Urban Restructuring

Cette contribution s'intéresse aux modes d'action de commerçants de détail face aux restructurations urbaines: comment parviennent-ils à faire valoir leurs intérêts? L'approche privilégiée ici met en rapport les échelles de mobilisation sociale et les dynamiques économico-urbaines.

'The Changing State of Gentrification' (2001) by Jason Hackworth and the late Neil Smith is one of the most influential papers ever published in TESG. By introducing three waves, or periods, of practices and patterns of gentrification, it changed the way we think about gentrification. This Introduction to the Forum discusses the three waves introduced by Hackworth and Smith as well as fourth wave introduced by Lees et al. Finally, I will argue that during the global financial crisis we have entered fifth-wave gentrification. Fifth-wave gentrification is the urban materialization of financialized or finance-led capitalism. The state continues to play a leading role during the fifth wave, but is now supplemented—rather than displaced—by finance. It is characterized by the emergence of corporate landlords, highly leveraged housing, platform capitalism (e.g. Airbnb), transnational wealth elites using cities as a 'safe deposit box', and a further 'naturalization' of state-sponsored gentrification.

Written at the intersection of migration studies, urban studies, and research on activism, this thesis contributes to the exploration of solidarities born on the ground in an urban context marked by immigration and economic restructuring. Based on ethnographic material collected 2013–2016 in Malmö, Sweden, it examines alliances and friendships generated across social, cultural, ethnic, and legal divides through a particular political practice—activism as carried out by the extra-parliamentarian left. A decisive aspect is the particularity of Malmö, a city with a high density and diversity of activist groups, and Möllevången, the neighbourhood where their actions are concentrated. Möllevången is conceptualised in this thesis as an incubator for resistance to the dispossessing effects of neoliberal economic restructuring and urban gentrification. Special attention is devoted to activist groups that, at the time of fieldwork, affected the most people through their large mobilisations and solidarity-based work. While not negating differences among activists or between activists and racialised migrants in precarious legal conditions, the thesis highlights their shared experiences of co-creating political spaces and interests—commoning. This kind of embodied solidarity requires activists to experiment with non-hierarchical and non-normative ways of structuring social relations, a process filled with challenges, ambivalences, and conflicts. The thesis shows how activists cope with challenges and what they perceive as achievements. Furthermore, it shows that—despite the ever-increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric, restrictive migration policies, and neoliberalisation of the commons—solidarity and commoning contribute to pathways of migrant emplacement: re-establishing life in a particular locality, building networks, making friends, and developing a feeling of belonging to a new place. Not only does the activists’ commitment to radical equality and mutual aid create certain pathways for emplacement in the city, it also enables the political socialisation of some migrants and paves the way for a new generation of migrant activists in Malmö.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the influential state and non-state stakeholders interact, conflict and collectively shape the urban transformation of downtown Cairo. The stakeholder analysis revealed interesting positions and power levels of the influential stakeholders impacting urban transformation in downtown. It also illustrated alliances and dependencies between entities within the same stakeholder group and between state and non-state stakeholders. Collaborations between influential stakeholders in the private sector interested in establishing lobby groups to further their interests in downtown. Despite the commonalities between the interests of the state and private investors, the state prefers to maintain development monopoly and control over the area in its beautification-focused development efforts. Influential stakeholders who do not have particular interest in the development of downtown, such as legislative authorities and large financial institutions, whose power and influence can be tapped into and directed towards a more sustainable transformation of the area. The thesis findings revealed that the ingredients of gentrification are present in downtown however it is currently inhibited by legislative and other parameters. This brings up the question as to how the state is planning on regulating potential urban transformation in downtown Cairo in the current stakeholder power dynamics to minimize negative socioeconomic impacts. A clear comprehensive vision for the development of downtown can only be successfully implemented through the buy-in of all stakeholder groups.

Tampere is a Finnish city with a powerful industrial past. Like many other cities around the world, Tampere has been struggling to keep up with the changing demands of globalisation. Recently, special efforts have been made to shape Tampere into a high-performing informational city. This volume provides insights into the overall dynamics of local development strategies as well as concrete aspects and stages in the development of Tampere. Current challenges and possible future directions for the city are also discussed.

The chapters in the book represent various viewpoints on local development, including history, knowledge economy, democratic e-governance, e-education, e-health, culture and e-inclusion. In addition, some of the articles provide international comparisons with other regions in similar situations.

