Gentrification Interrupted in Salford,UK: From New Deal to “Limbo‐Land” in a Contemporary Urban Periphery

This paper examines two potential lacunae in understanding low‐income residents’ experiences of contemporary state‐led gentrification via a study of neighbourhood restructuring in Salford, UK, 2004–2014. The first is the localised politics preparing the ground for neighbourhood “redevelopment” and housing demolition. The second is the blighted social landscape which emerges with the subsequent stalling of this project. A focus on “before” and “after” is adopted in order to disrupt the linear policy and “effects” temporalities that much qualitative gentrification research tends to inhabit. We see how state‐led neighbourhood restructuring does not simply displace, but carries residents from “empowerment” to abandonment and transfers them from active struggle into devitalised limbo. As such, the paper demarcates challenges and opportunities for resident mobilisation inherent in a vacillating urban renewal programme, powerful in its inception but which has since “hit the buffers” (Lees 2014, Antipode 46(4):921–947) in light of global and municipal fiscal crises.     

Coloured Cabinets: A Reflection on Material Culture as a Marker of Coloured Identity in Cloetesville,South Africa

In coloured neighbourhoods of the Western Cape in South Africa, there are objects in people's homes that live in a unique historical and cultural moment. This article reports on an examination, in the neighbourhood of Cloetesville, Stellenbosch, of how these objects inside residents’ homes tell a story of a creolised people and the locations in which they are situated. In the case of Cloetesville, as in many neighbourhoods that arose from a history of forced removals, many people experience various social and economic problems. Coloured people's identities are commonly thought to rest in these problems. This article, however, seeks to suggest an alternative way of exploring coloured identity through looking at objects in households and broader living environments. Thus, I hope to provide insight into different yet distinct experiences by contributing new perspectives through looking at nostalgic and ordentlike (respectable) sentiments of belonging. Specifically cabinets in living rooms are conceptualised as repositories of such sentiments in the home, and how the objects residing in the home have the power/ability to symbolically ground their owners in the neighbourhood of Cloetesville.     

Effect of Scale on the Links between Walking and Urban Design

Studies of the relationship between walking and urban form consistently show that pedestrian‐friendly neighbourhoods encourage local walking. However, the geographic scale of measurement of the built environment for developing walkability indices and their relationship with different types of walking (e.g. for transport and recreation) has not been fully examined. In this study, objective measures of the built environment were developed at three geographic scales: suburb, census collection district, and 15 min walk neighbourhood for each participant. Walking for transport and recreation within the neighbourhood was measured using the Neighbourhood Physical Activity Questionnaire. The likelihood of walking at all (yes/no) and as recommended for health benefit (150 min per week) were assessed using logistic regression. The walkability index captured a strong positive relationship between urban form and walking for transport, but found no relationship at any scale for recreational walking. Participants walking for transport and living in high versus low walkable areas were 63% more likely to walk at the suburb scale (odds ratio 1.63; 95% confidence interval 1.22–2.18), twice as likely to walk at the census collection district scale, and nearly three times more likely to walk at the 15 min walk scale (odds ration 2.79; 95% confidence interval 2.09–3.73). The scale at which environmental data are measured influenced the strength of the relationship, showing that the neighbourhood 15 min from home was most predictive of transport walking. This has research and policy implications. Standardised scales across studies would both improve comparability of results and enhance understanding of the influences on walking.     

Gender,age and the politicisation of space during the time of political violence in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

This article examines the way in which the modality of the political violence between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front politicised space in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The article demonstrates how place is actively produced through everyday practices. It shows how the spatiality of the violence shifted – from the body to multiple sites of everyday life such as the school and the household and finally to the neighbourhood. Residents were drawn into the violence differentially on the basis of their gender and age, rather than political beliefs and affiliations. Places were politicised in ways that linked their meaning to the political identity of those found in that space. By presenting a spatialised analysis of the political violence, and illustrating how the production of place articulated with the co-production of political identities, this article makes a novel contribution to the existing literature on political violence in KwaZulu-Natal.     

Planning the Neighbourhood Economy: Land-Use Plans and the Economic Potential of Urban Residential Neighbourhoods in the Netherlands

This article investigates the relationship between zoning by-laws, as put forward in governmental land-use plans and the viability of urban residential neighbourhood economies. The Dutch planning tradition has long been characterized by strict separation of functions and top-down planning. We argue that profound changes in social and economic structures make land-use planning practices less suitable for the current policy formula of “mixed urban milieus”. Although the residential neighbourhood might not be the location of large firms, it definitely attracts small ones, and facilitates starting businesses whose presence (and potential growth) can be beneficial to the city as a whole. We present a typology of spatial patterns of neighbourhood economies based on land-use plans and describe whether these are related to the distinctive economic development of the neighbourhood over the period 1999–2007.     

