“A Sort of Public Living Room”: Ignorance and the Racial Management of Disorder in Postwar Los Angeles

Exploring sanitation in postwar Los Angeles, this article argues that as white voluntary groups formed task forces to clean up the city, they endangered Mexican and black Angelinos by endorsing solutions to urban welfare defined by antistatism and carceralism. I read these activities through the lens of white ignorance, whereby white Americans elaborated folk knowledge of successful urbanism on their own terrain and terms, which had no capacity to attend to other classes and races. I treat white ignorance not as a cognitive defect or proxy for innocence, but rather as a structural condition of postwar urban political economy.

Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles

This article reviews Mariana Peterson’s Atmospheric Noise, which draws jarring, cacophonous resonances between the science and engineering of acoustics, urban political economy, governmentality, the metaphysics of sound and the social construction of ecology and environment in the city of Los Angeles.

Between containment and crackdown in Geylang, Singapore: Urban crime control as the statecrafting of migrant exclusion

Based on a case study conducted in Geylang, Singapore, this article explores the role of urban policing, surveillance and crime control as mechanisms of social ordering that contribute to the marginalisation of excluded groups, including low-income migrant workers and sex workers. Adopting a statecraft approach that emphasises the significance of ‘governing through crime’ for the upholding of urban political-economic projects, we examine the entanglement of political discourses and crime and social control practices as co-constructive of class- and race-based inequality in Singapore. Drawing from qualitative interviews with NGO workers and sex workers, augmented by extensive non-participant observations, we identify three processes through which state power is vectored in Geylang: the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood through association with marginalised groups, legitimising intense spatialised intervention; the enacting of performative zero-tolerance policing; and the containment and surveillance of illicit activities within the neighbourhood. Contributing to discussions that advance the statecraft approach to researching urban crime control, the article shows that seemingly contradictory practices of tolerance and intervention constitute strategies of governance. The article argues that spatially specific crime control practices in Geylang generated an exclusionary ‘spectacle’ which symbolically connects low-income migrant workers with deviance, in turn supporting citizenship exclusion, racialised marginality and a wider politics of capital accumulation resting on disempowered labour. As we argue, crime control policies are an important form of statecraft legitimising an urban political economy that is heavily reliant on low-cost labour provided by migrant workers.

Neoliberalism and neo-dirigisme in action: The state–corporate alliance and the great housing rush of the 2000s in Istanbul, Turkey

This paper foregrounds the state–corporate alliance in real estate development in Istanbul since the early 2000s. Employing a geo-coded sample of 294 private housing development projects built since the early 1980s and in-depth interviews with the private development companies, the paper focuses on how the construction industry and the massive commodification of urban land produced a new state–space nexus. The underlying question here is the nascent shape of urban political-economy, the trends of housing construction, the cycles of boom and bust and the mechanisms of capital accumulation concerning the state’s centralising control over space. In this sample, a few critical aspects of the production of concrete space became apparent. Seven findings are discussed. First, the developers of Istanbul followed the clientelistic patterns in the urban built environment. The second aspect is that the state is the sole supply-side actor that determines Istanbul’s built environment. The third point in this analysis of urban development initiated by the private sector is focused on the fact that the real estate speculation is state-led. The fourth and fifth points are related to the Turkish real estate developers’ inability to procure financing for the duration of the construction process. The sixth factor in the evaluation of the private real estate sector in Istanbul is the geographical and class dispersal of active development projects. The seventh factor in understanding those real estate developers is their novel approach to marketing and advertisement and the way they employ architecture as an extension of public relations.

W.E.B. Du Bois and the urban political economy tradition in geography

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s considerable contributions were actively diminished during his life and remain marginal in geography. This is unfortunate for urban geography, particularly its political economy wing, because his empirical and theoretical work offer an illuminating internal critique of modern debates in the field. This review essay attempts to initiate a wider dialogue about the potential value of Du Bois to the influential urban political economy paradigm in geography. Specifically, I adapt and apply Du Boisian definitions of racism to two literatures: the rise of neoliberalism and the significance of gentrification in Black spaces.

Transnational education zones: Towards an urban political economy of ‘education cities’

Prevalent notions of ‘education cities’ and ‘education hubs’ are vaguely defined, operate at blurry scales and tend to reproduce promotional language. The article contributes to theorising the geographies and spaces of globalising higher education by developing the concept of transnational education zones. Through an urban political economy lens, we review the relations between universities and cities, consider universities’ role in the political economy and understand universities as transnational urban actors. We exhaustively map the phenomenon of transnational education zones and empirically analyse cases from four cities (Doha, Dubai, Iskandar and Flic en Flac) with respect to their embeddedness in state-led projects for the ‘knowledge economy’, their vision for transnational subject formation and their character as urban zones of exception. The conclusion develops a research agenda for further critical geographic inquiries into the (re)making of cities through the development of transnational spaces of higher education that explores the relations between globalising higher education and material and discursive transformations at the urban scale.

Combating Inequality in the Postwar City

Despite significant achievements during the interwar years, the Pittsburgh branch encountered the persistence and even intensification of racial inequality in the postwar urban political economy. Deindustrialization, urban renewal, neighborhood depopulation, and global economic restructuring reinforced the color line in mid-20th century Pittsburgh. The Urban League emerged at the organizing center of early efforts to offset the destructive impact of these local, national, and transnational developments on the city's African American community. The agency pressed employers, public officials, and labor unions to increase opportunities for African Americans in a broad range of skilled, clerical, and professional occupations and stimulated the growth of the black middle class.

Critiques of the Shrinking Cities Literature from an Urban Political Economy Framework

This article outlines the political economy critiques of the shrinking cities literature by answering the following: (1) how does the “shrinking cities” canon define a categorically distinct set of geographies with unique challenges and what solutions are proposed? and (2) how has the urban political economy literature engaged with and critiqued these ways of framing problems and solutions? This analysis finds that the “the shrinking city” is loosely defined and that debates exist around their exceptionalism. Urban political economy scholarship debates whether the solutions provided through shrinking cities literature are innovative alternatives to growth-oriented development or manifestations of austerity urbanism.