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This article explores the reproduction of territorial stigmatization in the San Agustín neighborhood, located in Ecatepec, Mexico. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic research, the article analyzes how territorial stigma is produced and reproduced through the discourses, practices, and interactions of multiple actors positioned at different levels. It argues that stigma unfolds internally as social differentiation, creating a normative structure based on criteria of moral superiority and inferiority. This is manifested in the use of derogatory social categories to refer especially to younger inhabitants and in forms of symbolic distancing among neighbors. The results underscore the moral dimension of stigma and its role in the construction of symbolic and social boundaries in contexts of urban relegation. The study concludes that the reproduction of stigma in the neighborhood is due to a structure based on criteria of superiority and inferiority among residents, which is sustained by a moral evaluation that normalizes the dominant urban symbolic order of central Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles in this special section employ histories of cities to examine the relationship between human ambitions and the transformation of space, the development of power discrepancies, and unequal access to material and natural resources. They also reveal the relevance of this quintessential human creation to global dynamics on our planet by unveiling the complex and often messy intersection between urban trajectories, local, imperial, or national histories and longue durée global developments. More than a case study, each article delves into the details of the materiality of the urban history they examine to explain how cities exist in the world, or in Richard Harris's words, "how cities matter" to our shared planetary past and present. In this manner, they answer the call for new conversations about the historical relationship between our urban past and our broader global reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to debates about the everyday negotiation of difference, inequality and conflict in cities by developing the notion of 'coexisting normative regimes'. Normative regimes are plausible parameters of action that are sedimented in subjectivities and reproduced in everyday routines. We argue that in many Brazilian favelas and other marginalised urban spaces, distinct and unassimilable normative regimes coexist in space, each providing distinct frameworks and guidelines for dealing with everyday situations. Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted in a favela in the city of Belo Horizonte, the article identifies the everyday ways in which normative regimes operate, how they link to broader urban inequalities, and the ways in which individuals and groups navigate between them and the various threats they pose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the entanglement of urban activism and educational tourism, considering its constraints and potential for political agency, as manifested in guided walking tours of south Tel Aviv. Through an analysis of the historical and geographical context of south Tel Aviv, the article emphasises the necessity of a spatial analysis for unpacking the politics of racial fear and the reception of asylum seekers. In parallel, the article emphasises the connections between seemingly distinct conflicts, cultures, and geographies, which need to be better understood in urban studies. It further stresses the need for innovative methodologies to unpack strategies of political participation, belonging, and agency in cities shaped by the exchange and flow between multiple geographies and by the looming presence of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Urbanization and inequalities are two of the major policy themes of our time, intersecting in large cities where social and economic inequalities are particularly pronounced. Large scale street-level images are a source of city-wide visual information and allow for comparative analyses of multiple cities. Computer vision methods based on deep learning applied to street images have been shown to successfully measure inequalities in socioeconomic and environmental features, yet existing work has been within specific geographies and have not looked at how visual environments compare across different cities and countries. In this study, we aim to apply existing methods to understand whether, and to what extent, poor and wealthy groups live in visually similar neighborhoods across cities and countries. We present novel insights on similarity of neighborhoods using street-level images and deep learning methods. We analyzed 7.2 million images from 12 cities in five high-income countries, home to more than 85 million people: Auckland (New Zealand), Sydney (Australia), Toronto and Vancouver (Canada), Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. (United States of America), and London (United Kingdom). Visual features associated with neighborhood disadvantage are more distinct and unique to each city than those associated with affluence. For example, from what is visible from street images, high density poor neighborhoods located near the city center (e.g., in London) are visually distinct from poor suburban neighborhoods characterized by lower density and lower accessibility (e.g., in Atlanta). This suggests that differences between two cities is also driven by historical factors, policies, and local geography. Our results also have implications for image-based measures of inequality in cities especially when trained on data from cities that are visually distinct from target cities. We showed that these are more prone to errors for disadvantaged areas especially when transferring across cities, suggesting more attention needs to be paid to improving methods for capturing heterogeneity in poor environment across cities around the world.

