Urban Studies最新文献

{"title":"The effects of International City Network membership: Urban AI policies and the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights","authors":"Ronja Haenschen","doi":"10.1177/00420980261458527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261458527","url":null,"abstract":"Cities worldwide are participating in International City Networks (ICNs) to build capacities and develop responses to artificial intelligence (AI)-driven digital transformation, yet the role of ICNs in AI governance remains understudied. Addressing this gap, this article conducts a case study of the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights (CCDR), an ICN advocating for a human rights-based approach to urban digitalization. It asks: How does CCDR membership affect cities’ AI policies? AI is increasingly integrated into urban governance, with cities adopting AI-driven applications to enhance efficiency and sustainability. At the same time, AI raises significant concerns regarding the protection of citizens’ rights, data privacy, equity, transparency, and accountability, requiring regulatory frameworks that define the conditions under which such applications are utilized. Local approaches vary considerably in the extent to which cities adopt application-oriented policies, focused on the use of AI systems, and regulatory policies, which establish governance frameworks and normative principles. This article argues that trans-local interactions within ICNs affect local policy through processes of social learning, enhancing implementation capacities and informing policy preferences. Drawing on data from the Atlas of Urban AI, the article compares 161 AI initiatives from 15 CCDR member cities and 15 non-members. It classifies cities’ approaches in application-oriented and regulatory policies and assesses alignment with CCDR principles. The findings show that CCDR member cities adopt a higher number of AI initiatives and demonstrate greater regulatory depth, with a stronger emphasis on regulatory policies reflecting rights-based, ethical governance, highlighting the active role of ICNs in global AI governance.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"116 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148355557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Khula area: The urban and the pathological","authors":"Shweta Rani","doi":"10.1177/00420980261446407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261446407","url":null,"abstract":"Pathology informs and structures urban spaces. This article explores the relationship between the urban and the pathological by trailing the <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">Aedes</jats:italic> mosquito, the dengue vector, to trace the intersection of the civic, social, ecological, and political in the everyday life of Delhi. To control the possibility of a dengue epidemic, the gaze of public health authorities primarily focuses on areas considered inherently “dirty”—localities of East Delhi at the margins of the city, situated at Yamuna riverfront, populated by working-class migrants living in unauthorized colonies. The residents of such areas, however, have to deal with the absence of basic urban infrastructure on one hand, while also being under the stringent administrative glare for pest control. Interestingly, both the inhabitants of these areas and their administrators express the ungovernable stubbornness of such regions using the colloquial expression “ <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">Khula</jats:italic> area.” Based on a multi-sited ethnography, this work follows many usages of the term Khula by several actors across the city, including scientists, city administrators, and frontline workers. Then, it argues that the word Khula is an empty signifier, which, through many of its meanings, enables us to see urban spaces through the prism of the pathological and all things that fall within its shadow.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148355558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Justice without feeling? The case for Wildlife-Affective Urban Design","authors":"Jun Zhai, Emily Jia Zhai","doi":"10.1177/00420980261457772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261457772","url":null,"abstract":"Urban design and planning increasingly engage biodiversity, habitat restoration, and green infrastructure, yet they still pay limited attention to how human–wildlife relations are felt, contested, and governed in everyday urban life. This paper develops Wildlife-Affective Urban Design (WAUD) as a conceptual framework for examining how urban form shapes multispecies encounter not only through ecological performance, but also through fear, curiosity, attachment, irritation, avoidance, and unequal exposure to harm. Bringing wildlife-inclusive design, affective urbanism, emotional urbanism, multispecies ethics, and spatial justice into dialog, the paper argues that coexistence should not be understood as a linear progression from contact to empathy. Instead, encounters with wildlife may generate care, discomfort, nuisance, anxiety, or demands for control at the same time. In this way, the paper contributes to emotional urbanism by extending it beyond predominantly human-centered accounts of urban feeling toward the unequal politics through which multispecies emotions become institutionally legible and governable. Across landscape, neighborhood, and building/interface scales, WAUD shows how design can organize differentiated proximities, thresholds, and responsibilities rather than simply encourage closeness. Methodologically, it calls for combining quantitative indicators, situated accounts of encounter, and ecological proxies without presuming transparent access to nonhuman subjectivity. The paper concludes by redefining emotional equity not as the equal distribution of positive feeling, but as the reduction of systematic harms, exclusions, and unrecognized burdens in multispecies urban life.