Adaptive Behaviour in Urban Space;

Residential Mobility in Response to Social Distance

Sako Musterd¹, Wouter P.C. van Gent¹, Marjolijn Das² and Jan J. Latten^1,2

¹ Urban Geography, Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam

² Statistics Netherlands

Urban populations often show a high diversity in wealth or income. This is reflected in contrasts between affluent and poor neighbourhoods. Such contrasts feed policy and academic debates on housing market regulation and welfare arrangements. Generally, it is supposed that more liberal policy regimes give greater freedom for people to choose their residential location, which can lead to higher levels of segregation and homogenous neighbourhoods. This notion also often surfaces when differences in urban inequality between Northern American and Western European cities are discussed. The assumption is that European cities have a welfare state legacy of housing market regulation which assuages social segregation. Furthermore, social mixing policies try to bring a mix of different social strata into neighbourhoods in order to prevent unwanted patterns of segregation and accumulation of problems in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. So, rather than just choice, mobility is also structured by institutional arrangements like social housing waiting lists. Also, because income inequality is less pronounced and residential environments tend to be more mixed, people may not find it necessary to take the social composition of their neighbourhood into account.

Yet, despite regulation and interventions and lower inequality, Western European cities do exhibit patterns of social segregation with conspicuous concentrations of wealth and poverty. While acknowledging that segregation patterns within a city are produced and reproduced by a range of factors, we were interested in the role of individual residential moves in the continuous existing reality of contrasting affluent and poorer neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Do we see that ‘birds of a feather flock together’? In other words, do people show a preference for living among ‘equals’ in their mobility behaviour? Even weak signals of this selectivity behaviour may help to understand why segregation at neighbourhood level survives, even if policy measures try to counteract it.

This article focuses on ‘socio-economic distance’: the discrepancy between households’socio-economic positions and the socio-economic profile of their neighbourhood. We analysed large-scale longitudinal register data for all residents of the four largest cities of the Netherlands that were available at Statistics Netherlands.

We found that, despite government regulation, the socio-economic distance to the neighbourhood is an important driver of socio-economic segregation. Both households that are more affluent than the neighbourhood average and households that are poorer more often move out of that neighbourhood. Moreover, movers tend to select destination neighbourhoods in which the residents resemble their own socio-economic position more closely. So, notwithstanding household change such as moving in together or separation, households who move tend to adapt to, and thereby sustain, the socio-economic status of neighbourhoods.

Our findings offer new input for debates and policies relating to segregation and social mixing, and pose challenges for policy makers and politicians who believe that segregated neighbourhoods will eventually have negative effects on the whole society. Our findings suggest that economic segregation in neighbourhoods cannot be counteracted by housing market rules and regulations alone. Individual choices of residents lead to more homogeneous neighbourhoods, either low income neighbourhoods or high income neighbourhoods. However, residential mobility is not always a matter of individual choice alone. There are many limitations related to access and affordability when there is scarcity on the housing market. Also, regulations may produce several constraints. The economically stronger households will more easily find a place that fits their position. The economically weaker may be more or less forced to move, for instance when the character of a neighbourhood changes significantly, as some of the gentrification literature claims.

Our research may trigger new investigations into the ‘functioning’of neighbourhoods. Not every neighbourhood will function in the same way. Some neighbourhoods with substantial social mix may stay attractive to a wide range of households. It might be worth investigating under what circumstances socially mixed neighbourhoods are sustainable, what the main characteristics of such neighbourhoods are in terms of location, tenure, housing type, demographic, cultural and other compositions, and why people decide to stay in such environments.

From Fan Parks to Live Sites: Mega Events and the Territorialisation of Urban Space

Professor David McGillivray and Dr Matt Frew

Our Urban Studies article is concerned with the relationship between major sporting events (particularly mega events), urban space and the extension of corporate brandscaping, with a focus on the (relatively) new phenomenon of World Cup Fan Fests and Olympic Live Sites (Frew and McGillivray, 2008; McGillivray, 2011).  The provision of specially designed, temporary venues located within prime urban civic space has been enshrined in host city contractual obligations since the Germany 2006 World Cup, designed to accentuate the vibrancy of the host cities, for residents and visitors, providing opportunities for those without tickets for matches or events to participate in a collective viewing experience.

