A Long Way to Complexity: Nonlinear “Growth Stages” and Spatially Uncoordinated Settlement Expansion in a Compact City (Athens,Greece)

Recent urbanization trends reflect an increasing dependence on regional economic transformations, local population dynamics, and planning constraints, becoming intrinsically complex and nonlinear. Following this assumption, the present study proposes a new approach for the analysis of long-term urban expansion in a compact metropolitan region (Athens, Greece), clarifying the importance of spatial heterogeneity and volatility in building activity over more than one century. A spatially explicit statistical approach was used to define a development cycle reflecting the stratification of heterogeneous waves of compact and dispersed urbanization at municipal scale. While resulting in distinctive spatial patterns of building activity, long-term urban growth emerged as a multifaceted response to market stimuli, social change, and diversified territorial contexts. Results of a spatially explicit analysis of long-term urban expansion based on official statistics shed further light on processes of metropolitan growth and change, and contribute to design integrated strategies enhancing spatial coordination and a more balanced socioeconomic development of contemporary cities.     

Falling Apart at the Margins? Neighbourhood Transformations in Peri‐Urban Chennai

This article explores the peri‐urban dynamics in developing cities using a theoretical examination of the metropolis as the new urban condition. Although a western conceptualization, the notion of the metropolis, and particularly metropolitan planning, was exported to the developing world to address its urbanization problems. Metropolitan development authorities were established for wider city regions and accorded legislative powers to prepare master plans for the metropolitan areas. However, in most instances, their planning strategies resulted in a conflation of the urban–rural interface into a more complex peri‐urban condition, marked by heterogeneity and fragmentation. The article illustrates this through an empirical investigation in the Indian city of Chennai, where socio‐spatial transformations of two borderland neighbourhoods on its southern periphery are assessed mainly in terms of metropolitan planning decisions over the decades. In outlining their metamorphosis, the study is careful not to perceive such conflicts as simple forms of polarization between the rich and the poor. Rather, it sets the class conflicts against the politico‐economic dynamics yielding newer forms of polarization in the peri‐urban spaces.     

Governmentalities of Urban Crises in Inner‐city Athens,Greece

Through the notion of “conjuncture” this paper explores the interplay of urban crises that have been unfolding in the city of Athens during the past 7 years (2008–2014). By focusing on specific “critical moments” that have significantly influenced the narratives, discourses and subsequent policies concerning “Athens in crisis”, it examines a number of intertwined approaches and tactics that shaped the governmentality of such crisis. These approaches and tactics, that work in tandem, include emergency‐driven policies and politics; politics of fear that occasionally transform into geographies of fear; processes of defining the “public” and “public enemies”; and redefinitions of (il)legalities. Yet, they have repercussions on people, places and politics. In this context, certain issues are deemed critical or urgent while others do not or are even obscured.     

The Hollowing Out of Brazilian Metropolitan Governance As We Know It: Restructuring and Rescaling the Developmental State in Metropolitan Space

Despite regulatory and financial rollout of the state at a number of scales, and a strengthening of the institutional framework that guides territorial planning and management, Brazilian metropolitan governance continues to be characterized by fragmented and relatively competitive organizational structures. Likewise, the Brazilian metropolis is marked by economic dynamism and intense socio‐spatial and environmental contradictions. Much of the mainstream literature on metropolitan governance has emphasized a natural “optimum” scale for planning and management in city‐regions, articulated by public and private stakeholders aimed at the coordinated delivery of economic, social and environmental services. Combining the literature on new state spaces and critical Brazilian urban‐regional studies, this paper provides an alternative framework to understand the impasse of Brazilian metropolitan areas, which is grounded within a geo‐historic reading of the contradictory projects and strategies of the developmental state and the contested nature of metropolitan scale itself.     

Urban and Rural Definitions in Regional Context: A Case Study on Turkey

Transformations in the urban and rural areas under the effects of global economic, social and political circumstances have rendered their boundaries more blurring. It has become increasingly difficult to make a clear distinction between urban and rural. This paper intends to bring definitions of urban–rural into discussion in the context of Turkey. It reveals the results of a research project (conducted by Hürriyet G. Ö?dül with Serkan Öngel and Habip Uluçay from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2007 and financed by the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey and Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Research Fund), aiming at revealing the degrees of the urbanity and rurality throughout the country, with an emphasis on the diversification of regions in the urban–rural context. The study is conducted at the NUTS 4 level. Districts are classified as “dominantly rural, dominantly urban and transitional” through the factor analysis based on six structures: agricultural production, non-agricultural production, employment, demography, education and flows of money, goods and people. The urban–rural profile of the country is found as rural and transitional. It is possible to observe some areas displaying deep rural characters in well-developed western regions and some “prosperity spots” dispersed throughout the less-developed eastern regions. Then, regional classifications ranging from “concentrated urban regions” to “rural regions” are made at the NUTS 1 level. Finally, the results are evaluated in perspectives of spatial planning of Turkey and entering process to the EU.     