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148355559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The spatiotemporally varying relationship between LRT development and gentrification: Evidence from a mid-sized urban area in Canada","authors":"Renan Cai, Su-Yin Tan","doi":"10.1177/00420980261457300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261457300","url":null,"abstract":"Urban rapid transit systems, such as light rail transit (LRT), may be associated with gentrification. Previous quantitative studies have adopted various analytical methods and reported mixed findings. However, they have often failed to differentiate gentrification from other forms of neighborhood change or assumed a homogeneous transit-gentrification relationship across space and time. This study argues that the relationship between transit and neighborhood change can vary across different zones and time periods within the urban area served by a transit line. A Bayesian modeling approach was employed to examine the spatiotemporally varying association between distance to LRT and neighborhood change from the planning to opening stages of the LRT line in Kitchener-Waterloo, a mid-sized urban area in Canada. Income improvement associated with LRT predominantly occurred in the opening stage of the transit line, while dwelling value growth related to LRT mainly occurred in the planning and construction stages. Neighborhoods showing significant associations between LRT and increases in income or dwelling value were found around central business district stations and near the northern and southern terminals. Some of these changes might be categorized as LRT-related gentrification. The research framework and advanced modeling approach presented in this study, as well as the novel concept of analyzing the relationship between transit and neighborhood change as a spatiotemporally variable phenomenon are valuable for transportation and gentrification research.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148342044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bringing nationalism into global urban studies","authors":"Jonathan Rokem, Öznur Yardımcı, Michael Gentile, Liza Weinstein","doi":"10.1177/00420980261456008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261456008","url":null,"abstract":"This critical commentary investigates the resurgence of nationalist politics through a global urban studies lens, arguing that cities are critical arenas in which contemporary nationalist projects are enacted, negotiated and contested. While scholarship on nationalism, geopolitics and international relations remains largely state-centric, global urban studies has tended to treat cities as denationalised nodes embedded in transnational networks of global capital. Our intervention is situated within a broader global context of democratic backsliding and autocratisation that have accelerated over the past two decades and are increasingly visible across both authoritarian regimes and constitutional democracies. These developments are closely tied to the rise of populism and ethno-religious nationalism, which have mobilised anxieties surrounding inequality, migration and ethnic and racial identity to advance exclusionary political agendas. We argue that cities function simultaneously as infrastructures of nationalist governance and as spaces of political resistance. Urban actors from municipal authorities to grassroots movements reproduce, adapt and contest nationalist projects through everyday political practices. Attending to the situated and uneven ways that these dynamics unfold reveals cities not merely as passive sites of national politics but as key arenas where the boundaries of citizenship, migration, belonging and state power are actively reconfigured.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148342019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond the binary: Hybrid urbanism and the limits of the (in)formal in Accra","authors":"Nana-Yaw Andoh","doi":"10.1177/00420980261454771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261454771","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary cities in the Global South operate through regulatory complexities that exceed the binary distinction between formal and informal urbanism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, Ghana, including narrative interviews and spatial observation, this analysis engages the concept of <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">hybrid urbanism</jats:italic> to illuminate how self-built housing and unregulated livelihoods are produced, organized, and governed through overlapping systems of authority, accountability, and spatial regulation. While existing scholarship successfully challenges the formal/informal binary, it has largely treated hybrid urbanism as a static condition rather than a dynamic process. This article addresses that gap by theorizing the temporality of hybrid urbanism: how it emerges through <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">graduated integration</jats:italic> and how it can be destroyed through <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">planning without integration</jats:italic> . Both in inner-city markets and within self-built settlements on the urban fringe, actors such as tenant coordinators, market women’s associations, and unelected informal leaders mediate disputes, enforce land-use norms, and regulate access to space, services, and income-generating opportunities. These practices sometimes involve consultations with and acknowledgments from municipal officials, thereby blurring the lines between legality and illegality, between planned and unplanned, and between formal and informal, revealing a regulatory multiplicity embedded in everyday urban life. The comparison between Old Fadama (where hybrid governance emerged organically over decades) and Adjen Kotoku (where relocated residents must rapidly reconstruct governance systems after state-imposed displacement) reveals what is at stake when planning interventions fail to recognize existing regulatory arrangements. This analysis introduces the concept of <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">social infrastructural acknowledgment</jats:italic> as a framework for planning practices that build upon, rather than destroy, existing hybrid governance systems. By theorizing hybrid urbanism from the ground up, this article contributes to an ongoing effort to reframe how cities are understood, built, and governed in a time of widening inequality, infrastructural fragmentation, and state withdrawal.