Toronto’s condo-builders: development approaches and spatial preferences

The City of Toronto has undergone a number of dramatic transformations in the last several decades morphing from an industrial-driven metropolis into a thriving real estate and consumer amenities market. Over these decades, the development of condominiums has significantly transformed Toronto’s cityscape surpassing by far other types of real estate development. Based chiefly on a series of interviews with property developers and local politicians, this article explores development from the perspective of condo developers. The article identifies the key condo developers and categorizes them according to their development approaches and spatial preferences. Findings reiterate the need to consider property developers as highly diverse and flexible place entrepreneurs. Differences play out not merely in preferred development location and size, but also in target population, tenure mix, corporate structure, and the extent to which capitalism and economic gain are mixed with more idealistic motivations such as social benefits.     

The empty rhetoric of the smart city: from digital inclusion to economic promotion in Philadelphia

Smart city initiatives have been adopted by cities worldwide, proposing forward-looking, technological solutions to urban problems big and small. These policies are indicative of a digitized urban condition, where social and economic exchange rely on globalized telecommunications networks, and governance strategies follow suit. Propelled through events such as IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge, the smart city acts as a data-driven logic urban change where widespread benefit to a city and its residents is proposed, masking the utility of these policies to further entrepreneurial economic development strategies. In this article, I present a case study of the Digital On-Ramps initiative that emerged from IBM’s policy-consultation in Philadelphia. The initiative proposed a social media-style workforce education application (app) to train up to 500,000 low-literacy residents for jobs in the information and knowledge economy, but even as the city’s mayor declared the project a success, it did not meet expectations. This essay argues that the rhetoric of intelligent, transformative digital change works much more to “sell” a city in the global economy than to actually address urban inequalities.     

Kenya's regional ambitions or China's Belt‐and‐Road? News media representations of the Mombasa‐Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway

Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), and its construction and financing by China, exemplifies the prominence accorded to mega‐infrastructural projects in contemporary economic development, as well as the dependence this has engendered on external loans. Alongside, multiple geographies intertwine in the SGR which is both a component of China's global ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI), as well as an East African regional link between coastal Kenya and neighbouring landlocked countries. In most popular and academic analyses, the role of China is emphasized over the SGR's positioning within East Africa. Does this then lead to an undermining of the meanings that are attached to the SGR within Kenya? This article seeks to add Kenyan perspectives to the debate over China's infrastructural loans by examining the range of news media discourses that have emerged around the SGR. Utilizing the theoretical lens of South‐South cooperation and African agency, this study analyzes how material infrastructure becomes meaningful within the context of a political superstructure. For Kenya, this political superstructure is shaped not only by Kenya‐China relations, but also by infrastructural competitions within East Africa, as well as within Kenya itself.     

AMBIDEXTROUS DALLAS*

ABSTRACT. Since its founding, Dallas, Texas has grown centrifugally. Since the 1990s, however, it has also grown centripetally, with developers building walkable, mixed‐use islands in the midst of metropolitan sprawl. This article surveys what amounts to a historic change of habit.     

Advancing development projects through mega-events: the 2010 football World Cup and bus rapid transit in South Africa

In 2010, the focus of the sporting world was on South Africa, the first African country to host a Football World Cup, and the largest mega-event ever held on the continent. Mega-events like the World Cup have become instruments for governments seeking material improvements to highways and telecommunications as well as the more elusive nation-building and sanguine legacies. Whereas the literature typically concentrates on stadia and sports-related infrastructure, this paper focuses on bus rapid transit (BRT) as an “indirect legacy” to understand the way in which cities exploit the financial and political capital made available to advance projects long delayed behind more pressing endeavors. The compressed time horizons, unlocked financing and focused planning can be a “mixed blessing” however by limiting the scope of the project to the event. The paper concludes that in South Africa advancing development through the World Cup reinforced state authority and legitimacy.     

