Handbook of Urban Geography 1785364596, 9781785364594

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HANDBOOK OF URBAN GEOGRAPHY

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RESEARCH HANDBOOKS IN GEOGRAPHY Series Editor: Susan J. Smith, Honorary Professor of Social and Economic Geography and The Mistress of Girton College, University of Cambridge, UK This important new Research Handbook series will offer high quality, original reference works that cover a range of subjects within the evolving and dynamic field of geography, emphasising in particular the critical edge and transformative role of human geography.   Under the general editorship of Susan J. Smith, these Research Handbooks will be edited by leading scholars in their respective fields. Comprising specially commissioned contributions from distinguished academics, the Research Handbooks offer a wide-ranging examination of current issues. Each contains a unique blend of innovative thinking, substantive analysis and balanced synthesis of ­contemporary research.   Titles in the series include: Handbook on Geographies of Technology Edited by Barney Warf Handbook on the Geographies of Money and Finance Edited by Ron Martin and Jane Pollard Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories Edited by Anssi Paasi, John Harrison and Martin Jones Handbook on the Geographies of Power Edited by Mat Coleman and John Agnew Handbook on the Geographies of Corruption Edited by Barney Warf Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration Edited by Katharyne Mitchell, Reece Jones and Jennifer Fluri Handbook of Urban Geography Edited by Tim Schwanen and Ronald van Kempen

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Handbook of Urban Geography

Edited by

Tim Schwanen School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK

Ronald van Kempen Formerly at Utrecht University, the Netherlands

RESEARCH HANDBOOKS IN GEOGRAPHY

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

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© Tim Schwanen and Ronald van Kempen 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930681 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781785364600

ISBN 978 1 78536 459 4 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78536 460 0 (eBook)

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Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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Contents List of figuresviii List of tablesix List of editors and contributorsx Prefacexiv  1 Introduction to the Handbook of Urban Geography Tim Schwanen

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PART I  URBAN THEORIES AND METHODS  2 Worlding cities and comparative urbanism Laura Cesafsky and Kate Derickson

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 3 Urban political ecologies of and in the city Joshua J. Cousins and Joshua Newell

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 4 Urban cosmopolitics Anders Blok and Ignacio Farías

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 5 Big data and the city Matthew Zook, Taylor Shelton and Ate Poorthuis

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PART II  URBAN NETWORKS  6  Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity as measured in the interlocking network model Ben Derudder and Peter J. Taylor

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 7 Inside mobile urbanism: cities and policy mobilities Cristina Temenos, Tom Baker and Ian R. Cook

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 8 Metropolitan mobilities: transnational urban labour markets Cathy McIlwaine and Megan Ryburn

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 9 Refugee mobility across networks and cities Ilse Van Liempt and Francesco Vecchio

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10 Urban infrastructures: four tensions and their effects Tim Schwanen and Denver V. Nixon

147

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vi  Handbook of urban geography PART III  URBAN REDEVELOPMENT 11  Emerging city regions: urban expansion, transformation and discursive construction Markus Hesse

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12 The cultural economy in cities Tom Hutton

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13 Urban regeneration through culture Jonathan Ward and Phil Hubbard

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14 Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin

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15 Terrorism, risk and the quest for urban resilience Jon Coaffee

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PART IV  URBAN INEQUALITIES 16 Urban inequality Chris Hamnett 17  Segregation: a multi-contextual and multi-faceted phenomenon in stratified societies Masayoshi Oka and David W. S. Wong 18 Neighbourhood effects on social outcomes Sako Musterd, Roger Andersson and George Galster 19  Gentrification and displacement: urban inequality in cities of late capitalism Agustín Cocola-Gant 20 Urban informatics and e-governance Barney Warf

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255 281

297 311

PART V  URBAN SOCIALITIES 21 Sociality, materiality and the city Sophie Watson 22  Spaces of encounter: learning to live together in superdiverse cities Nick Schuermans

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Contents  ­vii 23 Children’s geographies: encounters and experiences Peter Kraftl

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PART VI  URBAN POLITICS 24  Exploring insurgent urban mobilizations: from urban social movements to urban political movements? Lazaros Karaliotas and Erik Swyngedouw

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Urban governance: re-thinking top-down and bottom-up 25  power relations in the wake of neo-liberalization Mike Raco and Sonia Freire-Trigo

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26  The right to the city: theoretical outline and reflections on migrants’ activism in post-reform urban China Junxi Qian and Shenjing He

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27  Contextualizing neighbourhood activism: spatial solidarity in the city Katherine B. Hankins and Deborah G. Martin

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PART VII  URBAN SUSTAINABILITIES 28 Urban sustainability transitions Jonathan Rutherford

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29 Eco-cities445 Robert Cowley 30 The governance of climate change in urban areas Vanesa Castán Broto

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Index477

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Figures   6.1 Global network connectivity for producer services firms 86   6.2 Global network connectivity for non-governmental firms 92   6.3 Global network connectivity for maritime producer 94 services firms   7.1 Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille 104   7.2 Park Hill in 2016 115 15.1 Entry and exit points in the Ring of Steel 231 15.2 Extension to the Ring of Steel in 1997 233 17.1 Illustration of two spatial approaches 260 17.2 Correlations of local spatial isolation measures in St. Louis, 265 MO (340 census tracts) 17.3 Correlations of local spatial isolation measures in Chicago, 266 IL (1327 census tracts) 17.4 Residential isolation of advantage in St. Louis, MO (340 269 census tracts) 17.5 Residential isolation of disadvantage in St. Louis, MO 271 (340 census tracts) 17.6 Residential isolation of advantage in Chicago, IL (1327 273 census tracts) 17.7 Residential isolation of disadvantage in Chicago, IL (1327 275 census tracts) 20.1 Internet penetration rates in Europe, November 2017 315 22.1 The main hypothesis in the geographies of encounter literature341 350 22.2 Summary of the geographies of encounter literature 26.1 The front gate of Gongyou Zhijia in Pi-Cun, Beijing 406

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Tables   6.1 Direct measures of inter-city relations   6.2 Top 10 of most connected cities in infrastructure and corporate networks   6.3 Connectivity ratios between countries’ most connected cities   7.1 Examples of mobile policy elements 15.1 Stages in the evolution of the Ring of Steel 17.1 The multi-contextual and multi-faceted nature of segregation 17.2 Geographic and population characteristics of the study areas 20.1 US Internet usage rates by income, age, ethnicity and community type, 2015 25.1 The core characteristics of top-down and bottom-up planning

80 81 89 109 228 256 263 314 384

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Editors and contributors EDITORS Tim Schwanen is Associate Professor and Director of the Transport Studies Unit at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK. Ronald van Kempen was Professor of Urban Geography at the Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

CONTRIBUTORS Roger Andersson is Professor of Social and Economic Geography at the Institute of Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, Sweden. Tom Baker is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. Anders Blok is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Vanesa Castán Broto is a Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute and the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield, UK. Laura Cesafsky holds a PhD in Geography, Environment and Society from the University of Minnesota, USA. She is now a researcher at the Nissan Research Centre in Sunnyvale, California, USA. Jon Coaffee is Professor in Urban Geography in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Agustín Cocola-Gant is Research Fellow in Urban and Tourism Studies at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon, Portugal. Ian R. Cook is Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences at Northumbria University, UK. Joshua J. Cousins is Assistant Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry, USA. x

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Editors and contributors  ­xi Robert Cowley is Lecturer in Sustainable Cities at the Department of Geography, King’s College London, UK. Kate Derickson is Associate Professor of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota, USA. Ben Derudder is Professor of Urban Geography at Ghent University, Belgium. Ignacio Farías is Professor of Urban Anthropology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Sonia Freire-Trigo is a Lecturer in Urban Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London, UK. George Galster is Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA. Chris Hamnett is Emeritus Professor of Geography at King’s College London, UK, and Visiting Professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, China. Katherine B. Hankins is Associate Professor of Geography at Georgia State University, USA. Shenjing He is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Hong Kong, China. Markus Hesse is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg. Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London, UK. Tom Hutton is Professor of Urban Studies and City Planning at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Lazaros Karaliotas is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow, UK. Peter Kraftl is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK. Andrés Luque-Ayala is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK. Deborah G. Martin is Professor of Geography at Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA.

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xii  Handbook of urban geography Simon Marvin is Director of the Urban Institute and Professor at the University of Sheffield, UK. Cathy McIlwaine is Professor of Development Geography at King’s College London, UK. Sako Musterd is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Joshua Newell is Associate Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at University of Michigan, USA. Denver V. Nixon is Research Associate in Transport and Mobilities at the Transport Studies Unit at the University of Oxford, UK. Masayoshi Oka is Assistant Professor of Management at Josai University, Japan. Ate Poorthuis is Assistant Professor at Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore. Junxi Qian is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Hong Kong, China. Mike Raco is Professor of Urban Governance and Development in the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London, UK. Jonathan Rutherford is Senior Researcher at Paris Est University, France. Megan Ryburn is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Latin America and Caribbean Centre at The London School of Economics, UK. Nick Schuermans is Postdoctoral Researcher and Teaching Associate at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium. Taylor Shelton is Assistant Professor of Geosciences at Mississippi State University, USA. Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. Peter J. Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Human Geography at Northumbria University, UK. Cristina Temenos is a Lecturer in Urban Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. Ilse Van Liempt is Assistant Professor in Urban Geography at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

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Editors and contributors  ­xiii Francesco Vecchio is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, China. Jonathan Ward is Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Leeds, UK. Barney Warf is Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas, USA. Sophie Watson is Professor of Sociology at The Open University, UK. David W. S. Wong is Professor of Geography and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University, USA. Matthew Zook is Professor of Digital Geographies at the University of Kentucky, USA.

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Preface During the preparation of this Handbook Ronald van Kempen passed away after a short illness. His sudden death at the age of 57 was an immense blow in numerous ways and particularly for his loved ones, but also for this book. It was Ronald who had been approached by Edward Elgar Publishing about the Handbook. He was also the driving force behind the first stages of the book’s completion and continued working on it for as long as he could. For a while after Ronald’s passing, ignoring the book was a way of coming to terms with what had happened. Yet, neither abandoning the project nor asking someone else to step in as co-editor felt appropriate. I decided to complete the editing of the book on my own, in honour of Ronald and his scholarship, mentorship and friendship. The consequence of my choices has been that the Handbook has taken longer to finish than originally intended. I am deeply grateful for the support that has made the book’s completion possible. People I would like to thank in particular are Matt Pitman at Edward Elgar Publishing for his understanding and flexibility, the contributing authors for their patience and persistence, and the external reviewers whose generous and constructive comments helped to strengthen draft versions of the chapters in this book. I also want to thank Kirsty Ray, Nina Teng and Serkan Birgel for administrative support and help with the formatting and making consistent of the chapter manuscripts, the checking of references and many other tasks that are involved in the putting together of an edited collection. I am, finally, grateful to Ronald for asking me on a journey he was not able to complete himself and for sharing his experience and expertise in the early phases of the itinerary. I imagine he would have enjoyed the other parts of the trip too, as well as its destination. Tim Schwanen Oxford, October 2018

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1.  Introduction to the Handbook of Urban Geography Tim Schwanen

1.1 INTRODUCTION It is no exaggeration to say that in the twenty-first century Urban Geography has become one of the most exciting fields in the discipline of Geography. There are multiple reasons for this; one is the advent of the Urban Age now that, according to a wide variety of agencies and authors, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities (e.g. UNFPA, 2007; Seto et al., 2010). While it has been criticized heavily, not least by geographers (Gleeson, 2012; Brenner and Schmid, 2014), the Urban Age thesis has certainly caught the imagination. It has amplified ‘the new urbanology’ (Gleeson, 2012) – a set of typically optimistic, future-oriented frames and understandings about cities and urbanization as solutions to all kinds of ills and sites of growth, innovation and wellbeing (e.g. Glaeser, 2011; Hambleton, 2015). It has also strengthened more pessimistic, to some extent neo-Malthusian narratives of cities and urban areas as increasingly overpopulated, deeply unequal usurpers of resources and sources of emissions (e.g. Okulicz-Kozaryn, 2015; Science, 2016). Predictably, however, it has generated and refracted many, nuanced discourses and perspectives that cut across these positions (e.g. Gleeson, 2014; Amin and Thrift, 2017; Beauregard, 2018). Partly because of the (renewed) centrality of the city and urbanization to public and cross-disciplinary academic debates, Urban Studies as an interdisciplinary ensemble of discourse, method and praxis has grown rapidly and gained several younger siblings. Urban ecology, for instance, has become a burgeoning field of research, which is also in recognition of the observation that ‘[c]ities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanized world’ (Grimm, 2008, p. 756; see also Alberti, 2016). Another sibling is what Michael Batty (2013) has called the ‘Science of Cities’ – a confluence of new computational capabilities, big data, Urban Age discourse and concepts and ideas from across academic disciplines, including physics and quantitative geographical analysis from the heydays of the Quantitative Revolution and more recently (see also Barthelemy, 2016; Acuto et al., 2018; Chapter 5 below). 1

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2  Handbook of urban geography A second set of reasons for the resurgence of Urban Geography lies in developments within the field or sub-discipline itself. In the twenty-first century there have been several significant theoretical and methodological debates of which three stand out. Partly in response to earlier work on ‘world’ or ‘global cities’ (Friedmann, 1986; Sassen, 1991; Taylor, 2004), post-colonial geographers and planners – many of whom have also been influenced significantly by feminist and Marxist theories – started to develop a set of different and differing approaches to theorizing the city and the urban (e.g. Robinson, 2002, 2006; Roy, 2009). These go under different names, including ‘Urbanization 2s’ (Derickson, 2015; see also Chapter 2), and have introduced a suite of new concepts or borrowed them from other disciplines; examples include – but are not limited to – ‘ordinary cities’ (Robinson, 2006), ‘worlding’ (McCann et al., 2013) and ‘provincializing’ (Sheppard et al., 2013). There are important differences between such concepts; suffice to say that they all try to move beyond the imposition of Euro-American concepts and modes of thinking about cities and urbanization onto sites and processes across the planet. They thus aspire to theorizing and understanding cities in the Majority World on their own terms as much as possible. This does not amount to full-scale rejection of concepts, theories and practices developed by ‘Western’ urban geographers (cf. Chakrabarty, 2000) but a significant reworking as well as the invention of new modes of thinking and doing research that can shed light on the potentialities, complexities, contradictions and marginalizations in Majority World cities. One of the most productive strands of literature to have come out of these attempts is on relational comparison of cities, often in quite different parts of the world (e.g. McFarlane, 2010; Robinson, 2016; Hart, 2018) and of sites within a given city (McFarlane et al., 2017). However, the work by authors like Jennifer Robinson and Ananya Roy has also drawn criticism. According to Allen Scott (2012, p. 31), for instance: Robinson (2006) is correct to call for a cosmopolitan and non-dualistic urban theory for today’s work . . . The point is not to assert that cities everywhere are converging towards a common future destiny [as some post-colonial thinking seemed to have argued – TS]. The point is that cities in an increasingly capitalistic world can be understood by reference to a set of fundamental principles that are nonetheless accompanied by enormous divergence of empirical outcomes on the ground.

The risk, then, for geographers such as Scott is that post-colonial perspectives on cities and urbanization fail to strike the right balance between the general and the particular (see also Storper and Scott, 2016). Roy (2016),

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Introduction  ­3 in turn, has argued that historical difference – in particular if produced through colonialism – is too constitutive of urbanization to be reduced to empirical variation. She has also proposed a differentiation between the general and the universal. Her and others’ work does aim to achieve generalizations in the sense of conclusions that apply beyond the specific site where empirical research has been conducted but she is not aspiring to make universal claims that are valid everywhere. A clear difference in epistemological ‘temperament’ – to borrow a term from pragmatist philosopher William James (2000[1907]) – can be identified here, but also a difference in methodology. Scott and Storper, and many of the protagonists of the planetary urbanization thesis discussed below, prefer to study the city by ‘start[ing] from the outside in; that is, they want to see the city as a whole and map aspects of it, for they want to see the city as an expression of a larger force’ (Amin and Thrift, 2017, p. 4). Robinson, Roy and colleagues, in contrast, prefer ‘to see the city from the inside out . . . because cities work from the ground up’ (Amin and Thrift, 2017, p. 4). This last practice and temperament can also be found in scholarship on assemblage urbanism (McFarlane, 2011a, 2011b; see also Chapters 4 and 7). Much has been written about the concept of assemblage over the past 15 years in Geography and beyond (e.g. Anderson et al., 2012; Baker and McGuirk, 2017; Buchanan, 2017). The term is widely used to describe and conceptualize gatherings of heterogeneous elements whose arrangements are emergent, provisional, fragile and continually made and remade. It has been deployed to great effect, as exemplified in research on informal settlements in Majority World cities such as São Paulo or Mumbai (e.g. McFarlane 2011a, 2011b) or on policy mobilities between cities (e.g. Pow, 2014; Wang et al., 2016; see also Chapter 7). Nonetheless, assemblage perspectives on cities and urbanization have also been criticized intensely, amongst others for being naively empirical without searching for more structural underlying processes, their flattening of power relations and social hierarchies, their conception of agency, and their abstract nature (for further discussion, see Brenner et al., 2011; Storper and Scott, 2016). Both post-colonial and assemblage perspectives, which are much more interrelated than the discussion here might suggest, have also been criticized for ‘methodological cityism’ – ‘an overwhelming analytical and empirical focus on the traditional city to the exclusion of other aspects of contemporary urbanization processes’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015, p. 16). This concern needs to be placed in the context of the wider literature on planetary urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2015), which is first and foremost a critique of the idea of urbanization as city growth. In fact, Neil Brenner and colleagues follow and expand on Henri Lefebvre’s

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4  Handbook of urban geography claims that the city and the urban need to be separated – the former being an empirical category, the latter a theoretical construct (Brenner, 2013) – and that ‘[s]ociety has been completely urbanized’ (Lefebvre, 2003[1970], p. 1). In the most detailed theoretical statement of the planetary urbanization thesis to date, Brenner and Schmid (2015) argue that urbanization needs to be understood as the result of three ‘moments’: (1) concentrated urbanization – the agglomeration of population, infrastructure and capital in particular sites, conventionally denoted as cities (see also Wachsmuth, 2014), (2) extended urbanization – the uneven stretching and thickening across the planet of the practices, infrastructures and relationships that were once associated with the city and its hinterland (see also Monte-Mór, 2014), and (3) differential urbanization – the creative destruction of existing configurations for the generation of new forms of urban space and capital accumulation (a set of arguments building on, for instance, Harvey [2001]). The planetary urbanization thesis has rapidly become very influential. In her recent review of urban theory in the Urban Age, Derickson (2015) denotes it ‘Urbanization 1’, as if (versions of)1 the planetary urbanization approach is (or are) the only game in town when it comes to temperaments oriented towards generalization/universalization and methodological practices of seeing from the outside in. As Chapter 3 below suggests, (semi-)Marxist approaches to the city and the urban, such as Urban Political Ecology, have been adapting themselves to the new realities of theorizing the urban that have emerged with the planetary urbanization thesis. Moreover, the thinking by Brenner and colleagues has spurred a re-imagination and re-conceptualization of suburbs as often vibrant and central places in the twenty-first century (see Keil, 2018). At the same time, there have been strong criticisms. These range from concerns over the reduction of the city to an empirical rather than a theoretical category (Davidson and Iveson, 2015; Storper and Scott, 2016) and the absence of an ‘outside’ to urbanization (see also Jazeel, 2018; Ruddick et al., 2018) to a scaling of the ‘universalizing from the European experience to a new extreme’ (Derickson, 2015, p. 654) and insufficient attention being paid to human subjectivity, difference and everyday experience (e.g. Ruddick et al., 2018). The strict separation between the city and the urban, as well as the inclination to give both clearly defined and stable meanings, in planetary urbanization thinking have been criticized by Barnett and Bridge (2016). These authors seek to steer ‘attention away from trying to apprehend just what the city or the urban is [which is a central concern for Brenner and colleagues – TS] towards inquiring into what it is that cities and urban processes are presumed to be able to do’ (Barnett and Bridge, 2016, p. 1195, emphasis in the original). They discuss the case of the development of the

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Introduction  ­5 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), during which the urban issues obtained increased visibility in UN circles. Barnett and Bridge suggest that over the course of the negotiations around the formulation of SDG 11, which revolves around inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities and human settlements, three different spatial imaginations of the urban featured prominently: agglomeration – with the proximity associated with cities allowing all kinds of efficiencies and benefits to emerge; hub – with urban settlements being nodes of condensation in wider networks of people, trade, food, water, and so forth; and scale – the city as a figure for concentrated action and solutions rather than bearer or source of challenges. These imaginations overlapped, intersected and sometimes contradicted each other during the negotiations. The ‘lack of clear-cut, singular clarity in definitions’ (Barnett and Bridge, 2016, p. 1197) was not a problem but productive as it helped to turn cities into sites for governing and action. The implication of this example for Urban Geography as a sub-­ discipline or field of research is that crystal-clear and generic definitions of core concepts are not necessarily required or even helpful; meanings are at least to some extent context-specific, emergent and shaped by the problem(s) at hand. Moreover, different and changing meanings and imaginations can help to open up different forms of action and thus be productive. Surveying Urban Geography as a field of action suggests as much: different researchers across ‘epistemic cultures’ (Knorr Cetina, 2009),2 and to an extent across different localities, work with different understandings of the city and the urban, thereby generating a wide range of insights and knowledges that both overlap and diverge. Moreover, there are risks to imposing one understanding, or at least a tightly bounded set of understandings, of the city and the urban onto different strands of research or bodies of scholarship and to evaluating them in relation to that (or those) understanding(s). According to Isabelle Stengers (2011), the imposition of a standard and comparing different entities or practices with that standard erases from view the specificity, or what she calls the divergence, of those entities or practices; it might even destroy that specificity. Importantly, she understands divergence not as relational – as in divergence from others – but as constitutive: each entity or practice, including a particular mode or strand of Urban Geography, ‘does have its own positive and distinct way of paying due attention; that is, of having things and situations matter. Each produces its own line of divergence, as it likewise produces itself ’ (Stengers, 2011, p. 59). Divergence thus understood is generative as it makes different ways of understanding, imagining, experiencing and acting upon the city and the urban possible; it needs to be harnessed by urban geographers. This

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6  Handbook of urban geography does most certainly not mean that anything goes: the effects of practices – theorizing, conducting empirical research, communicating research to peers or non-academic stakeholders, and so forth – need to be evaluated on their own terms and be acceptable to others within a particular strand of research. There should also be a place for ‘engaged pluralism’ – open, inclusive, respectful, constructive, non-sanitized debate across boundaries of bodies of scholarship (Bernstein, 1988; Barnes and Sheppard, 2010; Kwan and Schwanen, 2016; Brenner, 2018) – given that the objects of interest to different constituencies within Urban Geography do have at least some elements in common. At the same time, harnessing divergence à la Stengers also means situating the theoretical debates about post-colonial perspectives, assemblage and planetary urbanization that have been touched upon above. These debates are of key importance to Urban Geography in the twenty-first century but urban geographers are positioned differently in relation to them. Some may be consumed almost completely by them, others follow or take notice of them to different extents, whereas still others may remain more or less unaffected by them. There is a geography to these debates as well. They seem to be present most in Anglo-American Urban Geography, although even within that broad constituency different epistemic cultures are engaging in different ways. Elsewhere, for instance in countries in Continental Europe, in East Asia or Latin America, these debates may not only be (slightly) different in nature but also carry a different weight than in, say, the UK.

1.2  ABOUT THE BOOK The Handbook of Urban Geography aims to convey and make understandable the vibrancy and heterogeneity of Urban Geography at a time when the twenty-first century is well underway. It seeks to harness divergences à la Stengers (2011, see above) within Urban Geography whilst also providing opportunities for ‘engaged pluralism’ (see above). So, what for some might look like a rather unfocused collection of quite disparate contributions can also be understood as the result of a deliberate attempt to bring together specific strands of scholarship focused on the city and the urban with their own particular histories, problems, concepts, methods, and so forth. The point is to convey the richness of engagement with the city and urban in Geography – and indeed beyond (see below) – and to push against all too settled understandings of what Urban Geography is or should be. To what extent the book successfully achieves its aims is for readers and users to decide. From an editor’s point of view, the book does offer a good

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Introduction  ­7 palette of colours, as any good paint sample card would do. Not only does it cover a wide range of substantive topics (discussed in Section 1.3 below), it also brings together different epistemic cultures, recognizes interdisciplinarity and includes contributions from topic specialists at different stages in their academic careers. In terms of epistemic culture, the book includes contributions that sit squarely within, or draw significantly on, Marxism (e.g. Chapters 3, 19, 24 and 26), the new data sciences (Chapter 5), a more established version of quantitative geography or spatial analysis (e.g. Chapters 7, 17 and 18) and materialist and more-than-human scholarship (e.g. Chapters 4, 7 and 21). Regarding disciplinarity, the book recognizes that the boundaries between Urban Geography and other disciplines’ engagements with the city and urban are fluid, porous and fuzzy rather than hard, impermeable and sharp. It therefore also contains contributions by scholars whose work evolves in conversations with geographers and others but who may not readily self-identify as geographers. This is healthy and even logical, given the emphasis on, and valorization of, interdisciplinarity across many academic institutions and the complexity of the city and the urban. At the same time, there are always different end results that could have been achieved. As a whole, the book speaks more from the West – and more specifically the Anglo-American world – than originally intended. Similarly, there are topics and perspectives that could, and perhaps should, have been covered but are absent from the final version. It would have been useful, for instance, to have separate chapters on the planetary urbanization thesis (but see Chapters 2 and 3 for reflection on this), on austerity urbanism, the urban commons, urban greenspaces and vulnerability and adaptation to climate risks. Other edited volumes focused on cities and the urban can be consulted for discussions of these and other themes (see, for example, Parnell and Oldfield, 2014; Hall and Burdett, 2018; Jayne, 2018; Ward et al., 2018).

1.3  ABOUT THE CHAPTERS Apart from this Introduction, the Handbook of Urban Geography consists of 29 chapters by specialists on the topics that are covered. The chapters are divided into seven Parts. Six of these cover broad and general themes in the Urban Geography literature of the twenty-first century: urban networks, urban redevelopment, urban inequalities, urban socialities, urban politics and urban sustainabilities. These six substantive themes, which relate to the urban and the city as an object of study for geographers, are preceded by a Part on theories and methods.

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8  Handbook of urban geography The division into Parts, and the allocation of individual chapters to specific Parts, is to some extent arbitrary. The division and allocation have changed somewhat during the preparation of the Handbook and when the chapters took shape. Like any categorization of internally heterogeneous entities, the final division and allocation risk occluding some of the connections between chapters. Two examples will suffice to support this point. Chapter 5 by Zook, Shelton and Poorthuis deals not only with big data, which is why it is included in Part I on theories and methods, but also with gentrification; it could also have been placed in Part IV on urban inequalities and thereby in more direct conversation with Chapter 19 on gentrification by Cocola-Gant. In addition, a draft classification at an earlier point in time had a Part on urban mobilities, containing most of the chapters now included in Part II, as well as Cousins and Newell’s chapter on urban political ecologies (now in Part I), Chapter 15 by Coaffee on anti-terrorism measures and urban resilience in London (now in Part III), Chapter 20 by Warf on digital im/mobilities (now in Part IV) and even Chapter 23 by Kraftl on children’s geographies (now in Part V). In the end, however, the current classification worked best insofar that it draws attention to the key themes of networks, redevelopment, inequality, sociality, politics and sustainability. This is certainly not to suggest that these are the only major or most important themes in the recent Urban Geography literature. They are, however, convenient ‘hooks’ for offering an overview of the many developments in Urban Geography as a vibrant and heterogeneous research field. The network theme is very well-rehearsed in Urban Geography. This is not least because of developments outside the field of Urban Geography, including Castells’s thinking on the ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996) and divergent developments in actor-network theory (ANT) (e.g. Latour, 2005), although the reception and reworking of the thinking by Friedman (1986) and Sassen (1991) – diverging in yet other ways – has been at least as influential. It is therefore not surprising that five quite different and diverging chapters have ended up in Part II. Chapter 6 by Derudder and Taylor needs to be placed in the long-standing Urban Geography tradition of inquiry into hierarchical networks of global cities. It surveys research on such networks, identifies methodologies and issues and provides insights into the complex nature of global city connectivities. Chapter 7 by Temenos, Baker and Cook would not have been possible without the integration of insights from ANT with longer-standing concerns among geographers with territoriality, place and stability/fixity. It offers a very useful framework for understanding how policy mobilities contribute to mobile urbanism (McCann and Ward, 2011) and illustrates this through a historical example of high-rise urban development.

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Introduction  ­9 Meanwhile, the Chapters 8 by McIlwaine and Ryburn, 9 by Van Liempt and Vecchio and 10 by Schwanen and Nixon engage with, and draw inspiration from, wider debates about networks in various ways. McIlwaine and Ryburn concentrate on transnational flows and networks of low-paid migrants, arguing for the importance of theorizing these from the South in line with the post-colonial scholarship introduced above. Van Liempt and Vecchio focus on another group at risk of marginalization and unequal treatment – that is, refugees, most of whom now live in cities. The latter, the authors suggest, should be understood as hubs of geo-political, networked economies. The emphasis in Chapter 10 is more on infrastructures than on networks of people, although infrastructure has become a very broad concept in Urban Geography; the authors also discuss understandings of social infrastructure (McFarlane and Silver, 2017) and people as infrastructure (Simone, 2004). Urban restructuring or redevelopment is a theme of seemingly perennial interest to geographers, whether this operates through logics of globalization, culture, new technology and/or security. These are, therefore, the foci of the chapters in Part III. Using Germany as a case study, Hesse discusses in Chapter 11 how, in response to globalization and the perceived need to increase their international competitiveness, urban areas consisting of core cities with surrounding daily commuter sheds are consolidated in largerscale spatial units, primarily with the help of discursive means. Chapter 12 by Hutton offers a wide-ranging overview of how the cultural industries continue to be implicated in urban redevelopment in the Western world in the twenty-first century, whereas Ward and Hubbard in Chapter 13 discuss more specifically how local authorities and planning officials seek to mobilize the arts and cultural activity for urban regeneration purposes; their empirical case concerns the coastal area around Folkstone in South-East England. There are multiple parallels between the two chapters, including some discussion of the implications for labour in the form of increased informality and precarity. Luque-Ayala and Marvin’s discussion in Chapter 14 concentrates on the role of smart technologies and smart urbanism discourses and practices in contemporary urban (re) development. Finally, Coaffee in Chapter 15 focuses on securitization in urban areas, offering a historical overview of how the City of London has been securitized since the 1990s in response to perceived terrorist threats. Cities have long since been places of profound social and spatial inequalities (see also Chapter 16), as only a cursory glance through Engels’s (2009[1845]) The Conditions of the Working Class in England about Manchester in the 1840s will reveal. The relationships between urbanization and inequalities have changed in many ways since the Industrial Revolution through numerous developments, including – but certainly not

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10  Handbook of urban geography limited to – the rise of Fordism and later neoliberal capitalism, the export of Western development models to other parts of the world, gentrification and the rise of digital technologies. The chapters in Part IV document different spatial manifestations of, and dynamics associated with, inequalities in cities. Proponents of the planetary urbanization approach rightfully draw attention to the spatial differentiations and inequalities that have emerged from, and have been reworked by, extended urbanization (see Section 1.1). However, it also remains the case that inequalities are most intense and spatially concentrated in cities. Hamnett in Chapter 16 offers a broad overview of what is urban in inequalities, what inequality is and how it manifests itself, what the underlying processes are and what roles the state plays in these. Chapter 17 by Oka and Wong concentrates on manifestations of a specific set of inequalities in cities – spatial segregation – through a discussion of the intricacies of conceptualizing and measuring such segregation. The application of their measurement techniques to data from Chicago and St Louis generates some powerful visual results. Musterd, Andersson and Galster also discuss a wide range of conceptual and methodological issues in Chapter 18, which focuses on the question how neighbourhood effects on social stratifications and individuals’ progress in life can be identified in a robust manner. Chapter 19 by Cocola-Gant is devoted to gentrification as a key urban redevelopment process under capitalism. It foregrounds the global character of gentrification and pays specific attention to the displacement effects associated with the process. Warf in Chapter 20 concentrates on the digital dimensions of urban inequalities through a discussion of digital divides and the (im)possibilities of addressing some of those through e-governance and Web 2.0 technologies. Debates about the socialities associated with urban life are perhaps not as old as those about inequalities but they have a long history too, particularly in Sociology (e.g. Tönnies, 2001[1887]; Simmel, 1971[1903]). They are ever more topical now, at least in Europe and North America, cities have become sites of (1) ‘super-diversity’ (Vertovec, 2007) due to increased ethnic and demographic differentiation; (2) ‘hyper-diversity’ (Tasan-Kok et al., 2014; Kraft et al., 2018) with additional variation in attitudes, lifestyles, behaviours and materialities that cut across traditional social identities; and (3) most recently renewed ethnic nationalism, xenophobia and a surge in the popularity of the Radical Right. Part V, therefore, consists of three chapters dealing with different dimensions of urban sociality. In Chapter 21 Watson offers a broad introduction to the theme and critically evaluates the contributions of the ‘material turn’ in Cultural Geography and cognate fields in the 2000s to the understanding of urban socialities, in part by drawing on some of her own recent

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Introduction  ­11 empirical research. Schuermans, in Chapter 22, engages with the literature in Urban Geography and his own empirical research on the themes of encounters with difference and the question if and how such encounters contribute to urban cultures of conviviality. Finally, in Chapter 23 Kraftl reviews existing, and discusses original, research on the experiences of children – as one social group in urban environments with specific socialities notwithstanding its large internal heterogeneity – in cities, foregrounding how children are key agents in urban spaces. As the etymological roots of the word politics in the ancient Greek polis demonstrate, the city and politics also have deep and intimate historical connections. As Karaliotas and Swyngedouw also discuss in Chapter 24, it is the city where protests continue to be concentrated and flourish. Consider, for instance, the Arab Spring, the Occupy protests, Critical Mass cycling events, Black Lives Matter manifestations and the Rhodes Must Fall campaign yet also many events in support of the Radical Right, including the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (August 2017). Often what is at stake in the (socially progressive) movements listed here is the ‘right to the city’, Lefebvre’s (1968, 1996) influential concept and rallying cry for a different form of urbanization configured around logics of use value, autogestion and play rather than exchange value, centralization and efficiency (see also Purcell, 2013). However, any discussion of urban movements as well as policy needs to reflect critically on the nature of politics and the political, especially in light of debates in Urban Geography and beyond over the last decade about the emergence of a post-political condition. Defined in different ways by leading thinkers like Mouffe, Rancière and Žižek (see Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014), the post-political condition is widely seen to be associated with the erasure of dissensus from how public life and cities are governed and its replacement by post-ideological consensus, technocratic management and problem-focused governance (e.g. Swyngedouw, 2007). In light of these considerations, the four chapters in Part VI address different aspects of contemporary urban politics. Karaliotas and Swyngedouw, in Chapter 24, discuss the implications of progressive urban social movements or urban theory and practice. They argue that the urban needs to be rethought in terms of political encounter, interruption and experimentation and the aforementioned movements as forms of democracy premised on an egalitarian urban being-in-common. Meanwhile, Chapter 25 by Raco and Freire-Trigo engages questions about the political in a different way. These authors evaluate the top-down versus bottom-up distinction which has long been used in relation to urban policymaking and suggest it needs to be replaced by more relational perspectives that are based on more antagonistic understanding of politics as inherent to public debate.

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12  Handbook of urban geography Qian and He concentrate on the right to the city concept and apply it to understand developments in grassroots activism in Chapter 26, which also offers an empirical assessment of the difficulties rural-to-urban migrants experience in asserting their right to the city in Beijing. Finally, Hankins and Martin, in Chapter 27, return to the neighbourhood level and the potential of neighbourhoods as sources of place-based activism in different parts of the world. They suggest a reciprocal relationship according to which such activism and neighbourhoods constitute and shape each other, even the nature and strength of that relationship differs spatially. Part VII is concerned with a much more recent set of urban issues than inequalities, socialities and politics, that is, the relationships between global environmental change and urbanization. While cities and urban areas are sometimes seen as the pre-eminent producers of greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. Seto et al., 2010), discourses that position cities as the places from which societal transformations to low-carbon living will unfold are perhaps more widespread. Geographers have played a key role in drawing attention to, and critically analysing, the role of cities and urban areas in such transformation in the interdisciplinary literature on sustainability transitions (Loorbach et al., 2017; Schwanen, 2018; see also Chapter 28). Part VII entitled Urban Sustainabilities brings together some of the insights that geographers and urban scholars have offered with regard to the role of cities in the governing of global environmental change. Chapter 28 by Rutherford provides a critical overview of different literatures on the urban nature of transformations towards greater sustainability and lowcarbon societies. Amongst other things he draws attention to the deeply political and uncertain nature of those transformations. In Chapter 29 Cowley discusses one of the literatures introduced by Rutherford in much greater depth, concentrating on the eco-city phenomenon and critically assessing its potentialities, ambiguities and pitfalls with regard to sustainability transitions. Finally, Castán Broto in Chapter 30 focuses on the role of cities as sites of social learning, experimentation and – importantly – contradiction when it comes to governing climate change. Through the example of an NGO working to improve the lives of waste pickers in Mumbai, she highlights the importance of linking low-carbon with social justice agendas so that urban experiments can create the conditions for ‘just’ sustainability transitions (see also Newell and Mulvaney, 2013). While the city and the urban are considered as objects of interest in Parts II‒VII, the contributions in Part I are concerned explicitly with how geographers are conceptualizing and examining the city and the urban. To some extent this Part pays tribute to the fertile period in urban theory and methodological thinking in recent Urban Geography. However, and as explained before, the distinction between this and subsequent Parts

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Introduction  ­13 is far from watertight. For instance, Chapters 7 by Temenos, Baker and Cook and Chapter 24 by Karaliotas and Swyngedouw also make claims about how the urban can or should be understood. Nonetheless, the four chapters brought together in Part I entitled Urban Theories and Methods engage most explicitly with thorny issues around modes of thinking and researching the city and the urban. Chapters 2 and 3 by, respectively, Cesafsky and Derickson and Cousins and Newell deal with some of the implications of the rise of planetary urbanization thinking, albeit in different ways. Cesafsky and Derickson depart from the aforementioned distinction between ‘Urbanization 1’ and ‘Urbanization 2s’ as different epistemological styles of theorizing the urban. They discuss how post-colonial and/or comparative approaches within Urbanization 2s can open up an inductive trajectory to theorizing the contemporary urban condition(s). Cousins and Newell, for their part, survey how the Urban Political Ecology approach, which has since the 1980s sought to understand the nature of urbanization process and the entanglement of the natural and the urban under capitalism, has adapted to the aforementioned criticism of methodological cityism. Chapters 4 and 5 take a different approach to understanding the urban. Blok and Farías ground their analysis in thinking in Science, Technology and Society studies (STS) and its interface with Urban Geography. They outline an approach to understanding the urban at a time of ecological crises that revolves around the concepts of agencements, assemblies and atmospheres and draws heavily on the thinking of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers about cities in what the former calls the new climatic regime (Latour, 2017[2015]). Zook, Shelton and Poorthuis are on a genuinely divergent trajectory in Chapter 5, exploring the potential contributions of research that makes innovative – ‘smart’ – use of big data to long-standing Urban Geography concerns, in this particular case gentrification. Their call for a dual rejection of (1) the naive empiricism of some data scientists and (2) certain critical geographers’ deep antipathy against engagement with the new data sciences is significant and important. At a time of a new Science of the City urban geographers cannot afford to remain on the sideline, even if they dislike some of the empiricist and neopositivist inclinations in sectors of the transdisciplinary and differentiated Science of Cities literature.

NOTES 1. The planetary urbanization literature is less homogeneous as it is sometimes made out to be (see also Brenner, 2018). Brenner and Schmid (2015), for instance, have been very

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14  Handbook of urban geography clear on the merit of combining their thinking with post-colonial perspectives on the city and urbanization; they offer a less totalitarian universalizing approach than some critics have suggested. 2. Epistemic culture is a concept by Knorr Cetina (2009) to denote the specific arrangements and ‘machineries’ that make knowledge construction possible; have distinct technical, social and symbolic dimensions; and exist within and across disciplinary boundaries. Marxist scholarship, ANT or GIScience are but three examples of the epistemic cultures that cut across contemporary Urban Geography.

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Introduction  ­15 Engels, F, (2009[1845]), The Condition of the Working Class in England, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friedmann, J. (1986), ‘The world city hypothesis’, Development and Change, 17 (1), 69–83. Glaeser, E. (2011), Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human, London: Macmillan. Gleeson, B. (2012), ‘Critical commentary. The urban age: paradox and prospect’, Urban Studies, 49 (5), 931–943. Gleeson, B. (2014), The Urban Condition, Abingdon: Routledge. Grimm, N. B., S. H. Faeth, N. E. Golubiewski, C. L. Redman, J. Wu, X. Bai, J. M. Briggs (2008), ‘Global change and the ecology of cities’, Science, 319 (5864), 756–760. Hall, S. and R. Burdett (2018), The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City, Los Angeles: Sage. Hambleton, R. (2015), Cities Are Good For You: The Genius of the Metropolis, Bristol: Policy Press. Hart, G. (2018), ‘Relational comparison revisited: Marxist postcolonial geographies in practice’, Progress in Human Geography, 42 (3), 371–394. Harvey, D. (2001), ‘Globalisation and the “spatial fix”’, Geographische Revue, 2, 23–30. James, W. (2000[1907]), ‘Lecture 1: the present dilemma in philosophy’, in Giles Gunn (ed.), William James: Pragmatism and Other Writings, New York: Penguin, pp. 7–23. Jayne, M. (ed.) (2018), Chinese Urbanism: Critical Perspectives, Abingdon: Routledge. Jazeel, T. (2018), ‘Urban theory with an outside’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (3), 405–419. Keil, R. (2018), Suburban Planet, Cambridge: Polity. Knorr Cetina, K. (2009), Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kraftl, P., G. Bolt and R. van Kempen (2018), ‘Hyper-diversity in/and geographies of childhood and youth’, Social & Cultural Geography, in press, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2018.1491619. Kwan, M.-P. and T. Schwanen (2016), ‘Geographies of mobility’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106 (2), 243–256. Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (2017[2015]), Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Polity. Lefebvre, H. (1968), Le Droit à la Ville, Paris: Anthopos. Lefebvre, H. (1996), ‘The right to the city’, in Eleonore Koffman and Elizabeth Lebas (eds), Writings on Cities: Henri Lefebvre, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 147–159. Lefebvre, H. (2003[1970]), The Urban Revolution, translated by Robert Bononno, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Loorbach, D., N. Frantzeskaki and F. Avelino (2017), ‘Sustainability transitions research: transforming science and practice for societal change’, Annual Review of Energy and Resources, 42, 599–642. McCann, E., A. Roy and K. Ward (2013), ‘Assembling/worlding cities’, Urban Geography, 34 (5), 581–589. McCann, E. and K. Ward (eds) (2011), Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. McFarlane, C. (2010), ‘The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34 (4), 725–742. McFarlane, C. (2011a), ‘The city as assemblage: dwelling and urban space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29 (4), 649–671. McFarlane, C. (2011b), ‘Assemblage and critical urbanism’, City, 15 (2), 204–224. McFarlane, C. and J. Silver (2017), ‘Navigating the city’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (3), 458–471. McFarlane, C. J. Silver and Y. Truelove (2017), ‘Cities within cities: intra-urban comparison of infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town’, Urban Geography, 38 (9), 1393–1417. Monte-Mór, Roberto L. (2014), ‘Extended urbanization and settlement patterns in Brazil: an

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16  Handbook of urban geography environmental approach’, in Neil Brenner (ed.), Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, Berlin: Jovis, pp. 109–120. Newell, P. and D. Mulvaney (2013), ‘The political economy of the “just transition”’. The Geographical Journal, 179 (2), 132–140. Okulicz-Kozaryn, A. (2015), Happiness and Place: Why Life Is Better Outside of the City, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Parnell, S. and S. Oldfield (eds) (2014), The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, Abingdon: Routledge. Pow, C. P. (2014), ‘License to travel: policy assemblage and the “Singapore model”’, City, 18 (3), 287–306. Purcell, M. (2013), ‘Possible worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 36 (1), 141–154. Robinson, J. (2002), ‘Global and world cities: a view from off the map’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26 (3), 531–554. Robinson, J. (2006), Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development, London: Routledge. Robinson, J. (2016), ‘Thinking cities through elsewhere: comparative tactics for a more global urban studies’, Progress in Human Geography, 40 (1), 3–29. Roy, A. (2009), ‘The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory’, Regional Studies, 43 (6), 819–830. Roy, A. (2016), ‘Who’s afraid of postcolonial theory?’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40 (2), 200–209. Ruddick, S., L. Peake, G. S. Tanyildiz and D. Patrick (2018), ‘Planetary urbanization: an urban theory for our time?’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (3), 387–404. Sassen, S. (1991), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schwanen, T. (2018), ‘Thinking complex interconnections: transition, nexus and geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43 (2), 262–283. Science (2016), ‘Rise of the city’, Science, 352 (6288), 906–907. Scott, A. J. (2012), A World of Emergence: Cities and Regions in the 21st Century, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Seto, K. C., R. Sánchez-Rodríguez and M. Fragkias (2010), ‘The new geography of contemporary urbanization and the environment’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 35, 167–194. Sheppard, E., H. Leitner and A. Maringanti (2013), ‘Provincializing global urbanism: a manifesto’, Urban Geography, 34 (7), 893‒900. Simmel, G. (1971[1903]), ‘The metropolis of modern life’, in Donald Levin (ed.), Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 324–339. Simone, A. (2004), ‘People as infrastructure: intersecting fragments in Johannesburg’, Public Culture, 16 (3), 407–429. Stengers, I. (2011), ‘Comparison as a matter of concern’, Common Knowledge, 17 (1), 48–63. Storper, M. and A. J. Scott (2016), ‘Current debates in urban theory: a critical assessment’, Urban Studies, 53 (6), 1114–1136. Swyngedouw, E. (2007), ‘The post-political city’, in BAVO (ed.), Urban Politics Now: Re-imagining Democracy in the Neo-liberal City, Rotterdam: Netherlands Architecture Institute Publishers, pp. 59–76. Tasan-Kok, T., R. Van Kempen, M. Raco and G. Bolt (2014), ‘Towards hyper-diversified European cities: a critical literature review’, Utrecht: Utrecht University, at https://www. urbandivercities.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/20140121_Towards_HyperDiversified_ European_Cities.pdf (accessed 28 October 2018). Taylor, P. J. (2004), World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis, London: Routledge. Tönnies, F. (2001[1887]), Community and Civil Society, edited by Jose Harris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) (2007), State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, New York: United Nations Population Fund.

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Introduction  ­17 Vertovec, S. (2007), ‘Super-diversity and its implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (6), 1024–1054. Wachsmuth, D. (2014), ‘City as ideology: reconciling the explosion of the city form with the tenacity of the city concept’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (1), 75–90. Wang, J., T. Oakes and Y. Yang (eds) (2016), Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism, London: Routledge. Ward, K., A. E. G. Jonas, B. Miller and D. Wilson (eds) (2018), The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics, Abingdon: Routledge. Wilson, J. and E. Swyngedouw (2014), ‘Seeds of dystopia: post-politics and the return of the political’ in Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw (eds), The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–22.

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PART I URBAN THEORIES AND METHODS

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2.  Worlding cities and comparative urbanism Laura Cesafsky and Kate Derickson

2.1 INTRODUCTION We have reached, as we are often reminded, a geographic tipping point in which the majority of people live in cities for the first time in human history. How is urban theory coming to terms with this new, apparently ‘global’ urban condition? In a series of papers, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid (2014, 2015) and Andy Merrifield (2013a, 2013b) argue that the new ‘urban age’ is an expression of ‘planetary urbanization’ or the ‘complete urbanization of society’ that Henri Lefebvre predicted in the 1970s (2003[1970]); riffing on Chakrabarty’s concept of History 1 and 2 (see also Sheppard et al., 2013), Derickson (2015) recently referred to this all-encompassing reading of the planetary condition as ‘Urbanization 1’. For yet other urbanists, the political possibilities of city life lie not at the cosmic scale of the planetary but in embodied and everyday practices of urban social reproduction and livelihood strategies. The latter group, the ‘Urbanization 2s’, engage with the analytical method of ‘provincializing’ Europe (Chakrabarty, 2000; Lawhon et al., 2014; Sheppard et al., 2013) in relation to urban theory and politics. This highly variegated body of work is animated by a sense that Urbanization 1s tell limited stories, that ‘the vagaries of urban fate cannot be reduced to the working of universal laws established by capitalism or colonial history’ (Roy and Ong, 2011, p. 1), and that the distinctively Southern axis of contemporary urbanization demands a different approach to inquiry (Watson, 2009; Roy, 2014). At stake in the theories of the global urban sketched above is the adequacy of existing ways of understanding the cities of the twenty-first century and therefore of the political possibilities that might inure in them. Some urban political economists have charged Urbanization 2s with a propensity for ‘difference-finding and deconstructive manoeuvres’ that underestimate matrices of power and pan-urban tendencies rather than producing ‘urban-theoretical renewal’ (Peck, 2015, p. 162; see also Brenner and Schmid, 2015). We suggest here that the chief point of difference between Urbanization 1s and 2s are incompatible assessments of the epistemological problem in global urban theory rather than differential tendencies to singularize or generalize urban knowledge – a point evidenced by postcolonial projects like Jennifer Robinson’s (2011, 2014) 19

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20  Handbook of urban geography comparative urbanism and Ananya Roy’s ‘worlding cities’ (2014, 2015; Roy and Ong, 2011). The contribution of the chapter is to clarify  and reframe a debate that has been played out in a series of manifestos and ‘calls’ for a new urban theory (Davidson and Iveson, 2015; Brenner and Schmid, 2014, 2015; Peck, 2015; Parnell and Robinson, 2012; Roy, 2011, 2014; Robinson, 2011, 2014; Sheppard et al., 2013, 2015). In the first section of the chapter we suggest, contra Peck (2015), that both Urbanization 1 and 2 are projects of ‘urban-theoretical renewal’. Each identifies a different epistemological and political problem with the ways previous generations of scholars have approached the global urban question – particularly the global cities research of the 1990s. Planetary urbanization theorists worry over an endemic ‘methodological cityism’ (Davidson and Iveson, 2015) that treats ‘the city’ as a bounded and replicable spatial unit or, worse, an irreducible singularity; Urbanization 2s have less truck with the problem of ‘what is the city as an object of knowledge?’ than with realist approaches to knowledge production that disregard how  what we ask and  how we go about knowing  substantively shape what  is. In the second section of the chapter, we show how comparative urbanism and worlding cities, as postcolonial approaches, seek to side-step totalizing narratives of universal capitalist globalization by deploying ethnographic and collaborative methods to generate alternative ‘transurban’ threads and solidarities that do – or potentially could – hold disparate urban worlds together. At stake for Urbanization 2s is the production of scholarship genuinely capable of generating ‘knowledge that supports the growth of progressive political subjects’ living in the midst of state-sanctioned violence, degraded environments and precarious productive and social reproductive arrangements (Wright, 2013, p. 51).

2.2 GLOBAL CITY RESEARCH AND ITS DISCONTENTS In the 1970s, at least in Geography, Marxist theory reoriented thinking about cities and urban development from inward looking characteristics of cities themselves to the system that interconnects cities (i.e. capitalism). As Diane E. Davis (2005) notes that, especially in the United States, most early generations of urban scholars did not emphasize the economic dynamics of urban development and rarely examined cities in global context. Davis argues that the ‘peculiar’ Durkheimian influence in the American sociology of the 1930s and 1940s led Louis Wirth and his Chicago School peers, for example, to view cities in terms of cultural dynamics playing out in an analytically contained city environment. This

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Worlding cities and comparative urbanism  ­21 despite the fact that many of the changes in Chicago studied by its urbanists could readily be traced to the national or even international political economy, understood either in terms of a burgeoning immigrant labour force fuelling the machines of capitalist industrialization or even in terms of the impact of a rural, slave-owning south on regional development and/ or the post-second world war exodus of blacks to northern cities (Davis, 2005, p. 97). David Harvey’s (1973) Social Justice and the City represents the literal bridge between the two traditions. While the first section of the book reads as a struggle to conceptualize the city within a liberal political framework, the second half sees Harvey develop theories of the value of urban space and of urban justice that, based in an original reading of Marx, pushed him toward the ‘revolutionary geography’ with which he has come to be associated. If, by 1985, Harvey was still not yet ready to sign on to the Lefebvrian dictum that industrialization was a form of urbanization all along, in the Urbanization of Capital he set himself to the task of ‘deriving a theoretical and historical understanding of the urban process . . . out of the study of the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production’ (Harvey, 1973, p. 17). By the 1990s, the Marxian model of transurban relationality was consolidating as global city network research, via authors like Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor and John Friedmann. The central conceit of this approach was that cities are articulated in a hierarchical global system dominated by competitive capitalism and a new imaginary of cities as ‘nodes’ in a global economic network emerged. Global city network analyses reconceptualized the urban question with direct reference to supraurban re-scaling processes (Brenner, 2000), revealing how cities were increasingly permeated by networks and circuits that at once intensified their interdependencies, hierarchized them in new ways and forced them into cut-throat economic competition. Although all cities were formally a part of these intercity systems, key texts like Sassen’s (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, trained empirical and theoretical attention on the elite group of cities at the helm of capitalist urbanization, where power and financial control were concentrated in form of multinational headquarters and producer services firms. Given this history of establishing strong linkages between the internal structures of cities and their exteriors (of which global city research is but one prominent example), planetary urbanization theorists’ Brenner and Schmid’s (2015) sweeping critique of a pervasive ‘methodological cityism’ in urban theory can feel a tad overwrought (Davidson and Iveson, 2015). It is perhaps better to understand the urban-theoretical renewal at work in planetary urbanization as (1) taking a longstanding interest in ­destabilizing

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22  Handbook of urban geography ‘the city’ as a epistemological category to its headiest extremes and (2) returning the question of politics (à la the young Harvey in Social Justice and the City) to the centre of an urban theory that global city research had rendered much more descriptive – so much so that it could be taken up as a ready development model and ‘operator’s manual’ for managers of wouldbe global cities (Peck, 2015). In The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre (2003[1970]) posited that the ‘complete urbanization of society’ was imminent, creating ‘a whole new spatial (dis)-order’ (Merrifield, 2013a, p. 910). Planetary urbanization theorists argue that, today, Lefebvre’s virtual reality has become real. For this reason, bounded, territorialized agglomerations are no longer the proper empirical or theoretical object of urban inquiry. Rather than imagine global urbanization in terms of a web of hierarchized nodal units, they draw on Lefebvre’s characterization of urbanization as a process of implosion and explosion to forward an epistemology of a differentiated-yet-singular ‘urban fabric’ that stretches across the planet and leaves no outside. More prosaically, Brenner and Schmid (2014, p. 162) identify four trends over the past 30 years constitutive of this socio-spatial transformation: the rescaling of urbanization to massive urban corridors; the blurring and dispersal of urban functions such as dense ‘downtowns’; the disintegration of the ‘hinterlands’ as they are pulled into the service of urban society; and the end of wilderness. Particularly for Merrifield (2013a, 2013b), at stake in this unbounded and technologically mediated urban fabric is the emergence of a new kind of ‘planetary urban society’ within which the seeds of global capitalist revolt germinate. If – and this is the startling thing about Lefebvre’s ‘urban revolution’ thesis – industrialization has been a special sort of urbanization all along, this ‘urban mode of production’ converts industrial contradictions into contradictions of the capitalist city, now extended to more-than-worldly horizons. If the urban process is open-ended and if urbanization is global and boundless, any transformative politics presumably need to be likewise . . . [under planetary urbanization] one gains a capacity to forge a politics based upon the e­ ncounter – a free-floating, dynamic and relational militancy . . . more attuned to a political landscape in which new social media can and have become subversive weaponry. (Merrifield, 2013b, p. 915)

Given that ‘the urban is now an ontological reality inside of us’ (Merrifield, 2013a, p. 83), not only is ‘the city’ a sociological pseudo-concept, but political movements that orient themselves stubbornly toward parochial struggles of and on ‘the city’ or ‘a city’ might actively impede the coalescence of a single counter-worlding movement against capital’s Empire. As Madden (2012, p. 783) argues, drawing on Nancy and Lefebvre, ‘problematizing

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Worlding cities and comparative urbanism  ­23 urban globality’ in this way then helps ‘us see anew the violence of global urbanization’ and ‘help us envision the possibilities for transformation that a urban world might still contain’. Planetary urbanization is thus a properly critical theory (Brenner, 2009) in a way that global cities research is not: the latter tends to limit itself to describing interurban circuits of global capital (as well as the production of inequality in global cities), while the former seeks to delineate the possibilities for how an anti- or post-capitalist world can emerge in a capitalist environment. Indeed, global cities research has seen itself folded into the evolution global capitalist urbanization. The idea that cities are increasingly entrepreneurial, fighting for investment and image, has been taken as a call-to-arms by urban managers who breathlessly adopt ‘successful’ urban policy from elsewhere; meanwhile, the hierarchization of cities according to the amenities they offer to desirable potential residents and tourists has become a high-stakes popular media pastime (Harvey, 1989; McCann, 2004, 2011). The critique of global cities research among Urbanization 2s moves in a somewhat direction. Jennifer Robinson’s (2006) Ordinary Cities opens with a powerful critique of how global urban theory has treated Southern cities: With the urbanisation of the world’s population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanisation of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations, most of which are now outside the West. The existing bias in urban studies towards Western cities and the relegation of cities in poor countries to residual categories (or, in fact, completely off the map in some approaches to cities) makes the irrelevance of urban theory a real possibility in life of global trends of urbanisation. (Robinson, 2006, p. 2)

These ‘trends’ to which Robinson makes reference are striking. While, as Sheppard et al. (2013) note, Europe’s nineteenth century explosion of urbanization left a threefold increase in urban population, across Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America, urban populations have increased 12-fold in the last 60 years. Though it had already became clear in the 1960s and 1970s that the future of urban life would be written in the Global South, urban theory did not respond by ‘seeing from the South’ (Watson, 2009). Rather, it tended to position Southern cities in negative reference to Western, modern and global cities, and to rob them of their dynamism and political agency by painting them as hotbeds of problems and as troubled by tradition (Robinson 2006, 2011). In the wake of Robinson’s critique, there appeared a series of calls to ‘provincialize’ global urbanism (Sheppard et al., 2013) and produce ‘new geographies of theory’ (Roy, 2009) from the Global South – a literature that Van Meeteren et al. (2016),

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24  Handbook of urban geography it must be noted, suggest has made a monolithic ‘strawman’ of global cities research by ignoring its ontological, epistemological and methodological diversity. The critique Urbanization 2s forward against global cities research nevertheless harbours a vital epistemological point that Marxian theorists have struggled to confront. This is that not only where, but also how and with whom one theorizes determines the veracity and efficacy of the knowledge produced. At stake for Urbanization 2s, as we previously noted, is the production of ‘knowledge that supports the growth of progressive political subjects’ living in the midst of state-sanctioned violence, degraded environments and precarious productive and social reproductive arrangements (Wright, 2013, p. 51). As Derickson (2016, p. 825) has argued elsewhere, the premise in planetary urbanization theory seems to be that the knowledge produced is all that is important about the knowledge production process and that ‘one can transcend all earthly, structural, geographical, cultural, phenomenological and embodied limitations to properly see all the struggles and understand all the wishes of the age – or all that are consequential, anyway’. Urbanization 2s tend to be suspicious that emancipatory knowledge can emerge in such a way. Instead, this approach holds that the places, processes and institutions where knowledge is produced matter, such that urban knowledge should be pursued through collaborative work across multiple sites that engages people along the spectrum of academics and activists and presented before and scrutinized by, multiple publics (Sheppard et al., 2013). The intellectual and political work is to create linkages between places that hold promise for productive solidarities toward urban futures that we do not know in advance. Epistemological questions are of substantial importance for how urban political possibilities can be recognized – a key issue for both planetary and postcolonial theorists. Because planetary urbanization makes the revolutionary protagonist synonymous with planetary urban society itself, it seems more adequate to theorizing politics in Global South cities typified by urbanization without industrialization. Revolutionary consciousness now emerges not from the labour experience, as in classical Marxian theory, but from the urban experience itself (Merrifield, 2013a). Yet it is precisely this epistemological stance – that politics can be known through analytical reasoning from a non-placed perspective – that troubles many Urbanization 2s. The latter therefore try to privilege everyday lived experiences and to locate urban politics and praxis in actually existing social movements and political subjectivities. The subaltern tradition within postcolonial urban theory, in particular, approaches the study of cities by attending to the tactics of survival and subversion among subordinated

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Worlding cities and comparative urbanism  ­25 populations so as to ‘skirt’ (Roy, 2011), invert and rework the capitalocentric (Gibson-Graham, 1996) logic of Urbanization 1. Other approaches try to think about capitalist urbanization differently – indeed, to think it through difference. Contrary to Marxist conceptions of the city, Buckley’s (2014, p. 343) work on social difference and construction labour in Dubai, for example, shows ‘the ways in which scales such as the home or the body are important to the day-to-day functioning of capitalist urbanization processes and how gendered, heteronormative, class- and ethnicity-coded practices of migrant segregation, policing and employment can be integral to the political economies of urbanization’. Difference here can be understood as a lived experience of intersectional power structures and an essential dimension of how urbanization happens. In other words, if the ‘urban age’ presents the ‘metaphilosophical problem of grappling with ourselves in a world that is increasingly urbanized’, as Merrifield (2013b, pp. 912‒913) puts it, the pertinent question for postcolonial urban theory is, ‘who is us?’.

2.3 COMPARATIVE URBANISM AND WORLDING CITIES Examining the burgeoning collection of research assembled under the flag of postcolonial urban theory, Peck (2015, p. 161) worries that urban theory is ‘losing traction in a protracted moment of deconstructive splintering’, where the impulse is to ‘embrace particularism and polycentrism’ rather than to generalize in pursuit of a unified theory of urban development and politics. Certainly there have been pleas among theorists of underdevelopment in the Global South that the unique features of cities there be afforded a distinctive theorization – a posture recapitulated to some extent in subaltern urbanisms (Roy, 2011). Robinson’s (2006) ‘ordinary cities’ approach, moreover, includes language that certainly sounds ‘singularizing’: An ordinary-city approach takes the world of cities as its starting point and attends to the diversity and complexity of all cities. And instead of seeing only some cities are originators of urbanism, in a world of ordinary cities, ways of being urban and ways of making new kinds of urban futures are diverse and the product of the inventiveness of people in cities everywhere. (Robinson, 2006, p. 1)

Yet we suggest that any ‘deconstructive’ moment in Urbanization 2 may, in the end, be transitional, as postcolonial approaches like comparative urbanism and ‘worlding cities’ push toward the production of generalizable (if not universalizable) concepts. Comparative urbanism and

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26  Handbook of urban geography worlding cities put the postcolonial epistemological methods outlined above in the service of building theories and concepts that ‘engage in constructive ways across multiple, overlapping differences with the goal of articulating knowledge commonalities – the basis for theorizing but also for ethico-political commitments’ (Sheppard et al., 2013, p. 899). Key to this is an inductive rather deductive spirit: a willingness to give threads and concepts that illuminate transurban or shared experience room to emerge, especially through ethnographic engagement, rather than beginning from prior conceptions of the relevant phenomena to be distilled from the complexity of city life. Ananya Roy (2015, p. 12) puts the point thus: To think via historical difference is not to avoid generalization but it is to insist that general processes . . . are not necessarily universal, that the jute mills of colonial and post-colonial Bengal [for example] might yield a different working-class politics, a different urban transformation, a different way of being political.

In order to be sensitive to diverse processes of globalization which shape differentiated outcomes, Roy (2011, 2014, 2015), with Aihwa Ong (2011), has been developing an approach to postcolonial urbanism that she dubs ‘worlding cities’. The approach intends not simply to study the cities of the Global South as if they were interesting and anomalous cases, but rather to recalibrate urban theory itself. Roy and Ong are interested in analyzing the subjects and processes of urbanization as they negotiate and engender complex, interwoven and networked relationships to political economic structures, histories, identity and agency that resist drawing on or being defined against the historical, geographical and subjective binaries of c­olonial/postcolonial, North/South, elite/subaltern. ‘Worlding’, Roy (2014) explains, is a concept Spivak adopted from Heidegger to describe how the post-colony or ‘third world’ is brought into the world. The approach charts how cities and subjectivities become ‘projects that attempt to establish or break established horizons of urban standards in and beyond a particular city’ (Roy and Ong, 2011, p. 4). The metropolis appears not as a fixed locality, but instead as a node where transnational ideas, institutions and actors are drawn together via concrete practices in the service of solving urban problems. Shifting from an analytics of structure to one of assemblage (see McFarlane, 2011), research in this vein stays close to the work of pulling together material, technical and discursive elements from elsewhere in order to construct particular urban worlds. Roy and Ong’s (2011) edited volume on worlding cities is focused on Asian cities, on the argument that the spectacular growth and dynamism of these cities has made them fecund sites for situated experiments that

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Worlding cities and comparative urbanism  ­27 reinvent the ‘global’. Refusing to identify any particular geographical hub or method, however, they leave open the question of how practices of urban worlding might be identified and theorized (Sheppard et al., 2013). Roy (2014) cites approvingly Abdou Maliq Simone’s (2001) work on African cities. Instead of focusing on the experiments of transnational Asian elites, Simone seeks to understand how worldings can be set into motion when everyday urban residents are ‘cast out’ into the world. Simone (2001, p. 15) asks: ‘How do African urban residents, who are conventionally assumed to operate within parochial, highly localized confines, operate at larger scales?’. He finds that the machinations of the ‘global economies’ make it difficult for many Africans to continue functioning inside their own cities. What permeates these spaces are not investment capital or hot policy ideas, but rather a ‘seemingly arbitrary circulation of the unknown’ that renders uncertain formerly legible categories like ‘[w]hat makes people rich or poor, what accounts for loss and gain and. . .who is doing what to whom’ (p. 17). As with Buckley’s (2014) work on construction labour in Dubai, here ‘worlding’ from below implies the circulation of bodies, resources, commodities and affects that tended not to be featured among the interurban flows that fascinated global cities researchers. If, as Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) have argued (cited in Roy, 2014), it is in the Global South that qualitatively new constellations of capital and labour are emerging that may presage the future of the Global North, making such worldings visible can generate productive theoretical frameworks for urbanism more broadly. Indeed, Buckley (2014) argues that the migrant labour exploitation she found integral to the political economy of city building in Dubai might be equally integral to the worlding of cities like Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where a large trafficking ring of Hungarians working under forced labour was recently discovered. A related avenue into to thinking across urban experiences is comparative urbanism. Comparative research in urbanism has a long history and many variants – indeed most urban research, including work on planetary urbanization, can be understood as comparative to the extent that it involves comparing, if implicitly, particular urban experiences with other urban experiences or with broader urban processes (Nijman, 2007). In recent years, however, urbanists have returned to explicitly question what might be gained from holding urban experiences up ‘side by side’ (see, for example, special issues on comparativism in Urban Geography in 2007 and 2012; Lees, 2012; Ren and Luger 2015). Nijman (2007, p. 1) views comparison as a methodological strategy ‘for exploring the zone between the planetary and particular, by developing knowledge that falls in between what is true of all cities and what is true of one city at

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28  Handbook of urban geography one point in time’. Others see the office of comparison as ‘highlight[ing] structural and cultural differences while allowing them to be examined in terms of common criteria’ (Keating, 1991, p. 11, cited in Ward, 2010). Ultimately the ‘value added’ of the comparative method, as Kevin Ward (2010) argues, fundamentally depends on how, what and to what end one compares. He draws on Tilly’s (1984) typology of four types of comparative research – individualizing, universalizing, variation-finding and encompassing – to show how each one refers to a different relationship between observation and theory, and how each aims for a different type of conclusion. Individualizing comparison, for example, focuses on local details in order to grasp the particularities of a given case, while universalizing comparison aims to ‘establish that every instance of a phenomenon follows essentially the same rule’, as with research in recent decades that explores commonalities in entrepreneurial policies across industrialized cities (Ward, 2010, p. 475). Working with collaborators on this theme of entrepreneurial policymaking (Cook and Ward, 2012; McCann and Ward, 2010, 2011), Ward develops a critique of existing approaches to comparison in urban geography. Building on Gillian Hart (2002), he proposes a ‘relational comparative’ method that advocates neither for ‘uniqueness and endless difference’ nor for ‘measuring cases against a universal yardstick’ (Ward, 2010, p. 478). Rather, relational comparison questions how the specificities of urban places are formed and reformed in dynamic relationship with other places. The stress is on how the trajectories of cities interconnect over time. As such this methodology moves away from searching for similarities and differences between two cities viewed as mutually independent contexts or contained units. Taking theoretical inspiration as well (like the Worlding Cities literature) from ‘assemblage’ concepts drawn from readings of Foucault and Deleuze, Ward and his colleagues focus on observable practices of borrowing, referencing and assembling ‘mobile’ policy ideas from elsewhere as constitutive of how policymaking and city building are actually conducted in the twenty-first century. For example, rather than situating the city of Cleveland’s waterfront redevelopment plans in a structural analysis of post-industrial capitalist development as a Marxian political economist might, Cook and Ward (2012) consider the reference points and comparisons that policy actors incorporated into Cleveland’s redevelopment scheme and that brought the city into concrete relation with other cities. While rejecting the universalizing narratives of Urbanization 1s, then, what Ward’s relational comparative approach does share with these is an animating worry about overturning ‘methodological cityism’ and exposing the relational geographies that underpin territorial political units.

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Worlding cities and comparative urbanism  ­29 Jennifer Robinson (2011, 2014), by contrast, has developed a comparative take on urban studies motivated by a postcolonial concern to reverse habitual exclusions of the Global South in urban studies while attending to the epistemological problem of how we go about knowing the city. Robinson’s comparativism is oriented toward breaking down analytical divisions between urban categories like North/South and developed/ developing and making all cities relevant sites for theory generation. This is to be done by eschewing the ‘encompassing’ method where different cases are assumed to take part in an overarching system like capitalism, and instead proliferating ‘a wide array of forms of comparative reflection, from critical engagements with international urban theory, to active learning from scholarship in different contexts or primary research across apparently divergent urban experiences’ (Robinson, 2011, p. 2). Robinson (2011) is particularly encouraged by the potential of ‘variation-finding’ methods that invert common assumptions that research should look for shared experiences across relatively similar cities. Drawing on Pickvance (1986), she suggests that comparing ‘most-different’ cases that cross the North-South divide might lead to new and unexpected connections. In this analytical vein, Kern and Mullings (2013, p. 38) have explored neoliberal urbanism and gendered violence in Kingston and Toronto to demonstrate the ways that women’s lives in both cities are ‘being shaped by governing technologies that rely upon fear, insecurity and violence, real or imagined’. Similarly, Shank and Nagar (2013, p. 105) use case studies from Minneapolis and India’s Sitapur district to identify ‘critical continuities between those sites and spaces that are analytically segregated from one another because of the dominant binaries of rural/urban and north/ south’. Vasudevan’s (2015) ‘global geography of squatting’ traces the way that key struggles, such as the trade-off between self-determination and legal recognition, play out in both the Global North and South as a way to remain insistently rooted in the ‘everyday efforts of the urban poor’ while simultaneously attempting to chart emergent possibilities for more just urban futures. Decentring the Euro-American hub of theoretical production, the impulse of this work is to appreciate the proliferation of different axes of power and resistance. By continuing to speak from particular urbanized places, it also leaves open the possibility that the world is not entirely dominated by the urban or indeed by ‘us’, and points toward a renewed vision of ‘planetarity’ itself (Sheppard et al., 2013). Quoting Spivak (2003, p. 72), Sheppard et al. (2013) suggest that ‘planetarity’ can be read in terms of alterity rather than singular capitalist domination, in the sense that our planet is itself a ‘species of alterity’ that belongs to another system – one in which we dwell ‘on loan’. Approaching global urbanism ‘through the lens of planetarity . . . asserts the possibility that

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30  Handbook of urban geography urban life remains subject to more-than-urban and more-than-human processes and events’ (Sheppard et al., 2013, p. 989). A messier ontology than planetary urbanization theorists might prefer, to be sure, but a more radically open – and open-ended – one as well. Most recently calls from Peck (2017) and Hart (2018) for conjunctural analysis or ‘a mode of analysis that works deliberately across levels of abstraction in dialogue with evolving midlevel formulations and connective concepts’ (Peck, 2017, p. 9). Drawing on the work of Hall and Massey (2010) on conjunctural thinking, this approach to urban analysis involves ‘[d]rawing up and down through cases and contexts as a different strategy to that of working laterally, “between” cases’ (Peck, 2017, p. 9). This approach holds promise as a powerful alternative to the either/or of Urbanization 1 and 2s. As always, however, how causal force is attributed to various elements of the ‘conjuncture’ will determine whether or not this approach can learn from the encounter between planetary urbanization and its others.

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Worlding cities and comparative urbanism  ­31 Hart, G. (2018), ‘Relational comparison revisited: thinking through interconnections’, Progress in Human Geography, 42 (3), 371–394. Harvey, D. (1985), The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, D. (1989), ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 71 (1), 3–17. Harvey, D. (2010[1973]), Social Justice and the City, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Keating, M. (1991), Comparative Urban Politics: Power and the City in the United States, Canada, Britain and France, Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar Publishing. Kern, L. and B. Mullings (2013), ‘Urban neoliberalism, urban insecurity and urban violence: explore the gender dimension’, in Linda Peak and Martina Rieker (eds), Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban, New York: Routledge, pp. 23–41. Lawhon, M., H., Ernstson and J. Silver (2014), ‘Provincializing urban political ecology: towards a situated UPE through African urbanism’, Antipode, 46 (2), 497–516. Lees, L. (2012), ‘The geography of gentrification: thinking through comparative urbanism’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (2), 155–171. Lefebvre, H. (2003[1970]), The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Madden, D. (2012), ‘City becoming world: Nancy, Lefebvre and the global-urban imagination’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30 (5), 772–787. McCann, E. (2004), ‘“Best places”: interurban competition, quality of life and popular media discourse’, Urban Studies, 41 (10), 1909–1929. McCann, E. (2011), ‘Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: toward a research agenda’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101 (1), 107–130. McCann, E. and K. Ward (2010), ‘Relationality/territoriality: toward a conceptualization of cities in the world’, Geoforum, 41 (2), 175–184. McCann, E. and K. Ward (eds) (2011), Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McFarlane, C. (2011), ‘Assemblage and critical urbanism’, City, 15 (2), 204–224. Merrifield, A. (2013a), The Politics of Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Merrifield, A. (2013b), ‘The urban question under planetary urbanization’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (3), 909–922. Nijman, J. (2007), ‘Introduction – comparative urbanism’, Urban Geography, 28 (1), 1–6. Parnell, S. and J. Robinson (2012), ‘(Re) theorizing cities from the Global South: looking beyond neoliberalism’, Urban Geography, 33 (4), 593–617. Peck, J. (2015), ‘Cities beyond compare?’, Regional Studies, 49 (1), 160–182. Peck, J. (2017), ‘Transatlantic city, part 1: conjunctural urbanism’, Urban Studies, 54 (1), 4‒30. Pickvance, C. (1986), ‘Comparative urban analysis and assumptions about causality’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 10 (2), 162–184. Ren, J. and J. Luger (2015), ‘Comparative urbanism and the “Asian City”: implications for research and theory’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (1), 145–156. Robinson, J. (2006), Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development, Abingdon: Routledge. Robinson, J. (2011), ‘Cities in a world of cities: the comparative gesture’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35 (1), 1–23. Robinson, J. (2014), ‘Introduction to a virtual issue on comparative urbanism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, at https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12171 (accessed at 14 September 2018). Roy, A. (2009), ‘The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory’, Regional Studies, 43 (6), 819–830.

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32  Handbook of urban geography Roy, A. (2011), ‘Slumdog cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35 (2), 223–238. Roy, A. (2014), ‘Worlding the South: towards a postcolonial urban theory’, in Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield (eds), The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, New York: Routledge, pp. 9–20. Roy, A. (2015), ‘What is urban about critical urban theory?’, Urban Geography, 37 (6), 1–14. Roy, A. and A. Ong (2011), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Malden: Blackwell. Sassen, S. (1991), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shank, S. and R. Nagar (2013), ‘Retelling stories, resisting dichotomies: staging identity, marginalization and activism in Minneapolis and Sitapur’, in Linda Peake and Martina Rieker (eds), Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban, New York: Routledge, pp. 90–108. Sheppard, E., H. Leitner and A. Maringanti (2013), ‘Provincializing global urbanism: a manifesto’, Urban Geography 34(7): 893–900. Sheppard, E., V. Gidwani, M. Goldman, H. Leitner, A. Roy and A. Maringanti (2015), ‘Introduction: urban revolutions in the age of global urbanism’, Urban Studies, 52 (11), 1947–1961. Simone, A. (2001), ‘On the worlding of African cities’, African Studies Review, 44 (2), 15–41. Spivak, G. C. (2003), Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press. Tilly, C. (1984), Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Van Meeteren, M., B. Derudder and D. Bassens (2016), ‘Can the straw man speak? An engagement with postcolonial critiques of ‘global cities research’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 6 (3), 247–267. Vasudevan, A. (2015), ‘The makeshift city’, Progress in Human Geography, 39 (3), 338–359. Ward, K. (2010), ‘Towards a relational comparative approach to the study of cities’, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (4), 471–487. Watson, V. (2009), ‘Seeing from the South: refocusing urban planning on the globe’s central urban issues’, Urban Studies, 46 (11), 2259–2275. Wright, M. (2013), ‘Feminism, urban knowledge and the killing of politics’, in Linda Peake and Martina Rieker (eds), Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban, New York: Routledge, pp. 41–52.

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3.  Urban political ecologies of and in the city Joshua J. Cousins and Joshua Newell

3.1 INTRODUCTION Urban political ecology (UPE) has been approached from multiple theoretical and methodological fronts, deploying conceptual and root metaphors such as metabolism, cyborgs and assemblage to understand the complex socio-spatial processes of urbanization. At a time when the impacts of the ‘urban century’ can be felt across the globe, the insights of UPE offer timely and important insights into contemporary urbanization (Heynen, 2014). However, as urban political ecology has sought to seriously engage with the socio-natural causes and consequences of planetary urbanization (Brenner, 2013; Merrifield, 2013; Derickson, 2015), the field has struggled, both methodologically and conceptually, to understand the city on the one hand, as a site of study and on the other, as a site that is part and parcel of a larger process of urbanization – one that engulfs city and countryside. In the words of Rademacher (2015, p. 137), ‘How do we conceptualize the city as a field site when urbanization encompasses the full spatial continuum from city to countryside?’ In this chapter, we distinguish between ‘UPE of the city’ and ‘UPE in the city’ as a way to delineate this contradiction within UPE. For some scholars urbanization is a global condition that has subsumed the boundaries of town, city, metropolis and territory through an extended urban fabric that operates at a planetary scale (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Lefebvre, 2003; Merrifield, 2013; Brenner and Schmid, 2014). In contrast, others seek to develop more situated understandings of the interactions between urbanization, the environment and knowledge and power within different places (Roy, 2005; McFarlane, 2010; Lawhon et al., 2013). We borrow our distinction of these two frames from Grimm et al. (2000) and Pickett et al. (2001) who use ‘ecology in the city’ and ‘ecology of cities’ to identify two contrasting approaches in the study of urban ecological systems. In their formulation, ecology in the city focuses on the physical environment (e.g. soils, urban hydrology, the distribution of plants and animals, urban heat island, air pollution and exotic-native species interactions). In contrast, the ‘ecology of cities’ takes a more systems-oriented approach that ­considers the ecology in cities, but also includes topics such as socio-economic drivers of urban ecological change and the impacts of 33

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34  Handbook of urban geography urban systems beyond their borders through in-depth studies of resource flows, urban ecological footprints and urban land teleconnections. What distinguishes these two approaches is the focus on ecological processes within cities versus framings that attempt to incorporate global urbanization processes. We suggest UPE has a similar tension of seeking to expand its scope, but also situate it within local contexts. The next section overviews the roots of UPE. We then discuss the two approaches (UPE in the city and UPE of the city) by using examples from the literature to characterize each. In doing so, we do not advocate for one approach over the other, nor do we suggest a rigid dichotomy between these approaches, which have fluid boundaries. Rather, we seek to stimulate discussion on the methodological and analytical focus of the field and its potential across places, territories and scales. The chapter concludes by identifying future avenues for UPE research.

3.2  ORIGINS OF UPE Urban political ecology is a diverse field with an intellectual history rooted in the traditions of cultural and political ecology, environmental justice and urban geography among other disciplines and subfields. Political ecology, as a distinct subfield, emerged as an outgrowth of human and cultural ecology to explore the ‘concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy’ (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987, p. 17). UPE shares many of the primary tenets of political ecology, such as a dialectical understanding of nature and society, but stems from a tradition that takes its starting point from Neil Smith’s (1984) ‘production of nature’ thesis and David Harvey’s (1996, p. 186) proposition that there is nothing unnatural about cities (Heynen et al., 2006; Loftus, 2012). Neil Smith (1984, p. xv) begins Uneven Development by stating that the book ‘represents the meeting of two types of intellectual investigation’, specifically the ‘archaic conception of nature that dominates western thought’ and the processes of uneven development in North American cities. Through the concept of the ‘production of nature’, his seminal book seeks to integrate the two concerns. Drawing upon the work of Henri Lefebvre (1991) and his concept of the ‘production of space’, Smith argues that nature is socially produced and that nature is increasingly becoming a product of capitalist social relations. Empirical examples include the processes of capital accumulation in urban water provision (Loftus, 2006), the commodification of urban nature and the production of uneven urban greenspace (Keil and Desfor, 2003; Heynen et al., 2006) and the transformation of urban environments wrought by ecological moderniza-

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Urban political ecologies of and in the city  ­35 tion (Desfor and Keil, 2004) among many others. Smith’s work offered a key intervention into debates on capitalism and nature in geography and brought a Lefebvrian conception of urbanization that offered scholars insights into the social production of urban environments. Harvey’s (1996) contribution to the establishment of UPE includes his theorizations on how cities are ‘created ecosystems’ – ones shaped by social power and the circuits of capital. These theorizations illustrate the processes perpetually [re]creating the city and firmly situated social and environmental change in dialectical terms. For Harvey (1996), created ecosystems are representative of the social systems that gave rise to them and are adapted forms of ‘second nature’. Through this lens, cities are interpreted as a part of nature formed through a constantly shifting and dialectical relationship of continuous social and ecological transformation. This leads to his famous assertion, ‘there is nothing unnatural about New York City and sustaining such an ecosystem even in transition entails an inevitable compromise with the forms of social organization and social relations which produced it’ (Harvey, 1996, p. 186). In other words, human activity cannot be viewed in isolation to the environment, but instead as co-produced. Emerging during the same period as the work by Smith and Harvey was a strand of scholarship that began engaging with the untidy categories of the city and countryside. Cronon (1991), for example, linked the growth of Chicago to the natural resource wealth of its hinterland and in doing so disrupted the taken for granted categories of the urban and the rural. Cronon’s approach is not in opposition to the approaches advocated by Smith and Harvey, but as Harvey (1996, p. 187) notes, ‘translates and extends’ Smith’s thesis through an historical geographical analysis of commodity exchange and capital accumulation that transformed Chicago and the West. Also exemplary in this regard is Matthew Gandy’s (2002) work on the social-ecological history of New York City. Gandy shows how the engineering structures extending out from New York City formed a metabolic system transcending urban and rural space – one driven by powerful interests to open up markets, increase economic efficiency and provide new spaces for capital accumulation. The emergence of UPE also coincided with the increasing influence of post-structural theory within political ecology (and geography more broadly). It brought attention to the role of social power in knowledge production and in discursive struggles over the meanings and practices of ‘nature’ (Escobar, 1995; Peet and Watts, 1996; Grove, 2009). In particular, concepts from post-structuralism, such as hybrids, cyborgs and assemblages shaped key UPE interventions with respect to advancing understandings of the uneven urbanization of socio-natural relations

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36  Handbook of urban geography (Swyngedouw, 1996; Gandy, 2005; Heynen et al., 2006). Swyngedouw (1996, 2004), for example, deftly interlinked post-structural and Marxist political-economy by charting the hybrid socio-natural relations that urbanize water and animate its politics. Through these empirical and theoretical interventions, urbanization came to be understood as a metabolic process – dissolving the boundaries between the social and the material world through the production of ‘cyborg’ cities (Gandy, 1999, 2005). Collectively, these approaches helped establish the field of UPE. The majority of theoretical approaches are still indebted to Marxist and Lefebvrian inspired theorizations on the ‘production of nature’ and ‘created ecosystems’. Scholars, however, have continued to refine the theoretical and empirical focus of the field. Evident in Swyngedouw’s (1996) early theorizations of UPE, efforts continue to bring the analytical strengths of actor-network theory (ANT), post-structuralism and Marxist UPE into conversation (Castree, 2002; Lawhon et al., 2013; Ranganathan, 2015). Although such an approach is subject to debate among urban political ecologists (Holifield, 2009), we see the continued cross-fertilization and integration of concepts from ANT, science and technology studies and other disciplines into UPE as an important interdisciplinary project. One that empirically and theoretically explores how cities are metabolic ­assemblages – hybrids of human and nonhuman actors and actants (Castán Broto et al., 2012; Newell and Cousins, 2015). While there is still room in UPE to embrace a broader range of theoretical approaches (Grove, 2009; Gabriel, 2014; Heynen, 2014; Cousins, 2017), these efforts have shunned dualist conceptions of nature and society in favour of representing urbanization as a dynamic process metabolizing both human and nonhuman inputs, unevenly producing new socio-spatial formations as an output.

3.3  URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY IN THE CITY When political ecology came to the city it brought with it an understanding of urbanization as a socio-natural process that rendered urban environmental injustice and inequality political. Much of the UPE literature, however, has treated the city as a specific socio-natural artefact produced through the metabolization of nature (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003; Newell and Cousins, 2015). While scholars have accused UPE of ‘methodological cityism’ by privileging the city as site over city as process (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015), we suggest UPE in the city as a means to clarify the analytical focus and purpose, of studies empirically drawing on those sites traditionally demarcated as ‘cities’. The aim is not to ignore the uneven and variegated patterns of planetary urbanization, but rather

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Urban political ecologies of and in the city  ­37 address methodological questions concerning ‘second wave’ UPE. UPE in the city is characterized by a focus on individual and comparative case studies that focus on the politics of urban nature occurring within cities. These studies are vital for producing exemplars around which UPE can advance understandings of urban ecological change (Flyvbjerg, 2016). A common thread running through this scholarship is a focus on environmental justice, which has provided an important frame to reveal the distributional inequalities wrought by socio-economic disparities that underlie socio-natural relationships locally. While environmental justice concerns are also shared within the framework of UPE of the city, this set of scholarship acknowledges the multi-scalar urban worlds in which environmental injustices are embedded, but are typically retained to a particular site and locality (Debbané and Keil, 2004). The empirical focus centres on the location where an event of environmental injustice occurs. The following paragraphs highlight key examples and fields of inquiry that characterize UPE in the city. This is not an exhaustive list. Rather it is representative of some of the dominant scholarship that characterizes UPE in the city – a focus on the questions of democracy, governance and the politics of everyday life in cities (Keil, 2003). 3.3.1  Trees, Parks and Gardens Investigations into the distribution of and access to trees, parks and gardens has provided a key entry-point for urban political ecologists to understand the socio-natural processes of urban environmental change. The work by Nik Heynen and his colleagues has proven to be highly influential (Heynen and Perkins, 2005; Perkins et al., 2004; Heynen et al., 2006). They have used inner-city case studies to link variables such as median household income, housing-market characteristics and racial and ethnic factors to changes in urban canopy cover to argue that the uneven spatial distribution of the urban forest presents a form of urban environmental inequity. While it has to be noted that trees may not always present a universal environmental good across space and time (Kitchen, 2013), the urban forest continues to be a concern of urban political ecologists engaging with issues of environmental justice and neoliberalism at the city scale (Njeru, 2013). Similarly, parks have become an object for geographers to explore the socio-ecological role of urban parks (Byrne and Wolch, 2009), how parks are enrolled into the discursive formation of the industrial city (Gabriel, 2011) and the challenges of making cities ‘just green enough’ (Wolch et al., 2014). Likewise, urban agriculture and gardens have proven to be fertile ground to explore the socio-natural production of urban space and the right to the city (Shillington, 2013), the subversive practices of

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38  Handbook of urban geography foraging in urban green spaces (McLain et al., 2014) and the discursive and material practices through which urban gardens became antithetical to normative conceptions of urban space (Moore, 2006). 3.3.2  Garbage and Waste Issues of garbage and waste also figure prominently in modernization efforts to bring cleanliness and order to cities in both the Global North and the Global South (Melosi, 2000; McFarlane, 2008; Gandy, 2013). In the Global North urban political ecologists have brought attention to how discourses on public health have shaped the infrastructural systems of the modern city to rid the city of waste and disease (Gandy, 1999). The politics of producing the ‘sanitary city’ in the Global South have examined the public health discourses that cast sanitation as a political, economic and social-ecological process that re-worked urban infrastructures unevenly across spatio-temporalities (McFarlane, 2008). Issues such as the politics of garbage have also brought attention to how the sociopolitical processes that marginalize groups may also create the conditions to leverage political power and shape new trajectories of socio-environmental change (Moore, 2008). Nonetheless, the social and environmental impacts of waste, when placed in their broader historical and political economic context, are shown to unevenly flow across urban space, producing environmental injustices (Njeru, 2006; Yates and Gutberlet, 2011). 3.3.3  Risks and Hazards Research into environmental risks and hazards has a long history in political ecology and while exposure to garbage and waste can certainly be considered an environmental hazard, work in this vein investigates biological and biophysical aspects of risk and vulnerability such as floods, fires, pollution and disease. The scholarship utilizes a localized event or exposure to a risk as its starting point to explore urban nature-society relations in the city. For example, Simon and Dooling (2013) use the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm or Tunnel Fire to show how a disconnect between the material and political forms of vulnerability produced a landscape where homes are vulnerable to wildfires. The fire destroyed more than 3,000 homes and is considered California’s largest urban wildfire in terms of homes lost, but the production of vulnerability was an outcome of legacies of timber extraction, real estate speculation, suburbanization and disinvestment at a city-scale. Similarly, Collins (2010) uses a case study of the 2006 El Paso-Ciudad Juarez flood disaster to argue that unequal risk to the floods is an outcome of marginalization and facilitation that shifts exposure to

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Urban political ecologies of and in the city  ­39 risk from elite and powerful actors to the poor and vulnerable. Like floods or fires, urban air pollution policies in Delhi, India are also shown to be driven by the environmental interests and values of an influential middle class that consequently displaces various forms of pollution and poorer urban residents spatially (Véron, 2006). UPE in the city has also focused heavily on the politics of urban nature within the city through explorations of the political imaginaries of planners, developers and residents that drive urban transformations. As Gabriel (2014, p. 40) notes urban imaginaries have long been a focus of UPE to demonstrate the role of discourses in shaping urban landscapes, subjects and practices. Hagerman (2007), for example, examined the discourses of livability shaping the urban imaginaries of planners and developers who articulated waterfront redevelopment as a way to reconnect the city with nature. Kear (2007), similarly explored the political visions seeking to produce nature on Vancouver’s waterfront through images of ecology, leisure and livability that have been ‘shaped around the consumption preferences of professionals in a service economy’ (Kear, 2007, p. 327). While these themes are certainly connected to a political ecology of gentrification (Quastel, 2009) and sustainable urbanism more broadly, they also shed light on the relationships between the natural, social and the technological aspects of urban spaces and natures (Domínguez Rubio and Fogué, 2013). In effect many of these discourses and imaginaries are shown to re-inscribe the ontological division between the urban and natural, whether through representations of urban blight (Millington, 2013) or sustainability initiatives such as urban growth policy (Huber and Currie, 2007). Collectively, this set of scholarship reveals the ‘meanings and practices of nature and the city that shape identities that make some forms of urban metabolisms possible while foreclosing others’ (Grove, 2009, p. 209).

3.4  URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF THE CITY For urban researchers to understand the social, economic and ecological aspects of urbanization, the global linkages of urbanization must be connected. This is not a city-centric version of political ecology, but rather one where urbanization has consumed both ‘city’ and ‘countryside’ into a complex metabolic system. Urbanization, as perhaps the feature of the Anthropocene, has global impacts that link the global flows of capital and commodities with the quotidian practices of everyday life (Loftus, 2012; Wachsmuth, 2014). Here the case studies focus on the global production networks, commodity flows and infrastructural systems that create an extended landscape of urbanization. These types of theorizations are a

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40  Handbook of urban geography critical component of efforts to urbanize political ecology as part of a ‘second wave’ of research that seeks to expand the conceptual focus of UPE beyond the city proper (Heynen, 2014). This branch of UPE scholarship has been successful in tracing the metabolisms, resource flows and global assemblages that organize urbanization at a variety of scales. 3.4.1  Metabolisms, Resource Flows and Global Assemblages The urban metabolism concept has been highly influential in UPE as a means to capture the dynamic and networked flows of goods and materials that form uneven social-ecological systems. The metaphor is useful for highlighting two important aspects of urbanization: transformation and circulation. Through this lens scholars have been able to reveal how the circulation of goods, resources, capital and commodities flow into and out of cities; simultaneously transforming both the city and its hinterland (Cronon, 1991; Newell and Cousins, 2015). This line of work eschews an urban-rural divide and seeks to connect the multiple spatialities under which planetary urbanization operates. Investigations into water infrastructures have been particularly revealing in this regard. Cousins and Newell (2015), for example, capture the flow of flows entangled in Los Angeles’s water-energy nexus to reveal the networked impacts of urban metabolisms on ecologies, peoples and places both inside and outside of the ‘city’. Domènech et al. (2013) also break down the binary between city and countryside by revealing how two apparently different struggles over water in urban and rural Nepal are connected by an urban metabolism that unevenly distributes benefits and impacts. Then there is Gandy’s (2002) and Swyngedouw’s (2004) classic work on New York City and Guayaquil, Ecuador to demonstrate how nature is transformed by and enrolled into the political and socio-economic practices that shape metabolic relationships between nature and society and city and countryside. Collectively, this research reveals an extended landscape of urbanization that channels the flow of flows across space. Similarly, there is a strand of research exploring rural geographies in explicitly relational terms. Understood as the urbanization of the countryside (McCarthy, 2008) exurbanization and amenity migration (Walker, 2003; Cadieux and Hurley, 2011), megapolitan political ecology (Gustafson et al., 2014) or the gentrification of the countryside (Phillips, 2004) these scholars demonstrate how urban-rural flows are intertwined. The ‘city’ and the ‘countryside’ are not thought of as discrete entities, but instead are constituted by a metabolism that connects human and non-human elements across space and time. Whether ‘urban’ or ‘rural’, landscapes occupied for leisure or consumption are reflective of an

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Urban political ecologies of and in the city  ­41 ‘urban society’ that structures new spatial forms at varied regional and ecological scales (Lefebvre, 2003; Brenner, 2013; Newell and Cousins, 2015). These processes have social and ecological consequences. Walker and Fortmann’s (2003) case of conflict over the politics of rural landscapes under transition, for example, bring forth how competing visions of landscapes in so-called rural areas are intimately linked to ongoing urbanization in California. Cadieux and Hurley (2011), similarly show how urban and rural are entangled through amenity migration and changing trends in the political economy of land and exurban land uses. The leisurescapes and resorts urbanites escape to are seen and understood as no less urban, but part of the urbanization of society. Other productive avenues have drawn theoretical insights derived from ‘assemblage thinking’ and the ‘more-than-human’ processes driving urbanization (Braun, 2005, 2006). Much of this research takes ANT and Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of assemblage as theoretical starting points to describe urbanization as a process that entangles nature and society through multiple networks that stretch across space and time. The goal is to come to a more distributive notion of agency that accounts for the vital materialism of both humans and non-humans (Bennett, 2010). Scholarship on infrastructure is revealing in this regard. Infrastructures mediate resource flows and shape many of the social and technical process that influence how urbanization unfolds. Work by Monstadt (2009), Graham and Marvin (2001) and others, for example, has empirically and theoretically illustrated how networked urban infrastructures bring social and natural processes into a relationship that influences how resources and people flow and circulate across the globe. Power is understood to be diffuse and relational, between human and non-human. As Bennett’s (2005) example of the North American blackout demonstrates, infrastructures like the grid span beyond any single bounded location and is indeed an assemblage of many human and non-human components, each exercising their own agential capacities.

3.5 CONCLUSION The rich and growing body of UPE scholarship reviewed here signals a field poised to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. The field has moved from ‘first wave’ concerns focused primarily on the production of nature in cities to ‘second wave’ concerns that simultaneously seek to expand and situate UPE (Heynen, 2014, 2016). Among the many future directions UPE can take, we conclude by identifying two potentially ­exciting avenues for future research.

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42  Handbook of urban geography First, how might we understand the situated, but evermore multi-sited and interconnected urban worlds we live in? Lawhon et al. (2013) suggests that an UPE with more distributed and situated notions of power rooted in everyday practices may offer a broader range of insights to understand how urban environments are formed and contested than the bulk of contemporary UPE scholarship. They offer examples from their experiences with African urbanism to situate how the everyday practices and subject formations of people mediate the ways materials flow in and through cities. The challenge, however, is how to address the disassociations and interconnections between Southern and Northern urbanisms without compromising theoretical and empirical rigour. The ethnographic work of Choy (2011) also offers a compelling way to understand the everyday lived experiences of people in a globally interconnected world. By focusing on the social practices centred on specification, exemplification and comparison in environmental advocacy, he links local-global environmentalisms. Similarly, Anna Tsing’s (2005) multi-scalar ethnographic work of supply chains that create ‘frictions’ around local-global knowledges and specificities offers a way to trace the global connections in an urbanized world. Second, the emergence of interdisciplinary perspectives in UPE offer avenues to further urbanize political ecology. Pincetl et al. (2012) and Newell and Cousins (2015) have sought to expand urban metabolism and political ecology more broadly, by utilizing metabolism as a boundary metaphor to account for the social, political and ecological factors that shape how materials and energy flow. The development of political-industrial ecology, for example, leverages the disciplinary strengths of UPE and industrial ecology to explore the material, political and economic mechanisms shaping the relationships between a product, commodity or material process, its primary inputs and outputs and the relevant social and ecological implications (Cousins and Newell, 2015, p. 41). The approach provides a relational way to map out the cartographic relationships between entities and to explore the qualities of goods, products, processes and other entities that operate on inputs producing outputs. As Cousins and Newell (2015) demonstrate, the urban water metabolism of Los Angeles is dependent on energy inputs for water to circulate and flow, but also requires industrial and infrastructural processes to pump, treat and distribute water and emits carbon as a primary output. Similarly, Guibrunet et al. (2016) illustrate how interdisciplinary perspectives allow urban political ecologists to engage with and politicize key concepts such as ‘system boundaries’ and ‘flows’ in areas of inquiry such as urban metabolism research. Leveraging both political and industrial ecology provides a compelling way forward to begin to think through the varied socio-ecological transformations wrought by urbanization. Finally, inter-

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Urban political ecologies of and in the city  ­43 disciplinary research can reinvigorate old concepts in a ‘second wave’ of UPE, as well as infuse new insights, theories and approaches into the subfield. Examining the political-industrial ecology of infrastructures and the situated political ecologies of urban environmental change offer just two of a body of promising methods and approaches to engage constructively across difference.

REFERENCES Amin, A. and N. Thrift (2002), Cities: Reimagining the Urban, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Angelo, H. and D. Wachsmuth (2015), ‘Urbanizing urban political ecology: a critique of methodological cityism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (1), 16–27. Bennett, J. (2005), ‘The agency of assemblages and the North American blackout’, Public Culture, 17 (3), 445–466. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blaikie, P. and H. Brookfield (eds) (1987), Land Degradation and Society, London: Methuen. Braun, B. (2005), ‘Environmental issues: writing a more-than-human urban geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 29 (5), 635–650. Braun, B. (2006), ‘Environmental issues: global natures in the space of assemblage’, Progress in Human Geography, 30 (5), 644–654. Brenner, N. (2013), ‘Theses on urbanization’, Public Culture, 25 (1), 85–114. Brenner, N. and C. Schmid (2014), ‘The “Urban Age” in question’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (3), 731–755. Byrne, J. and J. Wolch (2009), ‘Nature, race and parks: past research and future directions for geographic research’, Progress in Human Geography, 33 (6), 743–765. Cadieux, K. V. and P. T. Hurley (2011), ‘Amenity migration, exurbia and emerging rural landscapes: global natural amenity as place and as process’, GeoJournal, 76 (4), 297–302. Castán Broto, V., A. Allen and E. Rapoport (2012), ‘Interdisciplinary perspectives on urban metabolism’, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 16 (6), 851–861. Castree, N. (2002), ‘False antitheses? Marxism, nature and actor-networks greening the geographical left’, Antipode, 34 (1), 111–146. Choy, T. (2011), Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Collins, T. W. (2010), ‘Marginalization, facilitation and the production of unequal risk: the 2006 Paso del Norte floods’, Antipode, 42 (2), 258–288. Cousins, J. J. (2017), ‘Volume control: stormwater and the politics of urban metabolism’, Geoforum, 85, 368–380. Cousins, J. J. and J. P. Newell (2015), ‘A political-industrial ecology of water supply infrastructure for Los Angeles’, Geoforum, 58, 38–50. Cronon, W. (1991), Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York: W.W. Norton. Debbané, A.-M. and R. Keil (2004), ‘Multiple disconnections: environmental justice and urban water in Canada and South Africa’, Space and Polity, 8 (2), 209–225. Derickson, K. D. (2015), ‘Urban geography I: locating urban theory in the “urban age”’, Progress in Human Geography, 39 (5), 647–657. Desfor, G. and R. Keil (2004), Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles, Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Domènech, L., H. March and D. Saurí (2013), ‘Contesting large-scale water supply projects at both ends of the pipe in Kathmandu and Melamchi Valleys, Nepal’, Geoforum, 47, 22–31. Domínguez Rubio, F. and U. Fogué (2013), ‘Technifying public space and publicizing

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44  Handbook of urban geography infrastructures: exploring new urban political ecologies through the square of General Vara del Rey’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (3), 1035–1052. Escobar, Arturo (1995), Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Flyvbjerg, B. (2016), ‘Five misunderstandings about case-study research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 12 (2), 219–245. Gabriel, N. (2011), ‘The work that parks do: towards an urban environmentality’, Social & Cultural Geography, 12 (2), 123–141. Gabriel, N. (2014), ‘Urban political ecology: environmental imaginary, governance and the non-human’, Geography Compass, 8 (1), 38–48. Gandy, M. (1999), ‘The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24, 23–44. Gandy, M. (2002), Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gandy, M. (2005), ‘Cyborg urbanization: complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (1), 26–49. Gandy, M. (2013), ‘Marginalia: aesthetics, ecology and urban wastelands’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (6), 1–16. Graham, S. and S. Marvin (2001), Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition, New York: Routledge. Grimm, N. B., J. M. Grove, S. T. A. Pickett and L. Charles (2000), ‘Integrated approaches to long-term studies of urban ecological systems’, BioScience, 50 (7), 571–584. Grove, K. (2009), ‘Rethinking the nature of urban environmental politics: security, subjectivity and the non-human’, Geoforum, 40 (2), 207–216. Guibrunet, L., M. Sanzana Calvet and V. Castán Broto (2016), ‘Flows, system boundaries and the politics of urban metabolism: waste management in Mexico City and Santiago de Chile’, Geoforum, 85, 353–367. Gustafson, S., N. Heynen, J. L. Rice, T. Gragson, J.M. Shepherd and C. Strother (2014), ‘Megapolitan political ecology and urban metabolism in Southern Appalachia’, The Professional Geographer, 66 (4), 664–675. Hagerman, C. (2007), ‘Shaping neighborhoods and nature: urban political ecologies of urban waterfront transformations in Portland, Oregon’, Cities, 24 (4), 285–297. Harvey, D. (1996), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Heynen, N. (2014), ‘Urban political ecology I: the urban century’, Progress in Human Geography, 38 (4), 598–604. Heynen, N. (2016), ‘Urban political ecology II: the abolitionist century’, Progress in Human Geography, 40 (6), 839–845. Heynen, N., M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw (2006), ‘Urban political ecology: politicizing the production of urban natures’, in Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (eds), The Nature of Cities Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–20. Heynen, N. and H. A. Perkins (2005), ‘Scalar dialectics in green: urban private property and the contradictions of the neoliberalization of nature’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 16 (1), 99–113. Heynen, N., H. A. Perkins and P. Roy (2006), ‘The political ecology of uneven urban green space: the impact of political economy on race and ethnicity in producing environmental inequality in Milwaukee’, Urban Affairs Review, 42 (1), 3–25. Holifield, R. (2009), ‘Actor-network theory as a critical approach to environmental justice: a case against synthesis with urban political ecology’, Antipode, 41 (4), 637–658. Huber, M.T. and T. M. Currie (2007), ‘The urbanization of an idea: imagining nature through urban growth boundary policy in Portland, Oregon’, Urban Geography, 28 (8), 705–731. Kear, M. (2007), ‘Spaces of transition spaces of tomorrow: making a sustainable future in Southeast False Creek, Vancouver’, Cities, 24 (4), 324–334. Keil, R. (2003), ‘Urban political ecology 1’, Urban Geography, 24 (8), 723–738.

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Urban political ecologies of and in the city  ­45 Keil, R. and G. Desfor (2003), ‘Ecological modernisation in Los Angeles and Toronto’, Local Environment, 8 (1), 27–44. Kitchen, L. (2013), ‘Are trees always “good”? Urban political ecology and environmental justice in the valleys of South Wales’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (6), 1968–1983. Lawhon, M., H. Ernstson and J. Silver (2013), ‘Provincializing urban political ecology: towards a situated UPE through African urbanism’, Antipode, 46 (2), 497–516. Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (2003), The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Loftus, A. (2006), ‘The metabolic processes of capital accumulation in Durban’s waterscape’, in Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (eds), The Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, New York: Routledge, pp. 165–182. Loftus, A. (2012), Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McCarthy, J. (2008), ‘Rural geography: globalizing the countryside’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (1), 129–137. McFarlane, C. (2008), ‘Governing the contaminated city: infrastructure and sanitation in colonial and post-colonial Bombay’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (2), 415–435. McFarlane, C. (2010), ‘The comparative city: knowledge, learning, urbanism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34 (4), 725–742. McLain, R. J., P. T. Hurley, M. R. Emery and M. R. Poe (2014), ‘Gathering “wild” food in the city: rethinking the role of foraging in urban ecosystem planning and management’, Local Environment, 19 (2), 220–240. Melosi, M. V. (2000), The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Merrifield, A. (2013), ‘The urban question under planetary urbanization’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (3), 909–922. Millington, N. (2013), ‘Post-industrial imaginaries: nature, representation and ruin in Detroit, Michigan’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (1), 279–296. Monstadt, J. (2009), ‘Conceptualizing the political ecology of urban infrastructures: insights from technology and urban studies’, Environment and Planning A, 41 (8), 1924–1942. Moore, S. (2006), ‘Forgotten roots of the green city: subsistence gardening in Columbus, Ohio, 1900‒1940’, Urban Geography, 27 (2), 174–192. Moore, S. A. (2008), ‘The politics of garbage in Oaxaca, Mexico’, Society & Natural Resources, 21 (7), 597–610. Newell, J. P. and J. J. Cousins (2015), ‘The boundaries of urban metabolism: towards a political-industrial ecology’, Progress in Human Geography, 39 (6), 702–728. Njeru, J. (2006), ‘The urban political ecology of plastic bag waste problem in Nairobi, Kenya’, Geoforum, 37 (6), 1046–1058. Njeru, J. (2013), ‘“Donor-driven” neoliberal reform processes and urban environmental change in Kenya: the case of Karura Forest in Nairobi’, Progress in Development Studies, 13 (1), 63–78. Peet, R. and M. Watts (1996), Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, New York: Routledge. Perkins, H.A., N. Heynen and J. Wilson (2004), ‘Inequitable access to urban reforestation: the impact of urban political economy on housing tenure and urban forests’, Cities, 21 (4), 291–299. Phillips, M. (2004), ‘Other geographies of gentrification’, Progress in Human Geography, 28 (1), 5–30. Pickett, S. T. A., M. L. Cadenasso, J. M. Grove, C. H. Nilon, R. V. Pouyat, W. C. Zipperer and R. Costanza (2001), ‘Urban ecological systems: linking terrestrial ecological, physical and socioeconomic components of metropolitan areas’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 32 (1), 127–157.

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46  Handbook of urban geography Pincetl, S., P. Bunje and T. Holmes (2012), ‘An expanded urban metabolism method: toward a systems approach for assessing urban energy processes and causes’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 107 (3), 193–202. Quastel, N. (2009), ‘Political ecologies of gentrification’, Urban Geography, 30 (7), 694–725. Rademacher, A. (2015), ‘Urban political ecology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 44 (1), 137–152. Ranganathan, M. (2015), ‘Storm drains as assemblages: the political ecology of flood risk in post-colonial Bangalore’, Antipode, 47 (5), 1300–1320. Roy, A. (2005), ‘Urban informality: toward an epistemology of planning’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 71 (2), 147–158. Shillington, L. J. (2013), ‘Right to food, right to the city: household urban agriculture and socionatural metabolism in Managua, Nicaragua’, Geoforum, 44, 103–111. Simon, G. L. and S. Dooling (2013), ‘Flame and fortune in California: the material and political dimensions of vulnerability’, Global Environmental Change, 23 (6), 1410–1423. Smith, N. (1984), Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, Third Edition, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Swyngedouw, E. (1996), ‘The city as a hybrid: on nature, society and cyborg urbanization’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 7 (2), 65–80. Swyngedouw, E. (2004), Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swyngedouw, E. and N. C. Heynen (2003), ‘Urban political ecology, justice and the politics of scale’, Antipode, 35 (5), 898–918. Tsing, A. L. (2005), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Véron, R. (2006), ‘Remaking urban environments: the political ecology of air pollution in Delhi’, Environment and Planning A, 38 (11), 2093–2109. Wachsmuth, D. (2014), ‘City as ideology: reconciling the explosion of the city form with the tenacity of the city concept’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (1), 75–90. Walker, P. A. (2003), ‘Reconsidering “regional” political ecologies: toward a political ecology of the rural American West’, Progress in Human Geography, 27 (1), 7–24. Walker, P. and L. Fortmann. (2003), ‘Whose landscape? A political ecology of the “exurban” Sierra’, Cultural Geographies, 10 (4), 469–491. Wolch, J. R., J. Byrne and J. P. Newell (2014), ‘Urban green space, public health and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities “just green enough”’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 125, 234–244. Yates, J. S. and J. Gutberlet (2011), ‘Reclaiming and recirculating urban natures: integrated organic waste management in Diadema, Brazil’, Environment and Planning A, 43 (9), 2109–2124.

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4.  Urban cosmopolitics

Anders Blok and Ignacio Farías

4.1 INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE OF COSMOPOLITICS In recent years, the notion of ‘assemblage’ has come to encapsulate a series of influential attempts to rethink basic ontological assumptions about cities and urban geographies amidst, of course, a welter of parallel if distinct attempts and various attendant debates on how to re-cast these very notions (see, for example, Scott and Storper, 2015). Drawing inspiration from French poststructuralist sources – most notably those of Gilles Deleuze and the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour and others – assemblage urbanism by now denotes a recognizably relational, materially heterogeneous and ontologically multiple view of what cities are and how urban geographies come to be known, made and remade in uncertain and contested processes. From early programmatic statements and theoretical debates (Latour and Hermant 1998; Amin and Thrift, 2002; Farías, 2009; McFarlane, 2011a), urban assemblage thinking has quickly come to inspire a proliferation of new empirical and conceptual engagements, in and across human geography, science and technology studies (STS), political science, cultural anthropology and the whole interdisciplinary terrain of urban studies. Hence, the assemblage literature includes issues as diverse as infrastructure planning (Ureta, 2015), climate mitigation (Blok, 2013), low-budget urbanity (Färber, 2014) and fashion (Jayne and Ferenčuhová, 2013) in urban contexts, spanning geographies from the local to the transnational (Pow 2014), across Global North–South divides (Kumar, 2014), and with analysts moving rather freely across boundaries of expert planning, policy-making, activism and everyday life in various cities (McFarlane, 2011b). If assemblage has thus become a widespread and productive imaginary for rethinking urban studies and geographies, what this imaginary might imply for urban politics, including for the politics of urban studies itself, has often seemed less than obvious to observers. While some have hailed assemblage urbanism for re-engaging in a ‘politics of thick description’ (Rankin, 2011, p. 563) vis-à-vis processes of situated urban transformation, to the critical urban scholar the Latourian version of 47

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48  Handbook of urban geography this scholarship in particular ‘can appear overly detailed and seemingly apolitical’ (Jacobs 2012, p. 417).1 Such doubts on the terrain of the political have also been raised by urban scholars otherwise working in veins much closer to an assemblage ontology. In juxtaposing an assemblage approach to urban policy mobilities with related recent scholarship on urban worlding processes (Roy and Ong, 2011), for instance, Eugene McCann, Ananya Roy and Kevin Ward (2013) point to shared interests in contested and globalized processes of urban knowledge-making, translation and material mediation. Yet, when it comes to the question of urban politics, they contend, neither assemblage nor worlding have fully succeeded in elaborating a coherent take on the relational heterogeneity of city-making. Drawing on our own recent and partly co-authored interventions in these debates (Farías, 2011; Blok, 2014; Blok and Farías, 2016), we want to suggest in this chapter that this assessment – in so far as assemblage urbanism is concerned – is only halfway justified. What it overlooks is that the argument of urban assemblages, while initially cast in perhaps overly polemical form, has always contained within itself the seeds of a programmatic re-description and re-theorization of the urban political. This is true most especially of the Latourian version of the argument otherwise accused of its ‘apolitical’ character. To the contrary, one finds in Latour’s sustained intellectual engagement with ‘reassembling the political’ (Harman, 2014) a number of key conceptual resources for extending, rather than shortcutting, the questioning of urban politics as a problem of coexistence as opened up by assemblage urbanism. The key to this extension, we suggest, is the notion of urban cosmopolitics. Drawing inspiration from Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (2005), ‘cosmopolitics’ in Latour (2004a, 2007) denotes the collective search for and composition of a common world of human and nonhuman cohabitation (cosmos), under conditions of radical uncertainty, contestation, and experimentation as to what the relevant entities are and how they might relate to each other (politics). The crux here is the ‘common world’: in Latourian ontology, material-semiotic articulations always come in the plural, as forces, practices, networks and institutions criss-cross and collide, sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently. Politics, on this view, is the always ‘risky’ (Stengers, 2005), provisional and situated process whereby such multiple assemblages come to be co-articulated according to some sense of shared implication into and concern with the more-or-less troublesome, unequal or in any case problematic consequences of their con- and disjunction. In brief, a cosmopolitical approach to the city focuses on the multiple forces and assemblages that constitute urban common worlds, and on

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Urban cosmopolitics  ­49 the conflicts and compromises that arise among different ways of problematizing and composing their forms and limits. As such, it brings into view how urban worlds, however confined or extended, are always in the process of being questioned, criticized, subtly transformed, destabilized, decentred, or even destroyed. In doing so, it opens up novel questions as to the gradual and contested composition of urban life, whereby the situated study of urban publics and politics challenges ANT and assemblage thinking to move in new directions (Blok, 2012), forcing it to elaborate new conceptual repertoires in order to take more seriously the political challenge of urban assemblages (Farías, 2011). In what follows, we attempt to outline what we take to be the main challenges of cosmopolitics to the re-description of the problem of urban togetherness, one shared with allied-yet-divergent approaches (e.g. Amin, 2012). We start by recounting the pragmatist lineages of Latourian cosmopolitics, as this helps situate the approach in broader realignments of the urban political and bring out the specificities of its challenge. Next, we outline three key conceptual configurations of urban cosmopolitics – of agencements, assemblies and atmospheres – and assess their analytical importance to issues of urban conflictuality. Finally, we return to the theme of multiplicity, drawing on our own empirical work to illustrate how cosmopolitics serves to open up ontological questions as to what novel aspects of ‘cosmos’ count in present-day city-making practices.

4.2 FROM ASSEMBLAGES TO COSMOPOLITICS: REDISTRIBUTING THE URBAN POLITICAL? At the outset, the notion of cosmopolitics provides a suitable way of restating and reflecting on certain ethical-political effects sought and achieved via the moves characteristic of assemblage urbanism (see Farías and Bender, 2009). First, and most notoriously, much of this work has been dedicated to the elicitation of a recalcitrant and lively more-than-human urban ecology that cannot be read solely in terms of overarching capitalist metabolisms (Braun 2008). Rather, infrastructures, materials, technical artefacts, biological life-forms and ecological landscapes are read here as concrete and irreducible participants in heterogeneous urban worlds, to which analysts must pay due attention. Indeed, assemblage thinking stresses that such materialities are political to the extent that they are or become invested with moral-political capacities in specific urban settings, whether oriented and routed to effects of planning, ordering and governing urban life (Kurath et al. 2018) or enrolled in practices of questioning, experimentation and destabilization. Expanding urban conflictuality in

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50  Handbook of urban geography the direction of the politics of nonhumans remains a distinctive trait of assemblage urbanism. Second, grasping the relational topologies of such heterogeneous urban settings has meant developing a language of networks and mobilities that tie together actors, institutions, sites and processes in new translocal, distributed and contested constellations of cities in-the-making without assuming the existence of a priori fixed scales. So far, the most explicit engagement with urban politics along such lines has emerged from debates on urban policy mobilities (McCann and Ward, 2012; McCann et al., 2013). Here, the notion of assemblage serves to stress that the urban sites among which policies travel are not discrete territories but rather unbounded, dynamic and relational assemblages of parts of the near and far, of fixed and mobile pieces of expertise, regulation, documents, institutional capacities and so forth that are brought together in particular ways in and across specific sites. Extending this line of reasoning, in turn, Colin McFarlane (2011b) analyses Indian and South African slum dweller movements as translocal activist assemblages of materialized, tactical and critical learning. In general terms, we suggest, these lines of inquiry articulate a politics of scaling, in terms of paying close attention to the mundane devices, relations, practices and knowledges that allow for the re- and destabilization of ‘locality’ and ‘globality’ in the city. Third, and perhaps most ambitiously, deploying assemblages has meant reimagining ‘the city’ not as a bounded entity ‘out there’, but rather as a multiple and fractured object, made and unmade at particular sites of urban practice, and brought into being via concrete relations, materials, knowledges and engagements. Invoking the way STS scholars such as Annemarie Mol and John Law have handled the challenging and performative ‘object-spaces’ of the techno-sciences (e.g. Law and Mol, 2001), multiplicity refers here not to an epistemic problem of divergent perspectives and interests, but instead to an ontological problem of how realities (in the plural) come to be made and remade in overlapping and conflicting ecologies of practice. In a similar way, rather than throwing the baby (the city) out with the bath water (methodological cityism in urban studies), the crucial move of assemblage urbanism has been to view ‘the city’ as an entity constitutively in-the-making, as always being constructed and performed into being via multiple assemblages that constitute urban subjects, groupings, materialities, interests and knowledges in only partly coherent, always partly divergent and conflicting ways (Farías, 2011). In the language of Mol (1999, 2002), assemblage urbanism implies an ontological politics of cities in-the-making. These three moves – of materialities, scaling and multiplicity – help pave the way for raising anew the question of urban politics as indeed a

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Urban cosmopolitics  ­51 question of cosmopolitics, a politics of the urban cosmos, of searching for and composing urban common worlds of coexistence. Yet, while analytically productive, in and by themselves the moves are insufficient, we suggest, for posing what is arguably the key cosmopolitical problem of the city: the problem, that is, of how multiple urban assemblages come to be articulated and coordinated in and across specific urban sites, thereby provisionally settling what does and does not belong to the situated world held in common. Rather than a ‘normative’ issue per se, in the vein for instance of Ash Amin’s (2012) politics of urban strangers, cosmopolitics entails an ethico-political commitment to painstakingly documenting and describing actual practices and processes of urban problematization (see Barnett and Bridge, 2016). Full of gaps, asymmetries, exclusions and incompatibilities, such processes at the same time manifest an irreducible uncertainty and openness to emergent entities, critical explorations and contestations, as well as to new articulations of public matters of shared concern in the city. In order to see how this works, however, we need to dig deeper into the very notion of cosmopolitics, as it has been elaborated in the works of Latour and Stengers. While hard to pin down conceptually, the political writings of the ‘later’ Bruno Latour (manifesting from around 2000) show a consistent attempt to reinvent basic tenets of political philosophy, in part by reengaging with the classical American pragmatist lineage (Harman, 2014). The resulting politics comes with shifting labels – politics of nature (Latour, 2004b), Dingpolitik (Latour, 2005), cosmopolitics (Latour, 2004a, 2007) – but the underlying idea remains stable. Politics, Latour asserts (2007, p. 803), ‘is the building of the cosmos in which everyone lives, the progressive composition of the common world’. This trajectory of composition, in turn, is a conflictual one, involving clashes among different propositions for reassembling the elements of the common world, different cosmograms. Hence, the composition of the common world involves ‘the agonizing sorting out of conflicting cosmograms’ (Latour, 2007, p. 803). This brief exposition already exposes what is arguably the radical challenge of cosmopolitics: to conceive of the cosmos, this shifting and provisional articulation of human and nonhuman cohabitation, as the always problematic, unknown, uncertain object around which all of politics, urban and otherwise, turn. When thought along these lines, as noted, urban (cosmo)politics comes to designate all the practices, events and processes, at once conflictual and constructive, of searching for, articulating and provisionally settling the question of the common, of what does and does not belong to our common urban (and urbanizing) worlds. The questions opened up by assemblage urbanism, of materialities and nonhumans, of translocal connections and scaling, and of practices

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52  Handbook of urban geography and ontological multiplicity, are all key elements of such processes of searching, of experimentation and (re-)composition. Yet, as the detour through Latour and Stengers help clarify, these concepts do not exhaust the challenge of cosmopolitics when it comes to reimagining the political tasks and objects of urban studies and geographies. One way of further unpacking these challenges is to ask what exactly it means to say, as we just did, that urban (cosmo)politics from now on revolves around problematic, unknown, uncertain objects? Importantly, cosmopolitics does not turn around ‘objects’ simply understood as bounded and actual material entities or technical artefacts. It operates rather with a pragmatist understanding of objects as socio-material gatherings that have specific practical consequences for the situated transactions of humans with their environments. Arguing, as did the North-American pragmatists, that an object is defined by its practical consequences implies paying attention to the ‘future responses which an object requires us or commits us to’ (Dewey, 2004[1916], p. 196), including sensations, attachments, concerns and other ways of relating. Accordingly, an object is not an individual entity, but a shared concern whose very boundaries are open to situated negotiations. It is, to put it with Heidegger, a thing (or Ding). Accordingly, cosmopolitics as a politics of object-as-things, as a Dingpolitik, involves a refusal to reduce a priori the problematic character of objects to a supposedly underlying political clash between the vested interests and ideologies of opposing social groups defined along lines of class, gender, ethnicity or nationality. By taking objects seriously as things, cosmopolitics requires instead a precise understanding of the situations and processes through which these are problematized, that is, how problematic, unknown, uncertain objects become urban-political issues. Any serious attempt at grasping cosmopolitics in the city requires, then, studying the empirical trajectories of contested issues and matters of concern, how these are formed, formatted and acted upon in different urban configurations, as well as the varying ways in which political actors and modes of political engagement are constituted. In a seminal contribution, Latour (2007) outlines five such configurations in the cosmopolitical trajectories of issues, and hence five shifting modalities of ‘the political’. The argument can be illustrated via the case of the assemblage of Transantiago, a bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Santiago de Chile, as painstakingly described by Ureta (2015). To the extent that the design and engineering of this BRT system involves all sorts of new human–nonhuman associations, this is thoroughly political in the sense described by Ulrich Beck and much STS work, that is, as a sub-politics of science and technology in the city (political-1). However, due in part to its failed implementation, Transantiago quickly became a

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Urban cosmopolitics  ­53 public issue leading to the constitution of a variety of issue-specific urban publics concerned with its problematization, as postulated in John Dewey’s political theory (political-2). The ensuing governmental interventions to repair the system based on exceptional powers attributed to a Ministry commission once again re-constitute the issue, this time around the exercise of sovereign power, as theorized by political philosophers from Schmitt to Agamben (political-3). As part of this process, different dialogical instances aimed to facilitate mutual understanding and consensual definitions of the problems and solutions among different stakeholders, including bus users, in the vein of deliberative democracy theorized among others by Habermas (political-4). Finally, the eventual ‘normalization’ of Transantiago aimed to be achieved over the years involves yet another form of the political, so aptly described by Michael Foucault via the notion of governmentality, in terms of how silent, ordinary, authorized and routinized practices shape life together (political-5). As this example suggests, analyzing cosmopolitics in the city requires exploring how contested urban objects-as-things are rendered political in and through shifting actor constellations, modalities and settings, and how such particular trajectories come to reshuffle urban worlds, in part or in total (for another example, see Farías and Widmer 2018). In the remainder of this article, we reflect upon the ways in which this understanding of the urban cosmopolitical fits or rather challenges contemporary reflections in human geography on urban politics and on urban world-making. We do this, first, by introducing an analytical proposal to study cosmopolitical configurations shaping urban issues and, second, by exploring some of the ways in which ecological issues and geological forces are constitutive of current projects of urban world-making.