 

In this short video we discuss how Olympic Live Sites are inseparable from the corporate-media nexus that increasingly defines the mega sports event phenomenon. We argue that instead of free-flowing festive spaces, Live Sites have themselves become carefully planned and orchestrated venues, which though free, are subject to extensive commodification processes. They are attractive to global corporate brands and the mass media industries because they provide these corporate actors with unfettered access to large audiences, facilitated by the resources of the host city in the form of security and promotional support. They now operate as part of the valuable real estate that the sponsor family gains access to as a feature of their sponsorship investment. Host cities are required to subsidise financially the hosting of Live Sites, in the process ceding sovereignty over urban civic spaces to external organisations for the purpose of brand extension. As parks, squares and buildings are opened up as commodities hosts are also required to introduce legislation to protect the rights (commercial and legal) of sponsors, whereby third party advertising and trading practices are tightly controlled across these zones during the mega event (and often beyond).

 

In this article we draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and liken Olympic Live Sites to striated spaces which, like any spatial structure, possess what appear to be objective boundaries. Risk and security narratives are amplified to provide justification for search procedures, security and the segregation of space to organise activities within bounded walls and fences. Live Sites represent yet another institutionalised commercial sphere during mega sports events. Event zones (including, but not restricted to, Live Sites) see public squares, parks, roads, pavements and airspace cocooned, controlled and commodified under a gaze of governance afforded by exceptional legislation.

Professor David McGillivray holds a Chair in Event and Digital Cultures in the Creative Futures Institute, University of the West of Scotland. His research interests focus on the contemporary significance of events and festivals (sporting and cultural) as markers of identity and mechanisms for the achievements of wider economic, social and cultural externalities.

 

Dr Matt Frew is a Senior Lecturer within the School of Tourism at Bournemouth University. He came to academia with 15 years of industrial experience. His penchant for post structuralist theory takes him into the terrains of mega events, music festivity and the embodied impact of digital, social and transformational technologies.

SPECIAL ISSUE

Situating the Local in the Neoliberalisation and Transformation of Urban Governance

Ismael Blanco (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Steven Griggs (De Montfort University, UK)

Helen Sullivan (University of Melbourne, Australia)

 

The rise of the ‘urban’ has quite rightly turned our attention to the role of cities as spaces of creative destruction. It has brought to the fore the logic of the urban as a key determinant in the constitution of place-specific regimes of neoliberalisation. This logic of the urban, it is argued, has spread beyond the confines of the city itself, part of a wider urbanisation of social relations in and beyond the boundaries of the city. But, in elevating this logic of the urban, do we run the risk of pushing to the margins the alternative logic of the ‘local’?

The governance of cities remains conditioned to a greater or lesser degree by the proportion of public service spending channelled through local institutions. Local government continues to act as an important mediator of conflicts and strategies across cities because of its horizontal connections to other local stakeholders within and beyond the state, and its vertical connections with upper tiers of government. Locality is also tied to demands for democracy and citizenship politics, framed in part by narratives of proximity and of the relationship between decision-maker, service deliverer and citizen. In fact, the local conjures up the immediacy of the shared physical space within which citizens live and interact, articulating a chain of demands in which proximity equates with the democratic, community and common interests, active citizenship and public dialogue.

Extending the analysis of the processes of urban neoliberalisation to incorporate alternative logics of the local opens up new windows on the politics of place and ‘neoliberal localization’. It shifts our attention to how these different logics of the local and the urban interact in the arenas of cities, constituting one another such that the size and scale of cities shapes the ambition, capacity and influence of local institutions in the city and in surrounding areas, and the values of the local inform how cities are governed and services organised. With this in mind, how the logic of the local interacts with the logic of the urban, and with crisis narratives, and how articulated together the local and the urban, and other alternative logics, constitute the spaces that we call cities has to be pivotal, we suggest, to any inquiry into neoliberal regimes.

Meeting the demands of such an inquiry requires taking into account the study of local practices, in ways which recognise the multiple logics at play in different historical contexts, the role of ideology and affect, and the spaces such ambiguities and ‘messiness’ open up for different forms of situated agency. Indeed, we set out five focal points for the exploration of the local: understandings and dynamics of ‘crisis’; politics, meaning and affect; the role of agency and regulatory intermediaries in forging local responses to crisis; the turn to practice; and the role of place and comparison. By introducing the logic of the local as foil to investigate the urban, we thus seek to trigger new forms of inquiry into the everyday politics of cities.

