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Over the past three decades, research in urban politics or increasingly urban governance reveals a landscape powerfully reflecting what might now be defined as a post-political consensus. Following a waning of the community power,...
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Over the past three decades, research in urban politics or increasingly urban governance reveals a landscape powerfully reflecting what might now be defined as a post-political consensus. Following a waning of the community power, urban man-agerialist and collective consumption debates, this 'new urban politics' has appeared conspicuously absorbed with analysing a purported consensus around economic growth alongside a proliferation of entrepreneurially oriented governing regimes. More recent contributions, acknowledging the role of the state and governmental-ities of criminal justice, uncover how downtown renaissance is inscribed through significant land privatisations and associated institutionalised expressions like Business Improvement Districts and other 'primary definers' of 'public benefit': all choreographed around an implicit consensus to 'police' the circumspect city, while presenting as ultra-politics anything that might disturb the strict ethics of consumer-ist citizenship. Beyond downtown, a range of shadow governments, secessionary place-makings and privatisms are remaking the political landscape of post-suburbia. It is contended that the cumulative effect of such metropolitan splintering may well be overextending our established interpretations of urban landscapes and city politics, prompting non-trivial questions about the precise manner in which political representation, democracy and substantive citizenship are being negotiated across metropolitan regions, from downtown streetscape to suburban doorstep. This paper suggests that recent theorisations on post-democracy and the post-political may help to decode the contemporary landscape of urban politics beyond governance, perhaps in turn facilitating a better investigation of crucial questions over distributional justice and metropolitan integrity.
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The fire that erupted in Grenfell Tower in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in west London on 14 June 2017 is widely acknowledged to be the worst experienced during UK peacetime since the nineteenth century. It is confi...
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The fire that erupted in Grenfell Tower in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in west London on 14 June 2017 is widely acknowledged to be the worst experienced during UK peacetime since the nineteenth century. It is confirmed to have resulted in 72 casualties and 70 physically injured. It has also left a community physically and emotionally scarred. That the catastrophe occurred in the country's wealthiest borough added to the shock while the circumstances surrounding it also begged questions relating to political and corporate responsibility. The UK Prime Minister swiftly established a public inquiry which is ongoing and anticipated to stretch well into 2019. This paper offers a preliminary analysis of what some are interpreting to be a national atrocity. It begins by describing the events at the time of the fire while also identifying the key controversies that began to surface. It then examines the local geography of Grenfell Tower and the surrounding Lancaster West Estate revealing an astonishing landscape of inequality across the borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The paper then uncovers how such inequality was combined with a malevolent geography of injustice whereby for several years residents raised regular warnings about the building's safety only to be disregarded by the very organisations which were there ostensibly to protect and safeguard their livelihoods: the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea municipal authority and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation. The paper then deepens the analysis identifying how these organisations disavowed the local democratic process, in doing so dishonouring so tragically the Grenfell residents. It then finds this democratic disavowal to be multiscalar: for amid an incremental neoliberal political assault on the national welfare state, public housing across the country has become wretchedly devalued, stigmatised, and the subject of scandalous maladministration. A final section offers some preliminary analysis of the early stages of the Grenfell Inquiry, while also revealing the dignified resistance of Grenfell community in the face of London's increasingly plutocratic governance.
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Because redistributive policies are usually at odds with the economic interests of the city, proponents will find difficulty in gathering support for them. ... To contribute to a cause so unlikely of success is not worthwhile, wha...
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Because redistributive policies are usually at odds with the economic interests of the city, proponents will find difficulty in gathering support for them. ... To contribute to a cause so unlikely of success is not worthwhile, whatever the possible benefits. The policies of redistribution thus become ... 'unpolitics' (Peterson, 1981, p. 167). Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests ... [such that] ... The right to the city, as it is now constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires (Harvey, 2008, p. 38).
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In common with many countries in recent years, visions of an urban renaissance have been instrumental in guiding a transformation of England's cities, enabling a boom in economic development and 'urban living'. However, while crit...