Constructing contemporary artistic identities in Toronto neighbourhoods

This paper examines the role of the neighbourhood in the construction of artistic identities. Drawing upon in‐depth, semistructured interviews with Canadian visual artists from Toronto, I identify some of the common features of downtown Toronto neighbourhoods where artists congregate. I demonstrate that artists are drawn to neighbourhoods that have not been gentrified and do not directly reflect current dominant values in society. I focus, in particular, on the importance of marginal niches of improvisational space within the urban fabric. Marginal spaces, often neglected and overlooked, weakly classified and in a state of becoming, I argue, are essential to the development and sustenance of an artistic identity .     

Health hazards and socio-economic status: a neighbourhood cohort approach, Vancouver, 1976–2001

This paper lays the foundation for a research program concerned with the geographical patterning of environmental and population health at the urban neighbourhood scale. Based on the Vancouver metropolitan region, the aim is to better understand the role of neighbourhoods as epidemiological spaces where environmental and social characteristics combine as health processes and outcomes at the community and individual levels. With respect to procedure, this paper builds a cohort of commensurate neighbourhoods across all six census periods from 1976 to 2001, assembles neighbourhood air pollution (total particles) data, and provides an initial analysis to demonstrate how air pollution systematically and consistently maps onto neighbourhood socio-economic markers, specifically education and family status. We conclude with a discussion of how the neighbourhood cohort can be further developed to address emergent priorities in the population and environmental health literatures, namely the need for temporally matched data, a life-course approach and analyses that control for spatial scale effects.     

After Gentrification: Social Mix,Settler Colonialism,and Cruel Optimism in the Transformation of Neighbourhood Space

Social mix policies have emerged as a prominent mechanism to legitimate neighbourhood redevelopment efforts across the US. Despite integrationist rhetoric, results often disabuse marginalised communities of their claims to the city. This paper employs a hybrid spatio‐temporal analysis at the intersection of political‐economic theories of gentrification and post‐colonial and Black geographies literatures to examine underlying cultural logics and affective experiences animating such processes of neighbourhood transformation, contestation, and succession. Reflecting on 15 years of experience researching Over‐the‐Rhine (OTR), Cincinnati, we contribute a stylised distinction between the foundational, mature, and ongoing legacies of urban settler colonial relations. Our account discloses the power geometries shaping neighbourhood space by illustrating the impact of the discourses, tactics, and strategies employed by pro‐development actors and neighbourhood activists as OTR's socio‐political landscape shifted over time. In conclusion, we engage the thorny questions these dynamics raise surrounding how inner‐city neighbourhoods are theorised and struggled over after gentrification.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

Police and Politics in Aesthetics-Based Urban Governance: Redevelopment and Grassroots Struggles in Enninglu,Guangzhou, China

Rancière's theorisation of police, politics, and aesthetics offers an illustrative framework to understand urban (re)developments. While extant works have examined separately the art of governing through aesthetics and the political subjectivities of those having no part in the frame of visibility and intelligibility, this study argues that hegemonic aesthetic regime and bottom-up aesthetic practices can be mutually constitutive and reside in relationships of co-existence and mutual negotiation. Drawing on over a decade's investigation in Enninglu, a neighbourhood district in Guangzhou that underwent several rounds of political struggles related to redevelopment and conservation, we reveal how local residents negotiated aesthetic norms enacted by the state. Particular attention is paid to the interactions between the aesthetic regime imposed by the state and grassroots people reclaiming their own aesthetic sensibilities, culminating in a contingent, inconclusive, and “impure” space of politics. Both political subjectivities and aesthetic norms are redefined ongoingly in this process.     

The tropical backyard: performing environmental difference

This paper extends debates investigating the importance of domestic yards and gardens in shaping identities and the everyday practices and performances of human–nature interaction in a tropical city. It presents findings from a pilot study investigating backyards in a small but ethnically diverse neighbourhood in Cairns, Australia—a site that raises questions about the normative constructions of “nature” in much of the literature. The paper explores how Cairns residents make sense of their backyards, especially in terms of how they relate to them as “tropical”. Living in Cairns means managing excess water during the rainy season, dealing with new kinds of pests, and being critically conscious of the temperate bias of Australian garden retailers and house/garden magazines. The paper frames these experiences within a longer tradition of tropicality or a (western) way of making sense of/imagining tropical regions and environmental difference. In so doing, it opens up a new cultural geography of the suburbs, displaces normative constructions of “nature” and shows how the legacies of European colonialism still play out in a dominant Australian culture.     