Urban Studies Foundation

Take a look at the Urban Studies Foundation website (http://www.urbanstudiesfoundation.org/reports-publications/) to see video presentations from four of the Foundation’s Postdoctoral Research Fellows.  Sarah Barns, Marcin Dabrowski, Cecilia Dinardi and Michele Lancione discuss their ongoing research.

Special Issue - City-region governance, 10 years on

Special Issue - City-region governance, 10 years on

Edited by John Harrison & Michael Hoyler (Loughborough University)

J.Harrison4@lboro.ac.uk; M.Hoyler@lboro.ac.uk

The expansion of globalising cities into global city-regions poses key challenges for rethinking city-region governance. Often reliant on inadequate urban-economic infrastructure and fragmented urban-regional planning and governance arrangements, these newly emerging metropolitan spaces have generated impassioned debate about more ‘appropriate’, widely understood to mean more flexible, networked and smart, forms of planning and governance. At the same time,  new expressions of territorial cooperation and conflict have surfaced around issues relating to economic restructuring and increased competitiveness, infrastructure development, the collective provision of services, and governmentalised remappings of state space. Our contention is that the challenge of city-region governance is more pressing today than ever before.

Some ten years on from Allen Scott’s original treatise on the rise of city-regions in globalisation (Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy), what we hope to achieve with this Special Issue is a furthering of our understanding of the main governance tasks facing metropolitan regions. In the introductory paper, Governing the new metropolis, we identify four central tenets of the metropolitan region/governance debate and discuss their relevance for future research on city-regions: (1) periodisation and trajectories, (2) democracy and accountability, (3) form and function, and (4) fragility and mobilisation. These, we argue, pose key challenges for rethinking city-region governance within the emerging new metropolitan paradigm. Drawing on situated knowledge from research conducted on Amazonia, Canada, India, Ireland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States, each theme is then unpacked and developed across 11papers. Exploring some of the main contentions and as yet unanswered questions in the metropolitan region/governance debate, each contribution examines how current and near-future research can proffer new insights into, and bring about advances to, understanding city-regions and city-region governance.

It is our hope that the lines of argument developed in this issue will prove useful for scholars researching globalising cities and city-regions; provide an important staging post for considering the challenges of metropolitan governance; and ultimately contribute to a healthy programme of city-region research for the next decade. By bringing together both familiar and emerging voices the issue provides an up-to-date account of the different perspectives being developed to illicit fresh understandings of city-region governance. In adopting this approach we actively encourage others to join us in taking forward this research agenda, by responding directly to the arguments proposed in this issue and offering their own insights into the challenges for rethinking city-region governance. For us this is an innovative and productive area of research, and we look forward to seeing what response the issue generates.

Globalization as Reterritorialization: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union

In 2013, to mark 50 years of Urban Studies, the Editors put together a Virtual Special Issue, bringing together articles from across the years. Fifteen articles were selected: the five most downloaded; the five most cited; and the five most important published prior to 1990 (as collectively decided by the Editors). These articles were made freely accessible on the Journal's website for six months during 2013 and readers were invited to vote for their three favourite articles.

Neil Brenner's article, "Globalization as Reterritorialization: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union", was the clear favourite, with by far the most votes cast. The article, published in March 1999 (Volume 36/3), is one of Urban Studies' most highly cited articles.

To access the article please click here
You can view the video by Neil Brenner talking about his article below!




For more information visit Urban Theory Lab

Urban energy transitions

Jonathan Rutherford, LATTS (Ecole des Ponts ParisTech)

jonathan.rutherford@enpc.fr

As we all go busily about our daily lives, only very rarely do most of us consciously think about or visualize the flows, networks, uses and implications of energy underpinning our very existence and the functioning of the cities in which most of us live and work. This backgrounding or taken-for-grantedness is reflected in the urban studies literature where a sustained focus on energy has been, with a few notable exceptions, conspicuous by its near absence.

