Uncivil cities

In 2005, I was a witness as a Barcelona resident of a worrying emphasis on ‘incivility’ as a problem. All of a sudden, things that were part of daily life in urban public space, especially in a Mediterranean capital, such as street drinking, skating, prostitution or game-playing, took centre stage and became the object of a deafening policy and media debate. Those things, that we may have seen as annoying but normal, or even been the ‘perpetrators’ of, very quickly became a public problem and portrayed as a clear sign of the decay of Western civilisation. Almost overnight, graffiti and homelessness became punishable offenses, among many other, varied things. Something had changed in the Barcelona of ‘amigos para siempre will you always be my friend’.[1]

Soon after this happened, a copy of Urban Studies’ double issue on ‘(In)civility and the city’ fell in my hands, giving context to the events I had just lived. Incivility was becoming a global issue and different bodies in different countries were looking for tools to pursue a law and order approach to city life. These efforts received different names in different places, but were essentially all part of a global process to turn deviant behaviours into offences and thus turn them into a police matter.

The Barcelona case, however, seemed to have its own dynamic –the role played by the annual neighbourhood festivities, seen by some media as bacchanalia of incivility, or the government crisis the Socialist government at the time was going through, as well as an evident conservative turn experienced by the generation that had lived and been protagonists of the transition to democracy, who now demanded that their ‘right’ to enjoy a clean and non-degraded public space, to rest and to be tranquil and to not be ‘disturbed in the exercise of the freedom of circulation.

I became curious in the interplay between local and global dynamics, and the reason of this ‘defining up’ of deviancy. The international literature gave me clues that resonated with the Barcelona experience, but only in broad terms. The ins-and-outs of the Barcelona case did not match those described in the international literature. Trying to make sense of ‘asynchronic synchrony’ was the main driver behind the paper, written with the hope to get international authors to question some of their assumptions or generalisations, as well as to encourage other to explore similar local processes and contribute them to our scientific field.

Using a combination of urban studies literature, public policy process and transfer theory and media discourse analysis, the paper retraces the policy process of what was called the Civility Ordinance of Barcelona, finally passed on 1 January 2006, in an attempt to contribute a detailed account of the local determinant factors. These are put in light not only of similar processes elsewhere, specially the UK, but also in broader debates on the local security agendas in the 90s and 00s. By presenting a mainly empirical picture, the paper aspires to inform other comparative studies on the role of security and deviancy in urban environments, and on the political role of cities under globalisation.

Now that several years have passed since these schemes were implemented in different countries and cities, and so we can begin to evaluate their impact –and probably validate Bannister and Kearns’ hypothesis, quoted in the paper, that the emphasis on tolerance and respect through civility results in an erosion of tolerance and respect-, and in a time when urban anxieties are centered on the crisis and radicalisation processes, understanding the problems of the civility approach can act as a timely warning sign.

Gemma Galdon-Clavell.

Barcelona, May 2015

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[1] One of the landmark songs of the Olympic Games of 1992, symbolising tolerance, friendship and openness.

Mobile transitions: Exploring synergies for urban sustainability research

by Julia Affolderbach and Christian Schulz

 

When starting our research on green building initiatives and urban low-carbon strategies in Canada, Europe and Australia, we came across the promising complementarities of the Transition Studies approach on the one hand, and the more recent debate around Policy Mobilities. Given our primary interest in political, institutional, regulatory and organisational innovations and their impact on the greening of the building sector, the Social Studies of Technology (or “Transition Studies”) provided us with a useful heuristic to explore the interplay between niches for innovation, evolutions of the established regimes and changes of the general context conditions (“landscape”). But we also had to acknowledge the insufficient conceptualization of space in this approach, in particular when it comes to supra-national relationships, knowledge flows and long-distance influences. Here, the Policy Mobility approach allowed us to operationalize the extent to which local policies and actors’ behaviour are embedded into wider networks of constant policy exchange and learning processes, but also selective adoption and reinterpretation (mutation) of trend setting approaches. A combination of the two approaches gave us the opportunity to study both the localised settings and their impact on green building innovations and the relational articulation of urban sustainability programmes at the international level. The paper thus tries to contribute to the advancing conceptualization of space in the Transitions Studies literature, and – given its sectorial focus – to feed case study results from economic geography into the scholarly debates around the notion of Policy Mobility. We are convinced that a further engagement of the two approaches might not only reciprocally inspire the enrolled communities of researchers, but that it could also open new perspectives for both academics and practitioners/decision makers.

Provision of knowledge and evidence on the actual pathways and biographies of successful urban policies provides a basis to reconsider existing strategies without overrating the importance of local framework conditions in order (1) to facilitate the exchange and critical conversation with practitioners and decision makers in other city regions and (2) to develop a systemic understanding of influential levels and scales, without reifying the latter.

