Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment

How do states make the built environment more flexible and responsive to the investment criteria of real estate capital? Spatial policies, such as urban renewal funding for slum clearance or contemporary financial incentives, depend on discursive practices that stigmatize properties targeted for demolition and redevelopment. These policies and practices have become increasingly neoliberalized. They have further distanced themselves from those “long turnover” parts of the city where redevelopment needs are great but where the probability of private investment and value extraction is slight. They have become more entwined in global financial markets seeking short–term returns from subsidized property investments. They have shifted their emphasis from compromised use values (embodied in the paternalistic notion of “blight”) to diminished exchange values (embodied in the notion of “obsolescence”). I argue that obsolescence has become a neoliberal alibi for creative destruction and, therefore, an important component in contemporary processes of spatialized capital accumulation.     

Minority–Majority Relations in the Schelling Model of Residential Dynamics. 住宅动态迁移Schelling模型中的少数‐多数关系

The Schelling model describing segregation between two groups of residential agents, reflects the most abstract, basic view of noneconomic forces motivating residential migrations: be close to people of “your own” kind. The model assumes that residential agents, located in neighborhoods where the fraction of “friends” is less than a predefined threshold value F, try to relocate to neighborhoods where this fraction is F or higher. For groups of equal size, Schelling's residential pattern converges either to complete integration (random pattern) or segregation, depending on F. We investigate Schelling model pattern dynamics as a function of F in addition to two other parameters—the ratio of groups' numbers, and neighborhood size. We demonstrate that the traditional integration–segregation pattern dichotomy should be extended. In the case of groups of different sizes, a wide interval of F‐values exists that entails a third persistent residential pattern, one in which a portion of the majority population segregates while the rest remains integrated with the minority. We also demonstrate that Schelling model dynamics essentially depend on the formalization of urban agents' residential behavior. To obtain realistic results, the agents should be satisficers, and the fraction of the agents relocating irrespective of the neighborhood's state should be nonzero. We discuss the relationship between our results and real‐world residential dynamics.     

Neoliberalism and the Aestheticization of New Middle‐Class Landscapes

Abstract: If according to Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic 1990:28), the aesthetic is from the start “a contradictory, double‐edged concept”, how are seemingly innocent acts of viewing and consuming aesthetically pleasing landscapes implicated in the neoliberal politics of urban restructuring? Using contemporary Shanghai as a case study, this paper critically examines the role of the aesthetic in the politics of exclusion and urban segregation in post‐Socialist Shanghai where the restructuring and commodification of erstwhile public welfare housing have led to the rapid development of private “middle‐class” gated enclaves. A central objective of this paper is to excavate the underlying cultural politics of neoliberalism and demonstrate how the aestheticization of urban spaces in Shanghai has become increasingly intertwined with and accentuated by neoliberal ideologies and exclusionary practices in the city. Imbricated in the pristine neighborhoods of Shanghai's gated communities are the fault lines of social division and class distinction that are rapidly transforming urban China.     

沟通空间变革与人本的邻里场所体系架构--西方绅士化对中国大城市社会空间的启示

本文从对西方绅士化的回顾和反思中认识到,中产阶级对于和谐沟通氛围的追求损害了低收入居民的利益,从而引发笔者提出"沟通空间"概念,并对国内大城市沟通空间的现状进行了总结。对比人本的社会空间趋势,笔者认为有必要对大城市沟通空间进行变革,认为合理的沟通空间对社区融合和发展起到一定作用,在此基础上提出了"共生性竞争邻里场所体系"的规划布局模式和形成机制。     

Planning the Neighbourhood Economy: Land-Use Plans and the Economic Potential of Urban Residential Neighbourhoods in the Netherlands

This article investigates the relationship between zoning by-laws, as put forward in governmental land-use plans and the viability of urban residential neighbourhood economies. The Dutch planning tradition has long been characterized by strict separation of functions and top-down planning. We argue that profound changes in social and economic structures make land-use planning practices less suitable for the current policy formula of “mixed urban milieus”. Although the residential neighbourhood might not be the location of large firms, it definitely attracts small ones, and facilitates starting businesses whose presence (and potential growth) can be beneficial to the city as a whole. We present a typology of spatial patterns of neighbourhood economies based on land-use plans and describe whether these are related to the distinctive economic development of the neighbourhood over the period 1999–2007.     

