CITIES AND DEVELOPMENT

ABSTRACT This paper starts with a “primer” on what we know about the conceptual and empirical links between development and urbanization. While historical experience of developed countries is reviewed, today's rapid urbanization in developing countries offers an intense set of challenges. Rapid urbanization requires massive population movements and enormous local and inter‐city infrastructure investments in a modern context of heavy government interventions in economies. This context raises under‐researched issues, discussed in the second part of the paper. First concerns the spatial form of development. How much development should be focused in mega‐cities, or huge urban clusters, as opposed to being more spatially dispersed, a critical question facing China and India today? How do we conceptualize and measure both the benefits and costs of increased urban concentration; and how are they linked to a country's evolving national industrial composition? Second, what is the evolution of spatial income inequality under massive rural‐urban migration? Is inequality heightened today relative to the past by national government policies which “favor” certain cities and regions and by local government policies in those cities that may try to deflect migrants by offering them poor living conditions?     

Towards Liveable Cities: Progress in the European Union Urban Environmental Agenda

The 2006 “Thematic Strategy on the Urban Environment” is the first piece of official European Union (EU) policy solely focused on the urban environment. It follows a process of several years in which the EU has tried to promote an integrated approach to urban management. During the 2005–2007 “Liveable Cities” project, reflection was given to the “Thematic Strategy”. This resulted in important critiques on the EU's approach to the urban environment. Explaining how the initial top-down approach chosen by the EU contributed to the perceived “failure” of the “Thematic Strategy”, suggestions are made for alternative approaches to the creation of liveable cities in Europe.     

Urban Policies for the Creative Industries: A European Comparison

Abstract

Although the development of creative industries (CI) has formed into extensive and significant phenomenon in European cities, the conceptualization and generalization of these practices and policies is still rather weak. In addition to the attempts to explain the formation of these kinds of practices in the cities and discuss the path-dependent character of CI policies, the challenging task is to identify the main alternatives and inherent logic of CI policies, especially due to the existing rich and diverse experiences of European cities. This article aims to build a typology of the policy practices relating to CI. We make use of an “ideal types” approach, which focuses on determining a limited number of parameters to characterize alternative CI policies in different (European) cities; this is based on how one kind of CI policy practice can be distinguished from another. The article examines how the CI policies in four post-socialist cities (three of which are located in the Baltic region) contrast with the policies found in a range of other cities in Europe.     

SOVIET POPULATION CHANGE AND CITY GROWTH 1970-79: A PRELIMINARY REPORT

The total, urban and rural population of major civil divisions of the Soviet Union and the population of cities over 100,000 are analyzed and mapped on the basis of preliminary results of the 1979 census. Total population growth rates declined during the 1970–79 intercensal period compared with the 1959–70 period while urbanization continued apace, although unevenly on a regional basis. The Slavic and other western republics, which show the highest urbanization levels of 60 percent and more, were also characterized by the lowest overall growth rates of 6 to 8 percent. Rural population declined almost everywhere outside a southwestern belt of high growth extending from parts of the southern Ukraine through Transcaucasia to Central Asia. Among large cities, moderate growth continues among cities with a multifunctional economy; high rates are evident in cities with major current industrial projects (automotive, for example) and in oil production regions; low rates are typical of some coal-mining and steelmaking centers. (For another report on the 1979 census, see “News Notes,” Soviet Geography, September 1979.)     

基于遥感数据的中亚五国城市时空扩展变化研究

借助遥感与GIS技术,以1990年LandsatTM和2000年Landsat ETM+遥感影像为数据来源,提取中亚5国首都城市建设用地信息。计算1990年和2000年中亚5国首都城市的城市扩展强度、城市年扩展速率及城市形状紧凑度,对中亚地区五国城市扩展的时空变化进行定量分析。结果表明:1990年和2000年,中亚5国首都城市扩展强度指数和城市扩展速度差距较大,其中阿什哈巴德的扩展强度指数和城市扩展速度最大,分别为0.93、4.6,而最小的是杜尚别,分别只有0.001、2.6,二者相差悬殊。而紧凑度变化幅度不大,2000年,杜尚别、塔什干的紧凑度较大,分别为0.6、0.46,其城市结构更为紧凑,用地集约程度增大,而阿斯塔纳、比什凯克和阿什哈巴德城市结构相对较为松散。同时,中亚五国首都城市空间向外扩张、向内填充的强度、方向各不相同,从而呈现出各自的扩展特点。     

