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Long Waves of Urban Reform: Putting the Smart City in its Place

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Abstract

This article maps urban reform movements onto ‘long waves:’ consistently patterned technological and economic cycles that repeat over time. Using the example of the United States, we argue that periodizing urban reform movements in this way reveals surprising similarities in different historical contexts. Across cycles, two tropes repeatedly appear: discourses of efficiency, that propose technological solutions to urban problems, and those of beauty, that turn to nature to improve social arrangements through design. Within cycles, reform discourses follow a similar pattern in each case: they roll out amidst the excitement of an emergent socio-technical paradigm, but, used as guidelines for its institutionalization, create new social problems even as they aim to remedy the old. In each wave planners and decision-makers try to out-engineer and out-design inequality (and other social problems), and each time they fail. We use this analytic to historicize the contemporary ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’ city, arguing that it is only the latest in a series of beauty and efficiency solutions to urban problems, and its promises should be taken with more than a grain of salt.

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... Alongside such critical appraisals, we have previously argued that urban-environmental research has been too narrowly focused within city boundaries (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015) and that expanding the frontiers of urban sustainability offers a more spatially and socially inclusive vision of urban futures (Wachsmuth et al., 2016). Here, we add a temporal dimension to this intellectual project (see also Angelo and Vormann, 2018;Wachsmuth and Angelo, 2018), in order to interrogate a shift that otherwise risks being naturalised: from the city as a sustainability problem to the city as a sustainability solution. ...
... (1) Historical Contextualising present trends in urban sustainability policy and politics -including the notion that cities can save the planet -in historical terms reveals both important continuities and ruptures (see also Angelo and Vormann, 2018). The history of capitalist (urban) development has always been predicated on new mobilisations and exploitations of nature (Moore, 2015), and an emphasis on the historical embeddedness of particular configurations of the urban-environmental nexus is a potentially powerful corrective to ahistorical thinking which sees the return of nature to the city as a uniquely contemporary development. ...
Article
This article identifies and explains an underlying transition in global urban policy and discourse from the city as a sustainability problem to the city as a sustainability solution. We argue that contemporary policy discourses of cities saving the planet should be understood in the context of three major historical developments which have their roots in the 1970s and which intensified throughout the 1990s. The first is sprawl: the urban sustainability policy agenda in the Global North has been in large part a reaction to several decades of urban expansion and car-based planning. The second is informal settlements: since the introduction of UN-HABITAT in 1978, an international policy agenda has formed around addressing the environmental deficits associated with processes of informal urbanisation above all in the Global South. And the third is climate change, as the overarching concern that connects urban-environmental problems and policies in the North and South. We then contextualise the articles in this special issue by outlining a new research agenda for decoding the notion that cities can save the planet, which emphasises the need for an historical, multi-spatial, political and representational analysis of urban sustainability thinking and policy.
... Currently, Smart sustainable cities (SSCs) are the key mode of the development adopted by cities all over the world, as they respond better to environmental changes, ensure honest and clean government, enhance the quality of life, and create a global economic network [130]. In a smart city environment, the prospective effect of the integration of BIM and block chain on making buildings more sustainable in the context of City Information Management (CIM)/SSC was examined [131]. ...
... The spatial pattern of urban form plays a role in shaping urban functions and processes, from travel behaviour to how planners, designers and citizens engage with urban form. In particular, today's smart city concept aims to quantify and optimise urban spatial patterns to achieve the highest levels of control and improve cities the competitiveness of cities through technology (Angelo and Vormann, 2018;Kriv y, 2018). ...
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Purpose The emerging concept of smart city is known to aim at sustainable urban development. One of the requirements for a smart city is to address accessibility inequalities. This study aims to investigate the accessibility level issues in urban transformation before and after combining different street networks for Penang, Malaysia, as a case study to reveal greater insight and helpful information into mobility and accessibility inequalities for future smart city planning. Design/methodology/approach Using DepthmapX software, two main quantitative methodologies of space syntax, namely, spatial integration accessibility (SIA) and angular segment analysis by metric distance (ASDMA), are employed to analyse the level of accessibility for the main streets of George Town site before and after combination with contemporary networks. Integration, choice and entropy values were calculated for the study analysis. Findings Results revealed the implications of combining old irregular gridiron structures with the existing planned grid structures. George Town seems to have gained a higher capacity for pedestrian accessibility; however, vehicle accessibility has lost its capacity. Findings further suggest that a combination of irregular structure and grid structure is essential for urban growth in similar historical contexts to improve accessibility and address mobility inequalities. Originality/value The study concludes by highlighting the importance of the analysis of street structure transformation to predict consequences and promote the potential to reduce current inequalities in vehicle accessibility.
