Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE publishes more than 1000 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Our growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company’s continued independence. Los Angeles | London | New Delhi | Singapore | Washington DC | Melbourne SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483 Editor: Robert Rojek Editorial Assistant: Colette Wilson Production Editor: Rudrani Mukherjee Copyeditor: Rosemary Campbell Proofreader: David Hemsley Indexer: Cathryn Pritchard Marketing Manager: Sally Ransom Cover Design: Wendy Scott Printed in the UK Introduction and editorial arrangement © John Hannigan & Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 1 © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Part I © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 2 © Tim Bunnell 2017 Chapter 3 © Adam D. Dixon 2017 Chapter 4 © Greg Richards 2017 Part II © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 5 © Mark Jayne, Phil Hubbard and David Bell 2017 Chapter 6 © Philip Lawton 2017 Chapter 7 © Jasper Eshuis and Erik-Hans Klijn 2017 Part III © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 8 © Tom Slater 2017 Chapter 9 © Caroline Wanjiku Kihato 2017 Chapter 10 © Kevin Fox Gotham and Bradford Powers 2017 Part IV © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 11 © Bill Randolph 2017 Chapter 12 © Ian Smith 2017 Chapter 13 © John Hannigan 2017 Part V © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 14 © Can-Seng Ooi 2017 Chapter 15 © Tim Edensor 2017 Chapter 16 © Ricardo Campos 2017 Chapter 17 © Pier Luigi Sacco 2017 Chapter 18 © Christoph Haferburg and Malte Steinbrink 2017 Part VI © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 19 © Robert Hollands, Marie-Avril Berthet, Eva Nada and Virginia Bjertnes 2017 Chapter 20 © Graeme Evans 2017 Chapter 21 © Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt 2017 Chapter 22 © Lénia Marques 2017 Chapter 23 © Nienke van Boom 2017 Part VII © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 24 © Paul Collier and Anthony J. Venables 2017 Chapter 25 © Willem Boterman and Sako Musterd 2017 Chapter 26 © Daniel Silver 2017 Chapter 27 © Christiana Miewald, Daniela Aiello and Eugene McCann 2017 Part VIII © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 28 © Garth Myers 2017 Chapter 29 © Shenjing He and Junxi Qian 2017 Chapter 30 © Kim Dovey 2017 Part IX © John Hannigan and Greg Richards 2017 Chapter 31 © Clovis Ultramari and Fábio Duarte 2017 Chapter 32 © John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold 2017 Chapter 33 © Anna Luusua, Johanna Ylipulli, Hannu Kukka and Timo Ojala 2017 Chapter 34 © Sujata Shetty and Neil Reid 2017 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using FSC papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952131 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4129-1265-5 Contents List of Figuresviii List of Tablesx Notes on the Editors and Contributorsxi Acknowledgmentsxxi 1 Introduction John Hannigan and Greg Richards 1 PART I THE GLOBALIZED CITY 15 2 Locating Transnational Urban Connections Beyond World City Networks Tim Bunnell 19 3 Frontier Financial Cities Adam D. Dixon 30 4 Eventful Cities: Strategies for Event-Based Urban Development Greg Richards 43 PART II URBAN ENTREPRENEURIALISM, BRANDING, GOVERNANCE 61 5 Twin Cities: Territorial and Relational Urbanism Mark Jayne, Phil Hubbard and David Bell 63 6 Idealizing the European City in a Neoliberal Age Philip Lawton 78 7 City Branding as a Governance Strategy Jasper Eshuis and Erik-Hans Klijn 92 PART III MARGINALITY, RISK AND RESILIENCE 8 9 10 107 Territorial Stigmatization: Symbolic Defamation and the Contemporary Metropolis Tom Slater 111 The Liminal City: Gender, Mobility and Governance in a Twenty-First Century African City Caroline Wanjiku Kihato 126 Constructing and Contesting Resilience in Post-Disaster Urban Communities Kevin Fox Gotham and Bradford Powers 139 vi The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies PART IV SUBURBS AND SUBURBANIZATION: STRATIFICATION, SPRAWL AND SUSTAINABILITY 155 11 Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage Bill Randolph 159 12 The Climate Change Challenge Ian Smith 179 13 Social Construction of Smart Growth Policies and Strategies John Hannigan 192 PART V DISTINCTIVE AND VISIBLE CITIES 203 14 The Global Art City Can-Seng Ooi 207 15 Lights, City, Action… Tim Edensor 217 16 On Urban (In)Visibilities Ricardo Campos 232 17 Events as Creative District Generators? Beyond the Conventional Wisdom Pier Luigi Sacco 250 18 Mega-Events in Emerging Nations and the Festivalization of the Urban Backstage: The Cases of Brazil and South Africa Christoph Haferburg and Malte Steinbrink PART VI 19 CREATIVE CITIES Urban Cultural Movements and the Night: Struggling for the ‘Right to the Creative (Party) City’ in Geneva Robert Hollands, Marie-Avril Berthet, Eva Nada and Virginia Bjertnes 20 Creative Cities – An International Perspective Graeme Evans 21 Moving to Meet and Make: Rethinking Creativity in Making Things Take Place Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt 267 291 295 311 330 22 Creative Clusters in Urban Spaces Lénia Marques 343 23 Rebalancing the Creative City After 20 Years of Debate Nienke van Boom 357 Contents vii PART VII URBANIZATION, URBANITY AND URBAN LIFESTYLES 371 24 Urbanization and Housing in Africa Paul Collier and Anthony J. Venables 375 25 Differentiated Residential Orientations of Class Fractions Willem Boterman and Sako Musterd 388 26 Some Scenes of Urban Life Daniel Silver 408 27 Urban Foodscapes: Repositioning Food in Urban Studies Through the Case of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Christiana Miewald, Daniela Aiello and Eugene McCann PART VIII NEW DIRECTIONS IN URBAN THEORY 430 445 28 African Ideas of the Urban Garth Myers 449 29 New Frontiers in Researching Chinese Cities Shenjing He and Junxi Qian 462 30 Informal Settlement and Assemblage Theory Kim Dovey 480 PART IX URBAN FUTURES 497 31 The Changing Urban Future: The Views of the Media and Academics Clovis Ultramari and Fábio Duarte 501 32 Olympic Futures and Urban Imaginings: From Albertopolis to Olympicopolis John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold 514 Experiencing the Hybrid City: The Role of Digital Technology in Public Urban Places Anna Luusua, Johanna Ylipulli, Hannu Kukka and Timo Ojala 535 The New Urban World: Challenges and Policy with Respect to Shrinking Cities Sujata Shetty and Neil Reid 550 33 34 Index566 List of Figures 3.1 Modeling the frontier 11.1 Income inequality by OECD country, 1985–2011/12 11.2 Tom Toles’ ‘The Vast White Ring Conspiracy’ (1998) 15.1 Spectra, Ryoji Ikeda, London 2014 15.2 Urban Light, Chris Burden, Los Angeles, 2013 15.3 Aquarium, Durham Lumiere, 2013 15.4 Pool, Sydney Vivid Festival, 2014 16.1 Portuguese Parliament House 16.2 Monument to the victims of the Great War (Lisbon) 16.3 Headquarters of the Portuguese National Bank, Caixa Geral de Depósitos (Lisbon) 16.4 Centro Cultural de Belém/Belém Cultural Center (Lisbon) 16.5 Traffic signs 16.6 Traffic lights (Lisbon) 16.7 Video-surveillance cameras (Lisbon) 16.8 Shop window (Lisbon) 16.9 Outdoor advertisement (Lisbon) 16.10 Sticker placed on a banking advertisement (Lisbon) 16.11 Illegal writings (Lisbon) 16.12 Illegal mural graffiti (Hall of Fame), (Lisbon) 16.13 Mural Painting celebrating Amilcar Cabra (Cova da Moura) 16.14 Memorial to resident youth murder victims (Cova da Moura) 18.1‘Favela’ as a problematic sign and urban-policy interventions in the context of mega-events 18.2 Freedom Square (Soweto, Johannesburg) 18.3 Soccer City Stadium (Soweto, Johannesburg) 18.4 Cartographic invisibilization of the favela Pavão-Pavãozinho/Cantagalo 18.5 ‘Favela Painting’ in Santa Marta 18.6 Examples of typical favela paintings 18.7 ‘Rio de Janeiro from a new point of view’ – logo of Rio Top Tour 19.1 Protesting the closure of the Rhino squat, Geneva, 2007 19.2 Nightlife ‘strike’ outside alternative venue l’Usine, Geneva 2010 20.1 Urban and cultural policy convergence towards the creative city 20.2 Creative city policy rationales – large and small cities (population 000s) 20.3 Share of creative class in cities by rank size 20.4 Creative sectors – large and small cities (population 000s) 21.1 Viking Ship Museum, 2008: The Sea Stallion has returned from Ireland 21.2 The Roskilde Festival, 2014: Waiting for the Rolling Stones 22.1 Plan of section of Bairro Alto, Lisbon, Portugal, showing the main streets, buildings and stages of town development 22.2 View of one street of Bairro Alto (Lisbon, Portugal), by day 36 162 168 225 225 227 229 238 239 239 240 240 240 241 241 242 243 243 244 245 246 274 277 277 281 284 284 285 303 306 316 318 319 322 331 332 350 351 List of Figures 22.3 Outside of Buedaloco (nightlife & culture) by day. Bairro Alto (Lisbon, Portugal) 22.4 Detail of one street of Bairro Alto (Lisbon, Portugal), which bears the name of one of the Portuguese daily newspapers 22.5 Wall painting in a street of the Castelo district (Lisbon, Portugal) 22.6 Brick Lane: London’s ‘New East End’ (1) 22.7 Brick Lane: London’s ‘New East End’ (2) 22.8 Brick Lane: London’s ‘New East End’ (3) 25.1 Class fractions based on cultural positions 25.2 A typology of (15) residential milieus based on location in the region, density (urbanity), dominant building period, and average real estate value 25.3aClass fractions with strong overrepresentation (LQ > 2) in urban Amsterdam middle status neighborhoods, sorted by overrepresentation 25.3bClass fractions with strong overrepresentation (LQ > 2) in urban Amsterdam high status neighborhoods, sorted by overrepresentation 25.3cClass fractions with strong overrepresentation (LQ > 2) in suburban Amsterdam high status neighborhoods, sorted by overrepresentation 26.1 Four scenes of Ontario 26.2 Four scenes of Toronto 26.3 Predictors of some scenes 26.4 Predictors of change in university graduate percentage of the population 26.5 University graduates rise more in Romantic scenes surrounded by dense areas 29.1 Clusters of keywords of highly cited papers 30.1 A typology of informal settlements 30.2 Productive laneways and formal replacements, Dharavi, Mumbai, 2011 30.3 The picturesque slum, Medellin, 2014 30.4 Public escalators, Medellin, 2011 31.1 Recurrence of selected keywords in The New York Times, 1851–2010 31.2 Percentage change in the occurrence of selected key words in The New York Times having the previous decade as the baseline, 1851–2010 32.1 Albertopolis: Museums along Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London 32.2 Stratford Waterfront, the intended location for Olympicopolis 33.1 A participant photograph from the display study shows an uneasy relationship: the no-bicycles sticker and parked bicycles 33.2 Many participants felt that the displays disappear into their surroundings completely ix 351 352 353 353 354 354 392 394 397 398 398 418 419 420 424 425 464 482 483 484 489 506 507 515 527 541 545 List of Tables 4.1 2014 metrics for events in Cape Town 50 12.1 Summarizing four perspectives on urban adaptation to climate change 187 12.2 Adaptation perspectives and the suburban collective action problem 188 246 16.1 Urban visual culture polarities 17.1 The 12 culture-led developmental dimensions 251 18.1 Sports mega-events in the 21st century: economic and societal attributes of 269 host countries 20.1 Elements of the Creative City Index (order matched by author) 313 22.1 Features of cultural quarters and creative clusters 348 25.1 Number of individuals per employment sector, N per class fraction 393 25.2 Class fractions by residential milieus (location quotients) 395 25.3 Multinomial regression model (selection of results) 400 25.4 Four logistic regression models explaining the odds of living in (resp.) four middle status residential milieus; explanatory dimensions include combined cultural (employment) position and socio-economic (income) class position with 402 middle incomes (M), as well as demographic position 26.1 Analytical components of scenes I: theatricality, authenticity, legitimacy 414 26.2 Analytical dimensions of scenes II: dimensions of theatricality, authenticity, and legitimacy415 26.3 Canada’s typical scenes 417 29.1 Distribution of published papers by disciplines (2003–2013) 464 31.1 Recurrence of selected keywords in The New York Times, 1851–2010 507 31.2 Percentage change in the selected key words in The New York Times by decade, 1851–2010508 31.3 SAGE Publications, selected journals and recurrence of selected exact words 509 31.4 SAGE Publications, ‘The future of the city’ in the ‘urban studies and planning topic’, from 2001 to 2010 510 32.1 Host cities: legacy planning and management 520 34.1 Cleveland population trends, 1950–2010 551 34.2 Buffalo population trends, 1950–2010 554 34.3 Youngstown population trends, 1930–2010 556 34.4 Socio-economic conditions in Youngstown, Cleveland and Buffalo 560 Notes on the Editors and Contributors The Editors John Hannigan is Professor of Sociology and Associate Chair, Graduate Studies (Sociology) at the University of Toronto, where he teaches courses in cultural policy, urban political ­economy and environmental sociology. He has written four books: Environmental Sociology (1995, 2006, 2014), Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern City (1998), Disasters Without Borders: The International Politics of Natural Disasters (2012) and The Geopolitics of Deep Oceans (2015). Fantasy City was nominated for the 1999–2000 John Porter Award of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association. Environmental Sociology has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese. In his most recent book, The Geopolitics of Deep Oceans, Dr Hannigan argues that our understanding of the deep depends on whether we see it primarily as a resource cornucopia, a global political chessboard, a shared commons or a unique and threatened ecology. Greg Richards Greg Richards is Professor of Placemaking and Events at NHTV Breda and Professor of Leisure Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He has conducted research on a wide range of topics related to leisure, tourism and urban development. His recent major publications include Eventful Cities: Cultural management and Urban Revitalisation (with Robert Palmer), and Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating Place (with Paolo Russo). The Contributors Daniela Aiello is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia. She received her Master’s in Geography from Simon Fraser University where she studied restaurant gentrification in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Currently her research centres on the growing problem of evictions in Atlanta, Georgia and Vancouver, BC, as ongoing forms of racialized dispossession and violence. Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt is Professor of Human Geography in the Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University. His research interests includes mobility, tourist experience, place design, cultural heritage and local and regional development, and he belongs to the Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies (MOSPUS) Research Unit. Among his books in English are The Reflexive North (edited with Aarsæther; Nord, 2001), Performing Tourist xii The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies Places (with Haldrup, Larsen and Urry; Ashgate, 2004), Space Odysseys (edited with K. Simonsen; Ashgate, 2004), Coping with Distances, Producing Nordic Atlantic Societies (Berghahn, 2007), Mobility and Place (edited with Granås; Ashgate, 2008) and Design Research (edited with Simonsen, Büscher and Scheuer; Routledge, 2010). In addition, he has published recent articles in, among other journals, Mobilities and Journal of Consumer Culture. David Bell is Senior Lecturer in Critical Human Geography in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds, UK. He has published widely on cultural geography and cultural policy. His most recent book is Cultural Policy (co-authored with Kate Oakley; Routledge 2016) and his next book is a co-authored analysis of cosmetic surgery tourism, to be published by Manchester University Press. Marie-Avril Berthet graduated in Geography at the University Lumière of Lyon in 2003, and is currently doing a PhD on nightlife at Leeds Geography. She has worked for festivals and cultural institutions in Geneva, and, in 2010, co-edited a report on nightlife in Geneva for the City’s Cultural Department. She is also a DJ. Virginia Bjertnes is a social and cultural Anthropologist with a Master’s from Neuchâtel University. She has worked for a number of years in contemporary arts and as a social worker with young people, and was co-editor of a report on nightlife in Geneva for the city’s Cultural Department. She has also experienced local politics as city councillor for some time. These days, she is putting her energy into activism for climate. Willem Boterman is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His work focuses on ­gentrification, segregation, demographic change, gender and social reproduction of class. For more information, see http://www.uva.nl/profile/w.r.boterman Tim Bunnell is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses mainly on cities in Southeast Asia – especially in Malaysia and Indonesia – and their constitutive relations with elsewhere. His latest book, From World City to the World in One City: Liverpool Through Malay Lives, was published as part of WileyBlackwell’s Studies in Urban and Social Change series in 2016. He is currently working on a volume of essays on urban futurity in Asia arising from a large collaborative research project on ‘Aspirations, Urban Governance and the Remaking of Asian Cities’. Ricardo Campos holds a PhD in Visual Anthropology. Currently, he is postdoctoral research fellow at CICS.Nova – Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences, Portugal. Over the past fifteen years he has been researching urban youth cultures, urban art, visual culture and digital media. His publications include Porque pintamos a cidade? Uma abordagem etnográfica ao graffiti urbano [Why do we paint the city? An ethnographic approach to urban graffiti] (Fim de Século, 2010) and Introdução à Cultura Visual. Abordagens e metodologias [Introduction to Visual Culture. Approaches and Methodologies] (Mundos Sociais, 2013). He has co-edited (with Andrea Brighenti and Luciano Spinelli) Uma cidade de Imagens [A City of Images] (Mundos Sociais, 2011), Popular and Visual Culture: Design, Circulation and Consumption (with Clara Sarmento; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014) and Transglobal Sounds: Music, Youth and Migration (with João Sardinha; Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2016). He is also one of the editors of the Brazilian academic journal Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia [Journal Notes on the Editors and Contributors xiii of Art and Anthropology] and co-coordinator of the Luso-Brasilian Network for the Study of Urban Arts and Interventions. Paul Collier is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford University and a Director of the International Growth Centre. Previous positions include Director of the Research Development Department of the World Bank. He has worked extensively in development economics, focusing on Africa. Recent books include The Bottom Billion (2007), Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (2009), The Plundered Planet: How to reconcile prosperity with nature (2010) and Exodus: How migration is changing our world (2013). He has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Adam D. Dixon is Reader in Economic Geography and Director of the Geographies of Political Economy research group at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on comparative economic geography, the geography of finance, and the political economy of institutional investors. He received a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and The George Washington University in Washington, DC, respectively. Kim Dovey is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. He was educated at Curtin University, University of Melbourne and UC Berkeley (PhD), and has taught at Berkeley, RMIT and Melbourne Universities. His research on social issues in architecture and urban design has focused on experiences of place and practices of power, including investigations of housing, shopping malls, corporate towers, urban waterfronts and the politics of public space. His books include Framing Places (Routledge, 1999), Fluid City (Routledge, 2005), Becoming Places (Routledge, 2010) and Urban Design Thinking (Bloomsbury, 2016). Current research projects are focused on the application of assemblage thinking to urban morphology, informal settlements and transit-­oriented urban design. Fábio Duarte is urban planner, scholar and research lead in the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor of Urban Management at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Brazil. Duarte has been research associate at Harvard Graduate School of Design, and visiting professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. A consultant to the World Bank, Duarte has worked in Latin America and India. He is the author of Space, Place, and Territory (Routledge, forthcoming). Tim Edensor teaches cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002) and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), as well as the editor of Geographies of Rhythm (2010) and co-editor of Spaces of Vernacular Creativity (2009). Tim has written extensively on national identity, tourism, industrial ruins, walking, driving, football cultures, rhythms and urban materiality. Most recently, he has focused on spaces of daylight, illumination and darkness. His latest book is From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017), published by Minnesota University Press. Jasper Eshuis is Assistant Professor at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests are marketing and branding in the public sector, and co-production in complex governance processes. His research has been published xiv The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies in various journals such as Urban Studies, Cities, Public Administration Review and Public Management Review. Together with Erik-Hans Klijn he wrote Branding in Governance and Public Management (Routledge, 2012) Graeme Evans is Professor of Urban Cultures & Design and Director of the Art & Design Research Institute, Middlesex University School of Art & Design. He also holds the chair in Culture & Urban Development, Maastricht University. He has published widely on creative cities, cultural planning and policy, the creative economy and urban design, and advises culture ministries, Arts Councils, the Council of Europe and metropolitan authorities in this field. Recent studies include the role of culture in placemaking for the UK Cultural Ministry, and place branding and heritage for Historic England. He convenes the Regional Studies Association mega events research network (www.megaevents.org) and is a leading researcher on culture, mega events and regeneration. John R. Gold is Professor of Urban Historical Geography in the Department of Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University and Special Appointed Professor in the Graduate School of Governance Studies, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan. He is the author or editor of 19 books on urban and cultural subjects and is currently working on the third of his trilogy on architectural modernism, entitled The Legacy of Modernism: Modern Architects, the City and the Collapse of Orthodoxy, 1973–1990. Margaret M. Gold, Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at London Metropolitan University, is the joint author of Imagining Scotland (Scolar Press, 1995) and Cities of Culture (Ashgate, 2005), and joint editor of The Making of Olympic Cities (Routledge, 2012). She is currently working with John Gold on Festival Cities: Culture, Planning and Urban Life since 1918 (Routledge, 2018). Kevin Fox Gotham is Associate Dean of Graduate Programs, Grants and Research in the School of Liberal Arts (SLA) and Professor of Sociology at Tulane University. He has research interests in real estate and mortgage markets, the political economy of tourism and post-disaster redevelopment. He is author of Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (with Miriam Greenberg; Oxford University Press, 2014), Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2010 (SUNY Press, 2014, second edition), Authentic New Orleans: Race, Culture, and Tourism in the Big Easy (NYU Press, 2007) and Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment (2001, Elsevier Press). He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on housing policy, racial segregation, urban redevelopment and tourism. Christoph Haferburg is an urban geographer at the Institute for Geography, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, and visiting Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research deals inter alia with urban and social differentiation, property markets and the urban effects of mega events. With an epistemological background in theories of practice, he has been exploring societal and s­ patial aspects of urban development, especially in Southern Africa. Shenjing He is Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at The University of Hong Kong. Her primary research interests focus on urban redevelopment/­ Notes on the Editors and Contributors xv gentrification, housing differentiation and socio-spatial inequality, rural–urban migration and urban poverty. She has published more than 70 journal articles and book chapters in English and Chinese. She is the co-author/co-editor of four books, and the lead guest editor of several special issues. Shenjing is currently the Chinese editor of Urban Studies and editorial advisory board member of Journal of Urban Affairs, Geography Compass, International Planning Studies and Area Development and Policy. Robert Hollands is a Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University, England, and he has published widely around such topics as alternative urban cultures, nightlife, youth cultures and transitions, the egalitarian arts, smart cities and fringe festivals. He is the author of five books, including the co-authored Urban Nightscapes: Youth Cultures, Pleasure Spaces and Corporate Power (2003). His current research is funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship grant (2015–2017) and is entitled ‘Urban Cultural Movements and the Struggle for Alternative Creative Spaces’. Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Geography, King’s College London. He has published widely on the social life of cities, with a particular focus on the relations of sexuality and space. His books include City (Routledge, 2006), Cities and Sexualities (Routledge, 2012) and The Battle for the High Street (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Mark Jayne is Professor of Human Geography at Cardiff University, UK. He is a social and cultural geographer whose research interests include consumption, the urban order, city cultures and cultural economy. Mark has published around 75 journal articles, book chapters and official reports and has undertaken empirical research in the UK, Ireland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, the USA and China. Mark is author of Cities and Consumption (Routledge, 2005), co-author of Alcohol, Drinking, Drunkenness: (Dis)Orderly Spaces (Ashgate, 2011) and Childhood, Family, Alcohol (Ashgate, 2016). Mark is also c­ o-editor of City of Quarters: Urban Villages in the Contemporary City (Ashgate, 2004), Small Cities: Urban Experience Beyond the Metropolis (Routledge, 2006), Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities (Routledge, 2012), Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2016) and Chinese Urbanism: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2017). Caroline Wanjiku Kihato is a Visiting Senior Researcher at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research and teaching interests are migration, gender, governance, urban land markets and urbanization in the global South. She is the author of Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Life in an in-between City (Palgrave Macmillan & Wits University Press, 2013) and co-editor of Urban Diversity: Space, Culture and Inclusive Pluralism in Cities Worldwide (Johns Hopkins, 2010). Erik-Hans Klijn is Professor at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands). His research has focused on governance networks, network management, trust and topics like media attention and branding in governance. He has published widely in most Public Administration journals. His recent books include: Branding in Governance and Public Management (Routledge, 2012; together with Jasper Eshuis) and Governance Networks in the Public Sector (Routledge, 2016; together with Joop Koppenjan). xvi The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies Hannu Kukka is a post-doctoral researcher and holds the title of Docent in Ubiquitous and Urban Computing at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research interests include ubiquitous and urban computing, human information behaviour, and public displays. Kukka received a PhD in computer science from the University of Oulu, Finland. Philip Lawton is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Maynooth University. His research interests focus on the intersection of public space, policy making and urban social change. His work has been published in The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Cities and European Urban and Regional Studies. Anna Luusua is a post-doctoral researcher and an architect at the Oulu School of Architecture, University of Oulu, Finland. Her research focuses on the empirical study of digitally augmented urban places from an experiential point of view. To study these themes, Dr Luusua developed a participatory design evaluation approach, which employs design-oriented and ethnographically based methods in a participatory manner. Luusua defended her PhD thesis in October 2016, passing her viva with distinction. Currently, she continues to study the role of technologies in urban environments in further projects funded by, for example, the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation (TEKES). Lénia Marques is a Senior Lecturer in Events and Leisure at Bournemouth University (UK). After obtaining her PhD in Literature in 2007 at the Universidade de Aveiro (Portugal), she completed a post-doctoral research project on Travelling and Arts at CEMRI (Portugal). She worked at the Universidade Aberta (Portugal) and later at NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands), where she was a lecturer in Imagineering and Research. She has published widely in the fields of comparative literature and travel writing, cultural tourism, events and placemaking. Her current research focuses on creativity and innovation in tourism, leisure and events. Eugene McCann is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He researches policy mobilities, urban policy-making, planning, social and health policy, and urban politics. He is co-editor, with Kevin Ward, of Mobile Urbanism (Minnesota, 2011) and of Cities and Social Change, with Ronan Paddison (Sage, 2014). He is co-author, with Andy Jonas and Mary Thomas, of Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). He has published in a range of journals, including the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, the International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, Urban Geography, Urban Studies and Environment and Planning A. He is managing editor of Environment & Planning C: Politics + Space. Christiana Miewald is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University, Canada. She is a community-based researcher focused on issues of food security, food justice and health, including the role of food provision as part of harm reduction. Her previous work has touched on issues of housing and food security as well as urban agriculture. Sako Musterd is Professor in Urban Geography at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on a wide range of topics, of which segregation, creative industries, and neighbourhood effects are among the most prominent. For more information, see http://www.uva.nl/profile/s.musterd Notes on the Editors and Contributors xvii Garth Myers is Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies at Trinity College Hartford, CT, USA. Myers has authored four books: Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa; Disposable Cities: Garbage, Governance and Sustainable Development in Urban Africa; African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice; and Urban Environments in Africa: A Critical Analysis of Environmental Politics. He has co-edited two other books, along with more than 60 articles and book chapters on African development. Eva Nada is currently doing a PhD on young people and unemployment policies in Switzerland at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Neuchâtel. She also has contributed to coediting a report on nightlife in Geneva for the City’s Cultural Department. Timo Ojala is a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Center for Ubiquitous Computing at the University of Oulu where he is the PI of transdisciplinary research group Urban Computing and Cultures. He received MSc and DrTech degrees from the University of Oulu in 1992 and 1997, respectively. He has conducted research on computer vision, multimedia, ubiquitous and urban computing, human–computer interaction (HCI) and recently on hybrid reality. He has authored about 170 scientific publications, including the most cited paper published on engineering and computer science in Finland. He co-edited the book Citizen’s Right to the Digital City published by (Springer in 2015). He has served as the founding cochair of the 1st International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2002), the general chair of MUM 2007, the general co-chair of PerDis 2016 and MUM 2016, and the chair of UBISS 2010–2016. He is a member of the ACM. Can-Seng Ooi is a Sociologist and has worked on a number of topics related to the city. They include tourism and society, art worlds, cross-cultural encounters and branding places. His field sites include Singapore, Denmark and China. Australia has recently been added to the list; he is Professor of Cultural and Heritage Tourism at the School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania. A large part of his academic career is at Copenhagen Business School where he is the Director of the Centre for Leisure and Culture Services, and Professor in International Business and Creative Industries. Bradford Powers JD, LLM is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Tulane University’s interdisciplinary PhD programme ‘City, Culture and Community’. He has research interests in post-disaster redevelopment, disaster risk reduction and the urban coast. Junxi Qian is Assistant Professor in China Studies in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. His works are located at the intersection of geography, urban studies