Urban renewal, immigration, and contested claims to public space: The case of Piazza Garibaldi in Naples

This article examines the relationship between immigration and urban renewal in Naples during the 1990s through the conflicting representations and uses of Piazza Garibaldi, a large piazza located in front of the city's central railway station. As well as the hub of the city's public transport network, since the mid-1980s this piazza has been the multifunctional space for a number of immigrant groups. Re-envisioned as the `gateway' to the city's regenerated centro storico (historic centre) during the 1990s, the piazza became a focus of public debates on security, tourism and, in particular, immigration. I examine how these issues intersected with political discourses about a renewed sense of citizenship in redefining the piazza as a strategic but problematic public space. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of local newspaper reports, the article looks at the ways in which the piazza has been appropriated by different immigrant groups for social and economic purposes, and how, at the same time, they have been excluded from discourses about a `new' Naples.     

Gated communities and urban fragmentation in Latin America: the Brazilian experience

Since the mid-1970s, gated housing areas of the privileged have been spreading in Latin American cities. They have to be seen as a visible consequence of the deepening social disparities within Latin American societies and the resulting fragmentation of urban space. Condomínios fechados (Brazil) or barrios cerrados (Argentina) can be typified following different criteria, such as formation, location, size, fittings, construction typology, as well as social structure. Three groups of actors influence the process of their expansion: the real estate companies, for which the new form of living offers an attractive market segment, the target groups, whose increasing expectations regarding security and living comfort need to be met, and the public authorities, who have to find adequate responses concerning the further orientation of urban development. Based on case studies from Brazil, the paper will discuss the different phases of gated community expansion and the reasons why this is happening. Their internal structure and differentiation, as well as consequences for socio-spatial development and urban planning will also be dealt with.     

Repressive tolerance: The gay movement and the Vatican in Rome

The World Gay Pride week convened in Rome in July 2000 at the same time the Catholic Church planned on celebrating its Holy Year Jubilee. Thousands of gays came together, and by the end of the week more than 200,000 marched through the streets of Rome's historical centre. This unique event provides an opportunity to examine the causal relationship of the gay movement acquiring a political identity of its own while the city of Rome was trying to assert a `proper' identity for its public spaces. Acting in solidarity for the first time since its formation, the gay movement drew attention to the difficulties in securing unrestricted access to Rome's public spaces. Conservative sectors of society challenged the right to demonstrate, as guaranteed in Italy's Constitution, which resulted in the delay of obtaining the necessary permit. On the one hand, this revealed the existence of sectors of society not yet willing to acknowledge gay rights or even discuss gay issues in public; on the other, it helped make clear that the process for building Rome's identity is governed by a specific political design. In particular, policies for the privatisation of urban space in conjunction with discriminatory planning processes in the city's historical centre, point to tourism as a powerful tool to control urban space. Resisting this spatial marginalization the gay movement has significantly widened the scope of its social and political action in order to contest prevailing practices and trends which are shaping the city.     

Angels of memory: photography and haunting in Guatemala City

This article explores the relationship between historical memory, urban space, and photography by way of a case study: the place-specific public art of the Guatemalan photographer and human rights activist, Daniel Hernández-Salazar. As one of a growing number of Latin American artists committed to combating the “institutionalized forgetfulness” of human rights violations throughout the hemisphere, Hernández-Salazar deploys geographically-rich photographic installations to help his society remember its difficult past. The installations, known as Street Angel, are like ghosts haunting the graves of the murdered, fortresses of the powerful, bastions of the complicit. By shedding light on these ghostly angels, this article reveals the important role of photography, as a crucial vehicle of memory, in bearing witness to the unimaginable horrors that consumed much of the twentieth century, as well as that technology’s limitations. It also shows how remembrances of those atrocities depend on urban space for their grounding, articulation, and maintenance. Finally, by probing the artistic impulse and political sensibility that created Guatemala City’s angels of memory, it makes the case that, in the combustible political climate of post-war Central America, the work of remembering the past is not an antiquarian exercise: the labor of memory is a fundamental component of building a just society.