... According to their sleek and shiny proposals, a combination of sensors, apps, and platforms can generate the data needed to build the cities of the future, and to manage them better (Kaika 2017). Consulting firms like McKinsey promise that smart-city technologies can reduce commute times, save lives, cut crime rates, improve health, reduce inequality, lower carbon emissions, detoxify the air, speed up emergency response, and much more (Angelo and Vormann 2018;Woetzel 2018). As an all-purpose technological solution to social ills, the smart city is only the most recent in a long line of future visions that seek to make the world a better place, one city at a time. ...
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This article offers an analytical reflection on how urban futures have been imagined throughout history and into the present. Considering this question at a global scale, it examines the place of urbanization within the development of the modern/colonial order, accounting for the imagined futures that have supported this world-historical process. Three thematic sections—idealization, capitalization, and securitization—frame the discussion. Capturing desires for societal betterment alongside attempts to extract economic value and imperatives to govern anticipated threats, these heuristics provide insight into forms of urban future-making and future-thinking that continue to reverberate across contemporary projects, debates, and struggles. This lays the groundwork for the critical analysis of urban futures that identifies what is at stake in imagining the future of cities in one way rather than another.
... This perspective then expands the debate on digitisation in urban studies. Digitisation here has been mainly discussed in how it matters for urban economic development, optimising navigation and planning processes as debates about the smart city, start-up city or the cyber city indicate (Söderström, Pasche and Klauser 2014;Angelo and Vormann 2018;Graham and Marvin 2002;Graham 2004; for a critical intervention into this, see Rose 2020 andMoss et al. (2021, this issue). In addition, the debate on how digitisation affects the organisation of work in the urban is often centred around online platforms (see for example the coinage of platform urbanism by Rodgers and Moore 2018). ...
Article
Practices, organisations and sites of work are deeply entangled with urban development and impact on the way social interaction and spaces are experienced and constructed. Especially since the industrial revolution, spaces of work and home have been conceptually separated with boundaries drawn between the public and private sphere, between spheres of production and reproduction. Nevertheless, this divide has been subject to constant change and negotiation, with boundaries between the productive and reproductive sphere increasingly blurring—especially since the spread of digital technologies. The increasing muddying of these boundaries and what this might mean for our understanding of the urban is the central subject of this special feature. The included contributions therefore investigate how these blurring boundaries unfold in the city both on a social and spatial level in order to challenge and rethink the ways we conceptualise work in urban studies.
... Smart cities policies aptly illustrate this process. Like green urbanism, smart city policies are elaborated by a dense web of spatially distributed actors and have a series of historical antecedents (Angelo and Vormann, 2018;Townsend, 2013). Although corporations like IBM attempt to construe themselves as obligatory passage points (Söderström et al. 2014), the origin of smart city narratives cannot be easily associated with a place, a time and a limited set of actors. ...
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This paper explores how the smart city phenomenon becomes nearly ubiquitous in countries and cities around the world. Drawing on policy mobility studies and cosmopolitisation-defined as globalization from within-it focuses on the roll-out and take-up of smart city narratives and interventions in South Africa since 2005. Based on a media analysis on national and local scales, the paper shows that the smart city effect is an entangled phenomenon. Generally speaking, it consists of a lexical glue that holds together processes of data-driven neoliberalisation of urban governance. However, at municipal level we observe more variegated effects of reverse-scale policymaking, labelling and territorialisation where the smart city appears as a more-than-mobile but also as a more-than-local urban policy.
... In the design phase, information, construction knowledge, environmental, social and economic impacts need to be taken into overall consideration [93]. It is necessary to unify decision-makers, supervisors, investors, designers, construction parties, owners, and other stakeholders to participate in the design of BIM [8]. BIM integrates with sustainable building design process model [71] to collect a lot of unstable data information. ...
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‘Smart cities’ are a new type of city where stakeholders are jointly responsible for urban management. City Information Management (CIM) is an output tool for smart city planning and management, which assists in achieving the sustainable development of urban infrastructure, and promotes smart cities to achieve the goals of stable global economic development, sustainable environmental development, and improvement of people’s quality of life. Existing research has so far established that blockchain and BIM have great potential to enhance construction project performance. However, there is little research on how blockchain and BIM can support sustainable building design and construction. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the potential impact of the integration of blockchain and BIM in a smart city environment on making buildings more sustainable within the context of CIM/Smart Cities. The paper explores the relationships between blockchain, BIM and sustainable building across the life cycle stage of a construction project. This paper queries the Web of Science (WoS) database with keywords to obtain relevant publication, and then uses the VOSviewer to visually analyze the relationships between blockchain, BIM, and sustainable building within the context of smart cities and CIM, which is conducted in bibliometric analysis followed by micro scheme analysis. The results demonstrate the value of this method in gauging the importance of these three topics, highlighting their interrelationships and identifying trends, giving researchers an objective research direction. Those aspects reported in the paper constitute an original contribution.
