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As the “solutionism” of the San Francisco Bay Area tech industry infiltrates ever more of the spaces of social life and shapes when and how people interact, from remote work to app dating, it is important to question what the fates of Silicon Valley and the Bay illustrate about the transformations wrought on place and society by the cultural logics of information technology. Using the region’s transportation history since the 1950s as a lens, this research focuses on the material impacts of the tech industry’s anti-material ideology on its home region. The chapters chart a chronology of increasingly privatized and tech-influenced transportation, from the development of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), to contestation over the “Google Bus,” to the rise of ride-hailing platforms and now autonomous vehicles. This dissertation interweaves methods, including archival research; ethnographic interviews; content analysis of visual, news, and social media; and participant observation and documentation. It employs the ethnographic practices of “studying up” and “thick description” as methodologies suited to analyzing the social effects of data-driven industries, and poses several questions: 1) How do the means of moving people through urban space reveal assumptions about who the city is “for”? Who is served by these regimes/logics: whose lives do they facilitate or exclude? 2) How does transportation materialize the prevailing political-economic logics of an era? And 3) What role does the social history and imagining of Silicon Valley, with its predilections for speculative futurisms, play in the sweeping techno-cultural transformation of the Bay, and what does it portend for regions buying into the Silicon Valley franchise? The pursuit of these questions links two principal literatures—critical urban geography and the “new mobilities” paradigm—that have different approaches to political-economic and network analyses and are not frequently read together. Both offer advantages to the topics addressed in this project, and help expand the definition of urban space and its boundaries, as well as clarify the right to the city and the meaning of mobility justice.

In this dissertation, I investigate the relationship between underdevelopment and Black geographies. I then explore the consequences of this relationship on the city of Oakland. From 2019 to 2021, I conducted 68 in-depth field interviews of Black Oakland residents who detailed the processes and mechanisms by which California housing policy contributed to the displacement of Black subjects. Building on the work of scholars of Black geographies, I have interrogated the myth of development and the relationship to the dispossession of Black geographies. I theorize how racial capitalism produces vulnerable populations through housing in urban areas. The empirical contribution of my research is to provide a framework for Black geographies as people are being displaced. The theoretical contribution is to provide a conceptualization for Black geographies existing through abjections and placelessness as understood through residents of Oakland.I argue that the relationship between dispossession and refusal creates a distinct politic. In chapter two, I theorize the work of Moms for Housing to further understand Black knowledges of resistance to dispossession. Moms for Housing is used as a case study to highlight the many theoretical implications of dispossession occurring in Oakland. In chapter 3, I use two interviews from developers to demonstrate the contradictions in what I call the mythology of development. In chapter 4, I walk through the geographic stories of 2nd and 3rd generation Oakland residents and demonstrate each of the ways they feel locked out of the city as a result of the urban changes. In chapter 5, I demonstrate how communities resist dispossession and disposability. The city of Oakland lacks proactive implementation of equitable housing policy. The lack of action by the city of Oakland puts the onus on everyday residents to organize against their landlords, employers and the state.

This study explores the extent to which academic fields of study can explain the urban fabric of Los Angeles, a preeminent site of post-industrialization and the burgeoning global cultural economy. Relationships with gentrification are explicitly examined, shedding light on the mutual dependence between cultural capital-driven reproduction in higher education and the active (re)structuring of the urban environment. Spatial analysis techniques draw on data from the US Census American Community Survey and a community college in Los Angeles County, with findings revealing the importance of lateral structural divisions and processes to empirical, theoretical, and policy debates over inequality in education, housing, and other areas of urban life.

