Bodies,Shrines, and Roads: violence, (im)mobility and displacement in Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, gender and national identities intersect to shape people's mobility and security in the context of conflict. This article aims to illustrate the gendered processes of identity construction in the context of competing militarised nationalisms. We contend that a feminist approach is crucial, and that gender analysis alone is insufficient. Gender cannot be considered analytically independent from nationalism or ethno‐national identities because competing Tamil and Sinhala nationalist discourses produce particular gender identities and relations. Fraught and cross‐cutting relations of gender, nation, class and location shape people's movement, safety and potential for displacement. In the conflict‐ridden areas of Sri Lanka's North and East during 1999–2000, we set out to examine relations of gender and nation within the context of conflict. Our specific aim in this article is to analyse the ways in which certain identities are performed, on one hand, and subverted through premeditated performances of national identity on the other hand. We examine these processes at three sites—shrines, roads and people's bodies. Each is a strategic site of security/insecurity, depending on one's gender and ethno‐national identity, as well as geographical location.     

‘Filial son’, the family and identity formation among male migrant workers in urban China

This article is based on an ethnographic study of life histories of 28 rural–urban (internal) migrant men located within southern China. It explores their narratives with a particular focus on changing social relations within the family, from the perspective of migrant sons. It argues that traditional gender norms, such as those attached to being a ‘filial son’, are lived out, albeit reworked, among Chinese male migrant workers across generations. The men recount the role of traditional familial gender norms, which are central cultural resources in forging their ‘dislocated’ identities within specific temporal and spatial conditions. For example, being a ‘filial son’ has become an important reference point for these mobile male workers to actively negotiate their emerging masculine identities in the process of negotiating urban lives, while living away from their rural homes. The article also explores a more complex understanding of rural–urban migration in terms of critically engaging with the men's well-being as urban workers.     

Women's and Children's Quarters in Golden Gate Park,San Francisco

This paper explores the mythic domesticity encoded in the Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The play area, opened in 1888, represented a new genre of gender-specific public space developed in urban parks in the late nineteenth century. In welcoming women to the public domain of the urban park, gendered spaces such as the Children's Quarter signified a complex response to changing class and gender identities in the nineteenth-century city. Imposing a domestic structure on women's public presence, the Children's Quarter modeled a middle-class domestic ideal, affirming women's essential association with the private sphere even as it welcomed them to the public sphere of the urban park.     

Overcoming obstacles on the peri‐urban fringe: young people making new geographies

Understanding contemporary youth lifestyles is a challenge for urban planners and geographers. Young people's everyday needs are complex, and urban spaces in new outer city developments offer unique spaces for shaping their identities. Juxtaposed with affordances of digital technologies, the physical location of home exists in a fluid landscape. Overcoming obstacles, such as access to public transport, places to socialise, and meet their peers, is characteristic of the everyday young person's experience. Knowing how young people decide where to go for personal space, as well as who to ask for personal advice, was the aim of this study. The study was conducted with samples of young people growing up in the rapidly growing peri‐urban northern suburbs of the Australian city of Melbourne. A survey questionnaire was administered to a gender‐balanced sample aged 12–15 years (n = 523) with follow‐up interviews to better inform the results. Logistic regression and factorial analyses of variance reveal their favourite places to be ‘my’ bedroom, being with friends, the park, and the café. Although not the focus of this study, some gender differences were noted. In addition to innovative use of space, the results show the positive influences on their well‐being of trusted family and friends. Young people's geographies offer transdisciplinary insights that highlight their creative usage of these new urban spaces. They offer a new imaginary for geographical education and research.     

ROMAN CIRENCESTER AND GLOUCESTER COMPARED

Summary. Roman Cirencester and Roman Gloucester have in the past been seen as examples of success and (relative) failure in the urbanization of Roman Britain, but they seem better understood as expressions of different urban ideas. Cirencester actively remoulded itself as a model Roman city, although there may be allusions to its earlier past in its layout. Gloucester, perhaps deliberately, did not, with the result that its earlier history is expressed physically within the Roman city plan. The two communities may also have presented their collective identities differently. Other aspects of their urban expression are also explored.     

