Entrepreneurial Urbanism After the Crisis: Ireland's “Bad Bank” and the Redevelopment of Dublin's Docklands

The development of Dublin's Docklands was paradigmatic of the speculative storm that overwhelmed the Irish economy between the late 1990s and the crisis of 2008. It also served as a textbook case of entrepreneurial urbanism, with the development agency driving private‐led development on a former industrial and waterfront site. Following the crash, however, the key actors have been decimated: the development agency itself, the developers and the banks. This article traces the re‐emergence of Docklands development in order to analyse post‐crisis urban development. I argue that the latest phase of development reproduces key aspects of entrepreneurial urbanism, but also includes novel aspects. In particular, the National Asset Management Agency, a “bad bank” set up to rescue the financial sector, emerges as a major force. The article contributes to debates on urban development after the crash, and the specific relationship between post‐crisis entrepreneurial urbanism and financialization.     

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.     

Evolving enclave urbanism in China and its socio-spatial implications: the case of Guangzhou

Enclave urbanism has deep historical roots in China, from the earliest forms of enclave residence, i.e. the walled city and courtyard housing, to the contemporary intricate mosaic of enclaves comprising danwei (work unit) compounds, gated commodity housing estates and migrant enclaves. Yet the evolution of enclave urbanism is not simply a convergence with Western urban forms, nor is it a process of historical succession or cultural inertia. The story of enclave urbanism is far more complicated. Exploring China's evolving urban enclaves and their socio-economic implications would add much richness and diversity to the international debates on enclave urbanism. The first half of the paper discusses the evolving processes and dynamics of China's enclave urbanism, with special reference to Guangzhou. The complex dynamics of China's enclave urbanism are evolving around various socio-economic, cultural, institutional and political forces, within which institutional arrangements for urban spatial organisation and social control are playing a fundamental role. To present a fuller picture of the plural socio-spatial connotations of China's enclave urbanism, the second half of the paper unpacks the heterogeneity of urban fabrics and examines how different social groups perceive and represent the social aspects of their lives. Featuring a high degree of heterogeneity within and between different types of neighbourhoods, enclave urbanism in China has entailed a complex relationship between urban form and social fabric. In addition, for various social groups, urban enclave living is endowed with very different social meanings. In gated commodity housing estates, enclave living is an expression of a safe, high-quality and privileged lifestyle. In urban villages, it is a compromise choice involving makeshift urban living resulting from suppressed rights to the city. And, in danwei compounds, it is a lingering lifestyle to which people used to be collectively assigned with no exercise of their own choice and from which they are now emotionally estranged.     

Autonomy,Erasure, and Persistence in the Urban Gardening Commons

Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal's former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualising urban gardens as commons‐in‐the‐making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one hand, and the state erasure, overwriting or construction of top‐down commons on the other. While showing that urban gardening forges commons of varying persistence, we also demonstrate the ways through which the commons are always closely entwined with processes of enclosure. We further argue that urban gardening commons are divergent and cannot be judged against any abstract ideal of the commons. In conclusion, we suggest that urban gardening commons do not have a “common” in common.     

By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014

When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega‐event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”. Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of “necessity” combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside—a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods. CPOs can be used progressively, for example to abrogate the power of slum landlords for social democratic ends, yet with the increasing urbanisation of capital they more often target marginalised neighbourhoods in the pursuit of land and property valorisation. The growing use of CPOs as an exceptional measure in urbanisation, we argue, requires urgent attention in urban political struggles and policy practice.     

Incipient urbanism at the Early Andean center of Khonkho Wankane,Bolivia

Abstract

For decades archaeologists have recognized that Khonkho Wankane was an important monumental site in the Bolivian Andes, and most have interpreted it as a Tiwanaku regional center. A decade of research indicates that Khonkho Wankane was an important Late Formative center that engendered Tiwanaku’s Middle Horizon urbanism and ritual-political centrality. It was neither a Tiwanaku regional center nor Tiwanaku’s second city. Furthermore, recent research at Khonkho suggests a critique of the “one center, one polity” model of political complexity. Rather than being the singular center of a spatially bounded multi-community polity, Khonkho was one of multiple interacting Late Formative centers in an emergent macro-community that gave rise to Tiwanaku urban centrality.     

