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This paper seeks to understand the urban dimensions of the resolution of financial crises. It does so by focusing on Asset Management Companies (AMCs), or ‘bad banks’, which are established by governments to acquire and manage toxic assets, often linked to real estate, in the wake of systemic banking crises. Despite the fact that AMCs are a significant financial institution with clear urban implications, they have received surprisingly little attention. Indeed, despite the widespread recognition that financialized real estate markets are inherently crisis prone, there is an absence of literature on the resolution of such crises. The paper argues that AMCs have three distinctly urban dimensions. Firstly, they continue and enhance the extraction of value from urban space. Secondly, they act as ‘market makers’ by restoring the ‘liquidity’ of financialized real estate. Thirdly, they contribute to the globalization of real estate by intensifying the circuits linking local real estate with global pools of capital. Drawing on this analysis, the paper also theorizes AMCs as what have been called ‘apparatuses of financial accumulation’ which, significantly, reveal the systematic inter-dependence of financialization and urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a valuable and engaging critique, Hamnett and Butler conclude that our analysis of the socio-spatial dimensions of inequality in London originates from a ‘parallel universe’, that it is ‘bizarre’ for us ‘middle-class university professors’ to claim that ‘the middle class does not exist,’ and that our approach involves 'looking into the rear view mirror or class structure in the 1840s.' In this paper we provide a response, and we reiterate the urgent need for class-conscious politics and method in contemporary urban research. Dominant narratives of postindustrial transnational urbanism tend to erase any concern for class conflict, as old occupational structures that once closely reflected locally-observable relations of production are replaced by a much more intricate and respatialized occupational matrix of positions that (when analysed in conventional ways) creates an aspirational mirage of utopian middle-class opportunity. Yet the materialist conditions of capitalist urbanization intensify class antagonisms, while polarizing social relations within domains typically understood as 'middle-class' (including the professoriate). At the same time, the Right has hijacked traditional Left commitments to radical openness to difference and contingency, thus diverting critical energies away from fundamental challenges to class inequality into the safer technocratic territory of managing inequalities with a creative, de-classified menu of friendly-sounding policies of inclusion, mixing, tolerance, and social sustainability. One way to challenge this dangerous trend involves a fusion of multivariate quantitative analysis with contemporary critical social theory (drawing on Žižek and others) to account for the new multidimensional relations of postindustrial occupational structures within the increasingly severe class antagonisms of capitalist urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper showcases how temporary migration leads to urban transformation processes in inner-city Singaporean neighbourhoods, creating unique localities which I call ‘transitory community hubs’. Building on a case study of Little India, it demonstrates how the settlement and incorporation process of transient migrants, specifically foreign workers, has economic, environmental and social impacts on the neighbourhood. Urban transformation processes are driven by both global and local influences; their instigators are globally operating transient migrants, yet they are shaped by national and local conditions (e.g. migration policies), or the vernacular urban context. Ethnic-focused businesses play an important role in this process and render it visible for outsiders. However, the transient migrants themselves are not permitted to open their own businesses; rather, they feed the ethnic-focused economy as customers or employees, while the businesses serving them are run predominantly by permanent residents of Singapore, some with a migration background. Building on field research conducted between 2011 and 2014, which involved semi-structured interviews, participant observation, time-based research and visual analysis, the paper demonstrates how migrants, on the demand side, and ethnic-focused businesses, on the supply side, both become agents of urban transformation, yet in ways that differ from conventional accounts of the ‘ethnic economy’. The paper also shows how ‘transitory community hubs’ are characterised by particular time rhythms making their presence only temporarily visible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to connect to recent debates inCity(2011) regarding what assemblage thinking can offer to critical urban praxis. It proposes assemblage as a tool to take Sennett's (1970.The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. Yale edition with a new preface by the author, 2008. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) ‘uses of disorder’ in city life from theory to practice. The main reason for this is the consideration that Sennett's early thoughts about providing non-regulated spaces for interaction have not been implemented in urban practice to their full potential. Planners and architects have not been able to counter the overdetermination of functions and the social segregation resulting from modern urban developments. Assemblage can offer tools for urban practitioners to combine definition and indeterminacy when intervening in the public realm. In order to do so, the paper looks at similarities between recent contributions on assemblage thinking and Sennett's notion of disorder: the influence of sociomaterial associations on how people perceive strangers, the interest in indeterminacy and public space as an open process. Based on these findings, the paper proposes two sets of concepts as approaches for intervening in public space: ‘assemblage’ and ‘disassembly’. The first group of concepts proposes three tools to design associations introducing certain planned urban