Cultural production in peripheral urban spaces: lessons from Barriera,Turin (Italy)

Practices of cultural production within a peripheral urban neighbourhood can contribute to foster the sense of place, community belonging and local collective action. Starting from a critical perspective on the interconnections between cultural practices and urban regeneration, and developing on the concept of place-making, the paper has two main purposes: to investigate the nature of embeddedness of these practices and explore the ways of self-organization of cultural actors and their relationships with public policies. The case study concerns ‘Barriera di Milano’, a large peripheral area in Turin (Italy), formerly one of the most industrialized zones of the city. Over the past few years, and particularly after the real-estate bubble burst of 2007–2008, in Barriera a lively concentration of initiatives of culture has been taking place, redefining the urban and social space. These initiatives seem to be innovative for many reasons: firstly, while demonstrating a peculiar but significant embeddedness in the neighbourhood, they are mostly self-generated; secondly, the institutional assets, the economic self-sufficiency and the low degree of connection among initiatives support new forms of citizenship and place-making based on a ‘not-for-profit entrepreneurship’.     

How does transportation shape intrametropolitan growth? An answer from the Regional Express Rail

This paper analyzes the influence of transportation infrastructure, and in particular of the Regional Express Rail (RER), on employment and population growth in the Paris metropolitan area between 1968 and 2010. In order to make proper causal inference, we rely on historical instruments and control for all other transportation modes that could be complement or substitute to the RER. Our results show that proximity to an RER station increases employment and population density and, in particular, employment and population growth. The latter effects are higher in municipalities located near RER stations and close to employment (sub)centers. They are also found to be particularly strong for jobs in the service sector, for factory workers, and for highly educated population. We find no impact of the RER expansion on employment growth during the first part of the period, while the effect on population growth appears earlier but declines over time.     

Brutalism Redux: Relational Monumentality and the Urban Politics of Brutalist Architecture

Brutalism is an architectural form that is experiencing somewhat of a revival of late. This revival focuses almost purely on its aesthetics, but there is an ethical dimension to Brutalism that often gets overlooked in these narratives. This paper therefore reanalyses the original concepts and ethics of brutalist architecture with a reaffirmation of the original triumvirate of brutalist ethics as articulated by Raynar Banham as monumentality, structural honesty and materials “as found”. The paper then articulates these through the literature on architectural affect to argue that brutalist ethics are continually “enacted” via a relational monumentality that brings the building and its inhabitants together in the practice of inhabitation. Using the case study of Robin Hood Gardens in London, the paper posits that a “brutalist politics” comes into light that can help catalyse a broader critique of contemporary neoliberalism.     

An Informational Right to the City? Code,Content, Control,and the Urbanization of Information

Henri Lefebvre talked of the “right to the city” alongside a right to information. As the urban environment becomes increasingly layered by abstract digital representation, Lefebvre's broader theory warrants application to the digital age. Through considering what is entailed by the urbanization of information, this paper examines the problems and implications of any “informational right to the city”. In directing Tony Benn's five questions of power towards Google, arguably the world's most powerful mediator of information, this paper exposes processes that occur when geographic information is mediated by powerful digital monopolies. We argue that Google currently occupies a dominant share of any informational right to the city. In the spirit of Benn's final question—“How do we get rid of you?”—the paper seeks to apply post‐political theory in exploring a path to the possibility of more just information geographies.     

Rent,Real Estate,and Flood Mitigation in New Orleans East

This paper presents results from a study of environmental harm created in the collision of real estate speculation and the political process that governed extension of the urban frontier of New Orleans into its eastern wetlands. Near term concerns of rent‐seeking real estate capital and the contested politics of urban infrastructure expansion challenged a fragmented state charged with regulatory oversight and protection of investments in land and citizens. The paper engages theoretically the relative inattention of urban political ecology theory to rent as a way to theorize how capital flows through land, and argues for increased attention to the problem of land rent and the multiple scales of political engagement that manage ecological crisis immanent in the metabolism of nature and society under capitalism.     