... Essas tecnologias ainda permitem conhecer padrões coletivos e dinâmicos -como comportamentos de viagem, mobilidade e recursividade de atividades, fatores de saúde pública e segurança, e dinâmicas de localização e transformação urbana (Evans-Cowley & Griffin, 2012). Permitem ainda explorar a relação entre forma urbana e comportamentos dos cidadãos alimentados em plataformas digitais de participação social, dando suporte a abordagens de planejamento baseadas em evidências e dados e as tecnologias promovidas pelas smart cities (Angelo & Vormann, 2018;Kitchin, 2016). ...
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Resumo O presente artigo tem dois objetivos. Primeiro, traça um panorama inicial da pesquisa sobre forma urbana no Brasil e no Rio de Janeiro. Para tanto, discute algumas características das abordagens desenvolvidas nesse contexto bem como sinaliza possibilidades para o campo, incluindo expansões conceituais e metodológicas capazes de reconhecer as conexões entre forma urbana, cognição e dinâmicas sociais. Segundo, ilustra essas possibilidades com uma nova abordagem sobre a forma urbana como “informação”. A abordagem explora os modos como preservamos informação no ambiente físico e semântico das cidades e como usamos essa informação ambiental para atuar e tomar decisões sobre ações e interações a realizar. Para entender o papel da informação ambiental na ação e cooperação social, a abordagem reúne modelos computacionais de cidades e comportamentos bem como medidas de informação e entropia latentes nas estruturas físicas e semânticas das cidades. Esses métodos permitem examinar cidades com grande grau de detalhe e interpretar diferenças entre ambientes urbanos como “assinaturas de informação” potencialmente consistentes com diferentes culturas espaciais. Finalmente, a abordagem permite avaliar o impacto de diferentes ambientes urbanos sobre ações e graus de cooperação entre as pessoas.
... In light of recent scholarship stressing access to information as key to understanding disparate behaviors and outcomes in the housing search (Carrillo et al. 2016;Krysan and Crowder 2017;Marr 2005;Rosen 2014; Rosenblatt and DeLuca 2012), our work suggests that policies to reduce spatial inequality-particularly as it results from residential segregation-should focus on how individuals find homes and make attempts to equalize the information available to homeseekers. Additionally, we argue that in their current form online platforms may reproduce and even intensify existing forms of inequality within cities (Angelo and Vormann 2018;Brannon 2017). As long as technologies rely on user-generated content (such as advertisements composed by landlords) and user behavior (such as landlords' decisions about whether and how to list units) they are, alone, unlikely to promote social equity for citizens or produce representative datasets for policymakers. ...
... In light of recent scholarship stressing access to information as key to understanding disparate behaviors and outcomes in the housing search (Carrillo et al. 2016;Krysan and Crowder 2017;Marr 2005;Rosen 2014; Rosenblatt and DeLuca 2012), our work suggests that policies to reduce spatial inequality-particularly as it results from residential segregation-should focus on how individuals find homes and make attempts to equalize the information available to homeseekers. Additionally, we argue that in their current form online platforms may reproduce and even intensify existing forms of inequality within cities (Angelo and Vormann 2018;Brannon 2017). As long as technologies rely on user-generated content (such as advertisements composed by landlords) and user behavior (such as landlords' decisions about whether and how to list units) they are, alone, unlikely to promote social equity for citizens or produce representative datasets for policymakers. ...
Preprint
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Housing scholars stress the importance of the information environment in shaping housing search behavior and outcomes. Rental listings have increasingly moved online over the past two decades and, in turn, online platforms like Craigslist are now central to the search process. Do these technology platforms serve as information equalizers or do they reflect traditional information inequalities that correlate with neighborhood sociodemographics? We synthesize and extend analyses of millions of US Craigslist rental listings and find they supply significantly different volumes, quality, and types of information in different communities. Technology platforms have the potential to broaden, diversify, and equalize housing search information, but they rely on landlord behavior and, in turn, likely will not reach this potential without a significant redesign or policy intervention. Smart cities advocates hoping to build better cities through technology must critically interrogate technology platforms and big data for systematic biases.
... In light of recent scholarship stressing access to information as key to understanding disparate behaviors and outcomes in the housing search (Carrillo et al. 2016;Krysan and Crowder 2017;Marr 2005;Rosen 2014; Rosenblatt and DeLuca 2012), our work suggests that policies to reduce spatial inequality-particularly as it results from residential segregation-should focus on how individuals find homes and make attempts to equalize the information available to homeseekers. Additionally, we argue that in their current form online platforms may reproduce and even intensify existing forms of inequality within cities (Angelo and Vormann 2018;Brannon 2017). As long as technologies rely on user-generated content (such as advertisements composed by landlords) and user behavior (such as landlords' decisions about whether and how to list units) they are, alone, unlikely to promote social equity for citizens or produce representative datasets for policymakers. ...
