The Political Economy of Urban Transformation

Author(s):  
Emrah Ozturk

Cities, in the process of modernization, make historical progress parallel to the dynamics of capitalist development. Capitalism uses urban structures to overcome crises and increase the fluidity of capital. Changes in the labor force, agricultural policies, migration, urbanization or being otherized in the city, new consumption habits give clues of how capitalism uses the urban space to reproduce itself. In this article, which economic and sociological reasons emerged in the recent history of urban transformation, is examined. It is also the subject of the documentary how the transformation that has occurred since the 2000s has been shaped in line with the needs of capital in the transition to the new capitalist model. In this context, the questions raised in the documentary and the relationship between political economy and urban transformation were tried to be understood.

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-499
Author(s):  
Destin Jenkins

This essay revisits Making the Second Ghetto to consider what Arnold Hirsch argued about the relationship between race, money, and the ghetto. It explores how Hirsch’s analysis of this relationship was at once consistent with those penned by other urban historians and distinct from those interested in the political economy of the ghetto. Although moneymaking was hardly the main focus, Hirsch’s engagement with “Vampire” rental agencies and panic peddlers laid the groundwork for an analysis that treats the post–World War II metropolis as a crucial node in the history of racial capitalism. Finally, this essay offers a way to connect local forms of violence to the kinds of constraints imposed by financiers far removed from the city itself.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Lucas G. Pinheiro

Since the 1950s, interpreters of John Locke have debated whether his ideas about political economy figured among the intellectual sources of capitalist development. While some have labeled Locke a mercantile or agrarian “capitalist thinker,” others have insisted that, although a mercantilist, he was in no sense a theorist of capitalism. By reconstructing the relationship between Locke's ideas and the capitalist society of his day, this article challenges the prevailing terms through which commentators have traditionally interpreted his political economy and its place in the history of capitalism. I interpret Locke's perspectives on capital accumulation, foreign trade, and labor discipline throughout the 1690s as a reflection of the historical rise of export-oriented cycles of commodity manufacturing in the English countryside known as “proto-industrialization.” Moreover, I claim that, because proto-industrialization was tied to the expansion of England's colonial economy, this neglected context of Locke's economic doctrine sheds new light on his vision of empire. Looking to his writings on Ireland, I argue that Locke pursued proto-industrial economic reform by combining a hierarchical, stadial theory of progress with an imperial policy aimed at “improving” the colonies through decreed patterns of production and exchange that favored metropolitan trade.


2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 93-106
Author(s):  
Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska

The analysis of urban experience of modernity developed simultaneously with the analysis of collective memory. Urban space is related with a palimpsest metaphor, which includes urban memory in the history of memory understood as a history of the media. In recent years the relationship between memory and a city is analyzed on the examples featuring multiculturalism and migration movements of the cities of the Central Europe, e.g. in the Vienna monograph ca. 1900 Das Gedächtnis der Städte (The Memory of the City) by Moritz Csaky. On the other hand, the media paradigm is used by Christine Boyer, who analyses visual manifestations of city memory in her book The City of Collective Memory. Juxtaposition of the two mutually complementing scientific attitudes invokes a need to postulate a deeper analysis of the role of popular culture and visuality in shaping the memory of cities, as well as conducting further studies on cross-country and transnational “cultural tangles”.


Author(s):  
Jordan T. Camp

While many analysts have commented on the representation of 1968 campus events and antiwar demonstrations, less attention has been paid to the global significance of the dramatic struggles in industrial Detroit during the period. The meanings of events in the city were intensely fought over. As Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts observed, the events of 1968 were “an act of collective will, the breaks and ruptures stemming from the rapid expansion in the ideology, culture and civil structures of the new capitalism . . . in the form of a ‘crisis of authority.’” In Detroit the crisis of authority was expressed in the form of popular political struggles against racism, state violence, and the contradictions of life in the industrial capitalist city. This article asks and answers the following research questions about the struggle over the meaning of this decisive turning point in US history: What was the relationship between racial ordering, uneven capitalist development, and mass antiracist and class struggles? How did Black working-class organic intellectuals resist and alter hegemonic definitions of the situation? How are the dialectics of insurgency and counterinsurgency to be best theorized during this precise historical conjuncture? 


