Identity,contingency and the urban geography of 'race'

Traditional research in urban geography concerned with issues of 'race' has focused on a series of substantively important issues, yet with conceptual foundation inadequate to the task. Specifically, this body of work has employed outdated and theoretically limited conceptions of identity without sufficient consideration to the importance of historical and geographic contingency. I argue in this essay that topics of traditional concern to urban geography gain new relevance and importance when they are reconsidered and reworked from a social constructivist perspective that takes seriously the importance of identity and contingency. I illustrate my argument with discussions of two aspects of my current research agenda. First, I discuss how research on urban residential segregation gains considerably from a more sensitive encounter with multifaceted notions of identity that explicitly address geographic contingency. Second, I review recent empirical research on US mortgage-lending markets that demonstrates the geographic and class contingency of discrimination. The paper ends with a call for research that employs multiple methodologies.     

CULTURAL ECONOMY AND THE CREATIVE FIELD OF THE CITY

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra‐urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labour market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path‐dependent dynamics of the creative field. The article ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global.     

Probing the reds and blues: Sectionalism and voter location in the 2000 and 2004 U. S. presidential elections

The election outcomes of a place hinge largely on what is within its political boundaries: economic, social, cultural, and other compositional factors facing voters. Yet, it is also important to investigate geographic context, both within and between places. This study presents renewed emphasis on two geographic factors that relate to electoral outcomes while controlling for compositional attributes: sectional distinctions and population density. Within different regions of the United States and across different locations (urban, suburban, and rural residents), there exist notable differences in presidential voting. Using survey and county-level data on the 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections, this study evaluates the partisan preferences of voters from a regional perspective, and from a density perspective. The findings demonstrate independent relationships between section and voting, and location and voting. A major consequence of the distinctiveness of section and location in the face of migration effects (as noted by others) is the increased spatial polarization of the electorate's political preferences in these recent presidential contests.     

Selling Urban Housing in London. Can High-density Urban Living Be Sold to a Sceptical British Public? Distinction,Mobility, and Control over Environment

Marketing materials from brownfield housing developments in London are analysed in order to evaluate the extent to which the British government's 'urban renaissance' goals can overcome public scepticism and a historical distaste for high-density urban living. A case study of Tunnel Wharf in Rotherhithe is presented along with a broader analysis of marketing materials from other developments. These marketing efforts suggest that urban living can be successfully sold to some segments of the British public, in large part by playing to cities' natural strengths. However, these sales pitches rely heavily on appeals to such themes as exclusivity and the ability to control one's environment, and thus raise broader questions about the viability and coherence of the urban renaissance vision. Specifically, it is suggested that the psychological response to increased urban densities may imply possible trade-offs between the preservation of countryside and the promotion of 'urbanity' in cities.     

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 Ordinary City

As debates on globalization have progressed from an earlier phase in which commentators saw the intensification of world-scale flows and processes as the negation of local identities and autonomies, the city has been 'rediscovered' as the powerhouse of the globalized economy. Against the view that questions, for example, the continued specificity of the urban in an era increasingly mediated by locationally liberating, advanced telecommunications and rapid transport networks, some strands of urban research assert that cities are becoming more important as the key creative, control and cultural centres within globalizing economic, cultural and social dynamics. Building on these strands, this paper evaluates the assets that cities and metropolitan regions provide in an era of globalization. It attempts to develop an alternative perspective on the city based on the idea that contemporary urban life is founded on the heterogeneity of economic, social, cultural and institutional assets, and concludes by using this perspective to develop implications for urban policy and the quest for social and territorial justice.     

China and Geography in the 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is to help the subdiscipline at large develop a more international and inclusive approach, it must be driven by questions of significance in China, yield constructive answers of relevance to China, and at the same time derive theoretical ideas that diversify the collective geographical imagination.     

