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Interventions in Urban Geopolitics
Abstract
These interventions in urban geopolitics recognise that it is timely to develop a research agenda that reinforces, broadens and regenerates this field, bridging the disciplines of political geography, urban studies, planning and architecture in renewed ways.
Supplementary resource (1)
... Recent advances in the discipline seek to make sense of the geographical nature of politics in cities, more specifically, urban geopolitics. Rokem et al. (2017) argue that cities are at the intersections of multiple scales of geopolitics. Contestations and violence at these intersections of wider geopolitical processes often manifest in everyday urban life and spaces (Graham, 2004;Rokem et al., 2017). ...
... Rokem et al. (2017) argue that cities are at the intersections of multiple scales of geopolitics. Contestations and violence at these intersections of wider geopolitical processes often manifest in everyday urban life and spaces (Graham, 2004;Rokem et al., 2017). However, cities are not just passive sites where geopolitical processes of other scales play out. ...
... Because of this deemed 'illegal' status, they are also deprived of basic urban amenities and infrastructure that citizens are entitled to. These everyday, 'ordinary' contestations within cities are not just examples of grounded practices of urban geopolitics' wider exclusionary, violent practices (Rokem et al., 2017); they also show how wider processes concentrate and become intertwined within urban spaces, producing entangled exclusions over time. Apart from revealing debates over immigration that frame the Muslim Bengali population as the 'other' in Assam, these contestations in Guwahati embody the entangled exclusions that are produced in local spaces within the city based on class, faith, language, and ethnicity. ...
An epicentre of ethnicity‐based identity politics and exclusions, India's northeastern region has long been politically imagined as both a ‘frontier’ and ‘borderland’ for state control, territorialization, extractive economies and (re)developments by colonial and subsequent post‐colonial regimes. In post‐independence India, the region experienced many territorial assertions made on ethnic grounds. With the rise of religio‐national and neoliberal politics, new urban ‘developments’ and connectivity projects in the region have deepened exclusions based on class, caste, ethnic and religious borders. These have, in turn, led to further displacement, enclavization, and ghettoization of minority communities who are deemed ‘non‐native’ along ethnocentric lines. Taking two cases from Shillong and Guwahati, we introduce the concept of entangled exclusions to analyse the layered, intertwined, multi‐scalar nature of divides within these frontier cities. We argue these cities are critical sites for understanding urban geopolitics where concentrated entanglements of exclusions and (re)borderings become manifest as these cities experience new infrastructural investments.
... In numerous European municipalities, political visions and concrete experiences of inclusive approaches in the field of migration have emerged in recent years that combine questions of the right to global freedom of movement and social rights, de facto making the case for more open borders (Jones 2019). Debates about the "local turn" of migration and border regime analysis (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018;Hinger, Pott, and Schäfer 2016) resembling a broader "urban geopolitical turn" (Rokem et al. 2017) -, urban citizenship and sanctuary cities (Darling and Bauder 2019) as well as the nascent movement of "New Municipalism" (Thompson 2020) signal a shift to local politics in the field of migration in Europe in the last decade. Increasingly, civil society but also municipal initiatives emerge at the local scale that address the local scale to make and frame their claims and to implement their goals. ...
... Reflecting the potentials and pitfalls of local migration politics with a focus on non-governmental/governmental relations across localities also opens up perspectives on the complexities and ambivalences of local initiatives, which cannot be dichotomously categorised as either political solidarity or presumably unpolitical humanitarianism (Schwiertz and Schwenken 2020). With this multidisciplinary forum, we therefore aim at advancing empirical analysis as well as theoretical debates in the wider field of migration and geopolitics (see also Pascucci and Ramadan in Allen et al. 2018;Rokem et al. 2017): each contribution deals with a concrete empirical case of local politics as well as the challenges that emerge in these • How do urban civil society and municipal initiatives shape, negotiate, undermine or challenge migration politics and the borders of citizenship at local scales? • To what extent can cities be the setting for a political transformation: is it possible to counter the general tendency towards restrictive policies and anti-migrant stances with a more open, city-based approach to migration and what are the limits of such an approach? ...
... In the Summer of 2017, the Maximilian Park once again set the scene for a dramatic "geopolitics of refuge" (Rokem et al. 2017). After the demolition of the Calais 'Jungle' and make-shift settlements in places like Paris, a changing group of 600 to 1000 migrants got 'stranded' in Brussels. ...
In contrast to the increasingly repressive migration policies at national and supranational scales, new pro-migrant policies, networks, and practices of support have been initiated at the local scale. In numerous European municipalities, political visions and concrete experiences of inclusive approaches in the field of migration have emerged in recent years that combine questions of the right to global freedom of movement and social rights. While numerous studies have examined these “politics of scale” and scale-making at the local level in different places, this forum aims to further these debates by reflecting the entanglement of social movements and civil society organisations with the local municipalities across Europe and by bringing the analyses and experiences of diverse initiatives into discussion. We therefore examine practices, relations and institutions of local migration politics that re-negotiate and bypass national and supranational borders at local scales, but also create new borders and boundaries in these processes. With this multidisciplinary forum, we aim at advancing empirical analysis as well as theoretical debates in the wider field of migration and geopolitics. Each contribution deals with a concrete empirical case of local politics and the challenges that emerge in these contexts – focusing on European “host societies” in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany – as well as with analytical concepts that are key to understanding these cases and to linking them to broader societal structures and dynamics.
... Further, as a corrective to urban theorists' under-theorisation of the political, my analysis advances that the urban, as a political domain, is constituted through ordinary citizens' everyday socio-spatial practices and processes of political subjectivation that unfold in and through these citizens' contentious encounters with agents and agencies of government. 3 This exploration of urban spatial practices as constitutive of a domain of politics, thus, engages with writings concerned with bringing everyday urban contestation into the study of the complex interconnections between urban space and diverse political geographies (Featherstone & Korf, 2012;Dikec, 2012, Rokem et al., 2017Arampatzi, 2017). 4 These lines of analysis also resonate with theorisations of the political agency of "peripheral" urban actors and the forms that their struggles take (Benjamin, 2008;Holston, 2008Holston, & 2009Caldeira, 2017;Pithouse, 2008). ...
... These everyday practices pose a challenge to governmental rationalities and representations aimed at the management of people's 3 My argument here resonates with propositions advanced by Eder and Oz (2017) with reference to the Gezi events in Istanbul, and by Arampatzi (2017) with reference to the formation of "struggle communities" in Athens. 4 In their individual interventions on urban geopolitics, both Rokem and Fregonese (Rokem et al., 2017) underscore the need to bring the everyday and the spatial dimensions of urban conflict into the "urban geopolitics" research agenda. While not engaging with matters pertaining to geopolitical conflicts, my discussion of everyday urban contestation grounding the Uprising speaks to the call for a broader conceptualisation of urban geopolitics that incorporates everyday spatial contests. ...
This article centres the role of Cairo's popular forces in the 2011 revolutionary Uprising in Egypt. It does so by bringing to focus the relationship between these forces' everyday spatial practices and forms of contention, on one hand, and revolutionary activism and protests in central places like Tahrir Square, on the other. It demonstrates that everyday life in popular neighbourhoods of Cairo is constitutive of a political domain in which ordinary citizens cultivate resources, dispositions and capacities for collective action and mobilisation of the kind witnessed in the January Uprising. It also shows how the lived experiences of ordinary citizens in the city's popular neighbourhoods are formative of the oppositional subjectivities enacted in the context of this revolutionary mobilisation.
The article identifies and illuminates two primary paradoxes of revolutionary mobilisation. The two paradoxes arise out of a disjuncture between modalities of action pursued by Tahrir-oriented revolutionary activists (al-thuwwar) on one hand, and popular forces' tactics, strategies and conception of the Revolution, on the other. Tracing the engagement of popular forces in the context of the Uprising, this contribution reveals that in enacting their oppositional subjectivities popular forces articulated their own conception of the Revolution. More specifically, the article expounds on how they did so by shifting the locale of revolutionary action from Tahrir Square to Cairo's streets and popular neighbourhoods, and by widening acts of urban insurgency to advance rights claims to the city.
... The second component of our discussion of vertical informality is 'verticality.' Although not a new phenomenon, the last two decades have seen a growing scholarly focus on urban verticality and its physical, social, and political characteristics (Nethercote, 2019;Rokem et al. 2017;McNeill, 2005;Harris, 2015). Scholars have urged to consider verticality beyond its immediate spatial form-typically tall buildings-to explore issues of the multiple forms and scales of power, lived experiences, and materialities embodied in high-rise buildings, including apartment buildings (Graham, 2015). ...
... However, verticality has also been studied from more 'mundane' lenses of ordinary urbanism (Harris, 2015;Rokem et al. 2017). Scholars have employed the term to study new forms of social fragmentation and urban segregation (Pow, 2011;Costello, 2005;Blander et al., 2018), architecture and design (Harker, 2014), planning policies and regulations (Rosen and Charney, 2018;Margalit, 2013;Mualam et al., 2019), capital circulation and political economy (Nethercote, 2018;Craggs, 2018), and symbolism, iconicity, and power (Acuto, 2010;McNeill, 2002;Bunnell, 1999;Kaika, 2010). ...
This paper explores the phenomenon of vertical informality, an under-studied form of informal housing at large scale, and the role of developers within vertical informality. We investigate the case of vertical informality in Kufr Aqab, East Jerusalem, where developers have constructed multiple high-rise apartment buildings with thousands of inhabited apartments without land registration, zoning or building permits. We investigate the conditions for the formation of vertical informality in Kufr Aqab and explore the developers' perspectives and risks, including land ownership, finance, reputation and professional ethics, and construction standards. Drawing from the case study and interviews with local developers, as well as literature on informality, we define vertical informality as (i) developer-built high-rise or mid-rise housing for sale or for rent, that (ii) lacks formal registration and bank-financing, and (iii) does not comply with formal planning and building codes. Some aspects of vertical informality are unique to Kufr Aqab, relating mainly to the geopolitical status of contested East Jeru-salem. Other aspects are significant worldwide, shedding light on the role of the real estate developers in informal housing. We conclude with directions for future research.