A wide range of topics regarding sustainable transitions might serve as test beds for this recombined approach including the multi-facetted energy policy aspiring for low carbon transitions (encompassing the decentralized use of renewables, low/zero/plus energy buildings, district heating, smart grids), transport and mobility issues, food security and urban farming, and more organizational issues such as community planning, co-housing, or solidary economies, and local sharing schemes. All of these are identified as highly innovative fields showing dynamics of rapid and international dissemination as well as re-adaptation of promising concepts.

 

Photo: Sebastian Fastenrath (used with permission)

SPECIAL ISSUE - MAY 2015 - VOLUME 52/7

Governing for Urban Resilience

Ruth Beilin (University of Melbourne)

Cathy Wilkinson (Stockholm Resilience Centre)

Sue Parnell (University of Cape Town)

This Special Issue (published May 2015, Volume 52/7) focuses on social-ecological resilience (SER) and urban governance. The papers are case-based and analyse different practices (‘the doing’) of urban SER which transcend scale and location, governments and governance. Locating the action and understanding how it is constituted is a first step to constructing data-bases, creating stories or reconstructing ways of knowing places. 

 

The papers question policies and programs that are intended to shape the urban and highlight how SER can provide impetus for shifting boundaries (connecting ecosystems, waterways, pathways, buildings, species) to reinvigorate the spaces and occupation of the urban (from an allotment garden to the peri-urban revegetation corridor).  They also make visible the ecological, social, engineering and economic systems that run through and contribute to the dynamic forces of urban resilience.  Cross scale analysis becomes a way of interrogating this dynamism with citizens and with institutions. 

 

In the research presented here, SER is part of issues of social justice, economic sustainability, local knowledge and the way that these, coupled with memory, can shift our understanding of the urban. SER is not confined to the city as the urban has long transcended the visible infrastructure of its origins.   Collectively, the research in this Issue seeks to examine and support the radical social change needed to inspire citizen discourse and contribute to the ‘doing’ that informs our urban futures.

 

 

Pacifying Babel's Tower: Lessons for comparative urbanism

 

Michiel van Meeteren  (Ghent University)

 

Ate Poorthuis (University of Kentucky)

Ben Derudder (Ghent University)

Frank Witlox (Ghent University)

In our paper 'Pacifying Babel's Tower: A scientometric analysis of polycentricity in urban research', we analyze the origins of the fuzziness of the concept of polycentricity in urban studies. While seemingly little more than an adjective to describe the multi-cored character of settlements, the term 'polycentricity' disguises the much thornier and fundamental question of defining the notion of ‘city’ itself. This masking of a different debate suggests that, as a community of urban scholars, we have been talking past each other for a long time – hence our reference to Babel's Tower. We assume that we are discussing the same object, but are in fact often not. The paper extensively draws on the work of political scientist Giovanni Sartori (and his interlocutors) from which the notions of 'conceptual stretching', and 'Babel's Tower' are derived[1]. While conducting this research, we increasingly became convinced that Sartori's oeuvre might be able to provide important resolutions to some of the methodological issues plaguing (comparative) urban studies and human geography more widely (an insight that has proven productive elsewhere). In this post, as an extension of our paper, we explore the broader implications of Babylonian confusions caused by conceptual stretching for comparative research in urban studies.

 

 

The Tower of Babel (1563) by Pieter Breugel the Elder, Illustration used for the cover of Collier and Gerring's (2009) appreciation of the oeuvre of Giovanni Sartori. (Source: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Accessed 23/03/2015)

 

Polycentricity is a concept that fits comfortably in the methodological toolbox of comparative urbanism. It provides a seemingly coherent yardstick to compare urban regions. Of course, in a strict ontological sense, every city in the world is unique. However, finding similarities and differences between places allows us to abstract from these unique and concrete realities. Based on these abstractions, we then define wider 'urban processes' that serve to structure the debates in our field of research. The crucial point in these abstractions is to avoid what Sartori calls 'miscomparing': drawing undue conclusions regarding similarity or difference.

 

Miscomparing can either take the form of a wrong 'case definition' (the answer to the question 'what is this a case of?', which leads to the proverbial comparing of apples and oranges, or a wrong 'case scoring' (assessing how this case compares to others, a kind of measurement error). When a specific miscomparison is routinely made (as has happened in the debate on urban polycentricity), it is solidified in the literature and may consequently become 'paradigmatic'. In this way, reminiscent of Kuhn's description of scientific revolutions, communities of researchers may collectively and unknowingly hold on to a theoretical proposition that ought to be revised given the available empirical evidence.

