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This article explores the concept of the urban impasse, which refers to the tension between the potential actions available to individuals in urban environments and the constraints that limit their choices. The authors argue that this impasse contributes to structural inequalities in cities. They advocate for a relational approach to studying the urban, which considers the long-term trends and institutions that shape urban life. The article includes case studies from Berlin, São Paulo, and Brazilian favelas to illustrate the complexities of urban inequalities and the role of institutions in shaping social action. The authors conclude by emphasizing the need for a deeply situational perspective to understand the conflicts and management of cities. [Extracted from the article]

Placemaking is a concept used in urban planning to shape public spaces. It is a complex and evolving concept that involves various actors with different goals, including grassroots community members, artists, developers, and governments. Placemaking has the potential to address urban crises and improve urban life, but it is distinct from mainstream planning and can take the form of informal interventions led by activists. It has been influenced by various discourses, including post-capitalism and post-liberalism, and it is important to consider how it can benefit marginalized groups and contribute to meeting place-based goals of access and inclusion. Placemaking has gained renewed attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are challenges to maintaining its integrity, such as the rush to implement initiatives without proper community engagement. Despite these challenges, placemaking holds potential for progress in addressing social vulnerabilities and building bridges across communities. [Extracted from the article]

"Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis" by David Hugill examines the history of racism, inequity, and settler-colonial structures in Minneapolis, particularly focusing on the post-World War II era. The book explores the impact of urban change, racialized policing, and American imperialism on marginalized communities, with a particular emphasis on Indigenous peoples. Hugill highlights the structural barriers faced by marginalized groups and the need to dismantle white supremacist and settler-colonial structures. While the book primarily focuses on the violent aspects of settler-colonial urban policy, it also touches on the need to examine more subtle elements such as access to education, healthcare, and legal services. Overall, the book provides a critical perspective on the history of Minneapolis and challenges the perception of the city as progressive and inclusive. [Extracted from the article]

Writers' narrations of the city have always had a great and long-lasting influence on collective imaginaries and on people's urban experience. Sociology is debtor to urban novels that from XVII to XIX century anticipated the great themes of modernization process that deeply changed cities and urban culture. The analysis of the ways modern city has been narrated by writers take us to contemporary sociology and its major issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an explanation for how increased public participation can paradoxically translate into limited democratic decision-making in urban settings. Recent sociological research shows how governments can control participatory forums to restrict the distribution of resources to poor neighborhoods or to advance private land development interests. Yet such explanations cannot account for the decoupling of participation from democratic decision-making in the case of planning for climate change, which expands the substantive topics and public funding decisions that involve urban residents. Through an in-depth case study of one of the largest coastal protection projects in the world and drawing on global scholarship on participation, this article narrates the social production of resistance to climate change infrastructure by showing how the state sidestepped public input and exercised authority through appeals to the rationality of technical expertise. After a lengthy participation process wherein participants reported satisfaction with how their input was included in designs, city officials switched decision-making styles and used expertise from engineers to render the publicly-supported plan unfeasible, while continuing to involve residents in the process. As a result, conflict arose between activists and public housing representatives, bitterly dividing the neighborhood over who could legitimately claim to represent the interests of the "frontline community." By documenting the experience of participants in the process before and after the switch in decision-making styles, this article advances a sociological description of public influence in policy: The ability for participants in a planning process to recognize their own input reflected in finished plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Homelessness; body; ethnography; Athens; (spaces of) care; stigma dialectic; indigencia; cuerpo; etnografía; Atenas; (espacios de) cuidado; dialéctica del