Splintering urbanism in Mumbai: Contrasting trends in a multilayered society

This paper is an examination of the splintering urbanism argument of the relationship between neo-liberal reforms of infrastructure networks and urban cohesion. Based on an analysis of historical and contemporary processes of infrastructure provision (water, sewerage and power) in colonial/post-colonial Bombay/Mumbai, it questions the assumption of a “modern infrastructure ideal” in the context of developing cities. In Mumbai, the historical analysis reveals the contradictions between this ideal and a hierarchical society. From the outset, access to services (particularly water and sewerage) was highly distorted in favour of the elites, even though utilities networks contributed to urban integration through cross-subsidies within and across sectors, and through the setting up of municipal institutions. Second, ongoing sectoral reforms demonstrate contrasting trends as increased differentiation of services produces both positive – better adaptation to users’ needs – and potentially negative – fragmenting – socio-spatial implications. Third, an understudied potential fragmenting threat also lies in the sectoral approach to reforms as it undermines the existing crosssector subsidies and prevents the articulation of utility reforms with other limiting factors, such as land and transport, which are the main constraints for expanding housing and mobility in the city.     

Differentiating networked services in Cape Town: Echoes of splintering urbanism?

The central focus of this paper is on the differentiation of basic urban trading services in middle income cities and its role in service provision for the poor. Most studies dedicated to service delivery to the poor emphasize the inequalities pertaining from a growing differentiation in provision and take up some of the arguments of the splintering urbanism thesis. The paper examines some of the main claims made in this debate through a case study of Cape Town (South Africa). It illustrates how differentiation is implemented through service levels and tariffs and suggests that it is a pragmatic way of accommodating social and spatial disparities in a highly polarized city, while making progressive steps in favour of the poor. The main argument is that, in Cape Town like in many middle income cities, urban diversity restricts the relevance of conventional social policies and the scope of local solidarity with regard to service delivery. The differentiation of provision is thus a strategy to bring the diversity within the public service, and hence to preserve an institutional and financial public capacity of delivering subsidized services to the poor.     

The geography of multiple scarcities: Urban development and water problems in Lima,Peru

The paper discusses the contradictory evolution of water services and the politicised nature of water scarcity in Lima, the capital of Peru. It initially claims that water scarcity cannot be understood as an isolated phenomenon, but it is inserted in a wider multiplicity of scarcities that characterise contemporary urban development. The naturalisation of scarcity in the official policy discourse is then criticised for its tendency to overlook interconnected mechanisms of political differentiation and socioeconomic exploitation that influence the allocation and use of water. Against such reductionist readings, the analysis employs a non-essentialist interpretation of multiple scarcities related to water and emphasises the need to address the totality of the experience of scarcity. Based on qualitative fieldwork, which explored recent institutional reforms and the daily struggle for water in the periphery of Lima, three fundamental reasons were identified for the persistence of water scarcity: first, the expansion of water problems as a result of the poor quality of housing and the discriminatory practices against low-income residents; second, the modest improvements in water services provided by public investment programmes, which have primarily aimed to answer political and electoral demands of the ruling party; and third, the technocratic basis of new management approaches and the systematic exclusion of grassroots communities from the decision-making process. Genuine responses to the mounting water problems of Lima require a more critical appreciation of the production of circumstantial abundances and totalising scarcities in the city.     

Urban and rural groundwater use in Zhengzhou, China: challenges in joint management

Groundwater plays an important role in the total water supply of much of China, particularly in the north. It has contributed substantially to both agricultural growth and urban and industrial expansion. However, overexploitation and poor management have contributed to infamous groundwater depletion problems and less publicized groundwater quality deterioration. One of the key challenges for China will be how to make groundwater use sustainable while still meeting increased food needs as well as the industrial and domestic demands of a rapidly urbanizing society. Zhengzhou City, one of China’s test cities for building a “water saving society” highlights both the difficulties and potential solutions to northern China’s joint rural and urban groundwater challenges. Based on secondary data and a primary survey of groundwater management in the region, this report provides an overview of Zhengzhou’s groundwater development and use as well as the ongoing institutional and policy reform processes within the water sector. The results highlight how a deepening of ongoing reforms, which simultaneously consider groundwater as an integral rural and urban issue and a fundamental economic and social asset, may improve groundwater outcomes, not only in Zhengzhou but in China, as the country’s economy and demography continue to change.     