Over the past thirty years, cities across the US have adopted variants of “quality-of- life” policing. Central to these efforts have been local ordinances aimed at curbing visible poverty, suppressing “anti-social behavior,” and removing the homeless from public space. My dissertation examines the causes, practices, and consequences of criminalizing homelessness in the contemporary metropolis. By relating ethnographic observations in the political and bureaucratic fields with those between interactions of state officials and homeless individuals, the dissertation reveals novel forms of the criminalization of poverty, tracing how homelessness is turned into a criminal activity by state classifications, institutional transformations, and populist politicization thanks to, rather than in-spite of, provisions of welfare and rhetoric of assistance. It also uncovers novel forms of the penalization of poverty, disclosing how policing can be directed by urban change, economic organizations, community groups, and agencies of poverty governance tangential to the criminal justice system. Expanding the conception of the criminalization of poverty, which is often centered on incarceration or arrest, the study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of move- along orders, citations, and threats that dispossess the poor of property, create barriers to services and jobs, and increase vulnerability to violence and crime.

My dissertation examines the unique case of South Korean tenant shopkeepers waging collective actions to protect themselves from dispossession and displacement while mobilizing under their collective identity as workers. Korea presents an optimal site for analyzing when and how the precarity caused by tenants’ lack of rights over their shops—a crucial means of production for tenant workers—can activate the formation of a new class consciousness. This case study pushes the existing labor literature to question the boundary of the working class. With the labor literature’s predominant focus on wage workers, self-employed workers are too often ignored as part of the modern proletariat. Yet, self-employed workers continue to constitute a large proportion of the global workforce in late industrialized and developing countries, and these workers tend to be low-skilled, low-educated, elderly and retired workers pushed out of the formal workforce. The precarity of the self-employed is especially salient in Asia and Africa where the fastest rates of urbanization are occurring, accompanied by intensifying speculation in urban spaces, which exacerbates the precarity of those who depend on urban space to make a living—i.e., independent waste pickers, street vendors, and artists, along with tenant shopkeepers. I argue that the lopsided representation of the working class can create major blind spots in our ability to identify agents of social change. To elucidate the processes that newly led these workers to organize, I combine theories of class formation, social transformation, and social movements from the political sociology literature with an analysis of space drawing from the urban scholarship. I find that tenant shopkeepers creatively utilize urban spaces that their shops occupy by transforming these mundane spaces of commerce into symbolic spaces of political resistance. Through such practices, urban space becomes not only a source of workers’ precarity but also a space for building new workers’ power. I also find that new vocabularies of rights emerge from organizing the previously unorganized workers. Workers’ rights are manifested in rights claims that are conventionally considered urban issues—such as rent control and securing tenant’s long-term tenure rights—blurring the boundaries between urban and labor politics.