4.3 URBAN COSMOPOLITICAL CONFIGURATIONS: AGENCEMENTS, ASSEMBLIES, ATMOSPHERES As more broadly in the political-philosophical front, a good part of contemporary reflections on the political in urban processes imagine it as a tension between consensus and conflict, between hegemonic and subversive practices, between control and resistance. This becomes particularly evident in the notion of the post-political (Swyngedouw, 2009), which describes the emergence of an urban politics of consensus resulting from the uncontested rise of neoliberal governmental techniques and leading to an undermining of any critique of capitalism. Interestingly, however, the binary between consensus and conflict not only shapes the political imaginary of neo-Marxist critical urban studies, but also pervades some

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54  Handbook of urban geography anthropological and human geography studies of the everyday tactics of city inhabitants, from passers-by to guerrilla gardeners, as unfolding in the interstices of power (cf. Thrift, 2004). In this context, the analytical contribution of cosmopolitics can be aptly described not as an overcoming but as a reframing – much in line with wider pragmatist inclinations (Barnett and Bridge, 2013) – of the consensus-conflict analytics as the empirically traceable effect of specific configurations of the political in the context of more complicated issue trajectories. While committed to a radical democratic politics of uncertainty, problematization and experimentation, as carried by emerging and shifting constellations of concerned publics, urban cosmopolitics neither simplifies the task of defining the heterogeneous entities that must be made to co-exist amenably, nor partakes to any romanticizing of clashes and disruptions per se. If from a cosmopolitical perspective the ‘political’ is ‘what qualifies a type of situation’ (Latour 2007, p. 814), rather than an adjective that defines a profession, a sphere, a calling, a site or a procedure, then the key question that needs posing is how cosmopolitical situations are configured in cities. By definition, the answer to this question can only be tentative, as the search and composition of common worlds of cohabitation is always bound to the emergence of unexpected concerns. Having said this, we think that by paying attention to key issues in urban studies, as well as to the empirical and conceptual contributions to our recent volume on urban cosmopolitics (Blok and Farías, 2016), recurring urban configurations stand out in which practices and projects of world-making become not only apparent but also formatted and contested in specific ways. One such configuration is agencement, a concept that affords attention to the changing socio-material arrangements that assemble and disassemble what counts as urban (collective) actors in the first place (Phillips, 2006). The empirical study of urban agencements is thus fundamental to understanding the heterogeneous, emergent and distributed character of political forces shaping urbanization processes. In this way, the question of who and what acts, and how these agencies are equipped to act, is thus at the very core of cosmopolitical problematizations of urban transformations. Such agencies, as should be evident, reach beyond the list of usual political subjects – although there is certainly now a sizeable literature showing how specific infrastructural interventions and arrangements co-constitute new forms of urban political subjects and social movements (e.g. McFarlane, 2011b; Amin, 2014). At the same time, a focus on agencements as key cosmopolitical configurations is equally helpful to explore the ethical-political capacities invested with various nonhuman agencies, such as urban furniture, master plans or private corporations, to effectively rearrange urban worlds according to specific diagrams of the

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Urban cosmopolitics  ­55 urban cosmos, specific urban cosmograms. The concept of agencement, in short, invites us to study the specific and often conflictual becoming of agencies and attendant projects of world-making brought forward in urban transformations. A second distinct configuration is what we call assemblies, pointing to those urban situations in which heterogeneous concerned publics – involving neighbours, activists, affected groups and even engaged scholars – come together, claim recognition, and seek to de- and restabilize particular institutional orderings. Whereas agencements involves a problematization of what counts as an urban actor, assemblies are key cosmopolitical configurations in which new and emergent collectives are held together by a shared questioning, exploration and rendering visible of the intended or non-intended consequences of past, ongoing or potential urban interventions. In this sense, assemblies resemble the issue-publics of Dewey dubbed by Latour (2007) as political-2; yet, in the urban setting, we observe how such assemblies often emerge and blend at the intersections with other political modalities. The case of the Occupy movements around the world earlier this decade provides a good illustration of this point, as their very assembly in public space, such as in Madrid, was articulated around many different intersections (see Corsín Jiménez and Estalella, 2013). To begin with, beyond their sometimes rather vague political demands and diminished capacities to influence political decision-making, many Occupy assemblies involved experimenting with new socio-material associations in public space and prototyping alternative urban cosmograms. A second interesting feature of these assemblies was the introduction of new methods, rules and a certain ethics of dialogue and consensus-oriented mechanisms, thus articulating direct and deliberative forms of democracy. Finally, various Occupy assemblies had to politically engage in different ways with institutional decision-making instances of local and central governments to defend, for example, their right to occupy public space. As this example suggests, assemblies unfold at the intersection of multiple modes of the political and thus emerge as key configurations of urban cosmopolitics. Third and finally, the notion of atmosphere, as developed not least by Peter Sloterdijk (2004) – partly in dialogue with Latour (2009) – provides a precise problematization of cities as worlds sustained by specific ecological conditions and socio-technical arrangements of collective life-support and survival. Atmospheres, we argue, are fundamental parts of the cosmopolitics of articulating co-existence in urban space, especially considering that atmospheres are constituted by specific boundaries defining which assemblages can be brought together in a common world and from what entities and process such fragile worlds of heterogeneous cohabitation need to be

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56  Handbook of urban geography protected (cf. Tironi and Farías 2015). It is important to clarify that by thinking urban cosmopolitics as an atmospheric issue, we are advancing an understanding of the city that is different from Sloterdijk’s (2008) own analysis of the city as ‘foam’, that is, as an agglomeration of micro-spheres of inhabitation figuring the city as a space of ‘co-isolation’ (see Borch, 2008). From a cosmopolitical perspective, instead, the urban question is one of co-habitation rather than of co-isolation, and accordingly the city is not problematized as ‘foam’ but as shaped by con- and disjoint collective ‘bubbles’ of variable scales and dimensions each defining and sustaining specific conditions of life together.

4.4 THE SITE MULTIPLE: WORLDING PRACTICES AND INHUMAN FORCES As already noted, cosmopolitics shares analytical commitments with current research on the worlding of cities (Roy and Ong, 2011), since both programmes stress the conceptual tension of ‘world’ as both situated coexistence and as globalized assemblage. As Ong has emphasized (2011, pp. 11‒12), the study of worlding practices is committed to explore heterogeneous ‘projects and practices that instantiate some vision of the world in formation . . . that do not fall tidily into opposite sides of class, political or cultural divides’. What is at stake are rather emergent aspirational, experimental and speculative practices that imagine and shape worlds different from existing ones by remapping relationships among actors situated at different scales and localities. However, while sharing an interest in the way urban worlds are recomposed via a complicated politics of translocal mobilities and scale-making, one specific consequence of the politics of the cosmos is not quite stressed in the worlding cities programme, namely, that world-making capacities are by no means exclusive to humans. Before coming to a conclusion, we would like to draw upon two empirical examples that demonstrate the extent to which cosmopolitics, as the provisory composition of urban common worlds, involves inevitably engaging with sites which are themselves multiple and ecological, that is, enacted differently in trans-local and more-than-human assemblages. We chose these examples in part for the way they both pertain to the intersections of tell-tale assemblage concerns with contemporary urban politics, highlighting how questions of materialities, scaling and multiplicity are all integral to problematizations of urban ecologies under ‘Anthropocenic’ conditions (however troublesome a term; see Blok and Jensen, 2019). More specifically, both examples similarly pertain to the intersections of our cosmopolitical configurations, and not least to

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Urban cosmopolitics  ­57 questions of how translocal ecologies become matters of public concern, assembly and contestation in collective response to attendant materialsemiotic fragilities in urban atmospheres. Such questions, we seek to affirm, are key to how the programme of cosmopolitics stand to enrich conversations about ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner et al., 2011) in ways more attentive to the full range of uncertainties opened up at this historical juncture. Our first example concerns the way Surat, a fast-growing coastal city in North-West India, is currently being reassembled within translocal knowledge and policy assemblages of urban climate adaptation, and the way this process co-articulates a set of highly contested local ‘riskscapes’ that sit uneasily vis-à-vis each other (Blok, 2014). What this case shows, we argue, is the highly contentious processes whereby multiple agencies attempt to align local and global natures onto the territory of a vulnerable and starkly unequal urban setting, with attendant questions of knowledge politics. Amongst mobile urban consultants in India and beyond, as well as amongst their US-based financial sponsors and international urban policy networks, Surat has since 2008 come to be staged as a potential ‘best practice’ model for how to build resilient cities in South Asia in the face of global climate change. To civic activists on the ground, however, linking up to such globalized narratives and streams of climate funding seems rather like an excuse, on the part of local Surat policy and business elites, for ignoring more proximate causes of uncontrolled, capital- and pollution-heavy forms of urbanization and attendant dispossessions of the urban poor. Navigating somewhere in-between these opposing forces are local planners, civic architects and academics, mobilizing their professional capacities to shifting critical effects, beyond any final closure or ‘common world’. Standing at the centre of these partly overlapping, partly clashing forces are divergent mappings of the driving forces responsible for increasing flood risks in the city – as manifested in a dramatic 2006 flood event that inundated much of the city for over a week. Whereas mobile consultants and policy entrepreneurs link the issue of flooding firmly to global climate change and devise their socio-material interventions accordingly, emerging public assemblies of Surat-based civic and professional actors widely contest these claims, pointing instead to techno-political and economic factors such as large-scale dams and petro-chemical industries that together shape local urban ecologies in the direction of increased flood risks. In the process, specific urban sites and their ‘risky’ landscapes come to crystallize at the intersection of such divergent worlding projects or cosmograms, as mediated via collective but disjunctive knowledge practices. In short, new urban-ecological intersections – defined by the non-coherent

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58  Handbook of urban geography assemblages of land use changes, industrial pollution, periodic flooding, changing monsoon patterns and so on – have come to reshape the very direction and scale of how ‘change’ is presently imagined and contested in Surat (cosmo)politics in multiple, inchoate ways. Absent any singular sense of ‘Surat’ navigating planetary urbanization, then, multiple and conflicting socio-natural forces come to co-articulate in the search for urban common ground. Our second example pertains to the reconstruction of Chilean cities after the earthquake and tsunami of 2010 (Farías, 2018). The so-called 27F disaster spurred a situation in which the unknown, the excluded, the absent from common definitions of the urban world suddenly became not just visible and problematic, but also generative of new relationships. Concretely, the 27F disaster led to recasting the city as a complex assemblage shaped by geological forces, and more specifically, by the capacities of tsunamis to destroy urban environments. Indeed, despite its magnitude, the 2010 earthquake did not involve a particularly unexpected disruption of cities and urban life. Chile is, after all, a seismically very active country and earthquakes are well-represented geological forces, at least since 1928, when a destructive earthquake in Talca paved the way for the development of one of the first and most advanced anti-seismic building codes. Thus, the 2010 earthquake was nothing but yet another test or, literally, a trial of force, for the prevailing composition of the urban cosmos. The tsunami, in contrast, posed a new cosmopolitical challenge, as it triggered an exploration of how and to what extent urban worlds needed to be re-imagined and re-constructed to allow for co-existence with such incommensurable urban actors. In the language of Nigel Clark (2011), tsunamis, droughts, bacteria and other ‘inhuman’ forces require us to take seriously relationships and events characterized by a radical asymmetry beyond all proportions, thereby pointing also to possible ontological limits for a politics of the cosmos. Rather than pursuing this question in theory, however, we should consider the answer devised by the architects and engineers in charge of planning reconstruction in Constitución, one of the most severely destroyed cities by the tsunami. Their proposal was to transform the very first line of coast land into an anti-tsunami park that could significantly diminish the intensity and velocity of tsunami waves, thus transforming the tsunami into a sea rise and giving residents time enough to evacuate their homes. Interestingly, as the project developed, the main source of uncertainty sparking various controversies was not related to the next tsunami, but to the type and disposition of trees for the tsunami park. Should these be native or exotic species? How wide should the park be? How many trees per square kilometre would be necessary for mitigation?

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Urban cosmopolitics  ­59 Would this be really a park or rather a high-density shadowed forest – and if so, with what consequences for citizens’ approval? Meanwhile, we might say, the next tsunami remains in cosmopolitical abeyance, simultaneously part of, and absent from, the urban common world being forged (see Law and Mol, 2001). To reiterate, the cases of flood- and riskscapes in Surat and the antitsunami park in Constitución are noteworthy, we believe, in part because they make palpable the sheer extension of urban politics exerted by the presence of ‘cosmos’ in cosmopolitics, not least in an age of ecological crises. In the end, what is at stake here are not simply human relations to a pre-given environment but rather a whole range of dynamic interactions among other-than-human entities – climate change, floods, pollution, tsunamis, trees – and the way these entities co-condition or disrupt urban worlds as atmospheres of co-habitation in often non-coherent and radically asymmetrical ways. If, in the end, there is a reason to prefer the notion of cosmopolitics over related notions such as Dingpolitik, this might be because it forces the question of how urban sites relate to the sheer incommensurability of ‘inhuman’ forces that constantly criss-cross them. In the end, as noted, the cosmopolitical imaginary is then not one of an ‘objective’ planetary urbanization within which politics would be nested (as we read Brenner et al., 2011), but rather of multiple and fully political urban ‘worldlinesses’, embodied in myriad problematizations and searches for new forms of extended and more-than-human co-existence.

4.5 CONCLUSION: A NEW STRONG PROGRAMME FOR URBAN STUDIES? In this chapter, we have outlined the contours, challenges and promises of cosmopolitics as an emerging programme of urban studies, articulated within and across human geography, STS, political science, cultural anthropology and interdisciplinary urban studies. Urban cosmopolitics, we argue, is what happens when we take seriously the political challenge of assemblage urbanism ontology, inviting an active questioning of how multiple assemblages come to be composed into urban common worlds of cohabitation in specific sites of cities-in-the-making. Moreover, by sketching a range of key conceptual resources, inspired from the political work of Bruno Latour and its wider pragmatist lineage, we have attempted to position this programme within a changing landscape of the urban political. This rendition, we hope, will help make the politics of urban assemblages more recognizable to proponents and critics alike – if not necessarily for

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60  Handbook of urban geography that reason more agreeable, and certainly we hope no less challenging, as students of the urban undertake to inquire into the multifarious politics in the city. We recognize and indeed affirm that the conceptual registers and thematic clusters traced in this chapter – of multiplicity and scale-making, of assemblies and atmospheres, of materialities and ecological crises – serve to open up a range of further questions for empirical inquiry and conceptual debate. Urban cosmopolitics, as we define and defend it, is a self-consciously exploratory programme of inquiry, as much oriented towards cities-in-the-making, to potentialities and critical explorations, as to currently sedimented forms of urban life together. In this sense, a commitment to cosmopolitics also entails an ethics of urban inquiry, one attuned to the emergence of new problematizations and emerging matters of urban concern in and across shared public engagements with learning, experimentation and knowledge-making (Farías, 2011; McFarlane, 2011b). Practising cosmopolitics in conflictual settings of multiple and unequal assemblages implies a capacity, on the part of the researcher, of learning to be affected by emerging urban publics and their ways of problematizing and caring for specific more-than-human relations. Such a commitment, we believe, is both timely and important at the present historical juncture, as publics and cities around the world search for less ecologically destructive forms of co-habitation.

NOTE 1. In part, Jacobs is here summarizing across a string of critical exchanges among assemblage and critical urban scholars (e.g. Graham and Farías, 2009), including the exchange that took place on the pages of the journal City in 2011 (e.g. Brenner et al., 2011). We return to elements of these discussions later in the text.

REFERENCES Amin, A. (2012), Land of Strangers, Cambridge: Polity. Amin, A. (2014), ‘Lively infrastructure’, Theory, Culture & Society, 31 (7/8), 137–161. Amin, A. and N. Thrift (2002), Cities. Reimagining the Urban, Cambridge: Polity. Barnett, C. and G. Bridge (2013), ‘Geographies of radical democracy: agonistic pragmatism and the formation of affected interests’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (4), 1022–1040. Barnett, C. and G. Bridge (2016), ‘The situations of urban inquiry: thinking problematically about the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40 (6), 1186–1204. Blok, A. (2012), ‘Wandering around cities with ANTs’, Science as Culture, 21 (2), 283–287. Blok, A. (2013), ‘Urban green assemblages: an ANT view on sustainable city building projects’, Science & Technology Studies, 26 (1), 5–24.

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Urban cosmopolitics  ­61 Blok, A. (2014), ‘Worlding cities through their climate projects? Eco-housing assemblages, cosmopolitics and comparisons’, City, 18 (3), 269–286. Blok, A. and I. Farías (2016), Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, Atmospheres, London: Routledge. Blok, A. and C. B. Jensen (2019), ‘The Anthropocene event in social theory: on ways of problematizing the non-human’, accepted for publication in The Sociological Review. Borch, C. (2008), ‘Foam architecture: managing co-isolated associations’, Economy and Society, 37 (4), 548–571. Braun, B. (2008). ‘Environmental issues: inventive life’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 667–679. Brenner, N., D. J. Madden and D. Wachsmuth (2011), ‘Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory’, City, 15 (2), 225–240. Clark, N. (2011), Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet, London: Sage. Corsín Jiménez, A. and A. Estalella (2013), ‘The atmospheric person: value, experiment, and “making neighbors” in Madrid’s popular assemblies’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3 (2), 119–139. Dewey, J. (2004[1916]), Essays in Experimental Logic, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Färber, A. (2014), ‘Low-budget Berlin: towards an understanding of low-budget urbanity as assemblage’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 7 (1), 119–136. Farías, I. (2009), ‘Introduction: decentering the object of urban studies’, in Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender (eds), Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 1–24. Farías, I. (2011), ‘The politics of urban assemblages’, City, 15 (3‒4), 365–374. Farías, I. (2018), ‘Master plans as cosmograms: articulating oceanic forces and urban forms after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Chile’, in Monika Kurath, Marko Marskamp, Julio Paulos and Jean Ruegg (eds), Relational Planning: Tracing Artefacts, Agency and Practices, Cham: Springer, pp. 179–202. Farías, I. and T. Bender (eds) (2009), Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, London: Routledge. Farías, I. and S. Widmer (2018), ‘Ordinary smart cities: how calculated users, professional citizens, technology companies and city administrations engage in a more-than-digital politics’, Tecnoscienza, 8 (2), 43–60. Graham, S. and I. Farías (2009), ‘Interview with Stephen Graham’, in Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender (eds), Urban Assemblages. How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 197–206. Harman, G. (2014), Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, London: Pluto Press. Jacobs, J. M. (2012), ‘Urban geographies I: still thinking cities relationally’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (3), 412–422. Jayne, M. and S. Ferenčuhová (2013), ‘Comfort, identity and fashion in the post-socialist city: materialities, assemblages and context’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 15 (3), 329–350. Kumar, K. (2014), ‘The sacred mountain: confronting global capital at Niyamgiri’, Geoforum, 54, 196–206. Kurath, M., M. Marskamp, J. Paulos and J. Ruegg (eds) (2018), Relational Planning: Tracing Artefacts, Agency and Practices, Cham: Springer. Latour, B. (2004a), ‘Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?: Comments on the peace terms of Ulrich Beck’, Common Knowledge, 10 (3), 450–462. Latour, B. (2004b), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005), ‘From realpolitik to dingpolitik or how to make things public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 14–43. Latour, B. (2007), ‘Turning around politics: a note on Gerard de Vries’ paper’, Social Studies of Science, 37 (5), 811–820. Latour, B. (2009), ‘Spheres and networks: two ways to reinterpret globalization’, Harvard Design Magazine, 30 (Spring/Summer), 138–144.

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62  Handbook of urban geography Latour, B. and E. Hermant (1998), Paris Ville Invisible, Paris: La Découverte. Law, J. and A. Mol (2001), ‘Situating technoscience: an inquiry into spatialities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19 (5), 609–621. McCann, E. and K. Ward (2012), ‘Assembling urbanism: following policies and ‘studying through’ the sites and situations of policy making’, Environment and Planning A, 44 (1), 42–51. McCann, E., A. Roy and K. Ward (2013), ‘Assembling/worlding cities’, Urban Geography, 34 (5), 581–589. McFarlane, C. (2011a), ‘Assemblage and critical urbanism’, City, 15 (2), 204–224. McFarlane, C. (2011b), Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Mol, A. (1999), ‘Ontological politics. a word and some questions’, in John Law and John Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 74–89. Mol, A. (2002), The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ong, A. (2011), ‘Introduction: worlding cities, or the art of being global’, in Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (eds), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 1–26. Phillips, J. (2006), ‘Agencement/Assemblage’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2‒3), 108–109. Pow, C. P. (2014), ‘License to travel: policy assemblage and the “Singapore model”’, City, 18 (3), 287–306. Rankin, K. N. (2011), ‘Assemblage and the politics of thick description’, City, 15 (5), 563–569. Roy, A. and A. Ong (eds) (2011), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Scott, A. J. and M. Storper (2015), ‘The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (1), 1–15. Sloterdijk, P. (2004), Sphären I-III, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Sloterdijk, P. (2008), ‘Foam city’, Distinktion, 9 (1), 47–59. Stengers, I. (2005), ‘A cosmopolitical proposal’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 994–1003. Swyngedouw, E. (2009), ‘The zero-ground of politics: musings on the post-political city’, in Neyran Turan and Stephen Ramos (eds), New Geographies: After Zero, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 52–61. Thrift, N. (2004), ‘Driving in the city’, Theory, Culture & Society, 21 (4–5), 41–59. Tironi, M. and I. Farías (2015), ‘Building a park, immunising life: environmental management and radical asymmetry’, Geoforum, 66, 167–175. Ureta, S. (2015), Assembling Policy. Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World-Class Society, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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5.  Big data and the city

Matthew Zook, Taylor Shelton and Ate Poorthuis

5.1  CITIES AND THE RISE OF BIG DATA As more and more aspects of contemporary urban society are tracked and quantified, the emerging cloud of so-called ‘big data’ is widely considered to represent a fundamental change in the way we interact with and understand cities. For some proponents of big data, like Anderson (2008), big data means the ‘end of theory’ and the ability to let ‘the numbers speak for themselves’. For others, big data allows for the development of a single, ostensibly ‘universal’ theory of the urban that moves urban studies towards a greater standing in the scientific community (Bettencourt and West, 2010; Lehrer, 2010). Regardless of the particular context, the prevailing discourse around big data in the first half of the 2010s has been founded on the ‘widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy’ (Boyd and Crawford, 2012, p. 663). While these emerging data-driven understandings of cities often run counter to a more theoretical and heterodox approach to urban geography (Wyly, 2014), it is worth noting that these trends also pre-date the emergence of what we now call ‘big data’. For over a century urban planners, policymakers and social scientists have pursued a data-based, scientific and technologically-mediated understanding of urban life (cf. Ford, 1913; Fairfield, 1994; Light, 2003; LeGates et al., 2009; Barnes, 2013; Barnes and Wilson, 2014). While much of the initial work on big urban data has focused on the novelty of such datasets, the challenge moving forward lies in combining these new data sources and computational methods with established theoretical approaches applied to longstanding questions, as in the case of recent work by Cranshaw et al. (2012), Arribas-Bel (2015) and Shelton et al. (2015) utilizing social media data to understand the dynamics of urban segregation, mobility and neighbourhood change. In order to illustrate the potential of big data for urban geographic research, we explore how these data sources and methods might be usefully applied to the persistent question of gentrification. We first 63

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64  Handbook of urban geography review how gentrification has been defined and measured in the existing literature, and how these definitions and metrics have shaped our understandings of the process. Next, we outline nascent attempts to use big data, especially social media data, to understand gentrification. We pay attention to more ‘naïve’ approaches that draw upon big data but in ways that do not fully engage with its messy and complicated nature, or which fail to connect with longer standing approaches within urban geography. We then contrast these perspectives with a range of more constructive possibilities for using big data to study gentrification that build from existing scholarship and recognize both the advantages and disadvantages of big data over other more conventional forms of data used in previous research. In short, we argue that big data is unlikely to be a panacea for empirical studies of gentrification, or for any particular urban issue of interest, and the ‘multidimensionality of gentrification’ still means that ‘the use of a single variable to identify it is almost certain to fail’ (Bostic and Martin, 2003, p. 2431). We do argue, however, that big data can supplement existing data sources and provide a richer understanding of the multiple social and spatial processes that characterize the process of gentrification, its constituent parts, causes and effects.

5.2 CONVENTIONAL APPROACHES TO STUDYING GENTRIFICATION Gentrification – broadly defined as a transition in neighbourhood character associated with the displacement of lower-income residents by higher-income newcomers (Glass, 1964) – has been studied extensively for the last half-century. But as gentrification has accelerated in recent years, it has garnered newfound attention, especially in the mainstream press, leading some popular interpretations to seize upon scholarly debates about gentrification as a ‘chaotic concept’ (Rose, 1984) and question its utility, or even reality, as an approach to studying cities (Buntin, 2015; The Economist, 2015; Cortright, 2015). In part, this argument over whether gentrification exists is tied to the differences in how gentrification is defined and measured by assorted scholars. As Hammel and Wyly (1996, p. 248) argue, ‘[t]he uncertainty over the extent of gentrification stems not only from the complexity of the process, but also from the difficulty of observing and measuring the phenomenon’. At the same time, however, this ‘infatuation with how to define the process’ (Slater, 2006, p. 744) risks blunting the critical tenor driving much gentrification research. It is thus necessary to strike a balance between the identification of good metrics

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Big data and the city  ­65 for gentrification research while not allowing such metrics to become the ends, in and of themselves. By and large, most conventional analyses of gentrification use census data and other state-sourced secondary data to track change over time in key indicators, such as: household income, educational attainment, property values and rents, and less often, racial composition. While changes in an area’s median household income represent the most straightforward indicator of changing class structure, focusing only on income can be problematic, ignoring differences between ‘gentrifiable’ and ‘non-gentrifiable’ areas, and failing to recognize that changing class composition is not always reflected most directly in income. To capture these more complex class dynamics, alternative indicators might be better proxies for gentrification, such as the proportion of residents with a college education (Schuler et al., 1992; Hammel and Wyly, 1996; Freeman, 2005) or in professional or managerial careers (Atkinson, 2000). The use of race or ethnicity as an indicator of gentrifying neighbourhoods has been less commonly used, given that most analyses focus on gentrification as an essentially class-based process. But as many gentrifying neighbourhoods, especially in the United States, have higher than average proportions of minority (especially black) residents, race remains an inextricable aspect of how gentrification is experienced and interpreted in many places (Kirkland, 2008). Gentrification is also evident in material changes to neighbourhoods’ built environments and thus measures such as mortgage borrowing (Wyly and Hammel, 1999; Kreager et al., 2011) and owner-occupied housing (Heidkamp and Lucas, 2006) have served as metrics as well. Foundational work by Wyly and Hammel (1998, 1999; Hammel and Wyly, 1996) provides one of the most comprehensive assessments of these indicators, combining census data with an inductive, field-based survey of building conditions and upgrading activity to demonstrate how trends in these indicators align with different stages in the process of neighbourhood change. While not using big data per se, aspects of this approach have been updated in the digital era, as with Hwang and Sampson’s (2014) use of Google Street View to carry out a large-scale digital windshield survey of changes in neighbourhood built environments. Despite a general recognition that ‘[d]isplacement is vital to an understanding of gentrification, in terms both of retaining definitional coherence and of retaining a critical perspective on the process’ (Slater et al., 2004, p. 1144), it remains arguably the most difficult aspect of the process to measure. Census-type data showing loss of low-income or racial/ethnicminority households and gains in more affluent and white households can infer displacement, but capturing the why of particular shifts remains

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66  Handbook of urban geography e­lusive. Like the aforementioned attempts to capture on-the-ground upgrading processes, detailed descriptions and explanations of displacement are more complex and resource-intensive processes than most analyses are capable of grappling with. Further complicating this picture are attempts to destabilize the conventional interpretation of gentrification as negative for existing residents. For instance, work by Freeman (2005; Freeman and Braconi, 2004) and Vigdor (2002) has argued that residents of gentrifying neighbourhoods are in fact less likely to move or be displaced than the average resident of a non-gentrifying neighbourhood. More recently, researchers have also used less conventional, non-official (albeit not ‘big’) sources of data to measure gentrification. In addition to indicators of the built environment referenced above, scholars have used localized knowledge such as newspapers, non-profits and community groups to identify gentrifying neighbourhoods. These definitions often employ different criteria and as a result can vary significantly from academic studies, as Barton’s (2016) comparison of gentrifying neighbourhoods identified by The New York Times with those of Bostic and Martin (2003) and Freeman (2005) demonstrates. Other studies have focused on specific kinds of activities or businesses – such as coffee or cupcake shops (Papachristos et al., 2011; Smith, 2014; Twilley, 2009, 2011) – seen as indicative of gentrification’s impact on consumptive activities and commercial spaces. While these kinds of non-residential indicators can ‘provide an on-the-ground and visible manifestation of a particular form of gentrification – the increased presence of an amenity often associated with gentrifiers’ lifestyles’ (Papachristos et al., 2011, p. 216), this approach is difficult to replicate over time; cupcake shops might be indicative of gentrification now, but cultural tastes evolve quickly and this kind of indicator is unlikely to be useful for analyses in the more distant past or future.

5.3 POSSIBLE BIG DATA APPROACHES TO GENTRIFICATION Together, these competing understandings of gentrification and approaches to measuring it lead to questions of how emerging sources of big data might be used to add something new to our understanding of this process. In particular, one of the biggest advantages big data offers is the ability to overcome the persistent limitations of spatial and temporal scale in conventional data that are often released at large or irregular time intervals and aggregated to relatively coarse administrative geographies like census tracts (Schuler et al., 1992) divorced from the way neighbourhood change actually unfolds. Some studies – such as Freeman (2005)

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Big data and the city  ­67 and Freeman and Braconi (2004) in New York, Vigdor (2002) in Boston and Papachristos et al. (2011) in Chicago – even use neighbourhood definitions that are substantially larger than census tracts, with some ‘neighbourhoods’ including over 100,000 people within their boundaries. This is clearly problematic as gentrification occurs more rapidly than a decennial census can detect, and unfolds over irregular geographies, along commercial corridors or other points of interest, which may include parts of multiple administrative or statistical geographies, while encompassing none in their entirety. Indeed, the process of gentrification often results in the redefinition of neighbourhood names and boundaries as the character of previously distinct places evolves (Madden, 2017). New sources of big data, on the other hand, are often produced and collected continuously in real-time, while also being point-based, allowing for aggregation to multiple spatial scales, making them particularly relevant to tracking these finer-grained changes in the urban fabric. That being said, these more fine-grained sources of data have only emerged relatively recently so might not yet hold utility for understanding changes over longer periods of time, which still requires augmentation with some more conventional sources of social data. Despite these advantages, much of the work to date that uses big data to study gentrification has been narrowly focused and primarily descriptive, more about novelty than a substantively improved understanding of the process. For example, Beekmans (2011) uses Foursquare check-ins in Amsterdam to examine gentrifying neighbourhoods. Although this work was certainly novel and commendable in 2011, it remains primarily a descriptive mapping of Foursquare venues and check-in densities accompanied by a visual comparison of locations deemed to be gentrifying. Looking at the more negative aspects of gentrification, Schaefer (2014) and Venerandi et al. (2015) use tweets and Foursquare and OpenStreetMap data, respectively. Similar to Beekmans, they use their data roughly as point-of-interest data: the more points related to displacement or deprivation, the higher the ‘score’ for that location. Although these approaches provide a different view on gentrification than more conventional census indicators, it replaces one imperfect measure with another. Ultimately, the strengths of representative sampling and other safeguards against bias and inaccuracies might make census data a more reliable data source for rigorous analysis. And while Schaefer (2014) also attempts to analyse keyword frequencies in this data – including words such as ‘loft’, ‘eviction’, ‘yuppie’ and ‘gentrification’ – in his case study of Los Angeles, the few thousand tweets matching these criteria suggest that reliance on Twitter keywords alone may not be enough to detect the occurrence of gentrification (or conversations about it).

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68  Handbook of urban geography Although some of this early work might indeed be labelled naïve in its conceptualization and operationalization of gentrification, we can identify more informed approaches in some more recent studies. For example, Hristova et al. (2016) attempt to move beyond mere description by harnessing a dataset derived from both Twitter and Foursquare activity in London. They not only take into account check-ins at locations, but also consider at which categories of establishments these check-ins are made, constructing a kind of spatial profile of each person checking in that includes the user’s social ties and what other types of locations they have checked into. In this way, they construct a set of diversity indicators for each location, differentiating between those places that represent meeting points for friends or strangers, the diversity of visits and visitors to a given neighbourhood and the likelihood of serendipitous encounters. Comparing these various diversity metrics with census-derived deprivation indicators allows them to suggest that neighbourhoods with both high diversity and deprivation might overlap with neighbourhoods commonly thought of as gentrifying. Ultimately, these social media-based diversity indicators provide an example of going beyond the aforementioned descriptive approaches, capturing a more varied set of social and spatial processes through big data that would not be available through more conventional data sources, while also showing the potential for combining these new approaches with more conventional indicators to produce a synthetic analysis of gentrification. To address these shortcomings and build on the potential shown by Hristova et al. (2016), researchers could use a larger variety of big data sources either independently or in combination to understand the process of gentrification in a more holistic and multidimensional manner. In addition to questions of spatial and temporal scale, one of the key limiting factors of conventional spatial data sources is that they tie a person to a single point in space, most often where they sleep. However, people are fundamentally mobile, moving between and within many different locations, even in the course of a single day. In other words, it is highly limiting to sum up the very complex social lives of individuals, occurring across and within so many different places, into a single, fixed residential location (Kwan, 2012, 2013). This is especially relevant for gentrification research, as early phases of the gentrification process might not be linked solely to people moving to a new neighbourhood to take up residence, but also people moving through a neighbourhood to eat and drink, to go to art and music shows, or simply to hang out with friends who live there. While the finer spatial and temporal resolution of big data allows for some greater degree of accuracy in analysing gentrification, the ability to capture these everyday mobilities also provides an opportunity to rethink

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Big data and the city  ­69 the underlying geographies of the city and how gentrification is a process that itself reshapes urban geographies both materially and imaginatively. Rather than relying on, and reifying, conventional administrative or statistical geographies, such data can be used to demonstrate the fundamental connectedness of different neighbourhoods within the city, and how these connections are constantly changing. Indeed, big data now allows us to study these types of interconnections both on a daily scale, as well as via longer-term, multi-year longitudinal studies. There is already a wide variety of existing work on this type of urban mobility that can potentially be extended to look at gentrification processes specifically. Data sources that enable such analyses include social media data (Shelton et al., 2015), taxi and ride-share data (Liu et al., 2012), transit smart card data (Hasan et al., 2013), and mobile phone data (Järv et al., 2014, 2015). All of these data sources provide potential insights into daily travel and interaction patterns, allowing researchers to understand the spatiality of gentrification beyond simply the location of individual residences. Big data can also provide a window into other aspects of gentrification that are not well captured in conventional data sources. For example, with respect to the housing market itself, data from online platforms such as Craigslist, Zillow and Zoopla offer a supplement to more conventional data sources of property transactions or valuations, which typically fail to capture the crucially important role of the rental market in gentrification. While still relatively unexploited within the literature, recent work by Boeing and Waddell (2016) using Craigslist data, and by Wachsmuth (2017) on Airbnb short-term rental listings, suggests the potential for these platforms to provide insight on gentrification. Big data can similarly provide more fine-grained insights into the place of consumptive behaviour within the gentrification process. As mentioned before, researchers have already explored the role of specific kinds of consumption practices associated with gentrification, such as the sudden popularity of coffee shops and cupcake bakeries in a neighbourhood. But understanding these changes on a larger scale can be difficult, as even the North American Industry Classification system, with over a thousand industry classes, is unable to distinguish between a Dunkin Donuts chain or a shop that sells handcrafted, artisanal ‘cronuts’. Through the myriad of online platforms that people use to publicize their consumptive behaviour – from specialized sites like Yelp to more general purpose apps Foursquare and Facebook – we can not only attempt to answer the question ‘who consumes what where?’, but also subsequent questions such as ‘where else do people visiting a restaurant with a certain profile go?’. Some early work already shows promise in this direction: Foursquare check-ins can be used to look at the spatial and ‘cultural’ footprints of cities and

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70  Handbook of urban geography neighbourhoods (Silva et al., 2013, 2014), but can also be used to analyze socio-economic hierarchical structures within cities (Fekete, 2014; van Meeteren and Poorthuis, 2017). Some of these same processes might also be captured in non-social media sources of big data. For instance, data on credit card transactions or from mobile payment systems, which contains information on the consumer’s home location, consumption location, type of consumption and amount of money spent (de Montjoye et al., 2015; Singh et al., 2015), could provide insight into both conventional retail consumption as well as in non-brick-and-mortar staples in gentrifying spaces, such as farmers’ markets, food trucks and pop-up shops. Aggregated data from financial companies and credit bureaus, long used within geodemographic profiling (Singleton and Spielman, 2014), could even provide insight into the kind of individual or neighbourhood-level financial distress that helps to precipitate gentrification and displacement. Despite all of the potential applications of big data to studying gentrification and other urban geographic processes, these approaches and data sources represent only one small part of the available data, namely the part that is easily quantified and machine-readable. That is, each of these datasets and their utility is premised on the presence of locational data, time stamps and a limited set of quantitative variables and categories that serve as proxies for different kinds of socio-economic behaviour. However, many big data sources also contain rich qualitative data, ranging from restaurant reviews on Yelp, to tweets and Facebooks posts, to photos shared on Instagram and Flickr (cf. Zukin et al., 2015 for an analysis of the connections between restaurant reviews on Yelp and gentrification). This type of data is much more challenging to analyse in a comprehensive manner, but geographers are particularly well-equipped to marry quantitative and qualitative approaches to big data (DeLyser and Sui, 2013), which hold significant potential for studying the nuances of gentrification processes and how they are experienced and talked about by people in these places. On the one hand, qualitative methods are necessary to understand and analyse this data in all of its complexity, but are insufficiently equipped to handle its large volume (Jung, 2015). On the other hand, quantitative analysis, with approaches to textual and visual analysis such as machine learning, can process much larger volumes of data but can do so, for now, only in fairly crude ways (cf. Naik et al., 2014 and Liu et al., 2016 on the use of Google Street View to assess perceptions of the built environment). Although very promising, the veritable cutting edge of the field, this kind of hybrid approach has yet to be developed systematically in a way that convincingly demonstrates its potential for understanding gentrification and other urban processes.

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Big data and the city  ­71 Ultimately, despite the greater spatial and temporal granularity in these data and the creative potential for combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, challenges to using big data sources in urban geographic research continue to exist. Perhaps the most significant barrier is the difficulty of gaining access to the data in the first place. While national statistics bureaus often make data available to all researchers, many of the private entities that produce or facilitate the creation of big data might not make their data accessible at all. Or, as the case often is, only researchers with a significant degree of technical acumen or social capital are capable of accessing and analysing the data, reproducing a hierarchy between different social science methods (Poorthuis and Zook, 2017). Apart from issues of data access, there are also lingering issues around the validity and reliability of big data. How big data is collected and constructed differs radically from conventional sampling-based research and each big data source might introduce its own (potentially unknown) issues around who is represented within the dataset and what biases are introduced. On top of all this, there are also significant issues around privacy and the ethics of doing research with such datasets, with no scholarly consensus on how these issues should best be addressed (cf. Boyd and Crawford, 2012; Kitchin, 2013, 2014; Zook et al., 2017). Even were one to sufficiently address each of these issues, there would remain the question of whether big data is actually suitable for capturing the fundamental processes that underlie gentrification. As has been shown in a number of other contexts, the ‘bigness’ of the data does not necessarily make it appropriate for the given question at hand (Lazer et al., 2014). Tweets or Instagram photos are probably not the best means of quantifying displacement or the rent gap, among other difficult-to-quantify concepts. Though social media data is incredibly useful for understanding any number of social and spatial processes, we have to make sure that the indicators we gather from social media are indeed good indicators or proxies for the social process we are interested in, whether it be gentrification or anything else.

5.4 CONCLUSION Moving forward, the imperatives for urban geographical research using big data are two-fold. First, for those more computationally-minded scholars looking to apply these data sources to urban questions, it is necessary to avoid the naiveté that would lead one to assume that this data can provide a substantive understanding of the world without simultaneously being grounded in the requisite theoretical perspectives to inform such

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72  Handbook of urban geography an analysis. Knowing which questions to ask, and how those questions might be approximated by the data at hand, are crucial to any big data research. Second, for critical urban geographers, it is important not to discount the potential of big data simply because it is often used in these more naïve ways. Rather than being an inherent feature of the data, this is very much a result of the particular contingent circumstances that bring together data, methodology, epistemology and politics to produce these approaches (cf. Wyly, 2009). Gentrification, like other urban social and spatial processes, is so variegated and multifaceted that any single definition, let alone any single quantitative indicator, cannot do it justice. We should not expect big data to alter this dynamic. But even if big data cannot provide a single, universal way of understanding gentrification, it can offer alternative ways of analysing this and other sociospatial processes that complement and extend, rather than replace, existing methods and approaches. Indeed, it is through the creative combination of these data sources and methods that we might be able to extend our empirical and theoretical understanding of urban geography in all of its multidimensionality.

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PART II URBAN NETWORKS

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6.  Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity as measured in the interlocking network model Ben Derudder and Peter J. Taylor

6.1 INTRODUCTION This chapter provides a conceptual, methodological and empirical overview of urban-geographical research on the global connectivities of cities. We begin our overview with a discussion of how writings on ‘world’ and ‘global’ cities have helped shape this research agenda. This is followed by a discussion of how the ensuing question of measuring global urban connectivity has been tackled, after which we provide a straightforward overview of some notable examples of geographies of global urban connectivity.

6.2 THEORIZING ‘GLOBAL URBAN CONNECTIVITY’ Research on ‘world cities’ and ‘global cities’ has been instrumental in raising interest in the notion ‘global urban connectivity’. Although the terms ‘world city’ and ‘global city’ have a long history, they arguably only got their current interpretation as well-connected coordination points of the global economy in the early 1980s. Although not the first paper per se, the most influential article has turned out to be Friedmann’s (1986) statement of ‘the world city hypothesis’, which has formed the initial benchmark of the school of research on global urban connectivity and continues to be used as a spatial framework for much research. Friedmann’s (1986) world city hypothesis is described in terms of seven theses that link urbanization processes to global economic forces. One of the theses states that structural changes in cities depend upon their integration into the global economy and consequently upon the functions assigned to the city. Three main functions are identified: headquarter functions, financial centres and ‘articulator’ cities that link a national or regional economy to the global economy. The very important cities will carry out all three functions. This is directly related to one of Friedmann’s other theses, in which it is stated 77

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78  Handbook of urban geography that world cities are the ‘basing points’ of capital and the resulting linkages create a ‘complex spatial hierarchy’. Cities are where large corporations organize production and plan market strategies. The hierarchy is formed by taking into account a number of city characteristics, predominantly its importance as a centre for finance, corporate headquarters, international institutions, and business services and so on. From this information Friedmann (1986) identifies two levels of hierarchy, which he terms primary (such as London) and secondary (such as Milan). These are then geographically arranged in two ways. First, there is a ‘horizontal’ division (North/South) defining core and semi-periphery cities showing nine primary cities in the former and only two in the latter (Sao Paulo and Singapore). Second, there are ‘vertical’ divisions (east-west) defining three continental sub-systems: Asian, American and Western European. Friedmann (1986) put research into global connectivity firmly on the research agenda of urban geography. His schematic map entitled ‘The hierarchy of world cities’ has probably been the most potent pedagogic instrument in teaching and researching cities as being globally interconnected. But above all, he provided a new global vision of inter-city relations, a way of seeing connections between cities that transcended state boundaries. However, in subsequent research the conceptual context within which global inter-city relations were viewed changed. Sassen (1991) encapsulated this new thinking in her detailed study of New York, London and Tokyo as ‘global cities’. Sassen’s work is based upon contemporary globalization premised upon new telecommunications and information technologies. The practical implementation of these innovations has incorporated two different yet complementary spatial tendencies: both decentralization and agglomeration of economic activities. The combination of spatial dispersal and global integration of myriad economic processes has arguably created a new strategic role for major cities: dispersal has created a demand for new control and organization functions that are found in cities. According to Sassen (1991), the result is global cities that function in four new ways that form a ‘virtual economic circle’ exclusive to globalization: (1) the demand for control creates cities as ‘command points’; (2) this creates a demand for finance and business services and cities become the ‘key locations’ for what were becoming leading economic sectors; (3) as a result cities become sites of production and innovation within these leading service sectors; and (4) cities constitute markets for the resulting leading sector production. Sassen (1991) identifies New York, London and Tokyo as the ‘leading examples’ of global cities and argues that, despite their very different provenances, each city has experienced the same economic processes with consequent social change (e.g. social polarization) in ‘parallel’ in a globalizing world economy.

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­79 One key implication of Sassen’s work is that she displaces the focus of attention from the familiar issues of the power of large corporations. Global cities are more than simply ‘command centres’, they are the first ‘global service centres’ in urban history. The subsequent focus on intercity relations stems from the observation that these specialized service firms need to provide a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates or some other form of partnership. As a result we have seen a strengthening of ‘cross-border city-to-city transactions and networks’ (Sassen, 2001, p. xxi). This observation is essentially the position upon which much subsequent methodological and empirical research on global urban connectivity is based. At the same time, it is clear that conceptual research on global urban connectivity continues to be developed and refined. Bassens and Van Meeteren (2015), for example, have re-theorized the sizable global connectivity of a number of cities based through the lens of their (new) roles as obligatory passage points under conditions of financialized globalization.

6.3  MEASURING GLOBAL URBAN CONNECTIVITY 6.3.1  Direct and Indirect Measures of Connectivity There has been a recent surge in research seeking to measure global urban connectivity. Broadly speaking, there have been two approaches involving direct and indirect measures of inter-city relations, respectively. These alternative specifications include radically different answers to the questions of how cities are connected. Direct measurement solutions to the data deficiency problem for flows between cities have been found in two different sets of data. First, and most directly, there is information on the provision and execution of movements between cities, both material and virtual, by companies providing transport and communication services (for a conceptual discussion of the intersections between cities and material flows, see Hall and Hesse, 2013). Second, and somewhat less directly, there is information on corporate command structures, specifically headquartersubsidiary relations, that indicate flows of directive between cities in the manner that Pred (1977) pioneered. Both constitute basic infrastructures that have enabled global intercity relations to develop; there is therefore a clear-cut rationale for using large-scale analyses of these infrastructures to map how cities are connected in globalization. Table 6.1 lists research that employs these data solutions, with the studies on travel and communication networks further split in two categories by distinguishing between airline networks and other types of

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80  Handbook of urban geography Table 6.1  Direct measures of inter-city relations Travel and communication networks – airline networks

Travel and communication networks – other infrastructure networks

Corporate hierarchies

Smith and Timberlake  (2001) Matsumoto (2004)

Ducruet et al. (2011)

Krätke (2014b)

Malecki (2004)

Zook and Brunn (2006) Mahutga et al. (2010) Pirie (2010)

Jacobs et al. (2010) Rutherford et al. (2004) Ducruet and Lugo (2013)

Wall and van der Knaap (2011) Goerzen et al. (2013) Alderson et al. (2010) Rozenblat and Pumain (2006) Toly et al. (2012)

O’Connor and Fuellhart Tranos et al. (2014)  (2012)

Note:  All references in this table can be found in Taylor and Derudder (2016). Source:  Taylor and Derudder (2016, p. 36).

i­nfrastructure networks. Collectively, these papers give an overview of the extent of the contemporary empirical world city literature, but note that this list is by no means exhaustive. In addition to numerous studies not being listed here, there are also analyses that do not neatly fit into Table 6.1’s structure. This includes a number of studies that combine different data sources (Choi et al., 2006; O’Connor, 2010), but there is also research such as Matthiessen et al.’s (2010) study of transnational inter-city scientific cooperation between universities that enlists other data sources. Meanwhile, some studies do not directly refer to the world city literature but implicitly engage with it, such as Guimera et al.’s (2005) paper on cities’ global roles in airline networks. In any case, the sheer size of the table demonstrates that empirical research on transnational intercity-relations has clearly caught on in urban studies research at large. Discussing and comparing the results of the different analyses is not a straightforward matter. This is because in addition to a focus on different facilitators and generators of flows there are also fundamental dissimilarities in measurement frameworks and methodologies, making detailed comparative evaluations of results a difficult proposition. We will therefore restrict our discussion to one set of results drawn from each of the approaches listed in Table 6.1; simple rankings of what are shown to be the 10 most connected world cities are given in Table 6.2. The two first rankings are drawn from Choi et al. (2006), who measure (and compare)

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­81 Table 6.2 Top 10 of most connected cities in infrastructure and corporate networks Rank

Air passenger centrality*

Internet backbone centrality**

Corporate power***

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10

London Paris Tokyo Frankfurt Hong Kong New York Singapore Amsterdam Bangkok Seoul

London New York Frankfurt Paris Amsterdam Chicago Washington, DC San Francisco Copenhagen Stockholm

New York Paris Tokyo London Munich Amsterdam San Francisco Zürich Düsseldorf Toronto

Notes:   * Top 10 cities by Bonacich’s power in international air passenger networks 2002 (Choi et al., 2006).   ** Top 10 cities by Bonacich’s power in 2002 in Internet backbone networks (Choi et al., 2006). *** Outdegree centrality of cities in headquarter-subsidiary relations of Fortune 500 companies in 2007 (Alderson et al., 2010). Source:  Taylor and Derudder (2016, p. 37).

the centrality of cities in air passenger and Internet backbone networks in 2002. The third ranking is drawn from Alderson et al. (2010), who measure cities’ centrality in transnational inter-city relations by counting the connections between headquarters of multinational enterprises and their subsidiaries. Their data consist of information on headquarter and branch locations of the world’s 500 largest multinational firms in 2007. The city rankings in Table 6.2 show interesting differences, some due to the nature of the connections but others relating to the specific nature of the data. For air transport, for example, most cities listed are hubs of major carriers but note the omission of Chicago and Atlanta. The latter is because the researchers have used international air passenger networks thereby missing US domestic travel that is just as integral to globalization. For instance, Chicago–New York is not an international link but it is an important city-dyad in contemporary globalization. More generally air travel data shows a bias towards tourism destinations resorts, such as Bangkok in Table 6.2. In terms of the Internet backbone, Rutherford et al. (2004, p. 17) notice that some European urban centres are important because they may be

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82  Handbook of urban geography viewed as ‘gateway cities’ for high-bandwidth backbone connections as they act as links between the core area of Europe and more peripheral areas. Copenhagen does this for many of the pan-European networks that come from Germany and are destined for Scandinavia, thus ‘artificially’ boosting this city’s connectivity. Corporate power connections feature the world’s biggest corporations, thus boosting German cities and San Francisco, as automotive and technology firms are very important in these lists. This is also very visible in Krätke (2014), who focuses on exactly these sectors, suggesting that specific sectors where large corporations dominate impinge on these results. Furthermore headquarters of firms reflect the history of firms and therefore may include relatively small cities that have spawned large corporations – this was the case with Pred’s (1977) early example. This short discussion does not do full justice to the diversity of original approaches and findings summarized in Table 6.1.1 However the key point here is that collectively, this research has certainly enhanced our understanding of what Krätke (2014) has called the ‘multiple globalizations’ of cities. In this chapter, however, we take a different route. The principal reason why we believe these direct measures have limitations for studying inter-city relations is that their empirical analyses can be viewed as empiricist from a theoretical viewpoint. Quite simply these researches are not themselves about city process: they measure flows but do not address actual city formation. Thus small urban places can be both global HQ centres and sites of globally renowned universities (Taylor et al., 2008). Therefore our decision is that to produce credible measures of inter-city connections that are integral to the overall city development we revert to indirect but process-focused measurement. Indirect measures are based upon a theory of the process that can be modelled in such a way that data that is available can be transformed to provide estimated measures of inter-city relations. This is the route taken in the chapter authors’ own research (Taylor and Derudder, 2016; Derudder and Taylor, 2017), and will be the focus of the empirical overview. Although this approach has the potential disadvantage of flows being conjectured rather than actually measured, it does have an important advantage from a theoretical viewpoint in that measures explicitly deal with actual city formation processes. In this case the approach is called ‘world city network’ analysis, which essentially entails from a reinterpretation of Sassen’s thinking based on the insights of Jane Jacobs (1969) and Manuel Castells (1996) – the readers are referred to Taylor and Derudder (2016) for more details on this conceptual background. The starting point is that we cannot know all the information and knowledge flows generated through and by the finance and business

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­83 services firms put forward in Sassen (1991), but we can easily find where they have offices in cities across the world. Combining these data with a model of the everyday inter-office work practices in firms then provides a solution to our inter-city relations data problem. This model is called the interlocking city network model (Taylor, 2001), the results of which are not actual but potential flows. However, they do provide a theorized empirical basis for measuring global urban connectivity, and the remainder of this chapter deals with this model and its results. 6.3.2  The Interlocking Network Model The interlocking network model essentially provides an empirical specification of Allen’s (2010, p. 2898) observation that: [c]ity powers, if one can put it like that, are mobilized through networks; it is the forms of interaction and exchange which take place through a complex of networks which are constitutive of a city’s powers. In cities like New York and Tokyo, high-level professional working in banks, overseas finance houses, law firms, and the like mobilize their economic powers through the financial and business service networks; through the co-present interaction which enables them to shrink the space and time between each other and to construct closer, integrated ties and relationships.

The specification starts from a selection of finance and business service firms located in a selection of cities. The basic measure is a service value vij with information on the importance of the presence of any firm j in any city i. These observations can be arrayed as a service value matrix V. We then convert V so that it gives insight in the interaction between cities through firms rather than simply taking stock of firms’ presences in cities. The crux of this conversion is the assumption that actual flows of inter-firm information and knowledge between cities are dependent upon the importance of its office(s) as measured through service values. A city’s ‘global network connectivity’ GNCi is simply calculated by aggregating all possible connections with all cities across all firms: GNCi 5 bjvij.vbj   i ≠ b

(6.1)

These GNCi measures are often hard to interpret on their own terms, as they depend on the number of firms and cities in the data. To make them more readily interpretable, we therefore convert them into proportions of the maximum value. To explore the geographies of global urban connectivity we need to operationalize the model. To this end, data are required on the city office networks of large professional, financial and creative

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84  Handbook of urban geography service firms. Here we report on a data gathering for 2012‒2013, described in more detail in Taylor and Derudder (2016). In this data gathering, 175 firms are chosen by their ranking in lists of the largest firms in finance (75), accountancy (25), law (25), management consultancy (25), and advertising (25). Presences of these firms were recorded for a comprehensive list of 526 cities. For each city/firm-combination, assigning service values focused on two features of a firm’s office(s) in a city as shown on their corporate websites: first, the size of office (e.g. number of practitioners), and second, their extra-locational functions (e.g. regional headquarters). Information for every firm was simplified into service values ranging from zero to five as follows. The city housing a firm’s headquarters was scored five, a city with no office of that firm was scored zero. An ‘ordinary’ or ‘typical’ office of the firm resulted in a city scoring two. With something missing (e.g. no partners in a law office), the score reduced to one. Particularly large offices were scored three and those with important extra-territorial functions (e.g. regional headquarters) scored four. All such assessments were made firm by firm. In addition to a detailed overview of some of the results emanating from using this approach, we will also discuss results of parallel empirical research largely using the same model and operational strategy. We highlight the importance of the multiplicity of global urban connectivities by exploring the urban geographies of the global networks of maritime services firms (Jacobs et al., 2011) and non-governmental organizations (Taylor and Derudder, 2016, Chapter 5).

6.4 GEOGRAPHIES OF GLOBAL URBAN CONNECTIVITY In this section, we provide a straightforward overview of the global urban connectivities in networks of (1) finance and business services firms, (2) non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and (3) maritime business services firms. Throughout this section, results are shown on a cartogram illustrating the most connected cities, with darker shades reflecting stronger connectivities. This mode of presentation solves the problem of illustrating a very uneven distribution of cities across the world. Relative city concentration in some regions (e.g. in Western Europe) coupled with relative sparseness of cities elsewhere (e.g. in Central Asia) makes depiction of results on orthodox maps, with extremes of overlaps and empty spaces, sometimes difficult to perceive and interpret. Hence the cartogram, wherein each city is given its own equal space in approximately its correct relative position. Cities are indicated by intuitive two-letter codes, such as NY for New York and JB for Johannesburg. We have had to limit the

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­85 number of cities to aid comprehension of the cartogram and so as not to lose sight of the leading cities across the world. 6.4.1 Global Urban Connectivities for Finance and Business Services Firms Figure 6.1 shows global urban connectivity in the networks of finance and business services firms. Cities shown on the cartogram are those with at least one-fifth of the connectivity of the most connected city (London). The cartogram shows a worldwide pattern of global urban connectivity, albeit clearly an uneven one. At its simplest, the cartogram reproduces the old ‘North–South’ divide: higher connected cities tend to be in the ‘North’ and lower connected cities in the ‘South’, with the western Pacific Rim firmly bucking this trend. But the geography is, of course, much more complicated: this simple, not to say simplistic, interpretation is only a trend with many lower connectivity cities in the ‘North’ and some higher connectivity cities in the ‘South’ beyond Pacific Asia. Moving from ‘North–South’ terminology to world-systems language, the cartogram illustrates clearly the three contemporary zones of the core of the global economy: northern America, western Europe and parts of Pacific Asia. However, this is not a homogeneous core, the three zones have very different histories associated with their trajectories to core status and this is reflected here. The first core zone is western Europe and this is reflected in two features. First, this region has more world cities (35) than the other regions. And second, there is a wide variety of levels of connectedness amongst the region’s cities, ranging from the likes of London and Paris to the likes of Leeds and Rotterdam. In other words, in this region, there is a mixture of cities of varying importance all linking into the global economy. This is the opposite of Pacific Asia in which the connectivity levels of the cities is generally top heavy. In spite of booming and now widespread ­urbanization – the United Nations estimates that today there are almost 200 cities in Asia that have more 1 million inhabitants, about 100 of which are located in China – few of these cities in the most recent of the core zones have made the threshold of one-fifth of the connectivity of London. Thus this region has far less well-connected cities (16) than western Europe, although the number increases to 22 if we add Australasian cities and Auckland to create a Western Pacific Rim region. The third core zone, northern America (i.e. USA and Canada), is in between the other two in numbers of cities identified (27). However, in this case the range of levels of connectedness is very similar to western Europe with numerous less important cities such as Tampa and Charlotte joining. But there is a

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86

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S I

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Figure 6.1  Global network connectivity for producer services firms

Source:  Taylor and Derudder (2016, p. 72).

Note:  See the chapter appendix for details of city codes used in this figure.

C R

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60%–50%

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Global Network Connectivity

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­87 regional difference in that in northern America the more connected cities tend to be in the east and west of the region, leaving the centre bereft of well connected cities apart from the major exception of Chicago. Beyond the core there are no regions with concentrations of highly connected cities. In Eastern Europe (the former Communist states), the most common pattern is for capital cities to take on the leading role: apart from St. Petersburg, the only cities (14) that feature are capital cities. Having lost its political and economic distinctiveness, this region has become an appendage to the western European core, albeit that unlike western Europe there is only one well connected city (Moscow) and that there is much more concentration with generally one (capital) city per state. The same can be said for Latin America (20 cities) with respect to northern America where again capital cities dominate although in this case Sao Paulo, despite being neither former nor current Brazilian capital city, has become a highly connected city in its own right. Together with Mexico City, this city stands out in Latin America. This pattern is also found in South Asia (10 cities) and the large North African/West Asian region (11 cities), where Mumbai and Dubai as non-capital cities have become highly connected cities. Sub-Saharan Africa has only six cities but it does sport a clear regional leading city in terms of connectivity: Johannesburg. What does all this locational detail mean? Uneven globalization has spawned an uneven city connectivity distribution, but most certainly not a simple one. There are a large number of cities outside the core, and in general these regions have become much more integrated in the global economy over the past decade as longitudinal research has shown (see Chapter 7 in Taylor and Derudder, 2016). The universe of well connected cities is even less constituted as an exclusionary club of the world’s major cities than it was a decade ago, and increasingly has numerous linkages into regions beyond the roll call of the usual suspects such as New York and London. Furthermore, in addition to the rising numbers of cities from erstwhile less-connected regions as such, there are now also more highly connected cities in these regions as the strong connectivities of Dubai and Shanghai show. 6.4.2  National Influences in Global Urban Connectivities Although we are working on a model of a world-economy constituted by city economies, this does not mean that all markets operate at just these two scales. The observation that with exception of St. Petersburg all cities from former Communist states are capital cities is quite telling in this respect. In terms of the world market of finance and business services, regions and states are anything but irrelevant to world cities and their

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88  Handbook of urban geography connectivities. An interpretation of the matter is presented in Taylor et al. (2013), here we focus on the continued importance of the mosaic of states shaping global urban connectivities. States affect different services in different ways. For the various financial services there are regulations whose level of control varies by country. For law, states constitute legal jurisdictions that have to be coped with in any transnational commercial project (see Beaverstock et al., 1999). States also legitimate professional gatekeepers: who can and who cannot practice law, and other professions, in their territory. For advertising and management consultancy states are less intrusive but here other national effects become important. These are cultural effects on how products will be received. Global advertising not only has to deal with consumers who speak different languages in different countries, they may also have very different reactions to similar translated language or visual signals (Faulconbridge et al., 2011). Global management consultancy has to cope with different business mores and cultures, paternalistic companies where management merely means ‘direction’ provide a common challenge. The point of all these examples is to reinforce the idea that even in the world of ‘global urban connectivity’ the state cannot be ignored (cf. Therborn, 2011): cities as nodes in the global networks are also cities within countries. A stark example of this is what Hill and Fujita (1995) have referred to as ‘Osaka’s Tokyo problem’, but it is clearly much more than a Japanese phenomenon. As well as the Japanese market being largely serviced through Tokyo, the Austrian market tends to be served through Vienna, the Norwegian market through Oslo, the UK market through London, and so on. Thus the leading city in the ‘national urban system’ often becomes the national gateway into and out of the global market for services. Note that, in spite of the Eastern European example where capital city and the most connected city tend to be synonymous, this leading city does not need to be the capital city – the examples of Mumbai, New York, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Toronto, Istanbul, Johannesburg and Lagos are clear in this respect. But the point here is that the geography of global urban connectivity in Figure 6.1 is also shaped by national differences. This process can most easily be explored by looking at the balance – or the lack thereof – in global network connectivity between the leading city and the other cities in different countries. In the urban geography literature, different approaches to exploring this level of ‘urban primacy’ have been developed, each of which comes with specific advantages and drawbacks. Here we simply compute the ratio of global network connectivities between the city with the highest level in a country and the city ranked second.2 These ratios are shown for a selection of 30 countries in Table 6.3. The countries

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­89 Table 6.3  Connectivity ratios between countries’ most connected cities Rank

Country

Most connected city

Second most connected city

Primacy ratio

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Kenya South Korea Malaysia Argentina Indonesia Austria United Kingdom Egypt Japan Poland Denmark Bangladesh France Turkey Russia Mexico Nigeria Brazil Switzerland USA South Africa Italy Australia Germany Vietnam Pakistan India Spain Ecuador China

Nairobi Seoul Kuala Lumpur Buenos Aires Jakarta Vienna London Cairo Tokyo Warsaw Copenhagen Dhaka Paris Istanbul Moscow Mexico City Lagos Sao Paulo Zurich New York Johannesburg Milan Sydney Frankfurt Ho Chi Minh City Karachi Mumbai Madrid Quito Shanghai

Mombasa Pusan Penang Cordoba Surabaya Linz Manchester Alexandria Osaka Krakow Arhus Chittagong Lyon Ankara St Petersburg Monterrey Abuja Rio De Janeiro Geneva Chicago Cape Town Rome Melbourne Munich Hanoi Lahore New Delhi Barcelona Guayaquil Beijing

5.88 4.67 4.28 4.13 3.99 3.69 3.22 3.08 2.98 2.84 2.75 2.71 2.58 2.49 2.43 2.22 2.16 1.97 1.71 1.57 1.43 1.40 1.34 1.34 1.28 1.28 1.27 1.21 1.09 1.04

Source:  Taylor and Derudder (2016, p. 76).

are presented as two groups using a ratio of two as the divider, that is, whether the leading city in a country is more (17) or less (13) than two times more connected than its closest rival. This ratio of two obviously has resonance with national-level urban studies as specifying the rank-size rule with values significantly above two indicating the presence of primacy. The most important pattern emerging here is clearly linked with the overall level of political c­ entralization in a country.

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90  Handbook of urban geography Especially countries that are notorious for their strong political centralization tend to have a pattern where the capital city dominates all other cities. Although ratios vary widely, in all but two of the 17 countries of the first group the capital city is the dominant world city linking the national market to the world market. Furthermore, Istanbul is in fact an ex-capital, while the Lagos/Abuja ratio is very close to the dividing value of two. Countries in the second group tend to have much lower levels of political centralization: this leads to the presence of two (or more) cities with connectivities that are not immensely different, and the imprint of the capital city disappears. In only two out of 13 countries of the second group the capital city is also the most connected city, and in some cases the capital city does not even feature in the top two cities (South Africa, Pakistan, and Germany), and in some cases not even in the top five (Canada, Brazil, and Australia). Lack of political centralization is of course not the only facilitator of having multiple cities linking a national economy to the global economy. First, size matters: large economies obviously have more scope for hosting multiple well-connected cities (e.g. the United States and Germany) Second, states where (historical) political divisions inhibited the emergence of a single leading city still tend to have a polycentric structure (e.g. Vietnam and Spain). Third, states with long-standing economic rivalries between (the elites of) its major cities have developed multiple, almost equally important nodes (e.g. Australia and Ecuador). And fourth, some states have developed a functional division of labour between a capital city and one or more commercial gateway(s) (e.g. Italy and India). This then develops in two or more cities of roughly equal importance, as finance and business services firms need to be both where political and economic decision-making takes place. Nearly all of the processes highlighted here come together in contemporary China, where Shanghai and Beijing – combined with the ‘special administrative region’ Hong Kong – dwarf the rest of the 100-or-so cities with more than 1 million inhabitants in a ‘tri-primate’ pattern of global network connectivity. This is the combined result of the sheer size of the national market, making it difficult to operate from a single city; its historical and ongoing political divisions, with Hong Kong still operating as a quasi-autonomous area in financial and economic terms (Enright et al., 2005); boosterist visions of severe inter-city competition among some of China’s urban elites, which have led to the active pursuit of world city status in Shanghai (Wu, 2000); and functional divisions of labour as the Chinese political system imposes a context where finance and business services need to be near the centre of political decision-making in Beijing irrespective of commercial opportunities in Shanghai or Hong Kong (Lai, 2012). In conclusion, the evidence clearly

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­91 shows that the nature of states influences the nature of a city’s connections to the world market. Global urban connectivity operates with, through and alongside the mosaic of states as well as across them. 6.4.3  Comparative Connectivities Finance and business services are not the only agents through which cities are connected as the parallel research on the ‘multiple globalizations of cities’ (Krätke, 2014) shows. For example, there have been an increasing number of attempts to use the interlocking network model to analyse global urban connectivity through the lens of other agents. Indeed, a key emerging research agenda has been to diversify our understanding of world city networks by applying the interlocking network model to a broad variety of agents across a range of specific economic and institutional sectors (Jacobs et al., 2011; Hoyler and Watson, 2013; Martinus and Tonts, 2015; Chow and Loo, 2015; Martinus and Sigler, 2017). Drawing on Derudder and Taylor (2017), in this final empirical section, we discuss two recent analyses involving different actors. Although the methodological details may slightly vary, data were collected and manipulated in a similar way to define and discuss new connectivities of cities reflecting a different set of inter-city relations, that is, those created by non-governmental organizations and maritime business services firms. We begin by looking at the city networks of new social movements as reflected in the organization of environmental, development, humanitarian, and human rights NGOs (Taylor and Derudder, 2016, Chapter 7). In the cartogram in Figure 6.2 we show the connectivities of the 100 most connected cities in the NGO network using four simple categories for cities ranked between 1‒10, 11‒25, 26‒50, and 51‒100. The cartogram reveals a very different distribution of global connectivity cities across the world compared to Figure 6.1. The most notable feature is the widespread and relatively even pattern of cities across most world regions – if globalization is about organization that is worldwide in scope and operation, NGO connectivities show these institutions to be the globalizers par excellence. This relatively more even geography implies that regions previously identified as having few or no world cities are now well represented: the most obvious example is sub-Saharan Africa which now has almost 20 per cent of the cities on the cartogram but notice also the appearance of central Asia and Central America which are both almost wholly missing from the world city network created by finance and business services firms. In contrast, the reduction of the USA to just a couple of cities on this cartogram is quite startling; clearly US cities are relatively unimportant to the NGO global space of flows.

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Figure 6.2  Global network connectivity for non-governmental firms

Source:  Taylor and Derudder (2016, p. 84).

Note:  See the chapter appendix for details of city codes used in this figure.

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­93 The explanation for the relative lack of US cities has partly to do with the political nature of NGO business. Figure 6.2 is dominated by capital cities, locales where NGOs work with and through national politicians and governments. Unsurprisingly, Washington, DC and Brussels as ‘EU capital’ feature very prominently in NGO networks. Although New York and London remain the dominant dyad in this city network, there are major differences at the apex of this ranking. The most interesting result is the presence of ‘dedicated NGO centres’, which – very much like international financial centres – emerge as specialist centres in the organization of securing environmental, development, humanitarian, and human rights. These include Geneva and Brussels in Europe, but above all cities such as Nairobi and Dakar in Africa, Kathmandu and Phnom Penh in Asia, and Lima and Managua in Latin America. Our second example is the world city network generated by maritime business services as studied by Jacobs et al. (2011). Within the maritime transport sector there is an obvious demand for specialist services: to finance ships and port facilities, to insure ships and their cargo, to have a legal representation in case of an incident, to have software solutions in supply chain management, and to inspect ships and to provide technical expertise on damages. The geography of maritime business services is of particular interest, as the urban dimensions of the maritime industry make for a useful connection with the material infrastructures facilitating contemporary globalization (Hall and Hesse, 2013). Figure 6.3 presents the global network connectivities of the 100 most connected cities using four simple categories. Three patterns stand out. First, unlike the NGO network, the focus on the three core areas of the global economy re-emerges. There are major concentrations of connectivity in Western Europe and along the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as along the Eastern coast of the United States and throughout Pacific Asia. This contrasts with Africa, Central and South Asia, and also Latin America: cities from these regions are much less represented, and the overall geography of this city network therefore strongly resembles the pattern shown in Figure 6.1. However, and second, although the overall geography is similar, the cities themselves tend to be somewhat different. This is already obvious from the clusters of connectivity along the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea and the (even more) marked difference between coastal and central USA. This points to clusters of specialist centres for maritime services, with Piraeus, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg, Houston and Alexandria as key examples. These cities are obviously port cities and/or accommodate port-related industries. For example, Greek ship-owners, still a major force in global shipping, have based their commercial operations

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Figure 6.3  Global network connectivity for maritime producer services firms

Source:  Taylor and Derudder (2016, p. 86, based on Jacobs et al., 2011).

Note:  See the chapter appendix for details of city codes used in this figure.

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­95 in Piraeus, while Rotterdam and Houston house a large number of portrelated industries such as large oil-refining and chemical firms which lead to a demand for specialist services. Although identifying port cities as major maritime service centres may seem like stating the obvious, the interesting point here is that not all major port cities are major maritime service centres and vice versa. Indeed, and third, there are a number of world cities without major port activities that nonetheless feature prominently in this map. The most important example is London, but also landlocked cities such as Madrid, Paris and Moscow are relatively well connected in the office networks of maritime business services firms. The imperfect relation between port cities and maritime service centres is most clearly visible in China and Japan, where major port cities such as Ningbo and Yokohama are less connected in the office networks of maritime service providers than Hong Kong and Tokyo, respectively. Thus we can observe an interesting and complex intersection between our map of world cities and the global map of port cities.

6.5 CONCLUSIONS Figures 6.1‒6.3 collectively show that a small number of important cities – particularly London and New York, but also Singapore and Paris – can be found atop most rankings of global urban connectivity. These cities have become must-be places for brokering and negotiating connections in a global marketplace. Other cities enter the fray insofar as they have specific expertise on offer, and it is this specificity that lies at the root of the sometimes radically different geographies of global urban connectivity presented in this chapter. In addition to the continued relevance of the map of states, differences can be related to world-regional geographies (as in the example of NGOs, with sub-Saharan African cities featuring much more prominently) or the specific profile of cities featuring (as in the example of maritime business services, with Rotterdam and Piraeus featuring prominently).

NOTES 1. Moreover, there is even more diversity in that in addition to a focus on different facilitators and generators of flows there is also fundamental variation in measurement frameworks and methodologies (cf. Neal, 2014). 2. Note that China is equated here with Mainland China, that is, it excludes Hong Kong, Macau and Taipei.

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REFERENCES Alderson, A. S., J. Beckfield and J. Sprague-Jones (2010), ‘Intercity relations and globalisation: the evolution of the global urban hierarchy, 1981–2007’, Urban Studies, 47 (9), 1899–1923. Allen, J. (2010), ‘Powerful city networks: more than connections, less than domination and control’, Urban Studies, 47 (13), 2895–2911. Bassens, D. and M. Van Meeteren (2015), ‘World cities under conditions of financialized globalization: towards an augmented world city hypothesis’, Progress in Human Geography, 39 (6), 52–775. Beaverstock, J. V., R. G. Smith and P. J. Taylor (1999), ‘A roster of world cities’, Cities, 16 (6), 445–458. Castells, M. (1996), The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell. Choi, J. H., G. A. Barnett and B. S. Chon (2006), ‘Comparing world city networks: a network analysis of Internet backbone and air transport intercity linkages’, Global Networks, 6, (1), 81–99. Chow, A. S. and B. P. Loo (2015), ‘Applying a world-city network approach to globalizing higher education: conceptualization, data collection and the lists of world cities’, Higher Education Policy, 28 (1), 107–126. Derudder, B. and P. J. Taylor (2017), ‘Central flow theory: comparative connectivities in the world-city network’, Regional Studies, 52 (8), 1029–1040. Enright, M., E. Scott and K-M. Chang (2005), Regional Powerhouse: The Greater Pearl River Delta and the Rise of China, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Faulconbridge, J. R., P. Taylor, J. V. Beaverstock, and C. Nativel (2011), The Globalization of Advertising: Agencies, Cities and Spaces of Creativity, London: Routledge. Friedmann, J. (1986), ‘The world city hypothesis’, Development and Change, 17 (1), 69–83. Guimera, R., S. Mossa, A. Turtschi and L.A.N. Amaral (2005), ‘The worldwide air transportation network: anomalous centrality, community structure, and cities’ global roles’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102 (22), 7794–7799. Hall, P. V. and M. Hesse (2013), Cities, Regions and Flows, London and New York: Routledge. Hill, R.C. and K. Fujita (1995), ‘Osaka’s Tokyo problem’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 19 (2), 181–193. Hoyler, M. and A. Watson (2013), ‘Global media cities in transnational media networks’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 104 (1), 90–108. Jacobs, J. (1969), The Economy of Cities, New York: Vintage. Jacobs, W., H. Koster and P. Hall (2011), ‘The location and global network structure of maritime advanced producer services’, Urban Studies, 48 (13), 2749–2769. Krätke, S. (2014), ‘Cities in contemporary capitalism’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (5), 1660–1677. Lai, K. (2012), ‘Differentiated markets: Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong in China’s financial centre network’, Urban Studies, 49 (6), 1275–1296. Martinus, K. and T. J. Sigler (2017), ‘Global city clusters: theorizing spatial and non-spatial proximity in inter-urban firm networks’, Regional Studies, 52 (8), 1–13. Martinus, K. and M. Tonts (2015), ‘Powering the world city system: energy industry networks and interurban connectivity’, Environment and Planning A, 47 (7), 1502–1520. Matthiessen, C. W., A. W Schwarz and S. Find (2010), ‘World cities of scientific knowledge: systems, networks and potential dynamics. An analysis based on bibliometric indicators’, Urban Studies, 47 (9), 1879–1897. Neal, Z. P. (2014), ‘Validity in world city network measurements’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 105 (4), 427–443. O’Connor, K. (2010), ‘Global city regions and the location of logistics activity’, Journal of Transport Geography, 18 (3), 354–362. Pred, A. R. (1977), City Systems in Advanced Economies: Past Growth, Present Processes, and Future Development Options, London: Hutchinson.

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­97 Rutherford, J., A. Gillespie and R. Richardson (2004), ‘The territoriality of pan-European telecommunications backbone networks’, Journal of Urban Technology, 11 (3), 1–34. Sassen, S. (1991), The Global City, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (2001), The Global City, Second Edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Taylor, P. J. (2001), ‘Specification of the world city network’, Geographical Analysis, 33 (2), 181–194. Taylor, P. J. and B. Derudder (2016), World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis, Second Edition, London: Routledge. Taylor, P. J., B. Derudder, M. Hoyler and N. Pengfei (2013), ‘New regional geographies of the world as practised by leading advanced producer service firms in 2010’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (3), 497–511. Taylor, P. J., D. M. Evans and K. Pain (2008), ‘Application of the interlocking network model to mega-city-regions: measuring polycentricity within and beyond city-regions’, Regional Studies, 42 (8), 1079–1093. Therborn, G. (2011), ‘End of a paradigm: the current crisis and the idea of stateless cities’, Environment and Planning A, 43 (2), 272–285. Wu, F. (2000), ‘The global and local dimensions of place-making: remaking Shanghai as a world city’, Urban Studies, 37 (8), 1359–1377.

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APPENDIX: KEY TO FIGURES 6.1‒6.3 City Code Aberdeen AR Abidjan AI Abu Dhabi AB Accra AC Addis Ababa AZ Adelaide AD Alexandria AX Algiers AG Almaty AL Amman AA Amsterdam AM Antwerp AN Asuncion AO Athens AS Atlanta AT Auckland AK Austin AU Baku BQ Baltimore BO Bamako BM Bangalore BF Bangkok BK Barcelona BC Beijing BJ Beirut BT Belgrade BE Berlin BL Bern BN Bilbao BP Bogota BG Boston BS Bratislava BV Brisbane BB Bristol BI Brussels BR Bucharest BU Budapest BD BA Buenos Aires Busan BZ

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­99 Cairo CA Calcutta CC Calgary CG Canberra CB Cape Town CW Caracas CR Casablanca CS Charlotte CL Chennai CN Chicago CH Chisinau CU Cleveland CV Cologne CO Colombo CM Columbus CZ Copenhagen CP Cotonou CT Dakar DR Dallas DA DE Dar Es Salaam Denver DV DM Des Moines Detroit DT Dhaka DK Doha DH Dubai DU Dublin DB Durban DN Dusseldorf DS Edinburgh ED Frankfurt FR Freetown FT Gdansk GD Geneva GN Georgetown (Cayman Islands)  GE Glasgow GL Gothenburg GB Guadalajara GU Guangzhou GZ GT Guatemala City Guayaquil GY Halifax HX

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100  Handbook of urban geography Hamburg HB Hamilton HM Hanoi HN Helsinki HL Ho Chi Minh City HC Hobart HO Hong Kong HK Houston HS HY Hyderabad (India) Indianapolis IN Islamabad IL Istanbul IS Jakarta JK Jeddah JD Johannesburg JB Kabul KA Kaohsiung KH Karachi KR Kathmandu KM Kiev KV Kinshasa KS Kobe KB KL Kuala Lumpur Kuwait City KU La Paz LP Lagos LG Lahore LH Leeds LE Lilongwe LL Lima LM Lisbon LB Ljubljana LU Lomé LO London LN LA Los Angeles Lusaka LK Luxembourg LX Lyon LY Madrid MD Managua MG Manama MM Manchester MC

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Multiple geographies of global urban connectivity  ­101 Manila MN Maputo MA Marseille MR Maseru MS Melbourne ME Mexico City MX Miami MI Milan ML Minneapolis MP Monterrey MO Montevideo MV Montreal MT Moscow MW Mumbai MB Munich MU Nairobi NR ND New Delhi New Orleans NO New York NY Niamey NM Nicosia NC Osaka OK Oslo OS Ottawa OT Ouagadougou OU PN Panama City Paris PA Perth PE Philadelphia PH PP Phnom Penh Phoenix PX Piraeus PI PL Port Louis Port-Au-Prince PO Prague PR Quito QU Raleigh RL Reading RD Riga RI RJ Rio De Janeiro Riyadh RY Rome RM

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102  Handbook of urban geography Rotterdam RT Sacramento SM San Diego SD San Francisco SF San Jose (Costa Rica) SJ San Jose (United States) SS Sanaa SN Santiago SA SI Santo Domingo Sao Paulo SP Seattle SE Seoul SU Shanghai SH Shenzhen SZ Singapore SG Sofia SO SL St Louis St Petersburg SB Stockholm SK Stuttgart ST Sydney SY Taipei TP Tallinn TL Tampa TM Tbilisi TB Tegucigalpa TG Tehran TE TA Tel Aviv Tokyo TK Toronto TR Tunis TU Valletta VL Valparaiso VP Vancouver VN Vienna VI Vientiane VT Vilnius VS Warsaw WS Washington WC Wellington WL Zagreb ZG Zurich ZU

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7.  Inside mobile urbanism: cities and policy mobilities Cristina Temenos, Tom Baker and Ian R. Cook

7.1 INTRODUCTION In the southern suburbs of Marseille, by the Boulevard Michelet, is a 17-storey concrete housing block. Opening in 1952, the block – like its architect, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret – has had a significant influence on the form of post-war planning and architecture. Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, produced many spectacular plans throughout his lifetime, and visited many cities in the process, but it was not until he was sixty years old that he won his first major commission – to build the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (Hall, 2014). Here he was able to showcase part of his utopian vision of the city. Le Corbusier regularly framed the city as ‘a body in the last stages of a fatal disease – its circulation clogged, its tissues dying of their own noxious wastes’ (Fishman, 1977, p. 12). Simultaneously inspired and disgusted by his adopted city of Paris – as well as being inspired by numerous other architects and political ideologies – Le Corbusier argued that the only way to save the city was to destroy it and start again. The rebuilt city would be centrally planned, heavily centralized and densely populated. The apartment would be the mass-produced standard unit of accommodation, with the city hosting much green space and wide-open roads. The city would be modern, geometric, functional and efficient. In his 1933 plans for la Ville Radieuse (the Radiant City) – on which the Marseille development was based – Le Corbusier’s city would be built around neighbourhoods known as unités for 2700 residents, hosting a number of collective services such as cooking, cleaning and child care. There would be little social segregation, with the size of accommodation meeting the needs and size of the family rather than their ability to pay (Fishman, 1977). With much of the radical politics stripped away and far from being a fully formed neighbourhood, the freestanding Unité d’Habitation embodied a number of design features of the Radiant City model (Figure 7.1). When opened, it included 337 maisonettes, space for a shopping centre on the eighth floor and a rooftop featuring a paddling pool, playground and a restaurant. Images of the development proliferated across the professional 103

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Source: Alamy.

Figure 7.1  Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and popular media, and it attracted intrigued visitors from France and beyond (Cook et al., 2015). Le Corbusier also designed similar unités in France (Nantes, Briey and Firminy), in Berlin and was commissioned to design the Indian city of Chandigarh. Although he had few commissions before he died in 1965, his model underpinned many of the high-rise social

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Inside mobile urbanism  ­105 housing developments in post-war Western Europe and beyond (Hall, 2014). Over the decades, Le Corbusier’s ideas have been derided by many and countless Corbusier-like buildings have been demolished. Yet the imprint of his (dis)utopian vision of the city can still be seen in many cities across the globe. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation symbolizes a number of dualisms that define contemporary cities and, more particularly, the policy ideas that work to govern and seek to shape them. The first is that cities and urban policies are both local and global (the Unité d’Habitation being both a local building as well as being a ‘demonstration project’ for a global audience). Second, cities and urban policies are at the same time territorial and relational (the Unité d’Habitation being a physical space or territory but also one that has social relations with people and places in different parts of the world). Third, both cities and urban policies embody fixity and mobility (with Le Corbusier fixing his ‘mobile’ ideas in Marseille and other European cities). Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation is a concrete model that has gained traction in cities throughout the world. It is the mobility of such a concept and the ways in which it contributes to contemporary urbanism with which this chapter is concerned. In recent years, scholars have been particularly interested in capturing the heterogeneous and qualitative experiences and effects of being ‘on the move’ (Cresswell, 2006; Urry, 2007; Adey et al., 2014). The ‘mobility turn’ as it has been dubbed, is concerned with the physical movements, sociocultural meanings and political practices of mobilization. For urban scholars more specifically, mobility has been a longstanding interest – think, for instance, of the early work by the Chicago School which explored relationships between immigration and the spatial forms of the city (e.g. Park and Burgess, 1967). In recent years urban mobilities have captured the interest of a wide range of researchers; geographers in particular have focused their attention on urban policy mobilities. This emerging sub-field of urban scholarship examines the processes, practices and resources brought together to construct, mobilize and territorialize policy knowledge (McCann, 2011; Baker and Temenos, 2015). A central empirical concern for the policy mobilities literature has been to understand the ways in which policy models (such as the Radiant City) and policy actors (such as Le Corbusier) move between places, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the contexts through which they travel, aiming to understand the ways in which urban policies – as a constellation of ideas, people, resources, techniques and technologies – and their mobilities actively produce ‘the urban’. This chapter explores ‘mobile urbanism’ through the lens of urban policy mobilities. We discuss how geographers and other social scientists

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106  Handbook of urban geography have sought to understand the movement of policies between cities. In doing so, it returns to the dualisms outlined earlier to highlight key aspects of urban policy mobility. The chapter then examines how mobile policies are dependent on a range of related mobilities involving knowledge, people, materials and politics. It concludes with a visit to Park Hill in Sheffield, England, a large Le Corbusian-inspired post-war social housing development, recently redeveloped and gentrified, in order to reaffirm the core ideas running through the urban policy mobilities literature.

7.2  MOBILE URBAN POLICY Geographers are not alone in studying the movement of policies between places (Cook, 2015). Indeed, they were somewhat late to the party, entering these debates in the early 2000s (e.g. Peck and Theodore, 2001; Ward, 2006; McCann, 2008). There is, however, a long tradition in political science of exploring the diffusion of public policies (Walker, 1969), lessondrawing (Rose, 1991) and policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000). Galvanized by the mobilities turn and frustrated with the political science work’s often positivist underpinnings and their restricted engagement with questions of politics and spatiality, a broad range of social scientists, including geographers, planners, anthropologists and others, have sought to rethink the movement and mutation of policies, ideas and expertise (McCann and Ward, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2015). Policy mobilities scholars have approached the movement of policies between places through the lens of social constructivism, mainly focusing on three inter-related issues. This first is the social processes of constructing policy ideas and the work that goes into their creation, promotion, circulation and re-embedding. Policy ideas ‘that work’ do not naturally appear, nor are they automatically worthy of emulation by other policymakers and practitioners; they must be conscientiously made and sold. Therefore, analytical attention needs to be paid to the embodied social labour and the material and discursive practices that shape and facilitate the circulation of policy (McCann, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2015). The second issue is that of movement and mutation. McCann (2011, p. 115) reasons that ‘[p]olicies, models, and ideas are not moved around like gifts at a birthday party or like jars on shelves, where the mobilization does not change the character and content of the mobilized objects’. Policies do not move intact from ‘sites of invention to sites of emulation’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015, p. xxiv). Instead, policies mutate as they move. The third issue is the co-construction of policy ideas and the landscapes through which they travel. Geographers maintain that it is not simply

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Inside mobile urbanism  ­107 policy ideas that mutate but also the spatial contexts through which they move: ‘[p]olicies are not, after all, merely transferred over space; their form and their effects are transformed by these journeys, which also serve continuously to remake relational connections across an intensely variegated and dynamic socioinstitutional landscape’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015, p. 29, emphasis in original). This contention – that policy and space are mutually constituted – has particular relevance for urban geographers, who see urban policies as both arising from particular spatial contexts and remaking those contexts. Now that we have established the three central issues that underpin the social constructivist approach to policy mobilities, it is useful to reflect further on the three dualisms that we explored the Unité d’Habitation through in the introduction: local/global, fixity/mobility and territoriality/ relationality. This time we will relate them explicitly to the mobilization of policy through a social constructivist lens. Beginning with the local/ global dualism, urban policies are persistently local in many respects, but never purely local. Policies are learned, formulated and implemented within an increasingly global context ‘characterized by the intensified and instantaneous connectivity of sites, channels, arenas, and nodes of policy development, evolution, and reproduction’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015, p. 223). Thinking both globally and locally is imperative when analysing mobile policies. But rather than treat the global and local as somehow separate or supplemental to one another, researchers have positioned local and global as intermingled, seeking to problematize ‘the inherent tensions between local specificity and global interconnectedness, and the continuous process of embedding and disembedding, (mis)translation and mutation that this entails’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015, p. xxviii). This leads us to the dualism of fixity and mobility. Urban policy mobilities scholars have regularly issued ontological warnings to avoid fetishizing the mobility of urban policy as unfettered and untethered. Instead, the mobility of urban policies involves aspects of immobility and fixity. As McCann and Ward (2015, p. 829) point out: ‘even within the most “mobile” of policies there are elements of immobility, not least the institutional and physical infrastructures through which they travel and are conditioned . . . Furthermore, since policies do not move fully formed from place to place, some parts move while others prove less mobile and remain fixed in place’. Those that remain fixed can refer to material forms such as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation or more conceptual elements such as legacies that specific policies have developed and are tied to specific places. Those which remain can also be aspects of policy that do not work elsewhere as they have been developed for a specific locality. Recent work has explored the lack of mobility displayed by certain policies and

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108  Handbook of urban geography the difficulties and resistances associated with emulating policies elsewhere (e.g. Wells, 2014; McLean and Borén, 2015). Moving onto the third dualism – territoriality/relationality – urban policy mobility is both a territorial and relational phenomenon. Massey (2011) argues that the territorial qualities we tend to recognize in cities (e.g. institutions, streetscapes, ways of life) should be understood as the outcome of many relations that extend within and beyond any particular city. The city, for Massey, is understood as ‘a constellation of processes rather than a thing’ (Massey, 2005, p. 141). Allen and Cochrane (2007) extend this notion, claiming that while urban governance and urban policy are always territorial, they are never exclusively so. Urban policymaking is also composed of various ‘elsewheres’. Taking on board such insights means approaching the mobility of urban policy as both relational (displaying connections to various sites of exchange and implementation) and territorially ‘placed’ (acquiring meaning and legitimacy in territoriallyembedded contexts). The next section takes the fixity/mobility dualism further by considering what exactly is mobile about urban policy mobilities. It outlines four elements of mobility that accompany and make possible the mobility of urban policies: knowledge, people, materials and politics.

7.3 MOBILE KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, MATERIALS AND POLITICS If we consider urban policy only in its narrowest sense, as a set of prescriptions relating to the governance of cities, then studying the mobility of urban policy might well become a fairly straightforward task of figuring out where and when certain prescriptions were adopted. This understanding would spectacularly underestimate and misinterpret what urban policy mobilities entail and, more particularly, it would miss most of what is ‘mobile’ about urban policy. In fact, the appearance of a policy idea in multiple jurisdictions is merely where investigation begins. It is the initial clue, or the visible tip of an otherwise large iceberg. What lies below is a series of related mobilities involving knowledge, people, materials and politics, each of which we now discuss (see Table 7.1). First, the mobility of urban policy would be impossible without the mobility of knowledge. Although policy decisions get made based on the accounts of various actors with various sources of knowledge, expert knowledge is particularly powerful. It refers to ‘specialist knowledge that cannot be adjudicated on its own terms by actors from outside the community [of recognized experts]’ (Prince, 2010, p. 876). Expert knowledge

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Inside mobile urbanism  ­109 Table 7.1  Examples of mobile policy elements Knowledge

People

Materials

Politics

Expert knowledge, local knowledge

Bureaucrats, politicians, activists, lobbyists, service managers, Global Intelligence Corps, architects, designers, consultants

PowerPoints, reports, spreadsheets, speech transcripts, maps, visualizations

Political economic conditions, policy advocacy, activism

is often seen as globally mobile knowledge because there is often the ‘perception that local expertise is lacking and/or that a global approach is needed’ (Rapoport, 2015a, p. 112). Such globally mobile expert knowledge is however always mediated through relationships with local practitioners and local experts (Robinson, 2015). The power of expert knowledge varies depending on the political, geographical and historical contexts in which certain experts and forms of expertise are positioned. For instance, calculative forms of expertise, which involve claims based on quantification and measurement, are increasingly important to government decision-making, especially in contexts where evidence-based policy is idealized. But this was not always the case and it may not be the case in the future. The status and effectiveness of expert knowledge differs depending on the time and place in which it is located. Another powerful form of mobile knowledge relates to modelling. Policy models are often informed by expert knowledge but are distinguishable insofar as they contain a specific combination of features or a programmatic philosophy. Policy models are made with an explicit attention to their mobility (McCann, 2011). They are ‘flat-packaged’ (Allen and Cochrane, 2007) in order to be implemented with supposedly similar outcomes despite territorial differences (see also Peck and Theodore, 2015; Temenos and McCann, 2013). On one hand, models are mobile because they are framed as models for other places. On the other hand, policy models are made mobile through the codification and packaging of ostensibly reproducible features. Globally engaged policymakers, think tanks, design firms and other actors aim to provide proven solutions, models that ‘work’, across a variety of places. However, it is important to consider that in order for models to be mobilized, they must also have a receptive local audience (Robinson, 2015). The ways in which models are adopted, implemented and shape the formation of urban spaces often have as much to do with local knowledge as it does with mobile expert knowledge. As Robinson (2015, p. 832)

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110  Handbook of urban geography reminds us: ‘[p]olicy ideas might have wider circulations and histories, but the relevant histories and processes by which they come to policymakers’ attention might be entirely localized’. She goes on to caution that attention to expert mobile knowledge without attention to local knowledges produce ‘the possibility of incapacitating local policy expertise through the prolific circulation of good-practice examples and policy ideas by relatively powerful agents’ (Robinson, 2015, p. 833). Attention to such arguments highlights the necessity of unpacking the value attributed to globalized, expert knowledge and the erasure of local expertise and innovation, particularly in less-than-global, or ‘ordinary’ cities. The second element of the mobility of urban policy is strongly related to the practices of mobile people. Urban policymaking requires a diverse cast of actors. And despite information and communications technologies having brought people and places closer together, there remains a need for face-to-face encounter and shared experience through events such as conferences and study tours. Examining the role of conferences in the spread of Business Improvement District models, Cook and Ward (2012, p. 141) note that these events offer ‘opportunities for policy makers and practitioners to compare, evaluate, judge, learn and to situate their city in relation to others’. All types of policy actors – including bureaucrats, activists and social service managers – are ‘mobile actors’ at times. Temenos (2016), meanwhile, examines how conferences offer opportunities to educate attendees about apparently innovative local approaches and can be used strategically to advance local political agendas drawing public attention to problems and grievances. By temporarily convening a group of mobile people in one place, conferences are ‘ephemeral fixtures’ in the landscape of urban policymaking (Temenos, 2016). Another type of event involving mobile people is policy tourism. This involves policy actors visiting different places on ‘study tours’ for the purposes of experiencing and learning about past, present or forthcoming policies and practices. Like conferences, study tours result from the continuing demand for face-to-face interaction as well as a desire to see and experience places in transition and policies ‘in action’ (Cook et al., 2015; González, 2011; Wood, 2014). Likewise, conferences and study tours are selective in the ways places and policies are presented to and discussed with, audience members or delegates. While the mobility of urban policy and the mobility of people are closely related, policy actors are not equally mobile. Stratification exists between locally-tethered actors, who lack the economic and reputational resources to visit and learn from places elsewhere or promote their ideas to distant audiences and a cast of mobile or even hyper-mobile actors. Tracing the influence of a number of architects, planners and engineers constituting

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Inside mobile urbanism  ­111 the ‘global intelligence corps’, Rapoport (2015a) shows the mobilities of certain people make a significant difference to the mobile capacity of certain policy ideas. By virtue of their global presence, such actors are able to authoritatively frame urban problems and harness a diverse but carefully curated range of ‘local’ lessons as solutions. This puts them in the enviable and privileged position of being able to steer urban agendas, even if local authorities and actors have the last say on which policy ideas are implemented. Third, the mobility of urban policy is sustained by the mobility of materials. Although urban policy ideas are often mobilized through embodied interactions between mobile people, these interactions are informed, even prefigured, by various kinds of materials which circulate through virtual and physical spaces. As McCann (2008, p. 890) points out, materials such as reports, spreadsheets, speech transcripts and maps have their own complex itineraries: they get ‘passed around at conferences and meetings, move[d] from place to place on laptop hard drives or other electronic storage devices . . . transferred electronically . . . and are repeatedly the topic of discussion among a broad range of urban policy actors – from politicians, to policy professionals, to political activists and journalists’. Materials, in a sense, are productive: they spur conversations, inform ways of thinking and, in turn, shape the intentionality of policy actors. Images also function as mobile materials, particularly in the realm of urban policy and development where seductive images of urban modernity circulate widely. Rapoport (2015b, p. 312) demonstrates how visual images act as powerful educational resources because of their ability to redirect peoples’ thinking ‘from the realm of the abstract to that of the lived and experienced’, but stresses that imagery is far from being a neutral window onto the world. Remarking on stylized depictions of urban redevelopment, which her respondents referred to as ‘cappuccino pictures’, Rapoport (2015b, p. 321) notes that in such images, ‘the sun is always shining and children are always playing. The more negative features of urban life, such as traffic congestion and pollution, are entirely absent’. Finally, the mobility of urban policy is inseparable from mobile forms of politics. When we take ‘politics’ to reflect ideological contests over the appropriate forms and functions of the state and ‘policy’ as the means by which those forms and functions are realized, it follows that policy and politics are closely intertwined. If policies are vehicles for the achievement of political-ideological projects, then mobile policies signify the existence of mobile political-ideological projects. One of the primary reasons that geographers are interested in the mobility of policy is because it allows them to better understand the way political-ideological projects such

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112  Handbook of urban geography as roll-back welfare reform spread, become hegemonic and in doing so structure the scope of the possible. Of course, the type of political-ideological projects that assume hegemonic status will vary historically and geographically and will involve negotiation and contestation. For example, in Anglo-American cities, where neoliberal ideology and its subsequent policy projects has experienced a 30-year ascendency and has become dominant to varying degrees, policy ideas that go with the grain of established neoliberal preferences (i.e. market allocation, minimal government spending, self-reliance) have a significantly greater chance of uptake than those that do not. In previous historical periods, however, hegemonic political projects based on progressive and socialist ideologies supported the mobility of different kinds of urban policies in many cities of the Global North (Clarke, 2012; Cook et al., 2014). Reflecting on the political-ideological conditions structuring policy mobility in cities of the Global South, Phelps et al. (2014) explain how progressive-developmental political projects often set the terms on which policy decisions are made. This account joins urban policy mobility research with broader debates about the applicability of theoretical templates tending to originate from cities of the Global North. Kate Swanson’s (2014) study of the mobilization of zero-tolerance policing in Latin America and Tarini Bedi’s (2016) examination of cultural and political change accompanying the importation of the Singapore model of taxi transport in Mumbai have urged scholars to appreciate that the mobility of urban policies reflects many different political-ideological projects that are in-the-making. This pluralism constitutes the basis for debates arising within policy mobilities and shapes the current and future research agenda.

7.4  CRITIQUES AND FUTURES While there has been a noticeable degree of consensus within policy mobilities research, it is important to highlight some of the critiques within the literature. Critique has generally come from those working within, or close to, the policy mobilities approach – although see Marsh and Evans’s (2012) critique from a political science perspective and McCann and Ward’s (2013) response. Early critiques centred on the tendency for scholars to: (1) focus on neoliberal policies and privilege empirical and theoretical orientations towards cities in the Global North (Bunnell, 2013); (2) display a presentist outlook (Jacobs, 2012); and (3) take unreflexive methodological stances on a new theoretical approach (Harris and Moore, 2013).

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Inside mobile urbanism  ­113 As the literature has matured, it has begun to respond to each of these criticisms (Kuus, 2015; Temenos and Baker, 2015). On the centrality of neoliberalism and the Global North, Cohen (2015) and Söderström and Geertman (2013), for example, have respectively written about the importance of understanding ad hoc networks and less-than-neoliberal planning practices for evaluating geographies of global urban development. Both studies argue that it is specifically a focus in Southeast Asian cities that have led to such conceptual insights. A general predisposition towards the neoliberal present in the Global North may still dominate current research but it is now one (valuable) orientation among many in the literature. With regard to the critique of presentism, Quark (2013) and Cook et al. (2015), among others, have enthusiastically engaged in rich historical studies of pathways, conditions and mutations of policies as they are mobilized. These interventions have quashed any notion that the mobility of policy knowledge is somehow specific to the present. A number of methodological papers have emerged, notably a special issue of Environment and Planning A convened by Cochrane and Ward (2012). There is no methodological monopoly when it comes to policy mobility research. Indeed, studying mobile policies has been approached from ethnographic (Roy, 2012), comparative (Robinson, 2015; Temenos, 2017), tracery (Cook et al., 2015; McCann and Ward, 2011) and assemblage (Baker and McGuirk, 2017) approaches, among others. They cater to different empirical circumstances, different conceptualizations of policy (and of cities), different epistemologies and different styles of ‘research politics’. One of the more prominent approaches has been to ‘follow the policy’ as it moves across global landscapes. Peck and Theodore (2015) provide what is perhaps the most comprehensive account of what this approach means for researchers, working across cities in the Global North and Global South, travelling to conferences, think tank headquarters and sites of (in this case welfare service) operations. ‘Following the policy’ encompasses following various policy elements such as people, policies and places (McCann and Ward, 2011). Yet, following such things takes both time and substantial resources. Bok (2015) provides an insightful discussion on how to manage challenges to time, resources and access to research informants – challenges that all researchers face at one point or another – while being able to produce a richly detailed account of policy mobility. In so doing, Bok advocates for greater attention to discourse and document analysis. Likewise, Baker and McGuirk (2017, p. 434) argue that documents act ‘as texts that reveal particular ways of thinking and acting . . . whose itineraries and effects can be apprehended by following their “traces” in different contexts’. This type of understanding can be found in studies of contemporary policy mobilization and studies that use

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114  Handbook of urban geography archival material to investigate previous historical periods (Clarke, 2012, Cook et al., 2015). So where next for the studies of urban policy mobilities? This could be a very long list of avenues for future research but we restrict ourselves to four. The first is to expand the repertoire of policies and cities documented in the literature in order to avoid seeing all examples of urban policy mobility through the prism of Anglo-American experiences. This would put scholars in a better position to differentiate what is specific and what is general about processes of urban policy mobility. The second is to conceptualize policies and cities as being simultaneously local/global, fixed/mobile, territorial/relational as well as thinking about the movement of policies as being accompanied by a series of related mobilities involving knowledge, people, materials and politics. The third is to think more critically about notions and discourses of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ that shape policy development and circulation. Finally, it is important to engage with other conceptual questions in the field of urban studies. For example, Affolderbach and Schulz (2015) note that there have been many calls for a stronger conversation between policy mobilities and science and technology studies, yet few have come to fruition (see also Clarke, 2012). Throughout such a future research agenda, we argue that it is essential to keep in the forefront the question of how policy mobility is imbricated into the socio-spatial configurations of cities and urban life.

7.5 CONCLUSION We opened this chapter with a vignette of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and we close it with a brief account of another post-war development, Park Hill in Sheffield. Designed by Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn and commissioned and built by Sheffield City Council, Park Hill was built to rehouse families living in the city’s slums. Opening nine years after the Unité d’Habitation and perched on a hillside next to Sheffield city centre, the development – reaching 13 storeys at its highest point – looks like a series of snake-like buildings joined together with 3.5 metres-wide elevated walkways. Initially comprised of 955 dwellings (both apartments and maisonettes) as well as shops, pubs and other facilities, Park Hill would attract considerable media attention and host numerous ‘policy tourists’. While Park Hill is a much larger development than the Unité d’Habitation, the two display a striking physical resemblance, particularly in their concentric structure and use of colourful balconies. Indeed, Smith and Lynn were open about their admiration for Le Corbusier’s ideas and the Unité

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Inside mobile urbanism  ­115 d’Habitation, which they visited (Streets in the Sky, 2009). Yet, they were also influenced by two other architects, Alison and Peter Smithson, who were also enthusiasts of Le Corbusier. In their uncommissioned plans for the Golden Lane development in London, the Smithsons drew on the Unité d’Habitation’s interior street and moved them to the outside of the building – streets in the sky – an idea emulated by Smith and Lynn for Park Hill and subsequently by many other architects (Hollow, 2010). While the streets in the sky remain, today Park Hill is being redeveloped. Beginning in the late 2000s, the redevelopment is led by the private developers Urban Splash, known for ‘reimagining’ old inner city buildings in other UK cities. The redevelopment has stalled somewhat with only one building having been redeveloped thus far (see Figure 7.2). All buildings in Park Hill are due to retain their concentric structure and the walkways but now feature chic interiors, vibrant external colours and extensive window space. The most significant change, however, has been the occupants: out go the remaining tenants who have been rehoused elsewhere, in comes a ‘mixed community’ according to the developers, entering the redeveloped,

Source:  Ian R. Cook.

Figure 7.2  Park Hill in 2016 (with a renovated block on the left adjoined to an evocated block awaiting renovation on the right)

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116  Handbook of urban geography overwhelmingly private accommodation alongside reduced social housing and business space. The example of Park Hill speaks directly to the issues of mobile urbanism and, in particular, policy mobilities. It is a development in which thousands of people have moved in and out of over the years, and a place that is fixed, territorial and local as well as mobile, relational and global. Park Hill’s construction and recent reconstruction have involved drawing on policies – as well as people, knowledge, materials and politics – from places elsewhere. Yet its links to places elsewhere are multiple, messy and evolving. For instance, the initial construction was much more than a simple policy transfer from Marseille to Sheffield. It is also a building that has changed over time and its relations with Sheffield and places elsewhere have morphed too. This speaks to Peck and Theodore’s (2015) notion that policy models and their emulators are always hybrids and continually evolving. Both Park Hill and the Unité d’Habitation are entities that are better understood through the lens of urban policy mobilities. Like so many other aspects of urban life and urban policy though, they also require further academic investigation and such studies are needed to help refine our empirical and conceptual knowledge of mobile urbanism and policy mobilities.

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Inside mobile urbanism  ­117 Cook, I. R. (2015), ‘Policy mobilities and interdisciplinary engagement’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (4), 835–837. Cook, I. R. and K. Ward (2012), ‘Conferences, informational infrastructures and mobile policies: the process of getting Sweden “BID ready”’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 19 (2), 137–152. Cook, I. R., S. V. Ward and K. Ward (2014), ‘A springtime journey to the Soviet Union: postwar planning and policy mobilities through the Iron Curtain’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (3), 805–822. Cook, I. R., S. V. Ward and K. Ward (2015), ‘Post-war planning and policy tourism: the international study tours of the Town and Country Planning Association 1947–61’, Planning Theory and Practice, 16 (2), 184–205. Cresswell, T. (2006), On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, Abingdon: Routledge. Dolowitz, D. and D. Marsh (2000), ‘Learning from abroad: the role of policy transfer in contemporary policy-making’, Governance, 13 (1), 5–23. Fishman, R. (1977), Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, New York, NY: Basic Books. González, S. (2011), ‘Bilbao and Barcelona “in motion”. How urban regeneration “models” travel and mutate in the global flow of policy tourism’, Urban Studies, 48 (7), 1397–1418. Hall, P. (2014), Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Harris, A. J. and S. M. Moore (2013), ‘Planning histories and practices of circulating urban knowledge’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (5), 1499–509. Hollow, M. (2010), ‘Governmentality on the Park Hill estate: the rationality of public housing’, Urban History, 37 (1), 117–135. Jacobs, J. M. (2012), ‘Urban geographies I: still thinking cities relationally’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (3), 412–422. Kuus, M. (2015), ‘For slow research’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (4), 838–840. Marsh, D. and M. Evans (2012), ‘Policy transfer: coming of age and learning from the ­experience’, Policy Studies, 33 (6), 477–481. Massey, D. (2005), For Space, London: Sage. Massey, D. (2011), ‘A counterhegemonic relationality of place’, in Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward (eds), Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–14. McCann, E. (2008), ‘Expertise, truth, and urban policy mobilities: global circuits of knowledge in the development of Vancouver, Canada’s “four pillar” drug strategy’, Environment and Planning A, 40 (4), 885–904. McCann, E. (2011), ‘Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: toward a research agenda’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101 (1), 107–130. McCann, E. and K. Ward (eds) (2011), Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McCann, E. and K. Ward (2013), ‘A multi-disciplinary approach to policy transfer research: geographies, assemblages, mobilities, and mutations’, Policy Studies, 34 (1), 2–18. McCann, E. and K. Ward (2015), ‘Thinking through dualisms in urban policy mobilities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (4), 828–830. McLean, B.L. and T. Borén (2015), ‘Barriers to implementing sustainability locally: a case study of policy immobilities’, Local Environment, 20 (12), 1489–1506. Park, R. E. and E. W. Burgess (eds) (1967), The City, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Peck, J. and N. Theodore (2001), ‘Exporting workfare/importing welfare-to-work: exploring the politics of Third Way policy transfer’, Political Geography, 20 (4), 427–460. Peck, J. and N. Theodore (2015), Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Phelps, N. A., T. Bunnell, M. A. Miller and J. Taylor (2014), ‘Urban inter-referencing within and beyond a decentralized Indonesia’, Cities, 39, 37–49.

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118  Handbook of urban geography Prince, R. (2010), ‘Fleshing out expertise: the making of creative industries experts in the United Kingdom’, Geoforum, 41 (6), 875–884. Quark, A. A. (2013), ‘Institutional mobility and mutation in the global capitalist system: a neo-Polanyian analysis of a transnational cotton standards war, 1870–1945’, Environment and Planning A, 45 (7), 1588–1604. Rapoport, E. (2015a), ‘Globalising sustainable urbanism: the role of international masterplanners’, Area, 47 (2), 110–115. Rapoport, E. (2015b), ‘Sustainable urbanism in the age of Photoshop: images, experiences and the role of learning through inhabiting the international travels of a planning model’, Global Networks, 15 (3), 307–324. Robinson, J. (2015), ‘Arriving at urban policies: the topological spaces of urban policy mobility’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (4), 831–834. Rose, R. (1991), ‘What is lesson-drawing?’, Journal of Public Policy, 11 (1), 3–30. Roy, A. (2012), ‘Ethnographic circulations: space-time relations in the worlds of poverty management’, Environment and Planning A, 44 (1), 31–41. Söderström, O. and S. Geertman (2013), ‘Loose threads: the translocal making of public space policy in Hanoi’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 34 (2), 244–260. Streets in the Sky (2009), Saving Britain’s Past. BBC Two, 31 October. Swanson, K. (2014), ‘Zero tolerance in Latin America: punitive paradox in urban policy mobilities’, Urban Geography, 34 (7), 972–988. Temenos, C. (2016), ‘Mobilizing drug policy activism: conferences, convergence spaces and ephemeral fixtures in social movement mobilization’, Space and Polity, 20 (1), 124–141. Temenos, C. (2017), 'Everyday proper politics: rereading the post-political through mobilities of drug policy activism', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (4), 584–596. Temenos, C. and T. Baker (2015), ‘Enriching urban policy mobilities research’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (4), 841–843. Temenos, C. and E. McCann (2013), ‘Geographies of policy mobilities’, Geography Compass, 7 (5), 344–357. Urry, J. (2007), Mobilities, Bristol: Polity Press. Walker, J. (1969), ‘The diffusion of innovations among American states’, American Political Science Review, 63 (3), 880–899. Ward, K. (2006), ‘“Policies in motion”, urban management and state restructuring: the translocal expansion of Business Improvement Districts’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30 (1), 54–75. Wells, K. (2014), ‘Policyfailing: the case of public property disposal in Washington, DC’, ACME, 13 (3), 473–494. Wood, A. (2014), ‘Learning through policy tourism: circulating Bus Rapid Transit from South America to South Africa’, Environment and Planning A, 46 (11), 2654–2669.

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8.  Metropolitan mobilities: transnational urban labour markets Cathy McIlwaine and Megan Ryburn

8.1 INTRODUCTION Cities around the world are increasingly reliant on migrant labour to maintain the health and wealth of their economies. While this phenomenon has extensive historical antecedents, it has arguably accelerated in recent years as a result of the economic restructuring and de-regulation of labour that prevails in many metropolitan areas, but especially in cities in the Global North and South. On one hand, this has created increasingly dense and complex transnational ties across global urban systems. Yet on the other, and related to the increasingly restrictive nature of immigration regimes, it has produced a range of deeply divided and unequal urban labour markets, especially along gender and racial lines. This chapter will outline these processes with reference to a number of key conceptual issues, including the ‘migrant division of labour’ (MDL) (Wills et al., 2009, 2010), whereby international migrants tend to become concentrated in low paid, low status jobs at the bottom end of a labour market hierarchy. This migrant division of labour is also inherently transnational as it is invariably underpinned by a range of gendered and racialized international spatial dynamics, such as ‘global care chains’ (Hochschild, 2000; also McIlwaine, 2010), that create and sustain these inequalities, which are also characterized by high levels of precarity. The notions of precarious employment and precarity (Butler, 2009; Standing, 2011) will also be discussed in relation to migrant labour (Anderson, 2010), along with the notion of deskilling and downward occupational mobilities. Also important is that analysis of transnational labour markets tends to assume that migration flows are South to North despite a growing recognition that South–South flows are increasingly more widespread (Hujo and Piper, 2010; see also Ryburn, 2016). In turn, this chapter is situated within wider calls to recalibrate urban theory from a global perspective that challenges a Northern-centric vantage point and assumes that the Global South provides the empirical setting for conceptualizing cities (Roy, 2009; Myers, 2011; Parnell and Robinson, 2012). Indeed, not only should we theorize from cities of the South, but we should also recognize that urbanization processes are 119

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120  Handbook of urban geography themselves part of global urban systems underpinned by flows of capital, information and of particular relevance in the current case, of people (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). This chapter will therefore outline some core conceptual tools that we argue are useful in understanding transnational urban labour markets in global context. In doing so, we analyse the causes and consequences of precarious work as part of a transnational MDL, including the exploitative working conditions and the downward occupational mobility experienced by many migrants in cities in both Global North and South. Whilst acknowledging that migrants work in all sectors of urban economies and that they are extremely valuable in contributing skills, productivity and so on, this chapter focuses on low-paid migrant workers, not least because they form the majority of foreign-born workers in cities around the world. The chapter draws empirically on analyses of migrant workers in London, especially in relation to Latin Americans, and makes reference to Bolivian migrants residing in Santiago, Chile to highlight how ‘metropolitan mobilities’ are deeply imbued by global, transnational and intersectional inequalities.

8.2 MIGRANT DIVISIONS OF TRANSNATIONAL LABOUR Conceptualizations of a ‘migrant division of labour’ have their origins in theoretical analyses of the evolution of urban labour markets and concomitant intersections with immigration regimes. Such conceptualizations have been developed especially in global cities such as London over the last 25 years in order to understand the increasing reliance on foreign-born workers. In part, this draws on classic Marxist ideas around the ways in which immigration is functional to capitalism. This is because the demand for employees who can be paid little and work flexibly can be supplied through a ‘reserve army of labour’ (May et al., 2007) consisting of migrants. The provision of cheap labour by migrants has increased as the state has opened its borders, albeit selectively and with recent retreats from this stance in the UK and elsewhere. This ties in closely with Piore’s (1979) seminal analysis of urban labour markets which suggests that immigrant labour is preferable to that of ‘natives’ because costs can be kept down as migrants have few other options but to accept poor working conditions (Wills et al., 2009). Such acceptance is reinforced by migrants’ ‘dual frame of reference’, which validates low pay in destination labour markets compared to their conditions back home (Waldinger and Lichter, 2003). In cities such as London, the migrant division of labour emerged

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Metropolitan mobilities  ­121 and was consolidated throughout the 1990s and 2000s as dependence on such workers increased. This was facilitated by a selective immigration regime that focused on migration from the EU and on certain sectors such as construction, hospitality, transport and care work (Wills et al., 2010). Research in London has highlighted how the migrant division of labour functions on the basis of reproducing poor working conditions among low paid migrant workers in these sectors. These entail low levels of pay, long and fragmented working hours, a high incidence of having two or more jobs, and limited entitlements to sick pay, holidays, and maternity leave (Wills et al., 2010; see also McDowell et al., 2009). Migrants are actively sought and employed in jobs such as cleaning, catering and construction not just because of their willingness to work under these poor conditions, but also because of a presumed propensity to work harder and more efficiently than their ‘native’ counterparts (Wills et al., 2010; see also Stenning and Dawley, 2009). Yet, a so-called ‘hiring queue’ (Wills et al., 2009, p. 259) also means that employers create a workforce on the basis of national and racialized stereotypes, thus creating deep-seated divisions among migrants. Therefore, a ‘new hierarchy of inequality is developing within the migrant division of labour in Greater London’ (McDowell et al., 2009, p. 20) based on gender, ethnicity, skin colour, nationality and legal status (Datta et al., 2009). As part of this, new EU migrants tend to be favoured over those from the Global South, and especially people of colour from the former Commonwealth countries who are non-white, although certain EU nationalities are also preferred over others. This has therefore created a dynamic ‘rotating membership’ within the migrant division of labour in cities that changes depending on the needs of employers, the state and the city more widely at a given time (Wills et al., 2009, p. 268). Especially important within these processes is the role of immigration status, with irregular and undocumented migrants often providing the most flexible form of cheap and flexible labour within the MDL (Bloch, 2013). Employers are able to avoid meeting basic employment rights thus allowing them to maximize profits and maintain low costs through this ‘hyper-flexible’ labour force, while irregular migrants are able to access paid work, however exploitative it might be (Anderson, 2010; Wills et al., 2010). Also significant is that irregular migrants are often integrated into formal urban labour markets especially through paying taxes (Wills et al., 2010), yet they are excluded from claiming other state resources because of their lack of citizenship (Leitner and Ehrkamp, 2006). There are also other ‘grey areas’ in that many migrants may be ‘semi-compliant’ in that they might reside legally in a country but work in contravention of the conditions of their immigration status, such as the number of hours of paid work associated with a student visa, for example (Ruhs and

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122  Handbook of urban geography Anderson, 2006). Such processes of irregularity thus bolster the MDL, but they also allow migrants themselves a degree of agency to negotiate both the immigration regime and employers’ recruitment requirements. In the case of Latin American migrants in London, nationality and immigration status have been shown to be two major axes of differentiation within the MDL even within one community, albeit a diverse one (McIlwaine, 2015). For example, Latin Americans without regular status (especially Bolivians) were able to access the office cleaning sector through a range of ‘invisibility strategies’ such as borrowing, renting or buying false working visas or passports and false National Insurance (social security) numbers in a process sometimes called ‘irregular formality’ (Vasta and Kandilige, 2010). While this gave Bolivians in particular access to the jobs, they invariably had to work in the lowest status positions such as cleaning toilets. Colombians, on the other hand, who were more likely to be regular and more established (and therefore speak some English) were more likely to be cleaning supervisors. Despite some agency in accessing the labour market, irregular migrants have no comeback when they are exploited; one of the most common practices was employing irregular migrants for a month and then withholding their wages in the knowledge that they could not contact the police or labour unions (McIlwaine, 2015). In addition to ‘rotating membership’ based on nationality and immigration status, amongst other factors, the MDL is also inherently dynamic in other ways. One key aspect of this is how the MDL is affected during economic downturn. While some argue that there is not enough evidence to suggest that migrants in the low paid sector fare worse during economic recessions (see Findlay et al., 2010), others have highlighted how they have faced considerably increased economic insecurity and erosion of wages and working conditions, and unemployment (Datta, 2009). More specifically, it has been shown that the MDL in London has remained extremely resilient during the 2008 economic downturn (McIlwaine and Datta, 2014). Indeed, demand for labour in low-paid work has remained fairly constant (unlike in other European countries such as Spain) but working conditions worsened and jobs became more exploitative. This was evidenced through, for example, those working in the cleaning and catering sectors (where fragmented working hours are already the norm) having their hours of work reduced yet still being expected to complete the same tasks as previously as well as having pay cut. Other benefits have also been withdrawn such as chefs and catering assistants no longer being provided with free food in their workplaces. Such exploitative practices have been experienced more intensely among those with irregular immigration status, who also reported greater difficulties in securing work in the first place (McIlwaine and Datta, 2014).

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Metropolitan mobilities  ­123 The resilience of the MDL is also related to the need to recognize it as inherently transnational, especially during economic recession. Not only is it powered by foreign-born migrants, but these people are themselves constantly thinking in terms of their ‘dual frame of reference’ (see above) which is itself a transnational gaze (albeit not explicitly perceived as such by Waldinger and Lichter, 2003). In London, the main reason why migrants had moved was economic hardships back home where recession had also affected their livelihoods, as well as the draw of work opportunities in the city even if it meant marked occupational de-skilling (Wills et al., 2010; see below). Furthermore, this transnationality is even more complex in that the MDL also comprises migrants who form part of wider transnational social spaces, invariably moving from one part of the space to another. For example, the majority of Latin Americans arriving in London now migrate from other European countries and especially from Spain where they were initially able to enter and find jobs very easily in domestic care and construction work. However, with the severe economic collapse in 2008 – which also entailed a mortgage crisis among Ecuadorians – many moved to London as they were unwilling to return to their home countries (McIlwaine, 2012). Thus in 2010, 36.5 per cent of Latin Americans had migrated from an intermediate country before arriving in the UK, with 38 per cent moving from Spain (McIlwaine et al., 2011). Even more recently, it has been shown that 80 per cent of all Latin Americans who have moved from another European country to London come from Spain (McIlwaine and Bunge, 2016). The MDL therefore stretches across space with the migrant ‘reserve army of labour’ moving to fill positions in labour markets wherever it is possible to secure openings, despite poor working conditions. These MDLs in different countries are held together through transnational social spaces entailing the movement of people to and fro as well as remittances, especially in cases where transnational families have emerged (McIlwaine, 2012). This also highlights how migrants are not passive in creating the MDL in the first place, as well as being active in coping with its more deleterious effects, often drawing on mechanisms developed in home countries (Wills et al., 2010; see also Gilmartin and Bigge, 2015). Another key spatial dimension of the MDL relates to the transnational ‘chains’ of emotional labour that often underpins it. While in London, cleaning (and care) work is not always feminized but instead is performed by both women and men (McDowell, 2008; Datta et al., 2009; McIlwaine, 2010), generally, the MDL is deeply imbued with gender inequalities. The engine underpinning this is often the creation of ‘global care chains’ (Hochschild, 2000) referring to what Parreñas (2000) had previously called ‘the international division of reproductive labour’. ‘Global care

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124  Handbook of urban geography chains’ denote the transnational processes of gendering and racialization of paid and unpaid reproductive labour whereby women, mainly from the Global South, are paid to carry out reproductive labour previously carried out unpaid by women mainly from the Global North who have now entered the paid workforce. The concept also takes into account the caring work that the women from the Global South leave behind, and the women who take their places to do this. While not exclusively, these processes often occur from cities of the South to cities of the North and create not only gendered inequalities but also deeply racialized divisions. In turn, it is not the poorest in the leaving societies who migrate to the cities of the North as part of ‘global care chains’, but rather often the well-educated and middle classes, therefore also contributing to important class distinctions and complexities (Riaño, 2011). While the concept of global care chains has been useful in highlighting the transnationalities of caring work on a global scale, it has also been criticized, not least on grounds that it excludes the role of male migrants and tends to focus only on caring and cleaning employment (Yeates, 2012). Indeed, not only have there been calls to include male domestic workers in notions of global care chains but also to incorporate stereotypically male areas of domestic work, such as gardening and household repair and maintenance (Kilkey, 2010), and to recognize the multiple ways that migrant men deal with the ‘transgressive performance’ of working in low-paid feminized work (Datta et al., 2009; McIlwaine, 2010). Regardless of the specificities of the processes involved, it is clear that such reproductive work, whether carried out by female or male migrants, contributes significantly (although not completely) to the MDL, and plays a crucial role in the ‘invisible welfare’ of cities especially when migrants have no regular immigration status (Ambrosini, 2013). Also crucially important to note in relation to the spatialities of the MDL is that while it has mainly focused on global cities such as London, it is peculiar neither to cities in the Global North nor to cities normally thought to be global. As such, the transnationality of metropolitan mobilities plays out in many different geographical contexts. Indeed, the extent of international migration within the Global South, especially from poorer countries to more wealthy neighbouring nations and to large cities, is often overlooked (Hujo and Piper, 2010). This also resonates with wider debates on the need to focus attention on cities of the South as important players both empirically and theoretically in understandings of global urban systems (Chant and McIlwaine, 2016). These processes of South– South mobilities have been extensive in Latin American cities, especially in the Southern Cone of Brazil, Argentina and Chile, which are wealthier than neighbouring nations such as Bolivia and Peru.

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Metropolitan mobilities  ­125 The economy of Santiago, Chile, for example, which is increasingly being termed a ‘global city’, is markedly dependent on migrants to bolster its expanding economy (despite poor efforts to integrate them) (Leal Trujillo et al., 2016). Indeed, an MDL has emerged which consigns migrants to particular employment niches such as cleaning and caring work through processes of gendering and racialization. Whilst in the past women filling these roles were predominantly from rural Southern Chile, from the late 1990s as Chile has experienced economic growth, they have increasingly been filled by migrants. There is a degree of continuity over time, however, in that, since colonial times and into the present in Chile, certain gendered and ethnicized bodies have been inscribed as appropriate for this kind of work. Illustrating this, a survey of urban Chilean news­paper adverts for domestic help from 1960 to 2000 indicated that possessing ‘buena presencia’ was a common essential characteristic required (Stefoni and Fernández, 2013). This phrase euphemistically encapsulates the concept of a woman who does not appear too phenotypically ‘indigenous’, but is nonetheless easily distinguished from the (white) employer (Stefoni and Fernández, 2013; cf. Canessa, 2008). Female Bolivian migrants in Ryburn’s (2016) research contended that such racial hierarchies continue to function in the selection of migrant domestic workers. They noted that when potential employers interviewed various migrants of different nationalities and ethnicities at an employment agency, those who were Colombian or Peruvian with lighter skin would be selected over and above Bolivians who appeared more indigenous (Ryburn, 2016). A key difference in this Southern focused migrant division of labour in Santiago compared to the Northern case of London is the more extreme and precarious nature of low-paid migrant work. While conditions in London are certainly exploitative, work associated with the MDL in Santiago tends to be more precarious (see below) suggesting a place-based continuum of precarious work with precarity being more intense in the Global South than the Global North.