Article
Full-text available
Housing scholars stress the importance of the information environment in shaping housing search behavior and outcomes. Rental listings have increasingly moved online over the past two decades and, in turn, online platforms like Craigslist are now central to the search process. Do these technology platforms serve as information equalizers or do they reflect traditional information inequalities that correlate with neighborhood sociodemographics? We synthesize and extend analyses of millions of U.S. Craigslist rental listings and find they supply significantly different volumes, quality, and types of information in different communities. Technology platforms have the potential to broaden, diversify, and equalize housing search information, but they rely on landlord behavior and, in turn, likely will not reach this potential without a significant redesign or policy intervention. Smart city advocates hoping to build better cities through technology must critically interrogate technology platforms and big data for systematic biases.
... 17. For similar debates on competing visions of urban green growth outside of India, see Angelo and Vormann (2018), Angelo (2019), and Cohen (2016Cohen ( , 2017. 18. ...
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What are the political imaginaries contained within representations of urban climate futures? What silent but corollary rural dispossessions accompany them? I investigate these questions through the experience of migrants from rural coastal Bangladesh to peri-urban Kolkata. The threats posed to their villages by a variety of ecological disruptions (both loosely and intimately linked with climate change) drive their migration in search of new livelihoods. Their experiences suggest that the demise of rural futures is entangled with the celebration of urban climate futures. However, social movements in this region resisting agrarian dispossession point to alternative political imaginaries that resist teleologies of urbanization at the expense of agrarian livelihoods. Current work in both agrarian studies and urban studies theorizes these linked dynamics of rural–urban transition, seeking to understand them in relation to broader political economies. I bring these debates into conversation with one another to highlight the importance of attention to counter-hegemonic agrarian political imaginaries, particularly in the face of predictions of the death of the peasantry in a climate-changed world. It won’t be possible to identify or pursue just climate futures without them.
... Exploration of Kondratieff-like waves of activity in fields other than economic development has not been common, although Angelo and Vorman (2018) have recently published a study of long waves of 'urban reform discourses' in terms of Kondratieff-type waves. Again, their emphasis is on technological revolutions in building and transportation as a driving force in periodic waves of urban reform thinking, although along with this the analysis emphasizes the recurrence in new waves of discourses and tropes also used in earlier waves. ...
Article
Background: That there have been ‘long waves’ of consumption in parallel in different societies has previously been noted. Now there is a sustained drop in drinking among youth in most of Europe, Australia and North America. Can such changes be understood in a common frame? In terms of inexorable historical phenomena or forces, like Kondratieff waves? In terms of generational shifts, with a younger generation reacting against the habits of an older? Method: Such conceptual models for understanding the dynamics of social change are examined in terms of their potential contribution in explaining when and how substantial changes in levels of consumption occur roughly in concert in different societies, with particular reference to the decline in drinking and heavy drinking in current youth cohorts. Results and Conclusion: Timing tends to rule out economic change as a factor in the current widespread decline in youth drinking. The technological revolution of the electronic web and the smart phone seems a primary explanation, with the widespread change in social presentation and interaction — in habitus — between parents and children also involved. Directions for further research are suggested.
... This engagement is critical both for evidence-based city planning as well as for collaborative community-building in an era of ubiquitous technology. In particular, the Smart Cities paradigm today aims to quantify and measure urban patterns and processes in a positivist approach to understanding, controlling, and improving cities through information technology (Angelo and Vormann, 2018;Kitchin, 2016;Krivý, 2018;Townsend, 2015;Watson, 2015). As an epistemological project, Smart Cities research and practice take many diverse forms (Albino et al., 2015;Ismagilova et al., 2019;Lytras and Visvizi, 2018;Stone et al., 2018;Visvizi et al., 2018). ...
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Urban planning and morphology have relied on analytical cartography and visual communication tools for centuries to illustrate spatial patterns, conceptualize proposed designs, compare alternatives, and engage the public. Classic urban form visualizations – from Giambattista Nolli’s ichnographic maps of Rome to Allan Jacobs’s figure-ground diagrams of city streets – have compressed physical urban complexity into easily comprehensible information artifacts. Today we can enhance these traditional workflows through the Smart Cities paradigm of understanding cities via user-generated content and harvested data in an information management context. New spatial technology platforms and big data offer new lenses to understand, evaluate, monitor, and manage urban form and evolution. This paper builds on the theoretical framework of visual cultures in urban planning and morphology to introduce and situate computational data science processes for exploring urban fabric patterns and spatial order. It demonstrates these workflows with OSMnx and data from OpenStreetMap, a collaborative spatial information system and mapping platform, to examine street network patterns, orientations, and configurations in different study sites around the world, considering what these reveal about the urban fabric. The age of ubiquitous urban data and computational toolkits opens up a new era of worldwide urban form analysis from integrated quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
... This engagement is critical both for evidence-based city planning as well as for collaborative community-building in an era of ubiquitous technology. In particular, the Smart Cities paradigm today aims to quantify and measure urban patterns and processes in a positivist approach to understanding, controlling, and improving cities through information technology (Angelo and Vormann, 2018;Kitchin, 2016;Krivý, 2018;Townsend, 2015;Watson, 2015). As an epistemological project, Smart Cities research and practice take many diverse forms (Albino et al., 2015;Ismagilova et al., 2019;Lytras and Visvizi, 2018;Stone et al., 2018;Visvizi et al., 2018). ...