Mapping schools' NAPLAN results: a spatial inequality of school outcomes in Australia

This article identifies spatial dimensions of educational outcomes using maps of the 2016 Grade 5 reading results for Australia's National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy for all Australian schools. A geographical information system (GIS) was used to overlay schools' results onto suburbs' advantage or disadvantage to visualise spatial patterns. We then examined the extent to which school results “cluster” in socio‐economically advantaged and disadvantaged suburbs and considered the consistency of spatial patterns for results across major cities. That work illustrates both how GIS can foreground educational inequality and how “the spatial” is more than corollary for student socio‐economic status. Results show substantial differences between urban and remote areas and towns of different size. Maps of cities visualise spatial “clustering” patterns of school results, with most schools in advantaged suburbs having high results and almost no schools in disadvantaged suburbs having high results. Educational outcomes strongly align to local socio‐demographic characteristics, and parallel host communities’ levels of advantage or disadvantage. Differences between public and private schools are less significant than within‐sector differences for schools in advantaged or disadvantaged locales. Patterns in all cities are consistent—schools in advantaged suburbs predominantly have high results, whereas non‐government schools generally perform better than government schools in disadvantaged suburbs. Most concerning is the persistent and increasing trajectory of results in advantaged, and more so in disadvantaged suburbs, of all cities since the first National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy in 2008. Ameliorating spatial inequality between primary schools is one of the greatest challenges for Australians.     

China’s urban ideology: new towns,creation cities,and contested landscapes of memory

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the city as a technology of socialist party-state planning and government and urbanization as a messy social process over which the state struggles for control. It also calls for a recognition of the ways that ideology itself has shifted dramatically in China, from the Mao-era centrality and coherence of class struggle and its overriding goal of proletarianization to a much less coherent post-reform message of “stability”. The paper begins with a brief discussion of ideology and Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” in a Chinese register. It then considers the film 24 City, directed by Jia Zhangke, as a template for understanding urban spaces as sites of conflict between the city as an ideological device and urbanization as a social process. New urban spaces are then explored in an effort to tease out their complex and contradictory ideological renderings. I conclude with an argument about the openness and contradictions of China’s urban spaces and how an ideological analysis can resist the kind of theoretical closure that much work on urbanization in China seems to aim for.     

Rescaled “Rebel Cities”, Nationalization,and the Bourgeois Utopia: Dialectics Between Urban Social Movements and Regulation for Japan's Homeless

Urban social movements (USMs) and regulation have co‐evolved in Japan to deal with homelessness, spatializaing their politics on the national and subnational scales. The author first theorizes these USM–regulation relationships as scale‐oriented dialectics between two opposing forces—“commoning and othering”—both of which in my view are always internalized in today's “rebel cities” (Harvey 2012, Rebel Cities, Verso). Then, he analyzes two trajectories of USMs that attempted commoning—ie radical opening up of public goods/spaces within “zones of weakness” (Lefebvre 2009a )—against policing and workfare disciplines. The author detects “rescaling” dialectics in the case of Yokohama and “nationalizing” dialectics in the case of Tokyo. Lastly, through exploring and refreshing Engels's notion of the (petit‐)bourgeois utopia, the author concludes that our commoning projects and imaginaries are constrained by capitalist urban form that spatially others the homeless; but truly revolutionary moments of commoning emerge whenever people—even temporarily—conquer the fetishism of the public/private binary embedded in this urban form.     

世纪之交中国城市体系的结构变动与特征

20世纪90年代中国城市体系出现了一些新特点,突出的表现为:城市规模集中程度趋于下降,大城市和中等城市在城市体系中的地位加强;城市空间分布总体上呈"东密西疏"的格局,但城市组团现象明显,且城市分布的不平衡性进一步增强,沿海地带和铁路枢纽地区出现了都市带;我国城市普遍存在生产性职能强,服务性职能弱的特点,多数城市职能结构相似程度较高,但同时也有一定数量的城市职能结构存在较大差异。     

Green cities? Urbanization,trade, and the environment

Is urbanization good for the environment? This paper establishes a simple core–periphery model with monocentric cities, which comprises key forces that shape the structure and interrelation of cities to study the impact of the urban evolution on the environment. We focus on global warming and the potential of unfettered market forces to economize on emissions. The model parameters are chosen to match the dichotomy between average “large” and “small” cities in the urban geography of the United States, and the sectoral greenhouse gas emissions recorded for the United States. Based on numerical analyzes we find that a forced switch to a system with equally sized cities reduces total emissions. Second, any city driver which pronounces the asymmetry between the core and the periphery drives up emissions in the total city system, too, and the endogenous adjustment of the urban system accounts for the bulk of the change in emissions. Third, none of the city drivers gives rise to an urban environmental Kuznets curve according to our numerical simulations. Finally, the welfare‐maximizing allocation tends to involve dispersion of cities and the more so the higher is the marginal damage from pollution.     