8.3 PRECARITY, PRECARIOUS EMPLOYMENT AND MIGRATION IN CITIES The notions of precarity and precarious employment have been central to recent debates around exploitative labour relations among migrants. Deriving from the French précarité (Waite, 2009), precarity is more general and ‘designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (Butler, 2009,

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126  Handbook of urban geography p. ii). Precarious employment is generally thought to be unstable, lacking security and protection and involving unpredictable shifts and anti-social hours (Lewis et al., 2015a). Precarious work creates précarité and vulnerability in people’s lives beyond the labour market thus limiting their ability to anticipate the future (Anderson, 2010, p. 304). Therefore, a differentiation is usually made between two ‘camps’ of thinking between ‘precarious work and precarious lives’ (Lewis et al., 2015b, p. 584) even if they are closely interrelated as concepts (Strauss, 2018). The emergence of precarity as a concept is relatively recent especially as it relates to the casualization of labour linked with neoliberal restructuring and globalization that, according to Standing (2011), has created a contemporary ‘precariat’ or class of informalized worker. However, precarity is not necessarily a historically specific outcome of post-Fordist labour relations (Waite, 2009) and the precariat is not an undifferentiated class of worker (Munck, 2013). Indeed, precarious work can be experienced by the working classes and professional classes and has been experienced in many countries of the Global South for decades, albeit under the guise of informality or informal sector employment (Munck, 2013; Millar, 2017). Another important distinction has been made between precarious and vulnerable employment with the former affording greater agency to the worker and acknowledging a wide range of structural factors that create the exploitative conditions in the first place (Waite, 2009; Millar, 2017). In order to understand the nature of precarious employment in more depth, several scholars have used Skrivankova’s (2010) ‘continuum of labour exploitation’. This aims to move beyond the binary of forced labour and decent work to encompass the variety of discrimination and labour violations which range from more minor forms of exploitation such as breaches of contract to serious forms of forced labour. Precarity and precarious employment have increasingly been associated with migration and especially low-paid, low-status work undertaken by migrants. Indeed, the notion of ‘hyper-precarity’ has emerged from these debates to denote the most extreme levels of exploitation, insecurity and ‘unfreedoms’ experienced by irregular migrant workers employed in the lower echelons of the labour market (Lewis et al., 2015b). Irregular migrants with no citizenship rights have therefore become ‘emblematic’ of severely exploitative employment conditions as ‘precarious workers’ (Anderson, 2010, p. 304). The utility of exploring migrants’ working conditions through the combined framework of precarious employment and a continuum of labour exploitation has been indicated in the case of Bolivian migration to Santiago, Chile. While the working conditions of the majority of participants in Ryburn’s research could best be described as precarious and on a continuum of labour exploitation, there were d ­ ifferences in the level of severity. For example, more than in the cleaning sector where at

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Metropolitan mobilities  ­127 least basic pay was usually provided, conditions of work in the wholesale garment retail industry were especially precarious with multiple abuses of labour rights including trafficking. Through a disorienting and coercive process, women workers had been brought from Bolivia to Santiago where they were forced to work sixteen hour days, with half a day off per week. They slept in bunk beds in a room adjacent to their workplace. They were not paid, but were promised that they would be at the end of one year. Furthermore, they were made to believe that under Chilean law they were bonded to one employer for a year, which was not the case. This was a clear case of trafficking for labour exploitation – at the sharp end of the continuum of labour exploitation (Hopper and Hidalgo, 2006). In another case from London where onward migrants had citizenship rights as EU citizens, a recent survey of 400 Latin Americans recently arrived from other European countries showed that half worked in contract cleaning jobs as their only option (usually because of English language difficulties), with most working fragmented hours late at night and early in the morning. In turn, over one-third (35 per cent) had more than one job with 9 per cent having three or four jobs. Although everyone earned more than the National Minimum Wage, three-quarters earned less than the London Living Wage (LLW) at the time (the amount required to meet basic needs in the city) which was much more than the London working population as a whole. Therefore, although these migrants with full citizenship rights were integrated into the formal London labour market and earning legally minimum wages, their conditions of work were precarious, albeit not at the extreme end of the continuum of labour exploitation. Yet, 45 per cent reported having experienced problems in their workplace with some nationalities such as Bolivians being much more likely to discuss exploitation (74 per cent), such as not being paid for work carried out and verbal abuse. In addition, their wider lives were characterized by precarity and even hyper-precarity in that nearly half had to share their accommodation with other families or individuals and nearly a third considered their housing to be overcrowded. Also significant was that half had borrowed money to ‘get-by’ since leaving their homelands (McIlwaine and Bunge, 2016). Therefore, low-paid migrant workers in cities across the world tend to live and work in more precarious circumstances than their non-migrant counterparts. However, and again thinking transnationally, migrants working in cities of the Global South are more likely to work at the extreme end of a continuum of labour exploitation because of less developed labour legislation and/or less developed enforcement procedures and impunity. In all cases, however, it is also important to remember that migrants are also agents in these processes and not victims of wider forces.

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128  Handbook of urban geography

8.4 DESKILLING AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITIES AMONG MIGRANTS IN CITIES The creation of the MDL, which entails the precarious employment of migrants within a wider context of a continuum of labour exploitation, is usually predicated on processes of deskilling. This is indicative of a broader need to take into account the intersecting temporalities of metropolitan mobilities as well as the spatialities. Many migration regimes use a range of distinctions about what constitutes being skilled as a way of carefully constructing the nature of the labour market. This is done in ways that intend to enable the skilled and those required by the economy to enter, and to prevent entry of those perceived as ‘undesirable’, such as the unskilled and criminals (Anderson, 2010; Wills et al., 2010). The reality tends, however, to be much more complicated than the strictures of migration regimes allow for. Definitions of skilled workers vary by context, immigration regulations and professional accreditation, although ‘highly skilled’ usually refers to those with tertiary education and specialized experience in various fields. Yet many migrants who are skilled may not migrate as such, especially women (Kofman and Raghuram, 2006) and those with relatively free movement such as those within the EU (Wills et al., 2009). Indeed, language difficulties and lack of recognition of foreign credentials serve as key barriers to entering through the highly-skilled migrant route and/or act to channel well-educated migrants into the lowpaid, low status sectors of labour markets. Several scholars have drawn on Bourdieu’s institutional cultural capital to show how migrants’ labour market integration is affected by their ability to mobilize educational qualifications, language skills or other embodied capital such as accents, race or ethnicity – collectively known as symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986; Kelly and Lusis, 2006). In the case of Latin Americans in London, 70 per cent of migrants had some form of tertiary level education, yet 30 per cent of all migrants were able to speak only a little or no English. This resulted in half working in elementary jobs, mainly in the cleaning sector, again with those who were irregular being the most marginalized by these processes. Indeed, the lack of linguistic capital among this group was one of the primary reasons for their lack of mobility in the labour market even though many had actively aspired to move to London to learn English, part of a suite of capital accumulation mechanisms that they were then unable to realize (McIlwaine, 2012). Indeed, once working in destination labour markets, migrants continue to face significant obstacles to their occupational mobility. In what has been referred to as ‘brain abuse’ in the context of Vancouver, Canada, migrants also face active discrimination on the part of employers as well as lack of

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Metropolitan mobilities  ­129 familiarity with workplace practices (Bauder, 2003) making it difficult for them to move out of elementary jobs. However, it is often assumed that over time, migrants can gradually move into higher status work the longer they remain both in the country and in the specific labour market, learn the language and integrate into the wider society (Gilmartin and Bigge, 2015 on EU migrants in Dublin). While this is true in many cases, it is not universal. In Toronto, Canada, for example, Filipino migrants faced especially severe deskilling, which endures for a combination of reasons rooted in ‘being Filipino’ and being ‘culturally read’ in a particular way in a society linked with deep-seated racialization and discrimination that is passed from the first to second generations (Kelly et al., 2009). Similar processes have been found in London in research with onward Latin American migrants moving mainly from Spain. Although these migrants have EU citizenship rights, patterns of extremely marked downward occupational mobility emerged. This was evidenced by the fact that 65 per cent worked in cleaning when they arrived in London compared with only 1.3 per cent back home in Latin America and only 9.5 per cent in their previous country of residence (i.e. Spain for the most part). Partly related to their concentration in cleaning in London, very low proportions of onward migrants had their own business (1.5 per cent) or were self-employed (9 per cent) reflecting their recent arrival and lack of economic and social capital to establish businesses (McIlwaine and Bunge, 2016). This said, another study with Latin Americans in the city indicated that discrimination in work such as cleaning meant that establishing own account businesses, especially in restaurants, shops and cafes serving their own community was the only way that they could ensure some occupational mobility in a competitive labour market (McIlwaine et al., 2011). Indeed, this relates to wider labour market processes whereby ethnic minority and migrant entrepreneurs with access to resources, new market opportunities and business ideas transnationally, can develop a potential ‘diversity dividend’ to counteract their otherwise disadvantaged position in the MDL (Portes et al., 1999; McEwan et al., 2005). Given the number of migrants involved in these types of activities compared with the total number seeking decent work (Riaño, 2011), however, it is unlikely that such entrepreneurial activity will be able to provide for all those seeking to move out of precarious work. The MDL is therefore dynamic in relation to its rotating membership and transnational variations in its composition, yet it is much more entrenched when it comes to migrants being able to develop skills and tools to move beyond the types of precarious work that characterize it. There is some potential to develop small businesses, especially in terms of capitalizing on transnational linkages as a way of countering ­discrimination (Bagwell,

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130  Handbook of urban geography 2015), yet ultimately this is quite limited. Furthermore, entrepreneurial opportunities tend to be more developed in cities of the Global North while migrants trying to get by in cities of the South will in effect join those making a living in the already saturated informal sector. However, it is also important not to lose sight of migrant agency in these discussions. Despite lack of occupational mobility, some migrants working in precarious employment still exercise agency in relation to their decision to move, their ability to challenge workplace abuses, collective workplace action, and organizing around other aspects of social life (Paret and Gleeson, 2016). For example, in relation to temporary migrant workers in London, Alberti (2014) explores how some manage to escape poor working conditions through using their ‘exit power’ and move from one job to another within a given labour market or indeed to another country.

8.5 CONCLUSIONS This chapter has focused on a series of core conceptualizations and related issues for understanding the role of low-paid migrant labour in urban labour markets across the world including the migrant division of labour (MDL), precarious employment, precarity and a continuum of labour exploitation, as well as deskilling and occupational mobilities. While most research to date around these various aspects of metropolitan mobilities has assumed that these theorizations are relevant for interpreting processes in the Global North and that the underlying phenomena are peculiar to cities located there, we suggest that these play across North and South in transnational ways. This is because, first, urban systems are increasingly global in nature in terms of movement of goods, capital and people, second, so many international migrants move from countries in the South to those in the North, and, finally, there are increasingly important South– South flows of migrant workers to cities. Indeed, we also argue that it is extremely important to take the spatialities and temporalities of migrant labour into account within cities, and especially their transnational dimensions and how these can change over time. Furthermore, while low-paid migrant labour across the world is invariably incorporated into urban economies in ways that advantage employers and capitalism, migrants are also agents of change within these processes. Although their precarious working conditions might be highly exploitative everywhere, those who move have the potential to improve their lives if not for themselves, then perhaps for their children in the future.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Cathy McIlwaine would like to thank the Trust for London for funding her two projects on the Latin American community in London and the Latin American Women’s Rights Service for their partnership in both. Megan Ryburn would like to acknowledge the Queen Mary University of London Principal’s Studentship for funding her doctoral research.

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132  Handbook of urban geography Kelly, P. and T. Lusis (2006), ‘Migration and the transnational habitus’, Environment and Planning A, 38 (5), 831–847. Kilkey, M. (2010), ‘Men and domestic labor: a missing link in the global care chain’, Men and Masculinities, 13 (1), 126–149. Kofman, E. and P. Raghuram (2006), ‘Gender and global labour migrations: incorporating skilled workers’, Antipode, 38 (2), 282–303. Leal Trujillo, J., J. Parilla and S. Razmilic (2016), Global Santiago: Profiling the Metropolitan Region’s International Competitiveness and Connections, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Leitner H. and P. Ehrkamp (2006), ‘Transnationalism and migrants’ imaginings of citizenship’, Environment and Planning A, 38 (9), 1615–1632. Lewis, H., P. Dwyer, S. Hodkinson and L. Waite (2015a), Precarious Lives: Forced Labour, Exploitation and Asylum, Bristol: Policy Press. Lewis, H., P. Dwyer, S. Hodkinson and L. Waite (2015b), ‘Hyper-precarious lives: migrants, work and forced labour in the Global North’, Progress in Human Geography, 39 (3), 580–600. May, J., J. Wills, K. Datta, Y. Evans, J. Herbert and C. McIlwaine (2007), ‘Keeping London working: global cities, the British state, and London’s new migrant division of labour’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS, 32, 151–167. McDowell, L. (2008), ‘Thinking through work: complex inequalities, constructions of difference and trans-national migrants’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (4), 491–507. McDowell, L., A. Batnitzky and S. Dyer (2009), ‘Precarious work and economic migration: emerging immigrant divisions of labour in greater London’s service sector’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33 (1), 3–25. McEwan, C., J. Pollard and N. Henry (2005), ‘The “global” in the city economy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (4), 916–933. McIlwaine, C. (2010), ‘Migrant machismos: exploring gender ideologies and practices among Latin American migrants in London from a multi-scalar perspective’, Gender, Place & Culture, 17 (3), 281–300. McIlwaine, C. (2012), ‘Constructing transnational social spaces among Latin American migrants in Europe: perspectives from the UK’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 5 (2), 271–288. McIlwaine, C. (2015), ‘Legal Latins: creating webs and practices of immigration status among Latin American migrants in London’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (3), 493–511. McIlwaine, C. and D. Bunge (2016), Towards Visibility: The Latin American Community in London, London: Trust for London. McIlwaine, C., J. C. Cock and B. Linneker (2011), No Longer Invisible: The Latin American Community in London, London: Trust for London. McIlwaine, C. and K. Datta (2014), ‘Sustaining a global city at work: resilient geographies of a migrant division of labour’, in Rob Imrie and Loretta Lees (eds), Sustainable London? The Future of a Global City, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 111–128. Millar, K. M. (2017), ‘Toward a critical politics of precarity’, Sociology Compass, 11 (6), e12483. Munck, R. (2013), ‘The precariat: a view from the South’, Third World Quarterly, 34 (5), 747–762. Myers, G. (2011), African Cities: Alternative Visions of Theory and Practice, London: Zed. Paret, M. and S. Gleeson (2016), ‘Precarity and agency through a migration lens’, Citizenship Studies, 20 (3–4), 277–294. Parnell, S. and J. Robinson (2012), ‘(Re)theorising cities from the Global South: looking beyond neoliberalism’, Urban Geography, 33 (4), 593–617. Parreñas, R. S. (2000), ‘Migrant Filipina domestic workers and the international division of reproductive labor’, Gender & Society, 14 (4), 560–580. Piore, M. J. (1979), Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Metropolitan mobilities  ­133 Portes, A., L. E. Guarnizo and P. Landolt (1999), ‘The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (2), 217–237. Riaño, Y. (2011), ‘Drawing new boundaries of participation: experiences and strategies of economic citizenship among skilled migrant women in Switzerland’, Environment and Planning A, 43 (7), 1530–1546. Roy, A. (2009), ‘The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory’, Regional Studies, 43 (6), 819–830. Ruhs, M. and B. Anderson (2006), ‘Semi-compliance in the migrant labour market’, COMPAS Working Paper No. 30, at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=911280 (accessed 21 September 2018). Ryburn, M. (2016), ‘Living the Chilean dream? Bolivian migrants’ incorporation in the space of economic citizenship’, Geoforum, 76, 48–58. Skrivankova, K. (2010), ‘Between decent work and forced labour: examining the continuum of exploitation’, JF programme paper: Forced Labour. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Standing, G. (2011), The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury. Stefoni, C. and R. Fernández (2013), ‘Mujeres migrantes en el trabajo dómestico. Entre el servilismo y los derechos’, in Carolina Stefoni (ed.), Mujeres Inmigrantes en Chile: ¿Mano de Obra o Trabajadoras con Derechos?, Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, pp. 42–72. Stenning, A. and S. Dawley (2009), ‘Poles to Newcastle: grounding new migrant flows in peripheral regions’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 16 (3), 273–294. Strauss, K. (2018), ‘Labour geography 1: towards a geography of precarity?’, Progress in Human Geography, 42 (4), 622‒630. Vasta, E. and L. Kandilige (2010), ‘“London the leveller”: Ghanaian work strategies and community solidarity’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (4), 581–598. Waite, L. (2009), ‘A place and space for a critical geography of precarity?’, Geography Compass, 3 (1), 412–433. Waldinger, R. and M. I. Lichter (2003), How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor, Berkeley: University of California Press. Wills, J., K. Datta, Y. Evans, J. Herbert, J. May and C. McIlwaine (2010), Global Cities at Work, London: Pluto Press. Wills, J., J. May, K. Datta, Y. Evans, J. Herbert and C. McIlwaine (2009), ‘London’s migrant division of labour’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 16 (3), 257–271. Yeates, N. (2012), ‘Global care chains: a state-of-the-art review and future directions in care transnationalization research’, Global Networks, 12 (2), 135–154.

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9.  Refugee mobility across networks and cities Ilse Van Liempt and Francesco Vecchio

9.1 INTRODUCTION: THE URBANIZATION OF REFUGEES The number of refugees moving to cities has increased over recent decades. More than half of the world’s refugees now live in cities, whether in wealthier or in developing countries. Previously the norm for refugees was to live in refugee camps in the geographies where their displacement originated (UNHCR, 2009). Their urbanization has become a growing concern for policy-makers, aid agencies and scholars alike, especially in view of governments in wealthier countries attempting to curb the mobility of refugees whose journey is said to pose serious security risks, and agencies in the South struggling to reach out to refugees desperate to survive. Cities have thus begun to play a crucial role in refugee movements and it is expected that they will become even more important for refugees’ settlement in the near future. Cities offer opportunities. However, the conditions of ‘exception’ that apply to refugee camps, as explained by Agamben (1995), may be seen to apply to cities as a whole in the context of refugee migration (see also Al-Qutub, 1989; Perouse de Montclos and Kagwanja, 2000). Kreichauf (2018), for example, shows how asylum accommodation centres in cities like Athens, Berlin and Copenhagen produce structural barriers for refugees trying to build a new life. In line with Minca (2015), we argue that there is a need to incorporate ‘camp studies’ into the broader field of political geography, not merely as spaces of exception but also as constitutive hubs of much broader geopolitical economies that help us understand the relation between cities and refugees. Agamben (1995) described the conditions facing refugees in camps as ‘inhumana’ (inhuman), wherein the incarcerated become exceptionally excluded from the boundaries of humanity according to laws which make the personal subjectivity of the judicial agent no longer distinct. Following this line of reasoning, Hyndman (2000) argues that refugee camps symbolize exception because they operate within and outside the host state and its laws by having their own structure, budget and rules. A similar argument 134

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Refugee mobility across networks and cities  ­135 around exception has been made by carceral geographers concerned with new forms of concentration camps, prisons and transit and detention centres (see, for instance, Gill, 2010; Mountz, 2011; Moran, 2012; Moran et al., 2012; Mountz et al., 2013). When refugees move to urban areas clandestinely, they become illegalized, vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, with their human rights often denied. Their situation closely resembles the condition of ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1995) although with some differences. Descriptions of the conditions under which refugees live in cities have revealed distinct socio-legal spaces in which urban refugees are often denied access to rights and services. In Lebanon, legislation denies Palestinians rights including those of owning or inheriting property or of being employed in over 72 different professions (Halabi, 2004; Sayigh, 2001). These policies marginalize Palestinians economically and spatially, forcing them to inhabit overcrowded, camp-like areas on city peripheries (see also Saunders, 2010). This reality signals a deeper academic concern regarding what constitutes a camp and reflects society’s attitude towards refugees. The uncertain status of urban refugees and the difficulties they face obtaining a fixed, recognized identity for the future makes the political crisis around refugee migration very visible in concrete urban settings. It also highlights a condition wherein the camp is not immediately visible but becomes an invisible construct of laws, policies and regulations hindering internal mobility and legal rights. While the literature analyses the top-down structure that paralyses human agency, the social reality of refugees with an often entrepreneurial approach to life hardly resembles Agamben’s bare life, and indeed demonstrates that refugees make, or attempt to make, the most of their precarity in order to survive. In this light, refugee camps can be seen as cities with their own complex social arrangements and economic opportunities. The interactive website – http://refugeerepublic.submarinechannel.com – about the Syrian refugee camp Domiz, in northern Iraq, launched in 2014, visual artist Jan Rothuizen, journalist Martijn van Tol and photographer Dirk Jan Visser illustrates how the camp gradually transformed from a temporary refuge to a makeshift town, where people live and work, go to school, start a business, see a doctor and even marry. Agier (2002) and Malkki (2002) question refugee camps when they ask if camps can be seen as cities in their own right, despite the imposed rules on their formation. The logic of refugee camps rests very much on their temporality. However, exile usually takes much longer than anticipated and becomes more permanent. Some refugee camps, contrary to what they were meant to be, have established themselves as urban settlements (Perouse de Montclos and Kagwanja, 2000). In cities, the geographies and social spaces that the law forces refugees to inhabit constitute a camp which the refugees must

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136  Handbook of urban geography come to terms with. In so doing they become agents and subjects of these spaces’ economic development. In this chapter, we understand the city as an important lens through which to interrogate refugees’ mobility, as places both with camp-like conditions and of opportunities for change. We base our insights on two case-studies we are familiar with – South Asian and sub-Saharan African asylum-seekers in Hong Kong, and Somali refugees in London who previously lived in the Netherlands. We aim to unfold the complexity of refugee politics – how refugees are contained and made (in)visible and how they themselves contribute to their condition, survival and city development.

9.2  REFUGEE MOBILITY Refugee mobility is bound by an international legal framework for the protection of refugees, established in 1945 when the Allied Forces were faced with the problem of resettling a massive number of displaced people in Europe. The UNHCR mandate was later prolonged to assist refugees who slipped through the tightly secured Iron Curtain. Western countries’ commitment to human rights, confirmed by their adherence to refugee conventions, was supported by the limited number of refugees who made it through and their own political agenda aimed at embarrassing communist states during the Cold War (Keely, 2001). By the mid-1980s, refugee flows unexpectedly evolved with the multiplication of refugee situations (Black, 1993). Increasing numbers of people travelled from impoverished and dangerous lands on the periphery of the world to core, wealthy nations – their numbers and diversity creating a complex ‘problem’ which challenged both legal frameworks and the conscience of receiving societies (Cohen, 2006). This enduring problem has since magnified and today challenges European governments facing ever-mounting pressure to curb inflows exacerbated by the most refugee arrivals since the Second World War. At a macro level, these new arrivals can be explained by the proliferation of forces that have intensively restructured our lives, establishing ever denser networks that alter the character of our societies and the intrinsic cultural identity that underlies their formation (Castells, 1989). According to Harvey (1989), globalization creates a ‘time–space compression’ where revolutions in communication technologies and the use of more-efficient and cheaper transportation reduce the distance between spaces and reshape time as a controllable variable. In this, the entire world is linked together, as countries, regions and cities become dynamically connected through the movement and exchange of goods and entities – including

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Refugee mobility across networks and cities  ­137 people (Fawcett, 1989; Kritz et al., 1992). Wallerstein (1979), in particular, argues that the penetration of capitalism into non-capitalist societies disrupts more-traditional ways of living, producing a surplus of unemployed individuals who are forced to move into capitalist sectors, first in the cities of their region and then to international destinations, the latter accessed via the transnational linkages opened by foreign investment, trade and the unprecedented intensity and speed with which goods, services and information flow across the globe (Held and McGrew, 2003). Here cities are both the driver and the result of increased interconnectedness and patterned migratory movements, whether in developing or wealthier societies (Sassen, 2001; Price and Benton-Short, 2008). However, the above argument is pitched at a level that has been said to overlook the role of the state in explaining the beginning and scale of migration flows. From a politico-scientific perspective, Haddad (2008, p. 1) argues that refugees have become ‘an inevitable if unintended consequence of the international states system’. Drawing on ‘state theory’ (Hollifield, 2000), Zolberg et al. (1989) similarly contend that the emergence of unequal capitalist relations of production are as responsible for the failure of societies in the developing world to hold together as pre-existing colonial inequalities based on the formation of a nation-state’s system. Western states can be directly or indirectly involved in political violence abroad, depending on the support or opposition of governments in the South to the expansion of the global economy. However, the disruption of the development of a society may trigger population movements in response to the state failing to meet the fundamental needs of its citizens (Kane, 1995). Thus it appears that the collapse of contemporary societies generates war and violence in the form of internal conflicts rather than disputes between sovereign states. The nature of the violence that follows can be highly disruptive, as civilians may be specifically targeted (Kaldor, 2001), and quantitatively more-complex refugee situations are created as people fearing for their lives are driven away from their homes (Zolberg et al., 1989). This latest shift in refugee flows is at the root of the politicization of the issue of asylum-seeking today, thus affecting the protection, mobility and public perception of refugees in receiving societies. In times of hardship following the economic crisis of the early 1970s, European countries were the first to experience the high increase in arrivals (Castles, 2008). At the time, policy-makers and government officials began to view asylum as a problem of quantitative implications. A ‘cascade of modifications’ of immigration laws followed in the next few years, reflecting a restrictive approach aimed at impacting the migration of asylum-seekers, making their journey and choice of destination more difficult and their subsequent stay extremely unattractive (Ramakers 1997, p. 107). Refugee recognition

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138  Handbook of urban geography rates fell as a consequence, providing governments in core countries with an effective tool for representing modern asylum-seekers as economic migrants whose entry was to be restricted as they posed an alleged threat to the security and wellbeing of receiving societies.

9.3  REFUGEE NETWORKS However, refugee camps in developing countries do not constitute a oneoff solution for the problems which refugees face. Their security can be compromised by the vicinity of these camps to areas of conflict and the protracted limbo in which their inhabitants are often forced to live while waiting for more-permanent solutions. Affected by a punitive culture of control that prioritizes the logic of deterrence in developed countries (Bosworth and Guild, 2008), it is no surprise that micro-level refugee networks have prompted large numbers of asylum-seekers to either leave refugee camps or bypass them altogether in search for shelter in alternative places. Large numbers of undeterred asylum-seekers increasingly take ever-more-dangerous and costly journeys to gain access to protection in their preferred destination. Others, however, may simply ‘head for countries that are more open to migration and/or less capable of enforcing immigration regulations’ (Haugen, 2012, p. 66). Increasing numbers of refugees today travel to easier-to-reach places, where high standards of economic growth have been achieved through increased connectedness to the global economy (Vecchio, 2015). Research in many geographical contexts reveals the importance of agents and middlemen in facilitating migration at the low end of the social spectrum (Kyle and Koslowski, 2001; Van Liempt, 2007; Zhang, 2007; Vecchio, 2009; Koser, 2009; Alpes, 2011; Sanchez, 2015). Facilitators increasingly take on some of the traditional functions previously held by relatives and friends insomuch as they convey information about both core and peripheral destinations, the latter often temporarily or morepermanently replacing the former in journeys interspersed by an increased reliance on more-stringent border controls in developed nations. However, whereas some agents make a life out of their clients’ lack of mobility and deliver them to their preferred destination as promised (Koser, 2009), others may be less worried about their reputation and engage in this line of business for profit only, often resulting in asylum-seekers having little say in the final destination. When asylum-seekers arrive in little-known places they form new network ties, the impact of which may be significant in raising the profile of that particular place as a new destination on the geopolitical map of safe places to travel to for future asylum-seekers.

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Refugee mobility across networks and cities  ­139 Refugee networks thus create connections that inform migration decisions, convey resources and allow migration to become self-perpetrating and cumulative in nature (Massey et al., 2002). New ties, in particular, that are formed at the micro level are often with local co-nationals whom asylum-seekers meet on arrival, generally of an economic nature and often exploitative (Collyer, 2005). This is because new destinations may be easier to reach, but often lack resources or are unwilling to grant refugees the rights to which they are entitled according to international conventions that are laxly regarded or do not apply in these countries. Thus our choice of Hong Kong and London reflects a concern with larger, interconnected cities which, because of their economy and reputation, often become the last point of arrival for people on the move who have the financial capacity and connections to reach them. Our aim here is not to argue about whether global cities attract more migrants than other cities (cf. Robinson, 2006). Rather, in our case-study cities, we noticed how personal networks and specific policies can constitute the premise for the formation of a camp of Agambenian structure, and its development into a restrained environment where refugee agency is, however, not lacking due to the economic structure that supports these cities’ global status. 9.3.1 Hong Kong and Asylum-Seekers’ Networked Economic Transactions Despite much of Hong Kong’s population descending from people who escaped rural poverty and political persecution in China between the 1950s and 1980s, asylum-seeking is a new phenomenon there, with the first noticeable upsurge of asylum-seekers from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa appearing in the early 2000s. In fact, Hong Kong made headlines when over 250,000 Vietnamese sought safety in the city in the 1970s and 1980s. This group was first offered refuge but, when their migration was perceived in official and public understandings to be motivated by economic rather than political reasons, the protection framework initially set up to help them was scrapped (Thomas, 2000). Today, there are no specific legal provisions to protect asylum-seekers. Nonetheless, several court rulings have forced the city to operate a screening mechanism to ensure that a person will not be subject to cruel, inhumane treatment if returned to their origin country. Hong Kong provides asylum-seekers with neither legal status nor economic rights, nor does it allow them to remain legally in the city if their persecution claim is substantiated (Ramsden and Marsh, 2013). Authorities simply suspend repatriation procedures until it is deemed safe for asylum-seekers to return.

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140  Handbook of urban geography Asylum-seekers are afforded limited monthly assistance of up to HK$1500 for rent and HK$1200 for groceries, as destitution must be avoided but welfare cannot become a ‘magnet’ for more asylum-seekers to travel to Hong Kong (Legislative Council, 2015a). The result is welfare that is criticized by advocates and refugees alike as inadequate to meet basic needs in an expensive city. The accommodation asylum-seekers can secure for this amount is typically only available in slum areas at the margins of wealthier society. Even then, the cost of many rooms is greater than the government subsidy. Asylum-seekers thus face social marginalization and discrimination, amplified by language barriers and the ban on working. The constraints they face reveal a camp wherein asylum-seekers are de facto turned into a well-defined group of underprivileged and vulnerable individuals. Yet, this situation forces asylum-seekers to ensure their survival by relying mostly on their co-nationals for support and information, support which tends to come, however, in the form of income-generating activities. Asylum-seekers’ livelihoods are thus criminalized, while their working enables their stigmatization as economic migrants which then legitimizes welfare being set at levels that should discourage migration (Vecchio and Gerard, 2015). In what might be called a self-fulfilling cycle, asylum-seekers are enclosed within legal barriers that dictate their social and geographical environment. Against this grim backdrop, the number of asylum-seekers in Hong Kong has grown steadily from a few hundred in the early 2000s to 10,450 in 2015 (Legislative Council, 2015b). This number is well below reported figures in London and the UK, yet it highlights a situation in which policy objectives of discouragement may not be reached when multiple forces and individual agency play to produce refugee mobility. First, other than the push factors involved in refugee migration, it is plausible that refugee flight is dependent on growing economic links between China and the developing countries from where asylum-seekers originate (Vecchio, 2015). For example, hundreds of thousands of Africans make a living mostly as tourists and overstayers in China by trading cheap China-manufactured garments and electronics with their origin countries (Haugen, 2012). Hong Kong plays a vital role in this trade as a shipping port. Further, it is believed to be a law-abiding place where the rule of law is treasured and respected, thereby providing a legal environment that tourist traders and refugees believe protects and/or prevents them from being cheated as easily as in China. In this context, it appears that the greater the number of Africans who go to Hong Kong and China for business is, the more Africans become familiar with the region through either the stories they hear from their co-nationals or the cheap imported goods that appear in the local markets. Additionally, the more Hong Kong becomes known as an easier-to-entry

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Refugee mobility across networks and cities  ­141 developed destination, the more prospective asylum-seekers are directed by their networks to this location. Hong Kong is now assumed to be a city where asylum-seekers can stay, despite the fact that assistance is limited and legal status denied. Indeed, while its relatively liberal visa regime and geographical position make it an affordable destination, information is largely shared by facilitators and asylum-seekers alike, who may only share views about law enforcement being lenient and asylum-seekers de facto earning basic salaries (Vecchio, 2015). Second, as Hong Kong is elevated to core status in contemporary migration hierarchies through increasing flows of goods and information, the activities with which asylum-seekers engage are dependent on opportunities they find and how these are policed in Hong Kong. Most notably, asylum-seekers work within economic sectors that are constitutive of, and reliant upon, increased labour flexibility – one of the most salient trends of contemporary capitalist labour relations. Sassen (2001) famously argued that, under current economic conditions, especially in core cities, several sectors of the economy experience growing pressure to minimize costs and force governments to facilitate the controlling of labour mainly by purely economic market forces. More specifically, asylum-seekers in Hong Kong provide the muscles that power sectors in small-scale construction, cleaning and recycling. They are paid less than local residents for jobs that citizens do not want to do. Further, they operate within the traditional Hong Kong port-city economy to expedite and create new flows by either catering for increased tourist demand or trading in inexpensive garments, mobile phones and second-hand car parts to destinations that are difficult to access for local Chinese who lack similar human capital. 9.3.2  London: An Attractive but Hard-to-Reach Global City Although the UK has a longstanding track record of hosting refugees under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, recent decades have seen the British government crafting an immigration regime that focuses on reducing freedom of movement – particularly of so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ – as a direct response to what has been perceived to be an ‘asylum influx’ (Goodman, 2008). The ongoing Brexit negotiations might also have an impact on the number of asylum-seekers arriving in the UK. As asylum debates continue to dominate political and media spaces, media coverage has helped to incite a ‘moral panic’, reinforcing the public perception that illegal migrants in general, and asylum-seekers in particular, are a threat to national sovereignty (see, for example, Goodman, 2008). Apart from trying to reduce numbers, asylum policy has also been directly focused on restricting and curtailing the social and economic

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142  Handbook of urban geography rights and entitlements of the asylum-seeking population, including the right to work (Bloch, 2008), making it harder for asylum-seekers to survive in the city. From this perspective, asylum-seekers can be seen as competitors for survival in the poorer strata of the local population. This seems particularly the case as the economic distance between advanced and developing economies is decreasing overall but the divide between the rich and the poor both between and in the two worlds is increasing. In London, poverty is debatable (Hamnett, 1994) but an ESRC-funded research project entitled Global Cities at Work: Migrant Workers in Low-Paid Employment in London examined recent immigrants, refugees onward-migrating and asylum-seekers, demonstrating how these groups dominate the low-paid sectors of London’s labour market, the survival of which is often entangled with the stories of cleaners, hotel workers and care assistants who face abuse and exploitation. They earn wages barely above the legal minimum (Evans et al., 2005), if not below (Lewis et al., 2015). Exploitation at work is not new but the past few decades have seen it growing as a result of increased globalization and the heightened financial pressure faced by ever-increasing layers of subcontractors in the on-going economic crisis and the related policy of austerity. London has, for a long time, been at the centre of academic research trying to unpack the contested interconnection between the present times of globalization and the precarious labour conditions that Sassen theorizes as characteristic of global cities (Hamnett, 1996; Evans et al., 2005). National and urban policies and politics in the UK have even heightened the precarity that conjures up migrant uncertainty and instability, thereby producing the workforce upon which the London labour market relies (Lewis et al., 2015; Bloch and McKay, 2016). Nonetheless, the magnitude of the onward mobility of asylum-seekers within Europe and of former refugees from other European countries to the UK – particularly to London – has been on the increase, in terms of both documented and undocumented migrants. Refugee camps at the French–British border are still popular places from where asylum-seekers try to find an opportunity to get to the UK. Besides, a growing body of literature highlights that naturalized third-country nationals are making use of their ‘freedom of movement’ within the EU context to try to get to the UK. Dutch Somalis, Swedish Iranians and German Nigerians, for example, move to the UK as a result of the discrimination and lack of opportunities they experience in their previous place of residence (Van Liempt, 2011; Ahrens et al., 2016). It is not yet clear how the Brexit negotiations will impact on these internal migration flows within the EU. Refugee migration is a dynamic process driven by many reasons at different levels and at different moments in time (Van Liempt, 2011). For

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Refugee mobility across networks and cities  ­143 some, the move to London might be a career move as the result of a disappointed work life as a refugee in another European city. Other refugees’ decisions are more embedded in transnational family networks and driven by social and emotional support. Again others move within the UK, often away from a ‘prison-like’ situation in a dispersal location to a city where they can find more freedom and/or work. The UK government has long operated a policy of territorial dispersal of asylum-seekers but refugees may very well negotiate the negative effects of dispersal and containment by moving elsewhere. London is viewed by many as a place with more space for cultural differences and as offering more possibilities to belong. Job opportunities are a core reason for people moving to this city, but London’s cosmopolitan character also makes it an attractive place for asylum-seekers and refugees who feel less foreign there. Further, as most refugees tend to gather there, more networks are built that make it natural for others to follow in their footsteps and move to the city.

9.4 CONCLUSION This chapter has demonstrated that networks and cities are important lenses through which to interrogate refugees’ mobility. When refugee networks expand, new resources become available and eventually more people are able to move along these established paths. Simultaneously, refugee mobility is impacted differently by various state policies, politics and refugees’ growing dependency on third parties for their migration, which causes a distortion in refugee mobility. While many refugees continue to head for hard-to-reach yet desirable cities in Europe – like, for example, London – other refugees in developing countries now pragmatically head for places – like Hong Kong – that are more open to migration and/or less capable of enforcing immigration regulations. Looking at the urban conditions under which refugees live, it becomes pertinent that the concept of the refugee camp as a distinct socio-legal space of conditio inhumana (Agamben, 1995) appears to be very applicable. The camp may not be walled, geographically visible, but deep frustration may be experienced by refugees who feel that they are rendered rightless. It might be worth pointing out that asylum-seekers in Hong Kong often urge the local government to put an end to what they call state hypocrisy, namely the adherence to international covenants that ensure rights while de facto treating asylum-seekers otherwise (Refugee Union, 2016). This city, as well as London, offers them a chance to stay, yet the way they make use of this opportunity depends on the barriers which their camp is setting up on the one hand, and on the resourceful encounters they

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144  Handbook of urban geography are more likely to make in the city, on the other, which can result in their survival while also connecting the cities to their country of origin and the interspersed locations they crossed on their journey to safety.

REFERENCES Agamben, G. (1995), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agier, M. (2002), ‘Between war and city: towards an urban anthropology of refugee camps’, Ethnography, 3 (3), 317–341. Ahrens, J., M. Kelly and I. van Liempt (2016), ‘Free movement? The onward migration of EU citizens born in Somalia, Iran and Nigeria’, Population, Space and Place, 22 (1), 84–98. Alpes, M. J. (2011), Bushfalling: How Young Cameroonians Dare to Migrate, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, at https://research.vu.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/42133993/Alpes​ +PhD.pdf (accessed 26 October 2018). Al-Qutub, Y. I. (1989), ‘Refugee camp cities in the Middle East: a challenge for urban development policies,’ International Sociology, 4 (1), 91–108. Black, R. (1993), ‘Refugees and asylum-seekers in Western Europe: new challenges’, in Richard Black and Vaughan Robinson (eds), Geography and Refugees: Patterns and Processes of Change, London: Belhaven Press, pp. 87–103. Bloch, A. (2008), ‘Refugees in the UK labour market: the contention between economic integration and policy-led labour market restriction’, Journal of Social Policy, 37 (1), 21–36. Bloch, A. and S. McKay (2016), Living on the Margins: Undocumented Migrants in a Global City, Bristol: Policy Press. Bosworth, M. and M. Guild (2008), ‘Governing through migration control’, British Journal of Criminology, 48 (6), 703–719. Castells, M. (1989), The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process, Oxford: Blackwell. Castles, S. (2008), ‘The factors that make and unmake migration policies’, in Alejandro Portes and Josh DeWind (eds), Rethinking Migration: New Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives, Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 29–61. Cohen, R. (2006), Migration and its Enemies: Global Capital, Migrant Labour and the NationState, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Collyer, M. (2005), ‘When do social networks fail to explain migration? Accounting for the movement of Algerian asylum-seekers to the UK’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31 (4), 699–718. Evans, Y., J. Herbert, K. Datta, J. May, C. Mcllwaine and J. Wills (2005), Making the City Work: Low Paid Employment in London, London: Oxfam GB and Queen Mary University of London. Fawcett, J. T. (1989), ‘Networks, linkages and migration systems’, International Migration Review, 23 (3), 671–680. Gill, N. (2010), ‘New state-theoretic approaches to asylum and refugee geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (5), 626–645. Goodman, S. (2008), ‘Justifying the harsh treatment of asylum seekers on the grounds of social cohesion’, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 6, 110–124. Haddad, E. (2008), The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halabi, Z. (2004), ‘Exclusion and identity in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps: a story of sustained conflict’, Environment and Urbanization, 16 (2), 39–48. Hamnett, C. (1994), ‘Socio-economic change in London: professionalization not polarization’, Built Environment, 20 (3), 192‒203.

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Refugee mobility across networks and cities  ­145 Hamnett, C. (1996), ‘Social polarization, economic restructuring and welfare state regimes’, Urban Studies, 33 (8), 1407‒1430. Harvey, D. (1989), The Condition of Post-Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell. Haugen, H. Ø. (2012), ‘Nigerians in China: a second state of immobility’, International Migration, 50 (2), 65–80. Held, D. and A. McGrew (2003), The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, Cambridge: Polity. Hollifield, J. F. (2000), ‘The politics of international migration: how can we ‘bring the state back in’?’, in Caroline B. Brettel and James F. Hollifield (eds), Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 137–157. Hyndman, J. (2000), Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Kaldor, M. (2001), New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kane, H. (1995), The Hour of Departure: Forces that Create Refugees and Migrants, Washington DC: Worldwatch Institute. Keely, C. B. (2001), ‘The international refugee regime(s): the end of the Cold War matters’, International Migration Review, 35 (1), 303–314. Koser, K. (2009), ‘The economics of smuggling people’, Refugee Transition, 23, 10–13. Kreichauf, R. (2018), ‘From forced migration to forced arrival: the campisation of refugee accommodations in European cities’, Comparative Migration Studies, 6 (7), 1–22. Kritz, M. M., L. L. Lim and H. Zlotnik (eds) (1992), International Migration Systems: A Global Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kyle, D. and R. Koslowski (eds) (2001), Global Human Smuggling. Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Legislative Council (2015a), ‘Panel on security: unified screening mechanism for nonrefoulement claims’, LC Paper CB(2)1832/14-15(03), 7 July, at http://www.legco.gov.hk/ yr14-15/english/panels/se/papers/se20150707cb2-1832-3-e.pdf (accessed 26 October 2018). Legislative Council (2015b), ‘Press release’, LCQ12, 28 October, at http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/ general/201510/28/P201510280831.htm (accessed 26 October 2018). Lewis, H., L. Waite, K. Skrivankova and G. Craig (2015), Vulnerability, Exploitation and Migrants. Insecure Work in a Globalised Economy, London: Palgrave. Malkki, L. H. (2002), ‘News from nowhere’, Ethnography, 3 (3), 351–360. Massey, D. S., J. Durand and N. J. Malone (2002), Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Minca, C. (2015), ‘Geographies of the camp’, Political Geography, 49, 74–83. Moran, D. (2012), ‘“Doing time” in carceral space’, Geografiska Annaler, 94 (4), 305–316. Moran, D., L. Piacentini and J. Pallot (2012), ‘Disciplined mobility and carceral geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37 (3), 446–460. Mountz, A. (2011), ‘The enforcement archipelago: detention, haunting, and asylum on islands’, Political Geography, 30 (3), 118–128. Mountz, A., K. Coddington, R. T. Catania and J. Loyd (2013), ‘Conceptualizing detention: mobility containment bordering and exclusion’, Progress in Human Geography, 37 (4), 522–541. Perouse de Montclos, M. A. and P. M. Kagwanja (2000), ‘Refugee camps or cities? The socio-economic dynamics of the Dadaab and Kakuma camps in Northern Kenya’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 13 (2), 205–222. Price, M. and L. Benton-Short (eds) (2008), Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise of Immigrant Gateway Cities, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ramakers, J. (1997), ‘The challenges of refugee protection in Belgium’, in Philip Muus (ed.), Exclusion and Inclusion of Refugees in Contemporary Europe, Utrecht: Ercomer, pp. 96–116. Ramsden, M. and L. Marsh (2013), ‘The “right to work” of refugees in Hong Kong: Ma v Director of Immigration’, International Journal of Refugee Law, 25 (3), 574–596. Refugee Union (2016), ‘Refugee union supports withdrawal from UN Torture Convention’,

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146  Handbook of urban geography at http://www.refugeeunion.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Refugee-Union-supports-with​ drawal-from-UN-Torture-Convention2.pdf (accessed 26 October 2018). Robinson, J. (2006), Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development, London: Routledge. Sanchez, G. E. (2015), Human Smuggling and Border Crossings, London: Routledge. Sassen, S. (2001), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Saunders, D. (2010), Arrival City. How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World, London: Windmill. Sayigh, R. (2001), ‘Palestinian refugees in Lebanon: implementation, transfer or return?’, Middle East Policy, 8 (1), 94–105. Thomas, J. (2000), Ethnocide: A Cultural Narrative of Refugee Detention in Hong Kong, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. UNHCR (2009), ‘Media advisory: half of the world’s refugees now live in cities’, at: http:// www.unhcr.org/4b1cda0e9.html (accessed 26 October 2018). Van Liempt, I. (2007), Navigating Borders. Inside Perspectives into the Process of Human Smuggling towards the Netherlands, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Van Liempt, I. (2011), ‘And then one day they all moved to Leicester’: the relocation of Somalis from the Netherlands to the UK explained,’ Population, Space and Place, 17 (3), 254–266. Vecchio, F. (2009), ‘La dinamica dei flussi migratori nel Sud-Est Asiatico’, in Fondazione ISMU (ed.), XIV Rapporto sulle Migrazioni 2008, Milan: FrancoAngeli, pp. 291–307. Vecchio, F. (2015), Asylum Seeking and the Global City, Abingdon: Routledge. Vecchio, F. and A. Gerard (2015), ‘Surviving the politics of illegality’, in Sharon Pickering and Julie Ham (eds), Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 179–192. Wallerstein, I. (1979), The Capitalist World-Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhang, S. (2007), Smuggling and Trafficking in Human Beings: All Roads Lead to America, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Zolberg, A. R., A. Suhrke and S. Aguayo (1989), Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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10.  Urban infrastructures: four tensions and their effects Tim Schwanen and Denver V. Nixon

10.1 INTRODUCTION Like other fields, Urban Geography has experienced an ‘infrastructural turn’ (Graham, 2009, p. 10) over the past two decades or so. This is in part because of the ‘infrastructure frenzy’ (Cowen, 2017, n.p.) among a wide range of stakeholders, including public authorities, supranational organizations such as the World Bank, private developers, financiers and community groups. For many of these actors, the (re)development of infrastructures for transport, communication, digital data, water, energy and other metabolisms is a key means to facilitate, speed up and increase the resilience of the circulation of people, consumer goods, capital, information, practices and ideas. This in turn serves to make cities and other spatial formations more efficient and extract further profit from what Lefebvre (2003[1970], pp. 3–4) called the ‘urban fabric’ – the spatially extended webs of objects, practices and relationships generated by the explosion of the traditional city across the regional and increasingly planetary scales. However, infrastructure (re)development can also spur protest, ranging from NIMBY-ism to global social movements that trigger debates about social inequalities, (neo)colonialism, climate change, capitalism – as happened with the Standing Rock controversy in North and South Dakota in 2016 (Cowen, 2017). Moreover, as explained below, infrastructure development is not restricted to powerful elites but something that ordinary people engage in on a daily basis. Another driver behind the infrastructural turn has been the realization that infrastructures offer a useful and effective lens on the contemporary urban condition, nature–society relations, everyday life and experience in the city, and politics and governance in specific spaces and times. It is not surprising, then, that interest in infrastructure across Urban Geography has sprawled and become hugely diversified. One of the elements that holds this body of work together is a rejection of common sense notions of infrastructure as ‘hardware’, that is, roads, canals, cables, pipes and so forth. A range of alternative conceptualizations has been developed or 147

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148  Handbook of urban geography borrowed from other disciplines; well-cited examples include ‘architecture for circulation [that provides] the undergirding of modern societies, and . . . generate the ambient environment for everyday life’ (Larkin, 2013, p. 328) and ‘the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure’ (Berlant, 2016, p. 393). This chapter has a dual aim. It will start by charting the evolution of the infrastructural turn in Urban Geography through the discussion of four tensions. It will then illustrate how those infrastructural tensions are closely interrelated and collectively draw attention to key issues for twenty-first-century urbanization through a focus on cycling infrastructures in London and São Paulo. Cycling infrastructures may be modest in scale and imprint on the urban fabric but are (once more) the subject of fetishization. Moreover, they are not only at the centre of questions of access and justice, but also truly interconnected configurations offered by a much wider range of actors than commonly considered, including in a Minority World city such as London. Finally, we will allude to how cycling infrastructures are the subject of extensive experimentation.

10.2 URBAN GEOGRAPHIES OF INFRASTRUCTURE While geographers have long since been interested in infrastructures and the effects they generate (e.g. Garrison et al., 1959; Kosmachev, 1974), they – like other social scientists – have come to use infrastructures as a point of entry into understanding urbanization, sociality, politics, power and lived experience since the 1990s. The literature is too vast and too diverse to summarize here, but it can be introduced with the help of four interrelated tensions that cut across it: (1) visibility/invisibility, (2) c­ onnection/disconnection, (3) standardization/differentiation and (4) normalcy/disruption. Before discussing these tensions, we should point out that their identification hinges on a series of specific understandings about infrastructures. Compared to more traditional and common-sense understandings, the relational approaches rooted in Marxism and ‘materialisms’ (including, for instance, actor-network theory and non-representational theory), discussed below, take infrastructures as processes that are always in formation rather than static objects; infrastructures ‘become’ or co-evolve with their environments, their use and other infrastructures to which they are connected. In addition, infrastructures are not considered to consist predominantly of physical elements but are instead thought of as sociotechnical configurations – formations of interconnected social and

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Urban infrastructures  ­149 technical elements that are material, discursive and affective in nature. This heterogeneity is what allows them to have symbolic power, aesthetic value and/or an ambience or atmosphere (cf. Larkin, 2013). Finally, and related to the previous point, infrastructures are no neutral conduits for circulation but always already political and power-laden, configuring and reconfigured by expectations, norms, values, valorizations and subjectivities. 10.2.1 Visibility/Invisibility Tensions around (in)visibility are discussed in disparate lines of thought on infrastructure. They are evident in Susan Leigh Star’s (1999) observation, informed by Heidegger’s (1962[1927]) famous tool analysis in Being and Time, that working infrastructures shift from being invisible or readyto-hand (Zuhanden) to becoming visible or present-to-hand (Vorhanden) ‘when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout’ (Star, 1999, p. 382). There is an obvious connection here with the normalcy/disruption tension discussed below, but Urban Geography research has also qualified Star’s claims by showing that readiness-tohand (Zuhandenheit) and lived normalcy cannot be assumed for many people in Southern cities (Graham, 2009; Kallianos, 2018). Amin’s (2014) study in Belo Horizonte, for instance, demonstrates how in informal settlements – or rather ‘popular neighbourhoods’ given that they are often the place of residence of most people in Majority World cities (McFarlane and Silver, 2017) – much work is undertaken for infrastructures for water, sewage, energy, public transport and so forth to become invisible and recede ‘into the background of silent provisioning’ (Amin, 2014, p. 151). Amin further shows that invisibility can always be undone by upgrading policies imposed by authorities – as with the construction of a motorway or Bus Rapid Transit connection through the area – or due to gentrification when land values rise after ownership has been settled. The visibility/invisibility tension works out in different ways too. As Kaika and Swyngedouw (2001, p. 125, emphasis in original) have shown, infrastructures and the constituent technological artefacts that become part of the built environment have ‘become the embodiment of progress’ since early modernity, at least in Western Europe and North America. A double fetishization occurred, they suggest. Not only were the ‘underlying relations of production and social power relations’ (p. 130) obscured ­(fetishization in the classical-Marxist sense), but the physical elements of the infrastructures also became ‘objects of delight and desire in themselves’ (p. 130) as symbols of a better future (fetishization à la Walter Benjamin).

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150  Handbook of urban geography And when the infrastructures failed to deliver on their promise of a better society, they were increasingly rendered invisible by moving them to less conspicuous sites – underground, for instance – or overlaying them with newer, more fashionable infrastructures. The historical evolution of transport infrastructure development in Western cities can certainly be read in this manner.1 Consider, for example, how trams, urban rail systems and cycle infrastructures were first seen as manifestations of progress and a better life, and then abandoned in favour of, or at least seen as inferior in all but a few sites to, the sociotechnical configurations of the private car (Cox and Van De Walle, 2007). More recently, however, the ‘rail renaissance’ and ‘cycling boom’ have meant that in high-density locations the momentum seems to have shifted away from the private car and the infrastructures supporting it (Schwanen, 2016a). This is perhaps best demonstrated by the reallocation of road space away from car traffic and the construction of cycle infrastructures by city and metropolitan authorities. It should be noted how these initiatives include the construction of ‘cycle highways’ in cities such as Copenhagen and London (Jensen, 2013; Schwanen, 2016b), which suggest an enduring influence of infrastructures for the private car on how planners, policymakers and commentators think and talk about transport. Even so, the double fetishization of infrastructures as proposed in Kaika and Swyngedouw’s historical analysis can also be observed today. 10.2.2 Connection/Disconnection For McFarlane and Rutherford (2008, p. 366) ‘the development of urban infrastructure is always a highly political process’, and this is perhaps clearest in infrastructure reforms. Graham and Marvin (2001) have argued that after 1960 the ‘modern infrastructure ideal’ – the provision of integrated, standardarized and monopolistic energy, water, waste disposal, transport, communication and other services, often by the state or public sector – came under pressure and was gradually abandoned due to urban financial crises, globalization and urban competition, the rise of neoliberalism and infrastructural consumerism, scepticism about comprehensive urban planning and social and cultural critiques by social movements such as feminism, anti-racism, post-colonialism and environmentalism. Instead, an unbundling of networked infrastructures – that is, segmentation into different service packages – has occurred, allowing for selective connection and disconnection that further undermine the validity of the modern infrastructure ideal: valued users and places are connected whereas others are bypassed, so that ‘premium network spaces’ emerge in

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Urban infrastructures  ­151 which the rich, powerful and often cosmopolitan/transnational elites live, work and consume. Empirical research has shown that urban rail – especially ‘glocal’ city–airport connections – can play a key role in the creation of such premium network places that are more or less inaccessible to large parts of local populations (e.g. Richardson and Jensen, 2008 for Bangkok, Farmer, 2011 for Chicago and Enright, 2016 for Paris). Graham and Marvin’s propositions have been critiqued on various grounds, not least because in many Majority World cities there has never been bundled into monopolistic service provision and service differentiation does not always lead to increased inequality and reduced solidarity (e.g. Coutard, 2008; Wissink, 2013). Nonetheless, it can reasonably be argued that in recent decades and across the planet infrastructures have been subject to a distinctive mode of context-specific enclosure – a differentiated and territorial technique at the heart of capitalism that ‘deprive[s] people of what they create in common’, privileges exchange over use value, re-imagines which spatial practices and subjectivities are appropriate and desirable, and so marginalizes other practices and modes of being (SevillaBuitrago, 2015). Cycle highways are again a case in point as they privilege fast and efficient movement – time is money, after all – by able-bodied, fit and rational commuters travelling to/from paid work over the innumerable other ways in which gendered, aged, racialized and otherwise socially marked bodies can move on bikes. 10.2.3 Standardization/Differentiation The proposition about the demise of the modern infrastructure ideal may not be as generalizable as initially imagined but the ‘normative ideal of homogeneity and centralism continues to significantly shape the way residents, planners, governments and academics think about infrastructures’ (Lawhon et al., 2018, p. 723) in both the Majority and Minority Worlds. For Lawhon et al. and many other scholars (e.g. Meehan, 2014; Wakefield, 2018), centralized infrastructures connect citizens to the state and extend state power. The result is not only increased standardization and homogeneity but also ‘the superimposition of a generic and birds-eye view that structures problem-definition with corresponding blanket solutions for local and specific problems’ (Lawhon et al., 2018, p. 728). Consider Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which has diffused rapidly from Curitiba and Bogota to many cities across the world (Hidalgo and Gutiérrez, 2013). It is often promoted as a means to reduce congestion by speeding up circulation, reduce sprawl and structure urban development, increase land values (and thus creates new opportunities for profit making) and rationalize and formalize existing and fragmented transport

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152  Handbook of urban geography services by semi-legal and -regulated operators (Hidalgo and Gutiérrez, 2013; Cesafsky, 2017) – as if the particular nature of challenges faced by specific cities, or parts thereof, is no more than empirical variation on a universal set of issues. At the same time, the BRT example highlights the importance of unpacking the generic category of ‘the state’ as deployed in many Urban Geography studies of infrastructures. As Wood (2015) and Rizzo (2015) show, the development of BRT systems is not necessarily the outcome of the independent desires or actions of a state apparatus. Such development needs to be placed in a wider ecology of relations where city and state officials and agencies are influenced by, and inform themselves about, exemplar cities elsewhere and/or the practices, arguments and incentives promulgated by supranational agencies (e.g. World Bank, regional development banks) and NGOs (e.g. ITDP – Institute for Transportation & Development Policy), as well as Euro-American consultancy and construction firms that would benefit from BRT development and extension. Given these observations it would make sense, when examining urban infrastructures, to trade a focus on the state for one on the master narrative – the ‘voice that does not problematize diversity [and] speaks unconsciously from the presumed center of things’ (Star, 1999, p. 384). This master narrative, which – it should be emphasized – may itself be comprised of multiple strands, can be identified using the techniques of discourse analysis yet also when it is thrown into question by potential users who are somehow unable to access it. In addition, there are almost always people somehow excluded from, and at worst also displaced by, operational infrastructures. It is nonetheless important to avoid simply victimizing those people as if they are passive cogs in systems of service provision. Some will, at least to some extent, be able to make use of other infrastructures. As Lawhon et al. (2018) argue, particularly in the Majority World, infrastructures coexist in heterogeneous configurations within – and, we would add, beyond – cities. Centralized infrastructures are commonly complemented and/or contested by more decentralized versions offered and maintained by NGOs, social movements, entrepreneurs, and so forth. Lawhon et al. (2018) use the example of sanitation in informal settlements in Kampala, Uganda to draw attention to the multiplicity of different but interconnected infrastructures offered by different organizations and actors, including NGOs, churches, entrepreneurs and neighbours. The differences in ownership and operation are significant, for they each come with specific, embedded power relationships: ‘the provision of services by churches, for instance, . . . may be accompanied by a set of expectations in terms of moral behaviours and possibility of financial support for the church. What happens

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Urban infrastructures  ­153 to users who do not adhere to the doctrines associated with the service provider?’ (Lawhon et al., 2018, p. 728). The idea of differentiation in infrastructure is even more profound in research on social infrastructure – ‘a differentiated set of socio-material practices that make provisions for some of the basics of urban life: being able to get to work, to access schooling, to get basic healthcare and so on’ (McFarlane and Silver, 2017, p. 465). Simone (2004, p. 410), who prefers the term ‘people as infrastructure’, refers to a ‘conjunction of heterogeneous activities, modes of production, and institutional forms [that] constitutes highly mobile and provisional possibilities for how people live and make things, how they use the urban environment and collaborate with one another’. These infrastructures are common across Majority World cities where they are historically and geographically specific, incremental processes – ‘verb’ rather than ‘noun’ (McFarlane and Silver, 2017) – that are built up and continually change over time. They provide the connective tissue that makes popular neighbourhoods inhabitable and help people get by, not least because they enable the mitigation of all kinds of risk, from losing one’s livelihood(s) to not having anyone to look after one’s children when going out to work or getting access to cheap fuel for cooking. However, the notion of social infrastructure has also been criticized. Doherty (2017, p. 200) argues that it is ‘overly celebratory’ and does not sufficiently account for ‘mutual instrumentalization and exploitation’ and is therefore ‘unable to take up the ways in which these infrastructural worlds can be experienced as unfair, exclusionary, degraded, and degrading by those who live and work within them’. He bases these arguments on empirical research with drivers of boda boda – semi-legal motorbike taxis – in Kampala, where they fulfil a key role in keeping the city running. At the same time, these taxis are often seen as the antithesis of Kampala’s version of modernity and a cause of congestion, whilst their drivers are at risk of traffic injury and exploitative labour relations. His call to consider ‘infrastructural violence’ in accounts of social infrastructure is an important reminder that any form of infrastructure is imbricated in power relations and can generate inequality, marginalization and exclusion. Social infrastructures are perhaps best thought of as a double-edged sword: despite the downsides articulated by Doherty, they also contribute to resilience – a major benefit that is heavily valorized in the current era. 10.2.4 Normalcy/Disruption A prevailing preoccupation in recent social science literature on infrastructure is with disruption. Berlant (2016, p. 409), for instance, suggests that ‘we live in the precipice of infrastructure collapse economically,

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154  Handbook of urban geography politically, and in the built and natural world. Mid-20th century forms of expansive world building toward the good life have little or unreliable traction’. Whilst ‘bulwarks against disorder’ at the height of modernity, infrastructures are now ‘epitomizing a fatally flawed idea of hubristic human mastery’ (Wakefield, 2018, pp. 2 and 4). Whole literatures have emerged that seek to prevent and mitigate infrastructure breakdown against a background of the (perceived) increased threat of terrorism, deliberate targeting as part of warfare and protests, extreme weather and natural hazards, as well as black-outs and the ‘normal accidents’ (Perrow, 1984) resulting from increased interconnectivity and technological complexity. In transport research, for instance, the result has been a reinvigoration of network analysis, albeit usually without attention being paid to questions of why vulnerabilities emerge in the first place and/or who or what is affected most adversely (Schwanen, 2017). At the same time, as already indicated, there is also the realization that for very large numbers of people – particularly in the Majority World – the assumption of smooth functioning and normalcy of infrastructures has always been problematic, given that instability, unreliability and Vorhandenheit are commonly experienced. It is for these reasons that Kallianos (2018, p. 760) proposes to ‘deploy infrastructures as kaleidoscopic devices through which to explore the current crisis and its implications for political processes and urban governance’. Multiple governmental responses to that crisis have been examined in the Urban Geography literature. One is securitization, which has taken multiple forms (Graham, 2009), including militarization (Graham, 2012) and ‘urban ecological security’ (Hodson and Marvin, 2009). According to Graham (2012, p. 150), urban infrastructures have increasingly come under the influence of discourses and practices of warfare and militarism as well as ‘technophiliac dreams of anticipation and omniscience’. This has resulted, amongst others, in a proliferation of pre-emptive surveillance technologies and techniques, from CCTV and all kinds of GPS trackand-trace systems to machine learning algorithms seeking to isolate and identify mobile risks. Cowen (2014) has elaborated this form of securitization for global logistics systems. Hodson and Marvin (2009) have speculated that concerns over climate change and resource scarcity have led to a ‘metropolitanization’ of infrastructure networks, first and foremost in global cities. This is evident in (1) the adaptation of infrastructures that increase ‘strategic protection’ (e.g. retrofitting to increase resilience in case of flooding or high temperatures, creation of green infrastructures in cities), (2) attempts to decouple urban infrastructure networks from national ones and thus increase autarky in the provision of energy, water or transportation and (3) the creation of

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Urban infrastructures  ­155 inter-city networks for the exchange of expertise, resources and best practices around resilience improvements (e.g. C40). The creation of cycling infrastructures – networks of cycle lanes or paths, bike sharing schemes, events and media campaigns to encourage cycling and so on – and citylevel electric vehicle charging infrastructures exemplify the decoupling proposed by Hodson and Marvin. However, these examples also suggest that attempts at urban infrastructure securitization in the context of climate change and resource scarcity are not limited to global cities. In the UK, for instance, they can also be observed in secondary and tertiary cities (Schwanen, 2015). Much of the second governmental response – that is, urban experimentation with novel infrastructures (Bulkeley et al., 2014; Evans et al., 2016) – helps to enhance urban ecological security, but also has a suite of other objectives. Climate change mitigation, as well as enhancing urban competitiveness and social redistribution, are other important concerns, depending on which actors are involved. Nonetheless, the majority of experiments, including almost all those with EV recharging and most of those with cycling infrastructure in UK cities, are ‘means through which climate change comes to be learnt and experienced within the urban context’ (Bulkeley et al., 2014, p. 1476) for incumbent actors. In fact, Bulkeley and colleagues suggest, most of these experiments work to maintain incumbents’ hegemonic position at times of transformation and are postpolitical (Swyngedouw, 2009) insofar that they are premised on consensus formation, technocratic management and problem-focused governance. This claim is not to suggest that there are no ‘properly political’ – in the sense of ‘chang[ing] the very framework that determines how things work’ (Žižek, 1999, p. 199) – experiments with urban (transport) infrastructures; however, there is empirical evidence that, at least in UK cities, they play at best a limited role in reconfiguring transport infrastructures in anticipation of climate change and resource scarcity (Schwanen, 2015; see also Hopkins and Schwanen, 2018).

10.3 EVERYDAY CYCLING IN SÃO PAULO AND LONDON Cycling is many things to many people, but it has been (re)discovered by policymakers, planners and academics around the world as a means to make cities more compact, dense, efficient, liveable, cleaner and healthy. This started in Danish, Dutch and German cities in the final quarter of the twentieth century and from there moved to North America and also the Majority World. Numerous local particularities notwithstanding,

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156  Handbook of urban geography discourses and practices around everyday cycling, and how to encourage it, revolve around the creation and expansion of infrastructure as a physical, seemingly stable ‘thing’. Infrastructure is understood most commonly as cycle lanes on streets shared with other road users or segregated cycle paths only to be used by cyclists (and possibly people on scooters, rollerblades, and so forth) and sometimes also as encompassing facilities such as pumps and bike sharing schemes. These characterizations certainly resonate for London and São Paulo, two case studies as part of a research project by the authors of this chapter into the contribution that citizen-led infrastructural initiatives can make to a ‘just’ transition towards more sustainable everyday urban mobility. The decision to focus on London and São Paulo reflected multiple considerations. These included the desire to theorize urban mobility systems and sociotechnical transitions from multiple sites, rather than simply Minority World cities (see also Schwanen (2018) which builds on attempts to ‘world’ and ‘provincialize’ Urban Geography as articulated in Roy and Ong (2011) and Sheppard et al. (2013)). They also relate to the fact that both are cities that are characterized by deep social inequalities and have become national and continental leaders in pro-cycling policies by mayoral governments, even if questions can be raised about who – which social groups, where – have benefited from attempts to expand cycling infrastructures. 10.3.1  Fetishization and Enclosure Cycling infrastructure has been anything but invisible in the past decade in London and São Paulo. It has become profoundly politicized because of the role it has played in mayoral elections since 2000 in both cities, with (elected) mayoral administrations in London more consistently supportive of cycling than in São Paulo. One interpretation of developments in both cities is that many actors have worked hard to render cycling infrastructure invisible – that is, normal and normally functioning – in ways that resemble the efforts in Belo Horizonte’s popular neighbourhoods as documented by Amin (2014), albeit on a larger geographical scale. At the same time, both cities are experiencing a fetishization of cycling infrastructure. Both have seen the creation of a network of dedicated cycle lanes/paths. In São Paulo these are concentrated mostly in the city centre, although there are some scattered fragments in the eastern zone of the city. London authorities attempt to make commuting by bike from outer areas into the city centre easier via ‘cycle highways’, complementing this with more fine-grained networks of ‘quiet ways’ for less confident cyclists and numerous retrofits to existing road infrastructures. Both have also set up public bike sharing schemes (sponsored by banks), launched extensive

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Urban infrastructures  ­157 information and awareness raising campaigns and organized a host of public events. São Paulo is more active in this regard, with Ciclofaixas, officially sanctioned, temporarily segregated cycle lanes on Sundays (9‒4 pm) and Bank Holidays in the city centre. In both cities, then, cycling infrastructures are fetishized à la Walter Benjamin (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2001) and made into objects of delight and desire and as symbols of better futures, albeit by certain groups – this is heavily contested. Cycling infrastructure is fetishized in the traditional Marxist manner as well. Underlying social relations and relations of production are obscured insofar that questions about who benefits from policies, projects and schemes are easily glossed over. A ‘master narrative’ that they benefit everyone and the city in general is widely reproduced, including by public authorities. This is in spite of, at least for London, research suggesting that it is predominantly cis-gender men in their 20s‒40s, the able-bodied, the higher educated and those on medium-high incomes who benefit directly from them (see also Goodman and Cheshire, 2014; TfL, 2017; Lam, 2018; but see Aldred and Dales, 2017). We do not argue against changes to physical infrastructures for cycling, for they can enhance specific individuals’ capabilities to cycle, particularly if those individuals have the skills and confidence to cycle and wider social norms are supportive of cycling. Yet we do question the ‘solutionism’ whereby cycle lanes, cycle paths, bike sharing schemes and so forth are positioned as blanket solutions that are capable of solving all kinds of inadequately analysed problems in particular sites. They might help in certain situations but certainly not for everybody living in or visiting the city. Actually, the risk of a specific form of enclosure looms large. This occurs when cycling infrastructures are co-opted by broader logics of (1)  speeding up and increasing efficiency of the circulation of people and to some extent of goods and information (as with bike couriers), (2) enhancing productivity and urban competitiveness and (3) increasing property and land values – offering the opportunity of financial value capture and speculation (see El-Geneidy et al., 2016). Empirical evidence for (3) is unbeknownst to us for London and São Paulo but logics (1) and (2) feature commonly in policy discourses, usually without due consideration for who or which places are likely to benefit or be excluded from this particular form of enclosure. 10.3.2  Experimentation and Social Infrastructures Cycling infrastructure is so visible in both London and São Paulo for multiple reasons. Not only is it seen as a solution to all kinds of contemporary problems, and is often Vorhanden because of its poor quality and the

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158  Handbook of urban geography risks it generates for cyclists; there is also a wide range of experimentation with cycling infrastructure going on. One way to make sense of the heterogeneity in experimentation is to consider the role of local authorities. A spectrum can be identified, from local authorities being lead actors who are initiator, developer, financier and regulator to them playing a marginal role that is restricted to offering almost no support at all (see also Tonkiss, 2013). Initiatives like London’s cycle superhighways, quiet streets and ‘mini-Hollands’;2 São Paulo’s cycles lanes and paths that have been created using officially sanctioned, red paint; and both cities’ docked bike sharing schemes can be placed at the heavy involvement end of the spectrum. Owing to promotion campaigns, debates in (local) media and their role in election campaigns, these are the infrastructural experiments that are most visible. There is, however, another set of experiments that are led by individual and collectives of citizens and in which local governments play at best a marginal role. These grassroots experiments are very heterogeneous but are united in a focus on social needs and somehow disadvantaged groups in the city. The latter include, but are not limited to, people with disabilities, members of cultural and religious minorities, refugees and asylum seekers, women and gender-variant people, children and low-income residents of deprived neighbourhoods. The experiments themselves consist of regular cycling groups, bicycle repair training, bicycle riding instruction, the provision of navigational aids, temporary street closures and cycle path improvements. Despite minimal financial and human resources, most originators, leaders and staff tend to run their initiatives on the basis of visions of a more socially just and environmentally responsible society. They attempt to enact these visions and create new collective norms through a pre-figurative politics of ‘leading by example’. There are many similarities between São Paulo and London, although experiments in the former city followed political tides to a greater extent. São Paulo organizations involved in experiments tend to focus more on campaigning and dialogue with local government during pro-cycling administrations, and adopt a stronger do-it-yourself/do-it-together orientation at times of conflict and disagreement than local government. Part of that do-it-yourself/ do-it-together ethos is also the creation of temporary cycle lanes (and pedestrian facilities) on roads for motorized traffic using paint. This is a popular means to (re)appropriate some of the spaces that predominantly cater to a form of transport – privately owned cars – that is seen as socially and environmentally deeply unjust. The kinds of cycling infrastructure created in citizen-led experiments are different from those in which local authorities are very heavily involved. In São Paulo and London many of the citizen-led infrastructures

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Urban infrastructures  ­159 c­ omplement centralized infrastructures, which highlights the importance of thinking about infrastructures coexisting in heterogeneous configurations (Lawhon et al., 2018) in both Majority and Minority World cities. These infrastructures complement because they make streets amenable for cycling by people who do not conform to the deeply ingrained normative ideal of the able-bodied individual, or for people who, because they wish to avoid violence and crime, do not venture out as much or who avoid particular parts of the city. They also complement because they offer services that are not available in particular neighbourhoods or for specific groups. This is exemplified by cycle training and bike repair workshops that are specifically targeting children growing up in poverty or women and gender-variant people. What these infrastructural experiments also do is more than offering somehow disadvantaged groups and individuals the capability to cycle; they also create social or peopled infrastructures (Simone, 2004; McFarlane and Silver, 2017). They create networks, connective tissue and a sense of belonging among particular people. This is illustrated, amongst others, by the observation that people who have in the past benefited from particular experiments continue to be involved later on (e.g. as volunteer). These initiatives should not be romanticized; they can unintentionally marginalize certain ways of being (e.g. by replicating certain social norms) and involvement in the organizations running the experiments can involve personal sacrifices (e.g. foregoing a higher income). Nonetheless, the experimental infrastructures thus created do make cycling an option for a wider range of groups and individuals in the city, and complement more top-down organized and centralized cycling infrastructures in important ways.

10.4 CONCLUSIONS In this chapter we have highlighted the central role that infrastructures play in cities and urbanization, and in geographers’ – and other social scientists’ – attempts to make sense of the urban condition. The sprawling and highly diversified literature on infrastructure in Urban Geography from the last two decades has been summarized with the help of four tensions: (1) visibility/invisibility, (2) connection/disconnection, (3) standardization/differentiation and (4) normalcy/disruption. These cut across philosophical and theoretical approaches within Urban Geography, suggesting that infrastructure is a useful means with which geographers can have, and are having, conversations across constituencies within (Urban) Geography and with colleagues in other disciplines.

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160  Handbook of urban geography The diverse engagements with infrastructure also carry some risk. The most obvious is that the concept becomes so wide and all-encompassing that it loses analytical value. Reflexivity in the form of continual and careful definition and identifying its ‘others’ or ‘outsides’ can help to mitigate some of this risk. At the same time, there is merit in keeping the concept flexible and open, given that so many contemporary concerns come together in urban infrastructures, from security and climate change to the quest for modernity and development and the contestation of dominant ideas and practices.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research on which this chapter draws is part of the DEPICT (DEsigning and Policy Implementation for encouraging Cycling and walking Trips) project, funded by the ESRC (grant ES/N011538/1).

NOTES 1. No time periods are given for the changes summarized in this paragraph because these differ too much for different countries and sometimes even individual cities. 2. This is a scheme funded and overseen by the metropolitan transport authority, Transport for London, that seeks to create a network of cycle routes and improvements to the public realm in the three outer districts of Enfield, Kingston and Waltham Forest. It is due for completion in 2021.

REFERENCES Aldred, R. and J. Dales (2017), ‘Diversifying and normalising cycling in London, UK: an exploratory study on the influence of infrastructure’, Journal of Transport & Health, 4, 348–362. Amin, A. (2014), ‘Lively infrastructure’, Theory, Culture & Society, 31 (7/8), 137–161. Berlant, L. (2016), ‘The commons: infrastructures for troubling times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34 (3), 393–419. Bulkeley, H., V. Castán Broto and A. Maassen (2014), ‘Low-carbon transitions and the reconfiguration of urban infrastructure’, Urban Studies, 51 (7), 1471–1486. Cesafsky, L. (2017), ‘How to mend a fragmented city: a critique of “infrastructural solidarity”’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41 (1), 145–161. Coutard, O. (2008), ‘Placing splintering urbanism: introduction’, Geoforum, 39 (6), 1815–1820. Cowen, D. (2014), The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cowen, D. (2017), ‘Investigating infrastructures’, Society & Space Blog, at https://­societyand​ space.org/2017/10/03/investigating-infrastructures-a-forum/ (accessed 30 September 2018). Cox, P. and F. Van De Walle (2007), ‘Bicycles don’t evolve: velomobilities and the modelling

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Urban infrastructures  ­161 of transport technologies’, in Dave Horton, Paul Rosen and Peter Cox (eds), Cycling and Society, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 113–132. Doherty, J. (2017), ‘Life (and limb) in the fast-lane: disposable people as infrastructure in Kampala’s boda boda industry’, Critical Africa Studies, 9 (2), 193–209. El-Geneidy, A., D. van Lierop and R. Wasfi (2016), ‘Do people value bicycle sharing? A multilevel longitudinal analysis capturing the impact of bicycle sharing on residential sales in Montreal, Canada’, Transport Policy, 51, 174–181. Enright, T. (2016), The Making of Grand Paris: Metropolitan Urbanism in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Evans, J., A. Karvonen and R. Raven (eds) (2016), The Experimental City, London: Routledge. Farmer, S. (2011), ‘Uneven public transportation development in neoliberalizing Chicago, USA’, Environment and Planning A, 43 (5), 1154–1172. Garrison, W. L., B. J. L. Berry, D. F. Marble, J. D. Nystuen and R. L. Morrill (1959), Studies of Highway Development and Geographic Change, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Goodman, A. and J. Cheshire (2014), ‘Inequalities in the London bicycle sharing system revisited: impacts of extending the scheme to poorer areas but then doubling prices’, Journal of Transport Geography, 41, 272–279. Graham, S. (2009), ‘When infrastructures fail’, in Stephen Graham (ed.), Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–26. Graham, S. (2012), ‘When life itself is war: on the urbanization of military and security doctrine’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36 (1), 136–155. Graham, S. and S. Marvin (2001), Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructure, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition, London: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1962[1927]), Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper & Row. Hidalgo, D. and L. Gutiérrez (2013), ‘BRT and BHLS around the world: explosive growth, large positive impacts and many issues outstanding’, Research in Transportation Economics, 39 (1), 8–13. Hodson, M. and S. Marvin (2009), ‘“Urban ecological security”: a new urban paradigm?’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33 (1), 193–215. Hopkins, D. and T. Schwanen (2018), ‘Automated mobility transitions: governing processes in the UK’, Sustainability, 10 (4), 956. Jensen, A. (2013), ‘Controlling mobility, performing borderwork: cycle mobility in Copenhagen and the multiplication of boundaries’, Journal of Transport Geography, 30, 220–226. Kaika, M. and E. Swyngedouw (2001), ‘Fetishizing the modern city: the phantasmagoria of urban technological networks’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24 (1), 120–138. Kallianos, Y. (2018), ‘Infrastructural disorder: the politics of disruption, contingency, and normalcy in waste infrastructures in Athens’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (4), 758–775. Kosmachev, K. P. (1973), ‘Infrastructure and economic-geographic situation (a search for mutual enrichment of concepts)’, Soviet Geography, 14 (1), 45–52. Lam, T. (2018), ‘Hackney: a cycling borough for whom?’, Applied Mobilities, 3 (2), 115–132. Larkin, B. (2013), ‘The politics and poetics of infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343. Lawhon, M., D. Nilsson, J. Silver, H. Ernstson and S. Lwasa (2018), ‘Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’, Urban Studies, 55 (4), 720–732. Lefebvre, H. (2003[1970]), The Urban Revolution, translated by Robert Bonino, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McFarlane, C. and J. Rutherford (2008), ‘Political infrastructures: governing and experiencing the fabric of the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (2), 363–374.

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162  Handbook of urban geography McFarlane, C. and J. Silver (2017), ‘Navigating the city’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (3), 458–471. Meehan, K. M. (2014), ‘Tool-power: water infrastructure as wellsprings of state power’, Geoforum, 57, 215–224. Perrow, C. (1984), Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, New York: Basic Books. Richardson, T. and O. B. Jensen (2008), ‘How mobility systems produce inequality: making mobile subject types on the Bangkok Sky Train’, Built Environment, 34 (2), 218–231. Rizzo, M. (2015), ‘The political economy of an urban megaproject: the Bus Rapid Transit project in Tanzania’, African Affairs, 114 (455), 249–270. Roy, A. and A. Ong (2011), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Schwanen, T. (2015), ‘The bumpy road toward low-energy urban mobility: case studies from two UK cities’, Sustainability, 7 (6), 7086–7111. Schwanen, T. (2016a), ‘Geographies of transport I: reinventing a field?’, Progress in Human Geography, 40 (1), 126–137. Schwanen, T. (2016b), ‘Rethinking resilience as capacity to endure’, City, 20 (1), 152–160. Schwanen, T. (2017), ‘Geographies of transport II: reconciling the general and the particular’, Progress in Human Geography, 41 (3), 355–364. Schwanen, T. (2018), ‘Towards decolonised knowledge about transport’, Palgrave Communications, 4, 79. Sevilla-Buitrago, A. (2015), ‘Capitalist formations of enclosure: space and the extinction of the commons’, Antipode, 47 (4), 999–1020. Sheppard, E., H. Leitner and A. Maringanti (2013), ‘Provincializing global urbanism: a manifesto’, Urban Geography, 34 (7), 883–890. Simone, A. (2004), ‘People as infrastructure: intersecting fragments in Johannesburg’, Public Culture, 16 (3), 407–429. Star, S. L. (1999), ‘The ethnography of infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist, 43 (3), 377–391. Swyngedouw, E. (2009), ‘Apocalypse forever? Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change’, Theory, Culture & Society, 27 (2–3), 213–232. TfL (Transport for London) (2017), Analysis of Cycling Potential 2016: Policy Analysis Report, London: Transport for London. Tonkiss, F. (2013), ‘Austerity urbanism and the makeshift city’, City, 17 (3), 312–324. Wakefield, S. (2018), ‘Infrastructures of liberal life: from modernity and progress to resilience and ruins’, Geography Compass, 12 (7), e12377. Wissink, B. (2013), ‘Enclave urbanism in Mumbai: an Actor-Network Theory analysis of urban (dis)connection’, Geoforum, 47, 1–11. Wood, A. (2015), ‘The politics of policy circulation: unpacking the relationship between South African and South American cities in the adoption of bus rapid transit’, Antipode, 47 (4), 1062–1079. Žižek, S. (1999), The Ticklish Subject – The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso.

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PART III URBAN REDEVELOPMENT

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11.  Emerging city regions: urban expansion, transformation and discursive construction Markus Hesse

11.1 INTRODUCTION Large city regions are key to understanding the twenty-first century’s urban form and spatial organization. After decades that were characterized by the decline of the industrial city and the emergence of major decentralized, sub- and exurban areas, a new emphasis has since been placed on metropolitan regions and their urban cores. This observation is partly based on the growth of a number of prospering urban regions in the Western world, and partly associated with the steady expansion of mega-cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America since the 1980s and 1990s. Changing demographic and socio-economic trends in the industrialized world played a significant part in the process of the selective re-concentration of housing, employment and services in inner cities. According to some observers, the forces of agglomeration seem to be stronger than ever (Scott and Storper, 2015). In this context, this chapter deals with city regions that comprise an assemblage of an urban core and associated neighbouring cities and suburbs that are functionally linked. The chapter also addresses the specialization of some of these city regions that host advanced services, political functions, higher education infrastructure or gateway functions, which classifies them as ‘metropolitan’ regions. Further, attention is directed towards the processes through which regions are labelled and thus created as metropolitan areas – metropolization (Sénécal and Beher, 2009; Kinossian, 2017). This labelling includes indicator-based observations, political manifestations and also discursive representations. This chapter addresses all of these, as they are indicative of recent attempts to make sense of contemporary urbanization. Two major debates and developments have contributed massively to the common perception of a looming ‘Urban Age’, which gave rising attention to urbanization, cities and metropolitan regions. Firstly, the United Nations Population Fund’s 2007 report on the State of the World Population revealed a significant shift in the spatial distribution of population across the globe: ‘In 2008, the world reaches an invisible 164

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Emerging city regions  ­165 but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas’ (United Nations Population Fund, 2007, p. 1). This message received enormous attention from the broader public, in policy and planning and also in academic circles. Cities returned to the public debate, and the same applied to the academic discourse, the tone of which was switching from ‘voices of decline’ (Beauregard, 1993) to a rather ‘triumphant’ vocabulary (Glaeser, 2011). The dense assemblage of people in urban places, based on the combination of individual preferences, economic productivity and specific locational amenities, was considered largely positive for the city and also beneficial to society. A related echo was triggered by the 2009 Annual Report of the World Bank entitled Reshaping Economic Geography (World Bank, 2009), which made particular reference to debates on what is called New Economic Geography. Its main claim was that agglomeration would be essential for societies in the developed and in the developing world. A trinity of cities, migration and trade would contribute to economic growth, innovation and societal progress in the centres, rather than the periphery. Particular tools of analysis in geography, namely density, distance and division, feed into agglomeration and urbanization as key components of analysis and policy. The report also claims that economic growth will almost necessarily occur unevenly, and any attempt to modify the resulting disparities would be detrimental to growth as such. ‘But development can still be inclusive, in that even people who start their lives far away from economic opportunity can benefit from the growing concentration of wealth in a few places. The way to get both the benefits of uneven growth and inclusive development is through economic integration’ (World Bank, 2009, p. x). As a consequence, the report approached urbanization no longer as a term that signifies a process to be analysed, but as a normative primer or recipe for development and planning. While this report and the associated claims can be regarded as milestones in the evolution of a new urban paradigm, the interpretation of development delivered by the United Nations and by the World Bank also received substantial criticism (see Bryceson et al., 2009; Rigg et al., 2009). These comments bemoaned the primacy of a perspective that was perceived as over-simplified, spatially blind, unbalanced with respect to the disadvantages of concentration, and also one-dimensional in terms of economic development. The rather universalizing narrative promulgated by the World Bank, and many others, on the importance of agglomeration would confuse causal relationships and leave out alternative ways to approach development, which might be provided by places beyond large city regions as well.

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166  Handbook of urban geography Since the two reports have been published, the assumption of an Urban Age to come has prompted an intriguing debate in urban studies (see Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Shaw, 2015; Wachsmuth, 2014), which can be seen as essential for understanding the meaning that is associated with urbanization in general and large city regions in particular. Three positions can be distinguished that characterize such global urbanisms: one claims that the urban is becoming the dominant spatial formation on the planet, thus diminishing the difference between city and countryside that has overarched urban geography and planning for long. This almost totalizing, ‘law-bound’ view of urbanization (see Gleeson, 2013, p. 1842) was even interpreted as an ‘urban equation’ by the science-magazine Nature (Anon., 2010). In so doing, the raison d’être of cities has become almost naturalized and the narrative of urban triumphalism is further normalized. In opposition to this, a certain school of thought derived inspiration from Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist approach to urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). It proposes that modern society is already predominantly urban – not necessarily with respect to the spatial configuration it is embedded in (which then could be read from maps, statistics and the like), but based on the very assumption that space is actually produced by these socio-economic conditions. In contrast to the first two, the third position insists on some fundamental properties that differentiate cities from other spatial settings. According to Scott and Storper (2015, p. 6), ‘agglomeration is the basic glue that holds the city together as a complex congeries of human activities, and that underlies . . . a highly distinctive form of politics’. From this perspective, cities make a difference as places of economic exchange, as they are not only nodal points for internal relationships but also staging posts for long-distance trade. Specialization offers the potential for mutually reinforcing economic benefits, which are not limited to the sphere of economics, but extend to all aspects of social life. As a consequence, the authors state that even ‘the rise of a globalizing world system has been associated . . . not with the demise of the city, but rather with intensifying agglomeration/urbanization processes across all five continents’ (Scott and Storper, 2015, p. 8). With these contrasting views of the variegated ‘nature’ of cities in mind, this chapter discusses contemporary aspects of urban–regional development and policy. As an epistemological framework condition for further analysis, one has to take into account that the understanding of cities and regions has shifted away from essentialist views towards relational perspectives. Cities and regions are now increasingly acknowledged as co-constituted by larger associations, networks and mobilities, identities and belonging, rather than as fixed territories within a bounded space,

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Emerging city regions  ­167 delineated by clear margins. Relational thinking builds upon the large extent of external connectivity, and it also assumes (urban) space to be produced rather than being pre-given. Communicative construction that emphasizes issues such as discourse also plays a significant role here, which will be outlined below. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. After presenting a brief overview of the current state of city regions, the chapter sheds light on the different ways the state of city regions is being assessed. In order to add particular meaning to the empirical subject matter, the chapter also applies a discourse analysis perspective to city regions. Based on own research about metropolitan regions in Germany, the argument is that political discourses play a strong role for the semantic up-scaling of certain areas which is neither explained by an overall theory nor based on convincing empirical evidence. Rather, it follows the rationale of policymaking and may contribute to (policy) boosterism.

11.2 CITY REGIONS, THE PROCESS OF METROPOLIZATION AND RELATED POLICY CLAIMS 11.2.1  The State and Role of City Regions The subject at issue here is twofold. First, the chapter deals with city regions that have been understood as an extension of cities into the spheres of mutual interaction with neighbouring towns and suburbs. Second, it discusses metropolitan areas as a particular variant of city regions – those that are economically and functionally predominant and also politically relevant. Both subjects have to be understood against the background of urbanization processes that tend to be rather complex and that are characterized by a remarkable variation both across and within various countries. Longitudinal analyses indicate the shifting dynamics of socioeconomic development and the related urban imprint these can have. While urban development in the industrialized world was long characterized by demographic and economic growth and an associated expansion of the settlement areas towards the regional scale, contemporary dynamics reveal a fine-grain mosaic of interrelated patterns of growth and decline in centres and peripheries. This seems to be particularly the case in Europe, where urban development is characterized by a rather polycentric pattern and quite differentiated individual (national, local) trajectories, with still rather segmented national urban systems dominated by a capital city region.1

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168  Handbook of urban geography Empirical evidence on the actual performance of city regions in demographic or economic terms is provided by bodies such as the US Census Bureau for the United States, or by Eurostat and the European Spatial Planning Observation Network (ESPON) for Europe. In the latter case, various classification schemes have identified regions as Functional Urban Areas (FUA) or as Large Urban Zones (LUZ), previously known as the city region (ESPON, 2014). Recent dynamics and patterns are indeed multifaceted, with regions growing or declining but also revealing significant variation. Among the growing city regions, a majority was growing in both core and periphery, with higher growth rates in the cores of major cities in Germany and the UK, while countries such as France, Spain or Italy experienced higher growth in cores compared to peripheries. The classical case of suburbanization, with growing peripheries and declining cores, seemed to be prevalent across Central and Eastern Europe, and directly connected to recent political-economic transformations. Smaller cities in France and in the Benelux countries exhibited this pattern as well. Since continental European urban–regional debates are influenced by the English-speaking discourses about urbanization, it is interesting to confront the tenets of those discourses with empirical findings on the recent economic development performance of regions. Dijkstra et al. (2013) provided a meticulous assessment of the economic performance of European regions (predominantly urban, rural and intermediate), based on the analysis of longitudinal data of ESPON research and also the OECD’s database for the EU15 at the regional scale. They summarize their findings as follows (Dijkstra et al., 2013, p. 345): The 1990s was in many ways the first decade of the modern era of globalization . . . and a decade during which large core cities played an increasingly dominant role in the economy . . .. In marked contrast, however, the second decade of globalization since the turn of the millennium has witnessed a remarkable transformation in Western Europe. . . . Whereas the 1990s adjustments to the new global economic realities involved factor movements up the urban hierarchy, today’s economic growth in many countries appears to be increasingly driven by movements down the urban hierarchy.

Overall, their observations ‘cast a very different light on the role played by cities and urban areas in the performance of the European economy than the picture suggested by the current dominant academic debates’ (Dijkstra et al., 2013, p. 347). These more cautious findings on the role of cities or city regions as drivers of growth and wealth confirm earlier research on this subject matter. Buck et al. (2005), for instance, presented a comprehensive study of the apparent renaissance of cities and the relationship between competitiveness, social cohesion and governance. Their research,

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Emerging city regions  ­169 conducted as part of the British ESRC Cities Programme, addressed the belief in the strong and predominant role of cities as a new conventional wisdom – an orthodoxy which is widely accepted yet misleading, given the broad range of current developments and also the many problems of urban regeneration, social exclusion and local governance. Related complex trajectories were confirmed by Turok and Mykhnenko (2007), who analysed the development of 329 cities in 36 countries between 1960 and 2005. Depending on the general direction (positive, negative) and the very temporalities of development, they distinguished nine different trajectories among the 310 towns and cities considered. About 30 per cent experienced continuous growth, while 24 per cent had been temporarily declining, and 13 per cent were recently declining (Turok and Mykhnenko, 2007). Long-term urban development obviously makes fluctuating dynamics and subsequent cycles more visible than when short-term changes are considered. As determining factors, the authors consider the degree of urbanization of the country, city size and the importance of path dependency. While urban demographic change is often framed as part of a full-fledged urban resurgence, one can hardly assume a substantial urban recovery is indeed taking place on the basis of such data: only one of seven cities had revealed a positive turnaround since 1980, and just one of 16 cities since 1990 (Turok and Mykhnenko, 2007). Balducci and Fedeli (2008, p. 243) came to a similar conclusion in their review of the EU’s report The State of Cities: ‘Several cities, different trends, not linear’. A set of demographic, socio-economic and technological changes are often identified as the driving forces behind the transformations in the urban–regional system over the last decades. Economic factors enjoy a certain primacy, most notably in the context of a perceived shift from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of production, societal development and political regulation. Allen J. Scott, for example, sees city regions not only as increasingly becoming globalized, but also as subject to a ‘third wave’ of urbanization, where ‘cognitive-cultural’ economies have followed two earlier modes of production and reproduction, which were factory in the nineteenth and mass production in the twentieth century (Scott, 2013). This perspective is also instrumental for Scott and Storper’s search for a general urban theory (Scott and Storper, 2015): in such considerations, agglomeration and the interplay of a knowledge-based capitalism with the peculiarities of urban land markets (urban–land nexus) play a central role in explaining the restructuring of city regions. This perspective can be criticized for being too economistic and narrowing down the complex arrangement of socio-economic, demographic, and environmental factors of development: ‘The idea of a broad economic imperative driving urban growth and decline hardly captures the complex reality that many social

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170  Handbook of urban geography forces are at play in the course of urban change and that political choices always matter’ (Kantor and Turok, 2012, p. 481). Also, there is a severe downside to the success of some of these metropolitan regions, which is now widely acknowledged, as the living conditions in core metropolitan areas have become increasingly unaffordable, exclusive, and socially and spatially fragmented from their regional surroundings. With exploding costs for housing, just to name one example, the question of how to properly assess the rise of the global (or globalized) city region becomes even more pressing. In most general terms, it still seems justified to apply a cautious balance of the pros and cons of agglomeration, which is in line with a conclusion made by the widely acclaimed ‘Barca Report’ on European cohesion policies (Barca, 2009, p. 18): The evidence also shows that agglomeration effects are not limitless and that a concentration of activity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for high growth. It has long been known that, as the New Economic Geographers have stressed, the traffic congestion, price increases, pollution and other adverse effects on health, the environment and the quality of life, the rising costs of urban infrastructure and of urban sprawl, the social tensions and high crime rate which can all result from agglomeration can offset the benefits and bring the process to a halt. . . . Moreover, although agglomeration is a driver of growth and development, it is not the only one.

11.2.2  Metropolitan Regions, Processes of Metropolization, Policy Claims While mainstream discourses suggest that an Urban Age is looming, this belief is partly self-evident, simply on account of the sheer size and huge variety of city regions such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris or New York City. However, there is no reason to assume that size is automatically linked to growth and innovation, or to issues such as quality of life or just living conditions. If this is the case, what exactly is the miracle that dwells in the ‘metropolitan’, making this label an attractive target for urban–regional policies? It is useful to differentiate here between product and process, in this case between the metropolitan region as such and the process that turns city regions into something different, more advanced. Empirical properties that allude to the identification of certain subjects (such as regions) and the political process that is established in order to improve the ability of a place to adapt to changing framework conditions of development are vital components of the ‘making’ of contemporary territory (MacKinnon, 2010). The metropolitan-ness of certain regions is usually assessed or measured using a functional approach, where corporate headquarters, p ­ roperties such as research hub or trade gateway, or politico-administrative ­functions

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Emerging city regions  ­171 are used to classify a region as metropolitan. In so doing, the decision that leads to a place becoming metropolitan by definition solely rests on indicators and threshold values, and is thus a social construction – a prescription of regions that tends to be rather arbitrary. A more processrelated approach to signify the metropolitan reveals also qualitative changes, where cities and urban regions are becoming increasingly embedded in large-scale urban networks (Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000). Globalization, new technologies and a rapidly changing economic environment generate complex interdependencies between different spatial scales – the global, the regional and the local. A related concept that has evolved in this respect signifies processes of metropolization – the spatially selective, highly fragmented localization of metropolitan functions in specific locales (cf. Sénécal and Beher, 2009; Kinossian, 2017). As a result, these regions do not become metropolitan per se, but the proportion of international employment, the degree of inter-regional or cross-border commuting, the presence of international institutions and so on are significantly growing. In more generic terms, metropolization makes urban regions increasingly characterized by their inclusion in transnational networks and relationships. Also, given their internal structure and the specific opportunities and constraints of land, infrastructure and resources, polycentric patterns of settlement are gaining momentum, further transforming cities into spatially stretched urban regions. Thus, the character of cities as a spatially bounded site of interaction is questioned, in favour of a perspective that views cities as nodes in broader network associations. With regard to policy and governance, metropolitan-ness is also a principle that plays a role in regional political processes, set in place to overcome the administrative barriers that are prevalent between core city and suburban areas. In this context it is important to reflect that the associated changes are prevalent in the two dimensions characterizing their territorial embeddedness – that is, horizontally in areas beyond the territory of the core city, and vertically concerning upstream levels of scale (city region, the state, EU, others such as OECD or WTO). Such changes have manifold regional consequences, and challenge urban theory, in that we now ‘examine the traditional concept of the city in the context of urbanization processes that exceed it’ (Wachsmuth, 2014, p. 75). The origins of the city region were laid down in the process of urbanization – and it is now exactly this process that modifies its traditional form, function and meaning quite significantly. However, the dominant tradition of approaching these challenges by regional governance and planning is to focus on the horizontal dimension of the above changes, with a particular emphasis placed on urban form, local agents and traditional government arrangements. While informal

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172  Handbook of urban geography modes of governing – mostly voluntary collaboration across municipal borders – have been introduced so far, vertical forms of political steering and governance are often neglected, particularly in planning. Despite these difficulties, urban and regional planning institutions have been rather active in putting cities on the agenda of urban–regional or metropolitan discourses. In analytical terms, these accounts were building on earlier studies on suburbanization and on the question of how to deal with the subsequent emergence of ever larger metropolitan settlement types (cf. Agnew, 2013; Parr, 2005). Jean Gottmann’s (1957) concept of the megalopolis, which was developed on the basis of empirical research on the Northeastern United States, is one of the very first cases that dealt with these phenomena. Hall and Pain (2006) explored related cases in Europe, such as London and the South East of the UK, the Randstad in the Netherlands, the so-called Flemish Diamond in Belgium or the Ruhr Area in Germany. The latest case of this re-writing of the regional map is the discussion of so-called ‘mega’-regional urban forms that is now, almost unavoidably, emerging across the globe. Megaregion is the label for ‘networks of metropolitan centers and their surrounding areas’ (Ross, 2009, p. 9), particularly used in the case of areas in North America (such as the BosWash Corridor, New York/New Jersey, the Bay Area, or the LA/Southern California agglomeration) that comprise more than one major city or metropolitan region. The megaregion illustrates that the related discourses are not only driven by analytical curiousness, but also by political boosterism and advocacy, exemplified by the America2050 initiative – a new policy alliance for infrastructure financing that borrows from the imagery of size and growth promised by the mega-suffix (Hesse, 2015). Such initiatives often end up with simply re-drawing the map of ‘correct’ regions, by creating large urban–regional complexes, yet lack a convincing idea about adequate political steering structure and related governance mechanisms. However, the myth that these assemblages are economically powerful and thus important ‘to have’ is persistent. This may explain the temptation for governments to actively create such very large city regions, which are discussed in greater detail in the next section of this chapter.

11.3 ‘METROPOLITAN’ REGIONS GUIDING SPATIAL POLICY: THE CASE OF GERMANY 11.3.1 The ‘Metropolitan Region’ in the Light of Constructivist Approaches The perspective used in this section refers to the more recent tradition of constructivist approaches that have received increasing attention in

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Emerging city regions  ­173 cultural studies, social sciences in general and in urban studies (Jacobs, 2006). As mentioned above, regions are increasingly considered to be relational. In this context, analysing regions against the background of constructivism can be understood as a means to overcome essentialist ideas of space and place that have become increasingly untenable in the light of the complexity and the relational configuration of contemporary space–time frameworks. Flyvbjerg and Richardson (2002, p. 56) have framed this viewpoint as follows: Spaces, then, may be constructed in different ways by different people, through power struggles and conflicts of interest. This idea that spaces are socially constructed, and that many spaces may co-exist within the same physical space is an important one. It suggests the need to analyse how discourses and strategies of inclusion and exclusion are connected with particular spaces.

Such an approach can be useful for discussing the topic at stake here for various reasons. First, constructivist approaches allow for the reconstruction of urban–regional trajectories more comprehensively and thus provide a better understanding of the socio-economic conditions of development. Second, they can expose hidden agendas and diverging interests that might be located below the surface of big ideas that are often hegemonic – but rarely outspoken – in urban policy. So, power relations and conflicts embedded in the urban context can be made much more explicit and transparent than with traditional approaches. Thirdly, they suggest a specific meaning that is actively assigned to certain subject matters (Weichhart, 2008). Discourse can be considered an important filter or modifier through which data is attributed with meaning. Power relations come into play here as well, as they are always produced and mediated through language and discourse, thus adding to the basic authority and sovereignty to act. Although there has been an important claim for a turn towards materiality in cultural geography recently, it can be argued that there is a communicative practice that undergirds the process of establishing a region as a territorial entity. Hence, urbanization is understood here as an overarching discursive pattern – a meta-discourse – that not only comprises a certain narrative, but also helps to establish a separate layer of perception and communication of the urban, thus becoming an accepted part of reality (LeGreco and Tracy, 2009). This meta-discourse can be divided into different special discourses depending on the performance of a variety of subjects and propositions, actors and media. The special discourses presented here are related to two different areas. The first of these is about the urban world becoming increasingly metropolitan or dominated by large city regions, which is considered an outcome of major

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174  Handbook of urban geography economic and geo-political developments based on centripetal rather than decentralizing forces of urbanization. Second, and thus somehow turning the causalities at stake here, these major city regions are assumed to be engines of national or even global economies and therefore of direct interest to economic development policies. 11.3.2  Going for the ‘Metropolitan’ – Discursive Policy Shifts in Germany This section provides an empirical case of the appreciation of large city regions as a means of spatial development policy, most notably by dedicating the title ‘metropolitan’ to a selected number of regions that were deemed most suitable for stimulating spatial development. This section is based on own primary research, which is documented in certain detail in Hesse and Leick (2013); that paper also includes the sources that are referred to here. In the German context, the new spatial policy in favour of dedicating regions as ‘metropolitan’ was introduced by the federal government jointly with the 16 states (Länder) who are represented in the Conference of Ministers for Spatial Planning / Ministerkonferenz für Raumordnung (MKRO). This included a number of German city regions that were understood as distinctly metropolitan. Two different issues arise here: first, the definition of urban regions as ‘metropolitan’. In 1995, six urban agglomerations became designated metropolitan regions, namely the biggest city regions of the country such as Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne (as part of the Rhine-Ruhr Area), Munich, Stuttgart and Frankfurt. This list was complemented by the Halle/Leipzig-Region in Eastern Germany two years later. By 2005, as an outcome of political pressure, another four urban regions joined the club of ‘European Metropolitan Regions’, such as Bremen-Oldenburg, Hannover, Nuremberg and Rhine-Neckar. The second process comprises a programmatic change of spatial development policy in Germany that had been initiated in the early 2000s with the introduction of three different guidelines and strategies for action in spatial development. The first of these strategies aimed at adapting to a new economic imperative and emphasized growth, innovation and competitiveness – instead of the traditional distributional approach pursued by planning policy (the other two strategies focused on basic services and cultural landscapes). This modernization of informal planning strategies does not necessarily lead to immediate material policy turns. However, such paradigm shifts usually lay the basis for more general policy shifts in the long run. The rationales were changing socio-economic and political conditions, namely globalization, the increasing significance of European developments, and

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Emerging city regions  ­175 also the re-definition of the role of the state. The construction and promotion of metropolitan regions was a key issue here. As to the material justifications of this policy shift, theoretical reference had been made to models developed by the New Economic Geography (NEG). This was one of the most influential approaches involved in shifting attention towards the principle of agglomeration, and, concomitantly, to urban areas. However, a major problem occurred already in the beginning of this process as to how both urban theory and empirical findings would help determining centres of growth, and how such centres could be identified as favoured by the new guideline (Hesse and Leick, 2013, p. 347ff.). While a re-orientation of the spatial development policy was widely seen as necessary by scientific bodies included in this debate, the problem of properly identifying areas of growth and deriving robust strategies for a spatial politics of growth remained unsolved. The same applied to the question of the selection of the regions. This seemed to be the most delicate and, in scientific terms, challenging issue. As an answer to these questions, a government representative explained the role and the genesis of the German metro regions as follows: the 11 metropolitan regions would have been identified in a procedure based on analysis, imagination and politicization. In terms of methods, a ‘selective use of empirical evidence’ would have guided the decision making. Effectively, the spheres of politics and policy were decisive for including regions in this group. Whereas Berlin, Hamburg, Munich took part because of their sheer size, the east had to be represented for political reasons. The same was true for urban regions which were suffering from structural change, such as Bremen or Nuremberg. Indicators that identified regions as metropolitan were developed afterwards, proposed by scientific bodies in charge of the federal government and the federal states and politically decided by the Conference of Ministers for spatial development. After all, this can be considered a perfect case of ‘theory led by policy’. According to ex post analyses undertaken by both the federal government and the federal states (taking the lead here), jointly with the association of the regions, the dedicated metropolitan regions were considered ‘success stories’ and thus positively assessed. However, this contention has hardly been confirmed by empirical data. Precise analytics were only one out of three criteria making regions metropolitan, and the full set of indicators were only developed after the designation of regions as metropolitan had been decided. Overall, looking at demographics, occupational data and economic performance since 1997, the metro regions had been performing rather differently and not entirely positively. Population developed quite moderately in comparison with the rest of Germany, and the net migration balance was only slightly higher than in Germany as a

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176  Handbook of urban geography whole. Another important issue was the polarization among regions, and among metro regions in particular, which is likely to increase further in the future. The same applies to polarization tendencies that are observed within these regions. The development of employment confirms this view, the net balance being even worse, which is in some ways a product of transformation in eastern Germany. Old-industrialized regions such as the Ruhr are developing weakly, indicating that being metropolitan or not is certainly not equivalent to prosperity. Even in the prospering north of Germany, the net employment balance in metro regions is hardly positive, whereas significant growth happened particularly outside urban areas. Given the desire to have as many regions and municipalities included in the metropolitan community as politically negotiated, the strong liberal notion of this concept informed by New Economic Geography seems to have lost influence in the meantime, in favour of more inclusive and procedural interpretations. This has led to the paradox that only some regions conform to the initial idea of metropolitan-ness, while in many others (such as in eastern Germany) the ‘metropolitan’ area extended quite significantly into the rural periphery. Only a few cases are now considered to be successful in terms of local alliances established, while scientific observers increasingly allude to the distinction between ‘metropolitan areas’ as such and political ‘regions’ in particular.

11.4 CONCLUSION What can be learned from a constructivist perspective of metropolitan regions in the case of Germany? First, political framing and related practice can be considered part of a dedicated urbanism; that is, the attempt to communicatively construct spaces of significance and importance. The case described here indicates that city regions, while representing more the norm rather than the exception of contemporary urban patterns, do not necessarily appear as objective entities judged by empirical measure. They are also constantly created and re-produced by deliberate urbanisms. It is probably no coincidence that theories on agglomeration, urban growth and competitiveness were corresponding very well with the upcoming narrative of the Urban Age, thus co-creating the triumphant talk about the city in the twenty-first century. Second, in such contexts, city regions in general, and the dedicated metropolitan regions in particular, are no longer reduced to signify a certain stage in the process of urbanization, most notably urban expansion and transformation. Moreover, these regions convey the notion and discursive claim that such spaces connect to the modern world and will achieve growth and wealth. In the words of

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Emerging city regions  ­177 Martin (2009, p. 7), metropolitan regions are part of such ‘hypothetical worlds built upon and defined by simplified assumptions and idealized geographical landscapes’ or, as Weichhart put it, ‘designer regions’ (2008). Third, the creation of this category reveals certain conflicts, which are hidden by the official narratives of competition and growth. These include mainly distributive conflicts about public spending between different regions, and also a certain dissent that evolves from the diverging interests between cores and peripheries within metropolitan areas. It is interesting to observe that the call for a more balanced spatial development strategy has emerged in Germany recently, in response to the perception that the growth of major city regions creates disadvantages both within core city regions and for more peripheral spaces. The overarching policy shift towards new guidelines that was presented here became instrumental as it reflects the Zeitgeist of (neo-)liberal ideas that have become hegemonic in Germany since the 1990s. Scholarship in political economy suggests that competition, deregulation and uneven spatial development have been almost unquestioned over the last decades. One lesson learned from this experience is not to separate the shift in spatial development policies from its ideological contents and context. In addition, it can be argued that a very particular interaction of science and policy has been instrumental here, by producing selective knowledge and circulating specific ideas and styles of thought. Thus, the role of academic research is also addressed here: without participation and consultancy by state agencies, researchers in charge and boundary-spanning institutions who mediated between science and practice, such policy shift would have never been successfully framed and implemented.

NOTE 1. For historical reasons, European urbanization is distinct from North America, where a limited number of major urban regions are distributed across a much larger territory. While 60 per cent of the EU population lives in ‘metropolitan’ regions (defined by an urban core of at least 100,000 inhabitants; see ESPON, 2014), in the United States almost 84 per cent of the population lives in metropolitan statistical areas (MSA, defined by an urbanized core of at least 50,000 people). This share of the population is concentrated on roughly 25 per cent of the country’s territory (Wilson et al., 2012).

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178  Handbook of urban geography reflections upon urban phenomena in the European Union’, Urban Research & Practice, 1 (3), 240–253. Barca, F. (2009), ‘An agenda for a reformed cohesion policy: a place-based approach to meeting European Union challenges and expectations’, at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/regi/dv/barca_report_/barca_report_en.pdf (accessed 17 August 2018). Beauregard, R. A. (1993), Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, Oxford: Blackwell. Brenner, N. and C. Schmid (2015), ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’, City, 19 (2–3), 151–182. Bryceson, D. F., K. V. Gough, J. Rigg and J. Agergaard (2009), ‘Critical commentary. The World Development Report 2009’, Urban Studies, 46 (4), 723–738. Buck, N., I. Gordon, A. Harding and I. Turok (2005), Changing Cities: Rethinking Competitiveness, Cohesion and Governance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dijkstra, L., E. Garcilazo and P. McCann (2013), ‘The economic performance of European cities and city regions: myths and realities’, European Planning Studies, 21 (3), 334–354. ESPON (2014), ‘ESPON Atlas 2014’, at http://atlas.espon.eu (accessed 1 December 2015). Flyvbjerg, B. and T. Richardson (2002), ‘Planning and Foucault: in search of the dark side of planning theory’, in Philip Allmendinger and Mark Tewdwr-Jones (eds), Planning Futures: New Directions for Planning Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 44–62. Glaeser, E. (2011), Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, New York: Penguin. Gleeson, B. (2013), ‘What role for social science in the “Urban Age”?’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (5), 1839–1851. Gottmann, J. (1957), ‘Megalopolis or the urbanization of the northeastern seaboard’, Economic Geography, 33 (3), 189–200. Hall, P. and K. Pain (2006), The Polycentric Metropolis Learning from Mega-city Regions in Europe, London: Earthscan. Hesse, M. (2015), ‘Mega-urban regions – epistemology, discourse patterns, big urban business’, in John Harrison and Michael Hoyler (eds), Megaregions – Globalization’s New Urban Form?, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 29–50. Hesse, M. and A. Leick (2013), ‘Wachstum, Innovation, Metropolregionen: zur Rekonstruktion des jüngeren Leitbildwandels in der Deutschen Raumentwicklungspolitik’, Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 71 (4), 343–359. Jacobs, K. (2006), ‘Discourse analysis and its utility for urban policy research’, Urban Policy and Research, 24 (1), 39–52. Kantor, P. and I. Turok (2012), ‘The politics of urban growth and decline’, in Karen Mossberger, Susan E. Clarke and Peter John (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 468–485. Kinossian, N. (2017), ‘The Cart before the horse: the perils of state-led metropolisation in Russia’, Europa Regional, 23 (4), 61–68. LeGreco, M. and S. J. Tracy (2009), ‘Discourse tracing as qualitative practice’, Qualitative Inquiry, 15 (9), 1516–1543. MacKinnon, D. (2010), ‘Reconstructing scale: towards a new scalar politics’, Progress in Human Geography, 35 (1), 21–36. Marcuse, P. and R. van Kempen (eds) (2000), Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Martin, R. (2009), ‘National growth versus spatial equality? A cautionary note on the new “trade-off” thinking in regional policy discourse’, Regional Science Policy & Practice, 1 (1), 3–13. Parr, J. B. (2005), ‘Perspectives on the city-region’, Regional Studies, 39 (5), 555–566. Rigg, J., A. Bebbigton, K. V. Gough, D. F. Bryceson, J. Agergaard, N. Fold and C. Tacoli (2009), ‘The World Development Report 2009 “reshapes economic geography”: geographical reflections’, Transactions of the Institutions of British Geographers, 34 (2), 128–136.

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Emerging city regions  ­179 Ross, C. L. (ed.) (2009), Megaregions: Planning for Global Competitiveness, Washington, DC: Island Press. Scott, A. J. (2013), ‘Emerging cities of the third wave’, City, 15 (3–4), 289–321. Scott, A. J. and M. Storper (2015), ‘The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (1), 1–15. Sénécal, G. and L. Beher (2009), La Métropolisation et Ses Territoires, Quebec: Presses de l’Université Québec. Shaw, K. (2015), ‘Planetary urbanisation: what does it matter for politics or practice?’, Planning Theory & Practice, 16 (4), 588–593. Turok, I. and V. Mykhnenko (2007), The trajectories of European cities, 1960–2005. Cities, 24 (3), 165–182. United Nations Population Fund (2007), State of World Population 2007, New York: United Nations. Wachsmuth, D. (2014), ‘The city as ideology: reconciling the explosion of the city form with the tenacity of the city concept’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31 (1), 75–90. Weichhart, P. (2008), Entwicklungslinien der Sozialgeographie, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Wilson, S. C., D. A. Plane, P. J. Mackun, T. R. Fischetti and J. Goworowska (with D. T. Cohen, M. J. Perry and G. W. Hatchard) (2012), Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change: 2000 to 2010, Washington, DC: US Census Bureau. World Bank (2009), Reshaping Economic Geography: World Development Report 2009, Washington, DC: World Bank.

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12.  The cultural economy in cities Tom Hutton

12.1 THE CULTURAL ECONOMY IN CONTEXT – PROCESS AND PLACE Culture (and the cultural economy) permeates the spaces of the city, as it represents one of the foundational specializations of human settlements throughout history, together with political control and administration, markets and distribution, and other central place functions. The infrastructure of creative work in the historic city included studios and workshops, accommodating principal artists and designers, together with in many cases complex systems of artisans, assistants and apprentices, thus contributing to the geography of economic activity and proto-urbanism processes. ‘Culture’ was expressed in the geography of the city through the clustering of religious sites and structures, and places of assembly, and was inscribed in the semiotics of state power projection associated with palaces and government agencies, public buildings and monuments. The Industrial Revolution originating in late eighteenth-century England, then spreading to the advanced societies of the continent, forcefully inserted a new trajectory of development within the territory of the metropolis, and comprised a major force in the reshaping of urban geography of the city. Industrialization represented not a totalizing feature of change, as in many cases central districts specializing in administrative, commercial and retail retained their place in the geography of the city. But certainly the emergence of a comprehensive industrial infrastructure encompassing factory systems, production networks, warehousing, distribution and working-class communities constituted a restructuring of cities from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth-century, as well as shaping urban zonal structure, patterns of land use, and the built environment. The post-war era in western societies brought with it another restructuring of the economy, labour markets and space, favouring office-based activity and other services industries and employment from the 1970s onward, accompanied by a drastic contraction of Fordist production and labour, and the decline of ‘traditional’ industry. This experience was evocatively termed the ‘coming of postindustrial society’ by American sociologist Daniel Bell (1973) – a contested term, for many, to be sure 180

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The cultural economy in cities  ­181 (see Massey and Meegan, 1980; Bluestone and Harrison, 1982) – but for many urban scholars reflective of the scale of change in cities and urban systems. Postindustrialism was expressed in spatial terms by the dramatic growth of the central city corporate office complex (and new retail centres throughout the metropolis), and an emergent social geography shaped by the particular housing demands of an ascendant ‘new middle class’ of managers and professionals (Ley, 1996; Hamnett, 2003). At a larger geographical scale the growth of advanced/intermediate services in cities of the west and accompanying contraction of traditional industry represented nothing less than a ‘new international division of labour’ (Fröbel et al., 1980), with industrial investment, new factory capacity and production labour formation favouring the growth economies of East Asia. Over the past quarter century the growth of a cultural economy comprising a mix of production industries, consumption, and spectacle, together with innovation in housing and lifestyle correlates, has represented for the more ebullient urbanists a new vocation for the city. In this reading, the ‘new cultural economy’ and a putative ‘creative class’ characterized by quite specific locational preferences and lifestyle attributes represent defining features of successful cities (Florida, 2002; Glaeser 2012), although there is a large critical literature asserting more problematic features, which include precarity, inequality, and dislocation (Peck, 2005; Markusen, 2006; Hutton, 2016). These debates aside, there is an argument to be made that the cultural economy is in fact a significant feature of twenty-first-century urbanism, with implications for the recasting of space, place and the built environment, as well as for new industry formation, employment, and patterns of trade and exchange. There are locational features of the cultural economy derived both from agglomeration of enterprise and the revealed preferences of artists and other creative workers that provide clues and an analytical entrée to theory of the ‘new urban geography’ of contemporary cities. Research has disclosed cultural production networks and districts as features of the economic geography of cities, as well as ‘cultural quarters’ which typically encompass a more variegated suite of production, consumption and residential uses. But the urban geography of the cultural economy represents a challenge to structuralist interpretations of cities, ensuing from the instability of enterprise formation associated with insistent upgrading pressures in the city, the infiltration of cultural activity in residential and mixed-use areas, and the impacts of communications technologies which open up possibilities of sourcing inputs from more distant locations, undermining localized production networks. What follows is a discussion of salient implications of the emergence of the cultural economy for urban geography. First, I sketch the complex

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182  Handbook of urban geography f­ actors which shape location, including the enduring importance of capital, agglomeration and labour, but also taking in the influence of landscape, semiotics of space, memory and social factors. Second, I offer insights on taxonomies of the urban geography of the cultural economy, including the evocation of culture in the formation of industrial districts and ‘cultural quarters’, marked both by continuity and disjuncture. Next, I identify a host of factors and forces making for change in the urban geography of culture and creativity in the city, including the impacts of digitalized production, communications and consumption technologies on location and space; tensions between the ‘fast policy’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015) practices of neo-liberal governance and pervasive policy mimicry in competition for cultural firms and skilled labour, and the progressive values of community development; and finally the increasingly forceful dislocations produced by insistent capital relayering and upgrading in the city. I conclude with a recitation of key insights and suggestions for new research orientations.

12.2 THE ECOLOGY OF CULTURE AND THE URBAN MATRIX Imaginaries of the cultural economy of the city are weighted in favour of the complex of contemporary production sectors (video games, digital communications; IT start-ups combining synergy of creativity and technology) and consumption industries which have emerged since the 1990s, and which comprise significant elements of the urban economy of advanced societies. While iconic corporations such as Apple and Facebook are located in exurban idylls, notably in northern California, the contemporary geography of culture and technology-infused creativity includes complexes of multinationals and start-ups within the inner cities and larger regional territories of influential metropolises such as London, Berlin, New York, and especially Seattle (Microsoft, Amazon) and San Francisco (LinkedIn, Industrial Light and Magic). The value of some of these global MNCs, including Facebook, far exceeds that of many longestablished industrial giants, underscoring the extraordinary market penetration of culture and media potentiated by digital access and outreach. But there is a more complex spatiality of culture and creativity in the city, shaped by residuals of earlier economic, social and political forces and factors. These incorporate legacies of the historic role of the city as locus of cultural institutions, including galleries, museums and exhibition buildings, as well as public buildings and spaces imbued with important messaging of history and memory. Principal gallery, museum and exhibition space, such as the Louvre precinct in Paris, South Kensington and

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The cultural economy in cities  ­183 Bloomsbury in London, Barcelona’s Barri Gotic, and Tiananmen Square in Beijing, embody deep cultural values, produce considerable economic benefit, and (incidentally or by design) shape the zonal structure of cities. Major sporting venues also project emblematic cultural signifiers, not least football stadia such as Anfield in Liverpool, Milan’s San Siro, and the Camp Nou in Barcelona. These fora embody local/regional tribal loyalties, anchor the affinity of aficionados worldwide, and project intimidating imageries toward visiting teams and their fans. Culture and creativity are also central to the operation of industrial regimes and processes, exemplified by industrial design which has shaped advanced production economies for more than a century and a half in states such as Germany, Sweden, and Britain. Design practices embedded in regional cultures of craft production, social capital and traditions of mutual trust and co-dependency represent established features of industrial districts such as the ‘Third Italy’, notably in Emilia-Romagna. Design industries were crucial to the operation of flexible specialization regimes which supplanted traditional industries under post-Fordism from the 1970s onwards. Finally, Michael Storper and Robert Salais (1999) have described the importance of geography and design cultures in the emergence of successful design industries in Milan and western Lombardy, and the Paris Ile-de-France region, manifested in the spatial organization of production as well as in the shape and styling of high-value products. 12.2.1 Factors Shaping the Geography of Cultural Development in the City The logic of location and spatiality of the contemporary cultural economy of the city reflects what Allen Scott (2008), Stefan Krätke (2011) and others have affirmed as the durable factors of capital, agglomeration and skilled labour, which surely represent powerful motive forces for new industry and employment formation across diverse production sectors. But as critical as these traditional factors of industrial development clearly are, they are insufficient to fully account for the location, operation and development of the cultural economy of the city, as analysis must incorporate interdependencies between creativity, lifestyles, housing markets, and the visitor economy of cities. And here I want to underscore the crucial (and complex) roles played by qualities of space (and place) in the development of the cultural economy, not in a reductionist sense as a fixed dimension of location, growth and change; but rather as a highly complex, contested and multivalent quality of the city which embodies interdependencies (and conflict) which must be unpacked in the service of description and explanation. These represent necessarily then important signifiers of the complex positioning of culture within the geography of the city.

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184  Handbook of urban geography As an extension of this argument concerning the spatiality of the cultural economy of the city, we can readily acknowledge critical interdependencies between space and the cultural economy of the city. A tenet of both the Chicago School of Social Ecology and the subdiscipline of industrial urbanism concerns the power of economic activity to shape the production of space, as observed in the corporate office complex of the Central Business District (CBD), and in the role of manufacturing in the emergence of industrial districts. But as corollary, Edward Soja (2000, p. 166) has observed that ‘space’ has the potential to shape the location, production systems and other operating characteristics of ‘industry’. In this interpretation, the material and semiotic characteristics of ‘space’, as expressed in terms of location within the zonal structure of the city, as well as scale, configuration, built form, historical layering and other semiotic values, can influence the mix of activities which choose to locate within certain spaces of the city. I contend that this argument is particularly relevant to understanding the cultural economy of the city, in which many actors and agencies are sensitive to the environment of the city, and are especially attuned to the possibilities of space and the built environment for creative inspiration – an argument analogous to Bourdieu’s idea of the urban field (after Ley, 1996). But this represents a variable rather than ineluctably fixed attribute or interdependency, and is in any event susceptible to overriding factors such as prescriptive policies and, more forcefully, the actions of markets as I outline in the following discussion.

12.3 THE CULTURAL ECONOMY AND THE NEW INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT While there is a complex geography of the cultural economy, the basic matrix of creative industries, enterprise formation and labour is comprised of the city’s industrial districts. These typically comprise former territories of light manufacturing, resource processing, warehousing and distribution, as well as older, low-margin service uses within the CBD Fringe, which through disinvestment and obsolescence from the 1970s on have evolved as the principal sites of the arts, creativity and cultural industry formation. In important respects the emergence of cultural industry districts represents a contemporary evocation of Allen Scott’s concept regarding the evolution of the ‘internal production spaces of the city’ (Scott, 1988), in which social divisions of labour and product specializations are manifested in the spatial organization of production.

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The cultural economy in cities  ­185 In essence these cultural spaces of the city function as an important expression of the new industrial district, evoking many of the spatial and operating characteristics of the classic industrial districts of the midnineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries among advanced economies. Basic features include high-value industries, linked within extensive systems of inputs and sourcing, advanced production and fabrication technologies, distribution networks and of course intricate structures of segmented labour, including technicians, supervisors, and managers. The built environment of industrial districts of the city encompassed variously factories, smaller workshops for high-value artisanal production, machine shops and the like providing subcontracting services for larger manufacturing enterprises, warehouses and distribution facilities. As a final correlate of the spatiality of the industrial district we can acknowledge workers’ housing, typically comprising dense congeries of residential development in proximity to places of work, along with ancillary services and institutions. Industrial districts were formed initially as a response to the spatial requirements of production and ancillary warehousing and distribution in the nineteenth century, and were centrepieces of industrial zoning and land use in the early twentieth century. The negative environmental externalities of the urban industrial economy, including pollution at a level injurious to public health as well as the well-being of workers in situ, stimulated development control measures which formed part of the formative years of urban planning, while the deep social issues comprised part of the argument for reform, including of course the radical manifestos and dialectics of Marx and Engels, and the trenchant narratives of Charles Dickens. By the middle of the last century industrial districts in the city evolved as complex sites of advanced production, together with comprehensive policies and investments for supporting infrastructure and systems, as Robert Lewis (2008) has shown in the case of Chicago. But the rapid collapse of traditional industrial production from the 1970s onward produced disinvestment and massive unemployment, as well as what Ivan Turok (2015) describes as ‘redundant spaces’ for reinvestment and regeneration which, in many cases, have accommodated cohorts of artists and other creatives in the metropolis, while also exhibiting accelerated processes of restructuring, succession and dislocation. Extensive research on the growth of the cultural economy across a broad cross-section of cities and sites in Europe, North America and East Asia underscores the appropriation of (post)industrial spaces for the city’s cultural economy. These include, for the purposes of illustration, Clerkenwell in London, Kreuzberg in Berlin, Biccoca in Milan, Poblenou in Barcelona, New York’s Meatpacking District, the South of Market Area (SOMA) in San Francisco, and Suzhou Creek in Shanghai: in the

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186  Handbook of urban geography aggregate pointing to the saliency of the ‘cultural industry district’ as a defining feature of the urban geography of advanced societies. These are not in most cases stable, well-ordered sites of specialized production but rather complex social milieu which have shaped industrial development, replete with experiences of exploitation, inequality and social upheavals, observed notably in the Clerkenwell case (see Hutton, 2008, p. 127) and the South of Market (Hutton, 2008, p. 167). Further, the development of creative industries in cities has been shaped by a complex set of factors, including local heritage policies and regeneration programmes.