... This engagement is critical both for evidence-based city planning as well as for collaborative community-building in an era of ubiquitous technology. In particular, the Smart Cities paradigm today aims to quantify and measure urban patterns and processes in a positivist approach to understanding, controlling, and improving cities through information technology (Angelo and Vormann, 2018;Kitchin, 2016;Krivý, 2018;Townsend, 2015;Watson, 2015). As an epistemological project, Smart Cities research and practice take many diverse forms (Albino et al., 2015;Ismagilova et al., 2019;Lytras and Visvizi, 2018;Stone et al., 2018;Visvizi et al., 2018). ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Urban planning and morphology have relied on analytical cartography and visual communication tools for centuries to illustrate spatial patterns, propose designs, compare alternatives, and engage the public. Classic urban form visualizations - from Giambattista Nolli's ichnographic maps of Rome to Allan Jacobs's figure-ground diagrams of city streets - have compressed physical urban complexity into easily comprehensible information artifacts. Today we can enhance these traditional workflows through the Smart Cities paradigm of understanding cities via user-generated content and harvested data in an information management context. New spatial technology platforms and big data offer new lenses to understand, evaluate, monitor, and manage urban form and evolution. This paper builds on the theoretical framework of visual cultures in urban planning and morphology to introduce and situate computational data science processes for exploring urban fabric patterns and spatial order. It demonstrates these workflows with OSMnx and data from OpenStreetMap, a collaborative spatial information system and mapping platform, to examine street network patterns, orientations, and configurations in different study sites around the world, considering what these reveal about the urban fabric. The age of ubiquitous urban data and computational toolkits opens up a new era of worldwide urban form analysis from integrated quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
... This engagement is critical both for evidence-based city planning as well as for collaborative community-building in an era of ubiquitous technology. In particular, the Smart Cities paradigm today aims to quantify and measure urban patterns and processes in a positivist approach to understanding, controlling, and improving cities through information technology (Angelo and Vormann, 2018;Kitchin, 2016;Krivý, 2018;Townsend, 2015;Watson, 2015). As an epistemological project, Smart Cities research and practice take many diverse forms (Albino et al., 2015;Ismagilova et al., 2019;Lytras and Visvizi, 2018;Stone et al., 2018;Visvizi et al., 2018). ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Urban planning and morphology have relied on analytical cartography and visual communication tools for centuries to illustrate spatial patterns, propose designs, compare alternatives, and engage the public. Classic urban form visualizations – from Giambattista Nolli’s ichnographic maps of Rome to Allan Jacobs’s figure-ground diagrams of city streets – have compressed physical urban complexity into easily comprehensible information artifacts. Today we can enhance these traditional workflows through the Smart Cities paradigm of understanding cities via user-generated content and harvested data in an information management context. New spatial technology platforms and big data offer new lenses to understand, evaluate, monitor, and manage urban form and evolution. This paper builds on the theoretical framework of visual cultures in urban planning and morphology to introduce and situate computational data science processes for exploring urban fabric patterns and spatial order. It demonstrates these workflows with OSMnx and data from OpenStreetMap, a collaborative spatial information system and mapping platform, to examine street network patterns, orientations, and configurations in different study sites around the world, considering what these reveal about the urban fabric. The age of ubiquitous urban data and computational toolkits opens up a new era of worldwide urban form analysis from integrated quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
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Wildlife are increasingly recognized as critical to urban ecosystems, but the impacts and benefits of wildlife on people in cities are poorly understood. Environmental justice scholarship has concluded that elements of the urban environment can create or exacerbate social inequity, but human–wildlife interactions have not been considered through this lens. We conducted a literature review on urban wildlife, human–wildlife interactions and environmental justice. We triangulated between these three bodies of literature to identify trends, gaps and research needs. We identified six pathways through which wildlife presence or absence, wildlife management and human–wildlife interactions in cities may lead to social injustice for people. Our review shows that wildlife affect nearly all aspects of urban life for people, including economics, participation in decision‐making, patterns of urban space, human health, psychological well‐being and cultural discourses. Through these six pathways, urban wildlife management disproportionately impacts marginalized and vulnerable communities and benefits affluent urban residents. Contemporary intersections of urban planning, wildlife management and histories of systemic bias exacerbate existing injustices in cities. Synthesis and applications. Though wildlife are often characterized as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on their effects on people, we conclude that this dichotomy perpetuates injustice for people and wildlife. Instead, we argue that a ‘just city’ fosters healthy wildlife populations through equitable decision‐making. The pathways we lay out here offer a road map for incorporating environmental justice into urban wildlife management. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
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On the occasion of the book’s quasquicentennial, our special issue brings together four articles that show the continuing relevance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). The contributors illustrate how a fresh perspective on the theoretical insights that Du Bois began to develop in The Philadelphia Negro deepen understanding of contemporary topics such as gentrification, policing, residential mobility, and the rhythyms of daily life in Black neighborhoods. Taken together, these articles adopt four tenets of a Du Boisian Sociology that are grounded in the contributions of The Philadelphia Negro: (a) using history to contextualize the contemporary, (b) studying social phenomena through the subaltern perspective, (c) using a “case of” design, and (d) analyzing the structural context that shapes individual outcomes, with attention to people’s agency. As our special issue demonstrates, while already a classic, The Philadelphia Negro deserves an even wider audience for its lessons on what city blocks can tell us about the character of a city: the residents and their institutions that have come and gone, the shape of changing neighborhoods, and what all that could mean for urban change in the future.