and cultural studies. He holds a BSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Sun Yat-sen University, China, and a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. His recent research focuses on changing place identities in transitional China, urban public space, ethnic minorities and frontiers, and the restructuring of urban China. Bill Randolph is Professor and Director of the City Futures Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He has wide ranging experience in research on housing and urban policy in the academic, government, non-government and private sectors in the UK and Australia. His current research focuses on housing markets and policy, urban inequality and socio-spatial polarisation, urban renewal, high density housing and affordable housing. xviii The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies Neil Reid is Professor of Geography and Planning and Director of the Jack Ford Urban Affairs Center at the University of Toledo. He is an economic geographer and regional scientist with research interests in industrial location, regional economic restructuring, and local economic development. His current research focuses on a number of areas including: the health of metropolitan labour markets in the United States; policies to deal with decline in America’s shrinking cities; and the economic development opportunities surrounding America’s rapidly growing craft brewing industry. Reid currently serves as Executive Director of the North American Regional Science Council. He is also Editor for the Americas for the journal Regional Science Policy and Practice, Book Review Editor for Economic Development Quarterly, and serves on the editorial boards of Applied Geography, and the Journal of Economic Development in Higher Education. Pier Luigi Sacco (PhD, European University Institute) is Professor of Cultural Economics and Deputy Rector for International Relations and Research Networks, IULM University Milan, Senior Researcher at the MetaLAB (at) Harvard and Visiting Scholar, Harvard University. He is member of the Advisory Committee of Europeana Foundation, of the International Board for Research and Innovation of the Czech Republic and of the Commission for Cultural Economics and Museums of the Italian Ministry of Culture. He lectures and consults worldwide and has a vast international experience in cultural policy design and local development strategies. He has been keynote speaker for the European Commission (DG Culture and Education, DG Connect), UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and in the cultural policy conferences and workshops of the Lithuanian, Greek, Italian, Latvian and Dutch Semesters of Presidency of the European Union. Writes for Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s main financial newspaper. Sujata Shetty is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toledo. She received her undergraduate degree in architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India, and her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in urban and regional planning from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. She has worked as an architect and as an urban planner concentrating on community-based planning, research and evaluation projects. Her research explores the role of planning in marginalized and under-resourced communities from multiple perspectives, including land use planning, urban design, community development, and international development planning. Most recently, she has focused on the planning challenges in mid-sized cities in the US industrial mid-west, particularly cities facing population loss. Her work has been published in a wide range of journals including Housing Policy Debate, Urban Design International and Community Development. Daniel Silver is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and received his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is author (with Terry Nichols Clark) of Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life (University of Chicago Press) and editor (with Carl Grodach) of The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy: Global Perspectives (Routledge). His primary research areas include sociological theory, culture, and cities. He has written extensively on cultural policy, urban culture, and urban politics, as well as on general topics in sociological theory that extend insights from pragmatism, Georg Simmel, and Talcott Parsons. Tom Slater is Reader in Urban Geography at the University of Edinburgh. His undergraduate studies in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London (graduated 1998) triggered research interests in the institutional arrangements producing and reinforcing urban ­inequalities, Notes on the Editors and Contributors xix and in the ways in which marginalized urban dwellers organize against injustices visited upon them. He has written extensively on gentrification (notably the co-authored books, Gentrification, 2008, and The Gentrification Reader, 2010), displacement from urban space, territorial stigmatization, welfare reform and social movements. Since 2010 he has delivered lectures in 18 different countries on these issues. His work has been translated into eight different languages and circulates widely to inform struggles for urban social justice. For more information, see http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/tslater Ian Smith is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Accounting, Economics and Finance at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has published and researched how neighbourhoods respond to economic, social and environmental challenges and has worked with both regenerating and suburban neighbourhood communities. He has worked on a range of research projects that investigate how suburban communities respond to climate change (SNACC project – EPSRC-funded), how communities self-organize in response to climate change issues (SELFCITY project – JPI/ESRC-funded) and how built environment professionals learn new subject knowledge in response to sustainability challenges (ESRC-funded) posed by building new neighbourhoods. He has also worked on evaluations of neighbourhood renewal policy in England including the National Evaluation of the New Deal for Communities. Malte Steinbrink is a Social Geographer at the Institute of Geography and at the Institute of Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. He is also a senior research fellow of the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research and publications focus on the nexus of mobility and development, inequality and urban dynamics in the Global South, especially in Brazil and Southern Africa. Clovis Ultramari is an Architect and urban planner, Professor of Urban Management at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Brazil, and at the Universidade Federal do Paraná. Ultramari has been visiting scholar at the University of California Los Angeles, George Washington University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ultramari has worked with urban planning around the world, including Latin America, Russia, and Angola. Ultramari is co-editor of ICT for mobile and ubiquitous urban infrastructures (IGI Global). Recently, Ultramari has been working on the transfer of ideas in urban studies, and mutual influence between literature and cities. Nienke van Boom is Lecturer and PhD-candidate at the Academy for Leisure, NHTV Breda. She has a master’s degree in both Leisure Studies and European Urban Cultures. Her research and teaching activities focus on leisure, culture, creativity and urban studies. She currently works on a PhD-research on the role of amenities in attracting and retaining human capital to urban regions. Anthony J. Venables is Professor of Economics at Oxford University where he directs a programme of research on urbanisation in developing countries. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the Regional Science Association and the British Academy. Former positions include chief economist at the UK Department for International Development and professor at the London School of Economics. He has published extensively in the areas of international trade and spatial economics, including work on economic integration, multinational firms, economic geography, and natural resources. Publications include The Spatial Economy, Cities, xx The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies Regions and International Trade, with M. Fujita and P. Krugman (1999), and Multinationals in the World Economy with G. Barba Navaretti (2004). Johanna Ylipulli is a Cultural Anthropologist working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu, at the Center for Ubiquitous Computing. She specializes in interdisciplinary research which combines perspectives from anthropology, HCI and architecture. Methodologically, her focus is on qualitative and creative methods. She has worked within diverse fieldwork settings and planned several design-related empirical studies. In her PhD thesis (2015), Dr Ylipulli explored the design and appropriation processes of novel urban technologies by combining ethnography and methods of design studies. She completed her thesis while working in two research projects funded by the Academy of Finland, UBI Anthropos and UBI Metrics. Her current research focuses on sociocultural questions concerning virtual reality and augmented reality in urban spaces. Acknowledgments With 34 chapters and nearly 600 pages of text, The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies is a formidable undertaking. We would like to thank all the authors who decided to join us on this momentous journey and who gracefully responded to our constant requests and reminders. The original idea and initiative for the Handbook came from Chris Rojek, who patiently nourished the project and kept it going through many detours and delays. Many thanks indeed, Chris. Plaudits also to Cinthya Guzman and Martin Lukk, doctoral students in sociology at the University of Toronto, who carefully and adeptly copy edited the draft manuscript. We are also grateful to the many editing and production staff at SAGE who saw the book through the preparation and production stages. As noted in the Introduction, as the Handbook was taking shape, one of us (JH) was invited to lead a roundtable discussion on the subject of the cutting edge of urban studies at the Cities Research Cluster, National University of Singapore. Thanks to Tim Bunnell for organizing this event. Closer to home, JH would also like to thank his family, especially his wife Ruth, for their unwavering support and encouragement. GR would also like to thank his family for their support, and the many people who hosted me on my constant travels between cities large and small. 1 Introduction John Hannigan and Greg Richards When news first broke of the fatal shooting of 28 foreigners at the Splendid Hotel in Quagadougou, Burkina Faso, most reporters had only the remotest idea where the West African city is located. Those who did depicted it as a dreary inland administrative centre – David Tang, the Financial Times of London’s resident cultural sophisticate, includes it on his list of the world’s worst cities, ‘dirty, dusty and rotten’ (Tang, 2016: 1) – popular mainly with a few hundred foreign civilians working for faith-based relief agencies. In fact, Quagadougou is a culturally vibrant city of 1.5 million people, a third larger than Birmingham, England’s second most populous city. Ouagadougou is hardly unique. Recent urbanization along the Gulf of Guinea (West Africa) has been so rapid that the region will soon be comparable to the East Coast of the United States, with five cities over 1 million people, including one hypercity, Lagos Nigeria, with a population of 23 million (Davis, 2006: 5–6). Explosive urban population growth is not restricted to the African continent. In most countries, urbanization levels have reached record levels, with some world regions becoming more than 80 per cent urban (Brenner and Keil, 2006). This ‘planetary urbanization’ or ‘urban age’ trope has come to dominate how we think of cities. Since the late 1980s, Brenner and Schmid (2014: 312) note, the urban age thesis ‘has been embraced with increasing frequency in international urban scholarship and policy research, often by influential thinkers and practitioners as a convenient metanarrative for framing a wide variety of investigations within or about cities’ (Brenner, 2014). Arboleda (2014: 339) observes that the often heard claim that more than half the world’s population now resides in cities has become a form of ‘doxic common sense’ that determines the way in which questions regarding the urban condition are framed, both at multilateral agencies like the United Nations and the World Bank but also in ‘the conceptual repertoires of political progressive strands of 2 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES thought in urban studies’. While not disputing that the percentage of urban dwellers worldwide will soon be reaching epic proportions, Merrifield (2014: x) complains that academic experts and media commentators alike are engaging in ‘Malthusian fear mongering’ which ‘obfuscates the class and power question surrounding our current urban question’. Whilst urban commentators generally agree that we increasingly live in a ‘world of cities’, there is considerably less agreement on how to interpret and understand the contemporary urban condition. There are three interrelated points of contention. One major fault line has developed around the degree of importance that should continue to be accorded to physical space as an organizing concept. In the classic human ecological model which dominated urban sociology and geography for its first half-century, the organization and physical layout of the city were treated as having a life of their own. Park and Burgess (Park et al., 1925) asserted that the city could be visualized as a series of concentric circles or zones rippling outwards from the core. As one moves further from the central business district, the land becomes more valuable, the housing more desirable and the population more assimilated. When a political economy perspective finally mounted a successful paradigmatic challenge in the 1970s, physical space still held centre stage, albeit from a radically ­different vantage point. David Harvey (1973, 1975) asserted that urban space should be seen as a scarce resource that is distributed not by natural ecological processes, but rather by outcomes based on economic and political conflict rooted in class-based struggles (Hutter, 2007: 123). While agreeing that capital and class are regrettably missing from the human ecology paradigm, urban political economists differ widely on what an alternative treatment of space should look like. For example, Gottdiener and Hutchison (2011: 394–5) argue that neo-Marxist versions of urban political economy err in considering location merely as a container for economic processes. Their socio-spatial perspective identifies real estate interests and government intervention as missing elements in explaining how the built ­environment changes and develops. Inspired by Lefebvre’s triadic model of the social production of space, other urban analysts adopted a more explicitly constructionist approach. Representational space, the third element of the triad, allows for new forms of understanding in physical environments that otherwise seem to be fixed and controlled by economic and political elites. The possibility exists here for the imaginative re-use and remaking of the city, drawing on a different set of cultural and historical resources (Robinson, 2004: 172–3). In the introduction to their edited collection, Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender (2007) describe what a new perspective on the city might look like. Rather than focus on a single, defined physical space with fixed boundaries, we are urged to visualize the city as a field of experience that is socially constructed by its inhabitants. Cities are thus the products of a collective imagination, albeit one that is grounded in material space and social ­practice. Significantly, collective narratives about the city serve to construct, negotiate and contest boundaries, a process that inevitably leads to ethnic, racial and class conflict. Theoretically, the challenge here is to combine political economy, whose emphasis is on conflict and inequality, with more recent cultural and linguistic approaches that interpret the city as ‘a space of performance, theatre and signification’ (Gotham, 2002: 1739). This can potentially lead to a more sophisticated form of urban scholarship which does not lose track of the city as a site of inequality and struggle. More recently, the politics and use of urban space have been reconfigured by a global trend towards greater entrepreneurialism, more intense inter-urban competition and the ­promotion of place-specific development strategies (Ooi, 2004: 11). As Greg Richards points out in Chapter 4, the increasingly ­competitive global environment of cities ‘has Introduction forced them to adopt different strategies to distinguish themselves and create competitive ­advantage in order to attract resources, talent and attention’. One intriguing new treatment of urban space is captured by the concept of ‘gray space’. According to the Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel, in the early stages of the twenty-first century the structural dynamics of cities have pushed massive numbers of residents into gray space – political spaces characterized by mobility, informality, temporariness, marginality and extreme status and power disparities. This produces a structure that resembles ‘creeping urban apartheid’ (Yiftachel, 2009: 92), wherein many urban residents ‘are regarded as unrecognized, illegal, temporary or severely marginalized in urban regions in which they live and work’ (Yiftachel, 2015: 730). A second polarity within the urban literature aligns along the treatment of diversity and difference. Hannigan (2013) identifies and contrasts two opposing approaches here. The first, the economic and prosperity model, privileges economic productivity and competitiveness, cosmopolitan urbanity, cultural consumption, governance through privatepublic collaboration, creativity and innovation as growth drivers. By contrast, the rights, justice and emancipation model favours the informal economy, everyday urban practices, public infrastructures and spaces, citizenship rights, social equity and redistribution, social justice and democratic hope. Whereas the former treats diversity as a ‘lure’ with which to attract tourists, investors and ‘creative people’, the latter values urban difference in its own right as the portal to a liveable and just city. Merrifield (2014) situates this chronologically in a shift that occurred in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s the state primarily engaged in policies that promoted collective consumption items (housing, health, social welfare) vital for social reproduction. Under pressure from the fiscal crises and economic downturn during the 1980s, this changed. With ideological 3 and material support from the state, financial and merchant capital actively dispossessed collective consumption budgets. Rather, it now engaged in ‘valorizing urban space as a commodity, as a pure financial asset, exploiting it as well as displacing people’ (Merrifield, 2014: xii). After a brief interregnum, this spawned neo-liberalism. In a pair of recent papers (Scott and Storper, 2015; Storper and Scott, 2016) Allen Scott and Michael Storper have identified a third theoretical fault line that is deepening within urban theory and studies. On one side of this debate, Storper and Scott situate three influential versions of urban analysis: postcolonial urban theory, assemblage theory and planetary urbanism, each of which they find ‘seriously wanting as statements about urban realities’. On the other side, they offer up their own analytical understanding of the city, an approach which pivots on a logic conditioned by an urban land nexus. This features five crucial processes that shape the specifics of urbanization in different times and places: level of development; resource allocation rules; forms and levels of stratification; cultural norms and traditions; authority and power. Of the three ‘fashionable theories of urbanization’ critiqued by Scott and Storper, postcolonial urban theory has made the biggest splash. A seminal work here is Jennifer Robinson’s book Ordinary Cities (2006), in which she argues that we need to break free from a theoretical agenda dominated by North American and European traditions and consider a diversity of urban practices, identities and processes. Borrowing the notion of the ‘ordinary city’ from Amin and Graham (1997), Robinson asserts that it is wrong to rank urban centres according to ‘tiers’; all cities are distinctive, unique and equally of value. As Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne (both contributors to this volume) point out in the Introduction to their edited book, Urban Theory Beyond the West (2012: 1), ‘urban theorists have tended to remain entrenched in conceptual and empirical approaches that have barely moved beyond the study of a 4 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES small number of Western cities which act as the template against which all other cities are judged’. It has become almost common sense, Hentschel (2014: 79) observes, to criticize the division of urban studies into ‘cities of the West and cities of the South’. Roy (2009: 820) insists that ‘the center of (urban) theorymaking must move to the Global South’. Seminal attempts to redress this shortcoming can be found in Robinson’s (1997, 2008) research on South African cities; Abdou Maliq Simone’s (2007, 2014) ethnographic meditations on everyday life in West African urban settlements; and Ananya Roy’s (2011) discussion of ‘slumdog cities’ in India. One thread that runs through the work of all three authors is the strong sense of adaptability, originality and resilience that is said to characterize the urban in non-Western cities. As Robinson (2006: 4) observes, without taking into account this strong sense of creativity, ‘the potential for imagining city futures is truncated’. Still, the future does not appear to be uniformly bright. Simone (2016) has recently concluded that the space for autoconstruction in middle-latitude cities is shrinking. By autoconstruction he means those aspects of urban life where residents build their homes and workplaces from scratch or public housing is taken over by the residents. As such, these constitute a reaction to the severe repression and domestication that accompany the rise of the private city. A more optimistic view on this can be found in Chapter 30 of the Handbook, wherein Kim Dovey employs assemblage theory to visualize how formal and informal elements in low income housing areas might be usefully reconciled. Citing Peck (2015), Storper and Scott (2016) claim that postcolonial urban scholars have failed to satisfactorily resolve a fundamental tension between constant calls for a ‘worlding’ of urban analysis on the one hand, and the equally constant affirmation of a ‘North/South binary’ on the other. Worlding refers to the practices engaged in by cities outside the global North that indicate new directions for theorizing the urban in the twenty-first century. This is most obvious in the case of Asian cities. In their edited book, Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Roy and her colleague Aihwa Ong (2011) offer three modes for being global: modelling (for city futures), inter-­referencing (bits and pieces of one place can be found, seen, imagined and transplanted in or to another place [Ren and Luger, 2015: 6]), and new solidarities (the creation of new ‘aesthetic regimes’ beyond class, city and national divisions). Storper and Scott (2016) argue that some postcolonial urbanists attempt to sidestep the contradiction between the idiosyncratic exceptionalism of cities of the Global South and their potential utility as the building blocks of a new paradigm for urban studies by embracing a ‘comparative gesture’ whereby it is possible to ‘think across differences’ as long as this avoids comparison between the North and the South. These conflicting viewpoints notwithstanding, a strong case can nevertheless be made for treating the city as a distinctive object of scholarly analysis. Both Storper and Scott (2016) and Walker (2016) have vigorously defended the integrity of the city against suggestions by some proponents of ‘planetary urbanism’ (see Brenner and Schmid, 2015) that the city has faded away as an identifiable geographic entity, necessitating the abandonment of the distinction between the urban and the rural. Despite the fact that ‘cities are notoriously fuzzy at the edges, variegated within and differentiated from place to place’, Walker (2016: 14) insists that this does not mean that ‘we can’t reasonably distinguish them from their “other” in the countryside or find deep commonalities across cities in time and space’. Storper and Scott (2016) agree, calling the city ‘an irreducible collectivity’ whose unique character derives from its properties as a locus of agglomeration and from ‘its specific daily and weekly rhythms of life’. Farías and Bender (2010: 109) offer three reasons for continuing to regard cities as a legitimate object of study and analysis despite ‘urban Introduction sprawl, urban divides, distantiated communities and the multiplicity of sociotechnical networks proliferating in urban spaces’. First, a sufficient number of cities are distinctive, in that you know you are in one place as compared to another. Second, follow networks such as those found in the financial sector or in creative industries and you still end up in the city. Third, cities can be powerful actors in terms of producing small changes that can move on to become big changes. Continuing debates about the nature of cities and the urban are putting current ‘urban concepts under stress’ (Rickards et al., 2016). In the search for new concepts, models and theories, it is likely that fruitful avenues will be found along the intersections and fracture zones between established and emerging fields of enquiry. This Handbook will hopefully contribute to mapping some of these shifts and transitions. THE HANDBOOK From this brief overview of the current state of urban studies it should be evident that the field is at one and the same time rapidly expanding and undergoing a period of intense self-examination. Once situated largely within the traditional disciplines of economics, geography, political science and sociology, the field has now ‘widened’ (Miles and Hall, 2003: 4) to include anthropology, architecture, communications, creative industries, cultural criticism design and innovation, leisure studies, organization studies and tourism. Richard Florida, arguably the most widely recognized urbanist today outside the academy, operates his ‘Prosperity Institute’ from within the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto. David Harvey, the most cited urban geographer in the English-speaking world, is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York. Interesting new work on the former fringes of urban studies 5 is testing the boundaries of the field. Traditional tools of urban representation – such as maps, models and statistics – have given way to new forms of representation such as street poetry, art and performance that ‘speak to the experiences of different urban dwellers’ (Hall et al., 2008: 5). While this proliferating presence of urban studies is a positive development, it can easily take the form of multiple nuclei, rather than a single dominant paradigm or paradigm shift. All of this presents both a compelling reason to compile a Handbook of New Urban Studies and a rigorous challenge in so doing. We realized early on that any attempt to follow a linear narrative – from human ecology to urban political economy to postmodernism to postcolonial studies – was unlikely to succeed. Nor would it be helpful to follow the lead of past volumes and organize the material according to policy sector (environment, housing, health, transportation, social welfare), geographic region (Africa, Asia, Latin America) or type of city (economic city, rational city, gendered city, ludic city, global city, etc.). What we decided to do was bring together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars, each of whom has been working at the leading edge of urban studies, and ask them to produce an original paper. In so doing, four broad types of Handbook chapters emerged. Some of our authors produced an overview and update of current concepts, topics, debates and policies. Thus, Tom Slater reviews and extends the concept of ‘territorial stigmatization’; Mark Jayne and his co-authors explain the practice of ‘town twinning’ in the context of inter-urban competition; and Kevin Gotham and Brad Powers critically assess the seemingly ubiquitous notion of ‘resilience’ in post-disaster communities, showing how it is constructed and contested. Other contributors reprise and elaborate on an intriguing concept or idea that they themselves have previously introduced, demonstrating its potential efficacy. Accordingly, Adam Dixon expands on his typology of ‘frontier cities’ and Dan Silver 6 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES riffs on the cultural meanings embedded in urban ‘scenes’. Third, several contributors apply cutting-edge methodologies or theoretical notions to new contexts. Kim Dovey, for example, draws upon assemblage theory, which Scott and Storper cite as one of the three ‘fashionable theories of ­urbanization’ (see above). Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt demonstrates how Actor-Network Theory (ANT), an approach developed in the field of science and technology studies (STS) and often linked to urban assemblages (Farías and Bender, 2010), can be used to analyse what ‘makes things happen’. Fourth, we commissioned several contributors to write about cities, urbanization and academic analysis in regions outside of Europe and North America. Thus, Shenjing He and Junxi Qian describe the footprint and challenges created by rapid urbanization in China and point to new frontiers in researching Chinese cities and urbanism; while Garth Myers explores ‘African ideas of the urban’, and considers how these might be brought back into urban theorizing about the divided city in America. Given the diversity of perspectives and approaches adopted by our contributors, we resisted the temptation to impose a single, overarching theoretical framework. We did, however, choose to devote the largest single block of chapters in the Handbook to topics and issues related to the ‘culturalization’ of the city. In this we follow the example of Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall (2003: 4) who right from the start inform their readers, ‘Culture then, as a shaping force, is a recurring interest in this book’. The rationale for employing a cultural lens is convincingly stated by Rossi and Vanolo in their excellent text Urban Political Geographies: A Global Perspective (2012). Rossi and Vanolo describe the public discourse, emphasizing the role of culture and creativity (the latter representing a more energetic and growth-led variant of the former) as urban growth drivers constituting ‘one of the most influential urban narratives of the last decade’ (p. 19). It has been embraced by growth machines in both the affluent North and the emerging global South. One indicator of the rapidly proliferating importance of this cultural turn is its emerging role in Asian economies. In Chapter 20 of the Handbook, Graeme Evans foresees a time soon when China and other Asian economies (Singapore, India, South Korea) will compete directly with the creative economies of the West – which have left manufacturing (including cultural goods) largely behind. Already, Evans says, the global economic crisis and China’s slowdown has moved state policy towards higher value-added production and shifted attention to creative content and the creative industries. In their review of recent research on Chinese cities and u­ rbanism (Chapter 29), Shenjing He and Junxi Qian confirm this. In the last decade, they observe, culture-led regeneration and the cultural/creative industry have become new catchphrases in China’s urban policies, and a national cultural economy is in the making. He and Qian warn us, however, that this is a top-down initiative. In most cases, culture is exploited as a value-added asset to bolster economic growth and deal with the consequences of de-industrialization. Cultural policies and initiatives as urban growth drivers in emerging economies are anything but benign. In Chinese cities, He and Qian report, culture and creativity are more often than not deployed as hegemonic rhetorics to whitewash the capital accumulation process, inducing social displacement and exacerbating inequality and segregation. In their discussion of mega-events such as the Olympics and the football (soccer) World Cup (Chapter 18), Christoph Haferburg and Malte Steinbrink point out that these events follow different paths in emerging nations than in the urban North. In the latter, the hosting of events is often carried out in connection with brown field development of old ports, railway infrastructure or production sites. In the former, they occur at the inner peripheries of the city, notably within and adjacent to informal settlements. Drawing Introduction on examples from Brazil and South Africa, Haferburg and Steinbrink show how the state solves the ‘image problem’ posed by low income housing located in zones earmarked for event-related development by implementing ‘invisibilization’ measures ranging from the forced removal of inhabitants to the erection of ‘visual protection screens’. Ironically, an ongoing state-directed ‘pacification’ initiative in Rio’s favelas is designed not only to make these neighbourhoods safer and more liveable for its residents, but also to open them up to tourists seeking experiences of ‘controlled edge’ (Hannigan, 2006). One of the overarching effects of the culturization of urban systems has been a more holistic consideration of the different aspects of Lefebvre’s spatial triad, with the analysis of lived and representational dimensions of the urban particularly coming to the fore. The greater attention being paid to issues of ‘placemaking’ (Dovey, 2010) is redolent of this shift. Cities competing to put themselves on the global map and attract attention and mobilize resources need to orchestrate an increasingly complex range of stakeholders to ensure they become or remain attractive as places to live in, work in, invest in and visit. Culture becomes not just an output of the urban system that increases the attractiveness of places (Florida, 2002), but culture also becomes an input to the system, addressing the need to find new ways of living in the city and developing new ways of living, working and governing together. ORGANIZATION OF THE TEXT The Handbook of New Urban Studies is structured around nine Parts, slightly more than the seven