Contributions from both local and international experts are included. Due to its multidisciplinary approach, this book can be used for teaching in several fields. As a comprehensive analysis of an informational city, this book is useful for academics and practitioners who are looking for solutions to local development in a global age.

In this first chapter of Migrants and City Making, Dispossrssion. Displacement, and Urban Regeneration, Ayse Caglar and I discard the binary between migrants and non-migrants and yet keep
in focus the migration experience, with its multiple forms of displacement as well as barriers to and modes of emplacement withing globe´spanning processes of city´making.  The chapter provides explanations of key concepts and processes needed to initiate an approach to the relationship between migrants and cities that moves beyond methodological nationalism and the ethnic lens.

Globalisation is about the macrostructuration of the world order. It is a process in which exchange and interactive relations and orientation bases are becoming global. It is a boundary-eroding process in the sense that it crumbles institutional boundaries of territorial communities and increases interdependency on a global scale. The objective of this paper is to conceptualise the global-local dialectic from the point of view of strategic adjustment needs of territorial communities. Special attention is paid to local policy responses for globalisation and general aspects of local adjustment strategies.

Suburbs have long been glossed over by critical urbanists for being culturally, even if not spatially, less than urban. In Los Angeles, it is the San Fernando Valley that has received such treatment as scholars have tended toward the metropolitan basin. In this article, I aim to help re-center the
San Fernando Valley as a complex and conflictual cultural landscape through an autoethnographic exploration of four moments of urban restructuring in the Panorama City neighborhood. I provide a personal account of how a succession of events – the 1992 LA Riot, 1993 General
Motors Plant closure, 1994 Northridge earthquake, and 1996 dismantling of the Aid for Families with Dependent Children welfare program – led to the disruption and partial destruction of a neighborhood. I situate these moments of crisis within the context of a civil gang injunction and
outbreak of abject violence during this time period, which further destabilized the neighborhood and informed my own decision to pick up a gun.

While population losses have accompanied urban development since the emergence of the first cities, it has only been quite recently that "shrinkage" has become a field of research in its own rights. Critical scholarly research stands in a somewhat difficult relation to this situation. On the one hand, there are numerous contributions calling for a general "acceptance" of shrinkage and more "openness" towards planning for a reduced population size. On the other hand, one can find contributions that criticize the limits of existing rightsizing policies, describing smart shrinkage as an exclusionary project, or set it into a context of the current austerity moment. The evaluation of this new round of urban policies is thus controversial. The common denominator of the papers in this special issue is a call for both widening the perspective on rightsizing policies by embedding them into a wider context of neoliberal urbanization and a demand for more attention towards context-specific pathways, dynamics and outcomes. At the same time, we want to highlight not only the local specificities but also provide a comparative political economy perspective on shrinking cities.

There is a wide interest in the effects of forced relocation in the context of urban restructuring. This interest is also inspired by debates on gentrification and displacement. The prevailing idea is that the lowest income groups particularly suffer from displacement in terms of their housing quality and increased rents. In addition, increasing proportions of forced movers are assumed to harm the housing opportunities of other house seekers, while competing within the social rented sector. Although several studies deal with the consequences of forced relocation, a broader perspective on housing chances is currently lacking. Moreover, most studies are qualitative, whereas a larger-scale quantitative analysis is needed to test assumptions mentioned above. This paper addresses these matters by analysing housing allocation data of the Haaglanden in the Netherlands and two cross-sectional surveys among forced movers in the region's central city, The Hague. Findings indicate that housing chances for both forced and regular house seekers have not declined substantially since 2000. Moreover, most forced movers experienced dwelling progress, partly thanks to the design of the housing allocation model. However, low-educated, as well as middle- and higher-income households less often report dwelling progress. Explanations for these findings are provided.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the issues, literature, and theoretical frameworks concerning growing privatization, neoliberalization, and austerity politics that have contributed the shrinking public sphere in the contemporary society and have given rise to a planetary circuit of urban resistance across different cultural, geographical and political contexts. It further examine the commonalities and specificities of the recent resistance movements, and the role of public space, which together also set the context for the thematic organization of the book and the agenda for ongoing research on public space, urban resistance, and democratic practices.