Urban geography and protest mobilization in Africa

Urbanization has long been seen by scholars and policymakers as a disruptive process that can contribute to social and political unrest, yet there is little cross-national quantitative empirical research on the topic. In this paper we provide a comprehensive analysis of the links between urban geography and the incidence of protests (i.e. demonstrations, riots and strikes) in African countries since 1990. In contrast to previous studies, we are careful to distinguish between urban population scale effects, urban population ratio effects, population rate-of-change effects and urban population distribution effects. We also provide an explicit test of the long-standing hypothesis that ‘over-urbanization’ increases the risk of civil unrest. Employing multilevel negative binomial models that control for key political and economic variables we find that urban population size and the number of large cities in a country are both positively and significantly associated protest incidence. By contrast, we find that a country's level of urbanization is negatively associated with protest incidence and reject the over-urbanization hypothesis: higher levels of urbanization are associated with less frequent protests at all income levels. We find no evidence that the pace of urban population growth or urban primacy significantly influence protest mobilization. In sum, our results provide a nuanced picture of the relationship between urban geography and protest incidence that challenges conventional wisdom and contemporary hyperbole about the dangers of ‘rapid urbanization’ in Africa in particular, and developing countries more generally.     

Postcolonial polar cities? New indigenous and cosmopolitan urbanness in the Arctic

ABSTRACT

The arrival into geography, and especially urban geography, of a frame of questioning coming from postcolonial studies has contributed to a fascinating debate about what a “postcolonial” city is and how the urban duality between ethnically, socially, and spatially segregated “European” towns and “native” settlements is being reformulated and transformed. Obviously, Arctic cities are not postcolonial in the political sense of being independent from the former colonial centre – although this process may be under way in Greenland – but they have seen a progressive move from a Eurocentric culture toward greater hybridization. This article looks into two new trends that contribute to making Arctic cities postcolonial: first, the arrival of indigenous peoples in cities and the concomitant diminution of the division between Europeans/urbanites and natives/rurals; and second, the arrival of labour migrants from abroad, which has given birth to a more plural and cosmopolitan citizenry. It advances the idea that Arctic cities are now in a position to play a “decolonizing” role, in the sense of progressively erasing the purely European aspect of the city and making it both more local and rooted (through indigenous communities) and more global and multicultural (through foreign labour migrants).     

Suburbanization and sprawl in post-socialist Belgrade and Sofia

The goal of this research is to examine the processes of suburbanization and sprawl in two post-socialist capital cities in Southeast Europe – Belgrade, Serbia and Sofia, Bulgaria. Our analysis begins with a survey of relevant historical developments in the two cities, which illustrates the impact of major political, economic and social drivers on urban development processes and form. We follow this with an empirical study aimed at identifying contemporary features of peri-urban processes occurring in the two cities. Specifically, we explore spatial patterns, general population trends and changes in urban densities. Our study confirms earlier observations by other researchers that processes of suburbanization are occurring in Belgrade and Sofia. Yet this research goes further and emphasizes the specific combination of conditions inherited from the era of state socialism and the features of South-east European urban culture. Thus regarding the form of urban expansion, we observe relatively weak trends of sprawl with strong local specifics. On this basis, we discuss our empirical results with the objective of identifying the specifics of studied processes in Belgrade and Sofia as a grounds for the articulation of an appropriate policy framework.     

The Istanbul Modern Art Museum: An Urban Regeneration Project?

