The Involvement of Business Elites in the Management of Homelessness: Towards a Privatization of Service Provision for Homeless People?

Although the influence of local urban elites on urban planning is well established in urban studies and geography, the ways in which business and property owners take part in the management of homelessness has received far less attention. This article focuses on Portland (OR) in the United States as a means of understanding the motivations that underlie the role of the private sector and its impact on public policies. To this end, I focus on the support by Portland's downtown Business Improvement District of homeless outreach programs, and on the funding of two homeless shelters by business elites / philanthropists. I argue that although public authorities have different views on the actions to be taken to end homelessness, business elites often manage to bring initially-reluctant public authorities to support their projects in what might be termed a forced-march cooperation. I also highlight the versatility of the private sector and business elites’ participation in homelessness management, given that the outreach programs they support and the homeless facilities they fund provide services for the homeless while simultaneously removing them from visible public space. In this sense, the involvement of business and property owners is also a way for them to protect their own interests.

French Literature in Mono- and Multilingual Social Contexts

This article analyses the production and consumption of francophone manuscripts in thirteenth-century Flanders from a multilingual perspective. The polyglot linguistic reality of the County of Flanders, home to both Dutch- and French-speaking communities, is evident in documentary sources and manuscripts from around 1200. Using a database compiled for The Multilingual Dynamics of the Literary Culture of Medieval Flanders (ca 1200–ca 1500) project, the quantitative evidence for the apparent popularity of French literature will be scrutinized in the extant manuscripts produced and used in Flemish urban, monastic, and court environments during the thirteenth century. Furthermore, manuscript case studies related to the Flemish court illustrate how thirteenth-century francophone literary culture is shaped by social milieus and user contexts, including examples of the interregional francophone networks of noblewomen, cultural exchange between the court and urban elites, and a renewed interest in crusader history.

Million Trees for Warsaw: Managing pollution crisis through green renewal

The article proposes the notion of a “spectacle of repair,” a carefully calibrated social technology of green governance aimed at managing the environmental degradation through control over images in Warsaw, Poland. Using case studies Million Trees for Warsaw project and a candidacy for the Green Capital of Europe and building on political ecology literature that addresses the rise of new opportunities for capitalist expansion through restoration activity, this article claims that the production of the green policy sphere allows for a creation of an array of possible “green” actions in the city that are presented as interchangeable and effectively commensurable. As the municipality heavily invests in greenery and a removal of visible signs of messiness and dirt in the city, the depoliticized spectacle of a clean and green urban space focuses on creating an image of the authorities actively combating the pollution as well as working towards making Warsaw more “livable.” At the same time, the two major roots of pollution found in ever-increasing car traffic and old coal-heating systems remain insufficiently addressed amid a lack of political will. The paper argues that mitigation strategy of the city hall thus heavily relies on a management of visibilities; attempting to alleviate the citizens’ pressure to tackle the largely invisible air pollution by delivering the tidy greenery desired by the urban elites, keeping the city fit for competing in the global neoliberal economy.

Dreams about an Overcome Boundary: Street Children, Venders, Urban Political Regimes in “Wars of Memories” about the City of the “Nineties”

The article analyzes the images of the Irkutsk city center in the memories of the representatives of two marginal groups — street children and venders, who lived and worked there from 1999 to 2006, as well as its mo dern images in the public statements of the urban elites. The aim of the study is to identify the functions that the city center performed during the years of deep social transformations and to reveal why today one wants to forget about it as soon as possible. The author argues that the places mentioned by the respondents and the actions performed in those places largely shaped the current ideas about the period of social chaos in the “post-Soviet” city — a period of uncertainty, violence and fear. Today, these places and functions are mostly memories, which are gradually being replaced by the simplified and emotionally rich myths about the past that are being broadcast by the urban political regimes. The latter displace marginal groups from the center and change the places they previously occupied, simultaneously altering the collective memory associated with these places. The article puts forward and justifies a hypothesis that starting from the mid-1990s and almost until the end of the 2000s these territories were used by the majority of citizens as an extra-institutional interface necessary for connecting to the city resource node. This function has become the primary cause of fierce conflicts, during which numerous enforcers tried to establish a monopoly on the collection of rents from the human and resource flows concentrated there. The image of the center as a deviant place was constructed simultaneously by the urban regimes and marginal groups: the former used it as a weapon in the struggle for the “right to the city,” the latter associated it with the collective trauma they had experienced.

