, the article concludes that the potential of the social exclusion debate to grasp fundamental issues is yet to be fully realised.     

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。     

From Revanchism to Ambivalence: The Changing Politics of Street Vending in Guangzhou

By focusing on Guangzhou's street‐vending policy transformation, this article explores how exclusionary practices of urban politics in China are undermined by those who it seeks to exclude and the progressive political climate that questions the exclusionary framework. The exclusion of street vendors in Guangzhou has been led by the National Sanitary City campaign as a revanchist project. It has been discovered that while the exclusionary strategies are rendered difficult to operate due to the resistance of street vendors who develop a flexible, individualized and small‐scale activism to maintain their livelihoods, the discourse of social harmony at national level has driven local authorities to seek alternatives expected to alleviate social resistance and address people's livelihoods. However, rather than an overturn of the punitive framework, an ambivalent approach, recognized in a recent critique of revanchism, has been adopted to mediate the tension between the needs to retain attractive city images and address the livelihoods of the poor in Chinese cities.     

Normative Political Theology as Intensified Critique

ABSTRACT

Some theorists are suspicious of normative political theology because they believe it undermines critical rationality. In my view, these theorists neglect theological traditions that resist dogmatism through intensified critique. Because authoritarian dogma is not unique to religion, theology offers sophisticated techniques that may be useful for those who are not themselves religious. A normative theology that intensifies critique represents a valuable resource for political reflection, and not only for the faithful.     

Whose cultural value? Representation,power and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The debate around ‘cultural value’ has become increasingly central to policy debates on arts and creative industries policy over the past ten years and has mostly focused on the articulation and measurement of ‘economic value’, at the expense of other forms of value—cultural, social, aesthetic. This paper’s goal is to counter this prevalent over-simplification by focusing on the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated or denied to cultural forms and practices by certain groups in particular social contexts. We know that different social groups enjoy different access to the power to bestow value and legitimise aesthetic and cultural practices; yet, questions of power, of symbolic violence and misrecognition rarely have any prominence in cultural policy discourse. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to creative industry scholarship by tackling this neglected question head on: it calls for a commitment to addressing cultural policy’s blind spot over power and misrecognition, and for what McGuigan (2006: 138) refers to as ‘critique in the public interest’. To achieve this, the article discusses findings of an AHRC-funded project that considered questions of cultural value, power, media representation and misrecognition in relation to a participatory arts project involving the Gypsy and Traveller community in Lincolnshire, England.     

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.     

Excluded citizens? Participatory research with young people from a ‘failing’ school community

This paper examines a participatory community research project with young people from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ in a provincial New Zealand town. This school-based project aimed to celebrate the expertise and insights of these young citizens by profiling their digital stories to their community. However, the failure to achieve this goal compelled the researcher to confront the ‘presentist’ assumptions underpinning this project. A re-analysis of the lingering impact of historic processes and practices of exclusion in this divided town drew attention to the temporal, spatial and relational nature of citizenship. The paper proposes that deeper recognition be given to the ‘webs of social relations’ (Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Between Past and Future: Eight Excercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press) that citizenship acts are constituted within, alongside the lingering impact of historical legacies of socio-spatial exclusion. Recognising these aspects will enrich our understandings of citizenship as well as enhance the transformative potential of participatory community research.     

From the Angels of Mons to the Garden of Gethsemane: Some Theological Reflections on the Western Front

The Great War began with widespread public euphoria across the combatant nations, with community leaders, political, ecclesiastical and other, giving enthusiastic endorsement to the ‘war effort.’ In addition to simplistic and clichéd proclamations that ‘God is on our side,’ early in the war stories of spiritual phenomena, such as the so-called ‘Angels of Mons’ and the ‘White Comrade’, captured the public imagination. As the war progressed, however, and particularly in the wake of the Battle of the Somme from 1 July 1916, there is a noticeable shift in the spiritual and theological language of the battlefront (if not the home front) — away from angelic visitations bringing divinely ordained victory, and towards the ‘suffering God’ of No Man’s Land. The primary vehicle for this are the war poets, and the dominant symbolic language that of the Passion of Christ, who prays with great anguish in the garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest and betrayal that the cup of suffering might pass from him. As that cup will nor pass from Christ, neither would it pass those who endured the trenches of the Western Front. By the end of the war, the transcendent God had become an imminent deity, and the place of visitation was not the heavenly places, but the mud and blood of No Man’s Land.