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In common with many countries in recent years, visions of an urban renaissance have been instrumental in guiding a transformation of England's cities, enabling a boom in economic development and 'urban living'. However, while critics voice concerns about the renascent downtowns being increasingly privatized and inscribed through displacement-inducing gentrification, a seemingly inexorable rise in inequality also prompts misgivings about the social and geographical reach of any purported renaissance. Appreciative of this, the New Labour government introduced as part of its sustainable communities plan an initiative called Housing Market Renewal, designed to reconnect distressed areas of 'low demand' to the vibrant city centres. However, the extent to which this endeavour to stretch the frontier of England's urban renaissance is premised upon a fundamentalist faith in private property inclines us to delineate it as an archetypical case of late-neoliberalizing accumulation by dispossession that licenses state-orchestrated gentrification. We go on to consider how the landscape conversions precipitated by the renaissance vision have been convened alongside an unprecedented expansion of policies for crime control, designed to instil a particular version of 'civility' within the urban and suburban vernacular. The article thereby reveals how politically orchestrated endeavours to induce an urban renaissance appear to be increasingly-intertwined with gentrification and a punitive urbanism, and how this chimes with experiences across many parts of the urban world.
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The paper draws on recent theorising on policy mobility and post-politics to investigate the planning of a New Urbanist settlement, Tornagrain, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, and designed by Andres Duany. It details Dua...
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The paper draws on recent theorising on policy mobility and post-politics to investigate the planning of a New Urbanist settlement, Tornagrain, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, and designed by Andres Duany. It details Duany's role as an influential 'persuasive guru' of New Urbanism and his signatory charrette as a participatory method for engaging local citizens into the New Urbanist model of place-making. Nonetheless, the Tornagrain case raises non-trivial questions about this model, not least the faith being placed in a globally mobile policy evangelist becoming, in effect, a doctrinal conduit for convening local democracy. The paper then contributes to recent debate on post-political planning, particularly in terms of how latent expressions of dissent in local planning processes often appear to be deampli-fied through endeavours to forge a post-political consensus, in part to masquerade rent hikes and profiteering on behalf of powerful landowners, glitzy architects, consultants and other associates.
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Amid the globalization of economic life and a myriad of powerful challenges to Westphalian traditions of political statehood, it is now routinely contended that regions are 'in resurgence'. Nonetheless, much of the debate on this ...
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Amid the globalization of economic life and a myriad of powerful challenges to Westphalian traditions of political statehood, it is now routinely contended that regions are 'in resurgence'. Nonetheless, much of the debate on this purported regional renaissance is bedevilled by confusion over what scholars and activists mean by regions and an analogous mystification as to why some regions are 'successful', lagging' or 'different'. Our paper aims to instil some coherence to this debate by distinguishing between what we term regional spaces and spaces of regionalism. It then draws on this distinction to explore the institutionalization of England's South West region, highlighting some tensions which prevail over its economic future, its political representation, its territorial shape and cultural vernacular. In undertaking this, we demonstrate how the formation of any given regional map is reflective - and indeed constitutive - of an unevenly developing, often overlapping and superimposing mosaic of economic practices, political mobilizations, cultural performances and institutional accomplishments. This prompts us to question the currently fashionable inclination to fully jettison a scalar and/or territorial approach to the theory and practice of spatiality in favour of relational/topological/non-territorial approaches.