Unbundling Stockholm: The networks, planning and social welfare nexus beyond the unitary city

This paper focuses on the extent to which recent infrastructure-oriented urban developments in Stockholm concord with various aspects of the ‘splintering urbanism’ thesis of Graham and Marvin. This contextualisation allows us to extend their work empirically and conceptually. In the first instance, we study a particular case of the decline of a unitary networked city (in an urban context largely absent from their book). In the second instance, we develop their notion of ‘unbundling’ to capture not just core changes in the organisation of infrastructure provision, but an overarching disjunction of the established nexus between networks, planning and social welfare in the city. This disjunction operates through interlinked transformations concerning, for example, privatisation and outsourcing in network services, separation of infrastructure planning from broader urban planning, contradictions between the environmental and social mandates of infrastructure, and a (prospective) curtailment of the redistributive, social role of essential network service provision. We conclude nonetheless that this ‘destructive’ moment of unbundling has not so far been pursued by more explicitly ‘creative’ urban fragmentation strategies, due largely to the vestiges of a socio-political consensus based around redistribution and equality. In this respect, the Stockholm case pleads for a conception of ‘splintering’ as a dynamic and multi-stage process which is not only always ongoing, unstable and incomplete, but also non-linear and open to resistance/regulation.     

Water and power in Santiago de Chile: Socio-spatial segregation through network integration

The analysis of the history of the management and distribution of electricity, water and sanitation networks in Santiago de Chile throws light on a problem which is central to thinking on the relationship between urban services management and territorial splintering: what is the impact of urban policy, in particular housing policy and urban planning, on access to services and on the potential levels of social segregation and institutional splintering of metropolises?The Chilean example is eminently anchored in its political and institutional history. We shall see, for example, that the authoritarian urban policy of the military government, associated with early liberal reform, enabled the improvement of access to networks in every municipality of the Greater Santiago area. However, this success, leading to the integration by urban services of a large territory, does not signify that networks remained neutral as regards the process of spatial segregation. Inversely, we can defend the theory that the presence of an integrated service was a necessary condition and a reinforcing factor of the process of urban spread and residential segregation. This paradoxical argument is a result of the ambivalent liberal network and urban policies of the military government. Urban expansion was largely sustained by the development of integrated infrastructures and universal services. The processes of liberalising land and urban services were mutually sustaining and provided the necessary conditions for the birth of an extremely intense movement of urban sprawl and segregation between 1985 and 2000.     

Water and power networks and urban fragmentation in Los Angeles: Rethinking assumed mechanisms

Los Angeles is often described as the epitome of urban fragmentation, a notion which in this context is frequently connected to, or even conflated with urban sprawl. At the same time, the city features integrated water and power networks which have been under public ownership for over 70 years. We thus have an apparent paradox in the context of the debate on ‘splintering urbanism’, between socio-spatial fragmentation and the integration of networks. In discussing the idea that deregulation of infrastructural networks exacerbates urban fragmentation, the authors use the case of Los Angeles in order to highlight the central role of private interests in management decisions concerning infrastructure networks. The authors carry out their analysis in an historical perspective, revealing that network integration and universal access can often serve private interests more than the public good. Urban fragmentation in Los Angeles, they conclude, is the result of a complex process of instrumentalisation of network development and management.     

More rhetoric or less action? Digging into urban health vulnerabilities: insights from urbanizing Accra

Urbanization is a product of development and in recent years, most cities have been experiencing unprecedented growth with improvements in their infrastructure. The obvious benefits of the process tend to paradoxically overshadow its insidious symptoms, as unregulated growth tend to create huge unmet needs such as lack of access to good-quality services, increasing poverty and deteriorating environment. The origin of this dichotomy is rooted in the governance practices where city authorities pay greater attention to issues of managing the ‘global commons’ than the critical ‘brown issues’, such as improving water supply and sanitation that affect the urban poor. Using multiple research techniques, this study highlights how such neglected necessities consign sections of the population to one of the deadly infectious diseases Ghana has ever known—cholera. The paper calls for an all-inclusive and explicitly pro-poor community-led orientation as one of the effective strategy for achieving equity in the urban settings and possibly, helps win the ‘war’ on poor sanitation.     