sections in the original Handbook of Urban Studies (2001). As the first draft of the current Handbook was nearing completion, one of the co-editors (JH) had occasion to present a preview of the chapter line-up to a seminar organized by the 7 Urban Cluster at the National University of Singapore. Why, one of the participants wondered, did we eschew the usual convention in such volumes of starting with the classic theoretical pieces on cities by Benjamin, Harvey, Lefebvre, Park and Simmel in favour of a lead Part on ‘The Globalized City’? The answer, as Tim Bunnell points out in Chapter 2 of the Handbook, is that a twenty-firstcentury globalized world is increasingly formed in terms of transnationally-interconnected cities. In the mainstream vision of contemporary globalization, advanced producer and financial services cluster in a handful of first tier urban centres at the apex of a worldwide urban hierarchy, in and through which transnational corporations coordinate their production and investment activities (Brenner and Keil, 2006: 75–6). Bunnell argues that the dominance of the world/global cities paradigm as elucidated by Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor and others, has obscured the importance of other transnational urban connections, especially for those cities that never appear on world city maps. Among these are global immigrant or immigrant gateway cities with dense transnational migrant connections such as Dubai; urban policy networks that diffuse policies and best practices globally; and cities with a sizable population of ‘student sojourners’. Indeed, this is compatible with the ‘worlding’ approach of postcolonial scholars such as Ong and Roy discussed in the previous section. In Chapter 3, Adam Dixon approaches this from a different vantage point. In describing and explaining the global geography of finance, one needs to look beyond the established centres of global finance to other types of financial centres, notably frontier cities, on the periphery of or distant from the epicentre of global finance. These frontier cities, which do not rank highly on the usual hierarchies of financial centres, are nonetheless important because they function in social and institutional proximity to financial capitals such as London, New York and Hong Kong. In 8 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES the third article in this set (Chapter 4), Greg Richards profiles ‘eventful cities’, which represent another dimension in the global transformation of cities. As Short (2014: 245) has noted, the hosting of spotlight events such as film festivals, Expos and Olympic Games provides opportunities for city elites to stage a widely accessible and globally pervasive marketing campaign. Richards writes that such major events become a tool for cities to raise their global profile, attract media attention, stimulate tourism and generate economic growth. Central to this increased emphasis on marketing cities is the process of branding and image manipulation. In Part II, we offer up three articles that address the topic of ‘Urban Entrepreneurialism, Branding and Governance’. Responses to growing inter-urban competition are discussed by Mark Jayne, Phil Hubbard and David Bell in terms of the practice of town twinning. The idea of town twinning originally emerged in post-World War Two Europe as a means of re-establishing economic, social and cultural links severed by conflict. But in recent years the twinning of cities has been reconfigured through the growth of ‘new localism’ tied to the emergence of neo-liberal governance. It is now a device for linking places that are spatially distant but economically proximate, creating new glocalized circuits of resources and knowledge. Looking at the UK city of Manchester, this shows that cities are now the object of what González (2011) has termed ‘policy tourism’, which supports the reproduction of urban models through policy networks strung between cities. In Chapter 6 Philip Lawton examines how many of these models have become solidified into the ‘Barcelona Model’ or the ‘Nordic Model’, which have changed our ideas about how a ‘European City’ should function. The idea of European cities as high-quality places with a human scale was promoted through the work of planners such as Jan Gehl (who worked in Copenhagen, later touted as the ‘world’s most liveable city’). But Lawton shows that an aggressive approach to urban transformation has co-opted the liberal view of the European city and adapted it to the needs of a neo-liberal age. Jasper Eshuis and ErikHans Klijn carry on this debate in Chapter 7, examining how city branding has become the intangible form of urban development in the new Millennium. City branding targets the key segments of the neo-liberal marketplace, and tries to influence their actions in a new form of governance strategy. The emotional content of the brand is used to change perceptions and activate urban stakeholders through the way they feel about the city. This is replacing governance strategies supposedly based on rational evidence and analysis. The corollary of neo-liberal growth strategies is the increasing marginalization of certain groups and places in the contemporary city and the growing risk attached to many urban lives. Many cities are embodying the new fractures of Ulrich Beck’s (1992) ‘risk society’. The chapters analysing this shift in Part III (‘Marginality, Risk and Resilience’) begin with Tom Slater’s examination of ‘territorial stigmatization’ in Chapter 8. The ‘Create Streets’ concept in the UK was specifically designed to eradicate the stigmatized enclaves of high-rise social housing in favour of state-sponsored gentrification. This exemplifies the way in which neighbourhoods have become the problem in urban development, solutions for which are invariably sought in external intervention rather than grass-roots approaches. In an African context, Caroline Wanjiku Kihato examines the relationship between mobility and gender through the lens of cross-border women living in Johannesburg. She argues that the informal, ‘liminal city’ is not a ghetto, but ‘a gateway where many are trapped’, and suspended in a limbo between formality and informality, legality and illegality. These forces also shape the resilience of communities to external shocks, as Kevin Fox Gotham and Bradford Powers show in the case of post-Katrina New Orleans in Chapter 10. Disasters can wreak havoc with cities and Introduction their inhabitants, but they can also create the potential for developing new urban realities, as recent work on the New Zealand city of Christchurch has shown (Swaffield, 2013). As Gotham and Powers argue, global disaster risk is increasing, intensively concentrated, and unevenly distributed, often as a result of rapid and poorly planned urban development. Confronting these risks, particularly for vulnerable communities, also means increasing the resilience of cities such as New Orleans. In Part IV attention turns to the sprawling suburbs and processes of suburbanization. Bill Randolph shows how the physical risks discussed in the previous part are mirrored by uneven distribution of the risks of disadvantage. He notes an inversion of urban social structure with the recent resurgence of the inner city, powered by corporate investment, gentrification and the attraction of affluent mobile groups. The rise of the inner city has however been matched by a growing crisis of suburbia, which is becoming ‘unjoined’ from the rest of the city, subject to ‘transport poverty’. Suburbs are also seen as being at risk from climate change, as Ian Smith points out in Chapter 12. Smith examines different perspectives on the ability of suburban communities to respond to climate change, including systems theory, socio-technical transition, social practices and urban politics. He underlines the current lack of theorizing about the position of the suburban within the general urban context, particularly as ‘sites of rampant individualization within a notion of suburban cohesion’. John Hannigan then examines the social construction of smart growth policies, a hotly debated new policy arena. Smart growth was originally seen as an American variant of sustainable growth, although the idea is rapidly being embraced by policymakers in Europe and other world regions as well (Krueger, 2010). Originally coined as a political marketing tool, smart growth has now become a broad movement that frames the concept in many ways, including as a tool for urban improvement, as a solution for environmental problems, as a 9 form of environmental justice, and as a support for public health. Part V of the Handbook deals with a pressing issue for all cities – the need to become visible and ‘distinctive’ (Turok, 2009) in a competitive urban field. As the range of contributions to this part suggests, the strategies for achieving visibility are numerous and diverse. Can Seng Ooi analyses how cities have used art as a means of putting themselves on the map and mooring mobile tastemakers. ‘Art cities’ such as New York and Paris have long attracted artists, but now policies designed to attract art dealers, investors and critics are being pursued by emerging cities such as Singapore and Dubai, changing the global geography of art markets and the position and branding of these cities. Tim Edensor looks at the way cities have positioned themselves through the use of light, transforming the night into a visual spectacle with light installations and festivals. The colonization of the night is no longer restricted to the fringes of society, but is now the realm of corporate investment and neo-liberal policymaking as well. However, more engaging forms of lighting design can also be used to re-enchant places and produce new forms of nocturnal conviviality. The relationship between urban visibilities and invisibilities is examined by Ricardo Campos in Chapter 16. He views cities as a communicational environment, in which power can be wielded to make elements of the city and social groups visible or invisible, even though these forms of power can be countered through various tactics. Struggles around the production and eradication of graffiti (or street art, depending your position) are redolent of these arenas of (in)visibilization. Similar arguments are made by Christoph Haferburg and Malte Steinbrink (Chapter 18) in relation to the staging of mega-events in developing countries, where the undesirable elements of the urban landscape, such as shanty towns or favelas are made invisible or ‘cleaned up’ for events such as the World Cup or the Olympic Games. Pier-Luigi Sacco 10 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES (Chapter 17) also analyses the power of largescale events to remodel the city, this time in relation the European Capital of Culture. He argues that such events can increase the visibility of cities, but that they can also form the basis for new ‘creative districts’ in the city, which is one of the reasons why issues of event ‘legacy’ are becoming more important for cities (Smith and Fox, 2007). The turn toward the concept of the ‘creative city’ (Hubbard, 2006: 206–46) is examined in Part VI. Robert Hollands, Marie-Avril Berthet, Eva Nada and Virginia Bjertnes look at the way in which social movements eager to retain their ‘right to party’ have countered neo-liberal creative city policies. The example of ‘first world urban activism’ in Geneva, Switzerland is used to address wider debates about culture, creativity and politics in the neo-liberal city. The collision between alternative culture and creative city cool hunting has been extended internationally, as Graeme Evans shows in Chapter 20. Cities increasingly vie to position themselves on the kind of rankings that made Florida’s (2003) analysis of the creative class so attractive for policymakers. As he notes, the failure of many ‘creative city’ strategies to deliver tangible benefits is one of the reasons why such policies are now being subsumed into wider ‘smart city’ policies. Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt (Chapter 21) also makes the point that longterm actions often work better than short-term creative branding strategies. Using the case study of Roskilde in Denmark, he argues that it is important to understand how resources such as cultural production can be used to ‘make things happen’ in cities. He argues that Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and new approaches to mobilities and cultural production (Urry, 2007; Edensor et al., 2010) can be useful tools in this regard. In Chapter 22 Lénia Marques illustrates how creative clusters have been having concrete effects in cities for over 500 years. She argues that while much attention has been focused on the development of creative clusters and districts in recent years, this has often failed to address their relationship to urban dynamics and their consequences for urban planning and policy. Each cluster needs to be considered in its particular urban context, in order to understand what makes them tick – and this situated understanding is particularly important as creative development policies are exported to new contexts in emerging economies and in the Global South. Nienke van Boom analyses the development of the creative city in Chapter 23, showing how the concept has evolved from creative planning approaches to the rise of the creative industries to strategies based on attracting the creative class. She rounds off with a situated case study of creative development in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, a post-industrial city that has employed a range of different creative strategies in search of visibility and growth. Part VII examines the relationships between urbanization, urbanity and urban lifestyles. We start in Africa, where Paul Collier and Anthony J. Venables examine the relationship between housing and urbanization. They show that the sequence of investment in housing has been inefficient, with people arriving ahead of infrastructure provision, leading to the creation of slums. Low-density housing development, low home ownership and lack of infrastructure inhibits development, and although the situation could be ameliorated by government intervention, this has been slow to develop. In the case of a developed city – Amsterdam – Willem Boterman and Sako Musterd show in Chapter 25 that residential preferences are related to class factions. They find that social positions corresponding with specific residential orientations and, particularly, class fractions connected to creative and cultural professional spheres, are found in the most urban milieus of central Amsterdam. These data seem to confirm the link between urbanity and the creative class posited by Florida (2002) and the preference for inner city locations among certain segments of the middle classes. Using a much wider range of data Daniel Silver argues that urban life revolves around a Introduction series of ‘scenes’ or experiential settings, each one of which has multiple dimensions. Scenes have cultural meanings that can be quantified and compared across and within cities, even though this requires fine-grained data. Silver argues that locational decisions are not just related to objective factors such as cost or distance, but also to the extent to which people can see themselves fitting into a particular scene. A renewed concern with the role of culture as a driver of neighbourhood effects is signalled, following the lead of Sampson’s (2012) analysis of community in Chicago. Christiana Miewald, Eugene McCann and Daniela Aiello explore a more specific type of scene in Chapter 27, with an analysis of urban foodscapes in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. They examine the incursions of middle- and upper-class ‘foodie culture’ into a predominantly low income area. High-end restaurants and cafés have sprung up to serve the needs of the adventurous food tourists, jostling with the food banks and low-cost stores catering to local residents. Their analysis highlights the stark contrasts between food as a vehicle of gentrification and as an essential resource for survival. Part VIII focuses on new directions in urban theory, in particular examining how new ideas can be derived from rapidly urbanizing areas in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cities here can provide relevant lessons for cities elsewhere, even though usually the flow of ideas is structured in the reverse direction (e.g. OECD, 2010). Garth Myers poses the question of whether there is a particularly African idea of the urban in Chapter 28. In an interesting experiment in comparative urbanism he contrasts Zanzibar in Tanzania, which he has studied for the past quarter century, with his home city of Hartford, Connecticut. He finds that the spatially grounded spirituality of Zanzibar provides many lessons for developing policies that are relevant to the ‘shadow worlds’ inhabited by black and Latino citizens in Hartford. In Chapter 29 Shenjing He and Junxi Qian examine the vast scale of urbanization in China, where 11 it is expected that 60 per cent of China’s population will live in cities by 2020, compared with 53 per cent in 2012. They show that rapid urbanization has also been linked to burgeoning academic analysis of cities. This has generated debates about issues such as the attempts by Chinese cities to establish themselves on the global stage (which Can Seng Ooi also notes in his analysis of global art cities in Chapter 14), which at the same time contrast with urban poverty and growing inequality. China’s cities are also being marked by processes of commodification and ‘enclave urbanism’, while the expanding middle classes have helped to support the development of culture-led regeneration. These trends have in turn developed new debates about the ‘right to the city’ in China. In the following chapter Kim Dovey utilizes assemblage theory as a means of tracing the relationship of formal to informal practices in the city, and to provide a link to complex adaptive systems and urban resilience. These issues are important in analysing the development of informal settlements, which have been subject to the ‘invisibilization strategies’ described by Campos in Chapter 16, at the same time as they have been utilized to attract tourists. The upgrading of these areas requires an understanding of their urban processes and the very nature of ‘informality’ itself. The final Part (IX) of the book looks towards the future, tracing different future imaginaries of the urban as well as future cityscapes and policy imperatives. In Chapter 31 Clovis Ultramari and Fábio Duarte analyse the ways in which the future of cities has been imagined through history. Using press and academic databases they show that although the future of cities is becoming relatively less popular as a research topic among academics, it is still popular with the media. They tie this popularity to the potential for transformation, which is also a reason that cities vie to attract mega events such as the Olympic Games. In Chapter 32 John Gold and Margaret Gold outline how future transformation has become an important part 12 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES of the Olympic imaginary, with increasing effort being made to secure a ‘legacy’ from staging the event. Even though the imagined future of Olympic cities has often been much more positive than the eventual outcome (as Kissoudi [2008] illustrates in the case of the Athens Olympics), the visioning of the future provided by events continues to provide a powerful tool for urban change (as Sacco also notes in the case of the European Capital of Culture in Chapter 17). Anna Luusua, Johanna Ylipulli, Hannu Kukka and Timo Ojala then explore the development of the ‘hybrid city’ made possible by the application of digital technology in public urban places. Digital technologies have long been seen as having the potential to transform cities and our notions of community and public space (Aurigi, 2005). Using the example of the northern Finnish city of Oulo, Luusua and her colleagues contemplate the new geographies stemming from new technologies, and the possibility that high-speed Internet access will have the power to affect urban hierarchies in future. In the concluding chapter, Sujata Shetty and Neil Reid examine the obverse of the rapidly expanding cities in emerging economies – the shrinking cities of North America. Looking at Cleveland Ohio, Buffalo, New York and Youngstown, Ohio, they illustrate how cities have tried to manage shrinkage and its consequences. This is challenging, because policymakers are oriented towards growth, and ill-equipped to cope with decline. Shetty and Reid suggest that adaptive resilience may be a useful future coping strategy, involving collaborative networks of stakeholders, information systems and data-driven interventions, and an ability to address multiple policy goals. REFERENCES Amin, A. and Graham, S. 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Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Dovey, K. (2010) Becoming Places: Urbanism/ Architecture/Identity/Power. London: Routledge. Edensor, T. and Jayne, M. (2012) Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities. London: Routledge. Edensor, T., Leslie, D., Millington, S. and R ­ antisi, N. (2010) Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy. London: Routledge. Farías, I. and Bender, T. (eds) (2010) Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London: Routledge. Florida, R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books. Florida, R. (2003) ‘Cities and the creative class’, City & Community 2(1): 3–19. González, S. (2011) ‘Bilbao and Barcelona “in motion”: how urban regeneration “models” travel and mutate in the global flows of policy tourism’, Urban Studies 48(7): 1397–418. Gotham, K.F. (2002) ‘Marketing Mardi Gras: commodification, spectacle and the political economy of tourism in New Orleans’, Urban Studies 39(10): 1735–56. Introduction Gottdiener, M. and Hutchison, R. (2011) The New Urban Sociology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Hall, T., Hubbard, P. and Short, J.R. (2008) ‘Introduction’, in Hall, T., Hubbard, P. and Short, J.R. (eds), The SAGE Companion to the City. London: Sage, pp. 1–10. Hannigan, J. (2006) ‘A neo-bohemian rhapsody: cultural vibrancy and controlled edge as urban development tools’, in Lowes, M. and Gibson, T. (eds), Urban Communication: Production, Text, Context. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hannigan, J. (2013) ‘Analyser les villes et le changement dans une ère de ­mondialisation: deux points de vue divergents’ [­Analyzing cities and urban change in a global age: two conflicting perspectives], Sociologie et sociétés 45(2): 45–62. Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Harvey, D. 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Scott, A.J. and Storper, M. (2015) ‘The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 39(1): 1–15. 14 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Short, J.R. (2014) Urban Theory: A Critical Assessment (2nd edn). London: Palgrave. Simone, A.M. (2007) ‘Assembling Doula: imaginary forms of urban sociality’, in Çinar, A. and Bender, T. (eds.), Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, ­ ­Minneapolis: ­University of Minnesota Press, pp. 79–99. Simone, A.M. (2014) ‘Too many things to do: social dimensions of city making in Africa’, in Diouf, M. and Fredericks, R. (eds.), The Art of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructure and Spaces of Belonging, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 25–47. Simone, A.M. (2016) ‘The 9 Lives of Autoconstruction’, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies/Department of Geography Intersection Series, University of Toronto, 18 March 2016. Smith, A. and Fox, T. 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(2015) ‘“Creeping Apartheid” in Israel-Palestine’, Middle East Report 253, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer253 PART I The Globalized City When the original edition of the Handbook of Urban Studies was published by SAGE in 2001, its editor Ronan Paddison observed: By the end of the twentieth century, an observer might be forgiven for thinking that so much of the agenda of urban studies had become dominated by the over-arching theme of globalization and of its multiple impresses on the restructuring of cities within what is widely, if not uncritically, perceived as an increasingly global world. (Paddison, 2001: 3) Even the concepts used to proffer policy solutions to urban problems, Paddision notes, have become globalized. Fifteen years later, Paddison’s observation seems prophetic. Kleibert and Kippers (2016: 374) have recently claimed that mixed-use enclaves, integrated developments of office spaces, housing and leisure are becoming a crucial feature of today’s world, producing ‘new, globalized cityscapes throughout the Global South’. A number of the contributors to the 2001 volume engaged with various aspects of globalization and the city. In a chapter entitled ‘Cities in the global economy’ Saskia Sassen (2001) reprised her familiar thesis that the emergence of global markets for finance and specialized services has resulted in the bifurcation of late-twentieth-century cities, with a handful (London, New York, Tokyo) becoming leading centres for international financial, legal and real estate services, while most are relegated to second tier status. Mirroring this is the division in the global city between highly paid professionals in financial and high technology sectors and an underclass of poorly paid service workers. Extending Kevin Cox’s (1993) notion of the ‘new urban politics’, Boyle and Rogerson (‘Power, discourses and city trajectories’ [2001]) argued that there has been a major shift in the positions of cities away from local, regional or national roles towards roles ascribed by the 16 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES global economy. This has spurred a fierce competition among cities to attract global capital, consumer expenditure (especially in the form of tourist dollars) and major cultural, sporting and political events. Globalization remains a prominent theme in the current Handbook but it is more a starting than an end point. Departing from Sassen’s thesis, Tim Bunnell (Chapter 2) argues that cities which do not currently appear on world city maps – and on sites and localities within them – nevertheless articulate important transnational connections. In an earlier recent project (Bunnell, 2015), he demonstrated this for the case of Malay exseafarers in Liverpool (UK) who maintained robust transnational networks sustained by a late Victorian terraced hotel that served as a meeting place. Transnationality itself, Bunnell insists, must be projected beyond the realm of the economic and financial. In particular, cities differ considerably in terms of the density of their transnational migrant connections. Dubai, for example, ranks among the very top tier of ‘global immigrant cities’. Some urban centres can be classified as ‘immigrant gateway cities’, others host large numbers of ‘student sojourners’. Another instance of transnational urban linkages are cities whose policies and best practices extend globally in the form of urban policy networks (e.g. Austin [Texas], Curitiba [Brazil], Solo [Java]). This latter example recalls Roy and Ong’s (2011) concept of ‘worlding cities’ (see this volume’s Introduction). This is not to say, however, that such cities should automatically be reclassified from the category of ‘ordinary cities’ to that of ‘world cities’. In Chapter 3, economic geographer Adam Dixon offers up an original variation on Sassen’s globalization thesis. While acknowledging that hierarchies of financial centres can be a useful tool, he suggests that there is a need for additional conceptual tools to describe and explain the global geography of finance and the place of cities in it. To this end, he introduces the notion of frontier financial cities. This refers to financial centres that are situated at considerable distance from capitals of global finance such as London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore. Proximity and access here mean a lot more than just geography. Social proximity refers to the presence or absence of trust-based relations. Institutional proximity describes the sharing of formal (laws and regulations) and informal (habits and norms) institutions. By this measure, Auckland, New Zealand may be as geographically distant from New York and London as is possible, but it is socially and institutionally proximate. Dixon identifies three types of frontier financial cities: large frontier cities on the periphery of global finance (Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney, Melbourne); small cities on the frontier (most urban centres in Western Europe and North America, Abu Dhabi); and small cities on the distant frontier (Tripoli). Dixon’s typology, is useful, he claims, in so far as it can help facilitate greater understanding of the place and influence of finance in contemporary urban studies, and, conversely, the place of cities in that. As does Bunnell, Dixon expands the meaning of transnationalism and globalization beyond just a small handful of elite cities. In Chapter 4, Greg Richards expands Boyle and Roberston’s theme in the original Handbook about the increasing competition among cities in the global economy. The increasingly competitive global environment of cities has forced them to adopt different strategies to distinguish themselves and secure advantage. One increasingly used strategy here is the staging of events, which has become an important tool for cities to raise their global profile, attract media attention, stimulate tourism and generate economic growth. Indeed, it is possible, he says, to talk about the eventful city. Such events can act as important catalysts for urban regeneration and focus the attention of policymakers on specific issues, for example the need for environmental improvement. At the same time, there is a clear need for cities to adopt a more holistic and long-term policy approach that ensures a more equitable distribution of value The Globalized City and guarantees that an enhanced quality of life does not just accrue to a relative few. REFERENCES Boyle, M. and Rogerson, R.J. (2001) ‘Power, discourses and city trajectories’, in Paddison, R. (ed.), Handbook of Urban Studies. London: Sage, pp. 402–16. Bunnell, T. (2015) From World City to the World in One City: Liverpool through Malay Lives. Oxford: Wiley. Cox, K. (1993) ‘The local and the global in the new urban politics: a critical review’, 17 Environment and Planning C: Society and Space 11: 433–48. Kleibert, J.M. and Kippers, L. (2016) ‘Living the good life? The rise of urban mixed-use enclaves in Metro Manila’, Urban Geography 37(3): 373–95. Paddison, R. (2001) ‘Studying cities’, in Paddison, R. (ed.), Handbook of Urban Studies. London: Sage, pp. 1–9. Roy, A. and Ong, A. (2011) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Sassen, S. (2001) ‘Cities in the global economy’, in Paddison, R. (ed.), Handbook of Urban Studies. London: Sage, pp. 256–72. 