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148321790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The unbearable resilience of Medellín: Violent recovery and contested representations of (post-)conflict","authors":"Patrick Naef","doi":"10.1177/00420980261454569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261454569","url":null,"abstract":"This article critically examines the complex and ambiguous relationship between resilience and violence in the recovery of conflict-affected cities. Focusing on Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, it traces its transformation from a hotspot of intense urban conflict to a celebrated hub of tourism and innovation. Once labeled the world’s “murder capital,” Medellín has become a flagship for resilience initiatives, frequently lauded for its recovery from decades of violence. Yet beneath the celebrated narrative of the “Medellín Miracle,” extortion and forced displacement continue to permeate life in marginalized neighborhoods. Everyday violence challenges dominant accounts of postwar success and blurs the boundaries between wartime and the post-conflict period. To unpack these contested dynamics, the article advances a twofold framework—examining the <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">resilience of violence</jats:italic> and the <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">violence of resilience</jats:italic> —as a lens to rethink how urbanization and conflict mutually shape one another. By doing so, it demonstrates how recovery efforts, while promising stability and security, can also reproduce entrenched inequalities, consolidate marginalization, and generate new forms of victimization. By highlighting these tensions, the article contributes to broader debates on the politics of resilience, the afterlives of violence, and the uneven geographies of urban transformation in post-conflict settings.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148321793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Owning modernity: Indigenous architecture, fashion, and the aesthetics of modernity in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia","authors":"Kate Maclean","doi":"10.1177/00420980261448070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261448070","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how popular markets and cultural aesthetics challenge colonial binaries of tradition versus modernity, focusing on La Paz and El Alto during a period of Indigenous political power and economic expansion (2006–2019). Drawing on fieldwork and Bolivian scholarship, I show how two visible formations—Freddy Mamani’s “ <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">cholet</jats:italic> ” buildings and <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">la moda de la chola paceña</jats:italic> —enact plural, <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">ch’ixi</jats:italic> modernities rather than simple incorporations of “tradition” into consumer spectacle. The trends examined demonstrate how popular aesthetic practices disrupt binaries (modern/traditional, rural/urban, gift/commerce), and demonstrate the importance of understanding the institutions which channel capital, as well as cultural dynamics and the power of confidence, shame, and recognition in shaping urban space. I also analyze the institutional reception—in Bolivia and internationally—to show how Indigenous designers reframe what counts as art, expertise, and contemporaneity. The discussion relocates debates on the “Indigenous city” to the Andes and connects them to Latin American work on plurality, livelihoods, baroque economies, and settler-colonial urbanism. Rather than reading architecture and fashion as evidence of a growing consuming middle class, I show how they organize belonging and redistribute visibility in the city on their own terms. The case invites a reworking of urban theory attuned to Indigenous economic and cultural logics and to forms of modernity and contemporaneity that are not derivative of northern trajectories.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148321809","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Informal smart urbanism: A case study of digital resilience in Mathare informal settlement","authors":"Jan Fransen, Erwin van Tuijl, Harrison Kioko Simon, Stephen Ochieng Nyagaya, Samuel Kiriro","doi":"10.1177/00420980261450022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261450022","url":null,"abstract":"Informal smart urbanism is an emerging field that explores how digital technologies shape urban development in contexts marked by informality. We understand informality as a dynamic set of interactions that arise when formal regulations fail to meet people’s needs. Our study analyses digital resilience practices—the everyday ways households respond to shocks through digital technologies. These practices are widespread but often overlooked, especially given the vulnerabilities inherent in informal settings. We explore how repetitive digital practices form extra-legal rules. In Mathare, Kenya, four forms of digital resilience practices emerge: (1) belt tightening: households with low resilience use digital networks to receive digital gifts, replacing non-digital support; (2) maladaptive: digital tools are used in ways that undermine community resilience; (3) adaptive: digital platforms are used to strengthen household resilience in the short term; and (4) transformative: digital technologies systemically improve household resilience in the long term.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148321810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shifting elemental bodies in the city: Towards thermal and daylight justice","authors":"Kavita Ramakrishnan, Casper Laing Ebbensgaard","doi":"10.1177/00420980261453290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261453290","url":null,"abstract":"While thermal comfort and daylight exposure are subjective and context specific, and in some cases even counterpoised, we show how individual and communal efforts to reduce exposure (in the case of heat) or increase exposure (in the case of sunlight) center the elemental as a point of struggle for just urban living and citizenship. The two examples of Delhi and London that we present demonstrate how heat and daylight are encountered in the face of changing climate realities and top-down planning and housing development. With a focus on the asymmetrical vulnerabilities of exposure within thermal and luminous milieu, we contribute to calls for urban justice amidst rapidly changing and unstable climatic futures that demand pressing attention to urban social stratification and livability.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148322006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}