12.4 THE IMPORTANCE OF AFFINITY IN CULTURAL INDUSTRY DISTRICTS Clearly at the outset of the rise of the contemporary cultural economy of the city rents (and relatedly vacant premises) were significant factors in attracting artists, enterprise, institutions and workers across a spectrum of industries. The scale of industrial disinvestment associated with the comprehensive restructuring of post-Fordism (and relatedly the relocation of city distribution and transportation facilities) generated a steep devalorization of property values. But there is a substantial research literature which demonstrates a richer array of factors and interdependencies which represent preference for certain locations and environments as well as need. These include both ‘material’ and concrete factors of attraction, as well as a range of complex and contested semiotic values. Artists and other creatives are attracted to the material quality of space in (post)industrial spaces of the city, which include former factories, distribution sites and more particularly warehouses. These structures typically feature high ceilings, natural light, and flexible floorplates which can be customized according to need. Many creatives express an affinity for the mostly brick exteriors which present a counterpoint to the concrete towers of the Central Business District. As another physical feature of attraction, the quality of sites, and more particularly the intimate configuration of precincts within former industrial districts, serves to enhance the attraction of postindustrial spaces for artists and designers, promoting in the best cases a tangible sense of the collective and place-identity (see Drake, 2003). But extensive interview panels conducted by scholars have also disclosed the powerful semiotic attractors of the industrial built environment for many artists, including not only the ambience produced by building form, materials, and the multivalent meanings of space, but also the messaging encompassed in the social histories – replete with conflict and dislocation

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The cultural economy in cities  ­187 – of the districts themselves. For some artists and creatives, the complex and contested histories and embedded ‘memory’ of industrial urbanism, at the level of district, site and individual building, represent potent stimulus to creativity and the construction of imaginaries and narratives (Crinson, 2005; Mckenzie and Hutton, 2015). Viewed through the lens of urban history the emergence of cultural spaces in the city represents not only a critical development trajectory, in the spatial form of ‘new’ industrial districts, but also a strategic addition to the repertoire of global cities. In this regard Peter Hall (2000) has proposed that ‘culture and creativity’ be added to the established specializations of global cities, together with intermediate banking and finance, business services, and ‘power and influence’, including political power, and should also be incorporated in spatial models of the city. The cultural industries and labour concentrated within industrial districts can, therefore, be viewed as structural elements of the twenty-first-century metropolis. But the large tracts of former industrial lands of metropolitan cities such as London, New York, Shanghai and Vancouver have also proven increasingly attractive to higher-margin activities, such as professional business services, IT start-ups, and upscale housing, which can be viewed as outcomes of ‘industrial gentrification’ processes, and thus subverting the viability and tenure of cultural firms and creative labour. The fortunes of Shoreditch in inner north-east London provide a trenchant case in point. Much of this established nineteenth-century district was given over to tailoring and furniture production, and workers’ housing, until the collapse of London’s manufacturing sector over the 1970s and 1980s. An infusion of mostly younger artists signalled both pioneer gentrification and a new development trajectory in the 1980s, with some identifying the Hoxton–Shoreditch area as one of Europe’s largest artists’ communities, including complementary galleries, studios, cafes, coffee houses and bars. But in the first decade of the present century upgrading pressures took the form of business start-ups, new IT firms, physical redevelopment of key sites, and an increasingly larger presence of an ‘assemblage’ of property development, estate agency and marketing concerns keen to seize on the larger rents and profit possibilities of the revalorized territory (Martins, 2015). The policy rhetoric has shifted from a ‘creativity is great’ mantra to a harder-edged ‘technology is great’ messaging (Hutton, 2016), including the role of agencies of the central government in an insistent place-making and marketing programme, implicitly at least discounting the value of the local arts community in regeneration programmes.

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188  Handbook of urban geography

12.5 CULTURE AND CREATIVE ACTIVITY IN RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITIES Just as a certain amount of production activity has been historically conducted within residential areas, notably including tailoring and other forms of piece-work in many European and some American cities, there is assuredly a substantial volume of cultural activity undertaken within established communities of housing – and representing, in the aggregate, a significant contribution to the geography of culture in the city. The intimacy of social relations, the complexity of organization, and the informal quality of work performed in the home together constitute a particular and indeed defining quality of cultural activity in the city, underscoring the variegation of place-of-work and place-of-residence interdependencies in contemporary cities and communities. Here Chris Murray identifies ‘urban villages’ which in the best cases successfully mesh localized scale, cultural identity, mixed-use activities and social and economic integration which establish the criticality of neighbourhoods as ‘the life’s blood, the  atomic nuclei of cities’ (Murray, 2004, p. 193). What follows is a selective representation of some important themes and scholarly reference points. Creativity and cultural expression are defining features of neighbourhood life in many older urban societies, notably in European and Asian cases, within which the intermingling of culture, work, and production have been ever-present. An insightful treatment of the historic situation of cultural expression and creative enterprise is found in Franco Bianchini and Lia Ghilardi’s (2004) essay ‘The culture of neighbourhoods: a European perspective’. They observe that ‘neighbourhoods represent the first locus where certain individuals and groups within urban populations come into contact with cultural forms’ (p. 239). In European cities cultural identity and expression is formed at the neighbourhood scale, as in large metropolitan cities such as Paris, London and Barcelona where, respectively, neighbourhoods such as the Left Bank, Clerkenwell and El Raval form essential territories of cultural iconicity within the urban landscape. These localized sites of identity are, however, not immutable and they are subject to pressures of markets, transnationalism and demography which produce a stratification of cultures within pervasive contexts of capital relayering and upgrading. In both the Clerkenwell and El Raval cases ‘cultural upgrading’ produced both by the incursion of higher-­margin firms and inflows of affluent residents creates tension and dislocation, while in David Harvey’s (2005) depiction of Paris, Capital of Modernity much of the built environment, streetscapes and social mix of the Rue de Rivoli on the Right Bank of the Seine was in the Second Empire effaced

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The cultural economy in cities  ­189 by massive redevelopment enabled by a new capital class and affiliated financial institutions and property developers.

12.6 THE ‘CULTURES OF CITIES’ IN PLACE: AFFINITY, TENSIONS AND DISLOCATIONS These internal tensions of neighbourhood identity in the face of market pressures and other manifestations of globalization and transnationalism are expressed in uniquely eloquent terms in Sharon Zukin’s (1995) classic treatment of The Cultures of Cities. Zukin assesses the role of culture in New York’s neighbourhoods through three analytical lenses: ethnicity, aesthetic and marketing tool, the latter allied to the development aspirations of both government and the private sector. In a discussion of ‘culture as a means of framing space’, Zukin (1995, pp. 15‒16) asserts that the ‘material landscape’ of buildings, parks and streets’ have become New York’s ‘most important visual representation’. Heritage, too, has value in the symbolic economy as well as a potent symbol of social memory, as preservation of buildings and resonant spaces ‘represents the scarce “monopoly” of the city’s visible past’ (p. 17), although this ‘cultural capital’ is increasingly appropriated by property developers and their marketing affiliates in the mobilization of rent-seeking capital, producing social dislocation and pressures on marginal creatives. For Zukin much of the cultural animation of neighbourhoods in metropolitan cities such as New York and Los Angeles is generated by restaurants and retail outlets, many of which offer a mix of goods and services produced by immigrants and younger workers. A significant number of these workers combine part-time engagement in the service economy, infusing (for example) food and beverage preparation with what Richard Ocejo (2010) affirms as artisanal talents, while nurturing larger ambitions in diverse fields of the arts, including music, dance and the visual arts – cumulatively adding significantly to the vibrancy and diversity of the cultural economy of the city. While consumption comprises a large portion of the creative economy at the community and neighbourhood scales, there is also a very substantial level of cultural production, although it is difficult to be precise about the aggregate volume of output. These include heterogeneous cohorts of, for example, professionals engaged in Internet/web consulting and production; writers, artists and the like who produce creative works at home which are sold at local markets and/or online; and many individuals who perform some significant portion of their creative work at home while engaged in the formal business economy in the commercial districts of the city.

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190  Handbook of urban geography There is of course a positive side to this split working life, as many creative professionals undoubtedly value the opportunity to develop ideas and concepts in the comfort of their private spaces, away from the quotidian exigencies of the corporate life and business environment. But as Helen Jarvis and Andy Pratt (2006) have affirmed in a study of new media workers in San Francisco, there is at the same time considerable pressure and stress for many of those working at home, as it represents an unwelcome ‘extensification’ of the working environment, adding to the aggregate hours worked, reducing free personal time, and undermining the role of home as a place of relaxation and self-actualization. 12.6.1  Informalism in the Cultural Economy of the Neighbourhood The varied residential landscapes and mixed social spaces of cities also play important roles in the cultural economy, adding to the diversity of opportunity and entry points for creative workers. In this regard K. C. Ho (2009) has described the attractions of Little India in Singapore for young, low-margin start-ups in the creative technology sector. In his essay ‘The neighbourhood in the creative economy: policy, practice and place in Singapore’, Ho identifies the ‘wild and unruly’ quality of the built environment and social life of Little India, a residual of Singapore’s racialized colonial history which presents a marked contrast to the more formal, ordered and higher-rent spaces of Chinatown to the west of Singapore’s CBD. Ho opens by affirming that ‘[t]here is of course great complexity within the creative industries and the various strands manifest diverse spatial characteristics’ (p. 1187), and suggests that Singapore represents a particularly instructive case in point. The finely-grained restoration of two- and three-storey shophouses in the Chinatown neighbourhood of Telok Ayer in particular have attracted higher-margin architectural, design, and corporate branding firms, together with high-end amenities such as restaurants, bars and fitness clubs, constituting a familiar rendering of upscale, culture-led regeneration, with international correlates including Yaletown in Vancouver, and Ehrenfeld in Cologne. Little India’s (relatively) low rents have predictably attracted young creatives and start-up cultural enterprises. But the cheaper premises comprise only part of the storyline of affinity between place and creativity in the Little India case. K. C. Ho effectively meshes lively and evocative case studies and interview panels with theory, including Gernot Grabher’s (2002) concept of ‘self-organized creative projects’, Graham Drake’s (2003) discussion of ‘individualised creativity’ in the spaces of the city, Richard Lloyd’s (2006) influential ethnography of ‘neo-Bohemian’ creatives in Chicago’s Wicker Park, and the formal

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The cultural economy in cities  ­191 meta-narrative of cultural policy and programming in Singapore – the classic developmental state. Ho’s interviews with young creatives in Little India disclose a highly variegated micro-ecology of the neighbourhood which play into the cultural production experience, including contact with random visitors as well as friends, the proximity of second-hand stores and antique shops, the ready availability of ‘cheap eats’, and the day-to-day rhythms of street-life – comprising the diverse milieu of creative stimulus within the gritty inner-city in a globalizing city-state. While a diversity of urban spaces supports a broad range of creative enterprise, as we have just observed, upgrading tendencies can work to reduce the productive capacity of urban communities and neighbourhoods. A case in point is Soho, in Central London, situated between the upscale Mayfair area to the west and Bloomsbury, and in which a decidedly heterogeneous mix of activities and actors, including seedy bars, sex-clubs, and a raffish contingent of wheeler-dealers and criminals have co-existed with a lively cultural scene of film-making, music and other performing and visual arts in the post-war era. Soho represents a marked contrast to the mainstream, high-culture districts of South Kensington and Chelsea, among numerous others, and thus has contributed to the marked diversity of London’s cultural milieu. But an insistent capital relayering and reinvestment trajectory in this century has squeezed out some of the marginal cultural players in Soho, as well as long-standing Chinese businesses – upgrading tendencies deplored not only by artists and critics, but also by mainstream reportage. The more sanitized environment shaped by redevelopment certainly presents a more glossy landscape and tidier street scenes than that of twentieth-century Soho, but it seems clear that the diversity of London’s cultural eco-system has been diminished in the process. As a final example in this suite of neighbourhood sketches of local culture and the social geography of the city I cite tensions associated with live–work studios as idealized sites of congenial creativity. For some the live–work (or alternatively work–live) studio represents an exemplary form of the creative habitus, evoking images of the renaissance master artist, or perhaps figures derived from the rive-gauche in the early twentieth-century, in which the production of art co-existed in place with living space and complementary amenity and socializing. But in the revalorized mixed-use or designated industrial spaces of the city, the ‘live’ component of live–work studios can exert upward pressure on rents, giving rise to efforts by planners to control their proliferation in low-income neighbourhoods, as seen both in Vancouver and San Francisco.

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12.7 CONCLUSION: SUMMARY AND CHALLENGES TO THEORY Following the tendencies of earlier periods of economic change and industrial innovation, there is a marked spatiality to the cultural economy of the city. In particular, the clustering of artists and high-value cultural industries and labour within industrial districts presents prima facie an evolution of the internal production (and consumption) spaces of the city, shaped by the familiar motive forces of capital, agglomeration and labour, and infused by personal affinity and semiotic value of place and the built environment. There is also a significant creative economy situated within residential neighbourhoods, including the production of art work, writing (fiction as well as technical writing), and piece-work associated with the garment industry – demonstrating the persistence of informalism in the economy of the city, while for many the performance of creative activity in the home represents an arduous ‘extensification’ of the daily work cycle and production territory. There is in many cities a very substantial economy of cultural spectacle, experience and encounter, as represented by diverse museums, galleries, stadia, and exhibition space. These include (essentially) permanent setpieces, the iconic cultural institutions which embody national symbols and values, as well as in many cases messaging from the state and (increasingly) from the corporate world. As a departure from an earlier model in which visitors experienced a necessarily distanciated relationship with the objects presented, modern cultural institutions now offer myriad opportunities for interaction and consumption, achieved through small, curated tours mediated by docents, advanced digital perspectives, hands-on workshops for those interested in learning something of artists’ practices first-hand, and online shopping and cafes and boutiques located in situ – another demonstration of the functional (and spatial) intermingling of production, consumption and spectacle in the visitor economy. The rise of the cultural economy of the city intersects important theoretical terrains, providing validation for some fields of conjecture, while offering challenges for others. At the highest level of theorization, the emergence of a substantial economy of cultural production appears to chime with tenets of social ecology in which class formation associated with occupational change contributes to shaping the zonal structure of the city, although deep criticisms of the ‘creative class’ thesis of Richard Florida (2002) call into question whether cultural workers represent a coherent ‘class’ or alternatively an extension of the new middle class. Second, the rise of cultural districts is acknowledged by Peter Hall as an important element of both the metropolitan space-economy and (in

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The cultural economy in cities  ­193 the most important cases) repertoire of global city functions. It does seem a tenable thesis that cultural production districts present compelling features of the urban zonal structure as depicted within the models depicted by Allen Scott, Michael Storper, Andy Pratt and other exponents of industrial urbanism, incorporating product specialization, social and technical divisions of labour, and the shaping of the internal production spaces of the city. But change associated with insistent upgrading, digitalization and restructuring suggests the need to explore more fluid models of creativity and space in the city, recognizing the dislocations and splintering of space associated with the ‘cultural turn’. These contradictions and ambiguities are also part of the intersection of the cultural economy with theories of globalization and transnationalism. Certainly the extraordinary rise of global multinationals such as Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, and LinkedIn represent exemplars of the power of culture potentiated by technology, marketing and (importantly) demographic shifts, as well as the role of cultural MNCs in shaping the space-economy of the city. Another facet of globalization within the cultural economy is represented in the rapid increase in outsourcing on the part of cultural industries such as film and video game production, and access to the Internet and Cloud both for sourcing and online marketing of cultural goods and services. But locality still counts for something in the shaping of culture and creativity in the city. And here I cite Timothy Shortell’s (2016) important monograph on the experiences of ‘everyday globalization’ within the immigrant neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and Paris, in some ways a worthy successor to Sharon Zukin’s influential explication of the complex and contested ‘cultures of the city’.

REFERENCES Bell, D. (1973), The Coming of Post–Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books. Bianchini, F. and L. Ghilardi (2004), ‘The culture of neighbourhoods: a European perspective’, in David Bell and Mark Jayne (eds), City of Quarters: Urban Villages in the Contemporary City, London: Routledge, pp. 238–247. Bluestone, B. and B. Harrison (1982), The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry, New York: Basic Books. Crinson, M. (2005), Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, London and New York: Routledge. Drake, G. (2003), ‘“This place gives me space”: place and creativity in the creative industries’, Geoforum, 34 (4), 511–524. Florida, R. (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York: Perseus Book Group. Fröbel, F., J. Heinrichs and O. Kreye (1980), The New International Division of Labour:

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194  Handbook of urban geography Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glaeser, E. (2012), Triumph of the City, London: Pan Books. Grabher, G. (2002), ‘Cool projects, boring institutions: temporary collaboration in social context’, Regional Studies, 36 (3), 205–214. Hall, P. (2000), ‘Creative cities and economic development’, Urban Studies, 37 (4), 639–651. Hamnett, C. (2003), Unequal City: London in the Global Arena, London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (2005), Paris, Capital of Modernity, New York: Routledge. Ho, K. C. (2009), ‘The neighbourhood in the creative economy: policy, practice and place in Singapore’, Urban Studies, 46 (5–6), 1187–1201. Hutton, T. A. (2008), The New Economy of the Inner City: Restructuring, Regeneration and Dislocation in the 21st Century Metropolis, London: Routledge. Hutton, T. A. (2016), Cities and the Cultural Economy, Abingdon: Routledge. Jarvis, H. and A. C. Pratt (2006), ‘Bringing it all back home: The extensification and ‘overflowing’ of work: the case of San Francisco’s new media households’, Geoforum, 37 (3), 331–339. Krätke, S. (2011), The Creative Capital of Cities: Interactive Knowledge Creation and the Urbanization Economies of Innovation, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Lewis, R. (2008), Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ley, D. (1996), The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lloyd, R. (2006), Neo–Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, New York: Routledge. Markusen, A. (2006), ‘Urban development and the politics of a creative class: evidence from a study of artists’, Environment and Planning A, 38 (10), 1921–1940. Martins, J. (2015), ‘The extended workplace of a creative cluster: exploring space(s) of digital work in silicon roundabout’, Journal of Urban Design, 20 (1), 125–145. Massey, D. and R. Meegan (1980), The Anatomy of Job Loss, London: Methuen. Mckenzie, M. and T. Hutton (2015), ‘Culture-led regeneration in the post-industrial built environment: complements and contradictions in Victory Square, Vancouver’, Journal of Urban Design, 20 (1), 8–27. Murray, C. (2004), ‘Rethinking neighbourhoods: from urban villages to cultural hubs’, in David Bell and Mark Jayne (eds), City of Quarters: Urban Villages in the Contemporary City, London: Routledge, pp. 191–205. Ocejo, R. E. (2010), ‘What’ll it be? Cocktail bartenders and the redefinition of service in the creative economy’, City, Culture and Society, 1 (4), 179–184. Peck, J. (2005), ‘Struggling with the creative class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (4), 740–770. Peck, J. and N. Theodore (2015), Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Scott, A. J. (1988), Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Scott, A. J. (2008), ‘Resurgent metropolis: economy, society and urbanization in an interconnected world’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (3), 548–564. Shortell, T. (2016), Everyday Globalization: A Spatial Semiotics of Immigrant Neighborhoods, New York: Routledge. Soja, E. (2000), Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell. Storper, M. and R. Salais (1999), Worlds of Production: The Action Frameworks of the Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turok, I. (2015), ‘Redundant and marginalized spaces’, in Ronan Paddison and Tom Hutton (eds), Cities and Economic Change: Restructuring and Dislocation in the Global Metropolis, London: Sage Publications, pp. 74–92. Zukin, S. (1995), The Cultures of Cities, Oxford: Blackwell.

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13.  Urban regeneration through culture Jonathan Ward and Phil Hubbard

13.1 INTRODUCTION As a subset of more general urban and planning policy, urban regeneration policy has become more significant in recent decades, especially in those ‘shrinking cities’ that have borne the brunt of global shifts and economic transitions. Foremost here have been some of the former economic powerhouses of the industrial economy, with Detroit, Liverpool and Leipzig frequently cited as paradigmatic examples of cities whose economic base has been undermined by the emergence of a new international division of labour in which they are yet to find a significant role (Martinez-Fernandez et al., 2012). The language of regeneration, along with associated discourses of renaissance and renewal, has accordingly been deployed across a variety of post-industrial cities, typically, though not always, focused on those struggling communities and neighbourhoods in the inner and central districts that were at their most buoyant in the post-war era of high employment and mass consumption. Urban regeneration has sought to ameliorate the social and economic decline of these affected areas, deploying a variety of different logics to achieve these ends; some focused on improving ‘social capital’ and creating resilient communities (typically through the development of community facilities and investment in social infrastructure), others based on promoting economic prosperity through investment encouraging business and private enterprise. Over the last three decades, urban geographers have offered considerable insight into the shifting discourse and practice of urban regeneration, identifying important connections between regeneration policies and wider shifts in the urban political economy. In the 1990s, and following in the wake of David Harvey’s (1989) influential work, much attention was given to the changing role of the local state and especially the widespread adoption of a more ‘entrepreneurial’ stance that contrasted markedly with the welfarist, managerial role city government frequently fulfilled in the industrial city (Hall and Hubbard, 1996). Into the twenty-first century, motifs of urban neoliberalism have been more to the fore, with the selective withdrawal of the local state from various areas of policy intervention seen to be encouraging a reliance on the private sector to deliver urban regeneration, something emphasized in accounts of ‘revanchist’ city p ­ olitics 195

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196  Handbook of urban geography (e.g. Smith, 1996; MacLeod, 2002; Hubbard, 2004). In such accounts, it is posited that the local state’s role appears limited to making the city safe for corporate investment, with gentrification appearing to have become the only way that some city governors can imagine regeneration occurring. In this light, ‘austerity urbanism’ provides a new context for urban regeneration policy (Tonkiss, 2013), with DIY urbanism, localism and philanthropy offering an alternative to corporate-led regeneration. This said, even the efforts of community groups and activists can be co-opted by the state in ways that fuel gentrification rather than regeneration (Douglas, 2014). But across the decades, certain themes have been recurrent in both the academic and policy literature on urban regeneration. One theme that we wish to highlight in this chapter is the persistent attention devoted to the role of ‘culture’ in urban regeneration. While culture has always been one of the most problematic concepts in the social sciences, ‘cultural activity’ has frequently been posited as something of a panacea for urban problems, increasingly integrated into mainstream urban policy (Miles and Paddison, 2005). In this context, both local and national governments have used the cultural industries as a key, and perhaps central, element of urban development and regeneration policies, the economic impacts of a ‘creative renaissance’ in our cities being viewed as a possible ameliorative to the problems associated with the shift to a deindustrialized economy (Evans, 2009). While such policies take different forms, in many instances culture-led urban regeneration has also become synonymous with arts-led regeneration, with artists constructed as at the vanguard of processes that symbolically embellish place and unlock its ‘potential’, their presence being understood as ‘a catalyst for neighbourhood transition’ (Bridge, 2006, p. 1965). In an era of inter-urban competition, the arts have come to be increasingly prized in the post-industrial city for their ‘ability to brand, cultivate and classify space’ given ‘the presence of the arts (the alterations of built form and the caché attached to the artistic lifestyle/output) transforms the symbolic meaning of urban spaces and catalyzes economic development’ (Mathews, 2014, p. 1019).

13.2 CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ARTS-LED REGENERATION The role of art and culture in ‘creative city’ and urban regeneration strategies has now been explored in a wide range of academic literatures (e.g. Bailey et al., 2004; Evans, 2009; Markusen and Schrock, 2006; Pratt, 2008, 2011; Thompson, 2016), much of this critical of the idea that art can be a panacea for urban ills. Nevertheless, there is an influential body of policy-oriented

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Urban regeneration through culture  ­197 literature that is broadly supportive of such culture-led approaches, suggesting that art and artists are ‘entrepreneurial assets’ in the global battle for investment and tourism (see especially Landry, 2000; Florida, 2002). Here, the arguments mustered suggest that artists can be directly enrolled in the re-aestheticization of previously redundant and derelict spaces (Mommaas, 2004), can enhance local well-being by leading community arts initiatives (Bailey et al., 2004), generate ‘social capital’ through their networks (Ewbank et al., 2013; Vella-Burrows et al., 2014) and make a surprisingly large, though sometimes hidden, contribution to local economic development through their work (Markusen and Schrock, 2006). Arts-led regeneration also seems to have become synonymous with iconic architectural projects designed to anchor a cultural renaissance. Prominent examples include, for example, Bilbao’s Guggenheim and London’s Tate Modern (Dean et al., 2010; Plaza, 2000) – both interventions based around the development of large contemporary art galleries – as well as a wider range of museums, workshops and creative spaces (Mommaas, 2004). These typically follow a paradigmatic template wherein under- or disused industrial buildings are ‘recycled’ by cultural workers and become ‘dream houses’ that symbolize a particular constellation of hopes and aspirations (Thompson, 2016). The perceived contributions artists make as the ‘creative’ agents who inhabit such spaces are multiple given they are viewed as providing a cultural consecration of these spaces, something that draws on a bohemian mythology and the durable association between artists and those symbolically rich urban districts that carry connotations of being authentic, cool or edgy (Lloyd, 2010; Zukin, 2010). Hence, art, culture and creativity are used to tease out distinctive marks and connotations of authenticity and increase the symbolic capital of place so important in inter-urban competition. As Landry (2000, p. 118) argues, this is crucial ‘as celebrating distinctiveness in a homogenising world marks out one place from the next. Making the specific symbols of the city . . . visible [produces] assets from which value can be created’. Tate Modern on London’s South Bank is exemplary here, the gallery reconfiguring the disused Bankside power station into an icon of London cool (Dean et al., 2010). As such, the use of culture and creativity in urban policy can be understood as a competitive strategy based on the ‘upgrading’ of the city’s image and the development of a marketable city-product that will appeal to visitors, investors and, importantly, other creative workers. While advocates of arts-led regeneration projects often focus on wider social and economic benefits that follow in the wake of artist-led regeneration, it has also been argued that the artists themselves benefit from involvement in regeneration projects. For example, Scott (2000, p. 19)

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198  Handbook of urban geography highlights the ‘agglomeration economies’ of creative clusters and argues there can be ‘beneficial emergent effects’, including the creation of a local labour market attuned to creative recruitment, emergence of localized ‘politico-cultural assets such as mutual trust, tacit understandings, learning effects’, economies of scale in the provision of education and training and essential infrastructure. There are also assumed to be lifestyle benefits associated with the emergence of mixed-use design and arts space which incorporate work and office space, shops, bars, cafés and sometimes housing (Evans and Shaw, 2004). There are then many assumed social benefits of arts-led activity. For example, beyond the creation of arts spaces, the presence of artists is also registered in the placement of art works in a range of public spaces. For proponents, these art works can both aestheticize urban space and foment senses of public ownership and social cohesion, engaging with individual and shared meanings and identities. For instance, The Angel of the North, a giant angel-like sculpture in Newcastle/Gateshead, has arguably done much to consolidate local identities and sense of place, as well as creating a new and more positive image for the cities in question (Bailey et al., 2004). Meanwhile, Vella-Burrows et al. (2014, p. 36) point to the ‘strong correlation’ between engagement in cultural activity and reported improvements in health and well-being when assessing the impacts of culture-led regeneration in three coastal towns. Yet, as noted above, there is also criticism: arts-based interventions and strategies have been deemed a ‘distraction’ from underlying social problems (Pratt, 2008) and arts spaces accused of being an ‘inducement to sleepwalk’ into a new economy of precarity and poor wages (Thompson, 2016). Issues of inequity and exclusion are then raised as potential dangers of policies which place much faith in artistic labourers whose cultural capital is rarely matched by real economic clout (Pratt, 2008). Peck (2005, p. 763) also rejects the rhetoric that presents culture-led development as, in some way, ‘civilizing’, suggesting that it is involved in processes that ultimately ‘commodify the arts and cultural resources, even social tolerance itself, suturing them as putative economic assets to evolving regimes of urban competition’. He continues by suggesting that both in theory and practice such policy provides a ‘means to intensify and publicly subsidize urban consumption systems for a circulating class of gentrifiers’ (Peck, 2005, p.764). There are then many tensions between cultural production and consumption within these strategies, though as Comunian (2010) and Pratt (2008) note, the glut of work on cultural consumption in regeneration is not matched by an equivalent body of work on cultural production or labour conditions. Recent research has begun to address this, demonstrating that culture-led interventions have failed to adequately support

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Urban regeneration through culture  ­199 cultural production and may even undermine the artists who are supposed to feel ‘welcomed and rewarded’ (Ward, 2018). This said, the majority of critical accounts continue to circle around the assumption that creative renaissance can instigate wider processes of regeneration. Here, Pratt (2008) and Bailey et al. (2004) point out that the justification for arts-based strategies are often predicated on the myth of ‘trickle-down’ benefits to the wider community in the form of jobs and economic growth. Both note, however, that the evidence for this is thin indeed: ‘The distinct lack of and commitment to, in-depth research into this issue creates a situation in which policy makers are unable to draw an evidence base upon which to make key decisions in the application of culture-led regeneration strategies . . .’ (Bailey et al., 2004, p. 47). The insights of urban geography matter here in so much that the success or failure of arts-led regeneration appears contingent on local contextual factors (Cameron and Coaffee, 2005). While this means that it is hard to gauge the effectiveness of arts-led policy on the basis of singular case studies, such studies can still provide clues as to tendencies and, when considered in the context of geographical theories relating to the uneven production of space, can highlight how urban regeneration alters landscapes in material and immaterial ways, potentially encouraging a ‘zero sum game’ (Harvey, 1989) in which the benefits accruing to some social groups are reliant on the exploitation or displacement of others. Thus, the tension between the desire to improve localities for established residents and the dangers of promoting the incursion of wealthier gentrifiers is one that is at the heart of debates around arts-based regeneration and it is one we return to subsequently. Equally here, we want to emphasize the importance of the often-hidden labour through which new ‘creative’ and artful landscapes are produced. In the remainder of this chapter, we explore this through a case study of a declining coastal town (Folkestone in England) that has been seeking to reverse its fortunes through a major programme of arts-based activity. Via this brief example we seek to highlight a number of key themes in the urban regeneration literature and flesh out some important questions about the role of geographic research in promoting sustainable and inclusive culture-based policies for urban regeneration.

13.3 COASTAL REGENERATION, POSTINDUSTRIALISM AND THE LIMITS OF ARTSBASED POLICY Folkestone is a town in Kent’s Shepway district, situated at the southeastern tip of England between the North Downs and English Channel.

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200  Handbook of urban geography Shepway is largely rural, composed mostly of small towns and villages, with Folkestone accounting for over 45,000 of the district’s 100,000 residents. Contemporary accounts of Folkestone play on a melancholic imagery of a once genteel Edwardian seaside resort and thriving Channel ferry port that is now faded, shabby and part-derelict (Ewbank, 2011). Certainly, its popularity as a ‘bucket and spade’ seaside resort waned rapidly from the 1960s, with the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 gradually undermining the viability of the ferry port, docks and associated industry: ‘The town was going down and down and down; gradually it lost its grandeur, its heart. It all seemed inevitable – much of the time the council just saw its job as managing gentle decline’ (Philip Carter, former council leader of Folkestone, quoted in Ewbank, 2011, p. 14). Although located in the generally affluent South East of England and enjoying good high-speed train links to London, Folkestone suffers from some serious social problems, focused in particular in its central and eastern areas. In 2003 one of its census tracts (the Harvey Central ward) was the worst in Kent for health deprivation, worst in the South East for unemployment and in the 0.4 per cent most deprived wards in England and Wales. Thirty-four per cent of the working-age population was in long-term unemployment and had no formal qualifications (Ewbank, 2011, p. 31). In 2010, nine areas of Folkestone, which cover most of the town, were listed as within the 20 per cent most deprived in England and Wales. For Ewbank, these ‘indicators of deprivation told a consistent story: Folkestone was failing to thrive’ (Ewbank, 2011, p. 31). In response, Shepway District Council’s (2012, p. 29) Core Strategy noted that a ‘Strategic Need’ was the ‘challenge to improve employment, educational attainment and economic performance’, with a key part of the mooted solution the expansion of ‘cultural and creative activity in the district, with refurbished premises and spaces in Folkestone’s Old Town forming a vibrant Creative Quarter’. As part of its contribution to the Council’s strategic needs, this ‘Regeneration Arc provides major opportunities for development . . . to upgrade the fabric of the town drawing from its past and potential sense of place’ (Shepway District Council, 2012, p. 104). Speaking in 2010, Paul Carter, then Leader of Kent County Council, noted the ‘unique potential’ of Folkestone, suggesting the town could expect to develop as a popular place for artists thanks to its location and the contributions of local businessperson, founder of the Saga travel group, Roger De Haan (Jamieson, 2010). It is significant to note, then, that it is the Creative Foundation – a charity established in 2001 and funded by De Haan – that is driving this culture-led regeneration project (Ewbank, 2011). The Creative Foundation has purchased and renovated a majority of the properties in Folkestone’s Old Town, leasing them for

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Urban regeneration through culture  ­201 use as studios and galleries for creative businesses and practitioners. Most significantly, perhaps, it runs the Folkestone Triennial, the largest commissioning programme for public art in the UK: the third Triennial in 2014 featured work from 19 artists, some of which has now joined the permanent Folkestone Artworks collection of 27 public artworks distributed across the town, most produced by internationally-recognized ‘superstar’ artists (e.g. Tracey Emin, Yoko Ono and Mark Wallinger).

13.4 ARTS-POLICY AS URBAN REGENERATION POLICY The culture-led strategies undertaken in Folkestone were established under the New Labour UK government (1997–2010). This administration proved a consistent proponent of culture-led urban regeneration strategies, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) arguing that: ‘Now is the time to recognize the growing success story that is Britain’s creative economy and build on that. The vision . . . of a Britain in ten years’ time where the local economies in our biggest cities are driven by creativity . . .’ (DCMS, 2008, p. 6, emphasis in original). While the approach of subsequent administrations has been to divert attention elsewhere (e.g. the use of the 2012 London Olympics as a catalyst for regeneration in the East End of London), much local policy activity remains a product of that earlier period, with the cultural industries (branded ‘creative industries’) deemed a means to promote economic development, social inclusion and regeneration (DCMS, 2001, 2008; Local Government Association, 2009; Evans and Shaw, 2004; Hewison, 2011). Before the election of the Coalition (Conservative-dominated) government in 2010, Oakley (2010, p. 19) noted that it was at the ‘regional and local level that the fusion of economic development, regeneration and social inclusion goals was largely enacted’. This local/regional approach was backed-up with central government funding and support through, for example, the Local Government Association (2009, 2013) and the various regional development agencies which, from 1999 until 2011, were involved in many culture-led strategies and initiatives, such as establishing ‘cultural quarters’, new public art and ‘flagship’ galleries (DCMS, 2001, 2008; Oakley, 2010). Despite lacking the larger urban centres generally envisaged as locations for the hubs of the creative economy, local and regional cultural policy in many coastal communities developed in this context. Here, it is notable that many coastal towns in the UK fit neatly in with the narratives of decline that apply to the deindustrialized manufacturing areas of the

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202  Handbook of urban geography UK and are therefore viewed as prime candidates for the same kinds of cultural-led responses. Indeed, seaside towns may be particularly suitable for culture-led regeneration as coastal resorts have long engaged in placepromotion and undertaken strategies designed to alter their inherited identities. Such strategies are supported by initiatives such as the DCMS ‘Sea Change’ programme (2008–2010) which provided £37 million to projects that used culture to contribute to social and economic regeneration of seaside resorts (BOP Consulting, 2011). Supported projects in this programme include galleries and public art installations in Ilfracombe (where Damien Hirst’s 66ft Verity sculpture has become a landmark) and Hastings (where The Jerwood Gallery opened in 2012 at a cost of over £4 million). In each case, the focus on the visual arts suggests an important imagined synergy between the re-aestheticization of run-down neighbourhoods and the promotion of an arts community that is imagined as more socially mobile and resilient than those employed in ‘traditional’ seasonal seaside work (e.g. hospitality and catering) (Ward, 2018). The use of ‘flagship’ developments to anchor urban regeneration is nothing new (Loftman and Nevin, 1995), but there is then an important distinction here between arts-led interventions and the convention centres, sports stadia and heritage shopping districts which so often underpinned earlier forms of entrepreneurial place-making (Hall and Hubbard, 1996). The symbolism of key arts-based projects can be understood as helping to produce a representational space that overlays the existing material and symbolic properties of the town with new socio-spatial configurations (Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 41–42). These representations deploy a specific ideology of culture and creativity to imagine place as (inherently) creative, upgrading the image of the city-product through the utilization of ‘historically constituted cultural artefacts and practices and special environmental characteristics’ (Harvey, 2001, p. 404). In Folkestone this is expressly based on claims to uniqueness and authenticity (i.e. arts as embedded in the ‘old town’) and an exploitation of synergies between culture, leisure and tourism for economic development. The effect is the layering of socially constituted discourses of culture, creativity and art over existing and established ‘local’ understandings and lived experiences of these places. This is heightened in Folkestone as the Triennial and permanent Artworks collection imposes an ‘artful’ identity through acts of spatial inscription and place-making (e.g. public artworks, installations and interventions across the town). Indeed, the stated aims of the Folkestone Triennial/Artworks are explicit about this: [Folkestone Artworks is] helping to further develop Folkestone’s reputation as a unique destination in the UK . . . The aim remains that when people think

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Urban regeneration through culture  ­203 about Folkestone they think about the collection. The size of the collection now warrants a trip to Folkestone by itself and we would like the people of the town to be aware of it, proud of it and to talk about it. (Folkestone Artworks, n.d.)

There is little doubt that art can provide the basis for an effective reimaging of place given the media preoccupation with ‘superstar’ artists and the ‘value’ with which their art is imbued. For example, when German artist Michael Sailstorfer buried 30 bars of gold bullion worth £400 each on Folkestone beach as part of the 2014 Triennial, it attracted huge media attention: ITV breakfast, BBC news and even Chinese state television broadcast live from the town. The Creative Foundation counted 119 articles in regional, national and international media, 14 radio and television stories and more than 200 online articles estimating more than 1.6 billion hits.

13.5 EXCLUSIONS AND CONTESTATIONS OF ARTS-BASED POLICY In Folkestone the legacy of arts-based regeneration is then visible in a variety of ways, both literally in the form of public artworks and studio spaces and metaphorically in the forging of a new mediated reputation as a creative place. However, this conscious promotion of place can be problematic and contested. Indeed, attempts to draw attention to bubbles of ‘creative’ activity in parts of Folkestone has encouraged parts of the press to look beyond these to those who live in conditions of deprivation. For example, much of the media coverage in 2014 and 2015 sought to tell the stories of those digging for gold on Folkestone’s beach, questioning the logic of burying gold ‘under the noses of the poor’ and drawing attention to those who dug with their bare hands looking for a way out of ‘an empty and wrecked town’ (Armstrong, 2015). This type of observation chimes with the literatures on the role of artists in gentrification, suggesting a disconnection between the lifestyles and values of artists in deprived neighbourhoods and the needs of less wealthy or educated residents (Bain, 2003; Lees and Melhuish, 2013). As noted previously, the literature on artists as complicit in gentrification is now large and though mixed conclusions have been drawn, it is clear that the deliberate deployment of artists to ‘grotty’ neighbourhoods allows for the ‘grottiness’ to be ‘tamed and made safe’ for the arrival of the middle-class (Landry, 2000, p. 125). This was further highlighted as the Folkestone Harbour Company, owned by Creative Foundation backer Roger De Haan, began work on a £337 million property development close to the Creative Quarter. In securing

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204  Handbook of urban geography planning, the work of the Creative Foundation in developing the Creative Quarter and running two triennials is entered as evidence to attest to their commitment to the town: The plans for the redevelopment of the harbour and seafront have sat alongside considerable investment in the town by Roger De Haan through the Roger De Haan Charitable Trust, Creative Foundation and Folkestone Harbour Company. The town has gained a new vibrancy in the Creative Quarter, the mounting of two international arts exhibitions (the Folkestone Triennial) in 2008 and 2011, investment in schools and sports facilities, and improvements to the harbour itself, including public realm and visitor destinations. (Shepway District Council, 2013, n.p.)

However, the new development is aimed at people moving into the area, with only 8 per cent of the new homes classified as ‘affordable’. The urban cultural regeneration, then, has become de facto branding for a scheme of speculative property construction. This suggests that culture-led strategies can constitute the first stage of processes that materially and symbolically reconfigure spaces to the living, working and consumption patterns of incoming (wealthier) residents. In Folkestone the creative ‘pioneers’ of cultural regeneration are sited in an area of high deprivation where, with backing from Roger De Haan’s Creative Foundation, a swathe of dilapidated but still in-use commercial and residential property was bought, renovated and repurposed for ‘artists, artisans and creative businesses of the very highest calibre’ (Ewbank, 2011, p. 48). Taking up tenancies there requires applications from prospective residents and businesses to be vetted by committee and these are sometimes vetoed on the grounds of artistic quality. Therefore, the use of culture-led urban regeneration policy can be divisive, with the promotion of a ‘creative vibe’ often requiring the (literal and metaphorical) displacement of existing values, lifestyles and businesses. Indeed, in the case of Folkestone, it is clear the process of marketing the town as creative has reinforced distinctions between those who are artful and deemed to have the capacity to engage in designated creative spaces and the ‘uncreative’ classes who populate the more ‘ordinary’ town (see Edensor et al., 2009 on mundane creativity). This is manifest in obvious physical transformations as more and more of the town has been given over to gallery and workshop spaces, with these occupying derelict shops, nightclubs and amusement arcades.

13.6  ARTISTS AND LABOUR The assumption that arts-based regeneration creates cohesive communities is then highly questionable (see Lees and Melhuish, 2013) and much

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Urban regeneration through culture  ­205 more research is needed to establish whether indigenous creativity always suffers as external notions of artistic ‘value’ take hold. Perhaps the valorization of the visual arts is misguided in this respect, given the other forms of creativity that typically exist, but are not celebrated, in less affluent communities (e.g. crafting, modelling, music-making, gaming, playing). But it is clear that arts-led regeneration relies on other questionable assumptions, such as those that equate creativity with the economic prosperity of creative workers. For Lefebvre, the discoursing of a particular representation of (creative) space can serve to conceal the labour through which it originated: ‘Products and the circuits they establish (in space) are fetishized and so become more “real” than reality itself – that is, than productive activity itself, which they thus take over’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 81). Put another way, it appears the galleries and artworks that attract much attention from visitors, the media and policy-makers obscure the very labour and social relations on which the interpretation of these places as inherently ‘creative’ is built. Displays of artistic activity – in studios, galleries, festivals and fringe events – are vital in Folkestone’s re-imagination as a ‘creative’ town but are reliant on the labour of individual artists who are not necessarily part of the ‘flagship’ cultural project (Ward, 2018). Thus, while the media and policy attention in Folkestone might focus on the Triennial, or a general description of the town becoming a more ‘creative’ place, local artists’ labour plays an important part in producing these representations of space. Currid and Williams (2010, p. 423) note that ‘the social milieu plays a key role in the production, consumption and valorization of cultural goods’, reminding us that it is labour that produces the ‘buzz’ that ‘motivates consumption of cultural goods and generates aesthetic and market value’. Culture-led development strategies seek to exploit this and hence rely on the labour of ‘local’ artists, irrespective of the emphasis sometimes put on ‘star’ and global artists. Yet it is equally apparent arts-based urban regeneration can alienate local artists as much as it can other local residents who feel their values and opinions are being sidelined by agendas which are externally-oriented. Arguably, local arts production is undermined in Folkestone by the Triennial’s curatorial and commissioning activity and a focus on bringing in ‘big name’ artists: though there is an acceptance on the part of local artists that artworks are needed that can encourage visitors to Folkestone, there is also resentment evident as the most prominent policy interventions do not adequately represent local artists’ work, something important given the precarious working conditions endured by many visual artists. This was further illustrated by an event in February 2013, organized by Kent County Council, which addressed ‘Engagement, learning, skills’ and ‘Sector skills development’. To the consternation of local artists present, rather than exploring how to

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206  Handbook of urban geography develop skills and sustainability of the cultural sector, it unfolded as an uncritical presentation promoting culture as boosterist tool, focusing on East Kent’s (ultimately unsuccessful) bid to become UK City of Culture. Thus, despite the vital activity of artists in creating Folkestone as a creative place, policy activity arguably ignores the specific needs of artists, including the difficult working conditions that many face. Folkestone has attracted many artists to the town because it offers cheaper living and working spaces than many other towns in the South East, an essential trait for those who work in a sector where low pay and free labour, are the norm (Banks et al., 2013). While there are ethical questions as to the exploitation of artists’ labour by government and property owners, more prosaically there are also serious questions as to the long-term sustainability of a regeneration strategy based on promoting kinds of work that often pay less than the national minimum hourly wage and which are beset by chronic insecurity.

13.7 CONCLUSION In the apparently global battle for jobs and investment, culture-based urban regeneration strategies have much appeal for urban governors struggling to identify routes to a bright post-industrial future. The visual arts in particular seem particularly vaunted as a means by which place images can be transformed and struggling economies revivified. This chapter has explored the key arguments mustered here: namely that the presence of art adds value to place by changing dominant representations of a town or city at the same time artists are figured as a virtuous force for social change. In a context where the local state is rarely able to devote time or money to building ‘communities’ through the financing of social infrastructure or grassroots initiatives designed to reskill or otherwise reengage marginalized residents, the appeal of arts-based policy is obvious. But our conclusion is that arts-based regeneration must now come with health warnings, as it raises the spectre of gentrification, displacement and a class-based contestation in which those represented as ‘artless’ and ‘uncreative’ ultimately reject the arts-based identities foisted upon their communities. The example of Folkestone, though specific to a particular corner of South East England, demonstrates the importance of a continuing dialogue between urban geography and urban policy and a need for academics to better communicate why concepts like gentrification, displacement and precarity need to be invoked in discussions of arts-led regeneration. More than this, perhaps, this example suggests that labour of creative

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Urban regeneration through culture  ­207 workers themselves needs to be more fully considered in critical accounts of culture-led regeneration. So while Folkestone’s Creative Foundation is far from unique in suggesting it is building a successful creative community, questions remain about the viability and sustainability of an arts-based approach in this town. While arts-led regeneration has begun to produce economic returns via consumption-orientated models of development in Folkestone, we have argued that a perspective focusing on the dialectic of cultural production and consumption offers a better basis for making any evaluation of costs and benefits. In this respect, urban geographers need to work alongside artists to identify how their labour is being enrolled in projects of culture-based regeneration and include artists among the groups that might be disadvantaged or disenfranchized by seemingly inclusive arts-based urban policy.

REFERENCES Armstrong, S. (2015), ‘Why the digging has never stopped in England’s gold-rush town’, The Guardian, 16 April. Bailey, C., S. Miles and P. Stark (2004), ‘Culture-led urban regeneration and the revitalisation of identities in Newcastle, Gateshead and the North East of England’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 10 (1), 47–65. Bain, A. L. (2003), ‘Constructing contemporary artistic identities in Toronto neighbourhoods’, The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 47 (3), 303‒317. Banks, M., R. Gill and S. Taylor (2013), ‘Introduction: cultural work, time and trajectory’, in Mark Banks, Rosalind Gill and Stephanie Taylor (eds), Theorizing Cultural Work, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–16. BOP Consulting (2011), Sea Change Evaluation, London: BOP Consulting. Bridge, G. (2006), ‘It’s not just a question of taste: gentrification, the neighbourhood and cultural capital’, Environment and Planning A, 38 (10), 1965–1978. Cameron, S. and J. Coaffee (2005), ‘Art, gentrification and regeneration – from artist as pioneer to public arts’, European Journal of Housing Policy, 5 (1), 39–58. Comunian, R. (2010), ‘Rethinking the creative city: the role of complexity, networks and interactions in the urban creative economy’, Urban Studies, 48 (6), p. 1157–1179. Currid, E. and S. Williams (2010), ‘The geography of buzz: art, culture and the social milieu in Los Angeles and New York’, Journal of Economic Geography, 10 (3), 423–451. DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) (2001), Creative Industries Mapping Document, at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creative-industries-mapping-do​ cuments-2001 (accessed 30 September 2018). DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) (2008), Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy, at http://bufvc.ac.uk/copyright-guidance/mlr/index.php/site/498 (accessed 30 September 2018). Dean, C., C. Donnellan and A. C. Pratt (2010), ‘Tate Modern: pushing the limits of regeneration’, City, Culture and Society, 1 (2), 79–87. Douglas, G. C. (2014), ‘Do-it-yourself urban design: the social practice of informal “improvement” through unauthorized alteration’, City & Community, 13 (1), 5–25. Edensor, T., D. Leslie, S. Millington and N. Rantisi (eds) (2009), Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy, London: Routledge. Evans, G. (2009), ‘Creative cities, creative spaces and urban policy’, Urban Studies, 46 (5–6), 1003–1040.

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208  Handbook of urban geography Evans, G. and P. Shaw (2004), The Contribution of Culture to Regeneration in the UK: A Review of the Evidence, London: DCMS. Ewbank, N. (2011), Adventures in Regeneration, Folkestone: NEA Publishing, at http:// www.noku.no/files/3345/file/adventures-in-regeneration-by-nick-ewbank.pdf (accessed 30 September 2018). Ewbank, N., S. Mills and F. Gray (2013), De La Warr Pavilion: Analysis of Generation of Social Capital, Folkestone: NEA Publishing. Florida, R. (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books. Folkestone Artworks (n.d.), ‘About Folkestone Artworks’, at http://folkestoneartworks. co.uk/about/ (accessed 30 September 2018). Hall, T. and P. Hubbard (1996), ‘The entrepreneurial city: new urban politics, new urban geographies?’, Progress in Human Geography, 20 (2), 153‒174. Harvey, D. (1989), ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography, 71 (1), 3–17. Harvey, D. (2001), Spaces of Capital, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hewison, R. (2011), ‘“Creative Britain”: myth or monument?’, Cultural Trends, 20 (3–4), 235–242. Hubbard, P. (2004), ‘Revenge and injustice in the neoliberal city: uncovering masculinist agendas’, Antipode, 36 (4), 665–686. Jamieson, T. (2010), ‘Our dream of a great place to live and work’, Kentish Express, 4 February. Landry, C. (2000), The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators, London: Earthscan. Lees, L. and C. Melhuish (2013), ‘Arts-led regeneration in the UK: the rhetoric and the evidence on urban social inclusion’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 22 (3), 242–260. Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. Lloyd, R. (2010), Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, Second Edition, Abingdon: Routledge. Local Government Association (2009), Investing in Creative Industries: A Guide for Local Authorities, London: Local Government Association. Local Government Association (2013), Driving Growth through Local Government Investment in the Arts, London: Local Government Association. Loftman, P. and B. Nevin (1995), ‘Prestige projects and urban regeneration in the 1980s and 1990s: a review of benefits and limitations’, Planning Practice and Research, 10 (3), 299–316. MacLeod, G. (2002), ‘From urban entrepreneurialism to a “revanchist city”? On the spatial injustices of Glasgow’s renaissance’, Antipode, 34 (3), 602–624. Markusen, A. and G. Schrock (2006), ‘The artistic dividend: urban artistic specialisation and economic development implications’, Urban Studies, 43 (10), 1661–1686. Martinez-Fernandez, C., I. Audirac, S. Fol and E. Cunningham-Sabot (2012), ‘Shrinking cities: urban challenges of globalization’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36 (2), 213–225. Mathews, V. (2014), ‘Incoherence and tension in culture-led redevelopment’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (3), 1019–1036. Miles, S. and R. Paddison (2005), ‘Introduction: the rise and rise of culture-led urban regeneration’, Urban Studies, 42 (5‒6), 833–839. Mommaas, H. (2004), ‘Cultural clusters and the post-industrial city: towards the remapping of urban cultural policy’, Urban Studies, 41 (3), 507–532. Oakley, K. (2010), Creative Industries and the Politics of New Labour, London: City University London. Peck, J. (2005), ‘Struggling with the creative class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (4), 740–770. Plaza, B. (2000), ‘Evaluating the influence of a large cultural artifact in the attraction of tourism: the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao case’, Urban Affairs Review, 36 (2), 264–274. Pratt, A. C. (2008), ‘Creative cities: the cultural industries and the creative class’, Geografiska Annaler B, 90 (2), 107–117.

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Urban regeneration through culture  ­209 Pratt, A. C. (2011), ‘The cultural contradictions of the creative city’, City, Culture and Society, 2 (3), 123–130. Scott, A. J. (2000), The Cultural Economy of Cities, London: Sage. Shepway District Council (2012), Shepway Core Strategy Submission Document, Folkestone: Shepway District Council. Shepway District Council (2013), Report A/12/17, 31 July 2013, Folkestone: Shepway District Council. Smith, N. (1996), The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, New York: Routledge. Thompson, Z. (2016), Urban Constellations: Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in PostIndustrial Britain, London: Routledge. Tonkiss, F. (2013), ‘Austerity urbanism and the makeshift city’, City, 17 (3), 312‒324. Vella-Burrows, T., N. Ewbank, S. Mills, M. Shipton, S. Clift and F. Gray (2014), Cultural Value and Social Capital: Investigating Social Capital, Health and Wellbeing Impacts in Three Coastal Towns Undergoing Culture-led Regeneration, Folkestone: SDHRC and NEA. Ward, J. (2018), ‘Down by the sea: visual arts, artists and coastal regeneration’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 24, 121–138. Ward, K. J. (2015), ‘Geographies of exclusion: seaside towns and houses in multiple occupancy’, Journal of Rural Studies, 37 (1), 96–107. Zukin, S. (2010), Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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14.  Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism Andrés Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin

14.1 INTRODUCTION Across the world, smart urbanism (SU) is emerging at the intersection of visions for the future of urban places, new technologies and infrastructures. Promoted by international organizations, the corporate sector, and national and local governments alike, the dominant vision revolves around the meshing of interactive infrastructure, high-tech urban development, the digital economy and e-citizens. SU discourses are deeply rooted in seductive and normative visions of the future where digital technology stands as the primary driver for change. SU, it is argued, provides a flexible and responsive means of addressing the challenges of urban growth and renewal, responding to climate change, and building a more socially inclusive society (European Commission, 2012). As SU finds firm ground beyond the corporate world, in the sites of communities and local organizations, these optimistic readings of the interaction between digital and urban worlds are embraced by a wide range of stakeholders – arguably following both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ logics. Smart urbanism – as opposed to the more technocratic concept of smart cities – refers to the ways in which digital technologies and computational logics become intertwined with everyday life, numerous socio-technical networks and the wider socio-political context of their deployment. Our conception of SU is based on a relational understanding of socio-technical change which recognizes that the logics of smart city technologies are frequently challenged, contested and disrupted when they engage with different urban contexts and social interests, and rarely deliver the vision of their designers without being recast and reconfigured. However, our collective understanding of the opportunities, challenges, and implications of SU is still limited. Research in this field is slowly emerging (Caragliu et al., 2011; Luque, 2014; Luque et al., 2014) yet fragmented along disciplinary lines (e.g. Hollands, 2008) and based on single city case studies (Mahiznan, 1999; Mejia et al., 2011). As a result, we lack both the theoretical insight and empirical evidence required to assess the implications of this potentially transformative phenomenon. Given the significant 210

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Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism  ­211 implications of SU there is an urgent need to critically engage with why, how, for whom and with what consequences SU is emerging in different urban contexts. The rest of this chapter is structured in three sections. The following section provides an overview of the recent research literature on smart urbanism, identifying the need for a more critical assessment of the phenomenon. The third section identifies three research themes that could constitute a critical agenda. The final section concludes by identifying three future research priorities.

14.2 CRITICAL GAPS IN UNDERSTANDING SMART URBANISM A new language of ‘smartness’ is reshaping debates about contemporary cities, along with a new set of programmes and practices that are intent on realizing smart urbanism. This is visible in, for example, the importance given to smart cities in the EU Strategic Energy Technology Plan (European Commission, undated), the prolific development of smart city initiatives in Asia, Australia, the US and elsewhere (e.g. EPRI, undated; SmartGrid. gov, undated), and the emergence of dedicated teams aimed at developing business opportunities in smart city technologies within global engineering, telecommunications and utilities companies such as IBM, Cisco, Toshiba, Google, General Electric, Hitachi and others (Luque, 2014). SU is projected, often following normative or teleological approaches, as a futuristic solution brought to the present to deal with a broad multiplicity of urban maladies, including issues of economic growth, transport congestion, resource constraints, climate change and even the need to expand public participation within local democratic processes, amongst others. Taken together, these new drivers and programmes are creating a new lexicon through which the development of (smart) cities is being forged – urban apps, big data, intelligent infrastructure, city sensors, urban dashboards, smart meters, smart buildings, and smart grids, amongst others. The emergence of urban operating systems (or Urban OS) – integrated information packages made of hardware, software and digital platforms offering capabilities for the integration and control of a multiplicity of urban functions – consolidates a computational logic of urban control. This underpins a novel set of governing rationalities and operational techniques that make up the emerging ‘smart’ forms of urbanization (Marvin and Luque-Ayala, 2017). Historically grounded within military, logistics and corporate contexts (cf. Light, 2003; Cowan, 2014; Kallinikos, 2007), the techniques and rationalities of the Urban OS lead to a more audited, rationally managed, efficient, controlled and commodified city.

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212  Handbook of urban geography This is the city as a logistical entity, digitally redesigned for the purpose of maintaining circulations and flows (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016). It is in this context that the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, for example, turned to IBM for designing and delivering its Centro de Operaçoes Rio, a city-wide control room – globally regarded as an exemplar smart city initiative – aimed at digitally integrating urban functions whilst managing both the emergency and the everyday. Similarly, the City of Chicago has developed a new set of advanced mathematical and statistical capabilities, turning its WindyGrid programme into the world’s first citywide real-time urban analytics platform. New York City has turned to the expertise of cloud-based solutions firm Socrata for the development and operation of NYC Open Data, its municipal data platform, and, with the help of an active civic hacking community, recombines urban data towards generating novel ways of understanding, visualizing and imagining the urban. Barcelona has deployed Sentilo, a municipal ‘open source sensor and actuator platform’, agglomerating the data generated by hundreds of municipally owned sensors, from parking to waste and air quality, opening – yet unknown – possibilities for the recombination of the city’s ecological data. The smart city, with its computational logics and still under-examined governing rationalities and techniques, is mobilized by formal and informal stakeholders alike. As such, SU is neither top-down nor bottom-up. In Taipei and Hong Kong, for example, civic hackers have mobilized forms of digital resistance by deploying data-sharing platforms in support of the Sunflower Revolution and the Umbrella Movement. While often radical in ambition and scope, this shift to ‘smart’ logics is accompanied by new expectations of network flexibility, demand responsiveness, green growth, new services and connected communities. These expectations, in turn, are driving investments and reshaping policy priorities leading to the accelerated implementation of SU globally. Yet, the potential, limitations and broader implications of these transformations have seldom been critically examined. Existing research in the field has focused on the technical, engineering and economic dimensions of smart systems (Jamasb and Pollitt, 2011; Bakıcı et al., 2013; Alawadhi et al., 2012; Wade et al., 2010). This research tends to have a ‘problem solving’ focus, with limited critical analysis (Hollands, 2008) and primarily concerned with achieving optimal outcomes for smart systems under current technical, political and market conditions (NEDO, 2011; Kanter and Litow, 2009; Leydesdorff and Deakin, 2011; Batty et al., 2012). Whilst urban studies has a long tradition of critically examining the interface between space and digital technologies (Graham, 2002; Graham and Marvin 1996; Boyer, 1992; Crang, 2010; Crang and Graham, 2007; Thrift and French, 2002), and information studies has targeted the city as one

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Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism  ­213 of its key domains of study (Forlano, 2009; Foth, 2009; Galloway, 2004; Middleton and Bryne, 2011), narratives and practices around notions of ‘smartness’ have been largely absent. In this context a number of practitioners and scholars have started to question the problem-solving powers of ‘smart’, by asking questions around democracy and citizenship (Townsend, 2013; Greenfield, 2013; Halpern et al., 2013), drawing attention to the specific mechanisms through which code operates (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011), pointing to the risks of big data and a city with ‘sensory capabilities’ (Thrift, 2014a, 2014b; Klauser and Albrechtslund, 2014) and examining how smart rationalities and techniques alter contemporary functionings of power, space and regulation (Klauser, 2013). More recently, scholars working on the interface between politics, life and the environment – drawing on post-structuralist thinking and often outside the world of Urban Geography – have been examining the ways in which the material manifestations of such smart logics (through, for example, the ubiquity of environmental sensors and dashboards) are transforming modes of governing both the city and its population as a whole (Braun, 2014; Gabrys, 2014). We argue that, with the exception of some of the works cited above alongside a slowly growing body of critical works on the smart city, understandings of SU lack a critical perspective compounded by an undue emphasis on technological solutions that disregard the social and political domains. As evidenced by the analysis of multiple other design-based and techno-utopian interventions in urban systems, such as grid-based infrastructures (Hughes, 1983; Nye, 1999; Graham and Marvin, 1996, 2001), modernist urban planning (Sandercock, 1998) and new urbanism (Harvey, 1997), the urban plays a critical role in shaping, translating, and contesting the desired – and often failed – transformation. Urban studies scholars have previously alerted us to the extent to which contemporary understandings of the city have tended to neglect the material, technological and environmental dimension (Monstadt, 2009). In response, there has been growing interest in the political ecologies and cyborgian nature of cities (Gandy, 2005; Heynen et al., 2006) as well as in the social and political dynamics of infrastructure, urban sustainability and low carbon transitions (Bulkeley et al., 2011; Hodson and Marvin, 2010; McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008).These perspectives, when viewed through the lens of the claims enacted by SU, highlight the need for a more in-depth examination of the manner in which the transformational potential of SU is created. Such claims and potential, fundamentally produced with and through digital technologies operating under specific political rationalities and governmental techniques (Klauser et al., 2014), remain beyond the reach of social science at present.

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214  Handbook of urban geography Within this context, a critical assessment of SU is needed. From one perspective, SU may serve to further deepen the splintering of urban networks that dominated the last part of the twentieth century for many cities, creating deep divides between those with access to ‘smart’ and those without (Datta, 2016). Alternatively, in some guises, SU may serve to promote more ‘community’, ‘civic’ or ‘metropolitan’ forms of service provision and urban life (SENSEable City Lab, undated; Map Kibera, undated). Beyond this, ‘smart’ might be interpreted as yet another strand in the consolidation of dominant circuits of capital and a neo-liberal governmentality (Vanolo, 2013) or as a new governmental form altogether (Gabrys, 2014). Internationally comparative research is critical in order to develop a nuanced understanding of how and why this varies across urban contexts. Understanding these processes will enable us to consider the current trajectories of SU and examine what the potential trajectories for SU are in cities where it has yet to become established. The limits of current disciplinary approaches mean that addressing the critical challenges of SU cannot be achieved without a step-change in thinking.

14.3 TOWARDS A CRITICAL AGENDA: EMERGING THEMES AND CONTEMPORARY ISSUES In developing a response to these gaps in the existing research landscape there are three key challenges. The first of these is to develop an interdisciplinary conceptual approach for the analysis of SU. This means examining how SU is currently conceptualized within the sciences and social sciences, identifying areas for agreement, dialogue and dissent. It also means considering what theorizations of the co-constitution of social and technical systems offer for the conceptualization of SU. Second, there is a need to analyse the social and political implications of implementing smart logics – both materially and discursively – to examine how specific urban conditions enable and constrain SU transitions and to co-produce alternative pathways. Understanding the potential and implications of the transition to SU, and the possibilities for creating more sustainable and socially inclusive pathways, requires the intensive examination of how SU is produced and reproduced in particular urban contexts. Third, new knowledge about the forms, dynamics, and consequences of SU in an internationally comparative context needs to be generated. There is a lack of comparative analysis and a dearth of knowledge about the range of urban contexts within which SU is emerging. Far from being passive ­backdrops, cities variously complicate, enable, disrupt, resist, and translate SU.

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Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism  ­215 14.3.1  Critical Abilities and Knowledge Unpacking ‘smart’ starts with the development of an overview of the key debates, players and practices involved in the development of SU strategies – inevitably developed through coalitions between munici­ palities, civic technologists and ICT companies. This requires placing particular attention on the urban implications of a multiplicity of ‘coded objects’ and ‘coded infrastructures’ (Kitchin, 2014), but also on the ways in which digital systems are ‘un-black boxing’ urban infrastructures (by, for example, creating new forms of infrastructural visibility and involving users in their functioning) and the parallel ‘re-black boxing’ occuring through the digitalization of infrastructural processes via software, code and algorithms (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016). The discussion around these implications goes beyond traditional academic subjects within the IT–urban interface, such as urban surveillance and the promise of real-time analytics, touching upon debates around the role of the smart city in an era of austerity, the ways by which data – rather than materiality – shape the city (Shepard, 2014), and the presence of mainstream as well as alternative ways in which smart urbanism is being implemented in cities, by communities and across infrastructural grids (Luque et al., 2014). New research abilities are likely to be required for critically unpacking the emerging broad trends within the field of SU, such as the role of social media in the constitution of smart cities, the emergence of digital mechanisms for the establishment of forms of accountability in urban service provision, the challenges associated with ensuring inclusivity and public trust within smart technologies, and the digital transformation of urban ecological flows (e.g. flows of energy, waste and water). Most importantly, it requires transcending a disciplinary understanding of the role of digital systems in the city, which, often framed by surveillance studies, limits its reading of the smart city to an extension of a Foucauldian panopticon. Rather, we argue that SU is governmental in nature (LuqueAyala and Marvin, 2016). Operating through a productive and creative understanding of power, SU governs through the freedoms and capacities of the governed (Foucault, 2007) and ‘regulate[s] freedom as contingency through the principle of economy’ (Dillon, 2015, p. 48). Inevitably, advancing a critical agenda around SU involves embracing the tensions between corporate perspectives and critical research on smart cities. Critical research perspectives have become focused on the claims being made by corporate smart city initiatives, in particular highlighting the rather narrow range of stakeholders involved, the focus on economic and market making as opposed to wider social or environmental priorities, the claims of transformation that would result from technological

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216  Handbook of urban geography applications, and the attempt to lock-in cities around selected proprietary technologies (Söderström et al., 2014; McNeill, 2016). Yet, representatives from the user and developer communities counter these views by arguing that, within the corporate sector, there is much more uncertainty about how smart urban technologies might be developed, what role they should play in corporate strategy and what their potential benefits and profitability are in an urban context. Rather than the smart agenda being closed and locked-in to a particular logic of development, there is a recognition of the need for a more experimental character, and companies involved in the ‘rollout’ of SU are still learning about whether it is possible to develop the urban sector as a viable market segment. These tensions point to how there is no wider societal (or research) context within which the uncertainties and risks associated with smart urbanism are being identified and discussed, and instead these are largely taking place separately inside the academy and corporates. 14.3.2  Politics of the Implementation of Smart Understanding the politics of the implementation of SU requires exploring how the smart city is constituted discursively, techno-materially and spatially. Discursively, SU is constructed through the constitution of technology as an obligatory passage point (Söderström et al., 2014), and the development of a new moral order through technological parameters (Vanolo, 2013). It would be a mistake to assume that all SU discourses are the same. For example, the different rationalities underpinning SU (e.g. IBM versus Google) are likely to embed different approaches to the interface between ‘smartness’ and citizenship (McNeill, 2016; Gabrys, 2014), uncovering a differentiated politics of ‘smart’. Spatially, SU is underpinned by a combination of decentralization and centralization, with the emergence of new nodes of control such as highly specialized control rooms (Gordon et al., 2013; Mattern, 2015; Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016). Here it is possible to identify the dominance of a particular representation of smart urbanism around future paths and promises. Such populist utopian scenarios are unhelpful, as they miss the socio-political dimensions of smart urbanism and overlook how these emerging narratives of the city are aligned towards particular techno-entrepreneurial interests (Hollands, 2015). Narratives around ‘smart’ are too often embedded within a universalizing neo-liberal project, subscribing to a language of efficiency, optimization, entrepreneurialism and growth. In practice, their ‘rollout’ is characterized by multiple trajectories, disparate alternatives and, at times, resistance. There is an underlying assumption that SU implies changing dynamics of power. Yet, based on our own research

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Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism  ­217 interviews and conversations with practitioners, private corporate stakeholders involved in developing smart urbanism rather than speaking about promises manifest concerns about risks, uncertainties and the limited potential of alternatives. This evidences clear contradictions and tension in how smart technologies are being mobilized. 14.3.3  An Understanding of Smart Across Contrasting Geographies Finally, a critical research agenda around SU demands exploring the different ways in which its rationalities, techniques and subjectivities are being rolled-out across contrasting geographies. This approach calls for a specific understanding of how smart logics configure space, discussing the broad ways in which SU projects relate to both urban form and social problematics (Wigg, 2014). But beyond such major interventions, it also suggests querying the intricate and minor ways in which SU shapes everyday life and constitutes unexceptional and quotidian spaces in the city (Shepard, 2014). Whilst notions of optimization and risk avoidance tend to play a key role in the rollout of SU, not all forms of SU respond to such drivers. SU technologies play a role in enabling digital connectivity and, through this, the development of a digital geography of the city (which ranges from Internet access to e-governance, amongst others). Community stakeholders often embrace SU for a variety of purposes beyond an incessant search for optimization and efficiency, including political resistance (as in the cases of Hong Kong and Taipei, described previously), the deployment of art installations that operate as digital monitoring devices for resource quality and consumption (Calvillo, 2012) and the appropriation and enjoyment of public space through digital gaming (Invisible Playground, 2014). At the same time, social media and apps may also misrepresent or hide the social geography of the city, a process that could have significant implications in hindering democracy and participation or in creating new forms of digital exclusion. Data flows in the smart city do not accurately reflect the social world. Instead, as exemplified in 2012 by how Twitter messages created the false assumption that Manhattan was the critical nexus of Hurricane Sandy, there ‘are significant gaps, with little or no signal coming from particular communities’ (Crawford, 2013, no pagination). Such geographically orientated lines of research are of particular importance when considering SU as a global phenomenon. SU logics extend across the global North and South, yet, with limited exceptions (see Odendaal, 2006, 2016; Datta, 2016; Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016), there is a limited understanding of the different ways in which SU agendas are being rolled out in cities of the global South. Existing work on ICTs in the Global South already raises questions around the apparent fit

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218  Handbook of urban geography between development priorities and the smart agenda. In a South African context Odendaal (2006) has demonstrated the complex ways in which digital technologies have unexpected consequences that can also reinforce existing social disparities. The rollout of smart technologies may further exacerbate these tendencies associated with digital and mobile technologies. In more recent work on the early development of a program for 100 smart cities in India, Datta shows how the first mover city of Dholera exemplifies a new model of entrepreneurial urbanism with only a weak commitment to enhanced social justice (Datta, 2016).

14.4 CONCLUSIONS This chapter has focused on a wider set of debates about the potential development and societal implications of smart urbanism. We have grouped these together within three particular sets of issues that deserve further inquiry through a critical research agenda: the development of ways of theorizing and conceptualizing SU; an examination of its normative nature and of the extent to which alternative understandings of the city can be developed through SU; and the advancement of a comparative approach around the multiple and varied practices around SU. 14.4.1  Conceptualize and Theorize Rolling out SU is fundamentally a political exercise. Smart urbanism operates through strategic economic interests and everyday social practices to facilitate place specific ways for the control and regulation of increasingly fragmented cities and unequal societies. Central to understanding this project is the need to explore the creation of new ‘smart’ subjectivities conducive to the demands of the neo-liberal city. To unpack this political nature, an innovative set of theoretical frameworks is required, examining how knowledge and expertise on smart urbanism is constructed through specific contexts with a particular history and mediated through specific institutions and power relationships. Of particular relevance are approaches that can help analysing the interrelationships between software, data and digital technologies, socio-technical infrastructures, economic competiveness, ecological resources and flows as well as urban politics and social justice. The ‘promises’ of flexibility, control, growth, transformation and so forth offered by smart urbanism are reshaping current and future priorities of urban governments. An emerging set of detailed conceptual work is needed to illustrate how smart t­echnologies – data collection and analysis, software packages and digital platforms,

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Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism  ­219 sensors, digital networked infrastructures and new digital systems such as sophisticated control and pricing technologies – are used to more intensively unbundle and rebundle users, space, services and networks. Further conceptual and empirical work is needed to examine what political rationalities are embedded within such responses, and which stakeholders are excluded from the future ‘smart city’. 14.4.2  Normative Alternatives The second proposed line of inquiry calls for an exploration and interrogation of the purposes of smart urbanism through an engagement with its normative nature and the possibility of constructing alternatives. At first sight, an analysis of the differential logics of smart urbanism indicates the presence of ‘dominant’ (‘top-down’, formal or supply based) versus ‘alternative’ (‘bottom-up’, informal or demand-based) discourses and approaches. Dominant logics are characterized by a rather select and exclusive group of institutions, often more supply orientated, usually concerned with growth and economic priorities and more formal modes of social organization. But the future possibilities associated with these responses are uncertain and potentially transformative. The strategies of governing through smart citizenship are open, experimental and potentially modifiable – they can be refused or reversed by citizens and potentially redirected through new forms of urbanism. While corporate and municipal interests are fostering smart citizens who are constructed as subservient to individualized and marketized social relations, there are also other forms in which SU is being rolled out through a multiplicity of dispersed and disconnected initiatives under the guidance of communities, ad-hoc volunteer groups and local organizations. Examples of this abound, including the rise and fall of amateur Wi-Fi networks providing free Internet access (Powell, 2011), community organizations using big data ‘to build an economy of information more open to civic intervention’ (Couldry and Powell, 2014, p. 1), attempts to bypass traditional commercial digital connectivity through user generated fixed-line broadband (Middleton and Bryne, 2011) and the informal establishment of digital sensors in urban infrastructure towards civic uses (Shepard, 2014). Thus, alternative responses are characterized by a much more diverse and inclusive range of participants, often more user or demand focused, concerned with a wider set of social and environmental priorities and with more informal modes of social organization. However, despite differences in who is involved and their priorities, an in-depth analysis reveals much closer similarities in the technologies, techniques (discursive and material), and rationalities underpinning both

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220  Handbook of urban geography dominant and alternative smart approaches. The distinction between these two categories is often subtle, as, in practice, the landscape of SU does not follow black and white logics. Rather, it is a case of ‘middleware’ – establishing an analogy with the IT concept for a type of software that connects while also acting through and in-between operating systems and applications; SU is about both bridging and co-constituting. In light of the presumptions built into smart software, it is worth asking whether there are significant differences between dominant and alternative approaches, given their use of similar technological platforms, working techniques and thinking rationalities. In practice, community involvement in SU shows that notions of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ do not adequately reflect the complexity of issues at play. Rather than idealizing such alternative modes, critical research needs to examine the challenges associated with forms of SU from the bottom-up and the risks and opportunities of sustaining informal modes of SU, whilst interrogating the very computational rationalities giving rise to such alternatives. 14.4.3  A Comparative Approach Furthering the development of an analytical framework for SU requires a wider discussion around the potential interactions and crossovers between contrasting SU logics across geographies. Most of the research discussed in this chapter took a specific view of one single domain of smart, focused either on individual case studies or specific approaches, often in significant depth. Work has not focused on the wider landscape of SU across locations and perspectives. There is a need to explore the contradictions of smart urbanism, its differential expression across the global North and South, and the potential this creates to develop more oppositional and contested forms of knowledge alongside the subjectivities that emerge from these contexts. As previously mentioned, while the dominant logic of SU tests and explores the creation of smart subjectivities in line with the demands of the neo-liberal city, this is a complex process that does not take place in linear manners. Neo-liberalism in practice is far from uniform in time and space and varies in its responses through hybrid formations that are conditioned by particular local contexts, geopolitics and existing urban trajectories. Consequently, an agenda around how these relationships might be understood is needed for a critical understanding of SU – for example, does the voluntary work of civic hackers and other civic technologists working alongside municipal governments worldwide provide an alternative context for experimentation and testing that might be upscaled and developed in formal approaches? Who is developing the capacity for wider societal learning about the implications of smart experimentation?

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Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism  ­221 What sort of intermediaries could develop the capacity and knowledge for developing active and configurational transitions? A dialogue about the multiple ways in which SU is being imagined and enacted, taking place in different urban contexts and aiming for a systematic comparison of SU, would be a significant step in this direction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank the editors of the journal Urban Studies for allowing us to publish here a shortened, revised and updated version of an article originally published in 2015, Volume 52 (12), 2105–2116. We would also like to thank the Urban Studies Foundation for funding the workshop Smart Urbanism – Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Durham University, UK, 2013), and the various workshop participants for discussing their work and constructively helping to shape the research priorities identified in this chapter.

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Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism  ­223 Technological Change, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Kanter, R.M. and S. Litow (2009), ‘Informed and interconnected: a manifesto for smarter cities’, Harvard Business School Working paper 09–141, at https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/ informed-and-interconnected-a-manifesto-for-smarter-cities (accessed 9 August 2018). Kitchin R. (2014), ‘The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism’, GeoJournal, 79 (1), 1–14. Kitchin, R. and M. Dodge (2011), Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Klauser, F. (2013), ‘Through Foucault to a political geography of mediation in the information age’, Geographica Helvetica, 68 (1), 95–104. Klauser, F. and Albrechtslund A. (2014), ‘From self-tracking to smart urban infrastructures: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on Big Data’, Surveillance & Society, 12 (2), 273–286. Klauser, F., T. Paasche and O. Söderström (2014), ‘Michel Foucault and the smart city: power dynamics inherent in contemporary governing through code’, Environment and Planning D, 32 (5), 869–885. Leydesdorff, L. and M. Deakin (2011), ‘The triple-helix model of smart cities: a neoevolutionary perspective’, Journal of Urban Technology, 18 (2), 53–63. Light, J. S. (2003), From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America, Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Luque, A. (2014), ‘The smart grid and the interface between energy, ICT and the city’, in Tim Dixon, Malcolm Eames, Miriam Hunt and Simon Lannon (eds), Urban Retrofitting for Sustainability: Mapping the Transition to 2050, London: Earthscan, pp. 159–173. Luque, A., C. McFarlane and S. Marvin (2014), ‘Smart urbanism’, in Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin (eds), After Sustainable Cities?, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 74–90. Luque-Ayala, A. and S. Marvin (2016), ‘The maintenance of urban circulation: an operational logic of infrastructural control’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34 (2), 191–208. Mahiznan, A. (1999), ‘Smart cities: the Singapore case’, Cities, 16 (1), 13–18. Map Kibera (undated), ‘Putting marginalized communities on the map’, at http://mapkibera. org (accessed 9 August 2018). Marvin, S. and A. Luque-Ayala (2017), ‘Urban operating systems: diagramming the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41 (1), 84–104. Mattern, S. (2015), ‘Mission control: a history of the urban dashboard’, Places, March, at: https://placesjournal.org/article/mission-control-a-history-of-the-urban-dashboard/ (accessed 9 August 2018). McFarlane, C. and J. Rutherford (2008), ‘Political infrastructures: governing and experiencing the fabric of the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (2), 363–374. McNeill, D. (2016), ‘IBM and the visual formation of smart cities’, in Simon Marvin, Andrés Luque-Ayala and Colin McFarlane (eds), Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn?, London: Routledge, pp. 34–51. Mejia, F., R. Glasberg, G. Tamm and G. J. Lopez (2011), ‘Readiness level to adopt smart grid technologies: study for the city of Medellin’, in Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT Latin America), Medellin: IEEE PES, pp. 1–7. Middleton, C. and A. Bryne (2011), ‘An exploration of user-generated wireless broadband infrastructures in digital cities’, Telematics and Informatics, 28 (3), 163–175. Monstadt, J. (2009), ‘Conceptualizing the political ecology of urban infrastructures: insights from technology and urban studies’, Environment and Planning A, 41 (8), 1924–1942. NEDO (2011), ‘2nd Annual GridWise Global Forum’, at http://www.nedo.go.jp/english/ whatsnew_20111116_index.html (accessed 9 August 2018). Nye, D. E. (1999), Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Odendaal, N. (2006), ‘Towards the digital city in South Africa: issues and constraints’, Journal of Urban Technology, 13 (3), 29–48.

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224  Handbook of urban geography Odendaal, N. (2016), ‘Getting smart about smart cities in Cape Town’, in Simon Marvin, S., A. Luque-Ayala and C. McFarlane (eds), Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn?, London: Routledge, pp. 71–87. Powell, A. (2011), ‘Metaphors, models and communicative spaces: designing local wireless infrastructure’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 36 (1), 91–114. Sandercock, L. (1998), Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities, New York: J. Wiley & Sons. SENSEable City Lab (undated), ‘Forage tracking’, at http://senseable.mit.edu/foragetracking (accessed 9 August 2018). Shepard, M. (2014), ‘Beyond the smart city: everyday entanglements of technology and urban life’, Harvard Design Magazine, 37, 18–23. SmartGrid.gov (undated), ‘About SmartGrid.gov’, at http://www.smartgrid.gov (accessed 9 August 2018). Söderström, O., T. Paasche and F. Klauser (2014), ‘Smart cities as corporate storytelling’, City, 18 (3), 307–320. Thrift, N. (2014a), ‘The promise of urban informatics: some speculations’, Environment and Planning A, 46 (6), 1263–1266. Thrift, N. (2014b), ‘The “sentient” city and what it may portend’, Big Data & Society, 1 (April–June), 1–21. Thrift, N. and S. French (2002), ‘The automatic production of space’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 27 (3), 309–335. Townsend, A. M. (2013), Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Vanolo, A. (2013), ‘Smartmentality: the smart city as disciplinary strategy’, Urban Studies, 51 (5), 883–898. Wade, N. S., P. C. Taylor, P. D. Lang and P. R. Jones (2010), ‘Evaluating the benefits of an electrical energy storage system in a future smart grid’, Energy Policy, 38 (11), 7180–7188. Wigg, A. G. (2014), After the Smart City: Global Ambitions and Urban Policymaking in Philadelphia, Philadelphia: Temple University.

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15.  Terrorism, risk and the quest for urban resilience Jon Coaffee

15.1 INTRODUCTION In the last twenty-five years a vast academic literature in urban geography has developed around the concepts of ‘militarizing’ and ‘securitizing’ cities and cities’ responses to the occurrence and fear of crime, riots, protest and acts of terrorism. In praxis, many traditional policy interventions have embodied characteristics of the ‘carceral archipelago’ where security and strategies are punitively deployed within public places of the city and embedded within urban design and public management. Here, previous techniques focused on ‘designing out’ threats have commonly led to the use of ever-advancing surveillance technologies and the construction of fixed territorial borders, security cordons and ‘rings of steel’ to protect ‘at risk’ or vulnerable locations (Coaffee, 2004). More recently, Agamben’s (2005) studies of exceptionality have been increasingly deployed to highlight how ‘high profile’ security often becomes the ‘normal’ option for cities, seen as being on the front line in the war on terror, and how a range of uneven geographies emerge and are sustained in such locations (Murakami Wood and Webster, 2009). Conceptually, this chapter will draw from urban geography literature, and its connection to the security design of civic spaces. Empirically, the chapter uses data collected on urban counter-terrorism since the early 1990s in London which highlights the evolution of the various spatial strategies underpinned by ideas of risk and resilience, imprints that emerge from new conceptualizations and practices of urban security, and how these might be seen to characterize an increasingly security-obsessed State.

15.2  SECURITIZED URBAN GEOGRAPHIES In Discipline and Punish Foucault (1977) used the term ‘carceral archipelago’ to characterize how penitentiary techniques were increasingly being deployed in public policy programmes to expand disciplinary control over the entire social body. In this reading, the city was seen as 225

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226  Handbook of urban geography the place where techniques were mediated as a punitive or carceral city and where landscape markers continuously reinforce a code of control embodying a disciplinary society. The ideal type of controlling carceral environment was envisioned as the panopticon where the few see the many and where the centralized surveillant gaze constitutes ‘visible and unverifiable’ power (Foucault, 1977, p. 200). Such political techniques and technologies were seen to be embedded within social control systems – notably in the contemporary period through the rise in prominence of CCTV and the governance and selective ordering of the late modern city (see, for example, Fyfe and Bannister, 1996; Ball et al., 2012). Foucault’s ideas, particularly those emphasizing the ubiquity of coercive techniques, served to influence a range of geographical discourses in the 1990s and 2000s in urban security-related topics to understand how ideas of enclosure and social control, and techniques of ordering, become normalized through the imposition of security assemblages. Key topics have included surveillance and societies of control where the explosion of new technology served to facilitate the increased automation of everyday life (Lyon, 2001; Deleuze, 1992); the rise of carceral places as one of the ‘geographies of restructuring’ in the postmodern city (Soja, 1995, 2000); ‘fortress cities’ where affluent fortified cells co-exist with places of terror (Davis, 1990, 1998); interdictory spaces and spatial cleansing where (privatized) control over urban spaces leads to a range of exclusionary practices (Flusty, 1994; Sibley, 1995); revanchist urbanism where punitive policing facilitates urban ordering and upgrading through the removal of the ‘other’ (Smith, 1996); and, perhaps most notably from the perspective of this chapter, military urbanism where militarized strategies are increasingly embedded within the civic realm, and systems of management to enhance urban resilience as a response to a growing international terrorist threat (Coaffee, 2003, 2009; Graham, 2010). This work on ‘militarizing’ or ‘securitizing’ cities has developed alongside an ever-expanding interest in the vulnerability of cities to natural disasters and anthropogenic accidents. These streams are now merging through consideration of the ability of cities to continue to thrive against an ever-present threat of terrorism through the enhancement of urban resilience (Coaffee and Murakami Wood, 2006). Such practices as they have rolled-out in practice often sit in parallel, and sometimes in contradiction, to previous counter-terrorist policies focused upon territoriallybounded security cordons – so called ‘rings of steel’ – characterized by regulatory management, fortification and surveillance which aim explicitly to categorize, divide and control urban space (Coaffee, 2000). The following sections of this chapter will illuminate the spatial imprints of these evolving trends through an analysis of pre- and post-9/11 attempts

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Terrorism, risk and the quest for urban resilience  ­227 to counter the terrorist threat in the City of London, also known as the Square Mile.

15.3 1990s FORTRESS LONDON This section will chart the physical changes to the urban landscape, and the associated strategies employed by the agents of security, primarily the City of London police, that were developed in the Square Mile as a result of the terrorist threat in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. These strategies can be characterized in a number of stages between 1990 and 2001 that brought distinct changes to the physical landscape of the City (Table 15.1) and that saw the City increasingly separating itself from the rest of London in both physical and technological terms. 15.3.1 Apprehension The Provisional IRA’s main bombing campaign in the 1990s was aimed at economic targets in London with one of the first attacks occurring at the Stock Exchange in the centre of the City. However, before the 1992 St. Mary Axe bomb the perceived threat level was not considered high enough for the police to establish any special counter-terrorist measures. A more overt police presence coupled with a general security planning process was seen as a proportionate response to the threat faced. In early 1992 over 15 bomb hoaxes were received directly relating to the area covered by the City and in February a small terrorist bomb exploded in the northeast of the City. The police were now beginning to take the threat to the City more seriously, although little in the way of proactive security enhancement was contemplated until after the bombing of the Baltic Exchange at St. Mary Axe in the heart of the Square Mile in April 1992. 15.3.2 Containment The St. Mary Axe bomb exploded outside the Baltic Exchange on the evening of 10 April 1992 on the day of the General Election. Three people were killed and over 100 were injured, with a large area being devastated. This was the first major bomb in the City, and it was felt that an increased police presence, with officers carrying out spot checks on vehicles, was a suitable and proportionate response. Strategically, the police, stretching the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) to its limit, instigated a number of short term roving police checkpoints on the major entrances into the City deploying armed officers. However, in May 1992, a month

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228  Handbook of urban geography Table 15.1  Stages in the evolution of the Ring of Steel Stage

Dates

Key incidents

Main features of response

Apprehension

1990 – April 1992

●  Beginning

●  More

Containment

April 1992 – April 1993

Deterrence

April 1993 – Sept 1994

●  Bishopsgate

Optimism

Sept 1994 – Feb 1996

●  Provisional

Reactivation

Feb 1996 – Feb 1997

●  Docklands

Extension

Feb 1997 – June 1999

●  Decision

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of IRA mainland attacks against economic targets (Stock Exchange, July 1990) ●  Fernival Street bomb (February 1992) ●  St Mary Axe Bomb (April 1992) ●  Colman Street bomb (June 1992) Bomb (April 1993) ●  Business lobbying for enhanced security ●  Wormwood Street bomb find (August 1993) ceasefire

IRA

bomb (February 1996) ●  Subsequent attacks in London and Manchester to extend the ring of steel westwards

overt policing especially for major events ●  Plans for City-wide security schemes

●  Armed

Police checkpoints ●  Traffic management enhanced ●  CCTV adapted for counter-terrorism uses ●  Security checkpoints introduced ●  Advanced policeoperated CCTV and alert systems ●  Private CCTV schemes ●  Increased no-parking areas ●  Downgrading of visible police presence ●  Checkpoints become permanent ●  Updated policeoperated CCTV ●  Large increase in visible policing ●  Increased frequency of roving checkpoints ●  Use of legislation to increase stop and search ●  Expansion of ring of steel coverage ●  Advanced CCTV employed ●  Environmental improvements highlighted

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Terrorism, risk and the quest for urban resilience  ­229 Table 15.1  (continued) Stage

Dates

Re-appropriation June 1999 – Sept 2001

Key incidents

Main features of response

●  May

●  Proactive

Day / anticapitalism riots (June 1999) ●  Subsequent anti-capitalist demonstrations ●  Threats from dissident Irish republican terrorists

enhancement of private building security ●  Better liaison between City police and other Forces ●  New anti-terrorism legislation

after the St. Mary Axe bomb, an evaluation report argued that the Local Plan and draft Unitary Development Plan (UDP) for improving the City’s environmental and movement policies called Key to the Future should be implemented. Under these proposals (drawn up before the 1992 bomb) it was planned to pedestrianize a central part of the City around the Bank of England and alter traffic signalling on others, to improve traffic flow and reduce pollution. These policies became central to the City’s construction of counter-terrorist security measures in the preceding months and years. Immediately after the St. Mary Axe bomb some traffic management measures were introduced on an experimental basis on three City roads. At this time no official reference was made in such discussions to the counter-terrorist security implications of these changes as the Corporation were keen to downplay the impact of the bomb. These restrictions on movement around the central core of the City can be viewed as the first attempts by the police to identify the particular spatial area of the City for special attention. Two months later in June 1992 a minor explosion further increased calls for improved counter-terrorism measures to be constructed. This bomb, although only a small device, showed that security in the Square Mile could easily be breached. In addition to random roadchecks and vehicle access restrictions, the coverage of traffic management CCTV (Area Traffic Control – ATC) was extended and adapted to focus on incoming traffic whilst private businesses were encouraged by the police to install additional CCTV cameras. The period of containment after the St. Mary Axe bomb sought to enhance the control of space, limiting the ease with which terrorists could move around the City, and ensure that vehicles parked suspiciously could be easily identified. Enhanced security was, however, highly focused within a central core area of the City containing the most high profile institutions.

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230  Handbook of urban geography 15.3.3 Deterrence In hindsight, and despite the road checks and other measures set up after the 1992 bomb, the police were well aware of the limitations of PACE which prohibited permanent checks on vehicles coming into the City. By using mobile communications, and a scout sent ahead to tell them whether or not there was a police check operating, terrorists could still easily plant a bomb in the City. During the early months of 1993, with the delicate state of political dialogue aimed at brokering a Provisional IRA ceasefire, the risk of further attack to the City had significantly increased. The worst fears of the police were realized in April 1993 when a Provisional IRA bomb exploded in Bishopsgate in the east of the City. This device killed one person, injured 94 and caused considerable damage, initially estimated at £1 billion. The location of this bomb was away from the more highly central protected core of the City that had been subject to additional access restrictions after the 1992 bomb. In the wake of this bomb the business community began to suggest that drastic changes should be made to City security with many now supporting a permanent counter-terrorist security cordon. Initially, the leaders of the Corporation wanted to take stock of recent events before deciding whether or not to implement such radical proposals. In May 1993, given the heightened risk of further attack and severe pressure from the business sector, the police confirmed that they were considering radical plans, in the form of a security cordon, to deter terrorists from the City. The construction of the proposed scheme was essentially the same strategy (Key to the Future) that had been suggested on movement and environmental grounds prior to the Bishopsgate bomb. Given the perceived risk of further attacks, construction of the so-called ‘Ring of Steel’ began in June 1993, with the introduction of security checkpoints to bar all non-essential traffic. Such modifications were criticized by those who felt that it would cause traffic chaos at the boundaries of the City and could geographically displace the risk of terrorist attack to other areas. In July 1993 the majority of routes into the City were closed or made exit only, leaving seven routes (plus one bus route) through which the City could be entered (Figure 15.1). On these routes into the City, road-checks guarded by armed police were set up. Locally, the Ring of Steel was often referred to as the ‘Ring of Plastic’ as the temporary access restrictions were based primarily on the funnelling of traffic through rows of plastic traffic cones, as the scheme was still officially ‘temporary’. The Ring of Plastic provided a highly visible demonstration that the City was taking the terrorist threat seriously, even if many entering the City did not realize its counter-terrorist use.

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Figure 15.1  Entry and exit points in the Ring of Steel The Ring of Steel, or ‘Experimental Traffic Scheme’ as the Corporation officially called it, was put in place for an initial period of six months. Also established was a so-called ‘collar-zone’ around the Ring of Steel, which saw increased police patrols and roving checkpoints to alleviate the fears of those businesses within this area – that is, outside the Ring of Steel but still in the City of London. Additionally, the City enhanced its electronic surveillance capabilities. Notably, police-operated security cameras were erected to monitor the entrances into the Square Mile, 24/7, so that every vehicle entering the security cordon was recorded. From November 1993 there were numerous cameras filming at each entry point into the Ring of Steel providing high-resolution pictures that could be compared against intelligence reports and photographs. By the end of 1993 there were more than seventy police controlled cameras covering the City, aiming to create a highly surveilled environment where would-be terrorists could not hide. Cameras were seen as highly symbolic ‘electronic guardian angels’ (Davis, 1990) and were implemented, despite complaints from civil liberty groups. Additionally, the police launched an innovative scheme called CameraWatch in September 1993, to co-ordinate camera surveillance and create an effective, and highly visible, private camera network for the City. By 1996, over 1,000 private security cameras (in over 375 camera

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232  Handbook of urban geography systems) were operational in the City. The panopticon of surveillance that was constructed after the Bishopsgate bomb served to reinforce the access restrictions that were imposed. Through these territorial strategies, space within the Square Mile was increasingly organized in such a way that almost complete surveillance coverage became possible, reducing the perceived opportunity for terrorist attack. 15.3.4 Optimism Immediately after a Provisional IRA ceasefire was called in August 1994, the Ring of Steel was scaled down when armed guards were taken off most of the checkpoints. This was a very visible indication that the risk of terrorist attack had decreased in the eyes of the City Police. Moreover, permanent bollards, paving, and in some cases, flower beds began replacing temporary traffic cones, creating a less visible form of landscape alteration in an attempt to remove signs of overt security and giving the scheme an aesthetic permanence in keeping with vernacular architecture. The police camera network had also been continually upgraded to meet the terrorist threat. In the early months of 1995, the new high-resolution cameras for the traffic system were installed and 13 further cameras were added to monitor cars exiting the City. Exit cameras were particularly important, as police could now monitor traffic into the City and, if needed, track suspect vehicles across the City. 15.3.5  Reactivating and Extending the Ring of Steel The cessation of terrorist violence lasted until early 1996 when a large bomb exploded in the London Docklands, seen as a symbolic extension of the Square Mile. Following this bomb, a fortress mentality returned to the City with the full pre-ceasefire Ring of Steel being reactivated and made operational within a number of hours due to fears that the City would be attacked. Initially, there was a large increase in high-visibility policing both at the entry points and on the City streets in general. There was also an increased frequency of roving checkpoints. Furthermore, during the ceasefire, plans to extend the Ring of Steel westwards were developed, encompassing a greater proportion of the City into the secure zone through an enlarged ‘Traffic and Environment Zone’. This was undertaken in early 1997 (Figure 15.2). Coinciding with the opening of the western extension to the Ring of Steel, the police’s surveillance capability was once again enhanced. In February 1997, the new cameras at police checkpoints were linked, first to the Police National Computer, and then to the vehicle database and

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Figure 15.2  Extension to the Ring of Steel in 1997 ‘Hot List’ of vehicles at the Force Intelligence Bureau. These cameras were capable of zooming in and out and swivelling through 360 degrees and were fitted with lights, which enabled round the clock monitoring. The digital automated number plate recording (ANPR) technology they used could process the information and give a warning to the operator within four seconds. This considerably increased the capability of the City of London Police to run vehicle checks. 15.3.6 Re-appropriation Towards the end of the 1990s, with paramilitary ceasefires in place in Northern Ireland and a reduced state of terrorist alert in the Square Mile, the full Ring of Steel became relatively dormant. However, the City, like a number of other strategic global sites, was targeted by anti-capitalist ­protesters. Initially a large-scale demonstration was to have been held in the City in May 1998, but access restrictions and the blanket CCTV coverage given by the Ring of Steel, and, the fact that the planned event was going to be held during the weekend meant the event was postponed. A year later, on Friday 18 June 1999 – a workday in the Square Mile – between 6,000 and 10,000 demonstrators under the collective banner of

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234  Handbook of urban geography J18 (18 June) assembled in the City for a worldwide ‘Carnival against Capitalism’. During the demonstrations the Ring of Steel entry points were populated by police who monitored the flow of people into the Square Mile. Although the counter-terrorist cordon could do little in preventative and legal terms to stop the vast number of people entering the City, the extensive camera system was used to monitor the event and retrospectively identify many of those involved in the worst of the ensuing violence. Counter-terrorism was, however, still at the forefront of the City Police’s thoughts. During the late 1990s and into the new millennium, the terrorist threat was still taken seriously. During 2000 and 2001 the threat against the City of London was again increased by the terrorist bombing campaign of dissident Irish republican groups – the Real IRA – believed to be responsible for bomb or rocket grenade attacks against a number of prominent landmark buildings in central London such as the BBC and MI6. Overall, during the 1990s the City police sought to control and regulate the space within the Square Mile, attempting to create a particular image for the City based on a balance between a flourishing business environment, and safety and security concerns – a balance seen as vital if the area was to be competitive within the global economy. The City can therefore be seen in terms of both global connection and local disconnection – a condition, which, as a result of terrorism, continued to characterize the dislocated nature of the City’s relationship with the rest of London. In this context the Ring of Steel and other security measures highlight two of the most important trends in contemporary urbanism which have been extended in scope from an initial focus on Western cities to encompass a full range of international experiences. First, the increased militarization of urban space where the relationship between fear and form determines the extent of fortification measures. Second, the City’s defensive landscapes express the privatization and control of space, according to the preferences of the rich and powerful. Such control was increasingly asserted through physical and technological measures. This was associated with the need to maintain a predictable, efficient and orderly flow of commercial activity. The business community therefore supported enhancement of security at times of risk but wanted it downgraded when they perceived the risk to be declining. The spatial imprinting of these trends was evident through the construction of defensive landscapes, which became a concrete part of the 1990s urban scene in the City.

15.4  POST-9/11 PROTECTIONIST REFLEXES Post-9/11, the Ring of Steel was once again reactivated and used explicitly for counter-terrorism purposes. New technologies continued to play a

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Terrorism, risk and the quest for urban resilience  ­235 significant role in developing both the surveillance capabilities of the City Police and initiatives aimed at businesses within the Square Mile. The key point here is that, in reality, apart from the natural upgrading of technological systems and a reassessment of contingency planning, the City of London changed little after 9/11 given that its counter-terrorist approach was fully developed and could be activated immediately (Coaffee, 2004). In other ways the City’s security enhancements provided a blueprint that has been utilized in a number of cities, mostly but not exclusively in the Western world, as part of a ‘protectionist reflex’ that is increasingly evoked in times of vulnerability where a ‘withdrawal into the safe haven of territoriality becomes an intense temptation’ (Beck, 1999, p. 153). Although the initial counter-responses of urban authorities to terrorist attacks in the 1990s, exemplified by the City of London, were territorially focused, reactionary and centred on particular sites of high vulnerability, this reactive state did not last. Over time, stimulated by the unprecedented events of 9/11 and with the ability to reflect upon the new methods of terrorist attack employed, new ways of thinking about counter-terrorism have been enacted, often under the new banner of ‘resilience’ – defined as ‘the ability to detect, prevent and if necessary handle disruptive challenges . . . This includes but is not limited to disruptive challenges arising from the possibility of a terrorist attack’ (UK Resilience, 2005, no pagination). In the wake of 9/11, UK national security policy began to shift to proactive and pre-emptive solutions – what Heng (2006, p. 70) referred to as ‘active anticipation and reflexive risk management strategies’ at a number of sub-national (urban and regional) spatial scales. Whilst recent work suggests that such policy interventions occur in a number of interrelated ways that have ‘surged’ since 9/11, resultant policy responses have often amounted to little more than extrapolations of ongoing trends reducing the occurrence and perception of crime and terrorism (Coaffee et al., 2008; Graham, 2010). This, it can be argued, has occurred in four main ways as cities are increasingly scrutinized through the lens of ‘resilience’ (Coaffee and Murakami Wood, 2006); through the growth of electronic surveillance within public and semi-public urban spaces, in particular automated software-driven systems (Lyon, 2003); through the increased popularity of physical or symbolic notions of the boundary and territorial closure, and increased physical protection of key sites into which access is restricted; through the increasing sophistication and cost of security and contingency planning undertaken by organizations and different levels of government, intended to decrease their vulnerability and increase preparedness in the event of attack; and through the linking of urban resilience and security strategies to competition for footloose global capital where city marketing initiatives increasingly play on the

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236  Handbook of urban geography importance of the ‘safety’ of cities as places of business, utilizing security and resilience as a vital selling point in their global city offer (Coaffee and Rogers, 2008). 15.4.1  Business as Usual Post-9/11 and Securing the Olympic City 9/11 led to an instant counter-response from London police forces focused on digitalized tracking technologies as well as the overt fortressing of ‘at risk’ sites. In the City of London the Ring of Steel swung back into full-scale operation as part of a coordinated London-wide operation. This saw over 1,500 extra police patrolling the streets of the capital liaising with American firms to improve their security through extra patrols, as well as instigating a far greater number of stop-and-search checkpoints. The initial strategy adopted in central London was that the police were uniquely prepared to cope with the threat of global terrorism given over thirty years of active experience of dealing with similar threats. As such, the approach adopted was ‘business as usual’ in order to avoid a ‘siege mentality’. Over time, however, 9/11 did refocus the minds of London’s Police forces on counter-terrorism, along with the realization that high levels of technical surveillance, which had proved relatively successful against domestic terrorism, might be ineffective against new terrorist methods such as nowarning suicide attacks against crowded locations (Coaffee, 2003). Certain prominent landmark buildings in the City were also crudely fortified against vehicle-borne bombs, often through standardized security bollards, which led to the inevitable dislocation of London into zones of differential risk and security. Advanced technology was, however, at hand to provide a more expansive security blanket over central London. The Automated Number Plate Recording (ANPR) technology embedded in the Ring of Steel was ‘rolled out’ across central London for use in traffic ‘congestion charging’. This system became operational in February 2003 and used 450 cameras in 230 different positions. All number plate images were captured when vehicles entered the zone and automatically matched against a database of vehicles that were registered to pay or had exemption. Thus, central London was circled by digital cameras creating a dedicated ‘surveillance ring’, affording London’s police forces vast surveillance gathering capabilities for tracking the movement of traffic and people, and by inference, highlighting potential terrorist threats. In essence, it can be considered a full-scale extension to the City of London’s Ring of Steel and it has been alleged that ‘MI5, Special Branch and the Metropolitan Police began secretly developing the system in the wake of the 11 September attacks’, creating ‘one of the most daunting defense systems protecting a major world city’ (Townsend and Harris, 2003, no

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Terrorism, risk and the quest for urban resilience  ­237 pagination). Not surprisingly, civil libertarians feel misled over this hidden use for London’s scheme that is promoted as an attempt to beat traffic congestion. The latest chapter in the evolution of the Ring of Steel came with the preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. London, in comparison to prior Olympic cities, had a mature security infrastructure which, since the early 1990s, has sought to reduce the real and perceived threat from international terrorism through the adoption of physical, technological and managerial approaches to security at a variety of expanding spatial scales. London also had a distinguished track record in creating urban enclaves – spaces of exception (Agamben, 2005; see below) – that while not physically gated, are symbolically and technologically demarcated from their surrounding environments to reduce the risk from terrorism. The most enduring example of such exceptionality can be found in the City of London, through its Ring of Steel. As the then Metropolitan Police Security coordinator for the 2012 Games highlighted, the City of London’s Ring of Steel was exemplary of the territorialized security practice he would be trying to enact for the 2012 Games (Ghaffur, 2007). Concomitantly, security managers in London also developed a strong strategic capacity to proactively plan counter-terrorism operations and develop a strong resilience to potential terrorist attack through pan-London emergency planning approaches. It was onto this security infrastructure and governance regime that the 2012 safety and security programme was successfully grafted (Coaffee et al., 2011). Following a number of terrorist incidents in London throughout 2017, defensive security design and the cordoning off of high risk areas was once again enacted as the police, security experts and built environment professionals sought to make the UK capital as safe and secure as possible whilst maintaining a high level of preparedness to respond to attacks (Coaffee, 2017).

15.5 CONCLUSIONS: TERRORIST RISK, FORTRESS URBANISM AND THE AUTOMATIC CONTROL OF SPACE Since the early 1990s, London has provided the blueprint for the management of the relationship between terrorist risk and future urbanism, especially in the Western word, and in particular for the mindset of planners, architects, developers and security personnel who design cities in relation to risk-management criteria. Such interventions have placed great emphasis upon ‘target hardening’ although increasingly more covert approaches especially digitalized surveillance are taking over as the counter-terrorist

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238  Handbook of urban geography planner’s favourite tool. This highlights how, in the aftermath of 9/11, ‘military and geopolitical security now penetrate utterly into practices surrounding governance, design and planning of cities and region’ (Graham, 2002, p. 589) with the ‘war on terrorism’ serving as a ‘prism being used to conflate and further legitimize dynamics that already were militarizing urban space’ (Warren, 2002, p. 614). London, because of its global city status, its history and response to terrorist bombings, and because it occupies a pivotal place within the ongoing ‘war on terrorism’, has been thrust centre stage into the limelight as far as counter-responses are concerned. Primarily, such attention has focused upon its financial heartland – the City of London – that enacted security arrangements that combine territorial control and advanced surveillance through the lens of traffic and environmental improvements. Such an approach, whilst arguably reducing risk, has also disconnected that financial heartland physically and technologically from the rest of the city through the development of their ‘ring of confidence’ (Coaffee, 2003), creating a condition of ‘splintered urbanism’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001). As terrorism continues to cast a shadow over urban life, the response of urban authorities and public and private security agencies to this threat poses serious consequences for urbanity and the civic realm, and in particular for social control and freedom of movement. Ultimately, it appears that ‘fear and urbanism [are] at war’ (Swanstrom, 2002, p. 135). In London, the policy processes have led to the ever-increasingly automatic control and militarization of urban space, both of which have ultimately lacked transparency and scrutiny and have often been promoted in terms of traffic management or crime inhibiting measures. Having considerable splintering potential, such exceptional rings of security and rings of confidence are slowly, but surely, becoming ‘rings of exclusion’. Reflecting on the use of the concept of state of exception, Agamben has noted its evolution from being conceived as a provisional measure enacted to allow Governments to cope with immediate danger and restore normality as quickly as possible, to today’s usage, where, for security reasons, the state of exception constitutes ‘a permanent technology of government’ (Agamben, 2014, no pagination). In the context of London’s decades-long attempts to reduce terrorist risk, the spatial imprints and uneven geographies of such strategies can be seen to represent a space of exception and a contemporary carceral archipelago. The spaces thus secured, and their social and material effect on adjacent areas, the host city, or the wider nation, are relevant to contemporary urban restructuring debates within Geography as a response to terror and (in)security.

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REFERENCES Agamben, G. (2005), State of Exception, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Agamben, G. (2014), ‘From state of control to a praxis of destitute power’, ROAR Magazine, 4 February, at: http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-power-democracy/ (accessed on 5 July 2018). Ball, K., K. D. Haggerty and D. Lyon (eds) (2012), Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, London: Routledge. Beck, U. (1999), World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Coaffee, J. (2000), ‘Fortification, fragmentation and the threat of terrorism in the City of London’, in John R. Gold and George Revill (eds), Landscapes of Defence, London: Addison Wesley Longman, pp. 114–129. Coaffee, J. (2003), Terrorism, Risk and City, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Coaffee, J. (2004), ‘Rings of steel, rings of concrete and rings of confidence: designing out terrorism in central London pre and post 9/11’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28 (1), 201–211. Coaffee, J. (2009), ‘Protecting the urban: the dangers of planning for terrorism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26 (7–8), 343–355. Coaffee, J. (2017), ‘A balanced response? The quest for proportionate urban security’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), Spotlight on the City at War: Reflections on Paris, Beirut, Brussels, and Beyond, at: http://www.ijurr.org/spotlighton-overview/the-city-at-war/coaffee/ (accessed 1 August 2018). Coaffee, J. and D. Murakami Wood (2006), ‘Security is coming home – rethinking scale and constructing resilience in the global urban response to terrorist risk’, International Relations, 20 (4), 503–517 Coaffee, J. and P. Rogers (2008), ‘Reputational risk and resiliency: the branding of security in place-making’, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 4 (3), 205–217. Coaffee, J., P. Fussey and C. Moore (2011), ‘Laminating security for London 2012: enhancing security infrastructures to defend mega sporting events’, Urban Studies, 48 (15), 3311–3328. Coaffee, J., D. Murakami Wood and P. Rogers (2008), The Everyday Resilience of the City: How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, M. (1990), City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London: Verso. Davis, M. (1998), Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, New York: Metropolitan Books. Deleuze, G. (1992), ‘Postscript on the societies of control’, October, 59 (Winter), 3–7. Flusty, S. (1994), Building Paranoia: The Proliferation of Interdictory Space and the Erosion of Spatial Justice, Los Angeles: Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan, London: Penguin Books. Fyfe, N. and J. Bannister (1996), ‘City watching: closed circuit television surveillance in public spaces’, Area, 28 (1), 37–46. Ghaffur, T. (2007), ‘Letter to the House of Lords’, 8 June, London: Metropolitan Police Service. Graham, S. (2002), ‘Reflections on cities. September 11th and the ‘war on terrorism’ – one year on’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26 (3), 589–590. Graham, S. (2010), Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, New York: Verso Books. Graham, S. and S. Marvin (2001), Splintering Urbanism – Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition, London: Routledge. Heng, Y. (2006), ‘The transformation of war debate: through the looking glass of Ulrich Beck’s World Risk Society’, International Relations, 20 (1), 69–91. Lyon, D. (2001), Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, Buckingham: Open University Press. Lyon, D. (2003), Surveillance After September 11, Cambridge: Polity. Murakami Wood, D. and C. W. R. Webster (2009), ‘Living in surveillance societies: the

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240  Handbook of urban geography normalisation of surveillance in Europe and the threat of Britain’s bad example’, Journal of Contemporary European Research, 5 (2), 259–273. Sibley, D. (1995), Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West, London: Routledge. Smith, N. (1996), The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London: Routledge. Soja, E. (1995), ‘Postmodern urbanization: The six restructurings of Los Angeles’, in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (eds), Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 125–137. Soja, E. (2000), Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Oxford: Blackwell. Swanstrom, T. (2002), ‘Are fear and urbanism at war?’, Urban Affairs Review, 38 (1), 135–140. Townsend, M. and P. Harris (2003), ‘Security role for traffic cameras’, The Observer, 9 February. UK Resilience (2005). ‘English Regions’, at: http://www.ukresilience.info/response/­ english​ regions.aspx (accessed 12 October 2005). Warren, R. (2002), ‘Situating the city and September 11th: military urban doctrine, “pop-up” armies and spatial chess’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26 (3), 614–619.

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PART IV URBAN INEQUALITIES

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16.  Urban inequality Chris Hamnett

[A]ny city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another. (Plato, 360 BCE, Book IV)

16.1 INTRODUCTION Urban inequality has a long history. As long as cities have existed there has been urban inequality. There is not a city in the world which is not characterized by various different forms of inequality, whether it is socialist or capitalist. While the size, scale and form of inequalities will vary from time to time and place to place, they do not disappear and it is often a source of considerable concern that national and urban inequalities have increased in recent decades in many countries (Stiglitz, 2012; Dorling, 2014; Piketty, 2014; Atkinson, 2015). Inequality was very marked in capitalist cities in the nineteenth century, decreased in the decades after the Second World War in the boom years and expanding welfare state but has grown again since the late 1970s. There are some on the right, who ask what all the fuss is about regarding inequality. They often see it as an inevitable, and even a desirable condition which drives economies. While some degree of inequality is inevitable simply by virtue of location and differential location of and access to facilities such as schools, hospitals, parks, transport (Smith, 1974), high levels of inequality have the potential to generate considerable social problems as well as economic and social deprivation in some groups. Not surprisingly, urban inequality has been a continuing concern for many social commentators, social scientists, politicians and policy makers. Engels (1987[1846]) focused on inequality and poverty in the big British cities during the industrial revolution over 150 years ago and his concerns about poverty were later taken up by Charles Booth (1902) and other social reformers. I will return to some of the political and policy issues later. First, however, there are a number of key definitional issues which need discussion including the definition of inequality. The chapter then subsequently goes on to discuss its geographical scope, its forms and dimensions, including inequalities of resources, access and capabilities, the role of the state and market in promoting or 242

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Urban inequality  ­243 reducing inequality, the role of underlying structural inequalities in terms of class, religion, ethnicity and gender and the impact of austerity policies in reinforcing inequalities.

16.2  ISSUES OF DEFINITION The first problem to be addressed is what is meant by ‘urban’ inequality. Does the term refer just to a variety of inequalities found in cities (and in rural areas) or is it seen to have specific manifestations in cities and, possibly, causal powers in the sense that cities can generate or intensify specific forms of inequality by virtue of the structure of their economy, housing market or their physical structure? This is an issue going back to David Harvey’s (1973) pioneering work in Social Justice and the City. The position taken here is that urban inequality embraces both interpretations: it comprises both a set of structures and patterns of inequality which have their origins in wider national inequalities and which take a variety of urban forms and manifestations and, it also refers to inequalities which result from, or are intensified by, specific urban structures, processes and forms of governance. In other words, cities can generate and intensify forms of inequality which may have their origins in the wider society. This debate was very important in urban sociology in the 1970s with Saunders (1981) and others debating the existence of specifically urban processes (and theory). This debate has resurfaced again with Brenner and Theodore (2002) arguing that cities have become strategically important geographical areas in which neo-liberal initiatives, responses and management have been focused. Similarly, Peck (2012) has argued that since the global financial crisis ‘austerity urbanism’ has affected many cities financially, socially and politically. However, in addition, it can be argued that cities can generate new forms of inequality by virtue of their spatial forms and social patterns – for example, inequalities in the distribution of transport and facilities. Urban inequality involves both socio-economic and spatial inequalities in terms of the differential distribution of attributes and also of capabilities. The second issue which needs attention is that of geographical scope. There is a major difference between cities in the developed and developing world in terms of economic development, social facilities, such as education and housing, standards of living and the form and structure of urban inequalities. It is impossible, for example, to compare inequalities in education provision and attainment in developed and developing world cities where in the former virtually all children have free public education until the age of 16, to cities where many children do not go beyond

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244  Handbook of urban geography primary education level. The focus here will be primarily on the cities of the developed world although this is not to minimize the major issues of inequality in developing world cities. Gugler (2004) provides a valuable overview of urban inequality in the developing world. The third issue needing discussion is the differences between cities in the socialist, or former socialist, world and those in the capitalist world. Although the number of countries with a form of state socialist regime has shrunk massively in the last two decades, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the entry of many former Soviet satellites into the EU, the literature on state socialist cities (Szelényi, 1987; Andrusz et al., 2011) demonstrated that they had major inequalities, albeit of a rather different form from western cities. Szelényi (1978, p. 63) argued that in contrast to market economies where inequalities are produced by the markets and moderated by the redistributive intervention of the state, ‘in state socialist societies social inequalities are basically created and structured by (state) redistributive mechanisms’. The differences were seen in a particularly visible way in Berlin when it was divided into East and West. By the time the Wall fell in 1989, East and West Berlin had become very different areas with different structures of inequality both within and between them (Häussermann and Kappan, 2005). One of the interesting questions of the last 25‒30 years has been the implications for inequality of the transformation of cities from communism or state socialism to capitalism which replaced one set of inequalities with another (Clapham et al., 1996). This is particularly true in China where the economic opening up, a move to a market system in many areas, and increasing prosperity since 1978 has been accompanied by a massive widening of inequalities in income, housing, education and health. China is now one of the most unequal countries in the world (Wu, 2006; Logan, 2008).

16.3  WHAT IS INEQUALITY? Having clarified some important background issues, it is important to try to conceptualize what is meant by urban inequality and its forms and processes. Inequality refers to an uneven distribution of resources or conditions (income, wealth, life expectancy, educational access) over a population or set of geographical areas where some individuals or groups have unequal conditions or have a bigger or smaller share than others. Sen (1995) has also pointed to the role of inequalities of capability which can limit the ability of individuals or groups to access resources or overcome conditions. The resources may be present but individuals or groups may be unable to access them because of a lack of capability which could be

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Urban inequality  ­245 financial, social or cultural (Wilson, 1996). The definition of inequality commonly has a normative element where uneven distributions or shares are linked to unfairness but this is not necessarily always important as some unequal distributions, such as height or hair colour, are essentially random and it is possible to discuss inequality without invoking a normative element. Thus, inequality is not just about poverty, low incomes, poor housing or ill-health, but about the distribution of conditions across populations. It is about those who have, as well as those who have not, as the former are crucial to inequality. To put it more strongly, inequality should not be confused just with poverty, low incomes, poor housing and so on. These are manifestations of inequality but they are only one side of the question. The other side consists of the rich, the powerful, the healthy, the well housed, etcetera and both are integral to inequality. Inequality has a precise meaning and it is important not to confuse or conflate inequality with other concepts such as social polarization or segregation. Polarization is a very ill defined, and massively misused term often used to refer to any form of social division, whereas the original use of the term by Sassen (1991) was specifically used to refer to an increase in the percentage share at both the top and the bottom ends of the occupational and income distribution. Hence, this is sometimes seen as an hourglass distribution. But the evidence for polarization is mixed at best (Hamnett, 1996, 2003; Baum, 1999; Wessel, 2000; Chiu and Wong, 2011). I have argued that in London the evidence supports a picture of increasing inequality with no polarization: the rich have increased in number and got much richer. But this has been the subject of considerable dispute with arguments that changes in occupational structure allied to rising immigration have increased the number of low-wage service workers (May et al., 2007; Hamnett, 2015; Manley et al., 2015). It is important to differentiate between, on the one hand, the various forms or dimensions of urban inequality, particularly in terms of social provision and access to scarce goods and resources such as housing, education, health and transportation and the processes which give rise to such inequalities. We know that there are major differences in levels of urban health or housing provision between different areas and groups, but the key issue is the underlying causes of such inequalities as these will determine the extent to which inequalities can be successfully reduced.

16.4  FORMS AND DIMENSIONS OF INEQUALITY The forms of urban inequality take a number of different dimensions. There are, to take examples, major inequalities in the distribution of hous-

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246  Handbook of urban geography ing by type, price, condition, rental levels and location. In addition, there are significant inequalities in mortality and morbidity rates among different areas and groups in the population and there are also major inequalities in the nature, quality and extent of health provision in, for example, the distribution of hospitals and doctors surgeries and their costs. These inequalities in provision both reflect and reinforce social inequalities in terms of class, income, race and religion (de Vise, 1971) The same is true with inequalities in educational provision, access and attainment. These inequalities manifest themselves both between countries and between and within cities and they have been well documented for many decades. In London, for example, each eastward stop on the Jubilee line between Westminster and Canning Town marks a one year decline in life expectancy for the resident population (London Health Observatory, 2006, in Wills, 2010, p. 616). There are also inequalities in transport availability and cost, employment, pollution and a host of other variables including overall life chances, many of which are closely interrelated. Individuals or households who fare poorly on one indicator are likely to fare poorly on others. People who live in nice houses in wealthy areas are likely to be healthier and have better education levels. Inequalities are patterned and structured not random (Tudor Hart, 1971; Curtis, 2004). In London, for example, there are major inequalities in the percentage of secondary school pupils passing the GCSE exam at age 16 with five or more grades A–C between both individual schools and boroughs. These differences range from around 20 per cent in the lowest attaining schools to 100 per cent in the highest. The differences are strongly related to parental social class. There are also differences in exam results by ethnic group, with the highest scores being reached by Chinese and Indian pupils and the lowest by Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean pupils (Hamnett et al., 2007; Hamnett and Butler, 2011). There are also inequalities both in the number and distribution of state and private schools, and in differential access to schools. Because of the variation in school performance, many parents often try to get a place at a high performing school. But, because of the excess demand for places, a rationing system operates in which the determining factor is usually distance from home to school with a distance cut-off being applied. This introduces clear locational inequality which can reinforce existing class and ethnic differences between residential areas (Butler and Hamnett, 2014). Richer parents will often try to move into the school catchment area to maximize their chance of a place. This phenomenon of education segregation and inequality is widespread (Oberti, 2007) and is not confined to western cities (Wu et al., 2016). London, like other cities, also has major housing inequalities in terms of cost, access, condition and the like. In general, the rich and high income

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Urban inequality  ­247 groups live in larger, more spacious, better condition houses in more attractive areas while the poor live in poor quality, smaller housing in less attractive areas. The low income groups, along with some less successful ethnic minorities, tend to be concentrated in social or rented housing (Hamnett et al., 2007). These inequalities are of long standing and go back to the nineteenth century or much earlier (Engels, 1987[1846]; SteadmanJones, 1971). As Harvey (1973) pointed out, the urban housing market can be compared to a theatre where the rich are able to command the best seats and the poor have to make do with the poorest seats if they can gain access at all. Many of these inequalities of condition are also of long standing. The distribution of wealth and poverty was systematically mapped by Rowntree in York and Booth in London along with other social reformers in other late-nineteenth century cities. Ward (1989) documented changing conceptions of segregation in American cities. Dorling et al. (2000) have also shown the significant historical continuity between patterns of deprivation in late-nineteenth century and modern London. The areas which were poor and deprived 100 or more years ago tend, in general, to still be poor and deprived today. None of this should come as a surprise. The poorest groups live in the poorest areas and this holds over time, although there are significant changes in the social composition of some areas – for example, Notting Hill and Islington in London, Soho and Chelsea in New York and the left bank in Paris – as wealthier groups have moved into areas with close proximity to the city centre. There are also major variations in inequality between different cities. It is well documented that a number of global cities such as London, New York and Hong Kong are far more unequal than other cities (Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991; Hamnett, 2003; Chiu and Lui, 2004; Chiu and Wong, 2011). The reasons for this are debated, but one factor is that these cities generate large numbers of high skilled and high paid jobs and also attract members of the international rich to live there. They may also generate more low wage service sector jobs.

