Urban StudiesPub Date : 2025-01-09DOI: 10.1177/00420980241303626
Mădălina Mezaroş, Antoine Paccoud, Loretta Lees
{"title":"A ‘gentrification regime’ change: The fiscal roots of buy-to-let gentrification in Dudelange, Luxembourg","authors":"Mădălina Mezaroş, Antoine Paccoud, Loretta Lees","doi":"10.1177/00420980241303626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241303626","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces the notion of the ‘gentrification regime’, which we believe is better able to capture the diversity of gentrification trajectories than the more macro-level notions of gentrification ‘waves’ or ‘stages’. We define a ‘gentrification regime’ as a specific set of relations between producers and consumers of housing made possible by a particular policy and financial context. Empirically, this article tracks the shift from a gentrification regime in which social upscaling is linked to increases in ownership to one that foregrounds the development of the private rental sector. To evidence this shift, we use the full set of property transactions linked to the production and the sale of apartments in the city of Dudelange in Luxembourg between 1970 and 2019 to reconstruct the trajectories of residential projects. We observe the replacement of local developers, responsible for a construction boom in the early 1990s, by national-level developers focusing on locally supported flagship projects targeting investor demand, itself stimulated by national fiscal policies. We witness an investor interest for both new and existing housing, signalling an increased pressure on the housing market, which seems to lead to an incipient (cross-border) exclusionary displacement. The article thus shows that national-level fiscal policy, and not only the deregulation of the private rental sector, can create value gaps that trigger a shift to buy-to-let gentrification. The notion of ‘gentrification regime’ is thus shown to provide a new way to understand the locally and temporally specific processes underlying the diversity of gentrification dynamics we see today.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142940212","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 : 2025-01-07DOI: 10.1177/00420980241298095
Taylor Davey
{"title":"Calculative infrastructures of net zero urban governance: A transformative science-based agenda or reductive territorial project?","authors":"Taylor Davey","doi":"10.1177/00420980241298095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241298095","url":null,"abstract":"The current emphasis on data-driven urban climate governance, while not a new project, is nevertheless evolving as part of a new calculative politics shaped by a net zero agenda. This urban project is realised via the development of calculative infrastructures that deploy more robust measurement fields through which urban action can be made directly relevant to global climate targets. A key premise is that it is possible to project the global scientific concept of net zero onto the ground as a territorial target, which in turn relies on the technical work of balancing emissions. I argue that this often materialises as a reductive governance project based on the accountability of public actors to new carbon balance sheets, wholly detached from a more systemic transition politics. This critical commentary begins by introducing net zero as an urban agenda and explores how calculative infrastructures offer the means of making a consolidated international agenda actionable as an urban territorial governance project. I examine the urban carbon inventory protocol as the foundation to other calculative work and discuss three subsequent infrastructure projects: reporting frameworks and platforms, scenario planning tools and carbon budgets. This calculative project promises a long-term pathway to decarbonisation but is based on a narrow lens that misjudges the more systemic transformation that must take place. The commentary concludes by considering how (or if) net zero as a political framework could support a more radical transition politics.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142935696","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 : 2025-01-02DOI: 10.1177/00420980241301641
Fatima Tassadiq, Jonathan Silver, Yannis Kallianos, Prince K Guma
{"title":"The unending corridor: Critical approaches to the politics, logics and socio-technics of urban corridorisation","authors":"Fatima Tassadiq, Jonathan Silver, Yannis Kallianos, Prince K Guma","doi":"10.1177/00420980241301641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241301641","url":null,"abstract":"Corridors entail and promote pervasive logics of (dis)connectivity. Over the years, corridors have become increasingly predominant across a range of spaces, places and territories. Their prevalence reflects a critical global shift in planning approaches, urban-regional governance, investment trends, circulation regimes and broader urbanisation processes. This article engages with this paradigm shift to critically interrogate the term corridor and its various usages and dynamics, considering its analytical purchase and socio-spatial dynamic for urban studies. We provide a genealogical reading of the term corridor, examining its usage and conceptualisation in different contexts, to ask what these different interpretations and analytical functions of the corridor can offer to urban studies today. Through this critical review, we assert that the meaning and usage of corridors are permeated by heterogeneity and multiplicity that define their current dynamic. This leads us to problematise their linear delineations across space (and time). Thereafter, we offer a typology of different corridors, which helps us to address its analytical valence for urban studies and social science. We conclude by setting out four research directions in scholarship that offer a platform to develop further research imperatives and debates in relation to the growing urban corridorisation and its effects on urbanities, cities and everyday life.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142917072","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 : 2025-01-02DOI: 10.1177/00420980241300417
Gabriele D’Adda, Joanna Kusiak