Taking the discussion onward

ABSTRACT

This response to the foregoing reviews of The Poetry and Music of Science identifies common themes raised by them, responds to direct questions where this is possible and suggests further avenues of discussion. It focusses in particular on issues of the historical and cultural setting of human creativity, the particular issues raised by poetry, the differences between artistic and scientific imagination, the confusion (and de-confusion) of ‘imagination' and ‘creativity', the social and institutional framings of the sciences and the arts, the question of digital creativity and theological themes. A common emerging idea is that human creativity, whether artistic or scientific, is well-described by neither purely ‘expressive' nor ‘receptive’ actions but by a meeting of both.     

A Socio‐Geographic Perspective on Human Activities in Social Media

Location‐based social media make it possible to understand social and geographic aspects of human activities. However, previous studies have mostly examined these two aspects separately without looking at how they are linked. The study aims to connect two aspects by investigating whether there is any correlation between social connections and users' check‐in locations from a socio‐geographic perspective. We constructed three types of networks: a people–people network, a location–location network, and a city–city network from former location‐based social media Brightkite and Gowalla in the U.S., based on users' check‐in locations and their friendships. We adopted some complexity science methods such as power‐law detection and head/tail breaks classification method for analysis and visualization. Head/tail breaks recursively partitions data into a few large things in the head and many small things in the tail. By analyzing check‐in locations, we found that users' check‐in patterns are heterogeneous at both the individual and collective levels. We also discovered that users' first or most frequent check‐in locations can be the representatives of users' spatial information. The constructed networks based on these locations are very heterogeneous, as indicated by the high ht‐index. Most importantly, the node degree of the networks correlates highly with the population at locations (mostly with R² being 0.7) or cities (above 0.9). This correlation indicates that the geographic distributions of the social media users relate highly to their online social connections.     

The Emerging 'Urban Agenda' and the European Spatial Development Perspective: Towards an EU Urban Policy?

In recent years there has been a growing awareness of escalating problems in European urban areas caused partly by economic and technological changes in the European and global economies. The most visible representation of these changes has been a growth in urban unemployment and social exclusion. The European Commission has taken a growing interest in these issues and attempted to develop an European Union (EU)-wide approach to urban change. The focus of this paper is on the Commission's attempt to develop an 'urban agenda' and to promote policies which are more 'urban sensitive'. With reference to the 'urban agenda' this paper examines the contribution of, and problems associated with, two Urban Communications recently published by the Commission and the European Spatial Development Perspective. It then assesses the prospects for the development of an EU Urban Policy, arguing that an 'explicit' urban policy is unlikely to emerge in the short or medium term.     

Emerging challenges of an urban creative economy: reflections on the governance of creative clusters in Taipei City

ABSTRACT

Retaining the global mobile creative class has been considered a crucial strategy for driving creative economic development in inner cities. However, implementing the global creative city strategy overemphasizes the significance of amenity-based creative economic landscapes over institutional collaborations in contributing to the situated governance dynamics of creative clusters. Drawing on insights from an evolutionary perspective, this paper scrutinizes the extent to which creative city strategies foster the situated development of creative clusters based on a case study of Taipei. The paper argues that developing the urban creative economy requires a context-specific understanding of the urbanization process, and should involve an institutional collaboration to articulate the socio-spatial co-evolution between the diversified dynamics of creative clusters and urban form. This paper advocates reflexive thinking on neoliberal city strategies to develop a conjunctive, diverse and substantial creative policy to support alternative paths of creative city development.     

Urban Systems of Accumulation: Half a Century of Chilean Neoliberal Urban Policies

We analyse a half‐century of Chilean urban reforms to explain the introduction of a system of urban accumulation by dispossession of public resources and opportunities. Three stages have been conceptualised in the imposition of a neoliberal creative‐destructive process: proto‐neoliberalism, roll‐back and roll‐out periods. Empirical studies have traditionally analysed this process by examining a single urban policy's evolution over time. In this paper, we go beyond these types of studies by performing a systemic analysis of multiple urban policy reforms in Santiago, Chile. We use a genealogical thematic analysis to track changes in laws, government programmes and planning documents from between 1952 and 2014. Our analysis identifies different “urban systems of accumulation” by looking at the interplay of four urban policies: (1) urban planning deregulation; (2) social housing privatisation; (3) devolution of territorial taxes; and (4) decreased public service provision. Moreover, our multidimensional policy analysis in Santiago characterises a more radical, fourth expression in the creative destruction process of “accumulation by dismantling”. Consequently, we advocate for more multidimensional urban policy research that goes beyond a three‐period analysis in order to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary neoliberal creative‐destructive processes in variegated geographies.     

