Surviving through movement: the mobility of urban youth in Ghana

In Africa, young people are engaging with a globalised world of flows and movements but are coming of age in environments characterised by uncertainty, economic hardship and unemployment. Drawing upon research conducted in Madina, a suburb of Accra, a social navigation perspective is adopted to explore young people's everyday mobility and their aspirations for future mobility. By drawing attention to the meanings young people ascribe to movement, and by analysing their movements as tactics of social navigation, the importance of spatial mobility to young people's everyday well-being and their processes of social becoming are illustrated. Young people find that their mobility is bounded by a range of factors including labour market characteristics, gender and generational relations, and their spatial location on the outskirts of the city and the margins of the world. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial imagination is restricted to Madina; real or imagined travel takes them to other parts of the city, into rural areas and across the nation's borders. Through illustrating how significant mobility can be for everyday survival, this paper contributes to ‘the mobility turn’ in the social sciences which has overlooked the importance of mobility for livelihoods in the global South.     

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 violence of spectacle: Statist schemes to green the desert and constructing Astana and Ashgabat as urban oases

Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have been home to the most impressive urban development projects in the entire post-Soviet world. Their capitals, Astana and Ashgabat, now boast uniquely monumental architecture and local leaders have invested heavily in ‘green belt’ projects to surround the cities with lush vegetation, as well as developing green and water-laden public spaces. In doing so, elites have drawn on Soviet-era ‘garden city’ idealism, as well as more recent environmental sustainability narratives. Yet these schemes are anything but sustainable. Unfolding on the arid Central Asian steppe, they depend on heavy irrigation, with water diverted from rivers that already fail to meet regional demands. Employing a comparative approach, I ask why and with what effect state planners have sought to craft Astana and Ashgabat as spectacularly green ‘urban oases,’ when their local climates should defy the logic of sustainability. In so doing, I consider urban greening in the two countries as part of a wider phenomenon of statist schemes to green the desert, which have a long and diverse history. Extending the literature on desert greening, I argue that the structural violence they manifest and perpetuate is best understood by attending to how they operate as a form of spectacle.     

基于综合可达性的北京城市增长模拟与管控模式优化

社会经济活动的空间重构与交通设施配置息息相关,可达性成为优化城市空间结构,调控城市空间开发的重要手段。在以矢栅一体化的综合可达性测度并构建城市增长模型的基础上,对北京城市增长进行了成功模拟,透视了基于综合可达性导向发展模式的基本特征与主要问题,并提出了基于综合可达性的城市增长调控模式优化方案。研究发现：①城市增长密集发生在建成区周围可达性优越的区域,随着与城市中心的距离增加,城市增长的概率降低,反映了北京单中心的城市发展模式;②受城市规划与交通设施规划失调影响,可达性提升程度越大的区域并不一定带来更高的城市增长开发概率,严重削弱了可达性对城市增长的引导作用;③基于综合可达性的城市增长调控模式的优化方案,要以交通设施规划为基础,并合理耦合空间规划,才能更为有效地引导城市空间良性增长并预防规划失效。基于综合可达性的城市增长模型建立与调控模式优化方案的提出,对于确立与提升交通引导城市增长的基础性地位,优化城市空间结构具有重要的理论和现实意义。     

The enlightened city

Postsecularity, or the nature of the reflexive questioning or destabilization of the secular, remains a highly contested and problematic notion across the social sciences and humanities. Most perspectives share profound disappointment in the institutions of liberal democracy, requiring us to rethink the grounds for ethical and political action in post-political, -democratic, and -truth times. I argue with reference to select illustrative cases that one possible value of postsecularity rests in the notion of the enlightened city that emanates from three broad lines of inquiry: (1) new geographies of religion and postsecularity with implications for decolonial urban theory and the commons; (2) Frankfurt School-inspired messianic critical theory, reflexive secularization, and decolonial urban postsecularity; and (3) reflexive humanization, perceived “impossibility” of wholeness, and critical discourse on the Anthropocene. Rather than repeat the all-too-familiar dangers of Enlightenment rationalism, this approach stresses an immanent transcendent overlapping of ethical and political imperatives beyond the classical separation of life and politics, “planetary urbanization” and zone of indistinction providing the canvas from which postsecular processes unfold, and new subject formation that reconciles radical differences towards a higher unity and confronts injustices in more inclusive and humane ways.     

