Community Communication Approaches in Addressing Socio-Economic Dislocation from Cult-Related Violence in Ikorodu Environs, Lagos

This study examines the communication approaches employed in Ikorodu communities to address the issues of insecurity which residents have faced as a result of the cult-related violence in the area. The results aim to show how policy initiatives and media debates give much attention mainly to improving city governance, with an emphasis on protecting urban population and stimulating both social security and security of lives and property. This result shows that this is not sufficient in turning the tide due to the current policy interventions taken, the top-bottom approach to city governance – an approach that fights the symptoms – neglecting the bottom-top approach where urban communities initiate the processes of responding to the various underlying causes of the challenges. The study deployed triangulation, engaging both qualitative and quantitative methodology. It utilised the survey design to elicit information from selected samples within the larger population and also engaged focus group discussions (FGD) and in-depth interviews (IDI). The survey design was adopted because the study is tailored for acquiring data from a large population, using the standardized questionnaire. The interviews and FGDs focused on the challenges of crime and cult-related violence in Ikorodu and the ways these interactions have stimulated economic shocks and the communication approaches deployed to address them. Data from the FGD and interviews were analysed qualitatively utilising the thematic approach. Findings revealed that most cases of insecurity in Ikorodu are cult inspired. This is reinforced by inadequate security structure which has significantly shaped cult-related violence in the area. Findings also show that cult groups proliferate following growing immiseration and quest for power. Cult-groups appear to provide succour. Findings also show that community response is crucial in addressing questions of criminality in Ikorodu.

Cinema, colonialism, and contact zone: the movie theater and city governance in early-twentieth-century Shanghai

Moving away from the text-centered paradigm in film studies, the present research explores the relationship between the growing popularity of the film in Shanghai during the first two decades of the twentieth century and city governance in the International Settlement. It argues that the rise of movie halls contributed to creating a new kind of crowd that blended Chinese moviegoers with non-Chinese viewers. The emergence of the cinema as a space where people of different racial and ethnic origins encountered impelled the Shanghai Municipal Council – the governing body of the International Settlement in Shanghai – to respond by implementing new measures of public safety and altering its decades-long unspoken rules of segregation in the realm of everyday life. For Chinese enlightenment intellectuals and government officials, meanwhile, anxiety over their fellow Chinese's lack of basic decorum in public spaces arose with the intense intermingling of Chinese and non-Chinese filmgoers under the same roof. Thus, the cinema became a “contact zone” – a space of asymmetrical relations resulting not necessarily from colonists' exercise of colonial power but from the Chinese elite's wrapping of the discussion of movie theater etiquette reform within a political and ideological framework of modernization, patriotism, and anti-imperialism.

Municipal Statecraft For The Smart City: Retooling The Smart Entrepreneurial City?

Urban scholarship has begun to trouble the neat alignment of smart city governance with urban entrepreneurialism. Starting from the proposition that states remain central in smart city governance and that unfolding the smart city involves crafting new performances of the state, this paper revisits evolving theorisations of urban governance through the lens of urban entrepreneurialism to examine how municipal state roles and practices are being refashioned and reoriented. Utilising empirical research on smart city governance across Australia's two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, we identify and tease out the active roles and the constitutive and experimental practices of entrepreneurial municipal statecraft involved in smart city governance. We frame these as ‘extrospective’ or ‘beyond-the-state’ in which new forms of partnerships are forged, and ‘introspective’ in which the dispositions, capabilities and competences of the municipal state itself are reformed. The paper enriches entrepreneurial accounts of smart cities and the situated and contextually-articulated agenda pursued in the name of governing ‘the smart city’. It highlights plural municipal state agenda and the reworking of practices and performances of the municipal state that these entail. It remains imperative, the paper concludes, to attend critically to the ways that smart co-constitutes the state in unpredictable ways.