Copyright of Revista Española de Sociología is the property of Federacion Espanola de Sociologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Urbanization and inequalities are two of the major policy themes of our time, intersecting in large cities where social and economic inequalities are particularly pronounced. Large scale street-level images are a source of city-wide visual information and allow for comparative analyses of multiple cities. Computer vision methods based on deep learning applied to street images have been shown to successfully measure inequalities in socioeconomic and environmental features, yet existing work has been within specific geographies and have not looked at how visual environments compare across different cities and countries. In this study, we aim to apply existing methods to understand whether, and to what extent, poor and wealthy groups live in visually similar neighborhoods across cities and countries. We present novel insights on similarity of neighborhoods using street-level images and deep learning methods. We analyzed 7.2 million images from 12 cities in five high-income countries, home to more than 85 million people: Auckland (New Zealand), Sydney (Australia), Toronto and Vancouver (Canada), Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. (United States of America), and London (United Kingdom). Visual features associated with neighborhood disadvantage are more distinct and unique to each city than those associated with affluence. For example, from what is visible from street images, high density poor neighborhoods located near the city center (e.g., in London) are visually distinct from poor suburban neighborhoods characterized by lower density and lower accessibility (e.g., in Atlanta). This suggests that differences between two cities is also driven by historical factors, policies, and local geography. Our results also have implications for image-based measures of inequality in cities especially when trained on data from cities that are visually distinct from target cities. We showed that these are more prone to errors for disadvantaged areas especially when transferring across cities, suggesting more attention needs to be paid to improving methods for capturing heterogeneity in poor environment across cities around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, ghetto tourism, in which the aspects of poverty, exclusion and marginality are included in the tourism activity is discussed in ghettos which is a sharp form of urban segregation. Slum tourism, defined as a niche tourism type, is discussed through the discourse analysis of promotional texts on the websites of tour companies (Daytours4u, African Trails and Reality Tours & Travel) serving in Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town and Mumbai, where the world's largest ghettos are located. The discourses of these companies, which refer to the social benefits of ghetto tourism, are analyzed under the themes of "authentic consumption, awareness and regional development", which are related to each other. While the authentic consumption discourse offers the promise of a unique experience to the tourists, it is expected that experiencing poverty in the ghettos and intercultural interaction will create an awareness. It is assumed that this awareness will provide economic and cultural development in the ghettos through combating the stereotypes about the ghettos in the global media, increasing philanthropy and commercial activity in the region, and supporting NGOs. These relational themes are discussed based on the literature where two main approaches that see ghetto tourism as an opportunity and treat these tours as "alternative tours", "reality tours", "authentic tours" and critical approaches that consider it as "poverty tourism", "dark tourism", "safari tours" from the points of "social voyeurism", "commercialization of poverty" and other sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a multilevel modelling approach, this study investigates the impact of urban inequalities on changes to rail ridership across Chicago's "L" stations during the pandemic, the mass vaccination rollout, and the full reopening of the city. Initially believed to have an equal impact, COVID-19 disproportionally impacted the ability of lower socioeconomic status (SES) neighbourhoods' to adhere to non-pharmaceutical interventions: working-from-home and social distancing. We find that "L" stations in predominately Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino neighbourhoods with high industrial land-use recorded the smallest behavioural change. The maintenance of higher public transport use at these stations is likely to have exacerbated existing health inequalities, worsening disparities in users' risk of exposure, infection rates, and mortality rates. This study also finds that the vaccination rollout and city reopening did not significantly increase the number of users at stations in higher vaccinated, higher private vehicle ownership neighbourhoods, even after a year into the pandemic. A better understanding of the spatial and socioeconomic determinants of changes in ridership behaviour is crucial for policymakers in adjusting service routes and frequencies that will sustain reliant neighbourhoods' access to essential services, and to encourage trips at stations which are the most impacted to revert the trend of declining public transport use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an ethnographic account of elite neighbourhoods in Delhi. It unpacks the lived realities of these neighbourhoods by studying how elite-ness is both constituted and contested within gated residential areas and other public spaces of Delhi. It argues that elites extend the unequal world they inhabit outside their gated residences by identifying certain public spaces for their leisure activities, especially shopping malls, leaving the neighbourhood community centres or RWA clubs to cater to non-elite residents. It