Spatial Distribution of City Tweets and Their Densities

Social media outlets such as Twitter constitute valuable data sources for understanding human activities in the virtual world from a geographic perspective. This article examines spatial distribution of tweets and densities within cities. The cities refer to natural cities that are automatically aggregated from a country's small street blocks, so called city blocks. We adopted street blocks (rather than census tracts) as the basic geographic units and topological center (rather than geometric center) to assess how tweets and densities vary from the center to the peripheral border. We found that, within a city from the center to the periphery, the tweets first increase and then decrease, while the densities decrease in general. These increases and decreases fluctuate dramatically, and differ significantly from those if census tracts are used as the basic geographic units. We also found that the decrease of densities from the center to the periphery is less significant, and even disappears, if an arbitrarily defined city border is adopted. These findings prove that natural cities and their topological centers are better than their counterparts (conventionally defined cities and city centers) for geographic research. Based on this study, we believe that tweet densities can be a good surrogate of population densities. If this belief is proved to be true, social media data could help solve the dispute surrounding exponential or power function of urban population density.     

Green Infrastructure,Grey Epistemologies,and the Urban Political Ecology of Pittsburgh's Water Governance

This paper explores Pittsburgh's water governance to consider the way divergent approaches to urban stormwater management reproduce existing urban metabolisms and belie more radical possibilities for the urban hydro‐social cycle. Federal action has forced municipalities in the Pittsburgh metropolitan region to make changes to its urban water systems and develop a plan to comply with water quality regulations. Within Pittsburgh's water governance debates, compliance centers on various sets of technological strategies for defining and solving purportedly wicked urban environmental problems. Urban political ecology, here, is used to deconstruct the tensions and convergences between these different stormwater governance strategies. I argue that green infrastructure approaches (whose intentions are to expand practice and participation) are framed by dominant grey epistemological approaches. In this view, alternative and creative forms of greening the city may not necessarily represent a more democratic process, but instead reproduce uneven urban landscapes under greener cover.     

Cultural actors as agents of generating social co-presences within the place: Istanbul’s contemporary art scene

This paper builds on the designation of cultural actors’ actions as a decisive factor in the emergence of urban patterns of art-driven social co-presences in Istanbul. It contributes to the creative city debate from the perspective of community development by incorporating the contemporary arts into urban social space making efforts. Methodologically, the locations of art organizations in the contemporary arts scene of Istanbul are approached as an urban pattern of art driven social co-presences that resulted from the ‘collective action’ in which a multitude of cultural actors are involved. We find that the clusters of art organizations serve as multidimensional social interactions among artist communities. There are, however, inefficiencies in spreading this interactive networking throughout different social segments. Research findings conclude that the cultural actors as agents of generating social co-presences within the place, are not effectively contributing to the society’s social coherence, particularly in terms of creating links with disadvantageous neighbourhood residents.     

SPACE–TIME MEASURES OF DEMAND FOR SERVICE: BRIDGING LOCATION MODELLING AND ACCESSIBILITY STUDIES THROUGH A TIME‐GEOGRAPHIC FRAMEWORK

Demand for service in location modelling is often evaluated based on the spatial proximity of fixed and static reference locations of demand (e.g. home) to a facility, which ignores person‐specific activity–travel patterns and the temporal changes in demand for service throughout the day. To address these limitations, this study draws upon recent developments in space–time measures of individual accessibility to explore the spatial and temporal structures of demand by considering individuals' space–time constraints and impact of existing urban structures. Based on a time‐geographic framework, eight space–time demand measures were developed and compared with three conventional location‐based demand measures for 12 hospitals through an empirical study conducted in Columbus, Ohio. The results show that geographic proximity between clients' home and facilities may not be an effective indicator for service demand, and conventional demand measures tend to underestimate potential demand for service in most situations. The study concludes that space–time demand measures that take into account people's activity‐travel patterns in space–time would lead to better estimation of demand for service in most cases.     

