Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-09-16DOI: 10.1177/00420980261481387
Anthony Macedo, João de Abreu e Silva, Patricia C. Melo
{"title":"The effect of working from home on commuting duration: Evidence for Lisbon metropolitan area","authors":"Anthony Macedo, João de Abreu e Silva, Patricia C. Melo","doi":"10.1177/00420980261481387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261481387","url":null,"abstract":"According to the Portuguese Labour Force Survey (PLFS), in the first quarter of 2024, 17.9% of the total workforce in Portugal and 32.1% in Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA) worked from home at least once per week. We use longitudinal microdata for residents in the LMA from the PLFS to study the relation between working from home (WFH) and one-way commuting duration. Worker-level regressions for the period between the second quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2024, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, suggest that compared with non-WFH workers, working from home 1 day per week is associated with a 4.9% increase in commuting duration. The estimated effect rises to 8.8% for 2 days per week and is around 6% for 3 and 4 days per week. These findings hold even after carrying out different robustness checks.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148979504","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}
Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-09-12DOI: 10.1177/00420980261477575
Hilary Ansah, Yongmei Lu
{"title":"Gentrification and foodscapes: An integrative review of neighborhood change and food access","authors":"Hilary Ansah, Yongmei Lu","doi":"10.1177/00420980261477575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261477575","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents a purposive integrative review of research published since 2000 examining the dynamics of food environments and residents’ experiences of food access in relation to urban gentrification. The review synthesizes findings on how food environments and gentrification processes interact and how these interactions influence access for different groups. Guided by a realist Context–Mechanism–Outcome framework, the analysis identifies recurring mechanisms across diverse contexts, focusing on how food establishments function as drivers and signals of neighborhood change, how foodscape transformations create uneven access across demographic groups, and how communities respond. From an initial pool of 1353 publications, 40 empirical and theoretical studies were selected through a multi-step screening process. Four pathways emerge that clarify the mechanisms linking food retail transformations and neighborhood change in gentrifying areas. Symbolic displacement describes situations where new food spaces signal the beginning of customer switch before economic displacement occurs. Economic exclusion captures how food establishments contribute to rising costs of living and the pricing out of long-term residents. Racialized commodification refers to the appropriation and marketing of communities’ foodways to wealthier, predominantly white newcomers. Community resistance encompasses adaptations such as ethnic food stores and cooperatives that support resilience but may also unintentionally accelerate displacement or serve incoming residents. The review provides a framework for understanding how gentrification shapes food access and highlights opportunities for future research, including mixed-method approaches that capture these dynamics holistically. Interventions that strengthen community agency while addressing structural, economic, and cultural pressures may help preserve equitable food access in neighborhoods undergoing gentrification.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"8 2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148947026","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}
Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-09-10DOI: 10.1177/00420980261474804
Santi Furnari,Christof Brandtner,Khodr Badih
{"title":"Organizational governance and bridging activity places: What makes a park a travel destination across neighborhoods?","authors":"Santi Furnari,Christof Brandtner,Khodr Badih","doi":"10.1177/00420980261474804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261474804","url":null,"abstract":"Research on urban inequality and mobility has focused on individual-level activity spaces (i.e., the set of places where a person carries out her routine activities), showing that such spaces can alleviate neighborhood-level segregation. We know less about why specific places in an activity space become travel destinations across distant neighborhoods, thus mixing different people and counter-acting neighborhood-level segregation. In this article, we address this gap by developing the concept of activity place —a bounded location in an activity space—and by investigating the factors influencing a place’s ability to become a travel destination across distances, thus bridging neighborhoods. We conceive activity places as constructed by organizations and focus on a hitherto under-studied factor—that is, the governance of the organizations managing an activity place. Findings from the analysis of smartphone visitor data on a sample of 3080 parks in the largest 120 USA cities suggest that organizational governance does influence a place’s attractiveness across distances, over and above the place’s physical characteristics. Notably, public-private governance positively affects a place’s attractiveness to distant visitors, and such effect is amplified by the diversity of programmed events. We discuss the implications and limitations of our findings for the organization of bridging activity places and urban parks.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148934059","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}
Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-09-05DOI: 10.1177/00420980261477897
Adele Grenz, Milena von Kutzleben, Kathrin Boerner