近代英国工业城市的空间结构与城市规划（1848-1939）

以曼彻斯特、伯明翰和利兹为代表的新型工业城市在空间结构方面体现出鲜明特征:随着新型工业建筑的出现,土地功能实现区分;各类建筑交叉林立,城市布局混乱;新的社会阶层居所分离形成。这种空间结构特征,使得工业城市中的"城市病"问题尤为突出。在英国19世纪中叶兴起的近代城市规划运动中,工业城市积极开展规划实践,空间结构得到合理重组,"城市病"得以缓解,城市面貌显著改观。     

Geopolicing Race,Gender, and Class: How the Police Immobilise Urban Allochthones

City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic locations, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets” or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, between 2007 and 2011.     

Ritual performances and collective violence in divided cities – The riots in Belfast (1886) and Jerusalem (1929)

This article explores the interrelation of violence, space, and public rituals in Belfast and Jerusalem. With the image of being cities of violence, contested by two groups that compete for political and spatial hegemony, Belfast and Jerusalem are also characterised as divided, both on a material and symbolic level. The roots of this division can be traced back to the era of the British Empire, especially to the riots in Belfast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the uprisings in Jerusalem during the British Mandate of Palestine. In the wider context of British imperial policies of differentiation along religious lines and urban separation, communal identities were strengthened, and processes of residential segregation were accelerated, thereby creating urban frontiers. On the basis of historical sources, particularly reports by Royal Commissions of Inquiry that were set up to investigate the riots in Belfast and Jerusalem, this paper analyses how violent urban geographies were created in both cities in different but also remarkably similar ways. Down to the present day, public religious and political rituals, often combined with nationalist and militarist elements, are a crucial part of periodic manifestations of collective violence in these cities. Practices of appropriation of space and a temporary redrawing of borders and boundaries are dominant features of these rituals. Religious ceremonies, street parades, funeral processions or political demonstrations take place at contested sites or are led through areas “belonging” to the “other” group. The analysis shows that these ritual practices contributed greatly in transforming parts of the cities into urban spaces characterised by exclusion and imbued with memories of violence. This paper concludes that ritual performances in public space have a strong impact on the production and shaping of collective violence during riots.     

广州市外来人口居住隔离及影响因素研究

利用广州市人口普查街道(部分居委会)数据总结1990-2000年外来人口居住隔离的时空特征:隔离程度呈增加趋势,核心和外围区隔离程度及变化差异大,散点状为主的空间模式,并呈现异质性和非稳定性的社会特征。通过典型社区问卷访谈,对比外来人口与户籍低收入人口,建构影响因素的逻辑回归(Logistic regression)模型,显示户籍的属地差别是产生隔离的根本原因,与户籍属地管理相关的劳动力市场分割和住房政策共同构成了排斥的制度环境,限制了外来人口的住房选择,把其推向低端私人租房市场。在有限的居住选择下,交通和经济等个体择居要素影响了隔离空间的分布和社会特征,以城中村为代表低端私人租房来源的布局特征决定并固化了隔离空间的分布模式。     

TIPPING AND RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION: A UNIFIED SCHELLING MODEL*

ABSTRACT This paper presents a Schelling‐type checkerboard model of residential segregation formulated as a spatial game. It shows that although every agent prefers to live in a mixed‐race neighborhood, complete segregation is observed almost all of the time. A concept of tipping is rigorously defined, which is crucial for understanding the dynamics of segregation. Complete segregation emerges and persists in the checkerboard model precisely because tipping is less likely to occur to such residential patterns. Agent‐based simulations are used to illustrate how an integrated residential area is tipped into complete segregation and why this process is irreversible. This model incorporates insights from Schelling's two classical models of segregation (the checkerboard model and the neighborhood tipping model) and puts them on a rigorous footing. It helps us better understand the persistence of residential segregation in urban America.     