estigma; sans-abrisme; corps; ethnographie; Athènes; (espaces de) care; dialectique de la stigmatisation EN Homelessness body ethnography Athens (spaces of) care stigma dialectic ES indigencia cuerpo etnografía Atenas (espacios de) cuidado dialéctica del estigma FR sans-abrisme corps ethnographie Athènes (espaces de) care dialectique de la stigmatisation 953 971 19 09/09/22 20220901 NES 220901 Introduction Our meeting point was the cafeteria of the Greek National Theatre; cozy, affordable and never crowded, ideal for a "good" interview. They are the par excellence spaces of care inside spaces of care, where the so much desired comfort, care and cleanliness is practiced. Concluding, I reflect on this in-placeness/out-of-placeness paradoxical tension to suggest that the personal body work might facilitate the incorporation of a neoliberalizing ethic of care that shapes homeless care-recipients as active, responsible and, above all, resilient subjectivities in an increasingly insecure social environment and conditional care provision for vulnerable people. [Extracted from the article]

Jakarta, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh all bear witness to the uneven growth of Southeast Asian middle classes with increasing disposable income and changing consumer profiles. On this point, urban cosmopolitics converges not only with urban assemblage research (McFarlane [29]) but also with recent STS studies of infrastructure (Harvey, Jensen, and Morita [21]), which have focused on how relational worlds are contingently shaped by the interactions of numerous entities-multispecies, technological, and political-that often happen surreptitiously, to the side of overt techno-politics, while quietly giving shape to categories such as economics or politics, which are so often used to explain them. Alongside its emphasis on fixed structure, runs a process of relativization attuned to Asian intra-referencing (Chen [9]: 275), which resembles what in STS has been called lateral comparison (Gad and Jensen [17], see also Mohácsi this issue). I On 27 August 2019, Indonesia's president Joko Widodo announced that the country's capital will move from huge, sprawling Jakarta in Java to East Kalimantan. [Extracted from the article]

To introduce this symposium in I City & Community i on "Small Cities", we discuss the absence of "small-ness" in empirical and theoretical analysis in urban sociology, explore the importance of scaling down urban analyses to this level, and present three important lines of inquiry that the following articles explore and that further the research agenda on small urban contexts. Scholars mostly focused on large, industrializing cities, notably Chicago, with the famed Chicago School (Park [71]); Philadelphia and Atlanta, with the work and under the tutelage of W.E.B. Du Bois ([22], [23] [[23]]; see Morris [64]; Wright [98]); and Boston, with the work of William Foote Whyte ([95]). This pattern is perhaps a consequence of the Chicago School's powerful influence over generations of scholars through its qualitative approach (see Fine [28]), and, given the great number of studies conducted in that city, Chicago's symbolic placement within the discipline as the quintessential 20th century American metropolis. This pattern continues today with many well-known works focusing on the country's "big three" (e.g., Chicago: Brown-Saracino [14]; Grazian [34]; Lloyd [52]; New York City: Duneier [25]; Smith [84]; Smithsimon [85]; Wynn [99]; Los Angeles: Deener [20]; Stuart [87]). We are well into a new era of gentrification research with promising new directions that include, among others, "planetary gentrification" (Lees et al. [50]), commercial/retail gentrification (Hubbard [41]; Kosta [47]; Mermet [62]), advanced (Ocejo [67]) or "super-gentrification" (Lees [48]), and rural gentrification (Ghose [32]; Hines [40]; Phillips [73]). [Extracted from the article]

As elsewhere, cities in Africa exist as ensembles of houses, streets, social events, and practices and at the same time as objects in the minds of their inhabitants and visitors. Cities always have an imagined double as nobody can experience a city in all its parts and cultural dimensions. Urbanity as a way of living is intimately connected with partial, often contradictory, “uncanny” experiences of the city - but as imagined objects and communities, cities are most often seen as entities. Imagining the city thus means to accommodate idiosyncratic as well as collective views in one image, creatively mediating between one and many. As a practice, imagining calls for an analysis of how urbanites in Africa situate themselves in their cities as social spaces and how they build on their shared everyday experience. This contribution thus conceives urbanity as social practice that binds town dwellers to their cities as social spaces. Urban imagination transforms everyday experience into a sedimented image of the city as an object that town dwellers can relate to in meaningful ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper extending the size-productivity framework we examine the nature of relationship between city size and the deprivation index developed at a highly disaggregate level of urban centres (city/town) on the basis of dwelling conditions, basic