大都市区民宿和酒店业竞争格局演化及成因探测——上海案例

大都市区民宿和酒店业的空间竞争区位识别及其态势驱动力解析是实现都市旅游住宿业多业态共赢与全域可持续的重要现实条件。本文利用GIS空间分析技术和地理探测器,从微观尺度刻画上海市民宿和酒店业的空间竞争格局演化特征并探测其影响因素。研究发现：①上海市民宿业和酒店业集聚热点均趋向群集演化,民宿业历经“零星单点、单核、双核引领+郊区多组团”演化阶段且具有显著的景区指向性;酒店业历经“单核、单核强化、面状集聚+点状环绕”演化阶段且具有显著的城市商业中心指向性;②民宿业与酒店业的空间竞争程度加剧,竞争范围扩大,竞争形式由酒店业近乎垄断的空间剩余竞争发展为空间非剩余竞争和剩余竞争并存,最终形成空间竞争与错位共生并存状态。③文旅禀赋、商业设施和人口集聚是影响民宿和酒店业微观布局的主要因素,地价和交通条件的影响次之;经营理念、客群定位、经济实力以及空间载体差异是造成民宿和酒店业格局分异的隐性宏观动因。     

城市入境旅游景气指数构建研究——以北京为例

本文基于城市视角编制了旅游景气指数,并从理论上建立了包括先行指数、一致指数、滞后指数的旅游景气指数体系。本文以北京为例,运用月度数据编制了2007年-2012年入境旅游景气先行指数和一致指数,分析了在此期间北京入境旅游市场的波动情况及成因,揭示了先行指数和一致指数之间存在的时滞关系,以期为政府管理机构和旅游企业准确判断城市旅游业的发展并预测未来的动向、制定相关政策提供一定的依据。     

NEO‐LIBERALISM,CULTURE AND POLICY

This article looks at the hegemonic process of neo‐liberal globalisation and its implications for culture in general and cultural policy in particular from a critical perspective. A consideration of its ideological features is a necessary supplement to the economic analysis of neo‐liberal globalisation. Ideology mediates economics and culture. As it is used here, the concept of “ideology” refers to how dominant power relations and inequalities are legitimised by distorted representations of reality at various levels. While these include abstract theory and professional expertise, it is argued that everyday language and “common sense” exemplify the operations of ideology most profoundly in securing consent to prevailing and otherwise questionable arrangements. Culture is now saturated with a market‐oriented mentality that closes out alternative ways of thinking and imagining. The general argument is illustrated with several examples drawn from across the range of lived experience and institutionalised structures, especially in the arts and broadcasting. The logic of the annual European Capital of Culture competition is also discussed with reference to the neo‐liberal framework for urban regeneration. Specifically, the experience of Glasgow 1990 and the plans for Liverpool 2008 are addressed in this regard.     

‘Artists are a tool for gentrification’: maintaining artists and creative production in arts districts

This study investigates the relationship between arts-themed development and the strategies used by neighborhood stakeholders, including artists and other marginalized populations, to maintain their place in gentrifying arts and cultural districts. Using a case study of a state-sanctioned Arts & Entertainment District in Baltimore, MD (U.S.A.), I find that the organizations that are ‘thoughtful’ in their development actively seek to maintain the production of arts and the residency of artists in the neighborhood into perpetuity. At the same time, the influx of arts-themed development helps raise property values and spurs re-colonization of the neighborhood’s large industrial buildings, making it difficult for artists to find legal, affordable live/work spaces in the district. As illegal DIY artists’ spaces are increasingly scrutinized by city inspectors, artists and other marginalized populations lose territory in the district and feel that they are being used for capital interests. This paper evaluates arts-themed development and public–private partnerships as a strategy for maintaining artists in revitalizing neighborhoods and considers the possibilities for a more inclusive arts district through political and community engagement.     

Giving new meaning to religious conversion: Churches,redevelopment, and secularization in Toronto

Research on secularization has increased in recent years, particularly amongst urban geographers. Yet the debate is still dominated by competing theories that generally fail to account for the many institutions that impede and facilitate religiosity on the urban landscape. This article is about the role that land use planning regulations have had on changes to the religious landscape in Toronto. The empirical focus is on former churches that have recently been converted to residential uses. The larger conceptual goal is to explore the extent to which these transitions affect the religious landscape in the city and to determine what they can tell us about broader processes of secularization.