The greatest enemy of humanity is not war; it is the illusion of humanism and peacemaking. The convergence of militarization, memorialization, and recreationalization is a widespread modern phenomenon observed in spatial and architectural manifestations worldwide. For example, memorial parks have often been dedicated to the memory of wars while simultaneously designed for recreational activities. In this dissertation, I examine how these sites, which are often erected under the legitimizing banner of humanitarian or sacred values, are designed to have political socialization and militarization effects on the users. The neoliberal militarization of spaces of daily life, collective memory and recreations shape the political landscape of our world threatening societies with a slow but steady normalization of war and the spread of a deadly culture of global violence. Implementation of extensive spatial militarization, memorialization, and recreationalization is aiding the spread of neoliberalism in the formation of new Middle Eastern cities. Decades of US interventions under peace keeping and humanitarian banners have fueled Islamic fundamentalism and sectarianism, which preserves instability and animosity among the large oil-producing nations of the Middle East. In this dissertation, I examine the war-ridden landscapes of the Middle East as the most militarized spatial manifestation of a globally spreading neoliberal militant governmentality that I call militantality. Methods used in my research include literature review, archival research, newspaper and released top-secret CIA document analysis, as well as ethnographical methods, such as observation, participatory observation and interviews. Moreover, for my field research I traveled to the Islamic Republic of Iran, Republic of Turkey, and the Lebanese Republic where I focused on several main case study sites such as Iran’s Museum of Holy Defense, Turkey’s Panorama 1453 History Museum, and Mleeta, Lebanon’s multimillion-dollar theme park of martyrdom.The explorations and arguments in my dissertation are organized in three parts: militarization, memorialization, and recreationalization. Part one starts with a broad review of cultures of violence in developing countries in relation to the spread of colonialism, nationalism, advancement of warfare, and neoliberal imperialism. This is followed by chapter three, which is an in-depth investigation of the militarization of the Middle East, the world’s most extensively militarized and conflict-ridden region. Focusing on the United States imperialistic militarization of the Middle East, and Iran as my main case study, I argue that a lucrative economy of enmity fuels the regional wars, making military institutions ever stronger, while preventing any fundamental change to structures of power. Using Iraq as the main case study, the following three chapters in part two, explore the relationship between memory and violence in the Middle East in the twenty-first century. First, I offer an interdisciplinary approach for the study of memorials as media, followed by chapter five where I argue there has been what I call a memory-centric warfare waged against the region by the United States’ neoliberal military complex, producing, preserving and perpetuating sectarianism. Highlighting the role of scholar’s in militarizing cultural knowledge, I dedicate the next chapter to arguing that memory has been utilized as weapons of mass disorientation. In part three, I argue that new forms of Islamized spaces of recreation and leisure have emerged out of the interplay between terrorism and tourism through which local leaders militarize fate, history, and culture in order to expand neo-liberal urbanism. Using the Panorama 1453 Historical Museum in Istanbul, Turkey as my main case study, I argue that the converged militarized recreational landscapes of memory are both triumphs of neoliberal hegemony and symbolic edifices intended to generate fear in external enemies while simultaneously aiming to maintain order at home. I further demonstrate how these sites are designed to achieve the consent of the masses to further expand militarized urbanism by indoctrinating, legitimizing, and disseminating the ideas and values of dominant ideological, economic, and military leaders.Finally, in the epilog, I conclude that the spatial and architectural manifestations of the global militarized neoliberal imperialism can, by design, only perpetuate violence. Further I argue that we have entered a time of militantality where the overwhelmingly militant structure of our governments has encroached on the spaces of everyday life, leading to a highly militarized world where people are socialized into a culture of violence.

The term gentrification was coined in the mid-1960s to describe the process by which neighborhoods were changing from predominately low-income to middle-class. While the term has expanded in usage in the academy since then, we know little about what gentrification means in its every day use and how that might vary depending on city size, demographic composition, and housing and labor market conditions. In this study, I investigate the representations of gentrification by one cultural institution, the media, to understand the depictions that contribute to public opinions, attitudes, and assumptions about what the term means, who is affected, what is driving the change, and how those representations vary by context. Using data from 4 newspapers published in Baltimore, Maryland and San Francisco, California between 1990 and 2014, as well as Census data, I found that the news media replicates and reinforces racial and class hierarchies in its representations of gentrification by reflecting the patterns of uneven (re)development of the past and present, and reinforcing stereotypes of racial and class groups. How gentrification was framed in the news unfolded through three mechanisms that are embedded in reporting. The news media associated race and class with gentrification through descriptions of neighborhood residents and recent in-movers, categorized certain types of neighborhood change as gentrification, and spun the changes as positive, negative, or mixed. All three of these mechanisms were shaped and influenced by the racial and class demographics of the gentrifying neighborhood and the larger context of race, class, and space of the surrounding city. Despite distinct racial and class demographics, the Baltimore and San Francisco articles represented gentrification in similar ways. Gentrification was frequently associated with poor and black neighborhoods in articles from both cities. Changes in poor and black neighborhoods that were categorized as gentrification were most often about new and state-led development and given a more positive spin by the journalists and their sources. In contrast, residential and commercial changes were most often categorized as gentrification for working-class and white ethnic neighborhoods in Baltimore, and diverse and Latino neighborhoods in San Francisco and presented with a negative spin. These differences reflect both the history and current patterns of (dis)investment by racial and class demographics in the cities and the influence of racial and class-based stereotypes on the opinions of journalists and their sources. That is, poor and black neighborhoods have historically experienced less investment in infrastructure and amenities, which have made them spaces that need some form of structural investment. However, most modern-day processes of residential gentrification by which developers and higher income homebuyers invest in a community are not occurring in high poverty and majority black neighborhoods, but are happening in working-class and white ethnic neighborhoods in Baltimore and Latino and diverse neighborhoods in San Francisco. Thus, new development funded by and implemented by the City was more frequently occurring in poor and black neighborhoods. The actual patterns of (dis)investment and (re)development reinforce common stereotypes about poor and black neighborhoods as blighted, high in crime, and high in poverty.These findings demonstrate how the historical patterns of investment and decline by racial and class composition influence how neighborhood change is understood today. The neighborhoods we see as blighted, disinvested, and in decline are frequently the same neighborhoods that have been purposefully overlooked and ignored by developers, banks, city governments, and homebuyers. The differences in how gentrification was interpreted and spun in the media representations studied here suggest that policy responses to gentrification are likely to vary by the racial and class demographics of the affected neighborhoods, meaning that residents of some neighborhoods are more likely to experience protection than others. Thus, we are likely to see more demolishment of homes and continued large-scale dispersal of poor and black communities under the guise of “investment,” while residents of working-class, white, and diverse neighborhoods are more likely to be protected from having to leave their homes.