2 Locating Transnational Urban Connections Beyond World City Networks Tim Bunnell The current visibility of the transdisciplinary field of urban studies owes much to processes of globalization and associated ways of seeing the world. It is no coincidence that from the last decades of the twentieth century, a world increasingly seen in globalizing and transnational terms has also been one in which cities have risen to prominence in social science research. If globalization has drawn attention to border-crossing transnational processes in general, cities and cityregions (Scott et al., 2001) are among the preferred ‘subnational’ territorializations of globalization, particularly for geographers. In large part this is because cities – or, more precisely, certain cities – are understood to have assumed a new strategic role as ‘command and control’ points in the global economy (Sassen, 1991). Work on world and global cities has contributed to ways of seeing the world as comprised of transnational networks rather than in terms of nation-state units of analysis (Taylor, 2000). Conversely, perhaps it was the wider unsettling of methodological nationalism associated with recognition of ‘a move towards “node and network” forms of political-economy organization’ (Agnew, 1994: 65) which brought (back) into view the historically well-established long-distance connections of cities and city-states (Taylor, 2004). Whichever way round one prefers, a twenty-first-century globalized world is one increasingly framed in terms of ­transnationally-interconnected cities. In this chapter, I highlight some of the limitations of the prevailing metageographical imagining of world cities as nodes in globe-spanning networks. The term ‘metageography’ was popularized among urban geographers through work on globalization and world cities carried out at the University of Loughborough by Peter Taylor and colleagues. Their meta-view of the world was encapsulated in a highly-cited journal article published in the first issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers in the current millennium: ‘World cities represent an alternative metageography, one 20 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES of networks rather than a mosaic of states’ (Beaverstock et al., 2000: 123). The networks that these authors refer to are specifically those of Advanced Producer Service (APS) firms. I argue in the next section of this chapter that empirical examination of World City Networks (WCNs) has since proceeded to the relative neglect of ways in which they are grounded or territorialized in (world) cities. There is, of course, a danger here that I build from critique of a necessarily selective subset of what is in fact a diverse field of research (see Van Meeteren et al., 2016). My wider concern, however, is not to undermine the intellectual contributions of World City Network scholarship that grew out of collaborations at Loughborough. Rather, I consider some of the limiting effects of WCN scholars’ highly influential metageographical imag(in)ings, and draw attention to alternative – in some ways complementary – more-than-national urban geographies. I sketch ways in which it is possible to locate transnational urban connections beyond WCNs. Each of the three sections that follow elaborates on aspects of transnational urban connections that extend beyond – and may even have been obscured by – imaginings of transborder world/global city networks as the new metageography of the third millennium. After first considering how treatment of world cities as ‘nodes’ obscures both the local territorialization of APS firms’ activities, and other ‘sub-nodal’ urban groundings of transnational connections in world cities, I go on to sketch some of the ways in which cities that do not currently appear on world city maps – and sites or localities within them – also articulate transnational connections. Finally, I consider historical antecedents to locally-grounded transnational urban networks that are often depicted as being new to an era of globalization based on advances in technologies of communication and transportation from the last decades of the twentieth century. In all three sections, I am concerned with how transnational connections are anchored in particular local urban geographies. BEYOND WORLD/GLOBAL CITIES AS NODES So well established by now is the imagining within urban studies of world cities as ‘nodes’ in globe-spanning advanced producer service firm networks, that it is perhaps heretical to question this belief in a handbook for the field. My initial concern is that while APS firms may be concentrated in certain cities – those which have come to be labeled as ‘world’ or ‘global’ – this does not mean that the offices or socio-economic activities concerned are grounded or operationally territorialized at the level or scale of the ‘city’. Rather, APS activities are overwhelmingly conducted in certain parts or districts of world cities (in the case of London, rather confusingly, the most well-known of those parts happens to be named ‘The City’). Certainly, there are highly influential strands of research on financial and producer service centers that have foregrounded such locatedness or ‘localization’ (Amin and Thrift, 1992). Saskia Sassen’s seminal global cities work pointed to the importance of ‘proximity’ among the specialized service firms that are said to produce the capacity for global economic control (Sassen, 1991). However, subsequent strands of world/global city scholarship that have focused on transnational intra-firm networks, and sought to map the metageography of a World City Network (WCN), have largely lost sight (and site?) of firm located-ness and urban geographies of APS activity. The outcome has been that ‘in some WCN analyses, the city appears to be simply a point in Cartesian space’ (Coe et al., 2010: 145; though see Beaverstock, 2005 on the ‘translocal’ grounding of the social and organizational networks of managerial elites). Ironically, therefore, some of the Locating Transnational Urban Connections Beyond World City Networks most influential work on cities in recent ­decades – work which has made a significant contribution to the prominence of urban studies in debates on globalization – does not have much to say about the ‘urban’. The WCN metageography underspecifies, and even serves to occlude, urban geographies of APS activities. To the extent that WCN scholars cast their contributions as building on earlier work by Sassen, a related concern has to do with the problem of ‘synecdoche’ (Amin and Graham, 1997). Agenda-setting WCN scholarship directed attention to (intra-firm) networks rather than their territorial grounding precisely because it was considered that much was already known about the ‘attributes of world cities’ (Beaverstock et al., 2000: 124), and the ‘servicing of capital in localized complexes’ (p. 125). However, by mapping intra-firm networks as interconnecting city-level nodes or by implicitly scaling up from sub-nodal translocalities without reference to the wider supporting ecology of the city in which they are located (Beaverstock, 2005), WCN scholars made transnationallyconnected local producer-service complexes stand for ‘the city’. Metageographical mappings that are built on this synecdoche are problematic for urban studies in part because they obscure other (world) city localities that articulate other kinds of more-than-national networks and connections. Let me be clear here that in highlighting this concern, I am not merely echoing existing critiques of WCN scholars for their focus on APS networks per se – a (de)limitation which proponents of WCN work itself have themselves long acknowledged. Rather, my concern is that the reach and citational force of the (de)limited WCN way of seeing – the metageographical imaginings that it has generated, rather than merely (re)presented – has overshadowed other ways of seeing the urban in an era of globalization, and other ways of doing urban studies. Here it is worth revisiting Jennifer Robinson’s influential efforts to ‘postcolonialize’ urban studies (Robinson, 21 2002, 2006). Robinson’s work has often been taken as a call to take seriously ‘ordinary cities’, as opposed to those that appear on world/global city maps. Yet as Robinson’s initial 2002 statement makes clear, her intention was not to establish ‘ordinary cities’ as a category in itself – as a set of cities differentiated from world/global cities – but to resist a priori categorization of cities and to see all cities as (extra)ordinary. Bringing an expanded range of urban experiences into urban theory, or making it more ‘cosmopolitan’, then, does not necessarily mean looking away from ‘world cities’ or ‘global cities’. Rather, it could mean looking at cities that have come to be categorized in this way as more than just world/global cities – as cities with diverse territorial and relational urban geographies (McCann and Ward, 2010; see also Bunnell and Maringanti, 2010), including a wide variety of constitutive connections that extend across national borders. There is a range of existing work, much of it at the nexus of migration and urban studies, which considers the transnational connections of a diversity of localities within both established and ‘wannabe’ world cities (Yeoh, 2004). In London, a city that has repeatedly been placed at the ‘top’ of world/global city rankings, Ayona Datta’s work on Polish migrants is among recent scholarship to consider how migrants construct the city through localized neighborhoods that are connected up to a range of other localities within and across national boundaries (Datta, 2011). A city which has not featured so prominently (if at all) on WCN maps but which has attracted the attention of both urban and migration scholars because of its world city aspirations and transnational migrant linkages, is Dubai. Dubai is far from unusual in having made efforts to ‘ascend’ the world city hierarchy through investment in spectacular urban infrastructure (Acuto, 2010). In addition, in common with more established world cities, Dubai’s transnational migrant connections are not limited to the APS professionals who work in the city’s, world class, downtown 22 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES buildings. Yasser Elsheshtawy has drawn attention to a range of ‘hidden’ or ‘forgotten’ sites and areas of Dubai in which migrants meet and sustain connections back to scores of national homelands (Elsheshtawy, 2008). In an ‘urban immigrant index’ based on proportions of foreign-born residents, Dubai ranks among the very top tier of ‘global immigrant cities’ (Benton-Short et al., 2005). If one was to map such migrant connections then surely the metageographical effect would be one of urban nodes and networks, not dissimilar to the WCN. This does not in any way undermine scholarship on WCNs. Rather, the point is that one does not necessarily need analysis of APS networks in order to discern or map an alternative metageography to that based on more-or-less bounded nation-states (unless one sees all contemporary transnational migrant connections as epiphenomena of APS-defined world city-ness). In addition, perhaps the attention given specifically to APS networks – again reflecting the very ‘success’ of WCN scholarship – has served to obscure other more-than-national connections from parts of world cities beyond financial enclaves. BEYOND CITIES ON CONTEMPORARY WCN MAPS Although extending beyond understandings of world cities as ‘nodes’ for APS brings into view a range of other transnational connections, these (unlike APS intra-firm networks) are not limited to the subset of cities that appear on WCN maps. As early as 2000, geographers were seeking to widen the range of cities brought into scholarly conversations about contemporary global processes by arguing that ‘almost any city can act as a gateway for the transmission of economic, political and cultural globalization’ (Short et al., 2000: 318). Continuing initially in this section with the theme of migration, clearly there are many cities that are not home to a significant concentration of APS expertise or associated firms, but which do house migrant groups who sustain connections with diverse extra-national elsewheres. It is unfair to criticize WCN scholars for failing to examine such migrant connections or networks. Their empirical focus was, quite reasonably, on that sub-set of cities considered to be most important in terms of APS firms. My concern is, rather, with the way in which a global network metageography has been sketched solely on the transnational linkages of APS firms in world cities. World cities occupy a particular position in global economic processes, but other cities, positioned in a variety of other ways, are also bound up in economic and migrant networks that extend beyond national scale geographies (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2009). Anthropologists Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse Çağlar have sought to specify a range of structural political economic positions occupied by different cities. Each of these positions offers different pathways of migrant incorporation within the city concerned, and also different kinds of transnational economic opportunities. Other urban scholars have sought to identify alternative types of transnationally-constituted cities, such as ‘immigrant gateway cities’ (Price and Benton-Short, 2008), which attract particularly significant migrant flows and may therefore sustain wide-ranging transnational migrant connections. Immigrant gateways include, but are not limited to, cities that are conventionally classified as world/ global cities. Such work shows that it is not only world/ global cities that constitute a more-thannational metageography based on transnational networks. It is important to be mindful of ways in which these non-APS networks, no less than the activities of APS firms in and across world cities, may be grounded or territorialized in particular localities. Geographers have long noted a tendency for transnational discourse to focus on cross-­ border sociospatial relations rather than on the sites from or to which nation-state borders are crossed Locating Transnational Urban Connections Beyond World City Networks (see Mitchell, 1997). Until the 1990s, when transnationalized worlds were conceptually territorialized, it tended to be in terms of the abstract ‘city’ rather than any grounded site of urban social interaction. Brenda Yeoh and colleagues (2000: 149) were among the first to point out that the city needs to be understood instead as a ‘space of transnational people flows anchored in and articulated with specific local urban geographies’ (see 23 also Smith, 2001, 2005). The metaphor of ‘anchoring’ is particularly apt for some of my own recent work in the city of Liverpool (UK), which has focused on Malay ex-seafarers whose social networks and transnational ties back to homelands in Southeast Asia were sustained in large part through a house that served as a club and local meeting place (see Box 2.1 and Bunnell, 2016). Work on international student mobilities, meanwhile, Box 2.1 Liverpool’s more-than-world city translocal linkages (from Bunnell, 2016) As a maritime and commercial centre of the British Empire, in the 1880s, Liverpool was described as a ‘world city’. Clearly there are important differences between the colonial division of labour during that era as compared to the late twentieth century geopolitical, geoeconomic and technological conditions under which the ‘world city’ and ‘global city’ rose to prominence in academic urban studies. Yet similarities between imperial world city Liverpool on the one hand and the world/global cities of the new international division of labour and ICTs on the other are not merely nominal. Liverpool, or, rather, certain parts of this maritime world city, functioned as the coordinating centre of a world-wide network of shipping routes. Just as the importance of spatial proximity among the specialized service firms that produce the capacity for global economic control today is recognized in the urban studies literature, historical work on Liverpool has noted how ship owners and providers of other kinds of service functions to mercantile activity clustered on specific streets. The case of Liverpool shows not only that the geographically extensive command centre functions which are central to influential strands of world/global cities research over the last three decades have important historical antecedents (see also King, 1990; Arrighi, 1996), but also that such functions were associated with specific local urban geographies. Liverpool also provides evidence of long-distance networks and associated local urban geographies that exceeded and outlived world city service functions. One example concerns the city’s Malay population and its connections with the alam Melayu (Malay world region) in Southeast Asia. First, during the ‘world city’ era, Malays were among the colonial workforce whose labour sustained Liverpool-controlled maritime networks. Some of these seafaring men settled in Liverpool and maintained social connections with the alam Melayu that were bound up with, but not reducible to, commercial linkages. In the 1950s, a group of Malay seafarers and ex-seafarers formed a club which functioned as a meeting place for locally-based and visiting Malays. Initially, the club was located in the south docks of Liverpool. From the early 1960s Liverpool’s Malay Club re-opened in a late-Victorian terrace in the Liverpool 8 area of the city. The Malay Club enabled long-distance translocal (initially intra-imperial rather than transnational) connections with the alam Melayu during decades before ‘transnationalism’ and ‘globalization’ entered the lexicon of Anglophone urban studies. Second, although Liverpool fell from commercial prominence in the second half of the twentieth century and does not appear on maps or rosters of world/global cities in the new international division of labour (nor even among lists of today’s leading ‘world maritime cities’ – Verhetsel and Sel, 2009), the city’s Malay world connections continue. Some, of course, are founded specifically upon demographic legacies of Liverpool’s world city past. Among such post-world city linkages are transnational family (re)connections of Liverpool-based Malay ex-seamen made possible by the increasing affordability of international flight and/or uptake of increasingly ubiquitous technologies of long-distance communication. However, it is significant that other ongoing connections, such as those associated with the decision of Malaysian citizens to study in Liverpool, may have nothing to do with the historical presence of Malay seafarers or their families in this one-time world city. In such cases, Liverpool appears not specifically as a postworld city, but simply as a non-world city. Like the overwhelming majority of cities, Liverpool is not a global centre for advanced producer services today, but it does form part of and is remade through a variety of other constitutive social as well as economic networks. SMS and internet-based technologies mean that twenty-first century cohorts of Malay student sojourners in Liverpool are not as dependent upon a clubhouse or other fixed sites of association in the city for their long-distance communication, but that does not mean that transnational social linkages have become entirely unmoored from local urban geographies. 24 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES has emphasized how the lives of relatively short-term migrants or sojourners are both woven into, and serve to transform, certain inner city areas of Auckland (Collins, 2012). Consideration of transnational linkages associated with the ‘permanent temporariness’ of overlapping cohorts of student flows rather than with longer-term forms of migrant settlement, brings into view an expanded range of cities with important transnational linkages. International students are of course a significant (permanent temporary) presence in parts of cities that already feature in the WCN metageography, but they are also prominent in many other cities that do not. A rather different way in which a wider variety of cities (or, again, more precisely, parts of cities) than WCN nodes are enrolled in more-than-national networks is through the world of policy-making and mobilities. Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward (2010: 175) have detailed how city as well as national policy-makers ‘scan’ the world for ‘ready-made, off-the-shelf policies and best practices’, and are involved in travels and transfers constituting ‘networks that extend globally’. While world/global cities certainly figure in mental maps of best practice or model cities, including through offering putative lessons or ‘pathways’ for ascending the world city hierarchy (Bunnell, 2015), global policy networks also include a more diverse range of cities. Among the most well-known examples in Anglophone urban studies are Austin, Curitiba, Manchester, Porto Alegre and Vancouver (McCann and Ward, 2010). In Southeast Asia, the small city of Solo (or ‘Surakarta’) in the province of Central Java, Indonesia, has been vaunted as a model for, amongst other things, the rejuvenation of traditional markets, and has received study tours from municipalities in neighboring countries (Phelps et al., 2014). Municipal and policy networks are among the ways in which provincial cities such as Solo – a city which, unlike the Indonesian national capital, Jakarta, has little scope for transnational migrant linkages and is never talked about in terms of ‘world city’ potential (cf. Firman, 1999 on world city Jakarta) – operate beyond national boundaries. More widely, however, the proper noun toponym of a city can be a convenient but often inadequate ‘shorthand’ for innovative policies, practices and initiatives that are in fact associated with more locally-specific sites/sights (Bunnell et al., 2013; McCann and Ward, 2010). A morethan-national metageography of contemporary policy mobilities is thus perhaps more accurately conceptualized as ‘transurban’ than inter-city (Harris and Moore, 2013). BEYOND CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL AND TRANSLOCAL URBAN NETWORKS To what extent are transnational urban networks new to the current era of ‘globalization’? Following on directly from the previous section, it is worth noting Colin McFarlane’s critique of the ‘presentism’ of the recent literature on urban policy mobilities (McFarlane, 2011: 116). McFarlane shows that much of the presumed novelty of the ‘neoliberal’ networks and practices of policy transfer is diminished when viewed in a wider historical perspective that includes work on colonial urban planning practices and international municipal policy networks. This is not the occasion to review such arguments in detail (though see also Clarke, 2012; Jacobs, 2012). I note them here in order to raise the wider issue of whether the ostensibly recent transnational urban metageography, and the anchoring of longdistance networks in specific urban localities, has longstanding antecedents. The city of Liverpool is again a productive location from which to consider this possibility, having been described as a ‘world city’ in a late nineteenth-century international economy that shared many of the supposedly defining features of contemporary globalization dynamics (Wilks-Heeg, 2003; and see Hirst Locating Transnational Urban Connections Beyond World City Networks and Thompson, 1999 on an earlier era of economic ‘globalization’ between 1870 and 1914). Well beyond 1914, cartographies of world trade and associated commercial services gave prominence to relations between cities. A map of shipping routes of the Liverpool-headquartered Blue Funnel Line in the 1930s, which is displayed at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, for example, shows connections between port cities around the world, but no state boundaries. At one level, such maps are legacies of a world of maritime commerce that was, at best, fading by the 1930s and which was entirely dismantled through postcolonial state formation in the second half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, imaginings of a world of transnational city networks surely lived on given popular as well as commercial cartographic imagery of transport links between ports (and, subsequently, airports). In this light, transnational urban networks are not a new metageography that unsettled dominant state-centered imaginings. There are important historical antecedents if one looks beyond specifically APS networks. As is also the case for contemporary transnational networks, it is important to think about historical long-distance economic linkages and associated social networks as having been located or placed. Historians of Liverpool have noted how ship owners and providers of other kinds of service functions to mercantile activity clustered on particular streets, and that ‘none of these clusters could be too far from any of the others’ (Milne, 2006: 297). In the case of Alfred Holt and Co., owners of the Blue Funnel Line, this meant Water Street, on which the company’s new India Buildings headquarters were constructed in the 1930s. India Buildings became the coordinating center of a worldwide network of shipping routes. Many of the Liverpool-based Malay seafarers in my study were recruited to work along these routes in Singapore in the 1940s and 1950s. These men sustained long-distance social networks 25 that were clearly interwoven with, but not entirely reducible to, structures of imperial trade. And these social networks, too, were anchored in particular places (see Box 2.1 above). Historically further back still, into the era of sailing ships, dockside parts of port towns and cities were described by one maritime scholar as forming part of an interconnected, globe-spanning ‘Sailortown’ (Hugill, 1967). If the role of cities and more specific urban spaces in anchoring geographically extensive commercial and social networks has clear historical antecedents, then what is new about contemporary transnational urban networks? Few would go so far as to suggest that the international economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wholly anticipated ‘globalization’ today, many pointing instead to ways in which the current phase of economic globalization has fundamentally reshaped economic organization in terms of the degree of integration and functional interdependence through cross-border economic activity (for example, Dicken, 2011). Similarly, while the term ‘world city’ was used to describe Liverpool’s maritime commerce as early as the 1880s, and can be traced back even further (see Taylor, 2012), WCN proponents followed in the wake of a much more recent meaning of the term in the social sciences. This was of course associated with ways in which late twentieth-century developments in information and communications technologies (ICTs) enabled economic command and control on a global scale (for example, Beaverstock et al., 2000). Saskia Sassen (1991) preferred the term ‘global city’ precisely in order to make the historical distinction clearer. ICTs are also recognized as having impacted urban policy worlds – ‘the overall scope, pace and intensity of transnational urban policy transfer activity has increased significantly over the past two decades’ (Harris and Moore, 2013: 1504) – as well as possibilities for transnational social linkages. Reacting against what they saw as the 26 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES ‘spurious extension’ of the term ‘transnationalism’, Alejandro Portes and colleagues pointed to late twentieth-century advances in ICTs and transport technologies that made possible regular and sustained social linkages at a distance, although they did also acknowledge important historical antecedents, such as various trade diasporas (Portes et al., 1999). If the maritime linkages of Liverpoolbased Malay seafarers in the middle decades of the twentieth century were sufficiently regular and sustained to count among such historical antecedents, then the applicability of the term ‘transnational’ rests on whether the linkages extended across nation-state boundaries (something which arguably only applies to parts of British Malaya after they gained political independence from Britain). The question of whether translocal maritime urban networks were also historically transnational, in other words, is a matter of political geography (Bunnell, 2016). And so what might be historically most novel about the WCN and a wider transnational urban metageography at the start of the third millennium is not so much its inter-city or transurban networks as the fact that these are overlaid on a supposedly prior metageography of ­territorially-bounded nation-states. CONCLUSION The influence and reach of WCN scholarship partly accounts for the current prominence of urban studies in discussions of globalization. Among my concerns with WCN work considered in this chapter is under-specification of the ‘urban’ associated with territorialization of APS networks in world city ‘nodes’. I have acknowledged that it is unfair to couch this concern as a direct criticism given that WCN scholars sought to build upon earlier work by Saskia Sassen that did highlight subnodal dynamics. In addition, it is of course understandable, even inevitable, that metascale analyses miss sub-nodal details. Nonetheless, in a new handbook of urban studies, it is worth raising the possibility that powerful WCN ways of seeing have served to obscure smaller-scale urban processes and territorializations. Relational urban geographies visualized as inter-city in WCNs may be depicted more precisely as trans-urban (Harris and Moore, 2013) or translocal (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998). The urban geography of cross-border flows needs to be specified or, in the terms that I have deployed in this essay, ‘located’. While not denying that ‘the city’ remains an important analytical frame for certain kinds of urban studies, failure to question the adoption of this unit of analysis is tantamount to ‘methodological cityism’ (cf. Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2014). Ironically, some of the WCN work that has done so much to question the territorial trap of nation-state framings in social science may have fostered ways of seeing and doing urban studies that result in the city being taken for granted as a unit of analysis. A second concern has to do with the kinds of networks that are (not) seen in the WCN metageography. As I have been at pains to stress, this is not intended as a critique of scholars for focusing on APS firms and their networks per se. That is a legitimate focus and one that reveals concentrations of such firms and connections between them. My concern is instead with why these particular networks (and associated nodal cities) are taken as the basis for an alternative world mapping to that comprised of a mosaic of nation-states. Cities that are classified as world/global economic nodes articulate, or include localities that articulate, border-crossing connections other than APS networks. What is more, these other networks – migrants, student sojourners and urban policy networks are among the examples that I have given – are found in many other cities, beyond world or global cities. This leads on to the third concern that I have considered, which is to do with why other cities – those that do not appear on contemporary maps of world/global cities – are particularly important to any critical take on Locating Transnational Urban Connections Beyond World City Networks transnational urban metageographies. Most contemporary world/global cities have historical international economic, political and/ or imperial linkages which mean that, even in the face of state-centric thinking, they have always been recognized as more-thannational in one way or another. Many other cities, in contrast, have been much more easily contained within national scale or provincial imaginings. It may be suggested that WCN mappings perpetuate that imaginative containment by locating boundary-crossing networks specifically in world/global cities. It is important, therefore, for urban studies to treat WCNs not as a new metageography but as diagnostic of wider relational urban geographies. These have certainly proliferated through processes of globalization and associated advances in technologies of transportation and communication in recent decades, but they also have important historical antecedents extending back prior to the nationstate-centered metageography of the end of the second millennium. Few would doubt that constitutive connections between far-flung urban territories are as important a part of urban studies today as are consideration of what goes on ‘within’ those territories or their position in national scale systems and framings. There is inevitable disagreement about how to conceptualize diverse connections, the relative priority that is afforded to different kinds of connections and the ways in which they should be approached or studied empirically. Scholars who have prioritized APS connections as a way of understanding global economic command and control, have mapped and visualized world/global city networks fostering (not merely re-presenting) an alternative metageographical way of seeing the world to that based on a mosaic of state containers. The concerns that I have raised with this WCN scholarship echo, in part, existing postcolonial urban studies critique. Yet it is worth recalling that like WCN scholarship, many non-WCN strands of urban studies work, including some couched in postcolonial 27 urban terms, deal with transborder, relational urban geographies of various kinds. 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Coe, N.M., Dicken, P., Hess, M. and Yeung, H.W-C. (2010) ‘Making connections: global production networks and world city networks’, Global Networks, 10: 138–49. Collins, F. (2012) ‘Transnational mobilities and urban spatialities: notes from the AsiaPacific’, Progress in Human Geography, 36(3): 316–55. Datta, A. (2011) ‘Translocal geographies of London: belonging and “otherness” among Polish migrants after 2004’, in K. Brickell and A. Datta (eds), Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections. Farnham: Ashgate. pp. 73–92. Dicken, P. (2011) Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy. London: Sage. Elsheshtawy, Y. (2008) ‘Transitory sites: mapping Dubai’s “forgotten” urban spaces’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(4): 968–88. Firman, T. (1999) ‘From global city to city of crisis: Jakarta metropolitan region under economic turmoil’, Habitat International, 23(4): 447–66. Glick Schiller, N. and Çağlar, A. (2009) ‘Towards a comparative theory of locality in migration studies: migrant incorporation and city scale’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35(2): 177–202. Guarnizo, L.E. and Smith, M.P. (1998) ‘The locations of transnationalism’, in M.P. Smith and L.E. Guarnizo (eds), Transnationalism from Below. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. pp. 3–34. Harris, A. and Moore, S. (2013) ‘Planning histories and practices of circulating urban knowledge’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(5): 1499–509. Hugill, S. (1967) Sailortown. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (1999) Globalisation in Question. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jacobs, J.M. (2012) ‘Urban geographies I: still thinking relationally’, Progress in Human Geography, 36(3): 412–22. King, A.D. (1990) Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London. London: Routledge. McCann, E. and Ward, K. 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Locating Transnational Urban Connections Beyond World City Networks Robinson, J. (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge. Robinson, J. (2002) ‘Global and world cities: a view from off the map’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26(3): 531–54. Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, A.J., Agnew, J., Soja, E.W. and Storper, M. (2001) ‘Global city-regions’, in A.J. Scott (ed.), Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. Short, J.R., Breitbach, C., Buckman, S. and Essex, J. (2000) ‘From world cities to gateway cities: extending the boundaries of globalization theory’, City, 4(3): 317–40. Smith, M.P. (2001) Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, M.P. (2005) ‘Transnational urbanism revisited’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31(2): 235–44. Taylor, P.J. (2000) ‘Embedded statism and the social sciences 2: geographies (and metageographies) in globalization’, Environment and Planning A, 13: 1105–14. Taylor, P. (2004) World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis. London: Routledge. 29 Taylor, P.J. (2012) ‘Historical world city networks’, in B. Derudder, M. Hoyler, P.J. Taylor, and F. Witlox (eds), International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. pp. 9–21. Wilks-Heeg, S. (2003) ‘From world city to pariah city? Liverpool and the global economy, 1850–2000’, in R. Munck (ed.), Reinventing the City? Liverpool in Comparative Perspective. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. pp. 36–52. Van Meeteren, M., Derudder, B. & Bassens, D. (2016) ‘Can the straw man speak? An engagement with postcolonial critiques of “global cities” research’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 6: 247–67. Verhetsel, A. and Sel, S. (2009) ‘World maritime cities: from which cities do maritime decision-makers operate?’, Transport Policy, 16(5): 240–50. Yeoh, B.S.A. (2004) ‘Cosmopolitanism and its exclusions in Singapore’, Urban Studies, 41: 2431–45. Yeoh, B.S.A., Huang, S. and Willis, K. (2000) ‘Global cities, transnational flows and gender dimensions, the view from Singapore’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 91(2): 147–58. 