Securing disunion: Young people's nationalism,identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literature from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children's emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009, Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.     

Cities of Extremes

Modern cities have always been the locus of both inequality and opportunity. However, neoliberal policies pursued since the 1980s have intensified urban disparities. Cities are increasingly shaped more by the logic of the market than the needs of their inhabitants. This article, which introduces a collection of papers on the topic, examines the implications of the neoliberal turn for the ‘right to the city’ as the fundamental tenet of urban citizenship. While evidence suggests a formidable challenge from market forces to the ‘right to the city’, the authors argue that the neoliberal city remains a highly contested urbanity in which poor inhabitants continue to struggle for citizenship in highly diverse ways. The challenge for scholarship is to discover and document those intricate modes of claim‐making.     

Seeing Political Settlements through the City: A Framework for Comparative Analysis of Urban Transformation

This article presents a new analytical framework for studying cities in the developing world based on the ‘political settlements’ approach. This has a dual purpose: to enrich comparative urban research by bringing new theoretical ideas to bear on this field, but also to use capital cities as a lens to better understand national political settlements. The central argument is that urban built environments and their transformations in situations of late development reflect the workings of different varieties of clientelism, and by analysing the former we can better understand the latter. Specifically, issues such as the nature of urban land use and land allocation, the pace and form of construction, the effectiveness of environmental regulation and the provision of housing for different income groups are all revealing of political settlements and their broader development implications. The potential of this approach is explored through three narrative ‘sketches’ of contemporary urban development in Eastern Africa: the ‘city as marketplace’ (Kampala), the ‘city as expo’ (Kigali) and the ‘city as construction site’ (Addis Ababa). In presenting this framework, the article seeks to advance debate on epistemological and analytical approaches to the study of both power relations and differential patterns of urban development.     

Geographies of children’s play in the context of neoliberal restructuring in Istanbul*

This research analyzes the material and discursive transformations of children’s play in the urban context of socio-economic transformations brought about by neoliberal restructuring in Istanbul. Two new private play centers called ‘children’s cities’ and one public playground are investigated by using observation, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The findings of discourse analysis suggest that processes of privatization, exclusion and securitization underlying the city space deeply structure the new geographies of play. The hegemonic presence of private spaces is reinforced with the municipal neglect of public play spaces and also with particular framing of ‘good play’ as exclusive, secure and instrumental. The important conclusion is that neither the children’s cities nor the public playground observed in this study can fully meet the benchmarks of ‘the right to play’ that encompasses play that is free of charge and play as a right in itself rather than as instrumental for other developmental goals.     

The nation and the city: urban festivals and cultural mobilisation

This article attempts to map the relations between nation‐building processes in 19th‐century Europe and city cultures with their urban sociability. Three patterns are surveyed: [1] the modern‐national assimilation of medieval and early‐modern city cultures (sample case: Orléans and the French cult of Joan of Arc); [2] the modular replication across cities of urban festivals as cultural mobilizers (sample case: the spread of Floral Games festivals in Southern France and Northern Spain); [3] the reticulation of city‐based practices into a nationwide and nation‐building network (sample cases: the role of choral societies in German cultural nationalism; and its transnational knock‐on effect in the Baltic Provinces). By choosing the city as our social focus and placing it (or rather, its ideal‐type ‘Urbania’) alongside Gellner's ideal‐types of ‘Megalomania’ and ‘Ruritania’, we can avoid the finalism of studying regionalist and nationalist movements in the analytical framework of the post‐Versailles state system, and we gain a better understanding of the granulated, localized social basis of such movements and the translocally homogenizing role of culture.     

On National Heritage,Grand Narratives,and ‘Making History Fun’: Founders’ Hall,Prince Edward Island and the Story of Canada

Cities in developed countries are increasingly challenged by the advent of a global economy that mandates generating creative images of their cities. Meanwhile, it is argued in this study that globalisation, and its Arabic version of Dubaisation, is affecting the sustainability of cities as distinguished destinations because urban representation is influenced not only by ‘standardised global cliché’ but also by ‘standardised local images’ that transforms local cultures into contested heritage as it intensifies an official and civic nexus. The paradox is examined in Jordan, specifically the famously branded ‘city of mosaic’ – Madaba, where the state government is currently competing for attracting international investments and tourism development to achieve neoliberal urban restructuring. Urban heritage representation has been subject to passive dominant official discourse that rests upon orthodox mosaic practices of remote past – a praxis that is not necessarily endorsed by civic Ahl elbalad. The local mosaic heritage has hitherto been transformed into a competing culture that fosters heritage dualities and challenges the internal implications of heritage representation with its elevated feelings of alienation, disempowerment, gentrification and socio-cultural exclusion. A theoretical framework has been suggested for an alternative civic-orientated heritage revival that allows reconciliation between the official/civic nexus yet meanwhile stimulates creative urban images and identities. Other insights are also considered in the study.     