Weapons of the Strong: Elite Resistance and the Neo-Apartheid City

Transitions to democracy promise equal political power. But political ruptures carry no guarantee that democracy can overcome the accumulated inequalities of history. In South Africa, the transition to democracy shifted power from a racial minority in ways that suggested an unusually high probability of material change. This article analyzes the limits of public power after democratic transitions. Why has the post-Apartheid local state in Johannesburg been unable to achieve a spatially inclusive distribution of public goods despite a political imperative for both spatial and fiscal redistribution? I rely on interviews and archival research, conducted in Johannesburg between 2015 and 2018. Because the color line created a sharp distinction between political and economic power, traditional white urban elites required non-majoritarian and hidden strategies that translated their structural power into effective power. The cumulative effect of these “weapons of the strong” has been to disable the capacity of the local state to countervail the power of wealthy residents’ associations and property developers. Through these strategies, elites repurposed institutional reforms for redistribution to instead reproduce the city’s inequalities.

Land, Rights, and Tenure Insecurity on Customary Land in Zambia

Land is a key asset in the lives of village communities in Zambia. It is thus at the centre of their livelihood strategies as it provides social, economic, and financial benefits to these communities. The paradox though is that despite acknowledging its importance in the lives of village communities, tenure on this land is poorly protected by the state resulting in high insecurity for its occupants. In many instances, there are no clear regulations on its use and alienation while traditional authorities are also ill-equipped for the task of administering this land. The question then that emerges is: In this perceived absence of state protection, how are village communities protecting themselves from threats of dispossession by foreign investors, urban elites, and the state's own actions? This study found that village communities are using various means to protect themselves, including issuance of local land holding certificates.

Film and the Politics of Negative Community. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dialectic in the Late 1970s Polish People’s Republic

Polish People’s Republic (PRL) in the late 1970s saw an increased alliance among, and indeed, a blending of, workers and intellectuals, young and old, women and men, actively struggling against the state. A new kind of solidarity emerged that threw off tired notions of what constituted the working class. The preeminent filmmaker of this time, Krzysztof Kieślowski, is often seen as increasingly depoliticized as he moved into fiction, but in this paper the author argues for the dialogic value of his work with respect to political organizing. Kieślowski’s documentarist sensitivity to registering Polish reality and the intimacy of human engagement with the world led him to question the prevailing mode of representing these shifts in politics and class. His feature films, in articulating failures of representation, challenge a “realism” that purported to be universal, but instead reified a certain historical anxiety in the Polish political imaginary (workers vs. intellectuals, urban elites vs. peasantry), or precisely that which was being unraveled by the praxis of the late 1970s. Further, they refuse to cordon off interests of individuals from the very state shown to be oppressing them. Here we have a filmic counterpart to the immanent praxis of workers and intellectuals that turned one of the engines of the state—the trade union—into the greatest weapon against it. The author shows how this functions, in negative terms, in Kieślowski’s first feature, Blizna/The Scar (1976), in which class solidarity is felt stylistically as aporia, and is further developed in Amator/Camera Buff (1979), which expresses the personal as political in the tension between the desire for spokój (peace and quiet) and czegoś wiecej (something more). Rather than a retreat, we should see this in correspondence with the revolutionary consciousness being inscribed in individual Poles by the collective labor action of Solidarity in 1980.

The Integration Myth

When Polish elites utilized the language of state integration during the early-to-mid-1920s, they highlighted their own centrality in competitive civilizing projects in Volhynia. At the moment when the post-imperial state was itself being constituted, these actors crafted myths about who was foreign, based on civilizational hierarchies between—and even within—the zones of the former partitions. If the right-wing Endecja relied on the antisemitic trope that Jews were eternal foreigners in Volhynia, Polish military settlers also faced accusations of national and social foreignness from Volhynia’s Ukrainian-speaking peasants and Polish-speaking landowners alike. Moreover, in locations beyond Warsaw, notably Poznań and Lublin, urban elites fashioned their cities as civilizational leaders by offering to usher Volhynia’s Poles, particularly those in the provincial capital of Łuck, toward modernity.