This book focuses on urban grassroots movements in post-socialist Czechia and their struggle against unprofessional and nondemocratic urban processes in their cities. It shows that in the context of neoliberal urban restructuring, weakly consolidated democracy, and corporate capture of the local state, urban activists often resort to entering electoral competition as the only efficient way of improving the situation in their cities. The book is based on four case studies from different Czech cities, narrating stories of activists struggling against a controversial flood protection project, the demolition of public buildings, an unhealthy land-use plan, arrogant development, and overpriced city halls. It offers valuable insight into the obstacles created by institutionalized forms of power abuse which urban activists must deal with and discusses the pro-democratic potential of urban grassroot movements’ efforts to overcome their limited ability to influence political processes via standard means of civic engagement and protest activities.

"El presente artículo propone el análisis de la producción
del espacio como estrategia metodológica para
analizar, desde las ciencias sociales, los procesos de
neoliberalización y el funcionamiento de los flujos de
capital en nuestras ciudades. El interés de esta propuesta
reside en la creciente penetración de políticas
neoliberales en nuestro país, una penetración singularmente
tangible en el campo de la planificación urbanística.
Combinando la discusión teórica con la presentación
de un estudio de caso del centro histórico de
Palma (Mallorca), el artículo muestra cómo la dinámica
del valor de cambio y la creación de plusvalías no
suceden en una supuesta esfera económica exenta regida
por sus propias leyes, sino que necesariamente
deberá articularse con relaciones sociales de carácter
extramercantil a las que movilizará y reformulará exigiéndoles
que se ajusten a las necesidades de reproducción
(y expansión) del sistema de acumulación."

This paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a contested memory site. The project was once an ambitious, modernist project that housed former squatters during Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency (1970-1973) and its demise has subsequently become emblematic of the violent processes of neoliberal urban restructuring that marked the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Yet efforts to memorialize the site also contain within them certain silences and elisions, gaps which can help to reveal the complex, embedded nature of liberal property relations in Chile. These relations underscore certain dynamics through which squatters have historically been able to gain housing rights and a foothold in the city. They also provide a key location through which to better understand the specific contours of neoliberalism’s trajectory, including its haunted forms of ruination, its points of tension, its limits, and the making of its counterpublics.

"Governing movements in urban space", chapter 3 in B. Larsson, M. Letell and H. Thörn (2012) eds. Transformations of the Swedish Welfare State: From Social Engineering to Governance? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
This chapter, focusing on Gothenburg, Sweden's second city, shows that while global urban developments have penetrated deeply into the Swedish urban contexts, they are also conditioned by both national and local contexts. Specifically focusing on the interactions between urban government and collective action, the chapter argues that Gothenburg is a highly significant case in order to analyse the transformations of the Swedish welfare state in an urban context. On several occasions during the 20th Century, the city served as a model for urban engineering in the Swedish national context, and even for social policy programmes more generally; today it is perceived as a 'model city' for the new urban governance.

This paper describes the restructuring of Poland’s third-largest city, Lodz (Łódź). Once a thriving metropolitan hub of textile and clothing manufacturing, Lodz was confronted with the closure of its numerous factories in the early 1990s with Poland’s transition from a planned to a global market economy. The city suffered an abrupt and dramatic decline followed by a redefinition of its economic, spatial and social structures. The paper focuses on the major economic and spatial phenomena taking place in the city in the three decades after the economic collapse. Using an evolutionary approach, it identifies and discusses the gradual shift of Lodz’s restructuring. We claim that the restructuring initially involved mostly organic and spontaneous initiatives of dynamic local and non-local actors, with minor and circumstantial involvement from the local authorities. However, over time, the restructuring of Lodz has become influenced and driven by nationally and EU-set objectives and targeted urban policies, with urban and infrastructural projects as driving vehicles.

This paper was written right before covid-19 was understood to be a pandemic. Since that time, political and economic conditions such as austerity measures in public health, uncoordinated national responses and just in time production of medications and protective health equipment have facilitated the pandemic and laid bare the fundamental weaknesses of the way our daily life is organized. The pandemic is greatly intensifying the dispossessive processes outlined in this brief paper. In the paper, I define key terms dispossession, displacement, dispossariat, and conjuncture. These concepts are necessary to understand and overcome the inequality, precarity, and racialized disparities that are being heightened and made more visible by the pandemic.