16.5  UNDERLYING STRUCTURAL INEQUALITIES It is easily possible to list and document the varieties of inequality in different cities, but arguably most, if not all, of the forms of inequality are, in fact, manifestations of a small number of deeper, underlying inequalities. There is potential for considerable disagreement as to what constitutes a structural inequality particularly given the wide range of societies, but I would, tentatively, identify six. These are income and wealth; social

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248  Handbook of urban geography class; (un)employment; race, caste and ethnicity; gender; and religion. I will briefly discuss some of these. Looking first at gender, women have systematically had disadvantaged social positions for centuries. It is only relatively recently, even in western societies, that women got the vote. In Britain this was introduced in 1928. In Switzerland this did not happen until 1971 and in Saudi Arabia not until 2011. In Saudi Arabia, all women are required to have a male guardian (whose permission is needed for travel) and they were not allowed to drive before 2018. In many Middle Eastern and Islamic countries women are effectively second class citizens. Even in western societies women often occupy lower status jobs and receive lower wages for equal work (Wolf, 2013). Religion is another pervasive source of discrimination and inequality, where individuals from specific religious faiths are either excluded from social participation or actively discriminated against. This can take a variety of forms, ranging from historical discrimination against Catholics/Protestants or Jews in western countries, to the persecution of Muslims in Serbia and slaughter of over 8000 Muslim males in Kosovo and the Shia–Sunni conflict in the Middle East. Until recently, Catholics occupied a subservient position in Belfast and other cities in Northern Ireland where employment, housing and education were segregated by religion (Boal, 1969). Race and ethnicity is a widespread source of inequality in a large number of countries ranging from Myanmar to India, Sri Lanka, South Africa and the USA. In most of these countries, people of colour have occupied a subservient status as a result of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. In the USA, as is well known, black Africans were imported as slaves to work on the plantations and after slavery had ended they occupied marginalized economic and social positions where they were subject to intense racial discrimination with white-only buses, restaurants, schools and other facilities. After large-scale migration to the northern industrial cities from the 1940s onwards, blacks became concentrated and segregated in the worst housing in poor inner city areas as whites moved out to the suburbs. This has led to deeply inscribed social and spatial inequalities in employment, housing and education which Massey and Denton (1993) termed American Apartheid. The impact of de-industrialization has also had major effects on the black inner city population as William Wilson (1996) has shown in his study of Chicago When Work Disappears. One result has been deeply entrenched racial segregation. In South Africa, of course, inequality was deliberately put in place as a key element to differentiate the races. As is well known, blacks and coloureds (the terminology of the time) were systematically disadvantaged through the operation of apartheid policy which ensured that non-whites lived in the specific areas, far from the privileged white areas. The different

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Urban inequality  ­249 races were deliberately segregated through the operation of the Group Areas Act and other legislation with many adverse consequences. Not only were blacks and coloureds forced to live in poor-quality housing in separate areas (such as Soweto in Johannesburg or Cape Flats in Cape Town) but these areas are usually on the urban periphery which meant long journeys to work, given the poor quality of public transport. Inequality under Apartheid was the deliberate outcome of state policy. It was designed to keep blacks at the bottom of the social pile and South African cities were some of the most unequal in the world (Hindson et al., 1994). Along with gender and race, income and wealth also play a crucial role in structuring inequality. In a capitalist economy, where housing is a commodity bought and sold in the market, access to decent housing is generally controlled by income and wealth. Those with money are able to effectively out-bid other groups for the best or most desirable housing in the best areas. At the bottom end of the housing market there is the most marginal housing such as shared rooms in multi-occupied housing, hostels and rooming houses, and so on, and at the bottom the physically homeless. Housing is an example of how rich and poor are directly linked through the market. In cities such as London or New York the concentration of high-income earners and, increasingly, wealthy overseas investors seeking a haven for their money, are pushing up house prices with very detrimental consequences for many residents who are priced out of much, or all, of the market. Individuals or households without adequate income or family wealth are either forced to rent, to share, to seek social housing or to move out of the city. It is not surprising that London is witnessing a resurgence of sharing households as this is a response to high housing costs. Similar processes can be seen in most cities of the developing world and low income households tend to be found in favelas or peripheral squatter settlements (Garmany, 2014). In China, forcible redevelopment of inner city residential areas has displaced many low income residents out to the urban periphery with long commuting journeys. Income inequality is one of the most important forms of inequality simply because it influences the ability to purchase goods and services. At its simplest, those with very low incomes may be unable to purchase food, clothing or shelter and can become dependent on charity. There is considerable work on urban income inequality but at one level it clearly reflects changes in national income inequality which has widened considerably since the mid-late 1970s in many western countries (Hills, 2005; Stiglitz, 2012; Dorling, 2014; Piketty, 2014; Sayer, 2014). The reasons are complex, but some think it has its roots in the shift away from a more inclusive welfare state to a more neo-liberal society, while others argue

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250  Handbook of urban geography it has its roots in the ­changing nature of work and the hollowing out of the skilled manufacturing labour force and its replacement by low-paid service work. Finally, some argue that it reflects the changing balance of power in capitalist societies away from labour and towards capital which has enabled the top 10 per cent to greatly increase their salaries and overall remuneration while most of those in the bottom half of the distribution have seen their real wages remain stable or even decline. The inequality is often more intense in global cities with finance and business service sectors with large numbers of high paid workers (Warf, 2000; Fainstein, 2001; Hamnett, 2003; Chiu and Wong, 2011). Inequalities in income and wealth are, themselves, often manifestations of underlying social class. A person’s class frequently has a profound impact on their educational opportunities, their income, housing, health and life chances. Some individuals are able to transcend the limitations of class and class does not exercise a deterministic control limiting individual aspiration and opportunity. But in the aggregate, class does limit opportunities for some groups and open doors for others. In cultures where leaving school at 16 and getting a job is seen as an overriding and normal consideration it can be difficult, if not impossible, to stay on and undertake further training and go to university. In other families this is taken as the norm (Hoggart, 1957). The role of social and cultural influences on aspirations and life chances has been well documented by Bourdieu (1984) but the processes are not just social. There are also spatial dimensions and the role of neighbourhood social mix in influencing opportunities has been analysed by Musterd and Andersson (2005), Galster (2007) and others. It has long been thought that where people live has a powerful influence on their perceptions, experiences, peer groups and aspirations and life chances but this has often proved difficult to document. Finally, it is important to briefly note the key role of migration. Some migrants are highly skilled, highly educated and highly paid but many others fill less skilled roles and exist at the bottom of the pile undertaking low skilled and low paid work (Wills et al., 2009; Clarke, 1998).

16.6  STATE POLICY, WELFARE AND INEQUALITY It is impossible to look at urban inequality without analysing the role of government policy. Szelényi (1978) suggested that in state socialist societies the role of the state in distribution of resources (incomes or housing, health and so on) played the key role in inequality rather than markets but in capitalist economies the state can also play a key role in intensifying or reducing the role of marked-based inequalities. This is clearly seen

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Urban inequality  ­251 in the different levels of income inequality between different countries as a result of taxation and welfare policy (Atkinson, 2015). Most developed western countries have some form of welfare state although the extent and cost of welfare programmes varies considerably. At the top end, a number of countries, notably in Scandinavia but also France and the Netherlands, devote a high proportion of national GDP to welfare. But, in recent years, as the cost of welfare programmes has risen, there has been a growing conservative backlash, with strong arguments that the cost of the welfare state must be scaled back. This has happened in Sweden, the USA and the UK where the election of a coalition government in 2010 and a Conservative government in 2015 permitted major cuts to be implemented (see also Hamnett, 2014). There is no space here to discuss the details but cuts to housing benefits and caps on overall benefits, have, effectively, forced a large number of households out of London by virtue of their inability to pay the high rents out of welfare payments (Hamnett, 2010, 2014). Peck (2012) has also analysed the impact of what he terms ‘austerity urbanism’ in the USA where cuts in government finance and tax revenues post financial crisis are leading to extensive cuts in basic service provision. In recent years there has been considerable debate on the issue of rights to the city and the just city (Harvey, 2008; Fainstein, 2010). The idea of a right to the city is attractive but it is highly debatable whether there is a single ‘right to the city’ or rather a multiplicity of different ‘rights’, many of which may be in conflict with one another. Nonetheless, as a concept which focuses our attention on urban dispossession and exclusion it has considerable utility. The idea of a just city is perhaps more attractive as it enables discussion of what a just city might entail in terms of the distribution of and access to facilities such as education, housing, transport and so on, and the degree of inequality that may be acceptable. In reality, of course, most cities will continue to remain unequal in various ways and Harvey (2008) argues that the right to the city is important both as a political slogan and organizing device. What is important is that researchers and activists keep the pressure on politicians and policy makers to ensure that the degree of urban inequality does not increase further. What is certain is that urban inequality is going to remain important for the foreseeable future.

REFERENCES Andrusz, G., M. Harloe and I. Szelényi (2011), Cities after Socialism: Urban and Regional Change in Post-socialist Societies, Oxford: Blackwell.

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252  Handbook of urban geography Atkinson, A. B. (2015), Inequality: What Can Be Done?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Baum, S. (1999), ‘Social transformations in the global city: Singapore’, Urban Studies, 36 (7), 1095–1117. Boal, F. (1969), ‘Territoriality on the Shankill-Falls divide, Belfast’, Irish Geography, 6 (1), 30–50. Booth, C. (1902), Survey into Life and Labour in London, London: Macmillan. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brenner, N. and N. Theodore (2002), ‘Cities and the geography of “actually existing neoliberalism”’, Antipode, 34 (3), 349–379. Butler, T. and C. Hamnett (2014), Ethnicity, Class and Aspiration; Remaking East London, Bristol: Policy Press. Chiu, S. and T. Lui (2004), ‘Testing the global city-social polarisation thesis: Hong Kong since the 1990s’, Urban Studies, 41 (10), 1863–1888. Chiu, S. and S-L. Wong (2011), Hong Kong Divided? Structures of Social Inequality in the Twenty-First Century, Hong Kong Institute of Asia Pacific Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Clapham, D., J. Hegedüs, K. Kintrea, I. Tosics and H. Kay (eds) (1996), Housing Privatization in Eastern Europe, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Clarke, W. (1998), ‘Mass migration and local outcomes: is international migration to the United States creating a new urban underclass?’, Urban Studies, 35, 371–382. Curtis, S. (2004), Health and Inequality: Geographical Perspectives, London: Sage Publications. Dorling, D. (2014), Inequality and the 1%, London: Verso. Dorling, D., R. Mitchell, M. Shaw, S. Orford and G. Davey Smith (2000), ‘The ghost of Christmas past: health effects of poverty in London in 1896 and 1991’, British Medical Journal, 7276, 23–30. Engels, F. (1987[1846]), The Condition of the Working Class in England, London: Penguin. Fainstein, S. S. (2001), ‘Inequality in global city regions’, in Allen J. Scott (ed.), Global City Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 20–24. Fainstein, S. S. (2010), The Just City, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Galster, G. (2007), ‘Neighbourhood social mix as a goal of housing policy: a theoretical analysis’, European Journal of Housing Policy, 7 (1), 19–43. Garmany, J. (2014), ‘Space for the state? Police, violence, and urban poverty in Brazil’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104 (6), 1239–1255. Gugler, J. (ed.) (2004), World Cities beyond the West: Globalization, Development and Inequality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamnett, C. (1996), ‘Social polarisation, economic restructuring and welfare state regimes’, Urban Studies, 33 (8), 1407–1430. Hamnett, C. (2003), Unequal City: London in the Global Arena, London: Taylor and Francis. Hamnett, C. (2010), ‘Moving the poor out of central London? The implications of the government cuts to housing benefits’, Environment and Planning A, 42 (12), 2809–2819. Hamnett, C. (2014), ‘Shrinking the welfare state: the structure, geography and impact of British government benefit cuts’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39 (4), 490–503. Hamnett, C. (2015), ‘The changing occupational class composition of London’, City, 19 (2–3), 239–246. Hamnett, C. and T. Butler (2011), ‘Geography matters: the role distance plays in reproducing educational inequality in East London’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36 (4), 479–500. Hamnett, C., M. Ramsden and T. Butler (2007), ‘Social background, ethnicity, school composition and educational attainment in East London’, Urban Studies, 44 (7), 1255–1280. Harvey, D. (1973), Social Justice and the City, London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, D. (2008), ‘Right to the City’, New Left Review, 53 (1), 23–40. Häussermann, H. and A. Kappan (2005), ‘Berlin: from divided to fragmented city, in F. E.

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Urban inequality  ­253 Ian Hamilton, Kaliopa D. Andrews and Natasa Pichler-Milanovi (eds), Transformation of Cities in Central and Eastern Europe: Towards Globalization, Tokyo: United Nations Press, pp. 189–222. Hills, J. (2005), Inequality and the State, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hindson, D., M. Byerley and M. Morris (1994), ‘From violence to reconstruction: the making, disintegration and remaking of an apartheid city’, Antipode, 26 (4), 323–350. Hoggart, R. (1957), The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Logan, J. (ed.) (2008), Urban China in Transition, Oxford: Blackwell. Manley, D., R. Johnston, K. Jones and D. Owen (2015), ‘Occupational segregation in London: a multilevel framework for modelling segregation’, in Tiit Tammaru, Szymon Marcińzak, Maarten Van Ham and Sako Muserd (eds), Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities: East Meets West, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 30–54. Massey, D. S. and N. A. Denton (1993), American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. May, J., J. Wills, K. Datta, Y. Evans, J. Herbert and C. McIlwaine (2007), ‘Keeping London working: global cities, the British state and London’s new migrant division of labour’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32 (2), 151–167. Mollenkopf, J. H. and M. Castells (1991), Dual City: Restructuring New York, New York: Russell Sage. Musterd, S. and R. Andersson (2005), ‘Housing, social mix and social opportunities’, Urban Affairs Quarterly, 40 (6), 761–790. Oberti, M. (2007), L’École Dans La Ville: Segregation, Mixité, Carte Scolaire, Paris: Presse de Sciences Po. Peck, J. (2012), ‘Austerity urbanism: American cities under extreme economy’, City, 16 (6), 626–655. Piketty, T. (2014), Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato (360 B.C.E.), The Republic, translated by Benjamin Jowett, at http://classics.mit.edu// Plato/republic.html (accessed 29 September 2018). Sassen, S. (1991), Global Cities, New York: Columbia University Press. Saunders, P. R. (1981), Social Theory and the Urban Question, London: Unwin Hyman. Sayer, A. (2014), Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, Bristol: Policy Press. Sen, A. (1995), Inequality Re-examined, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, D. (1974), ‘Who gets what, where and how: a welfare approach for human geography’, Geography, 59 (4), 289–297. Steadman-Jones, G. (1971), Outcast London, London: Allen Lane. Stiglitz, J. (2012), The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Szelényi, I. (1978), ‘Social inequalities in state socialist redistributive economies: dilemmas for social policy in contemporary socialist societies of Eastern Europe’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 19 (1), 63‒78. Szelényi, I. (1987), ‘Housing inequalities and occupational segregation in state socialist cities: commentary to the Special Issue of IJURR on East European cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 11 (1), 1‒8. Tudor Hart, J. (1971), ‘The inverse care law’, The Lancet, 297 (7696), 405–412. de Vise, P. (1971), ‘Cook county hospital: Bulwark of Chicago’s apartheid health system: prototype of the nation’s public hospitals’, Antipode, 3, 9–16. Ward, D. (1989), Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, 1840–1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and Ghetto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warf, B. (2000), ‘New York: The Big Apple in the 1990s’, Geoforum, 31 (4), 487–499. Wessel, T. (2000), ‘Social polarisation and socioeconomic segregation in a welfare state: the case of Oslo’, Urban Studies, 37 (11),1947–1967. Wills, J. (2010), ‘Academic agents for change’, City, 14 (6), 616–618. Wills, J., K. Datta, Y. Evans, J. Herbert, J. May and C. McIlwaine (2009), Global Cities at Work: New Migrant Divisions of Labour, London: Pluto Press.

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254  Handbook of urban geography Wilson, W. J. (1996), When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wolf, A. (2013), The XX Factor: How Working Women are Creating a New Society, London: Profile Books. Wu, F. (2006), Globalisation and the Chinese City, London: Routledge. Wu, Q., X. Zhang and P. T. Waley (2016), ‘Jiaoyuification: when gentrification goes to school in the Chinese inner city’, Urban Studies, 53 (16), 3510–3526.

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17.  Segregation: a multi-contextual and multi-faceted phenomenon in stratified societies Masayoshi Oka and David W. S. Wong

17.1 INTRODUCTION Segregation refers to the extent to which individuals of different population groups occupy or experience different social contexts or environments. Among the social contexts in which people live, learn, work, and recreate, segregation in the residential space has been a topic of interest to a wide variety of academic disciplines (e.g. demography, economics, geography, political science, and sociology), and professionals or practitioners in multiple fields (e.g. law enforcement, urban planning, and health service providers). Underlying motivations are related to the fact that residential segregation has been coupled with unequal distributions of quality education, employment opportunities, health outcomes, and socioeconomic resources (Clark, 1986; Taeuber, 1968; Massey and Fischer, 2000; Williams and Collins, 2001; Anderson et al., 2003; Charles, 2003). In other words, segregation in the residential space has significant ramifications for many dimensions of societal wellbeing. With increasing racial and/or ethnic diversity around the globe, residential segregation is a societal concern not only in the United States (US), but also in other countries (Musterd, 2005). In addition to residential space, people experience segregation in many socio-geographical spaces, such as in school (e.g. Reardon et al., 2000), workplace (e.g. Deutsch et al., 1994; Wang, 2010), entertainment and cultural–religious activities (e.g. Lloyd and Shuttleworth, 2012; Gale, 2013), and other contextual settings. However, assessing segregation in multiple domains simultaneously is challenging. Even if this was possible, another important aspect of segregation is that people are also sorted by their socio-demographic characteristics. For instance, residential segregation is mostly about the spatial separation of racial/ethnic groups across residential neighbourhoods. Besides race/ethnicity, income can be a very powerful force to sort people into different residential areas. In certain situations, language can be a crucial factor in separating different types of people. For these reasons, segregation is a multi-contextual and 255

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256  Handbook of urban geography Table 17.1  The multi-contextual and multi-faceted nature of segregation Socio–geographical spaces Residential School Workplace Entertainment . . . Race–ethnicity Sociodemographic Income characteristics Age Gender Culture Religion Immigration  Status . . .

X X X X X X X

X X X X X X X

X X X X X X X

X X X X X X X

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

­ ulti-faceted phenomenon in today’s increasingly stratified societies m (Table 17.1). Table 17.1 is not intended to enumerate all possible contexts in which segregation can be studied but shows that segregation can be defined along two dimensions: socio-demographic characteristics and sociogeographical spaces. The first dimension refers to different ways to label people or divide population into groups. The second dimension refers to the environment in which segregation may occur. The cross-classification of these two dimensions (a cell in the table) defines a specific socio-­ demographic–spatial context to study segregation. In other words, using a specific socio-demographic characteristic to assign people into groups, their segregation levels can be evaluated in different socio-geographical spaces (i.e. cutting across different columns for a given row in Table 17.1). Similarly, given a specific socio-geographical space, segregation levels of the population can be evaluated in various ways according to different socio-demographic characteristics (i.e. cutting across different rows for a given column in Table 17.1). Historically, racial/ethnic segregation in the residential space has been the most frequently studied in urban geography (cell 1-1 in Table 17.1), with other types having been studied less intensively or not at all. Explanations of the level of segregation of a specific place need to consider historical, cultural–psychological, economic, political and geographical factors. Literature on this topic is immense and has been reviewed by Lloyd et al. (2014), and further reviews of the extensive literature on segregation are available in Wong (2016) and Yao et al. (2018). Hence, we provide a very brief overview of major challenges in measuring segregation from the spatial perspective. Although segregation is multi-faceted,

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Segregation  ­257 our discussion mainly emphasizes the isolation dimension as it is more applicable to the urban context than other dimensions of segregation. We use a case study of two US cities to illustrate the application of a spatial local segregation measure together with analyses using statistical graphics.

17.2 THE CHALLENGE OF MEASURING SEGREGATION One may have the impression that segregation is mostly studied by sociologists, partly because one of the most popular measures of segregation, the index of dissimilarity (D), was introduced by sociologists (Duncan and Duncan, 1955). However, the level of interest in segregation from economists and geographers should not be underappreciated. Relying heavily on the Gini coefficient, economists mostly approach segregation from the income inequality perspective, and inequalities in occupational and educational settings are often studied (e.g. Bishop and Salas, 2012). Ironically, the Gini coefficient and the D index favoured by sociologists and geographers are fundamentally the same (Silber, 2012) – both failing to account for the spatial separation between population groups. While the capability to measure the spatial distribution of population groups is essential in segregation studies (Johnston et al., 2014), only a small share of segregation indices can effectively and meaningfully capture the spatial distribution of population groups over geographical space (e.g. Lieberson, 1981; White, 1986; Morrill, 1991; Reardon and Firebaugh, 2002; Reardon and O’Sullivan, 2004). From a conceptual and methodological standpoint, the choice of an appropriate index will depend on the dimension (or nature) of segregation of interest. Nearly three decades ago, Massey and Denton (1988) analysed 20 segregation indices and concluded that segregation has five dimensions: 1. Evenness: the unequal or differential distribution of population groups; 2. Isolation or, its counterpart, exposure: the potential interaction of population groups; 3. Clustering: the spatial proximity of population groups; 4.  Concentration, similar to the concept of density: the intensity of population groups in a given region; and 5. Centralization: the dispersion of population groups from the social or geographic centre. The five dimensions are widely considered to summarize the nature of segregation (Massey et al., 1996). However, Reardon and O’Sullivan (2004),

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258  Handbook of urban geography Brown and Chung (2006), and Johnston et al. (2007) later concluded that the five dimensions can be reduced to fewer (super)dimensions, and some argued that evenness–clustering and isolation–exposure are likely distinctive dimensions (see Oka and Wong (2014) and Wong (2016) for further discussion). While Massey and Denton (1988) endorsed the D index, the information theory index (H), which was introduced by Shannon (1948a, 1948b) or Theil (1972), depending on the fields of study, has been deemed most adequate for capturing the evenness dimension (White, 1986; Reardon and Firebaugh, 2002; Reardon and O’Sullivan, 2004).1 On the other hand, the isolation index (P*), which was introduced by Bell (1954) and popularized by Lieberson (1981), has been the only popular one for capturing the isolation dimension (Massey and Denton, 1988; Reardon and O’Sullivan, 2004).

17.3  SPACE AND MEASURING SEGREGATION Notwithstanding the usefulness of H and P*, both indices as well as many other segregation indices share two inherent limitations. First, they are global indices that summarize the condition of the entire city or metropolis. Therefore, they fail to recognize the variations of segregation at the neighbourhood (or local) level (Wong, 1996; O’Sullivan and Wong, 2007; Reardon et al., 2008). Second, they are aspatial indices that do not account for the arrangement or relative positions of population groups, commonly referred to as the ‘checkerboard problem’. Therefore, swapping populations between enumeration units will not change the derived values (Morrill, 1991; White, 1983; Wong, 1998). Global indices of segregation are appropriate to compare the status between cities or regions, within which population counts in sub-units are used to compute the indices. In general, using data of smaller areal units (such as block groups versus census tracts in the US, or output areas (OAs) versus lower super output areas (LSOAs) in the UK) will produce higher segregation index values than using data for larger areal units. This is part of the scale effect of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) in measuring segregation (Wong, 1997). Areal units at the chosen resolution level are merely ‘containers’ of the population, but are not necessarily meant to be the ‘neighbourhoods’ of the residents. To address the first issue mentioned above, local measures have been proposed to assign a segregation value to each enumeration unit to reflect variation within the region (e.g. Wong, 2002; Feitosa et al., 2007; Reardon and O’Sullivan, 2004). These local measures are mostly derived from

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Segregation  ­259 spatially decomposing the global measures into measures for sub-units (e.g. census tracts) within the study area (e.g. a city or a metropolis). The fundamental problem with most traditional segregation indices is that they do not consider how the population within an enumeration unit is spatially related to populations in the surrounding units. Many methods have been proposed to address this issue, but a general idea is to compute segregation measures based on the aggregated population counts of enumeration units. The aggregation count of a unit consists of the population in that unit (the reference unit) and the population counts in neighbouring units, either partly or entirely, depending on the specific implementation. This concept was first implemented as the ‘composite population’ by Wong (1998). Later, spatial kernel was used to implement the idea (Reardon and O’Sullivan, 2004; Feitosa et al., 2007). The main difference between the two approaches is that the ‘composite population’ assigns a weight of one to all neighbouring units so all populations in these neighbouring units are included, whereas the spatial kernel assigns larger fractional weights to populations in units closer to the reference unit and smaller fractional weights to those in units farther away. Figure 17.1 illustrates these two spatial weighting schemes. From an analytical standpoint, spatial kernels capture the distance decay effect, the nature of spatial relationships that decline with increasing distances (Tobler, 1970). Therefore, the spatial kernel is more elegant than the simplistic binary (one or zero) weighting scheme in the ‘composite population’ approach. However, spatial kernels are strongly influenced by the size and the geometric configuration of enumeration units (Fotheringham, 1981; Griffith, 1982; Griffith and Jones, 1980). In fact, spatial kernels tend to underestimate or even ignore the spatial relationships of irregular enumeration units with varying spatial extents more than the ‘composite population’ approach. Put differently, spatial kernels are appropriate only if enumeration units are of similar sizes and uniform in all directions (i.e. equally spaced grid-like patterns). These developments in the measurement of segregation bring out several conceptual and implementation issues. The two population weighting approaches discussed above adopt the premise that neighbourhoods are spatially contiguous, assuming that people’s interaction is constrained to the area around their residential location. How a neighbourhood should be defined is a significant topic in itself and is beyond the scope of this chapter.2 Studies of people’s activity spaces have revealed that they visit locations that are not necessarily around their residential locations but dispersed over the larger city region. Thus, a comprehensive assessment of segregation needs to consider activity spaces to capture interactions

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260

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Figure 17.1  Illustration of two spatial approaches

Note:  Binary weight assigns a value of 1 (one) to neighbouring enumeration units, and 0 (zero) otherwise; all neighbouring units are weighted equally regardless of their distance from the reference unit. On the other hand, spatial kernel assigns a continuous value based on the distance between enumeration unit centroids; units closer to the reference unit are weighted more, whereas those farther away are weighted less.

Segregation  ­261 in all relevant socio-geographical spaces (Wong and Shaw, 2011), and a meaningful specification or formulation of ‘neighbourhood’ should effectively represent people’s activity space (Matthews, 2008; Kwan, 2009). A different attempt to defining neighbourhoods that does not consider activity patterns is to create individualized neighbourhoods of different possible sizes in the form of concentric rings around the individuals (Östh et al., 2014). In both approaches the creation of individual–specific neighbourhood boundaries start to overlap, which makes statistical analysis challenging. More generally, segregation studies seem to have moved away from the traditional ecological approach which lumps people within an area together, to focus more on individuals. The increasing use of individual-level data in segregation studies is a reaction to both the problems of using ecological or spatially aggregated data and the increasing availability of individual-level data, including historical census data with individual records (Logan et al., 2015). However, using such individual-level data creates a challenge in segregation studies as most applicable measures are based on ecological data. A spatial autocorrelation measure using individuals as the ‘unit’ of analysis has been developed to assess segregation levels using individual records of historical census data (Páez et al., 2012; Páez et al., 2014). In a similar fashion, recent studies exploit the isolation–exposure dimension of segregation by focusing on individuals’ interactions through their social networks (e.g. Wissink et al., 2016; Wissink and Hazelzet, 2016). In other words, the interplay of social network and geographical space is the focus. Since traditional studies on segregation were only concerned with the distribution of population groups over geographical space, these recent trends in segregation studies may shed light on the complex nature of segregation.

17.4 CAPTURING THE MULTI-FACETED NATURE OF RESIDENTIAL ISOLATION The enduring separation between racial/ethnic groups thereof remains a major concern (Taeuber, 1968; Clark, 1986; Massey and Fischer, 2000; Williams and Collins, 2001; Anderson et al., 2003; Charles, 2003). In an intra-urban context, the evenness dimension of segregation might offer useful insight into the disparities in access to resources between population groups. However, previous studies have shown that isolation is a more meaningful dimension to depict segregation between groups based on their potential levels of interaction (e.g. Reardon and O’Sullivan, 2004).

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262  Handbook of urban geography In addition, local measures are needed to show the spatial variation of segregation level within a metropolitan region or city, and there are existing local measures to evaluate isolation–exposure. We will, therefore, focus on the isolation dimension of segregation in the discussion below. Many studies have simply computed one segregation index based on one simple population grouping. Nonetheless, as shown in Table 17.1, the population can be classified according to many characteristics, and segregation can be evaluated using multiple population classifications. In the example below, we will evaluate isolation levels according to the race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) to explore the potential interaction between these two population characteristics in the urban context. Below, we will describe how the global aspatial index of P* (Bell, 1954; Lieberson, 1981) can be modified into a local spatial index by implementing a binary weighting scheme to define neighbourhood (i.e. an area entirely either belongs or does not belong to the neighbourhood of a reference unit). We show how a combination of correlation and visual analyses can be helpful in understanding the spatial separation between population groups defined by multiple characteristics. Population characteristics by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic statuses at the census tract level of two US cities, St. Louis, Missouri (MO) (which includes St. Charles County, St. Louis County, and St. Louis City) and Chicago, Illinois (IL) (Cook County), were obtained from the 2005–2009 American Community Survey (ACS) data.3 The ACS has been conducted every year by the US Census Bureau since 2005 and is the major source of demographic, socioeconomic, and housing data in the US. Although recent studies favour using individual-level data, those data are still not widely available. Therefore, our demonstration uses the widely available ACS data. Census tracts are the basic enumeration units (which are commonly used to denote ‘neighbourhoods’ in many US studies) in this demonstration. The population and geographic characteristics of the two cities are summarized in Table 17.2. For the sake of simplicity, the ‘composite population’ approach was used to modify the global aspatial isolation index of residential segregation into a local spatial index (Wong, 1998). In brief, the function cij(.) is a binary (0, 1) weight where cij 5 1 indicates census tracts i and j are neighbours, and cij 5 0 otherwise. The function cij(.) assumes that people not just move within the census tract i (cii 5 1), but also to neighbouring census tracts j (cij  5 1). The use of cij(.) is partly justifiable as at least five US studies showed that residential activity spaces (i.e. the local area in which people move or travel) tend to encompass individuals’ census tract of residence and its neighbouring census tracts (Basta et al., 2010; Coulton et al., 2001; Zenk et al., 2011; Colabianchi et al., 2014; Jones and Pebley, 2014).

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Segregation  ­263 Table 17.2  Geographic and population characteristics of the study areas   Total land areaa Number of census tractsb Total populationb Non-Hispanic whiteb Non-Hispanic blackb Hispanicb Asianb Other racial/ethnic groupsb Above povertyb Below povertyb Employedb Unemployedb Without Public Assistance Incomeb With Public Assistance Incomeb

 

St. Louis, MO

Chicago, IL

(km2)

2,918 340 1,692,563 70.0 23.3 2.3 2.6 1.8 88.8 11.2 92.8 7.2 98.1 1.9

2,433 1,327 5,257,001 45.2 25.3 22.5 5.6 1.4 85.1 14.9 90.7 9.3 97.4 2.6

  (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) (%)

Notes: a Calculated in geographic information system (not including bodies of water, such as rivers and ponds). b Derived from the 2005–2009 American Community Survey (ACS).

If spatial kernels were used, the binary weight of cij(.) would be replaced by a weight determined by a function of distance between the centroid of census tracts i and j. The spatial weight is larger when census tract j is closer to i, and smaller when it is farther away from i. Specific weights are determined by the kernel function adopted (e.g. Feitosa et al., 2007; Reardon and O’Sullivan, 2004). By implementing the binary function of cij(.), for example, the composite population count of group G in census tract i (cgi) is modelled as

cgi 5 a cij gj (17.1) (17.1) j

n where gj is the population count of gi group gi G in census tract j. In other words, a composite population P* 5 acount a 3 refers b to the population (17.2) count in ti i51 G census tract i plus the population cgi counts 5 a cijin gj its neighbouring census tracts (17.1)j. j The global aspatial index of P*cg (Bell, 1954; Lieberson, 1981) is defined as: cg i i SIi 5 n 3 (17.3) G gict gi P* 5 a a 3i b (17.2) (17.2) ti i51 G

where gi is the population count of group census tract i, G is the populacgi Gcgin i tion count of group G for the SI 3 area, and ti is the total population (17.3) entire i 5 study G cti

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264  Handbook of urban geography count in census tract i. Because this is a global index, derived values at the census tract level (i 5 1, 2, 3, cg. . . cij gjsummarized at the county(17.1) or meti 5 n) aare j ropolitan statistical area (MSA) level (expressed by the summation symbol, ∑). To obtain a local spatial version P*, n gof gi the local spatial isolation index i (SIi), population counts in P*the 5 census 3 (17.2) a b are replaced by their respective tract a ti i51 G composite population counts without summing over census tracts:

SIi 5

cgi cgi 3 (17.3) (17.3) G cti

where cgi is the composite population count of group G in census tract i, and cti is the composite population count of the total population in census tract i. Note that G in Equation 17.3 remains the same as Equation 17.2 because the population count of group G for the entire study area will not change. To capture the residential isolation by race/ethnicity, cgi in Equation 17.3 is substituted by the composite population count of non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, as well as G by their respective population counts for the entire study area. Similar specifications are used for capturing the residential isolation by SES: above or below poverty, employed or unemployed, and with or without public assistance income (Table 17.2). These SES variables have been conceived as key indicators of the socioeconomic composition of a neighbourhood in the US (e.g. Lantz and Pritchard, 2010). In deriving local spatial measures of SES isolation, however, cti in Equation 17.3 is also substituted by the composite population count of individuals in the labour force and of households on benefits, respectively. Derived from SIi given above, four racial/ethnic and six SES isolation measures were computed using R. These ten isolation measures were normalized by their ranges so that all measures are bounded between zero and one (i.e. minimum and maximum). Such normalizations are justifiable as the purpose of this study is to examine intra-city variations, not inter-city differences. The relationships between these ten isolation measures are examined in two separate scatterplot matrices for St. Louis, MO (Figure  17.2) and Chicago, IL (Figure 17.3). The upper off-diagonal panels show the correlation coefficients with associated 95 per cent confidence intervals in parentheses, and the lower off-diagonal panels show the scatter plots. To better understand the spatial patterns of population groups, racial and SES isolation measures were mapped in Figures 17.4–17.7. A quantile classification scheme was used to display the levels of residential isolation in these maps.

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Segregation  ­265 NonHispanic White

–0.64

(–0.70, –0.57)

NonHispanic Black

0.15

(0.04, 0.25)

0.30

0.87

0.85

0.75

(0.20, 0.39)

(0.84, 0.89)

(0.82, 0.88)

(0.70, 0.79)

–0.23 –0.27

–0.31

–0.32

–0.20

(–0.33, –0.13) (–0.37, –0.17) (–0.40, –0.21) (–0.41, –0.22) (–0.30, –0.10)

Hispanic

0.33

(0.23, 0.42)

Asian

0.20

(0.09, 0.30)

0.33

0.30

(0.20, 0.39)

0.34

(0.24, 0.42)

(0.24, 0.43)

Above Poverty

(0.98, 0.99)

0.98

Employed

0.33

(0.23, 0.42)

0.37

(0.28, 0.46)

0.94

(0.93, 0.95)

0.96

(0.95, 0.97)

–0.72

–0.62

–0.60

(–0.77, –0.67) (–0.68, –0.55) (–0.66, –0.52)

0.77

(0.73, 0.81)

0.05

0.89

(0.87, 0.91)

–0.11

0.88

(0.85, 0.90)

–0.07

(–0.06, 0.15)

(–0.21, 0.00)

(–0.17, 0.04)

–0.21

–0.26

–0.28

–0.56

–0.38

–0.35

–0.52

–0.38

–0.34

(–0.31, –0.11) (–0.36, –0.16) (–0.38, –0.18)

(–0.63, –0.48) (–0.47, –0.29) (–0.44, –0.26)

(–0.59, –0.44) (–0.47, –0.29) (–0.43, –0.25)

Without Public Assistance (–0.49, –0.31) (–0.36, –0.16) (–0.33, –0.13) Income

–0.40

–0.26

Below Poverty

(0.83, 0.88)

0.86

Unemployed

–0.23 0.85

(0.81, 0.87)

0.91

(0.88, 0.92)

With Public Assistance Income

Figure 17.2  Correlations of local spatial isolation measures in St. Louis, MO (340 census tracts)

17.5 INTERPLAY BETWEEN RACIAL–ETHNIC AND SES ISOLATION The cities of St. Louis and Chicago are quite different in population size, racial/ethnic composition, poverty rate, unemployment levels and households on benefits (Table 17.2). Despite these differences, the relationships between the ten isolation measures show similar patterns in both cities (Figures 17.2 and 17.3). For instance, four measures of racial/ethnic isolation do not follow linear relationships, and are weakly correlated with each other (r # 60.33); the only exception is the relatively strong negative (non-linear) relationship between non-Hispanic white and black isolation (r 5 20.65 for St. Louis, MO and r 5 20.45 for Chicago, IL). In addition,

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266  Handbook of urban geography NonHispanic White

–0.45

–0.25

(–0.50, –0.41) (–0.30, –0.20)

NonHispanic Black

–0.24

0.16

0.74

0.71

0.69

(0.11, 0.21)

(0.71, 0.76)

(0.68, 0.73)

(0.67, 0.72)

–0.21

–0.24

–0.30

–0.14

(–0.29, –0.19) (–0.26, –0.16) (–0.29, –0.19) (–0.35, –0.25) (–0.19, –0.08)

Hispanic

–0.10

(–0.16, –0.05)

Asian

0.13

(0.08, 0.18)

0.23

0.15

(0.10, 0.20)

0.25

(0.18, 0.28)

(0.20, 0.30)

Above Poverty

(0.93, 0.95)

0.94

Employed

0.00

(–0.05, 0.06)

0.22

(0.17, 0.27)

0.90

(0.89, 0.91)

0.96

(0.95, 0.96)

–0.54

–0.40

–0.44

(–0.58, –0.50) (–0.44, –0.35) (–0.49, –0.40)

0.61

(0.57, 0.64)

0.19

0.82

(0.80, 0.84)

0.03

0.60

(0.56, 0.63)

0.03

(0.14, 0.24)

(–0.02, 0.09)

(–0.03, 0.08)

–0.14

–0.13

–0.12

–0.35

–0.07

–0.33

–0.29

–0.14

–0.30

(–0.19, –0.08) (–0.18, –0.08) (–0.17, –0.07)

(–0.40, –0.31) (–0.13, –0.02) (–0.38, –0.28)

(–0.34, –0.24) (–0.19, –0.08) (–0.35, –0.25)

Without Public Assistance (–0.25, –0.14) (–0.07, 0.04) (–0.26, –0.15) Income

–0.19

–0.01

Below Poverty

(0.66, 0.71)

0.69

Unemployed

–0.20 0.82

(0.80, 0.83)

0.64

(0.61, 0.67)

With Public Assistance Income

Figure 17.3  Correlations of local spatial isolation measures in Chicago, IL (1327 census tracts) the measures of residential isolation of households above poverty, without benefits and in employment are very strongly and positively correlated with each other (r $ 0.90); they are also strongly and positively correlated with those for non-Hispanic white isolation (0.69 # r # 0.87). Finally, the measures for Hispanic and Asian isolation are weakly correlated with six measures of SES isolation (r # ±0.37). Figures 17.2 and 17.3 underscore the importance of studying residential isolation not only by racial/ethnic groups, but also by SES. An analysis of racial/ethnic or SES isolation alone would overlook the multi-faceted nature of residential segregation (Taeuber, 1968; Clark, 1986; Massey and Fischer, 2000; Williams and Collins, 2001; Anderson et al., 2003; Charles, 2003). In these two cities, a high level of non-Hispanic white isolation

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Segregation  ­267 refers to intensive spatial interaction with neighbours of the same racial group who are socioeconomically advantaged (i.e. households who are above poverty, employed, and not on benefits). In contrast, a high level of non-Hispanic black isolation refers to intensive spatial interaction with neighbours of the same racial group who are socioeconomically disadvantaged (i.e. individuals who are below poverty, unemployed, and on benefits). High Hispanic and Asian isolation refer to high levels of spatial interaction with neighbours of the same ethnic group. Taken together, people living in different neighbourhoods experience different social contexts due in part to the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic composition of their neighbours. Correlations and scatterplot matrices are helpful in exploratory spatial data analysis. In St. Louis, MO, for instance, the spatial patterns of residential isolation differ somewhat among non-Hispanic whites (Figure 17.4a), households above poverty (Figure 17.4b), employed (Figure 17.4c), and those who do not receive benefits (Figure 17.4d), although the respective segregation measures are strongly and positively correlated with one another (Figure 17.2). Likewise, slightly different spatial patterns can be observed for the residential isolation of nonHispanic blacks (Figure 17.5a), households in poverty (Figure 17.5b), unemployed (Figure 17.5c), and on benefits (Figure 17.5d) in spite of strong positive correlations between them (Figure 17.2). The same can be said for Chicago, IL (Figures 17.6 and 17.7 in reference to Figure 17.3). Thus, a combination of correlations and thematic maps provides a better understanding of the spatial patterns of residential isolation than just maps.

17.6  BEYOND THE INDICES Moving beyond the traditional realm of inter-city or inter-MSA analysis using global aspatial measures, we have used the local spatial isolation index (SIi) to capture intra-city variations in segregation at the neighbourhood level.4 Results show that segregation between non-Hispanic whites and blacks is still highly significant in St. Louis and Chicago despite strong globalization trends in major cities worldwide. The empirical example demonstrates that segregation of a population can be assessed using multiple population classifications, an important message depicted by Table 17.1. These results also indicate the potentially important roles of economic factors in the spatial sorting of populations. Thus, the extent to which the spatial distribution of racial/ethnic groups can be attributed to income or other variables not considered here remains an essential topic

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268

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Non-Hispanic White (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0430 0.0431 – 0.2226 0.2227 – 0.3875 0.3876 – 0.5487 0.5488 – 1.0000

a

0

5

10 km

Above Poverty (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.1505 0.1506 – 0.3067 0.3068 – 0.4183 0.4184 – 0.5440 0.5441 – 1.0000

b

269

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Without Public Assistance Income (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.2268 0.2269 – 0.3913 0.3914 – 0.4839 0.4840 – 0.6278 0.6279 – 1.0000

d

Figure 17.4  Residential isolation of advantage in St. Louis, MO (340 census tracts)

Note:  A quantile classification scheme was used to display the levels of residential isolation.

Employed (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.2024 0.2025 – 0.3608 0.3609 – 0.4685 0.4686 – 0.5976 0.5977 – 1.0000

c

270

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Non-Hispanic Black (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0006 0.0007 – 0.0025 0.0026 – 0.0517 0.0518 – 0.2076 0.2077 – 1.0000

a

0

5

10 km

Below Poverty (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0139 0.0140 – 0.0363 0.0364 – 0.1226 0.1227 – 0.3394 0.3395 – 1.0000

b

271

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With Public Assistance Income (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0097 0.0098 – 0.0340 0.0341 – 0.0832 0.0833 – 0.2147 0.2148 – 1.0000

d

Figure 17.5  Residential isolation of disadvantage in St. Louis, MO (340 census tracts)

Note:  A quantile classification scheme was used to display the levels of residential isolation.

Unemployed (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0331 0.0332 – 0.0609 0.0610 – 0.1164 0.1165 – 0.2725 0.2726 – 1.0000

c

272

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Non-Hispanic White (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0007 0.0008 – 0.0246 0.0247 – 0.1256 0.1257 – 0.2573 0.2574 – 1.0000

a

0

5

10 km

Above Poverty (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.1070 0.1071 – 0.2026 0.2027 – 0.2926 0.2927 – 0.3865 0.3866 – 1.0000

b

273

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Without Public Assistance Income (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.1490 0.1491 – 0.2448 0.2449 – 0.3295 0.3296 – 0.4393 0.4394 – 1.0000

d

Figure 17.6  Residential isolation of advantage in Chicago, IL (1327 census tracts)

Note:  A quantile classification scheme was used to display the levels of residential isolation.

Employed (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.1310 0.1311 – 0.2328 0.2329 – 0.3177 0.3178 – 0.4378 0.4379 – 1.0000

c

274

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Non-Hispanic Black (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0004 0.0005 – 0.0022 0.0023 – 0.0371 0.0372 – 0.2325 0.2326 – 1.0000

a

0

5

10 km

Below Poverty (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0302 0.0303 – 0.0708 0.0709 – 0.1579 0.1580 – 0.3249 0.3250 – 1.0000

b

275

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With Public Assistance Income (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0154 0.0155 – 0.0346 0.0347 – 0.0824 0.0825 – 0.1831 0.1832 – 1.0000

d

Figure 17.7  Residential isolation of disadvantage in Chicago, IL (1327 census tracts)

Note:  A quantile classification scheme was used to display the levels of residential isolation.

Unemployed (SIi) 0.0000 – 0.0374 0.0375 – 0.0714 0.0715 – 0.1183 0.1184 – 0.1956 0.1957 – 1.0000

c

276  Handbook of urban geography to investigate in the US and other countries. As segregation indices are often used in the context to reflect how different racial/ethnic groups are spatially separated, one should not simply conclude that race/ethnicity is the underlying cause. This short chapter clearly has a US focus. While the reported relationships between racial/ethnic and SES groups in St. Louis and Chicago may not be the same elsewhere, the general framework can easily be adopted to study cities outside of North America. Comparative international studies of segregation should be conducted cautiously due to differences between places in the definition of spatial units and population groups and other characteristics (e.g. Mateos, 2014). Traditional aspatial segregation measures are appealing to urban studies because they are easy to calculate and provide ‘objective’ values to compare. However, their limitations in discerning different population distributions and what they (fail to) measure or reflect need to be acknowledged, as recent reviews by Wong (2016) and Yao et al. (2018) have also emphasized. Global spatial measures are more complicated than aspatial measures in terms of formulation and calculation. This chapter has demonstrated that using local segregation measures is not trivial as these measures are computationally demanding and also require the use of graphical, cartographical and more advanced tools to interpret.

NOTES 1. A major conclusion of Massey and Denton’s statistical analysis of 20 segregation measures is that the evenness dimension is the most important dimension and the D index can reflect evenness the best based on a principal component analysis. Reardon and Firebaugh (2002) used a set of seven desirable properties, such as the principles of transfer and decomposition, to evaluate six popular segregation indices. They concluded that the H index is the most desirable and is the only one that can be decomposed to show intra- and inter-group diversity levels. 2. A generally acceptable conceptual definition of neighbourhood has not emerged yet. The literature has discussed the concept of neighbourhood extensively (e.g. Galster, 2001; Matthews, 2011; Spielman and Logan, 2013; Hasanzadeh et al., 2017), and also in the context of uncertainty (Kwan, 2012). Only operational definitions of neighbourhood associated with selected segregation measures or approaches discussed in this chapter will be mentioned here. 3. We recognize that ACS data have significant error (large margins of error) for small enumeration units and certain variables. We used the five-year estimates, which are more reliable than the one- and three-year estimates. 4. See also a recent paper by Oka and Wong (2015) for conceptual and methodological discussions with didactic demonstrations on the use of the local spatial version of H, and for a useful critique on the misuse of ineffective and insufficient index for measuring the evenness dimension of residential segregation.

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REFERENCES Anderson, L. M., J. St. Charles, M. T. Fullilove, S. C. Scrimshaw, J. E. Fielding, J. Normand and the Task Force on Community Preventive Services (2003), ‘Providing affordable family housing and reducing residential segregation by income: a systematic review’, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 24 (3S), 47–67. Basta, L. A., T. S. Richmond and D. J. Wiebe (2010), ‘Neighborhoods, daily activities, and measuring health risks experienced in urban environments’, Social Science and Medicine, 71 (11), 1943–1950. Bell, W. (1954), ‘A probability model for the measurement of ecological segregation’, Social Forces, 32 (4), 357–364. Bishop, J. A. and R. Salas (2012), Inequality, Mobility and Segregation: Essays in Honor of Jacques Silber, Bingley, UK: Emerald. Brown, L. A. and S-Y. Chung (2006), ‘Spatial segregation, segregation indices and the geographical perspective’, Population, Space and Place, 12 (2), 125–143. Charles, C. Z. (2003), ‘The dynamics of racial residential segregation’, Annual Review of Sociology, 29, 167–207. Clark, W. A. V. (1986), ‘Residential segregation in American cities: a review and interpretation’, Population Research and Policy Review, 5 (2), 95–127. Colabianchi, N., C. J. Coulton, J. D. Hibbert, S. M. McClure, C. E. Ievers-Landis and E. M. Davis (2014), ‘Adolescent self-defined neighborhoods and activity spaces: spatial overlap and relations to physical activity and obesity’, Health and Place, 27, 22–29. Coulton, C., J. Korbin, T. Chan and M. Su (2001), ‘Mapping residents’ perceptions of neighborhood boundaries: a methodological note’, American Journal of Community Psychology, 29 (2), 371–383. Deutsch, J., Y. Flückiger and J. Silber (1994), ‘Measuring occupational segregation: summary statistics and the impact of classification errors and aggregation’, Journal of Econometrics, 61 (1), 133–146. Duncan, O. D. and B. Duncan (1955), ‘A methodological analysis of segregation indexes’, American Sociological Review, 20 (2), 210–217. Feitosa, F. F., G. Câmara, A. M. V. Monteiro, T. Koschitzki and M. P. S. Silva (2007), ‘Global and local spatial indices of urban segregation’, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 21 (3), 299–323. Fotheringham, A. S. (1981), ‘Spatial structure and distance-decay parameters’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 71 (3), 425–436. Gale, R. (2013), ‘Religious residential segregation and internal migration: the British Muslim case’, Environment and Planning A, 45 (4), 872–891. Galster, G. (2001), ‘On the nature of neighbourhood’, Urban Studies, 38 (12), 2111–2124. Griffith, D. A. (1982), ‘Geometry and spatial interaction’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers’, 72 (3), 332–346. Griffith, D. A. and K. Jones (1980), ‘Explorations into the relationship between spatial structure and spatial interaction’, Environment and Planning A, 12 (2), 187–201. Hasanzadeh, K., A. Broberg and M. Kyttä (2017), ‘Where is my neighborhood? A dynamic individual-based definition of home ranges and implementation of multiple evaluation criteria’, Applied Geography, 84, 1–10. Johnston, R., M. Poulsen and J. Forrest (2007), ‘Ethnic and racial segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1980–2000: the dimensions of segregation revisited’, Urban Affairs Review, 42 (4), 479–504. Johnston, R., M. Poulsen and J. Forrest (2014), ‘Segregation matters, measurement matters’, in Christopher D. Lloyd, Ian G. Shuttleworth and David S. Wong (eds), Social-Spatial Segregation: Concepts Processes and Outcomes, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 13–44. Jones, M. and A. R. Pebley (2014), ‘Redefining neighborhoods using common destinations: social characteristics of activity spaces and home census tracts compared’, Demography, 51 (3), 727–752.

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278  Handbook of urban geography Kwan, M-P. (2009), ‘From place-based to people-based exposure measures’, Social Science and Medicine, 69 (9), 1311–1313. Kwan, M-P. (2012), ‘The uncertain geographic context problem’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (5), 958–968. Lantz, P. M. and A. Pritchard (2010), ‘Socioeconomic indicators that matter for population health’, Preventing Chronic Disease, 7 (4), A74. Lieberson, S. (1981), ‘An asymmetrical approach to segregation’, in Ceri Peach, Vaughan Robinson and Susan Smith (eds), Ethnic Segregation in Cities, London: Croom-Helm, pp. 61–82. Lloyd, C. D. and I. G. Shuttleworth (2012), ‘Residential segregation in Northern Ireland in 2001: assessing the value of exploring spatial variations’, Environment and Planning A, 44 (1), 52–67. Lloyd, C. D., I. G. Shuttleworth and D. S. Wong (eds) (2014), Social-Spatial Segregation: Concepts, Processes, and Outcomes, Bristol: Policy Press. Logan, J. R., W. Zhang and D. C. Miao (2015), ‘Emergent ghettos: black neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, 1880–1940’, American Journal of Sociology, 120 (4), 1055–1094. Massey, D. S. and N. A. Denton (1988), ‘The dimensions of residential segregation’, Social Forces, 67 (2), 281–315. Massey, D. S. and M. J. Fischer (2000), ‘How segregation concentrates poverty’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23 (4), 670–691. Massey, D. S., M. J. White and V-C. Phua (1996), ‘The dimensions of segregation revisited’, Sociological Methods and Research, 25 (2), 172–206. Mateos, P. (2014), ‘The international comparability of ethnicity and collective identity: implications for segregation studies’, in Christopher D. Lloyd, Ian G. Shuttleworth and David S. Wong (eds), Social-Spatial Segregation: Concepts Processes and Outcomes, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 163–196. Matthews, S. A. (2008), ‘The salience of neighborhood: some lessons from sociology’, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 34 (3), 257–259. Matthews, S. A. (2011), ‘Spatial polygamy and the heterogeneity of place: studying people and place via egocentric methods’, in Linda Burton, Susan Kemp, ManChui Leung, Stephen A. Matthews and David T. Takeuchi (eds), Communities, Neighborhoods, and Health: Expanding the Boundaries of Place, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 35–55. Morrill, R. L. (1991), ‘On the measure of geographic segregation’, Geography Research Forum, 11, 25–36. Musterd, S. (2005), ‘Social and ethnic segregation in Europe: levels, causes, and effects’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 27 (3), 331–348. Oka, M. and D. W. S. Wong (2014), ‘Capturing the two dimensions of residential segregation at the neighborhood level for health research’, Frontiers in Public Health, 2, 118. Oka, M. and D. W. S. Wong (2015), ‘Spatializing segregation measures: an approach to better depict social relationships’, Cityscape, 17 (1), 97–113. Östh, J., B. Malmberg and E. K. Andersson (2014), ‘Analysing segregation with individualized neighbourhoods’, in Christopher D. Lloyd, Ian G. Shuttleworth and David W. S. Wong (eds), Social-Spatial Segregation: Concepts, Processes, and Outcomes, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 135–162. O’Sullivan, D. and D. W. S. Wong (2007), ‘A surface-based approach to measuring spatial segregation’, Geographical Analysis, 39 (2), 147–168. Páez, A., F. A. López Hernández, M. Ruiz and J. Logan (2014), ‘Micro-geography of segregation: evidence from historical US Census data’, in Christopher D. Lloyd, Ian G. Shuttleworth and David W. S. Wong (eds), Social-Spatial Segregation: Concepts, Processes, and Outcomes, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 91–110. Páez, A., M. Ruiz, F. A. López Hernández and J. Logan (2012), ‘Measuring ethnic clustering and exposure with the Q statistic: an exploratory analysis of Irish, Germans, and Yankees in 1880 Newark’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (1), 84–102.

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Segregation  ­279 Reardon, S. F. and G. Firebaugh (2002), ‘Measures of multigroup segregation’, Sociological Methodology, 32 (1), 33–67. Reardon, S. F. and D. O’Sullivan (2004), ‘Measures of spatial segregation’, Sociological Methodology, 34 (1), 121–162. Reardon, S. F., S. A. Matthews, D. O’Sullivan, B. A. Lee, G. Firebaugh, C. R. Farrell and K. Bischoff (2008), ‘The geographic scale of metropolitan racial segregation’, Demography, 45 (3), 489–514. Reardon, S. F., J. T. Yun and T. M. Eitle (2000), ‘The changing structure of school segregation: Measurement and evidence of multiracial metropolitan-area school segregation, 1989–1995’, Demography, 37 (3), 351–364. Shannon, C. E. (1948a), ‘A mathematical theory of communication’, The Bell System Technical Journal, 27 (3), 379–423. Shannon, C. E. (1948b), ‘A mathematical theory of communication’, The Bell System Technical Journal, 27 (4), 623–656. Silber, J. (2012), ‘Measuring segregation: basic concepts and extensions to other domains’, in John A. Bishop and Rafael Salas (eds), Inequality, Mobility and Segregation: Essays in Honor of Jacques Silber, Bingley: Emerald, pp. 1–36. Spielman, S. E. and J. R. Logan (2013), ‘Using high-resolution population data to identify neighborhoods and establish their boundaries’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (1), 67–84. Taeuber, K. E. (1968), ‘The problem of residential segregation’, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, 29 (1), 101–110. Theil, H. (1972), Statistical Decomposition Analysis: With Applications in the Social and Administrative Sciences, New York: Elsevier. Tobler, W. R. (1970), ‘A computer movie simulating urban growth in the Detroit region’, Economic Geography, 46 (S), 234–240. Wang, Q. (2010), ‘How does geography matter in the ethnic labor market segmentation process? A case study of Chinese immigrants in the San Francisco CMSA’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100 (1), 182–201. White, M. J. (1983), ‘The measurement of spatial segregation’, American Journal of Sociology, 88 (5), 1008–1018. White, M. J. (1986), ‘Segregation and diversity measures in population distribution’, Population Index, 52 (2), 198–221. Williams, D. R. and C. Collins (2001), ‘Racial residential segregation: a fundamental cause of racial disparities in health’, Public Health Reports, 116 (5), 404–416. Wissink, B. and A. Hazelzet (2016), ‘Bangkok living: encountering others in a gated urban field’, Cities, 59, 164–172. Wissink, B., T. Schwanen and R. van Kempen (2016), ‘Beyond residential segregation: introduction’, Cities, 59, 126–130. Wong, D. W. S. (1996), ‘Enhancing segregation studies using GIS’, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 20 (2), 99–109. Wong, D. W. S. (1997), ‘Spatial dependency of segregation indices’, The Canadian Geographer, 41 (2), 128–136. Wong, D. W. S. (1998), ‘Measuring multiethnic spatial segregation’, Urban Geography, 19 (1), 77–87. Wong, D. W. S. (2002), ‘Modeling local segregation: a spatial interaction approach’, Geographical and Environmental Modelling, 6 (1), 81–97. Wong, D. W. S. (2016), ‘From aspatial to spatial, from global to local and individual: are we on the right track to spatialize segregation measures?’, in Frank M. Howell, Jeremy R. Porter and Stephen A. Matthews (eds), Recapturing Space: New Middle-Range Theory in Spatial Demography, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 77–98. Wong, D. W. S. and S-L. Shaw (2011), ‘Measuring segregation: an activity space approach’, Journal of Geographical Systems, 13 (2), 127–145. Yao, J., D. W. S. Wong, N. Bailey and J. Minton (2018), ‘Spatial segregation measures: a

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280  Handbook of urban geography methodological review’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, in press. DOI: 10.1111/tesg.12305. Zenk, S. N., A. J. Schulz, S. A. Matthews, A. Odoms-Young, J. Wilbur, L. Wegrzyn, K. Gibbs, C. Braunschweig and C. Stokes (2011), ‘Activity space environment and dietary and physical activity behaviors: a pilot study’, Health and Place, 17 (5), 1150–1161.

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18.  Neighbourhood effects on social outcomes Sako Musterd, Roger Andersson and George Galster

18.1 INTRODUCTION It is widely recognized that social, cultural or other stratifications shape individual social positions and prospects. Yet, the potential impact of individuals’ immediate environments on such outcomes is intensely debated. This is mainly because research findings do not all point in the same direction. Whereas this is partly due to methodological imperfections and limited access to adequate data, there is also conceptual debate. Regarding conceptual issues, there are questions about the geographical contexts that can have impact on social positions – these do not need to be residential spaces alone but could also involve other spaces related to work, school, leisure, and their interactions; about the population composition of these spaces – the share of people with certain social, economic, demographic, or ‘ethnic’ attributes – that may have impact on social outcomes; about the delineation of scales at which processes occur, or sometimes the interrelated or nested scales that may have impact on individuals; about a variety of mechanisms that may operate to create effects and how they are translated into operational research terms; about the non-population features of space, including physical characteristics, environmental hazards, and public facilities and services; about whom will be affected; and about the impact of duration of exposure to certain environments. Methodologically, there are discussions related to the type of data employed – cross-sectional, longitudinal, in-depth ethnographic; about the type of statistical models; about the role of quantitative or qualitative approaches; and about methodological issues dealing with geographic-selection bias, potential impacts of unobserved variables, and detecting non-linear relations between spatial compositions and individual outcomes, such as threshold effects. Being aware that the issues mentioned are just examples of conceptual and methodological questions or debates that may be raised when dealing with ‘context’ effect studies, we will provide a short overview of such debates and simultaneously provide results of some of the most recent 281

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282  Handbook of urban geography context effect research on social outcomes that we think represents the methodological cutting edge. As mentioned, individuals may be affected by a range of environments at different scales (country, region, city, district, neighbourhood, street, and immediate neighbours). Several studies on context effects include multiple scales and address these scales in multilevel models (for a recent example, see Andersson et al., 2018). The neighbourhood – although also a contested concept – has most frequently been used as the key context that affects individuals’ progress in life. Finally, at the end of this chapter some suggestions for further research will be presented.

18.2  CONCEPTUAL ISSUES Context effect research is concerned with isolating the independent impact of characteristics of the context on individual-level outcomes, through controlling for – ideally – all other potential impacts on such outcomes. It is obvious, however, that ‘contexts’ and ‘outcomes’ can have multiple meanings. ‘Contexts’ can cover residential and non-residential environments at various scales. Frequently these environments refer to the neighbourhood level. Yet, sometimes it is better to use the wider concept of ‘contexts’, especially when national, or regional settings are referred to, such as welfare regimes, labour markets or metropolitan service areas. In many cases these spaces will have to be taken into account simultaneously because variables at these levels may have impacts that potentially cancel out or reinforce each other. That is a reason why context effect research is often multilevel research. All of these spaces can be distinguished from each other on a range of dimensions: socio-economic, ‘ethnic’, ‘criminal’, or demographic, while a wide array of mechanisms can be distinguished through which the context may affect the outcome variables. The complexity, however, does not end here, but also depends on the ‘outcome’ in which researchers and policy makers are interested. Here we encounter a wide array of variation as well. There are studies that focus on physical or mental health outcomes, criminal behaviour, teenage pregnancy, educational outcomes, human interactions, and various forms of social outcomes, such as income trajectories, and (un)employment. Some of these are overlapping with and/or mediating other outcome processes. To make the discussion tractable, we will focus in this chapter on social, or more specifically, socio-economic outcomes (income, employment, etc.) and predominantly, yet not exclusively, look at impacts at the neighbourhood level. In this chapter, we will not only pay attention to the ‘spatial’ dimension, but also to the ‘temporal’ dimension. When during the life

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Neighbourhood effects on social outcomes  ­283 course individuals have been exposed to a certain environment, and how long the duration of exposure was, is likely to have impact on social outcomes as well. 18.2.1  Scales and Composition As said, context effects can be addressed at all scales. Macro-economic conditions at the level of the state or even beyond, and welfare regimes at the national scale have major impacts on individual’s lives (EspingAndersen, 1990). The ‘region’ may be considered an important ‘context’ as well, for example when the focus is on the labour market impact on individual’s opportunities. In studies in which the impact of characteristics at the regional or metropolitan level have been included, significant and strong effects of that level could be shown (Andersson et al., 2007, 2018). A wide range of neighbourhood effect studies, however, deal with smaller (statistical) spatial units, with local bundles of attributes that may have an impact on individual outcomes. Yet, here too it is important to be specific regarding the scale of the environment. Andersson and Musterd (2010) showed that social and ethnic compositions measured at the smallest scale (comparing three different levels: municipal, statistical neighbourhoods; and one hectare squares) had the strongest impacts on individual earnings. Andersson and Malmberg (2015) use bespoke scalable neighbourhoods to study educational achievements and provide arguments and empirical support for a multiscale approach of geographical context (see also Östh et al., 2015). However, it is not just the scale, but also the shape of the area that can have an effect on the results. This is also addressed as the MAUP, the Modifiable Area Unit Problem (Openshaw, 1984). Here, when dealing with the impact of neighbourhoods, we mostly do that at the level of the statistical unit. A range of attributes of such neighbourhoods can be connected to social outcomes. Some of the literature suggests that neighbourhood’s social and ethnic conditions, or the criminal activity and violence that we find there will reduce individual’s social progress in life (Sharkey and Sampson, 2010). Such findings explain why many argue in favour of attenuating such conditions through the creation of socially mixed neighbourhoods. Over the past decades, this has become a favourite form of policy intervention in advanced economies (Ostendorf et al., 2001; Galster, 2013). Neighbourhood effects are not only produced based on compositional characteristics; they can also be triggered by other attributes of neighbourhoods, such as the service level, or the level of pollution or liveability problems related to vandalism in public space. Several of such traits may have direct effects on mental and other health conditions of those who are

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284  Handbook of urban geography growing up there (McConnell et al., 2010). This may have (indirect) effects on social outcomes. Neighbourhood compositions have also been used in studies in which variation in school outcomes (often the key to further social outcomes, such as finding a good job or earning a good income) had to be explained. Reviews of the literature by Nieuwenhuis and Hooimeijer (2016) and Sharkey and Faber (2014) provide examples showing that the neighbourhood context has significant effects on school outcomes. As noted above, a study by Andersson and Malmberg (2015), in which individualized and scalable neighbourhoods have been used, supported these findings. Nevertheless, it seems useful to investigate the simultaneous impact of neighbourhood composition and school composition. Sykes and Musterd (2011) used a large longitudinal dataset aimed at measuring performance in secondary education in the Netherlands and combined the longitudinal data of the individual pupils and parents with information on the school and neighbourhood composition. They found that neighbourhood effects seemed to exist, even after controlling for parental characteristics and for early test material covering the pupils’ social and cognitive skills. However, after controlling for the socio-economic and ethnic composition of the school the neighbourhood effects turned out to disappear. 18.2.2 Mechanisms Creating Neighbourhood Effects: The ‘How’ Question Next to the questions about scales and composition of the neighbourhoods, we have to address some other important conceptual issues. This regards the question what kind of mechanisms theoretically cause the effect if we say that the socio-economic, ethnic or other conditions of the neighbourhood are responsible for the social outcome. We should ask ourselves the question how these conditions are translated into research terms: what are the mechanisms of the spatial context that may have effects on social outcomes? Over time a range of comprehensive reviews of the theoretical relations between neighbourhood characteristics and individual social outcomes have been published (examples include Gephart, 1997; Friedrichs, 1998; Atkinson and Kintrea, 2001; Sampson et al., 2002; Ellen and Turner, 2003; Pinkster, 2009a). Galster (2012) summarizes these studies and distinguishes a wide range of mechanisms, which can be grouped in the following four categories: ●

Social interactive mechanisms in one’s peer groups, which include, for example, social contagion mechanisms and social ties, through

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Neighbourhood effects on social outcomes  ­285 which people may carry over certain values and ideas; collective socialization processes, through which norms and attitudes and behaviours will be learned; and social networks, which may, or may not, offer support for finding the right channels to get ahead in life. It is clear that the composition of the neighbourhood, for example the level of deprivation, sets conditions for the character of the social interactions and collective social control, and the direction of ambitions regarding education, work and criminal behaviour. ● Environmental mechanisms, which include the exposure to violence and criminality in the neighbourhood, or more generally the state of disorder; the state of the built environment; the risk to be exposed to toxic materials; and the psychological climate in the environment. These mechanisms may reduce the level of activity and use of public space and may influence mental and physical health and subsequently the opportunities for further progress in life. ● Geographical mechanisms, which include the well-known spatial mismatch between where people live and where they can find the places, spaces and services that can help them getting ahead. The availability of adequate public transport connecting job demand and supply is an essential factor as well. ‘Redlining practices’ can also be seen as a geographic mechanism, when financial institutions or potential employers, for example, refuse to provide financial loans to those who live in a redlined area or when they refuse to hire someone who is applying for a job and living in such an area. ● Institutional mechanisms, which relate to the character of the institutional environment. In some contexts, for example, socially different neighbourhoods still may have rather similar levels of quality of schools (albeit with different socio-economic and ethnic compositions), with equal access to good schools at all levels, including universities. In other contexts, however, school quality and access to good quality education are much more, sometimes extremely, unequal, which makes access to good quality education highly dependent on the financial resources available in the household. Similar differences in institutional contexts relate to the quality of housing, where in some places also decent housing is available for the poor, whereas in other places this is not the case. This obviously has major impacts on opportunities for making social progress in life. The institutional mechanisms also include the level of stigmatization of the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood reputation. The mechanisms may creative positive or negative outcomes. Pinkster (2009a), for example, found in a detailed qualitative neighbourhood effect

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286  Handbook of urban geography study in The Hague that recent immigrants often benefited from the social networks and social support systems of people from the same origin who had already resided in the area for a longer period of time. They were assisted with finding employment soon upon arrival. Whereas this seems to be a positive result, in reality it often meant that the recent immigrants ended up in so-called ‘dead-end’ jobs and had limited interaction with people outside their direct environment. These processes, characterized by limited ‘bridging’ social networks, typically occur among lower-educated and lower-income people (Pinkster, 2009a; Wilson, 1987). Thus, it is not simply the existence of social relations but also the intensity of internal and external relations that is important for the understanding of neighbourhood effects. This brings us to consider other aspects of the mechanisms through which neighbourhood conditions affect social outcomes. Further to the intensity and frequency of interaction, it is also relevant to know more about the consistency of exposure to certain mechanisms and conditions. This also refers to the spatial extent of a certain neighbourhood ‘quality’ or to the duration of exposure to a certain environment. Persistent exposure to criminal environments may, for example, create psychological damage to residents and have negative impacts on their income-earning potential (Fitzpatrick and Boldizar, 1993) (see also the section below on temporal dimensions). In short, there is a wide range of mechanisms through which neighbourhood conditions may be connected to social outcomes directly or indirectly. Most of the mechanisms mentioned plausibly have certain effects on people’s social opportunities in life. Which of these are strongest is not immediately clear, however, and will depend on the context and the specific situation one encounters in different contexts. It is also to be expected that not everybody will be affected by their environment to the same extent, as we will show in the next sub-section. 18.2.3  Who Will be Affected? In general, we might expect that the specific combination of neighbourhood conditions and the characteristics of individuals exposed to such neighbourhoods trigger certain effects. A ‘bad’ environment may harm low-educated and disadvantaged residents, but will not necessarily be detrimental to a person who has managed to gain a stronger social position and educational level. Moreover, neighbourhood effects are likely to be stronger for those with greater exposure to the neighbourhood. Especially children, but also the elderly and unemployed or those with limited and only local social networks tend to experience more impact of

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Neighbourhood effects on social outcomes  ­287 the neighbourhood compared to the highly mobile, employed residents who also have networks elsewhere. Galster et al. (2010) investigated the impact of various levels of mixture of low-, middle- and high-income men in the neighbourhood on earnings of individuals and explicitly aimed at investigating whether such impacts would vary across gender, age, presence of children, employment status or income at the start of the analysis period. Applying a difference model to eliminate potential bias from selection, and using a rich longitudinal dataset (1991–1999) of almost 1.7 million adults in Sweden, they found very different and statistically significant effects for different categories. Neighbourhood mix effects were consistently stronger for parents and those who do not work full-time, after controlling for other individual dimensions. Specific combinations of personal attributes determined whether a person was particularly vulnerable to negative impacts of neighbourhood exposure. Lower-income metropolitan Swedish males and females over 30 years of age, for example, experienced income gains when lower-income or higher income neighbours were replaced by an equivalent share of middle-income neighbours. This association turned out to be stronger for males who were not working full-time and for females who were working full-time. The presence of children produced stronger impacts. High-income males benefited most from more higher-income males in their environment. Consistent results were also found by Galster et al. (2016a) applying an integrated differences (change) model and a fixed-effect panel model. Sharkey and Faber’s review (2014) reinforces these findings about interpersonal variation in neighbourhood effects. 18.2.4 The Impact of the ‘Temporal’ Dimension: Timing and Duration of Exposure to Certain Environments Apart from the spatial and interpersonal dimensions, there is also an important temporal dimension in neighbourhood effect research, which only recently started to receive the attention that is needed. Musterd et al. (2012) distinguished between four time-dimensions of exposure to a certain neighbourhood context that might have impact on social outcomes: (1) the timing of when exposure occurs and has effects (contemporaneous or lagging a certain amount of time); (2) the duration of exposure; (3) the cumulative exposure to a context over a certain time period; and (4) the issue of whether exposure to a particular neighbourhood creates a persistent effect, or one that quickly decays over time after the exposure changes. In the same vein, Kwan (2018, p. 1485) distinguishes between five temporal dimensions of exposure to the environment:

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288  Handbook of urban geography (1) momentary response: exposure might only have an effect at the moment of (or shortly after) the exposure; (2) recency and time-lagged response: a contextual effect could occur a certain period of time after exposure; (3) the number of episodes (or the frequency) of exposure: the outcome is affected by how frequently a person is exposed to the environmental influence; (4) duration: the outcome is influenced by the duration of each episode of exposure; and (5) cumulative exposure: the outcome is affected by the total duration of exposure over a certain period of time or a person’s life course.

We must acknowledge, however, that such temporal dimensions may have different impacts depending on what kinds of mechanisms are operating most evidently. The development of social networks of a certain kind, for example, will likely take some time before it creates some effect but such will not be the case for social disorder, crime and killings, which will have immediate effects. When a person moves to a deprived and stigmatized neighbourhood, we would thus predict some immediate negative effects though stronger effects must be expected from sustained exposure. The theoretically expected effects of the timing and duration of exposure have been tested by us with empirical research. Musterd et al. (2012) (see also Galster et al., 2015) supported the idea that continued and longer exposure to neighbourhoods with a particular income mix yields stronger associations with labour incomes of individual adults than lagged, temporary short-term ones. We also found that there is a distinct time decay (though some persistence) in the potential effects on individual’s labour income after exposure to certain neighbourhood income mixes ceases, albeit with some gender differences. Recent exposure to neighbourhood income mix has more effect on labour income than past exposure (of a similar duration).

18.3  METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES Several pressing methodological issues are connected to neighbourhood effects research (Duncan et al., 1997; Galster, 2008). The first issue regards the most general one: what is the best general strategy to enhance the knowledge of neighbourhood effects? We believe that neighbourhood effect studies require in-depth qualitative case study research (preferably longitudinal) and large-scale longitudinal quantitative multivariate data analysis in order to come to sufficient theoretical exploration and reflection, and ultimately a more advanced understanding of the impact of the neighbourhood on social outcomes. In general, cross-sectional research does not allow for the appropriate measurement of the causal impact of the neighbourhood on outcomes at a later

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Neighbourhood effects on social outcomes  ­289 moment; hence the preference for longitudinal studies. Perhaps the only exception is research with an experimental character in which crosssectional analysis may be performed before and after the experiment. When the experiment includes random assignment of individuals to certain neighbourhoods, such research may also provide a solution for the second methodological issue to be addressed in neighbourhood effect research – the problem of geographic selection, which may produce biased parameters when researchers do not know whether individuals moving into or remaining in certain neighbourhoods are driven by (unobserved, not statistically controllable) factors that also may have a direct impact on the outcome variables. Finally, a third methodological issue to deal with is the shape of the relationship between characteristics of the neighbourhood and the (aggregated) individual outcomes: is the relation linear or curvilinear? 18.3.1  In-depth Qualitative and Longitudinal Quantitative Studies Neighbourhood effects research typically requires analysis of time-related influences. Individuals are supposed to be exposed to a certain environment for a period of time and because of that are expected to be influenced by that exposure. That influence will have to be measured at a later stage. Qualitative research with a focus on such dynamics is particularly welcome when the level of existing theory/knowledge is low, and the aim is to answer the ‘how?’ question, exploring in greater depth the causal mechanisms that are operating in the neighbourhood. One example of such a study is the aforementioned work by Pinkster (2009b) who, among other things, found that labour market participation is indirectly influenced by living in a low-income neighbourhood because the residential situation limited residents’ access to information about jobs. In the same sphere, Small and Feldman (2012) called for a combination of qualitative and quantitative research, where qualitative research is used to develop theory and quantitative research is used to test the propositions on a larger scale, including a wide variation of individuals, neighbourhoods and contexts. Large-scale longitudinal studies seem to be appropriate to handle at least some of the quantitative challenges, as explained below. However, qualitative research has more functions than the ones mentioned. An iterative use of qualitative and quantitative research in tandem might optimize findings and advanced theory development, also in situations where groups are small and where phenomena are new or too exceptional to be studied meaningfully using quantitative methods and data (see also DeLuca et al., 2012).

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290  Handbook of urban geography 18.3.2 Dealing with Geographic Selection Bias: the Potentially Disturbing Impact of Unobserved Variables A well-known problem in neighbourhood effects research concerns the geographic selection bias (Manski, 1995; Galster, 2008; van Ham et al., 2012). Unmeasured variables may be responsible for the geographic (neighbourhood) selection and for a certain outcome. This problem of potential distorting effects of the unmeasured or unobserved variables has to be tackled in one way or another. Various strategies are available to do so. Options include the fixed effects models and difference models to which we have already briefly referred. These strategies make use of the panel structure of the longitudinal data (Galster and Hedman, 2013). With fixed effects models unobserved and time-invariant attributes of individuals that might be responsible for both neighbourhood selection and social outcomes are measured by individual dummy variables (Weinberg et al., 2004; Musterd et al., 2012). When applying a difference model, the unobserved, time-invariant attributes are eliminated by measuring differences between two periods for independent and dependent variables (Galster et al., 2010). Both strategies only target time-invariant unobservable factors, while difference models also suffer from a reduction of statistical power due to reduced variation in the outcome variable. Alternative strategies include those using instrumental variables. Proxy variables for geographic characteristics are devised that only vary according to attributes that are exogenous to the individual and thus are uncorrelated with their unobserved characteristics (Duncan et al., 1997; Ludwig et al., 2008; Cutler et al., 2008; Hedman and Galster, 2013; Andersson et al., 2018). Other researchers have used Propensity Score Matching. Here the idea is that individuals who are closely matched on a wide set of observable characteristics that predict their similar residential mobility behaviour are likely well matched on their unobservable characteristics as well; comparisons between matches of differences in their spatial contexts and individual outcomes should thus provide unbiased results (Harding, 2003). Galster and Sharkey (2017, pp. 13‒15) recently summarized the various options to reduce bias due to selection. They conclude that for all of the solutions we have mentioned so far challenges remain, but also refer to two strategies that might be superior: quasi-random assignment natural experiments and random assignment strategies. Examples of the first are the non-market interventions, often related to public housing desegregation programmes. Selection may nevertheless occur, because of specific traits of some of those who were involved. Random assignment strategies in an experimental setting would, according to many, form the best option

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Neighbourhood effects on social outcomes  ­291 for avoiding bias from geographic selection. The US MTO programme is the most well-known example of this strategy (Goering and Feins, 2003; Ludwig et al., 2008). Galster and Sharkey also summarize how in that programme volunteering public housing residents were allocated to one of three groups: those who got no voucher but stayed in public housing in disadvantaged neighbourhoods; those with rental vouchers with no restrictions; and those who were assisted to move to a census tract with less than 10 per cent poverty and who had to remain there for at least one year. Even though in theory such experiments may be the best approach to address the selection problems, Galster and Sharkey also mention several weaknesses of this programme. These vary from the observation that some remaining selection bias continued to exist, to the potential biasing effects of the limited duration of exposure to the new environments, to the fact that the programme was taking into account only part of the life-histories of those who were allocated. Galster and Sharkey (2017, p. 15) therefore conclude that random assignment is not the ‘unambiguously superior’ strategy that will avoid all geographic-selection problems. At this point we want to say that we also sympathize with Sampson’s view who states that geographic selection in itself is also a neighbourhood effect. When people move to a certain neighbourhood it may be (partly) a matter of selecting a certain neighbourhood, perhaps based on unmeasured attributes of the person who moves; but instead of people selecting neighbourhoods, one might also think of neighbourhoods attracting people, rather than the other way around. The specificity of the neighbourhood might strongly attract the residents who subsequently move to it. This must be seen as a process of higher-order ‘structural sorting’ (Sampson, 2012, p. 328). 18.3.3 Detecting Non-Linearity and Thresholds in the Relations Between Spatial Compositions and Individual Outcomes Most of the neighbourhood effect studies have investigated the linear relations between neighbourhood compositions and individual outcomes. Only a few studies have tested for non-linearities, despite strong theoretical justification for such effects (Galster, 2008, 2014). This is nevertheless important, especially when policy makers intend to intervene in the neighbourhood composition to reach a – collectively – better outcome situation. If there were a linear relation, the effect of changing the composition of one neighbourhood would be entirely offset by the effect of the change other neighbourhoods would have to face, because they have to house those who were moved from the first neighbourhood. This is the situation of a zero-sum game. When the relation is non-linear, positive or

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292  Handbook of urban geography ­ egative-sum games become possible outcomes. A nice example has been n given by Vartanian and Gleason (1999). They classified neighbourhoods in three equal groups: lowest quality third, medium third and highest quality third (on indicators of wealth or socio-economic status) and investigated the relation between their compositions and high school dropouts. The linear relation in the lowest and highest third were insignificant, while the effect of the neighbourhood was strongly negative in the middle third, indicating that there were evident thresholds. Hedman and Galster (2013) applied an instrumental variables spline model and found that when the share of low-income residents in the neighbourhood passed 20 per cent, the negative effect of the neighbourhood on individual earnings became substantial, becoming even more substantial after exceeding 50 per cent. Galster et al. (2015) applied a threshold model showing that a 10 percentage points increase of the share of low-incomes was associated with: ‘(1) no income difference if the neighbourhood’s low-income percentage stayed below 20; (2) a 5–8 per cent lower income if the neighbourhood’s low-income percentage stayed between 20 and 40; and (3) a 28–34 per cent lower income if the neighbourhood’s low income percentage was above 40’ (Galster et al., 2015, p. 333). In short, a 10 per cent increase of poor people in a neighbourhood has no or only limited negative effects on individuals if the share of residents with a low income is low or moderate; however, if the share is already high, the effect will be rather strong.

18.4  FUTURE CHALLENGES The conceptual and methodological discussions above are far from complete and the selection of results of neighbourhood effect research we have woven in the discussions is just a fraction of the research outcomes produced in this field. We did not have the space to go into findings of highly interesting research that nevertheless deserves further attention. For example, we know that social and spatial inequalities and mismatches as well as crime levels are more moderate in European contexts compared to North and South American contexts, but more work is required to reveal the causes and effects of such differences. We also know that bringing people together with very different social levels does not seem to trigger much interaction between them but it remains unclear how, when and why this blockade emerges. It is nevertheless very important to understand the absence of interaction better, since mixing may also have benefits that arise through environmental, geographic or institutional mechanisms. The desire many governments have to reduce economic and ethnic segregation tends to go hand in hand with a preference to reside

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Neighbourhood effects on social outcomes  ­293 in socially and culturally homogeneous environments among those who can afford to do so (Musterd et al., 2016). How can the gap between these two desires be bridged at a time when ongoing liberalization creates more spatial inequality, with potentially sharper divides between social areas? Research on threshold effects suggests that deconcentration of disadvantaged populations can occur with little negative impact on advantaged neighbourhoods and net positive gains for society as a whole, but more research is required before this can be confirmed. We also know that the ‘opportunity structure’ in neighbourhoods is relevant to residents, but only a few studies have investigated what the impact is of dynamic changes in these opportunity structures. In addition, we observe that there still is a lack of large-scale as well as in-depth research in which the local and wider networks of which people are part are taken into account as potential sources of context effects on individual outcomes. Perhaps it is wise to direct future research more towards neighbourhood effects among children (including school effects), the unemployed, the elderly and recent immigrants, because it is these categories of the population that are most exposed to local environments (see also Galster et al., 2016b, 2016c). When methodological progress and mixed method research results in a stronger knowledge base, it is also important to pay more attention to research on the strategies that may help to reduce negative neighbourhood effects and stimulate positive neighbourhood effects and to develop research aimed at the evaluation of interventions. Finally, it still is too early to present firm statements about the underlying causal mechanisms of neighbourhood effects on social outcomes. More research with both qualitative and large-scale quantitative methods is required, which can support each other and advance theory. Part of the research can be based on increasingly rich data in terms of information about individuals, their neighbourhoods, and the temporal dimensions of exposure to those neighbourhoods given that time-series of available data sets become longer. This allows intergenerational processes to be considered in neighbourhood effects research (see Hedman et al., 2013, for an early example). Arguably the temporalities of neighbourhood influence are an area where much further research is required and in which also longer time frames should get a place.

REFERENCES Andersson, E. and B. Malmberg (2015), ‘Contextual effects on educational attainment of individuals’, Urban Studies, 52 (12), 2117–2133. Andersson, R. and S. Musterd (2010), ‘What scale matters? Exploring the relationships

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294  Handbook of urban geography between individuals’ social position, neighbourhood context and the scale of neighbourhood’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 92 (1), 23–43. Andersson, R., S. Musterd and G. Galster (2018), ‘Port-of-entry neighbourhood and its effects on the economic success of refugees in Sweden’, International Migration Review, in press, DOI: 10.1177/0197918318781785. Andersson, R., S. Musterd, G. Galster and T. Kauppinen (2007), ‘What mix matters? Exploring the relationships between individual’s incomes and different measures of their neighbourhood context’, Housing Studies, 22 (5), 637–660. Atkinson, R. and K. Kintrea (2001), ‘Disentangling area effects: evidence from deprived and non-deprived neighborhoods’, Urban Studies, 38 (12), 2277–2298. Cutler, D. M., E. L. Glaeser and J. L. Vigdor (2008), ‘When are ghettos bad? Lessons from immigrant segregation in the United States’, Journal of Urban Economics, 63 (3), 759–774. DeLuca, S., G. J. Duncan, M. Keels and R. Mendenhall (2012), ‘The notable and the null: using mixed methods to understand the diverse impacts of residential mobility programs’, in Maarten van Ham, David Manley, Nick Bailey, Ludi Simpson and Duncan Maclennan (eds), Neighbourhood Effects Research: New Perspectives, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 195–223. Duncan, G. J., J. P. Connell and P. K. Klebanov (1997), ‘Conceptual and methodological issues in estimating causal effects of neighborhoods and family conditions on individual development’, in Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Greg Duncan and J. Lawrence Aber (eds), Neighborhood Poverty, Volume 1: Context and Consequences for Children, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 219–250. Ellen, I. G. and M. A. Turner (2003), ‘Do neighborhoods matter and why?’, in John Goering and Judith D. Feins (eds), Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Experiment, Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, pp. 313–338. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990), The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity Press. Fitzpatrick, K. and J. Boldizar (1993), ‘The prevalence and consequences of exposure to violence among African-American youth’, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 32 (2), 424–430. Friedrichs, J. (1998), ‘Do poor neighborhoods make their residents poorer? Context effects of poverty neighborhoods on their residents’, in Hans-Jürgen Andress (ed.), Empirical Poverty Research in a Comparative Perspective, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 77–99. Galster, G. (2008), ‘Quantifying the effect of neighbourhood on individuals: challenges, alternative approaches and promising directions’, Schmollers Jahrbuch: Journal of Applied Social Science Studies, 128 (1), 7–48. Galster, G. (2012), ‘The mechanism(s) of neighbourhood effects: theory, evidence, and policy implications’, in Maarten van Ham, David Manley, Nick Bailey, Ludi Simpson and Duncan Maclennan (eds), Neighbourhood Effects Research: New Perspectives, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 23–56. Galster, G. (2013), ‘Neighborhood social mix: theory, evidence, and implications for policy and planning’, in Naomi Carmon and Susan S. Fainstein (eds), Policy, Planning and People: Promoting Justice in Urban Development, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 307–336. Galster, G. (2014), ‘Nonlinear and threshold aspects of neighborhood effects’, in Jürgen Friedrichs and Alexandra Nonnenmacher (eds), Soziale Kontexte und soziale Mechanismen [Social Contexts and Social Mechanisms], Wiesbaden: Springer, pp. 117–133. Galster, G. and L. Hedman (2013), ‘Measuring neighborhood effects non-experimentally: how much do alternative methods matter?’, Housing Studies, 28 (3), 473–498. Galster, G., R. Andersson and S. Musterd (2010), ‘Who is affected by neighbourhood income mix? Gender, age, family, employment and income differences’, Urban Studies, 47 (14), 2915–2944. Galster, G., R. Andersson and S. Musterd (2015), ‘Are males’ incomes influenced by the income mix of their male neighbors? Explorations into nonlinear and threshold effects in Stockholm’, Housing Studies, 30 (2), 315–343. Galster, G., R. Andersson and S. Musterd (2016a), ‘Neighborhood social mix and adults’

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Neighbourhood effects on social outcomes  ­295 income trajectories: longitudinal evidence from Stockholm’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography, 98 (2), 145–170. Galster, G., A. Santiago and L. Stack (2016b), ‘Elementary school difficulties of low-income Latino and African American youth: the role of geographic context’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 38 (4), 477–502. Galster, G., A. Santiago, J. Lucero and J. Cutsinger (2016c), Adolescent neighborhood context and young adult economic outcomes for low-income African Americans and Latinos. Journal of Economic Geography, 16 (2), 471–503. Galster, G. and P. Sharkey (2017), ‘Spatial foundations of inequality: a conceptual model and empirical overview’, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 3 (2), 1–33. Gephart, M. A. (1997), ‘Neighborhoods and communities as contexts for development’, in Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Greg Duncan and J. Lawrence Aber (eds), Neighborhood Poverty, Volume I: Context and Consequences for Children, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 1–43. Goering, J. and J. D. Feins (eds) (2003), Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Experiment, Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Harding, D. J. (2003), ‘Counterfactual models of neighborhood effects: the effect of neighborhood poverty on dropping out and teenage pregnancy’, American Journal of Sociology, 109 (3), 676–719. Hedman, L. and G. Galster (2013), ‘Neighborhood income sorting and the effects of neighborhood income mix on income: a holistic empirical exploration’, Urban Studies, 50 (1): 107–127. Hedman, L., D. Manley, M. Van Ham and J. Östh (2013), ‘Cumulative exposure to disadvantage and the intergenerational transmission of neighbourhood effects’, Journal of Economic Geography, 15 (1): 195–215. Kwan, M.-P. (2018), ‘The limits of the neighborhood effect: contextual uncertainties in geographic, environmental health, and social science research’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108 (6): 1482–1490. Ludwig, J., J. B. Liebman, J. Kling, G. Duncan, L. Katz, R. C. Kessler and L. Sanbonmatsu (2008), ‘What can we learn about neighborhood effects from the moving to opportunity experiment?’, American Journal of Sociology, 114 (1), 144–188. Manski, C. F. (1995), Identification Problems in the Social Sciences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McConnell, R., T. Islam, K. Shankardass, M. Jerrett, R. Lurmann and F. Gilliland (2010), ‘Childhood incident asthma and traffic-related air pollution at home and school’, Environmental Health Perspectives, 118 (7), 1021–1026. Musterd, S., G. Galster and R. Andersson (2012), ‘Temporal dimensions and measurement of neighbourhood effects’, Environment and Planning A, 44 (3), 605–627. Musterd, S., W. van Gent, M. Das and J. Latten (2016), ‘Adaptive behaviour in urban space: residential mobility in response to social distance’, Urban Studies, 53 (2), 227–246. Nieuwenhuis, J. and P. Hooimeijer (2016), ‘The association between neighbourhoods and educational achievement: a systematic review and meta-analysis’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 31 (2), 321–347. Openshaw, S. (1984), The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem, Catmog 38, Norwich: GeoBooks. Ostendorf, W., S. Musterd and S. de Vos (2001), ‘Social mix and the neighbourhood-effect: policy-ambition and empirical support’, Housing Studies, 16 (3), 371–380. Östh, J., W. A. V. Clark and B. Malmberg (2015), ‘Measuring the scale of segregation using k-nearest neighbor aggregates’, Geographical Analysis, 47, 34–49. Pinkster, F. (2009a), Living in Concentrated Poverty, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. Pinkster, F. (2009b), ‘Neighborhood-based networks, social resources, and labor market participation in two Dutch neighborhoods’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 31 (2), 213–231. Sampson, R. J. (2012), Great American City. Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Sampson, R. J., J. D. Morenoff and T. Gannon-Rowley (2002), ‘Assessing “neighborhood

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296  Handbook of urban geography effects”: social processes and new directions in research’, Annual Review of Sociology, 28 (1), 443–478. Sharkey, P. and J. W. Faber (2014), ‘Where, when, why, and for whom do residential contexts matter? Moving away from the dichotomous understanding of neighborhood effects’, Annual Review of Sociology, 40 (1), 559–579. Sharkey, P. and R. J. Sampson (2010), ‘Destination effects: residential mobility and trajectories of adolescent violence in a stratified metropolis’, Criminology, 48 (3), 639–681. Small, M. L. and J. Feldman (2012), ‘Ethnographic evidence, heterogeneity, and neighbourhood effects after moving to opportunity’, in Maarten van Ham, David Manley, Nick Bailey, Ludi Simpson and Duncan Maclennan (eds), Neighbourhood Effects Research: New Perspectives, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 57–77. Sykes, B. and S. Musterd (2011), ‘Examining neighbourhood and school effects simultaneously: what does the Dutch evidence show?’, Urban Studies, 48 (7), 1307–1331. van Ham, M., D. Manley, N. Bailey, L. Simpson and D. Maclennan (2012), ‘Neighbourhood effects research: new perspectives’, in Maarten van Ham, David Manley, Nick Bailey, Ludi Simpson and Duncan Maclennan (eds), Neighbourhood Effects Research: New Perspectives, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 1–21. Vartanian, T. and P. Gleason (1999), ‘Do neighborhood conditions affect high school dropout and college graduation rates?’, Journal of Socio-Economics, 28 (1), 21–24. Weinberg, B., P. Reagan and J. Yankow (2004), ‘Do neighborhoods affect work behavior? Evidence from the NLSY79’, Journal of Labor Economics, 22 (4), 891–924. Wilson, W. J. (1987), The Truly Disadvantaged, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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19.  Gentrification and displacement: urban inequality in cities of late capitalism Agustín Cocola-Gant

19.1 INTRODUCTION This chapter provides the reader with an understanding of what gentrification is and why it is the cause of urban inequalities. In the last fifty years, gentrification has grown from a few cities in the Global North to become a world-wide strategy for capital accumulation. The following pages explore this evolution and contributes towards explaining why it has become a prominent topic for urban geography research, policy-makers and social movements. The chapter shows the role of the state and neoliberal urban policies in advancing gentrification, stressing the fact that the growth of the phenomenon is a central ingredient for the reproduction of capitalism. Finally, it assesses the way in which gentrification displaces residents from their places and so provides a critical understanding of gentrification as a process of social exclusion.

19.2  THE ORIGINS OF GENTRIFICATION The classical process of gentrification is the transformation of workingclass areas of the inner city into middle-class neighbourhoods, which ultimately means the displacement of low-income residents by high-income groups. The term was first coined by the sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe how many poor areas of London ‘have been invaded by the middle class’ (Glass, 1964, p. xviii) and ‘once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district it goes on rapidly, until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed’ (Glass, 1964, p. xviii). Glass observed that gentrification was related to housing rehabilitation, the tenurial transformation from renting to owning and the relaxation of rent control. She also noted the increasing liberalization of urban policies and stated that ‘in such circumstances, any district in or near London, however dingy or unfashionable before, is likely to become expensive; and London may quite soon be a city which illustrates the principle of the survival of the fittest – the financially fittest, 297

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298  Handbook of urban geography who can still afford to work and live there’ (Glass, 1964, p. xix). As has been noted, the term was coined as a ‘neighbourhood expression of class inequality’ (Lees et al., 2008, p. 80) to critically illustrate the displacement of working-class residents after the rehabilitation of the housing stock. Therefore, gentrification is a process of socio-spatial change in which the working-classes are displaced by the middle-classes and the residential and commercial landscape is upgraded. It is worth noting that the displacement of residents is inherent to any definition of gentrification so that there is no gentrification without displacement. The origin of gentrification was a post-war phenomenon seen in a few cities in the Global North, especially London and New York, that started when small-scale gentrifiers entered run-down neighbourhoods in order to rehabilitate individual homes for personal consumption. The consolidation of gentrification in metropolitan cities in the Global North took place after the crisis of 1973 and lasted until the end of the 1980s. In this period, usually called ‘second wave’ gentrification (Hackworth and Smith, 2001), the role of development firms in rehabilitating housing for the middle-class became increasingly more powerful, which exacerbated the displacement of low-income residents. Gentrification needs to be related to the abandonment and physical degradation of the inner city and the following process of urban regeneration. After decades of building expansion into the suburbs, which resulted in the decentralization of middle- and upper-income residents, inner cities became home to concentrations of poor immigrants and workingclass tenants who lived and worked in a decaying built environment. Deindustrialization and the crisis of 1973 in Western societies made both physical and social conditions in the inner-city worse, including the decay of buildings, unemployment, and marginalization. In response to this process of abandonment, successive governments adopted expansive regeneration programmes to change the social and material problems created by the decline of post-industrial city centres. As a result, the 1970s witnessed a euphoric ‘back to the city’ movement or ‘neighbourhood revitalization’ which, according to the media and policy-makers, was bringing new life to old neighbourhoods after decades of disinvestment (Lees et al., 2008). Simultaneously, some critical urban scholars searched beneath the euphemistic vocabulary to reveal a new geography of exclusion and depicted it as a process of gentrification in which inner-city areas had been upgraded by pioneer gentrifiers and as a consequence the indigenous residents were being evicted or displaced (Clay, 1979; Smith, 1979). It is worth stressing that this origin of gentrification concerned metropolitan areas of the US and London, but research on the geography of gentrification (Lees, 2012) shows that its temporality and forms are different in different places. The

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Gentrification and displacement  ­299 chapter will explore this issue under the heading ‘expanding the geography and forms of gentrification’ below.

19.3 EXPLANATIONS In the late 1970s and 1980s two theoretical perspectives proposed different explanations for gentrification: consumption-side and production-side theories. The former are derived from the work of David Ley (1996) who explains gentrification as a consequence of changes in the occupational and income structure of advanced capitalist societies. According to Ley, the shift of cities from being manufacturing centres to centres of business and consumption services produced an expanding group of qualified new professionals that have displaced the industrial working-class in desirable city centre areas. Ley sees rehabilitation activity as being stimulated by the market power of the growing white-collar labour force and their consumption preferences and demand for urban living. In this sense, it is no coincidence that cities like New York and London, which are dominated by the financial services sector, were at the forefront of gentrification activity (Atkinson and Bridge, 2005). Consumption-side theories have focused on the formation and behaviour of the middle-classes, exploring questions of class constitution such as who are the gentrifiers and why they are seeking to locate in central city areas. In The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City, Ley (1996) proposes a model of the potential gentrifiers who would typically be childless; primarily under 35 years of age; employed in the advanced services, that is, professional, administrative, technical, and managerial occupations; highly educated; and receiving a high income despite their young age. This model of the young professional as the prototypical gentrifier has usually been accepted in the classical explanation of gentrification (Lees et al., 2008). Regarding why gentrifiers prefer to locate in central city areas, Ley (1996) argues that a central location is valued because it offers access to work, leisure, and cultural activities, and it enables an urban lifestyle close to environmental amenities such as waterfronts, historical architecture, or local shops. Ley also relates this ‘back to the city’ movement to the counter-cultural awareness of the 1960s and 1970s during which the city centre was seen as a place for tolerance, diversity, and liberation, whereas the suburbs were the location for patriarchal families and political conservatism. The remaking of the central city was interpreted as a reaction against the structural domination of the modernist ideologies and planning (male-oriented society, industrial, authoritarian structures, mass production, religion, suburbs) and the

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300  Handbook of urban geography arrival of post-modern liberation through the consumption of culture and diversity (minorities, pluralism, rights, feminism, multiculturalism, identity, individualism) (see Harvey, 1990). This ‘emancipatory city thesis’ (Lees, 2000) is more explicit in Caulfield’s work (1994), and has also been applied to explain why women tend to locate in city centres as a rejection of patriarchal suburbia (Bondi, 1999). Production-side explanations consider gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy of the late twentieth-century, linking the process to a broader conceptualization of the production of space rather than the outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. The theory was developed by Neil Smith as a reaction to the optimistic celebrations of an urban renaissance in the late 1970s. For Smith, the important point to understand gentrification would be the mobility of capital and investments instead of the mobility of people (Smith, 1979). Smith follows Harvey (1978) to explain how capitalism creates new places for profit and accumulation and in the process devalorizes previous investments for future profit. The contribution of Smith was to connect these logics of uneven development – whereby the underdevelopment of an area creates opportunities for a new phase of redevelopment – to the conditions of American inner-cities. By analysing American processes of suburbanization, Smith showed that inner-cities were affected by a movement of economic capital to the suburbs and that this historical process of capital devalorization of the inner-city made profitable reinvestment possible. As a consequence, according to Smith (1979, 1996), a theory of gentrification must explain why some neighbourhoods are profitable to redevelop while others are not. In doing so, he proposed the so-called ‘rent-gap theory’, which focuses on the difference between the value of inner-urban land (low because of abandonment) and its potential value (higher if rehabilitated). The movement of capital to the suburbs, along with the continual devalorization of inner-city capital, eventually produces the rent gap. In other words, the rent gap refers to conditions in which profitable reinvestment is possible, and therefore, once the rent gap is wide enough, rehabilitation can start and capital flows back in. In the explanation of gentrification, Hamnett (1991) argued that production and consumption theories are partial abstractions from the totality of the phenomenon and so suggested the need to integrate both theories as complementary interpretations. Nowadays research has accepted that neither side is comprehensible without the other (Clark, 2005; Lees et al., 2008), and that an adequate explanation of gentrification will have to cover both aspects of the process: the production of urban space and the consumption of urban lifestyles.

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Gentrification and displacement  ­301

19.4 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE ROLE OF THE STATE Local governments have been advancing gentrification as a solution for urban decay since the 1970s and 1980s (Lauria and Knopp, 1985). However, state-led gentrification intensified in the 1990s after the global triumph of neoliberalism and urban entrepreneurialism (Hackworth and Smith, 2001). If in the first wave of gentrification the state played a crucial role in stimulating the back to the city movement, it also was concerned with the provision of public housing and decommodified components of welfare and collective consumption (DeVerteuil, 2015). However, as Hackworth (2002) illustrates, since the late 1990s state support has become more direct again, but this time outside of the Keynesian model and instead within the framework of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism involves the destruction of state redistribution and provision of welfare while creating new forms of state policy to promote capital mobility and consumption (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). The important point is that this role of the state has been translated into an increasing targeting of high-income residents and in a policy framework in which gentrification becomes a positive tool rather than a form of exclusion. In the neoliberal context, gentrification has been incorporated into public policy as an engine of urban renaissance (Lees, 2003b). The targeting of gentrifiers as a solution for urban decay has resulted in a number of policies aimed at ‘attracting the consumer dollar’ while criminalizing poverty and marginalized communities. It is for this reason that Hackworth defines gentrification as ‘the production of urban space for progressively more affluent users’ (Hackworth, 2002, p. 815). Among such policies, the deconcentration of poverty by demolition has been implemented in several cities. For instance, in the United States the HOPE VI programme provided grants for the demolition of public housing complexes that were partly substituted by middle-class dwellings (Wyly and Hammel, 1999), while in London council estates are in the process of being demolished and replaced with mixed income new-build housing (Lees, 2014). Such state-led gentrification policies rely on the rhetoric of social mixing or mixed communities. This rhetoric holds that the arrival of upper and middle-income residents will benefit poorer members of society by improving the economy as a whole. However, it has caused the displacement of tenants and a lack of affordable housing, while several empirical studies show little evidence of shared perceptions of community after gentrification (Bridge et al., 2012).

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19.5 EXPANDING THE GEOGRAPHY AND FORMS OF GENTRIFICATION The chapter has so far discussed an understanding of classical gentrification as it was depicted by the literature in global cities of the Anglo-Saxon world, especially during the period between the 1970s and 2000. This was useful to provide an overall description and explanation of the process. However, it is worth noting (1) that gentrification can be traced back to the late 1970s and 1980s in other contexts as well, such as in provincial cities of the Global North (Dutton, 2005) and Southern European urban centres (Arbaci and Tapada-Berteli, 2012); and (2) that gentrification is now a global process that has also spread to cities in the South as well as to the suburbs, the countryside and even to slums. The expansion of gentrification has been explained as the result of (1) the international dominance of neoliberalism (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Smith, 2002); (2) the globalization of real estate markets and the central role that urbanization plays in the reproduction of capitalism (Slater, 2017; Smith, 2002); and (3) the emergence of a global gentrifier class (Rofe, 2003) and growing middleclasses in places such as Asia and Latin America (Janoschka et al., 2014; Shin et al., 2016). In recent years, accounts of planetary gentrification (Lees et al., 2016; Slater, 2017) show that the process is a global strategy of rent extraction and that it takes a myriad of forms in different places. In relation to this, new forms of gentrification have been identified by several authors. The literature has described ‘rural gentrification’ as the process in which the post-productive countryside attracts middle-class residents from cities in search of the charm and natural environment that those locations provide (Phillips, 2005); ‘studentification’ refers to the formation of ‘student only’ enclaves that displace existing populations (Smith and Holt, 2007); ‘new-build gentrification’ is the process in which residential developments in low-income neighbourhoods cater exclusively to the middle-classes, transforming the character of the place and resulting in the rise of rent prices in the area (Davidson and Lees, 2010); ‘supergentrification’ is the gentrification of neighbourhoods that have already experienced earlier rounds of the process by an elite of super-rich employees in financial centres (Lees, 2003a); and ‘slum gentrification’ is defined as a process of capital investment and new interest in the consumption of cultures of informal built environments such as favelas in Brazil, resulting in the partial or total displacement of incumbent populations (Ascensão, 2018). Within the new forms of gentrification, ‘commercial gentrification’ and ‘tourism gentrification’ deserve special mention as they play a crucial role in contemporary urban change. Commercial or retail gentrification refers

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Gentrification and displacement  ­303 to the displacement of traditional and local stores and their substitution by boutiques, trendy cafes and franchises (Hubbard, 2016). Certain types of upmarket restaurants, cafes, and stores emerge in gentrified areas and thus are a highly visible sign of urban landscape change. Zukin (2008) stresses that commercial gentrification transforms the working-class character of the place into a new space for cultural distinction and differentiation. Although commercial gentrification tends to follow residential gentrification as the result of the consumption demands of new gentrifiers, it also needs to be contextualized within the trajectory of neoliberal urban policies aimed at transforming urban centres into spaces of consumption for affluent users. For instance, this is the case regarding the increased tendency to upgrade traditional food markets which are substituted by gourmet products and ‘local’ restaurants (Gonzalez and Waley, 2013). Importantly, authors like Gonzalez and Waley (2013) and Zukin (2008) note that, as a product of commercial gentrification, the resulting new middle-class shopping environment destroys the services that are essential for low-income residents because of their affordability. Therefore, this retail change strengthens the displacement pressures that low-income communities experience in gentrifying areas. The chapter will focus on how residents experience gentrification below. Tourism gentrification refers to the process by which residential areas are transformed into leisure spaces for visitors, threatening the right to ‘stay put’ of existing populations (Cocola-Gant, 2018; Gotham, 2005). The growth of tourism is a worldwide phenomenon and residents experience tourism-driven gentrification in both the North and the South. However, the way in which the process occurs varies in different places. First, in cities of advanced economies, tourism has been promoted since the 1970s as a tool for urban revitalization after the decline of old industries. This involved a major round of capital investment in decaying areas aimed at bringing the middle-class back to cities, ‘not as resident taxpayers but at least as free-spending visitors’ (Eisinger, 2000, p. 317). In other words, the emergence of urban tourism parallels the emergence of gentrification and, in fact, they tend to coexist in similar urban environments. In this regard, some authors note that gentrification usually becomes a precursor for the promotion of the place, particularly because visitors and middle-class residents usually feel comfortable in similar landscapes of consumption (Cocola-Gant, 2015; Judd, 2003; Maitland and Newman, 2008). Gentrified areas create tourist-friendly spaces as they provide visitors with sanitized environments, consumption opportunities and a middle-class sense of place. As tourism brings further consumers into gentrified areas, the resulting intensification of land use increases property prices and accelerates the effects of gentrification.

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304  Handbook of urban geography Second, tourism gentrification is especially important in peripheral economies where tourism represents a key factor for development and growth and so is an important driver of gentrification in the Global South. An overview of case studies on tourism gentrification reveals a geography that covers secondary cities in the North such as New Orleans (Gotham, 2005), but particularly the Global South from Latin America and the Caribbean to the Mediterranean and from South Africa and Mauritius to the Asia-Pacific region (Cocola-Gant, 2018). In these places, the progression of gentrification is less related to the consumption demand of a local middle-class and more to the effects of tourists from advanced economies as consumers of urban, rural, and coastal environments. Consequently, tourism gentrification in the Global South is an expression of uneven geographical development and regional inequality. Recently, tourism gentrification has been strengthened worldwide by the rise of digital platforms such as Airbnb and the consequent proliferation of short-term rentals (Cocola-Gant, 2016; Wachsmuth and Weisler, 2018). These authors show that suppliers of holiday rentals are less single families that occasionally rent the homes in which they live – as Airbnb suggests – and more companies and landlords that are renting out residential properties permanently. The growth and professionalization of holiday rentals leads to a shortage in the housing stock and a consequent price increase, which makes it increasingly difficult for residents to find affordable accommodation, exacerbating the effects of gentrification.

19.6 CONTEMPORARY DEFINITION OF GENTRIFICATION Initially, the chapter defined classical gentrification as a process in which middle-class professionals were rehabilitating low-priced residences in working-class areas, resulting in the displacement of existing populations. Then, we showed that gentrification expanded as a global strategy of capital accumulation and that it takes different forms. Early definitions are problematic when it comes to describing new phenomena in different places and, in fact, some authors have wondered whether they were gentrification at all (see Davidson and Lees, 2010). However, the evidence that processes such as studentification, new-build gentrification or tourism gentrification also cause displacement and socio-spatial change and are usually led by the initiative of private developers resulted in a redefinition and a more flexible conceptualization of gentrification. The important point is that the built environment is produced according to the demands of affluent users (Hackworth, 2002), and that such production displaces

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Gentrification and displacement  ­305 the indigenous inhabitants from their places. Regarding this, Lees et al. (2015, p. 442) state that ‘the phenomenon of gentrification is global to an extent that urban spaces around the world are increasingly subject to global and domestic capital (re)investment to be transformed into new uses that cater to the needs of wealthier inhabitants’. Consequently, Lees and colleagues conclude that any form of contemporary gentrification should include, in the widest sense, capital-led restructuring of the built environment with significant upper or middle-income newcomers and class-led displacement of the indigenous inhabitants. As Clark (2005, p. 263) pointed out several years ago: Gentrification is a process involving a change in the population of land-users such that the new users are of a higher socio-economic status than the previous users, together with an associated change in the built environment through a reinvestment in fixed capital. The greater the difference in socio-economic status, the more noticeable the process . . . It does not matter where, and it does not matter when. Any process of change fitting this description is, to my understanding, gentrification.

As Slater (2006) suggests, this understanding of gentrification retains the defining aspect given by Glass, that is to say, that the ‘gentry’ colonization of urban space and the neoliberal ‘principle of the survival of the fittest’ cause the displacement of low-income residents and so it is an expression of urban inequality. This is a definition which reveals that a process of dispossession is taking place. It challenges the celebration of gentrification as a process that ‘brings life’ to disinvested areas and, instead, reminds us that the term was coined to depict a new geography of exclusion.

19.7 EXPERIENCING GENTRIFICATION: DISPLACEMENT AND LOSS OF PLACE This chapter has shown that the displacement of communities constitutes a key element of any definition of gentrification and that for this reason gentrification is regarded as an expression of class inequality. Displacement is a politically controversial issue and has strong implications for public policy. If for critical scholars displacement shows that targeting affluent users excludes low-income residents from urban space, for neoliberal policymakers evidence of a lack of displacement can be used to claim the positive effects of gentrification and to deny the need for protective welfare measures. In order to disentangle these contradictory points of view, we need to pay attention to what displacement actually is and how it takes place. Regarding this, it is important to consider the conceptualization of

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306  Handbook of urban geography displacement proposed by Marcuse (1985; see also Slater, 2009). Marcuse (1985) suggested that gentrification causes direct displacement, displacement pressures and exclusionary displacement. Direct displacement refers to a ‘housing-related involuntary residential dislocation’ (Marcuse, 1985, p. 205). According to this definition, displacement occurs when any household is forced to move out of its residence. This is the most widely accepted definition of displacement and, as a result, several authors have attempted to measure the amount of people displaced in gentrified areas (Atkinson, 2000; Freeman and Braconi, 2004). However, Marcuse stressed that the involuntary out-migration of a place is not the unique socio-spatial impact of gentrification and that there are other consequences that usually remain hidden. For this reason, he suggested supplementing the definition of direct displacement with the concepts of exclusionary displacement and pressure of displacement. According to the author, exclusionary displacement occurs when any household is unable to move into a dwelling because it has been gentrified, and thus refers to affordability problems. Gentrified areas become increasingly expensive and this undermines the access to housing of low-income populations. Linked fundamentally to this concept, displacement pressure refers to changes at the neighbourhood scale that make it increasingly difficult for residents to continue living in the area. Those who avoid direct residential displacement may suffer the displacement of their neighbours, traditional retailers, public facilities, as well as the upgrading of stores and services. The result is that the area becomes less and less liveable for the indigenous population, triggering feelings of frustration and dispossession. Drawing on this conceptualization, recent research on displacement has not only focused on the out-migration of residents but on exploring the daily experiences of people who managed to remain in gentrifying areas. For instance, Newman and Wyly (2006) find that, for many low-income residents, staying put means accepting poor quality accommodation, overcrowding as well as having to cope with high housing cost burdens. The authors conclude that those ‘who have managed to avoid displacement are likely to be those people who have found ways to adapt and survive in an increasingly competitive housing market’ (Newman and Wyly, 2006, p. 28). This shows that direct displacement is not a test for gentrification and that residents can adapt and remain, but at the expense of undermining their quality of life and well-being. In relation to this, DeVerteuil (2012) observes the importance of considering the disadvantages of passively ‘staying put’, especially because the literature on gentrification usually sees immobility as inherently positive and unproblematic. In exploring how low-income residents experience gentrification on a daily basis, and linked to the concept of displacement pressures, several

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Gentrification and displacement  ­307 authors have concluded that a central impact is loss of place and a feeling of dispossession (Davidson, 2009; Davidson and Lees, 2010; Shaw and Hagemans, 2015; Valli, 2015). Place is usually defined as a space which people have made meaningful. It is not only a location but the subjective and emotional attachment that people have to any space (Cresswell, 2004). In addition, for Fullilove (1996) a sense of community is inherent to any definition of place. She emphasizes that for low-income residents the neighbourhood is a web of human bonds that leads to emotional links but also to mutual aid and solidarity that is essential for survival. In this regard, the loss of place caused by gentrification results both in an emotional loss and especially in the disintegration of the networks of exchange and solidarity that help low-income residents to stay put on a long-term basis (Betancur, 2011). For instance, Shaw and Hagemans (2015) find that despite the increase in restaurants and cafés in gentrifying areas, long-term residents expressed that they had fewer places to go out and meet their neighbours. As the authors state, ‘if the sources of the familiar – shops, services, meeting places, other people in the neighbourhood, the nature of local social order and governance – become unfamiliar, low-income people may lose their sense of place without the capacity to find a new one’ (Shaw and Hagemans, 2015, p. 327). The loss of resources that are essential for the everyday lives of low-income people such as meeting places, stores, and social networks make them vulnerable and leads to an emotional upheaval that is expressed in frustration, hopelessness and in the feeling that the place now belongs to others. Consequently, the effects of gentrification cannot be reduced to the outmigration of the neighbourhood. The measurement of direct displacement leaves important aspects of space silenced and so, in order to assess the impacts of gentrification, there is the need to emphasize the lived spaces experienced by residents (Davidson, 2009). As Friedmann (2010) has pointed out, the destruction of places caused by gentrification inevitably imposes immense human costs and the capacity to protect them should constitute a moral imperative for planners and policy-makers.

19.8  CONCLUDING REMARKS This chapter has provided an understanding of gentrification as a process in which spaces are produced according to the needs of middle- and upperincome users and in which the indigenous population is displaced. Going back to the explanations of the process, both the cultural − consumers of space − and the economic – production of space − theories stress the fact that gentrification is the consequence of changes in late capitalism: the

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308  Handbook of urban geography demand of the new white-collar class of the service society and urbanization and investment in the built environment as a central strategy of capital accumulation. Neoliberalism has stimulated gentrification to the extent that it has been promoted by the state and celebrated by policymakers and local authorities. In addition, the lack of advanced industries and services in the Global South turns this production of space for affluent users into a central growth strategy by which local governments – often in conjunction with property developers – seek to attract overseas investment and consumers. In conclusion, gentrification is a central ingredient in the reproduction of capitalism. However, the evidence that gentrification causes socio-spatial inequality shows the need to work for a more equal society rather than excluding residents according to their consumption abilities.

REFERENCES Arbaci, S. and T. Tapada-Berteli (2012), ‘Social inequality and urban regeneration in Barcelona city centre: reconsidering success’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 19 (3), 287–311. Ascensão, E. (2018), ‘Slum gentrification’, in Loretta Lees and Martin Phillips (eds), Handbook of Gentrification Studies, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 225–246. Atkinson, R. (2000), ‘Measuring gentrification and displacement in Greater London’, Urban Studies, 37 (1), 149–165. Atkinson, R. and G. Bridge (2005), ‘Introduction’, in Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge (eds), Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–17. Betancur, J. J. (2011), ‘Gentrification and community fabric in Chicago’, Urban Studies, 48 (2), 383–406. Bondi, L. (1999), Gender, class, and gentrification: enriching the debate’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17 (3), 261–282. Brenner, N. and N. Theodore (2002), ‘Cities and the geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”’, Antipode, 34 (3), 349–379. Bridge, G., T. Butler and L. Lees (2012), Mixed Communities: Gentrification by Stealth?, Bristol: Policy Press. Caulfield, J. (1994), City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto’s Gentrification and Critical Social Practice, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Clark, E. (2005), ‘The order and simplicity of gentrification: a political challenge’, in Rowland Atkinson and Gavin Bridge (eds), Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 261–269. Clay, P. L. (1979), Neighborhood Renewal: Middle-Class Resettlement and Incumbent Upgrading in American Neighborhoods, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Cocola-Gant, A. (2015), ‘Tourism and commercial gentrification’, paper presented at the RC21 Conference: The Ideal City – Between Myth and Reality, Urbino, at: https:// www.rc21.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/E4-C%C3%B3cola-Gant.pdf (accessed 21 September 2018). Cocola-Gant, A. (2016), ‘Holiday rentals: the new gentrification battlefront’, Sociological Research Online, 21 (3), 10. Cocola-Gant, A. (2018), ‘Tourism gentrification’, in Loretta Lees and Martin Phillips (eds),

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Gentrification and displacement  ­309 Handbook of Gentrification Studies, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 281–293. Cresswell, T. (2004), Place: A Short Introduction, Malden: Blackwell. Davidson, M. (2009), ‘Displacement, space and dwelling: placing gentrification debate’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 12 (2), 219–234. Davidson, M. and L. Lees (2010), ‘New-build gentrification: its histories, trajectories, and critical geographies’, Population, Space and Place, 16 (5), 395–411. DeVerteuil, G. (2012), ‘Resisting gentrification-induced displacement: advantages and disadvantages to “staying put” among non-profit social services in London and Los Angeles’, Area, 44 (2), 208–216. DeVerteuil, G. (2015), Resilience in the Post-Welfare Inner City: Voluntary Sector Geographies in London, Los Angeles and Sydney, Bristol: Policy Press. Dutton, P. (2005), ‘Outside the metropole: gentrification in provincial cities or provincial gentrification’, in Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge (eds), Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 209–224. Eisinger, P. (2000), ‘The politics of bread and circuses: building the city for the visitor class’, Urban Affairs Review, 35 (3), 316–333. Freeman, L. and F. Braconi (2004), ‘Gentrification and displacement New York City in the 1990s’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 70 (1), 39–52. Friedmann, J. (2010), ‘Place and place-making in cities: a global perspective’, Planning Theory and Practice, 11 (2), 149–165. Fullilove, M. T. (1996), ‘Psychiatric implications of displacement: contributions from the psychology of place’, The American Journal of Psychiatry, 153 (12), 1516–1523. Glass, R. (1964), ‘Introduction: Aspects of change’, in Centre for Urban Studies (ed.), London: Aspects of Change, Volume 3, London: MacGibbon and Kee, pp. i–xix. Gonzalez, S. and P. Waley (2013), ‘Traditional retail markets: the new gentrification Frontier?’, Antipode, 45 (4), 965–983. Gotham, K. F. (2005), ‘Tourism gentrification: the case of new Orleans’ vieux carre (French Quarter)’, Urban Studies, 42 (7), 1099–1121. Hackworth, J. (2002), ‘Postrecession gentrification in New York City’, Urban Affairs Review, 37 (6), 815–843. Hackworth, J. and N. Smith (2001), ‘The changing state of gentrification’, Tijdschrift Voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 92 (4), 464–477. Hamnett, C. (1991), ‘The blind men and the elephant: the explanation of gentrification’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16 (2), 173–189. Harvey, D. (1978), ‘The urban process under capitalism: a framework for analysis’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2 (1–4), 101–131. Harvey, D. (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity, Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell. Hubbard, P. (2016), The Battle for the High Street: Retail Gentrification, Class and Disgust, London: Springer. Janoschka, M., J. Sequera and L. Salinas (2014), ‘Gentrification in Spain and Latin America: a critical dialogue’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (4), 1234–1265. Judd, D. R. (2003), ‘Visitors and the spatial ecology of the city’, in Lily M. Hoffman, Susan S. Fainstein and Dennis R. Judd (eds), Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets, and City Space, Volume 1, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 23–38. Lauria, M. and L. Knopp (1985), ‘Toward an analysis of the role of gay communities in the urban renaissance’, Urban Geography, 6 (2), 152–169. Lees, L. (2000), ‘A reappraisal of gentrification: towards a “geography of gentrification.”’, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (3), 389–408. Lees, L. (2003a), ‘Super-gentrification: the case of Brooklyn Heights, New York city’, Urban Studies, 40 (12), 2487–2509. Lees, L. (2003b), ‘Visions of “urban renaissance”: the Urban Task Force report and the Urban White Paper’, in Rob Imrie and Mike Raco (eds), Urban Renaissance: New Labour, Community and Urban Policy, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 61–82.

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310  Handbook of urban geography Lees, L. (2012), ‘The geography of gentrification: thinking through comparative urbanism’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (2): 155–171. Lees, L. (2014), ‘The urban injustices of new Labour’s “New Urban Renewal”: The case of the Aylesbury Estate in London’, Antipode, 46 (4), 921–947. Lees, L., H. B. Shin and E. López-Morales (2015), ‘Conclusion: Global gentrifications’, in Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales (eds), Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 441–452. Lees, L., H. B. Shin and E. López-Morales (2016), Planetary Gentrification, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lees, L., T. Slater and E. Wyly (2008), Gentrification, London and New York: Routledge. Ley, D. (1996), The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maitland, R. and P. Newman (2008), ‘Visitor-host relationships: conviviality between visitors and host communities’, in Bruce Hayllar, Tony Griffin and Deborah Edwards (eds), City Spaces–Tourist Places: Urban Tourism Precincts, New York and London: Elsevier, pp. 223–242. Marcuse, P. (1985), ‘Gentrification, abandonment, and displacement: connections, causes, and policy responses in New York City’, Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, 28, 195–240. Newman, K. and E. K. Wyly (2006), ‘The right to stay put, revisited: gentrification and resistance to displacement in New York City’, Urban Studies, 43 (1), 23–57. Phillips, M. (2005), ‘Differential productions of rural gentrification: illustrations from North and South Norfolk’, Geoforum, 36 (4), 477–494. Rofe, M. W. (2003), ‘“I want to be global”: theorising the gentrifying class as an emergent élite global community’, Urban Studies, 40 (12), 2511–2526. Shaw, K. S. and I. W. Hagemans (2015), ‘“Gentrification without displacement” and the consequent loss of place: the effects of class transition on low-income residents of secure housing in gentrifying areas’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (2), 323–341. Shin, H. B., L. Lees and E. López-Morales (2016), ‘Introduction: locating gentrification in the global east’, Urban Studies, 53 (3), 455–470. Slater, T. (2006), ‘The eviction of critical perspectives from gentrification research’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30 (4), 737–757. Slater, T. (2009), ‘Missing Marcuse: on gentrification and displacement’, City, 13 (2–3), 292–311. Slater, T. (2017), ‘Planetary rent gaps’, Antipode, 49 (S1), 114–137. Smith, D. P. and L. Holt (2007), ‘Studentification and “apprentice” gentrifiers within Britain’s provincial towns and cities: extending the meaning of gentrification’, Environment and Planning A, 39 (1), 142–161. Smith, N. (1979), ‘Toward a theory of gentrification a back to the city movement by capital, not people’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 45 (4), 538–548. Smith, N. (1996), The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London and New York: Routledge. Smith, N. (2002), ‘New globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as global urban strategy’, Antipode, 34 (3), 427–450. Valli, C. (2015), ‘A sense of displacement: long-time residents’ feelings of displacement in gentrifying Bushwick, New York’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (6), 1191–1208. Wachsmuth, D. and A. Weisler (2018), ‘Airbnb and the rent gap: gentrification through the sharing economy’, Environment and Planning A, 50 (6), 1147–1170. Wyly, E. and D. Hammel (1999), ‘Islands of decay in seas of renewal: housing policy and the resurgence of gentrification’, Housing Policy Debate, 10 (4), 711–771. Zukin, S. (2008), ‘Consuming authenticity: from outposts of difference to means of ­exclusion’, Cultural Studies, 22 (5), 724–748.

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20.  Urban informatics and e-governance Barney Warf

20.1 INTRODUCTION Information technologies are central to successful urban areas. There is, of course, a vast literature on urban information networks, which need not be recapitulated here. Computer code has become so woven into the fabric of urban space as to be indispensable, profoundly shaping the contours of everyday life (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005). Ubiquitous computing has greatly enhanced the availability of real-time information about environments. As more cities become increasingly ‘wired’ with digital technologies being pervasive in their accessibility and usage, the real world and the world inside the wires have become locked in a mutually transformative relationship, that is, virtual space and physical space co-evolve (Hudson-Smith et al., 2009a, 2009b). As Graham and Marvin (1996) note, if cities arose to overcome time by using space, information and communications technologies (ICTs) overcome space with time. Hudson-Smith et al. (2009b, p. 271) argue that ‘computers in cities exist in abundance, of course, but it is cities inside of computers that now define the digital frontier’. Despite its surging popularity, for many people – including the familiar litany of the poor, the elderly, the undereducated, and many racial/ethnic minorities – cyberspace is an inaccessible, often dimly perceived realm. Lacking the requisite technical skills, the income to acquire a personal computer at home or an Internet-enabled cellular phone, jobs that provide reliable Internet access and facing government policies that assume their needs will be addressed by the private sector, people excluded from cyberspace fail to benefit from the advantages that it could provide them. A profound irony thus exists within many societies: those who enjoy reliable access to the Internet face an information overload, while many others are deprived of knowledge that could assist them obtaining jobs, lower consumer prices, entertainment and many other necessities and conveniences. Hence, as the number of different Internet uses has risen, the opportunity costs of those lacking access have risen proportionately. The digital divide is a serious obstacle to upwards social mobility, enhancing the vulnerability of long-disenfranchised populations (Malecki and Moriset, 2008). Denied regular access to cyberspace by the inability to purchase a personal 311

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312  Handbook of urban geography computer, the technical skills necessary to log on, or public policies that assume their needs will be magically addressed by the market, the information have-nots living in the economically advanced world are deprived of many of the essential skills necessary for a successful or convenient life. This chapter examines the interplay between urban informatics and the digital divide from several perspectives. It opens with a brief theorization of the digital divide, its causes, and consequences, using data from the US and Europe. Second, it notes multiple dimensions associated with the urban divide, including the social costs endured by those without access, the role of public schools in facilitating connectivity, wireless Internet access and telework. The third part focuses on e-governance, or the use of the Internet to deliver public services, and its problematic relationship to the digital divide. In the fourth section, it explores the role of Web 2.0 and neogeography, in which users can contribute input, to changes in urban planning. The conclusion summarizes the major observations in light of continuing and ongoing technological change.