GYNECOLOGY ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 48-52
Author(s):  
E N Kravchenko ◽  
R A Morgunov

The aim of the study. Assess the importance of pregravid preparation and outcomes of pregnancy and childbirth, depending on the reproductive attitudes of women in the city of Omsk. Materials and methods. The study included 92 women who were divided into groups: group A (n=43) - women whose pregnancy was planned; group B (n=49) - women whose pregnancy occurred accidentally. Each group was divided into subgroups depending on age: from 18 to 30 and from 31 to 49 years. For each patient included in the study, a specially designed map was filled out. These patients were interviewed at the City Clinical Perinatal Center. Results. Comparative analysis revealed the relationship between the reproductive settings of women of childbearing age and the peculiarity of the course of pregnancy and childbirth in these patients. Summary. The majority of women of fertile age are married: in subgroup AA - 25 (96.2%), AB - 13 (76.5%), BA - 25 (92.6%), BB - 20 (91.0%). The predominant number of women of fertile age have one or more abortions: in subgroup AA - 12 (46.2%), AB - 6 (35.3%), in subgroups of comparison BA - 8 (29.6%), BB - 6 (27.3%). More than half of the women of fertile age surveyed have a history of untreated cervical pathology (from 40.8% to 64.7%). The course of pregnancy in women planning pregnancy in most cases proceeded without complications: in subgroup AA - 13 (50.0%), AB - 11 (64.7%). The most common cause of complicated pregnancy in women whose pregnancy occurred accidentally is the threat of spontaneous miscarriage: in subgroup BA - 15 (55.6%), BB - 16 (72.7%). The uncomplicated course of labor more often [subgroup AA - 19 (73.0%), AB - 12 (70.6%)] was observed in women whose pregnancy was planned and they were motivated to give birth to a healthy child.


Author(s):  
Carlos Machado

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Zilberstein

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do–It–Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations. Through their engagements with cultural representations, space and time, grassroots artists represent and amplify the interests of marginal actors. By allying with residents, community organizations and other art spaces, grassroots artists form a social movement to redefine the goals and usages of urban space. My findings indicate that heterogeneous art networks exist and grassroots art networks can influence urban space in opposition to top–down development.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110078
Author(s):  
Romit Chowdhury ◽  
Colin McFarlane

In the history of urban thought, density has been closely indexed to the idea of citylife. Drawing on commuters’ experiences and perceptions of crowds in and around Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, this article offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between urban crowds and life in the city. We advance understandings of the relations between the crowd and citylife through three categories of ‘crowd relations’– materiality, negotiation and inclusivity – to argue that the multiplicity of meanings which accrue to people’s encounters with crowds refuses any a priori definitions of optimum levels of urban density. Rather, the crowd relations gathered here are evocations of citylife that take us beyond the tendency to represent the crowd as a particular kind of problem, be it alienation, exhaustion or a threshold for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ densities. The portraits of commuter crowds presented capture the various entanglements between human and non-human, embodiment and mobility, and multiculture and the civic, through which citylife emerges as a mode of being with oneself and others.


1983 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amechi Okolo

This paper traces the history of the relationship between Africa and the West since their first contact brought about by the outward thrust of the West, under the impetus of rising capitalism, in search of cheap labour and cheap raw material for its industries and expanding markets for its industrial products, both of which could be better ensured through domination and exploitation. The paper identifies five successive stages that African political economy has passed through under the impact of this relationship, each phase qualitatively different from the other but all having the common characteristic of domination-dependence syndrome, and each phase having been dictated by the dynamics of capitalism in different eras and by the dominant forces in the changing international system. Its finding is that the way to the latest stage, the dependency phase, was paved by the progressive proletarianization of the African peoples and the maintenance of an international peonage system. It ends by indicating the direction in which Africa can make a beginning to break out of dependency and achieve liberation.


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 213-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yorgos Koumaridis

AbstractThis article examines the ways in which nationalism transformed Greek urban space during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through urban planning, architecture, archaeology, the destruction of Ottoman material remains and the promotion of Ancient Greek and (later) Byzantine heritage, urban space was gradually hellenized and cleansed of its Ottoman past. Specific examples, including the case of Thessaloniki, where the strong Ottoman character of the city was gradually effaced, are examined so as to outline the aims and the patterns of this transformation.


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