3 Frontier Financial Cities Adam D. Dixon INTRODUCTION New York and London are booming. They are buzzing with activity. New skyscrapers are being built and wealth is omnipresent. If aliens arrived in New York or London, or any other major international financial center such as Hong Kong, they would find it unbelievable that the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression occurred within the last decade. If remnants of financial crisis exist, one would be hard pressed to find them in these global financial cities. The alien visitors would be forgiven for thinking that anything had happened. The Global Financial Crisis did not cut the legs off New York and London – the two places that facilitated the subprime boom and bust – reducing the power and influence of these global cities in the ebb and flow of global financial capitalism (Gordon, 2011). Nor did the crisis result in some fundamental reset in the rules of the game, despite extended social protests from the Occupy Movement, among others. It seems that they got away with it. There are various reasons why New York and London, and in turn the hierarchy of financial centers and the financial ­services industry that they represent, did not ­collapse, with some alternative urban geo­graphy and financial system replacing them. The irony of the Global Financial Crisis in comparison with other financial crises of the last several decades, such as the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, is that it was a developed-world financial crisis with its roots in the developed-world financial centers (Martin, 2011). Although crisis occurred in the core, the relative safety of the core vis-à-vis the periphery meant that the strength of the core remained intact. Investors did not rush to the periphery. They returned to the core. This is partly because the core, particularly New York but also London, deals in US ­dollars – the global numéraire (Eichengreen, 2011). Frontier Financial Cities On the other hand, New York and London benefited from explicit support in the form of massive government bailouts and implicit government guarantees that the system would not be allowed to fail. At the same time, the central banks of the United States and the United Kingdom have injected trillions of dollars into the markets through quantitative easing. This explanation alone does not, however, account for the resilience and persistence of New York and London, as such bailouts and guarantees occurred elsewhere (Grossman and Woll, 2014). Another transcendent explanation is that New York and London continue to produce and benefit from major agglomeration and increasing returns effects that reinforce their size relative to other financial centers in the global hierarchy (Porteous, 1995). The Global Financial Crisis, despite the prognostications of some, did not result in a fragmentation of the global economy and increasing international autarky. Global trade and commodity prices declined in response to economic recession, but they soon bounced back as growth resumed. Globalization continued apace as before (Drezner, 2014). Without some fundamental remaking of the global geography of capitalism it would seem unlikely, then, that there would be a fundamental change in the global geography of finance and financial centers. But it is incorrect to assume that there is not any change occurring or potential change that undercuts or could undercut the status quo and therefore the power resources of the global financial services industry and the markets they serve. There are certainly many voices that question the social and economic utility of the current status quo (see, for example, Malleson, 2014). Yet, it would seem that governments around the world are timid in challenging it. Arguably, the reforms that have been enacted and ongoing judicial enforcement of bad behavior are insufficient to effect significant change (Engelen et al., 2011). While an external institutional fix may not be forthcoming, this does not mean 31 that there are no possibilities for endogenous change within the wider global financial system and the cities and agents that serve that system. There are two points of consideration. First, there is the growing community of asset owners (for example, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, etc.) that are pushing against the principal–agent asymmetries in the investment management industry. Although small, this community of large institutional investors is rethinking how it engages and contracts with the for-profit financial services industry that populates the world’s major financial centers and markets. Some are insourcing asset management functions instead of delegating to for-profit services providers, while building transterritorial partnerships with other asset owners as a means of minimizing their reliance on the existing power structures and certain financial centers within the financial services industry (Dixon and Monk, 2014). While worthy of note, such pushback should not be taken as sufficient to alter radically the global geography of finance and financial centers. Rather, this development may be seen as the emergence of a parallel yet minor system of financial intermediation. Second, it is unclear if the current s­ tructure of market-based financial intermediation in the world’s leading financial centers is the most ideal institutional form for transferring economic resources across time and space as the structure of the world economy changes and new regions, such as mainland China, rise in prominence. At the same time, there are growing pools of capital in different regions of the world that are far from the major financial centers (Clark et al., 2013). New York, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore dominate the hierarchy of global financial centers, as their institutional foundations in the common law facilitate marketbased financial intermediation. However, in much of the world, particularly in developing economies, constructing and sustaining armslength ­market-based forms of finance have had a mixed record of success (Rousseau 32 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES and Wachtel, 2011). Where markets remain underdeveloped or lacking in sufficient institutional support (for example, lax regulation and enforcement), relationship-based financial intermediation provides a wider scope for the necessary investment monitoring and control. As this would suggest, there is an increased need for greater proximity and non-market-based financial intermediation. Although hierarchies of financial centers are a useful tool for ranking and categorizing the geography of global finance – not least because they continue to reflect an e­ mpirical reality – there is a need for additional conceptual tools for describing and explaining the global geography of finance and the place of cities in it. In that regard, this chapter, building on the author’s previous work (see Dixon and Monk, 2014), presents a conceptual typology of frontier financial c­ ities, ­taking into account city size and financial sector specialization, and their proximity and access to global finance in relation to social and institutional variables. The chapter is developed as follows. The next two sections provide an overview of the economic geography of financial centers, why they emerge and what sustains them. The penultimate section presents the conceptual typology. The final section concludes. FORCES OF CONCENTRATION Let us begin by considering what drives concentration in the financial services industry and the formation of financial centers. Concentration is, on the one hand, a product of the objective functions of finance in the market economy (Dixon, 2011; Levine, 1997). On the other hand, concentration of financial services in particular places is driven by economies of scale and agglomeration (Porteous, 1995, 1999). While political and social factors are important in shaping the competitive dynamics between financial centers within and between countries, particularly in the formulation of regulatory standards, our concern in this section is with explicating how the aforementioned economic forces shape the economic landscape (cf. Leyshon and Thrift, 1997). In a market economy two key functions of finance are: (1) to mobilize and pool economic resources; and (2) to transfer economic resources across time and space, whether in the form of payments between two parties or as investment. With respect to investment, financial centers facilitate the pooling of savings necessary for public and private largescale industrial or infrastructure projects, the growth of larger scale-efficient firms and industrial sectors, and the development of new technologies, acting as a switching point between geographically dispersed savers and borrowers. They are, in theory, the switching point between those that provide capital and those that put it to work. Historically, the territorial scope of these functions has followed a hierarchical pattern. Savings and investment begins locally, extending to a national center, with possible intermediate stops at regional centers, and then becoming international. Along the hierarchy specialization grows in both function and available products and financial instruments. However, this hierarchical pattern is not fixed over time. A range of forces, from geopolitical conflict to technological change, can distort or intensify the pattern (Conzen, 1977; Faulconbridge et al., 2007; Kindelberger, 1974). A third function of finance is risk management, which in practice buttresses the concentration of financial activity in large financial centers and reinforces the hierarchy among financial centers (Merton and Bodie, 2005). The most basic form of risk management in investing is the principle of portfolio diversification. If systemic risk is not avoidable, idiosyncratic risk is. Portfolio ­diversification minimizes idiosyncratic risk – or rather the probability that any specific investment fails – by spreading resources across numerous investments instead of concentrating them Frontier Financial Cities on one or a few (Markowitz, 1952). In effect, portfolio diversification, in theory, calls for a large range of possible investments where individual risk profiles are as uncorrelated as possible, as well as a range of financial products such as equities and fixed-income. Large financial centers are therefore attractive to investors, because they provide access to the largest range of possible investment opportunities. International financial centers are furthermore attractive, as they provide access to a larger range of geographies for investors and thus greater opportunities for portfolio diversification. In bringing many investors together into a single place/market, the large financial center also reduces liquidity risk, which is the speed at which an asset can be converted to cash. For any investor, locking up capital for extended periods of time comes at a risk. In theory, investors are more likely to part with their capital if they can sell the corresponding security on a secondary market as and when they need cash. In a deep market with many investors, the probability of being able to convert holdings to cash quickly is much greater. Consequently, this decreased liquidity risk reduces the capital returns demanded by investors from investees (for example, firms, governments). Hence, this reduces the cost of capital for issuers of securities. The latter are furthermore attracted by the concentration of potential investment capital in larger financial centers, as demand for securities is likely to be greater. This, again, reduces the cost of capital for issuers. Put simply, issuers pay less for capital in larger financial centers than if they were limited to smaller markets with fewer potential investors. In addition to the scale of the market for financial products, there are important increasing returns effects and agglomeration economies at work in the financial services industry that drive financial center formation and persistence. As a knowledge-based industry, financial services depend on the quality and depth of the labor market (Wójcik, 2012). The more specialized or the greater the range 33 of financial products and services on offer, the greater are the needs for specialized labor. Information and communications technology coupled with the increasing ease of travel have facilitated the offering of services at-adistance, but only partially (Grote and Taube, 2006; Wójcik, 2011). Financial services firms are thus attracted to large financial centers as there are greater and more specialized labor resources. This reduces search and match costs, while also ensuring ready access to different types of product, industry, or geographical expertise. The latter is important in fast-moving environments, which is typical of financial markets generally, where rapid decision-making is essential. Financial services workers are attracted, in turn, to larger financial centers given that there is a wider range of firms to work for and who will compete for their labor (Beaverstock and Hall, 2012). For financial services workers, this wider range of firms, or firms of significant scale, provides greater opportunities for skills development through labor switching. The opportunities are greater in a larger financial center for developing an extensive or intensive skill set. Competition for talent, and the increased remuneration this entails, likewise incentivizes financial services workers to upgrade their skills. This, consequently, raises the aggregate level of expertise available in the financial center to firms. Large financial centers are not simply home to large banks and asset management firms, but also to a larger range of intermediate service providers, ranging from legal and accounting services, to specialist research and consulting firms (Clark, 2002). Financial services firms, just as they are with labor, are attracted to larger financial centers on account of this large range of suppliers that are in competition among themselves in offering services. Moreover, these complementary service providers are subject to the same labor market effects as the core financial services providers, where workers (for example, lawyers, accountants, consultants) are attracted to the financial center on 34 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES account of a greater range of firms to work for and who will compete for their labor. Again, this induces skills upgrading and promotes greater specialization in the financial center. Taken alone, the scale and agglomeration economies present in large financial centers coupled with the scale and depth of the markets therein are a powerful explanation for the persistence of the hierarchy of financial centers. Firms and governments from around the world go to New York, London, and Hong Kong to issue shares and bonds, because the markets are so large. Likewise, investors from around the world go to these centers to obtain a range of services and expertise that may not be readily accessible or sufficient locally. It is true that the hierarchy of financial centers has changed over time, and there is no reason to assume that places like New York and London will remain on top forever. But replicating the scale and agglomeration economies in the financial services industry and the scale and scope of the markets in the leading global financial centers cannot be expected to happen quickly. INSTITUTIONS MATTER Another important contributing factor that creates and sustains the hierarchy of financial centers are institutions. Broadly defined, institutions are the informal and formal rules of the game that define and constrain the behavior of economic agents and the structure and efficiency of markets. In finance, trust is critical to the proper functioning of financial intermediation and the functioning of markets (Morris and Vines, 2014). Absent trust, the risk and uncertainty of transacting over time and space is amplified. In most instances, trust is underwritten through regulations and the rule of law. On smaller scales trust may be sustained through informal community and familial norms, but formal institutions become increasingly necessary as the scale and scope of the financial system increases. In other words, lending and borrowing among friends and family, or among a small community, may operate without formal rules and regulations. Familiarity and strong communal bonds underpin trust in these situations. But such familiarity and strong communal bonds are hard if not impossible to reproduce at scales above the family and the small community (RodríguezPose and Storper, 2006). Consider the following hypothetical example of three regions, A, B, and C. Region C has excess savings and minimal investment opportunities. Regions A and B have a ­deficit of savings, but are growing economies with many investment opportunities. Savers in region C would therefore be in a position to transfer their excess savings to regions A and B. Assume, however, that savers in region C are unlikely to know the borrowers in region A and B. There are therefore no social bonds or informal institutions to establish the trust that protects the interests of investors in region C. Yet, if regulations and recourse to the courts are in place to protect region C’s savers in the course of transferring capital resources to borrowers in region A and B, these replace the trust that familiarity and strong communal bonds would potentially bring at smaller scales. Regulations on investor protection are, hence, consequential to how the financial system develops. Where investor protections are weak for outside investors that are unable to exert influence over management or the entity that is employing the capital, markets are not likely to be very liquid and the cost of capital is likely to be higher. The pool of potential investors is apt to be smaller and those that do participate are likely to demand a higher rate of return, as their interests are less well protected. Investment risk is much higher. The reason why the leading international financial centers are in the position they are, in addition to those discussed in the previous section, is because of the legal protections afforded to external investors, which Frontier Financial Cities are strongest in common-law jurisdictions. It is not by chance that the leading financial centers are in cities where the legal system is or is derivative of English common law (La Porta et al., 1997, 2000). The United States, for example, has the largest and most liquid capital markets in the world, partly due to the very strong legal protections for minority investors (Berle and Means, 1933). Firms and other entities such as governments that issue debt or equity securities, are required to disclose regular information on their activities, and the management and the directors of companies are subject to particular legally defined fiduciary duties or codes of conduct to ensure they act in the best interests of the company (Clark and Wójcik, 2007). This does not mean that malfeasance and misfeasance does not occur, as the Global Financial Crisis demonstrated. Even so, the existence of strong investor protections in regulation and the law underwrites market efficiency, building trust among participants, which lowers the cost of capital for firms. A lower cost of capital encourages growth and development, as it makes opportunities more feasible and capital markets more appealing to firms. Where protections for external finance are weak and therefore markets are less viable, bank intermediaries take on a larger role in the financing of firms. This does not mean that in places where markets are developed banks are less important. Indeed, for most firms capital markets do not play a very large part in their financial dealings. Capital markets are in general only the preserve of large firms or high-growth firms (Pagano et al., 1998). Moreover, capital markets are much larger and more liquid in developed high-income economies. Reflecting patterns of economic development, capital markets are much less significant in the economies of low- to middle-income countries (Beck, 2012). Despite such differences, most small and medium-sized enterprises the world over, even in high-income economies, access external financing through bank intermediaries. In comparison to the market, banks internalize 35 the monitoring and control functions necessary to ensure trust. Banks, in pooling assets, writing specific financial contracts and demanding different forms of collateral, are able exact influence on firms and other ­borrowers. But this form of non-market intermediation is not necessarily limited to banks. It also includes private equity and other direct investors. It is true that capital markets have grown significantly over the last two decades around the world, including in many emerging ­market economies (Lane and Milesi-Ferretti, 2008). The ability to invest in public equity markets in the latter is not just left to sophisticated institutional investors, but is open to retail investors as well, made possible by the global financial services industry headquartered in the leading global financial centers (Sidaway and Bryson, 2002). But investing at-a-distance is pregnant with risk, particularly if access to credible information is not forthcoming and financial regulation and enforcement are underdeveloped. Coupled with the fact that proximity to markets has been shown to affect the financial performance of portfolio investors (Coval and Moskowitz, 2001), there is a role for peri­ pheral financial centers and the service providers therein. Or rather, there are limitations to the dominance of the leading centers in the allocation of capital between countries and regions. Being there matters. It is important likewise, as suggested above, not to overstate the scope and penetration of market-based financial intermediation. Markets, inasmuch as they exist, may be inefficient and unattractive due to underdeveloped regulation and enforcement that allows for effective monitoring and control. Or they may be of insufficient depth for investors that are concerned with liquidity risk. Put simply, not all investment opportunities are going to be accessible, or ideally accessed, via public markets. Although direct relationship-based investing through non-market channels does not solve the problem of liquidity risk – it can even exacerbate it – there is a greater capacity 36 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES for monitoring and control. Financial services providers based in the leading financial centers can certainly facilitate such investing by pooling capital in special investment vehicles that are then employed by operations closer to the investee. Making viable such close relationships and effective monitoring is limited by geographical distance. Being there matters. A B C D UNPACKING FRONTIER FINANCIAL CITIES Considering the discussion in the last two sections, the dominance of global financial centers has strong foundations provided through economies of scale and agglomeration and the institutional environment. To say that the dominance of global centers is immutable is reasonable to a degree, at least in the short term, but there are clear limits. A simple hierarchy of financial centers continues to provide a clear analytical basis for comparing and explaining the global geo­ graphy of finance. But simple hierarchies – just like simple core–periphery models – do not always provide an adequate or sufficiently dynamic map of economic activity and interaction across scales and between places. In Dixon and Monk (2014) a conceptual typology of cities is developed, which is rehearsed here, not as a replacement for conventional city-rankings of financial services, but as a supplemental device for explaining and describing financial centers. It should be noted that it does not specifically cover offshore tax havens and similar jurisdictions, where little actual intermediation occurs. Although, many financial centers, including the largest, offer various tax avoidance schemes (Christensen, 2012). Tax havens and financial centers are not mutually exclusive. The typology relies on a simple twodimensional framework. The y-axis represents city-size and financial sector specialization, including the specialization Figure 3.1 Modeling the frontier Source: Adapted from Dixon and Monk (2014) of complementary services (Figure 3.1). It is assumed that larger cities have, or are better able to produce and maintain, a critical mass of financial and related intermediate services that support large-scale asset management and market making. In addition, larger cities are better placed in comparison to smaller cities to attract and retain highskilled labor and talent. This is partly related to the greater presence on average in larger cities of ­cultural and social amenities that are appealing to high-income urban professionals. It is crucial to note that city size and specialization do not necessarily increase together in the same direction. Larger cities are not by default necessarily more specialized than smaller cities. Some smaller cities may be more ­specialized than some larger cities. The assumption remains, however, that larger ­cities tend to have a greater capacity for specialization across multiple domains. The x-axis is defined as the distance and access to global finance, which includes financial services and financial flows. On the one hand, this variable is meant to ­capture the size and scope of the local market. It assumes that for some places the local market is closer to or subsumed into larger markets, which Frontier Financial Cities consequently reduces the transaction costs associated with accessing global financial services and financial flows. For ­example, Toronto is the largest capital market in Canada. As the Canadian and US economies are highly integrated in various ways, Toronto easily taps into the wider market that New York covers. On the other hand, access is also concerned with the social and institutional proximity of a city and its respective national/ regional political economy in relation to other cities and regions (Boschma, 2005; Gilly and Torre, 2000). Proximity and access mean a lot more than just geography. Social proximity refers to the presence, or potential presence, of trust-based relations that form at the micro-level through close social relations and experience. Institutional proximity refers to the degree of shared informal institutions (for example, habits and norms) and formal institutions (for example, laws and regulations). So, for example, although Auckland, New Zealand, is incredibly far from New York and London, it is socially and institutionally proximate. Accordingly, Auckland’s access to global finance is greater than its geographic location would suggest. The model is further specified into four quadrants, A, B, C, and D. Quadrants A, C, and D represent frontier cities, and are therefore shaded. Quadrant B, which is not shaded, represents cities at the forefront of global finance, given a large market size and the degree of specialization. Examples of cities are provided below, but these examples are by no means exhaustive. A: Large Frontier Cities In quadrant A are large cities that are on the periphery of global finance, meaning that they are geographically distant as well as distant in terms of social and institutional proximity. In addition, the market in these places may be relatively small or limited in scope in relation to opportunities for diversification. The latter is likely related to the 37 diversity of the wider national or regional economy that the city represents. Just because the city is distant from global finance, it does not mean that the city is not important as a financial center locally. Indeed, it is not a necessary condition that the scope of the market is small, as the national/regional economy that the city or cities represent may be large. Two possible examples of large cities in quadrant A are Beijing and Shanghai. The latter is larger than the former and more specialized, as the most important financial center in mainland China. As such, Shanghai is further up on the y-axis than is Beijing. Shanghai is also further to the right than Beijing, as its global financial credentials and interconnections are more developed (Lai, 2011, 2012). But the Chinese ­political economy is still relatively institutionally distant from the core of global finance, due to restrictions on renminbi convertibi­ lity and capital controls, leaving Hong Kong as an important translation point for global finance into China, at least for now. Indeed, it would be wrong to assume that this situation will remain fixed indefinitely. The Chinese government has gradually internationalized the renminbi, moving closer and closer to full convertibility. Such continued internationalization would move mainland Chinese cities, namely Shanghai, further to the right along the x-axis. It is not unreasonable, then, to speculate that Shanghai could eventually over take Hong Kong as the most important financial center in the China region. In quadrant A are also cities like Sydney and Melbourne in Australia. The former is the center of Australian capital markets, and the latter has a significant position in the investment management of Australian superannuation funds. As a former British colony, Australia is socially and institutionally proximate with the United Kingdom. In effect, both cities sit far to the right in quadrant A. The social and institutional proximity reduces the significance of geography. Likewise, both cities are relatively well developed in terms 38 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES of the market for financial labor and complementary services. They also are diverse urban economies with amenities to attract highincome urban professionals. As a result, both cities are relatively high up on the y-axis. However, these two cities need to be seen in the context of the Australian economy as a whole, which is dominated by the natural resource extraction industry. Hence, there are limited opportunities for diversification that pull down the possible position on the y-axis. Put simply, the opportunities for foreign and domestic investors alike is limited. What is interesting about Australia is that compulsory pension savings, which was introduced in 1992, has resulted in accumulated pension savings greater than the size of the economy.1 These accumulated pension savings only continue to grow. As a consequence, the funds management industry in Melbourne and Sydney is increasingly forced into global investment. Global engagement is not a choice, but a necessity. B: Centers of Global Finance In quadrant B sit the world’s largest financial centers. They are cities with the greatest degree of specialization and the largest in terms of market size. They are the cities where major international banks and investment services providers have their headquarters and where much of their operations occur. They are also the cities with the highest concentration of foreign banks and foreign financial services providers. They are the cities with a very high proportion of the labor force devoted to the financial services industry and complementary service providers. Furthermore, they are the premier locations where investors from around the world come to seek a range of investment services and products. Likewise, they house the markets that attract the foreign listings of large public companies and the bond issuances of governments. As expected, New York and London sit in the top far right of the quadrant, with Hong Kong sitting relatively close to them as well. Singapore is another city whose global profile continues to expand, placing it in quadrant B. Tokyo is an interesting case, as it sits in quadrant B due to the sheer size of the Japanese economy; but Tokyo has lost much of its luster as a major global financial center. Although the Japanese economy remains one of the largest in the world, the relative decline of the country’s economy and its relative openness in comparison to global cities like New York, London, and Hong Kong, places it far to the left of them in the quadrant. C: Small Cities on the Distant Frontier In quadrant C are the most peripheral and isolated cities in terms of distance and access to global finance. On the one hand, cities in quadrant C are highly limited in the scope, depth, and specialization of the local financial services labor market, which roughly reflects levels of economic development. Access to global financial markets and services is constrained due to either physical distance or the distance created by social and institutional factors, including political instability in some cases. As an example of the latter, for example, one could include Tripoli in Libya – a country with significant capital resources from the production of petroleum that is geographically close to European markets, yet which also has a poorly diversified local economy. Political instability and uncertainty nonetheless severely constrains the development of local capabilities as well as the capacity to access global financial services. Also included in quadrant C are cities like Astana and Almaty, Kazakhstan. The country has had a fast growing economy, largely due to petroleum production, which has resulted in increasing capital accumulation and the growth in assets under the management of the country’s two sovereign wealth funds. Geographically the country is Frontier Financial Cities distant from global finance, as is its institutional and social proximity. Increasing interconnections between the country and global networks mean that these two cities are moving further to the right and further up in the C quadrant. D: Small Cities on the Frontier In quadrant D are cities that have relatively easy access to global financial services and global financial markets as a function of their location within the wider national or regional political economy that is represented by a global financial center. This, in effect, includes most cities in the United States and Canada and much of Europe. Such placement means that the linkages with global finance have a stronger institutional basis, and social proximity is likewise unproblematic. However, the cities themselves may be limited in terms of the local financial labor market and other specialized services. An example of a metropolitan region in quadrant D is the Dutch Randstad, a large conurbation that includes Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and The Hague. The Netherlands, like Australia, is very well developed in terms of its pension fund market, which accounts for assets of roughly 150 percent of GDP.2 And like Australia, Dutch pension funds are forced to invest abroad to achieve adequate diversification. Although the Netherlands is not deficient in its financial labor market and labor in complementary services, there is some reliance on service providers, in addition to the markets, in global financial centers. The geographic location of the Randstad with respect to London, coupled with social and institutional proximity facilitated by European integration, among other reasons, suggests that the Randstad conurbation would sit in the top half and on the right side of quadrant D. Another example in quadrant D is a city such as Abu Dhabi. The Gulf States region 39 has been growing in terms of its international linkages for all kinds of global ­economic activity, not least due to the massive accumulation of commodity wealth and the spending power this provides governments in attracting such activity. Indeed, the region is increasingly becoming an important regional center for business and commerce, comparable, for example, with Singapore’s position in Southeast Asia. However, the size and diversity of the regional economy is still limited. Hence, a city such as Abu Dhabi would be placed on the far left. Considering the limited scope and specialization of local financial services capabilities, it would sit in the b­ ottom half of the quadrant. CONCLUSION The globalization of financial services and the increasing global integration of capital markets over the last three decades has reinforced the power and prestige of the largest financial centers: London, New York, and Hong Kong. This contrasts with the ‘end of geography’ predictions of the early 1990s that financial globalization and advancements in information and communications technology would erode the significance of international financial centers (O’Brien, 1992). Even though the power of place has not been eroded through globalization, simple financial center hierarchies do not sufficiently grasp the form and function of different peripheral, or frontier, cities in the making of and their relationship with global financial markets. The continual morphing of the structure of the world economy and the rise of different regions, such as mainland China, or the growing pools of capital in places such as Australia, coupled with new models of financial intermediation further reinforces the need for better conceptual tools for describing and explaining the global geography of finance. 