Reconciling indigenous need with the urban welfare state? Evidence of culturally-appropriate services and spaces for Aboriginals in Winnipeg, Canada

Despite the increasing urbanization of the Aboriginal population in Canada over the past 50 years, most municipalities have not developed services and programs designed to meet their unique social and cultural needs. Faced with numerous health and social problems, the Aboriginal population is mainly forced to rely on the non-Aboriginal social services sector. However, little is known about the extent to which such sectors seek to accommodate Aboriginal populations in their programming. We examine the extent to which the recovery system makes space for Aboriginal healing through the provision of culturally-appropriate services and programming. Through the use of 24 in-depth interviews with staff members at seven treatment facilities in Winnipeg (Canada), we find an entrenched reluctance, indifference and lack of desire to create Aboriginal spaces of healing in treatment, save for one facility where Aboriginal healing spaces serve as a focal point of treatment. We discuss the implications in terms of the effectiveness of the non-Aboriginal recovery system (along with other social services) in meeting the needs of Canada’s urban Aboriginal population.     

Beyond passive consumption: Dis/ordering water supply and sanitation at Hanoi’s urban edge

In Hanoi people access, expand and create water and sanitation infrastructures in multiple ways that include, but are not restricted to, external provision of networked services. Urban master planning and the construction of large technological networks aim at integrating the urban region based on circulating ‘modern ideals’ of ubiquity and standardization of infrastructures. However, centralized infrastructure provision has remained unstable and spatially uneven. We examine differently networked spaces that have emerged at the edge of Hanoi along with rapid urban change and new financing mechanisms in the past thirty years, and the ways in which urban residents engage with the various water and sanitation systems. This engagement is shaped by circulating ideals, place-specific processes of urban re-production, sector-specific dynamics, and individuals. Not only in periurban villages, but also in modern housing estates, people rebut a role as passive receptors of external services. In some instances, they create relatively stable collectives through which they provide, negotiate and complement networked infrastructure connection. Thus, people living at Hanoi’s urban edge actively re-produce water and sanitation systems beyond passive consumption of externally provided services.     

Megacities and natural disasters: a comparative analysis*

Natural disasters are a worsening problem in many of the world's largest cities. Since an increasing majority of the world's population will soon live in cities, and mostly in large cities, the trend towards increasing urban hazard poses serious societal challenges for the future. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the International Geographical Union's Study Group on the Disaster Vulnerability of Megacities undertook a series of case studies of megacities that have been – and are – exposed to major natural disasters. These include: Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, Lima, Mexico City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, London and Dhaka. Case studies focused on reviewing the historic record of major disasters in each city and on documenting recent changes in different components of hazard including, risk, exposure, vulnerability and response. It was found that exposure and vulnerability are the components of hazard that are changing fastest and with the gravest implications for urban populations. Because hazards are only one part of the typical urban management agenda, hazards management in large cities should be pursued with careful regard to the context of general urban policy manking and management. Sustainability has become a guiding principle of urban management but the relationship between hazard and sustainability is little understood and little explored. The way lies open for hazard researchers to develop alternative contextualized approaches to the analysis and resolution of urban hazard issues. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Effects of gas pricing reform on China’s price level and total output

Natural gas plays an important role in the mitigation of climate change, yet its development is constrained by the current natural gas pricing mechanism in China. In the context of the natural gas pricing reform, this paper analyzes the potential effects on price level and total output. Through the input–output model, some conclusions are drawn as follows: (1) The gas pricing reform has relatively great impact on the products’ price of the sectors that have large gas consumption, such as industrial sectors and some service sectors, and on the total output of the gas production and supply sectors and the petroleum and natural gas extraction sectors, whereas the reform has relatively small impact on other industries; (2) effects of gas pricing reform on urban and rural residents are dissymmetrical, with larger effects on urban residents and (3) the reform has relatively small impacts on both various price indices and total output levels; thus, the government can realize the promotion of gas pricing reform nationwide at a cost of relatively small increase in general price level and little lose of total output.

