Sara Gonzalez

University of Leeds · Cities and Social Justice Group

This paper refreshes the debate around urban food deserts and improves the evidence base for the social value of traditional markets. It draws upon a wider project that brings together the markets sector and policy makers to develop new evidence, tools and insights to understand and enhance the community value of traditional retail markets. One imp...

«Un Sevillano podría cruzar la ciudad saltando de velador en velador» (Sevillatoday.es, 2016). Así bromeaba el diario satírico Sevilla Today, para poner en evidencia la saturación de terrazas en el espacio público (que en Sevilla se denominan veladores). Dos años más tarde, el diario ABC se hacía eco de otra noticia, esta vez real: «La barra de bar...

This best practice handbook is a practical guide for market operators on how to operate and develop traditional retail markets (TRMs) as community hubs for inclusive economies. Concerns about the gentrification of TRMs have increased in the UK in recent years, prompting many market operators to seek out advice and examples of how to avoid, minimise...

This paper argues that retail spaces, such as marketplaces are increasingly becoming sites of urban contestation. The globalisation of retail, online shopping and the redevelopment of cities has pushed marketplaces to the margins but they still serve millions of people, particularly the urban poor. Concurrently, marketplaces are branded as authenti...

This paper looks at the variegated impact of the 2008 global financial crisis and the different ways in which local strategic actors imagined and responded to it through a comparative study of Barcelona, Brussels, Leeds and Turin. Drawing on Cultural Political Economy, we see crisis moments as fertile territory for the analysis of variegation in ur...

El objetivo de este ensayo es analizar las transformaciones de los mercados públicos de abastos en las últimas décadas, desde una perspectiva crítica que enmarca estos cambios en procesos más amplios de gentrificación y turistificación de ciudades. En concreto destacaré una nueva tendencia, la de la «gourmetización», que está tomando fuerza en los...

Public markets can be spaces of social interaction and inclusion for diverse groups in the city, but in the UK the advancement of neoliberal urban policies threatens this increasingly important function. Focusing on Leeds’ Kirkgate Market during a phase of redevelopment, this chapter draws on data from interviews and participant observation to exam...

This paper uncovers examples of mobilisation and resistance against retail gentrification in London. It focuses on three campaigns that have emerged to save, promote and sustain traditional retail markets, which we see not merely as spaces not only of consumption but also socialising, identity-building and, additionally, contestation and resistance...

In this paper, we document the displacement and resettlement of over 11,000 villagers who were removed from their homes and relocated in modern apartment blocks to make way for the construction of a new business district in the western suburbs of Shanghai. We examine the expectations and concerns of displaced residents before and after their reloca...

Taking the articles in this special issue as a starting point, this commentary makes an intervention in the debate surrounding postcolonialism, particularism, abstraction and theorisation. The author argues that critical urban studies can benefit from the comparative turn while still maintaining a theoretical compass with the ultimate aim to overco...

This paper uncovers the mobilisation and resistance of citizens in the UK against retail gentrification. It focuses on existing and past campaigns that have emerged to save, promote and sustain traditional retail markets in particular in London. By traditional markets we refer to covered and uncovered licensed markets which sell all kinds of produc...

That cities compete against each other is a cliché of the contemporary neoliberal condition, in which so much focus and energy is expended on a zero-sum-game of trying to outshine imagined rivals. In this paper we examine how this type of competition plays itself out in China, and more specifically in and around Shanghai, in the Yangtze River Delta...

Hongqiao is one of China's largest ever urban development projects, and within Shanghai second only to Pudong. It is designed to kick-start growth in the western part of China's economic capital, just as Pudong did in the east. The project comprises a transport hub and a new central business district and involves the participation of an array of or...

Traditional markets in the UK find themselves at a crossroads; on one hand pushed out by changing retail trends and urban redevelopment, on the other championed as desirable, vibrant spaces which are the key to reviving town centres. Regeneration plans threaten what many traders and customers see as a unique and necessary public space in the heart...

Traditional markets in the UK find themselves at a crossroads; on one hand pushed out by changing retail trends and urban redevelopment, on the other championed as desirable, vibrant spaces which are the key to reviving town centres. Regeneration plans threaten what many traders and customers see as a unique and necessary public space in the heart...

This paper looks at the impacts of the 2008 global financial crisis on Leeds, a medium sized city in northern England, which in the last decades has specialised in finance-related economic activities. Our aim is to understand if the largely neoliberal pre-crisis urban growth model pursued in Leeds, based significantly on real estate speculation, re...

This article analyses gentrification processes in a mid-sized city in Northern England. This case study of Leeds helps us to "provincialize" the study of gentrifica-tion by focusing on a city that is not at the center of global capitalism, but rather is a provincial city. Our aim is to capture the specificities of gentrification in this city at the...

This article analyses gentrification processes in a mid-sized city in Northern England. This case study of Leeds helps us to "provincialize" the study of gentrification by focusing on a city that is not at the center of global capitalism, but rather is a provincial city. Our aim is to capture the specificities of gentrification in this city at the...

