Global flows and everyday violence in urban space: The port-city of Buenaventura,Colombia

Buenaventura, Colombia's rapidly expanding Pacific port, is simultaneously a city of violence. Focusing the linkages between local violence and the port economy, this contribution explores the role the port's global interconnections play for Buenaventura as a site of violence. In which ways does everyday violence shape urban spatial practices, particularly movement? How do every day coping strategies, reacting to a violent context, produce urban space? I suggest an analysis that links the production of urban space through everyday practices to the notion of violence as inherent to urban power relations on the one, and to the role of global flows of goods in urban space on the other hand. The main argument is that, global interconnections through the port are not decoupled from, but rather constitute a condition for violence in Buenaventura, particularly in neighbourhoods next to port terminals. This urban space is constituted both by daily violence and by stretching along global supply chains. Both violence and the secured, off-access port spaces shape, transform and limit inhabitants' mobility, while they enable global flows. I identify coping strategies such as mapping safe spaces, accompaniment, adaptation of movement to zig-zag patterns, and organised spatial strategies. The article contributes to recent debates on violence and the everyday, and urban space shaped by violent global-local encounters.     

On the edge: A tale of skaters and urban governance

The 'problem' of skating has been conflated with a 'problem' with young people in public spaces, reflecting a rise in fear of crime from the mid-twentieth century and referencing more general questions about public space and citizenship. My task in this paper is to highlight some of the tensions between skating and urban governance in Franklin Square, Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania in Australia. This task is indebted to ideas about governance and citizenship advanced by Nikolas Rose; about the proper city as conceived by Michel de Certeau; and about fortress strategies and species of spaces promulgated by Stephen Flusty. Franklin Square functions in two ways in this work. First, its examination encourages consideration of local cases. Second, it can be deployed as a heuristic device through which to explore the edges of public space and citizenship. The essay is intended to make two contributions to social and cultural geography, one enlarging on some well-rehearsed debates about situated and contested socio-spatial relations in what I hope are innovative ways, the other unsettling particular strategies that place skaters 'on the edge' and yet draw them into particular domains of citizenship via specific practices of urban governance.     

Children’s museums as cultural development strategies for urban revitalization

Cities have increasingly invested in cultural institutions in hopes of revitalizing their urban centers. Critical of the value of these expenditures, scholars have called for an examination of the various types of cultural institutions in which cities have invested, to determine whether they are capable of simultaneously serving the economic, physical, and social goals of urban revitalization. In response to that call, I examine whether the children’s museum, a distinct type of cultural investment, is able to provide this range of public benefit. To do so, I draw on secondary sources to examine the origins, development, and current practices of children’s museum and present an illustrative example of a children’s museum that is intended to serve as a catalyst for urban revitalization in a small city in the USA. I contend that children’s museums are worthy recipients of public funding because they are simultaneously able to address these diverse agendas.     

‘Mr Bourne's dilemma’. Consumer culture,property speculation and department store demise: the rise and fall of Bourne and Hollingsworth on London's Oxford Street

This paper explores the twentieth-century rise and fall of the traditional department store Bourne and Hollingsworth in London's Oxford Street as a means of re-examining the historical geographies of metropolitan consumption cultures. The research moves away from a preoccupation with urban retail's novelty and spectacle towards a consideration of the more conventional and conservative kinds of consumption that have been a vital part of the retail ecology of many major cities in the twentieth century. The paper analyses the intersections of different dimensions of the history of metropolitan consumption: with a culturalist focus on consumer identity and urban microgrographies; but also an examination of this as a family-owned, paternalistic business, and as a material space, both as a building designed and refurbished by its owners, management, architects and shopfitters, and as a particular site within the routes and flows of the West End. The final approach to Bourne and Hollingsworth as urban property, as a distinctive form of capital asset in the city, allows a new understanding of the vulnerability of this kind of retailing by the later twentieth century. The study shows that an emphasis on the significance of cultures of consumption provides at best a partial explanation for changes in the landscapes of consumption: it is argued that cities are the sites of complex intersections between cultural practices and other kinds of geography, in this case those of asset values and opportunities for property speculation.     