A diasporic right to the city: the production of a Moroccan diaspora space in Granada,Spain

In this paper, I bring together ideas of ‘diaspora space’ and ‘the right to the city’ and empirically demonstrate how the formation of diasporas is frequently dependent on migrants attaining certain rights to the city. These rights, I argue, are conditioned and attained by the interplay of urban structural context with the place-making strategies of migrants. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that Moroccan migrants in Granada, Spain, have achieved a partial right to a neighbourhood of the city, producing a multi-sensory, self-orientalised diaspora space. First, I show that certain urban conditions in Granada provided a foothold for Moroccan migrants to begin to form a diaspora and transform urban space. Second, I demonstrate that through the mobilisation of a strategically self-orientalised cultural capital, the diaspora have partly appropriated the valuable history of Al-Andalus, a key component in the city’s tourist imagery. These factors and strategies have enabled Moroccan migrants to gain a right to have a visible presence in the city, a right to produce and transform urban space and a right to spatalise diverse identities – all key rights, I argue, in the formation of a diaspora.     

Language,geography and identity: The case of the Welsh in London

This paper explores the role of language in the construction of Welsh identities in London. It begins by mapping out some key theoretical connections between language, geography and identity, and argues that a reading of diaspora theory might be helpful in conceptualizing Welsh identities in the British capital. In particular, diaspora theory stresses that identities are made up of multiple social axes that need to be seen relationally. Diasporic identities make connections with more than one place challenging the notion of culture and language as delimited by the boundaries of particular national spaces. For many Welsh people in London, language is an important part of their attempts to meet others who share a common identity. London-Welsh societies facilitate this need, defining language in different ways, and interweaving the linguistic with other social axes to form powerful senses of belonging. Whilst London is a key migration destination, it is also a space of Welsh identities that draw centrally upon language, but make different geographical connections with Wales. The paper concludes by arguing that a diasporic reading of such processes allows a wider and more progressive understanding of the Welsh language, and highlights the importance of geography in doing so.     

Industrial spaces for grassroots creative production: spatial,social and planning facets

Former industrial premises provide material and symbolic resources for grassroots creative production, but planning is complex as these sites are transitory and excessive intervention may stifle creativity. This paper analyses the transformations of La Ribera (Bilbao), a mixed-use peninsula waiting to be redeveloped, where, in the meantime, creative-based grassroots projects have settled. Drawing upon relevant planning documents, documentary material and interviews with key actors, the paper explores (i) the spatial and built form advantages of these spaces, (ii) their impact on neighbourhood life and (iii) the contradictions faced in the planning process. The analysis suggests that spatiality plays a critical role, but it is threatened by market pressures, local governments’ interest to encourage the city's reputation and neighbours’ mistrust for the changes they may trigger. As a result, we contend that art spaces’ institutionalization in the neighbourhood is decisive for their sustainability, but the conflicts that arise for the symbolic appropriation of space should be considered. Regarding policy, governance approaches that preserve users’ autonomy and spaces’ built form and atmospheric qualities are rather suitable responses if they are part of a comprehensive agenda that includes local socio-economic conditions and neighbours’ aspirations.     

Bound by blood: the ethnic and civic nature of collective identities in the Basque Country,Catalonia and Valencia

This paper explores the factors determining collective identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, paying special attention to language and birth as key domains of ethnolinguistic divide. We will also make a comparison to the case of Valencia, a region with a native language that nevertheless has not developed a nationalist movement. We have performed a cluster analysis to compare the differences between collective identities in these regions using data from the survey on National Identity in Spain, and discriminant analysis is used to test the validity of our model. Results show that an ethnolinguistic division, based on parental origin and linguistic skills, defines peripheral identities in the Basque Country and Catalonia, but this singularity cannot be found for Valencia. Finally, our model corroborates the relevance of ethnolinguistic factors in defining collective identities in the Basque and Catalan regions, while the civic factor may be more relevant in Valencia.     

Anchoring of Firms in the Neighbourhood: Does Local Social and Physical Order Affect Local Firms' Investment Strategies?