Problem Drug Use and the Political Economy of Urban Restructuring: Heroin, Class and Governance in Dublin

This paper offers an exploration of problem drug use in the urban environment, connecting with broader concerns about the progress and contradictions of city redevelopment and change. The discussion is situated within some recent theoretical debates about the political economy of uneven development, urban restructuring and neoliberal governance. The empirical discussion is based on studies of economic and social change, conflict and grassroots praxis in the inner city of Dublin, Ireland, wherein a heroin crisis has impacted for the last few decades, affecting in particular working‐class communities disadvantaged by broader patterns of economic restructuring and urban renewal. This provides some important analytical and political insights from a city that has undergone rapid and intense transformation and deepening patterns of inequality over recent decades, alongside the emergence of new forms of urban governance and community organization and contestation. The paper concludes with some considerations about the place and meaning of problem drug use in the city based on the foregoing theoretical and empirical discussion.     

Contesting the Settler City: Indigenous Self‐Determination,New Urban Reserves,and the Neoliberalization of Colonialism

In settler colonial contexts the historical and ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples is foundational to understanding the production of urban space. What does it mean that cities in what is now known as Canada are Indigenous places and premised on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples? What roles do new urban reserves play in subverting or reinforcing the colonial‐capitalist sociospatial order? This paper examines these questions in relation to new urban reserves in Canada. Most common in the Prairie provinces, new urban reserves are satellite land holdings of First Nation communities located outside of the city. While the settler state narrowly confines new urban reserves to neoliberal agendas, First Nations are successfully advancing reserve creation to generate economic self‐sufficiency, exercise self‐determination, and subvert settler state boundaries. I argue that new urban reserves are contradictory spaces, as products and vehicles of settler‐colonial state power and Indigenous resistance and place‐making.     

Pram mobilities: affordances and atmospheres that assemble childhood and motherhood on-the-move

The child-friendly city advocates for children's ‘right to the city’. Much of this advocacy focuses on the independent child, with little attention paid to the accompanied experiences of younger children, such as those travelling in prams. This paper draws on a material feminist perspective to help address this gap. We offer the concept of mother–child–pram assemblage to bring to the fore the corporeal dimensions of everyday pram journeys. By analysing sensory ethnographic materials collected with mothers and young children living in Wollongong, Australia, this paper highlights how the ‘affective affordances’ and ‘affective atmospheres’ of pram mobilities shape urban experience by reference to how motherhood and childhood are achieved on-the-move. We conclude with policy-relevant insights for the child-friendly city.     

On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut

ABSTRACT

This paper compares how Istanbul and Beirut both attempt to underline their cultural and developmental uniqueness today in contrast to a metonymic menace – Dubai, standing in for spectacular yet supposedly cultureless Gulf cities. Even amid their own speculative construction frenzies that threaten local heritage, Turkish and Lebanese city-shapers assert theirs are ‘real’ cities because they have ‘civilization’ and ‘history.’ By addressing their own efforts to build, defend, or oppose physical infrastructures related to local urban culture, Istanbullus and Beirutis rely on and reassert strategic, phatic discourses that frequently reference Gulf cities as counterpoint. Analysis focuses on how each city crafts a distinctive urban profile via civilizational appeals to historic senses of culture, inflecting infrastructural developments related to bridging (Istanbul) and bordering (Beirut). Historical truisms are deployed with marked flexibility to showcase these cities as ‘not Dubai.’ This study offers lessons on the particular worlding of Middle Eastern cities and the role of discourses in the material-symbolic infrastructure of implicit urban cultural policy.     

Contrasts between first-tier and second-tier cities in Europe: a functional perspective

Second-tier cities have been experiencing renewed interest within policy and research contexts, which is reversing a tradition of relative neglect due to the long-standing focus on large cities and capitals. This paper compares European second-tier and first-tier cities with regard to the presence of urban functions and how these are spread over their urban regions. The analysis shows the existence of a substantial ‘first city bonus’: a surplus of urban functions in first-tier cities which cannot be explained by their size or network embeddedness. We also show that second-tier cities are better served with urban functions in the absence of a dominant capital. In first-tier urban regions, the core municipality exploits the critical mass of the urban region to support its own functions, leaving that region functionally underserved. Second-tier cities lack this absorptive capacity, and their urban regions are endowed with more urban functions. These functional differences mean that second-tier cities demand a differentiated research and policy approach, in which city-regional integration becomes an important territorial development strategy. Rather than the dispersion process in first-tier cities leading to a ‘regionalization of the city’, integration in second-tier urban regions may be seen as a process of ‘citification of the region’.     