Revenge and Injustice in the Neoliberal City: Uncovering Masculinist Agendas

The literature on the Western city as a site of "actually existing neoliberalism" has done much to expose the injustices wrought by new modes of urban governance. In particular, this literature has highlighted the increasing exclusion of minority groups from the spaces of the central city. To date, however, there has been little sustained exploration of the gendered dimensions of this process. In this paper I offer such a gendered reading, suggesting that neoliberal policy serves to recentre masculinity in the cityscape at the same time that it encourages capital accumulation. I demonstrate this by noting some of the forms of revenge currently being exacted on prostitute women in Western cities, reading such actions as symptomatic of urban policies that serve both capital and the phallus. In conclusion, I suggest that the conceptual framework of neoliberalism is useful for making sense of contemporary urban restructuring, but only if we recognise that the resulting city can be mapped along axes other than those fixated on capital and class.     

“This neighbourhood deserves an espresso bar too”: Neoliberalism,Racialization, and Urban Policy

In the Dutch and more broadly European context, urban policymaking has generally been studied through the conceptual lens of neoliberalism. While important, I argue that this neoliberal lens does not fully account for the design and impact of urban policies currently transforming cities like Amsterdam. Following Mustafa Dikeç's (2007, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy) understanding of urban policy as place‐making practices that normalize particular distributions of people, authorities and spaces, I propose to focus on underlying visions of the normal and the good city that shape urban policymaking. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research on Amsterdam's “notorious” Diamantbuurt, I argue that this vision is informed by neoliberalism and by racialized concerns with migrants and ethnic minorities. It entails particular classed and racialized preferences that normalize and underwrite the partial displacement that is underway in the neighbourhood.     

European Capital of Culture Designation as an Initiator of Urban Transformation in the Post-socialist Countries

Since 1985, the EU has designated cities as European Capital of Culture (ECOC) for 1 year at a time. Various ECOCs have used the designation as a tool to revive the city space. The cultural initiatives, such as the ECOC designation, are the EU's political instruments, whose significance has increased during the recent decades, and through which the EU aims to influence various political objectives, such as the unity of the Union and economic growth. These particular objectives were brought into the focus of the ECOC initiative during the Eastern enlargement of the Union. Since 2007, various Central and Eastern European cities have aimed to regenerate their economy through large construction projects, developing and repairing public spaces, investing in creative industries and transforming the image of the city, with the help of the ECOC brand. On one hand, the investments have recreated the cities with a unified modern look and an up-to-date atmosphere. On the other hand, the ECOC designation can be criticized for homogenizing the urban spaces in European cities by forcing the cities to follow certain criteria and expecting them to obey certain cultural values and trends in the urban development.     

Heritage on the move. Cross-cultural heritage as a response to globalisation,mobilities and multiple migrations

Globalisation is creating new perceptions of social and cultural spaces as well as complex and diverse pictures of migration flows. This leads to changes in expressions of culture, identity, and belonging and thus the role of heritage today. I argue that common or dominant notions of heritage cannot accommodate these new cultural identities-in-flux created by and acting in a transplanetary networked and culturally deterritorialized world. To support my arguments, I will introduce ‘Third Culture Kids’ or ‘global nomads’, defined as a particular type of migrant community whose cultural identities are characterised high patterns of global mobility during childhood. My research focus on the uses and meaning of cultural heritage among this onward migrant community, and it reveals that these global nomads both use common forms of heritage as a cultural capital to crisscross cultures, and designate places of mobility, like airports, to recall collective memories as people on the move. These results pose additional questions to the traditional use of heritage, and suggest others visions of heritage today, as people’s cultural identities turn to be now more characterised by mobility, cultural flux, and belonging to horizontal networks.     

Cultivating belonging: refugees,urban gardens,and placemaking in the Midwest,U.S.A.

In the aftermath of failed urban renewal projects and the decline of central cities, community gardens have become increasingly popular in urban planning, public health, and environmental circles. However, gardens still occupy a tenuous and contradictory position in the city. While urban gardens are bounded spaces, they are also dynamic places where different understandings of (agri)culture, land use, and belonging are enacted and contested. In this paper, we identify three distinct ways in which gardens in a small Midwestern city are used and experienced by refugee gardeners and local officials: the material garden, the imagined garden, and the community’s garden. The material garden, embodied in the biophysical aspects of the soil, seeds, and resources needed to cultivate plants, shapes what can grow in the garden and the transformations by refugee agricultural practices. While planners tend to see urban gardens as temporary spaces that can promote limited pathways of migrant incorporation, gardeners practice, and imagine gardening differently through social, cultural, and economic interactions. We argue that these practices challenge traditional understandings of nature and urban planning, and can promote inclusive understandings of agriculture, cities, and sustainability, embodied in the ideal of the community’s garden.     