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For more than two decades, critical planning scholars have called for strategic spatial planning to cut its rational roots stemming from the 1960s–70s, and counter its tendency towards more incremental approaches of the 1980s–2000s. To truly address the core challenges of cities and regions in our times, spatial planning should plan for discontinuity. This paper explores how planning may embrace futuring practices to do so. Drawing on three materially oriented futuring approaches, ‘Critical Future Studies’, ‘Sociology of Expectations’, and ‘Sociology of the Future’, futuring practices may serve a threefold aim. First, exposing the power of ‘normalisation’, unlocking silenced futures. Second, providing a stage to exhibit and dramatise ‘future expectations’ (stories, images, artefacts) and their stakeholder connections. Third, letting urban materiality and corporeality truly speak for themselves to the present and the future, opening experiences of, and confrontations with, the technological, environmental and geographical unconscious. Consequently, we show how such futuring can take shape through the creation of an ‘Archive of the Future’, which we illustrate through Rotterdam as a case.
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Resumo: Este artigo visou investigar historicamente o emprego da noção de cidades inteligentes e sustentáveis no processo de candidatura e reconhecimento de Brasília como patrimônio mundial da Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura (Unesco), no transcurso da década de 1980. O projeto de iniciação científica que resultou neste texto foi empreendido desde agosto do ano de 2020, valendo-se de bibliografia de apoio e fontes primárias (documentos institucionais do Comitê do Patrimônio Mundial da Unesco). Os instrumentos utilizados para sistematização dos dados pesquisados foram o fichamento bibliográfico-conceitual, o mapa conceitual e as fichas de análise. Como resultados, o artigo apresenta reflexões a respeito do conceito de patrimônio mundial da Unesco, da experiência patrimonial de Brasília e da noção de cidades inteligentes. O texto está dividido em quatro partes. Inicialmente, promoveu uma discussão sobre o conceito de patrimônio mundial da Unesco. Em seguida, buscou definir e posicionar historicamente o conceito de cidades inteligentes, tomando como referência a bibliografia pertinente. Na terceira parte, investigou o emprego da noção de cidades inteligentes e sustentáveis no processo de candidatura e reconhecimento de Brasília como patrimônio mundial da Unesco. Por fim, traçou uma reflexão acerca das possibilidades de futuras pesquisas em relação a Brasília enquanto cidade inteligente.
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Significant resources and efforts have been devoted, especially in the USA, to develop predictive policing programs. Predictive policing is, at the same time, one of the drivers of the birth, and the ultimate material enactment of, the anticipatory logics that are central to the smart city discourse. Quite surprisingly, however, critical analyses of the smart city have remained divorced from critical criminology and police studies. To fill this gap, this article sets out the first critical, in-depth empirical discussion of Blue CRUSH, a predictive policing program developed in Memphis (TN, USA), where its implementation intersects long-term austerity for urban policy. The article, first, shows that there is no evidence of Blue CRUSH’s capacity to prevent crime, thus adding empirical material to skepticism over the role of predictive policing as a policy solution in the first place. And, second, it argues that, rather than making crime a matter of technological solutions, predictive policing shifts the politics therein – in short, it contributes to the expansion of policing into the field of urban policy at the same time as it disrupts present police work. These takeaways allow to further the critique of the salvific promises implicit in the smart city discourse.