Irish language education and the national ideal: the dynamics of nationalism in Northern Ireland

Since the beginning of the Northern Ireland conflict in the late 1960s, Irish nationalism has been identified as a prominent force in the political culture of the state. Recent studies have suggested, however, that the ‘Nationalist’ population has become increasingly content within the new political framework created by the peace process and the aspiration for Irish unity diminished. In placing the Northern Ireland situation within the theoretical framework of nationalism, this paper will analyse how these changing priorities have been possible. Through an analysis of Irish language study in Northern Ireland's schools, the paper will examine how the political ideals espoused by the nationalist Sinn Féin Party reflected the priorities of the ‘nationalist community’. It will be contended that the relationship between the ideology and ‘the people’ is much more complex than is often allowed for and that educational inequalities are a significant contributing factor to this.     

“Security,mobility, and the body – Syrian insurgent groups’ infrastructures and their geopolitical contestations through/by/in legal institutions”

Political geographers have repeatedly demonstrated how the ‘global war on/of terror’ has led to repressive and unjust international and domestic policies. Nevertheless, little has been said about the multifold intertwinements between such ‘Western’ perceptions and their shaping of anti-terrorism efforts within. To this end, this paper draws on recent feminist understandings of scale, global/local processes, and geopolitics, suggesting how these might be combined with current European participations in Syria, and its legal prosecution as ‘state-endangering actions.’ By visiting the sites where issues on security, mobility, and their interrelated body actions have been negotiated, I deploy an intersectional and multi-scalar analysis of how a layered system of gender-rendered and racialized patterns intersects with/in Germany's legal institutions combating terrorism wherever it may occur as well as the way multifold and different modes of support and logistics have been carried out through the European Schengen Area to Syria. Combining both feminist geopolitics and the vibrant work of (feminist) geolegalities, I offer another way of redressing Hyndman's call (2019) for expanding the tent of feminist geopolitics by not reversing the former, but through refocusing on embodied and material power-geometries and (legally) interconnected sites of an Islam-rendered, Western state-defined ‘war on/of terrorism’ simultaneously.     

Cinema-going during the Gezi protests: claiming the right to the Emek movie theatre and Gezi Park

This paper explores the relationship between social movements, urban regeneration programmes and media outlets in cities, with a focus on the transformation of urban culture in regards to people’s engagement with the spaces of media platforms. The argument is based on the study of cinema-going practices of an audience community in Istanbul, during and preceding the Gezi uprising. By employing ethnographic methods, this paper interrogates the activism of an audience community against the impact of shopping-mallisation and commodification of Istanbul’s urban spaces under AKP rule. In order to reclaim ownership of their spaces and future, this audience community claimed their right to the Emek movie theatre, Gezi Park and other parks whilst creating their own outdoor screenings and social media platforms. This paper also provides an interpretation of social movement development attached to media outlets such as film festivals and screenings, particularly the development of spatial activism in relation to people’s use of films, streets and movie theatres, thus illustrating, challenging and reinforcing rights to the city. More broadly, it gives new insights on the film and protest culture of a ‘secular’ group within a predominantly Muslim population and shows alternative and creative methods of protesting during a popular uprising.     

Rethinking popular geopolitics in the Falklands/Malvinas sovereignty dispute: Creative diplomacy and citizen statecraft

For more than twenty years popular geopolitics has proven an intriguing and fruitful field of research. It has spurred a lasting interest in everything from movies to stamps as important cultural artefacts that reveal to their audiences the geopolitical visions of their producers. This paper, however, brings into question the ‘popularity’ of popular geopolitics. Using recent examples from the ongoing dispute over the Falkland Islands, we examine the influence of social media and the associated flourishing of ‘citizen statecraft’ which, through its production of geopolitical knowledges, hints at the possibilities of a genuinely popular geopolitics 2.0. We also examine how creative practices, understood in myriad ways in relation to ‘statecraft’, work to unsettle and complicate previously tidy geopolitical categories of the ‘popular’, the ‘formal’, and the ‘practical’. We suggest, by way of conclusion, that ‘citizen statecraft’ may be productive in the flourishing of new modes of international dialogue between communities in dispute.     

