Globalizing Sportscapes

D Parthasarathi’s paper centres global sportscapes as indicative of global-local linkages and transnational flows of investment in clubs across nations and the spread of viewership and consumption across continents, but offers a different scope and perspective, through football within the political economy of leisure as it is played in the streets of Mumbai, Singapore and Bangkok. The changing politics of class, ethnicity, aspirations, and leisure among the urban working classes in these cities is illustrated using the lens of globalizing football. Heterotopic uses of public spaces through the sport of football, served as a counterstrategy of the urban poor, migrants, minorities and working classes against the dehumanizing and disciplining effects of alienating work and urban spatial exclusion. Some of these are also channeled into sport consumption cultures.

The role of business support interventions in promoting spatial justice : a case study of informal economic development in a residential zone, eThekwini (Ward 68)

The beginnings of apartheid initiated the manipulation of plans and policy to create cities which deeply entrenched segregation into the landscape of South Africa. This history of spatial exclusion is evident in the study area, Ward 68 in the South Durban Basin (SDB), with its diverse mix of industrial and residential land uses, with a proposed dug-out port planned for the area. In the three suburbs of Ward 68, some homes were spaces in which business was conducted. The diverse land uses, which has introduced formal and informal changes to space, have an impact on the people living and working in this area. In efforts to address the injustices of apartheid, South African strategy and legislation have included support to informal businesses; the National Informal Business Upliftment Strategy (NIBUS) serves as an example. This study uses the term “Business support interventions” (BSI) to describe the diverse approaches to providing financial or non-financial support to businesses. These interventions enable and strengthen informal businesses in residential zones, that is, home-based enterprises (HBE). The appropriateness of BSI and their effect on the quality of local spaces needed to be explored. Inadequate spatial orientation of BSI reduces the impact of HBE projects and programmes in townships. The mixed methods approach to this research includes a methodological design that uses qualitative and quantitative data. This research aims to contribute towards both practical methods for understanding the spatial-economic condition of local urban spaces, and towards providing more nuanced data and knowledge to BSI and urban management in the eThekwini Municipality (Durban). Distinctive challenges for the urban environment are related to the city’s spatial- economic disparities. A spatial justice lens and a case study approach have allowed for a critical investigation of how spatial logic can be applied to collaboratively address challenges of informality in urban spaces.

Invisible informality and the contribution of information modeling to data-based urban regulation

Recent studies have established the role of urban planning policies in feeding the growth of informal settlements in Brazilian cities, through the socio-spatial exclusion of low-income residents. The difficulties of reversing this exclusionary logic are due to several complex factors. A factor less discussed in Brazilian literature, which has began to draw the attention of scholars, is the invisibility of the informal city. This research assumes that it is necessary to regulate the urban form of precarious informal settlements, in order to prevent the deterioration of urban environmental quality. We highlight the importance of compiling data about their urban form and their built environment, in order to contribute to a reality-based regulatory policy for these settlements. After discussing the phenomenon of urban informality in Fortaleza, we applied a methodology that combines Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and City Information Modeling (CIM), to support the redefinition of urban rules for precarious settlements of informal origin. This procedure will reveal not only the extent of the inadequacies of the (past and current) land use and occupation codes, but will also present some potentialities of GIS and CIM to inform its redefinition.

Tribes at the Margin of Tribal Space: Urban Socio-Spatial Exclusion

Unlike the cities of the global North, where poor indigenous communities are primarily immigrants attracted to cities to secure better livelihoods, the tribals of Jharkhand in urban spaces are mostly ‘original inhabitants’. In Ranchi, their original state has been increasingly dwindled or marginalised and led to a dialectical process of socio-spatial poverty traps. This study attempts to understand the socio-spatial integration of the tribal community within Ranchi city through the identification of tribal toponymy and the patterns of clustering and concentration vis-à-vis the process of land association and dissociation. Further, it brings together the attributes of such a produced spatiality. Location Quotient, based on secondary data, and Key Informant Interviews with field observations are applied to measure the tribal concentration and the processes of spatiality, respectively. The findings present a dismal picture, where the tribals mostly find themselves at the margins of the city space, especially in the core-inner city and the microperipheral localities. The continuous inflow of outsiders, the issue of land rights and land alienation, the pattern of socio-spatial clustering and disadvantages, and the dynamics of tribal identity associations are all integrally connected in perpetuating tribals’ urban spatial exclusion and thereby their socio-spatial segregation.

