Urban StudiesPub Date : 2024-07-27DOI: 10.1177/00420980241262197
Jason Hackworth, Prentiss Dantzler
{"title":"Racial capitalism in urban studies: From spaces of victimisation to spaces of benefit","authors":"Jason Hackworth, Prentiss Dantzler","doi":"10.1177/00420980241262197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241262197","url":null,"abstract":"The burgeoning growth of racial capitalism work within urban studies (RCUS) has garnered considerable attention. In this critical commentary, we embark on an examination of existing scholarship to ascertain its theoretical relevance within this domain. Our inquiry reveals a predominant focus on the plight of individuals ensnared in the web of everyday racial capitalism. The existing body of work predominantly directs its gaze towards what we term ‘spaces of victimisation’, while largely neglecting those who derive advantages from this system. Transcending from the study of victimisation to the exploration of spaces characterised by benefit presents formidable challenges. We consider some of the challenges to making the leap from spaces of victimisation to spaces of benefit: the routineness of benefit, the scale(s) of benefit, and the remoteness of benefit. In sum, we suggest how the application of RCUS might confront these multifaceted challenges, offering a unique vantage point for critical analysis.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141794900","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 : 2024-07-27DOI: 10.1177/00420980241262705
David A McDonald
{"title":"(De)Financing remunicipalisation","authors":"David A McDonald","doi":"10.1177/00420980241262705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241262705","url":null,"abstract":"One of the primary impediments to the realisation and success of remunicipalisation can be financing. Not all remunicipalisations require additional funding, but the costs of bringing services back in-house can be enormous, preventing remunicipalisation efforts from getting off the ground and constraining what is possible once in place. This article discusses the conditions under which financing is necessary for remunicipalisation and examines a variety of (potential) sources of funding. It compares the financial needs of ‘pragmatic’ versus ‘transformative’ remunicipalisations and discusses the availability and suitability of different sources of financing for each. The paper also asks whether remunicipalisation provides an opportunity to ‘definancialise’ public services, exploring the pros and cons of different funding options in this regard, with a focus on the potential for public banks to play a role in reducing the influence of private finance in the public arena.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141794935","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 : 2024-07-25DOI: 10.1177/00420980241265050
Saeed Ahmad
{"title":"Book review: Streets in Motion: The Making of Infrastructure, Property, and Political Culture in Twentieth Century Calcutta","authors":"Saeed Ahmad","doi":"10.1177/00420980241265050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241265050","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141764136","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 : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.1177/00420980241257392
Tali Hatuka
{"title":"A conceptual framework for understanding neighbourhoods in the digital age","authors":"Tali Hatuka","doi":"10.1177/00420980241257392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241257392","url":null,"abstract":"Digital platforms are a central infrastructure that has dramatically changed our daily lives. Like any other urban infrastructure and amenity, the digital platform has a heterogeneous influence on social groups. Studies exploring the influence of the digital on the mundane tend to focus on users, their socioeconomic status and their digital skills. However, digitisation is not an exogenous force; rather, it relates to culture and place. The departure point of this article is to conceptualise the idea of neighbourhood in the digital age, which offers a path towards understanding the role of the digital in our daily lives in relation to places. The article starts by discussing the neighbourhood and digitisation, addressing gaps and links that connect these themes. This discussion is followed by presentation of a framework linking the material with the virtual in understanding neighbourhoods. This framework is based on gathering data on four key issues: spatial configuration, digital infrastructure, demographic profile and digital participation in a neighbourhood. Jointly, these four issues are viewed as the means to contextualise and expand the way we think about the interplay between infrastructures and the agency of the neighbourhood’s inhabitants.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755365","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 : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.1177/00420980241257148
Fredrik W Andersson, Selcan Mutgan, Axel Norgren, Karl Wennberg
{"title":"Seeking opportunity or socio-economic status? Housing and school choice in Sweden","authors":"Fredrik W Andersson, Selcan Mutgan, Axel Norgren, Karl Wennberg","doi":"10.1177/00420980241257148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241257148","url":null,"abstract":"Residential choices and school choices are intimately connected in school systems where school admission relies on proximity rules. In countries with universal school choice systems, however, it remains an open question whether families’ residential mobility is tied to the choice of their children’s school, and with what consequences. Using administrative data on all children approaching primary-school age in Sweden, we study to what extent families’ financial and socio-economic background affects mobility between neighbourhoods and the characteristics of schools chosen by moving families. Our findings show that families do utilise the housing market as an instrument for school choice over the year preceding their firstborn child starting school. However, while families who move do ‘climb the social ladder’ by moving to neighbourhoods with more households of higher socio-economic status, their chosen schools do not appear to be of higher academic quality compared to those their children would otherwise have attended.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755364","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 : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.1177/00420980241256905
Sören Petermann