... As someone working on the other end of the spectrum of such spectacular cities, one of the concerns I have is the portability of the concept to more peripheral cities of Asia and elsewhere. The recent interventions within the sub-discipline of urban geopolitics invite scholars to explore more postcolonial, ordinary, and embodied urban dynamics for a better conceptualization of shifts in the "global urban present" (Rokem & Boano, 2018;Rokem et al., 2017). Being an urban geographer investigating the geopolitics of "unspectacular" spaces in another city (Guwahati, the largest city in Northeast India) that is arguably even less visible on the map of international urban studies, I feel that representational politics of more obvious forms of statist spectacles needs to be supplemented by experiences of ordinary, everyday, and even subaltern variants of spectacles in peripheral cities to develop a comprehensive understanding of spectacular urbanism from Asia. ...
... My comments here are presented in a spirit of highlighting how the conceptual and normative questions addressed in the book-and these are numerous-might inspire additional conversations in political geography and related fields. I do not approach my appraisal from the perspective of urban geopolitics, an engaging and burgeoning field that has been recently summarized for its interdisciplinary and theoretical potential (Rokem et al., 2017). Instead, and this speaks to the innovation of Koch's work, I will tackle themes that set her work a bit apart from the turn towards urban geopolitics; namely, how spectacles and geopolitics-manifested in Asia's new capitals and elsewhere-are intimately bound up with discourses and practices of development. ...
... The article begins with a concise discussion of contemporary debates on African urban development and urbanism, leading into a framework of 'urban geopolitics' centred on the everyday struggles over urban space [12,13]. This is then followed by a historical analysis of Beira's city, detailing an urban trajectory shaped through the rise and fall of (hostile) state regimes and broader global geopolitical shifts. ...
... Analytically this implies moving away from the analysis of specific urban and/or development modalities and scales, towards a more open perspective of urbanism as a 'relational site' shaped through the engagements of different actors and claims making practices [13]. It is here where the novel framework of 'urban geopolitics' is particularly well suited, which has recently been put forward by political geographers Rokem et al. and Rokem & Boano, which have sought to centre urban debates on everyday struggles over urban space [12,13]. The basic premise of urban geopolitics is that the control of urban space is inherently contentious and that these contentions should be brought to the foreground. ...
In recent years, a new era of interventionism has emerged targeting the development of African cities, manifested in ‘fantasy’ urban plans, surging infrastructure investments and global policy agendas. What the implications of this new era will be for specific urban contexts is still poorly understood however. Taking this research agenda as a starting point, this article presents findings of in-depth empirical research on urban development in Beira city, Mozambique, which has recently become the recipient of massive donor investments targeting the built environment. Informed by current debates on urban geopolitics, the article unpacks these mounting global flows while locating them alongside pre-existing struggles over urban space. By doing so three distinct yet inter-related dimensions of urban geopolitics are identified, relating to the workings of the state, so-called ‘informality’ and international donors. Far from representing homogeneous categories, these dimensions each represent contradictory practices and interests which are shaping Beira’s urban trajectory. The article concludes by arguing that the inflow of donor resources has exacerbated pre-existing struggles over urban space while contributing to new contentions in ways which have undermined social equity targets of contemporary global development agendas. In doing so it provides important contributions to current debates on urban development in Africa
... For example, future discussions might consider how hotels have been appropriated by migrants' rights' groups as resources for accommodation and squatting in rejection of the formal accommodation models and carceral constraints of the state, with the short-lived tenure of City Plaza in Athens serving as the highest profile example (Lafazani, 2018). Similarly, cases of the formal reworking of hotels, such as the Magdas Hotel in Vienna, where asylum seekers and refugees are provided with employment and training through the hotel (Deshpande, 2015;Rokem et al., 2017); forms of co-housing in which hotel infrastructures are reused for collective housing that traverses immigration status (Oliver et al., 2020); and innovative projects such as the Grandhotel Cosmopolis in Augsburg that combined a hotel with an asylum centre, café and artistic space (Zill et al., 2020), all provide valuable inversions of the carceral tendencies of governmental uses of hotels. At the same time, as Piacentini et al. (2022, pp. ...
Geographical work on hotels has foregrounded their role as spaces of commercial hospitality, leisure, and increasingly as sites of emergency accommodation for a range of displaced groups. Developing such work, this paper critically examines the central role of hotels in accommodating and containing asylum seekers and refugees. By considering the use of hotels in the UK and Australia, we argue that the hotel is a durable and vitally important site of bordering, one that manifests many of the tensions and contradictions of state responses to asylum seekers and refugees. Far from being a marginal or temporary space, we centre the hotel as a critical site for the reproduction and maintenance of contemporary bordering. In doing so, the paper advances understanding of the hotel as a specific type of social, political and cultural space, associated with three dynamics that we explore in turn: forms of flexibility and emergency response, patterns of hospitality, and the violent displacements of the hotel as a site detached from ‘everyday life’. In surveying these understandings of the hotel, we argue that the cultural and political significance of the hotel as a site for understanding contemporary bordering emerges from its unique position at the confluence of the carceral and the hospitable. The paper thus proposes a concept of carceral hospitality , to designate the fraught positioning of the hotel between carceral conditions of institutional detention and spectacle, and the hospitable expectations more readily associated with sites of leisure, escapism and relaxation. It is this positioning that has allowed hotels in the UK and Australia to act as lightning rods for critical discussion and public concern over state responsibilities, welfare entitlements, and the narrowing scope of refugee protection.
... Cities are inherently bordered spaces (Bauman, 1995) and urban spaces being multicultural and transnational are produced through multiple borders that "make the concentrations of people, activities, wealth and power that constitute cities possible" (Scott & Sohn, 2019, p. 298). Cities are at the intersection of different scales (Rokem et al., 2017), and so are the urban borders. Borders within the city are not only concerned with production of binaries to demarcate socio-spatial segments. ...
... During the Russo-Ukrainian war, cities and suburbs became the main foci of military aggression. Different dimensions of urban geopolitics intersect in Ukrainian cities -the clash of different geopolitical preferences in geopolitical fault-line cities, the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories, everyday geopolitics during the war, the geography of refuge, vertical geopolitics, and definitely urbicide (Fregonese, 2012(Fregonese, , 2019Rokem et al., 2017;Torres-Adán, 2021;Gentile, Kragh, 2022). Ukrainian cities burn in real-time. ...
This article explores urbicide during Europe’s largest ongoing war of the 21st century. Urbicide in Ukraine is not just another story in a long list of well-covered destroyed cities; it has new manifestations and needs to be rethought. Despite the variety of forms and concepts associated with urbicide, it has some common features such as non-selective ness, simultaneous destruction of symbolic and mundane, ordinary places, both physical structures and values, is aimed at ‘killing’ the heterogeneous urbanity for its own sake, and even being carefully planned causes reconfiguration of urban spaces in unexpected ways. The article has three focuses; it concentrates on the extent and causes of direct ur bicide in Ukraine, the relation of urban life under occupation and indirect urbicide, and narratives of (non)return to occupied cities. All these foci are united by the main purpose of the study to understand the urbicide caused by the warfare and global geopolitical changes that are ‘exploding’ (in a literal and relative sense) in Ukraine’s cities. This re search is based on the analysis of semi-structured in-depth interviews, thematic analysis, as well as mapping of warfare and urbicide in Ukraine.
... An emerging 'urban geopolitical turn' (Rokem and Boano 2017a, 17) has advanced discussions of the relationship between state power, territorial control and cities, bridging political geography, urban studies and planning (Fregonese 2009(Fregonese , 2012Graham 2004Graham , 2010Rokem and Boano 2017b;Shtern and Yacobi 2019;Yacobi 2009;Yacobi and Pullan 2014). While urban geopolitics focused on two main themes -on the one hand, the militarisation of urban space and on the other, urban conflicts (Rokem et al. 2017) ̶ there has been an increasing interest in discussing non-conflict cities with the lens of urban geopolitics (Rokem and Boano 2017b). This article builds on this trend, by discussing the blurring of category between ordinary and contested cities, as well as how broader urban themes, such as informality or social segregation, play a role in urban geopolitics. ...
Connecting urban geopolitics with critical geopolitics, this article highlights the urban geopolitical significance of learning from the European South-east. Urban geopolitics has often made reference to the European South-east in discussions of urban warfare, conflict and contestation. In particular, Sarajevo and discussions of urbicide played a seminal role in understanding the contemporary relationship between conflict and the built environment. Beyond this attention to the 1990s wars, this article shows that contemporary urban transformations in the region reflect novel processes and alignments that can contribute to the larger project of rethinking urban geopolitics: allegedly ‘contested’ and ‘ordinary’ cities in the region reflect today a reshaping of practices of material and immaterial urban geopolitics highlighting transnational and global entanglements beyond the East-West and North-South conceptual and geopolitical divides. By employing a critical geopolitical analysis of the urban, the article discusses performative acts of power in urban space and the reconfiguration of the built environment in two cities in the region as a nexus of geopolitical processes, well beyond the wars of the 1990s: Sarajevo, arguably a divided city in a contested state, and Belgrade, an ‘ordinary’ capital city of a nation-state, albeit uncontested capital of a country with contested territories. The article highlights the emergence of newer relationships beyond the East-West divide, particularly with the Middle East, specifically articulated through urban space reconfigurations. It shows how the European South-east reflects that the urban geopolitical goes beyond the usual lens of ‘contested’ urban space to ‘ordinary’ cities, which become arenas of multi-scalar geopolitics.
... It signals development, modernity, and, perhaps most importantly, global ordinary urban geopolitical connectivity (cf. Loftsdóttir, 2014;Rokem et al., 2017). Moreover, as Romanenko (2021a, np) noted, 'the opening of a restaurant in Mariupol would be an important signal for the people living in the occupied territories [the DPR and LPR] that development takes place where there is Ukraine'. ...
