scholarly journals Stuck inside the urban with the dialectical blues again: abstraction and generality in urban theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Paul D Addie
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Internal Relations ◽  
Epistemological Position ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
Vantage Points

Abstract This article discusses how critical urban theory understands generalisation and particularity by unpacking the process of abstraction. It develops an urban interpretation of dialectics through the philosophy of internal relations to: (i) heuristically examine conceptual and political fissures within contemporary urban studies and (ii) critically recalibrate neo-Marxist planetary urban theorising. Examining the conceptual extension, levels of generality and vantage points of our abstractions can assist in constructively negotiating relations between urban difference and generality. The challenge is not which assertions are true based on a given epistemological position, but which abstractions are appropriate to address specific issues, given the range of politics and possibilities each establishes.

Theorizing Regulation-in-City for Homeless People’s Subaltern Strategy and Informality: Societalization, Metabolism, and Classes With(out) Housing

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110205
Author(s):  
Mahito Hayashi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
Urban Metabolism ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Housing Consumption ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory

This paper aims to expand critical urban theory and spatialized political economy through developing a new, broad-based theoretical explanation of homelessness and the informal housing of the deprived in public spaces. After reviewing an important debate in geography, it systematicallyreasserts the relevance of class-related concepts in urban studies and, mobilizing post-determinist notions, it shows how a class-driven theory can inform the emergence of appropriating/differentiating/reconciliating agency from the material bedrock of urban metabolism and its society-integrating effect (societalization). The author weaves an urban diagnostic web of concepts by situating city-dwellers—classes with(out) housing—at the material level of metabolism and then in the sociopolitical dynamic of regulation, finding in the two realms urban class relations (enlisted within societalization) and agency formation (for reregulation, subaltern strategies, and potential rapprochement). The housing classes are retheorized as a composite category of hegemonic dwellers who enjoy housing consumption and whose metabolism thus appears as the normative consumption of public/private spaces. Homeless people are understood as a subaltern class who lacks housing consumption and whose metabolism can produce “housing” out of public spaces, in opposition to a hegemonic urban form practiced by the housing classes. These urban class relations breed homeless–housed divides and homeless regulation, and yet allow for agency’s creative appropriation/differentiation/reconciliation. This paper avoids crude dichotomy, but it argues that critical urban theory can productively use this way of theorization for examining post-determinist urban lifeworlds in relation to the relative fixity of urban form, metabolic circuits, and class relations.

scholarly journals Kulturowa artykulacja nowych idei miejskich

2020 ◽  
pp. 321-338
Author(s):  
Ewa Rewers
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
Cultural Turn

The way in which cultural approach operates though disciplines of knowledge and urban theories is a central theme of this article. If cultural approach in urban studies worked largely through cultural turn ideas in the end of 20th century, recently works through reinterpreted and expanded concept of culture as a structure/infractructure of urban life. Reflecting the crisis of cultural turn in urban theory in 21st century some authors and disciplines became more interested in the study of the urban political economies, urban political ecology and critical urban theory. Research seeking to explore recent urban crisis as a result of climate changes, growing social inequality and lack of solidarity in global scale has unsurprisingly been diverse and varied. Analitically this moment is compelling because it emphasizes the weakness of cultural factors in the process of articulation of a new urban ideas. This, however, raises a question with respect to much of the most visible results of urban studies and urban theory: are its proponents inclined to accept again the offer of cultural oriented urban studies in terms of cultural materialism, eco-criticism, eco-philosophy, ethics and aesthetics? Are they ready to rethink the relationship between economic and extraeconomic causality in the conditions of global multilevel crisis? This article is therefore primarily a theoretical attempt to articulate how urban theory might be moulded by global urbanisation in crisis.

Openings: The Urban Question as a Scale Question?

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
Neil Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
The Core ◽  
Spatial Restructuring ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The City ◽  
Intense Debate ◽  
Geopolitical Context

For over a century, the urban question has generated intense debate on matters of conceptualization, method, and interpretation. Since the 1990s, in the context of debates on post-Fordism, globalization, and urban restructuring, the urban question has been redefined as a question of scale. Why has this scalar redefinition of the urban occurred, and what does this mean for urban theory and research? What are its analytical possibilities and dangers? In what ways does such an approach reframe the long-standing emphasis on the “city” as the core focal point for urban studies? This opening chapter elaborates these questions in intellectual and geopolitical context, thus setting the stage for the explorations of urbanization, state spatial restructuring, and rescaling processes that follow in the rest of the book. This chapter also situates the book’s argument in relation to contemporary debates on abstraction, generalization, comparison, and contextual particularity in critical urban theory.