20.2  THEORIZING THE URBAN DIGITAL DIVIDE Despite early utopian expectations that the Internet would obliterate the importance of social and spatial differentials, there remain significant discrepancies in terms of access to the Internet. Difficulties in procuring the skills, equipment and software necessary to get Internet access threaten to exclude economically and socially marginalized groups from the benefits of cyberspace, a phenomenon that reflects the growing inequalities generated by labour market polarization. Thus, the microelectronics revolution has accentuated the digital divide between groups that are proficient with computer technology and those who neither understand nor trust it, reinforcing and deepening the inequalities in broader social relations. The digital divide is a serious obstacle to upwards social mobility, enhancing the vulnerability of long-disenfranchised populations (Korupp and Szydlik, 2005). Theorizations of the digital divide include a variety of conceptual perspectives. For neoclassical economists, differences in Internet access are largely a matter of personal ambition and preferences (e.g. Brady, 2000). In this reading, inequalities result from individual tastes and behaviours. Such views invariably minimize the significance of the divide and uphold the market as the only feasible means of addressing it; digital divides are held to be the result of underdeveloped markets and asymmetries in information access. Supporters of this view can point to the high rates of Internet usage in the developed world; in the US, for example, in 2017,

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Urban informatics and e-governance  ­313 87.9 per cent of the population used the Internet (Internet World Stats, 2018). More realistic accounts point to the manifold ways in which social inequalities are reinscribed in cyberspace (Crang et al., 2006). More specifically, Internet access is conditioned by class and ethnic inequalities in incomes, educational opportunities, and labour market practices. Sociological accounts that often point to the diffusion of innovations have some bearing here (Korupp and Szydlik, 2005; Grasland and Puel, 2007). Given the vast social and political forces that structure the uneven social and spatial adoption of the Internet, the early days of cyberutopianism, in which the Internet was heralded as a new domain unfettered by the constraints of the non-virtual world, appear today to be little more than simplistic fantasies. Added to this mix of social variables is the issue of government policy, that is, the extent to which the state recognizes the existence of digital divides, attempts to address them, and the regulatory structure of the telecommunications industry, which is vital to changing costs and infrastructural investments. Neoliberalism has played no small part in fostering the digital divide in the American context (and no doubt elsewhere). A particularly useful interpretation of digital divides is offered by Gilbert (2010), whose work draws on the works of Pierre Bourdieu concerning social capital to illustrate why economically marginalized groups are often inhibited from using the Internet. Examining how the poor use ICTs in everyday life, she conceptualizes how technologies, power, and social relations become simultaneously determinate: digital inequalities both reflect and reinforce broader urban inequalities at multiple spatial scales. In this way, the digital divide may be seen as the conjoined outcome of global neoliberalism, metropolitan labour markets, residential segregation of communities and neighbourhoods, and patriarchal gender relations (Gilbert et al., 2008). The digital divide exists at multiple spatial scales (Poncet and Blandine, 2007). Uneven rates of access reflect an important digital divide among countries, in which denizens of richer states tend to live in more information-rich environments than those in which the Internet is less prevalent. Moreover, digital divides also exist within countries, meaning that the poor, elderly, and rural areas typically exhibit lower rates of usage. Everywhere, large urban centres tend to exhibit higher rates of connectivity than do rural areas. All over the world, Internet users tend to be concentrated in cities, where incomes, educational levels, and digital access are highest, whereas rural areas are typically underserved (Chen and Liu, 2013; Philip et al., 2017; Salamink et al., 2017). Because they are often not well served by telecommunications firms, rural areas often have slow or substandard connections. Rural areas are often shunned by Internet service providers

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314  Handbook of urban geography Table 20.1 US Internet usage rates by income, age, ethnicity and community type, 2015 Family income ($000s/year)

Age

150

18–29 30–49 50–64 65+

78 87 94 97 98 97

Ethnicity 97 97 80 65

White Black Latino

Community type 87 87 84

Urban Suburban Rural

89 89 75

Source:  Based on Pew Research Center (2015).

(ISPs) because their populations are distributed over broad areas, making it difficult to generate economies of scale, and are frequently poorer, older, and less educated than those in urban areas (Salamink et al., 2017). For these reasons, many ISPs invest reluctantly in such areas, preferring to concentrate on younger, denser, and wealthier urban areas. Numerous works have documented the digital divide in varying contexts, demonstrating that it is complex, rapidly changing, difficult to measure accurately, and a serious challenge to surmount. In the US, the divide falls largely among income, ethnic and age lines (Warf, 2013; Campos-Castillo, 2015). As Table 20.1 indicates, in 2015 the lowest penetration rates were found among low-income households, the elderly, Latinos, and rural areas. These social divisions are manifested in the geography of US Internet use, with considerably lower rates in the South (Pew Research Center, 2015). Europe, too, suffers from its own digital divides, notably between Eastern and Western Europe and between native-born Europeans and immigrants (Brandtzæg et al., 2011; Zillien and Marr, 2013). Figure 20.1 illustrates this distribution. While some observers paint the gulf between users and non-users as a national catastrophe, others minimize its existence. A significant share of the complexity of this issue is attributable to the fact that the digital divide is multi-dimensional and cannot be reduced to dichotomous measurements, but must instead be viewed as a continuum measured using multiple variables such as income, age, educational level, and degree of technical skill (Barzilai-Nahon, 2006; Van Deursen and Van Dijk, 2014). However, the foundational terms used to understand the digital divide, such as the definitions of ‘information technology’, ‘access’, and ‘use’, are all suspect (Selwyn, 2004). The very term ‘access’, for example, is

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Urban informatics and e-governance  ­315

Source:  Author, using data from Internet World Stats (2018).

Figure 20.1  Internet penetration rates in Europe, November 2017 a­ mbiguous and includes a range of meanings, including the ability to log-on at home, school or work. Rivalling access in importance and ambiguity is Internet functionality, that is, what users do with cyberspace, because access alone holds no guarantee that one will become an Internet user. As Goldfarb and Prince (2008) caution, in addition to the digital divide in Internet access, there is also a divide in terms of usage. Hence, while simple access to the Internet at work, home, school, or libraries is common, how it is used, particularly if it is used productively, can be a completely different story. Many users view cyberspace simply as a toy. However, Crang et al. (2006) point out that the degree to which digital technologies mediate everyday life can lead to qualitatively different lifestyles between those who have access and those who do not: the digital divide not only reflects socio-spatial differentials, but helps to bring them into being (Gilbert, 2010). In short, understanding the digital divide requires an assessment of the perspectives of the diverse groups who use it, or do not, for their own means, how they use it, and issues such as technical competency and speed of connection. Understanding the digital divide means viewing it not as simply a technological phenomenon, but a deeply social, economic, political, and spatial one as well.

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316  Handbook of urban geography

20.3 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DIGITAL DIVIDES As the uses and applications of the Internet have multiplied, the costs sustained by those denied access rise accordingly. At precisely the historical moment that contemporary capitalism has come to rely upon digital technologies to an unprecedented extent, large pools of the economically disenfranchised are shut off from cyberspace. As the Internet erodes the monopolistic roles once played by the telephone and television, and as the upgrading of required skill levels steadily render ICT skills necessary even for low wage service jobs, lack of access to cyberspace becomes increasingly detrimental to social mobility. The digital divide is also a major obstacle to the successful adoption and implementation of e-government (Yigitcanlar and Baum, 2006). Public schools are a critical domain within which the digital divide is manifested, reproduced, and sometimes overcome (Monroe, 2004). Variations in public school funding are reproduced in terms of the quality of Internet access within their classrooms (Warschauer et al., 2004): while 99 per cent of American schools offer children access to networked PCs, the speed and reliability of the ability to log onto the Internet vary significantly, with important effects: ‘students with Internet-connected computers in the classroom, as opposed to a central location like a lab or library, show greater improvement in basic skills’ (The Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004, p. 4). Unsurprisingly, the digital divide in public schools is racialized: white students are much more likely than are minorities to use the Internet in the classroom or school library (U.S. Department of Education, 2006). However, measuring Internet access via simple availability to PCs at a school fails to do justice to the extent of the digital divide: poor students are considerably less likely to have them at home or to possess the skills necessary to install and maintain them, or to navigate the accompanying software. Another change that has amplified the complexity of urban digital divides is the rapid growth in wireless and mobile broadband services. In 2018 approximately 95 per cent of Americans owned a cell phone of some kind and 77 per cent were smartphones connected to the Internet (Pew Research Center, 2018). One-in-five Americans use only their smartphones to access the Internet and do not have traditional broadband service at home (Pew Research Center, 2018). Predictably, these rates vary by income and educational level. As Internet access shifts increasingly to mobile devices, digital divides may gradually close, and thus reduce the social inequalities that they reflect and in turn sustain. The benefits of some ICTs can be enjoyed even by those who lack adequate Internet access, particularly if they are provided as a public

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Urban informatics and e-governance  ­317 service. For example, smart grids are used to manage electricity efficiently, including smart meters to inform households of their energy use and that charge higher prices during periods of peak demand (Calvillo et al., 2016). Smart grids manage energy packets in much the way that the Internet manages data packets, routing them across optimal network paths to minimize time and cost. Other benefits include: smart water meters that identify water mains that are likely to break ahead of time; minimizing the number of building inspectors as smart buildings report their maintenance status; and dispatching road crews only to those smart bridges that report icy conditions. Similarly, another impact of ICTs concerns intelligent transportation and smart mobility systems, including smart metering, electronic peak load road pricing, automated toll payments, real time navigation and travel advisory systems, and remote traffic monitoring and displays (Lyons, 2018). Such ICTs amount to public goods, and those without Internet access enjoy the benefits even if they cannot avail themselves of the information they offer. In other cases, however, the digital divide presents more serious obstacles. For example, ‘telework’ or ‘telecommuting’, in which workers substitute some or all of their working day at a remote location (almost always home) for time usually spent at the office (Haddon and Brynin, 2005; Golden, 2009), has gradually grown in popularity. Telework is most appropriate for jobs involving mobile activities or routine information handling such as data entry or directory assistance. The self-employed do not count as teleworkers because they do not substitute it for commuting. Proponents of telework claim that it enhances productivity and morale, reduces employee turnover and office space, and leads to reductions in traffic congestion and accidents, air pollution, and energy use. Critics contend that it is simply a digital version of the neoliberal labour market in which the boundaries between home and work disappear (Greenhill and Wilson, 2006). The extent to which telecommuting has become popular is unclear, but some estimates hold that there were roughly 2.9 million fulltime teleworkers in the US, or 2 per cent of the labour force, in 2010 (Lister and Harnish, 2011). Many others, however, may telecommute part-time. For those unable to access the Internet, telework is out of the question.

20.4  URBAN E-GOVERNANCE The extremely rapid growth of the Internet – now used by 53 per cent of the world’s population (We Are Social, 2018) – has unleashed enormous changes in how the planet’s netizens (Internet users) communicate, are entertained, shop, obtain information, and interact. It has also changed

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318  Handbook of urban geography how governments interact with their citizens. Electronic government, or e-government, has become increasingly widespread not only in the economically developed world, but in developing countries as well. Definitions of e-government vary (Yildiz, 2007), but all involve the use of the Internet to deliver government information and services, change administrative procedures, and improve citizen input and participation. Web 2.0, which allows users to interact with government bureaucracies rather than just passively receive information, has expedited this process considerably. The topic has been extensively scrutinized by scholars (for a review, see Rocheleau, 2007). E-government consists of a series of diverse practices that vary over time and space in response to varying political climates and institutional contexts. Typically, e-government is divided into three forms: government-to-business (G2B), government-to-government (G2G), and government-to-citizens (G2C). G2B e-government includes digital calls for contract proposals; submissions of bids, bills, and payments; and Internet management of supply chains. Among other things, G2G e-government enhances interaction among different government offices and agencies. These variations are frequently alleged to increase citizen accessibility, improve efficiency, create synergies, and generate economies of scale in the delivery of government services. E-government may also encourage a democratization of public bureaucracies by moving them from classic hierarchical forms of control to more horizontal, collaborative models. The most common type is G2C e-government, which is used, inter alia, for the digital collection of taxes; electronic voting; payment of utility bills, fines, and dues; applications for public assistance, permits, and licenses; online registration of companies and automobiles; and access to census and other public data. Online access facilitates acquisition of information and reduces trips to, and waiting times in, government offices. In very remote rural areas, e-government such as distance education or telemedicine offers advantages to people who may not receive these services at all. Local governments often use the Internet to entice tourists and foreign investors; interactive municipal sites give residents access to information about schools, libraries, bus schedules, and hospitals. By making public records more open, e-government improves transparency and helps to galvanize objections to arbitrary government actions. Chadwick and May (2003) describe three models of e-government – managerial, consultative, and participatory – drawn from the experiences of the US and the European Union. Managerial e-government maximizes the speed and efficiency of delivery of government services to citizens. The consultative model incorporates citizen input in various ways, so that information technologies are seen as inherently democratiz-

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Urban informatics and e-governance  ­319 ing (e.g. Internet voting, polling, referenda, and electronic conferences with officials). Finally, the participatory model includes input from nonstate actors, including corporations and non-governmental organizations. These views constitute a continuum of social access in which the consultative and participatory models are the most socially inclusive forms. Layne and Lee (2001) offered a well-received conception of developmental stages of e-government, ranging from simple online presence (i.e. a webpage); interfaces that allow citizen access to data and services; vertical integration in which citizens can actively participate (e.g. for license applications); and horizontal integration, in which one or a few centralized websites offer a broad range of government functions and purposes. Empirical assessments of e-government initiatives typically focus on the quality of websites, including criteria such as missing links, readability, the publications and data displayed, contact information for public officials, number of languages that provide access, sound and video clips, ability to use credit cards and digital signatures, security and privacy policies, and opportunities for citizen feedback.

20.5 WEB 2.0, URBAN E-GOVERNANCE AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDE Urban e-governance has been markedly changed by Web 2.0, a diverse set of software applications that have revolutionized usage of the Web. Key components of this technology are Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) and Application Programming Interfaces (API), which facilitate the creation of websites that allow instantaneous user interactions. The functionality offered by Web 2.0 has precipitated significant changes from traditional approaches to Internet usage, making the web markedly more user-centric. In this sense, it has fostered an unprecedented democratization of knowledge. Goodchild (2007, p. 217), focusing on ‘citizen sensors’, maintains that whereas ‘the early Web was primarily one-directional, allowing a large number of users to view the contents of a comparatively small number of sites, the new Web 2.0 is a bi-directional collaboration in which users are able to interact with and provide information to central sites, and to see that information collated and made available to others’. The growth of cellular or mobile phones and social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter likewise has paved the way for mobile governance, or what Linders (2012) calls the shift from e-government to ‘we-government’. One dimension of e-governance is the production and consumption of spatial information. The term neogeography, which has been used

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320  Handbook of urban geography in several ways with varying meanings, points to the process by which people use online geospatial tools to document aspects of their lives and environment in terms that are meaningful to them (Hudson-Smith et al., 2009b). Web 2.0 is vital to the production and consumption of volunteered geographic information, the heart of neogeography and participatory GIS. The interactive websites characteristic of Web 2.0 allow users to upload information about locations into online content and apply their data in diverse ways, including, for example, simple displays of locations (e.g. favoured routes for a proposed bike trail) or lists of attributes of a place near a user equipped with a GPS. This approach lies at the heart of mapping websites such as Google Maps, Yahoo!Maps, OpenStreetMap, and Bing Live Maps. As Web 2.0 has enabled growing legions of people to interact with one another, and with government agencies, neogeography has enjoyed explosive growth. As a consequence, geographic knowledge has increasingly escaped the confines of academia or urban planning professionals and has been embraced by an enthusiastic and rapidly growing public of amateurs and hobbyists. Rather than rely on state or corporate-produced data, neogeography generates volunteered data/content, relocating the centre of knowledge production from a handful of self-appointed experts to large numbers of people with limited formal geographic training. Sui (2008) labels these changes the wikification of GIS, after Wikipedia, the famously popular, user-generated, online encyclopaedia. User-generated maps of endangered bird species, handicapped-accessible restrooms, ideal camping locations, accident-prone roads, or green buildings may not pass the standards of academics and professionals, but their efforts yield results that are important and meaningful to their respective groups of contributors, creating a people’s geography that is quite distanced from the rarefied world of academia. GIS, for example, has moved from a scarce, specialized commodity operating on mainframe computers to become a common tool of planners, and in the process facilitated collaborative decision making in planning circles (Byrne and Pickard, 2016). As a consequence, GIS has been embraced by an enthusiastic and rapidly growing public of non-professional users, with results that have yet to be well understood. Foth et al. (2009) argue that neogeography may usher in a neo-planning paradigm, in which planning activities are carried out through active civic engagement aided by Web 2.0. In this view, virtual realities such as Second Life offer urban residents the chance to visualize how their worlds would be affected by urban planning designs. Adopted on a large scale, Web 2.0 and neogeography may encourage public bureaucracies to modernize their administrative practices, increase responsiveness and transparency, and empower citizens to shape local government actions (Noveck, 2009). In

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Urban informatics and e-governance  ­321 short, neogeography facilitates collective place-making rather than statemandated designs of locales. Others, however, are more critical, arguing that it empowers a technically skilled elite at the expense of the labouring masses (Haklay, 2013). While it is true that few cities offer e-government services beyond the most basic provision of digital forms and information (Reddick, 2004), Web 2.0-inspired municipal e-government has begun to materialize in fact. While simple, one-way government websites have become almost universal among municipalities in the economically developed world, the shift toward transactional ones has been much slower and spatially uneven. Moon (2002) suggests that larger cities are more likely to have interactive e-government portals and to offer a broader array of applications than are small ones. Global cities in particular are likely to adopt e-government in the delivery of services (Ingrams et al., 2018). Several major cities in Asia, for instance, have aggressively implemented e-government, such as Singapore (Baum and Mahizhnan, 2014), Seoul (Lee et al., 2014), and Shanghai (Gil and Zheng, 2017). However, e-governance initiatives can also be found further down the urban hierarchy. In the US a few municipalities (e.g. Bakersfield, CA) have been broadcasting city council meetings on the web, while (e.g. Durham, NC; Scottsdale, AZ; Fort Lauderdale, FL) offer online geographical information systems that permit location-based searches and interactive mapping (Kaylor et al., 2001). In Tampere, Finland, municipal Web 2.0 sites allow citizens to provide urban planners with their views and experiences (Jaeger, 2003). Finally, in Greece, the ‘digital city’ of Trikala was launched in 2006, giving its residents the ability to participate in telework, online library and school programmes, emergency response systems, environmental and transportation information, and demographic data that can be utilized through publicly available geographical information systems. The digital divide is a major obstacle to the successful adoption and implementation of e-government (Yigitcanlar and Baum, 2006). E-government is useless to those without access to the Internet; thus e-government and the digital divide are deeply intertwined phenomena (Helbig et al., 2009). For many economically and politically marginalized populations – the familiar litany of the poor, elderly, undereducated, and ethnic minorities – cyberspace is simply inaccessible. Fountain (2001, p. 248) notes that ‘[a]n increasingly digital government favours those with access to a computer and the Internet and the skills to use these sophisticated tools competently’. People who lack the requisite technical skills, the income to acquire a personal computer at home, schools or jobs that provide Internet access or the ability to utilize public Internet points such as libraries are excluded from the benefits of e-government. Sadly,

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322  Handbook of urban geography and ironically – because those who need the information that the Internet offers typically benefit the most, and those with abundant sources of input need it less – the digital divide may enhance, not simply reflect, the inequalities surrounding e-government. Those most in need of government services have the least opportunity to access them in digital form. Dugdale et al. (2005) found that those who use government services the most are least likely to use the Internet. Therefore, e-government may exacerbate, not reduce, social inequalities (Hossain, 2005; Becker et al., 2008). The growth of smart cellular telephones that offer Internet access may seem a promising route to reducing urban digital divides. Given the ubiquity of cell phones, this issue may seem self-evident. However, even in the mobile world, the digital divide reappears (Napoli and Obar, 2014). Young, well educated ‘digital natives’ are far more likely to use this technology than are their elders (Sourbati, 2009). Broadband access is also unevenly distributed by class, ethnicity, and between urban and rural areas (Riddlesden and Singleton, 2014). In developing countries, however, where Internet use is expanding rapidly, mobile technology is indispensable and often most people’s primary means of accessing the Internet.

20.6  CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Momentous changes have occurred around the world as ICTs have penetrated ever more into daily life. In 2018, 54 per cent of the planet – 4.1 billion people – was online, with roughly three-quarters of a million more joining daily (We Are Social, 2018). As a result of declining prices of electronic equipment, including computers and mobile phones, as well as public policies to encourage Internet use, penetration rates have grown rapidly. Thus, the digital divide, which has long been an object of concern, has gradually receded in importance. Nonetheless, significant pockets of offline communities stubbornly persist. In the US, one out of five families in poverty lacks Internet access. Rates among the elderly remain relatively low. In many countries, rural areas are poorly served, especially with broadband service. As being online has become increasingly necessary for everything from banking to tax payments to job search, those without access are increasingly disenfranchised socially and economically. The growth of telework is one manifestation of this trend. Increasingly, national and municipal governments have turned to the Internet to collect and deliver information, and often to allow residents to apply for licenses, pay fees, and take classes online. There is little doubt that e-government has greased the wheels of public bureaucracies

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Urban informatics and e-governance  ­323 c­ onsiderably. For the vast majority of urbanites, e-government makes life more convenient, obviating trips to public offices and reducing waiting times. Those excluded from cyberspace, however, enjoy few of these benefits, although in some cases ICTs create positive externalities (e.g. reduced traffic) that benefit Internet users and non-users alike. One of the more dramatic changes associated with the Internet has been the growth of Web 2.0, in which urbanites can do more than passively receive information but actively manufacture it. This change has markedly affected activities such as public participation GIS, allowing users to create their own geographies. Such neogeographies are markedly different from the top-down, state-sponsored forms found in traditional urban planning. Rather, ‘bottom-up’ forms of knowledge generated by different groups of users have greatly democratized the planning process. Here too, however, lack of Internet access threatens to deprive portions of urban populations from participating in this process. Increasingly, the digital divide silences those who do not or cannot log in. This points to the deeply political nature of the digital divide. The issue has often been analysed in studiously apolitical terms, that is, as if it were simply a technical, not a social, problem. Yet as the examples raised here indicate, lines of power that cross society at large – by class, ethnicity, and region – also permeate cyberspace. It is no accident that those with the least access to the Internet are those with the lowest degrees of political power. As increasingly large domains of business, recreation, and governance shift onto the Internet, it is likely that the populations of people excluded from Internet use, albeit declining, will also see their ability to shape the world around them shrink accordingly.

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324  Handbook of urban geography divide – a typology of internet users in Europe’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 69 (3), 123–138. Byrne, D. and A. J. Pickard (2016), ‘Neogeography and the democratization of GIS: a metasynthesis of qualitative research’, Information, Communication & Society, 19 (11), 1505–1522. Calvillo, C., A. Sanchez-Miralles and J. Villar (2016), ‘Energy management and planning in smart cities’, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 55, 273–287. Campos-Castillo, C. (2015), ‘Revisiting the first-level digital divide in the United States: gender and race/ethnicity patterns, 2007–2012’, Social Science Computer Review, 33(4), 423–439. Chadwick, A. and C. May (2003), ‘Interaction between states and citizens in the age of the internet: ‘e-government’ in the United States, Britain, and the European Union’, Governance, 16 (2), 271–300. Chen, R.-S. and I.-F. Liu (2013), ‘Research on the effectiveness of information technology in reducing the rural–urban knowledge divide’, Computers & Education, 63, 437–445. Crang, M., T. Crosbie and S. Graham (2006), ‘Variable geometries of connection: urban digital divides and the uses of information technology’, Urban Studies, 43 (13), 2551–2570. Dodge, M. and R. Kitchin (2005), ‘Code and the transduction of space’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95 (1), 162–180. Dugdale, A., A. Daly, F. Papandrea and M. Maley (2005), ‘Accessing e-government: challenges for citizens and organizations’, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 71 (1), 109–118. Foth, M., B. Bajracharya, R. Brown and G. Hearn (2009), ‘The second life of urban planning? Using neogeography tools for community engagement’, Journal of Location Based Services, 3 (2), 97–117. Fountain, J. (2001), ‘The virtual state: transforming American government?’ National Civic Review, 90 (3), 241–251. Gil, O. and T-C. Zheng (2017), ‘The smart city plan 2011–2013 in Shanghai’, in Yiyia Jing and Stephen P. Osborne (eds), Public Service Innovations in China, Singapore: Springer, pp. 127–149. Gilbert, M. (2010), ‘Theorizing digital and urban inequalities: critical geographies of “race”, gender and technological capital’, Information, Communication & Society, 13 (7), 1000–1018. Gilbert, M., M. Masucci, C. Homko and A. Bove (2008), ‘Theorizing the digital divide: information and communication technology use frameworks among poor women using a telemedicine system’, Geoforum, 39 (5), 912–925. Golden, T. (2009), ‘Applying technology to work: toward a better understanding of telework’, Organization Management Journal, 6 (4), 241–250. Goldfarb, A. and J. Prince (2008), ‘Internet adoption and usage patterns are different: implications for the digital divide’, Information Economics and Policy, 20 (1), 2–15. Goodchild, M. (2007), ‘Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography’, Geojournal, 69 (4), 211–221. Graham, S. and S. Marvin (1996), Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places, London: Routledge. Grasland, L. and G. Puel (2007), ‘The diffusion of ICT and the notion of the digital divide: contributions from francophone geographers’, GeoJournal, 68 (1), 1–3. Greenhill, A. and M. Wilson (2006), ‘Haven or hell? Telework, flexibility and family in the e-society: a Marxist analysis’, European Journal of Information Systems, 15 (4), 379–388. Haddon, L. and M. Brynin (2005), ‘The character of telework and the characteristics of teleworkers’, New Technology, Work, and Employment, 20 (1), 34–46. Haklay, M. (2013), ‘Neogeography and the delusion of democratisation’, Environment and Planning A, 45 (1), 55–69. Helbig, N., J. Gil-Garcia and E. Ferro (2009), ‘Understanding the complexity of electronic government: implications from the digital divide literature’, Government Information Quarterly, 26 (1), 89–97. Hossain, F. (2005), ‘E-governance initiatives in developing countries: helping the rich? Or, creating opportunities for the poor?’ Asian Affairs, 27 (1), 5–23.

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Urban informatics and e-governance  ­325 Hudson-Smith, A., A. Crooks, M. Gibin, R. Milton and M. Batty (2009a), ‘Neogeography and Web 2.0: concepts, tools and applications’, Journal of Location Based Services, 3 (2), 118–145. Hudson-Smith, A., R. Milton, J. Dearden and M. Batty (2009b), ‘The neogeography of virtual cities: digital mirrors into a recursive world’, in Markus Foth (ed.), Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-time City, Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 270–291. Ingrams, A., A. Monoharam, L. Schmidthuber and M. Holzer (2018), ‘Stages and determinants of e-government development: a twelve-year longitudinal study of global cities’, International Public Management Journal, in press. Internet World Stats (2018), ‘Internet users and 2017 population in North America’, at https://internetworldstats.com/stats14.htm (accessed 25 August 2018). Jaeger, P. (2003), ‘The endless wire: e-government as global phenomenon’, Government Information Quarterly, 20 (4), 323–331. Kaiser Family Foundation (2004), ‘Children, the digital divide, and federal policy’, at http:// www.kff.org/entmedia/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=46360 (accessed 9 August 2018). Kaylor, C., R. Deshazo and D. Van Eck (2001), ‘Gauging e-government: a report on implementing services among American cities’, Government Information Quarterly, 18 (4), 293–307. Korupp, S. and M. Szydlik (2005), ‘Causes and trends of the digital divide’, European Sociological Review, 21 (4), 409–422. Layne, K. and J. Lee (2001), ‘Developing fully functional e-government: a four stage model’, Government Information Quarterly, 18 (2), 122–136. Lee, J., M. Hancock and M. Hu (2014), ‘Towards an effective framework for building smart cities: lessons from Seoul and San Francisco’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 89, 80–99. Linders, D. (2012), ‘From e-government to we-government: defining a typology for citizen coproduction in the age of social media’, Government Information Quarterly, 29 (4), 446–454. Lister, K. and T. Harnish (2011), ‘The state of telecommuting in the U.S.: How individuals, business and government benefit’, at http://www.workshifting.com/downloads/down​ loads/Telework-Trends-US.pdf (accessed 2 January 2016). Lyons, G. (2018), ‘Getting smart about urban mobility: aligning the paradigms of smart and sustainable’, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 115, 4–14. Malecki, E. and B. Moriset (2008), The Digital Economy: Business Organisation, Production Processes, and Regional Developments, London: Routledge. Monroe, B. (2004), Crossing the Digital Divide: Race, Writing, and Technology in the Classroom, New York: Teachers’ College Press. Moon, M. (2002), ‘The evolution of e-government among municipalities: rhetoric or reality?’ Public Administration Review, 62 (4), 424–433. Napoli, P. and J. Obar (2014), ‘The emerging mobile Internet underclass: a critique of mobile Internet access’, The Information Society, 30 (5), 323–334. Noveck, B. S. (2009), Wiki Government: How Technology can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens more Powerful, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Pew Research Center (2015), ‘Digital divides 2015’, at http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/09/22/ digital-divides-2015/ (accessed 25 August 2018). Pew Research Center (2018), ‘Mobile fact sheet’, at http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/ mobile-technology-fact-sheet/ (accessed 25 August 2018). Philip, L., C. Cottrill, J. Farrington, F. Williams and F. Ashmore (2017), ‘The digital divide: patterns, policy and scenarios for connecting the “final few” in rural communities across Great Britain’, Journal of Rural Studies, 54, 386–398. Poncet, P. and R. Blandine (2007), ‘Fractured space: a geographical reflection on the digital divide’, Geojournal, 68 (1), 19–29. Reddick, C. (2004), ‘A two-stage model of e-government growth: theories and empirical evidence for US cities’, Government Information Quarterly, 21 (1), 51–64.

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326  Handbook of urban geography Riddlesden, D. and A. Singleton (2014), ‘Broadband speed equity: a new digital divide?’ Applied Geography, 52, 25–33. Rocheleau, B. (2007), ‘Whither e-government?’ Public Administration Review, 67 (3), 584‒588. Salamink, K., D. Strijker and G. Bosworth (2017), ‘Rural development in the digital age: a systematic literature review on unequal ICT availability, adoption, and use in rural areas’, Journal of Rural Studies, 54, 360–371. Selwyn, N. (2004), ‘Reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide’, New Media and Society, 6 (3), 341–362. Sourbati, M. (2009), ‘“It could be useful, but not for me at the moment”: older people, Internet access and e-public service provision’, New Media & Society, 11 (7), 1083–1100. Sui, D. (2008), ‘The wikification of GIS and its consequences: or Angelina Jolie’s new tattoo and the future of GIS’, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 32, 1–5. U.S. Department of Education (2006), ‘Computer and internet use by students in 2003’, at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/2006065.pdf?loc=interstitialskip (accessed 25 August 2018). Van Deursen, A. and J. Van Dijk (2014), ‘The digital divide shifts to differences in usage’, New Media & Society, 16 (3), 507–526. Warf, B. (2013), ‘Contemporary digital divides in the United States’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 104 (1), 1–17. Warschauer, M., M. Knobel and L. Stone (2004), ‘Technology and equity in schooling: deconstructing the digital divide’, Education Policy, 18 (4), 562–588. We Are Social (2018), ‘Digital in 2018: world’s internet users pass the 4 billion mark’, at https://wearesocial.com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018 (accessed 9 August 2018). Yigitcanlar, T. and S. Baum (2006), ‘E-government and the digital divide’, in Mehdi Khosrow-Pour (ed.), Encyclopedia of e-Commerce, e-Government, and Mobile Commerce, Hershey, PA: IGI Global, pp. 353–358. Yildiz, M. (2007), ‘E-government research: Reviewing the literature, limitations and ways forward’, Government Information Quarterly, 24 (3), 646–665. Zillien, N. and M. Marr (2013), ‘The digital divide in Europe’, in Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert (eds), The Digital Divide: The Internet and Social Inequality in International Perspective, New York: Routledge, pp. 55–66.

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PART V URBAN SOCIALITIES

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21.  Sociality, materiality and the city Sophie Watson

21.1 INTRODUCTION The city can be conceived of as a complexity of interconnected sites of vibrant matters, embodied entanglements and passionate affects. This chapter considers how sociality and materiality in the city are coconstituted and entangled in the city. Cities are constantly inventing and reinventing themselves, and are spaces where the ‘social’ and sociality is enacted and emerges in unpredictable ways. Cities are not static but are brought into being and in a state of flux, constituted by the bodies and the interconnections that are enacted there through shifting environments, senses and atmospheres. Cities are material/social spaces which are historically contingent and can be made and unmade in different configurations over time, constituted by sociomaterial and technological connections and networks, and entangled spaces of bodies, affects, things, urban infrastructures, pleasures, aesthetics, which are formed within fluid temporalities, spaces of flows and interconnections. In this complex array of connections, interconnections and networks, differences and socialities are performed and enacted, both constituted in the spaces of the city, and themselves constitutive of the very city itself. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section charts some of the key ways that sociality and materiality in the city have been conceived together in the city prior to the ‘material turn’. The second section outlines some of the major trends in contemporary thinking of materiality and sociality as co-constituted and entangled/intertwined not necessarily separated in any meaningful way. In the final section, I think through sociality and the materiality in the context of public space.

21.2 A (VERY) BRIEF EXCURSION INTO TWENTIETH-CENTURY URBAN THEORY Until the latter part of the twentieth century the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ in urban thinking were more or less distinct categories and realms, which produced one another – usually in a unilateral direction – from the material to the social, but which were not co-constituted or inextricably entangled 328

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Sociality, materiality and the city  ­329 with one another. It was not uncommon for the theorizing of sociality and social relations in the city, to make little reference to the material, and vice versa. Of course, there is a danger in such sweeping generalizations, since there are always traces, exceptions, meanderings from dominant trends in geographical and sociological thought. In this section of the chapter, I indicate how the ‘material’ did nevertheless figure in understandings of the social and sociality in the city, with different preoccupations from those that engage many geographers today. One guiding framework that has informed urban analysis of the particularities and social formations of city life was historical materialism (Bridge and Watson, 2010, p. 3). In 1844’s The Condition of the Working Class in England Engels (1987) brought forensic attention to the material life of the factory workers in Manchester – the poverty of their dwellings, clothes and food, drawing on Marx’s arguments about how materials are imbued with the wider social relations of their production, and the class exploitation and profit extraction from these materials. In an illuminating, and early attention to the body, Engels read from distortions of body shape and development to explore the particular interminably repeated tasks in the factory production process in which the body was involved. Marxist inspired analyses of the economy and what Harvey (1978) called the urban process in capitalism, became a dominant trope that underpinned much thinking of social life in the city for several decades. In this formulation, class was the major social division and social life in the city was highly structured and segregated by where people were placed in relation to the ownership of capital and the division of labour. This was a notion of the society ‘founded on the principle of “accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake”. . . (where) accumulation cannot, therefore, be isolated from class struggle’ (Harvey, 1978, p. 110). Such an account of social life in the city, though dominant in particular through the 1970s and 1980s, as the 1980s unfolded came under a growing challenge from feminist theorists, who saw class and the economic/material base as inadequate for explaining gender inequalities and a social world where women had less power, took greater domestic responsibility, and were discriminated in a whole raft of sites and ways that could not be simply reduced to capitalism, or the economy. Patriarchy was mobilized as a concept (Walby, 1990; Beechey, 1979) to explain men’s power over women. But it was far less possible to situate within any material structure – though some radical feminists attempted to do so through locating men’s power in the body/penis (Firestone, 1970) – despite its material manifestation in a host of ways, from gender segregated labour markets to domestic violence. From the early Chicago school, cities as material forms that were distinct from rural life were imagined to produce particular forms of

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330  Handbook of urban geography sociality. Tonnies (2001) famously coined the notions of gesellschaft and gemeinschaft to describe the (idealized) more integrated and connected communities of rural life (gemeinschaft) as compared to the looser social bonds of association (gesellschaft) characteristic of city life. Another influential interrelated strand of thinking derives from the German sociologist, Georg Simmel, writing in 1903, whose notion of the ‘blasé metropolitan attitude’ (Simmel, 1948) was developed to describe a response to the overwhelming stimulation and assault on the senses which was characteristic of modern city life, and which produced an individual who was not engaged with others, but was rather a detached and rational observer looking in. Walter Benjamin (1999), also influential in urban thought in the early nineteenth century, similarly developed the notion of an abstracted individual – the ‘flaneur’ wandering through the city enjoying the urban spectacle but somewhat detached from it. Finally, in this necessarily brief excursion through a wealth of urban writing on materiality, sociality and the city, there has been a considerable body of work that celebrates the city as a built form which through its density, complexity, and intensities affords possibilities first, for a vibrant public life, and, second, for social differences to coexist in relations of mutuality and acceptance. Famously, Jane Jacobs (1961, p. 35) writing about New York, postulated the city streets as core to a working, vibrant, safe and mutually respectful social life: ‘buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers must be oriented to the street’. Since then urbanists have drawn attention to urban design elements which are argued to enhance urban social life, such as flexible borders rather than firm boundaries which segregate people from one another (Sennett, 2010), or material forms such as gated communities constructed to respond to the fear of dangerous others, which arguably only serve to exacerbate them (Blandy et al., 2003). Others have emphasized the significance of marginal or liminal city spaces for social differences to be articulated and coexist or for vibrant publics to emerge (Watson, 2006).

21.3  THE MATERIAL TURN Intellectual thought inevitably proceeds, in part, as an encounter with that which has been written before. With the influence of cultural studies that spread through the social sciences from its 1970s origins in the influential Centre for Cultural Studies in Birmingham, led first by Richard Hoggart and then Stuart Hall, a new cultural geography emerged which drew on post-structuralist theory, particularly Foucault, feminist, post-colonial

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Sociality, materiality and the city  ­331 and psychoanalytic theory to place culture at the centre of geographical endeavours. Research thus shifted into studies of the body, identity, the home, tourism, sexuality, at the same time as reconfiguring more traditional areas of geography such as inequality, poverty, work, community, neighbourhood to ask new questions about culture, power, subjectivity, affect and so on. This shift in thinking brought its own reaction – the material (re)turn in geography (Anderson and Tolia-Kelly, 2004), which shifted the analytical lens, for some geographers once more. Geographers took different avenues. Latham and McCormack (2004), for example, approached the question of materiality, the sociality and the city from an angle which aimed to bring the immaterial into the immaterial as something which gives it liveliness and expressive life. In so doing, they took the examples of automobility and intoxication to open up the ways in which the material city can be thought, which involved seeing the urban affectively also as a site of desire and attachment. This renewed attention to matter, materiality and materialism started to gain momentum in the early 2000s (e.g. Jackson, 2000; Lees, 2002; Whatmore, 2002) and like the cultural turn was influenced by theory developed in other disciplines – amongst others Bruno Latour’s actornetwork theory (1993, 2005), Daniel Miller’s (1987, 1998) exploration of material culture, Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) attention to the social life of things, and Jane Bennett’s work on the enchantment of modern life (2001) and vibrant matter (2009). Anderson and Tolia-Kelly (2004), in a special issue of Geoforum, identified several strands of these material geographies – those which were rethinking the object, feminist work on embodiment, and a series of literatures attuned to the ‘more than human world’. In this special issue, the papers were chosen ‘to enact the differences between the figures of matter and materiality’ (Anderson and ToliaKelly, 2004, p. 670) that emerged from, amongst other traditions, cultural materialism, actor-network theory or non-representational theory, and to show that there was no single direction for the material turn. This has certainly been the case. Through the following decade, the material turn in geography has weaved a complex and textured path, the breadth of which cannot be easily captured here. Five years later, Anderson and Wylie (2009, p. 318) capture some of this work under the following clusters: ‘a vibrant material-cultures literature . . . a swathe of writing concerned with the varied intertwined materialities of nature, science and technology . . . and a third cluster . . . around the spatialities of the lived body, practice, touch, emotion and affect’. Rather than argue for a new theory of matter, these authors began from an assumption that matter is always ‘beyond itself ’ and that qualities, such as excess, animation and enchantment, that are

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332  Handbook of urban geography usually associated with ‘immateriality, figurative or affective effects, are of matter, rather than standing in opposition to it’ (Anderson and Wylie, 2009, p. 332). The question I want to address next is how these approaches intersect with the notion of sociality. One direction of thought, connected and imbricated in notions of materiality, comes under the umbrella of what has been termed non-representational theory, again a heterogeneous body of work which originated in the UK, and particularly in Bristol, with the work of Nigel Thrift (2007) and developed in different directions by many others (see Anderson and Harrison, 2010). In a very useful review of the book Taking Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, Cresswell (2012) points to some of the key features of NRT. These include its insistence on: [T]he practical and processual fluidity of things (rather than finished and fixed); on the production of meaning in action (rather than through pre-established systems and structures); on an ontology that is relational (rather than essentialist); on habitual interaction with the world (rather than ‘consciousness’ of it); on the possibilities of things emerging surprisingly (rather than being predetermined); on a wide definition of life as humans/with/plus (rather than strictly humanistic); and on an all inclusive materiality where everything produces the ‘social’ (rather than on an already achieved ‘social’ constructing everything else). (Cresswell, 2012, p. 97)

Although not all scholars, by any means, attach themselves to the label of non-representational theory, Cresswell’s summary of its key tenets here, points to many of the main ways of conceiving materiality and sociality together in the city. Influences come from many different theories, particularly developed within philosophy and sociology by, amongst others, Bourdieu and Butler (a focus on practice), Deleuze and Guattari (vitalist philosophies), Latour (actor-network theory), and Bennett and Massumi (the idea of vibrant matter and the potential of the ‘event’). In these ways of thinking, sociality in the city cannot be thought of separately from materiality. Rather, they are co-constituted, in process, fluid, multiple, contingent, interconnected and unpredictable. This points to different kinds of research on the social in cities, as we see shortly. First, though, what kinds of critiques have emerged in relation to these approaches? The predominant argument, with which I have some sympathy given the focus of my early research on gender and more recently on differences more widely, is that relations of power can easily be forgotten and eradicated from these accounts. If everything is possible, in process and contingent, how can we make sense of social inequality in the city and divisions which seem hard to shift, and which are rarely fluid? In the last decade or more, in many cities, there has been a growing economic and

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Sociality, materiality and the city  ­333 social inequality (Piketty, 2014) where the lives of rich people in almost every respect bear no relation to those on low or no incomes, and even to the middle classes. In a recent study of the North London borough of Highgate, Webber and Burrows (2016) expose the increasingly rarefied and privileged lives of the rich in what they term the ‘Alpha Territory’. These divisions are materially driven, in particular through fast rising house prices in global cities, and the spatial arrangements of cities where some have access to resources and amenities, and others do not. Gender relations in many cities are also far from fluid, entrenched in relations of power, where violence and rape (e.g. Kabeer, 2015), or exclusion from the public sphere or inability to gain access to resources, constitute everyday life for women. Meanwhile, there has also been an increase in racist attacks, particularly towards Muslims, across most European and American cities following the 2015 attacks in Paris. Second, and relatedly, the question has been put as to what remains of the human in relational thinking and in this ‘ontological flattening of the world into an undifferentiated sea of actants, machines, objects or entities’ (Simpson, 2013, p. 180). Simpson (2013, p. 193) addresses this question by arguing for an ‘ecological approach’ that focuses attention on the ‘irreducible interrelation of the organism-and-its-environment rather than, for example, the tracing of the coupling or de-coupling of actants in a network as with [actor-network theory] . . . or the processes of assembly and disassembly of assemblages as in assemblage theory’. In this view, organisms are always enmeshed with the environment, such that the place to start is with the relations themselves, which thus gives agency to the ‘full range of vibrant materials that populate the environment, both “thingly” objects and ambient-atmospheric conditions’ (Simpson, 2013, p. 193). According to Simpson, an ecological approach thus brings to light patterns, routines and norms that are relatively stable and organized, and rather than imposing a top-down structural imposition, it opens up an ‘affective, molecular micropolitics whereby continuity emerges in the not already (pre) determined circulation of habits, routines and discourses in and through the playing out of the ecologies of practice’ (Simpson, 2013, p. 194). Such an approach arguably goes some way to opening up the possibility of addressing relations of power in the formation of social worlds. Tonkiss (2013) approaches the materiality/sociality of a city through the lens of urban design. For her, then, the physical forms of the city – the housing stock, the buildings, the distributions and densities of the population, the transport systems, as well as the public/private relation – are all produced by the social, economic and political designs for the city. In this view, urban design objectives such as connectivity, permeability and accessibility are not just spatial objectives – they are social objectives also.

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334  Handbook of urban geography In this sense, they have to be read together. Her point is that a narrow definition of urban design as physical is inadequate. Rather, it should include policy and legal design also, as well as other forms of design – social, economic and organizational – which impact on city life. This thus represents another route into thinking through the material and social connection and interrelatedness in the city. In 2014, Amin usefully took stock of the current state of social science thinking with his notion of ‘lively infrastructure’ (Amin, 2014). The key aspects of this are the thinking together of the social and the material/ technological, where these are imagined as ‘hybrids of human and nonhuman association, with infrastructure conceptualized as a sociotechnical assemblage, and urban social life as never reducible to the purely human alone’ (Amin, 2014, p. 138). In such accounts, sociality in the city can only be conceived of in relation to the liveliness of sociotechnical systems. Amin categorizes the breadth of new thinking in three ways: that which approaches the city as a ‘provisioning machine’ – the sociotechnicalities involved in the distribution of services and resources; that which focuses on the symbolic power, affective and aesthetic qualities of the urban infrastructure; and thirdly, that which shows how visible and invisible, grand and everyday, infrastructures are implicated in individual and social experiences of the city shaping identities. There are so many different studies that have deployed different versions of these accounts in empirical case studies, to positive and intriguing effect, which cannot be covered here. Amin (2014), for example, takes his ideas on lively infrastructure to compare land occupations favela in Belo Horizonte in Brazil where he suggests that in the first case, the visibility of infrastructure was important in the construction of sociality and political claims, and in the latter case, where the invisibility of provisioning from the trunk road infrastructure made possible the opportunities for residents to exercise their citizenship. Simpson (2013), in an entirely different kind of place and study, deploys his ecological approach through looking at embodied experiences in practice, specifically street performance in the city of Bath. His point is that performing bodies co-emerge with the affective atmospheres of a specific ecology – and are themselves made up of multiple ‘organisms-in-their environments’ (Simpson, 2013, p. 186). Molotch and Noren (2010) explore public toilets/restrooms in New York, exploring how their design makes for certain forms of sociality and organizes bodies in particular ways. Thus, the person in the wheel chair and the young mother with a pushchair are constituted as subjects in common with similar concerns facing similar forms of exclusion in restricted spaces. These are but to mention three of the many case studies informed by these approaches.

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Sociality, materiality and the city  ­335

21.4  MAKING PUBLICS Sociality in the city happens and is performed in a multiplicity of sites, some of which could be designated public, some private and some in between or liminal, since private/public boundaries are blurry and hard to define. In the discussion which follows I refer to some of my own attempts to research the co-constitution of sociality and materiality in the arena of public space. In recent years, much of the writing on public space, social life and the making of publics has paid some attention to how the design and shape of cities affected social life as we saw earlier, but mostly took the material world as largely inert. The city and its public spaces were extolled for their potentialities for its ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’ and the co-mingling and encounter of strangers (Young, 1990, p. 2), for richer types of relationships amongst strangers (Sennett, 1990) and for providing possibilities for informal, mundane and everyday encounters between strangers for ‘rubbing along’ (Watson, 2006, p. 2). In much of this discussion of the public realm and public space, the city is dematerialized, it has no physical substance or solidity. In the last decade, my research into public space has itself taken a more material turn. In 2010 a group of us at the Open University, Amsterdam University and New York University were involved in framing a project on mundane objects in public space which saw them as actively engaged with making the social (Carter et al., 2011). The method of the project took as its starting point the conception of city objects as materializations of the actions of humans (designers, stakeholders, engineers, street cleaners, citizens) and non-humans (rules, laws, standards, prescriptions, plans) that are both present and absent. Thus, city objects – bollards, benches, bins, alarms – were understood as minor actants in the city yet microcosms that contain the whole city and are witnesses to the forces, wills, relations, subjectivities and power that make it up. The idea behind the project was to work through controversies and events – such as the moments of their making or remaking – we can identify and make visible those relations and forms of sociality that are materialized in and through city objects. We saw this as a way of understanding how objects are methods themselves for governing and ordering the city, as technologies for the strategic ordering of cities. But rather than a functionalist interpretation of the object, it aimed to open up questions of the relations, effects, indeterminacies and politics of object interventions. To take one example, in an exploration of the manuals and the websites for the product, street furniture comes alive as an object enrolling human subjects into particular modes of action and interaction through its very design. Davis (1990) famously showed how

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336  Handbook of urban geography the street benches in Los Angeles were designed to deter the homeless from sleeping on them. More recently I have turned to the matter of water to explore its role as a vibrant actor in making urban cultures and assembling multiple publics (Watson, 2019). In another study of a material public space – the laundry (Watson, 2015) – I explored how shifting laundry practices and technologies associated with this mundane object have over time summoned different spaces, socialities and socio-spatial assemblages in the city, enrolling different actors and multiple publics and constituting different associations, networks and relations in its wake as it travels from the home and back again. Focusing on the ‘thingness’ of washing, laundries and laundry spaces, I concluded by suggesting that doing the laundry has shaped and reshaped public/private boundaries shifting from privatized work in the home to the social spaces of the early wash houses, public laundries of the philanthropic and social housing estates, or later, of the launderette. As a private object made public through commercial laundry practices it became visible in the city in a different way, first in the commercial laundries scattered across the cities, and in its circulation in laundry vans on a daily basis, and later as a commonplace site in the launderettes of city high streets and in local neighbourhoods. As washing machines and tumble driers became more affordable, laundry practices once again departed the public sphere, reprivatized in the home, with the ‘public laundry’ of the service sectors, and the laundry of the minority upper classes, remaining the only dirty washing to move through the city to the remaining commercial laundries on the fringes of cities out of sight. This mundane object thus has had a mobile and shifting history enacting multiple socio-spatial, and gendered, relations and assemblages in the city, which have largely gone unnoticed in accounts of everyday urban life. On another terrain, that of everyday religious practices in the city, I have been interested in exploring the materialities of religious attachments (Dodsworth et al., 2013). In a study of attachments to religious sites in East London, our concern was to explore the mobilities and interconnections which are central to the formation of religious life and its architectures in cities. Religious practice and participation in religious communities have long been important for new migrants to the city as they seek spaces of belonging in a sometimes strange and alien world. Different groups of people, and migrants with different religious affiliations, settle and become attached to religious sites in different ways across time and space, making up multiple publics in the city and creating new urban materialities and cultures. Some people choose to place themselves out of sight and away from the regulating eyes of the mainstream community, while others, the more dominant and confident communities, build large

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Sociality, materiality and the city  ­337 religious buildings in the heart of the city, displaying their prominence and confidence in no uncertain way. In our research in the East End of London, which is an area of huge ethnic/racial and cultural diversity, we explored how religious communities form and stabilize attachments to their worshippers in the context of the significant demographic, economic and social flux. What we found was that the mechanisms devised to practice faith, spread the word and form attachment between worshippers and their community, extended far beyond matters of identity or even religious belief: those religious groups that were able to assemble durable communities did so by forming an assemblage that was at once liturgical, material, organizational, and social. At the material level, the very construction of religious buildings generated a physical presence in the city, which represented the community to itself and others in confident ways, while also providing spaces of sociality and connection. Internally, the material artefacts of the site enacted particular forms of religiosity and sociocultural practices that generated and assembled often marginalized groups into their spaces. Across a range of religious sites – Christian, Jewish and Muslim – embodied and material practices were thus revealed as crucial to religious attachments and socialities in the city.

21.5 CONCLUSION This chapter has considered how sociality and materiality in the city are coconstituted and mutually entangled in the city, which is itself a complex site of interconnections and embodied entanglements. Cities are material/social spaces which are formed and unformed in different configurations over time, constituted by sociomaterial and technological connections and networks, and entangled spaces of bodies, affects, things, urban infrastructures, pleasures, aesthetics, which are formed within fluid temporalities, spaces of flows and interconnections. Socialities, I have suggested, are performed, enacted and constituted in the spaces, sites, infrastructures and built environments of the city, while they themselves are also constitutive of the very city itself. As the chapter has illustrated, sociality and materiality in the city have in certain ways been conceived together in many writings on the city prior to what is often referred to as the ‘material turn’. We have seen, in the second section, that there was a diversity of ways of figuring and imagining the material/social together which variously take account of human and non-human association where sociality is seen as never distinct from vibrant sociotechnical systems and assemblages. These new ways of thinking sociality/materiality have produced a plethora of intriguing studies, which shift, for example, the making and unmaking of publics and

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338  Handbook of urban geography differences and understandings of social worlds from earlier frameworks which tended to disregard non-human actors in the city. Though these new directions in urban theory have proved highly productive for rethinking the city, I have argued that there is a danger, nevertheless, that the ‘social’ becomes flattened, and differences submerged, in a landscape sometimes devoid of any attention to power. I have concluded the chapter with some illustrations of how the material turn in urban geography and sociology have impacted my own thinking and research.

REFERENCES Amin, A. (2014), ‘Lively infrastructure’, Theory, Culture and Society, 31 (7/8), 137–161. Anderson, B. and P. Harrison (eds) (2010), Taking Place: Non- Representational Theories and Geography, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Anderson, B. and D. Tolia-Kelly (2004), ‘Matter(s) in social and cultural geography’, Geoforum, 35 (6), 669–674. Anderson, B. and J. Wylie (2009), ‘On geography and materiality’, Environment and Planning A, 41 (2), 318‒335. Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986), The Social Life of Things, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Beechey, V. (1979), ‘On patriarchy’, Feminist Review, 3 (1), 66–82. Benjamin, W. (1999), The Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bennett, J. (2001), The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bennett, J. (2009), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blandy, S., D. Lister, R. Atkinson and J. Flint (2003), Gated Communities: A Systematic Review of the Research Evidence, Bristol: ESRC Centre for Neighbourhood Research. Bridge, G. and S. Watson (eds) (2010), The New Companion to the City, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Carter, S., F. Dodsworth, E. Ruppert and S. Watson (2011), ‘Thinking cities through objects’, at http://research.gold.ac.uk/7986 (accessed 4 July 2018). Cresswell, T. (2012), ‘Review essay: non-representational theory and me: notes of an interested sceptic’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30 (1), 96–105. Davis, M. (1990), City of Quartz, New York: Vintage. Dodsworth, F., E. Vacchelli and S. Watson (2013), ‘Shifting religious practices in London’s East End’, Material Religion, 9 (1), 86–113. Engels, F. (1987), The Condition of the Working Class in England, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Firestone, S. (1970), The Dialectic of Sex, New York: William Morrow and Company. Harvey, D. (1978), ‘The urban process under capitalism: a framework for analysis’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2 (1–3), 101–131. Jackson, P. (2000), ‘Rematerializing social and cultural geography’, Social and Cultural Geography, 1 (1): 9–14. Jacobs, J. (1961), Death and Life of American Cities, New York: Jonathan Cape. Kabeer, N. (2015), ‘Grief and rage in India: making violence against women history?’, at https:// www.opendemocracy.net/5050/naila-kabeer/grief-and-rage-in-india-making-violence-again​ st-women-history (accessed 4 July 2018). Latham, A. and D. McCormack (2004), ‘Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 28 (6), 701–724. Latour, B. (1993), We Have Never Been Modern, London: Harvard University Press.

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Sociality, materiality and the city  ­339 Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lees, L. (2002), ‘Rematerializing geography: the “new” urban geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 26 (1), 101–112. Miller, D. (1987), Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, D. (ed.) (1998), Material Culture: Why Some Things Matter, London: University of Chicago Press. Molotch, H. and L. Noren (eds) (2010), Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, New York: New York University Press. Piketty, T. (2014), Capital in the Twenty First Century, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Sennett, R. (1990), The Conscience of the Eye: The Design of Social Life of Cities, London: Faber. Sennett, R. (2010), ‘Reflections on the public realm’, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds), A Companion to the City, London: Blackwell, pp. 380–387. Simmel, G. (1948), The Metropolis and Mental Life, translated by E. Shils from Social Sciences III Selections and Selected Readings, Volume 2, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simpson, P. (2013), ‘Ecologies of experience: materiality, sociality, and the embodied experience of (street) performing’, Environment and Planning A, 45 (1), 180–196. Thrift, N. (2007), Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge. Tonkiss, F. (2013), Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form, London: Polity. Tonnies, F. (2001), Community and Civil Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walby, S. (1990), Theorising Patriarchy, Oxford: Blackwell. Watson, S. (2006), City Publics: The (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters, London: Routledge. Watson, S. (2015), ‘Mundane objects in the city: laundry practices and the making and remaking of public/private sociality and space in London and New York’, Urban Studies, 52 (5), 876–890. Watson, S. (2019), City Water Matters: Cultures, Practices and Entanglements of Urban Water, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Webber, R. and R. Burrows (2016), ‘Life in an Alpha Territory: discontinuity and conflict in an elite London “village”’, Urban Studies, 53 (15), 3139–3154. Whatmore, S. (2002), Hybrid Geographies, London: Sage. Young, I. M. (1990), Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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22.  Spaces of encounter: learning to live together in superdiverse cities Nick Schuermans

22.1 INTRODUCTION According to Vertovec (2007), we are currently living in the era of ‘superdiversity’. With this term, he points at a quantitative shift in the number of immigrants in major cities and a qualitative shift in the characteristics of these newcomers. While scholars used to distinguish between ethnic minorities with seemingly clear-cut profiles, it has now become necessary to grasp the complex interplay between ethnicity and a range of other variables (Geldof, 2016). Because of the acceleration of migration, the splintering of lifestyles and the growing gap between the rich and the poor, residents of cities as diverse as Singapore, Birmingham, Chicago and Johannesburg need to negotiate the fact that many of the people they interact with in their everyday lives have a different cultural background, ethnicity, lifestyle, religion, gender, sexual orientation, mother tongue, socio-economic profile, legal status and/or country of origin than themselves (e.g. Wilson, 2011; Vertovec, 2015). Among urban geographers and other scholars in the field of urban studies, there are two opposing views on the way urban residents deal with these social, economic and cultural differences. Bauman (2003) calls them the ‘city of hopes’ and the ‘city of fears’. In the ‘city of fears’, two different, but interrelated purification strategies are set up to eradicate difference and to maintain homogeneity (Sibley, 1988; Bauman, 1995). The first strategy entails surveillance, discipline and assimilation. It is based on the conviction that ‘strangers’ can be incorporated into the dominant social group if they learn to conform to the norms and values of that group (e.g. Brubaker, 2001). The second strategy involves expulsion, exclusion and segregation. It is based on the idea that encounters with abject strangers can be avoided through the enforcement of spatial boundaries and social control (e.g. Sibley, 1995; Caldeira, 1996; De Cauter, 2004; Atkinson, 2016). While much of the Urban Studies literature considers the city in terms of exclusion, purification and segregation, it is also infused with the more optimistic image of the city as a site of encounter, interaction and 340

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Spaces of encounter  ­341 c­ onnection. Bauman (2003) calls this the ‘city of hopes’. In this vision, difference is not something to be feared and excluded, but something to be celebrated and learnt from. In many urban areas, people of different backgrounds and profiles get in contact with each other and learn to live with each other’s differences (Sennett, 1970; Amin, 2012). Occasional exchanges in the public spaces of a city and informal interactions at work, at school or at leisure allow people with different migration histories, cultural backgrounds and/or socio-economic situations to get to know each other and to develop a growing respect for difference (Amin, 2002). In the words of Iris Marion Young (1990, p. 119), the result is a city ‘where one should expect to encounter and hear from those who are different, whose social perspectives, experiences and affiliations are different’. Over the last decade, the geographies of encounter literature has stimulated a resurgence of this last vision (Valentine, 2008; Wilson, 2017). Often building upon Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis and micro-sociological work by Goffman (1963) and Lofland (1998), researchers in this field are interested in the potential outcomes of interpersonal interactions in ‘contact zones’ (Askins and Pain, 2011) or ‘spaces of encounters’ (Leitner, 2012). Inspired by multidisciplinary research on the lived realities of superdiversity and multiculture (e.g. Wise and Velayutham, 2009; Wessendorf, 2014), their basic argument is that everyday encounters across lines of race, class, gender, age and so on taking place in shared spaces can make people reconsider prevailing meanings, discomforts and anxieties around difference and pave the way for more progressive alliances (Figure 22.1). Wilson and Darling (2016, p. 10) underline, indeed, that encounters are not simply about the meeting and the maintenance of differences, but also about the destabilization, the reworking and the making of differences in unpredictable ways. In this chapter, I summarize research on encounters in the field of Urban Geography. Drawing upon the seminal work of Goffman (1963) and Lofland (1998), I will, first, distinguish between two types of encounter in two types of shared spaces: Section 22.2 investigates fleeting encounters in public spaces; Section 22.3 discusses shared activities in parochial spaces (Matejskova and Leitner, 2011; Winiarska, 2015; Schuermans, 2017). These two sections will substantiate Amin’s (2012, p. 59) argument that ‘the social dynamic of working, living, playing or studying together is quite different from that of strangers rubbing along SHARED SPACE

ENCOUNTER

EFFECT

Figure 22.1  The main hypothesis in the geographies of encounter literature

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342  Handbook of urban geography (or not) in public space’. Afterwards, I will point at three important issues to take up in the geographies of encounter literature. They relate to the interrelations between encounters at different times and places (Section 22.4), the potential effects of encounters (Section 22.5) and the mediation of encounters by personal experiences, public discourses and professional interventions (Section 22.6).

22.2 UNFOCUSED INTERACTIONS IN THE PUBLIC REALM In Urban Geography, most empirical work on encounters has been conducted in streets (Valentine, 2008; Leitner, 2012), squares (Low, 2000), parks (Neal et al., 2015), libraries (Peterson, 2017), trains (Bissell, 2010) or buses (Wilson, 2011). Goffman (1963, p. 24) would call most interactions in these places ‘unfocused’: ‘the kind of communication that occurs when one gleans information about another person present by glancing at him, if only momentarily, as he passes into and then out of one’s view’. In the framework of Lofland (1998), most of them occur in the public realm. This social realm is characterized by fleeting exchanges and short-lived encounters between people who remain strangers to each other. Urban geographers studying unfocused interactions in the public realm often infer that the public spaces of a city are sites of encounter and possibility. By using terms such as ‘commonplace diversity’ (Wessendorf, 2013) or ‘conviviality’ (Wessendorf, 2014; Nayak, 2017), they indicate that fleeting encounters with strangers have become an ordinary feature of the public realm for many urban residents. Drawing on observations and interviews in Rotterdam, Peterson (2017) emphasizes the importance of fleeting encounters and bodily co-presence in public libraries as they nurture a sense of collective life which makes people feel at home in their superdiverse neighbourhoods. In the same way, Wilson’s (2011) observational study of a bus line in Birmingham taught her that repeated journeys allow for the emergence of multicultural intimacies. Even when bus passengers do not talk with each other, cohesive relations and new modes of belonging develop on the bus. As such, these scholars argue that fleeting encounters contribute to a sense of familiarity with – and a feeling of belonging in – superdiversity. In this way, the racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious or cultural particularities of others do not necessarily pose an insuperable problem any longer (Gilroy, 2006, p. 27; Blokland and Nast, 2014). Nonetheless, many urban geographers also shatter the idea that prevailing meanings, discomforts and anxieties around race and class are easily reconciled through unfocused interactions in the public realm (Haldrup

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Spaces of encounter  ­343 et al., 2006; Valentine, 2008). My own research with middle class whites in Cape Town indicates, for instance, that the preconceived categories of whiteness, blackness, poverty and wealth are generally not challenged, but confirmed when unexpected encounters across lines of race and class are refracted through the prism of crime and fear of crime (Schuermans, 2016a). In privileged suburbs of Cape Town, many incidental encounters in public space are dominated by very strong feelings of fear and anxiety. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2000, 2004) theories about the role of vision and touch in encounters with strangers, I concluded that such encounters are not only informed by classed and racialized stereotypes, but that they also encourage people to uphold such stereotypes. In her study on Singapore’s Jurong West district, Ye (2016) explains how encounters between Chinese, Malays, Indians and new migrants are not so much dominated by fear, but by constant judgements and re-enactments of local norms of civility and normative views about appropriate conduct in public space (cf. Amin, 2012, p. 65). Drawing on focus-group discussions and in-depth autobiographical interviews with middle class whites in England, Valentine (2008) emphasizes, very much along the same line, that her racist informants felt such a big need to be politically correct that they curtailed the public expression of their prejudices and stereotypes. Because a seemingly positive attitude towards minority populations in a one-to-one encounter did not necessarily entail a wider feeling of solidarity and care, she concluded that ‘some of the writing about cosmopolitanism and new urban citizenship appears to be laced with a worrying romanticization of urban encounter and to implicitly reproduce a potentially naive assumption that contact with “others” necessarily translates into respect for difference’ (Valentine, 2008, p. 325).

22.3 FOCUSED INTERACTIONS IN THE PAROCHIAL REALM Many urban geographers argue that fundamental changes in the capacity to live with difference can best be achieved when different categories of people engage in shared activities on a regular basis (Matejskova and Leitner, 2011; Winiarska, 2015). For Goffman (1963, p. 24), this social dynamic is mostly marked by focused interactions. In his definition, they occur ‘when persons gather close together and openly cooperate to sustain a single focus of attention’. For Lofland (1998), such interactions take place mostly in the parochial realm. This social realm is marked by more communal relationships between neighbours, colleagues or acquaintances who do not remain – or have never been – strangers to each other.

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344  Handbook of urban geography Over the last decade, many urban geographers have studied the effects of focused interactions in parochial places marked by socio-economic, ethnic or cultural diversity. By way of example, Askins and Pain (2011) engaged in participatory research in a community art project with young people of African and British heritage taking place in a community centre in Newcastle upon Tyne. They found out that joint and recurring activities in which people of different backgrounds work closely together can counter racist and ethnocentric prejudices. Paying close attention to the tactile engagements of everyone involved, they underline how a complex interplay between subjects and objects nurtures transformative changes in social relations. Similarly, Lawson and Elwood (2014) point at shifts in neoliberal understandings of poverty among staff members of a welfare office in rural Montana. Taking up Gibson-Graham’s (2006, p. xxvii) challenge to develop an ‘ontology of a politics of possibility’, they demonstrate that encounters between privileged and underprivileged people can not only be moments of exclusion and social control, but also moments of transgression in which hegemonic understandings of poverty and privilege are troubled. Urban geographers also pay attention to focused interactions at school. Mainly drawing on observations and in-depth interviews, they reveal that multicultural networks develop in spaces of education and that an awareness of cultural differences, religious sensitivities and multilingualism can inform more socially inclusive practices. Based on extensive fieldwork in English primary schools, Hemming (2011) and Neal and Vincent (2013) confirm, for instance, that encounters in classrooms and at school gates allow children and parents from different cultures and religions to understand each other’s habits and to develop friendships outside their own communities. Likewise, Wilson’s (2014) ethnographic research with white British parents in a multicultural primary school in Birmingham demonstrates that many of their encounters with Muslim mothers and children are characterized by discourses of loss – or even betrayal – of British norms and values, but that new lines of commonality and solidarity can also develop around shared parental commitments. While we may not forget that many focused interactions in daily life are shaped by – and reproduce – unequal power relations, it would also be a mistake to dismiss the possibility that attitudes, stereotypes and discourses towards various forms of difference can be challenged, questioned and ultimately maybe even reworked through repeated encounters across lines of race, class or sexuality. Many studies on focused interactions in the parochial realm confirm Amin’s (2002) assertion that people are able to unlearn fixed relations by adopting new patterns of social interaction in common activities at school, at leisure or at work. Engaging with strangers

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Spaces of encounter  ­345 in a factory, a youth centre, a church or a sports club, Amin (2002, p. 970) argues, ‘disrupts easy labelling of the stranger as enemy and initiates new attachments’. Recurring interactions in these places ‘are moments of cultural destabilization’, he adds, ‘offering individuals the chance to break out of fixed relations and fixed notions, and through this, to learn to become different through new patterns of social interaction’ (Amin, 2002, p. 970). When strangers assume joint responsibility for their work, school or football club, it is possible that they learn to see each other as co-workers, co-learners or teammates and stop treating each other as strangers (Matejskova and Leitner, 2011; Wessendorf, 2014).

22.4 ENCOUNTERS AT DIFFERENT TIMES AND PLACES In general, urban geographers assume that both focused and unfocused interactions across lines of race, class, ethnicity or sexuality have effects beyond their spatial and temporal immediacy. On the one hand, encounters in the here and now are said to be informed by the recollection of encounters in the past. On the other hand, the positive effects of presentday encounters are also expected to endure in encounters in the future. Hence, Wilson and Darling’s (2016, p. 11) contention that ‘encounters are points of unanticipated exposure to difference that are situated within personal and collective histories as well as imagined futures’. Most studies cited in the two previous sections struggle to disentangle the connections between the past, the present and the future, however. By observing encounters in one particular place and time or by interviewing people about such encounters, researchers fail to consider connections with both former and forthcoming encounters. In the words of Valentine and Sadgrove (2012, p. 2050), ‘observational accounts cannot know how such momentary everyday negotiations and enactments are refracted through the personal histories of those observed – what people bring to encounters from their past which might prefigure the interactions observed; or their durability – whether the engagements recorded will be meaningful in terms of having lasting effects on the participants that may rematerialize in future encounters’. To grasp the interrelations between past, present and future encounters, Valentine and Sadgrove (2012, 2014) propose a biographical approach. Drawing on an audio-diary of everyday encounters, a life story interview, a second interview about attitudes towards difference and a third memberchecking interview to discuss preliminary findings, they indicate how focused interactions at home, at work, at church and at school tend to

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346  Handbook of urban geography reify moral dispositions throughout people’s lives, but that they can also act as catalysts of subtle or even dramatic changes in people’s dispositions and conducts at other moments in life (cf. Nayak, 2017). In her study on the transnational circulation of values, attitudes and practices towards difference, Gawlewicz (2015) confirms the potential of encounters at home and in other private spaces of family life over the life course. In fact, she demonstrates that the encounters of Polish migrants in the multicultural context of the UK are passed on, challenged and contested on visits to their significant others in Poland. A second strategy to reveal the interrelations between encounters at different times and places is rooted in the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry, 2006). As mobility has become such a central element in people’s lives, Kwan (2013) proposes to study spatio-temporal experiences through a people-based approach, rather than a place-based one. Instead of focusing on a particular place – in general, the place of residence – she advises to put the spotlight on a group of people and the experiences they have in the places they visit throughout their mobile lives (Leitner, 2012; Baumann, 2016; Schuermans, 2016b). Based on such a people-based approach, my own research with middle class whites in Cape Town demonstrates how focused and unfocused interactions in different places interact with each other. On the one hand, it was clear that regular exposure to informal settlements from the safe capsule of the car allowed many of my respondents to contextualize their personal talks with domestic workers at home (Schuermans, 2013). On the other hand, many of my interviewees also suggested that driving past an informal settlement or a poor township had become a different experience once they got to know people living under such circumstances (Schuermans, 2017). Taken together, these biographical and people-based studies demonstrate that the full potential of encounters across difference can only be discovered if attention is paid to the full gamut of potentially meaningful encounters in the private, the parochial and the public realm, together with the way in which focused and unfocused interactions add up to each other through the mobile lives of people. Nonetheless, the value of all placebased approaches should not necessarily be discarded. As long as urban geographers refrain from adopting a place-bound perspective and choose to study places relationally (Massey, 1991; Amin, 2004), they will come to understand that encounters in the places they study are influenced by – or have an effect upon – encounters at other times and places. Harvey’s (2005, p. 96) argument that ‘an event or a thing at a point in space cannot be understood by appeal to what exists only at that point’ and that ‘a wide variety of disparate influences swirling over space in the past, present and future concentrate and congeal at a certain point . . . to define the nature

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Spaces of encounter  ­347 of that point’, goes as much for places of encounter as it goes for the spatialized political and collective memories he was thinking of.

22.5  THE EFFECTS OF ENCOUNTERS The increased attention for focused and unfocused interactions across lines of race, class and ethnicity in various urban spaces of encounter reflects the conviction that such encounters can be meaningful (e.g. Valentine, 2008; Askins and Pain, 2011; Hemming, 2011; Mayblin et al., 2016). Different authors have come to understand this meaningfulness in different ways: as a reduction of prejudice (Valentine and Sadgrove, 2014), as an increase of empathy (Matejskova and Leitner, 2011), as an increased respect for difference (Valentine, 2008), as a deeper tolerance for others (Wilson, 2011), as a change of values and attitudes (Gawlewicz, 2016), as a disruption of preconceived categories, boundaries, stereotypes and understandings (Leitner, 2012; Lawson and Elwood, 2014) and so on. In any case, most of the effects of encounters are considered to be attitudinal and discursive, rather than behavioural. By ignoring what people do, much scholarship on the geographies of encounter struggles with the possibility that there could be an inconsistency between the values, the attitudes and the stereotypes people express in interviews or surveys and the actual practices they deploy in their everyday lives. On the one hand, Valentine (2008, p. 330) indicates that people with liberal values may eschew encounters with difference because they feel uneasy about their economic and cultural privilege and do not know how to show respect across inequalities. On the other hand, there is also a concern that seemingly civil exchanges and courteous behaviour with individual members of a certain group actually conceal deeper-held prejudices held vis-à-vis that group as a whole. In their focus group study with Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus, Valentine and Waite (2012) point out, for instance, that heterosexual people of faith are able to separate their positive conduct with individual lesbians and gay men from their religious beliefs about homosexuality and sexual morality more broadly (Valentine and Sadgrove, 2012, p. 2057). To overcome this gap between values and behaviour, it is essential to complement studies on changing attitudes and rhetorical gestures with research on the practices nurtured by meaningful encounters with difference (Schuermans and Debruyne, 2017). Eventually, this will also open up a perspective on the political transformation and change that can be initiated through encounters (Wilson and Darling, 2016). By way of example, Askins (2015, 2016) substantiates, in her research on a befriending scheme

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348  Handbook of urban geography between refugees, asylum seekers and more settled residents in Newcastle (England), that encounters do not only have the potential to shift how we see and feel about different groups in society, but that they can also nurture attempts to remake local place – or society at large – in more inclusive ways. Different theoretical frameworks can help us to conceptualize such attempts as ordinary citizenship (Staeheli et al., 2012), acts of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen, 2008) or practices of solidarity (Oosterlynck et al., 2016).

22.6 MEDIATION Many arguments in favour of social mix in neighbourhoods, schools and social housing estates rely on the conviction that the mere fact of bringing people of different backgrounds together is sufficient to achieve incremental change in values, discourses and/or practices, both among minority and majority populations (Schuermans et al., 2015). Scholars interested in the geographies of encounter clarify, however, that such a straightforward connection between spatial and social proximity is not only invalid because of micro-processes of self-segregation (e.g. Andersson et al., 2012), but also because of the impact of previous experiences, popular discourses, structural mechanisms and power relations on focused and unfocused interactions across difference (Wilson, 2011; Amin, 2012; Ye, 2016). In the words of Swanton (2010, p. 459), ‘newspaper stories, past experiences, gossip, micropolitical baggage, and rumour are sedimented in layers of virtual memory immanent to each moment of encounter’. Many scholars acknowledge that focused and unfocused interactions are not only mediated by individual biographies, talks with family members and civic principles of coexistence and interaction, but also by representations of diversity and difference in television reports, news­ paper articles, school textbooks, Internet forums or political propaganda. Nonetheless, only few of them have made the particularities of these interrelations explicit in their research. After an ethnographic study of the Marzahn neighbourhood in eastern Berlin, Matejskova and Leitner (2011, p. 735) suggest, however, that regular encounters between migrant and non-migrant residents often have a limited role in resolving conflicts and hostilities as they ‘are underwritten by much broader and complex processes of marginalization and deeply entrenched unequal power relations among different social groups, operating and enacted at multiple sites and scales’. Drawing on a comparison between two primary schools located in multi-faith districts of an urban area in the North of England, Hemming (2011) also concludes that interactions between children from different ethnic and religious backgrounds are strongly influenced by the

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Spaces of encounter  ­349 school’s efforts to propagate the values of kindness, tolerance and respect and to create an emotional climate where racism and bullying are deemed socially unacceptable. Hence, these studies demonstrate that a good understanding of the mediation process is necessary to open up an intervention perspective on encounters. In a context where policymakers consider managed contact and staged encounters as a panacea for many social ills, it is essential to move beyond the naive belief that spatial co-presence an sich fosters meaningful contact across difference. In their qualitative study of an interfaith cricket project in the UK, Mayblin et al. (2016) found out, for instance, that transformations in values and discourses are not only instigated by the provision of safe places where differences can be explored together, but also through professional interferences of skilled facilitators. Likewise, Wilson’s (2013) participation in a diversity training did not only make her attentive to the spatial configuration of chairs and flowers in the workshop rooms, but also to the well-tailored exercises, the well-timed questions and the icebreaker strategies of the workshop facilitators. By paying attention to the different ways in which encounters are mediated by professional actors, it becomes clear that the gathering of people in a particular place is only the first step in an intervention process to nurture belonging and solidarity across difference.

22.7 CONCLUSION Drawing on the arguments advanced in this chapter, Figure 22.2 summarizes many of the current insights in the geographies of encounter literature. Following the hypothesis schematized in Figure 22.1, the first column differentiates between encounters taking place in public, parochial and private spaces; the second one distinguishes between focused and unfocused interactions; and the third one categorizes attitudinal, discursive and behavioural effects of encounters. Three important issues to take up in the geographies of encounter literature are visualized in the figure. First, a reference has been added to the need to overcome a place-bound perspective. As explained above, this can be done by conducting life-course interviews, by undertaking research from a mobile, people-based perspective or by studying places of encounter relationally. Second, another reference has been included to remind us that the effects of encounters are not necessarily positive. Civil interaction with strangers often reproduce prejudiced values, exclusionary discourses and discriminatory practices. Third, the figure encompasses a triangle which symbolizes the way in which encounters are mediated by

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350  Handbook of urban geography

PUBLIC SPACE e.g. streets, squares, parks, markets, trains, buses, etc. PAROCHIAL SPACE e.g neighbourhoods, work places, schools, community centres, art projects, churches, sports clubs, etc.

ENCOUNTER

EFFECT

UNFOCUSED INTERACTIONS VALUES fleeting exchanges, -reduction of prejudice - increase in tolerance short-lived encounters visual exposure - increase of empathy glancing - change in attitudes FOCUSED INTERACTIONS shared activities cooperation working, living, playing or studying together

PRIVATE SPACE e.g homes and other spaces of family life MEDIATION

DISCOURSES - disruption of preconceived categories and stereotypes - troubling of understandings PRACTICES - ordinary citizenship - acts of citizenship - acts of solidarity

NOT NECESSARILY POSITIVE

OVERCOMING A PLACE-BOUND PERSPECTIVE

SHARED SPACE

Fears and anxieties Individual biographies Local norms of civility Unequal power relations Professional interventions by skilled facilitators Public discourses in newspaper articles, television reports, online forums, ...

Figure 22.2  Summary of the geographies of encounter literature fears and anxieties, local norms of civility, personal biographies, unequal power relations, professional interventions, public discourses and so on. Now that the capacity to live with difference has become an important asset in cities all over the world, it is of utmost importance to understand the lived realities of encounter in their full complexity. Rather than assuming that encounters across difference automatically translate into respect and tolerance, these three additions to the geographies of encounter literature can help us to find out where, when and how encounters can make people reconsider long-standing ways of talking about – and dealing with – people who are not like them. As such, the figure can be treated as an invitation to study cities not only as places of segregation and exclusion, but also as places of interaction and encounter.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2000), Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality, London: Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, London: Routledge.

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Spaces of encounter  ­351 Allport, G. (1954), The Nature of Prejudice, Reading: Addison-Wesley. Amin, A. (2002), ‘Ethnicity and the multicultural city: living with diversity’, Environment and Planning A, 34 (6), 959–980. Amin, A. (2004), ‘Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place’, Geografiska Annaler B, 86 (1), 33–44. Amin, A. (2012), Land of Strangers, Cambridge: Polity Press. Andersson, J., J. Sadgrove and G. Valentine (2012), ‘Consuming campus: geographies of encounter at a British university’, Social & Cultural Geography, 13 (5), 501–515. Askins, K. (2015), ‘Being together: everyday geographies and the quiet politics of belonging’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14 (2), 461–469. Askins, K. (2016), ‘Emotional citizenry: everyday geographies of befriending, belonging and intercultural encounter’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41 (4), 515–527. Askins, K. and R. Pain (2011), ‘Contact zones: participation, materiality, and the messiness of interaction’, Environment and Planning D, 29 (5), 803–821. Atkinson, R. (2016), ‘Limited exposure: social concealment, mobility and engagement with public space by the super-rich in London’, Environment and Planning A, 48 (7), 1302–1317. Bauman, Z. (1995), ‘Making and unmaking of strangers’, Thesis Eleven, 43 (1), 1–16. Bauman, Z. (2003), City of Fears, City of Hopes, London: Goldsmiths College. Baumann, H. (2016), ‘Enclaves, borders, and everyday movements: Palestinian marginal mobility in East Jerusalem’, Cities, 59 (1), 173–182. Bissell, D. (2010), ‘Passenger mobilities: affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport’, Environment and Planning D, 28 (2), 270–289. Blokland, T. and J. Nast (2014), ‘From public familiarity to comfort zone: the relevance of absent ties for belonging in Berlin’s mixed neighbourhoods’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (4), 1142–1159. Brubaker, R. (2001), ‘The return of assimilation? Changing perspectives on immigration and its sequels in France, Germany, and the United States’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24 (4), 531–548. Caldeira, T. (1996), ‘Fortified enclaves: the new urban segregation’, Public Culture, 8, 303–328. De Cauter, L. (2004), De Capsulaire Beschaving. Over de Stad in het Tijdperk van Angst, Rotterdam: NAi-publishers. Gawlewicz, A. (2015), ‘“We inspire each other, subconsciously”: the circulation of attitudes towards difference between Polish migrants in the UK and their significant others in the sending society’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (13), 2215–2234. Gawlewicz, A. (2016), ‘Beyond openness and prejudice: the consequences of migrant encounters with difference’, Environment & Planning A, 48 (2), 256–272. Geldof, D. (2016), Superdiversity in the Heart of Europe. How Migration Changes our Society, Leuven: Acco. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gilroy, P. (2006), ‘Multiculture in times of war: an inaugural lecture given at the London School of Economics’, Critical Quarterly, 48 (4), 27–45. Goffman, E. (1963), Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, New York: The Free Press. Haldrup, M., L. Koefoed and K. Simonsen (2006), ‘Practical orientalism – bodies, everyday life and the construction of otherness’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography, 88 (2), 173–184. Harvey, D. (2005), ‘Space as a key word’, in David Harvey (ed.), Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, pp. 93–118. Hemming, P. J. (2011), ‘Meaningful encounters? Religion and social cohesion in the English primary school’, Social & Cultural Geography, 12 (1), 63–81. Isin, E. F. and G. M. Nielsen (2008), Acts of Citizenship, London: Zed Books.

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352  Handbook of urban geography Kwan, M. (2013), ‘Beyond space (as we knew it): toward temporally integrated geographies of segregation, health, and accessibility’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (5), 1078–1086. Lawson, V. and S. Elwood (2014), ‘Encountering poverty: space, class, and poverty politics’, Antipode, 46 (1), 209–228. Leitner, H. (2012), ‘Spaces of encounters: immigration, race, class, and the politics of belonging in small-town America’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (4), 828–846. Lofland, L. H. (1998), The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory, Piscataway: Transaction Publishers. Low, S. M. (2000), On the Plaza. The Politics of Public Space and Culture, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Massey, D. (1991), ‘A global sense of place’, Marxism Today’, 35, 24–29. Matejskova, T. and H. Leitner (2011), ‘Urban encounters with difference: the contact hypothesis and immigrant integration projects in eastern Berlin’, Social & Cultural Geography, 12 (7), 717–741. Mayblin, L., G. Valentine and J. Andersson (2016), ‘In the contact zone: engineering meaningful encounters across difference through an interfaith project’, The Geographical Journal, 182 (2), 213–222. Nayak, A. (2017), ‘Purging the nation: race, conviviality and embodied encounters in the lives of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (2), 289–302. Neal, S. and C. Vincent (2013), ‘Multiculture, middle class competencies and friendship practices in super-diverse geographies’, Social & Cultural Geography, 14 (8), 909–929. Neal, S., K. Bennett, H. Jones, A. Cochrane and G. Mohan (2015), ‘Multiculture and public parks: researching super-diversity and attachment in public green space’, Population, Space and Place, 21 (5), 463–475. Oosterlynck, S., M. Loopmans, N. Schuermans, J. Vandenabeele and S. Zemni (2016), ‘Putting flesh to the bone, looking for solidarity in diversity, here and now’, Ethnic & Racial Studies, 39 (5), 764–782. Peterson, M. (2017), ‘Living with difference in hyper-diverse areas: how important are encounters in semi-public spaces?’ Social & Cultural Geography, 8, 1067–1085. Schuermans, N. (2013), ‘Ambivalent geographies of encounter inside and around the fortified homes of middle class whites in Cape Town’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 28 (4), 679–688. Schuermans, N. (2016a), ‘On the politics of vision and touch: encountering fearful and fearsome bodies in Cape Town, South Africa’, in Jonathan Darling and Helen F. Wilson (eds), Encountering the City. Urban Encounters from Accra to New York, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 97–110. Schuermans, N. (2016b), ‘Enclave urbanism as telescopic urbanism? Encounters of middle class whites in Cape Town’, Cities, 59 (1), 183–192. Schuermans, N. (2017), ‘White, middle class South Africans moving through Cape Town: mobile encounters with strangers’, Social & Cultural Geography, 18 (1), 34–52. Schuermans, N. and P. Debruyne (2017), ‘Learning to cope with superdiversity: place-based solidarities at a (pre-)primary catholic school in Leuven, Belgium’, in Stijn Oosterlynck, Nick Schuermans and Maarten Loopmans (eds), Place, Diversity and Solidarity, London: Routledge, pp. 33–50. Schuermans, N., B. Meeus and P. De Decker (2015), ‘Geographies of whiteness and wealth: white, middle class discourses on segregation and social mix in Flanders, Belgium’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 37 (4), 478–495. Sennett, R. (1970), The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life, New York: Alfred A Knopf. Sheller, M. and J. Urry (2006), ‘The new mobilities paradigm’, Environment and Planning A, 38 (2), 207–226. Sibley, D. (1988), ‘Survey 13: purification of space’, Environment and Planning D, 6 (4), 409–421.

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Spaces of encounter  ­353 Sibley, D. (1995), Geographies of Exclusion. Society and Difference in the West, London: Routledge. Staeheli, L. A., P. Ehrkamp, H. Leitner and C. R. Nagel (2012), ‘Dreaming the ordinary: daily life and the complex geographies of citizenship’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (5), 628–644. Swanton, D. (2010), ‘Flesh, metal, road: tracing the machinic geographies of race’, Environment and Planning D, 28 (3), 447–466. Valentine, G. (2008), ‘Living with difference: reflections on geographies of encounter’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (3), 323–337. Valentine, G. and J. Sadgrove (2012), ‘Lived difference: a narrative account of spatiotemporal processes of social differentiation’, Environment and Planning A, 44 (9), 2049–2063. Valentine, G. and J. Sadgrove (2014), ‘Biographical narratives of encounter: the significance of mobility and emplacement in shaping attitudes towards difference’, Urban Studies, 51 (9), 1979–1994. Valentine, G. and L. Waite (2012), ‘Negotiating difference through everyday encounters: the case of sexual orientation and religion and belief ’, Antipode, 44 (2), 474–492. Vertovec, S. (2007), ‘Super-diversity and its implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 (6), 1024–1054. Vertovec, S. (ed.) (2015), Diversities Old and New. Migration and Socio-Spatial Patterns in New York, Singapore and Johannesburg, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wessendorf, S. (2013), ‘Commonplace diversity and the “ethos of mixing”: perceptions of difference in a London neighbourhood’, Identities, 20 (4), 407–422. Wessendorf, S. (2014), ‘“Being open, but sometimes closed”: conviviality in a super-diverse London neighbourhood’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 17 (4), 392–405. Wilson, H. F. (2011), ‘Passing propinquities in the multicultural city: the everyday encounters of bus passengering’, Environment and Planning A, 43 (3), 634–649. Wilson, H. F. (2013), ‘Learning to think differently: diversity training and the “good encounter”’, Geoforum, 45 (1), 73–82. Wilson, H. F. (2014), ‘Multicultural learning: parent encounters with difference in a Birmingham primary school’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39 (1), 102–114. Wilson, H. F. (2017), ‘On geography and encounter; bodies, borders, and difference’. Progress in Human Geography, 41 (4), 451–471. Wilson, H. F. and J. Darling (2016), ‘The possibilities of encounter’, in Jonathan Darling and Helen F. Wilson (eds), Encountering the City: Urban Encounters from Accra to New York, Milton Park: Routledge, pp. 1–24. Winiarska, A. (2015), ‘Intercultural neighbourly encounters in Warsaw from the perspective of Goffman’s sociology of interaction’, Central and Eastern European Migration Review, 4 (2), 43–60. Wise, A. and S. Velayutham (eds) (2009), Everyday Multiculturalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ye, J. (2016), ‘Spatialising the politics of coexistence: gui ju (规矩) in Singapore’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41 (1), 91–103. Young, I. M. (1990), Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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23.  Children’s geographies: encounters and experiences Peter Kraftl

23.1 INTRODUCTION Children’s Geographies is a well-established and relatively large subdiscipline of Human Geography. The sub-discipline can trace its roots back to several fields of scholarship, including early urban ethnographies by the Chicago School and William Bunge (1973), psychologists’ studies of children’s environmental cognition (Matthews, 1992), and the increasing influence of feminist geographies of (for instance) parenting cultures during the 1990s (Holloway, 1998). In relation to the latter subfield, the study of children in Geography was in fact part of a broader turn to social difference within Human Geography, entailing a similar commitment to representing the experiences and, especially, the voices of marginalized groups. Scholarship in Children’s Geographies also owes much to parallel developments in Sociology and Anthropology, which saw the foundation of the so-called ‘New Social Studies of Childhood’ (NSSC). Critical of models of child development that were prevalent in Psychology, NSSC scholars sought to emphasize three principles: that childhood is a social construction, and not (only) a ‘natural’, biological state through which all humans pass; that children are a marginalized but important demographic group whose agency and voice deserve greater recognition by both the academy and society at large; and, that children’s experiences are hugely diverse – historically, geographically and socially (e.g. James and Prout, 2015). Children’s Geographies remains a cross-disciplinary field of study. Nevertheless, in distinction to NSSC, one can distil some key characteristics. Children’s geographers’ commitment to the spatiality of children’s lives means that their political and empirical commitment has been to certain kinds of experiences, such as (independent) mobilities and migrations, institutional power relations and identities, and interactions with ‘nature’ (Nairn and Kraftl, 2016). They have also emphasized that childhood is not merely a social construction but a spatial one (Holloway and Valentine, 2000). Thus, one may discern how the very materialities of a school space 354

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Children’s geographies  ­355 both represent and embody particular idea(l)s about childhood, which in turn play structure children’s, teachers’ and adults’ everyday interactions with those spaces (Kraftl, 2006). Within the subfield of Children’s Geographies, urban-based research has been particularly prominent. This chapter begins by reviewing some of that scholarship, including both ‘classic’ studies and more recent, cutting-edge research. Throughout, it highlights the (political) point made repeatedly by childhood researchers that children are not only affected by or resistant to processes of urban change, but are key agents in shaping urban spaces. Subsequently, the chapter reflects upon two key themes that have driven debate in children’s geographies in recent years: first, the relative lack of cross-fertilization between Children’s Geographies and Urban Studies; second, the possible political importance of children’s everyday urban experiences.

23.2 CHILDREN’S GEOGRAPHIES IN (AND OF) URBAN PLACES This section reviews scholarship on children’s geographies in urban places. Given the enormity of this task, it is necessarily partial and, in keeping with the overarching theme for Part V of the Handbook, it focuses on urban encounters and experiences. It also emphasizes research that is not only situated in urban spaces but where urban processes, thematics and socialities are foregrounded. This section examines three of the most significant themes in both classic and cutting-edge studies of children in urban places. Some of these will be very familiar to children’s geographers but it is necessary to introduce them for the broader readership of this volume. Others reflect emergent debates in the sub-discipline. The three themes are: mobilities; tensions; and materialities. Whilst providing a review of extant literature on children’s geographies in urban places, each of the following sections is brought further to life through some examples from the author’s own research. These examples draw on a major, four-year research project called ‘New Urbanisms, New Citizens’. The project examined children’s (9‒16) experiences of everyday life, mobility and participation in the context of large-scale, ‘sustainable’ house building in the UK. It focused upon children living in four newly-built, master-planned ‘sustainable’ communities, each of which represented a very different interpretation of ‘sustainability’ – from an exemplar community with eco-housing, sustainable drainage systems and photovoltaic panels on every roof, to a more traditional-looking ‘village’ into which notions of social sustainability and ‘community’ were at the

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356  Handbook of urban geography fore. The project involved 175 young people across all four communities, who were engaged through various qualitative research techniques. In order to facilitate cross-reference and further research by the reader, this chapter only includes case study materials already published elsewhere. 23.2.1 Mobilities For several decades, there have existed growing concerns about children’s declining use of outdoor spaces. In countries of the Minority Global North, those concerns centre on an apparent downward trend in children’s ‘independent’ mobilities (e.g. O’Brien et al., 2000; Woolley and Griffin, 2015). The concept of independent mobility refers to children’s unaccompanied movement in predominantly urban public spaces (Witten and Carroll, 2016). For some commentators, the extent and intensity of children’s independent mobilities are directly related to a range of societal indicators: the quality, safety and inclusivity of public spaces; parental and wider social attitudes to children; children’s health and well-being (in particular, combating obesity); children’s environmental learning and spatial cognition. Therefore, independent mobilities are, frequently, valorized as a societal ‘good’ and the apparent decline in children’s independent mobilities is consequently condemned (Mikkelsen and Christensen, 2009). As Skelton and Gough (2013) highlight in their excellent overview, scholarship on children’s (im)mobilities has been a key concern for Children’s Geographies in urban spaces. The vast majority of studies that concern children’s independent mobilities have taken place in towns and cities, most commonly at the neighbourhood scale (Ansell, 2009). Indeed, Skelton and Gough (2013) highlight what a focus on local, everyday mobilities of young people can bring to Urban Studies. They underline that, as young people grow in independence and explore their urban environs, they are particularly sensitive to the qualities of urban public spaces that make them ‘liveable’ for diverse urban groups – such as safe public transport and secure walkways (see also Skelton, 2013a). The New Urbanisms, New Citizens project uncovered diverse and in some cases surprising results concerning children’s everyday mobilities in highly planned, urban environments (see Horton et al., 2014). First, from children’s self-reports, it transpired that children’s mobilities were – in contrast to much research – actually greater in these communities than where they had lived previously. Whilst children did not necessarily travel further from their homes, their levels of mobility within their communities were high in terms of the number of children using outdoor spaces, the frequency of the trips, and the total distance they travelled on their journeys. Added to the fact that many young people were actually very

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Children’s geographies  ­357 positive about their new communities – in terms of their attractiveness and safety – it appears that the master-planning of urban places can be a factor in improving children’s levels of mobility. A second and more surprising finding concerned the intrinsic qualities of mobility. Whilst the mobilities literature has repeatedly demonstrated that – at least in the Minority Global North – we live in cultures that valorize mobility, this assumption has not necessarily applied to the simple act of walking. Nevertheless, the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project found many examples of young people who engaged in acts of ‘just walking’: perhaps exploring, perhaps socializing, perhaps hanging out on the way, but where the primary aim of their engagement with outdoor spaces was, simply, ‘just walking’ (Horton et al., 2014). In contrast to the assumed mobilities of young people in the Minority Global North, recent work on street youth demonstrates how young people’s urban im/mobilities may be complex and contingent. It has shown that, where urban spaces present dangers or challenges to young people, the latter also use forms of im/mobility in order to exhibit agency or carve out a small space for themselves. For instance, van Blerk (2013) shows how street youth in South Africa deploy a range of mobility strategies in order to evade police checks and find spaces where they can earn a living through street-work. Here, immobility is just as important as mobility. As Ursin (2016) argues in the context of Brazilian street children, finding a place to sleep, safely, in the public spaces of a city requires a range of spatial strategies, which change over time: younger children sleep in groups, hidden away from public view, whereas older young people sleep individually but in highly public spaces where they are less likely to be attacked. Proceeding within the above frameworks, research on young people’s urban im/mobilities has led to a bewildering array of empirical case studies, in diverse geographical contexts (e.g. Nansen et al., 2015; Hoechner, 2015). Much of this work remains empirically focused, yet two important challenges have been issued for scholars working on young people’s urban im/mobilities. The first relates to the assumption that it is independent mobilities that mark a kind of ‘gold standard’ for the quality of children’s mobilities (and, therefore, the quality of urban spaces in which they take place). Conversely, Mikkelsen and Christensen (2009) argue that children’s mobilities are, in fact, rarely ‘independent’ in the sense of taking place without others. They demonstrate that young people’s urban mobilities are collaborative, relational acts (see also Skelton, 2013a), taking place with friends, family members, pets and a range of other ‘others’. Yet, there is no sense that these relational mobilities in any way diminish the quality or diversity of young people’s urban encounters. The second challenge relates to the much broader positioning of childhood research in relation

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358  Handbook of urban geography to other fields of academic endeavour. Skelton and Gough’s (2013) assessment is that, whilst there exists significant research on children’s lives in and of urban spaces with much of it focusing on their im/mobilities, there is scant engagement between urban studies and childhood studies scholars. This issue is picked up in the chapter’s conclusion. 23.2.2 Tensions At the end of the previous section, the relationality of young people’s urban im/mobilities was stressed. This observation signals a second recurring theme in research on children’s lives in and of urban spaces: the intergenerational relations (Hopkins and Pain, 2007) and, especially, tensions, that in many ways structure young people’s encounters with urban public spaces. It is a long-established fact that children’s experiences are not only highly patrolled by significant adult others (parents, policy-makers, police officers and security guards) but that those experiences are constructed through prevalent societal attitudes about children. As Valentine’s (1996) classic study showed, children are, in contexts like the UK, viewed either as ‘little devils’ who pose a threat to adults in urban public spaces, or ‘little angels’ whose vulnerability puts them at greater risk of attack than adults. In an overlap with research on children’s im/mobilities, scholarship on intergenerational tensions in urban public spaces has examined how such tensions provide important insights into wider debates about the control and ownership of the city. For instance, a well-cited study by Matthews et al. (2000) explored the experiences of teenagers who used a semi-public, semi-private shopping mall in Northampton, UK. Those teenagers felt that they were unfairly singled out by security guards and other adults, who constantly asked them to move on, or followed them, without seeming reason. However, the same teenagers attempted to subvert or parody this treatment by taking the security guards on endless, fruitless trips around the shopping mall or by directly engaging in ‘banter’ with them. In a further overlap with the children’s im/mobilities literature, children’s geographers have produced important work emphasizing how children’s experiences of urban places are patterned by age, gender (Skelton, 2000) and ethnicity (amongst other identity categories). It is widely assumed that girls’ experiences of urban public spaces are more curtailed than those of boys, because of widespread fears amongst their parents about their greater perceived vulnerability. Yet, as O’Brien et al. (2000) demonstrated, those experiences were complicated by both ethnic and geographical differences: the mobilities of older Asian girls were reduced compared with their younger counterparts; and girls have fewer restrictions placed upon them in non-inner-urban settings (London’s Tower Hamlets in O’Brien et

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Children’s geographies  ­359 al.’s study) than in outer-urban locales. Therefore, it is crucial to understand that not only are children’s encounters with urban places structured by adults’ social constructions of childhood, but that children represent a far from homogeneous group, experiencing the outcomes of those social constructions in diverse ways. As Hopkins and Pain (2007) argue in their plea for more ‘relational’ geographies of age, it is crucial to understand how intergenerationality and intersectionality themselves interact in the production of children’s (urban) encounters. In the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project, the master-planned nature of the four case study sites presented some rather particular inflections upon intergenerational tensions in urban public spaces (discussed in greater detail in Kraftl, 2014). A first example centred upon odd parcels of land that were present in all four communities. These patches of land included small grassy spaces and areas of woodland, which were generally around 15m x 15m in size. Given the complexities of the master-planning process under the erstwhile Sustainable Communities plan (ODPM, 2003) in the UK, a huge range of public, private and voluntary stakeholders was involved in the delivery of new housing. Thus, very few people – at least very few residents – knew who actually owned or had direct responsibility for these small parcels of apparently public space. Given the newness of these communities, this situation led to various residents – adults and children – ‘claiming’ these parcels of land. In some cases, adult residents took charge of these spaces, tending them and mowing the grass. In others, children used them to hang out or play football. Yet, as in other contexts, the presence of children – simply being – in these spaces raised fears about what they might be doing (e.g. Langevang, 2008). Thus, children explained that they were repeatedly ‘moved on’ from these parcels of land, being told by adult residents that they were ‘private’ spaces, when in fact there was no evidence to suggest that they were. In fact, in one community, children reported that they felt they had to move themselves on, without being told to do so, such was the power of the adult ‘gaze’ in that community. The second example (also discussed in Kraftl, 2014) centres on an urban square in one of the four communities. The square includes some typical twenty-first century design features for a new urban public space in Britain: a solid stone surface with inset ground-mounted fountains; an amphitheatre-style space; lollipop-style trees on the periphery. The square was built and owned by one of the housing developers, who were to ‘gift’ the space to the community once housing was completed on all four sides. However, after the global economic downturn of 2008 onwards, house-building slowed to a virtual stop. By 2012 the square was still not opened, and remained partitioned off by security fences and advertising hoardings. Meanwhile, young people began to ‘break in’, using the square

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360  Handbook of urban geography for skateboarding, BMX-ing and hanging out. The resultant complaints by adult residents placed so much pressure on the developers that, as a solution, they decided to open the square for public use rather than barricade it further. The square has since become a very popular feature of the community with all age groups. Thus – in a strange way – young people’s agency in this case, which had appeared to sit somehow in tension with adults’ wishes, ironically resulted in the opening of the square for the benefit of the entire community. These contrasting examples from the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project – and, indeed, the other literatures cited in this section – anticipate two important and contemporary concerns within children’s geographies scholarship. The first relates to the observation that, on occasions, young people’s engagements with others – whether adults or other children – may be positive rather than operate in tension. Indeed, it is rarer to find research that focuses on the more positive aspects of young people’s intergenerational relationships with adults, although some exist (Hopkins and Pain, 2007). In particular, although not explicitly in an urban context, several studies have shown important relationships of inter-dependency (Punch, 2002) that exist between children and adults, where young people engage in acts of work or care that support significant adult others (Evans, 2015). Moreover, within urban contexts, young people can be seen as the ‘glue’ that holds together especially diverse city neighbourhoods, since they may make friendships across religious or ethnic differences that increase overall social cohesion (Karsten, 2005). The second observation relates to the politics of such tensions, as well as forms of positive relationship. Scholars have increasingly asked whether children’s encounters with difference in urban public spaces offer key examples of the everyday or micro-scale politics of children’s lives (Kallio and Häkli, 2013). This point is picked up in the chapter’s conclusion. 23.2.3 Materialities Everyday experiences and encounters with/in urban spaces do not only involve social interactions with other human beings. Rather, those encounters are (re)materialized in manifold ways (Lees, 2002). Children’s geographers have for many years offered incisive analyses of children’s engagements with the materialities of urban life, and of young people’s active role in material processes of urban change (Skelton and Gough, 2013). Early work by Hugh Matthews (1992) demonstrated how children’s spatial cognition in urban neighbourhoods was dependent upon an often keen knowledge of the everyday materialities of their local environments. Indeed, his study led to a range of work that demonstrated repeatedly

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Children’s geographies  ­361 how children are usually more aware than are adults of a range of apparently banal concerns: graffiti, litter, urban wildlife, and the other stuff of urban life. In fact, it is children’s deep knowledge of urban banalities that has provided some of the justification for the greater participation of children in decision-making about their local environments (e.g. Tisdall et al., 2006). The work of Cindi Katz (e.g. 2004) offered an alternative analysis of materiality (and materialism, in the Marxist sense). Katz’s preoccupation has been with the entanglement of young people with/in forms of economic restructuring, most famously comparing the lives of young people growing up in rural Sudan with those growing up in New York City. Katz demonstrated how the same economic processes led to differential outcomes in each place (for instance in terms of access to education, work or food). It is notable, however, that research by children’s geographers on the materialities of urban forms – for instance, of urban architectures – remains rarer than the kinds of work cited above. In the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project, children were asked about their particular engagements with ‘sustainable’ urban architectures (Kraftl et al., 2013; Horton et al., 2015). Rather than focus – like much research with young people – upon the educational value of such architectures within an Education for Sustainability framework (in other words educational approaches that direct environmental education to often fairly neoliberal understandings of resource use efficiency and technological governance), the project sought to examine their everyday experiences of sustainable design. Several findings stood out. First, despite their generally positive disposition to sustainability, most children were relatively conservative about ‘sustainable’ urban design, and especially about eco-houses. They thought that only ‘weirdos’ would live in such houses and preferred more conventional (from a UK standpoint) forms of house design. Second, although they liked playing in the swales (landscaped ditches) that formed parts of their communities’ sustainable urban drainage systems, they held a number of misgivings about their cleanliness and safety. In fact, their perceptions, for instance about rats living in the swales and the water being unsafe, were the stuff of rapidly-circulating rumours. Third, children were keen to engage with the ‘eco’ features of their communities but in one, where a wind turbine was due to be built, ongoing delays and malfunctions had compromised their initial enthusiasm. In fact, some children became highly knowledgeable and politicized about the ‘promises’ made by developers, which they believed to have been unfulfilled. In light of these findings, one can forward the rather glib assertion that, if ‘sustainable’ urbanism is to be a success, it is children – who will be the next generation to buy into and live in these communities – who must be persuaded about their relative

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362  Handbook of urban geography worth. Yet, at least in these local examples, there appeared to be several obstacles to ensuring the widespread public appeal of sustainable urban design. Future research and practice needs, therefore, to consider far more deeply children’s engagements with sustainable urban architectures. As Children’s Geographies has developed as a sub-discipline, so have its theoretical foundations diversified. In tandem with the above kinds of research, scholars have sought to think in new ways about children’s every-day, affective and material engagements with the urban life (Blazek, 2015), particularly through the lens of non-representational theories (Horton and Kraftl, 2006) and, more latterly, a so-called ‘new wave’ of childhood studies (Kraftl, 2013). Childhood scholars have sought to dismantle the apparently obvious divisions between (human) children and the (non-human) materialities with which they co-exist, demonstrating how children’s experiences are composed of ever-changing constellations of people, toys, technologies, food, pharmaceuticals and far more besides (Prout, 2005). Often this kind of work has necessitated a far deeper, intimate, ethnographic mindset and the development of innovative forms of doing and writing about childhood research (Rautio, 2013). In an urban context, Kim Kullman’s work is exemplary in terms of its deployment of non-representational and materialist theoretical frames. In one paper (Kullman, 2014), he takes one ‘ordinary’ piece of urban infrastructure – the pavement – to examine it through the experiences of 7‒12 year-old children in Helsinki. He argues that children employ ‘pavements to cultivate the caring potential of their city’, through a range of ‘childpavement entanglements’ (Kullman, 2014, p. 2864) that include patting dogs and checking the safety of their surroundings. Elsewhere, and linking to the above discussion of urban im/mobilities, Kullman (2015) explores the Children’s Traffic City in Helsinki, a model urban area designed for 5‒10-year-olds. Adopting a Deleuzian approach, he examines the ‘pedagogical assemblages’ that lead to alternative ways of learning about the city – through shifting rhythms of pedestrians and traffic, and through children’s contingent engagements with urban street furniture. In both contexts, non-representational, materialist theoretical frames are used not only to engage with the micro-scale entanglements of children and (non-)human others. Rather, Kullman’s work demonstrates – somewhat counter to critiques of children’s non-representational geographies (e.g. Mitchell and Elwood, 2012) – that these forms of (non-)human encounter are crucial to the articulation of broader issues that matter: of everyday practices of care, in and for the city; and of ways of learning, and learning differently, to be in the city (see also Pyyry, 2015).

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23.3 CONCLUSIONS This chapter has examined three (of many) key strands of research about children’s geographies, in and of the city. With a focus on children’s everyday urban experiences and encounters, it began by discussing a vast, rich seam of research on children’s urban im/mobilities. That scholarship remains not only a mainstay of research on urban childhoods, but on children’s ­geographies more generally. Yet, ideas as to what constitutes mobility – and the centrality of ‘independent’ forms of mobility – have been decentred  through  important scholarship in the Majority Global South and a call to consider the relationality of different forms of im/mobility. The second  theme was anchored around the kinds of intergenerational tensions  that structure how children  are either ‘in’ or ‘out of place’ in urban public life. However, despite a range of familiar intergenerational tensions – often repeated globally – it was argued that there are also important examples of research that point to more positive relationships between children and adults in public spaces, not least in ways that can lead to greater social cohesion for all. The final theme was materiality. The materialities of childhood experience have been an important focus for children’s geographies scholarship – from early work on children’s spatial cognition in urban neighbourhoods, to more entangled forms of analysis developed through nonrepresentational and other ­theoretical frames. This chapter ends with two brief, critical reflections upon children’s geographies in and of urban spaces. In the first, and drawing upon Skelton and Gough (2013), it remains troubling that there is so little collaboration and cross-reference between the fields of Children’s Geographies and Urban Studies. Rather than bemoan this situation, it is more important to highlight – given the broad readership of this volume – why it is so important that urban studies scholars take greater note of children’s experiences and encounters. Notably, these reasons summarize some of the key findings of work already discussed in this chapter. First, children and young people are one of the largest population groups in any city, and especially in the Majority Global South, where they can constitute 50 per cent or more of the urban population. Second, children and young people have repeatedly been shown to be the social group who spend most time using urban spaces, and tend to have far more nuanced knowledge of local urban environments than do adults. Third, children and young people may be more readily shaped by their immediate social environments than adults, since their spatial range is more limited than that of adults. And finally, if social scientists are truly to understand pressing questions around urban sustainability and super- or hyperdiversity (Visser et al., 2014), then attention to how children and young

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364  Handbook of urban geography people live with, and contribute to, such processes must be a pressing concern for urban research. In terms of the second reflection, it is remarkable that children’s geographers have become increasingly concerned with the multiple forms of politics in which children are engaged (Skelton, 2013b). Kallio and Häkli (2013) argue that children’s everyday lives are politicized in manifold ways, from being aestheticized or commoditized in attempts to envision neoliberal futures (Katz, 2008) to their participation in protest or other forms of political struggle (Jeffrey, 2012). In all of these contexts, young people’s political agency is figured as both ambivalent and contextualized – as contested, relational, and often contradictory. These are important insights, which have spawned a range of recent studies of children’s political geographies that extend beyond a formerly narrower focus on children’s formal participation in decision-making. Yet, in light of the first reflection (on the lack of cross-fertilization with urban studies research), those insights lead to two questions, which warrant further consideration. First, with such an expanded notion of ‘politics’, what are (or might be) the particular politics of children’s experiences and encounters in urban places? Certainly, innovative work by Marshall (2013) in the context of urban traumas felt by young people in Palestine offers a new vocabulary for interpreting children’s ‘agency’ through an aesthetics that may offer tentative grounds for hope. However, it might be asked how else children’s geographers and urban studies scholars might collaborate to produce critical but hopeful discourses about urban childhoods, in diverse contexts (compare Baeten, 2002). Second, despite the (rightful) focus on politics, it should also be remembered that much of the work reviewed in this chapter – and indeed many facets of children’s lives – extends beyond the political. Indeed, it might instead be asked: in what other ways might children’s experiences and encounters in urban spaces matter, beyond traditional questions of voice, agency and politics (see Kraftl, 2013, for a full discussion)? Some of the work cited in this chapter offers examples, in terms of children’s participation in work, or questions of safety, or matters of often ambivalent everyday engagements with sustainable urban architectures. Yet, the question must not only be one of how we might collect empirical examples of such experiences but, rather, whether and how we might – together, as children’s geographers and urban studies scholars – theorize those experiences in order to assess how they might matter to, and within, diverse urban contexts.

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Children’s geographies  ­365

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author acknowledges the financial support of the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), grant reference RES-062-23-1549. He would also like to thank his colleagues who worked on the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project: Pia Christensen (the project’s PI), John Horton and Sophie Hadfield-Hill.

REFERENCES Ansell, N. (2009), ‘Childhood and the politics of scale: descaling children’s geographies?’, Progress in Human Geography, 33 (2), 190–209. Baeten, G. (2002), ‘The spaces of utopia and dystopia: introduction’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 84 (3–4), 141–142. Blazek, M. (2015),  Rematerialising Children’s Agency: Practices in a Post-Socialist Estate, Bristol: Policy Press. Bunge, W. W. (1973), ‘The geography’, The Professional Geographer, 25 (4), 331–337. Evans, R. (2015), ‘Negotiating intergenerational relations and care in diverse African contexts’, in Robert Vanderbeck and Nancy Worth (eds), Intergenerational Space, London: Routledge, pp. 199–213. Hoechner, H. (2015), ‘Mobility as a contradictory resource: peripatetic Qur’anic students in Kano, Nigeria’, Children’s Geographies, 13 (1), 59–72. Holloway, S. L. (1998), ‘Local childcare cultures: moral geographies of mothering and the social organisation of pre-school education’,  Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 5 (1), 29–53. Holloway, S. L. and G. Valentine (2000), ‘Spatiality and the new social studies of childhood’, Sociology, 34 (4), 763–783. Hopkins, P. and R. Pain (2007), ‘Geographies of age: thinking relationally’, Area, 39 (3), 287–294. Horton, J. and P. Kraftl (2006), ‘What else? Some more ways of thinking and doing “children’s geographies”’, Children’s Geographies, 4 (1), 69–95. Horton, J., S. Hadfield-Hill and P. Kraftl (2015), ‘Children living with “sustainable” urban architectures’, Environment and Planning A, 47 (4), 903–921. Horton, J., P. Christensen, P. Kraftl and S. Hadfield-Hill (2014), ‘“Walking . . . just walking”: how children and young people’s everyday pedestrian practices matter’,  Social & Cultural Geography, 15 (1), 94–115. James, A. and A. Prout (eds) (2015), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, London: Routledge. Jeffrey, C. (2012), ‘Geographies of children and youth II: global youth agency’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (2), 245–253. Kallio, K. P. and J. Häkli (2013), ‘Children and young people’s politics in everyday life’, Space and Polity, 17 (1), 1–16. Karsten, L. (2005), ‘It all used to be better? Different generations on continuity and change in urban children’s daily use of space’, Children’s Geographies, 3 (2), 275–290. Katz, C. (2004), Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Katz, C. (2008), ‘Childhood as spectacle: relays of anxiety and the reconfiguration of the child’, Cultural Geographies, 15 (1), 5–17. Kraftl, P. (2006), ‘Building an idea: the material construction of an ideal childhood’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31 (4), 488–504. Kraftl, P. (2013), ‘Beyond “voice”, beyond “agency”, beyond “politics”? Hybrid childhoods

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366  Handbook of urban geography and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geographies’, Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 13–23. Kraftl, P. (2014), ‘Liveability and urban architectures: mol(ecul)ar biopower and the “becoming lively” of sustainable communities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (2), 274–292. Kraftl, P., P. Christensen, J. Horton and S. Hadfield-Hill (2013), ‘Living on a building site: young people’s experiences of emerging “sustainable communities” in England’, Geoforum, 50, 191–199. Kullman, K. (2014), ‘Children, urban care, and everyday pavements’, Environment and Planning A, 46 (12), 2864–2880. Kullman, K. (2015), ‘Pedagogical assemblages: rearranging children’s traffic education’, Social & Cultural Geography, 16 (3), 255–275. Langevang, T. (2008), ‘Claiming place: the production of young men’s street meeting places in Accra, Ghana’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 90 (3), 227–242. Lees, L. (2002), ‘Rematerializing geography: the “new” urban geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 26 (1), 101–112. Marshall, D. J. (2013), ‘“All the beautiful things”: trauma, aesthetics and the politics of Palestinian childhood’, Space and Polity, 17 (1), 53–73. Matthews, Michael H. (1992),  Making Sense of Place: Children’s Understanding of Largescale Environments, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Matthews, H., M. Taylor, B. Percy-Smith and M. Limb (2000), ‘The unacceptable flaneur: the shopping mall as a teenage hangout’, Childhood, 7 (3), 279–294. Mikkelsen, M. R. and P. Christensen (2009), ‘Is children’s independent mobility really independent? A study of children’s mobility combining ethnography and GPS/mobile phone technologies’, Mobilities, 4 (1), 37–58. Mitchell, K. and S. Elwood (2012), ‘Mapping children’s politics: the promise of articulation and the limits of nonrepresentational theory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30 (5), 788–804. Nairn, K. and P. Kraftl (2016), ‘Introduction: space, place and environment’, in Karen Nairn, Peter Kraftl and Tracey Skelton (eds), Space, Place and Environment, Berlin: Springer, pp. 1–20. Nansen, B., L. Gibbs, C. MacDougall, F. Vetere, N. J. Ross and J. McKendrick (2015), ‘Children’s interdependent mobility: compositions, collaborations and compromises’, Children’s Geographies, 13 (4), 467–481. O’Brien, M., D. Jones, D. Sloan and M. Rustin (2000), ‘Children’s independent spatial mobility in the urban public realm’, Childhood, 7 (3), 257–277. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) (2003), Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future, HMSO, London. Prout, A. (ed.) (2005), The Future of Childhood, London: Routledge. Punch, S. (2002), ‘Youth transitions and interdependent adult–child relations in rural Bolivia’, Journal of Rural Studies, 18 (1), 123–133. Pyyry, N. (2015), ‘Geographies of hanging out: connecting everyday experiences with formal education’, in Matej Blazek and Peter Kraftl (eds),  Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice: Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 107–121. Rautio, P. (2013), ‘Children who carry stones in their pockets: on autotelic material practices in everyday life’, Children’s Geographies, 11 (4), 394–408. Skelton, T. (2000), ‘Nothing to do, nowhere to go? Teenage girls and “public” space in the Rhondda Valleys, South Wales’, in Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine (eds), Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning, London: Routledge, pp. 69–85. Skelton, T. (2013a), ‘Young people’s urban im/mobilities: relationality and identity formation’, Urban Studies, 50 (3), 467–483. Skelton, T. (2013b), ‘Young people, children, politics and space: a decade of youthful political geography scholarship 2003–13’, Space and Polity, 17 (1), 123–136. Skelton, T. and K. V. Gough (2013), ‘Introduction: young people’s im/mobile urban geographies’, Urban Studies, 50 (3), 455–466.

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Children’s geographies  ­367 Tisdall, K. E., J. M. Davis, M. Hill and A. Prout (2006), Children, Young People and Social Inclusion: Participation for What?, Bristol: Policy Press. Ursin, M. (2016), ‘Geographies of sleep among Brazilian street youth’, in Karen Nairn, Peter Kraftl and Tracey Skelton (eds), Space, Place and Environment, Berlin: Springer, pp. 353–378. Valentine, G. (1996), ‘Angels and devils: moral landscapes of childhood’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14 (5), 581–599. van Blerk, L. (2013), ‘New street geographies: the impact of urban governance on the mobilities of Cape Town’s street youth’, Urban Studies, 50 (3), 556–573. Visser, K., G. Bolt and R. van Kempen (2014), ‘Out of place? The effects of demolition on youths’ social contacts and leisure activities – a case study in Utrecht, the Netherlands’, Urban Studies, 51 (1), 203–219. Witten, K. and P. Carroll (2016), ‘Children’s neighborhoods: places of play or spaces of fear?’, in Karen Nairn, Peter Kraftl and Tracey Skelton (eds), Space, Place and Environment, Berlin: Springer, pp. 331–350. Woolley, H. E. and E. Griffin (2015), ‘Decreasing experiences of home range, outdoor spaces, activities and companions: changes across three generations in Sheffield in north England’, Children’s Geographies, 13 (6), 677–691.

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PART VI URBAN POLITICS

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24.  Exploring insurgent urban mobilizations: from urban social movements to urban political movements? Lazaros Karaliotas and Erik Swyngedouw

24.1 INTRODUCTION Over the past few years, a wave of highly politicized urban mobilizations has been rolling through many of the world’s cities. This planetary circulation of urban insurgencies erupted rather unexpectedly after the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010 ignited the Tunisian Revolution. During the extraordinary urban year of 2011 – a ‘year of dreaming dangerously’ for Slavoj Žižek (2012) – urban insurgencies leapfrogged from Tunis and Cairo to Madrid, Barcelona, Athens and Thessaloniki during the summer before jumping to New York, Oakland, London, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and many other cities during the hot autumn of the Occupy! movement. Taksim Square in Istanbul would become the site of a massive urban uprising two years later, while São Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and many other Brazilian cities experienced widespread urban rebellions during the World Football Cup in 2014. Hong Kong, Sarajevo and Tuzla would become further nodes in this sequence during the same year. Of course, these events unfolded against the backdrop of deeply variegated historical and geographical contexts and were sparked off by a variety of conditions. And yet, we maintain that, despite their heterogeneity, they share a range of uncanny affinities. We consider these urban insurgencies to be incipient urban political movements that staged – albeit in often inchoate and contradictory manners – a profound discontent with the state of the situation and choreographed new ways of urban being and acting-in-common. A heterogeneous multitude of protesters gathered in public spaces and exposed the multiple ‘wrongs’ and deepening inequalities that accompany neoliberalization and its post-democratic or autocratic modes of urban governance (Swyngedouw, 2007). Mobilizing under generic names like Indignados, the Outraged, the 99% and through their rallying cry for ‘Real Democracy Now!’ the protesters did not articulate specific social or economic demands to the elites. Rather, they performatively staged new 369

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370  Handbook of urban geography ways of practising equality and democracy, experimented with innovative and creative ways of being together in the city, and prefigured, both in practice and in theory, new modes of managing the urban socio-ecological commons, re-defining urban political citizenship, and organizing urban space in an egalitarian manner (see Swyngedouw, 2014). Regardless of their success or otherwise in affecting institutional change, these incipient political movements translated Henry Lefebvre’s 1960s clarion call for ‘The Right to the City’ into directly political demands, claiming ‘The Right to the Polis’; nothing less than a new democratic constituent process (Lefebvre, 1972; Hardt and Negri, 2011). In so doing, they moved beyond the standard recipes of urban social movements that have choreographed many progressive urban struggles over the past three decades or so. The era of urban social movements as the horizon of progressive urban politics, celebrated since Manuel Castells’s groundbreaking work in The City and the Grassroots (1983), seems to be making place for a much more heterogeneous and often radical urban politicized struggle and conflict (see Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017). In this chapter, we seek to explore some of the questions and challenges that the political nature of these movements raises for urban theory and practice. We argue that these proliferating, albeit incipient, urban political movements call for a re-centring of ‘the urban political’, invite us to rethink the urban as a site of political encounter, interruption, and experimentation, and urban insurgencies as the performative staging of new forms of democratization that nurture radical imaginaries of what egalitarian urban being-in-common might be all about. This move, we maintain, also involves a change in theoretical perspective away from a focus on institutionalized politics, including the tactics, strategies and principles of organized urban social movements, towards a vantage point that considers other forms of contestation and disruption as well, even though they might lack the organizational form or legitimacy of social movements. The remainder of the chapter is organized in three parts. In the first part, we revisit some of the vast literature on (urban) social movements and urban activism, and interrogate their political performativity in light of the recent urban insurrections. In the second part, we argue for a ‘re-centring of the urban political’ by drawing on a number of post-foundational political theorists and philosophers who have recently explored the notion of ‘the political’. The final part of the chapter explores the promises and challenges for urban political movements that aim not only at interrupting the police order but also at its transformation.