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As the 21st Century world assumes an increasingly urban landscape, the question of how definitive urban spaces are to be governed intensifies. At the heart of this debate lies a question about the degree and type of autonomy that
As the 21st Century world assumes an increasingly urban landscape, the question of how definitive urban spaces are to be governed intensifies. At the heart of this debate lies a question about the degree and type of autonomy that towns and cities might have in shaping their economic, environmental, social and cultural geography. This paper aims to examine this question. Starting with the premise that the degree of autonomy any particular town or city has is inherently an empirical question – one which can only be conceptualised in relational terms vis-à-vis the distributed, networked and territorialised responsibilities and powers of the city and the nation-state and other zones of connection – we examine four different contexts where debates over autonomy have intensified in recent history (Brazil, UK, India and South Africa). Drawing on recent respective histories, we identify key elements and enablers in the making of urban autonomy: a characteristic that exists in a variety of guises and forms and creates a patchwork landscape of differentially powerful fragments. We reveal how, beyond its characteristic as a political ideal, autonomy surfaces as a practice that emerges from within specific sectors of particular societies and through their relationship with national and regional politics. Four alternative forms of urban autonomy are delineated: fragmented, coerced (or enclave), distributed and networked. We contend that the spatial templates for autonomy are not predetermined but can be enhanced in multiple different sites and forms of political space within the city. This enhancement appears essential for the integration and strengthening of capacities for sustainable and just forms of development throughout the urban.
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While long a preoccupation among scholars of law and social and political philosophy, the theme of social justice is generally considered to have been brought centrally into geographical debate with David Harvey's 1973 book Social...
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While long a preoccupation among scholars of law and social and political philosophy, the theme of social justice is generally considered to have been brought centrally into geographical debate with David Harvey's 1973 book Social Justice and the City. Reasoning that "principles of social justice had some relevance for the application of spatial and geographical principles to urban and regional planning" (Harvey 1973:9), and taking inspiration from his deepening engagement with Marxism (Harvey 2000), Harvey aimed to transcend the notion of distributive justice dominant among liberal formulations (Rawls 1971) in favor of a revolutionary socialist conception underlining the relations between production and distribution in bourgeois society and questioning the social power of money as the only measure of value (Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1996).
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It is near customary to reason that throughout the past 25 years or so, urban spaces across the 'advanced' economies have undergone dramatic transformations in their physical appearance, economic base, social composition, governan...
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It is near customary to reason that throughout the past 25 years or so, urban spaces across the 'advanced' economies have undergone dramatic transformations in their physical appearance, economic base, social composition, governance, topographical shape and cultural vernacular. In making such an assertion, however, it is nonetheless necessary to be ever-mindful of: overemphasising the extent and novelty of such change; and, neglecting how movement, restlessness and dynamic transformation represent essential qualities of the urban experience (see Engels, 1867; Wirth, 1938; Harvey, 1973; Castells, 1996). Nonetheless, all three present Editors subscribe to a view that recent years have witnessed a gradual decomposition of the Fordist/industrial model of development, alongside the slow erosion of key institutions enshrined in the welfare state and a major crisis in the legitimacy of modernist-inspired urban planning. The upshot of all this is that, over the past two to three decades, cities in the global North have become significantly different arenas within which to live and work and to engage in leisure or politically motivated activities. Thus, just as mid to late 20th century societal expectations relating to employment and welfare entitlement have been fatally compromised, so modernist assumptions about urbanisation and the socialisation of production and consumption have also been immensely disrupted (Castells, 1977; Harvey, 1989a; Gough, 2002).
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Whilst undoubtedly central to academic and policy-relevant spatial analysis for over a hundred years now, 'the region' has continued to be an elusive category: its various meanings and the implications therein frequently being cha...
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Whilst undoubtedly central to academic and policy-relevant spatial analysis for over a hundred years now, 'the region' has continued to be an elusive category: its various meanings and the implications therein frequently being challenged and modified through paradigmatic shifts in such spatial analysis. Today, amid what is undoubtedly a period of dramatic economic transformation, political restructuring and sociocultural change, a range of often multi-disciplinary approaches to the regional concept exist, informing us, variously, how regions can become competitive economic zones within a global economy, strategic political territories in a complex system of multi-level governance, cultural spaces forged through a politics of identity, or - in an approach that departs quite radically from conventional territorially based readings - spaces constituted out of the spatiality of flow and relational networks of connectivity. Drawing on the experience of a post-devolution UK, this paper critically assesses the respective merits of these various conceptualizations of the region, and offers some remarks about the challenges confronting contemporary regional studies.
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