Hasil untuk "Urbanization. City and country"

Jonas Eze

Henry Brugsch-Bey

Yiyue Tu

Max D. Woodworth

Sarah Knuth

This chapter explores the flipside of public land disposal, turning to the financial dynamics that have led institutional investors to aggressively incorporate rural farmland, long-term commercial leases, surplus public land inventories, and other low-rent-yielding properties into their portfolios, thereby transforming land into a fungible global asset. It investigates how shocks in asset prices in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis led investors to mobilize defensive understandings of land. In contrast to the more commonly studied speculative storylines of closing rent and yield gaps, the chapter exposes how the narration of land as a “safe” asset is significant in shaping patterns of global land investment, banking the stability of financial markets on social presumptions of land's countercyclicality and capacity to retain value. While these performative storylines build on historical patterns and statistical pictures, the fiction of safety that they collectively enact also fuels fresh risk taking, putting land to use in ways more tightly attuned to the logics and cycles of international finance and thereby undermining the fixity of the ground itself. Ultimately, the chapter aims to shed light on the financial sector not only as a key driver of global land and property transformations but one whose defensive strategies continue to shape US security in divergent ways.

Susan Robertson

The material discussed in this chapter concerns the experiential qualities and representations of how urban dwellers may occupy the city. The chapter aims at a better understanding of the multisensory city and at exploring how its mediations could add to representing, describing and designing city spaces in different and innovative ways. By advancing a new spectrum of experience and engagement, designers have the potential to shape the cities that are re-presented. Currently, there is a gap between the ‘planned' and the ‘lived' city and a lack of focus on socio-spatial practices often prevents a ‘potential' city from becoming an ‘effective' city. In order to bridge the gap, we can read the city in a different way, paying more attention to actual patterns of activity, in sensory terms. To do this we must look to multi- and interdisciplinary studies with a spatial focus on different sensory dimensions and urban life.

Remi Jedwab, Dietrich Vollrath

Today, the world’s fastest-growing cities lie in low-income countries, unlike the historical norm. Also, unlike the “killer cities” of history, cities in low-income countries grow not just through in-migration but also through their own natural increase. First, we use novel historical data to document that many poor countries urbanized at the same time as the postwar urban mortality transition. Second, we develop a framework incorporating location choice with heterogeneity in demographics and congestion costs across locations to account for this. In the framework, people prefer to live in low-mortality locations, and the aggregate rate of population growth and the locational choice of individuals interact. Third, we calibrate this to data from a sample of poor countries and find that informal urban areas (e.g., slums) can absorb additional population more easily than other locations. We show that between 1950 and 2005 the urban mortality transition could have doubled the urbanization rate as well as the size of informal urban areas in this sample. Of these effects, one-third could be attributed to the amenity effect of lower urban mortality rates, while the remainder is due to higher population growth disproportionately pushing people into informal urban areas. Fourth, simulations suggest that family planning programs, as well as industrialization or urban infrastructure and institutions may be effective in slowing poor-country urbanization. (JEL I12, J11, N30, O15, O18, R11, R23)

Neil Brenner

Abstract Since the 1990s, the intellectual landscape of urban studies has been transformed through debates on global cities, which are widely viewed as basing points for an increasingly globalized configuration of capitalism. This chapter develops a scale-attuned, state-theoretical reinterpretation of global city formation as a major expression of recent rescalings of capitalist urbanization. Such rescalings have been powerfully mediated through national state institutions, which, in so doing, have themselves been undergoing major spatial and scalar transformations. New urban spaces are thus produced through the rescaling of state space—and vice versa. In addition to exploring the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in the process of global city formation, this chapter also aims to destabilize the entrenched assumption that cities represent the default unit of analysis for urban studies. The scalar units of urbanization are themselves produced and rewoven through the creatively destructive forward motion of capital and the intricate mediations of the latter through state spatial strategies and sociopolitical mobilization.

Yen Nee Wong

The essay reviews Allison Goebal’s gendered analysis of women's 'right to the city' in post-apartheid South Africa and concludes that the work makes a crucial contribution to the scholarship in its injection of a 'politics of difference' and a gendered lens. The book would however benefit from expanding on its discussion of women's care burdens to explore the inclusion of care on African women's experience of justice in the city.

Jin-Heon Jung

Nicholas Harkness

Phil McManus

Shlomo Angel