40 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES To that end, this chapter elaborated a simple conceptual typology of frontier financial cities, taking into account city size and financial sector specialization, and their ­ proximity and access to global finance in relation to social and institutional variables. This ­typology allows for a better description of cities in terms of their relationship, or non-relationship with global finance, that a simple hierarchy may not adequately reflect. The typology allows for an appreciation of financial flows in both directions. In other words, it reflects the conditions that outside investors face in engaging with different cities while reflecting conditions for local investors. At the same time, the typology also provides scope for explaining the relative power of different cities and agents therein vis-à-vis the market for global financial services. Accordingly, the typology can help facilitate a greater understanding of the place and influence of finance in contemporary urban studies. In that respect, it makes a contribution to those urban studies scholars interested in what many term financialization, where finance, the global financial services industry, its logics and cultural cues seem to take an outsized role in modern life. Importantly, the typology injects an important spatial and economic geographical element into the study of financialization and the place of cities in that, reminding us that there are important economic forces but also diverse institutional conditions that open or constrain access to global financial markets, and in turn the leading edges of global capitalism. Understanding the place of the financial services industry in shaping any city requires an appreciation of its place in this broader global financial architecture. Notes 1 See OECD Pension Statistics, DOI: 10.1787/ pension-data-en 2 See OECD Pension Statistics, DOI: 10.1787/ pension-data-en REFERENCES Beaverstock, J. and Hall, S. (2012) ‘Competing for talent: global mobility, immigration and the City of London’s labour market’, ­Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 5(2): 271–88. Beck, T. (2012) ‘The role of finance in economic development: benefits, risks, and politics’, in D.C. 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Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wójcik, D. (2012) ‘The end of investment bank capitalism? An economic geography of financial jobs and power’, Economic Geo­ graphy, 88(4): 345–68. 4 Eventful Cities: Strategies for Event-Based Urban Development Greg Richards INTRODUCTION The increasingly competitive global environment of cities has forced them to adopt different strategies to distinguish themselves and create competitive advantage in order to attract resources, talent and attention (Turok, 2009). Such strategies may arguably have more impact than the activities of many nation states, as suggested by a recent OECD (2016) report, which posed the question ‘are cities the new countries?’ This is not just a question of size, even though many major cities are now larger than many small countries. It is increasingly a question of the economic and political power wielded by cities, which in many cases dictate national agendas. One area where this becomes clear is in the staging of events. In the past, events such as the Olympic Games used to reflect national agendas, but increasingly (as Gold and Gold illustrate in Chapter 32) cities pursue their own agendas, looking to the nation state mainly for economic support. Major events have become a tool for cities to raise their global profile, attract media attention, stimulate tourism and generate economic growth. We have recently seen a succession of models of the city centered on differentiation strategies, such as the ‘fantasy city’ (Hannigan, 1998), the ‘creative city’ (see Part VI), the ‘tourist city’ and the ‘entertainment city’. These models are usually based on the changing function of cities, aiming to underline newly emerging urban characteristics related to fundamental social and economic change. The concept of the ‘eventful city’ is one of the latest examples of such models, identifying the global transformation of cities through and for events. The ‘eventful city’ concept is arguably an increasingly attractive form of differentiation strategy, because it seeks to utilize the specific qualities of events that can provide advantages in an urban context. Events are relatively flexible compared to investment in fixed structures and iconic architecture, they can attract global media attention and 44 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES they can be repeated in different forms over a period of time. Perhaps most importantly they can also be an engine for the development of economic, social and cultural capital (Sacco, in this volume) as well as urban regeneration (Miles and Paddison, 2005). They provide an excuse not only to build new cultural and sporting facilities (Roche, 2000), but also to improve general transport infrastructure (Brunet and Xinwen, 2008), provide housing or even to improve environmental quality (Gold and Gold, in this volume). However, the many critics of mega-eventbased strategies also point out the potential pitfalls of event-led development, including skepticism about the scale of the benefits of events, the often large investments needed to stage such events and the distribution of any benefits obtained (for example, Boyle and Hughes, 1995; Long and Perdue, 1990). More recently Rojek (2013) has also criticized the emergence of ‘event management’ as a manipulative illusion of providing a respite from the drudgery of the everyday while maintaining the power and influence of global corporations. The argument made here is that single events in themselves, even though they can be in some instances powerful re-shapers of the city, are not enough to ensure the provision of benefits for all the city’s stakeholders. A broader strategy is required, which integrates events in the long-term strategy of the city to ensure a more equitable distribution of value within the city. Such ‘eventful city’ strategies are now being developed by a range of cities worldwide. EVENTS AND THE CITY Cities have always staged events, to celebrate and commemorate important points in their history, to act as a focus for civic pride or to stimulate economic activity. It is only in recent decades, however, that events have come to be seen as an urban phenomenon or sector in their own right. This is arguably due to the significant rise in the number and scale of events taking place in cities across the globe (Quinn, 2005). There are many reasons cited for the growth of festivals and events, including a general increase in the need for festivity, the search for economic impacts on the part of cities and regions and their need to profile themselves in international markets. The growing importance of events in cities was one of the major spurs for Häußermann and Siebel (1993) to coin the term ‘Festivalization’. This marked a concern with the transformation of urban centers into consumption spaces, spearheaded by urban administrations keen to attract the affluent middle classes. This process was fueled by economic and social restructuring processes and the perceived need for global attention, particularly in compensation for the declining attention paid by nation states to cities. Festivalization served as a tool for city governments to create attractions, increase the identification of residents with the city, and forge public consensus and common goals. Many commentators have noted similar trends in recent years; for example Waterman (1998) in New Orleans, and Waitt (1999) commented on the city marketing dimension of the Sydney Olympics in 2000. In South Africa, Saayman and Saayman (2006) noted the growing role of festivals as an economic and political tool. In Europe, Sabaté i Bel et al. (2004) talked about the emergence of ‘event places’, as cities became increasingly shaped by the events they staged. Architects also noted this increasing convergence of events and urban development, most notably in Bernard Tschumi’s Event-Cities series (1994). The increased attention for the relationships between events, space and place marks an ‘eventful turn’ (Pavoni, 2015) driven not just by top-down instrumentalization of events, but also by the increasingly important role that events play as a social coordination mechanism in the network society Eventful Cities: Strategies for Event-Based Urban Development (Richards, 2010). Pløger (2010) draws on Foucault’s concept of eventalization to underline the distinction between the urban as a scenario for spontaneous ‘presence-events’ and top-down, planned ‘serial events’. Presence events, such as the Pirate Parties held in the Danish capital Copenhagen are equated with eventalization, as they have the potential to challenge and change existing structure (Richards, 2015b), whereas top-down serial events are seen as instances of ‘eventification’. ‘Eventification’, according to Jakob (2013: 448), is the process through which the consumption of products and places is turned into an event, that is, the ‘deliberate organization of a heightened emotional and aesthetic experience at a designated time and space’. Eventification arguably plays a central role within an ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). Its introduction to urban development and planning is part of what Lorentzen and Jeannerat (2013) regard as ‘the experience turn in development and planning’. It thus connects the entrepreneurial strategies of businesses with policy makers, planners and city marketers, and generates new ways to form urban growth coalitions. The growing role of events as urban policy tools highlights their increasing utility in the network society. Events are effective vehicles for attracting attention (Richards, 2013), ­giving distinctiveness to cities (Turok, 2009), acting as a catalyst for urban regeneration (Miles and Paddison, 2005) and for ­synchronizing urban agendas (Stone, 1989). As cities have recognized this potential, events, rather than being a scenario for furthering other p­ olicy goals, have become an area of urban policy development in their own right. More and more cities are establishing dedicated events units or departments in order to develop events policies, and o­ pening ‘one stop shops’ to facilitate the organization of events. One effect of the ‘eventful turn’ in ­cities has been an emerging diversity of approaches to the development, management and 45 utilization of events. It is no longer the case that cities are only involved with festivalization, or eventification or eventalization, but increasingly the diversity of urban event stakeholders and event policy aims is likely to lead towards a combination of different approaches that need to be understood and utilized effectively to generate beneficial outcomes. This more structured and pro­active approach to events and their creation, development and management has been summarized as a move towards the ‘eventful city’ by Richards and Palmer (2010). EVENTFUL CITIES The eventful city is posited by Richards and Palmer (2010) as one in a long line of different ways of thinking about the city and the organization of urban processes. They outline a progression from the medieval city, with its regulating rituals, to the industrial city, with its spatial separation of work and leisure, to the image-boosterism of the postindustrial city. As Bridge and Watson (2000) argue, each of these different imaginaries of the city has a real impact on urban space and the organization of urban processes. As noted by Evans and by Sacco in the current volume, the rise of the creative class and the creative industries has stimulated the development of creative clusters and knowledge hubs. The eventful city is a process-based approach, which sees events as a catalyst for urban processes and a way of framing and distinguishing the city. Having failed to define the eventful city concept in the original book, Eventful Cities, Richards and Palmer (2010) later constructed the following definition: ‘An eventful city purposefully uses a programme of events to strategically and sustainably support long-term policy agendas that enhance the quality of life for all’ (Richards, 2015a: 39). By placing the quality of life as the essential outcome of the 46 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES eventful city process, this aligns it with the ‘smart growth’ strategies originally applied to the physical development of North American cities (Daniels, 2001) and more recently appropriated by European policy makers to denote a growth agenda that is ‘underpinned by a balanced industrial mix, the development and adoption of new know­ ledge or technological platforms, and risk taking in radical and incremental innovations as well as in soft and hard innovations’ (Cooke and De Propris, 2011: 366). Therefore, eventful cities usually utilize events as a means of achieving sustainable growth and development objectives across a range of policy areas. Cities such as Edinburgh, Barcelona, Montreal, Melbourne, Rotterdam and Singapore are among those identified by Richards and Palmer (2010) as being at the forefront of such developments internationally. The most successful eventful cities tend to be linked to a specific urban regime (Stone, 1989) that sees events as a useful support for its own agenda. Stone’s original study of regimes, or public–private coalitions, was based on the American city of Atlanta, during the period that the city was bidding for and staging the Olympic Games. Stone’s analysis indicated that a biracial coalition formed around economic development issues enabled the city to develop Olympic facilities in poor neighborhoods, despite civic resistance. Collaboration with the private sector enabled the Mayor to push through these developments in spite of his personal unpopularity. The success of the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992 was also attributed to the development of the ‘Barcelona Model’ of governance, which was heavily based on public–private collaboration. According to Caselas (2002), the most important aspects of the ‘Barcelona Model’ of development are: (1) Creating consensus between public administrations (2) Involving the private sector in the financing of projects (3) Creating autonomous entities to control planning and finance (4) Supporting an architectural approach to redevelopment (5) Introducing strategic planning (6) Placing ‘good ideas’ before ‘large finance’. This model helped to provide a basis for staging the 1992 Olympics as well as a series of theme years in the period 2000–2004. The Gaudi Year in 2002 was a particular success, attracting record numbers of tourists to the city. However, the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures was a relative failure, with less than half of the predicted 7.5 million visitors turning up to this UNESCO-sponsored event (Richards, 2015a). One of the problems with the Forum was the lack of consensus in the city about the aims and effects of the event, with local citizenry bemoaning the lack of consultation and involvement and sponsorship by big business. These examples not only show the importance of collaboration in laying the ground work for eventful city strategies, but they also emphasize the need for long-term planning. The wide range of stakeholders involved in events, including the municipal authorities, private companies, voluntary groups, event management companies, the media, etc., means that effective collaboration is only likely to be achieved over the longer term. Richards and Palmer (2010) suggest that a planning horizon of 20–25 years may be required to successfully implement such strategies. Glasgow, UK This is certainly the case in the city of Glasgow in Scotland, which began to develop urban regeneration strategies following devastating de-industrialization and economic restructuring in the 1980s. The program to re-position the postindustrial city relied heavily on a series of major events, including the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988, the Eventful Cities: Strategies for Event-Based Urban Development European Capital of Culture (ECOC) in 1990, the UEFA Champions League Final 2002 and the UEFA Cup Final 2007, the MTV Awards (2010) and the Commonwealth Games (2014). A report looking back on the 20 years following the ECOC (Myerscough, 2011) indicated a wide range of benefits that could be linked directly or indirectly to the event. These included an 82 percent growth in the number of live performances (music, theatre or dance) since 1992. There was also a 43 percent growth in cultural employment since 1993, and the market for culture overall was 20 percent higher than the previous peak in 1990 attributed to the ECOC. The implication made in the report is that event-driven strategies can deliver significant benefits to cities. In order to maximize these benefits, Richards and Palmer (2010) suggest that overall coordination of the event program and strategy is needed. This is also something that Glasgow has taken on board, at least in terms of larger events. Glasgow has now launched a Major Events Charter, which sets out what the organizers of major events can expect from the city. For example, under the heading of ‘One Glasgow’, the city states: Glasgow’s approach to major events is considered a model of best practice by our peers around the world and strengthens our competitive position in the global marketplace as a world class major events city. At the same time it commits the city’s events expertise and resources to support major event organisers in successfully staging events in Glasgow. Major events are defined as events which: • attract significant numbers of visitors from beyond the city of Glasgow and generate ­economic wealth • enhance Glasgow’s profile internationally by generating significant media and TV coverage • support the city’s strategic plans for sport, c­ ulture, economic and social priorities. Glasgow therefore exhibits an eventful city orientation in the alignment of event policy 47 with broader urban policy goals. The Events Charter also emphasizes that the city is ‘dedicated to assisting major events and ensuring the city’s reputation as one of the most event friendly destinations in the UK and Europe’. Glasgow is also committed to helping event organizers be more sustainable, measure the impacts of their events and assist them with event planning and event-related regulations. The emphasis in urban events policies in cities like Glasgow is gradually shifting away from direct intervention or subsidy for events, towards a more arm’s length model in which the city supports and facilities events by making public space available, and supplying joint marketing and knowledge exchange. Montreal, Canada Montreal has branded itself as a ‘City of Festivals’, based in particular on five main events that underpin the cultural program of the city: the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the Montreal World Film Festival, the Just For Laughs international comedy festival, the Montreal International Fireworks Competition, and the FrancoFolies de Montréal (French-language pop music festival). As Paul (2004: 578) notes, this branding was part of a new interpretation of the city, based more on ‘foreign investment, corporate headquarters and trade promotion … than grand monuments and high culture’. These festivals are arguably among the largest and most prominent in the world for their genre. The Montreal International Jazz Festival is the largest tourist event in Canada, with 3,000 artists, more than 1,000 concerts and close to 2 million festivalgoers, of whom 26 percent are tourists. In order to develop this world-class event, the festival has sought to attract the ‘new middle class’ (Paul, 2004). This has also been achieved by moving the festival from the ‘cosmopolitan Latin Quarter of the city at the edge of francophone East Montreal … to the Place des Arts in the heart of the downtown business district; 48 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES symbolically the Festival has moved from the bohemian fringe to the bicultural corporate mainstream’. The strategy adopted by Montreal seems to presage the emerging idea of festivals as potential ‘field configuring events’ (Lange et al., 2014) that can act as a hub to bring people, ideas, decision makers and investors together at one time in one place. The development of such field-configuring events in Montreal has strengthened the role of the city as a major global center for the cultural and creative industries, and in particular for specific creative activities such as animation and circus arts. As Sacco (in this volume) argues, such events can effectively become creative districts or cultural clusters, particularly when attention is paid to strengthening the temporal reach of the events in order to increase their place-based effects. Cohendet et al. (2010) also point out that the staging of events in the city has also been vital in consolidating the creative ‘underground’ of the creative sector, and in structuring the ‘middleground’ that is constantly navigating between the informal underground and the formal world of the creative upperground. Events emerging around Ubisoft, the video game developer, helped to integrate this upperground company into the local community and creative underground. Cohendet et al. (2010: 108) note: events (such as festivals, conferences, business fairs, Olympic games, etc.) are also necessary to nurture the middleground, to activate the cognitive role of local places, to widen the local buzz to other communities, to strengthen the global ­pipelines and to help bring the local underground to the surface. Paul (2004) argues that events have also been important in organizing the imaginary of the city around cosmopolitanism, global connectivity, place competition and consumption. Events provide a useful bridge between the local ‘space of places’ and the global ‘space of flows’ (Castells, 2009) that can help a city embed various forms of capital. Melbourne, Australia Melbourne has been characterized as the ‘world’s event capital’ (Foley et al., 2012). The events industry in Melbourne contributes $2.4 billion to the local economy each year through more than 8,000 events (Enterprise Melbourne, 2015). Misener and Mason (2009) describe how in the late 1970s Melbourne was faced with challenges of economic restructuring, including industrial decline, rising unemployment and the threat of urban decay. However, Melbourne arguably managed to avert the impending crisis by following a strategy of utilizing its cultural infrastructure and tradition of mass spectatorship at sporting events to drive economic development, and in the process revitalize the urban economy. There was considerable investment in both sporting and cultural infrastructure, including the revamping of the Melbourne Cricket Ground as a 100,000-seater stadium and the new Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre, alongside facilities such as the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Museum, the Public Records Office of Victoria, and the National Gallery of Victoria. Federation Square was also opened in 2002 as the centerpiece of downtown regeneration (O’Hanlon, 2009). These developments helped to re-launch Melbourne as an events city. The economic initiatives statement of 1984 thus undertook to begin a campaign to promote ‘Melbourne as a Festival City,’ the main component of which was to be an ‘agreement to create and stage an annual Arts Festival in Melbourne’. That festival became Spoleto in 1986, and then, from 1990, the Melbourne International Arts Festival. In a sense, the development of cultural and sporting infrastructure created an imperative for events in order to animate the new spaces in the city. Melbourne originally ‘borrowed’ the event concept from the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy and the Spoleto Festival USA to develop the Spoleto Festival Melbourne, which eventually became the Melbourne Festival. This is now one of the Eventful Cities: Strategies for Event-Based Urban Development major events of Melbourne’s arts and cultural calendar, attracting 416,547 visits in 2013. Growing event activity led to the creation of a dedicated events organization, which now takes a direct role in the events sector in the city, with ‘Premier events owned and managed by the City of Melbourne’, including Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, Melbourne Awards and Melbourne Music. The research by Misener and Mason (2009) among stakeholders in the ‘urban regime’ of Melbourne indicated that ‘Melbournians love their major events’. Among the explanations for the enthusiasm for major events among local residents was the shift in the orientation of the sports events program towards community development and capacity building. Arguably, Melbourne became a model for other ‘eventful cities’ in this respect, as ‘Manchester looked to Melbourne as an example of what they wanted to achieve with their events strategy and the ties to local community’ (Misener and Mason, 2009: 787) in staging the Commonwealth Games in 2002. In Melbourne, ‘regime members believed that the use of events for development was linked to communities and community development goals. In addition, regime members in those cities provided examples of symbolic attempts to foster community around the sporting events strategies’ (Misener and Mason, 2009: 790). O’Hanlon (2009) found evidence of the success of the events and culture strategy in the emergence of the ‘cultural and recreational services’ employment category in the inner-city economy. In 1971 there were only 6,000 cultural jobs, or just over 1 percent of total inner city employment. By 2001 this had grown by over 300 percent to 20,000 jobs or 4 percent. O’Hanlon (2009) argues that inner Melbourne is now a vibrant place with a thriving economy based on events, services, tourism and conspicuous consumption in new retail complexes and refurbished shopping streets. Melbourne’s recent experiences demonstrate that rebuilding inner cities and staging 49 ‘events’ can bring substantial economic and tourism benefits. Ensuring that the short- and long-term spoils of this urban renewal go to the broad population is, however, a much more difficult social and political task. In Melbourne and elsewhere in Australia, there is increasing evidence that poverty and urban deprivation are now overwhelmingly concentrated in outer metropolitan regions rather than the inner city, as was the case thirty years ago. Cape Town, South Africa The city of Cape Town has sought to capitalize on its iconic location and the reputation gained from the successful organization of sporting and cultural events to position itself as an eventful city. An Integrated Event Strategy was developed in 2011 and aimed to support the hosting of events, basically to boost tourism and thereby increase inward investment. As the events policy for 2013 stated: Cape Town has developed a strong track record as an events destination and continues to host major global events. The City of Cape Town’s success in hosting events of various sizes and types, throughout the year and throughout various parts of the city, has earned Cape Town an enviable reputation as an events destination. This reputation and branding is critical for business perceptions about the City as an investment destination. (Cape Town Green Map, 2014) The policy identifies an ‘events portfolio’ supported by four main elements: • Jewels (Signature Events): Annual events associated with the area’s identity, which provide the area with competitive advantage • Incubator (Brewing): Smaller events that show potential to develop into jewels • Bidding (Major or Mega Events): One-off large, compelling, major market events that have to be acquired through a bidding process • Leverage: Events occurring outside the destination, but providing a platform to promote ­tourism, trade and investment. 50 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Much attention has been focused on the ­bidding for mega events such as the Rugby World Cup (1995), the FIFA World Cup (2010) and the World Design Capital (2014). The bid launched by Cape Town for the 2004 Olympic Games was the first such bid from an African country, and arguably the most successful bid from a developing country at that time (Hiller, 2000). The discussion that has raged since then is the extent to which the attraction of such mega events serve the interests of business rather than the local comm­ unity. The basic argument of policy makers is that an events strategy can achieve both: These jewels are also heavily represented among the events that will receive three-year funding in an effort to ensure stability and to increase partnership opportunities between the city and its events. For the 2014/2015 financial year, the city planned to invest ZAR 30,975,191 (€2,167,824) in events. The return on investment arguably includes a considerable estimated economic impact, increased visitation and media coverage (Table 4.1). A glance at the figures in Table 4.1 indicate that the ZAR 10.7 million invested by the city in 2014 is estimated to have generated at least ZAR 2,395 million in economic impact, an ROI for the city of 223 to 1. However, one has to be skeptical of such claims, given the tendency for event organizers to inflate the economic impact of their events in order to attract public sector and commercial support (Richards and Palmer, 2010; Sacco, in this volume). The more important question is how much of these millions trickle down to local communities and help to increase the livabi­ lity of the city? As Christoph Haferburg and Malte Steinbrink suggest (in this volume), ‘the faces of South African cities have not been changed thoroughly by the event’. And given the current scandals surrounding the awarding of the World Cup to South Africa, The infrastructural development that accompanies mega-events, like the 2010 FIFA World Cup™, improves the livability of a city for its residents and enhances the appeal that it holds for visitors. The experiential nature of events – they draw our ­visitors into the city as participants – sets the stage for inspiration to be found in Cape Town and visitors to return to our city again and again. ­ (www.capetown.gov.za) The ‘jewels’ in the Cape Town portfolio include: Cape Argus Pick ‘n Pay Momentum Cycle Tour, the ABSA Cape Epic, the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, the Design Indaba, the Mining Indaba, the Old Mutual Two Oceans Marathon, the Volvo Ocean Race and the ITU World Triathlon Series. Table 4.1 2014 metrics for events in Cape Town Event Cape Town International Jazz Festival Cape Argus Pick‘n Pay Momentum Cycle Tour Old Mutual Two Oceans Marathon ABSA Cape Epic Mining Indaba Design Indaba Lion of Africa Cape Town Open ITU World Triathlon Series Economic impact (ZAR million) Media value (ZAR million) 553.3 199.8 34,000 2,750,000 450 30.3 34,395 865,000 266 10.0 30,000 300 500 326 Attendance/participants City contribution (ZAR) 45,000 7,800 40,000 1,350,000 50,000 2,200,000 2,000,000 4.38 million media audience 1,500,000 7.4 Source: http://www.capetown.gov.za/en/visitcapetown/Documents/Events_Strategy_2015_2017.pdf Eventful Cities: Strategies for Event-Based Urban Development one has to be even more skeptical about the ability of such events to provide community benefits in developing cities. As the city itself points out, it faces considerable challenges in coordinating and managing events effectively: Although the City has a good track record in the hosting of major events, the absence of a formal strategy and policy has meant that: the staging of events has often been done in an ad-hoc manner, lacking strategic co-ordination and direction … Also, the number and complexity of events continue to grow each year. The City is increasingly being requested to provide significant resources for the staging of events (including financial support) and to manage the impact on the city. The City needs to act in a co-ordinated manner and provide clear strategic, administrative and operational guidelines in order to build on the existing momentum and minimize the risk of ­failure. (City of Cape Town, 2015) In the case of Cape Town, hope probably lies in the development of a more balanced event portfolio that rests on smaller scale, locallybased events. Christchurch, New Zealand The Event Policy for Christchurch (2007–2017) outlined a vision in which ‘events inspire passion for the lifestyle, qualities and identity of Christchurch’ (Christchurch City Council, 2016). This policy was based on a wide range of economic and social objectives, including the contribution of events to quality of life, community pride, cultural understanding and attracting thinkers and innovators. The events strategy was also designed to underpin the identity of Christchurch as ‘the Garden City’, at the same time as establishing a new ‘events city’ role. The main budget (direct contribution) of the city to events in 2006/2007 was just over NZD 2 million. As in Cape Town, a range of different types of event were identified as being important to the total portfolio of the city. These ranged from ‘Icon events’ generating more than 51 NZD 10 million in economic impact, more than 10,000 visitor days and significant media coverage, through major events g­enerating over NZD 1 million to local events catering to small areas of the city and receiving no funding from the council. The city also set a range of aims relating to the events portfolio, which included the attraction of two icon events by 2010 and a 20 percent increase in visitors to icon events by 2010, as well as a 10 percent increase in the percentage of residents who believe that events contribute positively to life in Christchurch by 2017. The events strategy also identified a range of risks associated with the policy. However, it failed to identify one major event-related risk that eventually had a profound effect on the ability of the city to fulfill the potential of the policy. In September 2010 the Christchurch region was struck by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake, which although it caused no fatalities, weakened buildings and affected infrastructure. In February 2011 a second major earthquake hit the city, this time killing 185 people and causing an estimated NZD 40 billion in damage to buildings and infrastructure. Seventy percent of the Central City was listed for demolition, whole suburbs were closed off and Greater Christchurch’s population shrank by 13,600 people. This catastrophic event disrupted the ­normal course