Nonprofit Foundations and Grassroots Organizing: Reshaping Urban Governance

Collaborative urban governance has increased the role of community organizations in local decision-making processes. These organizations need financial resources in order to participate in urban governance. In this article, I examine the impact of foundation grants on the relationships and agendas of four community organizations in one neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. Drawing on interviews, observations of organizations, and archival research, I demonstrate that in the 1990s, nonprofit foundations had a significant impact on the formation of new organizations and on their agendas in the neighborhood. Foundations are, therefore, an important player in urban governance, shaping a “neighborhood policy regime.”     

State Transformation,Policy Learning,and Exclusive Displacement in the Process of Urban Redevelopment in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper explores the dynamics behind the changing regimes of urban renewal and its social impacts in Taiwan. Before the 1980s, the state was willing to solely shoulder the job of urban renewal with a wholly supportive financial budget and land appropriation law, while in the 1990s it became financially overburdened due to its renewal policy. Around the year 2000, the state turned towards promoting urban regeneration as a key business model. Through this historical exposition, the Taiwanese story of state transformation in urban renewal policy brings two issues to the fore. The first issue is the learning process concerning the policy of public-private partnership (PPP) initiatives. Trans-border policy mobility connects and constitutes cities, such as Taipei, with other places, such as London, through visits and seminars attended by policy makers and experts. However, policy transferred from abroad is “localized” in the learning process and used to prioritize the regeneration of public lands in the urban area. The PPP model is transformed in the face of domestic political struggles. The second issue is the social exclusion as a result of property-led regeneration. Rather than playing the role of an impartial institutional moderator, the state privileged landowners and developers and sacrificed the rights of tenants to stay put. By doing so, the state secures political support from landowner-cum-citizens and initiates a political culture of property in which local citizenship is predicated on ownership.     

Gender,Place, and Social Contacts: Understanding Awareness of Vulnerability to Terrorism

Abstract

Creating resiliency, accomplished in part by individuals preparing for disaster, is the primary strategy outside of law enforcement for responding to the threat of urban terrorism. Individuals prepare when they perceive a need to do so, yet little is known about what shapes a person's awareness of vulnerability to terrorism. Because evidence indicates that social contacts act as conduits of information and affect perception of risk to natural hazards, it is possible that such contacts also affect terrorism vulnerability awareness. Because social contacts are also known to be systematically segmented by gender and location, we hypothesized that conversations about terrorism vary by gender and place, specifically the home and work place. Drawing on data from 93 interviews with householders in Boston, the study demonstrates that: (1) family networks generated discussions of home preparedness, whereas workplace networks engaged a wider variety of topics; (2) women discussed terrorism more frequently and in greater depth than did men; and (3) women heard more preparedness messages for the home than did men, whereas men undertook preparedness activities external to the home. The findings bridge geography and terrorism studies by theorizing emplaced and subjective human experiences that prompt conversations about terrorism. These conversations, in turn, help urban emergency managers and risk-hazards geographers promote rational dialogue and action vis-à-vis terrorism. Hazards researchers have shown that the more people discuss terrorism, the less they seek extreme and unwarranted responses.     

Social Movements in Urban Society: The City as A Space of Politicization

Recent anti-systemic social movements have illustrated the central role of cities in social movement mobilization. We not only highlight the characteristics of urban social relations that make cities fertile ground for mobilization, but also point to the disjunctures between the geographies and spatialities of social relations in the city, and the geographies and spatialities of many systemic processes. Struggles for a more just society must consider the broad geographies and spatialities of oppression, which we illustrate with a brief analysis of the Occupy movement. Finally, we introduce the next five articles in this special issue, all illustrating the importance of the geographies and spatialities of urban social struggle.     

The validity of the monocentric city model in a polycentric age: US metropolitan areas in 1990, 2000 and 2010

In this article, we use local indicators of spatial association (LISA) and other spatial analysis techniques to analyze the distribution of centers with high employment density within metropolitan areas. We examine the 359 metropolitan areas across the United States at three points in time (1990, 2000, and 2010) to provide a spatio-temporal panoramic of urban spatial structure. Our analysis highlights three key findings. (1) The monocentric structure persists in a majority of metropolitan areas: 56.5% in 1990, 64.1% in 2000, and 57.7% in 2010. (2) The pattern of employment centers remains stable for most metropolitan areas: the number of centers remained the same for 74.9% of metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2000 and for 85.2% between 2000 and 2010. (3) Compared with monocentric metropolitan areas, polycentric metros are larger and more dense, with higher per-capita incomes and lower poverty rates.     

Population distribution and urban growth in Southern Italy, 1871–2011: emergent polycentrism or path-dependent monocentricity?

This study assesses changes in population distribution and the expansion of urban settlements in Southern Italy between 1871 and 2011. Four demographic phases are identified: (i) spatially balanced, mild population growth (1871–1921); (ii) moderate population increase concentrated in coastal and lowland areas (1921–1951); (iii) rapid and diffused population growth (1951–1981); and (iv) population stability with settlement dispersion (1981–2011). While urban growth in the years preceding the 1980s reinforced the polarization in rich and poor areas along the urban-to-rural gradient, since the early 1990s both urban and rural areas showed population dynamics that consolidated low-density settlements scattered around the largest cities. This path, however, does not reflect the evolution towards a more spatially balanced urban development, as observed in other European regions. Causes and consequences of the persistence of a fragmented urban hierarchy with dense settlements and sprawl concentrated around the main cities are finally discussed.     

Digitizing the Dragon Head,Geo-Coding the Urban Landscape: GIS and the Transformation of China's Urban Governance

While local governments have been one of the major user groups of GIS, there is still little research on how GIS development in local government might be intertwined with urban governance, particularly in non-Western contexts. Drawing upon insights from GIS implementation, critical GIS, and governmentality studies, this article seeks to bridge this gap by examining the implications of Chinese urban government GIS practices amidst China's changing urban governance. Through an in-depth case study of Shenzhen, this article analyzes how urban GIS has been transformed from a practice involving internal organizational workflow automation, into a more active dimension of the governance of urban spaces—reflected in the expanding practice of “geo-coding” the urban landscape. “Geo-coding” here refers to a broadly defined spatial practice of carving and reconstructing a rational urban space. GIS practices have constituted a particular form of geographic rationality that seeks to govern at a distance while simultaneously regulating the urban environment, intersecting with the broader transformations of China's urban governance. These GIS developments have been largely government-centric rather than citizen-centric, yet they provide possibilities for new forms of spatial knowledge production for citizen participation in urban governance.     

Gendered Spaces of Informal Entrepreneurship in Soweto,South Africa

Abstract

The full diversity of economic activities in the informal economy is not well understood. The apartheid legacy of limiting informal entrepreneurship explains the most obvious geographical patterns in South Africa. After a decade and a half since the end of apartheid, however, knowledge about the places from which informal entrepreneurs operate is incomplete. Retailing is overemphasized and production firm entrepreneurs, both male and female, remain a neglected spatiality. This study reports on a survey of 100 firms in Soweto and in-depth interviews with 30 firm owners. The findings challenge the representations of isolated urban entrepreneurs dependent on inherited social capital and of women's exclusive engagement in retail. Entrepreneurs create their own social capital in work-related realms, but there are important gender differences. More finely tuned conceptualizations of entrepreneurs and of gendered working spaces need to be developed so that policy does not perpetuate unitary myths and incomplete spatial representations. [Key words: entrepreneurship, Soweto, informal economy, gender.]