An increasing number of small- and medium-sized firms, whose low relocation propensity seems to point to strong local anchors, have moved to residential neighbourhoods. On the one hand, the neighbourhood context, an attractive production milieu with rich social network potential, may enable entrepreneurs to increase investments in either human capital (personnel) or physical capital (premises, production goods). These investments further anchor firms in a neighbourhood, where they contribute to a thriving local economy. On the other hand, high crime rates, a deteriorated physical environment and a lack of social capital can discourage entrepreneurs from investing locally. In this study, we conducted a multilevel analysis on the relative contribution of neighbourhood characteristics to entrepreneurial investment strategies and controlled for firm and entrepreneur characteristics. We found that neighbourhood cohesiveness and liveability—but not local market characteristics—make a small but significant contribution to explaining local entrepreneurs' investments. This contribution is even stronger for the smallest firms. Therefore, a spatially targeted policy aimed at improving social cohesion and safety is likely to benefit both residents and small local firms.     

HOW CHILDREN PLACE THEMSELVES AND OTHERS IN LOCAL SPACE

This study examines the ways in which children aged 11 to 15 in six adjacent neighbourhoods in a medium-sized Swedish town place themselves and others in local space. Special attention is given to how they discuss a neighbourhood stigmatized in the public discourse and how children who live in this neighbourhood react to the negative representations of the place in which they live. The study is based on group interviews and maps. The study shows that children construct representations of their own neighbourhoods as "quiet" neighbourhoods and place objects of "trouble" and "danger" somewhere else. It is argued that this is done both in relation to their personal knowledge of the neighbourhood and in relation to local and/or media representations of their own and other neighbourhoods. It is shown that the children are influenced by media representations of a stigmatized neighbourhood, but also that they are not passive reproducers of these discourses and that some of them are able to offer counter-discourses. The children living in this neighbourhood experience difficulties in defending it as the quiet place which they perceive it to be to outsiders because of the negative discourses.     

Photographing dispossession, forgetting solidarity: waiting for social justice in Wentworth, South Africa

South Africans today inhabit a fragmented and discontinuous landscape, often despite their most cosmopolitan intentions. Grounded in the Coloured neighbourhood of Wentworth in Durban, this paper asks how remains of the past appear as differently temporalised artefacts, some buried in the archaic past and others more readily used to critique the present. In particular, I explore photographs of inmates of a concentration camp from 1902, township youth appropriating a specific commons in the early 1980s, black political photography from the late 1980s, and film wrestling with the ambiguities of post-apartheid political life in a Coloured neighbourhood next to an oil refinery. What unites these moments is not just a meta-theoretical concern with photography as both documentary and aesthetic, but the specific political uses of images, exemplified by the work of two black political photographers. Their practice provides cues for situating these other photographs in a long century of multiple dispossessions. The paper explores when and how photographs might shock the viewer into recognising resemblances, connections and potential solidarities, not just with the past, but with subaltern critique of racial space and subjectivity in the present. I suggest how we might view photographs from various moments relationally, to understand how, in one corner of contemporary South Africa, people continue to wait for justice despite uncertainty and official dissimulation, in a state of anticipatory frustration.     

Class,Caste, Gender,and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have experienced a rapid transformation from mud to cement houses, which has been promoted by governments and cement companies for its positive impacts on household socioeconomic status and gender inequalities. But we know little else about how different communities are participating in house transformation. In this paper, I study the embodied and affective dimensions of house transformation in Himachal Pradesh, India. I argue that house transformation is also the transformation of traditional gender and caste identities into new middle-class identities which benefits some social groups, like upper-caste women and Dalit men, but not others like Dalit women along intersectional lines. My work extends literature in infrastructure studies and urban political ecology by highlighting how the materiality of infrastructures interacts with everyday dimensions of difference to reproduce the marginalisation of historically oppressed groups along intersectional lines of class, caste, and gender.     

Public space and memories of migration: erasing diversity through urban redevelopment in France

This article examines the meaning of public space and impact of heritage-led urban redevelopment in a diverse neighbourhood in Montpellier, France. It traces the relocation of a North African market from a central city plaza in favour of French antiques, and the resulting contestation over what constitutes local heritage, who has the capacity to determine how public space is used, and the seeming erasure of migrant identities and memories from an important community site. The paper considers how urban areas are re-imagined through a change in the materiality of public space, and outlines the role of outdoor markets in defining the social function of such spaces. The paper examines the intertwining of physical erasure (urban redevelopment and the removal of a diverse food market) and cultural erasure (the loss of certain community memories), and how these processes speak to broader debates about French national identity, cultural heritage, and the meanings attached to public spaces.