Boston’s Olympic bid and the evolving urban politics of event-led development

The sports mega-events industry is in the midst of a significant reorganization, and the urban politics of event-led development planning is increasingly tumultuous. Three trends stand out: (1) the mega-events industry has been professionalized through consultancies, sports federations' urban policy programs, and city-to-city knowledge-sharing partnerships. (2) Critics of mega-events have been successful in drawing attention to state intervention and public subsidies involved in mega-event planning. (3) A proliferation of anti-bid social movements has pursued a form of urban politics, which more aggressively questions the legitimacy of using mega-events to pursue urban development. I evaluate the implications of these trends with a case study of a bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Boston. The failure of the Boston bid illustrates increasing tensions between cities and the mega-events industry.     

The role of money in China’s urban production: the local property industry in Qujing,a fourth-tier city

What has made the urbanization of capital possible in China since the late 1990s? A major strand of literature in urban geography has pointed out land as the main trigger of urbanization. Scholars have highlighted the empowerment of local governments and their subsequent role in implementing China’s national urbanization objectives because of substantial revenues from the commodification of land. Other scholars have looked beyond the supply side, emphasizing the role of demand in stimulating urban development in China. In terms of demand, the speculative rationale of urban households aided land and property development during the 2000s, when property became a main alternative financial asset. However, this still raises the question of how urban production is financed. Based on a case study of the fourth-tier city of Qujing, in Yunnan province, this article investigates the financing of urban production from the perspective of the development industry. For the time being, little is known about how these companies finance their operations.     

Urban migrant women’s everyday food insecurity coping strategies foster alternative urban imaginaries of a more democratic food system

Urban migrant women worldwide utilize a creative combination of food insecurity coping strategies to procure food for themselves and their families. Using in-depth interviews with 72 migrant women in Medellín, Colombia, and Washington, DC, this paper argues that in low-income urban communities these everyday strategies can further their demands for autonomy in determining what foods they produce and consume. Relying on feminist geography and food sovereignty literature, this research explores how migrant women living in poverty rely on informal networks for growing and sharing food, seek out organic, fresh foods, and utilize independent survival strategies to counter exclusionary rhetoric and a food system they view as unhealthy. In doing so, they devise alternative urban imaginaries of a more democratic food system. This research contributes a more nuanced understanding of the food insecurity experiences of urban migrant women.     

Bargaining for nature: treating the environment in China’s urban planning practice

ABSTRACT

In much of the contemporary academic inquiry and political discourse on Chinese cities, urban entrepreneurialism and environmentalism often appear to be analyzed disjointedly and unreflectively. They are portrayed as two conflicting interests. Commentators also view urban planners as a homogenous group of professionals and/or state agents being forced to give up environmental goals to pursue economic value of space. Using the case of Tianjin Eco-City planning, this article interrogates the bargaining process between the “ecological value” and “commodity narrative”. It offers three major arguments. First, even though the discourse of environmental sustainability has been used to legitimize economic transformation, ecological demands are creating new pressures on entrepreneurial urban governance. Second, rather than treating Chinese planners as a fully constituted, internally coherent, organizationally-fixed, and operationally-consistent group, they should be viewed as hybrid, and diverse entities that represent divergent and sometimes contentious state interests. Third, planners, though still under tremendous pressure from landed interests, can become active players to positively influence urban transformation toward more environmental care.     

Generative urbanization in Africa? A sociotechnical systems view of Tanzania’s urban transition

Africa’s recent growth successes are raising hopes that its cities can generate the positive externalities needed to sustain long-term development. This paper examines the prospects for such a transformation in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A sociotechnical systems framework is elaborated: one which conceptualizes urbanization pathways as determined by the practices, modes of governance, couplings, and multiscalar relations that constitute production, consumption, and infrastructure regimes in cities. The framework is deployed to assess whether Dar es Salaam’s industries, markets, public services, and built environments are generating distributive development outcomes. The analysis shows that the city is experiencing socioeconomically and spatially uneven development driven by processes of extraversion, intraversion, and splintering. Urban regimes are thus serving a more “parasitic” role by channeling capital offshore, bringing imports onshore, and creating highly uneven distributions of basic services. The paper highlights points of intervention and the value of the conceptual approach for comparative urban research.     