NETWORKS OF IRON: THE ROLE OF BLACKSMITHING IN MEDIEVAL COPENHAGEN

The information which can be extracted from studying craft and production in past societies is by no means limited to technology and exchange. Analysing the chaîne opératoire of iron production in medieval society provides a new perspective and knowledge of its role for urban development. Seen as a complex network of economic, social and material relations, craft and production are embedded in society and have the power to influence it. This article presents and discusses the remains of blacksmithing found at the site of Rådhuspladsen ('City Hall Square') in Copenhagen. The analysis focuses on the scale, types and organisation of the ironworking, as well as identifying the people who may have been involved, including their social and geographical networks. This study aims to better understand the role of iron production for the development of medieval Copenhagen and in general, its role in medieval Danish towns.     

An empirical study on the modification of China's current urban social security system

This study challenges the conventional correlation between economic performance and the level of the development of social security systems. By focusing on China's urban areas, we provide an overview of the components and benefits, from a comparative perspective, of China's current social security system. We also create a comprehensive and generally applicable method using factors such as economics and population, among others, as standards to evaluate the efficacy of China's system. In order to demonstrate our primary hypothesis – that the Chinese Communist Party government has to modify its social security system to adapt to or bring about changes in the basis of its legitimacy – we analyse Chinese social security records and other related data after 1949 by statistical methods. The formula we provide in this study can be used to forecast China's expenditure on its urban social security system, and other scholars can apply our methods to countries in which conditions are broadly similar.     

Complexity and participation: the path of strategic invention

Abstract

The epistemological basis of the participatory action-research (PAR) methodology in the so-called 'paradigm of complexity' is plagued with misconceptions, imprecision and significant omissions. The appropriate and contextualised translation of concepts from the natural sciences for use in the social sciences is particularly necessary in qualitative-structural and participatory-dialectic methodological trends. This paper focuses on the concepts of 'entropy', 'complexity' and 'strategic action'. Based on a general notion of complexity relating to the consideration of uncertainty, innovation and the contextualisation of systems, performance-related aspects indicative of actions implied by this paradigm may be highlighted. Thus, it is argued that the conceptualisation of operations such as 'acting in order to know' and 'act knowing/know by acting', encompassed in the notion of 'strategic invention', complement and exceed the scope of typical planning operations and even self-planning ('knowing in order to act'). In short, these definitions are coherent with an ecosystemic perspective of social and natural reality, in which it is necessary to contextualise what is more or less complex in the world, in our knowledge of the world and in our practical actions when acting in the world. Consequently, participatory action-research methodologies should adopt this complex ecosystemic epistemological perspective, and be designed through a 'strategic invention' approach, in order to clarify the concepts imported from other scientific disciplines.     

Urban resilience as critique: Problematizing infrastructure in post-Sandy New York City

Drawing on Foucaultian work on problematization, this paper explores the urban resilience paradigm which emerged in the wake of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, which dramatically disrupted New York City. Using discourse and media analysis, examination of government commissions and proposals, and site observation at panels and conferences, it argues that, rather than an ahistorical “thing,” urban resilience was the name given to techniques resulting from a three-part process of problematization drawn together by media and government in the storm's aftermath. This process, I argue, was itself political, and included the identification of new problems to govern in the form of environmental and technical risks; the critique of modern urban governance techniques based on a city/nature separation and ideas of mastery and control as impediments to responding to these problems; and finally the overcoming of impediments via creative recalibration of government by redefining the social and ecological as interconnected infrastructure. The recalibrations produced within this three-part problematization, I show, were promoted by city government and local institutions as “urban resilience,” which was presented as the unquestionable answer to Sandy's problems as they had been posed. I conclude by discussing what this problem-based case study helps us see about urban resilience, but also how it advances our understanding of the growing interest in problematization within geography, as well as implications it suggests for thinking the political in the Anthropocene.