Chapter
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This chapter focuses on the hegemonic smart city approach in the European H2020 institutional framework that is slowly evolving into a new citizen-centric paradigm called the experimental city. While this evolution incorporates Social Innovations—including urban co-operative platforms that are flourishing as (smart) citizens are increasingly considered decision-makers rather than data providers—certain underlying ethical and democratic issues concerning the techno-politics of data remain unresolved. This chapter deciphers the meaning of data-driven smart cities by helping to understand the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and the algorithmic disruption in citizens. This chapter helps to understand new forms of Social Innovation slightly surfacing in European cities and regions in light of the post-GDPR data-driven landscape. This data-driven landscape has become dramatically critical in the aftermath of the post COVID-19 era. Data and platform co-operatives as the most common forms of urban co-operative platforms may emerge as an alternative to challenge digital platform capitalism.
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This book argues that there is no way to make progress in building a sustainable future without extensive participation of non-state actors. The volume explores the contribution of non-state actors to a sustainable transition, starting with citizens and communities of different kinds and ending with cities and city-networks. The authors analyse social, cultural, political and economic drivers and barriers for this transition, from individual behaviour to structural restraints, and investigate interplay between the two. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies from the UK, Australia, Germany, Italy and Denmark, and a number of comparative case studies, the volume provides an empirically and theoretically robust argument that highlights the need to develop, widen and scale up collective action and community-based engagement if the transition to sustainability is to be successful.
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The hegemonic ‘smart city’ approach in the European H2020 institutional framework is slowly evolving into a new citizen-centric paradigm called the ‘experimental city’. While this evolution incorporates social innovations—including urban co-operative platforms that are flourishing as (smart) citizens are increasingly considered decision-makers rather than data providers—certain underlying ethical and democratic issues concerning the techno-politics of data remain unresolved. To cite this article: Calzada, I. (2018), Deciphering Smart City Citizenship: The Techno-Politics of Data and Urban Co-operative Platforms. RIEV, Revista Internacional de Estudios Vascos/International Journal on Basque Studies 63(1-2):42-81. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24498.35524/6.
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This chapter focuses on the issues in current city planning and rebuilding. It describes the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding. The chapter shows how cities work in real life, because this is the only way to learn what principles of planning and what practices in rebuilding can promote social and economic vitality in cities, and what practices and principles will deaden these attributes. In trying to explain the underlying order of cities, the author uses a preponderance of examples from New York. The most important thread of influence starts, more or less, with Ebenezer Howard, an English court reporter for whom planning was an avocation. Howard's influence on American city planning converged on the city from two directions: from town and regional planners on the one hand, and from architects on the other.
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Thomas Friedman notes that in the first decade of the twentieth century, usage of “sustainability” increased exponentially. By 2012, this once-specialized concept had become both one of the most commonly cited terms in global policy programs – from the urban and regional scale to the national and international – and the single most copyrighted term (Friedman 2012). Notably, the term became as significant for policy makers as it did for marketers and CEOs. From the public to the private sector, and at multiple scales of commerce and governance, the pursuit of sustainability became, quite simply, a new common sense. Of particular note is the embrace of sustainability by core constituencies of what C. Wright Mills once called “the power elite” – that is, big business and the political leadership with which this business is aligned. As I will explore in this chapter, this usage now extends to locally based, entrepreneurially minded urban growth coalitions, whose members include local leaders in finance, real estate, tourism, marketing, and other leading industries (Logan and Molotch 2007). For these coalitions, sustainability, once viewed as a “positive externality” at best and a “barrier to growth” at worst, is now upheld as a central concern – albeit of an unexpected sort. In an age of urban, environmental, and financial crisis, as well as intense global competition, the pursuit of a particular, market-oriented version of sustainability has become popular and has been instrumentalized to support broader goals of urban economic growth. This marks a remarkable shift for a concept that emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s via grassroots and civil society groups, activists, and academics, largely as a challenge to the growth-oriented global economic and environmental status quo.
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This book presents a detailed and critical account of the regulation approach in institutional and evolutionary economics. Offering both a theoretical commentary and a range of empirical examples, it identifies the successes and failures of the regulation approach as an explanatory theory, and proposes new guidelines for its further development.
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This paper explores IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge as an example of global smart city policymaking. The evolution of IBM's smart city thinking is discussed, then a case study of Philadelphia's online workforce education initiative, Digital On-Ramps, is presented as an example of IBM's consulting services. Philadelphia's rationale for working with IBM and the translation of IBM's ideas into locally adapted initiatives is considered. The paper argues that critical scholarship on the smart city over-emphasizes IBM's agency in driving the discourse. Unpacking how and why cities enrolled in smart city policymaking with IBM places city governments as key actors advancing the smart city paradigm. Two points are made about the policy mobility of the smart city as a mask for entrepreneurial governance. (1) Smart city efforts are best understood as examples of outward-looking policy promotion for the globalized economy. (2) These policies proposed citywide benefit through a variety of digital governance augmentations, unlike established urban, economic development projects such as a downtown redevelopment. Yet, the policy rhetoric of positive change was always oriented to fostering globalized business enterprise. As such, implementing the particulars of often-untested smart city policies mattered less than their capacity to attract multinational corporations.