also focuses on the narratives of the domestic staff employed in elite households, who too inhabit the public spaces within these neighbourhoods, including parks, streets, and markets. In this way, the paper draws out the class contestations within elite neighbourhoods and explains how these spaces become sites of class fractions and factions as they are marked by the politics of who a 'real' elite is. As such, this paper is an account of how class exclusionary boundaries are drawn and subverted by elites and non-elites both in private (gated neighbourhoods) and public spaces (parks, shopping malls), thus bringing attention to the fractured realities of elite neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of home-based work raises questions about its long-term impacts on neighbourhoods and cities. By removing the need to commute, home-based work has the potential to advance the New Urbanism aspirations of walkable neighbourhoods in an urban village format where people live, work and play. Nonetheless, the uneven distribution of this emerging work practice, strongly associated with the socio-economic status of neighbourhoods, is exacerbating the risk of increased urban inequalities. This paper presents pre- and post-COVID data for the City of Gold Coast, Australia, and it discusses the urban distribution of home-based work by analysing the home-based workers’ locational preferences, their daily movement patterns, the preferred built environment outcomes, and the urban design features. The findings suggest that certain social and economic interactions tend to increase with the growth of remote work. These interactions, magnified by the COVID pandemic, offer opportunities to advance the New Urbanism aspirations of cohesive, walkable communities and neighbourhoods.

Copyright of Revista Brasileira de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais is the property of Associacao Nacional de Pos-Graduacao e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we bring issues of inequality as a cross-cutting principle to all SDGs with a critical perspective on power relations, exemplified through the relevant social question of housing. For this purpose, we have developed the inequality and poverty assessment model (IPAM), a systematic approach for streamlining problems and solutions within the SDG-framework in an inequality-sensitive way, serving as a guideline to screen topics for five dimensions of social and environmental justice: (a) distribution, (b) procedure and participation, (c) fairness in climate and environmental adaptation, (d) legitimacy and (e) recognition. Following a mixed-methods research design with expert interviews, stakeholder workshops, document analysis and an extensive literature review, we identify areas of concern, such as the interlinkage of energy efficient, affordable and climate-friendly housing, and elaborate on strategies and policy recommendations to support affordable and sustainable housing, in the specific context of urban (in)equalities in Austria. We recommend three sets of measures on the (I) De-commodification of housing by remunicipalisation, (II) De-commodification by spatial and building planning and regulated land use and (III) Strategies for more inclusive housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care strategies for older dependants are determined by not only individuals or network characteristics, but also contextual factors. The objective of this study is to determine whether urban contexts (neighbourhoods) are linked to the use of family care (informal), public services or private care at home (formal). We applied logistic regression analysis to data from the Survey of People in a Situation of Dependence 2018. The sample was composed of 530 older people (55 years old and over) living in two types of socio-economic groups of neighbourhoods in Barcelona, Spain. The type of neighbourhood is relevant in explaining the home care that older dependants receive. In neighbourhoods with a high socio-economic level, dependants are more likely to use private services and less likely to use informal care services and public services, even after controlling for household income, degree of dependency, sex, age and the number of people in the household. Understanding the factors that determine the use of public care services, private care services or family care-giving is important due to the increment in the number of older people in the population. Our results suggest that differences in urban socio-economic contexts determine some inequalities in the use of services even after controlling for socio-economic individual differences. The characteristics of neighbourhoods should be considered to adjust care policies for older dependants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite varying conceptions of what co-production entails, there is a growing consensus in research, practice and public policy discourse that co-production is a preferred strategy for leveraging resources to deliver basic infrastructure services in low-income settlements. Using largely qualitative data, this paper explores the adaption of co-production in the low-income settlement of Hanna Nassif in Dar es Salaam, implemented 20 years ago by state actors, international agencies and grassroots actors, with attention to basic infrastructure and local employment. The findings reveal that co-production engendered partnerships and platforms and transformed sociocultural norms and values that made inroads toward urban equality in the settlement, although it failed to address inequalities among the partners, or to be replicated subsequently. The paper argues that meaningful co-production of basic infrastructure services in low-income settlements of the global South requires a focus on the context-specific pro-poor concerns and priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus pandemic has had devastating effects on urban lives and livelihoods throughout the world. A major concern