of events in the city, making it impossible to stage many planned events. Major events, such as matches for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, were moved elsewhere. In addition, ‘venues for unorganized, informal interactions such as squares, parks, bars, shopping malls, cafés and entertainment venues have disappeared, reducing the average citizen’s ability to engage with their city and others who live there’ (Barber, 2013: 12). Interestingly, as Barber also outlines, the disruption of the earthquake was also a spur to many ad hoc events that sprang up in informal spaces, creating a form of ‘tactical urbanism’ (Lydon and Garcia, 2015). Organizations such as Gap Filler and Greening the Rubble 52 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES were established in the aftermath of the first earthquake in September 2010. Through a raft of small-scale events and interventions in the damaged urban fabric, civil society engaged in ‘creative placemaking’ in contrast to the top-down, centrally planned actions envisaged in the Christchurch Events Strategy. Tourism is now bouncing back, arguably partly as a result of the increased liveliness stimulated by the earthquake recovery process. Hotel capacity was severely hit by the quakes, but occupancies have climbed slowly as new capacity has been added in renovated hotels, with at least 600 additional hotel rooms since 2012. Lonely Planet and the New York Times have praised Christchurch for its resilience, creativity and comeback spirit, and this has helped both the image of the city and the visitor recovery process. As part of the recovery process, the city recognizes the need for ‘an externally focused Events Strategy’ (Christchurch and Canterbury Tourism, 2014: 20). This envisages that Christchurch: (1) identifies both major and minor event goals on a long-term basis (2) takes account of the prevailing tourism sector seasonality, which makes major events difficult to host in the Feb–Mar period each year (3) focuses on events that have high potential to attract a nationally or internationally sourced visitor audience as well as garnering strong local community support (4) focuses on events that can be supported by ­existing and new sports/entertainment venues (5) is adequately funded to ensure success. This strategy is now beginning to have some effect, as, in 2015, Christchurch hosted two major sporting events, the ICC Cricket World Cup and the FIFA Under 20 World Cup. MANAGING EVENTFULNESS The different eventful city cases analyzed above indicate a certain degree of global ­convergence in event governance. A limited range of urban event management models seems to be emerging as cities ‘borrow’ ideas from one another, as they have done in other areas of urban policy (González, 2011). In many cases, the decision to support event activity is linked to a particular type of urban regime (Stone, 1989), most frequently an economic development regime that seeks to stimulate economic growth through events and their contribution to improving city image, driving inward investment and stimulating tourism. However, there are also cases in which an events strategy can be more closely linked to improving the quality of life and other more ‘progressive’ urban regimes. Richards (2015a) also identifies different governance strategies being applied to eventful city strategies. Event-focused eventfulness At the most basic level, cities can concentrate on developing the number, range and type of events they stage in order to create more eventfulness. Many cities are now thinking about how they can program events in order to support the overall objectives of the city. Such strategies usually focus on event policy, programming and management. This is a relatively narrow strategic focus, which centers on the identification of new event-related products and markets. The most common measures taken include the establishment of an events unit to coordinate event policy and management and the development of an overall event programming strategy. Examples of this kind of strategy include the Antwerpen Open organization and Edinburgh Festivals. In the case of Antwerpen Open, the city itself was instrumental in developing and funding the event-coordination body for the city. Edinburgh Festivals, however, is driven by the festivals themselves, who came together to form Eventful Edinburgh. In particular, this bottom-up example reveals some of the important issues related to this event-focused model. As the Eventful Cities: Strategies for Event-Based Urban Development original Thundering Hooves report on the festivals strategy of Edinburgh revealed, the festivals themselves tend to have their own sectoral view of the world (AEA Consulting, 2006). So the Edinburgh Film Festival sees itself operating primarily within a circuit of film festivals, rather than being part of a festival economy in the city of Edinburgh. There may also be a certain rivalry between the festivals in the city, as they tend to regard public sector finance as a zero-sum game in which increased funding for one festival means reduced funding for others. In some cases, the different festivals may begin to compete among themselves, often dividing into established versus newer events. Sector-focused eventfulness Once a city is able to understand that events have a much more significant role beyond the immediate impact of the events themselves, then more sectoral approaches to strategy can be developed. These revolve around the idea that events are important platforms for particular economic, social and cultural activities in the city. The development of eventfulness should therefore be related not just to the events themselves, but also to the other stakeholder groups that benefit from and support events. These can include both direct stakeholders who stand to gain economically or politically from the events policy, and indirect stakeholders who will gain from the general growth in economic, social or cultural activity. Examples of sector-focused strategies include Dubai, Montreal and Rotterdam. In these cities events have become part of broader economic and social policies aimed at developing the city as a whole. In Montreal events such as the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, FrancoFolies, MUTEK and the Circus Arts Festival have provided essential support for the development of the entertainment and creative sectors in the city. 53 MUTEK, an international festival of digital creativity and electronic music, has now spread beyond Montreal to embrace events in Barcelona, Mexico City and Bogota. New-style event organizations such as Rotterdam Festivals operate outside the ambit of the public administration. They see their role as one of coordinating the events program to maximize the benefits of events for the city. They concentrate on directly ­supporting or initiating events which are of specific significance in telling the ‘Rotterdam Story’. The city has extended its storytelling role into the creation of ‘new traditions’, as in the case of the Rotterdam Unlimited festival, launched in 2013. This event is designed to celebrate the cultural diversity of Rotterdam as a ‘modern urban metropolis’. A sectoral focus also provides Rotterdam with opportunities to develop certain events into ‘field configuring events’ (Lange et al., 2014) that act as major global or international hubs within a certain economic, political or cultural field. For smaller cities, such events offer a world stage for a limited period of time, as demonstrated by the Cannes Film Festival, which focuses global attention on this small French city for a few days. Network-focused eventfulness Systemic-focused strategies tend to center on the specific sectors within the city that lead the economy or society. They usually bring together major local stakeholders who play an important role in a particular sector. This is the case in Austin, Texas, where the leading role of the music industry makes this a natural focus for development (OECD, 2014). Seeing events as an important focus for activities within the city is just one part of the potential of events. Their greatest effects can often lie beyond the city itself, in their ability to tie the city into broader global networks and in making it a hub for economic, social and cultural activity in a particular 54 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES field. This is the basic idea behind events as field configuring events. But this concept is in itself l­imited, because it only focuses on the ­network effects of the event itself. In the case of the eventful city, the key lies in conceptualizing the city itself as a network actor. Following Castells’ terminology, the city can position itself as a ‘switcher’ that links different networks together. As a switcher in global networks, the city can perform a vital role in linking local programmers with global networks, providing new opportunities and ideas. Two cities that have managed to position themselves as switchers in different ways are Den Bosch in the Netherlands and Barcelona in Catalunya. The Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch) has made extensive use of the creative industries in its program of celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the death of the painter Hieronymus Bosch in 2016. This event aims to attract large numbers of tourists, and also to strengthen the creative and cultural fabric of the city by bringing Bosch to life, using his artistic legacy as a creative inspiration for the future. The interesting challenge for Den Bosch is that it does not have any pictures by Bosch, as his remaining paintings are scattered across the world. The city therefore has to develop a creative tourism product based entirely on intangible assets, including the creativity inspired by Bosch’s work and the storytelling potential of being his birthplace (Marques, 2013). Particularly important are the Bosch Research and Conservation Project and the Bosch Cities Network. The Bosch Cities Network links the cities where Bosch artworks are present in museum collections. The network cooperates around research, restoration, performing arts and visual arts. Most importantly, the network has been used as a means of securing works by Bosch for the major exhibitions of Bosch paintings which was staged in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (February–May 2016) and in the Prado in Madrid (June–September 2016) within a program of international cultural collaboration between Spain and the Netherlands. Over 421,000 visitors saw the exhibition in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, including many domestic and international tourists. By linking tourism and the creative industries, the city has overcome limitations in the supply of cultural heritage resources, developed the creative capacity of the city, forged international networks to gather creative resources and focus visitor attention, and engaged citizens through the development of grassroots creativity. A city that was previously reliant on the heritage of the past has creatively linked itself to new sectors such as gaming and design to engage new visitor markets and extend its product portfolio. This case particularly illustrates how the creative sectors can help destinations reach new ­markets, extend their creative activities internationally and use clusters and networks to leverage added value. Critiques of eventification Although the relationship between events and the city has changed considerably in the last few decades, the critique of urban events and the growth of eventfulness has moved on relatively little. Many contemporary critiques rest largely on the original objections formulated by Boorstin (1964) and later applied in a specifically urban context by Häußermann and Siebel (1993). The basic idea is that planned events essentially involve a hollowing out, shallowing or trivialization of everyday life. The growth in the number, scope and effects of organized events simply served to shift the focus of the argument from the single events described by Boorstin (1964) as mere marketing tools, towards the idea of the city as a permanent stage for festivals and events (Häußermann and Siebel, 1993). This debate was continued by Waterman (1998: 54) who argued that ‘cyclical arts festivals transform places from being everyday settings into temporary environments that contribute to the production, processing and Eventful Cities: Strategies for Event-Based Urban Development consumption of culture, concentrated in time and place’, but that such festivals become related to place promotion, which favors the use of ‘safe’ art forms. Similarly, Johansson and Kociatkiewicz (1999) examined the tension between controlled image production and carnivalesque celebration in cities, and concluded that the instrumental use of events reduces their meaning. Such arguments were also reflected in Harcup’s (2000) analysis of the creation of the St Valentine’s Fair as a ‘civic spectacle’, designed to reposition Leeds (UK) as a ‘city of culture’. Interestingly, Leeds is still actively pursuing this course, having put itself forward as a candidate for the ECOC in 2023. The steady encroachment of events on urban public space and everyday life para­ llels the process by which capital invades the lifeworld, finding more niches and crevices to exploit (Richards, 2011), leading to the ‘eventification’ of place as a whole (Jakob, 2013). The increasingly instrumental use of events, and particularly major events by cities has therefore been one of the major complaints of event critics. In privileging economic capital, cities often exacerbate the marginalization of already vulnerable social groups (see Haferburg and Steinbrink, in this volume). City centers are also taken over and sometimes physically enclosed as event spaces, often excluding the residents who live there, as in the case of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay celebrations (Howie, 2000). The increasing frequency of such largescale, commercially orientated events also often leads to complaints about excessive ­festivalization, and in some cities anti-event protest groups have emerged (for example, Eisenhauer et al., 2014). The growth of events also increases the range of stakeholders engaged in events, escalating the potential for conflict between them. This has been particularly evident in major events such as the Olympic Games or the European Capital of Culture. Usually the complaint is that local residents, as indirect stakeholders in such events, are ­ 55 forced to give way to commercial interests. The events become less about sport or culture, and more about economics and financial gain. Dissatisfaction with mainstream festivals often produces a backlash in the emergence of fringe events, most famously in the Edinburgh Festival. As Hollands et al. (in this volume) show in the case of Geneva, the ‘right to the (party) city’ is also being fought for by various groups in and through urban events. The claimed benefits of major events also often fall short of the claims made before the event. This is because securing the ­political support necessary to fund and organize a major event requires a substantial carrot, ­usually in the form of promised economic benefits. Cost–benefit assessments made prior to such events often overstate the potential benefits, through a range of statistical and assumption-based strategies (Crompton, 1995). The problems of ensuring that the whole city benefits from the development of events is also one of the key challenges facing any ‘eventful city’. As the definition developed by Richards and Palmer suggests, the ultimate aim of developing eventfulness should be to ‘improve the quality of life for all’ (Richards, 2015a). However, the widespread criticism of eventification has in itself stimulated calls for a more nuanced approach. As Edensor points out in the current volume, ‘Critiques that focus on the commercialization and alienating propensities of festive spectaculars neglect how people playfully appropriate meaning’. Sacco (in this volume) also points to the need for a broader, more holistic vision for the design, implementation and evaluation of events. DISCUSSION One of the points made strongly in O’Hanlon’s analysis of Melbourne is that the development of Melbourne as an eventful 56 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES city stems not from the 1990s, when events became top of many urban policy agendas, but from the 1980s, as a direct response to economic restructuring. When we look at cities like Barcelona and Montreal, this long pedigree of event-related development is also evident, with both cities having initially developed their strategies in the 1980s. This underlines one of the important success factors for eventful cities identified by Richards and Palmer (2010): the need for long-term planning and political commitment. As suggested by Misener and Mason (2009), this commitment is usually underpinned by an urban regime capable of sustaining an agenda around events and eventfulness. There are a number of other implications that emerge from the preceding analysis of urban eventfulness. There is a clear need for cities to adopt a more holistic and long-term approach to the governance and management of events. This is often difficult to achieve in a climate of political uncertainty or economic adversity, when the emphasis is likely to be placed on implementing ‘fast policy’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015). However, there is growing evidence that risk-taking is an important factor in successful eventfulness strategies. In the past many such strategies were implemented by declining cities with few other options, but more recently other cities have also begun to grasp events as a means of making themselves more ‘distinctive’ (Turok, 2009). In this sense, events can not only act as important catalysts for urban regeneration projects, but also provide a framing to focus the attention of policy makers and other urban stakeholders on specific issues. In many cases attention will be focused on the theme of the event, such as cultural regeneration for an ECOC, or sports participation and health for a major sports event. But sometimes attention can be focused on general urban themes, such as the need for environmental improvement, as Gold and Gold (in this volume) illustrate in the case of London. The framing provided by events in temporal and spatial terms also makes them suitable ‘laboratories’ for experimentation and innovation. The idea that events provide a ‘time out of time’ means that activities which would not normally be contemplated in a city can become acceptable or even embraced. This was one of the themes addressed at a MUTEK event on ‘cultural festivals and events as laboratories’ held in Barcelona in 2013: ‘Unlike other traditional cultural institutions such as the museum, these events have the versatility to adapt rapidly to emerging artistic trends’ (MUTEK, 2012). Events can also act as zeitgebers, setting or changing the tempo of the city. In this way events can add to the quality of life by changing the tempo of daily life, adding variety and contrast to an otherwise increasingly linear and homogenous urban timescape (Richards, 2015b). In many cases the tendency is to reach back in time to a slower epoch in the city’s history, replacing the continual drone of car traffic with the beat of horses’ hooves. 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(2015) ‘Resistant legacies’, Annals of Leisure Research. 18(4): 470–90. Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2015) Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pine, J. and Gilmore, J. (1999) The Experience Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Pløger, J. (2010) ‘Presence-experiences – the eventalisation of urban space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(5): 848–66. Quinn, B. (2005) ‘Art festivals and the city’, Urban Studies, 42(5–6): 927–43. Richards, G. (2010) Leisure in the Network Society: From Pseudo-Events to Hyperfesti­ vity? Tilburg: Tilburg University. Richards, G. (2011) ‘Creativity and tourism: the state of the art’, Annals of Tourism Research, 38(4): 1225–53. Richards, G. (2013), ‘Events and the Means of Attention.’ Journal of Tourism Research & Hospitality, 2:2, http://www.scitechnol. com/2324-8807/2324-8807-2-118.pdf Richards, G. (2015a) ‘Developing the eventful city: time, space and urban identity’, in S. Mushatat and M. Al Muhairi (eds), Planning for Event Cities. Ajman: Municipality and Planning Dept. of Ajman. pp. 37–46. Richards, G. (2015b) ‘Eventfulness and the quality of life’, Tourism Today, 14: 23–36. Richards, G. and Palmer, R. (2010) Eventful Cities: Cultural Management and Urban Revitalisation. London: Routledge. Roche, M. (2000) Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London: Routledge. Rojek, C. (2013) Event Power: How Global Events Manage and Manipulate. London: Sage. Saayman, A. and Saayman, M. (2006) ‘Does the location of arts festivals matter for economic impact?’, Papers in Regional Science, 85(4): 569–84. Sabaté i Bel, J., Frenchman, D. and Schuster, J.M. (2004) Llocs amb esdeveniments – Event places. Barcelona: UPC. Stone, C.N. (1989) Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Tschumi, B. (1994) Event-Cities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Eventful Cities: Strategies for Event-Based Urban Development Turok, I. (2009) ‘The distinctive city: pitfalls in the pursuit of differential advantage’, Environment and Planning A, 41(1): 13–30. Waitt, G. (1999) ‘Playing games with Sydney: marketing Sydney for the 2000 Olympics’, Urban Studies, 36(7): 1055–77. 59 Waterman, S. (1998) ‘Carnivals for elites? The cultural politics of arts festivals’, Progress in Human Geography, 22(1): 54–74. PART II Urban Entrepreneurialism, Branding, Governance In the classic ‘regime’ model of urban governance forging a consensus, was primarily a matter of effective coalition building. Those in power rarely questioned the desirability of embracing economic growth as the engine that kept economies humming. Nevertheless, politicians were compelled to nurture and solidify coalitions of interest in order to successfully promote development (Dowding, 2001). With the collapse of managerialism and the emergence of the neoliberal city, the essentials of urban governance needed to be reinvented. Broadly, there was as a consensus that politicians and planners had to be much more innovative and entrepreneurial, ‘willing to explore all kinds of avenues through which to alleviate their distressed condition and thereby secure a better future for their populations’ (Ward, 2011: 726). How this should be done was less clear, especially given the necessity of ‘selling’ this vision to a varied cast of internal and external stakeholders. In Chapter 7, Jasper Eshuis and Erik-Hans Klijn note that marketing-led approaches, ­especially those that feature branding, fit well with objectives of decreasing state regulation and introducing private sector strategies. Indeed, city branding is now widely used as a governance strategy to create favourable images of cities and to attract various target groups (investors, tourists, creative w ­ orkers). Eshuis and Klijn see branding and governance strategies as symbiotic: cities align their policies and urban development with the branding in order to strengthen their brand. The authors suggest that branding is utilized to achieve three important governance functions: (i) it provides specific images about policy problems and solutions, thereby influencing perceptions and shaping decisionmaking; (ii) it activates and binds actors to urban governance processes, thereby securing their co-operation; and (iii) it communicates simple images and associations to the 62 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES outside world, notably the media, in a much more effective way than releasing large policy documents and in-depth statements that may remain unread. The authors conclude their chapter by discussing some risks and limits of city branding as a governance tool. In particular, they caution about the potential misuse of branding by governments, who ­exaggerate the positive features of their ­cities while overlooking negative aspects, ­burying any democratic discussion of unpopular ­topics such as social deprivation and poverty. In an era of place promotion and competition, perception is what counts and this is reflected in the conception of the ‘imagined city’ (Tallon, 2013: 127). In Chapter 6, Philip Lawton explores the imagining, or more properly the re-imagining, of the ‘European city’ as it has evolved in recent decades. He pays particular attention to a powerful spatial imaginary which brings together architecture, city-making and neoliberal forms of urban governance. One template for this is Barcelona. Since the 1980s the capital of Catalonia has shifted from a paragon of inclusion and re-invented local identity/culture to a central focus on design, as it is associated with the promotion of the knowledge economy and intensified property investment. Lawton critically unpacks the manner in which the ‘good city’ is produced, re-­ produced, and sold as offering an ideal way of life. Invariably, this revolves around ‘soft’ features such as walkability and inspiring architecture. As do Eshuis and Klijn in their chapter, Lawton worries that this re-branding of the European city conceals a darker side. For example, he points out how urban entrepreneurs engage in the ‘sanitization’ of urban space in order to promote an ideal landscape of consumption, a policy similarly noted by Haferburg and Steinbrink in Chapter 18 in ­relation to the staging of mega-events in ­cities of the South. In Chapter 5, Mark Jayne and colleagues Phil Hubbard and David Bell reprise their discussion of the practice of ‘city twinning’. Twinning typically involves civic visitation, educational exchanges and ­ cultural co-operation. On occasion, this generates sharp political exchanges between penny pinchers at city council who criticize these e­ xchanges as nothing more than junkets and participants who defend twinning partnerships as valuable tools for policy learning about new ­approaches to service delivery and democratic participation. Jayne et al. describe twinning as something subtler and quite significant. Rather than a fading legacy of post-war co-operation and reconciliation that has been marginalized by the ‘new ­urban politics’, they situate it at the epicentre of these politics. Drawing on extensive empirical r­esearch carried out in Manchester (UK), a city ‘that since the 1980s has promoted a strongly e­ ntrepreneurial mode of urban governance in which economic success has been sought through vigorous place promotion’, the ­authors report that twinning partnerships can be valuable tools in providing access to global markets, circuits and networks which may otherwise be difficult to reach. Furthermore, they suggest that this aids twin cities in moving up the global hierarchy discussed by Saskia Sassen and others (see Part I of the Handbook). Twinning cities thus constitutes a paradox: cities are in competition with one another for jobs, investment and status but engage in international collaboration as a route to securing competitive advantage. REFERENCES Dowding, K. (2001) ‘Explaining urban regimes’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(1): 7–19. Tallon, A. (2013) Urban Regeneration in the UK, 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge. Ward, K. (2011) ‘Entrepreneurial urbanism, policy tourism and the making mobile of policies’. In Bridge, G. and Watson, S. (eds), The New Blackwell Companion to the City. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Wiley ­Blackwell, pp. 726–737. 5 Twin Cities: Territorial and Relational Urbanism Mark Jayne, Phil Hubbard and David Bell INTRODUCTION One of the great tensions in an era of planetary urbanism is that while cities are in competition with one another for jobs, investment and status, international collaboration is often deemed the route to secure competitive advantage. This chapter discusses the forms of co-operation and competition through which urban policy and knowledges are constituted and transferred from city to city via a focus on practices of ‘city twinning’ (Clarke, 2009a, 2009b; Grosspietsch, 2009; Jayne et al., 2010).1 City or town twinning is a practice that has proliferated around the world, with citizens usually made aware of international partnerships though civic visitation, educational exchanges or cultural cooperation. In the UK alone, 1,399 cities, towns and villages have entered into 2,535 twinning partnerships (in 90 countries around the world), which, for Clarke (2008a, 2008b), represents an effective ‘globalisation of care’. In turn, such practices produce ‘proximities’ as part of the urban statecraft involved in a ‘new politics of scale’ in which the activities of ‘bottom-up’ social movements are crucial. Jones (2009: 497) argues that there is a need to pay attention to how relationality is ‘constructed, anchored and mobilized in and through territorially-defined political, socio-economic and cultural strategies’ (Jones, 2009: 494). Here, we conceptualize twinning as one of those strategies, a key means by which the world city network is made and remade through agency and practice (Watson and Beaverstock, 2014). In this chapter, we highlight how attention to twinning can contribute to broader research agendas associated with uncovering ‘actually existing neo-liberalization’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Peck, 2004), ‘actually existing comparative urbanism’ (Clarke, 2012), and the relational and territorial practices bound up with urban knowledge and policy transfer (McCann, 2010; McCann and Ward, 2010; Ward, 2006). In particular, we are interested in the extent to 64 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES which twinning works to bind city networks (Leitner and Sheppard, 2002; Massey, 2007; Taylor, 2004) in order to enhance flows between cities through acts of gifting, reciprocity and exchange (Urry, 2007). Here, the fact that twinning involves exchanges of ideas, people, goods, food, products, art and so on reminds us of the need ‘to multiply the readings of the city’ (Lefebvre, 1995: 159), suggesting the heterogeneity of twinning practices can be seen to contribute to geographical conceptualizations which stress the manifold agency of c­ ities (Amin and Thrift, 2004; Massey, 2007). URBAN STUDIES AND CITY TWINNING At the heart of city twinning is an economy of giving in which gifting is assumed to lead to reciprocity, with the ultimate act of reciprocity being the granting of unconditional hospitality to the Other (Chan, 2005). As such, the relatively small amount of academic attention paid to city and town twinning has focused on rituals in which gifts are exchanged, flows of trade and technical co-operation established, and interpersonal ties developed (see for example, Baldersheim, 2002; Cremer et al., 2001; Ewen and Hebbert, 2007; Furmankiewicz, 2007; Papagarufali, 2005; Saunier and Ewen, 2008; Vion, 2002, 2007). Others have considered the historical geographies of twinning, noting how the social and cultural networks created by government bodies, civil society and citizens’ groups have produced patterns of inter-urban reciprocity which have shifted over time, so that, for example, English cities have become more expansive over time in their search for twin cities, moving beyond a desire for postwar European peace and reconciliation to encompass a more global outlook (Clarke, 2009a, 2009b; Grosspietsch, 2009; Jayne et al., 2010). However, the work that best characterizes both the limitations and potentialities of the research into city twinning is an earlier intervention by Wilbur Zelinsky (1991), who argued that the study of twinning offers vital insights into the ‘transnationalization of society and culture’, and described twinning as a potential ‘entering wedge’ for unpacking ‘the vast subject of globalizing society’ (1991: 2). In seeking to capture the transnational logic of twinning, Zelinsky (1991: 4) stresses that ‘genuine reciprocity of effort and benefit, with neither community profiting at the expense of the other’ is a key tenet of twinning, adding that many city-to-city or citizento-citizen relationships are underpinned by ideological connections and/or humanitarian programs which are often at odds with official supranational, national or city political agendas and policies. In focusing on a ‘transnationalization of society and culture’, Zelinsky (1991) thus offers a tantalizing glimpse of the way in which studying city twinning can contribute to the advancement of urban theory. Questions asked by Zelinsky include: What sorts of people are involved in twinning, to what extent and in what ways? Who is not involved and why? What are the measurable economic and political results of twinning in the short and long term? What is the impact of twinning on the community and individuals? How have attitudes and perceptions changed because of twinning activities? How has consciousness of distant people and places been raised? How does twinning compare with other movements/connections – tourism, church missions, religious pilgrimages, trade fairs, labor migration, telecommunications, students’ movements, commercial dealings, non-government organizations and other networks? Unfortunately, however, the majority of research questions asked by Zelinsky have been left unanswered. Indeed, the empirically-focused approach of Zelinsky ultimately set a precedent where researchers continually point to the importance of the topic, offering rich and detailed case study material from around the world but ultimately failing to make a case for the theoretical import of city twinning Twin Cities: Territorial and Relational Urbanism (Baldersheim, 2002; Cremer et al., 2001; Ewen and Hebbert, 2007; Furmankiewicz, 2007; Jain, 2004; Saunier and Ewen, 2008; Vion, 2002). In contrast, Nick Clarke (2008a, 2008b, 2009a, 2009b, 2012) has developed a more critical account, showing how in the UK since 1945 twinning must be understood as part of ‘new localism’ and a ‘new politics of scale’ bound up with the emergence of neo-liberal governance. Clarke (2009a) locates twinning activities as part of a trans-­ sovereign politics associated with ‘urban entrepreneurialism’: that is, related to shifts from city government to urban governance bound up with capitalist restructuring – both upwards to the supranational scale and downwards to regional, urban and local scales. Clarke argues that twinning must be theorized as an outcome of statespatial restructuring and points to issues such as ‘municipal foreign policy’, ‘community development’ and ‘local government restructuring’ as examples of how twinning has now become indicative of contemporary urban ‘fast policy’ and inter-urban networking. Here, he also points to contemporary city twinning as marginalizing the ‘bottomup’ localism that has historically been a key feature of twinning programs. Following Zelinsky, Clarke (2009b) highlights that twinning has been used to extend care across space, emphasizing moral motivations and a spirit of equality and reciprocity that was initially vital in forging a political ‘community’ across national boundaries, but which has become involved in a more instrumental urban politics: Taken together, the uses and agents of town twinning over the past 60 or so years and much of the world have been so varied that town twinning is best conceptualised not as a movement, as it often is in the literature, but as a device: a device for producing topological proximity between topographically distant places; a device with its own repertoire of formal agreements, trade delegations, joint projects, exchange visits etc. but that is also just one technology in numerous higher-order repertoires. (Clarke, 2009b: 10, emphasis in original) 65 However, in arguing that twinning appears to be changing in character, Clarke (2009b: 12) suggests that attempts to globalize care through twinning have been negatively affected by contemporary neo-liberal policy agendas. The popularity of tightly focused projects, the clear benefit of which must be demonstrated via the institutionalization of monitoring, evaluation and auditing have, according to Clarke, permeated twinning partnerships, with performance being measured against targets at regular intervals. Clarke suggests then that it is ‘care-in-a-hurry’ which now dominates public and private sector elite attempts to exploit the economic benefits of twinning. Clarke’s work is important in that it discusses twinning in terms of broader theoretical debates relating to networks and connections, changing modes of urban governance, institutional thickness, regime theory, ‘neo-liberalization’, and ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ strategies of capital accumulation (Amin and Thrift, 1995; Geddes, 2005; Horan and Jonas, 1998). However, while Clarke’s work undoubtedly represents an important advance in theoretical engagement with twinning, Jayne et al. (2010) suggest that in drawing on regulation and state theory, Clarke’s structural political economy approach does not fully allow theoretical understanding of the complexity of the political, economic, social, cultural and spatial practices and processes which constitute city twinning. For example, Clarke’s argument fails to acknowledge that twinning is not only subject to formal monitoring and evaluation associated with contemporary urban governance, but that success is ‘performed’ and assessed through rituals of hospitality and gifting. In this chapter, we emphasize the intimate moments of hospitality and exchange that facilitate particular (often unmeasurable) political and economic returns capitalizing on the special relationships between ‘at a distance’ twinning partners (see Craggs, 2014). 