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.     

Bridging prehistory and history in the archaeology of cities

Abstract

Archaeology is ideally suited for examining the deep roots of urbanism, its materialization and physicality, and the commonalities and variability in urban experiences cross-culturally and temporally. We propose that the significant advances archaeologists have made in situating the discipline within broader urban studies could be furthered through increased dialog between scholars working on urbanism during prehistoric and historical periods, as a means of bridging concerns in the study of the past and present. We review some major themes in urban studies by presenting archaeological cases from two areas of the Americas: central Mexico and Atlantic North America. Our cases span premodern and early modern periods, and three of the four covered in greatest depth live on as cities of today. Comparison of the cases highlights the complementarity of their primary datasets: the long developmental trajectories and relatively intact urban plans offered by many prehistoric cities, and the rich documentary sources offered by historic cities.     

Barrio Women's Invited and Invented Spaces Against Urban Elitisation in Chacao,Venezuela

Outright victories against urban elitisation are rare in the current urban revolution. This article highlights how urban elitisation is confronted in Chacao, the most elite and urban part of Venezuela. Initially it reviews how this urban elitisation created the main economic, political and military strongholds of the opposition to the Bolivarian revolution. Then, in contesting it, the urban and Bolivarian revolutions feed each other through women's participation in invited and invented spaces of citizenship. From such spaces, Chacao women in their settler's movement organised struggles of insurgent citizenship to stop elitist urban renewal agendas and develop further forms of insurgent urbanism to conduct an urban renewal from below and establish a New Socialist Community for 600 families. They emerged as a revolutionary class to implement Bolivarian policies addressing the inefficiency and opportunism of the bureaucratic state and contesting urban elitisation with an anti‐capitalist and anti‐imperialist insurgent urbanism.     

Subjectification in Times of Indebtedness and Neoliberal/Austerity Urbanism

How can we analyse the (re)emergence of squatting in relation to the current housing crisis in Italy? Centred on the case of Rome, the paper theorizes this return as resulting from processes of subjectification in the housing sector linked to the raising of indebtedness as a main dispositif of capitalism under neoliberal/austerity urbanism agendas. The political economy‐oriented literature on neoliberal/austerity urbanism is bridged with the post‐Marxist approach of Maurizio Lazzarato. Debt is seen as the archetype of social relations, shaping and controlling subjectivities, making the “work on yourself” essential to the reproduction of (indebted) society. However, given the circular nature of power, indebtedness can be generative of new processes of subjectification aimed at subverting the same power relation. In this sense, the paper operationalizes the conceptualization of Foucauldian subjectification recently proposed by Judith Revel, emphasizing how subjectification always results from (1) an action/gesture and (2) a consequent deconstruction of the identity.     

单位社区杂化过程与城市性的构建

单位社区作为中国城市重要的传统社区之一,曾经是以单位制度作为组织形态和行为规范而形成的"准乡土性"社区。而在转型期,随着城市空间重构、单位制度解体与个人生活方式的转变,单位社区出现了以社区杂化过程为显著特征的制度-空间-社会的全面转型。单位社区杂化从广义上包括居民构成、社会交往、行为模式和社区认同四个维度的变化,导致了单位社区"准乡土性"的消失和"城市性"的构建。本文从城市性作为一种城市生活方式的经典理论出发,从不同维度理解单位社区杂化中城市性构建的现象与机制。     

Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism

Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a historical‐materialist theory of power, then examine particular artifacts and infrastructure to provide a critique of society. We argue that there are multiple ways of expanding this framing, including through political ecology or wider currents of Marxism. Here, we demonstrate one possibility: starting from theory and empirics in the South, specifically, African urbanism. We show how African urbanism can inform UPE and the associated research methods, theory and practice to create a more situated UPE. We begin suggesting what a situated UPE might entail: starting with everyday practices, examining diffuse forms of power, and opening the scope for radical incrementalism. © 2013 The Author. Antipode © 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd.     