 

A recent Special Issue of Urban Studies on ‘Urban energy transitions: places, processes and politics of socio-technical change’ contributes to thinking through the complex, diverse, always emerging and situated relations between energy and cities at a time when these are (re)appearing on political and policy agendas for a host of reasons. Security of energy resources and supply lines, climate change, affordability and accessibility, and governance and management of utilities are some of the ‘big’ stakes and issues through which energy systems are being rethought and reconfigured across North and South, implicitly or explicitly in relation to built environments and urban lives and lifestyles. But, in contrast to much of the normative policy agenda, taken as a whole, the Special Issue does not reduce the urban to a specific location, context, administrative level or actor, and nor does it view the urban as a readily available instrument or tool through which transitions of energy systems (on ‘other’ scales) can be easily deployed. Instead, we study an urban which is a constitutive and inseparable component (or set of intersecting components) of very diverse processes and practices of energy transition across North and South. By reflecting on the urban materialities, imaginaries, controversies and politics through which energy systems do and can change, and thus on what is, but also what might be, a specifically urban socio-technical transition, from Cape Town to London and Amman to Freiburg, we open up theory and practice to actualities and possibilities of urban energy relations which are other than black-boxed, bounded, pre-set and confiscated by governmental actors or transnational utility companies.

 

In the introductory essay, and prompted by the excellent contributions to the Special Issue, we suggest five potential, interconnected areas of reflection (riffs may be a better description) on urban energy transitions around materiality, relationality, socio-technical change, temporality and politics. There are undoubtedly (and hopefully) other ways in, but already these five together seem to us to begin to sketch out a framework for furthering critical urban energy research and analysis, and in the process both help to recover the notion of ‘energy transition’ (from its increasingly instrumentalised and univocal use in policy circles) through an explicitly urban lens, and to rethink the urban through a focus on socio-technical change.

 

To this end, the Special Issue does not separate out ‘the social’ and ‘the technical’ but speaks across these categories/binaries/boundaries to seek out and uncover how the urban is constantly produced and reproduced by assemblages of diverse actors, infrastructures, systems and metabolic circulations (of energy, but also its associated money, expertise, best practice models, social norms, etc) which all make an active difference to the nature, possibilities and (still uneven) outcomes of change and transformation. The papers show how various socio-technical components of energy systems become politicised in different ways and at different times, whether it be tariffs, heating plants, air conditioning, ‘green’ objectives or demand-side management. Energy is not an anodyne urban artifact – its own material make-up and physical properties do, for example, play a role in shaping how its flows connect and disconnect differently and unevenly as they pass through the urban fabric and become integrated into the practices, routines, cultures and affects of urban lives. Crucially, these urban energy flows and relations now crisscross the planet, incorporating ever more distant and diverse landscapes, localities and natures into the energetic functioning and reproduction of particular cities, often with stark consequences, as, for example, the photo of the tar sands landscape of Alberta on the front cover of Neil Brenner’s (2014) new edited collection powerfully implies.

 

Fruitful next steps require thinking about what might be a potentially progressive and inclusive political ecology of urban energy transition. This cannot neglect (analysis of) urban governmental actors and their very contrasting mandates and responsibilities around energy. At a time when more than a thousand European cities are pushing for more stringent energy efficiency and renewable energy objectives than those adopted by the European Commission (Energy Cities website, 18 February 2014), metropolitan governments in a range of cities across the South struggle to position themselves and create room for policy maneuver in energy systems dominated by powerful national actors (see Jaglin and Verdeil 2013). So there is clearly still much to be gained from study of local policy conflicts and the role of cities in ‘multi-level’ negotiations and struggles over resources and flows. But, at the same time, critical work on urban energy transitions might also continue to open up (to) questions of agency, subjectivity, knowledge and power, and their networked constitution and reproduction, thus enrolling a whole realm of local and not so local, formal and informal, human and more-than-human actors and perspectives, as well as a myriad array of material and imagined sites of displacement, disruption and deviation of given pathways of socio-technical change. Through this kind of approach, critical analysis envisioning energy as at once a hybrid and political object and flow, infrastructure and demand, collective convention and site of contestation can surely contribute to advancing urban theory and practice more generally.

 

References

Brenner, N. (ed.) (2014) Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, Berlin, Jovis Verlag.

Energy Cities website, http://www.energy-cities.eu/Politiques-energie-climat-2030-Il (18 February 2014)

Jaglin, S. and Verdeil, E. (2013) Énergie et villes des pays émergents: des transitions en question. Introduction, Flux 93-94, pp. 7-18.