This paper presents traditional retail markets in the UK caught between a narrative of decline and revival, on the edge of a gentrification frontier. Traditional indoor and outdoor markets have become somewhat residual in many British cities but essential for many low-income citizens that rely on their affordability. At the same time, the market is...

This essay calls for a systematic investigation of the financial-economic crisis as a source of new urban governance rationalities across Europe. We propose combining an understanding of neoliberalization as a variegated social phenomenon with a cultural political economy approach sensitive to the discursive dimension of variegation and the evoluti...

El objetivo de este artículo es realizar un recorrido crítico por la literatura mayoritariamente anglosajona que en los últimos años se ha centrado en el concepto de escala geográfica y las transformaciones socio-espaciales del capitalismo actual. Empezando por un comentario sobre el carácter discursivo de la globalización se propone el concepto de...

This paper explores how the so-called Bilbao effect and Barcelona Model are diffused internationally through what may be called urban policy tourism: short trips made to Bilbao and Barcelona by policy-makers to learn from their regeneration in the past 15 years. The paper reveals for the first time the substantial extent of this practice and contex...

Despite the entrenched and long-term nature of the Italian and English North/South divide, this has not always been considered a relevant scale at which to redress spatial inequalities. To explain this apparent conundrum, this paper has two interlinked aims: (1) to investigate why, how, for whom and when the North/South divide is held to be a relev...

This paper contributes to the debates on relational conceptualisations of space by focusing on how these notions are used by policy makers in particular governance contexts. It uses the example of Milan, where recent urban interventions and a particular fragmented governance structure demonstrate how overstated accounts of relationality can take ho...

This paper assesses contemporary power relations between the local state, capital and community interests in managing urban area development. It draws on work conducted under a Framework V EU project called SINGOCOM, focusing on one case among nine studied. 1 1 SINGOCOM (Social Innovation, Governance and Community building) is a Framework V, EU fun...

This introductory article does three things. First, it compares neo-liberal and social innovation discourses about urban socio-economic change, including associated policies and key agencies. Second, it seeks to improve the analytical framework of urban development by combining `spatialized' Regulation Theory with elements from Cultural Political E...

Amb la globalització, les ciutats, lluny de perdre la seva funció, han adquirit un paper més actiu com a nodes de fluxos internacionals de persones, serveis i coneixement. L'obertura dels mercats a l'economia global i la creixent neoliberalització exposen les ciutats a la competició internacional per recursos. Els ajuntaments passen de ser administ...

In this article I explore how theoretical metaphors about the contemporary rescaling of the capitalist economy are used by local policy actors to justify an entrepreneurial urban policy. I develop a new theoretical concept (scalar narrative), suggest an analytical approach (cultural politics of scales) and give evidence of a particular case (Bilbao...

This paper introduces a Special Topic on social innovation in the governance of urban communities. It also seeks to widen the debate on the meaning of social innovation both in social science theory and as a tool for empirical research on socioeconomic development and governance at the local level. This debate is organised around ALMOLIN—i.e. alter...

This paper draws on institutionalist approaches as developed in the fields of policy analysis and planning, to develop a methodological approach for assessing how the governance capacity for socially innovative action might emerge. After introducing the problematic of the search for governance relations which have the capacity for social innovation...

This paper argues that, in order to understand economic crises, we need to approach them in a multifaceted way and pay attention to the extra-economic elements. Economic crises, far from being irrevocably identifiable through objective indicators, are subject of multiple interpretations. Consequently, we need to pay attention to the perceptions of...

The Guggenheim Museum has had many 'effects' on the lives of local citizens and politicians in Bilbao as well as on wider communities such as architects, planners, cultural policy-makers or museologists. This article, however, deals with the effect that the museum has had on the urban governance practices in Bilbao. Urban policy litera-ture has cle...

La pregunta que esta tesis quiere responder es: ¿cómo se va construyendo Bilbao a lo largo de la historia, social y políticamente como un espacio de movilización social?, es decir, ¿por qué, cómo y liderado por quién Bilbao emerge como un espacio de interés para llevar a cabo un proyecto político? Además, la tesis se interesa por la configuración e...

Area Temática: Espacio y Ciudad En esta comunicación vamos a hablar del nuevo papel que el ocio juega en la creciente competitividad entre ciudades. Para ello, vamos primero a centrarnos en las políticas urbanas que tratan de responder a la nueva situación en la que se encuentran las ciudades una vez superado el modelo de acumulación fordista. Cuan...

With globalisation, cities, rather than losing their function, have taken on a more active role as nodes for the international flows of people, services and knowledge. The opening of markets to the global economy and growing neo-liberalism mean that cities have to face up to international competition for resources. City councils transform from admi...

El objetivo de este artículo es realizar un recorrido crítico por la literatura mayoritariamente anglosajona que en los últimos años se ha centrado en el concepto de escala geográfica y las transformaciones socio-espaciales del capitalismo actual. Empezando por un comentario sobre el carácter discursivo de la globalización se propone el concepto de...