Smart Cities and COVID-19: Implications for Data Ecosystems from Lessons Learned in India

This brief distils best data practice recommendations through consideration of key issues involved in the use of technology for surveillance, fact-checking and coordinated control during crisis or emergency response in resource constrained urban contexts. We draw lessons from how data enabled technologies were used in urban COVID-19 response, as well as how standard implementation procedures were affected by the pandemic. Disease control is a long-standing consideration in building smart city architecture, while humanitarian actions are increasingly digitised. However, there are competing city visions being employed in COVID-19 response. This is symptomatic of a broader range of tech-based responses in other humanitarian contexts. These visions range from aspirations for technology driven, centralised and surveillance oriented urban regimes, to ‘frugal innovations’ by firms, consumers and city governments. Data ecosystems are not immune from gendered- and socio-political discrimination, and technology-based interventions can worsen existing inequalities, particularly in emergencies. Technology driven public health (PH) interventions thus raise concerns about 1) what types of technologies are appropriate, 2) whether they produce inclusive outcomes for economically and socially disadvantaged urban residents and 3) the balance between surveillance and control on one hand, and privacy and citizen autonomy on the other.

Regime Divergence and the Limits of Austere Neoliberalism

The cities of Montréal, Nantes, Dandenong and Barcelona diverge in several ways from patterns of consolidation in austere neoliberalism discussed in chapter 4. These four cities all encounter familiar challenges with economic restructuring, and all have been exposed to waves of ideology, policy and state restructuring associated with austere neoliberalism and entrepreneurial development agendas. Yet, in the post-GFC period they moved in different, if inter-related, directions. The chapter first discusses Montréal and Nantes, as two cases of established urban regimes dealing with policy failure and coming under strain from internal contradictions. The second part of the chapter explores Greater Dandenong and Barcelona, cities with very different political orientations and traditions, but where constructive regime building activities were evident, respectively at a distance from and against austere neoliberalism.

The ‘Activity of Ruling Groups’: Containment, De-mobilisation and Fragmentation

This chapter considers the problem of containment, de-mobilisation and fragmentation, dimensions of urban governance that mitigate against both antagonistic and constructive modes of resistance. This endeavour casts light on a number of issues: first, the means by which urban regimes contain and enclose resistance, and insulate themselves from potential impacts; second, the chilling and divisive effects of social partnership traditions; third, the structural and institutional limitations on regime transition through the new municipalism; and finally, the recuperative power of neoliberalising and reactionary forces, consolidated through Syriza in Greece and Britain’s Conservatives in the struggle over Brexit.

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.

Exploring the Emergence of Innovative Multi-Actor Collaborations toward a Progressive Urban Regime in Madrid (2015–2019)

For the last decade, urban actors around the globe have been struggling to adapt to a post-crisis and austerity context through increasing social mobilization and experimentation, calling for an urban democracy renewal and challenging established neoliberal urban regimes and governance systems. This has triggered social innovations, in which novel collaborative formulas have been envisioned and implemented. In particular, civil-public collaborations (CPCs) have come to the fore as an empowering alternative to the well-established private–public partnerships (PPP). This article examines the conditions of possibility, enabling mechanisms and constraints for the emergence of innovative multi-actor collaborations (IMACs). For this aim, we developed a three-fold analytical framework combining social innovation, public governance, and urban regime theory. We applied this framework to the case of the so-called “government of change” in Madrid between 2015 and 2019. After exploring the pre-2015 context, the institutional innovations implemented once Ahora Madrid accessed the local government, and the post-2019 context, it points to the preconditions that allowed experimentation with IMAC, identifies the institutional mechanisms and governance innovations that support their emergence, and assesses to what extent and how power to act was created and used to accomplish urban regime change.

A NOMADIC STATE? THE ‘BLEMMYEAN-BEJA’ POLITY OF THE ANCIENT EASTERN DESERT

Ancient nomadic peoples in Northeast Africa, being in the shadow of urban regimes of Egypt, Kush, and Aksum as well as the Graeco-Roman and Arab worlds, have been generally relegated to the historiographical model of the frontier ‘barbarian’. In this view, little political importance is attached to indigenous political organisation, with desert nomads being considered an amorphous mass of unsettled people beyond the frontiers of established states. However, in the Eastern Desert of Sudan and Egypt, a pastoralist nomadic people ancestrally related to the modern Beja dominated the deserts for millennia. Though generally considered as a group of politically divided tribes sharing only language and a pastoralist economy, ancient Beja society and its elites created complex political arrangements in their desert. When Egyptian, Greek, Coptic, and Arab sources are combined and analysed, it is evident that nomads formed a large confederate ‘nomadic state’ throughout late antiquity and the early medieval period — a vital cog in the political engine of Northeast Africa.

DYNAMICS OF URBAN REGIMES IN CITY SPATIAL (CASE STUDY OF RECLAMATION IN JAKARTA)

Background of the study: Urban politics in city spatial tends to be related to uniting the capacity of power between actors. Jakarta's pantura reclamation policy is an important part of Jakarta's city spatial. The city regime is responsible for carrying out the reclamation. In the development of its dynamics, the DKI Jakarta urban regime has a different political decision, that is, some reject or terminate and also support or continue the reclamation. However, in this study, non-governmental actors namely reclamation developers dominate the actions of the urban regime's power in reclamation development. The political and economic dominance of developers is likely to determine the policies and regulations for reclamation development. Methodology: This article uses a qualitative research approach by analyzing problems holistically. Because this article examines one case, the writer has used a single instrumental. This article focuses on just one issue, namely the problem of the dynamics of the urban regime in urban spatial planning on the development policy of the Jakarta pantura reclamation area. Therefore, this article outlines the patterns, context, and settings of the political dynamics of the urban regime. Main Findings: The conclusion is that the dominance of developers tends not to make the reclamation policy effective. In this study improve the theory of the urban regime of Clarence Stone. That after the unification of power capacities between actors, urban regimes tend to face the dynamics of new regimes, namely the dominance of political and economic capacity by one of the actors in the actions of the urban regime's power. Novelty/Originality of this study: This article explains the dynamics of the urban regime in urban spatial planning in the Jakarta pantura reclamation area development policy. The focus of his writings is on the urban regime. Therefore, in this article, we dig deep information from the dynamics of the urban regime on the Jakarta pantura reclamation policy.

Urban Regimes in Russia’s Northern Cities: Testing a Concept in a New Environment

At a time when urbanization represents a major trend in human history and when the majority of the world’s population lives in an urban environment, the urban regime theory, developed by Clarence Stone in the 1980s, offers an insightful framework for discussing how urban stakeholders are compelled to work together to achieve their goals. While research on urban regimes has historically focused mainly on democratic contexts, this article argues that it is time to use urban regime theory in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries in order to better understand how urban politics develop. With growing urban activism and huge territorial contrasts, Russia offers a good case study for testing the notion of “urban regime.” This article focuses on three cities in Russia’s Far North—Murmansk, Norilsk, and Yakutsk—that face common sustainability challenges in Arctic or subarctic conditions; it delves into the mechanisms of their urban regimes and categorizes them by type: instrumental, organic, and symbolic.