La producción de imágenes de la ciudad constituye una parte fundamental de la política urbana de los últimos decenios. Los nuevos espacios de consumo, públicos o privados, han sido utilizados para contribuir, tal como se muestra para el caso de Barcelona, a formar una imagen de ciudad renovada y atractiva para el consumo extemo y a fomentar una imagen de consenso social en tomo a un modelo de espacio urbano adaptado a las necesidades de funcionamiento del sistema económico mundial.

ABSTRACT
This report proposes to present an urban restructuring project for the municipality of Piracicaba. Books, lectures and online documentaries as well as projects from other cities, such as Berlin and Barcelona. My current observation question the excessive use of automobiles and how it affects the construction of new neighborhoods, and its contribution to global warming. Therefore, in addition to the presentation of the plan itself, it also contemplates the advances, new technologies and concepts that permeate urbanism in the twenty-first century.
Keywords: Urbanism. Energy. Transport. Urban restructuring. Environment.

Urban restructuring programmes targeting distressed-poverty neighbourhoods have broadened their approach in recent years to address not only physical problems, but also social issues of individual residents. These programmes often include forced residential relocation, due to demolition of public or social rented housing. This paper identifies key parallels and differences in the combined urban restructuring–social service and support approaches employed in the US and the Netherlands. Within the context of forced relocation, important lessons are highlighted, learned from the US HOPE VI programme, which are relevant for advancing the development of the recent ‘behind-the-front-door’ approach in the Netherlands and beyond. Six significant issues are discussed which have key management implications for housing associations taking this approach: the challenges presented to housing associations as they assume the dual role of housing manager and service provider; the importance of offering services beyond the time limits of relocation; the necessity to balance the location and mobility of new services; the complexity of acquiring and maintaining trust and confidentiality among residents; the challenges of determining appropriate programme goals and overcoming fundamental obstacles to progress; and the crucial role of evaluation and research in developing, implementing and improving such complex initiatives.

This collaborative and comparative paper deals with the impact of Covid-19 on the use and governance of public space and street trade in particular in two major African cities. The importance of street trading for urban food security and urban-based livelihoods is beyond dispute. Trading on the streets does, however, not occur in neutral or abstract spaces, but rather in lived-in and contested spaces, governed by what is referred to as 'street geographies', evoking outbreaks of violence and repression. Vendors are subjected to the politics of municipalities and the state to modernize the socio-spatial ordering of the city and the urban food economy through restructuring, regulating, and restricting street vending. Street vendors are harassed, streets are swept clean, and hygiene standards imposed. We argue here that the everyday struggle for the street has intensified since and during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mobility and the use of urban space either being restricted by the c...

There is a wide interest in the effects of forced relocation in the context of urban restructuring. This interest is also inspired by debates on gentrification and displacement. The prevailing idea is that the lowest income groups particularly suffer from displacement in terms of their housing quality and increased rents. In addition, increasing proportions of forced movers are assumed to

This article describes a case of urban reform in an area of the Historic Centre of Ciutat
de Mallorca / Palma (Spain). The case study is framed within a global movement for recentralizing,
embellishing, commodifying and calming the historic centres of many cities,
in a process of re-direction of flows that can be observed both at metropolitan and global
levels (competition between cities). This case is composed of three reform planning
schemes (Sa Calatrava, Sa Gerreria and El Temple) legally independent but that are parts
or phases of a single large-scale execution unit with shared aims (fundamentally the
creation of added value) and which becomes obvious in its promotion as a single heritage
tourism product. Nevertheless, the different planning schemes seem to coincide with a
specific functional specialization of two differentiated sectors: Sa Calatrava becomes a
luxurious and calmed residential area without neighbourhood or outdoor life; Sa Gerreria
is to be upgraded both as a central and a corridor area.
The paper shows an interest in the way in which the actors re-signify and appropriate
this reforming action, re-creating from this ideas and social relations. Within this axiomatic
approach, we have focused on two ethnographic examples that show a parallel logic of
appropriation of discourse and action of reform, a logic that reads its arguments in a
zealous manner and therefore uncovers resources, which we call deviations.