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A pioneering urban economist presents a myth-shattering look at the majesty and greatness of cities.America is an urban nation, yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly . . . or are they? In this revelatory book, Edward Glaeser, a leading urban economist, declares that cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in both cultural and economic terms) places to live. He travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind. Using intrepid reportage, keen analysis, and cogent argument, Glaeser makes an urgent, eloquent case for the city's importance and splendor, offering inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest creation and our best hope for the future.
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A brief introduction to the special issue on “Economic-financial Crisis and Sustainability Transition” is provided. The relevance of this theme is motivated and core questions are formulated. The editorial ends with a brief summary of the various contributions, which include six long articles and four short viewpoints.
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The paper distinguishes four views on the impact of the financial–economic crisis on sustainability transitions (operationalized as diffusion of green niche-innovations). The first three views highlight the possibility of positive impacts of the financial–economic crisis on sustainability transitions and joint solutions: (a) a comprehensive transformation of the capitalist system, (b) a green Industrial Revolution, linked to a sixth green Kondratieff wave, and (c) green growth. The fourth view perceives the impact as mainly negative, because the financial–economic crisis weakens public, political and business attention for environmental problems. The paper confronts these views with secondary data on three analytical categories: (1) financial investment, (2) policy and governance, and (3) public opinion and civil society. Data focus on renewable energy and climate policy in the UK, Europe and the world. The paper concludes that the early crisis years (2008–2010) created a window of opportunity for positive solutions. But since 2010–2011 this window appears to be shrinking, with the financial–economic crisis having negative influences on sustainability transitions that may cause some slow-down.
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This study divides the principal urban areas of the United States into five size classes and examines the changing composition of those classes through four successive epochs extending over the years from 1790 to 1960. The epochs are defined by major innovations in the technology of transportation and industrial energy. The pattern of metropolitan "newcomers," "boom centers," and "dropouts" in each epoch appears to have been strongly influenced by these major technological changes, within the context of American values and territorial expansion. Two important problems emerge: the unpredictability of long-term changes in the size and physical structure of American cities; and the growth of a gigantic residue of obsolete structures resulting from successive exploitation and abandonment of urban land. As a result, one may expect continuing, and often conflicting, pressures for both (1) faster technological and organizational adaptation to metropolitan change and (2) controls to inhibit change and reduce the need for adaptation.
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Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital presents a novel interpretation of the good and bad times in the economy, taking a long-term perspective and linking technology and finance in an original and convincing way.
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This paper uses several events in New York in the late 1990s to launch two central arguments about the changing relationship between neoliberal urbanism and so–called globalization. First, much as the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of—rather than a regulator of—the market, the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As globalization bespeaks a rescaling of the global, the scale of the urban is recast. The true global cities may be the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa, as much as the command centers of Europe, North America and Japan. Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command–center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence.
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The following text is taken from the publisher's website: "Splintering Urbanism offers a path-breaking analysis of the nature of the urban condition at the start of the new millennium. Adopting a global and interdisciplinary perspective, it reveals how new technologies and increasingly privatised systems of infrastructure provision - telecommunications, highways, urban streets, energy, and water - are supporting the splintering of metropolitan areas across the world. The result is a new 'socio-technical' way of understanding contemporary urban change, which brings together discussions about: * globalisation and the city * the urban and social effects of new technology * urban, architectural and social theory * social polarisation, marginalisation and democratisation * infrastructure, architecture and the built environment * developed, developing and post-communist cities."
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The rise and rise of sustainability in urban and social policy circles has transformed the discursive terrain of urban politics. In 2009, Gunder and Hillier argued sustainability is now urban planning’s central empty signifier, offering an overarching narrative around which practice can be oriented. This paper takes up the notion of sustainability as an empty/master‐signifier, arguing that the recognition of its nominal status is central to understanding how it operates to produce ideological foundation. Drawing upon a series of interviews and focus groups with urban and social policy makers and practitioners in Vancouver, Canada, Zizek’s 1989 critique of the cynical functioning of contemporary ideology is used to interpret the city’s engagement with sustainability. Focusing on ‘social sustainability’ it is argued that sustainability has provided a quilting point that has enabled new social and urban policy‐related partnerships and organizational agendas to be developed. However, this coherence remains unstable and plagued by questions of signification due to the radical negativity of the master‐signifier, where efforts at definition and agreement are haunted by the non‐presence of sustainability. It is argued that this framing of sustainability as ideological conduit in Vancouver helps explain the co‐presence of transformative rhetoric and business‐as‐usual. Using Zizek’s critique of cynical reason in contemporary ideology, interview data is drawn upon to show how many practitioners seek to distance themselves from sustainability, but at the same time continue to act it out anyway. In conclusion, the sobering politics of Zizek’s critique of contemporary ideology are considered in the light of growing urban problems.