Globalising Economic Governance,Political Projects,and Spatial Imaginaries: Insights from Four Australasian1 Cities

This paper explores how territorial economic governance is discursively constituted in a globalising and neoliberalising world. It acknowledges both the increasingly recognised formative role of spatial imaginaries in economic interventions and the workings of co‐constitutive political projects that link particular imaginaries with political ambitions and policy strategies. Embracing recent calls for comparative ethnographic urban research at the local‐global interface, it explores currently dominant spatial imaginaries across the four Australasian cities of Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Based on multiple qualitative methods, this study claims that a considerable number of actor's spatial associations and reference points can be related to particular city‐specific governmental projects; Auckland's Super‐City, Sydney's Global and Green City, Melbourne's Liveable City, and Perth's Vibrant City. It is demonstrated how discursive governance techniques such as ‘story‐telling’, benchmarking, and policy transfer have been pivotal in the activation, circulation, and performance of those spatial imaginaries and their transformation into temporarily dominant visions for strategic urban interventions aimed at repositioning urban actors, spaces, and activities. While spatial imaginaries can be related to differently framed global aspirations, the effects of spatial political projects on urban governance and investment trajectories differ significantly across space. Theoretically, the paper stresses the importance of particular conceptions of territorial relations and time‐ and place‐specific institutional mediation in shaping context‐dependent discursive material governance alignments.     

Global Media Cities in a World-wide Urban Network

This article examines the link between cities and culture from the point of view of the production of cultural goods, including media products. It focuses on the institutional structure of present-day cultural production and the media industry and on their geographical organization at the local and global levels. The cultural economy is a prime mover for globalization processes in the urban system, in which cultural production clusters act as local nodes in the global networks of the large media groups. The models frequently used to analyse the global city system will be supplemented and partially modified by an empirical analysis of the 'world media cities'. The analysis of the world media cities enables those locations to be identified, from which globalization in the spheres of culture and the media proceeds and is 'produced' in practical terms. Global city research has predominantly emphasized the role of advanced producer services—in contrast this article concludes that for the process of globalization the globally operating media firms are at least as influential as the global providers of corporate services, because they create a cultural market space of global dimensions, on the basis of which the specialized global service providers can ensure the practical management of global production and market networks.     

Urban transformation in Istanbul and Budapest: Neoliberal governmentality in the EU's semi-periphery and its limits

By discussing the variety and variability of urban neoliberal governmentality and its limits in the semi-periphery of the advanced capitalist world, the article aims to explore the embeddedness of neoliberalism at the dawn of the new millennium. Cities that are increasingly becoming parts of the global economy, despite being on the periphery of advanced capitalism, host a myriad of diverse forms of neoliberal governmentality in terms of spatial change. Although responding with enthusiasm to the increasing mobility of capital and the internationalization of investments through gentrification plans, the current transformative efforts of Istanbul and Budapest under two conservative governments indicate, for instance, the re-invention of authoritarianism so that these cities serve the purposes of their national leaders. This development signals a hybrid form of governmentality that combines neoliberalism with illiberal logics and manifests similar processes in different locations despite disparities in scale, local needs and characteristics. The article further argues that since such urban transformations take place within the neo-conservative leaders' battles to acquire cultural and social capital, they create potential to make both metropolises the new rebel cities of Europe, albeit with divergent levels of resistance.     

Just this Once: urban Ireland in film

By focusing on the city of Dublin as both setting and character, Once, written and directed by Dublin native John Carney, portrays urban Ireland in the global context. Using a series of replacements – replacing population loss with in-migration, and replacing parochial ideals with multicultural ones – the film re-places Dublin, both representing the city it has become and providing space for continuing growth and change. For Dublin, as elsewhere, change enters as global flows of information and people become part of the city. Rather than conforming to the traditional global power of American culture, Bord Scannán na hÉireann (Irish Film Board) is striking its own global poses, producing and distributing films that construct an urban Irishness for international audiences. In my article, I examine how this award-winning Irish film constructs Irish urban identity in the face of globalism's cultural flattening.     