Public space design as class warfare: Urban design, the `right to the city' and the production of Clinton Square, Syracuse, NY

Urban designers and their design process remain largely outside the literature on public space. Either designers are cast as simple tools of capitalist social relations, producing exclusionary public spaces, or they figure as entrepreneurs that complement economic renewal schemes through beautification measures that bring business and jobs to the city. This paper analyzes both of these arguments, through an ethnographic analysis of the urban design process behind the redevelopment of a public square in Syracuse, NY. I argue that aesthetic considerations most often derive from economic and political pressures, pressures that draw upon the social contexts of urban designers within an international division of labor and their relationship to class struggle. Because public space serves such an important role in political and social life, its status as a product of urban design should therefore act as a crucial component in any discussion of rights to the city.     

Looking for the critical geographer, or why bodies and geographies matter to the emergence of critical geographies of Latin America

This paper argues that critical geographies of Latin America begin with an analysis of how and why the bodies and geographies of geographers themselves matter. To focus on the geographer as a producer of knowledge is not to advocate the kind of navel gazing so abhorrent to many scholars. Rather, it is an effort to call attention to and critically assess how the geographer's embodied social position and geographic location inform the production of knowledge about and representations of Latin American people and nature. To illustrate how and why bodies and geographies matter, I draw from feminist and post-colonial theory and include examples from my own experiences and those of other researchers doing fieldwork in Latin American countries. I conclude by exploring the notion of situated knowledge as a tactic that writes bodies and geographies into academic texts. Ultimately, situating knowledge represents a political intervention and contribution to the broader goals of emancipatory politics shared by critical human geographers.     

The political economy of informal settlements in post-socialist China: The case of chengzhongcun(s)

Informal settlements become an intriguing spatial dimension of urbanization in those countries which experience the systemic shift from socialism to neoliberal regimes. This paper takes chengzhongcun(s) (literally meaning ‘villages encircled by the city’ boundaries) as a case to explore the dynamics of informal settlements in post-socialist China that has certain distinctive features related to the legacy of socialist institutions and restructuring of urban space by various forces. The paper details the political and economic contexts, as well as the ways in which chengzhongcun(s) are transformed into functional but unregulated urban space. It also elucidates the policy approach towards formalizing chengzhongcun(s) and confrontation involving in government-led redevelopment. The analysis illustrates how spatial informality is shaped by the interaction of economic interests and political considerations in a post-socialist economy with retaining the rural-urban dualism of land ownership and the control of urban citizenship.     

Place-based learning and knowing: critical pedagogies grounded in Indigeneity

For Indigenous peoples, knowledge and science are written onto the landscapes our languages ??talk into being?? through the ??individual and collective consciousness of our communities (Cajete 2000, 284).?? Our landscapes are the storied histories, cosmogonies, philosophies and sciences of those Indigenous knowledges which are increasingly being pushed aside by the ??gray uniformity?? of globalization and its progenitor, European colonization. It is within storied places that we can still glimpse alternatives to this gray uniformity of globalization which brings with it a rhetoric of capitalism, modernism, abstract space and Western science. It is this rhetoric produced through globalization which erases the storied landscapes, destroying the libraries embedded within Indigenous toponyms, creating a terra nullius: an empty land awaiting a colonial/neo-colonial history and economy. As Paulo Freire has challenged us to see, critical consciousness requires us to ??read our world,?? decoding the images of our own concrete, situated experiences with the world (Freire and Macedo 1987, 35). A critical pedagogy of place recognizes the concrete experiences of communities grounded in shared histories, stories and challenges based within a politics of place. A critical pedagogy of place seeks to decolonize and reinhabit the storied landscape through ??reading?? the ways in which Indigenous peoples?? places and environment have been injured and exploited. This paper seeks to discuss how through reading the places in the world as ??political texts,?? one may engage in reflection and praxis in order to understand, and where necessary, to change the world.     

‘Our city is our identity!’: a field study on Kurdish local government experiences in Diyarbakır

In this paper, I analysed the neoliberal and socio-spatial transformations occurring in Diyarbak?r, the largest Kurdish city of Turkey. Rather than discussing the involvement of various national and international actors in those transformation processes, I tried to focus on the attitudes of the local social and political dynamics that create strong discursive counter-arguments against these processes. The study aims to demonstrate that dissident libertarian and egalitarian local groups can also become the supporters of and the actors in the neoliberal space strategies. In this regard, I examined the transformation of space in Diyarbak?r considering the tense and opposed relationship between neoliberal strategies and the local political formations mobilized by the demands for collective identity. Data acquired from the field study on the local governance experience in Diyarbak?r demonstrate that populist calls based on cultural existence became the focal point of local government. The slogan of “Our city is our identity!” functions as a meta-narrative that articulates the different class identities into neoliberal urban reality and becomes a discursive centre which normalizes the exclusive occupations over space.