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Exploring insurgent urban mobilizations  ­371

24.2 INTERROGATING THE POLITICAL PERFORMATIVITY OF (URBAN) SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Since the 1970s, the history of critical urban theory has been marked by a commitment to a politics of emancipatory transformation and to the creation of socially just urban geographies. Successive bodies of critical urban thought – emblematically pioneered by the early Marxist contributions of David Harvey (1973), Manuel Castells (1972) and Henri Lefebvre (1974) – intervened in the existing state of urban theory and practice, reframed and transgressed how urban theory should be done, and prescribed what kind of urbanism ought to be practised. This critical urban analysis focuses on how political-economic and other power relations mobilize and shape the urban process and how these produced socio-spatial characteristics permit accounting for and guiding the political tactics and organizational strategies of those who are marginalized, excluded, or otherwise disempowered. The implicit assumption of this mode of theorizing is that substantive critical (urban) theory is politically performative as it contributes to the formulation of strategies and the terms of contestation of unequal urban power relations on the one hand and considers the relationship between progressive urban politics and urban governance on the other. In this section we briefly explore some of the vast and diverse literature on urban social movements to argue that the recent proto-political urban uprisings question the political performativity that urban social movement analysis nonetheless believed to be an integral part of its intellectual agenda, and force us to turn the gaze decisively to considering how urban political acting and concrete performative intervention shape urban transformative processes. Manuel Castells first explored the notion of urban social movements in the 1970s and 1980s. In The Urban Question Castells (1972) would define ‘the urban’ as the space of collective consumption adding a further front of conflict to that between labour and capital. In this configuration, urban social movements would, Castells maintained, become the form of struggle over state-provision of collective infrastructures and services. Expanding and elaborating on this notion in The City and the Grassroots, Castells (1983) would mobilize Madrid’s citizens’ movement of the mid1970s as an exemplary case to argue that urban social movements combine struggles over collective consumption services, cultural identity, citizens’ rights and trade unionism. These struggles are waged by heterogeneous urban groups and fuse together in urban movements that would not only redefine the political subject away from the classic working class position that had traditionally animated emancipatory political conflict, but also re-centre the analysis of urban conflicts around the triptych of

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372  Handbook of urban geography collective ­consumption, cultural/territorial identity and local state politics (Castells, 1983). In the decades that followed – and despite Castells’s pessimistic assessment of urban social movements as ‘reactive utopias’ with limited ability to bring about structural change – urban social movements, generically understood, would gain in theoretical popularity as the key protagonists in progressive urban struggles (Pickvance, 2003). Of course, the ontological and epistemological parameters of what constitutes critical emancipatory enquiry have also shifted over the past three decades; a shift that paralleled the contours and dynamics of the neoliberal forms of the capitalist urbanization process itself. The theoretical, epistemological and methodological foundations of urban social movement analysis have also been examined, re-examined and reformulated. On the one hand, the increasing significance of feminist, post-colonial, post-human, and post-structural accounts in critical urban theory further expanded the horizon of urban social movement analysis beyond the early focus on the political economy of class-based urbanization. Concerns articulated increasingly around other identitarian inscriptions such as race, ethnicity, age, sexual preference, ability, sub-alterity and gender. On the other hand, urban social movement analysis moved beyond its ‘relative isolation’ (Pickvance, 2003, p. 102) to become part of a more general theorization of social movements (e.g. McAdam et al., 1996; Melucci, 1996; Della Porta and Diani, 2009). As a result, the urban social movement writings that followed have provided a more fine-grained analysis of the multiple spatial, discursive and organizational repertoires of (urban) social movements (Featherstone, 2008; Leitner et al., 2007) and the role of key organizers in linking geographically or sociologically diverse groups and struggles (Diani, 2004; Emirbayer and Goodwin, 1994; Gould, 2004). Notwithstanding these important insights, in much of this sociologically inflected analysis, political subjectivation – the process of becoming a collective political subject through sustained public acting – became increasingly framed in and straight-jacketed by a view that shifted the focus of attention from the political terrain to the space of urban social activism. Key arenas of action included concerns over identity formation and strategic terrains articulated around specific concrete themes rather than addressing the constituent order itself (Hamel et al., 2000). These perspectives assumed generally that contentious politics and urban social movements arose alongside and reacted to the shifting political-economic processes that animated deepening neoliberalizing forms of planetary urbanization (see, for example, Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Mayer, 2009). The ‘oppositional’ movements that allegedly emerged out of the socially contradictory and fragmenting forces of neoliberal urbanization are customarily understood as composed of actors that aim at resisting,

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Exploring insurgent urban mobilizations  ­373 tweaking or otherwise influencing the institutions of urban governance and entrepreneurial practices. Such social movements invariably engage with the hegemonic or actually existing governance arrangements, generally focusing on identifiable objectives like housing, the environment, participation, community services, and so on (see Leitner et al., 2007). Yet, surprisingly little critical theoretical reflection has been devoted to what constitutes the ‘urban political’ domain, to what ‘the political’ is, or to where it might be located, both theoretically and spatially (Swyngedouw, 2014). Within urban social movement analysis, as in most of urban theory’s critical theoretical apparatuses, ‘the political’ is indeed usually assumed to emerge from a broadly ‘socio-spatial’ analysis: it is the socio-spatial condition, and the excavation of the procedures of its production, that opens up and choreographs the terrain of political intervention and its actors. From this perspective, emancipatory politics seem to arise out of substantive analysis, of grasping the contours and dynamics of the state we are in. Political dynamics, their contents and practices, are seen to ‘derive’ from processes operative in other domains (like the social, the cultural, or the economic) and their analysis is concerned with the perceptible organization, tactics, and strategies of actors such as political parties, politicians, institutions, civil society organizations, unions, business elites, and even artefacts. These actors occupy particular places in the urban social and governance edifice, pursue a series of specific interests, and occasionally crystallize in more organized and collective forms of acting. These ‘perceptible’ dynamics, in turn, shape and are shaped by the ephemeral dynamics of a restless capitalist urban landscape that is increasingly taking planetary forms. Within this analytical constellation, debates usually focus on how exactly one or the other epistemological and theoretical framework constitutes the foundation for a more or less empowering, emancipatory, and/or transformative urban politics. Urban politics, in other words, are broadly assumed to be adequately understood and hence interfered with through the mobilization of the correct urban substantive theory. In contrast to this, we argue, together with Alain Badiou, that there is nothing that can any longer be done with substantive urban theory as a basis for ‘re-centring the political’. For Badiou ‘socio-economic analysis and politics are absolutely disconnected’ (Hallward, 2003, p. 225): the former is a matter for expertise and implies hierarchy; the latter is not. The various insurgent urban movements that dot the landscape of planetary urbanism, we argue, signal precisely the non-performativity of urban social movement analysis in political terms and urge us to think ‘the political’ again as an immanent field of action: one that operates both at a distance from substantive theory on the one hand, and from the theatres

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374  Handbook of urban geography (council rooms, parliaments, committee meetings and so on) of everyday urban governance on the other (see Swyngedouw, 2011; Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014). Alain Badiou contends indeed that the political is not a reflection of something else, like the cultural, the social, or the economic. Instead, it is the affirmation of the egalitarian capacity of each and all to act politically and emerges through a collective act of interruption, an inaugural event. The political manifests itself, therefore, as a site open for occupation by those who call it into being, claim its occupation and stage ‘equality’, irrespective of the ‘place’ they occupy within the social edifice. It is not philosophy or (critical social) theory that founds or inaugurates the political. On the contrary, the political is a form of appearance through the coming together of heterogeneous bodies that become constituted as ‘the people’ in a process of common acting in the name of equality (see Rancière, 1999; Swyngedouw, 2014). This is precisely, we argue, what the recent incipient urban political movements practice. Such urban insurgencies can consequently be understood as immanent political events.

24.3 RE-CENTRING THE URBAN POLITICAL: POLITICS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF EQUALITY In this section, we will further explore this post-foundational understanding of the urban political by drawing on a number of – otherwise deeply diverse – authors like Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Etienne Balibar. In doing so, we argue for an understanding of the urban political that foregrounds the notion of equality as the axiomatic – yet contingent – foundation of democracy, one that considers égaliberté (Balibar, 2010) as an unconditional and axiomatic democratic principle. Post-foundational thought, therefore, understands the political as an immanent process that manifests itself in the disruption of any given socio-spatial order by staging equality and exposing a ‘wrong’. This ‘wrong’ is a condition in which the axiomatic principle of equality is perverted through the institution of an oligarchic order. Jacques Rancière mobilizes the notion of ‘the police’ to refer to such institutionalized and in-egalitarian socio-spatial orders. He conceptualizes the ‘police’ as a heterogeneous set of organizational forms, technologies, and strategies for ordering, distributing, and allocating people, things, and functions, constituting a certain ‘partition of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2001: Thesis 7). This partition of the sensible: renders visible who can be part of the common in function of what [s]he does, of the times and the space in which this activity is exercised . . . This defines

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Exploring insurgent urban mobilizations  ­375 the fact of being visible or not in a common space . . . It is a partitioning of times and spaces, of the visible and the invisible, of voice and noise that defines both the place (location) and the arena of the political as a form of experience. (Rancière, 2000a, pp. 13‒14)

The police, then, are a set of practices – stemming from both state action and the ordering of social relations – that regulates the appearance of bodies, allocates a set of activities and occupations and arranges the characteristics of the spaces where these activities are organized or distributed (Rancière, 1999, p. 29). Hence, spatialized policies (planning, architecture, urban policies, etc.) are among the key dispositives of the police. For Rancière, while the differences between instituted orders matter in important ways, they are also invariably oligarchic and partially inegalitarian in their effort to order exhaustively the social and define who is seen as capable of doing politics and who is not, thereby repressing or disavowing the principled equality of each and all qua speaking beings. The police order is indeed predicated upon saturation: ‘The essence of the police is the principle of saturation; it is a mode of the partition of the sensible that recognizes neither lack nor supplement. As conceived by “the police”, society is a totality compromised of groups performing specific functions and occupying determined spaces’ (Rancière, 2000b, p. 124). It is precisely this suturing process that suspends political litigation, voicing or staging dissent, and asserting polemical equality. Yet, this drive to suturing is never fully realized as other modes of being-incommon and of constructing a political community are constantly emerging, despite not being recognized as such. Indeed, the constitutive antagonisms that rupture society preempt saturation; there will always be a constituted lack or surplus; that which is not accounted for in the symbolic order of the police (Dikeç, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2011). It is exactly this lack or excess that keeps the space of the political vacant and guarantees ‘its return’. The political, thus, manifests itself through enunciating dissent and rupture, literally voicing speech that claims a place in the order of things, demanding ‘the part of those who have no-part’ (Rancière, 2001, Thesis 5). The political is, therefore, always disruptive; it emerges with the ‘refusal to observe the “place” allocated to people and things (or, at least, to particular people and things)’ (Robson, 2005, p. 5): it is the terrain where the axiomatic principle of equality is tested in the face of a ‘wrong’. Such ‘wrong’ is the experience and practice of inequality that inheres in the oligarchic spaces of any instituted polity and associated practices, routines, and rituals. The political, therefore, opens up a lived space through the testing of a ‘wrong’ by staging and performing equality. In political terms, therefore, ‘equality is not something to be researched or verified by

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376  Handbook of urban geography critical or other social theory or philosophy but a principle to be upheld’ (Hallward, 2003, p. 228). Equality is, consequently, neither some sort of utopian longing – as in much of critical social theory – nor a sociological and empirically verifiable category. Rather, political equality is the very axiomatic condition upon which the democratic political is contingently and performatively founded. Balibar (2010) names the semantic fusion of equality and liberty égaliberté, the former defined as the absence of discrimination and the latter as absence of repression. It is the very promise of ‘egalibertarian’ democracy that is always scandalously perverted in any police order that is, of necessity, oligarchic, and therefore necessitates continuing reclamation, reformulation and renewed democratic instantiation and substantiation. Freedom and equality can only be conquered; they are never offered, granted, or distributed. The political, therefore, is not about expressing demands to the elites or a call on the state and its elites to rectify inequalities or un-freedoms. In contrast, it is the performative staging of equality by the ‘part of no-part’ that articulates its voice and takes its place in the spaces of the police order: it appears, for example, when undocumented workers shout, ‘we are here, therefore we are from here’ (see Dikeç, 2013); or when the Spanish Indignados demand ‘Democracia Real Ya!’ and the Occupy! movements claim to stand for the 99 per cent that have no voice. These are the evental time-spaces from where a political sequence may unfold. Insurgent democratic politics, therefore, are radically anti-utopian. Rather than fighting for a utopian future, they bring into being and spatialize what is already inscribed in the very principle upon which the political is constituted: egalitarian emancipation. Rather than expressing pre-constituted political subjects, the political emerges through the act of political subjectivation as the embodied decision to act, to interrupt, to stage (Rancière, 1999). It appears as the voice of ‘floating subjects that deregulate all representations of places and portions’ (Rancière, 1999, pp. 99‒100) who occupy, organize and restructure space: In the end everything in politics turns on the distribution of spaces. What are these places? How do they function? Why are they there? Who can occupy them? For me, political action always acts upon the social as the litigious distribution of places and roles. It is always a matter of knowing who is qualified to say what a particular place is and what is done to it. (Rancière, 2003, p. 201)

The political, therefore, always operates at a certain minimal distance from the State/the police and customarily meets with the violence inscribed in the functioning of the police. Its spatial markers are not fixed to the parliament, meeting room or council chamber – and its instituted practices

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Exploring insurgent urban mobilizations  ­377 of representation, decision-making and implementation – but can arise anywhere: the public square, the housing estate, the people’s assembly, the university campus, the Social Centre or the factory floor. Politics, then, is the moment or process of confrontation with the police order, when the principle of equality confronts a ‘wrong’ instituted through the police order; it appears ‘when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no-part’ (Rancière, 1999, p. 11). The space of the political is to ‘disturb this arrangement [the police] by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole’ (Rancière, 2001). This space is therefore always specific, concrete, particular, and contentious, but stands as the metaphorical condensation of the universal. In this sense, politics is about the production of spaces and the recognition of the principle of dissensus. As Rancière attests: ‘The principal function of politics is the configuration of its proper space. It is to disclose the world of its subjects and its operations. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in one’ (Rancière, 2001, Thesis 8). Politics occurs when there is a place and a way for the meeting of the police process with the process of equality (Rancière, 1999, p. 30), when a new world and new ways of ‘worlding’ (of making a new world) becomes present in the world, when two worlds meet and make their presence felt (see also Dikeç, 2013).

24.4 INSURGENT URBAN MOBILIZATIONS: TOWARDS URBAN POLITICAL MOVEMENTS? Such egalitarian-democratic practices, scandalous in the representational order of the police yet eminently realizable, are precisely like those staged through the urban insurgencies that mark the contemporary landscape of planetary urbanization. Over the past few years, a number of urban public – occasionally privately owned – spaces have indeed become engrained in our symbolic universe as emblematic sites of insurrectional democratic demands. Tahrir Square, Assaha-al-Khadra, Syntagma Square, Taksim Square, Zuccotti Park, Paternoster Square, Puerta del Sol, Rothschild Boulevard, and Plaza de la Catalunya stand as points de capiton that quilt a chain of meaning through such signifiers as democracy, revolution, freedom, being-in-common, equality, solidarity, and emancipation. Political space, these events suggest, is opened through a political act that stages collectively the presumption of equality and affirms the ability of ‘the People’ to self-manage and organize their affairs. In the process, identitybased positions such as religion, ethnicity, gender or social class become

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378  Handbook of urban geography transfigured into a commonality and a new common sense through the process of political subjectivation, of acting-in-common by those who do not count, who are surplus to the police. Such insurrectional events constitute an active process of intervention through which (public) space is reconfigured and – if successful – a new socio-spatial order is inaugurated. The taking of urban public spaces has indeed always been, from the Athenian ochlos demanding to be part of the polis to the heroic struggle of Tunisian and Egyptian people claiming to be ‘The People’, the hallmark of emancipatory urban political trajectories. A range of observers has systematically commented on and argued for a more in-depth theoretical and practical engagement between these insurrectional movements and the experimental practices that articulate around new forms of egalitarian and solidarity-based management of the commons (see, for example, Badiou, 2012; Bassett, 2014; Dean, 2014; Douzinas, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2014, 2018; Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017). They interrogate the possibilities and promises of forms of democratizing politicization that aim not only at interrupting the post-democratic consensual order but at its transformation. In contrast to celebratory accounts of insurgency and occupation as political in themselves, such events do not necessarily unfold an emancipatory sequence (Kaika and Karaliotas, 2016; Karaliotas, 2017). In fact, the challenge is to move from outbursts of indignation to the slow process of sustained transformative strategies through which a new socio-political spatialization becomes imagined, practised, and universalized. Alain Badiou has explored the significance of the recent insurrectional events, insisting on their proto-political but fundamentally urban nature. The proliferation of urban insurgencies, Badiou (2012) argues in The Rebirth of History, is a sign of a return of the universal ‘Idea’ of freedom, solidarity, equality, and emancipation. Such ‘historical riots’ as he dubs them, are marked by procedures of intensification, contraction, and localization that together construct a new sense of time and a new spatiality (Badiou, 2012, pp. 90‒92). Intensification refers to the enthusiasm marked by an intensification of time, a radicalization of statements, and an explosion of activities, condensed in an emblematic space that is mobilized and re-organized to express and relay this enthusiasm. Importantly, there is no a priori space – no privileged spatiality – for the becoming of an event. Rather, as we explored in the previous section, such events produce their own spatiality and unfold through this production. Evental spaces operate precisely through the prefiguring of socio-spatial practices that both expose the in-egalitarian ordering of the existing ‘distribution of times and spaces’ while experimenting with new forms of equa-libertarian being-in-common.

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Exploring insurgent urban mobilizations  ­379 Second, and at the same time, enormous vital energies are mobilized for a sustained period of time. All manner of people come together in a contracted explosion of acting and being-in-common. This intensity operates in and through the collective togetherness of heterogeneous individuals who, in their multiplicity and process of political subjectivation, stand for the metaphorical condensation of ‘The People’ (as a political category). It is precisely this procedure of contracted encounter of politicizing, yet sociologically heterogeneous, subjects that permits the sociological minority to become the stand-in for ‘The People’ as a whole, exemplified by the 99 per cent of Occupy!, or the name of ‘the Egyptian People’ on Tahrir Square. In doing so, they ‘replace an identitarian object, and the separating names bound up in it’ (Badiou, 2012, p. 92) (like worker, intellectual, Muslim, Christian, young, old, woman, man) with the common name of ‘we, the People’. Finally, a political Idea/Imaginary cannot find grounding without localization. A political moment is always placed, localized and invariably operative in public space. Squares and other public spaces have historically been the sites for performing and enacting emancipatory practices; they are the sites of existence, of exhibition, of becoming popular. Without a site, a place or a location, a political idea is impotent. Politics, in this sense, is intimately bound up with creating spaces from within established orders, making them places where a wrong can be addressed and equality demonstrated (Dikeç, 2005). However, such intense and contracted localized practices can only ever be short-lived, an event, original, but ultimately pre-political. They do not (yet) constitute a political sequence. Nonetheless, the ‘Idea’ crystallized in the insurrectional event will last long after the return to the ‘normality’ of everyday life. What is at stake, then, is how to organize the energy and to universalize the ‘Idea’ inaugurated in the original event. What is required now and what needs to be thought through is if and how these protopolitical localized events can turn into a political sequence – one capable of transforming the urban order in a more egalitarian manner. Politicization, from this perspective, revolves around enunciating demands that lie beyond the symbolic order of the police; demands that cannot be symbolized within the frame of reference of the police. Political change, therefore, would necessitate a transformation in and of the police to permit symbolization to occur. Yet these are demands that are eminently sensible and feasible when the frame of the symbolic order is shifted. This is when the parallax gap between what is (the constituted symbolic order of the police) and what can be is made visible or perceptible. A new symbolic order becomes constituted whereby what was once considered as nonsensical becomes increasingly common sense. Politics,

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380  Handbook of urban geography therefore, enunciates the sort of demands that ‘restructure the entire social space’ (Žižek, 1999, p. 208). This requires sustained politicization. The key political question, then, revolves around what happens when the squares are cleared, the tents removed and the energies dissipated, when the dream is over and the dawn of ‘ordinary’ everyday life breaks again. Answering this revolves squarely around questions of political organization, the arena of struggle, and the construction of new political collectivities. This, in turn, raises the question of political subjectivation and requires forging a political name that captures the imaginary of a new egalitarian commons appropriate for twenty-first-century’s times and places. As we have discussed in this chapter, (urban) social movements as the key political actor that invariably engages with the state as the arena of struggle is no longer politically performative. For those who maintain fidelity to the political events choreographed in the new insurrectional spaces, the urgent tasks now revolve around inventing new modes and practices of collective political organization and to think and organize the concrete modalities of spatializing and universalizing the idea that was provisionally materialized in these localized insurrectional events. Those who maintain fidelity to these events need to mobilize a wide range of new political subjects who are not afraid to imagine a different commons, demand the impossible, stage the new, and confront the violence of the police that will inevitably intensify as those who insist on maintaining the present order realize that their days might be numbered. While staging equality in public squares is a vital moment, the process of emancipatory transformation requires the slow but unstoppable production of new forms of spatialization quilted around materializing the claims of equality, freedom, and solidarity. This is the promise of the return of the political embryonically manifested in insurgent urban practices.

REFERENCES Badiou, A. (2012), The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, London: Verso. Balibar, E. (2010), La Proposition de l’Egaliberté, Paris: puf. Bassett, K. (2014), ‘Rancière, politics, and the Occupy movement’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (5), 886–901. Brenner, N. and N. Theodore (eds) (2002), Spaces of Neoliberalism – Urban Restructuring in North American and Western Europe, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Castells, M. (1972), La Question Urbaine, Paris: F. Maspero. Castells, M. (1983), The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dean, J. (2014), ‘Occupy Wall Street: forcing division’, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 21 (3), 382–389. Della Porta, D. and M. Diani (2009), Social Movements: An Introduction, London: John Wiley & Sons.

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Exploring insurgent urban mobilizations  ­381 Diani, M. (2004), ‘“Leaders” or “brokers”? Positions and influence in social movement networks’ in Mario Diani and Doug McAdam (eds), Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 105–122. Dikeç M. (2005), ‘Space, politics and the political’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23 (2), 171–188. Dikeç, M. (2013), ‘Beginners and equals: political subjectivity in Arendt and Rancière’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (1), 78–90. Dikeç, M. and E. Swyngedouw (2017), ‘Theorizing the politicizing city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41 (1), 1–17. Douzinas, C. (2013), Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis, London: Polity. Emirbayer, M. and J. Goodwin (1994), ‘Network analysis, culture, and the problem of agency’, American Journal of Sociology, 99 (6), 1411–1454. Featherstone, D. (2008), Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of CounterGlobal Networks, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Gould, Roger V. (2004), ‘Why do networks matter? Rationalist and structuralist interpretations’, in Mario Diani and Doug McAdam (eds), Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 233–257. Hallward, P. (2003), Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hamel, P., H. Lustiger-Thaler and M. Mayer (eds) (2000), Urban Movements in a Globalising World, London: Routledge. Hardt, M. and T. Negri (2011), ‘The fight for “real democracy” at the heart of Occupy Wall Street: the encampment in Lower Manhattan speaks to a failure of representation’, Foreign Affairs, at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-america/2011-10-11/fight-real-dem​ ocracy-heart-occupy-wall-street?page=show (accessed 4 July 2018). Harvey, D. (1973), Social Justice and the City, London: E. Arnold. Kaika, M. and L. Karaliotas (2016), ‘The spatialization of democratic politics: insights from Indignant Squares’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 23 (4), 556–570. Karaliotas, L. (2017), ‘Staging equality in Greek squares: hybrid spaces of political subjectification’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41 (1), 54–69. Lefebvre, H. (1972), Le Droit à la Ville, Paris: Anthropos. Lefebvre, H. (1974), La Production de l’Espace, Paris: Anthropos. Leitner, H., J. Peck and E. Sheppard (eds) (2007), Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers, New York: Guilford Press. Mayer, M. (2009), ‘The “Right to the City” in the context of shifting mottos of urban social movements’, City, 13 (2–3), 362–374. McAdam, D., J. D. McCarthy and M. N. Zald (1996), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melucci, A. (1996), Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pickvance, C. (2003), ‘From urban social movements to urban movements: a review and introduction to a symposium on urban movements’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27 (1), 102–109. Rancière, J. (1999), Disagreement, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (2000a), Le Partage du Sensible: Esthétique et Politique, Paris: La Fabrique. Rancière, J. (2000b), ‘Dissenting words: a conversation with Jacques Rancière (with Davide Panagia)’, Diacritics, 30 (2), 113–126. Rancière, J. (2001), ‘Ten theses on politics’, Theory & Event, 5 (3), no pagination. Rancière, J. (2003), ‘Politics and aesthetics: An interview’, Angelaki, 8 (2), 194–211. Robson, M. (2005), ‘Introduction: hearing voices’, Paragraph, 28 (1), 1–12. Swyngedouw, E. (2007), ‘The post-political city’, in BAVO (ed.), Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neo-Liberal City, Rotterdam: NAI-Publishers, pp. 58–76. Swyngedouw, E. (2011), ‘Interrogating post-democracy: reclaiming egalitarian political spaces’, Political Geography, 30 (7), 370–380.

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382  Handbook of urban geography Swyngedouw, E. (2014), ‘Where is the political? Insurgent mobilisations and the incipient “return of the political”’, Space and Polity, 18 (2), 122–136. Swyngedouw, E. (2018), Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Post-Democratic Environment, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wilson, J. and E. Swyngedouw (eds) (2014), The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Žižek, S. (1999), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2012), The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, London: Verso.

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25.  Urban governance: re-thinking top-down and bottom-up power relations in the wake of neo-liberalization Mike Raco and Sonia Freire-Trigo

25.1 INTRODUCTION Traditional studies of urban politics draw copiously on the hierarchical terms ‘top-down’ [TD] and ‘bottom-up’ [BU] to describe and explain the processes underpinning the formation and implementation of urban policy agendas. The former is usually associated with the hierarchical or vertical power relationships associated with formal processes of government, whereas the latter is elided with broader imaginations ­ of community empowerment and heterarchical, horizontal governance arrangements. In this chapter, we argue that despite their intuitive appeal, the use of such terms can mask some of the more relational and complex governmental processes that are taking place in cities across the world. Many of the assumptions that underpin these framings have been broken open in the wake of intensive globalization, de-territorialization, and the neo-liberalization of state practices. We begin by outlining some of the core academic and policy literature on decision-making and the key debates that have given meaning to the terms. We then discuss the growth of relational methodologies in urban studies and argue that these provide a better insight into contemporary policy-making processes, characterized by an increasing hybridization between traditional TD or BU approaches, actors and structures. The chapter concludes that the terms should be used as a first analytical step from which to develop more sensitive epistemological and network-based understandings of the complexities of contemporary urban governance.

25.2 TRADITIONAL VIEWS OF TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP APPROACHES TO POLICY-MAKING The academic and policy literatures that dominate urban studies are replete with references to ‘top-down’ [TDA] and ‘bottom-up’ [BUA] 383

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384  Handbook of urban geography approaches to planning and policy-making. The terms are used in multiple ways to denote the hierarchical institutional relationships in and through which policy programmes are formulated, institutionalized, and implemented. They provide a selective epistemological view of the nature of policy-making processes and the methods and methodologies that should be used to analyse them. They are often used by researchers intuitively to frame their research designs and have been particularly influential in writings on multi-level governance, development processes and practices, urban and regional planning, and international relations (see Richardson and Mazey, 2015). The core characteristics and contrasts between TDAs and BUAs approaches are set out in Table 25.1. For Sabatier (1986, p. 22), top-down approaches normally start ‘with a policy decision (usually a statute) and examine the extent to which its legally-mandated objectives were achieved over time and why’. TDAs have traditionally been associated with modernist forms of planning and governance in which clear lines of accountability, decision-making structures, and power relationships were seen as integral elements in the creation of effective and efficient forms of policy-making and delivery. Table 25.1  The core characteristics of top-down and bottom-up planning Characteristic

Top-down

Policy-making process Government Dominant power Hierarchies  relationships Institutional organization Formal institutional practices and structures Policy-making outcome Abstract legal/ regulatory frameworks Organizational structures Bureaucratic rules Leadership Forms of democracy Intellectual roots Timeframes Dominant theoretical  framings in planning studies Forms of governmental  organization

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Expert-led and technocratic Representative Political sciences and international relations literature Bureaucratic Systems view Centralized intervention

Bottom-up Governance Heterarchies Spontaneous and incremental Grounded in the day-to-day practices of implementation Discretion and autonomy of local actors Community/citizen-led Participative Sociological studies Sociological Communicative theory Participatory development

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Urban governance  ­385 It was assumed that representative governments, in democratic societies, were elected on clear mandates and could operationalize their policies through strong institutional arrangements and managerial mechanisms. Of course, the openness of such arrangements was always challenged by elite theorists, with TDAs overseen by political, economic, and technocratic elites, often working in relationships free from public scrutiny (see Harding, 1995; Mills, 1956). Some of the best examples of post-war TDAs in city planning were found in the activities of ‘strong’ leaders, such as Robert Moses in New York or T Dan Smith in Newcastle, leaders who instigated the physical re-shaping of their cities but in ways that were insulated from the claims of competing democratic interests (see Caro, 2015; Pendlebury, 2001). During the 1960s and 1970s TDAs came under fierce attack from critics in the fields of development and public policy. A series of landmark studies highlighted the limitations of the assumptions they embedded and the ‘implementation deficits’ often associated with public policy (see Barrett, 2004). Anthropologists such as Lipsky (1980) showed that state actors employed a high degree of autonomy and discretion in interpreting and carrying out policy procedures. Human beings act in prejudicial and context-dependent ways that go beyond the imaginations of centralized decision-makers, making TDAs subject to knowledge fallibilities and context-specific variations. In the fields of urban and development planning scholars were increasingly claiming that urban programmes should devolve powers and resources to autonomous citizens (see Castells, 1979; Lefebvre, 1968). However, it was not until the first and second oil shocks of the 1970s, which undermined much of the faith in the power of governments and TDAs, that the legitimacy of planning as a scientific discipline was fundamentally challenged (see Ryser and Franchini, 2008). The TDAs that dominated the discipline in the aftermath of World War II, and had mainly focused on the recovery of the physical dimension of cities, had already been giving way to a more complex set of approaches, in which cities were presented as ‘systems’ or ‘interrelated sets of parts’ (Pissourios, 2014). The theoretical works of scholars such as McLoughlin (1969), Chadwick (1971) and Faludi (1973) advocated planning practices based on ‘programmes’ and ‘patterns’ that would be better capable of dealing with the complexity of cities than the traditional and limited ‘planning standards’. Their writings laid the foundations for a more systematic challenge to TDAs, which was precipitated by the oil crises. As a result, the 1980s saw the growth of ‘communicative planning theory’ and the replacement of standardized approaches with a new search for more pragmatic ways of governing that would focus on ‘progressive ways of collectively

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386  Handbook of urban geography making sense together while living differently’ (Healey, 1992, p. 143; see also Forester, 2012; Healey, 2009). A core component of these shifts in thinking was the turn towards Bottom-Up Approaches (BUAs), that in contrast to TDAs look for ‘the multitude of actors who interact at the operational (local) level on a particular problem or issue’ (Sabatier, 1986, p. 22). Under BUAs ‘the familiar policy stages of formulation, implementation, and reformulation [embedded in TDAs] tended to disappear. Instead, the focus has been on the strategies pursued by various actors in pursuit of their objectives’ (Sabatier, 1986, p. 22). BUAs have been particularly significant in development studies. By the 1980s, the perceived failures of development policies in the so-called ‘Third World’, called for an analysis of the reasons that limited policy effectiveness and outcomes (Mansuri and Rao, 2013). Writers such as Ostrom (1990) and Sen (1982) pointed to the lack of community empowerment and engagement as the underlying reasons for the policy failures. The Brundtland Report of 1987 also argued for solidarity and cooperation as ways to confront the effects of rapid urbanization (WCED, 1987). The emphasis was placed on grassroots organizations as the enablers of (urban) change through ‘participatory development’, in opposition to the traditional ‘centralized interventions’ implemented by government institutions. Such views were seen to be more ‘in-line’ with wider social trends in which societies from the 1960s onwards were becoming more reflexive and critical of the decisions made by governments and experts (see Beck, 1996; Giddens, 2003). The legitimacy of TDAs, in the wake of such criticisms, became increasingly fractured as societies and class structures in many western countries underwent fundamental change. Such debates were not limited to western cities. In post-war period Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, governments were involved in constant struggles over the balance between top-down centralization and some degree of bottom-up local autonomy and control, a discussion that intensified with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 (see Hatherley, 2015). Moreover, from the 1970s a growing band of Public Choice theorists and neo-liberals began to develop their own alternative political economic agenda. Many of these writers were inspired by the work of Hayek and the so-called Chicago School of economists. They argued that it was impossible for state institutions to govern effectively from the top down. Individual decisions, made by knowledgeable actors operating in contexts that only they understood, should be empowered from the bottom up (see Blythe, 2013; Pennington, 2006). The role of the state should be to act as an arbiter of market relations, rather than a TD decision-maker. Similar logics were extended to welfare reform and spatial policy i­nterventions

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Urban governance  ­387 with individuals viewed as ‘independent’ actors who should take greater responsibility for their own welfare. Under neo-liberalism, there were calls for greater deregulation and autonomy to cities and regions. BUAs, therefore, lent themselves to the establishment of new models of economic governance, often directly at odds with some of the more radical approaches outlined in development studies.

25.3 DEVELOPING MORE RELATIONAL VIEWS OF POLICY-MAKING The previous discussion illustrates the emergence of BUAs as a reaction against the traditional and centralized TDAs that were common across different academic disciplines and policy orthodoxies. However, this binary opposition has been subject to growing criticisms in urban studies that have become more concerned with the relationality embedded within policy-making and political processes (see Bulkeley et al., 2018). For Massey (2007), traditional separations between ‘top-down’ influences (such as globalization, capitalism, and technological change) and ‘bottomup’ everyday ‘realities’ in cities have become increasingly irrelevant in a world that is becoming more and more inter-connected. Massey argued that this is not simply a function of heightened modernity, but represents a new way of thinking about governance that explores ‘the relational construction of space and place. It would understand that relational construction as highly differentiated from place to place through the vastly unequal disposition of resources’ (Massey, 2004, p. 13). Massey’s relational take on policy-making and political processes resonates with writings by other scholars that argue for an agonistic framing of urban processes (see e.g. Hillier, 2002, 2003; Ploger, 2004; McAuliffe and Rogers, 2018). Drawing on the work of Chantal Mouffe (1999, 2000, 2005, 2013), these authors criticize the post-political ideal of a democratic consensus achieved through rational deliberation, whereby conflict is portrayed as a problem to be solved from the top-down ‘through legal means or other forms of power’ (Ploger, 2004, p. 75). As a result, ‘rational’ decision-making processes exclude dissenting voices and interests that could get in the way of a desired consensus, which usually serves the interests of existing hierarchies of power (Hillier, 2003). For these authors, the only plausible way to ‘democratize democracy’ (cf. Purcell, 2013) is to shift the antagonistic framing of politics towards an agonistic one, where conflict is embraced as an inherent feature of a genuinely democratic debate, and consensus is replaced by compromise. Such an agonistic conceptualization of democracy would open up spaces for dissenting voices

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388  Handbook of urban geography to engage in decision-making processes but in ways that do not assume a simple and managed devolution of powers and resources from governing agencies to individual or collective actors. In this way, an agonistic framing of democracy would appear to be better equipped to deal with the growing plurality of demands that are a feature of modern societies. With regards to planning, these agonistic scholars argue that ‘communicative planning’ rests on the assumption that a rational consensus is possible (Flyvbjerg, 1998; Tewdwr-Jones and Thomas, 1998; Hillier, 2003; Ploger, 2004). Drawing on the work on Jurgen Habermas, communicative planning theorists believe that consensus is possible as long as all the voices are represented in the decision-making processes, enabling the emergence of hybrid approaches to governance that incorporate both TDAs and BUAs as a mode of ‘third way’ politics, built around the creation and institutionalization of consensus. However, far from bringing about a relational construction of space and place, as Massey argued for, such hybrid approaches marginalize alternative possibilities and dissenting voices through inclusion in rational decision-making processes (McAuliffe and Rogers, 2018). They provide an illusion of inclusiveness that leaves unchallenged the antagonistic framings that underpin democratic debates, themselves a consequence of the deepening of structural changes and inequalities that are emerging under conditions of neo-liberal reform. We now identify and discuss three particularly significant instances that illustrate the impact of these hybrid approaches on changing governance relations: globalization and the hollowing out of the nation-state; the growth of urban social diversity; and the rise of expert systems and planning. 25.3.1  Globalization and the Hollowing Out of the Nation State The scale of economic, social, and political globalization makes it increasingly difficult to identify specific, institutional locations of TD or BU power. In the post-war period powerful supra-national bodies such as the World Bank, the United Nations (UN), and the European Union (EU) have emerged and played a greater role in facilitating global governance. These organizations, along with nation-state governments, provide new platforms for the implementation of TDAs, disguised as BUAs, to shape macro and micro-economic policy discussions in some ‘developing’ countries. In spite of the local empowerment and local control entailed in their development programmes, the truth is that the scope and scale of BUAs are heavily circumscribed by the tight monitoring role exercised by these organizations. At the same time, the ability of government actors and policy-makers to have a direct influence on policy outcomes is also

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Urban governance  ­389 being hollowed-out by a growing multiplicity of international networks. Governance decisions are no longer developed and implemented by easily defined hierarchies but operate through assemblages of actors and organizations, loosely bounded together in networks (see McFarlane, 2018). The structural form and character of decision-making arrangements have thus been subject to systematic and intensifying rounds of change. The growing influence of neo-liberal agendas has also reduced the autonomy of formal government bodies. In the wake of austerity following the financial crash of 2007, governments are increasingly reliant on global finance to support welfare spending and investment programmes in infrastructure. As Schäfer and Streeck (2015) note, most governments face growing restrictions on their ability to raise taxes for political and economic reasons but are simultaneously facing increasing demands for spending. This has made them more reliant on private sector sources of finance and investment and encouraged the growth of what Davis and Walsh (2016) term the ‘financialization’ of government and the growing involvement of the financial sector into the everyday lives of citizens and the decision-making practices of state bodies (see also Krippner, 2011). An element of these reforms has involved the mass-privatization of public services and what some have termed the corporate take-over of the welfare state (see Crouch, 2015). Private firms not only provide a growing number welfare services but also own, manage, finance, and operate a greater share of welfare infrastructure. In the United Kingdom, for instance, Private Finance Initiatives have been used to fund state activities and new infrastructures, amounting to an overall spending of over £300 billion. The UK is now used by global agencies (public and private) as a ‘model’ country for others to emulate around the world (see Raco, 2014). These processes have been compounded by new forms of austerity urbanism (Peck, 2012), in which state spending and investment has been reduced to historically low levels compared to post-war standards (Blythe, 2013). Within such contexts, the traditional model of government as a provider of services is breaking down along with established, vertical lines of accountability and decision-making. The optimistic accounts of collaborative governance reforms of the 1980s and 1990s look increasingly outdated as new hybrids and networks of public, private, and civil society bodies take greater ownership and control of responsibilities from government bodies. Descriptions of such networks as BU replacements for TD structures conceal the antagonistic nature of reforms provide a false sense of inclusivity and decentralization of power. TD and BU approaches are unable to capture the complexity of these changing circumstances and therefore look increasingly anachronistic.

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390  Handbook of urban geography 25.3.2  Growing Diversity At the same time as the systems and structures of the state are being fundamentally reconstituted, urban societies themselves are undergoing a process of diversification. Tasan-Kok et al. (2013) label this the rise of hyper-diverse cities and societies, in which there is growing heterogeneity between and within what were traditionally regarded as collective social groups. In Europe official figures show that 20.7 million people living in member states were born outside of the EU and a further 13.6 million hold citizenship rights in another country (Eurostat, 2014, p. 1). Most of these live in urban areas, as do the vast majority of illegal migrants. In the wake of globalization a burgeoning literature has emerged on the growth of cosmopolitan identities and reduced attachments to place identities (see Held, 2010; Delanty, 2012). Whilst much is made of the difficulties for government bodies to manage, identify, and govern diverse groups, the mobilization of BUAs and agendas do not seem to be capable of offering simple solutions either. BUAs have long been subject to the charge of over-simplifying the diversity of views that exist within and amongst communities and the scale of recent diversification has made the articulation of coherent agendas from the grassroots increasingly challenging. The implications for governance are profound. It may be increasingly difficult to identify a coherent set of BUAs within coherent ‘communities’ or ‘social groups’ in cities that are becoming more and more heterogeneous in terms of identities and class affiliations (Bauman, 2017). Moreover, within Europe and much of the Global North, debates over diversity have been increasingly fractured and linked to imaginations of social order and socio-cultural division. A series of events since the early 2000s have undermined some of the progressive assumptions of cosmopolitan and multicultural writers. The results of the Brexit Referendum of 2016 and the electoral successes of extremist right-wing political groups across Europe and elsewhere have been portrayed as strong blows against models of assimilation and/or integration. The recession that followed the financial crisis of 2007 has further fuelled a rising tide of resentment towards diversity and migration policies with many countries adopting more aggressive integrationist or neo-assimilationist forms of intervention (see Goodhardt, 2018). Governments across Europe and elsewhere are, therefore, facing severe challenges to established ways of governing, further emphasizing the limited usefulness of the traditional binary opposition of TD and BU terms in framing governance arrangements and systems.

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Urban governance  ­391 25.3.3  Expert Systems and the Privatization of Planning A third set of changes relates to the nature of planning and the growing influence of new forms of private expertise in the governance and management of cities. As systems of government become increasingly complex, so the nature of policy-making process has been subject to fundamental change. Private experts, such as consultants and specialists, are playing a growing role in the development of urban planning and its implementation. In countries such as England over 40 per cent of planners now work in the private sector (The Planning Magazine, 2017). Many state actors are increasingly performing as co-ordinators or facilitators, taking on the responsibilities associated with contract-writing and project management. Consequently, governance is becoming more and more concerned with what Yeatman (2002) terms the ‘new contractualism’, in other words a context in which contracts are used to sustain the operation and delivery of government systems. Under these conditions a whole range of players including lawyers, accountants, project managers and consultancies shape the formulation and implementation of policy in ways that differ markedly from the post-war period, when government bureaucracies tended to be vertically integrated. This represents part of a wider set of changes to the role of experts and expert knowledge in modern governance arrangements and the breakdown of established modes of public sector-led leadership and TD organizations (see Susskind and Susskind, 2014). The TDAs of strong leaders in the twentieth century no longer look possible, whether or not they were or are desirable. And, as Froud et al. (2017) show, governance arrangements that rely on complex technologies, such as privatization and the contracting out of core functions, make it increasingly difficult to identify clear ‘command posts’ that exercise power in modern economies and societies. As they note, ‘neither government nor an outsourcing company has a clear view from the bridge, and the contract is a contested and uncontrolled object rather than a device with a clear field of action’ (Froud et al., 2017, p. 85). The outcome is a contested model of governance with, complex hierarchies and networks, and uncertain and variable outcomes. The growth of contract-led privatization has created new, more plural landscapes of expertise and decision-making (Raco and Savini, 2019). Any residual belief that TD experts, within the public and/or private sectors, are able to apply abstract technologies in an uncontested and linear fashion underplays the fundamentally inter-subjective and context-specific nature of knowledge production and its application. In Turner’s (2014) terms, understandings of the role of experts and expertise need to be located in a broader appreciation of the contexts within which their knowledge is

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392  Handbook of urban geography forged, institutionalized, and applied. Efforts to insulate private actors from political scrutiny or market fluctuations are likely to be only partially successful, whatever the technologies of governance that are put in place. Expertise is always therefore prone to what Newman and Clarke (2018, p. 51) term moments of stabilization and instability under which ‘particular formations of knowledge and power are configured’ and reconfigured as contexts change. Forging alliances and assembling and empowering particular groups of experts is a fiercely political exercise that in Froud et al.’s (2017, p. 80) terms creates opportunities ‘for the consolidation of elite power while also being prone to crisis’. The establishment of clear TDA or BUA to understandings of contemporary processes of governance are therefore increasingly difficult to ascertain. Despite much recent writing on the emergence of ‘post-political’ cities (cf. Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017) and the idea that new elite groups have emerged to promote technical solutions to urban problems in a consensual and non-political manner, the scale of the processes of deterritorial uncertainty highlighted above draw attention to the relational character of policy-making. As noted, this is not necessarily empowering for citizens and social groups. As Du Gay and Lopdrup-Hjorth (2016, p. 33) argue, claims that traditional modes of governance are characterized as ‘being repressive, authoritarian, favouring a management perspective, [and] lacking spontaneity’ are, in themselves becoming something of an orthodoxy that can underplay the very real benefits that can accrue from the existence of responsive and accountable forms of bureaucratic organization (see also Du Gay, 2000).

25.4 CONCLUSIONS In this chapter we have argued that debates over planning, development, and policy-making have been dominated for decades by explicit and implicit uses of the terms Top Down and Bottom Up. They have usually been framed as being in a state of dynamic tension, with policy-making systems presented as more or less focussed on one or the other. We have also argued that whilst such terms had value as representations of modernist programmes and ways of working in the post-war period, structural changes in economies and societies have reduced their significance and heuristic value. Drawing on the work of authors such as Massey, we argue that inter-connections between places plays a vital role in policy-making processes and accordingly, these should be conceived as being more relational in form. So, is there still any value in using the terms TD and BU? Research projects, at all scales, often draw implicitly and explicitly on them. They

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Urban governance  ­393 can act as a useful descriptor, or a starting point around which mapping exercises can be established to document and describe the formal government and governance arrangements existing in a place. These can then be used to frame broader questions and methodologies. However, we have shown that the binary opposition of TD/BU, or the hybrid TD/BU approaches, cannot fully capture the complexity of the urban processes currently taking place in our built environments. Both of them are based on an antagonistic understanding of politics that treats conflict as ‘a problem to be solved’ rather than an inherent feature of democratic debates. Therefore, we would suggest that the use of TD and BU terms needs to be developed into more relational forms of analysis, one that follows the agonistic conceptualization suggested by Mouffe and others, where the plurality of contemporary urban governance is embraced in all its complexity.

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394  Handbook of urban geography Froud, J., S. Johal, M. Moran and K. Williams (2017), ‘Outsourcing the state: new sources of elite power’, Theory, Culture and Society, 34 (1), 77–101. Giddens, A. (2003), Runaway World, Cambridge: Polity Press. Goodhardt, D. (2018), The Road to Somewhere – the New Tribes Shaping British Politics, London: Penguin. Harding, A. (1995), ‘Elite theory and growth machines’, in David Judge, Gerry Stoker and Harold Wolman (eds), Theories of Urban Politics, London: Sage, pp. 35–54. Hatherley, O. (2015), Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings, London: Allen Lane. Healey, P. (1992), ‘Planning through debate: the communicative turn in planning theory’, The Town Planning Review, 63 (2), 143–162. Healey, P. (2009), ‘The pragmatic tradition in planning thought’, Journal of Planning Education and Research, 28 (3), 277–292. Held, D. (2010), Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Reality, London: Polity Press. Hillier, J. (2002), The Shadows of Power: An Allegory of Prudence in Land-Use Planning, Abingdon: Routledge. Hillier, J. (2003), ‘Agon’izing over consensus: why Habermasian ideals cannot be “real”’, Planning Theory, 2 (1), 37–59. Krippner, G. R. (2011), Capitalising on Crisis – The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1968), Le Droit à la Eille (suivi de) Espace et Politique, Paris: Editions Anthropos. Lipsky, M. (1980), Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Mansuri, G. and V. Rao (2013), Localizing Development. Does Participation Work?, Washington, DC: The World Bank. Massey, D. (2004), For Space, Cambridge: Polity Press. Massey, D. (2007), World City, Cambridge: Polity Press. McAuliffe, C. and D. Rogers (2018), ‘Tracing resident antagonism in urban development: agonistic pluralism and participatory planning’, Geographical Research, 56 (2), 219–229. McFarlane, C. (2018), ‘Fragment urbanism: politics on the margins of the city’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (6), 1007–1025. McLoughlin, J. B. (1969), Urban and Regional Planning. A Systems Approach, London: Faber. Mills, C. W. (1956), The Power Elite, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mouffe, C. (1999), ‘Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism’, Social Research, 66 (3), 745–758. Mouffe, C. (2000), The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (2005), On the Political, Abingdon: Routledge. Mouffe, C. (2013), Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London: Verso. Newman, J. and J. Clarke (2018), ‘The instabilities of expertise: remaking knowledge, power and politics in unsettled times’, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 31 (1), 40–54. Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peck, J. (2012), ‘Austerity urbanism – American cities under extreme economy’, City, 16 (6), 625‒655. Pendlebury, J. (2001), ‘Alas Smith and Burns? Conservation in Newcastle upon Tyne city centre 1959–68’, Planning Perspectives, 16 (2), 115–141. Pennington, M. (2006), Liberating the Land – the Case for Private Land-use Planning, London: The Institute of Economic Affairs. Pissourios, I. (2014), ‘Top-down and bottom-up urban and regional planning: towards a framework for the use of planning standards’, European Spatial Research and Policy, 21 (1), 83–99. Ploger, J. (2004), ‘Strife: urban planning and agonism’, Planning Theory, 3 (1), 71–92.

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Urban governance  ­395 Purcell, M. (2013), The Deep-down Delight of Democracy, New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Raco, M. (2014), State-led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare Reform and Localism in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Raco, M. and F. Savini (eds) (2019), Planning and Knowledge: How New Forms of Technocracy are Shaping Contemporary Cities, Bristol: Policy Press. Richardson, J. and S. Mazey (eds) (2015), European Union – Power and Policy-Making, Fourth Edition, Abingdon: Routledge. Ryser, J. and T. Franchini (eds) (2008), International Manual of Planning Practice, Fifth Edition, Madrid: ISOCARP. Sabatier, P. (1986), ‘Top-down and bottom-up approaches to implementation research: a critical analysis and suggested synthesis’, Journal of Public Policy, 6 (1), 21–48. Schäfer, A. and W. Streeck (2015), ‘Politics in an age of austerity: introduction’, in Wolfgang Streeck and Armin Schäfer (eds), Politics in an Age of Austerity, Wiley, Oxford, pp.1–25. Sen, A. (1982), Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Susskind, R. and D. Susskind (2014), The Future of Professions – How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tasan-Kok, T., R. van Kempen, M. Raco and G. Bolt (2013), Towards Hyper-Diversified European Cities: A Critical Literature Review, Brussels: European Commission. Tewdwr-Jones, M. and H. Thomas (1998), ‘Collaborative action in local plan-making: ­planners’ perceptions of planning through debate’, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 25 (1), 127–144. The Planning Magazine (2017), Survey Results, London: The Planning Magazine. Turner, S. P. (2014), The Politics of Expertise, New York: Routledge. WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development) (1987), Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeatman, A. (2002), ‘The new contractualism and individualized personhood’, Journal of Sociology, 38 (1), 69–73.

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26.  The right to the city: theoretical outline and reflections on migrants’ activism in post-reform urban China Junxi Qian and Shenjing He

26.1 INTRODUCTION 26.1.1  The Intellectual Context of the Right to the City Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, ‘the right to the city’ has become a prevalent concern in critical urban research and concurrently a favoured slogan for grassroots activism (Blokland et al., 2013). The extraordinary impetus gained by this rallying cry underscores the centrality of the city to political movements and struggles. Following Harvey (2008), it can be argued that the extraction and appropriation of surplus value is structured increasingly through the patterns of production and consumption in cities. As Harvey (2012, p. 129) argues, exploitation and disempowerment take place not merely in workplaces, but in all aspects of the mundane experiences of urban living – ‘all these forms of exploitation are and always have been vital to the overall dynamics of capital accumulation and the perpetuation of class power’. The inherent inequalities produced by capitalist urban order have created the need for an umbrella concept to motivate and evaluate the multiplicity of urban-based claims to dignified urban life, in both the Global North and South. Originally proposed by the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city, which encompasses both a theoretical edifice and a radical political agenda, enables the imaginations of an alternative urbanism to those built on the logics of capital, profit and market value. Writing on the eve of the 1968 student uprising in Paris, Lefebvre (2003) was ahead of most urban theorists in recognizing that urban processes had become a principal means by which surplus value and capital accumulation could be realized. Accordingly, urban space needs to be viewed as a primary battleground of the struggles for rights and justice (Soja, 2010). In this sense, to assert a ‘right to the city’ may hold a key to reversing the alienation and exclusion wrought by capitalist modernization (Lefebvre, 1996). In all, the right to the city advocates that: (1) the process of decisionmaking must be democratized so that previously disempowered groups 396

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The right to the city  ­397 can make claims in a common space of participation; (2) use value, in lieu of exchange value, needs to be underlined as the organizing principle of urban spaces, while the users and inhabitants of urban spaces should be entitled to resources which the city has to offer (Purcell, 2013a; He, 2015). To fully appreciate Lefebvre’s proposal, it is helpful to start with his denouncement of the city in modern capitalist economies as the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 147). The city, in this view, is a field of relations in which the capitalist mode of production holds together the whole organization of the political and the social. Differentiated functions of spaces are delineated to rationally organize socio-spatial orders, essential to which is a system of private property rights. This spatiality of segmented land uses, eventually, results in segregated social spaces which curtail the chances of encounter and interaction between residents of the city (Purcell, 2013a). In addition to the naturalization and hegemonization of the market logic, Lefebvre (2001) contends that the state has become deeply enmeshed in the production and maintenance of territorial conditions for the expansion of economic production. The conspiracy between capitalism and state power institutes an overwhelming structure within which everyday life is programmed and subjugated to serve capitalist accumulation and passive consumption (Lefebvre, 1971). In contrast, the needs, uses and claims which are not conducive to the maximization of exchange value tend to be thoroughly excluded from dominant visions of the city. An essential contradiction exists between the totality of a market-oriented socio-spatial order and the inevitable fragmentation and segregation of everyday experiences. Hence, to affirm the right to the city entails a radical break with the colonization of the lifeworld by the ordering endeavours of capitalism. In Lefebvre’s words, the right to the city advocates that no particular social groups will ‘be thrown out of society and civilization into some space which has been produced solely for the purpose of discrimination’ (Lefebvre, 1976, p. 35). The right to the city has become an appealing idea to scholars working on social (in)justice in the city, for it resonates with an important intellectual tradition that insists on the structural roots of urban crises and inequalities, exemplified by the works of David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Peter Marcuse, Neil Smith, Neil Brenner, among many others. The purpose of this chapter is threefold. First, in Section 26.1.2, we will clarify the difference between the thesis of the right to the city and the liberal-democratic construction of citizenship and rights, focusing on the questions of ‘what right’ and ‘whose right’. Second, in Section 26.2, we will synthesize and compare the implications of the right to the city for policies, legislations, international opinion-making and social movements around the globe. We suggest that, when applied to actual initiatives,

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398  Handbook of urban geography the right to the city has become close to an ‘empty signifier’, inclusive of diverse rationalities and priorities, many of which are not compatible with, not to mention radically deviate from, Lefebvre’s original formulation. Finally, mindful of the fact that the right to the city is a clarion call but not a know-how manual for social movements on the ground, Section 26.3 evaluates the status quo and recent progress of grassroots activism of rural migrant workers in urban China, to test whether a political ideal conceived in the late-modern Europe sheds light on a post-socialist society increasingly involved in the global neoliberal economy. We argue that, because migrant organizations are seriously co-opted by state authority, they are still far removed from the ideal of the right to the city. Nevertheless, drawing from the Migrant Workers’ Home (Gongyou Zhijia 工友之家), a migrant NGO in Beijing, we suggest that grassroots activism contributes to a nascent struggle for the right to the city, characterized by the collective identity of a new working class (Chan and Pun, 2009) and consciousness of the subsumption of lived experiences by the logic of capital. 26.1.2  What Right and Whose Right? Two consequential questions arise from Lefebvre’s radical stance: on the one hand, what right can be counted as the right to the city and on the other, who are entitled to the right to the city? In terms of the first question, while the right to the city does not reject increased access to social resources and wealth within an existing order of distribution, it is more often emphasized and promoted as a collective right, a claim to an alternative order, rather than a right to specific interests and for specific individuals (Harvey, 2008). As Marcuse (2009, p. 242) summarizes succinctly, ‘it is a vision that is intended to go beyond redistribution of the existing, into claiming also the right to the fulfilment of the other values that made a humane life worth living’. To understand the right to the city entails a radical rethinking of the very concept of right. For the protagonists of this idea, right cannot be understood as a discrete possession to be distributed within a bureaucratized legal–political framework. As we argued in an earlier work (Qian and He, 2012), right needs to be conceived of as an aspect of social relatedness rather than an inherent property of individuals. Dikeç (2001) has argued that the city is an arena of simultaneity and encounter, while the right to the city is something to be achieved and concretized via ongoing struggles. Thus, the right to the city must move beyond the politico–legal framework instituted by the state. This is fundamentally different from static conceptualization of rights as codified by, for example, a liberal-democratic system (Purcell, 2013b).

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The right to the city  ­399 As Lefebvre (1976) has also suggested, the right to the city is implicated in a right to difference. Here, difference refers to the refusal to subscribe to homogenizing powers of capital and state bureaucracy. The connotation of difference simultaneously moves beyond the exclusive emphasis on particularity. The right to the city underscores the building of solidarity across particularities by affirming a universal right to differ, the capability to contest the imposed categories of identities and dominant power (Dikeç, 2001). Meanwhile, the right to the city ensures that urban inhabitants have access to participation in political life and collective administration of the city. A key idea that Lefebvre (2009) championed is autogestion or selfmanagement, which is the direct involvement of the people in processes of decision-making. In line with autogestion, the state is transformed into a decentralized institution with full-fledged grassroots participation – people make decisions on the collective future of the city, rather than surrender decision-making to a cadre of elites and officials, who ostensibly represent the common good of the urban society (Purcell, 2013a). As to who are enfranchised to have the right to the city, the answer given by Lefebvre is loud and clear. A radically expanded conception of citizenship is invoked, which advocates that one’s everyday experiences of inhabiting the city, rather than the legal belonging to a nation-state or owning of properties, constitutes the basis of rights and citizenship (He, 2015). In other words, a socially just city must provide opportunities of self-realization even for those who are legally excluded from the right to urban spaces (Purcell, 2002). Lefebvre insisted that one essential means to revive the city as a place of social connection and encounter is the active appropriation of urban space by the inhabitants of the city (Lefebvre, 1996). As Purcell (2013a, p. 149) expounds, ‘[i]n claiming a right to the city, inhabitants take urban space as their own, they appropriate what is properly theirs’. By normalizing equal access and unconstrained mingle of individuals, more communicative and cooperative social relations are bred. In sum, whereas conventional systems of enfranchisement empower social members by way of institutional arrangements, the right to the city empowers by recognizing one’s lived experiences and inhabitation in the city (Purcell, 2002). The centrality conferred on inhabitation implies that the right to the city emphasizes the organization of social life around the use value, rather than the exchange value, of urban space. To Lefebvre (2009), exchange value, embodied by capitalist relations of production and consumption, produces abstract space that perpetuates alienation and exclusion. But it is the needs of inhabitants that bear the real value of urban spaces (Lefebvre, 1996). Therefore, Lefebvre (2009) proposed that the solution to the s­ ocio-cultural

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400  Handbook of urban geography impoverishment of urban space is to prioritize the ways in which space is actually used. Conceived of in this way, the city is a human oeuvre, a dynamic and fluid product of the inhabitants of the city (Kuymulu, 2013), with the latter enlivening ‘a space for encounter, connection, play, learning, difference, surprise and novelty’ (Purcell, 2013a, p.149). 26.1.3  The Right to the City in a Global Context The successive crises that haunted global capitalism since the end of the Second World War have attested to the theoretical value and social relevance of the notion of the right to the city. Over the past one or two decades, the neoliberal assaults on the welfare state and two major global financial crises (of 1997 and 2008) have prompted scholars and activists to turn to the right to the city for intellectual inspirations. In Brazil, the City Statute, which is a national law, incorporates the rhetoric of the right to the city to implement a legal recognition of the ‘social functions’ of urban spaces in addition to the economic functions. Initiatives advanced by grassroots activists and NGOs also engage explicitly with the right to the city. For example, the World Social Forum (WSF), first held in Brazil, 2001, is a congregate of civil society organizations which celebrates transnational solidarity, but contests capital-oriented globalization. It played a leading role in the subsequent formulation of the World Charter for the Right to the City. In the US, the Right to the City Alliance, a national alliance of racial, economic and environmental justice organizations, has made major progress in building a united response to capital-induced spatial injustice such as gentrification. Even UN-HABITAT and UNESCO express an interest in the right to the city, though their end goal of promoting sustainability, poverty alleviation and inclusion in cities, yet without touching the foundation of capitalism, is at odds with the radicalism of Lefebvre. As Brown (2013, p. 959) rightly points out, because of the highly abstract and extraordinarily radical nature of Lefebvre’s original formulation of the thesis, there exists a real gulf between ideals and realpolitik on the ground – ‘[t]here is little guidance on how the ideal of citizenship based on residency could be applied, how the right to the city might be transformed into practice’. Based on the theoretical discussions in the previous section, we propose that three criteria may be applied to evaluate tentatively the various movements and campaigns that are inspired by or employ the rhetoric of, or at least imply some hint of, the right to the city. First, do movements resist exchange value by asserting the use value of the city? Second, do movements expand space of political participation and, in ideal circumstances, break from the state and existing legal order? Third and the most crucially, does the movement envisage an alternative to the

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The right to the city  ­401 capitalist ordering of the world and thus resist being confined to claims of particular interests? To clarify, not all social movements or political campaigns which extant studies have analysed explicitly invoke the rhetoric of the right to the city. Nonetheless, they can be interpreted from the lens of this ‘common rallying cry’ (Mitchell and Heynen, 2009), for these claims are rooted in lived experiences of inhabiting and negotiating the city. Such movements all, in explicit or implicit terms, recognize the neglect of use value as a key component of urban injustice; many stress the legitimacy of the claims based on dignity, self-fulfilment and community, rather than capital and property interests. Most typical of this value re-orientation is Brazil’s City Statute, which has developed a discourse of the ‘social functions’ of urban development and hence endowed certain legitimacy to grassroots practices such as informal land occupation, settlements and housing. The recognition of social use value has contributed to the expansion of institutionally ratified citizenship rights, creating ‘the possibilities for the state to act in the determination of a more balanced and inclusive public order in cities’ (Fernandes, 2007, p. 209). Likewise, the World Social Forum reflects critically ‘on the mechanisms and instruments of domination by capital, on means and actions to resist and overcome that domination and on the alternatives proposed to solve the problems of exclusion and social inequality’ (WSF, 2001, cited in Kuymulu, 2013, p. 930). Similar attempts at de-prioritizing exchange value are also evident in struggles for public housing and protests against the gentrification and arts and culture (Sinha and Kasdan, 2013; Novy and Colomb, 2013). Relatedly, to assert the use value of spaces must work in synergy with demands for participation, voice and publicity (Leontidou, 2010). The Montreal Charter of Rights and Responsibilities, a memorandum of understanding between urban citizens and the municipal state, allows for more space for citizen participation in the definition of rights (Purcell, 2013a). In Argentina, organizations that support community-based solutions to housing deficit have been successful in working with a Leftleaning state to foster participatory modes of design, informal settlement improvements and the production of neighbourhoods (Cutts and Moser, 2015). Akin to the notion of autogestion, some movements have taken direct control and self-management of neighbourhoods. However, the perspective of the right to the city also casts light on certain limitations that hamstring the movements and campaigns at question here. To begin with, urban social movements frequently fall prey to what Kuymulu (2013) terms the ‘collective individualism’; that is to say, people organize struggles around the axes of particular interests or identities, without recognizing intricate connections between variegated forms

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402  Handbook of urban geography of injustice. An illustrative case is reform-era China. The Chinese state’s abiding disinterest in political participation from below and promotion of consumer citizenship following marketization give rise to ‘distorted’ ways of enacting the right to the city, based on what Pow (2009) has called the ‘marketplace democracy’. As Shin’s (2013) study of property rights activism in Guangzhou shows, struggles of residents inflicted by demolition and relocation are restricted almost exclusively to bargaining for better compensation. This leads those authors to duly note that there is a huge gap between struggles for utilitarian purposes in China and the right to the city. What makes the picture less pessimistic is the fact that the right to the city actually provides a route to coalition between fragmented struggles. Purcell (2013b) proposes the notion of ‘networks of equivalence’ and argues that the notion of inhabitance may become a guiding principle to be widely shared, since all struggles are towards the common goal of ‘inhabiting well’. Iveson’s (2014) study of Sydney’s Green Ban movement also attests to the potential of alliance building. The Green Ban, consisting of a great diversity of activists, has six working slogans that embody vividly the spirit of the right to the city: (1) ‘Everyday democracy’, ‘worker control’, ‘direct action’ and ‘people’s plans’, resonating with the ideals of direct democracy and participation in decision-making; (2) ‘people before profits’ and ‘quality of life’, resonating with the emphasis on use value. Another problem to which movements or campaigns drawing on the right to the city are often susceptible is the co-option by existing legal–political order and market logic. As Brown (2013) argues, it is very difficult for politics of urban citizenship to operate completely outside the official governance mechanism. Purcell (2013a), for instance, points out that neither the City Statute nor the Right to the City Alliance moves beyond a liberal-democratic system or challenges the notion of private property. This problem is especially evident in top-down initiatives led by national or international agencies such as UN-HABITAT and UNESCO. As Kuymulu (2013) has poignantly criticized, in the World Urban Forum, held by UN-HABITAT, the right to the city rhetoric is exploited by state officials to create space of manoeuvre for tackling issues emerging from rapid urban change and by business elites to nurture private–public partnership. It exhibits a (neo)liberal appetite for market and property rights, while omitting any anti-capitalist discourses or agendas. Worse, the forum envisions that the urban poor can participate in city politics only when they are acculturated into ‘responsible’ subjects of the market and desirable partners for business.

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The right to the city  ­403

26.2 MIGRANT ACTIVISM AMIDST CHINA’S URBAN REVOLUTION: A PERSPECTIVE OF THE RIGHT TO THE CITY 26.2.1  Migrant Activism in Urban China: Insights from the Literature As Section 26.1.3 has shown, the right to the city is, in one sense, an ideal type which is in reality difficult and uncommon to be realized. Without ­reifying this concept as a teleology, however, it is still a valuable endeavour to examine the varying extents to which social activisms positioned differently in the global capitalist economy have potential for delivering the promise envisaged by Lefebvre. In this spirit, this section uses the notion of the right to the city as a point of entry to analyse rural migrants’ activism in urban China, both by reviewing an extant corpus of studies and reflecting on materials that we collected for a larger project on the cultural politics of migration. If, as the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz once commented, technological innovation in the US and urbanization in China are the two keys to mankind’s success in the twenty-first century (The Economist, 2014), rural–urban migration is one of the factors that make China’s urban revolution precarious and uncertain. At present, Chinese cities are home to 250 million migrants from rural regions and offering equal access to the resources and opportunities afforded by urban life poses immense challenges for the Chinese state and society. The relevance of the right to the city to the study of migrants in China originates from two facts. First, because of the household registration (hukou) system, social welfare in China is divided between the urban and the rural. Rural hukou holders who live in the city are denied legal access to basic necessities, such as public housing, health care, community service and education. Although neoliberal agendas in post-reform China are arguably distinct from those in the West, Chinese cities underwent a comparable process of decentralization and transfer of fiscal burden to the local scale. This gives rise to pro-profit mentalities, which foreclose any emphasis on justice for migrants. Hence, for Chinese migrants, citizenship is never a given entitlement, but always a construction borne by lived experiences of inhabiting the city. Second, constituting the backbone of China’s manufacturing labour, migrants are subject to the predatory seizing of surplus value by global capitalism. The Chinese state’s refusal to grant migrants full access to urban resources makes their costs of labour reproduction extraordinarily low, which correlates positively to suppressed wages. In this sense, the pauperization and subordination of migrant labourers in China serve to subsidize consumerism in the US and other epicentres of global capitalism (Gray and Jang, 2015).

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404  Handbook of urban geography Against this backdrop, does grassroots activism counteract the circumscription of migrants’ right to the city? Answers implied by the extant studies are ambiguous at best. Currently, migrant activism is carried out mostly by NGOs and while the NGOs’ work expands migrants’ access to services and resources, it has contributed little to political participation or a movement beyond particular interests. To be sure, migrant NGOs in China have made notable achievements in nurturing rights consciousness, enhancing the mobilizing capacity of migrant labourers and collecting knowledge on lived experiences of adapting to urban life. In addition to providing services such as legal aid, skill training, social services and community integration (Hsu, 2012), NGOs also promote awareness of the conditions of the working class and build up collective identities. Moreover, they conduct social surveys on migrants’ working and housing experiences and reach out to media to influence decision-making (Chan, 2012). At the same time, however, migrant NGOs, for the pragmatic purpose of surviving in China’s political climate, rely heavily on the state. Migrants are encouraged to accept state arbitration of labour disputes, although the state–capital nexus usually leads to migrants being trapped in the state apparatus (Chan and Seldon, 2014). To win the begrudging cooperation of the state, NGOs must adopt self-censorship, de-politicize their agendas and surrender to political authority by not conducting any ‘sensitive’ activities (Franceschini, 2014; He and Huang, 2015). They focus predominantly on the specific interests of particular individuals, which, as Xu (2013) warns, atomizes migrants rather than organizes them. Despite the NGOs being taken into the panopticon of the state, migrants do engage in more radical forms of resistance. Migrants’ collective actions, in the form of riots, strikes, rallies, demonstrations and so on, are increasingly common to political scenes of Chinese cities, in most cases for resisting labour exploitation (Chan and Seldon, 2014). Some collective mobilizations are characterized by networks of solidarity across workplaces and beyond specific situations of grievances (Chan and Pun, 2009). Shared class consciousness also begins to emerge, as more and more migrants recognize capital domination as the heart of enduring injustice. A small number of migrant NGOs have already adopted discourses advocating democratic union, labour rights and labour movements; some turn to the means of c­ ultural mobilizing and aim at building up a collective culture which a­ rticulates anticapital feelings and experiences of actually existing exploitation (Xu, 2013). 26.2.2  Gongyou Zhijia: a Nascent Consciousness of the Right to the City? The extant literature on migrant activism in China implies at least two deficiently answered questions need to be addressed, if we want to

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The right to the city  ­405 build a constructive dialogue with the thesis of the right to the city: (1) can migrants develop sufficiently strong awareness of the contradiction between use value and exchange value, to feed into a notion of collective right based on anti-capital impulses; (2) is it likely that their conceptions of rights move beyond workplaces, but include other aspects of inhabiting the city? The studies we reviewed above suggest uneven relations of power between migrant activists and the state, but say little about what migrants do when they are not entrapped by state apparatus. In fact, a state-centric perspective makes us easily fall prey to fixed, legally coded conceptions of rights and citizenship. Instead, if we move beyond the state and take a closer look at some other aspects of migrants’ collective lives, identities and struggles, some subtler and less pessimistic findings are likely to emerge. We bring forth some empirical materials, preliminary and incomplete as they are, which derive from our research on Pi-Cun, a small village-inthe-city (chengzhongcun) at the northeastern fringe of Chaoyang District, Beijing. For more than a decade, Pi-Cun has been the base of a variety of collective activities arranged by the grassroots organization Gongyou Zhijia (Migrant Workers’ Home, henceforth GZ). Pi-Cun is a peri-urban village whose landscape is dominated by muddy roads, small workshops, substandard facilities and dilapidated housing, making it hard to believe that it is only about 20 kilometres away from the flourishing urban modernity in downtown Beijing (Figure 26.1). It is there where migrant activists get a first-hand impression of socio-spatial unevenness of capitalist development. Naming their organization a ‘Cultural Development Centre’, GZ recognizes that the construction of an alternative culture not colonized by the logic of capital is essential to the empowerment of migrant workers. Established in 2002 by two migrant workers – Sun Heng and Wang Dezhi – GZ, like other migrant NGOs, emphasizes the provision of legal and social services. To secure tacit consent from the state, it does not encourage collective mobilization of migrants, either. Meanwhile, however, a significant proportion of the organization’s resource is dedicated to building community and collective identity. At the centre of GZ’s agenda is to construct a ‘new migrant culture’, an anchor point for migrants to make their own voices. In various media reports, the leaders of GZ express their sympathy with Leftist political ideologies. The alternative culture envisaged by the activists is based on an aesthetics consisting of three key components: 1. An explicitly articulated collective identity of activists and fellow migrants, with translocal solidarity formed with labour NGOs in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It is advocated that

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406  Handbook of urban geography migrants speak on behalf of themselves and on behalf of their own subjection to exploitation and discrimination. 2. The conception of migrants as active subjects, both as labourers and cultural producers, instead of the passive recipients of the cultures of consumerism and capitalism. 3.  An anti-capital orientation. The ideology of GZ places emphasis on the value and respectability of labour rather than the ability to consume via exchange value and on mutual cooperation rather than atomization in capitalist modernity. GZ mobilizes various forms of expression to enunciate their cultural ideas. The New Worker Troupe (Xin Gongren Yishutuan), formed by a number of activists, composes songs and also publishes soundtracks. What has attracted extensive media attention is the annual Migrant Workers’ Spring Festival Gala (dagong chunwan), held since 2012, which is viewed by many as an antipode to the official cultural discourses in the pompous Spring Festival Gala held by China Central Television (CCTV). Activists’ music and cultural activities involve a number of themes derived from urban

Source:  Junxi Qian and Shenjing He.

Figure 26.1  The front gate of Gongyou Zhijia in Pi-Cun, Beijing

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The right to the city  ­407 lives: working and exploitation; claims to rights commonly violated; alienation in the city; discrimination by state institutions; problems with housing and children’s education; nostalgia for a stable past; and, aspiration for an urban identity. Here, however, an urban identity is not achieved by being tolerated and accepted by urban elites, but by struggling and making rightful claims. Another means for migrants to make claims via cultural expression is the Migrant Worker Cultural Museum (Dagong Wenhua Bowuguan). Set up by GZ in 2007, the museum is a grassroots creation by migrants to narrate history in their own terms. It is attuned to GZ’s overall philosophy of promoting awareness of the value of work and labour. Hence, objects ignored in the dominant visions of urban modernity, but bearing memories of hard work, exploitation and discrimination, become cherished collectibles of the museum – Temporary Residence Permits, uniforms, tools, letters to hometowns and so on. The assembling of the collection, in this sense, is an active process of self-construction to resist subjugation by capital and the stigmatization of migrants in mainstream discourses. To choose which items are to be collected, therefore, is an act of value coding that inspires critical thinking and resistant identity. Last but not least, GZ promotes communal life by encouraging collective labour that does not serve capital accumulation but highlight the use value of urban life and material resources. With funding donated by migrants, the organization rents a land plot of 30 mu (2 hectares) to make an orchard. The orchard is planted by migrants’ collective labour on a voluntary basis, while the revenue is for supporting community activism. Buyers are encouraged to participate in GZ’s activities and get to know the actual producers of consumed products. Also, GZ has initiated a social enterprise named ‘Tongxin Mutual Help Store’. The latter not only takes in donations from the public to sell to migrants at extraordinarily low prices, but also encourages migrant workers to share with each other via the channel of the store. In doing so, it aims to reduce the waste of surplus resources and materials and also routinize mutual aid and a form of ­‘collective consumption’ among migrants. To summarize this section, it is our view that GZ is trying to enact a nascent form of the right to the city, albeit incomplete and precarious. While still exclusively directed towards the group of migrants, GZ has to a notable extent moved beyond servicing specific individuals and been focusing on incubating a collective identity based on an anti-capital orientation and aspiration for migrants’ own voices and histories. Also, it has successfully moved beyond a politics of workplaces and based its activism on a general conception of migrant subordination with regard to many different aspects of living in the city, including, to name a few, housing

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408  Handbook of urban geography deficit, lack of cultural expression and spiritual life and denial of migrant children’s access to education. In this village called Pi-Cun, migrant activists have carved out a small ‘space of hope’, which has become a spring of innovative thinking in terms of rights, the politics of culture and class consciousness.

26.3 CONCLUSION The right to the city resonates with many critical urban scholars, in a time when cities are reduced to commodities and subordinate groups suffer from the consequences of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2012). If, as Brenner (2009) argues, critical urban theory is inclined towards the critique of both ideology and power relations, the right to the city is obviously one of the most radical proposals, which screams out discontent with taken-for-granted legitimacy of exchange value and uneven access to the process of decision-making. As this chapter has shown, the extents to which movements or campaigns live up to the spirit of the right to the city are uneven. Some, such as the World Social Forum, are more explicitly aligned with anti-capital agendas. Others, like those initiated by the UN, seem to be couched in lexicons of existing orders. For subordinate groups, to struggle for meeting some immediate needs often entails that they work within the ambits set by the powerful; and there is no reason for critical scholars to blame these groups for compliance or co-option. That said, however, we still need to bear in mind that the ultimate vision of the right to the city is not to be patronized by the political institution, but to re-shape it for enabling direct participation. Finally, the right to the city can be brought into useful dialogue with research on cities in the Global South. Certainly, the concept of the right to the city is coined by a white, male theorist from the Global North and may not capture all the sensibilities and priorities of social activism and movements in different segments of the world. That said, we nonetheless believe that the need for exposing and contesting the hegemony of capitalbased relations of power has perhaps never been more urgent, as the world is increasingly interconnected and global capitalism is arguably the single most critical driving force of the uneven geometry of interconnectedness. At the onset of Samara et al.’s (2013, p. 1) introduction to an edited volume on the right to the city in the South, the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is quoted, who says, ‘You don’t see yourself as part of the city – there are no places that you relate to, that you love to go . . . Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s

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The right to the city  ­409 power.’ Ai’s words can be used as a productive start to understand not only socio-spatial divisions perpetuating some groups’ alienation from urban spaces and resources, but also the enclosure of political space of participation. To address these issues entails more radical forms of politicization. The Gongyou Zhijia in Beijing, for example, does not envisage an expanded right to consumption-based citizenship, but a right recognizing the value of labour and the appropriation of urban space. In sum, for grassroots claims to rights in the South to gain real political momentum, the right to the city may well serve as a valuable source of inspiration. After all, at the centre of all progressive urban social movements is one fundamental question: whose city?

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410  Handbook of urban geography Kuymulu, M. B. (2013), ‘The vortex of rights: “right to the city” at a crossroads’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (3), 923–940. Lefebvre, H. (1971), Everyday Life in the Modern World, New York: Harper and Row. Lefebvre, H. (1976), The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production, New York: St Martin’s Press. Lefebvre, H. (1996), Writings on Cities, Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (2001), ‘Comments on a new state form’, Antipode, 33 (5), 769–782. Lefebvre, H. (2003), The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre, H. (2009), ‘Theoretical problems of autogestion’, in Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (eds), State, Space, World, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 138–152. Leontidou, L. (2010), ‘Urban social movements in ‘weak’ civil societies: the right to the city and cosmopolitan activism in southern Europe’, Urban Studies, 47 (6), 1179–1203. Marcuse, P. (2009), ‘Beyond the just city to the right to the city’, in Peter Marcuse, James Connolly, Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivo, Cuz Potter and Justin Steil (eds), Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice, London: Routledge, pp. 240–254. Mitchell, D. and N. Heynen (2009), ‘The geography of survival and the right to the city: speculations on surveillance, legal innovation and the criminalization of intervention’, Urban Geography, 30 (6), 611–632. Novy, J. and C. Colomb (2013), ‘Struggling for the right to the (creative) city in Berlin and Hamburg: new urban social movements, new “spaces of hope”’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (5), 1816–1838. Pow, C-P. (2009), Gated Communities in China: Class, Privilege and the Moral Politics of the Good Life, London: Routledge. Purcell, M. (2002), ‘Excavating Lefebvre: the right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant’, GeoJournal, 58 (2), 99–108. Purcell, M. (2013a), ‘Possible worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 36 (1), 141–154. Purcell, M. (2013b), ‘To inhabit well: counterhegemonic movements and the right to the city’, Urban Geography, 34 (4), 560–574. Qian, J. X. and S. J. He (2012), ‘Rethinking social power and the right to the city amidst China’s emerging urbanism’, Environment and Planning A, 44 (12), 2801–2816. Samara, T. R., S. He and G. Chen (2013), ‘Introduction: Locating right to the city in the Global South’, in Tony Roshan Samara, Shenjing He and Guo Chen (eds), Locating Right to the City in the Global South, London: Routledge, pp. 1‒20. Shin, H. B. (2013), ‘The right to the city and critical reflections on China’s property rights activism’, Antipode, 45 (5), 1167–1189. Sinha, A. and A. Kasdan (2013), ‘Inserting community perspective research into public housing policy discourse: The Right to the City Alliance’s “We Call These Projects Home”’, Cities, 35, 327–334. Soja, E. W. (2010), Seeking Spatial Justice, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. The Economist (2014), ‘Building the dream’, 19 April. Xu, Y. (2013), ‘Labor non-governmental organizations in China: mobilizing rural migrant workers’, Journal of Industrial Relations, 55 (2), 243–259.

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27.  Contextualizing neighbourhood activism: spatial solidarity in the city Katherine B. Hankins and Deborah G. Martin

27.1 INTRODUCTION In much Global North urban geography, neighbourhood activism refers to propinquity-based solidarity formed among residents who share a particular district or part of a city. Outside of western, industrialized countries, the concept of neighbourhood as a place identity – and therefore a basis for solidarity – can be less resonant, depending on the sociopolitical context. Understanding neighbourhoods as a type of relational place provides a broader framework for conceptualizing neighbourhood activism as a particular form of place-based activism. The ontological basis of activism is shaped within distinct, socio-spatially intertwined political, economic and cultural contexts. In this chapter we define how place-based activism emerged in the North American context and examine the different ways in which types of ‘neighbourhood’ activism have emerged or been foreclosed in other regions of the world. We conceptualize neighbourhoods as relational places that enact and draw upon certain imaginaries of residency and social solidarity, arguing that ultimately, relational place offers a more robust conceptualization for understanding activism that accounts for local context.

27.2  CONCEPTUALIZING NEIGHBOURHOOD Neighbourhoods are the myriad places within a city or an urban area where people live and as a consequence, where they walk and maybe drive, see other people – with whom they might stop to talk or to whom they might wave – think, play and learn. Neighbourhood is a word that, at least in North American contexts, usually connotes residency and sociality; a neighbourhood is where people live, in the sense of sleeping at night, interacting with household members and generally being who they are with daily life routines and practices. Neighbourhoods are not homes, however, but collections of residences; they are places where people interact socially beyond the scope of their families; where people interact with one another. 411

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412  Handbook of urban geography Early research on neighbourhoods in the US context showed that they could function as sites of community, where social relations and norms could be established and solidified (Park et al., 1984[1925]). Although neighbourhoods are sites where social interaction occurs, they may or may not foster deep social ties. Most formal US city planning definitions of neighbourhoods include parks and schools (Martin, 2003a), which signify the (normative) idea that households with children live in neighbourhoods. Parks and schools are the types of places where children may first encounter people outside of their immediate families, so the idea of encounter and sociality is very much at the heart of this traditional idea of neighbourhood. Early American urban research and subsequent activism, both foregrounded the imputed community of propinquity. The Chicago School of urban scholars – and W. E. B. DuBois (1899) before them – systematized the study of urban neighbourhoods as part of understanding the intersecting race, ethnicities and urban economic niches of different neighbourhoods (Park et al., 1984[1925]). Despite Park et al.’s problematic conflation of race/ethnicity with notions of appropriate class or occupational position, this work nonetheless legitimated the notion that urban neighbourhoods were distinct communities, founded upon common infrastructure and cultural resources such as religious institutions and commercial functions. DuBois’s (1899) work highlighted the structural constraints such as labour market discrimination, which contributed to neighbourhood conditions and community. Additionally, and crucially for activism, Saul Alinsky (1969) recognized the potential for shared grievances that arose from neighbourhoods such as the ‘Back-of-the-Yards’ in Chicago, where residents not only shared the same built environment, but also the common experience of working in the same factories. Alinsky viewed these workplace experiences and the impoverished communities that constituted the homeplaces of factory workers, as critical bases for political activism (Alinsky, 1969). These approaches to urban communities and activism recognized the solidarities that can derive from shared territorial circumstances. While Robert Park and colleagues (Park et al., 1984[1925]) saw ethnic ties of language and religion and occupational status, as the basis for neighbourhood community culture, Alinsky (1969) situated it in workplace and living conditions, shaping an understanding of territorially-based social justice claims. Struggling to situate theoretically the specificities of urban space for understanding communities, Manuel Castells (1977) identified infrastructure and services such as roads, schools and garbage collection as the core shared elements of urban neighbourhoods. For him, these mostly government-provided resources for daily life and reproduction

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Contextualizing neighbourhood activism  ­413 of households in the sphere of ‘collective consumption’ were a basis for collective activist claims. What unites these various approaches to understanding urban neighbourhood activism is an understanding that the shared conditions of life are a basis for shared grievances and ultimately, activism – whether these be found primarily in the shared factory workplaces of people in urban neighbourhoods (as in Alinsky, 1969), cultural signifiers such as religion and lifestyle (as in the Chicago School) or relations with government as evidenced in local infrastructural upkeep, policing and schools (as in Castells, 1997). In all of these cases, grievances and activism derive from shared, geographically-situated conditions or as Cox and McCarthy (1982) term neighbourhood activism a ‘politics of turf ’ (see also Cox, 1984). To some degree, then, activism comes about from a set of extrafamilial experiences that emerge from shared spaces. These experiences foster what we might call a ‘passive’ solidarity, in that, from their shared experiences and conditions of life, neighbours recognize and develop community or even solidarity, with one another. More often than not, neighbourhood activism is understood as engaging in ‘active’ solidarity to press claims or enact ‘spatial visions’ of what a neighbourhood ought to be (e.g. Purcell, 2001). As Bayat (2002, p. 3) asserts, ‘[a]s an antithesis of passivity, “activism” includes many types of activities, ranging from survival strategies and resistance to more sustained forms of collective action and social movements’. As such, we see neighbourhood activism as encompassing a range of actions rooted in place-based solidarity. Solidarity itself refers to ‘an attitude of compassionate reciprocity, aimed at achieving a social order that ensures mutual respect and a decent life for all’ (Nel and Taylor, 2013, p. 1091). While solidarity as a sociological concept has been connected to social groups that find commonalities within (and against) the territorial nation-state, such as anti-apartheid coalitions from the twentieth century or the Arab Spring from the twenty-first (which may, in fact, originate in the streets of neighbourhood settings), following Oosterlynck et al. (2016, p. 765) we suggest that solidarity is a useful framework to consider the allegiances and commonalities that develop ‘in the different spatio-temporal register of everyday place-based practices’. They point out that encounter in the place of the sidewalk or everyday space of the city can be a source of solidarity, echoing the insights of the Chicago School of urban sociologists, who identified that in the modern American city the traditional social bonds of family attachments could be replaced by informal social relations and solidarities that emerged in the context of the urban neighbourhood (Oosterlynck et al., 2016; Simmel, 1971[1903]). Walter et al. (2017) term the solidarity that emerges from place-based concerns and shared values

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414  Handbook of urban geography based on propinquitous living spatial solidarity. Spatial solidarity does not, of course, necessarily emerge from close residential proximity, as scholars of the social mix literature point out (e.g. Lees, 2008; Davidson, 2010), but a shared place can be a key source of ‘common identity, based on common experiences, interests and values’ (Martin, 2003b, p. 730).

27.3  NEIGHBOURHOOD AS RELATIONAL PLACE The motivations for neighbourhood activism, as a particular form of activism that is place-based, thus relies upon some motivations or conditions that relate the neighbourhood specifically to activism. Scholars from a variety of disciplines, including geography, sociology and political science, among others, have not agreed on the precise definition or operationalization of the concept of the neighbourhood (e.g. Park et al., 1984[1925]; Galster, 1986, 2001; Kearns and Parkinson, 2001; Clark, 2009). Despite the challenges associated with the concept, scholars remain engaged in examining its many dimensions, such as its significance for individual behaviour and collective action (Jupp, 2012; Madden, 2014) and for shaping political decisions and outcomes (Allen and Cars, 2001; Docherty et al., 2001; Madden, 2014). A neighbourhood is not self-evident, however, as Martin (2003a) reminds us. Instead, we construct neighbourhoods to operationalize research or to contextualize our social lives, based on shared understandings of what neighbourhoods ought to be. And they are not stable constructs but become imagined and reimagined over time (Martin, 2003a, 2003b). As we have argued elsewhere (Hankins and Martin, 2014, p. 24), a neighbourhood should be considered as a place and as such should be studied as a ‘contingent, flexible space that nonetheless has material, experiential salience for people’s lives’. Neighbourhoods may seem to be places that are anachronistic in contemporary society, since people can be more linked via social media to people they have never seen, than they may be to their neighbours. As Newman and Goetz (2016, p. 696) assert, however, neighbourhoods ‘have retained their importance as the places from which people experience, understand and shape multiscalar processes like globalization’. In other words, while a neighbourhood may suggest a locally-bound territory, they are often experienced as much more open and relational and thus are contemporary sites from which people engage in daily life and participate in multiscalar processes and relationships. Extending this notion and following Pierce et al. (2011), we suggest that neighbourhoods are relational places, blending elements of a locality, such as the immediate built environment and the people who live there,

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Contextualizing neighbourhood activism  ­415 with far broader relations and processes, such as job opportunities or a factory that ships overseas or the financialization of mortgages. People in neighbourhoods notice and experience different processes and local elements, understood as ‘bundles’ (Massey, 2005) that coalesce into shared socio-spatial places (Pierce et al., 2011). Seeing neighbourhoods as relational places situates them in their appropriate temporal and geographical context, as theorized and instantiated in a North American context and not necessarily conceptually as relevant in other places. Thus, neighbourhoods-as-relational-places invokes both local conditions and broader urban and nation-state processes and politics, in understanding them. This approach to neighbourhoods offers a connection with that of W. E. B. Du Bois (1899) from over a century ago, as he contextualized his understandings of Philadelphia’s ‘Black Ghetto’ in relation to the overt (broader, structural) job discrimination faced by its residents. Relational place takes a geographical as well as sociological approach to understanding places as sites where social, economic, political and even ecological processes occur, but never solely in that one site; processes always interact, connect and extend places. Conceptualizing the neighbourhood as a relational place, then, opens up our ability to understand neighbourhood activism not just as a place experience but rather as the emergence of active, engaged solidarities of place among some groups of people (who may or may not be contained in that place). Martin (2003b) identified ‘place frames’ as a key discursive element in this shift. Place frames articulate shared, activist-oriented spatial visions and grievances. The concept of place frames clarifies how activists reference local conditions in relation to specific forms of action or policy change that they seek. While not limited to neighbourhoods, place frames typically have been understood in a North American context in which the residential neighbourhood is a key spatial analytic in activist discourses (Martin, 2003b; Larsen, 2004; Elwood, 2006; Pierce et al., 2011). Understanding the resonance of neighbourhood or place-based, activism in different contexts, however, requires a more global, comparative perspective.

27.4 THE POLITICAL ECONOMIC CONTEXT OF NEIGHBOURHOOD ACTIVISM In examining the various expressions of neighbourhood activism in different regions of the world, it is important to consider the salience of neighbourhood activism at different moments in the political economic trajectory of a region (Fisher and Kling, 1993). For example,

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416  Handbook of urban geography i­ndustrialization and rapid urbanization, which have unfolded differently across space and time, have created possibilities for close, urban living and often dramatic inequalities, fostering conditions for spatial solidarity around social injustices to emerge in urban districts. This form of urban industrialization occurred in European and American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in Latin American and African cities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Cultural institutions, such as churches, have likewise played a variable role in providing resources or theological imperatives for social justice activism (such as liberation theology that shaped Latin American social movements or the role of the church in the Civil Rights movement in the US context (see Hankins et al., 2015)). The changing nature of the state – whether a strong, centralized state, a newly-independent post-colonial democracy or a republic based on territorial representation – also mediates the possibilities for neighbourhood or other place-based activism, creating openings for spatial solidarity to emerge in some contexts while foreclosing it in others. China’s hukou system, for example, grants urban services only to people officially registered to live in a given city, generally restricting the ability of migrants to make claims for services, such as education and social welfare, if they are not registered in that place. One of the more dramatic shifts affecting neighbourhood activism and claims that scholars have documented in recent decades includes neoliberalizing processes that have been an expression of global capitalism, wherein the state’s role in securing economic growth has been prioritized over the provision of social welfare (Harvey, 2005; Peck and Tickell, 2002; Hackworth, 2006). Within this shift has been an emphasis on devolving the state to local organizations and nongovernmental organizations, often in an effort to co-opt grassroots resistance (Peck and Tickell, 2002; Newman and Ashton, 2004; Heathcott, 2005; Purcell, 2008). International development agencies, such as the World Bank, have fostered programmes with community participation and participatory development, which has had the effect in many instances of depoliticizing communities’ struggles (Miraftab, 2009). As Miraftab (2009, p. 34) asserts, ‘This global trend [of state decentralization] embodies the state’s hegemonic strategy to contain grassroots struggles through local formal channels for citizen participation and claims. Such a hegemonic move, however, creates contradictions that can stimulate grassroots movements building deep democracies from below’. This process, she suggests, can ‘expose and upset the normalized relations of dominance’ (Miraftab, 2009, p. 34). Thus, neighbourhood activism can reflect authentic grassroots efforts as well as top-down (neoliberal) state-led efforts. Further, citizen participation and community initiatives may reshape the place politics at

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Contextualizing neighbourhood activism  ­417 play such that notions of ‘community’ may be rooted in a neighbourhood place or may be enacted at smaller or even more disparate geographical scales. These relations highlight that characterizing the geography of neighbourhood activism is in itself challenging, given the ever-changing contexts in which place-based solidarities might emerge and the different motivations, strategies and goals of activists (see Fisher, 1993; Fisher and Kling, 1993). In what follows we provide a necessarily limited account of the contours of neighbourhood activism as they have evolved in different regions of the world. As noted above in our tracing of the meanings of neighbourhood, the North American context has fostered neighbourhood activism in relation to a range of issues, including land-use struggles, schooling, social and environmental justice movements associated with pollution and gaining rights and resources for the urban poor. And a key strand of the placebased solidarity associated with neighbourhoods-as-places involves the politics of home ownership (e.g. Cox, 1980, 1983; Purcell, 2001). In many US cities, for example, homeowners’ associations were an early basis for spatial solidarity, as homeownership, undergirded by federal policies that aided working-class and middle-class white households in purchasing homes, grew dramatically in the mid-twentieth century (Jackson, 1985; Wiese, 2005). Reflecting the articulation of middle-class tastes for manicured lawns and uniform housing styles, in many cases, homeowners’ associations often sought to codify the aesthetics of their communities by regulating lot size, setbacks and even the palate of paint colours available for homes’ exterior colours. With more sinister motivations, many early homeowners’ associations were formed to keep African American and other non-whites out of newly-constructed housing subdivisions (Jackson, 1985; Sugrue, 2005[1996]; Wiese, 2005). As Sugrue (2005[1996], p. 214) recounts in his excavation of Detroit’s twentieth-century rise and decline, the homeowners’ movement ‘emerged as the public voice of proud homeowners who defined themselves in terms of their tightly knit, exclusive communities. But the simultaneous occurrence of economic dislocation and black migration in postwar Detroit created a sense of crisis among homeowners’ who responded to the ‘threat of black movement into their neighbourhoods’ with homeowners’ associations instituting restrictive covenants and, in some cases, inciting violence to keep African Americans from moving into their neighbourhoods (see also Hirsch, 1998[1983]). The spatial solidarity in this case reflected the racist and classist sentiments of working-class and middle-class whites, rallying around maintaining the exclusivity of their single-family homes.1 Purcell (2001, p. 181) points out that not all homeowner-based activism is classed or raced, but rather that ‘political interest is diverse’. He argues

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418  Handbook of urban geography that activism among neighbourhood residents is in large part about maintaining the spatial visions or spatial imaginaries that they have for their neighbourhood. While we would argue that class, race and gender underlie many social conflicts, we agree that spatial imaginaries, or indeed, place frames (Martin, 2003b), articulate and amplify these conflicts through spatial visions. Purcell (2001, p. 179) argues that homeowners act on their agenda because of their ‘constant spatial mismatch between the geography homeowners want and the geography they actually experience’. This mismatch inspires collective action and pressing for changes (or resisting changes) around the space of the home. In many US cities, the neighbourhood serves as an important territorial unit for engaging in urban politics and urban planning. For example, in the city of Atlanta, Georgia, USA, neighbourhood associations are collected into Neighbourhood Planning Units (NPUs), which serve in an advisory capacity in land-use zoning and master-planning decision making for the City Council and the Mayor’s office. Established by Atlanta’s first African American mayor Maynard Jackson in 1974 as a way to harness the neighbourhood movement (Stone, 1989), the NPU system has provided the city residents with a formal structure to engage in local decision making to regulate neighbourhood amenities, to approve zoning changes and to press for changes at the broader city level. The NPU serves as the de facto official representation for neighbourhood concerns and has heightened neighbourhood (and NPU) identities in the city. This programme is not unique and similar forms of neighbourhood-based citizen input and decision making exist in the governance structures of many American cities. Issues around schooling have also been a significant driver of neighbourhood activism, particularly in cities where attendance zones are scaled to the neighbourhood level. For example, the desegregation of American public schooling following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision drove white residents of some neighbourhoods to form coalitions to resist desegregation, while many homeowners fled neighbourhoods for (all-white) suburbs (e.g. Kruse, 2005). Neighbourhood activism around fighting school closures, as Basu (2007) documents in Ontario or creating schools in the case of charter-school activism (Hankins, 2007) reveal different ways in which place-based, collective action emerges around the school as a key neighbourhood institution. Engaging in place-based activism can also offer a conscious building of a place-based community. The case of intentional neighbouring, where middle-class people exercise their Christian faith by moving into neighbourhoods where poor people live to offer their resources and to live in the community constitutes a different form of active solidarity than that of Alinsky-style neighbourhood activism. Rather, it is what

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Contextualizing neighbourhood activism  ­419 might be termed ‘quiet politics of the everyday’ (Hankins, 2017) wherein a neighbourhood community is actively fostered (Walter et al., 2017). In the case of intentional neighbours moving into high-poverty, inner-city neighbourhoods, an emphasis on ‘doing life’ with neighbours and sharing resources, whether a ride to a grocery store or a meal, constitutes an active (but quiet) spatial solidarity.

27.5 NEIGHBOURHOOD ACTIVISM IN GLOBAL CONTEXT Much of our discussion thus far has focused on the dynamics of neighbourhood activism in the North American context, where home ownership rates, school attendance zones and the territorial basis of government yield various forms of activism around the commonly-accepted designation of the neighbourhood. Yet understanding the possibilities for a ‘provincialized’ (Leitner and Sheppard, 2016) relational neighbourhood activism requires attention to the interplay of the everyday with structural contexts. In countries such as Great Britain, the move to localism has been a reflection of neoliberalization processes that began under Thatcher in the 1980s and intensified in recent decades. For example, the Coalition government formed in 2010 promised to give new powers to local councils, communities, neighbourhoods and individuals, including a ‘radical devolution of power and greater autonomy to local government and community groups’ (HM Government, 2010, p. 11) spurring the decentralization of resources to local communities with uneven effects. Similarly, Australia has experienced the neoliberal reworking of the welfare state from the 1990s to the present. For example, McGuirk and Dowling (2011, p. 2615) examine the role of Masterplanned Residential Estates in Sydney and suggest that they are a neoliberal urban strategy in which the responsibility for the means of social reproduction ‘is recast ethnopolitically and governed at the neighbourhood and community scales’. The ‘activism’ associated with the Masterplanned Estates revolved around the participation of residents in the management of the estates in which they live and reveals the expectation that residents will be consumer citizens (see also Jupp, 2012). Larner and Craig (2005, p. 409) explore the neoliberalization processes in New Zealand and the impacts on community organizations, which went from largely grassroots to increasingly professionalized under ‘competitive contractualism’ by the state, becoming sites for ‘de-centralized professional and technical capacity’. In these contexts, emphasis on local governance, community-based organizations and the non-governmental sector (to deliver services previously offered by the state) suggests possibilities

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420  Handbook of urban geography for new forms of place-based identities and activism and ways in which neoliberalism can denude the progressive possibilities of place-based solidarities. Neoliberalization processes have also shaped the form and very existence of neighbourhood activism in Latin American countries. Conceptualizing neighbourhood activism in Latin American countries is, unsurprisingly, complex, given that Latin America is constituted by more than twenty independent republics and very diverse sociopolitical contexts. Activism, broadly conceived, has included indigenous movements and various social movements, which have changed in focus and style, as many Latin American countries moved from authoritarian and military rule to democratic rule (Foweraker, 2001; Posner, 2012). Influenced by structural adjustment programmes and the ‘Washington consensus’, many Latin American countries underwent a pronounced shift as democracies emerged along with significant restrictions on state expenditures for social services. For example, Posner (2012) examines shifts in housing policy under different regimes in Chile and the ways in which they shape community activism around housing. He found that under the neoliberal logic of limited public assistance, housing policy reinforced social stratification among the urban poor and promoted competition for scarce resources rather than creating conditions for collective action and collective solutions to shared problems. An important change for many countries occurred in the 1970s and 1980s as significant percentages of countries’ populations moved from agrarian to urban settings. This shift changed the nature of grassroots organization, where in countries like Brazil, the growth of cities ‘was accompanied by the birth of 8000 neighbourhood associations’ (Foweraker, 2001, p. 843). This increase in urban social movements, often rooted in the space of the neighbourhood ‘was seen as both a response to the precarious conditions of urban life and as a response to the repressive policies of the state and the suppression of more traditional forms of political organization like political parties and trade unions’ (Foweraker, 2001, p. 844). Focusing on the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, Abers (1998) examines the emergence of neighbourhood organizations and the shift from clientelism (where local bosses divvied up state resources) to associationalism (where activists formed coalitions to make demands of the state). Neighbourhood-based groups demanded services such as public transportation, paved streets, running water, sewers and basic health care (as suggested by Castells’s (1977) work on collective consumption) and were often rewarded with much-needed resources. The move to democratic forms of governance along with agrarian to urban migrations have resulted in the emergence of neighbourhood-based activism as an important arena for locally-based

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Contextualizing neighbourhood activism  ­421 claims-making in an era characterized by the sometimes paradoxical dynamics of neoliberalism. These local, state, economic and social shifts point to the always-emerging nature of (relational) places and thus, neighbourhood activism. The complexity of the different states of the Middle East, which include nationalist-populist regimes, such as Egypt, Iraq, Turkey or pro-Western rentier states such as Iran and the Arab Gulf states, has made the terrain of political activism uneven at best (Bayat, 2002). While grassroots activism and large social movements have emerged, as famously demonstrated by the many uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2012, neighbourhood-based activism is less salient in the Middle Eastern context.2 Bayat (2010, p. 50) notes that the organizations such as ‘local soup kitchens, neighbourhood associations, church groups or street trade unionism are hardly common phenomena in the Middle East, Asia or Africa (with the exception of countries like India and South Africa)’. Instead, the strength of the family and kinship relations is the basis for the primary solidarities that shape social life, particularly in authoritarian states. Exceptions, however, are found in the kinds of solidarities that emerge on the streets: ‘Streets, as spaces of flow and movement, are not only where people express grievances, but also where they forge identifies, enlarge solidarities and extend their protest beyond their immediate circles to include the unknown, the strangers’ (Bayat, 2010, p. 12). The street and family contexts in Bayat’s illustrations highlight the salience of relational place, in which different sites of social interaction enable and foster particular forms of engagement with the polity and orientations to social change. In the case of the street in the Middle East, therefore, activism is linear, mobile and flowing, rather than rooted in a home-oriented neighbourhood. It is, nonetheless, relational and place-enacted. Neighbourhood activism in other regions has ebbed and flowed, depending on the sociopolitical and economic context. In India, for example, scholars have examined the rise in middle-class activism in Indian cities (Fernandes, 2006; Anjaria, 2009). In her examination of conflicts over street vendors in middle-class neighbourhoods, Fernandes (2006, p. xii) argues that the newly-empowered middle-class ‘form civic and neighbourhood organizations in order to reclaim public space and consolidate a style of living that can adequately embody [middle-class] self-image’. Anjaria (2009) analyses the activism of a neighbourhood residents’ association in Mumbai to protest/ban food hawking on the streets. One of his research participants pointed out that it is only a subset of the middle-class that engages in activism to overcome what Purcell (2001) had identified in Los Angeles as the spatial mismatch between activists’ spatial imaginary versus what they experience (public space occupied by food hawkers, in

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422  Handbook of urban geography this case): ‘The poor don’t care about open spaces. And the elite, they just fly off to Geneva [when they want relief from the city’s problems]. It is only people from the middle class who are active in these matters’ (Anjaria, 2009, p. 397). In slum communities, such as those examined by Nijman (2008), local agencies and communities are increasingly brought into development policy agendas, echoing the emphasis on local responsibility (and, to some degree, empowerment) that has been a consequence of neoliberalizing processes. As Miraftab (2009, p. 35) asserts, squatter movements in the Global South can serve to make the poor legible to the state at the same time that they breed counter-hegemonic and insurgent movements, ‘mobilizing beyond the state’s control and claiming their right to the city’. These locally-based movements seek to improve conditions of life in their neighbourhoods, sometimes in ways that challenge the state and sometimes in more neoliberal ways that replace state inaction (Mitlin and Satterthwaite, 2004). The contradictory tendencies of globalized neoliberal capitalism are likewise expressed on the African continent (Mitlin and Satterthewaite, 2004; Miraftab, 2009). As Miraftab (2009) recounts, the forces of political liberation and economic liberalization occurred simultaneously in countries like South Africa and subsequent social movements have emerged by grassroots organizations to make demands of the state. She examines the formation of place-based organizations that formed in response to forced home evictions by both the state for non-payment of rent in public housing and by private banks for non-payment of mortgages. The organizations drew from the anti-apartheid struggles but also utilized new strategies and practices that the newly-democratic state allowed. In other regions, such as China, the culturally-defined understandings of land tenure and a strong, centralized state has left the ‘neighbourhood’ with little meaning in terms of a place generative of solidarity, although as noted above, the hukou registration system enacts a powerful ‘place’ identity which shapes some forms of activism by limiting who can make claims as residents (He et al., 2015). As Tang (2014, p. 71) has pointed out, in much urban theorizing, ‘the non-West is poorly understood with inappropriate conceptual categories’. For example, historically cities and towns in China did not serve as the locus of autonomous administrative units. Furthermore, the relationship to land and land tenure in China was traditionally unlike the ‘ownership model’ of property, which dominates in western countries (see Blomley, 2013). Rather, in imperial China ownership of land was distinguished between the right to use the land from the right to own it, and arable land was divided into two landholders: ‘one refers to the topsoil (dipi); and the other to the subsoil (digu)’ (Tang, 2014, p. 79), which had important implications for peasants’ abilities to remain

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Contextualizing neighbourhood activism  ­423 on and cultivate land rather than being dispossessed and forced to sell their labour power in cities. Urbanization has, of course, dramatically changed the Chinese landscape and likewise, shifts in the strong, centralized state have created openings for neighbourhood-based governance. For example, Liu (2005, p. 1) documents the efforts in Shanghai to develop an elected neighbourhood council system to ‘increase residents’ engagement in grassroots political process with a deliberative and participatory fashion’. This top-down approach to localizing representation echoes that of neoliberalizing efforts to decentralize the state apparatus by engendering greater buy-in to the neoliberal state project while offloading responsibilities to citizens. The ‘presence’ of the central state in the relationality of local places in this context suggests a much different form or experience of the role of local place in generating solidarities among urban residents.

27.6 CONCLUSION: THE WORK THAT NEIGHBOURHOOD ACTIVISM DOES While this review of neighbourhood activism in different regions is necessarily brief, it raises important issues around the possibilities for place-based solidarities to emerge as the world is becoming more urban and as the relationality of places intensifies. Clearly the potential exists for neighbourhood-based activism to flourish in many contexts, but as neoliberalism unfolds across the globe, heightening inequalities and, in some places, local control of resources, its contradictory tendencies may hinder possibilities for broader solidarities to emerge. While activism, as we have demonstrated, ranges from quiet, repeated acts of neighbouring in the everyday to drawing from and further developing large social movements, it remains a critical arena for urban geographers. It is an inherently place-based form of solidarity that can have real effects in how urban life unfolds both locally in the here and now and more distantly, both elsewhere and in the future. For example, neighbourhood activism can result in creating and maintaining a strong democratic and socially-inclusive place, as Schmidt (2008) demonstrates in her case study of the Riverwest neighbourhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. Or the efforts of neighbourhood activism can result in shaping the character of a place such as resisting multinational chain stores and protecting local merchants, as in the case of activism in Athens, Georgia, that Martin (2003a) describes. Neighbourhood activism can contribute to significant land-use changes, such as pressing local municipalities to provide housing for the urban poor in South Africa (Miraftab, 2009) or bringing resources to devastated Mexican American communities in El Paso, Texas

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424  Handbook of urban geography (Marston and Towers, 1993). Furthermore, the spatial solidarity in and of the neighbourhood has given voice to local residents and has enabled the poor and marginalized to be connected to centres of power in the city (e.g. Hankins and Walter, 2012). Importantly, neighbourhood activism has been connected to, or the inspiration for, broader social movements that have changed not just neighbourhoods but the trajectory of so many (urban) lives (e.g. Jonas, 1998; Newman and Goetz, 2016). To come full circle, activism can, as we have suggested (Hankins and Martin, 2014), constitute and reconstitute neighbourhoods themselves. Whether because of neighbourhood boundary disputes or a threatened school closure or resisting an undesired land use, neighbourhoods as relational places can emerge through the process of recognizing commonality in place that derives from external pressures or opportunities. Thus, place-based activism can serve to identify or create neighbourhoods as distinct places, engendering yet more possibilities for spatial solidarity in the city.

NOTES 1. The forces driving such exclusionary behaviour were not solely individual antagonisms towards difference. Social theories such as those of Park et al. (1984[1925]) that predicted economic decline in any neighbourhood with diverse – namely Black and Latino – ­residents articulated and expanded hostilities of the time; and were compounded by Federal housing policies that codified these assumptions and biases into the housing appraisal and mortgage lending systems in the 1930s and 1940s (Jackson, 1985). 2. Israel is an exception with its Local Neighbourhood Committees (e.g. Cnaan and Katan 1986).

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Contextualizing neighbourhood activism  ­427 Newman, K. and E. Goetz (2016), ‘Reclaiming neighborhood from the inside out: regionalism, globalization, and critical community development’, Urban Geography, 37 (5), 685–699. Nijman, J. (2008), ‘Against the odds: slum rehabilitation in neoliberal Mumbai’, Cities, 25 (2), 73–85. Oosterlynck, S., M. Loopmans, N. Shuermans, J. Vandenabeele and S. Zemni (2016), ‘Putting flesh to the bone: looking for solidarity in diversity, here and now’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39 (5), 764–782. Park, R. E., E. W. Burgess and R. D. McKenzie (1984[1925]), The City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peck, J. and A. Tickell (2002), ‘Neoliberalizing space’, Antipode, 34 (3), 380–404. Pierce, J., D. Martin and J. Murphy (2011), ‘Relational place-making: the networked politics of place’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36 (1), 54–70. Posner, P. (2012), ‘Targeted assistance and social capital: housing policy in Chile’s neoliberal democracy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36 (1), 49–70. Purcell, M. (2001), ‘Neighborhood activism among homeowners as a politics of space’, The Professional Geographer, 53 (2), 178–194. Purcell, M. (2008), Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures, New York and London: Routledge. Schmidt, D. (2008), ‘The practices and process of neighborhood: the (re)production of Riverwest, Milwaukee, Wisconsin’, Urban Geography, 29 (5), 473–495. Simmel, G. (1971[1903]), ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in Donald N. Levine (ed.), George Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 324–339. Stone, C. N. (1989), Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta 1946–1988, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Sugrue, T. J. (2005[1996]), Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tang, W-S. (2014), ‘Where Lefebvre meets the East: Urbanization in Hong Kong’ in Lukasz Stanek, Christian Schmid and Akos Moravanszky (eds), Urban Revolution Now, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 71–91. Walter, A., K. Hankins and S. Nowak (2017), ‘The spatial solidarity of intentional neighboring’, in Stijn Oosterlynck, Nick Schuermans and Maarten Loopmans (eds), Place, Diversity and Solidarity, London: Routledge, pp. 109–126. Wiese, A. (2005), Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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PART VII URBAN SUSTAINABILITIES

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28.  Urban sustainability transitions Jonathan Rutherford

28.1 INTRODUCTION The idea that it might be in cities that social, economic and environmental processes and needs can be, partially or substantially, met and reconciled has gained ever greater traction in academic and policy circles. This has been reinforced by ‘urban age’ discourses emanating from UN Habitat and numerous popular urban commentators (for critical overviews, see Gleeson, 2012; Brenner and Schmid, 2014). There is recognition that the big issues of our time such as austerity, migration and climate change have a major urban component or dimension to them, whether it is in the location of crises and their material effects, the role of urban practitioners in shaping multi-level policy responses, or the possibilities of enacting alternative projects and practices of urban change. Nevertheless, attaining critical purchase on the idea of urban sustainability has proved difficult due to its slippery and flexible definition and use. It is still assumed in some quarters that objectives for economic development and for major reductions in resource use and environmental externality can be met in parallel (‘green growth’), without trade-offs, difficult decisions and struggles over priorities, means and redistribution (e.g. OECD, 2013). Elsewhere, the long-held question remains as to whether cities are the object of sustainability or making a contribution to wider (social, planetary) sustainability (Satterthwaite, 1997). Furthermore, the inherently normative connotations of sustainability mean that we appear to know more about desired ‘end points’ or objectives than about the complicated process through which these outcomes might be achieved. A notion of urban sustainability transitions captures the underlying rationales of perpetual search for urban improvement and the concrete processes of implementing transformative change to our living spaces and conditions. This chapter takes stock of some of the diverse and disparate literature emerging across disciplines and traditions, and focuses on the processes through which urban change is defined, implemented and contested in a search for more sustainable configurations. Much of this work analyses the nature, modalities and implications of some form of ‘transition’, a notion that has become increasingly diffuse across the social sciences and an important nexus for transdisciplinary 429

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430  Handbook of urban geography conversations about socio-technical change. Building on work in the vein of the ‘Dutch school’ of transitions, this notion identifies a fundamental, systemic, long-term and multi-level process of societal, or socio-technical, change (Rotmans et al., 2001). It is argued that such change is required to address a series of interconnected, deep-set problems, and to shift society onto more sustainable pathways. In this chapter, I take ‘urban sustainability transition’ not as a single, linear shift or a clearly demarcated epistemological field, but rather as an umbrella concept to group some of the diverse analyses of how our societies are, or may be, moving to sustainable urban configurations. While recognizing the contribution of transitions research, I also open out the idea of ‘urban sustainability transition’ to other work which helps to capture the multiform and uneven processes and outcomes through which cities and urban spaces are actually being made and remade. This reflects the aims of recent work which has made connections between transitions analysis and other distinctive approaches to systemic societal shifts (Meadowcroft, 2009; Monstadt, 2009; Bulkeley et al., 2011; Lawhon and Murphy, 2011; Truffer and Coenen, 2012). From a critical overview of recent research, the chapter makes three main points. First, the city is increasingly recognized as a key nexus for intervention in any making of sustainable socio-technical futures. Urban transitions research seeks to understand competing pathways of multiple possible sustainabilities (the always ongoing and contested making of sustainable configurations), without maintaining the illusion of a predefined ‘ideal’ state that it would be possible for all cities to reach at a specific point in the future. Sustainability transition processes involve different interests, arguments and rationalities which interrelate and contest futures in the urban arena. Second, this perspective supposes a shift from studying sustainability transitions in cities to a conception of urban sustainability transitions where the urban is fully constitutive or actively formative of actual and possible pathways, and not just a passive context for grounding configurations defined or initiated elsewhere. Third, this urban constitution of transition moves the focus onto the material and political components, modalities and outcomes of change which make and remake the urban. In fine, conceiving the urban in constantly evolving material and political terms is to focus on how socio-technical change comes about.1

28.2  EMERGING URBAN POTENTIALS Cities are increasingly seen to have a central role in contributing to major systemic societal changes.2 This is all the more so given the lack of action in some areas on national and international scales. Global urban

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Urban sustainability transitions  ­431 population growth, the increasing dependence of (increasingly) urbanized societies on energy and other resources, and the policy mandate which has been allocated to, or taken up by, urban authorities in many countries for developing local responses to sustainability issues mean that a specific focus on the urban scale and the growing roles for urban actors in transition processes is highly relevant (see McCormick et al., 2013). From this shared starting point, however, perspectives diverge on how and why the urban matters. In some policy literatures, cities continue to be viewed as little more than an instrument through which national objectives can be met, as discrete and bounded scales of action within multi-level hierarchies, or as singular, homogeneous actors implementing urban policy. When used exclusively, these narrow views unhelpfully conceive of cities as passive contexts or agents somehow outside of the processes in question, delinked from their wider environments, and represented by only one central decision-maker. Elsewhere, the traditional assets of cities – proximity, density, economies of scale, quality of life – are seen as qualities to be built on in the production of urban sustainability with regard to, for example, infrastructure and service provision, promotion and dissemination of innovation, or management of waste and pollution (see, for example, Newman et al., 2009). Urban authorities frequently have a range of responsibilities for improving environmental actions and performances in their own building stock and municipal practices, in public service provision, in planning and transport policy, and in building and land use regulation (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2003). So local actors always have at least some degree of capacity to shape and effect specific interventions and change within broader sustainability processes (Krueger and Agyeman, 2005). In other work, the potential for ‘disruptive socio-technical change’ emerging from urban arenas is quite high (McCormick et al., 2013; Rohracher and Späth, 2014), as when cities come together to form quite powerful collective lobbies. Crucially, this is also the case in smaller-scale initiatives within individual cities and communities, where a variety of experiments and mobilizations driven by different groups may have as much meaning and transformative potential. Recent research focusing on collaboration and learning through the development of ‘urban laboratories’ is one example of this (see Nevens et al., 2013; Karvonen and van Heur, 2014). So there is recognition that the forms and degrees of change now necessary require more transformative shifts than piecemeal local actions and policies. At the same time, the range of sites and coalitions of possible urban transformation has multiplied. This has implications for our ways of conceptualizing, studying and knowing transformative change. The

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432  Handbook of urban geography diversity of actors and interests involved, and the variety of tools and ways of working that they use, alter the questions we pose and our frames of analysis. As Whitehead (2003, p. 1186) observes, urban sustainability becomes ‘as much a political vision or social ideal – incorporating its own moral geography and forms of ecological praxis – as it is a tangible object, or location on a map’. Similarly, Braun (2005, p. 640) has argued for ‘urban sustainability [to] be seen in terms of urbanization processes, and as fundamentally a political rather than a technical or design problem’. This involves recognizing that it is founded on competing imaginaries and practices of the urban; it mobilizes arrangements of flows, networks and distributions that are put to work for particular interests; and it produces uneven outcomes through which different social groups and spaces are affected in diverse ways (see Heynen et al., 2006). Uncovering and understanding how sustainability becomes a political process in different urban arenas is now a key task for urban transitions analysis. It is essential to unpack the different interests, to understand how they can be brought together around a particular goal or site (e.g. local energy projects), and whether, why and for whom they are, in fact, working in distinct ways. These competing views and actions always frame, and indeed help to forge a variety of possible pathways to sustainable urban configurations (Guy and Marvin, 1999; White and Wilbert, 2009; Cook and Swyngedouw, 2012). It is this ongoing and contested process of making sustainabilities that needs to be analysed. In order to gain a firmer grasp of this contested process and how the urban becomes constitutive of it, in the next section I discuss briefly three strands of research which have analysed in different ways urban interventions where broader socio-technical futures are being negotiated and played out.

28.3 ANALYSING URBAN INTERVENTIONS: LEARNING, DESIGN, METABOLIC FLOWS Most work around urban sustainability transitions shares a starting point of the (future) world as complex, dynamic and radically uncertain. It analyses the inherent tension between this uncertainty and the will and capacity of actors to shape, test and/or govern emerging societal pathways (Callon et al., 2001; Evans, 2011; Frantzeskaki et al., 2012). These interventions in urban improvement are diverse in practice reflecting the different resources, capacities and aims of actors across variform local contexts, and research has interpreted these from distinctive perspectives. This divergence reflects the number of possible responses to ecological crisis and resource constraint, and the mobilization of quite distinctive

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Urban sustainability transitions  ­433 rationalities, means and prospective outcomes in/through those responses. There is a constant search for urban improvement, but always varying ways of opening up the city to go about this. To illustrate some of this diversity, I briefly outline and discuss three strands of work being done around place-based learning in sustainability transitions, eco-urbanism design, and reconfiguration of urban energy and carbon flows. These are not disconnected from each other, nor necessarily the most emblematic strands under the broad umbrella of urban sustainability transitions, but they reveal some of the forms and logics of socio-technical change, the discourses, rationales and meanings of sustainability in different contexts, and the shifting and contingent understandings and matters of the ‘urban’ in the making of sustainable configurations. 28.3.1 Making Place-Based Sustainability Transitions Socio-technical transitions research is a now well-established field branching across STS (science and technology studies), innovation studies, policy studies and other cognate areas. It studies transformations in the major systems of societal functioning and reproduction and how these changes emerge and build up. Historical studies of socio-technical evolution and change focusing on a variety of technological artefacts and sectors allowed gradual conceptual refinement of the ‘multi-level perspective’ (MLP), a heuristic analytical tool which identifies the interacting sets of logics and forces present across landscape, regime and niche levels which are productive of change (see, for example, Geels, 2002). Socio-technical regimes are stable, embedded and intertwined assemblages of technologies, infrastructures, regulations, norms and user practices. They are dynamic and can change through a combination of pressures from the wider social context (landscape) and from emerging distinct (or competing) configurations developed in niches. Much research has focused on the innovation processes of emergence, stabilization and diffusion of new configurations (progressive ‘alignment’ or ‘structuration’ of the components in regime assemblages), and thus on ‘niche-regime interactions’ supported by landscape pressures. These ‘levels’ are interdependent, in constant flux, and represent analytical topologies rather than fixed, containerized, or indeed geographical, hierarchies or scales. Through study of current sustainability transitions, ongoing innovation and change processes are analysed in their multidimensional, dynamic aspects in an attempt to produce better understanding of potentially radical shifts in (otherwise stable) socio-technical systems ‘which exhibit strong advances regarding environmental performance, economic prosperity and societal equity’ (Truffer and Coenen, 2012, p. 5; see also Markard et al.,

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434  Handbook of urban geography 2012). A systems approach is adopted to understand the dynamics of socio-technical change in the structures underpinning production and consumption. While this has shed light on the multi-level interactions through which socio-technical system configurations evolve, researchers have increasingly called for analysis of the central role of space, place, scale and politics in systemic change. Communities, cities and regions have usually been neglected in favour of a pre-eminent national context for innovation, industry and policymaking, while participants have often been restricted to major players in these domains leading to limited understanding of the deployment, shaping and outcomes of particular (other) agencies and power relations in the formation of systems. An emerging subfield around ‘urban sustainability transitions’ has begun to take up some of these critiques and apply transitions thinking to the study and practice of place-based sustainability policy. Emanating (partly) out of the normative policy-oriented agenda of transition management, researchers in this subfield note the fragmented organization and only incremental adjustments promoted by local responses and call for more holistic, joined-up, long-term thinking for policy learning and better reflexive governance of the ‘locus of change’ (Roorda et al., 2012; Wittmayer et al., 2014). While there is a more inclusive participatory approach here involving a wider set of stakeholders than authorities and businesses, this conception of urban sustainability transitions still attempts to steer change in the ‘right’ direction: ‘cities are given an impulse that translates into a sustainability movement for the city’ (Wittmayer et al., 2014, p. 9). In this view, cities become ‘transition managers’ by grouping practitioners and decision-makers together to make rational choices about urban futures and the ‘optimal’ pathway to be taken, although the forms of participation, inclusion and collaborative planning remain open and require further investigation. Other urban transition approaches attempt to feed off, rather than overcome, uncertainty by seeing it as a resource for the creation and extension of productive spaces of debate and negotiation which might open up alternatives and possibilities not yet considered. This recognizes that cities are neither merely neutral contexts within which transition happens to take place nor singular and homogeneous actors governing the transition process on behalf of all citizens (Hodson and Marvin, 2010a), but are assembled relationally through exchanges between a multitude of agents working at and across scales (Affolderbach and Schulz, 2016). Through this, there is a call to open out processes of transition to a wider framing of the political contests through which change can come about: ‘[s]ustainability initiatives should be analysed not only as instrumental policy problems, but also as discursive acts in an ongoing political struggle

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Urban sustainability transitions  ­435 for resources and as an expression of conflicts of interest in the respective regions’ (Truffer and Coenen, 2012, p. 15). Configurations for societal futures, like technology, are inherently malleable, full of interpretive flexibility, and can be put to use for very different purposes and interests. So we need to multiply and diversify competing understandings of otherwise apparently stable components and systems, and foreground the ways in which these are mobilized or destabilized by particular social groups for specific aims and finalities (Lawhon and Murphy, 2011; Geels, 2014). Ventures by the sustainability transitions literature into the urban arena have thus far been largely devoid of critical engagement with meanings and materialities of the urban, and therefore have not yet got to the urban constitution of the components, work and practices that go into change. Coenen and Truffer (2012) (and others) have called for dynamics of ‘territorial embeddedness’ to be given more ‘theoretical purchase’ in analysis to take into account local specificities and contingencies in understanding systemic change processes (see Bulkeley et al., 2011). Through this urban formation process, urban transitions might move beyond seeking to promote ‘shared understandings’ (Wittmayer et al., 2014, p. 76) of problems and potentials, and envisage change as emerging from disagreement and discrepancy. This may forge a critical transitions framework, focused squarely on the underlying ideologies and meanings of urban transition and (thus) on questions about who initiates change, for what purpose and with what consequences. 28.3.2 Tales of Transcendence and Exemplarity: (Re)Engineering Eco-Urbanisms From Stockholm and Hamburg to Tianjin and Masdar, new visions and material enactments of the eco-city of the twenty-first century are being deployed on scales ranging from the district to entire new tabula rasa cities (see Joss et al., 2013 for a range of case studies). The templates, models and productions of these incisive urban interventions in (bits of) the city are coming to represent one dominant view of what urban sustainability is. They circulate and reproduce internationally through global networks of practitioners, architects and design experts, taking on a performative quality by being eminently adaptable to almost any urban context. The Arup-led project at Dongtan near Shanghai encapsulates this neatly, having been widely disseminated for a number of years as a form of ‘best practice’ in eco-urban design even though it had not been built and ended up never leaving the drawing board. Yet, as notions of sustainable urban development, urban resilience, low carbon cities and so on have moved up urban agendas into the

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436  Handbook of urban geography mainstream (World Bank, 2010; Joss, 2011), researchers have engaged in diverse theoretical and empirical analyses of what ecological discourses and imperatives mean for our understanding and practice of urban development (Haughton, 1997). Some research has an applied focus, offering frameworks of possible responses and examples of ‘best practice’ in sustainability planning based on a normative view of what urban practitioners might, or indeed should, be doing to improve urban environments (Girardet, 2000; Kenworthy, 2006; Newman et al., 2009). Other research works from the limits of official planning practice to promote alternative, bottom-up sustainability collectives focused on meeting local community needs and creating meaningful social interaction (see, for example, Seyfang and Smith, 2007; Pickerill and Maxey, 2009). Critical analysis of the aims, practices and outcomes of current ecourbanism is also emerging (Hodson and Marvin, 2010b; Caprotti, 2014b; Rapoport, 2014). This is uncovering and unpacking the singular storytelling, dominant social interests, narrow techno-economic knowledge and rationales, and pernicious consequences of the making of supposedly exemplar urban projects around the world. While they may be the latest in a long line of utopian planning ideals reflecting the dominant social concerns of the day (Cugurullo, 2013; Rapoport, 2014), their particular mix of the discursive and the material makes them useful objects of critical analysis of urban sustainable transformation processes. Whereas eco-urban experiments in the 1960s and 1970s were designed to promote local living within environmental limits, more recent projects have explicitly aimed to bypass these limits offering repositories for state-ofthe-art global dwelling that are not constrained (in technology or finance . . .) by their immediate milieu (Rapoport, 2014). This ­‘transcendence’ – defining ways to bypass or benefit from crisis and constraint – fits neatly with the transferability of designs and technologies which can be marketed and deployed the world over (Hodson and Marvin, 2010b), and with the ecological modernization aims of sustainable development more generally where overcoming technological and cultural limits for growth effaces any idea of working within environmental limits to growth (Rapoport, 2014). Far from demonstrating progressive urban pathways for the future, some projects are shown to emblematize merely the latest round of entrepreneurial capitalist accumulation integrating inter alia: the creation of new build or retrofitted development opportunities (Joss, 2011; Caprotti, 2014a); insertion of green technology and infrastructure; gentrification, dispossession, and social control; intensive branding to add value to the whole; and the circulation and transfer of models, expertise and labour between projects as the sustainability narrative goes global. The

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Urban sustainability transitions  ­437 organizing principle for recent eco-cities is thus a combination of expert knowledge, technology deployment and a narrow view of innovation as top-down techno-social change leading necessarily to greater sustainability. The finality of many initiatives is economic in the form of investment, competitiveness, and new property and real estate markets, as urban ecology is reduced to a business opportunity. Learning possibilities come from seeing and studying these projects, not as standalone entities, but always within their political and economic contexts (Rapoport, 2014). Eco-urban initiatives can stagnate or decline because of banal and everyday difficulties such as maintaining political interest over time and shifting priorities and resources (Rohracher and Späth, 2014). Local actors and coalitions often have a lot of (new) work to do to produce green cities alongside traditional economic development or to link sustainability to broader local agendas (Desfor and Keil, 2004; While et al., 2004; Krueger and Gibbs, 2007). These grounded analyses take us beyond a concern for urban form and exemplar new design practices to focus on ongoing contested urbanization processes and struggles around the incremental maintenance and reconfiguration of the urban already surrounding us. 28.3.3 Seeking Fluid Materialities of the Future: Urban Energy and Low Carbon Transformations A third strand of work which usefully extends our understanding of urban sustainability transitions is the wealth of recent research around urban energy and low carbon transformations.3 In its analysis of interventions into the flows, circulations and wider metabolisms which are fundamental to urban functioning and its constant reproduction, this work places emphasis firmly on forms, meanings and outcomes of urban sociotechnical change (Bulkeley et al., 2011; Rutherford and Coutard, 2014). Again, there is a noticeable difference between those approaches focused on technology deployment, optimum scales and governance configurations, or input-output analysis of urban systems (in technical and policy journals), and those which start from and track and trace the politics of transitions as revealed at infrastructural sites, through energy flows and for particular social interests and users. There are at least three urban points of interest deriving from this critical work delving into the politics of energy and low carbon infrastructure networks. First, it shows a relational and specific temporal urbanism reliant on fluid, long-distance interconnection of resources, production, transport, distribution and consumption which reproduces the urban and its functioning in near real-time and using materials, plants and infrastructure

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438  Handbook of urban geography which is often only partially located within the city (Bridge et al., 2013). This offers an extremely pertinent empirical illustration of some of the recent thinking in urban studies around emerging new space-times and extended urbanization processes. Second, it inherently links shifting infrastructural configurations and urban materialities to changing forms of urban knowledge and strategic organization. Work on institutional change is associated with sociotechnical transformations, as forms of intermediary organization are positioned at the interface between the ‘what’ (visions, plans) and the ‘how’ (implementation) to construct capacities to act (Hodson and Marvin, 2012). The changing materiality of supplying and consuming energy shapes and is shaped by the relational capacity and expertise of actors and organizations across scales (Rydin et al., 2013; Webb, 2015). Third, this reveals cities to be actual sites of socio-technical change of energy systems, but also arenas of experimentation and learning around possible future configurations. This is crucial when some authors highlight the ways in which ‘low carbon’ comes to be taken up by the State and vested interests to reproduce existing market practices and configurations (While et al., 2009; Bulkeley et al., 2014). By critically interrogating the process and potential of socio-technical change, this work conceives transitions as the art of negotiating, governing, populating and contesting the interaction between the actual and the possible. Energy is thus not an anodyne urban artefact – its own material make-up and physical properties do, for example, play a role in shaping how its flows connect and disconnect differently and unevenly as they pass through the urban fabric and become integrated into the practices, routines, cultures and affects of urban lives. By reflecting on the urban materialities, imaginaries, controversies and politics through which energy systems change, and thus on what is, but also what might be, a specifically urban socio-technical transition, recent work on energy and low carbon opens up theory and practice to actualities and possibilities  of urban energy relations which are other than black-boxed, pre-set and confiscated by governmental actors or transnational utility companies.