Shifting borders,shifting center: hedging-out uncertainty in west Jerusalem’s urban core

ABSTRACT

This article argues that contested cities are inherently characterized by uncertainty and uses the interconnections between conflict, uncertainty and urban planning as a new analytical framework for investigating conflict cities. In the contested city of Jerusalem, geopolitical uncertainty stems from the Israeli occupation over East Jerusalem. Focusing on recent urban regeneration plans for West Jerusalem’s city center, the article explores how the municipality locates, plans and imagines the city center when the city’s external and internal boundaries are contested and unfixed. A two-tier analysis is employed. First, a historical analysis shows that the “city center”, as defined by authorities, is an unfixed locale that shifts in concurrence with shifts in the city’s boundaries. Then, a geopolitical analysis shows that by shifting the city center’s boundaries, the Israeli authorities decouple the city’s economic development (in the west) from Israel’s continuing ethno-national policies (in the east).     

The street as urban icon? Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard

In this article, I analyze Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard as an example of an urban symbol and suggest that while main streets, avenues and boulevards are usually perceived as integral parts of the urban symbolic ecology, they are rarely considered as exclusive urban icons in their own right. Although prestige of “privileged” streets influences reputations of cities and constitutes an important part of their imaginary, their complicated physical structure and multifunctional character conflict with their iconic status. The physical nature of streets resists configuration and articulation as exclusive, durable urban icons because symbols are generally conspicuous physical objects that can be directly interpreted and rendered as iconic.     

Men and women in Boston learn about terrorism differently: gendering the urban values–vulnerability nexus

This paper expands the values-vulnerability nexus for studying urban vulnerability to terrorism. Gender is among the most salient social structures affecting a person’s interpretation of risk, and urban geographers have demonstrated that gender also deeply affects the experience of urban life. However, the values that shape urban vulnerability to terrorism have been conceptualized more broadly, usually focusing on the underpinning economic organization of cities that terrorists exploit rather than on concepts such as gender. As a result, the role of gender in understanding societal responses to terrorism—specifically risk perception and preparedness—is underdeveloped, including in the 2008 US National Survey of Disaster and Preparedness, which sought to understand Americans’ responses to terrorism. This paper outlines a gender values–vulnerability nexus for studying terrorism. Using interview data from Boston, Massachusetts conducted before and after the 15 April 2013 Boston Marathon attacks, I demonstrate that gender deeply affected how Bostonians learned about and responded to terrorism. The gender values–vulnerability nexus explores the role of gendered political, social, economic, and geographical dimensions in urban vulnerability to terrorism. The role of gender has the potential to substantially increase vulnerability for urban populations, particularly given gender-similar social networks and urban contexts that continue to yield different experiences for men and women. The implications of these findings may signal challenges for urban emergency managers, public safety officials, and ordinary people in American cities.     

The urban geopolitics of neighboring: conflict,encounter and class in Jerusalem’s settlement/neighborhood

This article examines a unique, yet paradigmatic, case study of a colonial neighborhood in East Jerusalem that is undergoing a significant demographic transformation.¹ The French Hill neighborhood, built in 1971, was one of the first settlements in East Jerusalem. Initially, it was populated primarily by upper-middle class secular-Jewish residents. This group has been steadily diminishing as two other distinct new groups moved into the neighborhood: Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Palestinians. This volatile social mix has caused intense inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic collisions. Based on qualitative and quantitative studies, we argue that the juxtaposition of colonial and neoliberal logics of space reveals a shared, yet fragile, middle-class identity. We suggest that this new geopolitical space of neighboring calls for a discussion of political conflict, housing and current colonial conditions that brings class back to our understanding of the production of contested space.     