This essay aims to examine metropolitan cities of Latin America with two aspects of the literature in anthropology, history, and sociology in mind. First, the essay addresses an imbalanced focus on cities in the USA and Canada by sketching the significance of migration, creation, and urban development in four major metropolises of Latin America. Second, in place of a framework of urban imaginaries, which has dominated the sociology of Latin American cities in recent years, I argue for a more precise notion of metropolitan imaginaries that better frames the creativity of particular cities and their level of integration into international and regional networks. With this more precise notion, I distinguish southern cities as highly connected places, which attract migrants and bring economic and cultural traffic to their shores, ports, plazas, and streets. They are lively centers of Atlantic modernity with connections that generate greater magnitude for creativity and, as such, bear international significance as places of architecture and urban design. In their informal settlements, impulses of organic creation further distinguish southern metropolises from their North American counterparts. The quality of international and regional connections distinguishes these cities from other urban centers in Latin America, a point underestimated in the literature on urban imaginaries. In this essay, I examine 19th and 20th-century Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. Each is distinguished from most cities by the magnitude of migration, the diversity of their populations, and the connections they have to global and regional developments. Crucially, each one stands out for the quality and impact of their metropolis-making, particularly in creative architecture and urban design.

The purpose of the study is to identify and analyze the technology of creating an art project as a strategic tool that can provide an effective process of implementing the activities of the manager of the socio-cultural sphere. Methodology of the study is the principles of dialectics, systemic, socio-cultural, and historical approaches, fundamental provisions of the theory of culture. The general scientific and interdisciplinary research methods are used: analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, comparison. The scientific novelty of the obtained results is to identify the characteristic features of urban music culture that distinguish it from other manifestations of musical culture; providing characteristics of the cultural space of the city as an environment for the realization of urban musical culture; determining the place of the script approach in the life of the representatives of urban music culture. Conclusion. Urban music culture is a complex and multi-vector phenomenon that characterizes the realization of music culture in the form of creating, performing, and listening to music in an urban environment. It demonstrates the attitude of members of the urban community to music and its role in the life and evolution of the urban social and cultural environment demonstrates a public interest in its manifestations through a desire to listen to music, to make music, or to produce works that are well-received by the urban society. The realization of the city's musical culture, its embodiment occurs by performing its basic functions, among which the most important are: axiological, cognitive, educational, communicative, semiotic, relaxation

O objetivo deste trabalho consiste em apontar as principais contribuições do autor para o campo da sociologia urbana brasileira. Para isso buscaremos resgatar a gênese da construção do urbano enquanto questão pelas ciências sociais brasileiras e o papel desempenhado por Kowarick tanto na ocasião da emergência do debate, quanto no desenrolar da construção do tema com o passar dos anos, refletindo sobre o legado por ele deixado. Cientes de que o reconhecimento por sua relevância analítica e seu pioneirismo se dá, em grande medida, por seu engajamento com a empiria e pela busca por interpretações consistentes acerca das características e nuances da realidade urbana brasileira, destacamos o entusiasmo do autor com o campo das pesquisas urbanas no Brasil e seu empenho para promover uma construção teórica coletiva. Resgatamos o convite aberto feito aos demais pesquisadores do urbano para firmar um compromisso de trabalho com a materialidade e com a construção de uma sociologia urbana autêntica e ajustada à experiência brasileira.