28.4 FOREGROUNDING THE MATERIAL PRODUCTION AND POLITICAL WORK OF URBAN SOCIO-TECHNICAL CHANGE Urban sustainability transitions analysis involves tracking the multiple sites of the constant search for urban improvement through which the city

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Urban sustainability transitions  ­439 is being opened up for socio-technical intervention and change. The three literatures considered here involve reflexive learning processes, the drawing boards of design architects, the circulation of expertise, norms, capital and labour, and reconfigurations of resource flows and infrastructure systems, all on multiple scales. They constitute where possible pathways to better urban societal futures are being materially discussed, decided and shaped. The variety of work discussed highlights that cities are not the passive stage or theatre for the enactment of sustainability transition plays written elsewhere. This narrow perspective separates out the visions, logics and interests of change from the sites where change is actually taking place. Work on the spatial politics of urban transitions, on critical eco-urbanisms and on urban energy and low carbon transformation is, instead, demonstrating how the urban is fully constitutive of the nature, modalities and outcomes of socio-technical change (see also Coutard and Rutherford, 2016), reconfiguring actual and potential pathways of sustainability on a level beyond that of ‘the city’ as a context of transition. For all their distinctions, the three strands invite us, in particular, to delve into the material production and political work of urban transition. They share an interest in questions of who participates in and who is excluded from sustainability processes, how transitions are configured for particular agendas, purposes and finalities, the spatial relations and power geometries that are thus mobilized across scales, and the uneven, unequal socio-materialities that shape and are shaped by specific socio-technical configurations. As others have proposed, these kinds of questions might be productively further investigated through an engagement with political ecology and urban materiality approaches. Truffer and Coenen (2012, p. 12) state that ‘sustainability transitions are by their very nature political projects’. While work emanating from transitions studies is coming to grips with place, power and politics, developing understandings of urban transitions has to be seen as offering a distinctive take on socio-technical (re)configurations. Urbanization processes are always emerging material productions and involve political work which differs from the kinds of narrow politics seen in views of cities as entities to be integrated into other change perspectives. Some studies miss the full spectrum of political possibility by not seeing the urban as constitutive of change/potential, but still largely and foremost, in an ecological modernization lens, as a question of design (e.g. good governance arrangements) or technical control or mastery. Urban sustainability transitions analysis has to focus at once on where, how, why and by/for whom initiatives are emerging in particular urban arenas, and on developing comparative understanding of how transitions

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440  Handbook of urban geography and transition roles are conceived, deployed and related to differently in and between extremely distinctive urban contexts across the world. There is certainly an urgent task to explore the variety of forms of governance and modes of governing of sustainability transition, but beyond this institutional perspective, there is an equally important need for more theoretical grasps of the wider implications of the combinations of elements and actors coming together to forge and contest change processes at particular urban sites which may be productive of new or renewed spaces of political activity and engagement. Urban materiality is indeed at the very heart of what is or needs to be sustained. Whether focused on organization and learning, design projects or infrastructure networks, making sustainabilities always involves ways of acting on or enrolling urban materiality for particular interests. This is an inherently political process, which is always contested. Understanding how this enrolment is done (how things are put to work and therefore constituted as matters) and how it becomes contested says a great deal about the nature and possibilities of materiality as multiple, evolving and disputed forms of relationship between us and our physical world. And this is kind of what sustainability issues and debates are fundamentally about: sustaining human-environmental relations and our democratic ability to disagree about the form, process and outcome of those relations.

28.5 CONCLUSION By focusing on urban sustainability transitions rather than sustainability transitions in cities, the aim here has been to show how much recent work envisions cities or urban areas as more than just another context for, or scale of, wider dynamics which are somehow imported into the city from outside. Instead, urban processes and practices have to be seen as fully formative of the nature, modalities, outcomes and possibilities of socio-technical transitions. The urban creates, multiplies and diversifies sustainable pathways, instead of a given pathway being applied to the context of the city. The focus and argument developed in this chapter offer a number of reflections around the nature and implications of ongoing sustainable socio-technical transformations. First, it helps to move from concern for a shared desirable end point or condition (sustainability) to a productive debate about uncertainty over this, and to focus on pathways and processes reproducing uncertainty rather than prescriptions for how to overcome or at least better govern it. Second, it opens up the process of socio-technical change to more actors, interpretations and possibilities

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Urban sustainability transitions  ­441 rather than foreclosing spaces, participants and contents of deliberation. Third, it places the inherently contested visions and materialities of the urban arena at the heart of analysis (of how change comes about). Overall, then, we have a dynamic, plurivocal, politicized process in which locations, participants, rationalities and end points are not fixed and static, but fully part of the evolving negotiation and constitution (and therefore the uncertainty) of the change process. Fruitful next steps require continuing to envisage what might be a potentially progressive and inclusive political ecology of urban sustainability transition. This cannot neglect (analysis of) urban governmental actors and their very contrasting mandates around a host of social and environmental issues. There is clearly still much to be gained from study of local policy conflicts and the role of cities in multi-level negotiations and struggles over resources and flows. But, at the same time, critical work on urban transitions might also continue to open up (to) questions of agency, subjectivity, knowledge and power, and their networked constitution and reproduction, thus enrolling a whole realm of local and not so local, formal and informal, human and more-than-human actors and perspectives, as well as a myriad array of material and imagined sites of displacement, disruption and deviation of given pathways of sociotechnical change. Through this kind of approach, we might envision the hybrid and political objects and flows, infrastructures and demands, collective conventions and sites of contestation of socio-technical transitions which can contribute to advancing urban theory and practice more generally.

NOTES 1. Socio-technical is used here to move beyond an artificial distinction between social and technical aspects, components and actors of systemic change processes and thus to speak constantly and symmetrically across the two to underscore their always already intertwined and co-evolutionary formation. It allows us to analyse relations between actors, their interests, rationalities and purposes, and to take seriously the make-up and materiality of the technologies and instruments deployed, in a perspective which stresses that these are mutually shaping of potentials and limits. 2. Recent publications on various topics from international organizations such as the World Bank, the OECD and the European Commission highlight this point, while The Guardian, the New York Times and other media outlets either have cities pages or run frequent reports on urban issues. 3. Other work has, of course, focused on water, food and information flows and systems, but a focus on energy here is useful because, amongst other reasons, it has for so long been largely absent from urban studies (Rutherford and Coutard, 2014).

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442  Handbook of urban geography

REFERENCES Affolderbach, J. and C. Schulz (2016), ‘Mobile transitions: exploring synergies for urban sustainability research’, Urban Studies, 53 (9), 1942–1957. Braun, B. (2005), ‘Environmental issues: writing a more-than-human urban geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 29 (5), 635–650. Brenner, N. and C. Schmid (2014), ‘The “urban age” in question’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (3), 731–755. Bridge, G., S. Bouzarovski, M. Bradshaw and N. Eyre (2013), ‘Geographies of energy transition: space, place and the low-carbon economy’, Energy Policy, 53, 331–340. Bulkeley, H. and M. M. Betsill (2003), Cities and Climate Change: Urban Sustainability and Global Environmental Governance, Abingdon: Routledge. Bulkeley, H., V. Castan Broto, M. Hodson and S. Marvin (eds) (2011), Cities and Low Carbon Transitions, London: Routledge. Bulkeley, H., V. Castan Broto and A. Maassen (2014), ‘Low carbon transitions and the reconfiguration of urban infrastructure’, Urban Studies, 51, 1471–1486. Callon, M., P. Lascoumes and Y. Barthe (2001), Agir dans un Monde Incertain: Essai sur la Democratie Technique, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Caprotti, F. (2014a), ‘Critical research on eco-cities? A walk through the Sino–Singapore Tianjin Eco-City, China’, Cities, 36, 10–17. Caprotti, F. (2014b), ‘Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or, denying the right to the city?’, Antipode, 46 (5), 1285–1303. Coenen, L. and B. Truffer (2012), ‘Spaces and scales of sustainability transitions: geographical contributions to an emerging research and policy field’, European Planning Studies, 20 (3), 367–374. Cook, I. and E. Swyngedouw (2012), ‘Cities, social cohesion and the environment: towards a future research agenda’, Urban Studies, 49 (9), 1959–1979. Coutard, O. and J. Rutherford (eds) (2016), Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South, Abingdon: Routledge. Cugurullo, F. (2013), ‘The business of utopia: Estidama and the road to the sustainable city’, Utopian Studies, 24 (1), 66–88. Desfor, G. and R. Keil (2004), Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Evans, J. (2011), ‘Resilience, ecology and adaptation in the experimental city’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36 (2), 223–237. Frantzeskaki, N., D. Loorbach and J. Meadowcroft (2012), ‘Governing societal transitions to sustainability’, International Journal of Sustainable Development, 15 (1–2), 19–36. Geels, F. W. (2002), ‘Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case-study’, Research Policy, 31 (7–8), 1257–1274. Geels, F. W. (2014), ‘Regime resistance against low-carbon transitions: introducing politics and power into the multi-level perspective’, Theory, Culture and Society, 31 (5), 21–40. Girardet, H. (2000), ‘Cities, people, planet’, Third Annual Schumacher Lectures, 8 April 2000, Liverpool: John Moores University and The Schumacher Society, at: http://cepd. cap.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/08/Cities_people_planet_Girardet.pdf (accessed 7 October 2018). Gleeson, B. (2012), ‘Critical commentary. The urban age: paradox and prospect’, Urban Studies, 49 (5), 931–943. Guy, S. and S. Marvin (1999), ‘Understanding sustainable cities: competing urban futures’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 6 (3), 268–275. Haughton, G. (1997), ‘Developing sustainable urban development models’, Cities, 14 (4), 189–195. Heynen, N., M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw (2006), In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, London: Routledge. Hodson, M. and S. Marvin (2010a), ‘Can cities shape sociotechnical transitions and how would we know if they were?’, Research Policy, 39 (4), 477–485.

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Urban sustainability transitions  ­443 Hodson, M. and S. Marvin (2010b), ‘Urbanism in the anthropocene: ecological urbanism or premium ecological enclaves?’, City, 14 (3), 298–313. Hodson, M. and S. Marvin (2012), ‘Mediating low-carbon urban transitions? Forms of organization, knowledge and action’, European Planning Studies, 20 (3), 421–439. Joss, S. (2011), ‘Eco-cities: the mainstreaming of urban sustainability: key characteristics and driving factors’, International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning, 6 (3), 268–285. Joss, S., R. Kargon and A. Molella (2013), ‘Eco-cities in pan-Asia: international discourses, local practices’, Journal of Urban Technology, 20 (1), 7–22. Karvonen, A. and B. van Heur (2014), ‘Urban laboratories: experiments in reworking cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (2), 379–392. Kenworthy, J. (2006), ‘The eco-city: ten key transport and planning dimensions for sustainable city development’, Environment & Urbanization, 18 (1), 67–85. Krueger, R. and J. Agyeman (2005), ‘Sustainability schizophrenia or “actually existing sustainabilities”? Toward a broader understanding of the politics and promise of local sustainability in the US’, Geoforum, 36 (4), 410–417. Krueger, R. and D. Gibbs (eds) (2007), The Sustainable Development Paradox, New York: Guilford Press. Lawhon, M. and J. Murphy (2011), ‘Socio-technical regimes and sustainability transitions: insights from political ecology’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (3) 354–378. Markard, J., R. Raven and B. Truffer (2012), ‘Sustainability transitions: an emerging field of research and its prospects’, Research Policy, 41 (6), 955–967. McCormick, K., S. Anderberg, L. Coenen and L. Neij (2013), ‘Advancing sustainable urban transformation’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 50, 1–11. Meadowcroft, J. (2009). ‘What about the politics? Sustainable development, transition management, and long term energy transitions’, Policy Sciences, 42, 323–340. Monstadt, J. (2009), ‘Conceptualizing the political ecology of urban infrastructures: insights from technology and urban studies’, Environment and Planning A, 41 (8), 1924–1942. Nevens, F., N. Frantzeskaki, L. Gorissen and D. Loorbach (2013), ‘Urban Transition Labs: co-creating transformative action for sustainable cities’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 50, 111–122. Newman, P., T. Beatley and H. Boyer (2009), Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change, Washington: Island Press. OECD (2013), Green Growth in Cities, Paris: OECD Publishing. Pickerill, J. and L. Maxey (2009), ‘Geographies of sustainability: low impact developments and radical spaces of innovation’, Geography Compass, 3 (4), 1515–1539. Rapoport, E. (2014), ‘Utopian visions and real estate dreams: the eco-city past, present and future’, Geography Compass, 8 (2), 137–149. Rohracher, H. and P. Späth (2014), ‘The interplay of urban energy policy and sociotechnical transitions: the eco-cities of Graz and Freiburg in retrospect’, Urban Studies, 51 (7), 1415–1431. Roorda, C., S. Maas, N. Frantzeskaki and K. Fortuin (2012), ‘Systems analysis for urban sustainability transitions: a joint understanding of complexity and dynamics’, Third International Urban Research Symposium, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Rotmans, J., R. Kemp and M. van Asselt (2001), ‘More evolution than revolution: transition management in public policy’, Foresight, 3 (1), 15–31. Rutherford, J. and O. Coutard (2014), ‘Urban energy transitions: places, processes and politics of socio-technical change’, Urban Studies, 51 (7), 1353–1377. Rydin, Y., C. Turcu, S. Guy and P. Austin (2013), ‘Mapping the coevolution of urban energy systems: pathways of change’, Environment and Planning A, 45, 634–649. Satterthwaite, D. (1997), ‘Sustainable cities or cities that contribute to sustainable development?’, Urban Studies, 34 (10), 1667–1691. Seyfang, G. and A. Smith (2007), ‘Grassroots innovations for sustainable development: Towards a new research and policy agenda’, Environmental Politics, 16 (4), 584–603.

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444  Handbook of urban geography Truffer, B. and L. Coenen (2012), ‘Environmental innovation and sustainability transitions in regional studies’, Regional Studies, 46 (1), 1–21. Webb, J. (2015), ‘Enabling urban energy: governance of innovation in two UK cities’, in Oliver Coutard and Jonathan Rutherford (eds), Beyond the Networked City: Infrastructure Reconfigurations and Urban Change in the North and South, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 204–226. While, A., A. E. G. Jonas and D. C. Gibbs (2004), ‘The environment and the entrepreneurial city: searching for the urban “sustainability fix” in Manchester and Leeds’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28 (3), 549–569. While, A., A. E. G. Jonas and D. C. Gibbs (2009), ‘From sustainable development to carbon control: eco-state restructuring and the politics of urban and regional development’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35, 76–93. White, D. F. and C. Wilbert (eds) (2009), Technonatures: Environments, Technologies, Spaces, and Places in the Twenty-first Century, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Whitehead, M. (2003), ‘(Re)analysing the sustainable city: nature, urbanisation and the regulation of socio-environmental relations in the UK’, Urban Studies, 40 (7), 1183–1206. Wittmayer, J., C. Roorda and F. van Steenbergen (2014), ‘Governing urban sustainability transitions – inspiring examples’, Rotterdam: DRIFT, Erasmus University. World Bank (2010), Eco2 Cities: Ecological Cities as Economic Cities, Washington DC: World Bank.

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29.  Eco-cities

Robert Cowley

29.1 INTRODUCTION The concept and practices of the eco-city have gained wide international currency among policy-makers and in the media, and attracted the attention of a growing body of academic commentators. However, for those approaching the subject for the first time, a degree of confusion would be forgivable. Rather than advancing a particular definition of the eco-city, this chapter aims at least to untangle the subject matter by reviewing the different ways in which it might be approached. In so doing, it describes the eco-city’s historical origins and some of its contemporary variety. This is followed by an overview of the key critical perspectives in the academic literature. The chapter then concludes by looking to the future, suggesting that the very cityness of the eco-city may need clearer articulation if it is to realize its potential as an experimental process.

29.2  MAKING SENSE OF THE ECO-CITY The broad force of the term eco-city is to communicate some type of ambition to improve the ecological health (Register, 1987) of urban areas. However, any attempt to pin down what this might mean in practice, and how precisely the eco-city differs from other models of the future city, will be hampered both by its heterogeneity in practice and by the absence of a generally accepted set of principles or evaluative criteria. Equally, delineations of the subject matter for purposes of analysis will always be open to contestation. While the starting point, then, must be to acknowledge the fuzziness of the term, a consideration of the various possible approaches to its definition does allow some sense to emerge. 29.2.1  ‘Eco-city’ as a Label One way of arriving at a definition might be to review the totality of initiatives explicitly labelled as eco-cities. Such an undertaking would not be straightforward, however – even assuming information was readily available about all cases. A first problem arises where apparently 445

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446  Handbook of urban geography equivalent terms are used in languages other than English. Should, for example, an Italian ecocittà be considered? Since città encompasses the English ideas of both city and town, would initiatives labelled in English as eco-towns then also qualify? Should we go on expanding the set of labels to include, for example, Greensburg GreenTown (Kansas, USA)? What if our research reveals a self-labelled eco-city initiative with a plainly rural or exurban setting? If we acknowledge that the eco-city label is often used interchangeably with various other fashionable urban descriptors (de Jong et al., 2015), then are variations such as Langfang Eco-Smart City (Hebei Province, China) admissible? Since there is no barrier to anybody calling a project an eco-city (Rapoport, 2014), this approach may well be revealing of the uses and abuses of the label to market and promote urban areas, city regions, and particular developments. Its intrinsic meaning, however, may remain out of sight. 29.2.2  Eco-cities as ‘Megaprojects’ Alternatively, we might seek to understand how the eco-city tends to be constructed as an object of enquiry. The international media, first, tends to portray eco-cities as large-scale, new-build urban development schemes with stated environmental ambitions, mostly located outside Europe and North America (Joss, 2011a). There is a good case for considering the ecocity in these terms. A recent report commissioned by the UK government (Moir et al., 2014), analysing the language used to describe future cities in English-language publications, found that the term eco-city has waned in recent years, except when associated with large Asian new-builds. To the extent that this understanding of the eco-city is a commonplace one, it merits further discussion. High-profile megaprojects feature heavily in the academic literature explicitly using the eco-city label to describe its subject matter. These include: the Chinese examples of Tianjin (see Caprotti, 2014a; 2015; Caprotti et al., 2015; Flynn et al., 2016), Caofeidian (Joss and Molella, 2013), Shenzhen (de Jong et al., 2013), and the stalled Dongtan project (Chang and Sheppard, 2013; Pow and Neo, 2013; Chang, 2017); Songdo in South Korea (Shwayri, 2013); Lavasa in India (Datta, 2012); and the United Arab Emirates’ Masdar City (Caprotti, 2015; Cugurullo, 2013a, 2013b, 2016). The importance of this model of development is highlighted in a recent typology of the urban design of new towns across Asia, in which the eco-city is presented as one of six dominant approaches (Keeton, 2011). There are several good reasons for seeing such projects as archetypes of contemporary eco-city development. First, they most clearly exem-

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Eco-cities  ­447 plify the tendency for eco-city initiatives to have grown in scale over time. Rapoport (2014, p. 141) typifies this new wave of eco-cities as ‘large top-down . . . projects master-planned by prestigious international architects’, contrasting markedly with older, small-scale initiatives such as the German and Austrian Oekostadte neighbourhood retrofitting programmes of the 1990s (Joss et al., 2011; Damm, 2015), or the influential BedZED development in suburban London, completed in 2002 by non-governmental organization BioRegional. Second, they reflect the mainstreaming of the eco-city into national – and international – ­policy-making (Joss, 2011a; Rapoport, 2014). Masdar City’s planning and development, for example, has been closely tied to Abu Dhabi’s national economic strategies (Crot, 2013; Cugurullo, 2016). Tianjin, inhabited since 2012 but still expanding, resulted from a joint agreement between the governments of China and Singapore in 2007. Elsewhere, national governments have sponsored various eco-city programmes and competitions since the millennium, including in India, France and Japan (Joss and Cowley, 2017). Third, the Asian megaproject most clearly illustrates the so-called ‘ubiquitization’ (Joss et al., 2013) of the eco-city, whereby its spread has been accompanied by increasing international knowledge transfer involving public and private sector actors, a growing focus on carbon emissions and climate change, a fusion of ‘green’ and ‘smart’ technologies, and an underlying belief that economic growth will further environmental innovation. 29.2.3  Eco-city Initiatives as Umbrella Concepts While the eco-city as megaproject approach renders the subject matter more manageable for analytical purposes, commentators nevertheless typically acknowledge explicitly that the eco-city has broader geographical scope and practical variety. A third approach, then, is to treat it as a label accommodating a wider variety of initiatives aimed at furthering ‘green’ urban outcomes. This broader landscape of ‘eco-city initiatives’ might include retrofitting schemes, as well as policy drives relating to specific social and environmental agendas, which may facilitate but not prescribe specific interventions in the built environment. This approach was adopted in Joss et al.’s (2011) international survey of the phenomenon. To be included, initiatives needed to have an operational scale ranging from at least the neighbourhood to the broader city-region; to encompass multiple sectors of activity (such as urban transport, energy, and housing); and to be recognized in policy processes. The use of the label eco-city itself was not a key criterion; those adopting other cognate or closely related terms (for example, low carbon city or sustainable city or

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448  Handbook of urban geography hi-tech eco-town) also qualified if they had been reported on internationally as ‘environmentally friendly’ urban developments. Using this definition, the authors were able to distinguish between new-build, urban in-fill/extension and retrofit initiatives. Among these, new builds constitute the smallest group, accounting for just 24 out of the 178 cases captured (Joss et al., 2013). Two examples of the retrofitting schemes captured within this broader eco-city definition are the Eco-City Alexandria initiative (Virginia, USA) and the Eco-Smart City masterplan for the Chinese city of Langfang, mentioned earlier. The former has aimed to improve local quality of life by intervening in the management of land use and open space, water resources, air quality, transportation, energy, green building practices, solid waste, environment and health, and building resilience to unforeseen environmental threats (City of Alexandria, 2008). The Langfang master plan is explicitly positioned ‘[i]n contrast to the pattern of new city development common in China’ (Woods Bagot, undated, no pagination). Urban in-fill and extension schemes, which typify contemporary eco-city development in Europe, include Ecociudad Valdespartera on the outskirts of Zaragoza (Spain), the four locations selected as part of the UK government’s abandoned eco-towns initiative, and the widely fêted Hammarby Sjöstad brownfield regeneration area in Stockholm (Sweden). Even on its own terms, however, this survey does not capture the full extent of the eco-city phenomenon. The authors acknowledge that, due to reliance on internationally available sources of information, initiatives publicized only locally (and, by extension, perhaps associated more with grassroots actors) are probably under-represented. We are reminded elsewhere that studying urban transformational initiatives exclusively through the lens of official policy may only provide a partial picture (Whitehead, 2012; Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013); a search for more innovative challenges to the status quo might be more fruitfully conducted among initiatives taking place outside formal institutions (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013; Feola and Nunes, 2014). A different problem with this approach lies in the difficulty of capturing the extent of eco-city development in China specifically. While Wu (2012) counts ‘more than 100’ municipal governments planning to build eco-cities or eco-towns, the Chinese Society for Urban Studies recently identified as many as 259 declarations of intent to become eco-cities (Joss et al., 2011, p. 1 and footnote 2; see also Yu, 2014, p. 78). Chien (2013, p. 177) cites a report by the China City Science Association counting more than 230 ecocities in 2010, such that ‘more than 80 per cent of prefecture-level cities had at least one eco-city project’. Elsewhere, Ren (2013, p. 112) claims that, as of 2011, ‘more than 1,000 cities and counties had announced plans and

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Eco-cities  ­449 timetables to achieve eco-city or eco-county status’. The significance of these numbers in any case remains unclear: in China, there is no generally agreed central government guidance as to what constitutes an eco-city (Wu, 2012). 29.2.4  The Eco-city as a Set of Normative Principles Rather than drawing arbitrary boundaries around the eco-city’s empirical manifestations, perhaps we should defer to its normative theorization. The original prescriptive concept of the eco-city was minimally defined by Richard Register three decades ago as an ‘ecologically healthy city’ (Register, 1987, p. 3). Register’s broad principles, focusing on biodiversity, density and energy use, were soon complemented by David Engwicht’s (1992) promotion of the city as a fragile ecology of social exchanges, and vilification of the private automobile. Joss (2015) compares Register’s urban ecology principles with Kenworthy’s (2006) more recent eco-city dimensions and Lehmann’s (2010) principles of green urbanism. Despite clear thematic commonality (all are variously concerned, for example, with mobilities, compact urban design, waste management, local food production, economic viability, and the need for places to be desirable and attractive for residents), these three frameworks are also subtly descriptive of shifts in broader thinking about the (urban) environment over time. Thus, while the urban ecology principles focus on local and city-regional issues, Lehmann’s framework has a more global scope, encompassing climate change and the needs of the developing world. In foregrounding the creation of closed-loop systems, Kenworthy’s ideas reflect the ‘growing use of systems thinking underpinning urban sustainability concepts’ (Joss, 2015, p. 21). While Register makes no reference to CO2 emissions, these are at the core of Lehmann’s principles, no doubt reflecting the rise of the carbon agenda in environmental thinking since the millennium (While et al., 2010; Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013). And other, quite different definitions have been formulated in the meantime. Downton (2009), for example, synthesizes different strands of what he called ecopolis theory into an overarching framework with social justice as a guiding principle. A revival of this normative definitional work might be discerned in the recent proliferation of urban sustainability certification schemes and frameworks of indicators (Joss et al., 2015), often labelled using eco-city or cognate terms, and intended to be applicable across different urban settings. While varying considerably in their criteria and governance functions, such schemes imply the possibility of some de facto standardization of environmentally friendly urban development in the near future. We might hypothesize that such standardization would primarily reflect

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450  Handbook of urban geography the differentiated ability of the various actors involved (ranging from small NGOs to large private sector engineering and IT companies, and international governmental bodies) to promote their own schemes, or their relative acceptability to adopters working within existing commercial and policy constraints. The emergence of a pragmatic consensus, in other words, would not necessarily provide a definitive answer to the question of what the eco-city should consist of. 29.2.5  Eco-city as Provocative Oxymoron Reviewing the ways that normative definitions of the eco-city have changed over time may invite the conclusion that it merely holds up a mirror to its shifting commercial and policy contexts. However, its more intrinsic conceptual force becomes evident through a consideration of the conditions of its historical emergence. In one sense, the nascent eco-city thinking of the 1980s was derivative, displaying continuity with grassroots and anti-establishment environmental movements and ideas emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, including ecofeminism, bioregionalism, appropriate technology, environmental justice and the steady state (Roseland, 1997). However, practical living experiments associated with such ideas had typically taken the form of rural ecovillages (Barton and Kleiner, 2000; Dawson, 2006; Rapoport, 2014), drawing on an anti-urban zeitgeist in which the city had long been constructed as ‘the antithesis of environmentally sustainable futures, green living and the survival of “nature”’ (Hinchliffe, 1999, p. 145). The environmental discourse of the time tended to position cities as essentially parasitical, the locus of political and economic problems (Taylor, 2013), and to equate the ‘good life’ with ‘smaller communities’ (Haughton, 2007, p. 278). The radical essence of the eco-city, in this context, was the proposition that environmental improvements could and should take place in urban settings. The eco-city, at its historical heart, had generative force as a provocative apparent oxymoron. By inverting dominant assumptions about the potential ecological and social benefits of rural versus urban life, earlier normative conceptions of eco-city development have had ongoing resonance (with Richard Register’s work typically accorded seminal status by current writers on sustainable urban development). The generative force of this provocation is evidenced by the extent to which early eco-city principles have passed into mainstream thinking about sustainable urban design. While, for example, urban density was until relatively recently associated with unsanitary slum conditions, it is now widely valorized, in line with Register’s (1987, 2006) vision, as are facilitating public transport provision

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Eco-cities  ­451 and use, healthy walking and cycling, greater sociability, enlivened public spaces and resource efficiencies in domestic heating. A historical perspective also allows the eco-city to be differentiated from the sustainable city. First, the eco-city predates the discourse of urban sustainability, even if the international rise of the latter has certainly catalyzed its spread as an idea (Joss, 2011a; Rapoport, 2014). And, second, if sustainable development is understood as a particular – albeit loose – discourse within environmental thinking (Dryzek, 2005), then the eco-city is a broader church: in some cases continuing to encompass less anthropocentric forms of green politics; in others, embracing the more market-oriented philosophies of ecological modernization and green growth. 29.2.6  Eco-city as Experimental Process If the search for commonalities across time and space only takes us so far, it may be more sensible to embrace the eco-city’s multiplicity as a defining characteristic. From this perspective, it might be understood as a historically situated, multiple process of real-world experimentation into future modes of societal organization. It is historically situated in that it responds to a series of particular contemporary concerns over local and global environments, ongoing global urbanization, problematic processes of rapid city growth in the Global South, and the future of post-industrial cities in the Global North (Joss, 2011a). Viewed in experimental terms, the eco-city constitutes a ‘technical and scientific repository and container of potential solutions’ in an ‘age of crisis’ (Caprotti, 2015, p. 9). Its experimental variety relates not only to trialled green and digital technologies, and urban forms, but also to processes of delivery and management. Current and recent eco-city initiatives exhibit a broad spectrum of modes of implementation, ranging from very detailed top-down planning orchestrated by central government (as in the case of Sejong City in South Korea), through to newer, dispersed forms of governance involving collaborative networks of local actors (for example, the EcoDistricts initiative in Portland, Oregon, USA). And just as we might expect to learn from the success or failure of new technologies to spread from particular experimental niches (Geels, 2002), the eco-city as a variegated experimental process may also yield important lessons for urban governance at different scales. If ongoing learning is an important part of this process, then critical commentary on the eco-city serves a vital role, and it is to this that we now turn.

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452  Handbook of urban geography

29.3  CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES 29.3.1  Environmental Credentials In environmental terms, eco-cities may make an easy target for criticism. ‘Scientific’ claims about their environmental performance are prone to contestation, both because no definitive set of eco-city indicators exists, but also – following Hulme (2009) – because they may be shaped by particular deep-rooted values which are incompatible with those of others. Actors placing faith in market-led green economic growth, for example, are likely to adopt rather different criteria than, say, anti-capitalist campaigners, or advocates of deep ecology. But questioning the eco-credentials of eco-cities need not only be a matter of arbitrarily privileging one set of values over another. More constructively, it may help us acknowledge and understand the contingent nature of particular framings of the environment. In a recent study of Tianjin’s current residents’ behaviours, for example, Flynn et al. (2016, p. 86) suggest that observable efficiency gains from new technologies may be outweighed by increased consumption among the ‘upwardly mobile wage earners’ which the city is attracting. By observing that Caofeidian Eco-City lacks a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with its hinterland in terms of renewable energy provision and sustainable transport, Joss and Molella (2013, p. 123) challenge the spatial framing of official environmental claims. Equally, they question the temporal framing of official accounts by noting that these omit the carbon emissions associated with the land reclamation required for Caofeidian’s construction (Joss and Molella, 2013, p. 129). Such insights not only broaden the scope of future critical research, but potentially serve to counterbalance the instrumental mobilization of selective criteria to support marketing strategies or strategic political campaigns. Critical analysis of environmental credentials may deliberately aim to reveal underlying values and discourses, rather than contest the choice of superficial criteria. Caprotti, for example, suggests that the promotion of certain megaproject eco-cities reveals a modernist society/nature binary opposition, whereby the aim is not so much to resolve broader environmental problems as to shield residents from them (Caprotti, 2014b, p. 1293). The presentation of Masdar City, meanwhile, implies an understanding of a ‘positive juxtaposition’ to a hostile desert – a ‘negative “first nature,” which needs to be transformed through technology into a green, pleasant, cool and low-carbon urban “second-nature”’ (Caprotti, 2015, p. 80). Alternatively, critics may consciously seek to promote an alternative set of deep values in arguing that a given initiative is flawed. From the starting assumption, for example, that an urgent, radical restructuring of

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Eco-cities  ­453 the global social and economic system is required, pragmatic experimentation and incrementalism may appear to illustrate a collective self-delusion (Rees, 2015) allowing business as usual to proceed at a time when ‘the world is on course for collapse – ecological implosion, resource wars, civil insurrection and geopolitical chaos’ (Rees, 2015, p. 3). 29.3.2  Neo-liberal Eco-urbanism Whether or not they catalyze business as usual, eco-cities are sometimes criticized for foregrounding economic considerations over others (e.g. Romero Lankao, 2007; Datta, 2012; Cugurullo, 2013a, 2013b). The internationalization of the phenomenon has been accompanied by its embedment into global circuits of trade, with the enthusiastic involvement of international consulting, engineering and IT firms (Joss et al., 2013). Meanwhile, the use of the eco-city label for ‘cultural branding’ (Joss, 2011a, p. 14) would seem symptomatic of a broader pattern of inter-urban economic competition. Such arguments may bolster a reading of the contemporary eco-city through the lens of what Whitehead (2013) calls neoliberal urban environmentalism, characterized by ‘market-oriented governance, enhanced privatization and urban environmental entrepreneurialism’ (Whitehead, 2013, p. 1348). The public–private hybrid arrangements through which eco-city projects are increasingly delivered (Joss et al., 2013) may also raise questions for those who interpret the broader shift towards more networked governance as indicative of the ‘neoliberalization’ of urban policy-making (see, for example, Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Purcell, 2008; Gualini, 2010). In his studies of Treasure Island and Sonoma Mountain Village eco-city schemes in California, Joss (2011b) suggests that their governance at a distance development models have unclear implications for sustainability, alerting us to the possibility that the complexity of such arrangements hinders accountability and public engagement (Joss, 2015). 29.3.3  Social Justice The risk of eco-city developments coming to constitute ‘premium ecoenclaves’ is contemplated by Hodson and Marvin (2010), who paint a dystopian picture of a future characterized by ‘an archipelago of interconnected “self-reliant” islands’ (Hodson and Marvin, 2009, p. 210) of wealthy cities in an otherwise socially and environmentally degraded world. Indeed, Grydehøj and Kelman (2016, 2017) observe that many eco-city initiatives are literally located on small islands or near-islands, with examples including Dongtan Eco-City on Chongming Island near

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454  Handbook of urban geography Shanghai and the Västra Hamnen area of Malmö, Sweden. The bounded nature of these island spaces adds to their appeal as sites of experimentation. And yet their contribution to global sustainability is questionable insofar as they operate as ‘secessionary enclaves’ for elite groups, and proceed by ‘monetising the environment, incentivising largely symbolic “green” projects and architecture, drawing attention away from unsustainable practices elsewhere, and exacerbating social inequality’ (Grydehøj and Kelman, 2016, p. 3). Other critics focus on intra-urban social divisions and inequalities related to eco-city development. Watson (2014) includes eco-cities among the types of projects used by African countries to attract inward investment. Not only does she question their goal of being ‘self-contained and able to insulate themselves from the “disorder” and “chaos” of the existing cities’ (Watson, 2014, p. 229), but suggests that ‘the most likely outcome of these fantasy plans is a steady worsening of the marginalization and inequalities that already beset these cities’ (Watson, 2014, p. 215). In China, the poor treatment of migrant workers on megaproject eco-city construction sites has been highlighted (Chien, 2013; Caprotti, 2014a, 2014b) alongside other problematic social side-effects: the rich have benefitted at the expense of social goods; existing public buildings have been wastefully demolished; and local citizens forcibly displaced (Chien, 2013). Such concerns dovetail with those of the literature on eco-gentrification (see, for instance, Dooling, 2009; Quastel, 2009; Checker, 2011), which most often focuses on the rather different context of North America. 29.3.4 Techno-Utopianism The commonly desired eco-city goal of replicability (Hodson and Marvin, 2010) implies that eco-city actors may sometimes downplay the significance of place-specific historical, social, political and cultural factors for promotional purposes, presenting a ‘techno-economic paradigm’ (Rydin, 2011, p. 131) for universal consumption. Accordingly, one key strand of the critical literature explores the problem of framing eco-city ambitions in strongly technological terms (e.g. Shwayri, 2013; Yigitcanlar and Lee, 2014; Carvalho, 2014; Caprotti, 2015). The ‘megaproject’ eco-city in particular is characterized as having a technocratic and systems-based engineering approach to urban design, such that the vision of the urban arguably ‘becomes devoid of human and political potential’ (Caprotti, 2014b, p. 1287). The foregrounding of technological solutions is aligned with the use of a recognizable type of utopian rhetoric for promotional purposes. In one reading, Masdar City’s projected image as ‘an ideal urban development in balance with nature’ is undermined by its lack of urbanity, as ‘a non-

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Eco-cities  ­455 anthropological spatial entity bereft of an organic society’ (Cugurullo, 2013a, pp. 33‒34). On this view, Masdar’s use of ‘[i]mages of the ideal city . . . to boost the local economy and fulfil the political interests of the ruling class’ (Cugurullo, 2013b, p. 66) exemplifies the use of such rhetoric to obscure contingent economic and political agendas, in the service of enabling the export of technologies to other locations. Of course, technological blueprints and ubiquitous master plans should not be equated with the cities or practices which result in real-world contexts. The involvement of internationally recognized planners, designers, architects or engineering companies may often serve primarily to legitimize proposals locally (Chang and Sheppard, 2013; Rapoport, 2015); the city actually built – and inhabited – may be a different matter altogether. Nevertheless, it seems important to question whether the contemporary eco-city might not retain unacknowledged ‘[u]topian underpinnings’ (Vallance et al., 2011, p. 346). This may be more obviously the case for its earliest theorizations, reflecting the idealism of the eco-village, and arguably echoing a longer tradition of utopian urban visions, including the Garden City movement, the Techno-City (Kargon and Molella, 2008), and the UK’s New Towns, all attempting to ‘reinvent the city’ (Joss, 2010, p. 240). We might not therefore expect Richard Register (1987, 2006), in outlining his aspirational vision of the good city, to have wrestled with difficult questions of governance and politics. But in drawing up plans for real-world implementation, such questions become rather more pertinent. The UK’s (eventually abandoned) eco-towns initiative – specified in highly technological terms by national government (DCLG, 2009) – was hampered significantly by vociferous opposition from local residents in the four chosen locations.

29.4  CONCLUSIONS – LOOKING TO THE FUTURE What, then, is the eco-city? A promotional label (or buzzword)? A particular type of new-build urban development? A broader category of loosely related environmental initiatives focused on city space? An aspirational set of norms? A generative historical provocation? An open-ended experimental process? It might be any of these, depending on our intentions. But the eco-city is not only a malleable discursive construct: it is backed internationally by policy-making at different levels, and by substantial commercial resources. It deserves our attention, in other words, because it has tangible effects on the world. And yet the significance of these effects is ambiguous. The critical perspectives above reflect on a process of translation whereby, over time,

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456  Handbook of urban geography a radically innovative idea has come to be realized in different real-world contexts. In the most pessimistic assessments, its transformative potential has largely been compromised as related practices have emerged through existing political institutions and market structures; even best practice showcase outcomes appear to have negligible broader impact, and may even be reproducing the structural conditions of unsustainability. In a more flattering light, however, eco-city initiatives, individually or collectively, may represent a constructively incremental approach to a series of pressing global problems. On this view, any given eco-city initiative, particularly when accompanied by critical reflection and knowledge-sharing, might be welcomed more pragmatically as ‘just . . . a step in a much more ambitious undertaking towards less-wasteful lifestyles in built environments, more sustainably in tune with their broader context and future needs’ (Ryser, 2014, p. 123). Accordingly, there is a need to engage with eco-cities as ‘sites of experimentation and innovation’ which may help ‘drive broader socio-technical transitions’, rather than as failing in the utopian ambitions with which they are marketed (Rapoport, 2014, p.137). And if the current field of eco-city experimentation is dysfunctional, to the extent that it is disproportionately shaped by powerful commercial and political actors, then critical engagement has a vital corrective role to play. Looking beyond the utopian rhetoric, however, may also require us to pay closer attention in the future to the cityness of the eco-city. This is not only a matter of acknowledging the complexity of urban systems and the need for convincing eco-city development to be comprehensive and integrative rather than sector-specific in its achievements. It also requires caution in the face of those plans and visions which conceptualize the city reductively as a particular scale of governance. In grappling with the technological challenges of transformative change at the city-wide scale, there is a risk of overlooking the dynamic life of cities as political and public spaces, marked by social tensions, irrationality, and conflict, as much as by civility and functionality. Citizenship, after all, entails more than passive, compliant service use. And while the unpredictable performative public dimensions of the (eco-)city can perhaps never be planned for, we might be alert to the risk that they may be planned against. If acknowledging this risk is difficult from within the scalar conceptual framework underpinning the commonplace assertion that we now live in the Urban Age (Brenner and Schmid, 2014), then more imaginative (eco-)city geographies may be required to secure more convincingly urban outcomes in the interests of all. Meanwhile, it seems misguided to expect a universally applicable model of environmentally friendly urban life to emerge from the iterative processes of eco-city experimentation. An optimistic student of the eco-city

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Eco-cities  ­457 might instead hope that their collective outcomes will be both unpredictable and generative of a multiplicity of quite different ways of thinking about the future – which may or may not rely on the spatial framing of the city.

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458  Handbook of urban geography DCLG (2009), Planning Policy Statement. Eco-towns: A supplement to Planning Policy Statement 1, London: Communities and Local Government Publications. de Jong, M., S. Joss, D. Schraven, C. Zhan and M. Weijnen (2015), ‘Sustainable-smartresilient-low carbon-eco-knowledge cities; making sense of a multitude of concepts promoting sustainable urbanization’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 109, 25–38. de Jong, M., D. Wang and C. Yu (2013), ‘Exploring the relevance of the eco-city concept in China: the case of Shenzhen Sino–Dutch low carbon city’, Journal of Urban Technology, 20 (1), 95–113. Dooling, S. (2009), ‘Ecological gentrification: a research agenda exploring justice in the city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33 (3), 621–639. Downton, P. F. (2009), Ecopolis: Architecture and Cities for a Changing Climate, Adelaide: Springer. Dryzek, J. S. (2005), The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engwicht, D. (1992), Towards an Eco-City: Calming the Traffic, Sydney: Envirobook. Feola, G. and R. J. Nunes (2014), ‘Success and failure of grassroots innovations for addressing climate change: the case of the transition movement’, Global Environmental Change, 24, 232–250. Flynn, A., L. Yu, P. Feindt and C. Chen (2016), ‘Eco-cities, governance and sustainable lifestyles: the case of the Sino–Singapore Tianjin Eco-City’, Habitat International, 53, 78–86. Geels, F. W. (2002), ‘Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective’, Research Policy, 31 (8), 1257–1274. Grydehøj, A. and I. Kelman (2016), ‘Island smart eco-cities: innovation, secessionary enclaves, and the selling of sustainability’, Urban Island Studies, 2, 1–24. Grydehøj, A. and I. Kelman (2017), ‘The Eco-Island Trap: climate change mitigation and conspicuous sustainability’, Area, 49 (1), 106–113. Gualini, E. (2010), ‘Governance, space and politics: exploring the governmentality of planning’, in Jean Hillier and Patsy Healey (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning Theory: Conceptual Challenges for Spatial Planning, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 57–85. Haughton, G. (2007), ‘In pursuit of the sustainable city’, in Peter J. Marcotullio and Gordon McGranaham (eds), Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges: From Local to Global and Back, London: Earthscan, pp. 274–290. Hinchliffe, S. (1999), ‘Cities and natures: intimate strangers’, in John Allen, Doreen Massey and Michael Pryke (eds), Unsettling Cities: Movement/Settlements, London: Routledge, pp. 141–185. Hodson, M. and S. Marvin (2009), ‘“Urban ecological security”: a new urban paradigm?’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33 (1), 193–215. Hodson, M. and S. Marvin (2010), ‘Urbanism in the anthropocene: ecological urbanism or premium ecological enclaves?’, Cities, 14 (3), 298–313. Hulme, M. (2009), Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joss, S. (2010), ‘Eco-cities: a global survey 2009’, WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 129, 239‒250. Joss, S. (2011a), ‘Eco-cities: the mainstreaming of urban sustainability – key characteristics and driving factors’, International Journal of Sustainable Development Planning, 6 (2), 1–18. Joss, S. (2011b), ‘Eco-city governance: a case study of Treasure Island and Sonoma Mountain Village’, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 13 (4), 331–348. Joss, S. (2015), Sustainable Cities: Governing for Urban Innovation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Joss, S. and R. Cowley (2017), ‘National policies for local urban sustainability: a new governance approach?’, in Malcolm Eames, Tim Dixon, Miriam Hunt and Simon Lannon (eds), Retrofitting Cities for Tomorrow’s World, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 227–245. Joss, S. and A. Molella (2013), ‘The eco-city as urban technology: perspectives on Caofeidian International Eco-City (China)’, Journal of Urban Technology, 20 (1), 115–137.

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Eco-cities  ­459 Joss, S., D. Tomozeiu and R. Cowley (2011), Eco-Cities – A Global Survey 2011, London: University of Westminster International Eco-Cities Initiative. Joss, S., R. Cowley and D. Tomozeiu (2013), ‘Towards the “ubiquitous eco-city”: an analysis of the internationalisation of eco-city policy and practice’, Urban Research and Practice, 6 (1), 54–74. Joss, S., R. Cowley, M. de Jong, B. Müller, B. Soon Park, W. Rees, M. Roseland and Y. Rydin (2015), Tomorrow’s City Today: Prospects for Standardising Sustainable Urban Development, London: University of Westminster International Eco-Cities Initiative. Kargon, R. H. and A. P. Molella (2008), Invented Edens: Techno-cities of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Keeton, R. (2011), Rising in the East – Contemporary New Towns in Asia, Amsterdam: SUN Architecture. Kenworthy, J. R. (2006), ‘The eco-city: ten key transport and planning dimensions for sustainable city development’, Environment and Urbanization, 18 (1), 67–85. Lehmann, S. (2010), The Principles of Green Urbanism: Transforming the City for Sustainability, London: Earthscan. Moir, E., T. Moonen and G. Clark (2014), What Are Future Cities? Origins, Meanings and Uses, London: Future Cities Catapult. Pow, C-P. and H. Neo (2013), ‘Seeing red over green: contesting urban sustainabilities in China’, Urban Studies, 50 (11), 2256–2274. Purcell, M. (2008), Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures, Abingdon: Routledge. Quastel, N. (2009), ‘Political ecologies of gentrification’, Urban Geography, 30 (7), 694–725. Rapoport, E. (2014), ‘Utopian visions and real estate dreams: the eco-city past, present and future’, Geography Compass, 8 (2), 137–149. Rapoport, E. (2015), ‘Globalising sustainable urbanism: the role of international masterplanners’, Area, 47 (2), 110–115. Rees, W. E. (2015), ‘The context for thinking about “eco-city” initiatives’, at https://www. westminster.ac.uk/eco-cities/reflections (accessed 5 August 2018). Register, R. (1987), Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Register, R. (2006), Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature, Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada: New Society Publishers. Ren, X. (2013), Urban China, Cambridge: Polity Press. Romero Lankao, P. (2007), ‘Are we missing the point?’, Environment and Urbanization, 19 (1), 159 –175. Roseland, M. (1997), ‘Introduction: dimensions of the future: an eco-city overview’, in Mark Roseland (ed.), Eco-city Dimensions: Healthy Communities, Healthy Planet, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, pp. 1–12. Rydin, Y. (2011), The Purpose of Planning: Creating Sustainable Towns and Cities, Bristol: Policy Press. Ryser, J. (2014), ‘Eco-cities in action: sustainable development in Europe – lessons for and from China?’, in William Hofmeister, Patrick Rueppel and Liang-Fook Lye (eds), EcoCities: Sharing European and Asian Best Practices and Experiences, Singapore: KonradAdenauer Stiftung and Brussels: Europe, pp. 107–123. Shwayri, S. T. (2013), ‘A model Korean ubiquitous eco-city? The politics of making Songdo’, Journal of Urban Technology, 20 (1), 39–55. Taylor, P. J. (2013), Extraordinary Cities: Millennia of Moral Syndromes, World-Systems and City/State Relations, Cheltenham UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Vallance, S., H. C. Perkins and J. E. Dixon (2011), ‘What is social sustainability? A clarification of concepts’, Geoforum, 42 (3), 342–348. Watson, V. (2014), ‘African urban fantasies: dreams or nightmares?’ Environment and Urbanization, 26 (1), 215–231. While, A., A. E. G. Jonas and D. Gibbs (2010), ‘From sustainable development to carbon

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460  Handbook of urban geography control: eco-state restructuring and the politics of urban and regional development’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (1), 76–93. Whitehead, M. (2012), ‘The sustainable city: an obituary? On the future form and prospects’, in John Flint and Mike Raco (eds), The Future of Sustainable Cities: Critical Reflections, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 29–46. Whitehead, M. (2013), ‘Neoliberal urban environmentalism and the adaptive city: towards a critical urban theory and climate change’, Urban Studies, 50 (7), 1348–1367. Woods B. (undated), ‘Langfang eco-smart city and transportation hub, Langfang, China: Metropolitan masterplan for future generations’, at http://www.woodsbagot.com/project/ langfang-eco-smart-city (accessed 15 January 2016). Wu, F. (2012), ‘China’s eco-cities’, Geoforum, 43 (2), 169–171. Yigitcanlar, T. and S. H. Lee (2014), ‘Korean ubiquitous-eco-city: a smart-sustainable urban form or a branding hoax?’, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 89, 100–114. Yu, L. (2014), Chinese City and Regional Planning Systems, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

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30.  The governance of climate change in urban areas Vanesa Castán Broto

30.1 INTRODUCTION Climate change and urbanization are two impending challenges for contemporary societies. Climate change follows the use of fossil fuels for energy provision and the subsequent release of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere. Urbanization advances apace with current estimations characterizing over 55 per cent of global population as urban, a figure likely to increase to 68 per cent by 2050 (UNDESA, 2018). In its 2014 report, the IPCC argued that urbanization is strongly correlated with higher consumption of energy and higher GHG emissions (Seto et al., 2014). The future of humanity depends on our ability to deliver low carbon, climate resilient cities to host the majority of the world population while preserving energy resources and preventing global temperatures rising by more than two degrees Celsius. This is a multi-dimensional challenge which requires addressing three interrelated objectives: (1) the decarbonization of the built environment, which entails the direct reduction of both embodied and operational GHG emissions (e.g. Karvonen, 2013); (2) urban energy security, so that the urban area can meet its resource needs to ensure its reproduction (Hodson and Marvin, 2009); and (3) the recognition of energy as a basic urban service, bringing in the means to provide universal energy access (Singh et al., 2014). The last decade of scholarly and policy debates on climate change governance has put cities at its centre. This shift towards the urban not only acknowledges the enormity of the urban challenge, but also, recognizes the possibilities to intervene for climate change at an urban level. Global assessments of climate change in urban areas have pointed out the manifest increase in local initiatives for climate change (Bulkeley, 2013; Hoornweg et al., 2010; Rosenzweig et al., 2011; UN-Habitat, 2011). In contrast to past attempts to control and manage urbanization, urbanization today is understood as providing a unique opportunity to respond to the challenges of climate change and sustainable energy at the global level (UN-Habitat, 2016). Responding to climate change will require a radical change to enable substantial gains in fairer access to resources 461

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462  Handbook of urban geography while reducing their overall use, rather than responses that only lead to incremental, efficiency-related gains (Haberl et al., 2011). The underlying assumption is that only a planned, coordinated response, can bring such a radical change. Climate change governance is often thought of in terms of actors and institutions, and of the different means of operation which emerge associated with climate change problematics. However, climate change governance can also be understood in relation to the configuration of different forms of power and control and how these are orchestrated and organized (Bulkeley, 2015). While there are examples of spatial planning measures that, in specific contexts, can deliver GHG emissions reductions (e.g. McGregor et al., 2013), there are no blueprints for planning the urban energy transition. Instead, current planning approaches tend to reproduce existing barriers to low carbon societies and ignore radical systems alternatives (Truffer et al., 2010). An urban transition to sustainability, thus, relates to an acceptance of the political nature of environmental governance and the need for pluralistic approaches in a multi-linear, constantly renegotiated process (Smith and Stirling, 2007). Experiments are local initiatives through which the means to intervene in the city are designed, promoted and implemented (Bulkeley et al., 2014a). Turning to experimentation as a means for climate change governance in urban areas emphasizes decentralized, bottom-up processes of engagement with the material which emerge from actions which, without being explicitly coordinated and managed, respond to the same problematic. This is an approach which embraces uncertainty as a force of change. Experiments follow the assumption that change will happen by activating, rather than by controlling, change. They emphasize innovation, creativity, and flexibility (Evans et al., 2016). Experimentation, however, is associated with fragmented and unmanaged forms of climate change governance in urban areas. This raises doubts about the significance of the aggregate impact of different actions (Seto et al., 2014). A focus on experiments assumes lack of control over the outcome. Experimentation and its impacts are fundamentally ambiguous in terms of who gains and who benefits, and how just are their results (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013). Experiments, for example, reinforce the economic and political structures of consumerism if they are limited to cosmetic improvements to unsustainable consumption practices (Sanzana Calvet and Castán Broto, 2016). Yet, the possibility of acting for climate change through experiments turns attention to the role that each one of us plays in delivering sustainability transitions. Experimentation fosters forms of scholarship with a manifested normative inclination, in which analysis is directed towards catalysing progressive action. Justice is a fixation of much climate

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The governance of climate change in urban areas  ­463 change work, in the sense that a radical configuration towards low carbon, climate resilient cities cannot leave behind those who are most affected by climate change impacts (Leach et al., 2010; Bulkeley et al., 2014b). In this chapter I take stock of thinking on cities and climate change governance over the last decade to understand what constitutes a progressive approach to the governance of climate change in urban areas. The emphasis is on how we can generate positive action for a sustainable future, building on three pillars: first, social learning is presented as the key mechanism at the heart of transitions to low carbon, climate-resilient cities; second, experimentation is a governance strategy which, while seeking means to intervene and control the fabric of the city, also generates opportunities for action; third, progressive action develops in relation to an analysis of the ubiquitous contradictions in climate change governance. Overall, this is an understanding of climate change governance in urban areas that moves away from technocratic recipes for action, looking instead for the means to engage with such transition as a fundamentally political process.

30.2 TRANSITIONS AND SOCIAL LEARNING IN URBAN AREAS During the last decade we have seen a growing interest in transitions to sustainability (for an overview see Markard et al., 2012). Transition studies assume that incremental change is not sufficient to bring about a sustainable economy and society. Hence, they focus on the means to create a radical, rapid change that would bring about the reconfiguration of urban energy systems – a true urban energy transition (Monstadt, 2009). Sustainability transitions are often thought of as following a multiple, context-specific transitions pathway (Rydin et al., 2008; Leach et al., 2010). Urban areas can be thought of as attractors, shaping sustainability transitions by posing specific constraints and opportunities. Urban areas concentrate people, resources and knowledge so that it creates literally more opportunities for the chance encounters that ultimately lead to innovation. Equally, economies of scale in cities mean that innovations can be rolled out at higher speeds through the connection with investors or users. There is another set of opportunities related to the institutional context of cities and the role of planning processes as mechanisms which open up opportunities for action. The way relations are organized in a particular manner in urban areas both predisposes action intentions and shapes their accomplishment (Hodson and Marvin, 2012). Engaging with these

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464  Handbook of urban geography debates, Næss and Vogel (2012) have argued for the need to transcend urban areas as contexts for transitions to sustainability to think of them as constituting the object of such transitions, that is, urban areas are what changes in a transition. Systemic issues like climate change are patent in cities and urban areas, where cumulative problems are exacerbated by agglomeration and density. Urban areas are characterized by complexity, scale and context dependency, relative permanence of the built environment and the intervention of vested interests, cultural norms and lifestyles (Næss and Vogel, 2012). The urban sustainability transition belongs to a class that in planning has been thought of as ‘wicked problems’, that is, problems for which there is neither an exact clear solution nor a stopping rule, because it is not possible to say when the problem is actually solved (Rittel and Webber, 1973; Lawton, 2007). We can hardly imagine how a decarbonized urban area will look like in, let’s say, 2050, and what will matter to its inhabitants. How do we deal with low carbon transitions as a wicked problem? Transitions necessarily build on modes of governance which are appreciative of the complexity of urban issues, their uncertainty and the asymmetries of power, thus seeking to mobilize both deep analysis and broad data to facilitate processes of learning and experimentation (Turnheim et al., 2015). Since the 1990s and the implementation of Local Agenda 21, sustainability governance in urban areas has emphasized the need to retain a diversity of actors’ viewpoints. Dialogue-based forms of planning emerge as key strategies to deal with the problem of urban areas as problems of ‘organized complexity’ (Brand, 2005). What is social learning and why it matters for the governance of climate change in urban areas? Social learning is the result of a process of collective learning that challenges the institutional basis of society (Castán Broto et al., 2014). Such social learning involves social interaction and goes beyond the individual acquisition of knowledge that could be developed independently (Reed et al., 2010). When actors take decisions together and, necessarily, share the consequences of such decisions, experiential knowledge accumulates as part of the collective memory, in relation to forms of distributive cognition. This may lead to the codification of new routines, new rules and, most of all, the abandonment of previously held paradigms (Pahl-Wostl et al., 2008, 2011). Social learning thus does not necessarily lead to new knowledge about how to do things. Rather social learning is linked to forms of institutional development in which the re-examination of fundamental assumptions becomes possible (Castán Broto et al., 2015). Urban transitions relate to relationships of power and influence (Avelino et al., 2016). Dominant interests are critical in shaping ‘alternative’ spaces and strategies (Hodson et al., 2015).When looking at transitions in urban

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The governance of climate change in urban areas  ­465 context, they emerge as political processes, shaped by actor constellations with enough capacity to develop discursive coalitions and stir different transition trajectories (Späth and Rohracher, 2012). With its focus on shifting regimes, transitions theory questions the dominant actor and material configurations that shape the context of governance, focusing on the possibilities to challenge more or less fixed regimes (Elzen et al., 2004; Geels, 2005; Geels and Schot, 2007). Following these ideas, social learning is the process to overcome the structural resistance to change embedded in regimes through the development of new relational capacities and networks around and between actors (Loorbach, 2010). Social learning thus becomes the means to break through established hegemonies, challenging established means of doing things and reassembling resources and narratives for the constitution of an urban space amenable to intervention. In summary, social learning is a form of social change that emerges from the re-evaluation of existing values and that leads both to institutional change and to a broader reconfiguration of material and technological regimes. As institutional change, social learning questions the hegemonic norms, values and conventions that mediate human interactions and exchanges. Social learning emphasizes alternatives that moderate or even challenge the economic growth imperative and its consequences for infrastructures (Castán Broto and Dewberry, 2015). Social learning thus brings new forms of interaction with infrastructure, increasing flexibility and a challenge to the fixity of those relations. Experiments become, in this sense, the main means through which social learning – understood as a form of social change – can be apprehended. Experimentation has long been recognized as a key means to facilitate social learning. Initially, experiments were thought of as bounded in space and time, so that they could constitute a fixed means to learn about how specific forms of social change can be brought about, and hence, how they can be controlled and planned (Brown et al., 2003; Brown and Vergragt, 2008). Since these initial attempts at understanding experiments experimentation has grown and diversified, moving away from the idea of socio-technical experiments as bounded. Experimentation is thus a form of governing in which social learning for radical change is the central objective.

30.3 WHAT IS EXPERIMENTATION AND HOW CAN WE STUDY IT? The rise of climate change experimentation can be tracked to 2005 with the ratification of the Kyoto protocol that led to an increasing interest in the possibilities to intervene for climate change in practical, localized

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466  Handbook of urban geography ways (Castán Broto and Bulkeley, 2013). Empirical engagements with local governments’ action and their operation in transnational networks led to the realization that not only were local governments leading climate change action, but, also, they were shaping broader processes of global environmental governance (e.g. Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005; Betsill and Bulkeley, 2006, 2007). This literature highlighted, however, that an exclusive focus on local governments was missing the operation of a myriad of other actors in climate change policy, while not being able to conceptualize the complex material realignments that follow climate change intervention (Bulkeley, 2010). This critique was in effect a call to examine climate action that happens beyond or despite climate plans. An engagement with practical action on the ground revealed that experimentation is a key means to govern climate change in urban areas (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013). First, experiments may be associated with a sentiment of discontent with the lack of progress in the international climate change regime, fostering a desire to intervene among a variety of public, private, and civil society actors (Bulkeley et al., 2014a). Second, experimentation emerges in relation to the development of a carbon calculus, that is, the need to establish mechanisms of control for governing climate change in the city (While, 2013). This combination between the need to open up spaces of intervention from the bottom up, and the drive to establish mechanisms of control makes experiments not only unpredictable, but also, enmeshed in complex debates about the advancement of climate justice (Bulkeley et al, 2014b). Experiments are thought of as generative (Gross, 2010), as much as reproducing the conditions of the regimes in which they emerge (Bulkeley et al., 2014a). Bulkeley et al. (2014d) have explained that what the experiment does – how it transforms the urban fabric – depends both on the transformative potential of the experiment and on the extent to which the experiment fits specific contextual conditions that enable its reproduction. This conclusion follows an analysis of experiments through a Foucauldian lens, in which they are seen as central for the constitution of authority in climate change governance. Thus, while the involvement of different actors in climate change experimentation does enable the decentralization of authority and the generation of new means to govern beyond the traditional spheres of government, such involvement has vocations of control and calculation. Using this perspective, Bulkeley et al. (2014d) have developed a framework (the MML framework) to characterize experiments as they travel through specific contexts of urban change and development. The MML framework refers to the three interrelated processes that experiments go through of ‘making’, ‘maintaining’ and ‘living’. Making is the process whereby actors put together a diverse range of elements for the experiment

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The governance of climate change in urban areas  ­467 to work: economic resources, ideas about what works and how it works, institutional and public support, publicity. Making the experiment is a means to link the ideas that inform it and the material means to make it concrete in a particular location. Maintaining experiments is crucial both because they require multiple activities of repair, and because they need to be adjusted to the overall fabric of the city. This means material integration in physical networks as much integration of the experiment into overall discourses of urban governance that portray it and imagine it as new and innovative. Mere integration alone may miss the experimental character of the action (Castán Broto and Bulkeley, 2018). Finally, living emphasizes that experiments are integrated in daily routines and that they need to belong to how people experience and live in cities. Experiments then work to shape conduct as subjectification is a key part of experimenting (Bulkeley et al., 2014c). The MML framework enables a dynamic analysis of experiments as they connect with the wider context of urban development and the emergence of wicked problems in planning. Experiments mark the beginning of climate change action, but success is an altogether more complex process which will depend on how change and impact are measured. Their impact and outcomes cannot be predicted at the outset. Experiments provide a means to start action, but they do not provide direction in themselves. Instead, finding direction for progressive climate change action requires looking into the fundamental contradictions that shape climate change governance in urban areas.

30.4 CONTRADICTIONS AND THE LOW CARBON TRANSITION Contradiction analysis enables using experimentation to govern unexpected futures (Castán Broto, 2015). Contradictions are inherent to the governance of climate change in urban areas. For example, the paradoxical rhetoric of climate governance in the city (Rutland and Aylett, 2008) and the stubborn gap between aspirations and actions remains embedded in much political action for climate change at the local level (Betsill and Bulkeley, 2007). Haughton and McManus (2012), for example, have examined the contradictions within neoliberal policy regimes as manifested in neoliberal experiments subject to constant modification and adjustment, which have their maximum expression on the deployment of discourses of environmental quality of life alongside neoliberal storylines of private sector efficiency and innovation. Often such contradictions are treated as irresolvable challenges. To overcome contradictions, governance actors take part and aim at eradicating them.

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468  Handbook of urban geography In cities, for example, there are contradictions between increasing density and supporting decentralized means of production. The prioritization of compact city models over alternative modes of spatial organization seeks to override alternative concerns about living self-sufficient urban life. Equally, for those promoting decentralized means of production such as rainwater harvesting, self-building, or urban agriculture criticize the high rise models of construction that dominate compact city models. However, this treatment of contradictions hardly support transitions to progressive futures: they do not promote social learning but simply the imposition of one point of view; rather than fostering experimentation, this approach enforces a given solution. Instead, we can approach contradictions as analytic tools (Castán Broto, 2015). In my previous work I have sought to understand how contradictions emerge within a set of social and material relations. Contradiction, thus, captures the mutual interdependence of opposites rather than the mutual incompatibility of such opposition. The perception of contradictions in governance reflects a lack of understanding of the structural variables within which such contradictions emerge. In this way, contradictions are simply symptoms of broader structural conditions. Actors intervening in governance may choose to eradicate those symptoms or learning to read them to make more appropriate diagnoses about why particular governance strategies do not lead to the expected results. The twentieth-century philosopher Alexander Kojève argued that contradictions were inherent to the human experience. They are engines of social change because ‘to become aware of a contradiction is necessarily to want to remove it’ and removing it requires ‘modifying one’s own existence through actions’ (Kojève, 1969, pp. 54–55). Kojève argued that contradiction-led action cancels authority by questioning its justification within a context of social relations (Kojève, 2004). Contradiction analysis is an instrument to foster social learning that can question hegemonic unsustainable regime and foster radical institutional and cultural change. When contradictions are approached as engines of change, in relation to the structural conditions that generate them, they become a means to transform the underlying paradigms that prevent action. This can be seen, for example, in relation to the different stages in the way the automobile has been consumed in the automotive history of the United States, as described by Gartman (2004). In the age of ‘class distinction’, in the early twentieth century, the automobile was a status symbol for the accommodated classes, which used them as leisure objects in ostentations ways. Protesters used automobiles as symbols of the elite’s disregard for workers’ lives. This led to the transformation of the automobile industry, which now sought to cater for such workers – in the age of mass ­individuality

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The governance of climate change in urban areas  ­469 – through a Fordist model of industrial production. Serving cars to the masses, however, did not serve to escape the dehumanizing aspects of mass production, as represented in the increasing homogenization of the automobile. According to Gartman this led to a third cultural age of the automobile starting in the 1960s, the age of subcultural difference, in which the automobile industry developed multiple niche markets catering for identity-oriented products that sought to individualize the means of consumption. Gartman’s analysis shows that each stage of development in automobile culture incorporates, but does not solve, the contradictions of the previous stage: ultimately the transition to a new stage means subsuming, rather than substituting, the previous ones (Gartman, 2004). Contradictions gave way to new alternative means of organization of production and consumption process, thus leading to radical changes in the configuration of the automobile industry.

30.5  CONTRADICTION AND CHANGE In the urban sustainability transition contradictions point towards specific instances in which the hegemonic conditions of production and consumption can be questioned. To facilitate contradiction analysis, we can distinguish three stages of analysis: first, contradiction analysis must look beyond the opposition of contraries, focusing instead on providing explanations about how contraries are mutually constituted. For example, Holden and Linnerud (2011) find an inherent contradiction in the application of sustainable transport policies. They argue that policies aiming at reducing the negative impacts of everyday travel often have the opposite effects. They look into policies like compact cities, pro-environmental attitudes and the use of ICT to manage traffic and find that they reduce the use of private vehicles in everyday life while stimulating leisure travel. The contradictory impacts of transport policies in this example do not simply negate each other: instead, the strength of the argument lies in the relation between the reduced use of cars in everyday life and their increased use for leisure travel. Both changes emerge within the same assemblage of sociotechnical practices and thus are facets of the same trend. The question should not be about using the car for work or for leisure but about how the car becomes part of everyday life. Second, contradictions need to be approached from their capacity to generate change. In thinking about low carbon cities, Rutherford (2011) ties contradiction to materiality in a relational analysis of infrastructure and networks that reveals inherent tensions in urban material flows and inertias. This reveals contradictions, he argues, that are themselves

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470  Handbook of urban geography conducive to action. He explains that there is a contradiction between the aspiration to dematerialize the economy through advances in ICT and the critiques which see these advances as relying on disproportionate consumption of energy. This contradiction appears to have spurred multiple attempts to redefine the terms of operation of the IT industry. Rutherford’s analysis thus points at the possibility of change and movement embedded in such contradictions. Third, transcending the contradiction requires moving beyond diagnosis of what experiments are (e.g. what is their impact in reducing carbon emissions), to think instead about what kind of cultural and material configurations they can mediate. This is best explained with an example. Stree Mukti Sanghatana is an NGO inspired by feminist principles, which, since 1975, has been raising awareness in Mumbai about the living conditions of waste pickers, mostly women and children, while also organizing their access to health care and education services. The NGO also looks into sustainable energy alternatives to support waste pickers’ livelihoods. They propose that waste pickers could be involved in the management and running of small bio-methane plants across the city. To promote this vision, they have established a pilot initiative with the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (BARC). Waste pickers now work in the management of waste streams for this pilot project in the plant. However, at the experimental site, the real managers of the project  – those who give visitors ‘the grand tour’ around and explain the technology – are male and formally-educated scientists. Within the experimental site, women waste pickers continue to clean and manage the waste without raising their eyes. They remain as isolated as they are outside the experimental site. The fundamental contradiction embedded in the lack of recognition of women waste pickers is not resolved by merely finding new livelihood opportunities. These women are still ignored and bypassed, their presence goes unacknowledged and the stigma remains. In the case of Stree Mukti Sanghatana’s initiative, reimagining waste as an energy resource or denouncing the health risks associated with waste picking are not sufficient to bring about a radical change in the conditions of living of waste pickers. Focusing on the service provided by waste pickers, rather than on the structural conditions that lead to them having a particular position in society, leaves the contradiction unsolved because it does not reveal the fundamental connections that lead to the constitution of such contradiction. Activists in Stree Mukti Sanghatana are aware of this. Thus, alongside their energy and waste management initiatives they campaign for justice, provide education and facilities, criticize policies, and even write plays that, in between jokes, denounce the living conditions of waste pickers.

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The governance of climate change in urban areas  ­471 From a contradiction perspective, the bio-methane plant can be reinterpreted not for what it is, but for what it does or what it can do. The biomethane plant is not just a means to improve waste management systems, because it also challenges established assumptions about waste pickers and how to support them. One activist from Stree Mukti Sanghatana explained that the initiative had improved the status of the waste pickers, because waste pickers are proud of saying that they work at BARC, and when they go there ‘they wear their best sari’. Access to a site such as BARC would have been unthinkable without the legitimization provided by discourses of low carbon development and energy security. This is an experiment in which both social and technological relations – particularly in relation to who holds expertise – are being reconfigured. In doing so, Stree Mukti Sanghatana creates new social representations which challenge existing socio-political hierarchies, opening access for waste pickers to education, social recognition and respect.

30.6 CONCLUSIONS Climate change governance should move beyond fostering energy efficiency focusing instead on bringing about broader social changes which can support a radical reconfiguration of infrastructures. While technological innovation may support such changes, a sustainability transition depends on developing new institutions and new systems of value and exchange. This chapter explains this as a process of social learning. The reconfiguration of socio-technical systems is particularly visible in urban areas, where spaces for intervention are more apparent. Experimentation is a means of governing by trying things out. Experimentation is a strategy to approach planning and urban development challenges as wicked problems. Experimentation is particularly visible in urban areas. Ultimately, experimentation may challenge established assumptions and generate different forms of social learning. Experimentation offers the means to initiate actions: it entails an active process of constructing the material means of governance and the discursive apparatuses that make that intervention reasonable, urgent, and necessary. Bulkeley et al. (2014a) have developed a framework to characterize experiments within specific contexts of urban development as emerging from interweaved processes of making, maintaining and living experiments. While making refers to the assemblage of experimental resources, maintaining is directed towards the insertion of the experiment in the constraints of the urban fabric, and living makes explicit the process of subjectification that incorporates experiments in everyday life as a means

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472  Handbook of urban geography for individuals to regulate their own conducts. This framework enables a detailed analysis of experimentation as a form of urban governance, whereby climate change objectives are advanced. The analysis is bleak, however, because experiments cannot be apprehended in terms of their consequences and how they impact different people in different ways. A progressively-oriented understanding of climate change governance in urban areas needs a mechanism of analysis that provides direction to reach progressive outcomes after a transition to sustainability. Contradictions are symptoms of how fundamental socio-political structures condition local socio-ecological conflicts. Contradiction, as a generative but unmanageable force in infrastructure transitions, is a key concept to understand not only the history of infrastructure configurations but also how to bring about new ones. Future research can use this notion to challenge dominant high carbon regimes and foster progressive changes towards sustainability.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This chapter presents a synthesis that summarizes, connects and clarifies three separate strands of my work. The first strand is work on social learning that was developed within the EPSRC project ‘Shock (not) Horror’ funded by the EPSRC (EP/J005657/1; PI: S. Glendinning). The main insights from this project were already published in Castán Broto and Dewberry (2016). The second one is a synthesis of a large multi-authored body of work on climate change experiments, developed within the ESRC project ‘Urban Transitions: Climate change, global cities and the transformation of socio-technical systems’ (RES-066-27-0002; PI: H. Bulkeley). This chapter reassess particularly the insights presented in Bulkeley, Castán Broto and Edwards (2014d). The third one is an exploration of the notion of contradiction in low carbon governance which I developed within the ESRC project ‘Mapping Urban Energy Landscapes’ (ES/ K001361/1; PI: Castán Broto). The main argument about contradictions and governance were already presented in Castán Broto (2015). I am indebted to Harriet Bulkeley for her constant support and guidance in the study of climate change governance.

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The governance of climate change in urban areas  ­473 Betsill, M. M. and H. Bulkeley (2006), ‘Cities and the multilevel governance of global climate change’, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 12 (2), 141–159. Betsill, M. and H. Bulkeley (2007), ‘Looking back and thinking ahead: a decade of cities and climate change research’, Local Environment, 12 (5), 447–456. Brand, R. (2005), ‘Urban infrastructures and sustainable social practices’, Journal of Urban Technology, 12 (2), 1–25. Brown, H. S. and P. J. Vergragt (2008), ‘Bounded socio-technical experiments as agents of systemic change: the case of a zero-energy residential building’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 75 (1), 107–130. Brown, H. S., P. Vergragt, K. Green and L. Berchicci (2003), ‘Learning for sustainability transition through bounded socio-technical experiments in personal mobility’, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 15 (3), 291–315. Bulkeley, H. (2010), ‘Cities and the governing of climate change’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 35 (1), 229–253. Bulkeley, H. (2013), Cities and Climate Change, London: Routledge. Bulkeley, H. (2015), Accomplishing Climate Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bulkeley, H. and M. M. Betsill (2005), Cities and Climate Change: Urban Sustainability and Global Environmental Governance, London: Psychology Press. Bulkeley, H. and V. Castán Broto (2013), ‘Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (3), 361–375. Bulkeley, H., V. Castán Broto and A. Maassen (2014a), ‘Low-carbon transitions and the reconfiguration of urban infrastructure’, Urban Studies, 51 (7), 1471–1486. Bulkeley, H., G. A. Edwards and S. Fuller (2014b), ‘Contesting climate justice in the city: examining politics and practice in urban climate change experiments’, Global Environmental Change, 25, 31–40. Bulkeley, H., A. Luque-Ayala and J. Silver (2014c), ‘Housing and the (re)configuration of energy provision in Cape Town and São Paulo: making space for a progressive urban climate politics?’, Political Geography, 40, 25–34. Bulkeley, H., V. Castán Broto and G. A. Edwards (2014d), An Urban Politics of Climate Change: Experimentation and the Governing of Socio-Technical Transitions, Abingdon: Routledge. Castán Broto, V. (2015), ‘Contradiction, intervention, and urban low carbon transitions’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33 (3), 460–476. Castán Broto, V. and H. Bulkeley (2013), ‘A survey of urban climate change experiments in 100 cities’, Global Environmental Change, 23 (1), 92–102. Castán Broto, V. and H. Bulkeley (2018), ‘Realigning circulations: how urban climate change experiments gain traction’, in Bruno Turnheim, Paula Kivimaa and Frans Berkhout (eds), Innovating Climate Governance: Moving Beyond Experiments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 69–84. Castán Broto, V. and E. Dewberry (2016), ‘Economic crisis and social learning for the provision of public services in two Spanish municipalities’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 112, 3018–3027. Castán Broto, V., S. Glendinning, C. Walsh, M. Powell and E. Dewberry (2014), ‘What can we learn about transitions for sustainability from infrastructure shocks?’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 84, 186–196. Castán Broto, V., D. A. Macucule, E. Boyd, J. Ensor and C. Allen (2015), ‘Building collaborative partnerships for climate change action in Maputo, Mozambique’, Environment and Planning A, 47 (3), 571–587. Elzen, B., F. W. Geels and K. Green (2004), System Innovation and the Transition to Sustainability: Theory, Evidence and Policy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Evans, J., A. Karvonnen and R. Raven (eds) (2016), The Experimental City, Abingdon: Routledge.

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474  Handbook of urban geography Gartman, D. (2004), ‘Three ages of the automobile – the cultural logics of the car’, Theory Culture & Society, 21 (4–5), 169–174. Geels, F. W. (2005), Technological Transitions and System Innovations: A Co-Evolutionary and Socio-Technical Analysis, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Geels, F. W. and J. Schot (2007), ‘Typology of sociotechnical transition pathways’, Research Policy, 36 (3), 399–417. Gross, M. (2010), Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haberl, H., M. Fischer-Kowalski, F. Krausmann, J. Martinez-Alier and V. Winiwarter (2011), ‘A socio-metabolic transition towards sustainability? Challenges for another great transformation’, Sustainable Development, 19 (1), 1–14. Haughton, G. and P. McManus (2012), ‘Neoliberal experiments with urban infrastructure: the Cross City Tunnel, Sydney’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36 (1), 90–105. Hodson, M., E. Burrai and C. Barlow (2015), ‘Remaking the material fabric of the city: “alternative” low carbon spaces of transformation or continuity?’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 18, 128–146. Hodson, M. and S. Marvin (2009), ‘“Urban ecological security”: a new urban paradigm?’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33 (1), 193–215. Hodson, M. and S. Marvin (2012), ‘Mediating low-carbon urban transitions? Forms of organization, knowledge and action’, European Planning Studies, 20 (3). 421–439. Holden, E. and K. Linnerud (2011), ‘Troublesome leisure travel: the contradictions of three sustainable transport policies’, Urban Studies, 48 (14), 3087–3106. Hoornweg, D., P. Bhada, M. Freire, C. L. Trejos and L. Sugar (2010), Cities and Climate Change: An Urgent Agenda, Washington, DC: The World Bank. Karvonen, A. (2013), ‘Towards systemic domestic retrofit: a social practices approach’, Building Research & Information, 41 (5), 563–574. Kojève, A. (1969), Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, New York: Basic Books. Kojève, A. (2004), La Notion de l’Autorité, Paris: Editions Gallimard. Lawton, J. (2007), The Urban Environment, London: Royal Commission of Environmental Pollution. Leach, M., I. Scoones and A. Stirling (2010), Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology, Environment, Social Justice, London: Earthscan. Loorbach, D. (2010), ‘Transition management for sustainable development: a prescriptive, complexity-based governance framework’, Governance, 23 (1), 161–183. Markard, J., R. Raven and B. Truffer (2012), ‘Sustainability transitions: an emerging field of research and its prospects’, Research Policy, 41 (6), 955–967. McGregor, A., C. Roberts and F. Cousins (2013), Two Degrees: The Built Environment and our Changing Climate, London: Routledge. Monstadt, J. (2009), ‘Conceptualizing the political ecology of urban infrastructures: insights from technology and urban studies’, Environment and Planning A, 41 (8), 1924–1942. Næss, P. and N. Vogel (2012), ‘Sustainable urban development and the multi-level transition perspective’, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 4, 36–50. Pahl-Wostl, C., C. Nilsson, J. Gupta and K. Tockner (2011), ‘Societal learning needed to face the water challenge’, Ambio, 40 (5), 549–553. Pahl-Wostl, C., D. Tabara, R. Bouwen, M. Craps, A. Dewulf, E. Mostert, D. Ridder and T. Taillieu (2008), ‘The importance of social learning and culture for sustainable water management’, Ecological Economics, 64 (3), 484–495. Reed, M. S., A. C. Evely, G. Cundill, I. Fazey, J. Glass, A. Laing, J. Newig, B. Parrish, C. Prell, C. Raymond and L. C. Stringer (2010), ‘What is social learning?’, Ecology and Society, 15 (4), 1–10. Rittel, H. W. and M. M. Webber (1973), ‘Dilemmas in a general theory of planning’, Policy Sciences, 4 (2), 155–169. Rosenzweig, C., W. D. Solecki, S. A. Hammer and S. Mehrotra (2011), Climate Change

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The governance of climate change in urban areas  ­475 and Cities: First Assessment Report of the Urban Climate Change Research Network, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rutherford, J. (2011), ‘Rethinking the relational socio-technical materialities of cities and ICTs’, Journal of Urban Technology, 18 (1), 21–33. Rutland, T. and A. Aylett (2008), ‘The work of policy: actor networks, governmentality, and local action on climate change in Portland, Oregon’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26 (4), 627–646. Rydin, Y., P. Devine-Wright, C. I. Goodier, S. Guy, L. Hunt, M. Ince, J. Loughead, L. Walker and J. Watson (2008), ‘Powering our lives: foresight sustainable energy management and the built environment project. Final project report’, London: Government Office for Science. Sanzana Calvet, M. and V. Castán Broto (2016), ‘Green enclaves, neoliberalism and the constitution of the experimental city in Santiago de Chile’, in James Evans, Andrew Karvonen, Rob Raven (eds), The Experimental City, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 107–121. Seto, K. C., S. Dhakal et al. (2014), ‘Human settlements, infrastructure and spatial planning’, in Ottmar Edenhofer, Ramón Pichs-Madruga et al. (eds), Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 923–1000. Singh, R., X. Wang, E. Ackom and J. Reyes (2014), ‘Energy access realities in urban poor communities of developing countries: assessments and recommendations’, Copenhagen: Global Network on Energy for Sustainable Development (GNESD), at: http://orbit.dtu.dk/ files/106352494/Energy_access_realities_v_final_updated.pdf (accessed 10 October 2018). Smith, A. and A. Stirling (2007), ‘Moving outside or inside? Objectification and reflexivity in the governance of socio-technical systems’, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 9 (3–4), 351–373. Späth, P. and H. Rohracher (2012), ‘Local demonstrations for global transitions: dynamics across governance levels fostering socio-technical regime change towards sustainability’, European Planning Studies, 20 (3), 461–479. Truffer, B., E. Störmer, M. Maurer and A. Ruef (2010), ‘Local strategic planning processes and sustainability transitions in infrastructure sectors’, Environmental Policy and Governance, 20 (4), 258–269. Turnheim, B., F. Berkhout, F. Geels, A. Hof, A. McMeekin, B. Nykvist and D. van Vuuren (2015), ‘Evaluating sustainability transitions pathways: bridging analytical approaches to address governance challenge’, Global Environmental Change, 35, 239–253. UNDESA (2018), World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision. New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. UN-Habitat (2011), Cities and Climate Change, London: Earthscan. UN-Habitat (2016), World Cities Report 2016, Nairobi, Kenya: UN-Habitat. While, A. (2013), ‘The carbon calculus and transitions in urban politics and political theory’, in Harriet Bulkeley, Vanesa Castán Broto, Mike Hodson and Simon Marvin (eds), Cities and Low Carbon Transitions, Second Edition, London: Routledge, pp. 42–53.

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Index 9/11 226, 234–5, 238 27F disaster 58–9 Abers, R. 420 activism 11–12, 47, 50, 110–11, 370, 470–71 see also social movements neighbourhood 411–24 right to the city 396–409 actor-network theory 8, 36, 41, 47, 49, 148, 331 Affolderbach, J. 114 Agamben, G. 53, 134–5, 225, 238 age 256, 299, 311, 314, 322, 341, 358, 372, 379 agencements 54–5, 151 agglomeration 4–5, 22, 56, 78, 164–6, 169–70, 172, 174–6, 181–3, 192, 198, 464 Agier, M. 135 Ai, W. 408–9 Airbnb 69, 304 Alberti, G. 130 Alderson, A. S. 81 Alinsky, S. 412, 418 Allen, J. 108 Allport, G. 341 Amazon 182, 193 amenity migration 40–41 America2050 initiative 172 American Community Survey 262 Amin, A. 51, 149, 156, 334, 341–2, 344–5 Anderson, B. 331 Anderson, C. 63 Andersson, R. 10, 250, 281, 283–4 Anjaria, J. 421 Anthropocene 39, 41, 56 apartheid 248–9 Appadurai, A. 331 Apple 182 Arab Spring 11, 413, 421 Argentina

activism/social movements 401 global urban connectivity 89 migrant division of labour 124 Arribas-Bel, D. 63 Askins, K. 347–8 assemblage 3, 6, 26, 28, 33, 35–6, 40–41, 47–52, 55–60, 113, 164–5, 172, 187, 226, 333–4, 336–7, 362, 389, 433, 469, 471 asylum seeking 134, 137–43, 348 see also migration; refugees atmosphere 55–6, 60 austerity 7, 142, 196, 215, 243, 251, 389, 429 Australia activism/social movements 402, 419 eco-cities 447 global urban connectivity 85, 88–90 smart urbanism 211 Austria, global urban connectivity 88–9 autogestion 11, 399, 401 Badiou, A. 373–4, 378 Bailey, C. 199 Baker, T. 8, 13, 103, 113 Balducci, V. 169 Balibar, E. 374, 376 Bangladesh, global urban connectivity 89 Barca Report 170 Barnett, C. 4–5 Barton, M. 66 Bassens, D. 79 Basu, R. 418 Batty, M. 1 Bauman, Z. 340–41 Bayat, A. 413, 421 Beck, U. 52 Bedi, T. 112 Beekmans, J. 67

477

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478  Handbook of urban geography Belgium global urban connectivity 93 infrastructures 172 Bell, D. 180 Benjamin, W. 149, 157, 330 Bennett, J. 41, 331 Berlant, L. 153–4 Bianchini, F. 188 big data 1, 8, 13, 63–72, 211, 213 BioRegional 447 Black Lives Matter 11 Blok, A. 13, 47 Boeing, G. 69 Bok, R. 113 Bolivia, migrant division of labour 124–7 Booth, C. 242 Bosnia, activism/social movements 369 Bostic, R. W. 66 Bouazizi, M. 369 Bourdieu, P. 128, 184, 250, 313, 332 Braconi, F. 67 Braun, B. 432 Brazil 302, 401 activism/social movements 369, 400, 420 children’s geographies 357 global urban connectivity 87–90 infrastructures 148–9, 151, 155–9 migrant division of labour 124 smart urbanism 212 sociality and materiality 334 Brenner, N. 3–4, 19, 21–2, 397, 408 Brexit 141–2 Bridge, G. 4–5 Brown, A. 400, 402 Brown, L. A. 258 Brundtland Report 386 Buck, N. 168 Buckley, M. 25, 27 Bulkeley, H. 155, 466–7, 471 Bunge, W. 354 Burrows, R. 333 Business Improvement District models 110 Cadieux, K. V. 41 Cambodia, global urban connectivity 93

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Canada activism/social movements 418 comparative urbanism 27, 29 cultural economy 187, 190–91 global urban connectivity 81, 85, 90 migrant division of labour 128–9 capitalism 10, 13, 19–23, 25, 28–9, 34, 49, 53, 120, 130, 137, 141, 147, 151, 234, 242, 244, 249–50, 297, 299–300, 302, 307–8, 316, 329, 372–3, 396–7, 399, 401–4, 406, 416, 452 Caprotti, F. 452 carbon emissions 437–8, 449, 463, 470 Carter, P. 200 Castán Broto, V. 12, 461 Castells, M. 8, 82, 370–71, 397, 412, 420 activism/social movements 372 Caulfiend, J. 300 CCTV 154, 226, 228–9, 231–4 census data 65–8, 168, 200, 259, 262, 264 Central Business Districts 184, 186, 190 Centre for Cultural Studies 330–31 Cesafsky, L. 13, 19 Chadwick, A. 318 Chadwick, G. F. 385 Chakrabarty, D. 19 charity 249 Chicago School 20–21, 105, 184, 329, 354, 386, 412–13 children’s geographies 8, 11, 354–64 Chile 52–3, 58–9 activism/social movements 420 migrant division of labour 120, 124–7 China activism/social movements 398, 402–8, 422–3, 435–6 cultural economy 183, 185, 187 digital divides 321 eco-cities 446–9, 452–4 global urban connectivity 85, 87, 89–90, 95 inequalities 244, 249 refugee mobility 139–40, 143 Choi, J. H. 80–81 Choy, T. 42 Christensen, P. 357

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Index  ­479 Chung, S-Y. 258 Cisco 211 citizenship 121–2, 126–7, 213, 219, 348, 390, 397, 400, 402, 405, 456 city of fears 340 city of hopes 340–41 Civil Rights movement 416 Clark, E. 305 Clark, N. 58 Clarke, J. 392 class 25, 52, 56, 65, 206, 243, 246, 248, 250, 298–301, 303, 305, 308, 313, 322–3, 329, 341–3, 345–7, 371, 377–8, 404, 408, 412, 417–18, 421–2 climate change 7, 12, 47, 57, 59, 147, 155, 210–11, 429 governance 461–72 Coaffee, J. 8–9, 225 Cochrane, A. 108, 113 Cocola-Gant, A. 8, 10, 297 Coenen, L. 435, 439 Cohen, D. 113 Cold War 136 Collins, T. W. 38 Colombia infrastructures 151 migrant division of labour 125 colonialism 3, 19, 125, 137, 147, 248 Comaroff, J. 27 Comaroff, J. L. 27 communism 386 comparative urbanism 19–30 competition 21, 90, 150, 177, 182, 196–8, 235, 420, 447, 453 Comunian, R. 198 connectivity see global urban connectivity constructivism 106–7, 171–3, 176, 332, 354, 359 consumerism 150, 403, 406, 462 Cook, I. R. 8, 13, 28, 103, 110, 113 cosmopolitics 47–60 Cousins, J. J. 8, 13, 33, 40, 42 Cowley, R. 12, 445 Cox, K. 413 Craig, D. 419 Craigslist 69 Crang, M. 315 Cranshaw, J. 63

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Creative Foundation 200, 203–4, 207 Cresswell, T. 332 crime 170, 191, 225, 235, 282–3, 285–6, 288, 333, 343 see also terrorism Critical Mass 11 Cronon, W. 35 Cultural Geography 10–11 culture 256, 331, 337, 341–2, 344, 408 cultural capital 128, 189, 198 cultural economy in cities 180–93 urban regeneration through 195–207 Currid, E. 205 cycling 155–9, 451 Darling, J. 341, 345 Datta, A. 218 Davis, A. 389 Davis, D. E. 20 Davis, M. 335 De Haan, R. 200, 203–4 Deleuze, G. 28, 41, 47, 332, 362 Denmark global urban connectivity 82, 89 infrastructures 150, 155 refugee mobility 134 Denton, N. A. 248, 257–8 deprivation 67–8, 200, 203–4, 242, 247, 285 Derickson, K. D. 4, 13, 19, 24 Derudder, B. 8, 77, 82, 84, 91 DeVerteuil, G. 306 Dewey, J. 53, 55 Dickens, C. 185 digital divides 10, 311–23 digital technologies 10, 210, 212–13, 218, 311–16, 451 see also smart technologies Dijkstra, L. 168 Dikeç, M. 398 Dingpolitik 51–2, 59 see also cosmopolitics discrimination 126, 128–30, 140, 142, 248, 329, 349, 376, 397, 406–7, 412, 415 see also inequalities displacement 10, 39, 64–7, 70–71, 134, 136, 152, 199, 204, 206, 230, 249, 297–308, 441, 454 divergences 5–6

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480  Handbook of urban geography division of labour 181, 193, 195, 329 migrant division of labour 119–25 DIY urbanism 196 Doherty, J. 153 Domènech, L. 40 Dorling, D. 247 Dowling, R. 419 Downton, P. F. 449 Drake, G. 190 droughts 58 Du Gay, P. 392 DuBois, W. E. B. 412, 415 Dugdale, A. 322 earthquakes 58–9 eco-cities 12, 435, 437, 445–7 economic growth 125, 138, 165, 167–8, 199, 211, 416, 447, 452, 465 economies of scale 198 eco-urbanisms 435–7 ecovillages 450 Ecuador 40 global urban connectivity 89–90 migrant division of labour 123 education 65, 128, 164, 203, 242–4, 246, 251, 255, 281, 283–6, 292, 299, 311, 313, 316, 318, 341, 344, 348–9, 354–5, 361, 407–8, 417–19, 470–71 e-governance 10, 317–23 Egypt activism/social movements 369, 378–9, 421 global urban connectivity 89, 93 Elwood, S. 344 emerging city regions 164–77 Emin, T. 201 energy 147, 149–50, 154, 215, 431, 433, 437–8, 447–8, 451, 470–71 Engels, F. 9, 185, 242, 329 Engwicht, D. 449 entrepreneurship 23, 28, 57, 129–30, 135, 152, 195, 197, 202, 216, 218, 301, 373, 436, 453 environmental concerns 12, 37, 150, 170, 448, 450 epistemic cultures 5–7, 14 equality 374–6 see also inequalities ethics 71, 206

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ethnicity 25, 52, 65, 121, 125, 128, 243, 246–8, 255, 261–7, 276, 281–5, 311, 313–14, 322–3, 337, 340, 342, 344–5, 347–9, 358, 360, 372, 377–8, 412 see also segregation European Spatial Planning Observation Network 168 European Union 121, 127–9, 142, 168–9, 171, 211, 244, 318, 388 Brexit 141 Eurostat 168 Evans, M. 112 Ewbank, N. 200 expert knowledge 108–9 exploitation 27, 69, 120–22, 125–8, 130, 135, 139, 142, 153, 186, 199, 202, 205–6, 261, 329, 396, 402, 404, 406–7 Faber, J. W. 284, 287 Facebook 69–70, 182, 193, 319 Faludi, A. 385 Farías, I. 13, 47 Fedeli, A. 169 Feldman, J. 289 feminism 2, 150, 329–31, 354, 372, 470 Fernandes, L. 421 financial crisis 150, 243, 251 1997 400 2008 121, 359, 389, 400 Finland children’s geographies 362 digital divides 321 fires 38–9 Flickr 70 floods 38–9, 57–9, 154 Florida, R. 192 Flynn, A. 452 Flyvbjerg, B. 173 Fordism 10, 126, 180, 469 Fortmann, L. 41 Foth, M. 320 Foucault, M. 28, 53, 215, 225–6, 330, 466 Fountain, J. 321 Foursquare 67–70 France activism/social movements 396 cultural economy 182–3, 188–9, 193

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Index  ­481 eco-cities 447 global urban connectivity 81, 85, 89, 95 inequalities 247, 251 infrastructures 168, 170 mobile urbanism 103–5, 114, 116 Freeman, L. 66–7 Freire-Trigo, S. 11, 383 Friedmann, J. 8, 21, 77–8, 307 Froud, J. 391 Fujita, K. 88 Fullilove, M. T. 307 Functional Urban Areas 168 Gabriel, N. 39 Galster, G. 10, 250, 281, 284, 287, 290–92 gaming 217 Gandy, M. 35, 40 Garden City movement 455 Gartman, D. 468–9 gated communities 330 gateway functions 82, 88, 90, 164, 170 Gawlewicz, A. 346 gemeinschaft 330 gender 25, 29, 52, 119, 121, 123–5, 151, 158–9, 243, 248–9, 256, 288, 313, 329, 332–3, 340–41, 358, 372, 377–9, 418 General Electric 211 gentrification 8, 10, 13, 39–40, 63–72, 149, 187, 196, 198, 203, 206, 297–308, 401, 437 origins of 297–9 Germany cultural economy 182–3, 185, 190 eco-cities 447 global urban connectivity 81–2, 89, 93 infrastructures 155, 167–8, 170, 172, 174 mobile urbanism 104 power relations 386 refugee mobility 134 super-diversity 348 urban regeneration through culture 195 gesellschaft 330 GHG emissions 1, 12, 461–2 see also carbon emissions

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Ghilardi, L. 188 Gibson-Graham, J. K. 344 Gilbert, M. 313 Glass, R. 297–8, 305 Gleason, P. 292 global care chains 119, 123–4 global cities 20–25, 77–8, 125, 187, 250, 302 see also world cities Global North 27, 29, 38, 42, 47, 85, 112–13, 119–20, 124–5, 130, 217, 220, 297–8, 302–4, 356–7, 396, 408, 411, 451 see also individual countries Global South 23–4, 26–7, 29, 38, 42, 47, 85, 112–13, 119–21, 124–7, 130, 134, 137, 217–18, 220, 302–4, 308, 363, 396, 408, 422, 451 see also individual countries global urban connectivity 77–95 globalization 9, 20, 26, 48, 78, 82, 87, 91, 110, 126, 136, 142, 150, 169–71, 174, 193, 302, 383, 388–90, 400, 414 glocalism 151 Goetz, E. 414 Goffman, E. 341–3 Goldfarb, A. 315 Gonzalez, S. 303 Goodchild, M. 319 Google 65, 70, 211, 216 Gottmann, J. 172 Gough, K. V. 356, 358, 363 GPS 154, 320 Grabher, G. 190 Graham, S. 41, 150–51, 311 Greece activism/social movements 369 digital divides 321 global urban connectivity 93, 95 refugee mobility 134 Grimm, N. B. 33 Grydehøj, A. 453 Guattari, F. 41, 332 Gugler, J. 244 Guibrunet, L. 42 Guimera, R. 80 Habermas, J. 53, 388 hackers 212, 220

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482  Handbook of urban geography Hackworth, J. 301 Haddad, E. 137 Hagemans, I. W. 307 Hagerman, C. 39 Häkli, J. 364 Hall, P. 172, 187, 192–3 Hall, S. 30, 330 Hammel, D. J. 64–5 Hamnett, C. 10, 242, 300 Hankins, K. B. 12, 411, 414 Hart, G. 28, 30 Harvey, D. 21, 34–5, 136, 188, 195, 243, 247, 251, 300, 329, 346–7, 371, 396–7 Haughton, G. 467 hazards 38–9 He, S. 12, 396 health 153, 170, 198, 200, 244–6, 250, 255, 282, 285, 356, 420, 448 Hedman, L. 292 Heidegger, M. 26, 52, 149 Hemming, P. J. 344, 348–9 Heng, Y. 235 Hesse, M. 9, 164, 174 Heynen, N. 37 high-rise developments 8, 104–5, 114–16, 468 Hill, R. C. 88 Hirst, D. 202 Hitachi 211 Ho, K. C. 190–91 Hodson, M. 154–5, 453 Hoggart, R. 330 Holden, E. 469 homelessness 249, 336 Hong Kong activism/social movements 369, 405 global urban connectivity 81, 90, 95 inequalities 247 refugee mobility 136, 139–41, 143 smart urbanism 212, 217 Hooimeijer, P. 284 HOPE VI programme 301 Hopkins, P. 359 housing 65, 69, 164, 170, 181, 183, 187–8, 204, 243–51, 262, 285, 297–8, 301, 304, 306, 329, 333, 359, 361, 373, 401, 404, 407, 417, 419–20, 423, 447

M4713-SCHWANEN_9781785364594_t.indd 482

public 290–91, 301, 401, 403, 422 social 106, 116, 249, 336, 348 Hristova, D. 68 Hubbard, P. 9, 195 Hudson-Smith, A. 311 Hulme, M. 452 human rights 135–6 Hurley, P. T. 41 Hutton, T. 9, 180 Hwang, J. 65 Hyndman, J. 134 hyper-diversity 10, 363, 390 IBM 211–12, 216 income 37, 64–5, 140, 157–9, 244–51, 255–7, 267, 282, 284, 286–9, 292, 297–9, 301–3, 305–7, 311, 313–14, 316, 321, 333 see also socioeconomic status India activism/social movements 421 climate change governance 470–71 cosmopolitics 50, 57–9 eco-cities 446–7 global urban connectivity 87–90 inequalities 248 mobile urbanism 104, 112 smart urbanism 218 urban political ecologies 39 Indonesia, global urban connectivity 89 industrial districts 185 Industrial Revolution 180, 242 industrialization 21, 180, 416 inequalities 9–10, 12, 242–51, 307, 331 digital divides 311–23 gentrification and displacement 297–308 infrastructures 9, 38, 40, 42, 47, 49, 79–80, 147–60, 180, 185, 195, 198, 210–11, 215, 313, 328, 337, 437–9 innovation 1, 110, 181, 433, 437, 456 Instagram 70–71 interlocking network model 83–4, 91 IPCC 461 Iran, activism/social movements 421 Iraq activism/social movements 421 refugee mobility 135 Ireland

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Index  ­483 inequalities 248 migrant division of labour 129 Israel, activism/social movements 369 Istanbul, activism/social movements 369 Italy cultural economy 183, 185 global urban connectivity 89–90 infrastructures 168 Jackson, M. 418 Jacobs, J. 82, 330 James, W. 3 Japan eco-cities 447 global urban connectivity 78, 81, 83, 88–9, 95 Jarvis, H. 190 Jeanneret, C-E. see Le Corbusier Johnston, R. 258 Joss, S. 447, 452–3 Kaika, M. 149–50 Kallianos, Y. 154 Kallio, K. P. 364 Karaliotas, L. 11, 13, 369 Katz, C. 361 Kear, M. 39 Kelman, I. 453 Kenworthy, J. R. 449 Kenya, global urban connectivity 89, 93 Kern, L. 29 Kojève, A. 467 Kosovo, inequalities 248 Kraftl, P. 8, 11, 354 Krätke, S. 82, 183 Kreichauf, R. 134 Kullman, K. 362 Kuymulu, M. B. 401–2 Kwan, M-P. 287–8, 346 Kyoto protocol 465–6 labour markets 119–30, 313 land use 58, 180, 431, 448 Landry, C. 197 language 25, 50, 58, 85, 88, 127–9, 140, 173, 195, 211, 216, 255, 319, 340, 342, 412, 446 Large Urban Zones 168

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Larner, W. 419 Latham, A. 331 Latour, B. 13, 47–9, 51–2, 55, 59, 331 Law, J. 50 Lawhon, M. 42 Lawson, V. 344 Layne, K. 319 Le Corbusier 103–7, 114–15 Lebanon 135 Lee, J. 319 Lees, L. 305 Lefebvre, H. 3–4, 19, 21–2, 34–6, 147, 166, 205, 370–71, 397–400 Lehmann, S. 449 Leick, A. 174 Leitner, H. 348 Lewhon, M. 151–2 Lewis, R. 185 Ley, D. 299 Lieberson, S. 258 Linders, D. 319 LinkedIn 182, 193 Linnerud, K. 469 Lipsky, M. 385 Liu, C. 423 living conditions 170, 243, 431, 470 Lloyd, C. D. 256 Lloyd, R. 190 Local Agenda 21 463 localism 196 Lofland, L. H. 341–3 London Living Wage 127 Lopdrup-Hjorth, T. 392 Luque-Ayala, A. 9, 210 Lynn, J. 114–15 Madden, D. 22 Malaysia, global urban connectivity 89 Malkki, L. H. 135 Malmberg, B. 283–4 manufacturing 187, 201 Marcuse, P. 306, 397–8 Marsh, D. 112 Marshall, D. J. 364 Martin, D. G. 12, 411, 414–15, 423 Martin, R. W. 66, 177 Marvin, S. 9, 41, 150–51, 154–5, 210, 311, 453 Marx, K. 21, 185, 329

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484  Handbook of urban geography Marxism 2, 4, 7, 20–21, 24–5, 28, 36, 120, 148–9, 157, 166, 329, 361, 371 Massey, D. 30, 108, 248, 257–8, 387–8, 392 Matejskova, T. 348 materiality 328–38, 360–63, 440 Matthews, H. 358, 360–61 Matthiessen, C. W. 80 May, C. 318 Mayblin, L. 349 McCann, E. 48, 106–7, 111–12 McCarthy, J. J. 413 McCormack, D. 331 McFarlane, C. 50, 150 McGuirk, P. 113, 419 McIlwaine, C. 9, 119 McLoughlin, J. B. 385 McManus, P. 467 Merrifield, A. 19, 22, 25 metropolization 167–72 Mexico, global urban connectivity 87, 89 Microsoft 182 migrant division of labour 119–25 migration 9, 25, 105, 119–30, 175, 245, 248, 250, 256, 286, 298, 306, 314, 336, 340–41, 343, 346, 348, 390, 398, 403–8, 420, 429, 454 see also refugees laws 137–8, 141, 143, 390 refugee migration and mobility 134–44 Mikkelsen, M. R. 357 militarization 226 Miller, D. 331 Minca, C. 134 minimum wage 127, 142 Miraftab, F. 416, 422 MML framework 466 mobile urbanism 103–16 mobilities 8, 50, 63, 69, 166, 202, 311–12, 316, 336, 346, 356–8, 363 mobile urbanism 103–16 refugee mobility 134–44 transnational urban labour markets 119–30 modifiable area unit problem (MAUP) 258, 283–4 Mol, A. 50 Molella, A. 452

M4713-SCHWANEN_9781785364594_t.indd 484

Molotch, H. 334 Monstadt, J. 41 Moon, M. 321 more-than-human processes 7, 30, 41, 49, 56, 59–60, 331, 441 mortgages 65, 123 Moses, R. 385 Mouffe, C. 11, 387, 393 MTO programme 291 Mullings, B. 29 multiculturalism 341, 346 see also super-diversity multi-level perspective 433 multinational enterprises 81, 182, 193, 211 multiple globalizations 82, 91 Murray, C. 188 museums 182, 192, 197, 407 Musterd, S. 10, 250, 281, 283–4, 287–8 Myanmar, inequalities 248 Mykhnenko, V. 169 Næss, P. 463 Nagar, R. 29 Neal, S. 344 neighbourhood activism 411–24 neighbourhood effects 281–93 Neighbourhood Planning Units 418 neogeography 319–21 neoliberalism 10, 29, 37, 53, 113, 126, 150, 177, 182, 195, 214, 216, 218, 220, 243, 249, 297, 301–3, 305, 308, 313, 344, 361, 364, 372, 383–93, 400, 402–3, 416, 419–20, 423, 453, 467 neo-Marxism 53 Nepal 40 global urban connectivity 93 Netflix 193 Netherlands 284 activism/social movements 369 global urban connectivity 81, 85, 93, 95 inequalities 251 infrastructures 155, 170, 172 refugee mobility 136 networks of equivalence 402 New Economic Geography 165, 170, 175–6 new materialisms 148

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Index  ­485 New Social Studies of Childhood 354 New Towns 455 New Urbanisms, New Citizens 355–7, 359–61 New Zealand, activism/social movements 419 Newell, J. 13, 33, 40, 42 Newman, J. 392 Newman, K. 306, 414 Nicaragua, global urban connectivity 93 Nieuwenhuis, J. 284 Nigeria, global urban connectivity 88–90 Nijman, J. 27, 422 NIMBY-ism 147 Nixon, D. V. 9, 147 non-governmental organizations 12, 84, 91–3, 152, 398, 400, 404–8, 416, 450, 470 Noren, L. 334 Norway, global urban connectivity 88 Oakley, K. 201 O’Brien, M. 358 Occupy movement 11, 55, 369, 376, 379 Ocejo, R. 189 Odendaal, N. 218 OECD 168, 171 oil shocks 385 Oka, M. 10, 255 Olympics 201, 236–7 Ong, A. 26–7, 56 Ono, Y. 201 Oosterlynck, S. 413 OpenStreetMap 67 Ostrom, E. 386 O’Sullivan, D. 257–8 Pain, K. 172 Pain, R. 359 Pakistan, global urban connectivity 89–90 Palestine, children’s geographies 364 Papachristos, A. V. 67 Park, R. 412 Park Hill 114–16 parks 37–8, 242, 412 Parreñas, R. S. 123

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path dependency 169 patriarchy 299–300, 313, 329 Peck, J. 20, 25, 30, 113, 116, 243, 251 Peru global urban connectivity 93 migrant division of labour 124–5 Peterson, M. 342 Phelps, N. A. 112 philanthropy 196 Pickett, S. T. A. 33 Pickvance, C. 29 Pierce, J. 414 Pincetl, S. 42 Pinkster, F. 285–6, 289 Piore, M. J. 120 planetary urbanization 3–4, 6–7, 10, 13, 19–24, 27, 30, 33, 36, 40, 57–9, 372–3, 377 pluralism 6, 112, 300, 462 Poland global urban connectivity 89 super-diversity 346 police 112, 378 political movements 369–80, 412 politics of nature 51 see also cosmopolitics pollution 33, 38–9, 57–9, 111, 170, 185, 283, 417, 431 Poorthuis, A. 8, 13, 63 population growth 431 Posner, P. 420 post-colonialism 2, 6, 9, 13, 19–20, 24–6, 29, 150, 330, 372 post-Fordism 169, 183, 186 post-industrialism 180–81, 199–201 post-structuralism 35–6, 47 poverty 142, 159, 242, 245, 247, 263, 267–8, 272, 274, 329, 331, 343–4, 400, 419 see also socioeconomic status Pow, C-P. 402 power relations 3, 29, 33, 35, 41–2, 54, 149, 152, 173, 180, 213, 216, 226, 250, 313, 329, 331, 333–4, 344, 348, 350, 354, 371, 383–93, 396–7, 399, 405, 408, 424, 439, 441 bottom up 383–4, 386, 388–90, 392–3 top down 383–6, 388–93 Pratt, A. 190, 193, 198–9

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486  Handbook of urban geography precarity 9, 20, 24, 119–20, 125–30, 135, 142, 181, 198, 205–6, 403, 407, 420 Pred, A. R. 79, 82 Prince, E. 315 privacy 71 Private Finance Initiatives 389 privatization 391–2, 453 privilege 24, 111–12, 140, 151, 248, 333, 343–4, 347, 378 protectionism 234–7 Provisional IRA 227–30, 232 Pubic Choice theory 386 public housing 290–91, 301, 401, 403, 422 Purcell, M. 399, 402, 417–18, 421 Qian, J. 12, 396 Quantitative Revolution 1 Quark, A. A. 113 race 37, 65, 119, 121, 124–5, 128–9, 151, 246, 248–9, 255–6, 261–8, 270, 272, 274, 276, 311, 316, 333, 337, 341–7, 349, 372, 412, 415, 417–18 see also segregation Raco, M. 11, 383 Rademacher, A. 33 Radiant City model 103, 105 Radical Right 10–11 Rancière, J. 11, 374–5, 377 rape 333 Rapoport, E. 111, 447 Real IRA 234 Reardon, S. F. 257–8 recession 122–3 refugee camps 134–6, 138, 140, 142–3 refugees 9, 134–44, 348 see also migration regeneration 195–207 regional development banks 152 Register, R. 449–50, 455 religion 243, 246, 248, 256, 336–7, 340, 342, 344, 347–9, 360, 377–9, 418 Ren, X. 448–9 rent gap 71, 300 reproductive labour see global care chains resilience 225–38

M4713-SCHWANEN_9781785364594_t.indd 486

resource flows 40–41 retrofitting 154, 156, 436, 447–8 Rhodes Must Fall 11 Richardson, T. 173 right to the city 12, 396–409 Right to the City Alliance 400, 402 Ring of Steel 228–34, 236–7 risks 38–9 riskscapes 57, 59 Rizzo, M. 152 Robinson, J. 2–3, 19–20, 23, 25, 29, 109–10 Rothuizen, J. 135 Roy, A. 2–3, 20, 26–7, 48 Russia, global urban connectivity 87, 89, 95 Rutherford, J. 12, 81–2, 150, 429, 469–70 Ryburn, M. 9, 119, 125–6 Sabatier, P. 384 Sadgrove, J. 345–6 Sailstorfer, M. 203 Salais, R. 183 Samara, T. R. 408 Sampson, R. J. 65, 291 Sassen, S. 8, 21, 78, 82–3, 141–2, 245 Saudi Arabia, inequalities 248 Saunders, P. 243 Sayer, A. 243 Schaefer, B. 67 Schäfer, A. 389 Schmid, C. 19, 21–2 Schmidt, D. 423 Schuermans, N. 11, 340, 343, 346 Schulz, C. 114 Schwanen, T. 1, 9, 147 science and technology (STS) studies 13, 36, 47, 50, 52, 59, 433 Science of Cities 1, 13 Scott, A. 2–3, 166, 169, 183–4, 193, 197–8 Second Life 320 security 9, 138, 154, 225–38 segregation 255–76, 313, 329, 340, 350, 418 Sen, A. 244, 386 Senegal, global urban connectivity 93 Serbia, inequalities 248

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Index  ­487 service economy 39, 189, 245, 250, 308, 316 sexuality 25, 340, 344–5, 347, 372 Shank, S. 29 Shannon, C. E. 258 Sharkey, P. 284, 287, 290–91 Shaw, K. S. 307 Shelton, T. 8, 13, 63 Sheppard, E. 23, 29–30 Shin, H. B. 402 Shortell, T. 193 shrinking cities 195 Simmel, G. 330 Simone, A. M. 27, 153 Simpson, P. 333–4 Singapore cultural economy 190–91 digital divides 321 eco-cities 447 global urban connectivity 81, 95 mobile urbanism 112 super-diversity 340, 343 Skelton, T. 356, 358, 363 Skrivankova, K. 126 Slater, T. 305 slavery 248 Sloterdijk, P. 55–6 slums 50, 302 Small, M. L. 289 smart cities 210, 212–13, 215, 217, 219 see also smart urbanism smart technologies 9, 13 smart urbanism 9, 210–21 smartphones 316, 319, 322 Smith, I. 114–15 Smith, N. 34, 300, 397 Smith, T. D. 385 Smithson, A. 115 Smithson, P. 115 social capital 195, 197, 313 social constructivism 106–7, 171–3, 332, 354, 359 social housing 106, 116, 249, 336, 348 social media 63–4, 67–71, 182, 193, 217, 319, 414 social movements 11, 369–80, 401 see also activism social networks 261, 285–8, 307 social outcomes 281–93 socialism 242, 244, 250

M4713-SCHWANEN_9781785364594_t.indd 487

sociality 328–38 socioeconomic status 262, 264–8, 270, 272, 274, 282, 284–5, 292, 340–41, 344 see also income Socrata 212 Söderström, O. 113 Soja, E. 184 South Africa activism/social movements 421–3 children’s geographies 357 cosmopolitics 50 global urban connectivity 87–90 inequalities 248–9 smart urbanism 218 super-diversity 340, 343, 346 South Korea digital divides 321 eco-cities 451 global urban connectivity 81, 89 Soviet Union 386 Spain activism/social movements 369, 371 cosmopolitics 55 cultural economy 183, 185, 188 eco-cities 448 global urban connectivity 89–90, 95 infrastructures 168 migrant division of labour 121, 123 smart urbanism 212 urban regeneration through culture 197 spatial development policy 174–5, 177 spatial solidarity 411–24 Spivak, G. C. 26, 29 Sri Lanka, inequalities 248 St. Mary Axe bombing 227–30 Standing, G. 126 Standing Rock 147 Star, S. L. 149 start-ups 186–7 Stengers, I. 5, 48, 51–2 stereotypes 121, 343–4, 347 Stiglitz, J. 403 Storper, M. 3, 166, 169, 183, 193 Stree Mukti Sanghatana 470–71 Streeck, W. 389 Sudan, children’s geographies 361 Sugrue, T. J. 417 Sui, D. 320

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488  Handbook of urban geography Sun, H. 405 super-diversity 10, 340–50, 363–4 supply chains 42 sustainability 12, 429–41, 463, 471 see also eco-cities Sustainable Communities plan 359 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5 Swanson, K. 112 Swanton, D. 348 Sweden 287 cultural economy 183 eco-cities 448, 454 global urban connectivity 81 inequalities 251 Switzerland global urban connectivity 89, 93 inequalities 248 Swyngedouw, E. 11, 13, 36, 40, 149–50, 369 Sykes, B. 284 symbolic capital 128 Szelényi, I. 244, 250 Taiwan activism/social movements 405 smart urbanism 212, 217 Tang, W-S. 422 Tasan-Kok, T. 390 taxation 121, 251 Taylor, P. J. 8, 21, 77, 82, 84, 88, 91 Techno-City 455 telework 317, 321–2 Temenos, C. 8, 13, 103, 110 terrorism 8–9, 154, 225–38 Thatcher, M. 419 Theodore, N. 113, 116, 243 think tanks 109, 113 Thrift, N. 332 Tilly, C. 28 Tolia-Kelly, D. 331 Tonkiss, F. 333 Tonnies, F. 330 Toshiba 211 tourism 23, 81, 110, 140–41, 197, 302–4, 318, 331 trade unions 371, 373, 420 traffic congestion 111, 170, 229, 237, 362 trafficking 127

M4713-SCHWANEN_9781785364594_t.indd 488

Transantiago 52–3 transnational urban labour markets 119–30 transparency 173, 238, 318, 320 transport 79–81, 136, 147, 149–52, 154–5, 186, 211, 242, 245–6, 249, 251, 317, 420, 431, 438, 447–8, 450 Truffer, B. 435, 439 Tsing, A. 42 tsunamis 58–9 Tunisia, activism/social movements 369, 378 Turkey activism/social movements 421 global urban connectivity 88–90 Turner, S. P. 391–2 Turok, I. 169, 185 Twitter 67–8, 70–71, 217, 319 Uganda, infrastructures 152–3 unemployment 121, 137, 200, 248, 263, 267, 275, 282, 286, 293, 298 Unité d’Habitation 103–5, 107, 114–16 Unite the Right 11 United Arab Emirates comparative urbanism 27 eco-cities 446–7 global urban connectivity 87 United Kingdom 202, 419 activism/social movements 369, 417 children’s geographies 355–6, 358–9, 361 cultural economy 180, 182–3, 185, 187–8, 191 eco-cities 446, 448, 455 gentrification 297–9, 301 global urban connectivity 78, 81, 85, 87–9, 93, 95 inequalities 242, 246–7, 249, 251 infrastructures 148, 150, 155–9, 168–9, 172 London Olympics 2012 201, 236–7 migrant division of labour 120–21, 123–5, 127–30 mobile urbanism 106, 114–16 power relations 385, 389, 391 refugee mobility 136, 139–43 security 227–38 segregation 255, 258

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Index  ­489 sociality and materiality 329, 332–4, 336–7 super-diversity 340, 342–4, 346, 348–9 urban regeneration through culture 195, 197–202, 204–7 United Nations 85, 165, 388, 408 Population Fund 164–5 UNESCO 400, 402 UN-Habitat 400, 402, 429 UNHCR 136 United States 334 activism/social movements 369, 400, 403, 412–13, 415–16, 418–19, 421–4 big data 65, 67 children’s geographies 361 climate change governance 468 comparative urbanism 28–9 cultural economy 182, 185, 187, 189–91, 193 digital divides 312–14, 316, 318, 321–2 eco-cities 446, 448, 451, 453 gentrification 298–9 global urban connectivity 78, 81–3, 85, 87–91, 93, 95 inequalities 247–9, 251 infrastructures 147, 168, 170, 172 neighbourhood effects 291 power relations 385 segregation 257–8, 262, 268, 270 smart urbanism 211–12, 217 sociality and materiality 330, 336 super-diversity 340, 344 urban political ecologies 35, 38–42 urban regeneration through culture 195 universities 80, 82, 250, 335 Urban Age 1, 4 urban expansion 164–77 urban heat island 33 urban inequality see inequalities urban metabolism concept 39–42 urban operating systems 211 urban political ecologies 4, 8, 13, 33–36195 urban regeneration 195–207 Urban Splash 115 Urbanization 1 13, 19–20, 25, 28, 30

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Urbanization 2 2, 13, 19–20, 23–5, 30 Ureta, S. 52 Ursin, M. 357 Valentine, G. 343, 345–7, 358 value added 28 van Blerk, L. 357 Van Liempt, I. 9, 134 Van Meeteren, M. 23–4, 79 van Tol, M. 135 Vartanian, T. 292 Vasudevan, A. 29 Vecchio, F. 9, 134 Vella-Burrows, T. 198 Venerandi, A. 67 Vertovec, S. 340 Vietnam, global urban connectivity 89–90 Vigdor, J. L. 66–7 Vincent, C. 344 violence 20, 23–4, 29, 48, 125, 137, 153, 159, 232, 234, 283, 285, 329, 333, 376, 380, 417 virtual realities 320 Visser, D. J. 135 Vogel, N. 463 Wachsmuth, D. 69 Waddell, P. 69 Waite, L. 347 Waley, P. 303 Walker, P. 41 Wallinger, M. 201 Walsh, C. 389 Walter, A. 413–14 Wang, D. 405 Ward, D. 247 Ward, J. 9, 195 Ward, K. 28, 48, 107, 110, 112–13 Warf, B. 8, 10, 311 waste management 38, 431, 449 water 34, 36, 40, 42, 147, 149–50, 154, 215, 420, 448 Watson, S. 10, 328 Watson, V. 454 Web 2.0 319–23 Webber, R. 333 Weichhart, P. 177 welfare state 242, 249, 251, 283, 389, 419

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490  Handbook of urban geography Whitehead, M. 432, 453 wicked problems 464, 467, 471 Wikipedia 320 Williams, S. 205 Wilson, H. F. 341–2, 344–5, 349 Wilson, W. 248 Wirth, L. 20 Wong, D. W. S. 10, 255, 256, 259, 276 Wood, A. 152 working conditions 121–3, 126–7 World Bank 147, 152, 165, 388 World Charter for the Right to the City 400 world cities 77–8, 80–82, 87 see also global cities World Social Forum (WSF) 400–401, 408 World Trade Organization 171 World Urban Forum 402 worlding cities 19–30

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Wu, F. 448 Wylie, J. 331 Wyly, E. K. 64–5, 306 Xu, Y. 404 Yao, J. 256, 276 Ye, J. 343 Yeatman, A. 391 Yelp 69–70 Young, I. M. 341 YouTube 193 zero-tolerance policing 112 Zillow 69 Žižek, S. 11, 369 Zolberg, A. R. 137 zoning 185, 418 Zook, M. 8, 13, 63 Zoopla 69 Zukin, S. 189, 193, 303

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