elements that give rise to an unplanned use of public space: ‘reassembling’, ‘convergence of diversity’ and ‘complex connections’. The second set of concepts offers two tools that propose to leave unbound points in public space: ‘open systems’ and ‘failure and disconnections’. These concepts address different uses of disorder proposed by Sennett and serve as guidelines to propose interventions in public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I engage with the notion of the city as capitalist space, focusing on the specific actors that come together to realign economically heterogeneous spaces into the monolithic, capitalist city. By tracing the role of cartographic practice in enacting the city as a space of industrial economic production in the 19th century, I show how maps helped to bring the capitalist city into view by ‘drawing together’ cartographers, city managers and ordinary citizens, enabling the apprehension of the city as an economic object by emphasizing a specific understanding of what cities looked like, how they worked and what happened in them. In addition, I examine the place of urban nature within this emerging urban imaginary, and its role as a counterweight to the purported totality of the capitalist city. To illustrate these points, historical maps drive a discussion of the specific case of Philadelphia, focusing on two events that coincided with the expansion of the industrial city: the consolidation of the city in 1854 and the establishment of Fairmount Park in 1868. The paper concludes with a discussion of the political possibilities that are opened up by an assemblage-oriented approach for examining the early development of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper revisits China's recent experiences of hosting three international mega-events: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games. While maintaining a critical political economic perspective, this paper builds upon the literature of viewing mega-events as societal spectacles and puts forward the proposition that these mega-events in China are promoted to facilitate capital accumulation and ensure socio-political stability for the nation's further accumulation. The rhetoric of a ‘Harmonious Society’ as well as patriotic slogans are used as key languages of spectacles in order to create a sense of unity through the consumption of spectacles, and pacify social and political discontents rising out of economic inequalities, religious and ethnic tensions, and urban–rural divide. The experiences of hosting mega-events, however, have shown that the creation of a ‘unified’, ‘harmonious’ society of spectacle is built on displacing problems rather than solving them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I seek to extend the debate on assemblage and critical urbanism by both responding to Brenner et al.'s critique of my earlier paper, ‘Assemblage and Critical Urbanism’, and by attempting to prompt further questions and debate. I reflect on three issues that Brenner et al. discuss: the role of ontology in assemblage thinking; the relations between assemblage and political economy; and the approach assemblage brings to questions of the ‘context of contexts’. I conclude the paper with a note on the generative potential of assemblage thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, China's major trading cities have witnessed rapid social, cultural and physical change which has accompanied the country's boom in manufacturing and exports. A small but increasingly significant element of this growth has been the China-Africa trade in small-scale manufactured goods. The opening of China's economy has created new spaces for migrant entrepreneurs capturing a share of international value chains, transforming social and business relations, and reconfiguring urban space. This paper draws on a pilot study by the authors of African migrants in Guangzhou in 2007, active in the exports to the African sub-continent. Findings challenge established models of global city growth, identifying the collective importance of individual entrepreneurs in promoting a trade which has significant impacts on African cities, while creating new interactions with identifiable, distinctive and unanticipated impacts on this dynamic host city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings two literatures into dialogue. The first is the world-cities literature that explores the strategic importance of key cities in the global economy. The second focuses on the efficacy of city marketing and place promotion in boosting urban competitiveness. It is suggested here that both are fixated on an atomistic conception of urban processes that sees cities prospering on the basis of their indigenous characteristics (e.g. the presence of 'critical infrastructure'). Drawing on poststructural ideas, this place-based perspective is rejected in favour of a relational perspective that reconceptualizes competitive world cities as networked rather than bounded phenomena. The paper concludes that successful city marketing relies on pursuing a spatialized politics of flow rather than a place-based politics of competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the transformation of Milan's Chinatown in the years following the April 2007 revolts and how these changes have been affected by conflicting interests. More specifically, I look at the political economy of urban space and the role of Chinatown in the dynamics of urban restructuring in Milan. Milan's Chinatown today is neither a Chinese residential area, nor a tourist district; rather, it is an ethnic economic and commercial enclave in a gentrified area near the city centre, where businesses owned by Italians and foreign nationals coexist. Since the revolts, Chinatown has become an increasingly contested space characterised by the presence of conflicting agendas. On the one hand, Italian businesses, the autochthonous population and local authorities regard Chinatown as a ‘problem’ and have attempted to reclaim the area. On the other hand, Chinese retailers and workers claim the right to use this urban space and carry out their businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Migrants who came to Vienna as guest workers