Until 24 February 2022, when Russia launched its full‐scale attack on Ukraine, Mariupol, like many other Ukrainian government‐controlled cities in the country's eastern regions, was trying to reinvent and rebrand itself as a modern European city. But it was missing something: the golden arches, that ubiquitous symbol of globalization that can be found in almost any medium‐sized city in Europe. Because McDonald’s restaurants are perceived as powerful symbols of global capitalism and of Western or American culture, the establishment of new McDonald’s restaurants has sometimes been challenged – even violently – by nationalist or anti‐globalist forces. In Mariupol, which lost its status as a “McDonald’s city” at the beginning of the Donbas war in 2014, this was not the case. In this intervention, I describe how the restaurant was a symbolic centrepiece of local debates taking place in this geopolitical fault‐line city, where deep divisions surrounding foreign policy and geopolitical preferences carried the potential for volatile and unpredictable urban conflict, trumping most frictions related to the city’s diverse ethno‐national structure. In its role as globally signifying flagship, McDonald’s had generated an area of popular and political consensus ‐ a Pax McDonaldica ‐ while also acting as a (welcome?) distraction from a low‐intensity war that had already lasted for eight years. This all came to an end when Russia attacked Ukraine, destroying much of the city, killing thousands, forcefully displacing or deporting hundreds of thousands, and terrorizing those left behind.
... Even though political geographers and anthropologists have been talking about geopolitics at varying scales and scope (e.g. urban geopolitics (Fregonese, 2015(Fregonese, , 2017Rokem et al., 2017), water and maritime geopolitics (Braverman & Johnson, 2020;Campling & Colás, 2018;Chalfin, 2015;Clarke-Sather et al., 2017;Germond, 2015;Hannigan, 2016;McCormack, 2017), polar geopolitics (Dodds & Nuttall, 2016), desert geopolitics (Ellis, 2018;Urbansky, 2020), subterranean geopolitics (Squire & Dodds, 2020)), in this review, geopolitics is taken at its commonly-understood scope and scale, meaning the entanglements of culture, power and territory at the interstate level. Common to political geographers and anthropologists, geopolitical themes that guide this review essay comprise (a) the makings and unmakings of state and nation at international borders, and substate and cross-border regions; (b) geopolitical infrastructures; (c) scaled up wars, pervasive militarization, and the flourishing cultures of militarism, securitization of mobility, and affect. ...
Over the last 3 decades, while ethnography has arguably become a popular and legitimate method to study geopolitics among geographers, anthropologists have increasingly turned towards geopolitics as a popular subject to investigate former and emergent empires as everyday phenom- ena. Yet, their efforts remain rather disjointed. Written by an anthropologist, this review essay aims to put these rather disjointed efforts into a programmatic conversation and think about how one might (re)calibrate geopolitics as an ethnographic object and agenda. To that end, the essay first takes stock of the existing ethnographic knowledge of geopolitics through a review of selected works by geographers and anthropologists. Then, to help students and scholars of geopolitics from within these cognate disciplines move this engagement forward, the essay concludes by proposing the ‘cultures of geopolitical expertise’ as a productive avenue to recalibrate geopolitics as an ethnographic object and agenda.
... We also contribute to the study of urban geopolitics and its focus on the intersection between political conflict and urban space (Fregonese, 2012;Graham, 2011). With numerous cities in the world experiencing ethnonational discord, analyzing the connection between urban-developmental and geopolitical spheres can reveal spatial-political dynamics common to many of these cities (Rokem et al., 2017). ...
This paper evaluates the role and impact of neoliberal redevelopment strategies in inner-city urban regeneration projects in Belfast, Beirut, and Jerusalem. As governments in these nationally contested cities struggle against embedded geographies of antagonism and segregation, neoliberal and market-based approaches have arisen in the production of new city center spaces in these contested cities. This comparative analysis examines Titanic Quarter in Belfast, Solidere central district in Beirut, and Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem. The cases utilize similar modes of urban reproduction and share common limitations. We find that neoliberal regeneration in contested cities is politically effective and financially successful. Yet, these market-based strategies heighten class-based exclusion and have been a disinterested agent in efforts to bridge urban ruptures associated with ethno-nationalist segregation and past violence. We conclude that analysis of how these projects can contribute to equitable peacebuilding not be subordinated to market prerogatives in more comprehensive project development plans.
... Recent scholarship on urban geopolitics has called attention to the contested nature of cities due to the coalescence of growing inequalities, segregation, mobility, and a surge in nationalist identity politics (Rokem and Boano 2017, 5;Rokem et al. 2017). Yangon's urban frontier dynamics of the 1980s and 1990s illustrate this 'contested urbanism' (Rokem and Boano 2017, 5) in postcolonial and 'transitional' cities, as new economic policies worked in tangent with legislation narrowing eligibility for citizenship, tying understandings of property rights and citizenship more closely together. ...
Myanmar’s systematic dispossession of religious and ethnic minorities is well-documented as a tool for counterinsurgency through territorialisation. However, the specific contours of the relationship between minorities, territorialisation, and urban dispossession remain underexplored. The article argues that legislative changes linking identity, property, and belonging led to widescale invisible dispossession of minorities, through the mechanisms of law, citizenship and bureaucracy. Such dispossession gave birth to multiple urban frontiers – temporal spaces that break down existing property relations and create new ones through territorialisation. This article explores one such moment in Myanmar’s largest city and former capital, Yangon, through the lens of Islamic pious endowments, or waqf. By positioning Yangon’s post-1988 landscape as an urban frontier, the article shows how legislative changes serve to actively create frontiers in urban centres through legal dispossession and the transformation of property relations. The article develops the concept of the urban frontier as inextricably tied to territorialisation and dispossession, positing that a frontier, as a spatialized moment in time, can exist at geographical centres as well as peripheries.
... These two polarizations highlight 'main currents' in a more complex, multi-faceted political geographies and economies. They feed on one another to create new assemblages of urban geopolitics (Rokem et al 2017). On the one hand, metropolitan liberal cosmopolitanism has become a call-to-arms for anti-liberal neonationalist movements. ...
Political geographers have recently renewed conversation on the spatialities of exclusionary neonationalism, surfacing in the form of right-wing political populism (Casaglia et al, 2020), Islamophobia (Koch and Vora, 2020) and neo-colonial relations (Avni, 2020). These insightful commentaries, however, are yet to address an important political-geographic dimension of the phenomenon: the growing schism between metropolitan and nationalist politics, which we conceptualize here as double polarization. The spatial and political consequences of this emergent dynamic, we contend, call for new articulations of urban political geography.
... Nationalistic debates about the material and imaginative geography of home, homeland and belonging have expanded, raising questions about where and how refugees should be housed (Shim 2016: 4). Rokem et al. (2017) highlight that 90 per cent of Syrian refugees live in cities, not camps, therefore, understanding refugees' urban living experiences is an important area of study. This location of refugees within European cities is a vital component to include when considering concepts of home and security. ...
... In conclusion, when examined from the urban, local scale, we can see that Jerusalem is not simply a microcosm of national-level politics, but that it offers a different, more complex urban geopolitics (Rokem et al. 2017) that is shaped by everyday life and micro-geographies of encounter (Greenberg Raanan and Avni 2020; Shtern 2016). Local institutions and initiatives in East Jerusalem have managed, in an admittedly limited way, to advance a notion of urban citizenship that is grounded in everyday life and local needs. ...
In recent years, Israel has witnessed a wave of heightened nationalism. Although nationalism is not new at all in this part of the world—quite the contrary—Israel's acting Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government are today part of an international alliance of leaders (including Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, and Narendra Modi) promoting neo-nationalism and right-wing populism. Notwithstanding the significant global aspects of neo-nationalism, as described by de Souza (2020), Koch and Vora (2020) and Yiftachel and Rokem (2020), this commentary focuses on nationalism's localized manifestations in Jerusalem/al-Quds, highlighting the way local dynamics complicate and subvert nationalism's powerful influence.
... In conclusion, when examined from the urban, local scale, we can see that Jerusalem is not simply a microcosm of national-level politics, but that it offers a different, more complex urban geopolitics (Rokem et al. 2017) that is shaped by everyday life and micro-geographies of encounter (Greenberg Raanan and Avni 2020; Shtern 2016). Local institutions and initiatives in East Jerusalem have managed, in an admittedly limited way, to advance a notion of urban citizenship that is grounded in everyday life and local needs. ...
... What are the risks of turning "endurance" into humanitarian organizations' and architecture charities' main purpose, simply helping people to "live on" and cope with circumstances that they cannot change (Feldman 2015)? Th e sense of precarity that animates these questions can only be addressed by considering the urban, rural, and camp geopolitics of displacement in Lebanon and the wider Middle East (Rokem et al. 2017), as well as the global inequalities produced and reinforced by border, mobility, and settlement regimes. Even a small and overall successful project like the CatalyticAction Jarahieh school reminds us that real participation of refugees and their allies in imagining, constructing, and living the built environment can never be disentangled from enduring struggles for justice. ...
In this article, we examine the school project implemented by the architecture charity CatalyticAction in the informal refugee settlement of Jarahieh, in the Bekaa, Lebanon. In doing so, we propose an approach to participatory humanitarian architecture that extends beyond the mere act of designing “together” an “object building.” We see participatory architecture as a process that develops incrementally through the socioeconomic life of precarious communities—through what we call the “living through” and “living on” of participation. While remaining attentive to the infrastructural and political limitations to architectural durability in refugee settlements, we foreground the social life of architectural forms, and consider the built environment as not simply “used,” but produced and (re)productive through time, beyond, and often in spite of, humanitarian interventions.