Territorial development,planning reform and urban governance: the case of Ireland’s second-tier cities

The increased emphasis within Europe on the role of second-tier cities has implications for the ways in which these urban centres are considered within national spatial planning strategies. In centralized, monocentric states such as Ireland, there has been a general ambivalence towards urban policy for cities outside the capital city, and historically, this has prevented the development of a strong, diversified urban hierarchy undermining prospects for balanced regional development. This paper examines the extent to which a new found emphasis on Ireland’s second-tier cities which emerged in the ‘Gateways’ policy of the National Spatial Strategy was matched by subsequent political and administrative commitment to facilitate the development of these urban centres. Following a discussion of the position of second-tier cities in an international context and a brief overview of recent demographic and economic trends, the paper assesses the relative performance of Ireland’s second-tier cities in influencing development trends, highlighting a comprehensive failure to deliver compact urban growth. In this context, the paper then discusses the implications of current development plans for the second-tier cities and proposals for Irish local government reform for securing compact urban development.     

Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town

Abstract: To achieve a world‐class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio‐spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post‐apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio‐spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll‐out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio‐spatial inequalities is an open question.     

Geopolitical cultures,pragmatic patriotism,and Russia’s disputed islands

This paper draws on the notion of “geopolitical culture” as a conceptual tool for understanding debates over the formulation of foreign policy in contemporary Russia. To draw out the value of this concept, the paper explores the symbolism of territory as a means for restoring Russia’s status, respect, and power. However, in contrast to previous studies, it traces the ways in which a concession of territory has been promoted as a device for achieving Russia’s great power ambitions. More broadly, the paper seeks to stimulate a wider debate on reconceptualizing the relationship between territory and identity in Russia, at the same time as it places Russia’s Far Eastern borderlands at the heart of debates on the spatial imaginaries of the Russian homeland. By drawing on and advancing recent theoretical innovations in critical geopolitics, and recognizing the significance of the discourse of nationalism within these framings, the paper explores the nuanced and multiple story lines that constitute Russia’s geopolitical culture. Through this approach, intriguing and complex plot lines and unexpected twists are revealed, which have at times been obscured by nationalist-territorial-revanchist narratives on Putin’s Russia. It is suggested that such approaches can also provide insights for interpreting cases and contexts beyond Russia and Eurasia.     

Fear,feminist geopolitics and the hot and banal

In this paper we bring together Billig’s notion of banal nationalism and recent feminist geopolitical examinations of fear in order to analyze two cases studies of fear among U.S. college students and U.S. soldiers experiencing sexual violence. Putting banal nationalism and feminist geopolitics into conversation, we argue, reveals both their compatibilities and important pathways for political geography and critical geopolitics to build on Billig’s work. In this regard, the paper makes three key contributions. First, we demonstrate how the insights and imperatives of banal nationalism intertwine in critical ways with the work of feminist geographers, as the banal is often rendered feminine and apolitical and as gender itself is often treated as banal despite its role in the reproduction of the nation. Second, we argue that the multi-scalar analytic of feminist geopolitics offers a valuable intervention into banal nationalism, as relational feminist approaches to binaries like intimate/global provide a useful model to account for hot and banal nationalism as a single, intertwining complex. Finally, through an analysis of fear in relation to sexual violence, the paper illustrates both the inseparability of banal and hot nationalism and how they are deeply gendered, as certain forms of deeply hot violence and fear are depoliticized through their banalization (e.g. sexual assault on college campuses), and as violence that is recognized as hot (e.g. war) is maintained through processes that are deemed banal (e.g. gender).     

Shifting meanings in changing contexts: the role of the creative city in Shanghai,Hong Kong and Taipei

Abstract

This paper probes the underlying motives behind the adoption of the ‘creative city’ policies in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei. It argues that while the global appeal of the creative city is commonly attributed to urban entrepreneurialism, this reason alone is insufficient in explaining the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in these three cities, because none of them ascribe to the conventional format of the post-industrial ‘entrepreneurial’ city. In order to identify other major forces driving the adoption of creative city initiatives in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, this work delves into the ways in which the idea of the creative city is reworked within the context of global city making. The study found that in addition to urban entrepreneurialism, the inherited cultural policy agenda, which largely stems from national interests, also plays a significant role in directing (and changing) the ‘global cultural city’ making process. By looking into different roles attached to the ‘imported’ policy discourse of the creative city in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, this study not only contributes to the understanding of urban cultural policies within the Chinese-speaking world and East Asia more generally, but also lends some insights to the developing field of cultural policy mobility.