Spatial Justice

Marginalized communities around the world are disproportionately impacted by the distribution of unjust infrastructure and environmental conditions. However, through distributive, procedural, and restorative frameworks, it is possible to teach spatial designers to challenge, inform, and reshape the world toward a more just and equitable future. This chapter delves into the various themes developed as part of the “Spatial Justice” professional elective at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which offers an interdisciplinary perspective on urban studies, urban design, and the roles that social, environmental, and ecological justice play in designing a more just and equitable urbanity. In this course, students explore critical urban theory, justice, counter cartographies, design activism, participatory systems, and spatial agency using alternative mapping methodologies to render legible latent sociospatial asymmetries.

Opus Oppidum: Research for architecture, research beyond the city

<p>Metropolises around the globe continue on the path of relentless growth under the extreme forces of urbanisation, whilst the provinces are neglected. This design-led research builds on recent discussions concerning New Zealand’s regional inequality and decline, calling upon the critical role of architecture. It asks, what about the small towns? What about the non-city? The research presented in this thesis was deployed through a dual inquiry; Firstly, it explores the emergent rurban context of the non-city as architecture’s project; Secondly, it seeks to reveal methods for architecture’s critical engagement as a catalyst towards regional transformation and prosperity. An uninhabited ‘buffer zone’ between Port Otago and the township of Port Chalmers is presented as the rurban context for architecture’s project. Developed in parallel to the design inquiry, the theoretical framework discusses new critical urban theory, arguing for a new lens to which design methods and experiments within form and field can be tested. The dual inquiry reveals strategies and tactics towards a transformative rurbanism equating to the final design proposition: Opus Oppidum: A possible armature. The conglomeration of the final design proposition, theoretical framework and exploration of design method, form a body of work that establishes the rurban condition (the non-city) as a place that desperately needs architecture’s critical engagement, and a place that is critical for the discipline of architecture.</p>

Opus Oppidum: Research for architecture, research beyond the city

<p>Metropolises around the globe continue on the path of relentless growth under the extreme forces of urbanisation, whilst the provinces are neglected. This design-led research builds on recent discussions concerning New Zealand’s regional inequality and decline, calling upon the critical role of architecture. It asks, what about the small towns? What about the non-city? The research presented in this thesis was deployed through a dual inquiry; Firstly, it explores the emergent rurban context of the non-city as architecture’s project; Secondly, it seeks to reveal methods for architecture’s critical engagement as a catalyst towards regional transformation and prosperity. An uninhabited ‘buffer zone’ between Port Otago and the township of Port Chalmers is presented as the rurban context for architecture’s project. Developed in parallel to the design inquiry, the theoretical framework discusses new critical urban theory, arguing for a new lens to which design methods and experiments within form and field can be tested. The dual inquiry reveals strategies and tactics towards a transformative rurbanism equating to the final design proposition: Opus Oppidum: A possible armature. The conglomeration of the final design proposition, theoretical framework and exploration of design method, form a body of work that establishes the rurban condition (the non-city) as a place that desperately needs architecture’s critical engagement, and a place that is critical for the discipline of architecture.</p>

Theorizing Regulation-in-City for Homeless People’s Subaltern Strategy and Informality: Societalization, Metabolism, and Classes With(out) Housing

This paper aims to expand critical urban theory and spatialized political economy through developing a new, broad-based theoretical explanation of homelessness and the informal housing of the deprived in public spaces. After reviewing an important debate in geography, it systematicallyreasserts the relevance of class-related concepts in urban studies and, mobilizing post-determinist notions, it shows how a class-driven theory can inform the emergence of appropriating/differentiating/reconciliating agency from the material bedrock of urban metabolism and its society-integrating effect (societalization). The author weaves an urban diagnostic web of concepts by situating city-dwellers—classes with(out) housing—at the material level of metabolism and then in the sociopolitical dynamic of regulation, finding in the two realms urban class relations (enlisted within societalization) and agency formation (for reregulation, subaltern strategies, and potential rapprochement). The housing classes are retheorized as a composite category of hegemonic dwellers who enjoy housing consumption and whose metabolism thus appears as the normative consumption of public/private spaces. Homeless people are understood as a subaltern class who lacks housing consumption and whose metabolism can produce “housing” out of public spaces, in opposition to a hegemonic urban form practiced by the housing classes. These urban class relations breed homeless–housed divides and homeless regulation, and yet allow for agency’s creative appropriation/differentiation/reconciliation. This paper avoids crude dichotomy, but it argues that critical urban theory can productively use this way of theorization for examining post-determinist urban lifeworlds in relation to the relative fixity of urban form, metabolic circuits, and class relations.