... 3 Blame games and their often violent ramifications reflect histories of subjection (Weheliye, 2014) and are not new; their novelty in the current era is their visibility, commonly through digital media, as well as their proliferation. The list of subjected groups is open in an era of increased international migration, continual urban fragmentation as diversity increases everywhere while tensions wrought of difference fester (Rokem et al., 2017), and deepening divides that render marginalized publics susceptible to the vicissitudes of vitriolic discourses promulgated through an array of media channels (Boler & Davis, 2018). People saddled with the burden of societal ills face punishment, which can range from biopolitical strategies of indirect governance such as segregation, to sovereign acts of mundane yet impactful decisions to underpay or unjustly fire workers as well as extreme acts of detention, imprisonment, physical attack or torture, even sanctioned murder. ...
This provocation unbounds ‘state of exception’ to account for its sustainability and its role in daily life. I argue that sustaining a ‘state of exception’ requires a governmentality to govern and render the exceptional ‘normal’ over time, pointing to the mutual constitution of the two modes of governance. The omnipresent condition of possible shifts between sovereignty and governmentality relocates precarity from a statically defined objectified circumstance to the active slippage between these two fields of power. Yet whereas a ‘state of exception’ can become normalized, subjectivity cannot because the configuration of individuals’ multiple subjectivities differs relative to their lived experiences.
... Certainly, the notion that the way urban conflict unfolds is also influenced by geographically remote actors is not a new one (Kliot & Mansfield, 1999;Calame & Charlesworth, 2009: 11-12), but little is known about situations in which these distant forces are the primary actors involved. In other words, in geopolitical fault-line cities, localized conflicts and violence are not only connected to broader geopolitical processes (Rokem et al., 2017) -they are their main product. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to illustrate the main characteristics of the geopolitical fault-line city, positing its distinctiveness as intrinsically related to the spatio-temporal evolution of information diffusion across the territories of antagonistically predisposed geopolitical alliances. ...
ABSTRACT The literature on divided (or contested) cities has expanded rapidly during the past decade, with a handful of iconic sites presiding over the long list of cities wounded by conflict, violence or general unrest. In this paper, it is suggested that this literature has overlooked a particular, and increasingly prominent, type of divided city deserving of attention in its own right: the geopolitical fault-line city. The main differences between the "classic" divided city and the geopolitical fault-line city relates to the character and origin of conflict. In divided cities, conflict is mostly local and related to social and spatial justice concerns, discrimination, security and political representation; this makes it somewhat predictable. In geopolitical fault-line cities, on the other hand, the main disputes are about geopolitical alignment, foreign policy, and the overall character of government; such disputes are largely scripted elsewhere, adding a substantial measure of volatility. This paper's contribution lies in its provisional theorization of the geopolitical fault-line city in the light of the literature on divided cities. Against a background of powerful ongoing changes in the global information landscape-most notably the increased influence of social media-it illustrates the main characteristics of the geopolitical fault-line city, theorizing its distinctiveness as intrinsically related to the spatio-temporal evolution of information diffusion across the territories of antagonistically predisposed geopolitical alliances.
This article develops the concept of cities as geopolitical actors by proposing a new conceptual framework that foregrounds their space-making strategies. This intervention seeks to address the gap between research on cities as international actors and the growing interest in cities’ external geographies stimulated, among others, by the planetary urbanisation thesis. Drawing together recent discussions in urban governance with critical geopolitical scholarship and socio-spatial theory, the article makes two specific contributions: first, it defines the narrative that is usually mobilised to explain the rise of cities as international actors as a contested and ongoing spatialisation of world politics, in which city governments play an active role. Second, it proposes an analytical scheme to examine how cities contribute to processes of territorialisation, place-making, rescaling, and networking. Ultimately, this conceptual framework introduces a more spatially sensitive approach to the idea of cities as geopolitical actors by developing a toolbox to examine how they participate in the struggles for the production, control, and management of space.
In the era of globalization, migrants are unneglectable forces that magnify, mediate, and modify geopolitics. In geographical literature, the geopolitics of migration has become an emerging field of study that critically juxtaposes migrants' experiences with geopolitical processes. By tracing the theoretical and empirical progress of the field, this article outlines the ontological and epistemological reflections that facilitate the ongoing dialogues between geopolitics and migration studies. It argues that: 1) Ontologically, the geopoli-tics of migration stresses migration-related practices as the embodiment of geopolitical tensions and the en-meshment of geopolitical actors. This challenges the state-centered characterization of international relations, by politicalizing the territorialization and deterritorialization of human mobility. 2) The geopolitics of migration offers decentered, relational, and materialist epistemologies by harnessing postmodern theories such as feminism, biopolitics, and assemblage thinking. Then, this article maps four often-discussed themes of empirical concern, including refugees, borderwork, labors, and diasporas. By doing so, it illustrates how each theme enriches the documentation and theorization of geopolitical processes, mediations, and subjects from different angles. Zooming in on the themes allows an engagement of research with evolving migration gover-nance and geopolitical praxis. Lastly, this article suggests exploring more possible junctions of migration and geopolitics in previously neutralized interfaces between migration and nonhumans, technologies, and environment .
Armed forces in urban areas are a very visible source of socio‐spatial and urban change. Even in contemporary cities ‘at peace’, this presence and ensuing changes can be wide‐ranging, evident across infrastructure, organisations, narratives of place, events, and everyday activities. Although over the past 2 decades critical military studies and urban geopolitics have explored some of these themes, an urban studies perspective on such military geographies in peacetime has elicited far less attention. The aim of this article is to open up opportunities for deeper conceptualisation and research on urban military geographies. This article establishes a dialogue between critical military studies and urban geopolitics, to review the different dimensions of the influence of a military presence in urban space, and to provide a synthesis of these two bodies of literature. Using Lefebvre's dialectical theory of spatial production, this review shows how cities can be privileged spaces for the reproduction of militarism and preparation for war. Moreover, it examines how the presence of military forces in peacetime can influence the material and immaterial production of urban space.
Political geographies engage with the relations between space and power, between geography and politics. It is one of the oldest subdiscipline of human geography. The chapter introduces political geography and the plurality of approaches in the discipline which have ranged from the scrutiny of the impact of physical geography on the politics and international relations of specific states, through the political aspects of regional science to the spatial analysis of elections and conflicts and the political economy of the state. More recent developments echo the broader turns in geography: the cultural turn with critical geopolitics and critical border studies, the feminist turn with feminist political geographies and feminist geopolitics, the material turn with more-than representational and more-than-human approaches and ethical ones.
Using an example of China’s environmental data activism, this study explores the state–society interactive mode of socialization in the politics of open government data. Drawing on an interactionist approach, this study argues that in this intermediate situation, NGOs are relatively autonomous, organizing their campaigns and initiatives independently instead of partnering with the state. However, these two sides both spur and exploit each other, shaping an ‘interactive field.’ Data actors use the state’s open data agenda as an opportunity to initiate spin-off data activism to counteract the deficiencies of data disclosure by the government. In response, state agencies adjust and enhance their data disclosure practices, thus performing reactive data governance. We identified several dynamics of this interactive field: (1) It involves multiple grassroots data actors in the form of NGOs that attempt to expand the autonomy of their data advocacy by forming activist networks to bargain with state bureaucracy. (2) The interactive strategies mainly involve tactics of ‘rightful resistance’ but are hybridized with other boundary-spanning strategies that straddle the demarcation of confrontation and non-confrontation. (3) Although the state and nonstate actors are not partnered, they exert mutual influence over each other’s actions and strategies. The shrinking of institutional space has caused NGOs to reorganize interactive strategies. Our study also highlights the local geopolitical dynamics that condition such interactions: besides the inter-administrative dynamics that afford political opportunities, the trans-local advocacy network coordinates actors and resources to exercise data counterpower. Also, the selection of advocacy strategies is varied with targeted government agencies.
This essay advances an affective agenda in urban geopolitics that studies the everyday felt experience of urban terrorism. It takes as examples the relations between the spatial politics and affective atmospheres of Place de la République (Paris) and Place de la Bourse/Beursplein (Brussels) in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016. Intersecting feminist geopolitics and non-representational geographies, the essay bridges geographical studies of experience and affective atmospheres with experiential accounts in urban geopolitics. It argues for a renewed conceptual engagement and scholarly focus on the affective dimensions of urban geopolitics and security, that highlights the contested and unequal topographies of everyday experience in the aftermath of terrorism in urban Europe.
This essay examines the political utility of humor using a framework developed in recent geopolitical scholarship read through Jacques Rancière's theorization of the politics of aesthetics and applied to everyday political life in contemporary Mexico City. Geopolitics here offers a unique lens through which to understand the spatiality of humor and its effects on the aesthetic and affective processes by which urban identities are constructed and contested. Building on roughly 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that humor's subversive potential allows for simultaneous or co-constitutive aesthetic effects, such as the simultaneous disruption of political norms and the genesis of a more inclusive spatial imaginary of urban citizenship. This argument extends previous work on humor by emphasizing the complex, mutable, and multifarious nature of humor effects in practice, perhaps most especially in subversive modes. I demonstrate the strategic political value of humor through the exploration of three ethnographically derived examples: an episode of a popular satirical video series, a newly christened popular saint said to protect residents of an historic neighborhood from gentrification, and a humorous tirade against the city's mayor at a local neighborhood meeting.
This article develops a spatial analysis of the authoritarian governmentality of the Kurdish issue in Turkey through a case study of Diyarbakır in which geographies of war and peace have coalesced. Drawing on recent theorisations of military urbanism, it examines encounters—including both conflict and cooperation—between the state bureaucracy, local pro‐government elite and pro‐Kurdish municipal authorities within the context of the initiatives to rehabilitate the city’s historic centre, Suriçi, during the period 2002–2015. The article suggests considering Suriçi’s rehabilitation as part of a post‐conflict urban regime to thwart social and political vibrancy of the Kurdish urban poor in tandem with the idea of securitisation through marketisation. In doing so, it demonstrates that unpacking spatial imaginaries and rationalities that have rendered Suriçi dwellers displaceable by devaluing their collective urban experience is critical for our understanding of the utter violence erupted during and after the urban warfare of 2015.