Commercial gentrification often accompanies residential gentrification. Both processes contribute to the real or perceived threat of displacement for longtime residents of ethnic enclaves experiencing gentrification. Cultural displacement is a related concern among residents who may experience a declining sense of ownership, control, or belonging as newer residents and commercial establishments move into their communities. Yet, other longtime residents experience an increased sense of safety as their neighborhoods gentrify and they may appreciate the new amenities gentrification brings. I highlight the symbolic significance of local businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods and identify two different patterns of longtime residents experiencing their communities as something alien to them—a phenomenon I call alienation from place. Alienation from place may be a product of social and cultural displacement or may be alleviated by changes to a neighborhood accompanying gentrification processes, a posteriori alienation from place and a priori alienation from place, respectively.

У статті досліджено особливості формування та трансформації релігійності в урбанізованому суспільстві. Доведено, що урбанізаційні процеси здійснюють вплив на буття людини та соціуму, в тому числі й на релігійну сферу. Навіть в умовах секуляризації, що характерна для урбанізованого суспільства, релігія не зникає, а трансформується. Відбувається, з одного боку, розділення сфери релігійного і світського, а з іншого – за необхідності релігія може залучатися до вирішення проблем, які знаходяться поза її межами. Окреслену ситуацію можна охарактеризувати як постсекулярну, коли релігія під впливом соціальних обставин змінює свою функціональність, навіть здійснює вплив на ті сфери, від яких вона була відокремлена секуляризацією. Проаналізовано окреслену проблематику в контексті розвитку українського суспільства. Обґрунтовано, що традиційна релігійність українців, яка здебільшого була орієнтована на сільський спосіб життя, не зовсім сприймається сучасним жителем міста. Проте це означає не зникнення релігійного складника духовності, а його трансформацію відповідно до потреб людини, адже релігія не втрачає своєї затребуваності. Досліджено, що в умовах урбанізації релігійність характеризується такими рисами, як приватність, анонімність, вибірковість, пошуком нових форм і засобів задоволення релігійних потреб. Оскільки існування міських жителів здебільшого є раціонально обґрунтованим, орієнтованим на корисність, а спілкування характеризується поверховістю та швидкоплинністю, то релігія посідає чільне місце в житті людини як один із засобів подолання викликів, які постають перед нею в урбанізованому суспільстві. Показано, що релігійність набуває нових рис, адже людина сама вибирає час, місце, форми її вияву. За таких умов значного поширення набувають неорелігійні рухи, яким властива значна динамічність та гнучкість, що також притаманні міському способу життя. Вказано, що одним із процесів, який супроводжує урбанізацію, є віртуалізація, яка також впливає на релігійність, адже дає змогу сучасній людині реалізовувати свої релігійні потреби не за допомогою традиційних засобів, а у віртуальному вимірі.

Urban diversity poses significant challenges for social work education in Europe’s major cities. These challenges manifest themselves in an accumulation of conflicts, inequalities, and fracture lines between individuals, networks, cultures, but also different groups and their institutional and political environments. This current challenge for the education of the next generation of social workers is also related to the rapidly changing environmental conditions and complexity of the urban diversity. Urban society is increasingly fragmented and diverse requiring new knowledges and tools to support future social work practice. The aim of the paper is to analyze the potential of Community Service Learning (CSL) as an approach that can be effectively applied in complex urban settings. CSL is an experiential learning format that integrates academic and experiential learning within a community service context. The participative training model identifies three basic principles: civic engagement, cooperative and multiple learning, and the importance of critical reflexive learning. This paper builds on existing CSL literature and represents ongoing discussions in an Erasmus+ project, exploring social work education in complex urban settings.