Reproducing the Plot: Making Life in the Shadow of Premature Death

A protracted process of policy development has been underway in Jamaica to curtail the widespread incidence of informal settlements. Against the logic of emerging policy, this article aims to reconnect present-time unauthorised use of space to ancestral refusals of plantation land monopoly. Through ethnographic research and a reconsideration of historical texts, the article situates insecure tenure in a long history of conflict over land and livelihood—conflict that produces a boundary around the authorised use of space. That boundary is porous and mobile, the outcome of a palimpsest of colonial violence and its negation. This argument interrogates the gap between “landless” and “ownershipless”, revealing both the role of incomplete dispossession in racialised social reproduction and the spatial practices through which Jamaicans “make life” even in the shadow of premature death.     

The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics

This essay outlines a theoretical framework for investigating the links between the production of urban space (Lefebvre) and the production of ideology (Althusser) and hegemony (Gramsci) by proposing the concept of “the urban sensorium”. With a view to the aesthetics of urban experience and everyday life, this concept aligns Fredric Jameson's “postmodern” adaptation of city planner Kevin Lynch's research on “cognitive mapping” with Walter Benjamin's insights on “aestheticizing politics” in order to ask: how does urban space mediate ideology and produce hegemony while aestheticizing politics? In so doing, the spotlight falls on a conceptual constellation including four key theoretical terms: “ideology”, “aesthetics”, “mediation” and “totality”. While working through them, the essay argues that Jameson's outstanding contribution to a spatialized understanding of “postmodernism” lies above all in his Marxist (Lukácsian, Althusserian and Sartrean) theorization of mediation and totality; whereas radical students of the city can find the richest dialectical elaboration of these two concepts with special attention to space and urbanism in the oeuvre of Henri Lefebvre, especially in the recently translated The Urban Revolution.     

Metelkova as Autonomous Heterotopia

This article examines conflicts concerning urban space, focusing on relationships between autonomous space and neoliberal urbanism through the empirical example of the cultural centre AKC Metelkova Mesto in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Through a thematic discourse analysis of activist interviews and collective statements by activist groups connected to Metelkova, research questions concern how urban conflict is constructed from the vantage point of autonomous space; what role autonomous space is assigned in relation to such conflict; and how tensions and antagonisms within the autonomous space can be understood. Theoretically we engage in a reinterpretation of the notion of heterotopia in conjunction with critical urban theory, analysing Metelkova as an autonomous heterotopia. Further, we argue that theoretisations of autonomous spaces need to consider experiences from Central and Eastern Europe, in which the conditions are shaped and constructed in conjunction with particular configurations of abruptly implemented neoliberal governance and the rise of the authoritarianism.     

A state of suspended animation: Urban sanitation and water access in Nogales,Sonora

With its hilly terrain and fast-paced growth, Nogales, Sonora, located on the US-Mexico border, is an extremely challenging place for sanitation and potable water provision wherein access to basic services is highly uneven. The labor demands of maquiladoras (typically, foreign-owned assembly plants) draw a steady influx of newcomers to the city, many of whom must turn to land “invasion” to create spaces for affordable housing. With tacit government approval, invasions occur on inexpensive, often topographically precarious land. Officials tend to frame these spaces as “illegal,” and, by extension, those who inhabit them, as existing outside the realm of formal governance. Despite such views, in this paper we understand the distinctions drawn between so-called formal and informal urban governance to unfold along two key axes: regularization of informal land titles and piped water and sanitation. We show how colonia residents feel caught in a state of suspended animation between hope for full urban service provision and trepidation that it will ever reach them. This ambiguity is visible in residents' and government officials' interactions with each other and the public services landscape, and in the unevenness of services provision. We critique the claim that such ambiguousness reflects an instrumental approach within official planning. Instead, we draw from state theory within political geography and political ecology to show how ‘the state’ is an emergent effect of the processes of inclusion and exclusion, an effect constantly destabilized by Nogales's precarious physical geography and uneven urban services grid. Reconceptualizing authority and ambiguity holds quite different implications for the struggle for urban services provision.     