     

Globalisation and regional integration: the case of the Italian urban system

A recent study on the European integration of the Italian urban system shows that globalisation processes do not necessarily separate cities from their regional networks. The most successful cases of recent urban development in Italy are associated with the formation of metropolitan networked regions in which a major metropolitan centre is linked with cities of a lower level by hierarchical, complementary and synergetic relations. The paper examines the result of an analysis carried out on 148 major Italian daily urban systems. It takes into account two sets of indicators: one referring to the supraregional network interactions, measuring the degree of globalisation, and one referring to the proximity interactions inside the regional networks, measuring the degree of regional cohesion. They allow the definition of typologies of urban systems founded on a (normally positive) correlation between supraregional functional openness and regional integration.     

Placing splintering urbanism: Introduction

This paper introduces a collection of case studies aimed at “Placing Splintering Urbanism”, in reference to the thesis developed by Graham and Marvin [Graham, S., Marvin, S., 2001. Splintering Urbanism. Networked Infractructures, Technoloical Moblilities and the Urban condition. Routledge, London]. Whilst acknowledging the value of the thesis as an analytical framework in opening the way to innovative understandings of contemporary urban dynamics, the paper argues that, taken together, the articles in this themed issue seriously challenge the “splintering urbanism” thesis theoretically, empirically and methodologically. They question in particular the postulated universality of the “modern infrastructural ideal” and of “unbundling” and “bypass” processes — all of which are key elements in Graham and Marvin’s argument — as well as the assertion that reforms in infrastructure sectors should generally result in more discriminatory, socially regressive patterns of provision of essential services and more splintered urban spaces. Based on these fundamental critiques, the paper concludes that one cannot speak of “splintering urbanism in general” — i.e., as a global trend — in any meaningful analytical way.     

Effects of gas pricing reform on China’s price level and total output

Natural gas plays an important role in the mitigation of climate change, yet its development is constrained by the current natural gas pricing mechanism in China. In the context of the natural gas pricing reform, this paper analyzes the potential effects on price level and total output. Through the input–output model, some conclusions are drawn as follows: (1) The gas pricing reform has relatively great impact on the products’ price of the sectors that have large gas consumption, such as industrial sectors and some service sectors, and on the total output of the gas production and supply sectors and the petroleum and natural gas extraction sectors, whereas the reform has relatively small impact on other industries; (2) effects of gas pricing reform on urban and rural residents are dissymmetrical, with larger effects on urban residents and (3) the reform has relatively small impacts on both various price indices and total output levels; thus, the government can realize the promotion of gas pricing reform nationwide at a cost of relatively small increase in general price level and little lose of total output.     

In poor health: Supermarket redlining and urban nutrition

Over the past 100 years, ethnic minorities and the poor have become increasingly concentrated and isolated in low-income urban neighborhoods. While the demographic changes in cities are well documented, the parallel history of urban retailing is less well known. Little research has been done on changes in urban food retailing, particularly as they concern the urban poor. As the residential character of urban neighborhoods changed during the 20th century, so did the amenities available in those neighborhoods. The low point for urban retailing was in the 1980s, when cities experienced a net loss of supermarkets even as, nationally, store openings exceeded closings. The trend toward fewer, bigger stores located outside cities has continued to the present. Some critics have referred to this disinclination of large chains to locate in cities as `supermarket redlining'. Changes in food availability are a key element in the changing social conditions of the urban poor and, as good nutrition is critical for good health, a contributing factor in the decline of urban health. This paper will examine changes in urban retail food availability, the impact these changes have had on the health status of the urban poor, strategies utilized by the urban poor to address inadequate access to quality food sources, and the role of supermarkets in distressed communities.     