from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey during the 1960s still form the majority of the local immigrant population. Business activities of Turks and former Yugoslavs cover a multitude of diverse sectors; what was once a niche economy has now become an important part of Viennese business life. This paper combines official statistics for Vienna as a whole, survey material and expert interviews, to analyse business ventures run by migrant entrepreneurs on two commercial streets in Vienna. Our research shows significant local variation in the migrant economies of the two groups in the study areas, highlighting the importance of the local context as an additional determinant shaping the diversity of business activities of certain immigrant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper engages the debate between assemblage thinking as an emerging body of critical urban theory and the desire to contain it within a framework of urban political economy. I take critical urban theory to mean the broad intellectual engagement with the ways in which cities and urban spaces are implicated in practices of power. Assemblage thinking moves outside a strict political economy framework and embodies different ontologies of power and place, yet this is not a shift away from criticality. Such thinking connects disparate threads of current urban theory as it opens new modes of multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary research geared to urban design and planning practices and therefore to potentials for urban transformation. To contain emerging assemblage theory under political economy is to neuter it and potentially produce conservative forms of practice. The framework of urban political economy brings enormous explanatory power to our understanding of cities and will develop most effectively if it does not consume its offspring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O ver two decades ago, the term “restructuring” became a popular label for describing the tumultuous political-economic and spatial transformations that were unfolding across the global urban system. As Edward Soja (1987: 178; italics in original) indicated in a classic formulation: Restructuring is meant to convey a break in secular trends and a shift towards a significantly different order and configuration of social, economic and political life. It thus evokes a sequence of breaking down and building up again, deconstruction and attempted reconstitution , arising from certain incapacities or weaknesses in the established order which preclude conventional adaptations and demand significant structural change instead [...] Restructuring implies flux and transition, offensive and defensive postures, a complex mix of continuity and change. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars mobilized a variety of categories—including, among others, deindustrialization, reindustrialization, post-Fordism, internationalization, global city formation, urban entrepreneurialism, informalization, gentrification and sociospatial polarization—in order to describe and theorize the ongoing deconstruction and attempted reconstitution of urban social space. These concepts provided key intellectual tools through which a generation of urbanists could elaborate detailed empirical studies of ongoing urban transformations both in North America and beyond. In the early 2000s, such concepts remain central to urban political economy, but they are now being complemented by references to “neoliberalism,” which is increasingly seen as an essential descriptor of the contemporary urban condition. This widening and deepening interest in the problematic of neoliberalism among urban scholars is evident in the papers presented in this special issue of CITY : all deploy variations on this terminology—“neoliberalism,” “neoliberal,” “neoliberalized,” “neoliberalization,” and so forth—in order to interpret major aspects of contemporary urban restructuring in North American cities. At the same time, like earlier analysts of urban restructuring, the contributors to this special issue reject linear models of urban transition, emphasizing instead its uneven, contentious, volatile and uncertain character. Indeed, each of the contributions included here suggestively illustrates Soja’s conception of restructuring: whether implicitly or explicitly, each postulates a systemic breakdown of established forms of urban life (generally associated with postwar, Fordist-Keynesian capitalism) and the subsequent proliferation of social, political, discursive, and representational struggles to create a transformed, “neoliberalized” urban order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical, conceptual and methodological choices must be framed in relation to concrete explanatory and interpretive dilemmas, not ontological foundations. In engaging with the limits and possibilities of recent assemblage-based work in urban studies, our concern has been to help forge new analytical tools for deciphering emerging patterns of planetary urbanization, which have unsettled the coherence and viability of earlier intellectual frameworks. As urbanization is changing, so too must urban theory change, and it must do so in ways that provide critical purchase on emergent sociospatial divisions, conflicts, struggles and transformations at all spatial scales and across divergent places and territories. To this end, responding to several strands of the debate on assemblage urbanism that has unfolded in previous issues of City, here we clarify our meta-theoretical stance, address several methodological questions and reiterate our arguments regarding the importance of a reinvigorated geopolitical economy of planetary urbanization. We insist on the importance of abstraction as a necessary methodological moment in any reflexive approach to urban knowledge formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author focuses on the impact of university for critical urbanism. It mentions that critical urbanists need to think about building power in order to serve as a vanguard for social and political change, and states the impact of political economy on higher education and academic cultures. It also mentions the use of urban knowledge and social transformation for critical urban studies.