Der Beitrag widmet sich der qualitativen, ethnographischen Untersuchung autoritärer Trennungen am Beispiel einer Feldstudie in Leipziger Kneipen. Basierend auf einem relationalen Raumverständnis (Massey, 1994) werden Vorzüge und Ambiguitäten ethnographischer Forschung zu räumlichen Subjektivierungsprozessen und rechten Tendenzen diskutiert. Dabei liegt der Fokus auf der Verschränkung des Forschungsgegenstandes mit der gewählten Methode. Kneipen im Leipziger Osten werden als (exklusive) soziale Orte politischer Verstetigung und Prismen urbaner Veränderung kontextualisiert und damit als „strategically situated micro-situation[s]” zur dichten Betrachtung vorgeschlagen (Sayer 2000, 151). Forschungserfahrungen werden in Bezug auf Zugang(-sschwierigkeiten), ethische und moralische Dilemmata methodisch und analytisch reflektiert. Daraus ergeben sich abschließende Arbeitsthesen zur Verschachtelung raum-zeitlicher Ebenen politischer Subjektivierung.

This article reflects the qualitative, ethnographic research of authoritarian divisions exemplified by a case study in pubs of Leipzig, East Germany. Based on a relational conception of space (Massey, 1994), advantages and ambiguities of ethnographic research on spatial subjectivation and far-right tendencies are discussed. Centrally, the entanglement of research method and object of research is illuminated. Pubs in Leipzig’s inner East are contextualized as (exclusive) social spaces of political consolidation and prisms of urban restructuring and thus proposed as “strategically situated micro-situation[s]” (Sayer 2000, 151) for fine-grained analysis. Research experiences are reflected with regards to (difficult) access, ethical doubts, and moral dilemmas, both methodically and concerning their analytical value. This results in final work hypotheses on nested scales of spatio-temporal political subjectivation.

The Dutch urban restructuring policy, initiated in 1997, has generated much urban geography research. As with so many other fields, the associated debate has witnessed the perception of a gap between policy and research among both researchers and policymakers. Using four examples, this paper argues that this perception of a gap fails to reflect properly what is happening in the interchange between research and policy. Drawing on a broader typology of the use of research in policy-making (Stevens, 2007), the paper shows that the relationship is more complex and critically highlights the role of researchers herein. Moreover, ignoring or ‘cherry-picking’ of research by policymakers does not necessarily reflect a lack of relevance, which is a fundamental discussion within current geography research. The four discussed examples are: ambivalent outcomes of relocation research, the selection of renewal target areas, potential negative spillover effects on other areas, and the stubbornness of the concept of social cohesion in policy.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the influential state and non-state stakeholders interact, conflict and collectively shape the urban transformation of downtown Cairo. The stakeholder analysis revealed interesting positions and power levels of the influential stakeholders impacting urban transformation in downtown. It also illustrated alliances and dependencies between entities within the same stakeholder group and between state and non-state stakeholders. Collaborations between influential stakeholders in the private sector interested in establishing lobby groups to further their interests in downtown. Despite the commonalities between the interests of the state and private investors, the state prefers to maintain development monopoly and control over the area in its beautification-focused development efforts. Influential stakeholders who do not have particular interest in the development of downtown, such as legislative authorities and large financial institutions, whose power and influence can be tapped into and directed towards a more sustainable transformation of the area. The thesis findings revealed that the ingredients of gentrification are present in downtown however it is currently inhibited by legislative and other parameters. This brings up the question as to how the state is planning on regulating potential urban transformation in downtown Cairo in the current stakeholder power dynamics to minimize negative socioeconomic impacts. A clear comprehensive vision for the development of downtown can only be successfully implemented through the buy-in of all stakeholder groups.

The global economic crisis exposed the instability of financialized urban governance at precisely the moment when governing coalitions have launched ambitious, expensive plans to reimagine urban transportation infrastructure, driven by the imperatives of restoring accumulation amid intensifying economic and regional competition. In Chicago and Toronto, processes of urban restructuring and state reterritorialization disclose contradictory tendencies in the city-regions’ modes of urbanization. Tracing the contingent path-dependencies of transportation crises highlights tensions between, and within, preexisting metropolitan dynamics and an ascendant neoliberal city-regionalism. The mobilization of collective regional agency appears necessary to overcome the inertia of divisive metropolitan politics, yet the specific political–economic contexts of the case city-regions significantly condition the structural capacity of actors producing, and the potential articulation of, emergent city-regional governance.