Exploring the future of rural–urban connections in sub-Saharan Africa: modelling urban expansion and its impact on food production in the Addis Ababa region

Abstract

The built-up area of Addis Ababa and its surrounding towns is expanding into the peri-urban region leading to high losses of farmland, directly influencing the food production for the urban population. This paper investigates the patterns of settlement growth in the region surrounding Addis Ababa and their impact on peri-urban agriculture using an urban spatial scenario design model. The effects of two population density scenarios are explored within the framework of a proposed master plan. The model output was used to estimate areas of different suitability levels that would be lost to the modelled settlement expansion. The settlement area in 2038 would represent 29% of the case study’s total area in the low-density scenario but only 19% in the high-density scenario. Compared to the low-density scenario, the high-density scenario would only require a third of the agricultural land transformed into settlement areas. Settlement development would contribute to higher losses of land suitable for cultivating important export products, high nutritional value and import-substituting products. The scenario approach can support sustainable regional planning for settlement expansion that conserves valuable farmland in the peri-urban area and contributes to building capacity for strategic planning of the city regions of sub-Saharan Africa.     

How do Ghana’s landfills affect residential property values? A case study of two sites in Accra

Like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana lacks well-engineered sanitary landfill sites. Increased urbanization and concomitant real estate growth lead landfills to compete with residential land use, resulting in closer proximity between landfill sites and residential neighborhoods. The effects of landfills on the property values of nearby residential communities have been the subject of much debate in the developed world, where state-of-the-art and environmentally well-engineered landfills are common. However, academic and other research is inconclusive on the effects of landfills on property values in the developed countries. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the effects of landfills on residential property values in Ghana, using the Oblogo and Mallam landfills in Accra as a case study. Our analysis indicates that while landfills do depress nearby residential property values, the effects are contingent on property location relative to the level of urbanization in a community, and year of completion and total costs of property development.     

Meeting the urban challenge? Urban agriculture and food security in post-conflict Freetown,Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone has recently emerged from a long period of political instability and is ranked among the world's poorest countries. During the decade-long civil war of the 1990s, widespread forced out-migration left much of the countryside abandoned, as rural residents fled to the safety of the capital city, Freetown. Consequently, food production became severely dislocated and, in the post-conflict era, the state of the agricultural sector has become a major concern to governmental and non-governmental development agencies. Focussing on the question of urban food security in Freetown, this paper examines the incidence, dynamics and significance of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) among households, at a crucial point in Sierra Leone's post-conflict reconstruction phase. Drawing on recent field-based data, the paper contributes to the growing debate concerning how urban planning and development might be reconciled with the promotion of an ‘enabling environment’ in which UPA is encouraged and supported. It is argued that in the case of Freetown, a detailed evaluation of UPA is urgently needed to determine how agricultural activities can fit in with urban structure, urban problems and the livelihoods of a wide range of actors in and around the city. The paper concludes that not only is UPA a vital element in ensuring household food security, but it could potentially play a fundamental role in safeguarding the urban food continuum and promoting sustainable urbanization in the post-conflict period and beyond.     

China’s food security situation and key questions in the new era: A perspective of farmland protection

As the world’s largest developing country, the ability of China’s agricultural resource utilization to effectively support the current and future food security goals has been affected by a variety of factors (e.g., transformed supply channels, tightening international situation and frequent emergencies) in recent years and has attracted extensive attention from the academic community subject to multiple factors. This study uses literature review, statistical analysis, and spatial analysis methods to systematically explore China’s food security situation in the context of farmland resource constraints. It is found that the demand-side pressures such as demographic changes, social class differentiation, and dietary structure adjustments derived from economic growth and rapid urbanization have placed extremely high expectations on food supply. However, the quantitative restrictions, utilization ways, and health risks of farmland resources on the supply side constitute a huge hidden concern that affects the stability of food production. Although China’s farmland protection system is undergoing a transition from focusing on quantity management to sustainable use, the matching and coordinating demand pressure and supply capacity for food security is unbalanced. Therefore, facing uncertain future development scenarios, policymakers should focus on building a resilient space for China’s farmland protection to withstand the interference of major emergencies. The existing farmland protection space policy can be integrated by establishing a national farmland strategic reserve system (based on resilient space), and further development of targeted use control measures for zoning, grading, and classification will help realize sustainable China’s farmland resources use.     