Revanchist Urbanism Heads South: The Regulation of Indigenous Beggars and Street Vendors in Ecuador

Abstract: Much of the discussion surrounding neoliberal urbanism has been empirically grounded in the North. This paper shifts the discussion south to focus on the regulation of indigenous street vendors and beggars in the Andean nation of Ecuador. Inspired by zero tolerance policies from the North, the cities of Quito and Guayaquil have recently initiated urban regeneration projects to cleanse the streets of informal workers, beggars, and street children. In this paper, I explore the particular and pernicious ways in which these neoliberal urban policies affect indigenous peoples in the urban informal sector. Grounded in the literature on space, race and ethnicity in the Andes, I argue that Ecuador's particular twist on revanchism is through its more transparent engagement with the project of blanqueamiento or “whitening”. I further argue that Ecuador's “refinement” of revanchist urban policies only works to displace already marginalised individuals and push them into more difficult circumstances.     

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.     

Neoliberalism and Socialisation in the Contemporary City: Opposites, Complements and Instabilities

This paper explores some dialectics of neoliberalism and socialisation in contemporary urbanism. The significance of socialisation—nonmarket cooperation between social actors—in both production and reproduction has tended to increase in the long term. Socialisation does not always take politically progressive forms, yet it always has a problematic relation with private property and class discipline. Socialisation of diverse forms grew during the long boom, but this exacerbated the classic crisis tendencies of capitalism and resulted in increasing politicisation. Neoliberalism offered a resolution of these tensions by imposing unmediated value relations and class discipline, fragmenting labour and capital and fostering depoliticisation. However, this has led to manifest inefficiencies and failure adequately to reproduce the wage relation. Many longstanding forms of socialisation have therefore been retained, if in modified forms. Moreover, substantially new forms of urban socialisation have developed in cities. This paper examines the role of business organisations, industrial clusters, top–down mobilisation of community and attempts at “joined–up” urban governance. It is argued that these fill gaps in socialisation left by neoliberalism. Their neoliberal context has largely prevented their politicisation, in particular heading off any socialist potential. Indeed, the new forms of urban socialisation have internalised neoliberal social relations and often deepened social divisions. Thus, paradoxically, they can achieve the essential aims of neoliberalism better than “pure” neoliberalism itself. Nevertheless, these forms of socialisation are often weakened by neoliberalism. Contemporary urban class relations and forms of regulation thus reflect both opposition and mutual construction between neoliberal strategies and forms of socialisation. The paper ends by briefly contrasting this theorisation with associationalist and regulationist approaches.     

Fast Activism: Resisting Mobile Policies

“Fast” urban policy is increasingly common as city leaders draw on globally mobile policy models to accelerate the policymaking process. Critics have responded with new types of “fast activism” strategies. Fast activists plan temporary and strategically timed campaigns, use relationally local messaging that jumps between global and local political critiques, and organise ideologically diverse coalitions to mobilise quickly against policy proposals. This was observed in protest campaigns against Olympic bids in Boston (USA) and Hamburg (Germany). Protesters successfully opposed mega‐event planning in both cities by combining all three tactics within a short period of time. The paper presents a comparative study of the Boston and Hamburg protests, drawing from qualitative fieldwork on the campaigns in both cities. The paper contributes by conceptualising an emerging mode of urban opposition, and by evaluating how this type of resistance changes local receptions of fast and mobile urban policy.