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.     

China's Emerging Neoliberal Urbanism: Perspectives from Urban Redevelopment

Abstract: China's urbanization is undergoing profound neoliberal shifts, within which urban redevelopment has emerged in the forefront of neoliberalization. This study aims to understand China's emerging neoliberal urbanism by examining the association between urban redevelopment and neoliberalism. Rather than a deliberate design, neoliberalization in China is a response to multiple difficulties/crises and the desire for rapid development. The neoliberalization process is full of controversies and inconsistencies, which involve conflicts between neoliberal practices and social resistance, and tensions between central and local states. Nevertheless, China's neoliberal urbanism has a responsive and resilient system to cope with the contradictions and imbalances inherent in neoliberalism. Meanwhile, neoliberal urbanism is more tangible at the sub‐national scale, since the local state can most effectively assist neoliberal experiments and manage crises. This study not only contributes to the understanding of China's neoliberal urbanism, but also has multiple implications for neoliberalism studies in general. First, in examining the interrelationship between the state and market, it is the actual effect of legitimizing and facilitating market operation rather than the presence (or absence) of the state that matters. Second, a new nexus of governance has formed in the neoliberalization process. Not only the nation state but also the local state is of great significance in assisting and managing neoliberal projects. Third, this study further validates the importance and necessity of scrutinizing neoliberal practices, in particular the controversies and inconsistencies within the neoliberalization process.     

THE CAREER OF L. S. BERG

The following appraisal is by Eduard M. Murzayev, physical geographer and toponymist, with interests in Mongolia and Central Asia, who was a student of Berg at Leningrad University, and since this graduation in 1930 has been associated with the Institute of Geography of the Academy of Sciences USSR, first in Leningrad and after 1936 in Moscow. This article is based on a talk given by Murzayev in March 1976 at a memorial session of the Geographical Society USSR in Leningrad.     

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.     

Race,Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard

This paper advances the concept of “waste formations” as a way of thinking together processes of race, space, and waste in brownfield redevelopment projects. Defined as formerly industrial and contaminated properties, in the 1990s brownfields emerged as the grounds for new forms of urbanization and an emerging environmental remediation industry. Through their redevelopment, the twentieth century's urban wastelands—environmentally degraded, economically divested, and often racially marked—have become sites of investment, resignification, and value formation. The concept of waste formations provides a critical framework on the ways these socio‐ecological transformations rework twentieth century urban inequalities—in particular, the articulation of waste and toxic waste—and the ways they produce new geographies of environmental injustice through the displacement of toxic waste to newly waste‐able spaces. This paper develops an analytic of waste formations and applies it to the process of brownfield redevelopment at the Hunters Point Shipyard in southeast San Francisco.     

What to do with vacant and abandoned residential structures? The effects of teardowns and rehabilitations on nearby properties

In the presented paper, we estimate the impacts of three distinct housing policy interventions to deal with distressed and abandoned residential properties: leaving vacant buildings in their current state, remodeling/rebuilding residential structures, and razing vacant structures. We show that vacant structures negatively impact nearby housing up to 4.1%, but when demolition is followed by complete reconstruction, neighboring housing can be appreciated by as much as 14.1%. In addition, negative spillover effects from foreclosures and vacant buildings are primarily observed in low‐income and middle‐income Census tracts, whereas positive spillover effects generated by remodeling are seen in high‐income Census tracts.     

Social sustainability of urban regeneration led by industrial land redevelopment in Taiwan

Abandoned industrial sites, usually contaminated by hazardous substances, create social injustice in the surrounding communities. Redevelopment of industrial land has brought prospects of sustainable development to the communities that live in and around them. This research is to identify the critical factors facilitating urban regeneration and particularly social sustainability in Kaohsiung, an industrial city of Taiwan which experienced deindustrialization in recent decades, resulting in several abandoned industrial sites and decay of the adjacent urban communities. Two different industrial land redevelopment projects were examined; (1) Jhongdou Wetland Park, which focuses on environmental sustainability, and (2) Pier-2 Art Centre, which focuses on economic sustainability. Measured by the social sustainability indicators developed by the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development and through findings from a questionnaire survey of community members, this study found that the redevelopment project of the Pier-2 Art Centre has a higher level of social sustainability than the Jhongdou Wetland Park, performing better in six out of nine themes. Critical dimensions resulting in the better performance in social sustainability of the Pier-2 Art Centre included rental affordability, heritage conservation, community image, cultural activity, community association, public space, local organization and higher accessibility to facility.     

The Politics of the Evicted: Redevelopment,Subjectivity, and Difference in Mumbai's Slum Frontier

In recent years cities around the world have undergone mass slum clearances for redevelopment. This study of Mumbai offers an alternative interpretation of urban capital accumulation by investigating the differentiated political subjectivities of displaced slum residents. I argue that Mumbai's redevelopment entails not uniform class‐based dispossessions but a process of accumulation by differentiated displacement whereby uneven displacement politics are central to the social production of land markets. Two ethnographic cases reveal that groups negotiate redevelopment in contradictory ways, supporting or contesting projects in varying moments. Redevelopmental subjectivities are influenced at key conjunctures by market‐oriented resettlement, ideologies of belonging, desires for improved housing, and participation in non‐governmental groups. This articulated assemblage of power‐laden practices reflects and reworks class, gender, and ethno‐religious relations, profoundly shaping evictees' experience and political engagement. The paper concludes that focusing on differentiated subjectivities may usefully guide both analysis and social justice practice aimed at countering dispossession.     

Monumentality in Urban Design: The Case of Russia

A prominent American urban geographer and observer of the Russian urban scene provides an overview of grand planning and monumental urban design in Russia and the former Soviet Union through the lens of four themes outlined in a previous paper by Larry Ford (2008). In the process, he adds two more themes relevant to Russia and the former USSR: town building and architecture intended to define and legitimize state power, and the shaping or remodeling of society to reflect a regime's ideology. Noting the obstacles in the West to getting large urban projects planned, accepted, and completed, he argues that monumental urban landscapes appear to demand some degree of sustained, centralized, authoritarian leadership. The latter has been present in Russia and the USSR during much of the past millennium, including the present, but the emergence of new commercial/corporate forces in urban land development also bears scrutiny in studies of the processes promoting urban monumentality. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, R14, R52. 10 figures, 44 references.     

Heritage conservation and advocacy coalitions: the state-society conflict in the case of the Enning Road redevelopment project in Guangzhou

The Enning Road redevelopment project has been controversial in Guangzhou as the site possesses many vernacular buildings that are not officially recognised by the authorities as significant but are nevertheless highly regarded by non-state stakeholders as important entities that embody the unique essence and culture of local neighbourhoods. This paper examines the positive role led by the press media, the New Express, in bringing about changes in the government-sanctioned Enning Road redevelopment project plan through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). The significance of this paper lies in detailing how the news group has helped shift the project priority from being property-led to conservation-led. Its reports have gained a wide audience in appreciating and recognising the conservation value of non-designated vernacular architecture in inner city areas. Nonetheless, this paper raises question about the sustainability of civil mobilisation in subsequent conservation efforts, due to a general lack of enthusiasm. Neither urban redevelopment strategies nor conservation agenda have been subject to a major overhaul due to the impact of this individual redevelopment project. Therefore, the promise of change is at best a tactical compromise adopted by the municipal authorities to nullify opposing public voices in Guangzhou.