Mapping women in Tehran's public spaces: a geo-visualization perspective

Functioning public spaces, as ‘public’ political, social, and cultural arenas of citizen discourse, affect not only the citizen's quality of life, but are also indispensable infrastructure in democratic societies. This article offers a nuanced understanding of Iranian women's usage, feelings, and preferences in public spaces in present-day Tehran by not simply importing Western theories that sustain distinctions between traditional and modern women, but instead by hearing women's stories. This article raises concerns related to the gender identities, the politics of space, and design of these places. Meidan-e-Tajrish, Sabz-e-Meidan, and Marvi Meidancheh in Tehran accommodate an ethnographic visualization of gendering space. The process by which Iranian women attach symbolic meanings to those public spaces offers insight into the mutual construction of gender identities and space politics. The contrasting urban locations, different design styles, and distinct social activities provide an excellent comparison between the selected public spaces. Findings suggest caution in using gender as an essential category in feminist geography research to better represent the diversity of experiences in public spaces. Binary categorization of modern versus traditional, secular versus religious, public versus private, and male versus female in urban studies should be carefully validated as Iranian women's lived experiences challenge the homogenizing Western theories, particularly the predominant critics of modern public spaces in North America. The research process also highlights the benefits of geo-visualization in understanding the complex interaction between gender identities and the built environment.     

American Girls and French Jeunes Filles: Negotiating National Identities in Interwar France

This essay is a transnational and comparative study of how gendered national stereotypes structured the experience of American women who studied in France in the 1920s and 1930s and how this cross‐cultural exchange contributed to cultural internationalism. In both the French and American popular imaginations, American girls and French jeunes filles connoted opposite modern and traditional notions of femininity. In the process of negotiating these two competing identities in popular consciousness and in daily life, some American women students came to appreciate the limitations of the stereotypes, as well as more complex underlying cultural differences, notably in their encounters with French youth's heterosocial practices and with French women students. I argue that the outcome of this process included women's construction of alternative identities for themselves and a new tolerance and appreciation for cultural difference that represents a distinctive development toward cultural internationalism. This study challenges the cultural asymmetry of United States and European relations between the wars and locates gender and women at their centre.     

Cultural icons and urban development in Asia: Economic imperative,national identity,and global city status

Global cities are characterized by the multiplicity of flows that they are implicated in – flows of people, goods, services, ideas, and images. Yet, global cities do not derive their status only on the basis that they are networked nodes. They also require particular forms of cultural capital. Cities with global aspirations have thus increasingly recognized the need to accumulate cultural capital, for which one means is to create new urban spaces, in particular, new cultural urban spaces (e.g. grand theatres, museums, libraries). These often monumental structures are intended to support a vibrant cultural life, in order to attract and sustain global human and economic flows. In this paper, I examine the efforts by Shanghai's, Singapore's and Hong Kong's governments to develop cultural icons as part of the strategy to help their cities gain global city status, and in the process, constructing shared national and city identities. I illustrate how such efforts are not universally interpreted in the manner intended, with city populations sometimes protesting, sometimes simply oblivious. At the same time, I argue that such strategies to achieve global city status are sometimes at odds with projects of nationhood.     