Expatriate everyday life in Dar es Salaam,Tanzania: colonial origins and contemporary legacies

Under German colonial rule and the British mandate, Dar es Salaam was a racially segregated city. The means of segregation were a series of building ordinances that established varying standards of construction in the city's neighborhoods. A result of these ordinances was the concentration of expatriates—those people living outside their home country—in two areas of the city: the City Center and the Msasani Peninsula. Using qualitative survey and interview data with fifty expatriates in contemporary Dar es Salaam, this paper demonstrates that segregation persists in spite of postcolonial efforts to desegregate the city. In fact, segregation in contemporary Dar es Salaam affects more than just residential patterns; all aspects of expatriate everyday life are overwhelmingly concentrated in these two urban areas. This paper engages with colonial city and expatriate literatures to identify the lingering effects of colonialism and the various ways that residents perceive and transform urban space. Several explanations exist for the persistence of this segregation. These two areas historically housed expatriates and thus contain desirable urban amenities such as supermarkets and shopping malls. These areas also offer expatriates the comfort of living among other expatriates in a perceived safe environment.     

The Politics of Subjectivity in Vangelis Raptopoulos’s Urban Stories

In this article I offer a critical analysis of the spatial cultures of modern Athens through the urban portraits presented in three fictive stories by Vangelis Raptopoulos—“At the Bottom of the Sea” (Sto Vytho), “One-Way Street” (Monodromos), and “Long-Distance Call” (Yperastiko)—from his 1995 collection “In Pieces” (Kommatakia). I argue that by constructing first-person fictive narratives, written in confessional prose, Raptopoulos problematizes the notion of subjectivity in its varying relationships to modern urban and spatial cultures. My main focus is on the practice of subjective recitations of urban space in view of the narrator’s experiences of imaginative and physical spatial appropriation. I argue that these experiences and the fragmentary style, through which they are conveyed in the stories, are an incisive critique of the official planning practices of urban public space and prescribed practices of spatial mobility. By drawing on the critical-philosophical and critical-historical literature, with particular reference to Benjamin, Foucault, Lefebvre, and de Certeau, this article contributes to the broader critique of the politics of subjectivity in modern Europe.     

Racializing Cities,Naturalizing Space: The Seductive Appeal of Iconicities of Dispossession

In pursuit of a critical geography of globality, my essay examines how racial hegemonies are sustained and perpetuated by the ways in which urban spaces inhabited by peoples on the margins of the world economy are imagined, represented, and brought to public visibility. Central to my inquiry is how iconic representations of “slum life” are produced for a white consumer public. Propelled by fantasies of racial essence, primal bodies, and exotic naturalism, the iconicities of “shantytowns” and the “black ghetto” are circulated as popular commodity forms throughout Europe's metropolitan centers. In analyzing this process, I identify “africanism” (spaces of contested black civility, premodern savagery, urban jungle) and “tropicalism” (naturalized landscapes of color and houses, childlike creativity, and happy workers) as representational codes for how “slums” as sites of urban dispossession are racially mapped and consumed.     

Storytelling as Method in Spatial Planning

Abstract

Drawing on the case of the Wageningse Eng in the Netherlands, this paper considers the role of “storytelling” within spatial planning practices. It moves away, though, from seeing it as merely a model of spatial planning, where “storytelling” is sometimes used to justify planners' ideals for the landscape, or a model for spatial planning, which pushes for a normative use of “storytelling” as a means of encapsulating local knowledge and the views of those who live in, and use, the landscape. Rather, the paper engages “storytelling” as a method for revealing how formal planning practices may be destabilized by more vernacular narratives seeking to subvert dominant discourses and processes. In doing so, it seeks to not only show the contested nature of participatory planning within the Netherlands, but also the ways in which narratives—as revealed via such a method—construct specific positionalities with real implications for notions of inclusivity within planning practices.     

Playing with Infrastructure like a Carishina: Feminist Cycling in an Era of Democratic Politics

This article discusses transit infrastructure as a site of radical possibility and limitation in an age of participatory democracy across Latin America. I focus on multiple spaces of participation in Quito, Ecuador to elucidate how citizenship and infrastructure are co‐produced through gendered processes. I first analyse city space of Quito from a gendered and infrastructural lens to consider how urban environments are dictated by violence and insecurity. Then, against this backdrop, I explore the spatial strategies of the feminist bicycle collective, Carishina en Bici, which translates from Quechua to “bad housewives that cycle”. Here, I draw on the concept of “deep play” to reveal how public practices in Quito question the equitable impacts of local democratic experimentation. To examine Carishinas’ spatial practices, I focus on an urban alleycat race, the Carishina Race, to show how strategic practices of solidarity reinsert feminist possibilities in urban space.     