in the global North has been the hollowing out of central cities caused by remote working. The consequences for cities in the global South extend further and deeper because their economies are weaker, social and spatial inequalities larger, and healthcare systems more fragile. The paper explores the uneven trajectory of COVID-19 for people and places in South African cities, drawing on unique individual panel data. It shows how communities that were already the most vulnerable have been hit hardest by the pandemic, triggering hardship, hunger and social unrest. Local institutions will have to play a stronger role if society is to manage pandemics better in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Platform-based services are rapidly transforming urban work, lives and spaces around the world. The rise of platforms dependent on largely expendable labour relations, with significant migrant involvement, must be seen as connected, and as replicating larger social processes rather than merely technological changes. This perspective paper urgently calls for an intersectional perspective to better understand social-technical relations crossing the digital-urban interface of platform urbanism in contemporary European cities. Critics of platforms and gig work, to date, have mainly focused on algorithms-based social control, degraded working conditions, problematic employment relations and precariousness of gig work. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has both disrupted and amplified these issues, intensifying the vulnerability of gig workers. For example, in Sweden, migrant groups and gig workers were separately identified as being hardest hit by Covid, but with little attention to the interconnectivity between these categories, nor to how these groups are co-positioned vis-a-vis larger socio-economic inequalities. Thus, we argue for a deeper understanding of the social processes underlying platforms and for active investigation of how inequalities are being produced and/or maintained in/by these processes. Urban planners, designers and policy makers will need to actively address the hybrid (digital and physical) urban spaces produced in platform urbanism in order to prevent spatial and economic inequalities. We argue for a stronger recognition of interrelated and overlapping social categories such as gender and migrant status as central to the construction of mutually constitutive systems of oppression and discrimination produced in and through the platform urbanism.

The rapid growth of home-based work raises questions about its long-term impacts on neighbourhoods and cities. By removing the need to commute, home-based work has the potential to advance the New Urbanism aspirations of walkable neighbourhoods in an urban village format where people live, work and play. Nonetheless, the uneven distribution of this emerging work practice, strongly associated with the socio-economic status of neighbourhoods, is exacerbating the risk of increased urban inequalities. This paper presents pre- and post-COVID data for the City of Gold Coast, Australia, and it discusses the urban distribution of home-based work by analysing the home-based workers' locational preferences, their daily movement patterns, the preferred built environment outcomes, and the urban design features. The findings suggest that certain social and economic interactions tend to increase with the growth of remote work. These interactions, magnified by the COVID pandemic, offer opportunities to advance the New Urbanism aspirations of cohesive, walkable communities and neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hegemonic studies understand urban poverty as a consequence of an uneven distribution of resources differentially distributed throughout the city. In this context, this article aims at further understanding the production of urban inequalities and socio-spatial injustice through a Lefebvrian approach, which considers space as an active agent and not merely a physical environment. It proposes the use of the concept "urbanization of poverty", understood as the trialectic production of poverty through urbanization, leading to unjust geographies through processes of unequal geographic development and accumulation by dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do urban green space (UGS) policies often fail to promote justice? This article investigates such a policy in Beersheba, the "capital" of Israel's southern region and one of the nation's fastest developing cities. The new municipal UGS policy aims for justice by investing an equal amount of resources per square meter in both old, inner-city neighborhoods and the newer, more desirable outlying neighborhoods. Nevertheless, most of the inner-city UGSs are still run down. The article reveals the disparity between justice and equality in the policy. The findings suggest that social and environmental injustice is an outcome of basic planning decisions. Beersheba continues to plan large UGSs, under the misguided notion that they will foster local prestige and improve residential quality. In reality, however, planning large UGSs creates nonurban spaces and encourages climatically unsuitable development that requires more maintenance. Thus, the city is, unintentionally, pouring public funds into large UGSs in the newer areas at the expense of smaller UGSs in the older, weaker, and denser inner-city neighborhoods. As a consequence, the current policy preserves existing social disparities and promotes social and environmental injustice instead of using the UGS policy to create a more just city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the spatial differentiation of COVID-19 in cities and its driving mechanism is helpful to reveal the spatial distribution pattern, transmission mechanism and diffusion model, and evolution mechanism of the epidemic and can lay the foundation for constructing the spatial dynamics model of the epidemic and provide theoretical basis for the