Aesthetic Dissent: Urban Redevelopment and Political Belonging in Luanda,Angola

Over the previous decade, African cities experienced a wave of frenzied construction driven by imaginations of world‐city status. While these projects provoked new discussions about African urbanism, the literature on them has focused more on the paperwork of planning than actual urban experiences. This article addresses this lacuna by investigating residents' reactions to the post‐conflict building boom in Luanda, Angola. I show that Luandans' held highly ambivalent orientations towards the emerging city. Their views were shaped by suspicions about pacts between Angolan elites and international capital that recapitulated longstanding tensions over national belonging. These concerns were voiced via discussions of the very aesthetics of the new city. Buildings became catalysts for expressions of dissent that put into question the very project of state‐driven worlding. The paper therefore argues that the politics of aesthetics are central to grasping the contested understandings of urbanism currently emerging in various African cities.     

Urban Villages in China: A 2008 Survey of Migrant Settlements in Beijing

A team of Beijing-based urban planning specialists is joined by a noted American geographer to present the results and analyze their 2008 survey of migrant settlements in China's capital city. The paper examines the living and work conditions as well as housing consumption behavior of migrants in Chinese cities, focusing on chengzhongcun or urban villages—rural settlements that have been transformed into poor living spaces for migrant workers. It finds that although migrant workers are willing to pay the same or higher rent per unit of space, they consume much smaller dwelling spaces than local residents. Estimations of the Mincerian wage equation and of a housing demand equation show that migrants' small space consumption is a function not only of low income but also of a reluctance to spend their earnings in the city. The findings reinforce the notion that migrant workers consider the city as a place to work rather than a home in which to live. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: J610, O150, R210, R230. 14 figures, 5 tables, 34 references, 1 appendix.     

Domesticating the church: the reuse of urban churches as loft living in the post-secular city

In recent years, numerous mainline Christian denominations throughout Canada have sold their places of worship in the real estate market in response to declines in religious membership and participation. At the same time, a growing demand for creative residential spaces by a group of the new middle class encourages the redevelopment of churches into upscale lofts, a practice connected to but divergent from the post-industrial loft living made popular in cities like New York. In this paper, I explore how the production and consumption of churches as lofts represents a novel terrain of private urban redevelopment. Church lofts are an emergent form of housing and the latest frontier in the remaking of material, cultural and religious landscapes in the post-secular city – a context where novel forms of secularity take shape alongside new expressions of religion. With an empirical focus on Toronto, I investigate how ‘redundant’ worship spaces are appropriated and transformed into private domestic spaces of commodified religion and heritage. Rebuilt as unique but exclusive places to live, church lofts are part of a secular upscaling of the central city, a process that increasingly remakes the city as a place of capital reinvestment, middle-class colonization and socio-secular upgrading.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

Knowledge production and border nationalism in northern Mexico

ABSTRACT. This article examines the transformations in the cultural sphere of Tijuana, one of Mexico's largest and fastest growing cities, in order to emphasise the border as a crucial site of nation‐building in northern Mexico. I propose that cultural and intellectual actors, through particular sites, are changing the way the city is positioned in relation to the national political space of Mexico. Two institutions are considered specifically, both of which are integral to the propagation of an array of representations of Tijuana. In looking to articulations of nationhood and practices of knowledge production, this article delineates how urban identities reclaim and reconfigure key aspects of national identity in a region heretofore unrecognised as central to the creation of a national imaginary.     

The Gender,Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Gentrification,assassination and forgetting in Mexico: a feminist Marxist tale

In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics – promoted by the Mexican and US governments – for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the working poor. By combining a feminist focus on the daily struggle of social reproduction with a Marxist emphasis on accumulation by dispossession, I show how this official ‘forgetting’ segues with an international gentrification plan in downtown Ciudad Juárez that seeks to expand the rent gap by denying place, legitimacy and legal status to the working women and their families who have made this border city famous as a hub of global manufacturing. As such, I argue that the social struggles against the official forgetting are struggles against a violent political economy that generates value via a devaluation of the spaces of the working poor, even of the spaces of their literal existence.     

全球化视角下的世界城市网络理论

城市诞生时就相互保持着联系,只有将城市纳入世界城市网络中才能正确把握城市产生和发展的本质。1980年以来在第三次全球化浪潮的背景下,世界生产要素和产品市场开始整合,世界城市的兴起是国际劳动分工在空间上的表达。Cohen、Friedmann、Sassen、Castells和Taylor等学者提出并发展了世界城市理论,世界城市网络理论已经成为研究城市问题的重要框架。联系数据的缺乏长期制约了世界城市网络的实证研究,二十世纪九十年代中期以来学者们创新性地解决了方法论的问题,对世界城市网络的各个层面进行了实证研究。