 

By way of example, let us consider an 'institutionalized miscomparison' identified in our paper that can potentially influence comparative urban studies in a detrimental way. In the polycentricity debate, differences between American and European contexts have commonly been overstated, despite the fact that the processes behind polycentricity are very similar across contexts. Because the processes behind polycentricity overlay distinct historical trajectories, incorrect assessments of difference between Europe and the United States have been made when studying the concrete situation 'on the ground'. At the correct level of abstraction (in this instance this involves comparing changing agglomeration-economy regimes across contexts), these cases should have been labeled as the 'same', whereas an empiricist assessment has led to a conclusion of 'difference'.

 

In general terms, this example highlights once again how the adopted theoretical and methodological perspective determines the results of comparative research. Miscomparing can result in accepting 'wrong' theory as 'valid', similar to type II errors in statistics, a concern that is at the heart of postcolonial critiques in urban studies, for example in the interventions of Jennifer Robinson or Ananya Roy. But it can similarly lead to type I errors: rejecting 'right' theory as 'invalid'. The polycentricity debate is one such example; another possibly arises if one takes too literally Roy’s sweeping suggestion that 'EuroAmerican theories' of the city cannot be used to say something useful about cities in Asia.

 

Therefore the most important conclusion of our study, which transcends the more narrow confines of the polycentricity debate, is that (as Sartori would phrase it) the proper application of the ‘ladder of abstraction’ is of paramount importance. We should always ask: are we comparing the same thing across contexts? If not, then we end up comparing apples to oranges, leading to erroneous conclusions about similarity and difference. This is remedied by abstraction, which results in the equally fascinating activity of comparing fruits.

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[1] A wonderful introduction to Sartori's work on comparitivism is Collier & Gerring's 2009 edited volume Concepts and Method in Social Science.

 

The Effects of Urban Greenways on the Geography of Office Sectors and Employment Density in Seoul, Korea

Myungjun Jang¹

Chang-Deok Kang²

¹ Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Daegu University, Kyungsan, Korea

² Department of Urban Planning and Real Estate, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea

Creativity is a core value of the contemporary urban economy. Thus, the creative class in such diverse fields as science and engineering, architecture and design, education, the arts, and music and entertainment is the main driver of new ideas and technologies, and is the vehicle for urban economic prosperity. It is logical that city leaders should prioritize policies that solicit and retain the creative class in particular urban settings. We postulate that amenities are influential in attracting highly skilled and creative workers. Therefore, we hypothesize that the presence of an urban greenway influences the location decisions of businesses, because workers prefer to be in a clean and neat environment.

We test whether Seoul’s urban greenway attracts and retains office sectors. In order to define office sectors, we integrate the typical office sector categories with Florida’s creative class concept after a critical review of related literature. Next, we isolate the effects of the greenway on the spatial distribution of office sectors and on employment density by reviewing background theories and empirical research. Here, we utilize multilevel modeling to fit the data structure, discuss the main findings, and provide our conclusions and policy implications.

Our multilevel models confirm that Seoul’s urban greenway tends to attract and retain firms in office sectors within a kilometer, while the freeway provides a favorable infrastructure for the geography of service industries. In addition, employment density increased within wide bands surrounding the urban greenway, in contrast to the freeway, which only had a similar effect within narrow bands.

 

This study shows that the urban greenway is a favorable factor for the location choice for the advanced and general office sectors, while the previous freeway infrastructure offered mobility benefits for the services category. The presence of public amenities has influenced the knowledge-based sectors’ pooling near the CGC corridor. Businesses are more likely to locate in close proximity to the CGC corridor in order to attract better workers. In addition, the co-location of retail shops and restaurants near the corridor has attracted office sectors that tend to rely on aspects of the urbanization economy, such as social networking and the exchange of knowledge. By contrast, the freeway was important for businesses in the services sector because customers relied on access to the transportation network.

This study raises questions concerning constructed amenities in an age of climate change. These questions should be addressed by further research. Many city leaders invest public finance in designing and building amenities to convert auto-oriented urban settings into people- and environment-oriented sites. Further and more detailed evaluation of similar projects would provide better references for constructed amenities. We believe that the spatiotemporal frame of this study could provide a cornerstone for identifying local variables that generate the spatial differences affecting business location decisions and employment density.

Assessing residential satisfaction among low income households in multi-habited dwellings in selected low income communities in Accra

Dr. Irene Appeaning Addo

Urban low income housing units in Ghana are often described as inadequate, lacking the basic amenities and found in poor neighbourhoods. Some of these neighbourhoods are overcrowded and characterised with rundown facilities, poor quality buildings, poor environmental facilities and poor sanitation. Although these neighbourhood characteristics are not contested, residents’ perception and use of these neighbourhoods may be contrary to what the policy maker thinks. Moreover, research has shown that households’ staying in multi-habited houses in the low income communities in Ghana exhibit very little residential mobility. Apart from lack of funds, what other factors could account for this observation? Could it be some form of residential satisfaction that they derive from living in their communities? Could it be the existence of social networks that help them to get by in life? Research in Ghana has looked at the physical characteristics of housing and the existing social dynamics as a composite measure of residential satisfaction in these neighbourhoods. The contribution of neighbourhood characteristics on residential satisfaction was not actually studied. However, it plays a significant role in residential satisfaction and household mobility patterns.

