scholarly journals Inviting the stranger in: Intimacy, digital technology and new geographies of encounter

2020 ◽  
pp. 030913252096188
Author(s):  
Regan Koch ◽  
Sam Miles
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Economic Opportunity ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Conditional Relations ◽  
The Stranger

Digital technologies are profoundly reshaping how people relate to unknown others, yet urban studies and geographies of encounter have yet to adequately incorporate these changes into theory and research. Building on a longstanding concern with stranger encounters in social and urban theory, this paper explores how digital technology brings new possibilities and challenges to urban life. With examples ranging from GPS-enabled apps for sex and dating to sharing economy platforms that facilitate the peer-to-peer exchange of services, new practices mediated by digital technology are making many stranger encounters a matter of choice rather than chance, and they are often private as much as they are public. This paper examines these changes to develop a conceptualisation of stranger intimacy as a potentially generative form of encounter involving conditional relations of openness among the unacquainted, through which affective structures of knowing, providing, befriending or even loving are built. We offer an agenda for researching stranger intimacies to better understand their role in generating new kinds of social and economic opportunity, overcoming constraints of space and place, as well as generating dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, privilege and disadvantage. The paper concludes by considering what critical attention to these encounters can offer geographical scholarship and how an emphasis on digital mediation can push research in productive directions.

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.

Postcolonial Urbanism

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Ren
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Urban Research ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Way

Postcolonial urbanism encompasses a range of scholarship in urban studies that engages with postcolonial theory, postcoloniality as a historico-political status, and postcolonial criticism of urban theory. There is not a singular concept of postcolonialism. A rudimentary definition of postcolonialism as the study of the lasting effects of being a former colony confines it to a historical category, which dissonant voices have largely displaced. In place of a conceptual uniformity, postcolonial urbanism can rather be understood as a kind of intervention, in terms of both the places and issues at the core of its concern, as well as an intervention into the way that urban research and theory is being generated. Building on postcolonial thought from the 20th century that emerged from a period of decolonial and anticolonial political struggle and largely defined by key scholarship in the humanities, postcolonial urbanism translates these concepts and questions for urban space, urban research and urban theory. The analysis of power, representation, and identity is transmuted for a spatial analysis of urbanization, urban development, and urban life. This is particularly evident in the postcolonial scholarship on urban planning and architecture, which situates the built environment within a contextual postcoloniality or applies a postcolonial lens to analyzing the cultures of planning or architecture. Moreover, the critiques of discipline that postcolonial theory espouses are also adopted in postcolonial urbanism in the watershed of scholarship on issues around knowledge production in urban studies. These have spurred debates around the parochialism of urban theory, the nature of theory, and the comparative approaches that could possibly enrich theoretical developments. In parallel to these epistemological debates is a rich scholarship with a long tradition in area studies that continue to delve into the question of alternative urbanisms, seeing the postcolonial world as determined category of shared experience, which may help generate various forms of “Southern” urbanisms. The key question here is whether postcolonial urbanism serves more as a theoretical intervention into the way that urban theory is generated, or an empirical intervention into the sites and concerns of urban theory. The scholarship shows that these positions are not easily extricated from one another. Out of this lively debate has emerged an outpouring of influential conceptual developments particularly in theorizing urban everyday life around topics like informality, periphery, grey space, waste, and utopia.

Post-digital prosumption and the sharing economy of space: The pay-per-minute cafe

2021 ◽  
pp. 146954052110220
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kviat
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Pricing Policy ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Brick And Mortar ◽  
Physical Spaces

Although prosumption and the sharing economy are currently at the cutting edge of consumer culture research, little attempt has been made to explore the theoretical relationship between these concepts and approach them with a pluralistic, dynamic, nuanced and ethnographically informed lens moving beyond the dichotomies of capitalism versus anti-capitalism, rhetoric versus reality, exploitation versus empowerment and traditional versus digital consumer culture. This article addresses these gaps by focusing on the phenomenon of pay-per-minute cafes – physical spaces inspired by digital culture and meant to apply its principles in the brick-and-mortar servicescape. Drawing on a multi-site, multi-method case study of the world’s first pay-per-minute cafe franchise, the article shows a multitude of ways in which prosumption and the sharing economy, both shaped by different configurations of organisational culture, physical design, food offer and pricing policy, are conceived, interpreted and experienced by the firms and customers across the franchise and argues that conflicts and contradictions arising from this diversity cannot be reduced to the narrative of consumer exploitation. Finally, while both prosumption and the sharing economy are typically defined by the use of digital platforms, this article makes a case for a post-digital approach to consumer culture research, looking into the cultural impact of digital technology on traditional servicescapes.

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.

The Sharing Economy: Rhetoric and Reality

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet B. Schor ◽  
Steven P. Vallas
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Environmental Benefits ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Carbon Footprints ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Intellectual Foundations ◽  
User Trust

The sharing economy is transforming economies around the world, entering markets for lodging, ride hailing, home services, and other sectors that previously lacked robust person-to-person alternatives. Its expansion has been contentious and its meanings polysemic. It launched with a utopian discourse promising economic, social, and environmental benefits, which critics have questioned. In this review, we discuss its origins and intellectual foundations, internal tensions, and appeal for users. We then turn to impacts, focusing on efforts to generate user trust through digital means, tendency to reconfigure and exacerbate class and racial inequalities, and failure to reduce carbon footprints. Though the transformative potential of the sharing economy has been limited by commercialization and more recently by the pandemic, its kernel insight—that digital technology can support logics of reciprocity—retains its relevance even now. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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.