{"title":"Preference for internet at home in a disadvantaged neighbourhood","authors":"Sören Petermann","doi":"10.1177/00420980241256905","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241256905","url":null,"abstract":"Although most households are equipped with digital information and communication technologies (DICT), a significant digital divide remains in internet access at home along income and digital native/immigrant status. Previous research has mainly investigated whether this digital inequality is attributable to constraints such as technological availability or financial resources. This article examines the extent to which digital inequality of internet access at home is preference-driven by comparing internet preference with other housing preferences and investigating the effect heterogeneity of social status on internet preference. We analyse a dataset comprising 131 residents of a disadvantaged neighbourhood in Bochum, Germany. This neighbourhood provides a suitable setting, as internet access is available throughout the area but varies between individual households. Using a factorial survey with housing vignettes, we assess the importance of internet preference. This research design circumvents many of the difficulties in measuring housing preferences, such as unrealistic wishful thinking, and facilitates the investigation of effect heterogeneity in terms of social status characteristics. The results show that the preference for internet access at home is comparable to that of other housing amenities and does not vary according to age, income or the presence of children. The findings reinforce the importance of the financial constraint-driven causes of the digital divide.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755369","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 : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.1177/00420980241256821
Jose Carpio-Pinedo, Jesús López-Baeza
{"title":"Castro, Soho, Chueca, Le Marais. An international approach to queer urban spaces of symbolic capital accumulation","authors":"Jose Carpio-Pinedo, Jesús López-Baeza","doi":"10.1177/00420980241256821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241256821","url":null,"abstract":"LGBTQ+ neighbourhoods and venues in our cities have fulfilled many vital functions for LGBTQ+ people and for society as a whole. Generally identified through the concentration of consumption spaces that host meetings between LGBTQ+ people, they have a great symbolic value in the fight for their rights and against intolerance. At a time when doubts arise about their future, there are far fewer spatial, quantitative and systematic analyses of these concentration patterns, especially from an international and comparative approach to the phenomenon. The digitisation of our daily lives generates big data that make possible avenues of research that were hitherto impossible, not only in detail and extent, but also in the nature of the questions to answer. In this article, we analyse Foursquare location-based social big data to quantify and spatialise clustering patterns of queer places and symbolic capital in four LGBTQ+ neighbourhoods (Castro in San Francisco, Soho in London, Chueca in Madrid and Le Marais in Paris) and take similar spaces with no LGBTQ+ identity as a reference. In doing so, the greater accumulation of symbolic capital in LGBTQ+ spaces is revealed and measured in these four cities. In future, similar studies could capture trends like the gentrification of these environments, to help policymakers make data-driven decisions to promote more inclusive and diverse cities.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755366","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 : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.1177/00420980241258297
Julia Gabriele Harten, Geoff Boeing
{"title":"Access to the exclusive city: Home sharing as an affordable housing strategy","authors":"Julia Gabriele Harten, Geoff Boeing","doi":"10.1177/00420980241258297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241258297","url":null,"abstract":"Home sharing, particularly via online platforms, is becoming a mainstream housing strategy as social processes evolve and housing costs rise. Recent research has studied shared rentals as a modality for students and kin-based households, as one strategy among diversifying pathways to housing and as a social phenomenon. However, we still know little about whether it actually creates opportunities for home seekers in unaffordable markets. Analysing online rental listings in Los Angeles, we find that shared rentals are both more affordable and more widely available across diverse neighbourhoods than traditional whole-unit rentals. Shared rentals have historically been understudied due to their limited data trail, but they offer important entryways into unaffordable markets. We argue for shared housing research to shift its traditional focus away from students and young adults and towards a broader exploration of the diverse populations that may benefit from or depend on shared housing.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755368","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 : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.1177/00420980241255198
Charles Williams, Mark Pendras
{"title":"Questioning pandemic recovery: A regional second city perspective","authors":"Charles Williams, Mark Pendras","doi":"10.1177/00420980241255198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241255198","url":null,"abstract":"The Covid-19 pandemic unsettled many assumptions about cities and urban life. Even discounting media fears about urban ‘collapse’, the pandemic and its aftermath have led to real uncertainties about the trajectory of urban development. While the struggles of ‘superstar’ cities in the Global North have attracted significant attention, here we shift focus onto the experiences of regional second cities in an attempt to capture a different perspective. In doing so, we avoid both the sensationalism of ‘doom loop’ projections that herald the end of major cities and the uncritical embrace of new ‘opportunities’ for peripheral cities in the wake of pandemic turmoil. Instead, we offer a more critical view that acknowledges some new possibilities while highlighting both their constrained parameters and the related threat of regional gentrification. As cities around the country begin to recover from the turmoil of pandemic disruption, we accordingly question the applicability and consequences of some of the more prominent recovery strategies beyond the context of major cities and suggest careful consideration of alternative development paths for regional second cities. To illustrate the regional second city experience, we explore recent outcomes in Tacoma, Washington, where the city’s post-pandemic development strategy embraces a reliance on luxury residential growth and associated consumer amenities, defined in relation to the dominant neighbouring city of Seattle. Cautioning over working-class displacement, regional gentrification and other vulnerabilities associated with this version of recovery, we conclude by looking at emerging housing activism in Tacoma for insights into how the present moment might generate new political organising for more equitable urban development.","PeriodicalId":51350,"journal":{"name":"Urban Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141755443","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}