Abstract

In the 2000s, contemporary art institutions have flourished in Istanbul. New museums (mostly private) and art galleries have been created; biennials and fairs of contemporary art have attracted a growing number of visitors. To what extent could this fostering of culture be linked with the “Bilbao effect”? To what extent are the promoters of these cultural investments betting on economic development and urban regeneration through these projects? Focusing on the Istanbul Modern Art Museum (IM), this article analyses the process of its creation and its potential impact on its environment. It argues that the development of culture investments in modern arts in Turkey is mainly due to the private initiatives of large industrial groups and the wealthiest families, most of the time with political support. More than the expected economic impact of cultural investments, the main reason for these public–private collaborations is the symbolic dimension that contemporary art provides to a country which strives to be perceived as modern, developed and European. From the IM to Istanbul European Capital of Culture 2010, cultural investments are a means of strengthening an international image in the context of the “membership” negotiations between “Turkey and the European Union”.     

Sustainable Communities? A Comparative Perspective on Urban Housing in the European Union

This paper examines the sustainability of urban housing in the European Union. It outlines a number of key criteria for assessing the sustainability of urban housing including mixed-use developments, higher residential densities, high-quality dwellings and neighbourhoods, affordability and food production. Utilizing the 2007 tranche of the European Quality of Life Survey, it finds significant variations between countries in the sustainability of urban housing and communities and highlights the leaders and laggards in this regard. The relative success of urban areas in Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Finland deserves some additional research, although there is scope for considerable improvement even in these “leader” countries. The paper highlights significant problems with housing and communities in some urban locations which must significantly retract from (a) the quality of life of residents in these locations and (b) the sustainability of their cities.     

Using PP GIS interviews to understand residents’ perspective of European ecological network Natura 2000

ABSTRACT

Sustainable nature-based tourism was brought to the public's attention as a solution to the problem of economic diversification in Central and Eastern European (CEE) communities included in European Ecological Network – N2000. However, Natura 2000 tourism development has not yet proven to be an effective way to boost local economies and the notion of sustainable tourism based on Natura 2000 resources has been challenged by residents of the CEE communities. The study goal was to explore issues concerning Natura 2000 tourism from the perspective of local residents within three municipalities of Ma?opolska in Poland to determine if Natura 2000 is perceived by local residents as a valuable tourism asset. We employed a mix-mode methodology: an in-depth interview and public participation GIS mapping task. The study results highlight several areas of concern regarding resident perspectives of Natura 2000-based tourism: first, the misconception that residents need and want nature-based tourism when other economic activities provide sufficient income; second, the misconception that Natura 2000 is considered a valuable asset when other tourism attractions in a municipality attract more visitors; third, the residents misconception of nature-based tourism itself; and last but not least the importance of engaging with residents when assessing the potential for Natura 2000 tourism. These findings can assist policy-makers and tourism managers with prioritizing avenues for further action.     

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.     

Youth geographies of urban estrangement in the Canadian city: risk management,race relations and the ‘sacrificial stranger’

This paper explores the impact of urban social divisions and changing race relations on the experiences of disadvantaged youth living on the periphery of two Canadian cities: Vancouver and Toronto. We analyze a cross-national subsample of 60 disadvantaged youths’ perceptions of urban social conflict and changing race relations in their city and school. We raise the larger question of how and why economically disadvantaged young people might embody particular understandings of safety, race, the other and security in different spatial registers of the city. We utilize an ethnographic methodology drawing from diverse but interrelated fields: border studies, the phenomenology of estrangement and a materialist version of critical race studies [(Ahmed, S. 1999. “Home and Away Narratives of Migration and Strangeness.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329–347, Ahmed, S. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Ahmed, S. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge; Kearney, R., and V. E. Taylor. 2005. “A Conversation with Richard Kearney.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6 (2): 17–26)].     

Post-Socialist Transition in Serbia and Its Unsustainable Path

Since the beginning of its post-socialist transition, Serbia has been going through a major political and economic crisis, thus isolated from the mainstream trends of the European integration and convergence. The country's comparative advantages and competitiveness have worsened in terms of two key aspects, that is, its structural qualities and its territorial capital. The economic recovery after the year 2000 assumed a form of “growth without development”, mostly based on poorly legitimized transition reforms, whereby Serbia's inherent unsustainable spatial development patterns have been perpetuated. Today, Serbia finds itself in the position of an economic, ecological and financial semi-colony of a few powerful international political, economic and financial actors, paralleled by the collapse of its strategic thinking, research and governance. Rather bleak development prospects for Serbia call for prompt further research on predictable development scenarios. Therefore, we have discussed the key issues in the current planning system and practice and analysed the basic elements of the prospective future using the scenario approach.     

“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.