Isaac K. Arthur, Robert Lawrence Afutu-Kotey, Irene Appeaning Addo
{"title":"SECURITY ZONES AS ‘NEW CITIES’: Public-private Partnership and the Transformation of Land Use in Accra, Ghana","authors":"Isaac K. Arthur, Robert Lawrence Afutu-Kotey, Irene Appeaning Addo","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Using the Cantonments City project as a case study, we examine the changing land use of state security zones in Accra, Ghana, through public-private partnership. Combining qualitative and secondary data, this article explores the drivers, processes and implications of the project on urban space and people. The findings demonstrate that the project addresses the accommodation challenges of Ghana’s police while advancing the profit-driven goals of a domestic private investor, aligning with government policies on densification and efficient land use. However, the project also fosters social inequality and segregation. Consequently, the study highlights the need for inclusive PPP policies to balance economic efficiency with social equity.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"921-938"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148533385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ORCHESTRATING DIFFERENCE AND SIMILARITY: Black Fungibility, and the Spatial Redrawing of Racial Categories in Spanish Colonial Morocco, Sahara and Guinea","authors":"Pol Fité Matamoros","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article I dissect the spatial strategies through which the Spanish attempted to orchestrate both racial difference and similarity in the African colonies of Morocco, Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea during the first half of the twentieth century. With the ‘loss’ of its last American colonies, and increasingly positioned as the internal ‘other’ of Europe, the Spanish sought to build a new Ibero-African empire and leverage their historical, geographical and racial ties to northwest Africa through the built environment to justify colonial rule and accrue political capital. Yet Spain’s colonial geographical project required Black fungibility both as its raw material—enabling those new colonial landscapes, real or imagined—and as a limit category that could be occupied by any/body. Drawing from both primary archival materials and a host of secondary sources, I show how space—broadly understood as geographic imaginations, architectural styles, urban designs and the uses and policing of public places—became key to orchestrating such similarities and differences, capitalizing on the fluidity of racial categories and securing the supremacy of a struggling Spanish colonizer.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"960-981"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-2427.70049","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148522806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hanna Hilbrandt, Erandi Barroso Olmedo, Fritz-Julius Grafe
{"title":"THE CHAINMAKER: How Intermediaries Sustain Urban Policy Initiatives over Time","authors":"Hanna Hilbrandt, Erandi Barroso Olmedo, Fritz-Julius Grafe","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70045","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Practitioners implementing urban climate initiatives are frequently faced with the intermittent nature of urban projects and the short-termism of policy experiments. In this conjuncture, understanding how urban transformations are advanced necessitates grasping how small-scale efforts are carried forward or sustained despite these brief time horizons and a related condition of resource scarcity that urban bureaucracies also confront. To address this question, this article develops a figure we provisionally term the <i>chainmaker.</i> Building on literature that discusses the role of intermediaries in debates on entrepreneurial governance and urban experimentation, this heuristic captures the role of urban practitioners who build temporal chains, that is, who sustain ideas, projects or reforms across different initiatives and bureaucratic cycles in the long run. We draw on a comparative study that traced the functioning of these initiatives in four secondary cities in Mexico and India to explore two different dimensions of intermediation over time. This work of anchoring and sustaining small-scale policy efforts to effect lasting change reveals the challenges to creating continuity and effecting structural change and the different conditions of that work in the studied contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"785-800"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-2427.70045","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148533367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"REPAIR AND RECONSTRUCTION FOR URBAN COMMONING: The Making of the Liberated Spaces in Naples","authors":"Martina Locorotondo, Adam Fishwick","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Commoning requires repair. Where capitalist logics of accumulation, enclosure and exclusion produce abandoned space through the city, urban commoners remake that space to serve the needs of inhabitants. Without hiding the paradoxes and risks of repair, based on years-long ethnography in the Liberated Spaces in Naples, Italy, we demonstrate how repair and reconstruction produced the conditions for societal transformation in the city. We show how this was achieved through four connected processes that underpinned the making of these urban commons. In doing so, we develop a theoretical contribution on the relationship between repair and the commons as it affects: the role of practices of material repair of previously abandoned buildings in shaping the commons; the significance of memory reconstruction in reconstituting these spaces; the formation of social bonds and collective subjectivities through these practices; and the potential of repair in the urban commons to expand these practices and prefigure broader social transformation.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"1020-1039"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-2427.70048","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148532677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DIGITAL TECHNOSCIENTIFIC SOCIALITIES AS AN ENTANGLED COMMONS","authors":"Lucilla Barchetta","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70059","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this contribution I examine digital technoscientific socialities through ethnographic fieldwork with Health for All, an interdisciplinary network formed at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak. I expand the entangled commons framework for anthropological inquiry into collaborative, data-intensive science, arguing that digital technoscientific socialities—not merely data—constitute entangled commons situated in the sociomateriality of knowledge coproduction. Focusing on mental health research in Italy, I explore tensions between open and proprietary data to reveal how data are never inert units but embedded in social relations. I argue that achieving multidimensional health notions requires open care to attend simultaneously to knowledge subjects, processing tools and infrastructures, rather than relying solely on data accumulation.