Police and Politics in Aesthetics-Based Urban Governance: Redevelopment and Grassroots Struggles in Enninglu,Guangzhou, China

Rancière's theorisation of police, politics, and aesthetics offers an illustrative framework to understand urban (re)developments. While extant works have examined separately the art of governing through aesthetics and the political subjectivities of those having no part in the frame of visibility and intelligibility, this study argues that hegemonic aesthetic regime and bottom-up aesthetic practices can be mutually constitutive and reside in relationships of co-existence and mutual negotiation. Drawing on over a decade's investigation in Enninglu, a neighbourhood district in Guangzhou that underwent several rounds of political struggles related to redevelopment and conservation, we reveal how local residents negotiated aesthetic norms enacted by the state. Particular attention is paid to the interactions between the aesthetic regime imposed by the state and grassroots people reclaiming their own aesthetic sensibilities, culminating in a contingent, inconclusive, and “impure” space of politics. Both political subjectivities and aesthetic norms are redefined ongoingly in this process.     

The Unstable Coastline: Navigating Dispossession and Belonging in Colombo

This article explores how residents of a small coastal fishing enclave in Colombo live with cumulative waves of dispossession brought on by exclusionary projects of urban development. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I introduce the analytic of navigation to describe how people move, plan and live with both present and future threats of dispossession. Navigation offers a unique perspective on questions of agency and resistance in oppressive conditions. Rather than framing subjects as “resisting” projects of world-class city-making, this analysis shows that urban residents instead engage in complex and occasionally contradictory modes of living with uncertainty. I complicate existing understandings of the term “navigation” by describing how questions of nation and belonging are crucial to comprehending how people navigate. Ultimately, I suggest that expressions of belonging and obligation to an imagined community might not only be strategic, but instead reflect some of the broader social forces which structure possibilities for action.     

Black Belonging,White Belonging: Primitive Accumulation in South Africa's Private Nature Reserves

Evictions have been shown to be a mechanism of primitive accumulation in nature conservation. This paper adds an historical analysis to the discussion on primitive accumulation in conservation by exploring the seemingly innocuous mechanism of White belonging to land in South Africa's private nature reserves. Contemporary articulations of White belonging are replete with stories and images of White male “pioneers” from the colonial era who, upon arrival in “empty lands”, were able to create economies out of nothing. Such representations of history on private nature reserve websites and other promotional material invisibilise Black belonging and legitimise private conservation. By illuminating the inconsistencies in the empty lands narrative and the legacies of three championed conservation pioneers from the 19^th century, this paper argues that White belonging is a mechanism of primitive accumulation, while Black belonging continues to be expressed in various ways in contemporary South Africa.     

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.     

Belonging,memory and the politics of planning in Israel

This paper focuses on contradictory expressions of memory and belonging of Jews and Palestinians in Israel. It examines the conflicts over planning procedures, which engage such contradictory memories, and belonging at the national and local scales of planning. It explores how the dynamics of power relations can operate differently at each level and can result in planning resolutions, which link in different ways to the constructions of memory and belonging of Jews and Palestinians. The paper begins with an overview of the expressions of belonging and commemoration at the national scale of planning; in the agenda of the Council for the Restoration and Preservation of Historic Sites (CRPHS) in Israel and the rhetoric of the government National Master Plan of Israel (TAMA/35). It challenges this rhetoric in two local planning events: ‘the road and the graveyard’ and the ‘new Jewish neighbourhood and the old Palestinian village’.     

Belonging to Bad: Ambiguity,Parramatta Girls and the Parramatta Girls Home

From 1887 to 1974, ‘corrupt’ adolescent girls were incarcerated in Parramatta Girls Home, a New South Wales state government facility charged with their ‘care and protection’. This paper examines the experiences of former inmates of Parramatta Girls Home (PGH) and explores their ongoing connections to the Home. Using the narratives of former inmates and submissions to public inquiries, the relationship that these women have with the Home and each other is explored. There is a strong thread of connection to place amongst former inmates, with their identity as ‘Parra girls’ shaping aspects of their post‐incarceration lives. For those women who were incarcerated at PGH, the connection to people and place focuses on the Home and is a powerful influence on their subsequent experiences of security and belonging.     

论美国城市政治集团的兴衰

政治集团是19世纪中后期至20世纪前期活跃于一些美国大城市的腐败政治组织。19世纪美国城市的快速发展和外国移民的大批涌入为职业政客提供了进行权利交易的大量机会和条件,导致了政治集团在很多大城市兴起。随着城市政治改革运动的兴起与发展,加之美国社会的进步,政治集团逐渐失去了活动空间,走向衰落。     

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.     