     

Young people’s voiceless politics in the struggle over urban space

This article discusses the particularity of young people’s politics as it unfolds in the practice of everyday life. By exploring a conflict concerning the use of a public park in the City of Oulu, Finland, we discuss how young people may participate in struggles over urban space trough politics that is not based on voice but voicelessness. This political engagement can be understood as a form of nonparticipatory politics that is easily left unnoticed—politics that shirks civic involvement, customary participatory practices and articulated resistance. We deem it important to acknowledge such action as political for two reasons. First, voiceless politics is a weapon of the weak: It is used when other political agencies are not feasible e. Viewing non-participation as apolitical will only further marginalize those who practice politics in such ways. Second, it is important to find ways of acknowledging nonparticipatory action because, while not commonly understood as politics, it is not easily bypassed in political struggles either. By distinguishing political aspects from young people’s urban behaviors, instead of hearing their presence as mere noise, provides tools for bringing their politics to the public agenda and thus developing more democratic urban spaces.     

Historical space as narrative medium: on the configuration of spatial narratives of time at historical sites

This paper examines how narratives of history are organized spatially at historical sites and memorial spaces, especially in urban settings and in places invested with a sense of collective memory. Much recent research has focused on landscape, memory, and place and how relationships of political and social power influence the representation of historical events in public spaces. Although the meaning of such sites may be hotly contested for long periods of time, we focus here on narrative theory and the related, but unexplored, issue of how such historical stories are configured on the ground at actual historical sites. We identify a number of narrative strategies which are frequently used to configure historical stories in space. Declamatory strategies using markers presenting a snapshot of an event are common, but sequential and non-sequential linear strategies are also used, as are thematic strategies that cross-cut space and time to present complex historical stories at various spatial scales. Examples are drawn from a range of historical sites in North America, Europe and Israel.     

The urban land debate in the global South: New avenues for research

The global ‘land grab’ debate is going urban and needs a specific conceptual framework to analyze the diverse modalities through which land commodification and speculation are transforming cities across the globe. This article identifies new avenues for research on urban land issues by drawing on an extensive body of academic literature and concrete cases of urban land transformations in Asia, Latin America and Africa. These transformations are analyzed by focusing on three types of urban investments – investments in property, investments in public space and public services, and investments in speculation, image building and ‘worlding’ – and the way these investments are intermingled with and enhanced by processes of gentrification and speculative urbanism. Addressing real estate and infrastructure investments, speculation and gentrification through a land-based lens allows us to deepen the discussion on urban land governance in the global South. We argue that urban land acquisition cannot be thoroughly understood in isolation from the workings of urban real estate markets, public policies, and displacement processes. The urban land grab debate needs to consider the dialectic interplay between land use change and general socio-spatial transformations both in central – or recentralized – and peripheral areas. This is why we plea for a kaleidoscopic perspective on urban land governance by uncovering the complex patchwork of urban land acquisitions and their diverse temporalities and spatialities, their hybrid character in terms of actors involved, and the multiple and often unpredicted ways in which urban dwellers try to gain control over and access to urban land.     

Emotion and politics in a mediated public sphere: Questioning democracy,responsibility and ethics in a computer mediated world

This article debates the extent to which particular forums of the internet enable democratic discussions around social and political issues, developing the interest in cyber-geographies from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The paper investigates discussions around abortion in the UK media, and public response(s) to such discussions. The analysis originates from an article written for the Huffington post by political editor Medhi Hasan and deconstructs subsequent reactions to this through mainstream media and news sites, comments pages on these sites, and reactions on Twitter. We assess the democratic potential of these types of media, developing Habermasian notions of the public sphere by analyzing the extent to which specific forums within the internet sphere play a role in facilitating emotions in political discussions. We also discuss the impact of individual narrative and personal perspective and its role within this quasi-political space. In so doing, we question the extent to which these types of ‘new media’, as a forum for public discussion and interaction, enable democratic deliberation by assessing the engagement between users of this sphere, and the nature of those discussions. This presents an assessment of computer mediated communication as a new way of ‘doing’ politics through its absence and presence(s) and through ideas of distance, moral responsibility, and an understanding of ethics and care at-a-distance, presenting a holistic account of how we might envision these debates playing out.     

