Disparity Despite Diversity: Social Injustice in New York City's Urban Agriculture System

Many studies have documented the benefits of urban agriculture, including increased food access, job creation, educational opportunities, and green space. A focus on its social benefits has fed an association of urban agriculture with social justice, yet there is a distinction between alleviating symptoms of injustice (such as disparate access to food or environmental amenities) and disrupting structures that underlie them. Despite its positive impacts, urban agriculture systems may reinforce inequities that practitioners and supporters aim to address. This paper reports findings from a 2‐year study of urban agriculture in New York City, which found race‐ and class‐based disparities among practitioners citywide. Using the lens of critical race theory, it argues that a failure to examine urban agriculture's role in either supporting or dismantling unjust structures may perpetuate an inequitable system. The paper concludes with recommendations for urban agriculture supporters and scholars to help advance social justice at structural levels.     

Microclimates of Urban Reproduction: The Limits of Automating Environmental Control

Enclosed, controlled environments, stretching from sites of luxury consumption to urban food production, are proliferating in cities around the world, utilising increasingly advanced techniques for (re)creating and optimising microclimatic conditions for different purposes. However, the role of automated control systems—to filter, reprocess and reassemble atmospheric and metabolic flows with growing precision—remains under-researched. In this article, we explore the phenomenon of automated environmental control at three sites in the UK city of Sheffield: a botanical glasshouse, a luxury hotel and a university plant growth research lab. In doing so, we first show how controlled environments are constituted through specific relations between the inside and outside, which are embedded in inherently political urban contexts and processes. Second, we identify the technical and ecological tensions and limits of indoor environmental control at each site which limit the scope of automation, and the considerable amount of hidden labour and energy required to maintain and restabilise desired conditions. Drawing on these more established examples of ecological interiorisation in a key moment of transition, we raise urgent questions for critical urban and environmental geographers about the possible futures of controlled environments, their practical or selective scalability, and who and what will be left “outside”, when they are emerging as a strategic form of urban adaptation and immunisation in the face of converging ecological pressures.     

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.     

The Political Aesthetics of Middle Class Housing in (not so) Neoliberal Mozambique

This article explores the social and material repercussions of middle class aspirations in a system that is still infused by socialist aesthetics in Maputo, Mozambique. We argue the activation of “middle classness” reproduces ingrained inequalities and boundaries. This is demonstrated through two ethnographic case studies of urban housing, long central to imaginaries of prosperity. First, fearing downward mobility, members of the upper middle class seek to embody a liberal ideology of “autonomy”, while simultaneously being dependent on state structures. Second, members of the lower middle class attempt to create enclaves to experiment with forms of privatisation normally only accessible to a privileged elite. Through this examination of the ways in which a spectrum of privileged urbanites attempts to secure their position in the face of a precarious future, the article outlines middle classness under contemporary capitalist conditions and how this is shaped by the legacies of the past.     

The City Evita Built. Cinematic Childhood and Peronism in Luis César Amadori’s Soñemos (1951)

This article examines the under-studied film productions known in Peronist Argentina as “docudramas”. Placing documentary elements within a fictional plot, docudramas marked a significant change in the state propaganda machine and were used as a new vehicle to influence social habits. I focus particularly on Soñemos [Let’s Dream], a short film directed in 1951 by Luis César Amadori to showcase urban reforms. Through an analysis of Amadori’s docudrama in regard to its representation of the Children’s City built by the Eva Perón Foundation, I discuss relationships between entertainment, the constitution of a political hegemony, and modernisation. With film techniques such as the dissolve, Soñemos depicts the Children’s City as an enterprise capable of delivering material happiness and amplifies the narrative of a fairy tale come true promised by Evita’s social service programmes. Ultimately, the docudrama affirms the central role played by the state in the definition of the “right to a home” – from supportive benefactor to constitutive replacement.     

Tourism planning and place making: place-making or placemaking?

ABSTRACT

Tourism destination planning and marketing are fundamentally place making actions intended to shape the image and imageability of a place. Place making is an innate human behavior, ranging from the organic and unplanned actions of individuals, defined here as ‘place-making,’ to planned and intentional global theming by governments and tourism authorities, defined here as ‘placemaking.’ Place-making and placemaking are ends on a continuum of options, with most places have a mix of local and global elements. These elements also range from the tangible (base in urban design) to the intangible (peoplescapes and imaginations). The tools of place making are essentially the same for both organic place-making and planned placemaking, but the intentions and outcomes can vary enormously. Tourism development, as an economic activity, almost always has a neoliberal planned placemaking agenda. Organic place-making emerges through individual agency, which if allowed to proceed, will make its imprint even in a heavily master planned tourism landscape. An understanding of place-making and placemaking gives insight into research questions on the political economy of tourism and the roles of hosts and guest in co-producing tourism places. Examining the elements of place making in a tourism landscape can more clearly identify how different worldview perspectives have contribute over time to the making of tourism places, and thereby assist in planning for the future development of destination communities.     

Assessing the contribution of cultural agglomeration in urban regeneration through developing cultural strategies

The recent discussion regarding contemporary urban regeneration has underlined the increasing role of art and cultural agglomeration as an essential part of a progressive agenda for local development. In fact, there is a good deal of literature which is related to specific and finite cultural strategies. Although scholars, in some cases, may suggest other perspectives, their value narrows to a comprehensive evaluation regarding the possible interpretation of cultural agglomeration in respect of urban regeneration. Accordingly, this study, by using an interdisciplinary systemic approach based on the clustering of cultural carriers, developed the cultural strategies under a six concepts scheme. The study then, through developing a method based on modes and development approach of cultural agglomeration, recategorized the six mentioned strategies into three major categories of cultural strategies, to find out their contribution in the process of urban regeneration. Overall, the study revealed the extent of cultural agglomeration as a method of developing cultural strategies in urban regeneration.     

Power to the people: when culture works as a social catalyst in urban regeneration processes (and when it does not)

This article focuses upon the relationship between culture, urban regeneration schemes, and their impact on socio-cognitive assets – namely, social and human capital. It examines three major urban regeneration projects in the districts of Saint Michel (Montreal, Canada), Auburn (Sydney, Australia) and Bicocca (Milan, Italy), where culture has been invoked as a main transformational driver at the economic and socio-environmental levels, but with different approaches and results. Through comparative analysis, we develop a more general reflection on the social impact of culture-led urban transformation processes, questioning the actual role of cultural initiatives – particularly those related to the creation of new cultural facilities and the programming of big cultural flagship events – and participation as a means to improve the local social milieu. We find that a key role for social efficacy is played by projects’ capacity to elicit the commitment of residents through inclusive cultural participation, as opposed to instrumental top-down initiatives mainly addressing city and neighbourhood branding and real estate marketing purposes.