Citizenship and Belonging in the Rural Fringe: A Case Study of a Hindu Temple in Sydney,Australia

Despite Australian multicultural policy that asserts the right of all citizens to maintain and practice their religion, formal citizenship has not guaranteed the welcome or belonging of migrant religious groups at the neighbourhood scale. This is most starkly reflected in contests over the inclusion of minority religious spaces in the Australian landscape, which increasingly take place in the rural–urban fringe of metropolitan areas. This work examines the controversy over a proposed Hindu temple in metropolitan Sydney and reveals insights into the way that rural–urban fringe space is imagined, understood and experienced by land use planners, residents and temple members. Critical discourse analysis of policy documentation along with interviews reveals that land use planners circumscribe belonging in the landscape through the use of zoning ordinances and design controls, local residents mark the boundaries of white privilege through narratives of heritage and cultural difference and temple members claim rights to citizenship based on assertions of sameness.     

Formative Geographies of Belonging in White Australia: Constructing the National Self and Other in Parliamentary Debate, 1901

The relationship between nationally unified calls for immigration restriction in the White Australia period and the emergence of an imagined national identity has been the focus of much valuable historical research. Through the method of content analysis, a geographical lens was used to re-examine the Commonwealth Parliamentary debates regarding the development of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 and to provide empirical support to the existing scholarship. The content analysis provided statistical evidence for the ways in which immigration restriction in this specific historical context was legitimised and rationalised by social constructions that reproduced racisms. Constructions of the Self and the Other were fundamental in defining exclusion and inclusion during the White Australia era. The national Self was complexly defined by overlapping constructions of the Self as Australian, British (racially and culturally) and White. This is indicative of the tensions and negotiations between national interests and cultural, historical and ‘racial’ ties to Britain at the time. Additionally, content analysis provided nuanced insight into the ways in which the designation of inherent (and diametrically opposing) racial attributes to the White Self and non-White Other justified the ways in which ‘they’ were different from ‘us’. In this way the Other was characterised as an intrinsic threat to the development of the nation and the wellbeing of its peoples. ‘We’, on the other hand, were integral to the development of White Australia.     

The Symbolic Politics of Belonging and Community in Peri‐urban Environmental Disputes: the Traveston Crossing Dam in Queensland,Australia

This paper examines a recent dispute generated by the Queensland State Government proposal to build the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River in southeast Queensland, Australia. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which interrelated issues of belonging, community identity, and social diversity were negotiated during the anti‐dam campaign. As an unusual alliance of farmers, environmentalists, urban retirees, some Aboriginal people and others, it takes a view of the anti‐Traveston Crossing Dam campaign as a fluid network of people and approaches the notion of community identity as the symbolic construction of similarity. Locally specific, the paper describes pertinent aspects of community politics in the context of rural socioeconomic change, and the mobilisation of heritage. With regard to local senses of belonging, it also discusses the involvement of Aboriginal people during the campaign. More broadly then, this paper attempts to make an ethnographic contribution to the study of environmental disputes and the politics of alliance in peri‐urban areas of settler‐descendant societies such as Australia.     

Frontiers of Urban Control: Lawlessness on the City Edge and Forms of Clientalist Statecraft in Zimbabwe

This article develops the concept of “urban frontier” to explore conflicts over state regularisation of city edge informal settlements in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. It conceptualises the presence of “lawless” urban frontiers and “illegal” territorial authorities in capital cities as expressions of a permissive form of central statecraft. In so doing, the article takes forward debates over the politics shaping the margins of Africa’s rapidly expanding cities, redressing scholars’ tendency to neglect central party‐state strategic calculations and party politics in their analyses of unregulated settlements. Dominant interpretations generally hinge on state absence or weakness and emphasise localised influences. The case of Harare’s highly politicised city‐edge informal settlements reveals the inadequacy of apolitical approaches particularly clearly, as all were controlled by the ruling ZANUPF party. The conflicts provoked by regularisation provide a lens on disputes within the ruling party, which we interpret as disputes over different forms of clientalist statecraft. Analyses of urban frontiers can thus help move away from generic one‐size‐fits‐all explanations of informality and patronage politics in Africa’s expanding cities.     

Terrace Dissent in Urban Western Sahara: Between Plazas and Homes

Since 2018, domestic Saharawi houses in occupied Western Sahara have become tactical sites for organising dissent. The move to interior spaces came as a collective retreat from the city's public plazas. This retreat from extravagant plazas illustrates that the turn toward interior spaces was a tactic in front of destructive occupation power rather than a withdrawal. This article explores Saharawi spatial production of dissent under two different political moments. I ask, what spaces of dissent do people under occupation animate when the city is mobilised against them? This paper is based on ethnographic engagement with encounters between Saharawis and Moroccan security forces that led Saharawis to construct the house as its own public. I demonstrate interiorising the exterior by analysing homes’ terraces as the new space of urban dissent in the Western Sahara. As such, the terrace appears as a new space and a new tool of and in urban insurgency.     