This paper examines the relation between ethno-nationalism and neoliberalism in urban space. Contrary to common views in urban studies, it argues that the ‘ethno-nationally divided city’ and the ‘neoliberal city’ are not antithetical, but that neoliberal nationalism is a new modality of urban conflict in a globalised world, which reshapes the relation between the local and the global and draws new urban geopolitics. By investigating practices of nation-branding in a divided city, this paper bridges different theoretical fields to shed light on an aspect of urban conflict that has largely been ignored by the literature on nationalism and urban divisions. It also complements existing research on neoliberal nationalism by emphasising the spatial and material aspects of nation-branding, and by showing how it can be used by competing ethno-national leaders to mobilise their communities and extend their control at the national and urban levels. By highlighting processes common to neoliberal and divided cities, this paper draws on recent calls within urban geopolitics to rethink current theoretical categories and labels attributed to cities. It develops this analysis by examining contemporary neoliberal urban policies in Skopje, Macedonia, which have become a new battlefield where interethnic conflicts unfold.
The extent to which ‘geographies of encounter’ facilitate tolerance of diversity and difference has long been a source of debate in urban studies and human geography scholarship. However, to date this contestation has focused primarily on hyper-diverse cities in the global north-west. Adapting this debate to the volatile conditions of the nationally-contested city, this paper explores intergroup encounters between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem. The paper suggests that in the context of hyper-polarisation of the nationally-contested urban space, the study of encounter should focus on macro-scale structural forces. In Jerusalem, we stress the role of ethnonationality and neoliberalism as key producers of its asymmetric and volatile yet highly resilient geography of intergroup encounters. In broader sense, as many cities worldwide experience a resurgence of ethnonationalism, illuminating the structural production of encounter may demarcate a broader function for reading contemporary urban geopolitics.
In 2018, the International Organization for Migration stated that ‘migration has nearly become synonymous with urbanization, given the dominance of the city as the destination of most migrants’. The geopolitical dimension of migration governance is especially important in Mediterranean cities where the European Union’s (EU) efforts to push border management onto external actors has occurred alongside the transfer of new powers, competencies, and responsibilities for local authorities. Morocco is one such country where a number of administrative and territorial reforms have sought to transform the territoriality of migration governance, and by extension the structure of Euro-Mediterranean affairs. Our objective is to examine more fully how distinctly local aspects of Moroccan migration diplomacy have been harnessed as a force for geopolitical action today. The approach serves to decentre analysis of EU migration policy by rescaling the focus of migration to the urban peripheries of Europe, and to thereby contest Eurocentric accounts of migration governance in the region. Based on an analysis of Moroccan cities’ involvement in migration governance, including the MC2CM Project – a Mediterranean network of cities supported by EU and international actors – we argue that the rescaling of migration diplomacy aims to ‘change the narrative’ about Morocco’s capacity to manage immigration in light of international condemnation of state violence towards sub-Saharan migrants. In particular, devolution is skilfully used to cast Morocco as an advocate for the empowerment of local authorities managing migration, and migrants themselves as an opportunity for socio-economic development. At the same time, however, we observed that the rescaling of migration governance does not so much change the prevailing autocratic securitization of demographic mobility, but rather restructures its coordination through new governing actors (cities) and management techniques (migration).
Mushrooming of illegal housing on the periphery of cities is one of the main consequences of rapid urbanization associated with social and environmental problems in developing countries. This book discusses the linkage between urbanism and sustainability, and how sustainable urbanism can be implemented to overcome the problems of housing and living conditions in urban areas. Through case studies from India, Indonesia, China, etc. using advanced GIS techniques, it analyses several planning and design criteria to solve physical, social, and economic problems, and refers to urban planning as an effective measure to protect and promote cultural characteristics of specific locations in developing countries.
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In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of Black geographies as a domestic form of colonialism, with an expanded understanding of domesticity as political work. We develop the domestic geopolitics framework based on the dual meaning of domestic: the inward facing geopolitics of racialization and the resistance embodied in domestic labors of maintaining life, home, and community. Drawing on Black feminist scholars, we describe three categories of social reproductive labor in conditions of racialized toxicity: the labor of keeping wake, the labor of tactical expertise, and the labor of revolutionary mothering. We argue that Black survival struggles exemplify a domestic geopolitics of everyday warfare against racial capitalism’s onslaught.
Reading Reece Jones’s Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. 224 pages, Verso, New York and London (2017), p. £16.99 (hardback), ISBN: 9781784784713 - -
Book Review Forum, Published online in Political Geography Journal - 6th January 2020 - access to published version: - -
[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102129] -
This forum is around Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones, the winning volume of the first edition of the biennial book award of the Political Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographic Society with IBG (PolGRG) in conjunction with Political Geography Journal. The book award was established in 2016 to give recognition to new academic volumes that engage with the thematic remit of PolGRG and contribute to develop the diverse field of political geography more widely. In line with the diversity of PolGRG interests and membership, the PolGRG Book Award is aimed at published volumes advancing the debate around themes spanning territoriality and sovereignty; states, cities, and citizenship; geopolitics, political economy and political ecology; migration, globalization and (post)colonialism; social movements and governance; peace, conflict and security. All this appreciating the implications of these phenomena with gender, race, class, sexuality and religion.
This article puts emphasis on the political representation of tramway projects in Casablanca, Morocco, and Jerusalem, Israel/the Palestinian territories. In this paper, we discuss both tramway projects as flagships of national worlding strategies that try to promote the respective city on global markets of attention, competing for international investors and tourists. As such, they are majorly driven by national political interests, fostering the hegemonic position of the central state in cooperation with private actors. The tramways are aimed at portraying modernity as well as political and economic stability, while aspiring to a supposed international urban world-class. At the same time, governments frame tramways as tools to promote socio-urban integration and to improve local transport systems. However, the paper shows that although governments are eager to stress the integrative role of tramways, they continue with violent politics of urban exclusion at the same time. Thus, the integrative wording behind tramway planning has to be understood against political (and economic) pressures to regain political legitimacy in a moment of crisis - both domestically and internationally. Consequently, the paper uses interview data and applies methods of discourse analysis to shed light on the worlding of tramways and its ambivalent practices of symbolic inclusion and exclusion.
This article examines how variegated local and transnational interactions are reconfiguring Myanmar's largest city of Yangon. We do this through an analytical focus on frontiers and an empirical focus on how these are secured, drawing on interviews at two Security Expos and street‐level observations in Yangon conducted over three years. Yangon thereby becomes a site for critical reflections about complex and multiple imbrications of frontiers, security and the urban with implications for how these may be conceptualized elsewhere.
The city of Slavutych was built specifically to house the workers who would continue to work post-disaster at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) and their families. It was the pinnacle of Soviet planned cities, the culmination of decades of lessons learned from similar projects, and the architectural embodiment of Soviet multinationalism. However, in spite of all the excitement the new city elicited, within just a few years the now-independent Ukrainian government, under pressure from international organizations like the International Atomic Energy Association and the United Nations, established a hard expiration date for the shutdown of all ChNPP reactors, which in turn would mean economic devastation for Slavutych and render its existence wholly unnecessary. Rather than wait for the inevitable, city leaders and residents leveraged global and national interest in the Chornobyl disaster and its aftermath, drawing investments from multinational corporations, international organizations, and states to keep the city alive. Their scattergun approach to economic diversification and pre-emptive urban revitalization paid off, as Slavutych thrived even as the rest of Ukraine suffered major economic and demographic crises. This paper examines how Slavutych citizens were able to forge, and then to act upon, geopolitical relationships to mitigate the lingering social, political, and economic effects of the Chornobyl disaster in the city.
With the intensification of attacks in European cities since 2014, preventing radicalization has become the main security strategy for fighting ‘terrorism’ in Europe and beyond. While the concern with radicalization in security policy was due to a realization that European cities are not just the target of but also increasingly the ‘breeding ground’ of terrorism, less attention has been paid to how radicalization prevention has changed the relations between European cities and war. Debates in critical security studies have remained a-spatial for the most part, focused on either the national or international scales, while the question of radicalization has not yet become a topic of scrutiny in the literature on urban geopolitics. Addressing this lacuna, I engage with the policy debates at the EU, urban, and regional levels as well as the role of the European Forum for Urban Security that eventually led to the first EU Mayors' conference on terrorism and radicalization in Brussels in March 2018. The core observation here is that, rather than another form of national security, radicalization prevention is an extension of counterinsurgency in European cities. This extension of the liberal way of war inside Europe is also accompanied by an increasing focus on urban geopolitics of danger, one that is the relational outcome of the assumed ungovernability of the Other at the urban and international scales and which blurs spaces of liberal peace and war. These developments point to the gradual incorporation of radicalization prevention into the processes of urban governance.
This paper offers a new way of conceptualising how intersectional solidarities are actualised. It recounts and theorises an outbreak of radical internationalism, when working class struggles in Britain and South Africa were unexpectedly linked. It examines how intersectional solidarity was materialised through a process of coming together against the architectural fabric of the South African Embassy and considers the interwoven temporalities that enabled this action to occur. On 31 March 1990, nearly a quarter of a million people demonstrated in London against the Poll Tax that was due to take effect in England and Wales the following day. On the day, the Metropolitan Police lost control of an already enraged crowd and provoked a large scale riot that engulfed the West End of London for several hours. In the midst of the riot, during a short retreat by the police, protesters took the opportunity to attack the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square – many windows were broken and an attempt was made to set the building alight. Drawing on interviews with former anti-apartheid protesters who were present on that day (and who had concluded a four-year long Non-Stop Picket of the embassy a month earlier), this paper explores and analyses their memories of that unexpected moment when their previously symbolic call to ‘burn it down’ was (almost) materialised. In doing so, it contributes new ways of conceptualising the spatiality and temporality of intersectional solidarity.