‘Halt! Be Men!’: Sikelgaita of Salerno,Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy

This article examines the career of Sikelgaita (1040–1090), wife of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, as a means of understanding the impact of the ‘other’ Norman conquest of the eleventh century. Sikelgaita is unusual in that she has left images in narrative sources both within and well beyond the confines of southern Italy. She is also well documented at a local level. Both types of material combine to reveal her crossing gender boundaries in titles she used, the way in which she managed property, her legendary presence alongside Robert on his campaigns and, more speculatively, in organising a campaign of written propaganda to ensure the succession of her son to his father's patrimony in preference to his half‐brother by Sikelgaita's predecessor as Robert's wife. Her history raises the problems of women's access to written texts, their conscious shaping of their own identities, their conflicting loyalties between natal and marital families, and the need for competing male heirs to prove themselves against a prevailing notion of masculinity in a period when one aggressively masculine group, the Lombards, was being supplanted in power by another, the Normans. As such, it demonstrates that the lives of so‐called ‘exceptional’ women continue to have a value to historians of gender in the middle ages, and can often demonstrate the patriarchal boundaries which even they could not cross.     

Fringe explosions: risk and vulnerability in Canada's new in‐between urban landscape

This article argues that a new landscape of urbanization takes shape in Canadian cities. In‐between the old downtowns and the new suburbs of urban Canada, a hitherto underexposed and under‐researched mix of residential, commercial, industrial, educational, agricultural and ecologically protected areas and land uses has become the home and workplace, and increasingly also the playspace of most people in Canada. The article examines this new landscape through the lens of the specific risks and vulnerabilities experienced by its inhabitants and users. Using a propane gas explosion in Toronto in the summer of 2008 as an example, we demonstrate that the ‘in‐between city’ is a space of great complexity, which has grown haphazardly and in a contradictory fashion, where, in contrast to the archetype of inner city and suburb, no clear spatial imaginary has been guiding urban development. This leads to always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous proximities between various and competing uses and social practices. This is nowhere as clear as it is in the splintered urban infrastructures that service this landscape or use the in‐between city's space to service other adjacent or distant purposes.     

The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.     

The work that parks do: towards an urban environmentality

Cities today are typically framed as sites of capitalist development, while the urban park is theorized as an indirect response to the emerging hegemony of industrial production in the nineteenth century. Yet, this historical framing tells us little about the process through which our notions of ‘the city’ and of ‘nature’ are produced, or how this knowledge affects the formation of urban people's identities. The discursive formation of the capitalist city can be traced to specific historical moments, one of which is the construction of urban parks during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, which I argue was instrumental in producing a new knowledge of the capitalist city by creating a boundary between the social space of the city and the natural space of the park. Using Philadelphia's Fairmount Park as a case study, I draw on archival photographs and annual park commission reports to explore the formation of park subjects during this period and shed light on diverse economic practices that were once widespread in and around the city but whose erasure was ultimately a prerequisite for the successful formation of an urban discourse organized around the construction of the city/nature boundary.     

'Hard and Heavy': Gender and Power in a heavy metal music subculture

This article analyses gendered structures of power in a heavy metal (HM) music club. Although both male and female HM devotees often declare that they are engaged in a rebellious activity, this romantic conviction sits uneasily alongside the HM scene's reinforcement of conventional gender relations and identities. Although many women gravitated toward the HM setting in order to escape stifling adolescent situations, they wound up in another oppressive context. Both the forceful corporeal practices of men and the highly gendered structures of power meant that women 'did' gender on men's terms. HM texts, narratives, identities, and corporeal practices constituted a complex and contradictory gender regime that literally kept women 'in their place'.     

CONTEMPORARY URBANIZATION AND AN OPTIMAL SIZE FOR SOVIET CITIES

Three Leningrad geographers use a recent book by Yu. L. Pivovarov of Moscow as a point of departure to focus on two issues relating to urbanization in the Soviet Union: (1) the nature of the urbanization process; (2) optimal city size. The authors challenge Pivovarov's view that urbanization is a relatively independent socio-historical process in which places evolve on their own from lower forms to higher forms of settlement. They contend that urbanization is closely related to the characteristics of a given socio-economic system and that, in the Soviet Union, it involves not only city growth per se, but the relationship between urban and rural settlement and the penetration of urban life styles into the countryside. On the controversy surrounding optimal size, the writers say that the issue is not to find the ideal size for cities in general, but to set desirable limits for cities of different functional types and, most important, to insure that the infrastructure of cities keeps pace with industrial potential. If industrial development moves far ahead of infrastructure, the authors argue, it is desirable to constrain further growth, especially by keeping out industries that tend to have an agglomerative effect in attracting other industries. Once infrastructure catches up with industrial development, the constraints can be eased and the economies of size inherent in large cities can again come into play.     

Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.     

Constructing Masculinity and Women's Fear in Public Space in Irvine,California

Fear in public spaces negatively impacts women's lives. Even when danger is low, the idea of women as endangered in public space endures—due, in part, to its centrality in the construction of gender identity for men and women. In this article, the author examines the construction of contemporary, masculine gender identities and men's perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in public space. Through interviews with 82 male students in Irvine, California, USA, the author examines how men's construction of masculine identities builds upon perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in Irvine public spaces. Though they regard Irvine as safe, men see women as vulnerable there. The author investigates this apparent inconsistency in light of men's performances of two masculine identities—the youthful 'badass' and the chivalrous man—which depend for their construction on opposition with women as fearful. Recommendations include suggestions for continued research on the spatial construction of masculine identities.     

"酷儿"视角下的城市性和空间政治

围绕城市与同性恋的主题,本文从现代性的视角回顾了同性恋作为一个"社会群体"在城市中的出现和发展,强调了同性恋身份认同本质上的城市属性.文章揭示了同性恋研究在城市研究中的独特地位,并主要探讨了组织和控制城市空间与同性恋欲望和权利表达之间的张力,尤其关注同性恋现象在不同社会语境下"公共空间"的建构.文章以2009年中国大陆主要城市中"同志"社群引发媒体关注的事件为例,展现了这个群体争取公共空间,改变城市社会景观的努力.文章认为当代中国同性恋社群不断提升的社会可见度和日益扩展的公共空间,反映了中国城市和社会发生的积极变化.     

An Informational Right to the City? Code,Content, Control,and the Urbanization of Information

Henri Lefebvre talked of the “right to the city” alongside a right to information. As the urban environment becomes increasingly layered by abstract digital representation, Lefebvre's broader theory warrants application to the digital age. Through considering what is entailed by the urbanization of information, this paper examines the problems and implications of any “informational right to the city”. In directing Tony Benn's five questions of power towards Google, arguably the world's most powerful mediator of information, this paper exposes processes that occur when geographic information is mediated by powerful digital monopolies. We argue that Google currently occupies a dominant share of any informational right to the city. In the spirit of Benn's final question—“How do we get rid of you?”—the paper seeks to apply post‐political theory in exploring a path to the possibility of more just information geographies.     

From ‘Problem City’ to ‘Promise City’: Gentrification and the Revitalisation of Newcastle

The city of Newcastle is a complex and changing landscape. Once regarded as Australia's ‘problem city’, Newcastle's identity is being significantly transformed. This identity transformation draws significantly upon the emergence of more cosmopolitan landscapes within inner Newcastle associated with the gentrification of these areas. The discourse of gentrification is inherently post‐industrial, providing a cleaner and more positive identity as Newcastle seeks to erase the stigma of its’ industrial heritage. However, as landscapes are the amalgam of multiple identities, Newcastle's industrial heritage periodically re‐emerges to problematise the city's newly adopted cosmopolitan identity.     

Increasing Unevenness in the Distribution of City Sizes in Post-Soviet Russia

This paper describes the distribution of urban areas in post-Soviet Russia using the rank-size method for quantifying longitudinal change. As many studies show, urbanization under state socialism achieved a relatively uniform city-size distribution in accordance to Marxist ideals. I test the initial hypothesis that variation in city size would increase after dissolution of the USSR, to converge toward distributions found in market economies. The analysis shows that increasing unevenness in city-size depends on the nature of variation that existed prior to the USSR's disintegration, as well as on geographic location within Russia. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: J61, O18, R58. 7 figures, 4 tables, 46 references.