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.

Race and the construction of city and nature

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (9) ◽  
pp. 1948-1967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Loughran
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The City

Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the “hybridity” of urban–environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed “binary” relationship between “city” and “nature” that dominated historical understandings of urban–environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated this shift in city–nature boundaries have been understudied. Many explanations position accelerating urbanization or changes in global political economy as driving the decline of the city–nature binary. This paper proposes that this transformation is also a product of the changing cultural and spatial dynamics of “race” between the 19th-century and the present. Drawing on research on urban parks in Chicago, I consider the production of park space at four important historical moments: (1) the mid-to-late 19th-century, when large picturesque parks were built; (2) the early 20th-century, when reform-oriented “small parks” were constructed; (3) the post-World War II period, which was marked by the development of recreation facilities; and (4) the contemporary period, where linear parks like Chicago’s 606 (which I term “imbricated spaces”) bring together built and natural environments in new ways. Through this analysis, I argue that the social construction of “city” and “nature,” as spatialized through urban park development, was co-produced with racialized spaces and symbols and contributed to the creation of metropolitan racial boundaries. Further, I argue that historical shifts in these racialized spaces and symbols have been implicated in the weakening of the city–nature binary and the rise of the hybrid city–nature relationship.

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.

New Urban Spaces

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Intensive Research ◽  
Spatial Strategies ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The City

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit—the city or the metropolis—and explores the multiscalar constitution, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Urban resilience czy krytyczne teorie zmiany? Spór wokół studiów miejskich na marginesie kryzysu pandemii

2020 ◽  
pp. 339-358
Author(s):  
Agata Skórzyńska
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Critical Knowledge ◽  
A Current

The aim of the article is critical reconstruction of a current dispute in the field of urban studies. Recent dabates and polemics between researchers related to such approaches, as planetary urbanisation thesis, urban political ecology, assemblage urbanism, urban postcolonial studies and – last but not least – well known Los Angeles School – showed that the expieriencie of the urban cirisises is closely related to the search for the new knowledge and concepts, that can bring visons of change and sollutions. At stake is, however, the recognition that some theoretical proposals have the potential to develop critical knowledge, while others tend to become just new urban ideologies, attractive, but often reactive, ineffective or exclusive. The climate change, as well as recent pandemic crisis shows clearly that well-established theoretical criticism is just as nessecary as cultural activity or political action, if urban studies are to continue to provide us with knowledge that responds to the challenges of the future. Theoretical disputes are sometimes just a „family war”, but they often show the most sensitive problems to which scientific knowledge must answer. Urban crisises in turn, as COVID-19 pandemic clearly shows – are often unexpected pracitical tests of theories.

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.

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.

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