This research will discuss about access to urban community education after the Implementation of the zoning system, this study departs from the number of urban communities living on the railroad banks in Ketintang, Surabaya. The purpose of this study is to determine access to education for urban communities related to values, and patterns of action constructed by urban communities in accessing formal education from pre to post implementation of the zoning system policy. This research will be dissected using social construction theory with externalization, objectivation and internalization processes proposed by Peter L Berger with a qualitative descriptive approach. The result of this study is that access to education has turned into a zoning system, making it difficult for urban communities who have a residency status because the country's schools limit quotas and prioritize native citizens of Surabaya.

Nowadays, one of the subjects that in urban society is talking about mostly is that security of citizens in a city. Today crime and feelings of insecurity in urban areas especially in developing countries like Afghanistan is the prime problem that has many effects on development of a society and city the main goal of this researching is investigating about the role of city pre-active quality and security feeling in Mahdieh town. Mahdieh town locates in 13 districts of Kabul, and it is built without standard project designing plan and it is not built according to standards that can cause many damages. The criteria that are considered are sense of location. Identity of location remembrance legibility general perception and visual joys. Form and morphology that criteria have many sub-criteria that are as index of urban perspective for measurement of security feeling of citizen in Mahdia town. method of this researching is a kind of practical analytical disruptive the collecting information is the method of surveying and library, and for analysing the data for finding the result of research the (SWOT) method is used that the most important subjects in ( weakness, strangeness, threat and opportunity) points are considered and the organization is located in conservatism of (WO) and the weakness must be shortened and most usage be on opportunities and for analysing and checking hypotheses about 355 questioners are considered that after certain justify ability and final is suitable. The subjects of hypotheses are checking (SPSS) program that showed relationship is between two variables of hypotheses location identify and legibility. The second hypotheses is rejected by the Friedman test that covered the research’s variables readability, feeling of seizing and reminiscent are not in the priority.

Este trabalho apresenta um Plano de Mobilidade Ciclística para Teresina (Piauí), e tem como foco a elaboração de diretrizes intervencionistas para manutenção, requalificação e ampliação da infraestrutura cicloviária da cidade. Partindo do entendimento de que a saturação dos padrões urbanos de deslocamento significa retrocesso da cidade, a implantação dessa rede representaria a melhoria da qualidade de vida das pessoas a partir de uma potencial opção de circulação urbana sustentável. Com propostas sob formato de plano, o trabalho apresenta através de mapeamentos georeferenciados de que forma essa nova rede será inserida na malha urbana, como satisfará as necessidades de origem/destino, prevê a integração com os sistemas de transporte coletivo, caracteriza a rede proposta de acordo com o tipo de via ciclável prevista, e a hierarquiza em função da prioridade de implantação de cada ramal na malha viária. Trata também da arborização urbana, do mobiliário e dos equipamentos de apoio a serem inseridos na rede para viabilizar o uso da bicicleta nas adversidades do clima quente da cidade. Desta forma, o presente trabalho se coloca enquanto possibilidade na busca por uma Teresina mais inclusiva e equitativa, tendo a bicicleta como instrumento de transformação da realidade eminentemente caótica dos transportes motorizados privados.

Today, the role of women in social activities in Iranian society is more important than ever. Despite the increasing presence of women in the social arena, their participation and attendance in sports activities are limited. The purpose of this study is to investigate the barriers affecting women's non-participation in sports activities in both urban and rural communities. The data of this study were collected using a questionnaire on barriers to women's participation in sports activities. Findings indicated that the two groups of urban and rural women reported similar priorities, with the highest priority being related to economic and personal barriers. The lowest priorities were related to family, cultural barriers. With extensive and targeted advertising, a variety of mass entertainment programs of sports activities can be assigned to the adult age categories. Such interventions will lead to better welfare and quality of life for women in urban and rural communities.

The idea of a city has changed over the course of human evolution and in modern times finding a definition as to what is exactly meant by a city has become a really difficult task. A city is signified not only by the structural differences it resembles something which is not accepted as a city for not having a physical built environment surrounded by concrete buildings and stagnation of office spaces, instead a city signifies a social reality and the interactions thereof, by which people come to differentiate a city from something which is not. This paper looks at the different definitions and ideologies brought forward by an urban sociologist in analysing the city while looking at the ecological, cultural and new urban sociological ideologies in defying and identifying the concept of a city.