Making the invisible hyper-visible: Knowledge production and the gendered power nexus in critical urban studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-50
Author(s):  
Margath A. Walker ◽  
Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Cumulative Advantage ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Invisible Colleges ◽  
Degree Of Dominance ◽  
Gendered Power ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
Education Academic ◽  
Insight Into

This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as “invisible colleges”. The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and “double dipping”, or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a concept that has largely escaped attention in urban studies and geography, we highlight the usefulness of visibility as a technology of equity. En route, the paper describes and visualizes some of the impacts of the proliferation of uneven knowledge production through the coalescing of factors such as path dependency, cumulative advantage, expected inequality and the Matthew and Matilda Effects.

Critical Urban Theory versus Critical Urban Studies: A Review Debate

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 1904-1917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Marcuse ◽  
David Imbroscio ◽  
Simon Parker ◽  
Jonathan S. Davies ◽  
Warren Magnusson
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Theory Versus ◽  
Critical Urban Theory

The City-Logic of Resistance: Subverting Urbicide in the Middle East City

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Extreme Variant ◽  
Urban Terrain ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

Most armed conflict today takes place within urban terrain or within an urbanised context. An extreme variant of such armed conflict is violence perpetrated by external state and non-state forces within the city, known as urbicide. Urbicidal violence deliberately strives to kill, discipline or deny the city to its inhabitants by targeting and then reordering the sociomaterial urban assemblage. Civil resistance within urbicidal violence seeks to subvert the emerging alternative sovereign order sought by such forces. It does so by using the inherent logic of the city in order to maintain/restore the community's social cohesion, mitigate the violence, affirm humanity, and claim the right to the city. This paper investigates the city-logic of civil resistance through examples drawn from the recent urbicidal experiences of Middle East cities such as Gaza, Aleppo, Mosul, and Sana'a. Theoretical insights from the conflict resolution literature, critical urban theory, and assemblage thinking inform the argument.

Urban space and the politics of socially engaged art

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 985-1000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilie Sachs Olsen
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
Material Environment ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
Definition Of

This paper interrogates the political potential of socially engaged art within an urban setting. Grounded in Lefebvrian and neo-Marxist critical urban theory, this political potential is examined according to three analytics that mark the definition of ‘politics’ in this context: the (re)configuration of urban space, the (re)framing of a particular sphere of experience and the (re)thinking of what is taken-for-granted. By bringing together literatures from a range of academic domains, these analytics are used to examine 1) how socially engaged art may expand our understanding of the link between the material environment and the production of urban imaginaries and meanings, and 2) how socially engaged art can open up productive ways of thinking about and engaging with urban space.

Current debates in urban theory from a scale perspective: Introducing a scenes approach

Urban Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (8) ◽  
pp. 1487-1497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cary Wu ◽  
Rima Wilkes ◽  
Daniel Silver ◽  
Terry Nichols Clark
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Urban Scenes ◽  
The World ◽  
Geographical Scale ◽  
The City ◽  
Review Current ◽  
Hierarchical Scale

Cities, all over the world, have become more diverse than ever. This poses great challenges to urban studies and theorising. In this article, we review current debates in urban theory through Howitt’s (1998) three-facet conceptualisation of geographical scale and find that urban theorists have high levels of disagreement on the areal (scale as size), the hierarchical (scale as level) as well as the dialectical (scale as relation) aspects of the city. We show that, if urban theorists are to find a common approach to the city, we should contemplate: 1) what cities to study; 2) from which geographical level(s); and 3) how the city relates to other entities. We illustrate how the theory of urban scenes could potentially be used to address these debates in urban theory.

Spatial Justice

2022 ◽  
pp. 41-64
Author(s):  
Salvador Lindquist
Keyword(s):  
Urban Theory ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Participatory Systems ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
University Of Nebraska Lincoln ◽  
Social Environmental ◽  
The University ◽  
Alternative Mapping

Marginalized communities around the world are disproportionately impacted by the distribution of unjust infrastructure and environmental conditions. However, through distributive, procedural, and restorative frameworks, it is possible to teach spatial designers to challenge, inform, and reshape the world toward a more just and equitable future. This chapter delves into the various themes developed as part of the “Spatial Justice” professional elective at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which offers an interdisciplinary perspective on urban studies, urban design, and the roles that social, environmental, and ecological justice play in designing a more just and equitable urbanity. In this course, students explore critical urban theory, justice, counter cartographies, design activism, participatory systems, and spatial agency using alternative mapping methodologies to render legible latent sociospatial asymmetries.

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