Toronto,an American city: Aspects of its postwar planning, 1940–1960

Toronto is conventionally considered quite unlike “American cities.” This article does not fundamentally challenge this convention, but does suggest that differences between Toronto and American cities may be overdrawn and that Toronto may have more American elements than is generally recognized. The evidence presented in this study comes from three episodes in Toronto’s postwar planning history: creation of an ambitious postwar master plan in 1943–44, formation of metropolitan government and planning in the mid-1950s, and the design and construction of the iconic suburban neighborhood of Don Mills also in the 1950s. All three show strong American planning connections. The article then offers some reasons why these American planning ideas did not produce an “American city,” and concludes by challenging the view that it is due to Canada having a fundamentally different urban culture.     

The Scaling of Sustainable Urban Form: A Case of Scale-related Issues and Sustainable Planning in Malmö, Sweden

In this article, I investigate “spatial scale” as an aspect that needs to be more carefully addressed in the discussion and planning of “sustainable urban forms”. Focusing on the Malmö–Lund region in Sweden, I discuss problems of scale as related to the new take on sustainability in Malmö planning documents, especially the update of the Malmö comprehensive plan from 2005. The article is divided into three sections. First, I discuss the concept and problem of spatial scale, contextualizing it in theory as well as in recent discussions on urban transformations. Second, I briefly discuss the discourse of sustainable urban forms, pointing out some scale-related issues that need to be more carefully addressed. In the third and main section of the article, I investigate plans and projects for urban development in Malmö, focusing and elaborating on spatial scale and discussing the findings in terms of three kinds of scale stabilization: in terms of territory, size and hierarchy. The article concludes with a call for further work for the possibilities of a more dynamic and multi-scalar approach in urban planning.     

Locational disadvantage and the spatial distribution of government expenditure on urban infrastructure and services in metropolitan Sydney (1988–2015)

Provision of public services by state governments rather than municipalities is considered an important urban governance factor preventing deeper levels of socio‐spatial inequality in Australian cities. The paper examines the spatial patterns of investment by the New South Wales state government in a wide range of services and infrastructure in metropolitan Sydney over 28 budget years from 1988/89 to 2015/16. We examined the relationship between volume and type of investment in infrastructure and services, and considered a local area's socioeconomic characteristics, distance from the central business district, and designation as a strategic site in metropolitan plans. Despite an overall redistributive approach favouring relatively disadvantaged areas, the most disadvantaged suburbs in metropolitan Sydney had significantly lower levels of investment. When funding was directed to the most disadvantaged suburbs, it was often in the form of new social housing development, reinforcing both the concentration of poverty and disadvantage in resource access. The findings suggest that this is a case of under‐investment by the state government in areas already populated by disadvantaged communities rather than a market‐driven process whereby disadvantaged households move into poorly resourced neighbourhoods.     

Fishing Livelihoods,Seashore Tourism,and Industrial Development in Coastal Rio de Janeiro: Conflict,Multi‐Functionality,and Juxtaposition

Critical global political ecology and critical cultural political economy approaches are used in a study involving decades of research to evaluate the changing relationship between fisher livelihoods, seashore tourism, and urban industrial development in an economically dynamic region of coastal Brazil. As the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro expanded and encompassed fishing communities, socio‐environmental transformations created threats to fisher ways of life, opened new multi‐functional opportunities, and also introduced unrelated juxtaposed activities. As stocks fell due to overfishing and urban industrial pollution over the last two decades, small‐scale inshore fishing declined in the bay–lagoon systems located to the east and south‐west of Rio de Janeiro. Tourism increased but proved to be a poor substitute for declining fishing activities because it and other new multi‐functional activities rarely aggregated significant value to local livelihoods. Consequently, only a small minority of fishers benefited and remained on the islands and sand spits, while the great majority left for the mainland. New cultural and environmental functions were also absent, so that of the types of multi‐functionality identified by Wilson and Holmes, those present in the study area are weak and basically serve outside urban production and consumption interests.     

Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large–Scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy

This paper summarizes the theoretical insights drawn from a study of thirteen large–scale urban development projects (UDPs) in twelve European Union countries. The project focused on the way in which globalization and liberalization articulate with the emergence of new forms of governance, on the formation of a new scalar gestalt of governing and on the relationship between large–scale urban development and political, social and economic power relations in the city. Among the most important conclusions, we found that: ?Large–scale UDPs have increasingly been used as a vehicle to establish exceptionality measures in planning and policy procedures. This is part of a neoliberal “New Urban Policy” approach and its selective “middle — and upper–class” democracy. It is associated with new forms of “governing” urban interventions, characterized by less democratic and more elite–driven priorities. ?Local democratic participation mechanisms are not respected or are applied in a very “formalist” way, resulting in a new choreography of elite power. However, grassroots movements occasionally manage to turn the course of events in favor of local participation and of modest social returns for deprived social groups. ?The UDPs are poorly integrated at best into the wider urban process and planning system. As a consequence, their impact on a city as a whole and on the areas where the projects are located remains ambiguous. ?Most UDPs accentuate socioeconomic polarization through the working of real–estate markets (price rises and displacement of social or low–income housing), changes in the priorities of public budgets that are increasingly redirected from social objectives to investments in the built environment and the restructuring of the labor market. ?The UDPs reflect and embody a series of processes that are associated with changing spatial scales of governance; these changes, in turn, reflect a shifting geometry of power in the governing of urbanization.     

Declining,transition and slow rural territories in southern Italy Characterizing the intra-rural divides

As metropolitan areas around the world keep expanding, behind them, rural areas continue to be affected by greater rates of depopulation. This is not a new phenomenon: rural to urban migration has been reported in the developed world at least from the period between the two world wars. However, recent rural depopulation trends have dramatically intensified in both the developed and the developing countries worldwide. In planning literature, greater emphasis is placed on the “urban–rural” divide, that is, people leaving the countryside to look for better opportunities in urban areas. However, a growing body of literature points to the fact that not all rural areas are declining at the same rate. Indeed, some rural towns have managed to retain population and even to grow. Therefore, at least in developed countries, an “intra-rural” divide notion is emerging. To exemplify this notion, we have studied rural towns in Southern Italy.     

Coordinating Transport and Urban Planning: From Ideologies to Local Realities

In Europe, the idea that coordinating transportation and urban planning is a necessary condition for setting sustainable urban development into motion has spread throughout academic and professional circles. While this concern is not new, the objectives underlying transport and urban planning coordination have deeply changed over the last decades. How have local authorities translated the requirements and objectives of national laws? How have they accounted for the evolution of these global objectives? What factors explain innovation and continuity in the relationship between land use planning and transport policies? In a comparative research between Switzerland and France, we addressed the question of political change by reconstituting the “trajectories” of four urban areas: Geneva and Bern in Switzerland and Strasbourg and Bordeaux in France. We have described the policy paths of these urban areas since the end of the 1960s by focusing on the contents of master plans, the principal technical solutions and projects that have been implemented, and the means of inter-sectorial coordination used. For each case, factors of change or inertia have been identified by focusing on three main variables that are often studied alternatively in public policy analysis: ideas, institutions and interests.     

The “New Urban Europe”: Global Challenges and Local Responses in the Urban Century

Modern cities in the open European space-economy are powerhouses of creative ideas, smart technologies, sustainable developments and socio-economic wealth. They play a pivotal role in the future of an urbanized Europe, but they are also confronted with grand challenges, notably far-reaching demographic transformations, environmental decay and climatological change, unequal social participation and ever-rising mobility trends. The challenges for urban environments may be turned into new opportunities, in particular, in such domains as advanced infrastructure and logistic systems, environmental and climate-neutral facilities, creative and knowledge-intensive strategies for socio-economic prosperity and well-being. Cities—and in particular metropolitan areas—may thus act as spearheads of sustainable economic growth for European countries. These observations call for appropriate long-range policy strategies for metropolitan areas—and networks of cities—in the highly diversified European space-economy. Such policy actions would need to be supported by solid, multidisciplinary and evidence-based research on the challenges and opportunities of urban environments in Europe. The main contribution of this paper lies in the systematic strategic approach to transform urban megatrends and challenges into research and policy concerns for Europe. The analytical framework employed to highlight and better understand such research and policy response in Europe from a typological perspective is built around four interconnected pillars (cornerstones) that form the focal points for identifying strategic future images that may be instrumental in mapping out the research and policy challenges for the “New Urban Europe”.     

The Politics of Subjectivity in Vangelis Raptopoulos’s Urban Stories

In this article I offer a critical analysis of the spatial cultures of modern Athens through the urban portraits presented in three fictive stories by Vangelis Raptopoulos—“At the Bottom of the Sea” (Sto Vytho), “One-Way Street” (Monodromos), and “Long-Distance Call” (Yperastiko)—from his 1995 collection “In Pieces” (Kommatakia). I argue that by constructing first-person fictive narratives, written in confessional prose, Raptopoulos problematizes the notion of subjectivity in its varying relationships to modern urban and spatial cultures. My main focus is on the practice of subjective recitations of urban space in view of the narrator’s experiences of imaginative and physical spatial appropriation. I argue that these experiences and the fragmentary style, through which they are conveyed in the stories, are an incisive critique of the official planning practices of urban public space and prescribed practices of spatial mobility. By drawing on the critical-philosophical and critical-historical literature, with particular reference to Benjamin, Foucault, Lefebvre, and de Certeau, this article contributes to the broader critique of the politics of subjectivity in modern Europe.     