{"title":"Striking back with the law: Legal struggles against corporate landlords in Barcelona and Berlin","authors":"Gabriele D’Adda, Joanna Kusiak","doi":"10.1177/00420980241300417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241300417","url":null,"abstract":"Corporate landlords have emerged as a new powerful actor of the housing crisis. Fuelled by financialised capital and operating simultaneously at a global and local scale, they have increased pressure on the housing markets. Urban social movements and tenants’ unions are reorganising through news strategies to adapt to new challenges. These include combining resistance on the streets with a strategic use of the law. This paper analyses the legal strategies employed by social movements in Barcelona/Catalonia and Berlin, which include promoting new legislation and creatively utilising existing legal frameworks to introduce forms of rent control and re-municipalisation of social and public housing and to force corporate landlords to offer social rents to vulnerable families instead of evicting them. In Catalonia, we focus on two laws developed by social movements and passed by the Catalan Parliament and Government: Law 24/2015, which introduced mechanisms to avoid evictions, deal with over-indebtedness problems and expand the public housing stock. Law 11/2020, which created a form of rent control, applied to several Catalan cities. In Berlin, we focus on the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen, DWE, which proposed the use of Art. 15 of the German Constitution to ‘socialize’ (i.e. to expropriate and re-municipalise) housing owned by corporate landlords. Focusing on these case studies we intend to critically investigate the impact and results of these new laws and policies. Through this analysis, we aim to contribute to academic and activist debates on the effectiveness, potential and limits of legal strategies for progressive urban change.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142917073","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 : 2024-12-30DOI: 10.1177/00420980241301664
Ana Muniz
{"title":"Cleaning up Los Angeles: The construction and non-resolution of a sanitation infrastructure crisis","authors":"Ana Muniz","doi":"10.1177/00420980241301664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241301664","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing specifically on sanitation services in Los Angeles (LA) City, I examine (1) how various stakeholders socially construct and mobilise around breakdowns in public infrastructure and (2) how technology is used, both practically and politically, to address breakdowns. Through an archival analysis of six years of LA City Council documents and proceedings, supplemented by interviews with four key informants, I demonstrate how, in 2014 Los Angeles, media and political actors constructed a perceived crisis in trash services. In responding to claims of inadequate and biassed services, City sanitation officials blamed technological glitches and deceptive data. To address the crisis, the sanitation department developed a database to track neighbourhood cleanliness and strategically deploy sanitation workers to the areas most in need. Despite local politicians’ and sanitation officials’ presentation of technological innovation as a panacea, the database had little effect and was deactivated after three years. The failure of the database is attributed to two dynamics: first, inverted development wherein LASAN prematurely developed and deployed digital technology before a strong analogue foundation had been established to make the technology functional and efficient; and second, LASAN utilised the cleanliness indexing database as a form of mediatised stopgap technology. Although the database ultimately proved to be of little practical use, LASAN’s public relations strategy around the database effectively intervened in a political crisis and reinforced the agency’s power.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142901892","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 : 2024-12-30DOI: 10.1177/00420980241305322
Benedikt Schmid
{"title":"The spectre of growth in urban transformations: Insights from two Doughnut-oriented municipalities on the negotiation of local development pathways","authors":"Benedikt Schmid","doi":"10.1177/00420980241305322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241305322","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the ambiguous role of economic growth in shaping urban transformations within two municipalities that are implementing the Doughnut Economics (DE) framework. Doughnut Economics proposes a radical reorientation of economic objectives, prioritising human well-being and ecological limits as the primary goals of economic activity. Adopting an ‘agnostic’ stance on growth, DE does not explicitly oppose economic growth, unlike degrowth approaches, but rather side-lines it. This paper explores the practical implications of this agnostic stance by analysing how DE principles and tools are interpreted and applied in real-world contexts. Empirical insights from two small municipalities – Tomelilla (Sweden) and Bad Nauheim (Germany) – highlight a key tension: while decentring but not rejecting growth allows for the engagement of a broad range of actors in urban transformations, the absence of a robust discussion on growth in these growth-oriented settings enables pro-growth perspectives to persist largely unchallenged. Recognising the challenges this poses for urban transformations beyond growth, the paper advocates for an open but decidedly growth-sceptical approach, replacing Doughnut Economics’ ‘growth agnosticism’ with a ‘secularisation of growth’.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"114 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142901893","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 : 2024-12-30DOI: 10.1177/00420980241303832
Gertjan Wijburg, Richard Waldron