The Semantics of Corruption: Political Science Perspectives on Imperial and Post-Imperial Methods of State-Building

Although imperial historians concentrate on regions and periods with abundant documentation, it is worth considering how another discipline copes with the political fate of post-colonial societies whose records are not so easily accessible. The nine works reviewed below cover problems of misgovernment in new states in several regions. This article concentrates on their methods and conclusions for states in sub-Saharan Africa and more especially West Africa. Authors and editors have made considerable use of patron-client (or clientelistic) explanations in their interpretations of the aims and performance of African leaders under post-independence constitutions. Techniques of patronage have a long history; colonial rulers applied them to find useful intermediaries between administrators and African ethnic groups; and there is ample evidence for their existence in the politics of new states under the label of ‘corruption’.

Despite accepted definitions of patronage, the terminology of clientelism contains ambiguities when employed to denote historical cases in a large number of cultural contexts with poor economic management and dictatorial governance. The collective conclusion of the books reviewed charges African civil and military leaders with corruption in appropriation of public resources for private gains. All the authors comment on that generic term; one of them supplies a detailed analysis of its ramifications. Most have drawn, too, on imperial works and records as background to their explanation for the policies of civil and military leaders in independent states in coping with debt management, risk of territorial fragmentation, use of parastatals and misuse of resources. It is concluded here, however, that input from the late colonial period has been misunderstood; second, that anthropologists’ knowledge of the institution of chieftainship, its survival or disappearance, throws light on the ‘indeterminacy’ of leadership succession in Africa, unless overcome by the mechanisms of constitutional elections; and, third, that political science has not investigated the reasons for the lack of competent judicial and civil service institutions to safeguard the working of Africa's constitutions.     

Class,Community and Communicative Planning: Urban Redevelopment at King's Cross,London

Abstract: This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class‐ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”‐based rather than in class‐sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.     

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.     

Immigrants,Banlieues, and Dangerous Things: Ideology as an Aesthetic Affair

Abstract: This paper engages with the notion of ideology, bringing together Laclau's theorisation of the specificity of the ideological, and Rancière's notion of aesthetic regimes. Ideology, I argue, works through what it makes available to the senses and what it makes to make sense. It is in this sense that it is an aesthetic affair. This argument is illustrated with an account of the so‐called “securitarian ideology” in France that characterises the repressive policies of the recent governments.     

Inside Checkpoint 300: Checkpoint Regimes as Spatial Political Technologies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

As a part of the architecture of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, the Israeli government introduced in 2005 a series of so‐called terminal checkpoints as “neutral border crossings”, to minimise the impact of these barriers on Palestinian lives through a different design and the use of several machines, such as turnstiles and metal detectors. In this article, we analyse terminal Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, framing it as a spatial political technology aimed at controlling the movement of Palestinians. More specifically, we investigate the interactions between Palestinian commuters, Israeli soldiers/security guards and the machines operating inside Checkpoint 300. We conclude by suggesting that Checkpoint 300 is a porous barrier whose regime is produced, reproduced but also challenged by such interactions, and that, despite the new “neutral design”, Checkpoint 300 is a place still filled with tension and violence, often exercised by the machines and their “decisions”.     

Planting Roots,Making Place: Urban Autochthony in Port Vila Vanuatu

A contentious issue for Pacific Islanders, as well as researchers of the Pacific Islands, is ni-Vanuatu notions of ‘belonging’ to urban centres. Previous research in Vanuatu has shown that despite generations of people born and raised in Port Vila, the nation's capital, the urban centre is not generally perceived as a ‘place’ to which urban migrants can say they are from. For many, exclaiming that one is ‘from’ town is tantamount to admitting one has ‘no place’. This paper, based on fieldwork among a group of urban young men in Freswota, a residential community of Port Vila, argues that in contrast to this, Freswota young men are generating a new locative identity. Their urban community rather than their parents' home island places is emerging as their primary location of belonging and the source of their sense of self, personhood and social identification. As such, these young men are the urban autochthones of the country.     

Negotiating Green Space with Landed Interests: The Urban Political Ecology of Greenway in the Pearl River Delta,China

Land‐centred urbanisation has precipitated shortage of green space in Chinese cities. However, in the Pearl River Delta, an ambitious greenway system has recently managed to flourish. It is intriguing to ask how this has become possible. Informed by the perspective of urban political ecology, this paper finds that the greenway project in the Pearl River Delta represents a set of politically realistic endeavours to alleviate urban green space shortage by adapting to, rather than challenging, powerful landed interests. Three interlocking dimensions about land—municipal land quota, rural land use claims, and real estate development—have influenced why, where and how greenways have been created. Based on these findings, we argue that research on China's politics of urban sustainability necessarily needs to understand the country's land politics.