Washing urban water: diplomacy in environmental art in the Bronx,New York City

Lillian Ball's art project WATERWASH creates a new ecological imaginary in the South Bronx. Building on a tradition of ‘maintenance art’, the work exhibits the power of soil, plants and microorganisms to clean water – in effect maintaining urban water. An overarching goal of WATERWASH is to educate local people about the metabolism of urban water, causes of river pollution, and to familiarize them with the capacity of soil and plants to respond to that problem. As part of its creation, the project provided diverse groups of people with opportunities to participate, including a group of Bronx youth who assisted in planting the wetland. Several of these apprentices will be involved in future monitoring of the effectiveness of the wetland in mitigating parking lot runoff. I use Isabelle Stengers' notion of ‘diplomacy’ to interrogate the efforts of the artist in negotiating and creating an occasion in which people with divergent interests can both recognize and maintain the relationships of care that sustain them. In effect, this effort extends the feminist discourse of maintenance work to include that undertaken by the ‘other-than-human’.     

Living with patriarchy and poverty: women's agency and the spatialities of gender relations in Afghanistan

This article examines the spatialities of gender relations and women's oppression in urban Afghanistan under conditions of poverty and strict patriarchy. Using empirical data from biographical interviews with Afghan women from urban households in Kabul, Herat, and Jalalabad, the article questions how gender as social relation and gender as difference is lived and experienced among the urban poor in Afghanistan. Looking at urban livelihoods through the lens of feminist geography helps to better understand the gendered spaces of home and the outside world, of households as sites of security and violence, and of urban contexts and ethnic affiliations. The approach allows for reflection on women's subjectivities and their own understandings of gender inequality and injustice. Examining the gendered geographies in urban Afghanistan shows how social difference is lived under conditions of patriarchy and poverty and how women's agency contributes to the livelihoods of their households.     

The Street Corps of Changsha around 1920

The Changsha Street Corps originated in the local militia during the period of the Taiping Rebellion, and it played an important part in Changsha’s urban social management at the grassroots level. However, the role and influence of the street corps underwent changes during the process of modernization and the building of the modern nation–state. By 1920, although the street corps of Changsha still worked as the agent of the state at the grassroots level, its autonomy had been curtailed, and its social influence weakened. In the new social environment, even the maintenance of neighborhood interests became a challenge for the street corps. This article illustrates the readjustments in geopolitical and industrial relations during the process of urban modernization. It also illustrates how a new form of state power, namely the police, infiltrated the social management system, affected the traditional social structure, and complicated the interaction between modern state and society.     

The Urban “Cultural Nexus of Power”： Intellectual Elites in Shanghai and Beijing, 1900-1937

In the decades before the full-scale war with Japan in 1937, a robust series of institutions connected the bourgeois with intellectuals （which included professionals and journalists, as well as academics） in Shanghai. Collectively, these institutions can be understood as forming an urban ＂cultural nexus of power＂ that allowed non-state actors to effectively control aspects of Shanghai＇s political life. This bourgeois-intellectual alliance was not inevitable; no similar bonds existed between these same two groups in Beijing. It was forged in Shanghai due to the city＇s unique historical position as a Treaty Port and its dynamic economy, which included an extensive structure of private higher education and a market-based publishing industry. Unlike the rural ＂cultural nexus of power＂ originally described by Prasenjit Duara, this urban nexus grew stronger during the political and economic changes of the early twentieth century. War and revolution in the 1930s and 1940s, however, destroyed the connections between the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, ending the vibrant urban environment they had created.     

转型时期我国城市贫困研究述评

本文基于地理学、规划学和社会学视角,在“过程-互动-行动”研究框架下,统计分析1990年代以来我国城市贫困研究的文献数量和内容演变情况,论述了研究分布与社会经济转型和社会救助政策密切相关。在综合述评每类研究的主要观点基础上,论文指出目前研究存在几方面问题:缺少贫困阶层社会空间研究,缺少与城市发展、城市空间结构的关系研究,缺少对贫困阶层需求和空间资源公平配置的研究,并探讨对未来城市研究的启示。