amenities and assets in possession. Further, the demographic and economic characteristics in relation to the deprivation index and city size are analysed in detail. Very large cities are endowed with better living conditions and infrastructural facilities, displaying lower magnitude of the index though this relationship is not very strong, suggesting the importance of other variables such as income, location and the overall level of urbanisation, impacting on the index value. Large cities experience agglomeration economies but they do not benefit all sections of the population equally, which in turn does not necessarily bring in proportionate decline in the deprivation index with a rise in city size. Further, other demographic and economic variables are examined in relation to the deprivation index and city size. Findings show Further, there is no marked improvement in these other indicators of development with increase in as city size increases. Greater intervention is called for to provide support in terms of housing, sanitation and water, and for other indicators of development to improve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Activities of daily living are currently the simplest form of activity. For many people this is the only activity in which they participate. In this connection, it is important to determine the level of physical activity connected with daily habits including occupational activities. The main goal of the presented study has been to assess the level of activities of daily living in different age groups and its differentiation by season and working (WD) and non-working days (NWD).Material and Methods: The study group (urban citizens, N = 106) was divided into young (Y) (N = 40), middle-aged (M) (N = 38), and senior (S) (N = 28) participants. The daily step number on 7 consecutive days during 4 seasons between June 2012 and 2013 was counted objectively using pedometers. The long-form of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) was completed each season as a subjective assessment.Results: The daily step number for the whole group for the year was (median) 6615 (range: 3648-10 709), fewer than recommended. The median (Me) was highest in group M (Me = 6994, range: 3648-10 709) followed by Y (Me = 6957, range: 4094-10 321) and S (Me = 5469, range: 3743-8955). The lowest daily step number occurred in winter (M = 6208, Y = 6063, S = 5242), and the highest in spring (Y = 7385) or summer (M = 7717; S = 6095). All groups had a greater daily step number on WDs compared to NWDs (Y: 8411 vs. 5744, M: 7612 vs. 5839, S: 6327 vs. 4580; p < 0.01 for all). Pedometer-tracked values did not correlate with the IPAQ results.Conclusions: Activity level in Polish urban society is low, especially on NWDs and in colder months. The daily number of steps is highest in the middle-aged group, which may be connected with working status. Objective methods are recommended for assessing physical activity level. Int J Occup Med Environ Health 2018;31(1):47-54. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 21st century, a growing number of people live ‘informal’ lives within fissures between legality and informality. Concomitantly, power relations are increasingly expressed through devices of confinement. While urban informality and confinement are on the rise often occurring simultaneously, scholars have so far studied them separately. By contrast, this article proposes a new framework for analysing urban informality and confinement relationally. It generates new insights into the role of informality in the (re)production of confinement and, vice versa, the role of confinement in shaping informal practices. While these insights are valuable for urban studies in general, the article charts new lines of research on urban marginality. It also discusses how the six articles included in this special issue signal the heuristic potential of this relational framework by empirically examining distinct urban configurations of ‘confined informalities’ and ‘informal confinements’ across the Global North and the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature on contested urban politics has revealed the political agency of seemingly marginal urban residents, including those experiencing the threat of eviction. Yet with much of this work highlighting single instances of successful resistance, the agency of informal urbanites can be overstated and much of what is understood as resistance may actually be confinement. This article addresses this issue by situating an ethnographic analysis of residential evictions in Delhi and Mumbai in historical perspective. Analyzing the character of insecurity since the 1950s, it demonstrates that historically rooted antagonisms and mobilized responses to insecurity have produced political stalemate. The comparative analysis reveals that while evictions in Delhi and Mumbai today occur in places with different histories and characters of insecurity, ongoing contestations between residents, activists, and local government in both cities have produced similar conditions of confinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the most effective way of tackling the urban informal economy. It has been recently argued that the conventional