Based on Tsai Ming-liang's cinematic portrayals of cities, I argue for consideration and appreciation of artistic devices in our thinking and writing on cities. Specifically, I look into four types of absence the Taiwanese director engages with: absence of movement, absence of speech, absence of home and absence of infrastructure. Tsai depicts absence by extrapolating what seem to be inherent elements of an urban situation or an urban setting thus disrupting their taken-for-grantedness. Tsai's multi-layered preoccupation with the notion of absence and the visual language he develops to talk about it may be inspiring for urban researchers, especially those among us working with visual methods. After introducing his work and elaborating on its urban contexts, I will investigate Tsai Ming-liang's use of absence as a method of inquiring into various aspects of urban life, particularly those involving interactions with infrastructure. In the spirit of interdisciplinary and inclusive thinking promoted byCity, I will conclude by reiterating the validity of cinema—among other arts—as a tool for critical reflection on cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens when the Right to the City is understood as the right to reoccupy the inner city by middle-class suburbanites? In the self-styled Maboneng Precinct in Johannesburg, the writing is on the wall, literally. Graffiti reading, ‘We won't move’ on the roof of Revolution House begins to tell the story of hipster-styled urban gentrification in the city. These processes force a radical reinvention of the meaning of the right to the city, of centrality and of accumulation by dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including assemblage thinking and critical urbanism, relations of political economy and everyday life, and the importance of sociomateriality.

In this short response I would like to address some of the criticisms made by Neil Brenner, David Madden and David Wachsmuth (2011) to the programme of urban studies presented in the volume Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (Farías and Bender, 2009). I will do this by addressing some crucial differences between this approach and the project of critical urban studies, which, as Brenner et al. noted, is not thoroughly discussed in the aforementioned volume. I think there are four fundamental matters to be discussed: the style of cognitive engagement (inquiries or critique), the definitions of the object of study (cities or capitalism), the underlying conceptions of the social (assemblages or structures) and the envisaged political projects (democratization or revolution). Obviously these pairs of concepts don't represent clear-cut distinctions. They do, however, signalize differences of emphasis making up the politics of urban assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, China has impressed the world with its rapid economic growth and urbanization which has been responsible for eliminating much of the world's abject poverty. Its continued high single-digit growth promises to bring both societal improvements and growth concerns. From environment degradation to energy shortages, many studies have been conducted on the technologies and methods that might ameliorate these growing problems. The Chinese government has promulgated numerous environmental and development laws, decrees and policies, as the push for sustainable development showcased in the next Five-Year Plan demonstrates. Sceptics give little credit to China's sustainable development rhetoric and are correct in raising the issues of local government compliance and lack of public participation and support. But what differentiates this policy from past environmental rhetoric is that sustainable development presents itself to the Chinese as a real solution for a pressing issue. The 11th Five-Year Plan reveals that choice and the need to quickly enact sustainable development policy to maintain national stability. China has reached a point where it is desperate for energy, fearful of social instability and economically able to take action for sustainable development. Never before has this combination coincided with an emboldened environmental civil society and increased international pressure and aid. This combination of factors bodes well for China's urban sustainability policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the loss of the cultural traditions in Ireland due to the country's economic resurgence. Illustration of the loss in films such as "Veronica Guerin"; Factors attributed to the trend.