Scales of exception: Experiments with knowledge and sheer life in tropical Southeast Asia

New political spaces, I suggest, are generated by varied strategies that govern populations in and through multiple scales of exception. I identify biopolitical assemblages as a space of inquiry into the situated play of exceptions that territorializes different kinds of value. Scales of exception are produced when a neoliberal logic of economic growth articulates biopolitical problems of population security. Neoliberal and biopolitical decisions not only focus on accumulating values in space, but also anticipate the value of currently devalued spaces. By invoking exceptions, states alternately favour neoliberal or biopolitical values, thus investing spaces with different kinds of value. The interplay of biopolitical and neoliberal logics and the resulting configuration of scales of exception are well illustrated in Southeast Asia in an age of pandemics. In Singapore, a technomedical hub assembles networks for capturing knowledge capital and property rights, configuring an ecology of expertise. This is a site of scientific prowess in a region increasingly viewed as a space of 'third world' exception to global health norms. In Indonesia, health crises have prompted a logic of ethical sensibility to basic human survival whereby political leaders invoke bio-sovereignty, configuring a national scale of ethical exception that challenges the global power of biocapital and the World Health Organization over the supply of vaccines. In contrast to approaches that foreground spaces of capital accumulation, I attend to diverse logics that differently valorize scales of exception, thus giving visibility to situated mechanisms that animate and mutate political cartography.     

“Turn your brand into a destination”: toponymic commodification and the branding of place in Dubai and Winnipeg

ABSTRACT

The selling of naming rights to corporate sponsors has led urban policymakers to increasingly view the identities of public places as rent-generating assets to fund urban infrastructure. Yet few scholars have critically analyzed this emerging global trend of toponymic commodification and the seeking of “naming rent.” Through a combination of archival research, on-site field observations, and semi-structured interviews, this study examines how the practice of toponymic commodification is transforming the cultural landscapes of contemporary cities by considering two naming rights programs: Dubai’s Metro Naming Rights Initiative and the Sponsor Winnipeg Program. In each case, we explore the implications of commodifying public place names as well as the conflicting perceptions of such sponsorship programs. In doing so, the present study illustrates how the selling of naming rights is reshaping the built environment into a space of symbolic/economic capital transformations as brands become destinations and public places are reconceived as marketing opportunities.     

Naming rights,place branding,and the tumultuous cultural landscapes of neoliberal urbanism

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, urban policymakers have increasingly embraced the selling of naming rights as a means of generating revenue to construct and maintain urban infrastructure. This practice of “toponymic commodification” first emerged with the commercialization of professional sports during the second half of the 20th century and has become an integral part of the policy toolkit of neoliberal urbanism more generally. As a result, the naming of everything from sports arenas to public transit stations has come to be viewed as a sponsorship opportunity, yet such naming rights initiatives have not gone uncontested. This special issue examines the political economy of urban place naming through a series of case studies that consider how the commodification of naming rights is transforming the cultural landscapes of contemporary cities. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the geographies of toponymic commodification as an emerging research focus within the field of critical urban toponymies and propose several theoretical approaches that can enhance our understanding of the commodification of naming rights as an urban spatial practice. We then discuss the main contributions in this special issue and conclude by exploring potential directions for future research on the geographies of urban toponymic commodification.     

Small towns resisting urban decay through residential attractiveness. Findings from Denmark

Small towns are often considered as losing out in the current trend towards urban development. However, research from around Europe shows a great diversity of small town development, including successful development trajectories despite geographical disadvantages. Investigations into this are predominately done in the context of economic development and urban systems, but such approaches fail to explain why a number of small towns that are not centrally located near a metropolitan region are not in decay. This paper examines how the restructuring of retail and service sectors, demographic composition, residential migration, social organisation and community engagement form and affect small town (1000–5000 inhabitants) development patterns in Denmark and specific place-based endowments. The study is carried out with mixed methods, comprising a quantitative analysis of development trends, complemented by qualitative case studies in six small towns. Our findings show how favourable development paths are a combination of a positive development in population, provision of daily commodities and attractive housing, and a high number of local voluntary social organisations. Introducing the concept of ‘residential urbanism’, the paper discusses the extent to which a residentially driven urban development can compensate for the generally unfavourable regional development context.     

Transformations of the Spatial Hegemony of the Courtyard in Post-Soviet St. Petersburg

Abstract

The courtyard is a space that existed before, during, and now after the Soviet period in Russian urban history. Noting the change in the courtyard's formerly hegemonic position on daily trajectories illustrates both Harvey's and Lefebvre's suggestions for uncovering the way that spaces articulate social values. A particularly revealing case study occurs in the struggle over including courtyards in a Chinese developer's project for a new multi-use district outside St. Petersburg. A brief history of the courtyard in Soviet planning allows subsequent analysis of the ways in which the city administration, the Chinese design team, and Russian planners deployed the courtyard as a spatial code for social meaning in design discussions. Examining the change in function and conceptualization of the courtyard shows how different groups in post-Soviet Russia seek to retain or redeploy concepts of the “collective” as they attempt to remake St. Petersburg as a successful “world” city.