rational economic actor approach (which increases the costs of participating in the urban informal economy so that they outweigh the benefits) should be replaced or complemented by a social actor approach which focuses upon improving tax morale. To evaluate the effectiveness of these supposedly alternative approaches to tackling the participation of urban populations in the informal economy, we report the results of face-to-face interviews conducted in 2013 with 17,886 urban dwellers across the 28 Member States of the EU. Multilevel logistic regression analysis reveals that both approaches are effective in significantly reducing the urban population's participation in the informal economy. When tax morale is high, however, the rational economic actor approach of increasing the costs has little impact on reducing the probability of engagement in the informal economy. The paper concludes by calling for greater emphasis on improving the tax morale of the urban population so as to tackle the informal economy in the urban areas of Europe and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Urban residents are surrounded by discrepant infrastructural capacities … Being surrounded from all sides, and with such thick textures of surveillance and calculation, promises both the possibility of being really ‘pinned down’ and disappearing altogether.’ (AbdouMaliq Simone)1 We are surrounded, negatively, by infrastructural capacities or, positively, extended by them? Or perhaps both, surrounded and extended? If so, in what proportions? And is it/was it ultimately a choice, or series of choices, ones that can still be made, or not? And what are these externalities, contexts? Are they media/technologies or perhaps the one-time project of ‘the city’ now taking on the (increasingly alien?) form of urbanisation? Or, beyond that, is there the now marginalised realm of the country/nature? And, ‘space’? Are those realms, best characterised perhaps as ‘nature’, outside or inside us? If inside/outside, are we, somewhat paradoxically, surrounded by ourselves? Or by aspects of ourselves, whose inner/outer separation and possible distortion we need to recognise and address if we are to avoid ‘the promises [of] both the possibility of being really ‘pinned down’ and disappearing altogether’? Or …  * * * * Such questions and some answers are suggested by our special feature in this issue on infrastructures, from which AbdouMaliq Simone's words are taken, by papers from three other substantial projects, one on urbanisation by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, with a reply from Richard Walker, a second on Africa by David Simon, and a third on technologised and politicised realms by Stephen Graham, now looking into ‘urban air’. Introducing one of a series of particular temporal dimensions as explored in this journal, Melissa Wilson draws in part on a reading2 of a particular period, looking into the early pages of City, an early stage of its project, as elites and ‘multitudes’, edged towards 2000, towards and away from ‘millennium.’ Further investigations are undertaken in papers on the nature of smart cities as contexts, on a possible basis for social transformation in Poland, and on London's class structure and struggles. Only the third, Mark Davidson and Elvin Wyly's paper following, as does Chris Hamnett, our occasional series on London's class structure, is touched on here. We conclude with a return to Simone's thoughts on infrastructure's more than marginal role in social organisation and to a summing up and a polemical conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to characterize, for the social-ensemble that negatively defines them, the marginal urban spaces stigmatized in terms of their structuring value. We state that these spaces must be understood according to the system they integrate with pure and neutral spaces. Based on an critical review of the concept of heterotopy, we state that these sites of insignificant relative weight, in the material and political economy of contemporary cities, become essential for their symbolic and affective economy. These spaces accomplish the socially effective --and humanly cruel-- task of setting the lower limits of the urbanensemble, which takes consistency by their sustained expulsion. By embodying the radical exterior of contemporary cities, these spaces also act as the cathartic and projective locus of the collective imagination and passions that, at the same time, feed from them and discharge against them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a politics of urban knowledge because urban knowledge is political: A rejoinder to "Debating urban studies in 23 steps" As a result, in many parts of the world, urbanism - knowledge about urbanization, understood in the bureaucratic, technocratic, derogatory sense used by Henri Lefebvre ([10] [[10]]) - is an important element of what used to be called the ruling ideology. The most recent contribution to this discussion is Alex Schafran's "Debating urban studies in 23 steps" (Schafran [14]). For Schafran, the critique of neoliberalism - and not the shibboleths and orthodoxies of neoliberal capitalist urbanism itself - has become so repetitive as to be useless. [Extracted from the article]