关闭煤矿工业广场再开发策略研究

随着我国煤炭去产能政策的有力实施,一批资源枯竭及产能落后矿井陆续关停废弃,传统的独立工矿区因此沉寂,服务于煤炭生产和职工生活的工业广场面临功能丧失、土地闲置等问题。挖掘关闭煤矿工业广场的价值并赋予其新功能,是盘活存量资源、激发独立工矿区活力的关键。以山西省晋城市关闭煤矿凤凰山矿为例,研究该矿与晋城市的发展演变及其相互作用;分析关闭煤矿工业广场空间构成要素,采用层次分析法(AHP)进行价值评估,判明主要空间要素的价值特征与更新挑战;进而探索关闭煤矿工业广场的再开发城市设计策略。分析认为,山地矿业风貌与绿色生态本底是凤凰山矿的核心价值表征,应将风貌存续与生态保育作为再开发重点。关闭煤矿需确立“矿退城进”的更新目标,主动与城市产业对接,由“封闭的工业广场”转变为“开放的城市街区”。在此基础上,提出景观引导下的秩序控制、功能空间的整合与重置、交通体系的外通与内融、矿业文脉特色的延续与塑造、既有建筑的再循环改造5个方面的城市设计策略。研究表明,通过基础设施景观化改造,可在提升矿区环境质量的同时创造城市特色;借鉴城市设计思维可为关闭煤矿保护性再开发策略的制定提供帮助,在此类资源型地区的城市更新中具有应用前景。      

Political ecology in North America: Discovering the Third World within?

Political ecologists working in many other parts of the world are now heading north, or simply going global, posing a series of important questions related to theory, methodology, politics, and policy along the way. This special issue, contains papers originally delivered at a conference held at Rutgers University in 2003 that addressed this phenomenon. The papers collected offer case studies that reveal the First World as subject to a host of processes that can be insightfully understood via a political ecology perspective. First, globalized production and consumption regimes have created new linkages that demand synoptic analyses of often far-flung research sites. Second, the painful coincidence of deindustrialization and a radical restructuring of agricultural credit and price support systems have devastated North American and European heartlands, effectively producing “Third World” conditions in many depressed rural areas. Third, migration streams originating in Latin America, Africa and many parts of Asia have brought sizable Third World populations into the spatial heart of capitalism. Fourth, the belated recognition of some indigenous claims to resources, especially in Canada, and fierce opposition to others, have reopened questions of (internal) colonial domination. Finally, we see the burgeoning First World political ecology literature as the culmination of what Louise Fortmann has called “the long intellectual journey home” for many scholars who originally carried out research on/in the Third World. All of these factors have combined to help political ecologists discover suitable analytical terrain in the First World.     

An interdisciplinary political ecology of drinking water quality. Exploring socio-ecological inequalities in Lilongwe’s water supply network

Urban political ecology attempts to unravel and politicize the socio-ecological processes that produce uneven waterscapes. At the core of this analysis are the choreographies of power that influence how much water flows through urban infrastructure as well as where it flows, thereby shaping conditions and quality of access in cities. If these analyses have been prolific in demonstrating uneven distribution of infrastructures and water quantity, the political ecology of water quality remains largely overlooked. In this paper, we argue that there is a clear theoretical and practical need to address questions of quality in relation to water access in the South. We show that conceptual resources for considering differentiated drinking water quality are already present within urban political ecology. We then contend that an interdisciplinary approach, highlighting the interdependencies between politics, power, and physiochemical and microbiological contamination of drinking water, can further our understandings of both uneven distribution of water contamination and the conceptualisation of inequalities in the urban waterscape. We illustrate our argument through the case of water supply in Lilongwe, Malawi. Our political ecology analysis starts from an examination of the physicochemical and microbiological quality of water supplied by the formal water utility across urban spaces in Lilongwe. We then present the topography of water (quality) inequalities in Lilongwe and identify the political processes underlying the production of differentiated water quality within the centralised network. This paper thereby serves as a deepening of urban political ecology as well as a demonstration of how this approach might be taken forward in the analysis of urbanism and water supplies.     