“Mongrel City”: Cosmopolitan Neighbourliness in a Delhi Squatter Settlement

Abstract: This paper examines the construction of a “cosmopolitan neighbourliness” which emerges in a Delhi squatter settlement in the context of communal violence. Through interviews with over 80 inhabitants, I suggest that an openness to “others” in the settlement is produced in order to construct a home for oneself in an exclusionary city through a series of relational constructs—between the “cosmopolitan” city and the “parochial” village; between the “murderous” city and the “compassionate” slum; between the exclusionary urban public sphere and the “inclusive” neighbourhood sphere. The squatter settlement is internalised as a microcosm of a “mongrel city”, a place which through its set of oppositional constructs becomes inherently “urban”. “Cosmopolitan neighbourliness”, however, remains fragile and gendered. It is a continuous strategic practice that attempts to bridge across differences of caste and religion through gendered performances that avert and discourage communal violence even when the city becomes murderous.     

Making-Home From Below: Domesticating Footpath and Resisting “Homelessness” in Mumbai

Drawing upon ethnography among footpath dwellers in Mumbai this paper argues that hegemonic ideas and practices of urban inhabitation constrain subaltern visions of home as well as public space. In doing so, it warrants an ontology of urban inhabitation that transcends occupancy politics. It is not just the neoliberal state and property-entrenching capital but also the politics of inclusion that fragments subaltern subjectivities of belonging and dispossession. By highlighting everyday practices, particularly the use of footwear, food preparation and consumption, performance of modesty, and rearing of pets, I articulate two ways in which home is experienced and homelessness is resisted through claims where interlocutors have no spatial legitimacy: by (re)producing spatial and moral boundaries and practising multiple mobilities that enable transient domesticities. This paper thus provides an expanded sense of home that moves beyond the materialities of home making, and binaries of the “private” interior and “public” exterior.     

民族视角下社会空间分异研究的时空间行为转向

全球化与快速城市化过程中，城市内部以不同种族、民族为代表的多元社会群体，因其社会文化背景、生活习惯等不同而存在诸多差异，群体间的空间分异与融合正成为城市发展中的重要科学问题。本研究梳理了基于居住空间的国内外种族/民族社会空间研究，指出，在城市研究移动性转向的背景下，社会空间分异的研究正在突破传统的静态居住空间研究的局限而出现移动性转向，且在群体间行为差异、活动空间的种族/民族分异测度、少数族裔可达性劣势和混合地理学方法等方面展开了研究。在此基础上，本研究进一步提出了民族视角的社会空间分异时空间行为研究框架，以期为理解中国城市社会空间分异、解读民族的日常生活与社会空间融合提供新的视角。     

The archaeological study of neighborhoods and districts in ancient cities

The spatial division of cities into residential zones is a universal feature of urban life from the earliest cities to the present. I propose a two-level classification of such zones that archaeologists can use to analyze preindustrial cities. Neighborhoods are small areas of intensive face-to-face social interaction, whereas districts are larger areas that serve as administrative units within cities. I review comparative historical data on neighborhoods and districts and outline archaeological methods for their identification and analysis. Illustrative cases are drawn from Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica, and I conclude with a review of the major top-down and bottom-up social forces that generate and shape neighborhoods and districts in preindustrial cities.     

Measuring the Scale of Segregation Using k‐Nearest Neighbor Aggregates

Nearly all segregation measures use some form of administrative unit (usually tracts in the United States) as the base for the calculation of segregation indices, and most of the commonly used measures are aspatial. The spatial measures that have been proposed are often not easily computed, although there have been significant advances in the past decade. We provide a measure that is individually based (either persons or very small administrative units) and a technique for constructing neighborhoods that does not require administrative units. We show that the spatial distribution of different population groups within an urban area can be efficiently analyzed with segregation measures that use population count‐based definitions of neighborhood scale. We provide a variant of a k‐nearest neighbor approach and a statistic spatial isolation and a methodology (EquiPop) to map, graph, and evaluate the likelihood of individuals meeting other similar race individuals or of meeting individuals of a different ethnicity. The usefulness of this approach is demonstrated in an application of the method to data for Los Angeles and three metropolitan areas in Sweden. This comparative approach is important as we wish to show how the technique can be used across different cultural contexts. The analysis shows how the scale (very small neighborhoods, larger communities, or cities) influences the segregation outcomes. Even if microscale segregation is strong, there may still be much more mixing at macroscales.