Polic(sh)ing up the Leipzig Main Station: an ethnographic reflection on abjection, space and resistance

In this article, I explore the interplay of abjection, space and resistance at the example of a protest intervention that reclaims a highly policed urban space in the city of Leipzig (Saxony, Eastern Germany)—the Main Station. Methodologically, I combine ethnographic material collected throughout the process of a performative counter-action attempting to reclaim and re-imagine Leipzig Main Station as a venue and politicized space with a contextual analysis regarding the discursive landscape evolving around and shaping this urban locale. My empirical analysis is structured along the theoretical discussion of abjection: While Butler's theorization (Butler in Bodies that matter, Routledge, New York, 1993) allows me to focus on the formative power of spatial exclusion and the disruptive potential of protest, theoretical accounts in which abjection is conceived as a “threshold zone” or “overlap space” (Sharkey and Shields in Child Geogr 6:239–256, 2008; Vighi et al. in Between urban topographies and political spaces. Threshold experiences, Lexington Books, Lanham, 2014) help me to outline ‘abject space’ as a space of negotiation and contradiction.

Community Arts Programming as a Factor in Newcomer Youth Inclusion: The Toronto Situation

The value of engaging newcomer youth through community arts programs is examined within the Canadian context, specifically within Toronto. Expanding upon the existing literature and studies concerned with newcomer youth settlement needs, themes of social, structural and spatial exclusion set the context for discussion of using arts-based methods. Relating these to theories of social inclusion, social capital and critical social theory of youth empowerment, a primary investigation involved interviews with a private funding foundation, the Laidlaw Foundation, and a focus group session with newcomer youth from Beatz To Da Streetz, an active community urban arts program. The implications of this study are a demonstration of the positive process and outcomes of using arts methods for newcomer youth inclusion, but that the lack of support and resources available to such programs, particularly from federal and provincial sources, limit the impact of such programming.

Community Arts Programming as a Factor in Newcomer Youth Inclusion: The Toronto Situation

The value of engaging newcomer youth through community arts programs is examined within the Canadian context, specifically within Toronto. Expanding upon the existing literature and studies concerned with newcomer youth settlement needs, themes of social, structural and spatial exclusion set the context for discussion of using arts-based methods. Relating these to theories of social inclusion, social capital and critical social theory of youth empowerment, a primary investigation involved interviews with a private funding foundation, the Laidlaw Foundation, and a focus group session with newcomer youth from Beatz To Da Streetz, an active community urban arts program. The implications of this study are a demonstration of the positive process and outcomes of using arts methods for newcomer youth inclusion, but that the lack of support and resources available to such programs, particularly from federal and provincial sources, limit the impact of such programming.

Stones and slaves: labour, race and spatial exclusion in colonial Santo Domingo

Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in what was later called the ‘New World’, was a centre of the Atlantic slave trade. While it has been called the ‘cradle of blackness in the Americas’, discussion of racial exclusion and marginalization is mostly absent in the city's architecture and urban history. This article investigates how architecture and urban design helped reinforce the colonizers’ control over enslaved peoples. Specifically, we explore the Santa Bárbara neighbourhood, its church and the slave warehouse known as La Negreta. Drawing on historical maps and archival documents, we draw attention to how the spatial and material construction of Santa Bárbara constituted and maintained social and racial structures of oppression.

CREATIVITY BASED ON NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN DESIGN OF AGE-FRIENDLY CITIES: POLISH SENIORS ABOUT THEIR NEEDS – RESEARCH REFLECTION

The identified changes in age structure on a global and local scale pose a major challenge for modern societies. And so, the issue of adapting urban spaces to the needs of older people has become of particular interest. But the intensity of changes requires a creative approach to this matter. One of the responses to this phenomenon has been the World Health Organization proposal to build age-friendly cities and communities. It details how to effectively reduce social and spatial exclusion experienced by older people. Importantly, the needs of the elderly are increasingly being taken into consideration during the design process. This article provides the theoretical explanation of the issues related to the creative solutions based on new technologies in the perspective of building an age-friendly city. The empirical section presents selected survey results conducted among Polish seniors which focus on three main aspects of new technologies: the current importance for seniors; the current state of solutions in the city; the predicted importance in the future.

Energy Solutions, Neo-Liberalism, and Social Diversity in Toronto, Canada

In response to the dominance of green capitalist discourses in Canada’s environmental movement, in this paper, we argue that strategies to improve energy policy must also provide mechanisms to address social conflicts and social disparities. Environmental justice is proposed as an alternative to mainstream environmentalism, one that seeks to address systemic social and spatial exclusion encountered by many racialized immigrants in Toronto as a result of neo-liberal and green capitalist municipal policy and that seeks to position marginalized communities as valued contributors to energy solutions. We examine Toronto-based municipal state initiatives aimed at reducing energy use while concurrently stimulating growth (specifically, green economy/green jobs and ‘smart growth’). By treating these as instruments of green capitalism, we illustrate the utility of environmental justice applied to energy-related problems and as a means to analyze stakeholders’ positions in the context of neo-liberalism and green capitalism, and as opening possibilities for resistance.