In my paper I explore dwelling characteristics, social networks and neighbourhood characteristics as a composite measure of residential satisfaction of multi-habited low income households in some communities in Accra. This was achieved by presenting the nature of multihabitation, measuring the level of residential satisfaction among low income households and identifying the specific variables that influence residential satisfaction.

The results show that there is a direct correlation between the shared facilities such as electricity supply and bathroom available in the house and the level of residential satisfaction. Where the households had enough facilities to share with less associated conflict, they expressed greater residential satisfaction. Dissatisfaction is high among households living in overcrowded family houses in some indigenous communities in Accra.

Overall, the study indicates that residents living in compound houses were moderately satisfied with their dwelling characteristics, neighbourhood characteristics and existing social networks. Surprisingly, many more residents were moderately satisfied with their neighbourhood characteristics as compared to the physical characteristics and access to informal social networks. Proximity to recreational areas also played a key role in residents’ satisfaction and these should be included in plans for urban low income housing. Policy makers often think about only housing for the poor and leave out the ancillary community facilities.  

Urban housing development in Ghana should be matched with infrastructure development and pioneered by private developers instead of state institutions.  At best, public-private partnership should be promoted. State institution-led projects in Ghana have not been very efficient and muddled with corrupt practices. Local development banks could be encouraged to invest in sanitation and other infrastructure development in urban low income communities. Moreover, there should be rigorous policies to drive urban infrastructure expansion, enforcement of local government by-laws to ensure that each low income house has adequate amenities and utilities such as bathrooms, toilets, electricity and water supply.

SPECIAL ISSUE - FEBRUARY 2015 (VOL 52/3)

Geographies of the Urban Night

Ilse van Liempt (Utrecht University)

Irina van Aalst (Utrecht University)     

Tim Schwanen (University of Oxford)

 

What happens at night in the city?

 

A major part of research within Human Geography, Sociology, Criminology and Planning suffers from nyctalopia: night blindness. Most studies focus on urban daily life activities and overlook night-time activities. This special issue addresses the challenges of 21st century place-making after dark and aims to deepen our understanding of ongoing and current transformations in how the space-times of the urban night are produced, used, experienced and regulated in different geographical contexts.

 

 

Phil Hadfield in his commentary on this special issue refers to the collection of papers as part of the ‘third wave’ of research on the ‘evening and night-time economy (ENTE)’. In the ‘first wave’ cultural planners vaunted redevelopment strategies to extent the vitality of city centers after 5 pm. The 24-hour city concept emerged in this period and the night-time economy (NTE) was approached with much optimism. A ‘second wave’ of NTE research later showed the unanticipated consequences of neoliberal deregulation, resulting in material degradation of social and cultural opportunities after dark and moral panic around the NTE’s unplanned growth. Previous naivety within urban governance policy and research was highlighted and much emphasis placed on public risk, safety and surveillance. A ‘third wave’ of research is now emphasizing the exclusionary outcomes that can result from a strong emphasis on securitization. The first two waves of research focused heavily on the English and Australian experience. In the third wave, other NTE geographical contexts are being explored and analyzed, as well as the expansion of temporal boundaries: hence the emergence of reference to the ENTE and the social analyses of how nights merge into days.

 

The collection of articles presented in this special issue is united in a focus on the complexity, messiness and local specificity of the formation of urban nights and is structured around four important focal points for researching for the night:

 

1)    Changing meanings and experiences of darkness and nights

2)    The evolution of the night-time economy

3)    The intensification of regulation

4)    Dynamics in practices of ‘going out’

 

Contributions to the collection show how the night has important social strengths. Night allows forms of sociality and conviviality to emerge that are not normally encountered during daylight hours. At the same time, nightlife areas are contested and experienced differently. Darkness creates a feeling of liberation, which can be uplifting; but it also creates a sense of surrender that can be unsettling. The enticing possibilities of intensive mixed-use urban spaces, as outlined by Jane Jacobs, remain a seductive vision for social liberals. Yet there remains a social tension concerning the uses and functions of urban night space, wherein one person’s ‘expression’, may be another person’s ‘disturbance’. Furthermore, we still have few case studies of the more hidden space-times and how they, for example, may allow limited access to the city at night for marginalized groups. An important reason for this is that most ethnographers, except the most committed ones, have retired to their beds at night.