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Urban Studies ◽  
2022 ◽  
pp. 004209802110556
Author(s):  
Hanna Baumann ◽  
Haim Yacobi

In this introduction to the Special Issue ‘Infrastructural Stigma and Urban Vulnerability’, we outline the need to join up debates on infrastructural exclusion on the one hand and urban stigma on the other. We argue that doing so will allow us to develop a better understanding of the co-constitutive relationship between the material and the symbolic structures of the city shaping urban exclusion and vulnerability. Positing that stigma is not merely a symbolic force but has significant material effects, we show how urban dwellers often experience it in deeply embodied ways, including through impacts on their physical health. Furthermore, stigma is not only imposed on the built environment through discourse, it also emanates from the materiality of the city; this agentic role of the city is often disregarded in sociologically-informed approaches to urban stigma. When infrastructures become sites of contestation about urban inclusion, stigma can be utilised by stigmatised residents to demand connection to public networks, and the wider symbolic inclusion this entails. Through examining the issue of infrastructural stigma in cities and urban territories across the Global North and Global South, as well as the places in between, the nine articles in this Special Issue pay attention to the global relationalities of infrastructural stigma. Ultimately, our focus on the infrastructural origins of stigma draws attention to the structural causes of urban inequality – a reality which is often occluded by both stigma itself and by prevalent academic approaches to understanding it.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110614
Author(s):  
Solveig Grønnestad ◽  
Anne Bach Nielsen

This article analyses participants’ reasoning for their city’s membership in transnational municipal networks and the extent to which this changes over time. Theoretically, we build on new-institutional theory and conclude that although parts of the members’ reasoning have rational components, a discursive institutional perspective improves the understanding of cities’ membership of transnational municipal networks. This perspective uncovers how important aspects of transnational municipal network participation are motivated by a different logic than that of measurable output. Cities use transnational municipal networks as sources of internal and external legitimacy, to legitimatise their position in domestic politics and their international position among other ‘global’ cities.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110583
Author(s):  
Max Nathan

Cities around the world are the epicentres of the coronavirus pandemic: both in the first wave, as the disease spread from East Asia, and now, as many countries enter a third wave of infections. These spatial patterns are still far from properly understood, though there is no shortage of possible explanations. I set out the emerging theories about cities’ role in the spread of coronavirus, testing these against existing studies and new analysis for English conurbations, cities and towns. Both reveal an urbanised public health crisis, in which vulnerabilities and health impacts track (a) urban structural inequalities, and (b) wider weaknesses in institutions, their capabilities and leaders. I then turn to ‘post-pandemic’ visions of future cities. I argue that this framing is unhelpful: even with mass vaccination, COVID-19 is likely to remain one of many globalised endemic diseases. Instead, ‘pandemic-resilient’ urban places will require improved economic, social and physical infrastructure, alongside better public policy. Describing such future cities is still highly speculative: I identify five zones of change.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110567
Author(s):  
Karen Coelho ◽  
Ashima Sood

The millennial turn saw a distinct efflorescence in scholarship on urban India. This essay introduces a Virtual Special Issue on urban studies in India that showcases a selection of articles from the journal’s archives. It traces the disciplinary, thematic and methodological shifts that have marked this millennial turn. On the one hand, the social science of the urban has had a statist bent, reacting to the policy focus on cities as growth engines in the post-liberalisation era. On the other hand, critical urban studies has brought attention to the unregulated, deregulated, unplanned and unintended city produced by dynamic processes of informality acting overtly or covertly against the state’s neoliberal agendas. This introductory essay aims to examine the ways this interplay has unfolded both in the pages of this journal and elsewhere. It locates the Virtual Special Issue selection within a broader review of the state of scholarship in Indian urban studies and marks out areas for productive interventions in the future study of Indian cities.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110597
Author(s):  
Camila Saraiva

This paper presents an innovative comparison that works creatively with the entangled spatialities of policy mobilities, drawing on a city-to-city cooperation between São Paulo (Brazil) and eThekwini (South Africa) municipalities for the exchange of slum upgrading expertise. The proposed comparative tactic entails tracing the establishment of this connection in order to disassemble the constituent flows and localities merged within it. Subsequently, by posing questions to one another, a relational comparison of the trajectory of slum upgrading policy in each locality is composed, unearthing the political and institutional conditions that preceded the existence of the connection per se. In that sense, both eThekwini and São Paulo are considered equivalent starting points from which local actors engaged in circulating ideas and mobilised slum upgrading policies. This paper not only brings a fresh approach to comparative methods – incorporating political contexts and their extensive overlapping networks of relations alongside a focus on particular policy trajectories – but also contributes to furthering global urban studies in two other ways. First, it provides insight into the processes by which policies are put on the move and localised (or not). Second, it demonstrates how repeated instances of urban practice may be unravelled by allowing each context of policy formation, with its distinctive trajectory of slum upgrading, to speak to one another. In this regard, the comparative analysis identified how, in both São Paulo and eThekwini, the consolidation of democracy was followed by the development of more technocratic approaches to the detriment of earlier slum upgrading initiatives focussed on community empowerment.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110562
Author(s):  
Oded Haas

The right to housing is generally understood as a local struggle against the global commodification of housing. While useful for recognising overarching urbanisation processes, such understanding risks washing over the distinctive politics that produce the housing crisis and its ostensible solutions in different contexts around the globe. Situated in a settler-colonial context, this paper bridges recent comparative urban studies with Indigenous narratives of urbanisation, to re-think housing crisis solutions from the point of view of the colonised. Based on in-depth interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel, the paper compares two cases of state-initiated, privatised housing developments, one in Israel and one in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: the new cities Tantour and Rawabi. Each case is examined as a singularity, distinctive formations of the spatialities of Zionist settlement in Palestine, which are now being transformed through privatised housing development. The paper presents these developments as mutually constituted through a colonial-settler project and Palestinian sumud resistance, the praxis of remaining on the land. The paper utilises comparison as a strategy, exploring each new city in turn, to reveal the range of directions in sumud. Thus, by seeing housing development as site for negotiating de-colonisation on the ground, the paper contributes to recent debates over the power of comparative urbanism to re-think global phenomena through treating urban terrains as singularities.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110553
Author(s):  
Charlotte Lemanski

This afterword to the Urban Vulnerabilities: Infrastructure, Health and Stigma special issue highlights two cross-cutting themes that are addressed by all the articles in the issue, and that have the potential to make a significant contribution to debates within urban studies. First, I reflect on how the articles reveal the inseparable connections between infrastructure and stigma, demonstrating both as political and material processes that are inter-dependent and mutually constitutive. Consequently, it is urgent to bridge disciplinary siloes in bringing these scholarly debates into deeper conversation in ways that recognise the materiality of stigma and the politicisation of infrastructure (and vice versa). Second, to a greater and lesser extent, the articles all reveal the centrality of citizenship to the capacity of both urban dwellers and the state to negotiate and/or restrict access to infrastructure, and to perpetuate and/or challenge the impacts of stigma. While the connections between infrastructure and citizenship are explored in my recent work on infrastructural citizenship, the articles in this collection demonstrate the importance of temporality and scale in understanding how citizens negotiate their material and political rights.


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