A key question in urban sociology is how people interpret the urban environment. At a time when cities are increasingly militarized, this question is particularly important for understanding how militarism impacts urban life. However, urban sociologists have not addressed how people experience militarized environments. This article turns to this question by considering the case of Lydda‐Lod, an Israeli city that has been demographically and physically transformed by war, displacement and securitization. Drawing on Wacquant's sociology of spatial stigma and adding insights from works on emotions in (post‐)conflict cities, I examine how poor Palestinians think and feel about the surveilled districts where they live within the city's broader landscape of ruins. I show how the Israeli military, security and policing agencies have collectively produced spatial stigmatization of these districts. I discuss how Palestinians respond to this spatial stigma by attaching a sense of worthlessness to their districts. However, this reproduction of spatial stigma is punctuated by expressions of care for the built environment and by a desire to revalorize collective Palestinian life in the city. I conclude by discussing how a perspective on militarized cities focused on everyday responses to militarism and attentive to marginalities enriches urban sociology and urban studies more generally.
Community infrastructures: shelter, self-reliance and polymorphic borders in urban refugee governance. Territory, Politics, Governance. Over the last two decades community-based programmes have become important tools of migration and refugee governance. Governmentality approaches have argued that the same technologies of governance applied to advanced liberal societies are being translated onto spaces of forced displacement in the Global South through the notions of ‘community’ and ‘self-reliance’. Other accounts have instead focused on the potentially emancipatory character of migrant and refugee self-organization. This article contributes to this body of work by drawing on ethnographic research on refugee community shelters in Cairo, Egypt. It theorizes community as an informal and precarious infrastructure in which refugees’ social relations are mobilized as substitutes for direct, material humanitarian assistance in a global condition marked by the shrinking of aid budgets. Predicated as it is on the institutionalization of national and ethnic belonging, community-based shelter provision constitutes a relational bordering practice in which the new universal humanitarian values of empowerment and resilience reproduce old exclusions. Refugees in Cairo perceive these policies as inadequate and contest the ethos of self-reliance as practically untenable. Community infrastructures are thus also sites of friction where repoliticization can occur.
This paper critically examines the political geography of asylum accommodation in the UK, arguing that in the regulation of housing and support services we witness the depoliticisation of asylum. In 2010, the UK Home Office announced that it would be passing contracts to provide accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to a series of private providers, meaning the end of local authority control over asylum housing. This paper explores the impact of this shift and argues that the result is the production of an asylum market, in which neoliberal norms of market competition, economic efficiency and dispersed responsibility are central. In drawing on interviews with local authorities, politicians and asylum support services in four cities, the paper argues that the privatisation of accommodation has seen the emergence of new assemblages of authority, policy and governance. When combined with a market-oriented transfer of responsibilities, depoliticisation acts to constrain the possibilities of political debate and to predetermine the contours of those policy discussions that do take place. In making this case, the paper challenges the closures of work on post-politics, and argues for an exploration of the situated modalities of practice through which forms of depoliticisation interact with, and are constituted by, processes of neoliberalisation. In this context, the framing of asylum seekers as a ‘burden’ emerges as a discursive and symbolic achievement of the neoliberal politics of asylum accommodation. Framing asylum seekers as a burden represents both a move to position asylum as a specific and managerial issue, and at the same time reiterates an economic account of asylum as a question of resource allocation, cost and productivity.
This introductory piece sets the context for the special issue and explains its rationale. It offers a series of reflections on the rise of the mobilities turn and its relations with preexisting research traditions, most notably transportation geography. Rather than placing different approaches in opposition and favoring one over others, we contend that all need to be seen as situated, partial, and also generative modes of abstraction. Each of these approaches makes mobility exist in specific and ultimately simplified and selective ways. In addition, we argue that geography as a pluralistic discipline will benefit from further conversations between modes of conceptualizing, theorizing, and examining mobility. We outline five lines along which such conversations can be structured: conceptualizations and analysis, inequality, politics, decentering and decolonization, and qualifying abstraction. The article concludes with discussion on three fruitful directions for future research on mobility. © 2016 by American Association of Geographers Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
This paper is a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. It seeks, in particular, to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in many cities between the 1930s and 1970s and the contemporary proliferation of radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the economistic orthodoxy, derived from the work of Edward Glaeser, that contemporary housing crises are best addressed by removing state intervention in housing production so that market-driven verticalisation can take place. The following two sections connect the rise of such orthodoxy with the ‘manufactured reality'—so central to neo-liberal urban orthodoxy—that vertical social housing must necessarily fail because it deterministically creates social pathology. The remainder of the paper explores in detail how the dominance of these narratives have been central to elite takeovers, and ‘luxification’, of the urban skies through the proliferation of condo towers for the super-rich. Case studies are drawn from Vancouver, New York, London, Mumbai and Guatemala City and the broader vertical cultural and visual politics of the process are explored. The discussion finishes by exploring the challenges involved in contesting, and dismantling, the hegemonic dominance of vertical housing by elite interests in contemporary cities.
Departing from most coverage of Iraq, which tends to be focused on insecurity, this paper is about securities; drawing on research in the provinces of Iraq administered by the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). In the last decade, the KRG’s territory has experienced very few significant bomb attacks. These were directed against KRG personnel, rather than targeting civilians per se, as so frequently happens elsewhere in Iraq. In contrast, the KRG has enjoyed relative security, enabling fast development. To the southwest however, there is a complex territorial contest between the Peshmerga (armed forces of the KRG), the forces of the central government of Iraq and Islamic State (al-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah – frequently called ISIS or ISIL in English) whose insurgent territory spans the Iraq–Syria border. To the northeast, the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK), who have contested the Turkish state since the mid-1980s, now control swathes of territory. Transecting these spaces, the paper develops a grounded study of how Kurdish security forces operate. While insecurity continues in the disputed territories and the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan governs the zone along the Turkish border, the security forces of the KRG utilize very direct forms of surveillance and control. Negotiating these, our paper traverses spaces of security, sovereignty and (disputed) territory.
“Nature” is more than a resource bank whose riches can trigger armed conflict and finance its depredations; it is also a medium through which military and paramilitary violence is conducted. The militarisation of nature is part of a dialectic in which earthy, vibrant matter shapes the contours of conflict and leaves its marks on the bodies of soldiers who are both vectors and victims of military violence. Three case studies identify some of the central bio-physical formations that became entangled with armed conflict in the twentieth century: the mud of the Western Front in the First World War, the deserts of North Africa in the Second World War, and the rainforests of Vietnam. Taken together, these reveal vital connections between the materiality and corporeality of modern war and their continued relevance to its contemporary transformations.
This paper examines the production of contested and mundane spaces in Jerusalem. So far, scholarship has focused primarily on the turbulent ethnonational relations in Jerusalem, while paying less attention to struggles over issues of growth and development that do not touch directly upon Israeli-Palestinian controversies. In this paper we consider late entrants to the Jerusalem scene, tall buildings, to investigate how planning policies and practices have shaped some contested and mundane spaces in the city. Through the examination of planning documents and in-depth interviews, we outline the high-rise geographies of 'Three Jerusalems': the Old City, Israeli Jerusalem, and Arab Jerusalem. In each of these cities diverse planning approaches, values, and motivations contribute to the transforming cityscape. The Old City remains a protected space of immense significance in the long-lasting visual image of a Holy City. In Israeli Jerusalem, exceptional tall buildings have become more acceptable, as entrepreneurialism gains power; in Arab Jerusalem, enduring exclusion and discrimination against the Palestinian population makes taller buildings possible, provided that they are built within the informal development path. Overall, high-rise geographies demonstrate the different dimensions of Jerusalem relating to ethnonational rifts, capitalistic ambitions, and to formal and informal processes of reproduction and transformation.
In this chapter, I propose to de-center the way we look at the central question that has been asked-that of the ghetto-and change the way we think about it. On the one hand, I will not talk about ghettos in their most established and recognized forms; the American ghetto or the French “ghettoized” suburbs, for example, will be brought up only by way of comparison in the analysis. I will change our perspective by turning toward spaces set apart and separated, precarious places to which populations with uncertain futures are relegated. More generally, we will turn toward spaces I call heterotopian, according to the concept launched by Foucault; we usually find these spaces “somewhere else”-such as in southern countries, particularly in Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America-but they are also found nearby, for example, in the encampments of foreigners in Europe. I have studied these places in my fieldwork investigations and am striving to construct an integrated description of them.
List of Maps, Illustrations, and Tables Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Anthropology with an Accent PART ONE: The Talk of Crime 1. Talking of Crime and Ordering the World Crime as a Disorganizing Experience and an Organizing Symbol Violence and Signification From Progress to Economic Crisis, from Authoritarianism to Democracy 2. Crisis, Criminals, and the Spread of Evil Limits to Modernization Going Down Socially and Despising the Poor The Experiences of Violence Dilemmas of Classification and Discrimination Evil and Authority PART TWO: Violent Crime and the Failure of the Rule of Law 3. The Increase in Violent Crime Tailoring the Statistics Crime Trends, 1973-1996 Looking for Explanations 4. The Police: A Long History of Abuses A Critique of the Incomplete Modernity Model Organization of the Police Forces A Tradition of Transgressions 5. Police Violence under Democracy Escalating Police Violence Promoting a "Tough" Police The Massacre at the Casa de Detencao The Police from the Citizens' Point of View Security as a Private Matter The Cycle of Violence PART THREE: Urban Segregation, Fortified Enclaves, and Public Space 6. Sao Paulo: Three Patterns of Spatial Segregation The Concentrated City of Early Industrialization Center-Periphery: The Dispersed City Proximity and Walls in the 198s and 199s 7. Fortified Enclaves: Building Up Walls and Creating a New Private Order Private Worlds for the Elite From Corticos to Luxury Enclaves A Total Way of Life: Advertising Residential Enclaves for the Rich Keeping Order inside the Walls Resisting the Enclaves An Aesthetic of Security 8. The Implosion of Modern Public Life The Modern Ideal of Public Space and City Life Garden City and Modernism: The Lineage of the Fortified Enclave Street Life: Incivility and Aggression Experiencing the Public The Neo-international Style: Sao Paulo and Los Angeles Contradictory Public Space PART FOUR: Violence, Civil Rights, and the Body 9. Violence, the Unbounded Body, and the Disregard for Rights in Brazilian Democracy Human Rights as "Privileges for Bandits" Debating Capital Punishment Punishment as Private and Painful Vengeance Body and Rights Appendix Notes References Index
Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn on the Frontline of Politics and War charts the rich history of the city’s famous Holiday Inn hotel. Describing in detail the tumultuous events that took place within its walls and in its immediate environs, this book explores the opening of the building in advance of the 1984 Winter Olympics through the early 1990s when the hotel was utilized by political elites through to the siege of Sarajevo, when the hotel became the main base for foreign correspondents. Kenneth Morrison draws upon a plethora of primary and secondary sources, and includes extensive interviews with many participants in the drama that was played out within the confines of the hotel, contextualizing the case of the Holiday Inn by analyzing how hotels are utilized in times of conflict.
