Elvin Wyly’s research while affiliated with University of British Columbia and other places

... While cities have begun to focus on vulnerable communities and prioritize the implementation of NbS in high-risk neighborhoods 37 , a growing body of literature suggests that the introduction of NbS has inadvertently led to green gentrification in some cities 38,39 . The risks of displacement for vulnerable groups associated with green gentrification have been found to be more pronounced in contexts where social protection measures and affordable housing policies have been largely dismantled 38 . ...

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Socially equitable climate risk management of urban heat

... The common theme is that when commodified, housing answers to exchange-value, rather than use-value of people living in it. And while the way 'use-value' is articulated changes, the basic opposition to exchange value remains (Lees et al. 2010;Lees and Phillips 2018). ...

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Cash rules everything around me: in defence of housing markets

... However, since the emergence of digital technology in the 1950s, the development of cities around the globe began to take an increasingly technological approach (Cugurullo, 2021;Kitchin et al., 2019). With the growing number of concerns relating to the future of urban living, digital innovation has given birth to a number of smart-city projects, offering a model capable in theory of achieving an infinite source of efficient energy and sustainable urban growth: a model that has been extensively critiqued particularly by geographers and urbanists on the basis of extensive empirical research Mackinnon et al., 2022;Wilson & Wyly, 2023). This paper attempted to deviate from both the exclusively critical stance as well as the contrasting idyllic projections typically adopted by smart-city scholars, and instead used a Bloch (1989) interpretation of utopianism as a means to explore the possibility of a more progressive approach to future urban developments. ...

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Beyond dystopian smart cities? Unlocking a progressive utopian future in smart urbanism

... As a result, they remained behind in the utility of different fields as compared to the developed counties. Similarly, this idea is inculcated by Wyly (2023) as he argues that although new technologies like Metaverse are emerging, they will create social, economic, and cultural disparities among communities from different parts of the world because of the availability of this medium. He predicted the future of class difference due to metaverse usage as Marshall McLuhan predicted for the usage of TV at that time. ...

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Metaverse as Medium: Understanding the Revival of McLuhan's Notion 'Medium is the Message' in the Emergent Virtual Reality Landscape History

... This type of approach has earned its own term, and is referred to in the subject literature as the NIMBY syndrome ('not in my backyard'). NIMBY is a negative phenomenon, implicating irrationality and narrow-mindedness (McClymont & O'Hare, 2008;Owens, 2000;Eranti, 2016;Burningham, 2000;Petrova, 2016), the opposite of which is YIMBY ('yes in my backyard') (Wyly, 2022). The local community objects to the implementation of a development project, being worried about an adverse impact on their livesnuisance, reduced attractiveness or depreciated value of real estate (Ratnasingham & Hebert, 2007;Wassmer & Wahid, 2018). ...

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Renewable energy source facilities as a factor in locational conflicts in rural areas

... By recalling Richard Lake's pragmatist position about the power of conversational urbanisms, we can say that the "hope and the expectation that things can get better must be distinguished from optimism, the claim that things will get better" (Lake, 2020, p. 272). Embracing the possibility for creative democracy and urbanism as a practice of hope implies the rejection of cynicism and requires nurturing conversation and search for communication throughout and within differences (Wyly, 2021). ...

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Dialogic practices of urban gardening in Rome: “Reading for difference” in social innovation

... A third and final theme discussed in scholarship on territorial stigmatization is the role of race and racism (Tyler 2020;Loyd and Bonds 2018). Processes of territorial stigmatization cannot be detached from questions of race and racism, particularly in contexts like Chicago and other U.S. cities (Shabazz 2015;Wilson 2018). Research has shown that territorial stigmatization in these urban contexts is always also enmeshed with racism where "territorial stigmatization reinforces racial boundaries through discursively framing black communities as violent 'no-go' zones" (Schwarze 2022a(Schwarze : 1423. ...

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“Missing the Community for the Dots”: Newspaper Crime Maps, Territorial Stigma and Visual Criminology

... And so, it was surprising to hear that the Editorial Board debated whether and how to retain the Book Review section at Urban Geography. In 2020, Urban Geography reflected on its 40 years of publishing and editors related significant changes that the journal has undergone on the basis of volume numbers and digitizing (Ward, 2020), the impact of corporate ownership changing it from a "small, engaged and personal type of capitalism" to a "small cog in a big machine" (Shearmur, 2020, p. 357) and the broader expansion of ideas (Hanson, 2020;Wyly, 2020) that seems to necessitate "near-constant reflection on the question of what should (or should not) be encompassed within the bounds of 'urban geography'" (Lake, 2020, p. 364). With this in mind, the book review section is being revived and revised, through the format of book forums. ...

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Book review forums: reviving a platform

... 'We will grow', Weaver notes, and we will grow smartly. This globalblanketing city building, our study's focus, is spurred by a best-practice contagion and the lore of scientific planning to create what now dots cities: techno-greened gentrified areas, wired-smart office buildings, LEED-certified 'urban futures' buildings and housing complexes, Wi-Fi automated optimization of residential and commercial buildings and surveillance-saturated open spaces (Datta and Odendaal, 2019;Wyly et al., 2018). 3 The apparent miracle of smart city building, it seems, has just begun. ...

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Toward a Dracula urbanism: Smart city building in Flint and Jakarta

... The intellectual battlefield of the urban has stimulated numerous theoretical contributions to urban geography, including but not limited to urban morphology and urban form, gentrification, globalization and network society, social justice and critical urban studies, and new city science. The most up-to-date contribution made to urban geography is the concept of "planetary urbanization" or "Urbanization I" termed by Derickson [9] and its derivative research [18][19][20]. This new epistemology has pushed forward the field in three recognized ways: (1) to examine the notion of urban rather than the conception of the city, (2) to interpret the notion of urbanization as a liminal process, and (3) to see urbanization as a variegated, center-less process [21]. ...

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China’s Integrated Urban–Rural Development: A Development Mode Outside the Planetary Urbanization Paradigm?