As Basket and Papu: Making Manus Social Fabric

Between 2012 and 2019, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, hosted Australia's offshore detention centre for asylum seekers and refugees, known as the Regional Processing Centre (RPC). This paper analyses some of the social impacts of the RPC on Lorengau town, the urban centre of Manus, through the analytical lens of the Manus idiom, as basket (Tok Pisin). Materially this refers to the everyday Manus basket whilst metaphorically, it refers to an individual's or community's social, cultural, political and economic base. First, I examine asylum seekers and refugees as a social category that emerged during this period when they were referred to as papu by locals. Papu is an honorific kinship term for grandfather or elder man; for men who are symbols for family identity, social belonging, and rights to land. Second, I examine the changing materiality of Lorengau's markets as indicative of wider societal transformations and dissonance brought about by the RPC. My ethnographic data are based on long term involvement in Manus, including three recent visits to Lorengau in 2017, 2018, and 2019 where I studied the social impacts and the changing social practices of Manus people in response to the RPC.     

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.     

Rembrandt’s faceless faces

This article examines Rembrandt’s investigation of his own face in tandem with his studies of outcast populations in and around Amsterdam. While historians have titled these latter studies as “beggars,” I contextualize these figures within a history of migration, early modern Dutch globalization and shifting concepts of poverty and charity. Understanding these figures in a larger historical framework illustrates how Rembrandt used his own face to visualize the increasingly faceless populations passing through Amsterdam.     

Fostering and planning urban regeneration: the governance of cultural districts in Copenhagen

Policy-makers and urban planners struggle to find the right formula to implement urban regeneration processes based on cultural assets, often focusing on the desired outcomes, but rarely questioning how the policy process can shape them. This paper examines different governance models for the implementation and organization of cultural districts, and evaluates how they can affect their actual realization by investigating three cases in Copenhagen, Denmark. The deindustrialization of Copenhagen left many of the city’s harbour areas disused and in turn provided the opportunity to develop three new cultural districts in the city centre. The paper contributes to the literature on cultural districts by matching specificities and contingencies attached to a particular urban area with the governance model adopted for its development. The paper claims that temporal experimentation has to be included in cultural planning and a mix of bottom-up and top-down approaches is more desirable than both a totally unregulated initiative and a real estate-driven development and a totally unregulated initiative, as it ensures that initiatives remain financially viable and that the creative workers and companies retain a certain control of the area development, and in turn counteracts gentrification.     

Linking polycentricity concepts to periphery: implications for an integrative Austrian strategic spatial planning practice

This contribution searches for a regional planning conception that allows for a mutual recognition and practical translation between strategies for urban regions and peripheries beyond separate urban and rural categories; taking the Austrian strategic spatial planning context as the example. For this, various notions of polycentricity are discussed and assessed with regard to periphery. The Austrian strategic spatial development concept ÖREK sets out a focused work programme with changing responsibilities and participation of actors. The objectives are targeted and the processes are implementation oriented. Amongst other topics, urban regional issues and peripheral, declining regions are worked on separately. A conceptually integrative, plan-like strategic instrument across the topics and for the whole of Austria is lacking. The ESPON notion of ‘inner peripheries’ is proposed as a complementary concept to the ESDP notion of polycentricity, helping to create a bridge between urban regional and periphery strategies. This has the potential to guide strategic planning practice efforts in Austria towards a yet missing strategic spatial plan for the whole of the country beyond urban and rural categories. Practice relevant conclusions related to the case of Austrian strategic spatial planning are drawn and a need for further, comparative research in a European context is identified.     

Towards lower carbon cities: urban morphology contribution in climate change adaptation strategies

Non-urbanized areas (NUAs) play an important role in reducing the effects of climate change by providing both carbon storage and sequestration. Urban areas are responsible for the emission of 60% of global greenhouse gas, 50% of which are produced by buildings. During the past decades, increasing urban growth and sprawl processes produced several urban layouts characterized by different morphological features and a common lack of sustainable energy and environmental solutions. Investigating the relationship between urban morphology, energy demand and carbon emission/sequestration represents a relevant topic for urban planning practices implemented to face urban climate change effects. This study proposes a method for a transformability assessment aimed at investigating the transformation suitability of different urban morphology types. The case study is the metropolitan area of Catania (Italy), characterized by an impressive urban growth since the 1960s. The proposed method identification of limits and options for increasing sustainability of urban areas considering the contribution of both NUAs and built-up areas. This approach allows to identify appropriate planning tools for new layouts of urban fabrics while increasing the objectivity of the decision process. In the framework of climate change mitigation and adaptation, the outcomes of this research may lead to innovative urban planning practices.     

The resurgence of regional design

Regional design, long a backbone for spatial planning, even if under other names, has become topical again for two reasons – as a key strategy and as a key tool in spatial management. This is due to several reasons. New conditions of urbanization that result from the convergence of several factors highlight the need for spatial strategy formation and application at supra-metropolitan scales. These new conditions include globalization, climate change, booming urban population, increased mobility and interconnectivity, and new infrastructure technologies. These forces driving urbanization today and into the future play out at the urban scale, which is increasingly encompassed in the city-region. The solutions to the impacts and problems that these forces cause must be dealt with by a strategic urbanism at a scale that matches. This scale of urbanism can be denoted as regional design. To justify these claims and to understand the origins of regional design and its relevance today and into the future, the master strokes in its history are presented next. After that, we discuss current concepts and practices in regional design. In conclusion, we offer answers to the question: why a resurgence of regional design?     

Improving land readjustment practice. Application of management models to Portugal

Whilst the advantages of the application of Land Readjustment (LR) are well known, there are nevertheless numerous countries in which application of LR is difficult or has not been successful. In its analysis of land readjustment constraints, conditions and the international practice, this paper contributes to improving the implementation of an LR system, particularly with respect to the management process. At the international level, management models in seven countries were studied: Australia, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Sweden. In Portugal, three case studies in the municipalities of Almada, Coimbra and Lisbon were selected, with semi-structured interviews being conducted with the respective managing entities. The management models are distinguished by the type of initiative and leadership processes, relations among stakeholders, managing entities and operating rules. It can be concluded that the role of the public authority as the process facilitator from the very initial stages, the existence of a managing entity and a board of specialists, and the legal conditions governing expropriation are key factors for the improvement of land readjustment management.     

‘Lived bodies’ and the neoliberal city – a case study of vulnerability in London

This article explores the ‘more-than-work’ aspects of the lives of vulnerable women who street-sex work. Particularly, we are interested in the differences between the women’s experiences, within the broader context of power structures as manifested in neoliberal cities. Few studies have explored this aspect of street-sex workers’ lives and theorisations of the co-creation of environments tend to elide the experiences of the most vulnerable people. Specifically, we explore the relationships that these women have with two environments: the quotidian (where they undertake routine everyday activities), and the gentrified (relating to changes in the spaces in which they live and work). We find that their experiences are extremely local, and heavily contingent on the services made available to them (or not) by the statutory and third sectors, and the emotional contacts they make, particularly in third sector support services. This challenges some of the literature which suggests a separation of ‘home’ and ‘work’, and which finds close associations between women who street-sex work. While places designed by the third sector are more responsive to these women, they are also more vulnerable to closure through lack of funding. This contributes to a significant degree of ontological non-linearity and ontological insecurity in these women’s lives.