This article investigates the relationship between refugees’ integration and residential segregation by analysing Eritreans’ participation in local squatting practices in Rome. While it has often been assumed that residential concentration is linked to lack of participation in wider society, this case study points to counterintuitive implications of integration and segregation dynamics. After revisiting the relevant debate with specific focus on socialization and agency, I illustrate that, on the one hand, these housing practices are instances of cooperation between refugees and natives—specifically, within the frame of the local housing rights movement. On the other hand, I highlight how Eritrean involvement in squatting practice has also led to spontaneous segregation and ongoing mistrust towards local society. Considering refugees’ own agency, even under deprived circumstances, is of crucial importance to understanding both how different aspects of housing segregation and local integration are produced and, the conditions under which cooperation between refugees and local squatters is established and, in some instances, interrupted.
This paper assesses ways in which urban segregation is shaped and
transformed by Jerusalem’s public transport network, enhancing mobility and
potential group encounters. We suggest that segregation should be
understood as an issue of mobility and co-presence in public space, rather
than the static residential-based segregation that continues to be a central
focus of debate in urban studies. We explore public transport infrastructures,
considering how their implementation reflects the variety of ways that transport
can have impact: segmenting populations, linking populations and/or creating
spaces for interaction or conflict between the city’s Jewish Israeli and Arab
Palestinian populations. Space syntax network analysis suggests that in the
case of Jerusalem, access to public transport is multi-dimensional: as well as
providing access to resources, it shapes opportunities for spatial mobility that
may either overcome or reinforce area-based housing segregation. We discuss
these opportunities in the light of Jerusalem’s on-going ethno-national division
in an-increasingly-fractured-urban-reality.
See link for full final draft paper: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1535273/
This article explores the role of planning in the deeply divided and politically polarized context of Jerusalem. The overall argument developed throughout the article is that the relation between planning and politics is a non-hierarchical set of interactions, negotiated within specific historical, geographical, legal and cultural contexts—in other words, orders don't come down from the politicians to be slavishly followed by planners. In this respect our findings, based on in-depth interviews with Israeli planners, suggest that the case of Jerusalem represents a particularly dramatic illustration of the fact that the function of planning expertise can only be understood in relation to the surrounding socio-political environment. Furthermore, contrary to conventional wisdom, planners in Jerusalem are not destined to either complicity or irrelevance in the face of political imperatives; planners' agency, however, does not simply reflect their mastery of specific professional knowledge and tools, but also their ability to act strategically in relation to the context in which they operate.
In response to the growing interest in ways to take forward an agenda for a more global urban studies, this essay advocates a comparative approach to theory building which can help to develop new understandings of the expanding and diverse world of cities and urbanization processes, building theory from different contexts, resonating with a diversity of urban outcomes but being respectful of the limits of always located insights. The essay is inspired by the potential of the comparative imagination but, mindful of the limitations of formal comparative methods, which in a quasi-scientific format can drastically restrict the scope of comparing, it outlines ways to reformat comparative methods in order to put them to work more effectively for a more global urban studies. The essay proposes a new typology for comparative methods based on the vernacular practices of urban comparison, tracing these through the archives of comparative urbanism. It also suggests some lines of philosophical reflection for reframing the scope and style of theorizing. New repertoires of comparativism are indicated which support the possibility of a revisable urban theory, starting from anywhere.
This paper’s core argument is that we should start creating theories that encompass different cities and include them in a more flexible and relational comparative framework. This must include a new urban terminology which does not continue the all-too-fashionable labelling of cities on a continuum between first world and third world, global North-West and South-East or as I emphasize below, including what have been labelled extremely contested cities in a more flexible and relational ordinary cities framework. To introduce such a comparative approach, I will examine Jerusalem and Stockholm via three contrastive and relational patterns: institutional segregation; urban violence; and non-governmental organization involvement in planning. In so doing, I point towards the necessity to open up research on extreme urban conflicts, suggesting that when assessing specific contextual patterns, those labelled as extremely contested cities (such as Jerusalem) share more similarities with other more ordinary cities (represented by Stockholm) than was previously perceived, often stemming from ethnic, racial and class conflicts revolving around issues of politics, culture and identity, among others.
This paper explores how planning, politics and architecture work together to socially produce new vertical cityscapes. Our contention is that the inception and development of high-rises are interlocked into the narrations of cities, reflecting cultural values and social cleavages, political interests and planning agendas, symbolic connotations and everyday life experiences. By using a mixed-method approach, which includes the analysis of official documents and interviews with decisionmakers, planners and observers, we examine two trajectories of tall-building development at opposite ends of Jerusalem. In Israeli West Jerusalem, the development of high-rises is part of a neo-liberal growth package that seeks to stimulate economic activity, rebrand the city and increase the city's competiveness at national and global scales while evading highly contentious religious-cultural cleavages. At the other end of the city, the construction of tall buildings in grey spaces symbolically represents a Palestinian revolt against Israeli restrictive planning and development policies, but also addresses day-to-day needs and changing preferences of the Palestinian population. Our analysis uses verticality as a representation of social relations demonstrating manipulations of power and legitimacy. In Jerusalem, planning and development of ordinary high-rises next to recently completed icons, the Bridge of Strings and the Separation Wall, epitomises a dialogue that unmistakably promotes political agendas and produces symbolic meanings. This dialogue can either support the original values and aims of urban icons or challenge them.
Literature on both transnationalism and ‘lived citizenship’ has highlighted the multiple, fluid and simultaneous character of migrant experiences of belonging. Geographers, however, have questioned this emphasis on mobility, connections and simultaneity, regrounding research on migrant transnationalism through the study of materiality and embodiment, and pointing to the salience of temporality in defining contemporary migration and asylum regimes. Drawing on ethnographic research with Somali refugees living in Cairo, Egypt, in this article I explore the material and temporal ‘disruptions’ that mark their condition at three interrelated levels. These are the experience of ‘time suspension’ associated with maintaining transnational family connections, the uncertain temporalities characterizing the work of humanitarian agencies, and the ‘everyday emergencies’ that mark daily life in a Cairo neighbour-hood. Through the heuristic lens of materiality and assemblage geographies, through the analysis I hope to offer a more nuanced account of the tension between ‘fluidity’ and groundedness in refugees’ transnational practices, as well as an appraisal of the role temporalities and materialities play in emerging forms of ‘irregular citizenship’ in the Global South.
In recent years, three superficially distinct urban subfields have made parallel efforts to incorporate the city’s traditional ‘outsides’ into urban research. Urban political ecology, American urban sociology and postcolonial urban studies have made, respectively, ‘nature’, the ‘rural’ and the ‘not-yet’ city the objects of self-consciously urban analyses. I argue that these interventions are analogous efforts to hybridise city/nature, city/country or society/nature binaries, and that they have a common cause. Each is a response to a persistent ‘city lens’ that remains pervasive in urban practice, and whose assumptions are an increasingly poor fit for contemporary urban environments. This lens, ground in the context of the 19th century metropolis, interprets the world through a series of binary associations hung on the basic assumption that the city can be defined against a non-urban outside. I develop John Berger’s (2008 [1972]) idea of ‘ways of seeing’ as a heuristic for understanding this situation and, using the case of nature, show how the city lens encourages practitioners and some scholars to romanticise, anachronise or generalise when confronting signs of the not-city in the urban. I conclude by evaluating the limitations of hybridity as a solution to the problems of the city lens, and by outlining an alternative approach. I advocate for turning this way of seeing into a research object, and argue for the importance of an historical and process-oriented examination of the ongoing use of these categories even as critical urban scholars attempt to move beyond them.
Most cities today are demographically multicultural, and more are likely to become so in the foreseeable future. The central question of this essay is how to come to terms - theoretically, philosophically, and practically - with this empirical urban reality. In a three-stage argument the essay suggests, first, that we must deal with the challenge to our urban sociological imaginations of how we might live together in all of our differences. Second, we need a deeper political and psychological understanding of difference, and its significance in urban politics. Third, we must theorize an intercultural political project for 21st century cities, addressing the shortcomings of 20th century multicultural philosophy.
This paper introduces a set of analytical frames that explore the possibilities of conceiving, researching and writing a global geography of squatting. The paper argues that it is possible to detect, in the most tenuous of urban settings, ways of thinking about and living urban life that have the potential to reanimate the city as a key site of geographical inquiry. The paper develops a modest theory of ‘urban combats’ to account for the complexity and provisionality of squatting as an informal set of practices, as a makeshift approach to housing and as a precarious form of inhabiting the city.