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"1075-1084"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-2427.70059","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148533426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FINANCIALIZED GREEN STATE ENTREPRENEURIALISM AND THE URBANIZATION OF MOUNTAINS: Chongli’s Consumption-based Territorial Business Model for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics","authors":"Thierry Theurillat, Mengke Zhang","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70036","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article develops the concept of a territorial business model (TBM) to renew the analysis of the production of the urban built environment beyond established urban cores. Based on the case of Chongli, a site for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, this article provides a double decentering of the ways in which a mountain region was urbanized within a context of State-led financialized green entrepreneurialism. We emphasize that, as a bet on future revenues from growth and by considering extra-economic purposes, the built environment questions territorial value creation and extraction. By reflecting on the impacts of the increasing circulation of individuals’ incomes on territorial development, we posit that territorial value creation refers to a system made up of export-, visitor- and household-based flows of revenues that circulate at varied and larger scales. Simultaneously, the built environment incorporates this territorial value and is transformed into financial assets through various circuits of finance and value extraction. The TBM extends the business model concept developed by post-neoliberal/colonial scholars that calls for decentering analysis away from the dominant variegated financialization of the built environment approach that was developed from Western contexts. It further decenters the analysis by addressing urbanization processes beyond large city centers.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"856-876"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-2427.70036","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148533913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexandra Makridou, Ioannis Frangopoulos, Nikos Kapitsinis
{"title":"REFUGEE CAMP SITING AND THE EMERGENCE OF NIMBY MOVEMENTS: A Mixed-method Analysis of the Role of ‘Top-down’ Governance and Media Influence in Greece","authors":"Alexandra Makridou, Ioannis Frangopoulos, Nikos Kapitsinis","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Studies on the association between spatial planning and local NIMBY responses dating back to the late 1970s have focused on NIMBY mobilizations against various unwanted facilities, with less attention to NIMBY responses to refugee accommodation units. This article seeks to examine the role of the implementation of a ‘top-down’ system of migration governance and the influence of the media in the emergence of NIMBY mobilizations against refugee accommodation facilities. To this end, it adopts a socio-spatial approach, perceiving space as a specific sociological concept and a non-autonomous interpretative parameter of the social dynamics, distinguishing the logics of production and appropriation of space. Furthermore, adopting a Lefebvrian perspective, it explores the effects of the ad hoc siting of refugee camps as representational spaces, at the level of both collective spatial representations and spatial practices through the lens of the media. To achieve the research aim, it employs analysis of secondary data related to refugee arrivals and the distribution of refugees in the accommodation units, and document analysis of 50 national and local press publications. It contributes to the academic debate on spatial planning and the sociology of space, highlighting NIMBY opposition as an urban social movement claiming information and involvement in the decision-making process.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"897-920"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148534357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FEMINISTS VERSUS MONUMENTS? From Protests to Anti-monuments in Mexico City","authors":"Fernando Gutiérrez","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the role of heritage spaces and monuments in the Historic Centre of Mexico City during ongoing feminist mobilizations. Feminists have claimed that the Mexican government is more concerned about protecting monuments and urban heritage than acting to prevent gender-based violence and femicide. While feminists have demanded actions and solutions from the authorities, some have also sought to distance themselves from the state, utilizing counter-hegemonic tactics. The research shows how feminist activists have used cultural demonstrations and established alternative memorials to commemorate women who have suffered from violence and crime. These approaches differ from those of other social movements in Mexico. By occupying symbolic historic spaces and, in some cases, damaging monuments, feminists have also established what they call anti-monumentas. Such tactics reflect how politics, memory and public space continuously intertwine during demonstrations.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"982-1002"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-2427.70051","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148532679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ENTANGLED PUBLIC ESSENTIALS: Female Perspectives on Public Toilets in Portugal and How to Propel Change","authors":"Bruna Coelho","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70056","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Women living in more affluent urban contexts have poor access to sanitary infrastructures owing to a lack of female public toilets. Existing toilets are often poorly maintained, and their design does not suit women’s daily needs. In this essay I use a mixed-methods approach that combines the analysis of documents and secondary sources with the use of ethnographic methodologies. My goal is to understand not only how public toilets in Portugal are designed and maintained, but also to make sense of how women perceive public toilets in urban settings and whether these toilets are designed to fulfil the needs of the population they are supposed to serve.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"1047-1052"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-2427.70056","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148533424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"THE CONTESTED CITY OF VENICE: Caring for Commodified Common Infrastructures in a Touristified Environment","authors":"Cornelia Dlabaja","doi":"10.1111/1468-2427.70057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70057","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this essay I reveal contested common infrastructures in the interplay between vanishing public infrastructures in Venice and lack of care by governmental actors in a city with a shrinking number of inhabitants. I examine care and commodified public infrastructures in heritage cities facing mass tourism and climate change effects by zooming in on effects of entangled commons at the micro-spatial level (public furniture), meso level of the neighbourhood (public buildings) and macro level of infrastructure decisions (cruise ships and harbour areas) that affect both the ecosystem and everyday life. I also discuss the role local initiatives play who are fighting for the right to the city. My ongoing ethnographic fieldwork since 2019 forms the empirical basis.</p>","PeriodicalId":14327,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Urban and Regional Research","volume":"50 4","pages":"1053-1064"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2026-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-2427.70057","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148533427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}