ON HANDLING URBAN INFORMALITY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

In this article I reconsider the handling of urban informality by urban planning and management systems in southern Africa. I argue that authorities have a fetish about formality and that this is fuelled by an obsession with urban modernity. I stress that the desired city, largely inspired by Western notions of modernity, has not been and cannot be realized. Using illustrative cases of top–down interventions, I highlight and interrogate three strategies that authorities have deployed to handle informality in an effort to create or defend the modern city. I suggest that the fetish is built upon a desire for an urban modernity based on a concept of formal order that the authorities believe cannot coexist with the “disorder” and spatial “unruliness” of informality. I question the authorities' conviction that informality is an abomination that needs to be “converted”, dislocated or annihilated. I conclude that the very configuration of urban governance and socio‐economic systems in the region, like the rest of sub‐Saharan Africa, renders informality inevitable and its eradication impossible.     

"Common–Sense" Neoliberalism: Progressive Conservative Urbanism in Toronto, Canada

This paper argues that urban neoliberalism can best be understood as a contradictory re–regulation of urban everyday life. Based on an analysis of neoliberalism as a new political economy and as a new set of technologies of power, the paper argues that the urban everyday is the site and product of the neoliberal transformation. Governments and corporations play a key role in redefining the conditions of everyday life through neoliberal policies and business practices. Part of this reorientation of everydayness, however, involves new forms of resistance and opposition, which include the kernel of a possible alternative urbanism. The epochal shift from a Keynesian–Fordist–welfarist to a post–Fordist–workfarist society is reflected in a marked restructuring of everyday life. The shift changes the socioeconomic conditions in cities. It also includes a reorientation of identities, social conflicts, and ideologies towards a more explicitly culturalist differentiation. Social difference does not disappear, but actually becomes more pronounced; however, it gets articulated in or obscured by cultural terms of reference. The paper looks specifically at Toronto, Ontario, as a case study. An analysis of the explicitly neoliberal politics of the province’s Progressive Conservative (Tory) government under Mike Harris, first elected in 1995, demonstrates the pervasive re–regulation of everyday life affecting a wide variety of people in Toronto and elsewhere. Much of this process is directly attributable to provincial policies, a consequence of Canada’s constitutional system, which does not give municipalities autonomy but makes them “creatures of provinces.” However, the paper also argues that Toronto’s elites have aided and abetted the provincial “Common–Sense” Revolution through neoliberal policies and actions on their own. The paper concludes by outlining the emergence of new instances of resistance to the politics of hegemony and catastrophe of urban neoliberalism.     

Towards lower carbon cities: urban morphology contribution in climate change adaptation strategies

Non-urbanized areas (NUAs) play an important role in reducing the effects of climate change by providing both carbon storage and sequestration. Urban areas are responsible for the emission of 60% of global greenhouse gas, 50% of which are produced by buildings. During the past decades, increasing urban growth and sprawl processes produced several urban layouts characterized by different morphological features and a common lack of sustainable energy and environmental solutions. Investigating the relationship between urban morphology, energy demand and carbon emission/sequestration represents a relevant topic for urban planning practices implemented to face urban climate change effects. This study proposes a method for a transformability assessment aimed at investigating the transformation suitability of different urban morphology types. The case study is the metropolitan area of Catania (Italy), characterized by an impressive urban growth since the 1960s. The proposed method identification of limits and options for increasing sustainability of urban areas considering the contribution of both NUAs and built-up areas. This approach allows to identify appropriate planning tools for new layouts of urban fabrics while increasing the objectivity of the decision process. In the framework of climate change mitigation and adaptation, the outcomes of this research may lead to innovative urban planning practices.     

Deracinated Dispossessions: On the Foreclosures of “Gentrification” in Oakland,CA

This paper challenges dominant geographies of urban theory by conceptualising the dynamics of displacement in Oakland through place‐specific histories of racial/spatial politics. It argues that the repeated transposition of a San Francisco‐based model of “tech gentrification” results in deracinated dispossessions, or accounts of displacement uprooted from grounded histories of racial violence and resistance. It also argues that, while urban scholars acknowledge the role of historical difference in contouring dispossessions in metropolitan versus postcolonial cities, this consideration should be broadened to account for the racial/colonial dimensions of urbanism in the US as well. Treating Oakland as a “crossroads of theory”, this paper joins calls for a deeper engagement between postcolonial urban studies and critical race and ethnic studies from North America. Drawing upon the authors’ activist and empirical work, it contends that “thinking from Oakland” demands a foregrounding of racial capitalism, policing, and refusal.