Critical urban theory in the Anthropocene

Critical urban thinkers often imagine urbanisation and the Anthropocene as inevitably being companion processes. But is planetary urbanisation the necessary telos and spatial limit of life in the Anthropocene? Is urban resilience the final form of urban responses to climate change? Will (or should) the urban (as either spatial form or process) survive the upending impacts of climate change or adaptation? Or, if the Anthropocene is a time of deep environmental and epistemological upheaval without historical precedent, might even more recently created spatial concepts of the planetary urban condition themselves soon be out of date? This article raises these questions for urban scholars via critical engagement with a proposal to retire Miami – considered climate change ‘ground zero’ in the US and doomed by rising seas – and repurpose it as fill for ‘The Islands of South Florida’: a self-sufficient territory of artificial high-rises delinked from global infrastructural networks. This vision of an ‘urbicidal Anthropocene’, the article argues, suggests that the injunction subtending planetary urbanisation work – to relentlessly question inherited spatial frameworks – has not been taken far enough. Still needed is Anthropocene critical urban theory, to consider urban forms and processes emerging via climate change and adaptation, but also how such mutations may point beyond the theoretical and spatial bounds of the contemporary urban condition itself.

The constitution of the city and the critique of critical urban theory

A theoretical account of the genesis and internal spatial structure of cities is given. The essence of the urbanisation process is described in terms of the following main developmental phases: (a) the emergence of relationships based on specialisation and interdependence in society; (b) the pre-eminent role of the division of labour within these relationships and its recomposition in dense spatial nodes of human activity; and (c) the concomitant formation of the networked intra-urban spaces of the city. These phases are then contextualised within three intertwined dimensions of urban materiality, namely, an internal dimension (the internal organisation and spatial dynamics of the city), a socially ambient dimension (the relational structure of society at large) and an exogenous dimension (the geographic outside of the city). In light of this account, an evaluative review of what I designate ‘the new critical urban theory’ is carried out, with special reference to planetary urbanisation, postcolonial urban theory and comparativist methodologies. I argue that while every individual city represents a uniquely complex combination of social conjunctures, there are nonetheless definite senses in which urban phenomena are susceptible to investigation at the highest levels of theoretical generality.

Krisendiagnostik einer kritischen Stadtforschung

Höhne und Michel (2021) beschreiben Symptome einer „Krise der Städte“, die im Zuge der Coronapandemie deutlicher zum Vorschein kommen. Mit ihren Thesen legen sie nahe, dass es auf ein Ende des Städtischen – as we know it – hinauslaufen könnte. Im Grunde genommen bezeichnen viele der Thesen Entwicklungen, die schon vor der Pandemie zu beobachten waren. Gerne gehe ich auf die Einladung ein, über die Krisendiagnostik einer sich als kritisch verstehenden Stadtforschung zu reflektieren. Anstoß nehme ich daran, dass die Perspektive der Krisendiagnostik im Debattenaufschlag ungeklärt bleibt. Aus wessen Sicht wird hier eine Krise diagnostiziert und mit welchem Zweck? „Kritisch“ im von mir vorgeschlagenen Sinne ist eine Stadtforschung, die sich in der Krise zu verorten und (Ent-)Scheidungen herbeizuführen weiß. Dieser Beitrag argumentiert für eine kritische Stadtforschung als konsequente Fortsetzung des Erbes der Frankfurter Schule. Er baut auf Kernideen aus „What is Critical about Critical Urban Theory?“ von Neil Brenner (2009) auf.

A Review of Robert Shaw, The Nocturnal City. London: Routledge, 2018, 126 pр.

This review focuses on the book The Nocturnal City written by the British social geographer Robert Shaw. The author’s major objective is to put the night at the center of the research agenda in urban studies, to contribute to urban theory in general, and to open up a new research field — nightology. The theoretical ambition for Shaw is an attempt to establish a dialogue between planetary urbanism (critical urban theory) and the post-structuralist understanding of the city (assemblage thinking). The author employs the conceptual model of ‘three ecologies’ developed by Felix Guattari; it considers the city as consisting of three interconnected layers: ‘self — society — earth’. Another important analytical tool is the post-colonial metaphor of the night as a frontier, which Shaw develops, considering specificities of the nocturnal city: infrastructures of artificial lighting and cleaning, the night-time economy, the changing aesthetics of cities at night and the experience of night-time at home, beyond the public space. The book does not offer a ready-made solution to theoretical problems and reveals just a little of the empirical diversity of nocturnal cities, but it is recommended as an introduction to a new field — nightology (especially for the Russian social sciences) — and as an elaboration of the discussion around the compatibility of critical urbanism and assemblage thinking in urban theory.