Relative soil moisture in China’s farmland

Journal of Geographical Sciences - Based on the data of relative soil moisture in 653 agricultural meteorological stations during the period of 1993‒2013 in China, the characteristics and...     

An obsolete dichotomy? Rethinking the rural–urban interface in terms of food security and production in the global south

The global food system is coming under increasing strain in the face of urban population growth. The recent spike in global food prices (2007–08) provoked consumer protests, and raised questions about food sovereignty and how and where food will be produced. Concurrently, for the first time in history the majority of the global population is urban, with the bulk of urban growth occurring in smaller-tiered cities and urban peripheries, or ‘peri-urban’ areas of the developing world. This paper discusses the new emerging spaces that incorporate a mosaic of urban and rural worlds, and reviews the implications of these spaces for livelihoods and food security. We propose a modified livelihoods framework to evaluate the contexts in which food production persists within broader processes of landscape and livelihood transformation in peri-urban locations. Where and how food production persists are central questions for the future of food security in an urbanising world. Our proposed framework provides directions for future research and highlights the role of policy and planning in reconciling food production with urban growth.     

A spatio-temporal assessment and prediction of Ahmedabad’s urban growth between 1990–2030

Journal of Geographical Sciences - Analyzing long term urban growth trends can provide valuable insights into a city’s future growth. This study employs LANDSAT satellite images from 1990,...     

Japan’s urban singles: negotiating alternatives to family households and standard housing pathways

In comparison to other advanced economies, the rise of people living alone in Japan has been late and rapid, with singletons now accounting for almost half of all households in major cities. The normative and structural frameworks surrounding standard family-household formation, however, remain formidable, reducing life-course opportunities for non-family formers. This paper considers the household and housing pathways being negotiated by younger-adults living independently. In addition to various secondary data sources, we draw on qualitative interviews with 35 individuals from 28 Tokyo households in addressing manifestations of, and resistance to, atomisation and individualisation in the Japanese context. Our analysis focuses on meanings and practices of homemaking among renters and buyers in the growing sector of single-person dwellings, as well as the recent emergence of commercial shared housing . This analysis provides a contrast to discourses surrounding the “singles boom” and “the growing appeal of living alone” in Western cities.     

Creative destruction in urban planning procedures: the language of ‘renewal’ and ‘exploitation’21

This paper examines the language and phraseology of ‘creative destruction‘ (‘renewal‘ and ‘exploitation’) expressed in urban planning procedures concerning one particular house in West Jerusalem: 28 Radak Street. Through a forensic examination of the planning-related communications about this address, the work analyzes the various stages of the ’destruction’ and ’renewal’ of the property. It demonstrates how each of the various actors involved (Municipality, planning committees, legal courts, private entrepreneur and local residents) uses different language and phraseology to present their argument, while the voice of the original Palestinian owners of the house is entirely absent from the planning battle.     

Multi-designated geoparks face challenges in China’s heritage conservation

The author selects a thorny issue of doubled designations that bother pol- icy-makers, professional planners and managers in the field of conservation for protected areas. The analyzed case study areas cover 5 National Geoparks of China in Sichuan Prov- ince, 18 UNESCO Global Geoparks in China, and 219 World Heritage sites in China and 8 European nations. Through analysis and synthesis, the author concludes that doubled des- ignation, which also leads to unbalanced park distribution, is particularly prevalent in China other than in Europe. Therefore, on-site management agencies and related governments in China should carefully translate the doubled designations into responsibilities and harmoni- ous partnerships between all stakeholders in order to enhance the management effectiveness and avoid paper park phenomenon.