This study attracted researchers to examine empowerment efforts based on Adult Farmer Groups by involving family members and using social capital owned by members of the Gemah Ripah Adult Farmer Group (AFG) in Bausasran Village Yogyakarta City. The study used a qualitative research method with purposive sampling as a sampling technique for determining informants. Data collection was carried out through observation, in-depth interviews, and documentation to be analyzed. Resulting that empowerment in AFG is sought and has brought various benefits for empowerment and family socio-economic resilience. Social capital is used in this empowerment effort, emphasizing family functions, namely the socialization function and the economic function. In the existing efforts and empowerment, there is potential for its sustainability, namely various forms of social capital that are still maintained and refreshed in the dynamics of AFG. There is support from residents, government, universities, the private sector, and the media. Meanwhile, the obstacles faced are that there are still some residents or family members who do not yet have awareness or concern about the essence of urban agriculture, including the young people who are more challenging to empower than the elderly, then the busyness constraint which is a classic obstacle for urban society.

Two previous English translations of this classic essay by Georg Simmel have been in wide circulation, shaping the worldwide reception of Simmel’s urban theory. Both rendered Simmel’s philosophical idiom in psychologistic terms, translating Seele (soul) as ‘psyche’ and Geist (spirit) as ‘mind’. With their overtones of behaviourism, earlier translations bear the clear mark of their time. This translation seeks to return, as much as is possible without sacrificing lucidity, to Simmel’s original idiom, in the hope that this will contribute to an imaginative rediscovery of this classic text. The introduction to the new translation gives an overview of the publication’s historical and intellectual context, its reception and influence, and the distinctiveness of Simmel’s approach.

This paper proposes a new theoretical perspective for understanding urban social spaces and their interrelations. In an effort to understand these multifaceted, complex relations, an inquiry committed to a flat ontology was deployed. Accordingly, we draw our theorization on the Lacanian ontological lack, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Laclau and Mouffe’s discursivity of social reality. Thus, we propose that urban social spaces are discursive and real entities with real and sensual qualities and constituted through specific relations. They are located within discursive social relations, where each urban social space has a “differential position” in an urban system of relations. Each urban social space has an “identity,” defined by its specific mixture of social groups and its specific real and sensual qualities. These qualities construct a sensual object with a specific sensual identity within the web of different urban social spaces. Therefore, urban social spaces are being made through multiple interrelations and are constituted through their location in a nexus of positions. The proposed framework that captures the interrelations among urban social spaces is based on three interrelated logics: the logic of difference, the logic of equivalence, and the fantasmatic logic. Understanding the relations of urban social spaces through these logics offers multifaceted social, political, psychological, and spatial illumination, details, and a more nuanced and flexible investigation of the formation and change of these spaces. Hereby, the city is conceived as comprised of spatiotemporal configurations where social spaces have social and political relations ranging from harshly antagonistic to inclusive and equivalent. This proposed framework informs both sociological and political realms of planning theory. It provides planning theory with new perspectives for understanding the city as a web of interrelated social spaces. Furthermore, it allows a more critical understanding of urban reality by illuminating inequality, injustice, antagonism, and the formulation of “otherness.”

Research often links gentrification to racial inequality. Nevertheless, scholars know surprisingly little about whether the racial composition of gentrifiers moderates the consequences of gentrification. Few quantitative studies compare the effects of gentrification across different racial groups, and those that do tend to limit their outcome of interest to housing. This paper represents perhaps the first ever large–scale assessment of the ways in which gentrifiers’ racial composition is associated with local retail development. Using data on retailers in over 500 U.S. cities between 2000 and 2010, the paper shows that retail development was significantly slower in neighborhoods gentrified by Blacks rather than Whites. Put differently, White gentrifiers gained a disproportionate amount of the retail development associated with gentrification. Scholars must acknowledge that the consequences of gentrification vary depending on the racial composition of gentrifiers, which is likely one reason why the field struggles to appropriately operationalize and measure gentrification.