Exploring the structure of the U.S. intercity passenger air transportation network: a weighted complex network approach

The U.S. airline network is one of the most advanced transportation infrastructures in the world. It is a complex geospatial structure that sustains a variety of dynamics including commercial, public, and military operations and services. We study the U.S. domestic intercity passenger air transportation network using a weighted complex network methodology, in which vertices represent cities and edges represent intercity airline connections weighted by average daily passenger traffic, non-stop distance, and average one-way fares. We find that U.S. intercity passenger air transportation network is a small-world network accompanied by dissortative mixing patterns and rich-club phenomenon, implying that large degree cities (or hub cities) tend to form high traffic volume interconnections among each other and large degree cities tend to link to a large number of small degree cities. The interhub air connections tend to form interconnected triplets with high traffic volumes, long non-stop distances, and low average one-way fares. The structure of the U.S. airline network reflects the dynamic integration of pre-existing urban and national transportation infrastructure with the competitive business strategies of commercial airlines. In this paper we apply an emerging methodology to representing, analyzing, and modeling the complex interactions associated with the physical and human elements of the important U.S. national air transport and services infrastructure.     

Territorial exclusion and violence: the case of the state of São Paulo, Brazil

If we had to point out one single feature to define Brazilian cities today, it would be the existence of a dual built environment: a landscape produced by private entrepreneurs and contained within the framework of detailed urban legislation, and another one, three times greater, self-produced by the poor and eternally situated in an intermediate zone between the legal and the illegal. In addition to being an expression of economic and social disparities, this contrast has profound implications on the form and functioning of the cities. The sprawl of the precarious peripheries has lead to an absurd disconnection of poorly urbanized spaces and the city center where jobs, cultural and economic opportunities are concentrated. The effects of this persistent territorial exclusion are devastating and occur in both the peripheries and the city center. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nexus between the precarious and risky urbanization which took place in Brazilian cities and the urban violence that seems to be the most recent and visible face of this model, using the concrete example of different cities in the state of São Paulo. In order to construct the links it is first important to understand how patterns of economic development and population trends have contributed to the generation of risk urbanization and how planning and urban management policies interact with it.     

Sustainable urban drainage systems: examining the potential for green infrastructure-based stormwater management for Sub-Saharan cities

Green infrastructure (GI)-based approaches to urban drainage such as sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) could provide Sub-Saharan cities with an opportunity to address projected climate change impacts and existing deficits in their drainage infrastructure, even more so due to the synergies between an enhanced green infrastructure stock and sustainable urban development. The objective of this paper was to assess the theoretical value of using green infrastructure for stormwater management as an alternative and supplement to conventional pipe-based stormwater management systems. A SWOT analysis is performed to assess the potential that SUDS hold if adopted and implemented in Sub-Saharan cities. This analysis is based on a review of sustainable stormwater management as well as urban planning and governance literature. Results show that despite seemingly significant barriers to the adoption of SUDS in Sub-Saharan cities such as low prioritization on the urban agenda and lack of data among others, the concept may hold valuable potential for flood risk reduction, even more so due to its multi-functionality and synergies with urban agriculture, amenity and water supply. In the light of the existing threats and weaknesses, it is recommended that GI-based SUDS may be best approached initially as experiments at a local community scale.     

Agglomeration and location choice of foreign financial institutions in China

In the midst of global economic and financial integration, there are increasing cross-border capital flows between China and the rest of the world. Foreign financial businesses also start to play more important roles in the nation’s market after waves of financial reforms. Within such a background, this study aims to investigate the agglomeration and location choice of overseas financial institutions in Chinese cities. Data from the 2004 China Economic Census show that foreign financial establishments, including banks, insurance companies, and other financial service businesses, were mainly agglomerated in coastal cities. In particular, three major urban areas, Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, concentrated a majority of overseas financial institutions. Results from regression models show that foreign businesses’ location choice is greatly influenced by a city’s urban economy, involvement in the global market, and telecommunication infrastructure. However, we do not find a significant link between foreign financial institutions’ market entry and the size of domestic financial centers in China.