policy design, spatial planning and implementation of epidemic prevention and control and social governance. Geodetector (Origin version, Beijing, China) is a great tool for analysis of spatial differentiation and its influencing factors, and it provides decision support for differentiated policy design and its implementation in executing the city-specific policies. Using factor detection and interaction analysis of Geodetector, 15 indicators of economic, social, ecological, and environmental dimensions were integrated, and 143 cities were selected for the empirical research in China. The research shows that, first of all, risks of both infection and death show positive spatial autocorrelation, but the geographical distribution of local spatial autocorrelation differs significantly between the two. Secondly, the inequalities in urban economic, social, and residential environments interact with COVID-19 spatial heterogeneity, with stronger explanatory power especially when multidimensional inequalities are superimposed. Thirdly, the spatial distribution and spread of COVID-19 are highly spatially heterogeneous and correlated due to the complex influence of multiple factors, with factors such as Area of Urban Construction Land, GDP, Industrial Smoke and Dust Emission, and Expenditure having the strongest influence, the factors such as Area of Green, Number of Hospital Beds and Parks, and Industrial NOx Emissions having unignorable influence, while the factors such as Number of Free Parks and Industrial Enterprises, Per-GDP, and Population Density play an indirect role mainly by means of interaction. Fourthly, the factor interaction effect from the infected person’s perspective mainly shows a nonlinear enhancement effect, that is, the joint influence of the two factors is greater than the sum of their direct influences; but from the perspective of the dead, it mainly shows a two-factor enhancement effect, that is, the joint influence of the two factors is greater than the maximum of their direct influences but less than their sum. Fifthly, some suggestions are put forward from the perspectives of building a healthy, resilient, safe, and smart city, providing valuable reference and decision basis for city governments to carry out differentiated policy design.

This article, given as the Antipode RGS‐IBG Lecture on 28 August 2019, argues that hope can be found through training an attentiveness to the social world in troubled times. Hope then is an empirical question and a matter of documenting hopeful possibilities that often otherwise remain unremarked upon. In this sense "worldly hope" draws possibilities that are manifested in the social world and stands in contrast to cruel forms of optimism or an unrealistic faith in future progress. An argument for such an approach to hope and trouble is developed through two examples drawn from contemporary London life, namely, the silent walks at Grenfell Tower in West London and a community arts project in Bellingham, South East London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks into the successive public and private interventions that have created the conditions for an incipient gentrification process in the 5th area of the urban trace of the failed Ex highway 3, located in Villa Urquiza neighborhood, in Buenos Aires city. It also delves into the more recent urban project for this area called Barrio Parque Donado Holmberg (law no. 3396) and it explores the territorial transformations that this regulation promotes. Thereby this paper gives attention to the ways in which a type of urban governance (urban entrepreneurialism) articulates itself with a kind of territory intervention (neoliberal urbanism) and -through certain policies-creates the conditions for a widespread phenomenon in current cities: gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past 200 years, urban spaces have been imagined as neatly laid out, well-planned, sanitised and civilised places of dense human habitation with regulated economic activity, where political power, financial capital, the frontiers of knowledge and technology thrive. This has been the urban planners dream, even while it does not reflect the full reality, whether of cities in the LMICs or the HICs. In the face of such homogenising visions arising from Euro-American models, formal urban systems fail to provide adequately for residents' needs, who then carve out their own resources and processes for meeting them, largely within the domain of urban “informality.” While large part of literature presents urban informality as reflected in the slum, others have shown how it is found in relation to all classes (1). The concept of informality has largely been applied to the core dimensions of economic life of the city. Applied to people's “ways of life,” intermingling of the formal and informal becomes distinctly evident in everyday practices in locations such as the peri-urban, and in activities such as health care. This paper opens up the sphere of health care for urban planning that has, in recent decades, left it largely untouched. It uses data from a rapid assessment of health seeking behaviour of three socioeconomic groups—the middle class, slum-dwellers, and homeless— in Delhi, the capital city of India. The findings, relevant beyond the specific location, reveal that people of all sections resort to myriad informal arrangements for their health care, challenging the dominant connotation of the formal-informal denoting a legitimate-illegitimate dichotomy. This provides potential directions to bridge the formal-informal divide, to re-configure urban planning towards more sustainable futures with plural visions of land use and urban greening for healthier urban conditions and for health care provisioning. The analysis posits that, besides the economic and political relations shaping the formal and informal, the politics of knowledge must be factored in if the informal has to be adequately understood for building sustainable futures.

