Moral urban citizenship and the youth problem in a Danish ghetto

PurposeThis article examines the interventions from municipality, state and other actors in the Gellerup estate, a Danish “ghetto” by focusing on the youth problem and its construction, by examining a cross-disciplinary academic workshop intending to “solve the youth problem” of the estate.Design/methodology/approachThe article is based on the two authors' participation in the academic workshop, as well as their continued engagement with the Gellerup estate through separate project employments and ethnographic research projects in the estate, consisting of both participant observation and interviews.FindingsIn the article the authors suggest that the 2015 workshop reproduced particularly the category of idle urban young men as problematic. The authors analyze this as a form of “moral urban citizenship”. The article also analyzes some of the proposed solutions to the problem, particularly architectural transformations, and connects the Danish approach to the problems of the “ghetto” to urban developments historically and on a global scale.Originality/valueCross-disciplinary academic attempts to solve real-world problems are rarely incorporated as ethnographic data. In this article the authors attempt to include part of their own practice as academics as valuable data that opens up new perspectives on a field and their own involvement and analysis of it.

Questions of Citizenship and the Nature of "The Public"

This essay is taken from a talk given at a symposium discussing Professor Ken Stahl’s book, Local Citizenship in a Global Age.1 It is not a traditional book review, but rather a series of musings inspired by the ideas in the book. Professor Stahl’s new book, Local Citizenship in a Global Age, addresses a number of important issues, many of which have been the focus of my prior work: the existence of boundaries, borders, and the spaces in between; who we include in those boundaries and who we exclude; public space, private space, and the lines between them; spaces of production versus those of consumption; and questions of place and authenticity. Thus, I was excited to participate in a discussion of the book. This essay focuses specifically on Part III of Stahl’s book, which addresses “Race, Space, Place, and Urban Citizenship.” In addition to the topics I mentioned above, Professor Stahl’s book is about citizenship. Indeed, it is primarily about citizenship. But, as Professor Stahl describes various conceptions of citizenship, it is clear that the reader has to grapple with all of the other issues I noted—boundaries, place, exclusion—in order to fully understand citizenship. This essay provides no broad critiques or sweeping analysis. Rather, it will discuss the concepts that struck me in the book and the ideas it made me think about. Thus, what follows are some thoughts, organized generally in the order in which they came to me as I was reading Part III of the book.

Deadly serious: Humor and the politics of aesthetic transgression

This essay examines the political utility of humor using a framework developed in recent geopolitical scholarship read through Jacques Rancière's theorization of the politics of aesthetics and applied to everyday political life in contemporary Mexico City. Geopolitics here offers a unique lens through which to understand the spatiality of humor and its effects on the aesthetic and affective processes by which urban identities are constructed and contested. Building on roughly 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that humor's subversive potential allows for simultaneous or co-constitutive aesthetic effects, such as the simultaneous disruption of political norms and the genesis of a more inclusive spatial imaginary of urban citizenship. This argument extends previous work on humor by emphasizing the complex, mutable, and multifarious nature of humor effects in practice, perhaps most especially in subversive modes. I demonstrate the strategic political value of humor through the exploration of three ethnographically derived examples: an episode of a popular satirical video series, a newly christened popular saint said to protect residents of an historic neighborhood from gentrification, and a humorous tirade against the city's mayor at a local neighborhood meeting.

Migrant Economic Behaviors: Causal Effects of Health Education on Saving Rates, Social Medical Insurance, and House Purchasing

BackgroundsHealth China as the essentials policy with advancing Global Health, contributing to decline the inequality between rural and urban health education, and recovering the domestic markets after Coronavirus. The goal of this study is to evaluate the economic returns on health educations in a developing country. MethodsWe combine life cycle mechanisms and safety beliefs to evaluate continuous values of health education from 720,900 migrants’ economic behaviors through the ERM model, average treatment effects, and heterogeneous treatment effects robust empirically approach.ResultsWe find that health education positively affects participation in social medical insurance and house purchasing. In contrast, the relationship between health education and saving rates is an inverted ‘U’ shape. Heterogeneous treatment effect empirically robust account for heterogeneity in the previous generation and young generation; urban citizenship and rural citizenship continuous effects of health education. ConclusionThe finding suggests that health education stimulates immigrant consumption behaviors; however, extra health education is not a wise policy. Rural-urban citizenship acquisition bias is a significant factor of health education effects differential.JEL CLASSIFICATIONI15; D14; R23

Goon Squad Democracy? The Rise of Vigilant Citizenship through Victim Support and Neighborhood Watches in Amsterdam (1980-1990)

This paper analyses the rise of a new kind of urban citizenship in the context of the urban crisis of the 1980s: the vigilant citizen, characterized by a view of citizens as possible victims, who assume and are called upon to take responsibility for social safety. Top-down policy explanations insufficiently clarify why the polarized debate over urban petty crime developed into a consensus by the mid-1980s. Tying in with recent trends in urban police history, this paper shows the diversity of bottom-up actors in Amsterdam that helped to, sometimes unintentionally, further a communitarian “social safety” agenda: vigilantes and victim-support groups, the former based in more conservative circles, the latter partly inspired by women advocacy groups. These actors entered into a sometimes-tense dynamic with the police and municipality, which took up the challenge of providing victim support and of educating the public for neighborhood prevention. This slowly yielded results.

Physical activity, sport and transnational migrant spaces in Shanghai, China: (Re)crafting contours of a metropolitan cityscape

This study examines associations between sport/physical activity space, community formation and social life among Shanghai’s highly skilled migrant demographic. There is limited illustration of the roles sport and physical exercise provision and spaces play in this migrant cohort’s lives, community formation and participation in their host societies. Yet, such evidence is of value in determining social policy, urban development and community engagement initiatives. Using a mixed-methods approach involving public policy critique, cultural and spatial analysis and virtual community investigation, this article provides a conceptual exploration of ways sport and physical activity frame individual and collective migrant experiences, and how such experiences enmesh with wider geo-spatial, political and domestic context. Amid Shanghai’s presentation as a globally attractive space, we reveal some of the complexities of the cityscape as an emblematic location for highly mobile, highly skilled migrants. A confluence of ideals about urban citizenship, social participation and localised physical activity/sport-based (inter)action, we note, articulate Shanghai anew, and contribute to debates on highly skilled transnational mobility and community formation.