Measuring Ambient Urbanities

2019 ◽  
pp. 252-280
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Exploratory Case Study ◽  
Quality Of Urban Life

The purpose of this chapter is to explore mechanisms and potentials for measuring ambient urbanities. This work advances the ambient metrics concept as a way of shedding light on the evolving nature of measures, standards, and indices required by more dynamic, adaptive, and aware environments, characteristic of smart and responsive cities. In the form of ambient metrics, measures are sought that support more informed city experiences, increased engagement and participation, and improved quality of urban life. The research literature for smart city metrics, standards, and indices is explored in this chapter enabling identification of issues, controversies, and problems. Using an exploratory case study approach, solutions and recommendations are advanced. This chapter makes a contribution to the research literature for smart city metrics, standards, and indices; the evolving of urban theory for 21st century cities; and urban theory in formulating a conceptual framework for rethinking measures for smarter urbanities.

Introduction to David Harvey

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Swyngedouw ◽  
David Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Original Writings ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Academic Mission ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
Racial Exclusion ◽  
Intellectual Influence ◽  
The City ◽  
Us Cities

David Harvey is one of the few global public intellectuals whose lifelong political and academic mission is the search for a more genuinely humanizing geography of everyday urban life. His relentless and thought-provoking engagement with the realities and contradictions of contemporary capitalist urbanization has long inspired those seeking to fight for an urban life free from the practices of social, political, and racial exclusion and the divisions that have been the hallmark of modern urbanization throughout the world. Harvey is one of the urban geographers whose intellectual influence has reached most widely across disciplines. With a Ph.D. in Geography from Cambridge University, he embarked on a lifelong intellectual and political trajectory that has transformed the ways in which urban theorists approach the capitalist city and in which activists seek urban, social, and political change. Already noted for the landmark publication in 1969 of Explanation in Geography, his epistemological and political attention soon turned to a more radical and Marxist understanding of the urban. This epistemological shift coincided with his transatlantic migration to the Johns Hopkins University, where he taught Marxist urban theory for the next fifteen years or so. The deep injustices that had just come to the boil in rioting US cities, combined with a rediscovery of the power of historical materialist Marxist analysis, resulted in the publication of Social Justice and the City (1973). Harvey’s theorization of the city, deeply embedded in the original writings of Marx, also draws on the radical urban theories and politics pioneered by Henri Lefebvre. For Harvey, cities are—and have always been—highly differentiated spaces of activity, excitement, and pleasure. They are arenas for the pursuit of unoppressed activities and desires, but also ones replete with systematic power, danger, oppression, domination, and exclusion. Exploring the tensions between this dialectical twin of emancipation and disempowerment has been at the centre of Harvey’s theoretical and political concerns. Questions of justice cannot be seen independently from the urban condition, not only because most of the world’s population now lives in cities, but above all because the city condenses the manifold tensions and contradictions that infuse modern life.

Urbanising climate justice: constructing scales and politicising difference

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kian Goh
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
Change Climate ◽  
Historical Difference

Abstract Central debates in urban studies often appear to neglect the most urgent issues confronting cities and regions. Discourses on generalised urban processes, historical difference and planetary urbanisation rarely take, as a primary object of analysis, intertwined global climate change and urban change. Climate change is often considered generalised, affecting everyone everywhere. But its impacts are unevenly distributed and experienced. It links generalised processes and particular impacts and actions with implications for urban theory. This article builds on theories of multiscalar research and the politics of location to develop a conceptual framework of urban change through the lens of climate justice.

Paris

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Newman
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Urban History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Capital City ◽  
French Language ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban Issues

Paris is the capital city of France and center of the Île-de-France region, Europe’s second-largest urban agglomeration. Paris is a globally important hub for finance, education, culture, and the arts, and by some measures it is the world’s most visited international tourist destination. The city’s importance for the field of urban studies is due primarily to (a) its present significance as a global city, and, to a greater extent, (b) its historical importance as a place where a particular version of modernity emerged that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, would heavily influence the design and cultural landscapes of cities around the world. For this reason, the urban history of Paris exerts a broad influence in the fields of planning, geography, and architectural history, as well as in public health, the history of science and technology, art history, and literature. Indeed, research on Paris stands out among other cities for the degree to which scholars in the humanities have sought to engage with urban issues. This is due to the fact that a large proportion of the artistic and cultural output associated with Paris ruminates about the nature of urban life itself. This bibliography has been written for a broad Anglophone readership; it therefore privileges scholarship in English. English translations of important French works have been supplied wherever possible. However, in an effort to balance accessibility with rigor, some French-language scholarship is included as well. In several cases, English-language publications by prominent French scholars have been supplied that may not be the best representation of these scholars’ work, but such citations will nevertheless serve to introduce these important figures to an Anglophone audience. Readers should be warned that the small number of French-language citations included here are far from comprehensive, and are primarily intended to round out the bibliography for those Anglophone scholars who read French. The bibliography is organized under the three broad headings: Historicizing Modernity, Linking Past and Present, and Contemporary Paris. The logic for this structure is based on that notion that distinguishing between urban history and contemporary urban studies will be convenient for many readers. However, some of the best work on Paris combines past and present, and a great deal of contemporary work is most engaging when placed in dialogue with the city’s history, and vice versa.

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