{"title":"Cities under state capitalism","authors":"Gertjan Wijburg, Richard Waldron","doi":"10.1177/00420980241303832","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241303832","url":null,"abstract":"State interventions in urban development and planning are not new to state capitalism, even though intensifying ‘muscular’ state responses to urban challenges can now be observed across the entire geopolitical and urban landscape. This viewpoint explores this intensifying connection between state capitalism, the capitalist state and urban governance. It argues that for strategic geopolitical and economic reasons states increasingly govern, regulate, manage and own parts of the urban built environment. However, regulatory intervention in the city cannot be mistaken for a return to the post-war development state which strongly focused on promoting spatial development and industrial policy and protecting social welfarism and labour conditions. Rather, the new state capitalism is about proactive market intervention so that states and their partners can profit from the growth, wealth and revenue that cities have to offer. As for that, this commentary concludes with four avenues for future research at the boundaries of state capitalism and urban governance. Examples from cities in the Global North, Global South and Global East are given to illustrate the broader argument. Shifting geopolitics are also discussed as a driver of state rescaling and reterritorialisation.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142908487","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 : 2024-12-24DOI: 10.1177/00420980241298199
Minjee Kim, Hyojung Lee
{"title":"Upzoning and gentrification: Heterogeneous impacts of neighbourhood-level upzoning in New York City","authors":"Minjee Kim, Hyojung Lee","doi":"10.1177/00420980241298199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241298199","url":null,"abstract":"In light of the calls to relax restrictive density regulations, this paper examines how increasing residential development capacity, i.e. upzoning, may change the demographic, socio-economic and housing characteristics of the affected neighbourhoods. We examine the neighbourhood-level upzonings of New York City to answer this question. We find that upzoning is positively associated with signs of gentrification – upzoned neighbourhoods became whiter, more educated and more affluent in the long run. Upzoning is also associated with increases in housing production, but housing prices also increased. Most importantly, we find that these effects varied significantly by the intensity of upzoning and the pre-upzoning local contexts. Neighbourhoods affected by intense upzonings experienced gentrification more intensely, along with greater housing production, rent growth and housing price appreciation. Black-majority and low-income neighbourhoods experienced gentrification to the greatest extent, while neighbourhoods with high demand for housing saw the greatest increases in housing supply. We discuss different mechanisms of gentrification likely at play for the different types of neighbourhoods.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142879973","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":"On measuring Muslim segregation in urban India","authors":"Arpit Shah, Anish Sugathan, Naveen Bharathi, Andaleeb Rahman, Amit Garg, Deepak Malghan","doi":"10.1177/00420980241296998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241296998","url":null,"abstract":"The spatial segregation of Muslims in urban India is central to their social, economic and political marginalisation. However, the quantitative characterisation of Muslim segregation has suffered from the lack of readily available demographic data at high spatial and temporal resolution. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of accurately quantifying Muslim segregation in urban India using the latest electoral rolls data from Bengaluru (a megapolis of over 13 million residents) and an improved open-source algorithm to identify Muslim names. Our approach provides significant improvements over past efforts in this regard. We introduce two new metrics (diversity and local divergence) to account for substantial intra-city variation in the spatial segregation of Muslims. Our analysis suggests that the threefold ghetto–enclave–mixed taxonomy that the extant literature has quantified for entire towns can be found within large urban agglomerations such as Bengaluru. Our quantitative framework for Muslim segregation helps uncover the complex relationship between segregation and the ghettoisation of Muslims in urban India. Our measurement framework uses publicly available data and can be applied to study segregation patterns across urban India.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142869840","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 : 2024-12-19DOI: 10.1177/00420980241295935
Leonie Büttner, Nele Kress
{"title":"(Re)defining the smart city at national level? Coexisting narratives of urban sustainability governance in Germany","authors":"Leonie Büttner, Nele Kress","doi":"10.1177/00420980241295935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241295935","url":null,"abstract":"While the question of how the Smart City (SC) concept is mobilised at global and local levels is well researched, few studies have focused on the national level. In this article, we seek to better understand the role of the national level regarding the embedding and creation of SCs. More specifically, we explore the German Smart Cities Dialogue Platform, established by the German government in 2016 as a place where ways of thinking about and acting on the SC are produced and stabilised. Drawing on key concepts of governmentality, we analyse dominant narratives of the SC in Germany, focusing on how the national SC discourse shapes the governance of urban sustainability. We show that the national level in Germany plays a decisive role in embedding and creating the SC, as it mediates between globally prevailing ideas of the SC and local realities. By linking the SC to nationally prevailing values, norms and political cultures such as sustainability, the common good, civil rights and digital sovereignty, a corrective to globally dominant techno-euphoric narratives of the SC is created. At the same time, the (re)definition at the national level promotes an ecological modernisation approach to sustainable urban development to the exclusion of alternative visions of urban sustainability pathways.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142869842","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}