{"title":"Old age in urban discourse: The age-friendly city and the ambiguities of later life","authors":"Adele Grenz, Milena von Kutzleben, Kathrin Boerner","doi":"10.1177/00420980261477897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261477897","url":null,"abstract":"Population ageing and urbanisation have intensified efforts to design cities that support later life. The World Health Organization’s Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) framework promotes autonomy, participation, and health, yet it remains unclear how advanced old age and vulnerability are positioned within this agenda. This qualitative document analysis draws on situational analysis to examine how later life is constructed across international, national (Germany), and municipal AFCC policy documents. Using situational, social worlds/arenas, and positional maps, the analysis reconstructs actors, institutional logics, and discursive tensions. Ageing is predominantly framed as a functional and governable condition centred on activation, prevention, and environmental adaptation. Across governance levels, policy discourse separates activity from care: activation narratives cluster around early later life, while frailty and dependency are largely confined to specialised care systems. Advanced old age and health-socio-economic inequalities remain weakly integrated into the dominant urban imaginary. The article demonstrates how age-friendly urbanism constructs later life as active and locally governable, while structural vulnerabilities are only partially addressed, informing more inclusive and targeted approaches to urban ageing policy.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148899622","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}
Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-09-05DOI: 10.1177/00420980261480968
Nicola De Martini Ugolotti
{"title":"Sounds of Asylum Bristol: Musicking and secretly public commoning in a city of sanctuary and violence","authors":"Nicola De Martini Ugolotti","doi":"10.1177/00420980261480968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261480968","url":null,"abstract":"This paper contributes to urban studies debates on the commons-as-practice by examining the “secretly public” musicking spaces co-created by people seeking asylum and allies in Bristol, UK—a city where the language of sanctuary coexists with state-sanctioned forms of slow violence and uneven processes of urban regeneration. The analysis draws on 18 months of ethnographic and participatory research with a group of around 60 men and women of diverse origins, many seeking asylum, who convened weekly music sessions. Building on perspectives that show how sound shapes the sensing, sharing, and reconfiguration of urban space, the study attends to the sonic and affective registers, urban geographies, and (in)visible spaces of sociality that emerged from the group. It argues that “public secrecy” constitutes a condition of possibility for commoning in cities shaped by sanctuary initiatives and state enforcement infrastructures. The paper conceptualises a secretly public commons as a collective practice that composes publicness through thresholds of visibility, generating shared affective, social and material resources while exceeding normative frames of (in)visibility and (un)deservingness that dominate public narratives of asylum. In doing so, this paper extends debates on the urban commons, sanctuary, and sonic urbanism by showing how sonic practices reconfigure public presence under intersecting forms of dispossession, and by using ethnographic and participatory approaches to address what tends to go unnoticed in studies on urban commons and sanctuary urbanism.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"386 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148899617","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}
Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-08-31DOI: 10.1177/00420980261476524
Julian Formella
{"title":"Parallel paths: Binary conceptions of the social in the study of motorway infrastructures","authors":"Julian Formella","doi":"10.1177/00420980261476524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261476524","url":null,"abstract":"Motorway infrastructures are fundamental to the organized movement and metabolic reproduction of contemporary societies. They are inextricably entwined with globalizing economies, as they are integral for road freight or a prerequisite for mass car ownership. Given their centrality, motorways have been extensively studied; however, dominant research often reduces the social construction of these systems to partial insights. Within “objectivist orthodoxies,” motorways are treated as delineable technical systems serving a pre-defined economic logic. Conversely, “ethnographic subjectivisms” challenge these orthodoxies by focusing on everyday practices. Yet both approaches isolate the motorway either as a static entity or as a mere matter of individual perception, thereby obscuring the internal relations between state and capital. To offer a more comprehensive conceptualization, I draw on a dialectical methodology. I argue that motorways must be understood as a concrete universal, a socio-material system practically produced within capitalist social relations and a global network of nation-states. Accordingly, local practices are neither independent of these structures nor strict reflections of them; instead, they constitute a field of metabolic struggle where the violence of capital and statehood can be revealed and challenged.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148858789","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}
Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-08-31DOI: 10.1177/00420980261475829
Michele Acuto
{"title":"Holding open the urban imagination","authors":"Michele Acuto","doi":"10.1177/00420980261475829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261475829","url":null,"abstract":"Urban studies has repeatedly depended on imaginative acts, even if its imaginative capacities have often remained implicit, unevenly distributed, or overshadowed by explanatory commitments to understanding cities as they are rather than as they might become. Can urban imagination still sustain urban futures in a time of geopolitical fragmentation, democratic uncertainty, and academic precarity? This debate paper introduces the special issue on <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">Urban Imaginations and Urban Futures</jats:italic> by proposing a conceptual and methodological reorientation of urban studies around the relationship between imagination and futures thinking. It argues that urban imagination should be understood not simply as a representational domain but as an enabling infrastructure through which urban futures are made thinkable, actionable, and contestable. Drawing on recent debates on crisis, infrastructure, urban uncertainty, southern praxis, and computational urbanism, the paper advances three propositions. First, imagination is conceptualized as a distributed capacity embedded across diverse urban sciences and practices, from everyday urbanism and architectural design to engineering and computational modelling. Second, fragments are proposed as methodological resources that enable interdisciplinary dialogue while sustaining epistemic plurality and critical engagement. Third, imagination is positioned as a critical means of reclaiming resilience from its technocratic uses by expanding the generative capacity of urban scholarship to engage uncertainty, plurality, and transformation, thereby helping keep urban futures open.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148858790","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}
Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-08-31DOI: 10.1177/00420980261475597
Gabriel Schwake
{"title":"The military spatial complex: A framework of neoliberal urban power relations","authors":"Gabriel Schwake","doi":"10.1177/00420980261475597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261475597","url":null,"abstract":"This paper develops the concept of the <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">military–spatial complex</jats:italic> (MSC) to analyze how armed forces increasingly shape neoliberal urban development. While military urbanism has often been studied through the visible apparatus of surveillance and security, the MSC highlights subtler forms of militarization: the embedding of martial authority into civilian urban life through planning, land governance, and property development. Correspondingly, this paper argues that militaries today operate as hybrid actors, part sovereign apparatus, part market developer, transforming their privileged access to land and resources into mechanisms of accumulation and control. Drawing on Israel, Egypt, and Serbia, the paper demonstrates how the MSC operates across different political economies and institutional configurations. Whether the relocation of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bases and the militarization of the Israeli south, the development of the new administrative capital in Cairo and the military-led slum clearance programs, or the housing projects for military personnel alongside the rearrangement of military sites in Serbia, these cases reflect a broader reconfiguration of state power under neoliberalism, in which rather than retreating, states restructure authority through military-led urbanism. Accordingly, the MSC captures this paradoxical shift, in which armed forces seemingly demilitarize yet extend influence via civilianized urban mechanisms. Therefore, it offers a framework for understanding the ways in which neoliberalism emerged not as an externally imposed transition, but rather from internal power relations.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148858791","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}
Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-08-27DOI: 10.1177/00420980261473102
Jennifer S. Minner, Courtney Bower, Felix Heisel, Wyeth Augustine-Marceil
{"title":"Building a circular construction economy in New York State: A multi-level perspective study of prospects for circular cities and statewide socio-technological transition","authors":"Jennifer S. Minner, Courtney Bower, Felix Heisel, Wyeth Augustine-Marceil","doi":"10.1177/00420980261473102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261473102","url":null,"abstract":"Globally, construction and demolition of the built environment contribute significantly to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and generate vast amounts of waste. In New York State, buildings and waste management rank as the first and fourth largest GHG emitters, collectively responsible for 43% of annual emissions. To address this, a network of academic labs and community leaders developed a vision for deconstruction and building material reuse, aiming to foster a circular construction economy. The network and the vision it promotes represent growing niches of innovation against a backdrop of COVID-19 and pandemic recovery, uneven urban development pressures, and climate and political change. Using the multi-level perspective (MLP) framework, this article explores how micro-level innovations in New York State can be scaled and institutionalized, and identifies actionable pathways and policy recommendations for advancing a circular construction economy. The result is a study of the roles of state and local governments, private industry, nonprofits, and citizens in creating a new socio-technological configuration. The authors argue that New York’s circular construction initiatives, viewed through the MLP lens, are transitioning from experimentation to early stabilization, with the potential for wider diffusion. The article further examines the implications of scale and multi-level governance in advancing these innovations.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148821091","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}
Urban StudiesPub Date : 2026-08-24DOI: 10.1177/00420980261474813
Dorothee Riese, Simon Lenhart, Benjamin Gröbe, Renate Reiter, Stephan Grohs
{"title":"Only for the big players? How small and medium-sized cities seek recognition and agency in the European Union","authors":"Dorothee Riese, Simon Lenhart, Benjamin Gröbe, Renate Reiter, Stephan Grohs","doi":"10.1177/00420980261474813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261474813","url":null,"abstract":"Cities are affected by the European Union (EU) in multiple ways, for example when using funding or implementing EU legislation. However, they need not be just passive recipients of rules or money: cities are increasingly recognised as an integral part of the EU as illustrated by the Lisbon Treaty’s new provisions on local government or programmatic developments like the Urban Agenda for the EU. But while research has focused on large cities in the EU, showing how they develop agency, for example, through lobbying for their interests, we know much less about small and medium-sized cities. Therefore, this paper asks how and under what conditions smaller cities, too, develop agency, despite less favourable conditions compared to their large counterparts. To answer these questions, the paper relies on a concept of agency that includes agency claims on the one hand and recognition of these claims on the other. Furthermore, it takes the concepts of <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">uploading</jats:italic> and <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">horizontal networking</jats:italic> from Europeanisation literature to distinguish who is addressed by agency claims. Empirically, the paper focuses on German cities, drawing on a quantitative survey and eight qualitative case studies (cities). The analysis shows that small and medium-sized cities are only partly engaged in uploading activities, but very active in horizontal networking. Through our theoretical lens, horizontal networking can be interpreted as a source of recognition that is often considered missing in uploading activities. By linking Europeanisation and city agency literatures, we also contribute to the broader literature on cities’ international agency.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2026-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148809902","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}