Exploring the dynamics that drive the processes of immigrant settlement and assimilation, this fascinating book looks at whether these are solely the outcome of the temporal setting, cultural background, and the contemporaneous socio-economic and political conditions, or whether there are factors which, irrespective of the prevailing environment, are constant features in the symbiosis between the outsider and the insider. Focusing on the area of Spitalfields in East London, this volume compares and contrasts the settlement, integration and assimilation processes undergone by three different immigrant groups over a period of almost three hundred and fifty years, and assesses their relative successes and failures. The three groups examined are the Huguenots who arrived from France in the 1670s, the Eastern European Jews coming from the Russian Empire in the last third of the nineteenth century, and the Bangladeshis who began settling in Spitalfields in the early 1960s. For centuries Spitalfields in East London has been a first point of settlement for new immigrants to Britain, and its proximity to both the affluence of the City of London and the poverty of what is now the London Borough of Tower Hamlets means that it has been, and still is, an area 'on the edge'. Concentrating on this district, this book examines at grass roots level the migrant experience and the processes by which the outsider may become the insider.
Cessation of Transactions as a general IBG journal would accelerate fragmentation in geography.- Jennifer Clayton
Spatial clustering seems to be an inevitable accompaniment of urban life. Spatial processes have resulted in many forms of clustering (ghettos, gated communities, ethnic enclaves, religious communities, developments for the elderly), but the dividing line between those clusters that are of public concern and those of no public policy interest is not always clear. There are two purposes to this chapter. One is to provide a framework in which socially acceptable clustering may be differentiated from clustering that is undesirable. I suggest that segregation, that is, clustering that is involuntary, or better yet, hierarchical (i.e., derived from a ranking system that reflects superiority based on wealth, status, or power), is generally objectionable and should be countered by public policy measures. Clustering that is voluntary, that is, nonhierarchical, clustering, is not in general objectionable. The second purpose is to illuminate the role that governments play in making various forms of segregation feasible. The forces that produce segregation or undesirable clustering may indeed be strong and are historically dominant. But these forces depend on the state for the implementation of segregation, and it is the state that has the power to end segregation. The argument is developed with four steps beginning with formal definitions of clustering and segregation, in order to be clear about the terminology used. Second, there is an examination of the origins of clustering, attempting at the same time to be explicit about the existing public policy position and the values that underlie that position. Third, it traces the role of the state in implementing segregation throughout history focusing specifically on the United States. Finally, there is a discussion of how and with what tools governments could end segregation.
In the postindustrial city, relegation takes the form of real or imaginary consignment to distinctive sociospatial formations variously and vaguely referred to as ‘inner cities,’ ‘ghettos,’ ‘enclaves,’ ‘no-go areas,’ ‘problem districts’ or simply ‘rough neighborhoods’. How are we to characterise and differentiate these spaces; what determines their trajectory (birth, growth, decay and death); whence comes the intense stigma attached to them; and what constellations of class, ethnicity and state do they both materialise and signify? These are the questions I pursued in my book Urban Outcasts (Wacquant, 2008a) through a methodical comparison of the trajectories of the black American ghetto and the European working-class peripheries in the era of neoliberal ascendancy. In this article, I revisit this cross-continental sociology of ‘advanced marginality’ to tease out its broader lessons for our understanding of the tangled nexus of symbolic, social and physical space in the polarising metropolis at century’s threshold in particular, and for bringing the core principles of Bourdieu’s sociology to bear on comparative urban studies in general.
Recent assertions of urban theory have dismissed the value of postcolonial critique in urban studies. This essay draws on postcolonial theory to demonstrate key flaws in such theoretical formulations. In doing so, it returns to the puzzle of how and why studying urbanism in the global South might matter for the reconceptualization of critical urban theory. Instead of a universal grammar of cityness, modified by (exotic) empirical variation, the essay foregrounds forms of theorization that are attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituent of global urbanization. What is at stake, the essay concludes, is a culture of theory, one that in its Eurocentrism tends to foreclose multiple concepts of the urban and alternative understandings of political economy. A concern with the relationship between place, knowledge and power?a key insight of postcolonial critique?might make possible new practices of theory in urban studies.
Jerusalem might be considered an enclave city par excellence: Israeli settlements in the Palestinian east of the city enjoy higher levels of services and are connected through infrastructures that immobilise those in Palestinian neighbourhoods. At the same time, Palestinian neighbourhoods have become exclaves of the city since the construction of the Separation Barrier. Beyond the top-down view of ethnically-based residential segregation, however, attention to quotidian movements reveals the practices through which the borders of enclaves are undermined and reinforced. Palestinians move through and into exclusively Jewish spaces, strategically making use of their amenities, while utilising the spatial autonomy of marginalised Palestinian areas. As borders are reinforced from above and below in times of political tension, they also attempt to disrupt Israeli intrusions into their enclaves. By showing how the quotidian practices of marginalised residents continually undermine and re-make intra-urban borders, the mobility-based perspective adds valuable nuances to the understanding of Jerusalem as an enclave city.
This book brings together a series of new and historical case studies to show how different phases of globalization are transforming the built environment. Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, the author draws on sociological, geographical, cultural and postcolonial studies to provide a critical account of the development of three key concepts: global culture, post colonialism, and modernity. Subsequent case studies examine how global economic, political and cultural forces shape the forms of architectural and urban modernity in globalized suburbs and spaces in major cities worldwide. The first book to combine global and postcolonial theoretical approaches to the built environment and to illustrate these with examples, Spaces of Global Cultures argues for a more historical and interdisciplinary understanding of globalization: one that places material space and the built environment at the centre and calls for new theories to address new conditions.
As the world increasingly urbanizes, the imaginaries, conceptions and politics of urban density will become increasingly urgent for research, policy, practice and activism. Density is a keyword in the history of how the city has been conceived and understood, and is firmly back on the global urban agenda. However, we lack sustained studies of how the geographies of density have been defined, lived, and contested. This paper develops a topological approach to urban density, considers key ways in which density has been politicized, and examines an emerging research area that understands the life and politics of density as ‘intensive heterogeneities’.
This article sets a new agenda for research into the geopolitics of hotels. Moving beyond the study of hotels as neutral sites of leisure and tourism, hospitality mediated by financial exchange, we argue that hotels need to be researched as geopolitical sites. Hotel spaces - from conference rooms to reception halls, from hotel bars to corridors and private rooms - are connected to broader architectures of security and insecurity, war- and peacemaking. We present six themes for this research agenda: hotels as projections of soft power, soft targets for political violence, strategic infrastructures in conflict, hosts for war reporters, providers of emergency hospitality and care, and infrastructures of peace-building. We conclude that the geopolitical potential of hotels emerges from two spatial dimensions of the relation of hospitality: hotels’ selective openness and closure to their surroundings, and their flexible material infrastructures that can facilitate and mediate geopolitical processes. Research on geopolitics, and its engagements with the everyday materialities that shape war and peace, must take seriously the hotel as a geopolitical space.
In a race for the sky marked by the proliferation of skyscrapers in cities of emerging market economies, the historic European metropolises are faced with intense debates on the relevance and significance of the return of towers. Their skylines are changing, revealing a new local geopolitical order in which developers have gained backing from local authorities. With more than 200 towers planned, London exemplifies this new high-rise governance that manages to overcome often strict legislations. The new London skyline has now become the materialisation of convergent private and public interests that, in turn, translate into a set of territorial markers instrumented by what Sklair identifies as the transnational capitalist class (TCC). Real estate actors with the help of local authorities have taken control of the skyline, redrawing it rather than erasing it. A new ‘glocal’ landscape is emerging where picturesque vistas on iconic historical buildings are protected, serving as the décor for the new skyscrapers. This enables the adoption of a standardised architectural language common to global real estate actors but also a distinction provided by their setting in the London landscape. Our hypothesis is tested through the study of the controversial construction of the Shard and the Pinnacle, two skyscrapers redrawing the skyline of Central London.
Contending that domestic violence and modern international warfare are part of a single complex of violence, this paper identifies their shared intimate dynamics. Both violences operate through emotional and psychological registers that are as central to their effectiveness as incidents of direct physical harm. While these dynamics are intimate, they are present across scale, and read here through a feminist lens on intimacy-geopolitics where neither framing has primacy. Research on the connections between domestic violence and international warfare is longstanding, most recently highlighting how intimate violence is produced within warzones. The analysis here begins instead from intimate dynamics, to draw out the warlike nature of domestic violence in peacetime. Tactics of modern warfare are juxtaposed with the dynamics of domestic violence in suburban Scottish homes: shock and awe, hearts and minds, cultural and psychological occupation, just war and collateral damage. Resisting the temptation to regard domestic violence as everyday militarism, the relation is rotated: both violences continuously wind through the intimate-geopolitical. This spatial reconfiguration is structured by gender, race, class, nation and citizenship, resulting in uneven impacts from all kinds of intimate war. The interweaving of military and intimate themes is intended as a casting-off point for progressing political geographies that are attentive to intimacy as foundational in the workings of power across scale.
First published in 2003, this account of the anti-terrorist measures of London's financial district and the changes in urban security after 9/11 has been revised to take into account developments in counter-terrorist security and management, particularly after the terrorist attack in London on July 7th 2005. It makes a valuable addition to the current debate on terrorism and the new security challenges facing Western nations. Drawing on the post-9/11 academic and policy literature on how terrorism is reshaping the contemporary city, this book explores the changing nature of the terrorist threat against global cities in terms of tactics and targeting, and the challenge of developing city-wide managerial measures and strategies. Also addressed is the way in which London is leading the way in developing best practice in counter-terrorist design and management, and how such practice is being internationalized.
Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism.Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.
This paper develops a more diverse and multi-dimensional agenda for understanding and researching urban verticality. In particular, it argues for vertical geographies that encompass more than issues of security and segregation and are not necessarily framed by the three-dimensional politics of Israel/Palestine identified by some commentators. In opening up a wider world of vertical urbanisms, the paper outlines three key approaches: close attention to where urban verticality is theorised and the relationship between power and height, the importance of ethnographic detail to emphasise more everyday verticalities and disrupt top-down analytical perspectives, and geographical imaginations that carefully attend to the myriad spatial entanglements of the three-dimensional city.