Overlapping and interlinked dimensions of time are shaped by and, in turn, structure contemporary urbanization and everyday life. This Special Feature debates the implications of such temporal dynamics for our cities: It explores the making of temporalities, the power relations in and through which this process is embedded, and the inequalities that its effects entail. Beyond definitions that focus on the material characteristics of infrastructures, the Special Feature understands temporalities themselves as infrastructures: structures that underlie and powerfully shape current forms of social organization and interaction. Considering time through this analytic lens promises to elucidate the ways in which political, social and economic conditions shape and exert authority over the everyday urban, as well as the material and social effects of such dominations. The papers assembled in this Special Feature unite scholars from different disciplines, probing this infrastructural lens to understand the structuring effects of urban temporalities in relation to central issues of contemporary urban development, including urban mobility and transnational migration, the politics of financializing urban infrastructure, urban energy transitions and climate risk. Moreover, thinking through the making of temporal infrastructures—that is, disentangling temporal authorities and their underlying power structures—allows thinking through opportunities for action and political change. In sum, these contributions advance three aims: to strengthen and enrich the analytical notion of infrastructure; to facilitate new knowledge about the construction of present, past and future temporalities; and to unveil potential entry points for social interventions that aim to establish empowering approaches towards urban equality and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annali di Igiene, Medicina Preventiva e di Comunità is the property of Societa Editrice Universo s.r.l. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, the transformation processes of the so-called old peripheries of the City of Buenos Aires are reconstructed in relation to the metropolitan context. This process has been far from homogeneous, resulting in a crown of city neighborhoods limiting their conurbation. Despite sharing the late integration with the central city, they have adopted particular dynamics and logics. We propose to unravel through a sociological and historical analysis the factors that have influenced these uneven territorial configuration processes. We consider that the current dynamics of these neighborhoods are tributary to their configuration processes, in which different modes of city production have been prioritized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While urban inequalities have become ubiquitous globally, there is still much debate on how we might conceptualise the forces that produce, reproduce and govern them. As an introduction to this themed issue, the present essay situates its contributions as a critical intervention with the Urban Age thesis. In particular, we focus on the prevalent Urban Age narrative that couples a standardized prescription for economic growth with a risk-management agenda to govern the political expectations, environmental pressures, large-scale migrations, and industrial creative destruction inherent to rapid urban growth. The most prominent alternative to this discourse, the Planetary Urbanization thesis, draws on the Marxist work of Henri Lefebvre, who foresaw the urbanization of the globe and argued that in the future urbanization instead of industrialization would become the driving force of capitalist accumulation. Despite some excellent insights into understandings of the urban as a global process, the Planetary Urbanization literature has yet to dig deep into just how urbanization might drive future accumulation, and even more, how inequalities might be structured and governed in such a world. We argue that the production and governance of urban inequality are intrinsically intertwined with an urbanization-driven capital accumulation. However, such a conjuncture is wrought with contradictions, notably the political limits to rising inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the making of a Social Impact Assessment (SIA) for Beersheba, Israel, using a modified version of Susan Fainstein’s ‘just city’ vision. Four key dimensions are analyzed: equality, built environment, diversity and democracy. The SIA reveals that the new plan offers positive steps towards narrowing spatial inequalities. However, it overlooks threats of social dislocation as a result of massive development planned for the city. It also ignores the needs of minorities and creates a democratic deficit. SIA is shown to be needed if planning is to face the challenge of the twenty-first century – doing the just city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]