The use of housing as a spatio-political measure: the Israeli case

This paper focuses on the use of the provision of public housing in Israel as a political measure, in addition to its benign role of providing shelter. In the early stages of Jewish settlement in the country the Right controlled most towns and cities, while Labour was engaged in building a rural base. As urban growth attracted many of the newly arrived workers, Labour found it necessary to become politically active in the urban sphere. This has been done through the provision of a variety of services, among which was the provision of housing with a view to recruiting their political support. Two strategies were adopted. One was the penetration of existing towns by building public housing estates, the other was the establishment of new urban centres. These strategies have enabled Labour to attain local political hegemony in many cities, but while the provision of public housing proved to be as effective political tool in the short run, it has failed to secure a lasting impact.     

An archaeology of fear and environmental change in Philadelphia

This paper examines how mechanisms of social control function to mediate human-environment relations and processes of environmental change in the city. Using the Fairmount Park System of Philadelphia as a case study, I argue that a history of social control mechanisms, both formal and informal, maintained viable socio-environmental urban relationships. Their decline over the last several decades has produced a legacy of fear towards the city’s natural environment that has had, and continues to have, profound socio-spatial and ecological implications. I argue that these changes have their origin in a set of racially motivated decisions made during the volatile years of the late 1960s and early 1970s and that African American women, in particular, have been impacted disproportionately by their consequences. Fear of crime in the natural environment and suspicion of environmental change have resulted in the exclusion of local women and children from what was, historically, a politically and socially viable public space. In this context, urban ecological change is locally understood as more an issue of social control than one of environmental concern.     

A composed index of critical accessibility (CICA) to healthcare services in a traditional African City

While empirical works that analyse rural–urban differentials in accessibility to health services are common in the developing countries, systematic studies focusing on intra-urban variations in accessibility to overall healthcare resources remain scant. Yet, many urban dwellers especially in the Sub-Saharan Africa have to travel long distances within the urban space to access basic health services. This study employs composed index of critical accessibility (CICA) to analyse differentials in access to health resources in Ibadan, a traditional African City. Data on healthcare centre location, ownership, doctors’ population were collected through field survey while spatial data on the administrative units and populated places were obtained from archival sources. Also, data on road networks was collected. Results show that the distribution of health facilities across local administrative units varies. In terms health facilities, Ibadan South West has 26 (36 %) of the total number while Ibadan South east has only 7 (9.8 %). The Doctor-Population Ratio also exhibits similar variations as Ibadan North has 20.5 as against 2.2, 1.9 and 0.3 for Ibadan SW, Ibadan NW and Ibadan NE respectively. The CICA analysis shows that 228,938 inhabitants are in high risk of negative accessibility while 49,234 are faced with condition of low risk of negative accessibility, which implies that a significant proportion of the population still finds it difficult to access basic health services as and when needed. The variations in the distribution of this deprived population are also noteworthy as the largest proportion of this group was localized in Ibadan NW. This has grave implication for the health and wellbeing of the population and raises once again the question of spatial equity in the delivery of urban public service. Curiously, these differences in the level of accessibility cut across administrative boundaries which brings to the fore the role of jurisdictional partitioning in ensuring equity in the delivery of urban public services. This opens a vista of research opportunity into the role jurisdictional partitioning in service provision in the urban centres.     

Spatial contestation? – The theological foundations of Carl Schmitt’s spatial thought

Carl Schmitt’s work on the political is extensively used as an intellectual point of departure in contemporary academic debates about political contestation. More precisely, Carl Schmitt’s friend versus enemy-distinction is invoked as an essential figuration of political contestation. At the same time, the past few years have seen the attention paid to the spatial thought of Carl Schmitt increase. However, references to the work of Carl Schmitt fail to take the embeddedness of his theories in a complex theological–political–spatial triangle into account. This article aims at joining these readings of Schmitt with regard to the current debate about contestation and space by analyzing the idiosyncratic connection between Carl Schmitt’s Catholic faith, especially in the figure of the katechon, his theory of the political and his conceptualization(s) of space. The underlying logic of his worldview becomes explicit by reviewing his concepts of (a) the nomos, (b) land and sea, (c) the Großraumordnung, as well as (d) the Partisan, which form the benchmarks of his work between the 1930s and the 1960s. Against this background we analyze the value of Schmitt’s work for the ongoing debate about contestation and space. Our core argument is that his understanding of the spatial–political nexus and his metaphysical worldview stand in contrast to contemporary conceptualizations of spatial–political relationships.