66 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES TWINNING, ENTREPRENEURIAL URBANISM AND TERRITORIAL/ RELATIONAL CITIES: MANCHESTER AS A WORLDLY CITY In the remainder of this chapter, we present discussion centered on empirical research from the city of Manchester (UK) in order to engage with debates about city twinning and with wider discussions about relational and territorial urbanism.2 Manchester is an interesting example to consider given, since the 1980s, it has promoted a strongly entrepreneurial mode of urban governance in which economic success has been sought through vigorous place promotion (Quilley, 2000). Manchester has accordingly sought to utilize its cultural assets to promote a ‘creative city’ vibe, offering forms of hospitality and welcome to members of the ‘creative class’, in part through the development of the ‘mediacity’ in Salford Quays, but also through the development of consumer spaces in the ‘gay village’ and Northern Quarter. Yet such spaces have not merely been marketed to those in the UK, but have been put to work internationally. Twinning has been one part of the means by which Manchester has done this, and sought to revive its fortunes following years of industrial decline. By focusing on the transfer of urban know­ ledge and policy bound up with Manchester’s twinning activities, we draw on Cook and Ward’s (2011) critical review of Manchester’s Olympic and Commonwealth Games bids, which emerges from a broader tradition of theoretical engagement with urban policy and knowledge transfer (see, for example, Cochrane et al., 1996; Cox and Mair, 1988; Harvey, 1989; McCann, 2010; Stone, 2004). In order to reveal the underlying motivations and expectations of public and private sector elites who visit (and are visited by representatives of) other cities in order to amass knowledge and policy inspiration, Cook and Ward (2011: 2) call for researchers to take ‘seriously the circuits, networks and webs in and through which urban knowledge and learning is constituted and moved around’ and highlight the importance of re-thinking ‘“territoriality vis-à-vis relationality” in order to understand how cities are constantly being assembled, disassembled and reassembled … [through] fixity in motion … [and the ways in which] cities are parts of circuits, networks and webs in and through which they compose and learn’ (2011: 23–5). Building on previous work focused on the city of Manchester as a UK exemplar of the movement from ‘municipal socialism’ to ‘new urban politics’, Cook and Ward (2011: 4) focus on the city’s ‘position in trans-urban networks of learning and the ways in which such networks of learning informed the Games projects and the governance of regeneration in Manchester more widely’ (also see Peck and Ward, 2002; Randell, 1995; Quilley, 1999). Comparing Cook and Ward’s findings with our own research into Manchester’s twinning partnerships highlights a number of important key similarities as well as significant points of departure that, when read together, help to illuminate the contested and complicated nature of territorial and relational urban politics. Before engaging in this dialogue it is important to note that public sector actors from Manchester City Council and other partner organizations were well rehearsed in their responses during interviews, insisting that the city does not have ‘twinning’ or ‘twin city’ relationships but instead enters into ‘friendship agreements’. As discussed by Jayne et al. (2010) and Clarke (2012), the motivation behind the choice of this labeling appears to be bound up with a concern to avoid historic associations of twinning dominated by civic and symbolic activities and associated public and popular (territorial) concerns over ‘junkets’ and ‘jollies’ in contrast to the acknowledgment of the (relational and entrepreneurial) benefits of making connections with cities in other parts of the world. Moreover, of Manchester’s nine ‘friendship Twin Cities: Territorial and Relational Urbanism agreements’ only four were deemed by public and private sector respondents as being ‘active’ – Wuhan (China), St Petersburg (Russia), Chemnitz (Germany) and Cordoba (Spain) – with the latter two being characterized as of minor importance. In contrast, community and other social groups maintained active programs (although to varying degrees) with seven cities – Wuhan, St Petersburg, Chemnitz, Cordoba, Rehovot (Israel), Faisalabad (Pakistan) and Bilwi (Nicaragua) – sometimes as part of ‘official’ programs but more often working outside of the continued formal public and private sector engagement with those cities. With this important point of definition in mind, in the remainder of the chapter we introduce empirical research which seeks to recount a number of interconnected stories bound up with territorial and relational urbanism which relate to the conflicts, tensions and contradictions underpinning Manchester’s strategic, uneven and at times ambivalent engagement in co-operative and competitive ‘friendship agreements’. When is a Junket not a Junket? Strategic, Uneven and Ambivalent City Twinning Research into Manchester’s ‘twinning’ relationships highlights the importance of ‘factfinding trips’ and ‘visits’ as part of the scheduled program of active friendship agreements. Cook and Ward (2011: 9–15) suggest, however, that despite being a ‘common feature of contemporary urban governance, relatively little is known about their performance, role in urban governance and their ramifications’, suggesting that Manchester’s Olympic and Commonwealth Games bids’ ‘“globetrotting” trips were to lobby rather than to learn … [and that] trips “confirmed … rather than taught”’ (emphasis in original). Such findings ring true in our research on twinning, with both public and 67 private sector elite actors also suggesting that while it is important to see, of more importance is to be seen: So on the one hand I think they learned more from us than perhaps we learned from them but on the other hand it was a two-way relationship, because we saw some of the very innovative regeneration programs that they were running but they really kept us on our toes … you know, talking to them … I mean the main thing is, is that, you know, Manchester has got ‘about’ in the positive sense … not just symbolic, but being there, and being seen to have weight. So when we do interact, particularly with the two strongest cities [Wuhan and St Petersburg] … What we are saying is taken very seriously. (Senior Manchester City Council Officer) In contrast, Manchester’s twinning partners were much happier highlighting just what it was they had learned from visiting the city: I would like to mention the Manchester experience in strategic planning and the vision of Manchester city’s development. For example, Manchester has succeeded very well and in the promotion of creative industries and how to apply them to the life of the city, to the well-being of its population … We have seen that it depends on several reasons, of course, business heads and skills that can corres­ pond with the interests of the private companies. (Local Authority Representative, St Petersburg) The research findings also emphasize how public and private sector actors focus on the development of face-to-face personal relationships with ‘movers and shakers’ (Peck, 1995), interactions seen as vital to facilitating access to ‘difficult to reach’ circuits, networks and webs of co-operation: the Chamber of Commerce will take companies over to trade with China, we haven’t successfully got any of them to invest in Wuhan yet. But we’ve managed to get some of the Wuhan companies to set up here in the Manchester Science Park … Having said that the civic thing is vitally important to Chinese relationships … They love their leaders and they love their mayors. And, and one thing that is very valuable to us in Manchester is to have succeeded in persuading the Chinese to locate a Consul General here … Mr Gong, he can open doors for us back in China as well and give us 68 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES endorsement. So when we went over two years ago, to Beijing initially and then on to Wuhan … which we timed to coincide with the Man United tour, when they did China and Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo, Mr Gong was able to get Richard Leese [the then Leader of the City Council] an audience with the Mayor of Beijing … and also the Head of the Olympics Committee, which wasn’t an easy meeting to get. And that, you know, was very effective for us, it raised our profile … One of Mr Gong’s assistants said ‘I saw you on Beijing TV’ … And that sort of relationship is, is really important, it opens doors for you. And, and that’s not always the case you know, it’s hard work when you’re out there, you know, it’s meeting upon meeting, and receptions and you get a lot out of it absolutely because you put a lot into it. (Manchester Economic Development Agency Representative) Throughout interviews with public and private sector elites, the ‘connectivity’ that Manchester sought to develop was shown to be constituted by key institutions, organizations and individual actors including local universities, football teams, representatives of the airport, hotels and tourist board, large and small to medium-sized businesses, citywide and international development agencies and specific councilors and officers. The concern with connection and exchange was, significantly, also seen as the most important way in which Manchester’s friendship agreements have the ability to create ‘work’ through accessing ‘new’ global markets (Taylor, 2004). Indeed, one feature of each trip abroad was that the constitution of delegations was tailored to the aims of the specific visit and host city. For example, on a trip to St Petersburg, local authority officers and councilors were joined by the Manchester Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS), a number of high-profile academics, and a range of ‘cool’ creative businesses and cultural organizations (see Mellor, 1997). Analyzing the ways in which twinning ­delegations are populated by different individuals, groups and organizations shows that there is much to be gained from unpacking the mundane material and discursive practices of the circulation of ‘good practice’ and ‘ideas’ in order to highlight how comparison, expertise, learning and policy movements unfold (or indeed fail to manifest). Cook and Ward (2011) also importantly highlight how knowledge and policy transfer does not involve a single, linear and literal movement from one place to another. Indeed, our research found that Manchester’s friendship with Wuhan was less important in its own right than the connections that the partnership facilitated with Beijing, Shanghai and the Chinese National Government. Thus, while one local authority officer acknow­ ledged that in hindsight if Manchester was currently entering into a friendship agreement with a Chinese city they would prefer a formal agreement with the better known, larger and more economically successful city of Shanghai, but that nonetheless the friendship agreement with Wuhan had led to greater connections and possibilities to access Chinese markets: because of Chinese culture and politics because it’s a one-party state, because of what they call their private sector companies are still state owned … If you don’t have the support of the government, and by that I mean not only national but local government in China, you’re not going to be as successful, so it is actually, the relationship between Manchester City Council and Wuhan Council, Municipal Council, that allows us to have status … That’s what we’ve now got when we actually go in there and even in the cities where there’s not a city relationship, like Shanghai for example, where we went last year and did a big seminar because we got support from the Shanghai Municipal Government, it was that much easier to get into the infrastructure, so in China in particular it’s very important to have that specific and political relationship … China is a long-term prospect and that is purely because of that friendship agreement, we wouldn’t have got into China if it hadn’t been for that … (Senior Manchester City Council Officer) Myself, and three others from the Council went out at what seemed like a moment’s notice last July because Man City were playing out in Shanghai and what we had time to do there was corporate hospitality … so we invited people to come and watch the game with us and invited intermediaries or companies that we’d already got in touch with, through the local vice mayor who was on the Board of Governors of the local Twin Cities: Territorial and Relational Urbanism university … We invited him to our box for the match but of course he was so important he had his own box. So we were invited to his box. As a result of that we got the relationship with the vice mayor so that Richard Leese was invited to a private lunch … (Manchester Economic Development Agency Representative) Cook and Ward (2011) also highlight that Manchester’s Olympic and Commonwealth Games bids were developed not only through mobile learning, by visiting other cities and meeting ‘experts’, but also in conjunction with the commissioning of ‘fact finding’ and ‘best practice’ consultancy reports and attendance at conferences and seminars. This raft of activities involved in knowledge and policy transfer similarly underpinned the evaluation of Manchester’s friendship agreements during the shift from ‘municipal socialism’ during the late 1980s and early 1990s which led to the rationalization of the city’s friendship agreements and the emergence or consolidation of other trans-urban networks and connections (cf. Clarke, 2012). For example, following a review of its friendship agreements in 1990 as part of a broader consideration of the efficacy of the City’s international activities, Manchester City Council embarked on sustained involvement in a growing number of national and international networks, including, for example, the English Core Cities, Eurocities, Digital Cities, and so on3 (see Manchester City Council, 1990; Lever and Vaughan, 2003). As the following quote shows, facilitating ‘multiple points of comparison, multiple trans-urban networks of learning … constitutive of contemporary governance’ (Cook and Ward, 2011: 25), was a clear priority for the city council at this time: So to cut a long story short I was asked in 1990 to do a review of the economic impact of inter­ national relationships and we came up with two things. One that Manchester should join the Eurocities organization, which we did in ‘92, and secondly, in order to make the biggest impact on Eurocities to develop a three-way partnership between us, Cordoba and Chemnitz beyond the 69 Eurocities network so that we could kind of get us involved in those European programs which did apply directly to us … and that three-way relationship being the starting point, from the twinning, the friendship relationships, but that this should become primarily about economic development and training and best practice … so it was a complete shake-up of our whole attitude, and then gradually during the 1990s I took over the responsibility of the European funding and economic development. I just took ourselves off to Brussels for a week and we just went round every single office saying we’re Manchester, we know we haven’t done much in the past, we intend to change that, tell us about Europe … Eurocities and the rest is history and from there … I think the idea of twinning is a bit old-fashioned in terms of the things you want to achieve out of those relationships, so I think definitely we tried to move away from, sort of … visits and hand-shaking … so if you look at local authorities and the districts that have that sort of twinning, they don’t really have the depth of the sort of international activities that places like Manchester does but I think, we don’t, we don’t need to make it into something bigger than it actually is. I guess it was sort of a new style, we’ve got an agreement that is with Wuhan, it’s been going for what, three, two and a half years, something like that. There’s sort of [a] basis of one with St Petersburg, and that’s it at the moment. (Ex-Senior Manchester City Council Officer) Such (re)evaluation of Manchester’s transurban relationships led to both new engagements with networks and cities and a re-articulation of the importance of Manchester’s ‘active’ friendship agreements with Wuhan and St Petersburg. While in these terms Manchester’s friendship agreements and the involvement of public and private sector elites can, at best, be described as strategic or on the other hand as uneven or ambivalent, one of the side effects of Manchester’s involvement in a proliferating number of networks at this time was the emergence of what one local authority officer described as an influx of ‘regeneration tourists’. The officer lamented that large numbers of delegations from cities around the world regularly contacted city council officials wishing to undertake ‘fact-finding tours’ or ‘study visits’ to the city, in addition to 70 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES numerous requests for new friendship agreements. As the following quote shows: Manchester is a famous city … Manchester football teams, I guess that helps, but Manchester is a very popular destination … the amount of change that has taken place in the city in the last decade or so is very interesting and attractive to cities from every­ where who want to come and see how we’ve done it. So I guess for them they’ve got the same sort of desire to promote trade. The importance of Manchester for them is a case study and large-scale regeneration. We get, we get far more requests now than ever before … for them to come here and to see what we have done … more than we can accommodate. (Manchester City Council Officer) However, what becomes clear from the interviews is that Manchester’s changing ­ engagement with international city-to-city relationships was based upon ‘worldly’ knowledge and/or perceptions that sought to locate the city at a place in an urban hierarchy to best exploit policy and knowledge transfer. As such, the strategy of the City Council to focus on just two active friendship agreements and to pursue involvement in networks such as the English Core Cities, Eurocities and other ad-hoc relationships that the city council has sought to develop (with cities such as New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Los Angeles and Shanghai), highlights how Manchester aimed to target and work with cities which are believed to be ‘comparable’ whether in size or reputation or are part of ‘exploitable’ circuits, networks and webs of co-operation that the city wants to gain access to. In these terms, the City Council sought to make informed ‘worldly’ choices about what can be learnt from cities judged to be equally or ‘more successful’ than Manchester. In contrast, the following quotes depict cities such as Cordoba and Chemnitz – the other non-active ‘twinned cities’ – as cities that can learn from Manchester: Some very big challenges in regeneration … and one of the things that Chemnitz are interested to look at now is the concept of social enterprise and cooperative movement can be extended with Chemnitz to help regenerate the city involved in … given that Manchester has expertise in this area … they’re very keen to work with Manchester on … extend the … exchange … project over two years. (Manchester City Council Officer) With Shanghai, New York and Los Angeles, we are getting very practical relationships politically and that are doing the job for us. What we don’t need is … formal agreement such as friendship agreements with any Tom, Dick or Harry. We are also looking at relationships with Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. Melbourne has a very similar economic profile to Manchester. (Senior Manchester City Councilor) However, while such quotes clearly show how Clarke’s (2009a, 2009b) concern that twinning constitutes ‘care-in-a-hurry’ had indeed begun to dominate Manchester’s engagement in ‘new’ urban partnerships, what is also clear from our research findings is that there is also an explicit acknowledgement among both public and private sector elites that the kinds of reciprocity of effort and benefit, constituted through mutual understanding, friendship and activities that Zelinsky described as constituting ‘old-style’ twinning, have become ever more important in the ‘new urban politics’: I suppose by the nature of the thing that you do are very different in terms of institutions and structure of the cultures of St Petersburg and Wuhan … in the first place but actually makes it a little less straightforward but then maybe try to think … the structures where there is a more similar sort of ownership. The other thing I meant to say at the beginning is that, that there are, you know, the reason we’re doing this isn’t just for the Council, actually I see this as like a wide network of … you know, we have very strong relationships with the city that we try to sort of … together really, everything from football clubs to universities, large and small businesses … these organizations and the networks we have are needed to add weight to our visits, but we were absolutely clear that we would need ten years of ‘getting to know each other’ … together as people because that’s what the Chinese and Russian people like, they like to be able to trust you and know that you mean business. (Senior Manchester City Council Officer) In these terms, respondents acknowledge that ‘care-in-a-hurry’ has limitations and that they have had to develop understanding of, account for, and approach specific political, Twin Cities: Territorial and Relational Urbanism economic, social and cultural geographies at the heart of trans-urban relationships in different ways. The focus of Manchester’s friendship agreements in pursuing the (territorial) goals of economic development and wishing to avoid political and popular controversies over ‘junkets’ is thus clearly taking place in parallel with what private and public sector elites confirm to be a re-articulation of (relational) reciprocity expressed through hospitality. The careful balancing of territorial and relational urban politics in order to enter certain ‘markets’ is thus demanding the very sets of activities and events that the City Council (publically at least) wish to distance themselves from. This uncomfortable contradiction of ‘new urban politics’ of targeted involvement in networks, circuits and webs of policy and knowledge transfer involved in the active friendship agreements was a clear issue of concern for the city authorities. For example, while Manchester City Council has sought to distance itself from ‘civic’ and symbolic elements of twinning in favor of a more focused economic rationale, it was acknowledged that twin city events continue to be based upon hospitality underpinned by assemblages of human and nonhuman actors (McCann and Ward, 2011). These included football boxes, official civic receptions, dinners and private lunches, the signing of documents, the naming of streets, the planting of trees, the unveiling of plaques and so on, as well as mutual exchanges of ‘performances’ by acrobats, professional and community theatre troupes, children’s groups and other cultural and community organizations as key elements necessary to facilitate the pursuit of knowledge and policy transfer: We wanted to develop a more economically focused activity but I think in addition to that we also have a very big dilemma in terms of the Chinese and Russians … I think it’s been an interesting activity, has been about exploiting and highlighting links around education in particular … we’ve got 16 or so young people going out to Manchester schools, and Manchester children going to Wuhan and Shanghai … and we’ve had 71 acrobats in China coming here … so there are some activities that we manage to focus on without going overboard. (Manchester City Council Officer) Football, but also most of them, people know that Manchester is [an] industrial city of Great Britain and many of them know that Manchester is twin city, St Petersburg. Manchester come … from Manchester come to our city and also have Manchester Street in St Petersburg … And you know in our, one of, in one of our parks there is an alley, alley of twin cities. And there is, there are many stones with names of twin cities with St Petersburg with years and with trees planted in those years by delegations which came … and Manchester also, they remember Manchester also, it’s presented on this alley of twin cities with St Petersburg. In … but they are, in Russian, the … Victory Park. (Local Authority Representative, St Petersburg) As these quotes show, the hospitality which represents the ‘success’ of friendship agreements continues to be constituted and represented through actors, activities, rituals and ceremonies through the ‘translation amongst incommensurate networks, division of labor among human and non-human actors, and place based constellations of distanciated practices’ (Doel and Hubbard, 2002: 361) rather than unmeasurable economic and political outputs of friendship agreements judged through formal auditing, monitoring and evaluation. Ruth Craggs (2014) has similarly drawn attention to performances of hospitality enacted in other moments of international relations, showing how the staging of friendly relations is at the heart of politics and diplomacy; as she puts it, it is important to attend to the ‘little things which together make up geopolitical life’ (Craggs, 2014: 92). Territorial and Relational Geographies of Co-operation and Competition A second overlapping theme to emerge from our research is that contradictions relating to the territorial and relational pressures of the 72 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES co-operative and competitive nature of city twinning were bound up with involvement in the transfer of policy and knowledge and what has argued to be a marginalization of ‘bottom-up’ localism in official twinning programs. On one hand, Clarke’s (2009a, 2009b) depiction of ‘care-in-a-hurry’ as a neo-liberal response to the formulation of ‘new urban politics’ can clearly be seen to have been a consequence of Manchester City Council’s involvement in increasing numbers of networks (alongside a lack of involvement in ‘less active’ and non-active friendship agreements), and through the emergence of ‘statecraft’ which does not deem all ‘bottomup’ localism and community relationships as important to official programs of twinning. This was particularly true in terms of what at times was the deliberate exclusion or marginalization of social and community groups from active friendship city events. Indeed, a leader of a youth community organization – whose offer for the children from their group, who had annually travelled to the friendship city and facilitated successful educational exchanges, to meet the visiting mayor was rejected by city council officers – suggested that ‘I don’t know what they thought our 8–10 year olds would say to the visiting mayor, but they thought somehow we might embarrass the city and ruin the visit’. In contrast, on the other hand, those elected councilors that were interviewed (unlike city council officers) who had often been involved in the setting up of friendship agreements or in reciprocal visits over decades, highlighted a very different relational view of the co-operative and competitive nature of city twinning. In particular, councilors pointed to their own active participation in both official and non-official relationships facilitated by involvement with a greater diversity of networks, circuits and webs of knowledge than those deemed to be of strategic importance by council officers and other public and private sector elites. Councilors pointed to their ability to actively facilitate and maintain links with a wider variety of groups, organizations and individuals from partner cities than specifically assigned as part of their official duties as twinning delegates. Cultural associations, trades unions, formal and informal neighborhood groups, business-to-business connections and friendships with individual actors were all highlighted as being valued and productive parts of friendship agreements through ‘non-official’ routes. Indeed, several councilors continued to draw on contacts developed over time with active groups who worked beyond local-authority sanctioned activities in both active and inactive friendship cities, in regular and ad-hoc ways. Such relationships ensured up-to-date understanding of the success and failure of urban development strategies undertaken elsewhere, and thus ensured that they gained knowledge and policy insights from their involvement in ‘city networks in a multiplicity of cities’ (Doel and Hubbard, 2002: 364). While Clarke (2009a) is thus right to suggest that bottom-up localism is often marginalized, our evidence shows that while certain artistic, social and community groups are being excluded from official twinning programs, others retain a high visibility at twinning events in order to represent ‘­official’ expressions of hospitality and friendship. However, beyond those institutions – organizations and individuals sanctioned by the city council to ‘reach out’ beyond the boundaries of the city through involvement in official twin city partnerships – the continuation of ‘non-official’ twinning relationships remains dependent on personal relationships or ad-hoc activities that nonetheless ensure Manchester’s continued successful engagement and co-operation with ‘official’ activities in meaningful ways. In this regard, Jon Binnie’s discussion of the use of twinning relationships and routeways by LGBTQ groups across Europe shows both the tactical extension of existing relations into new arenas (in this case, sexual politics) and the subversion of twinning hospitality ‘to create discomfort within the niceties of twinning arrangements’ (2014: 961). In his analysis, Twin Cities: Territorial and Relational Urbanism a different form of relational comparison is mobilized – though one that is shown to be problematic for its construction of some twin cities as more ‘advanced’ than others, seen as ‘backwards’ in relation to LGBTQ rights. Nevertheless, Binnie’s discussion reminds us of the need to play close attention to intended and unintended, formal and informal uses of twinning networks. A further important issue that arises in regard to the territoriality and relationalities of Manchester’s friendship agreements emerges from a lack of reflexivity by public and private sector elites about the contradictions and tensions bound up with both the co-operative and competitive nature of city twinning. What was surprising during the interviews was that while respondents rationalized the reasons and motivations for Manchester’s international relationships, there was very little reflection upon how the strategic and tailored approach was judged by their partners in the context of their own multiple twin city partnerships and ‘distanciated social relations’ (Doel and Hubbard, 2002: 354). For example, during interviews with representatives of Manchester’s friendship cities, the view that Manchester was a good ‘friend’ often emerged, but there was also an acknowledgement that other twinning partners took the relationship more seriously and applied more effort in maintaining the ‘friendship’: Milan, Corsica, Shanghai, Helsinki, Helsinki, yes, then in France, Bordeaux then, I think I already mentioned the Baltic States. … Maybe in this aspect the geographical reason can play some role, our nearest neighbors … but they are the most active, for instance Corsica, there is quite an active relations … in promoting all its possibilities, all its achievements and showing us in St Petersburg this year, Shanghai are doing their best also, you know. In this year but with Manchester I think we have all possibilities, all reasons to intensify … but other relations are stronger … (Local Authority Representative, St Petersburg) Such a sentiment was repeated through­ out interviews with representatives of Manchester’s friendship cites. As such, 73 while Manchester’s public and private sector elites believed that they are successfully balancing the (territorial) demands of economically focused relationships with the (relational) benefits of knowledge and policy exchange, they were unaware that their efforts are subject to the same sets of criteria, not only judged by their own friendships partners but by the twin cities of those partners. In these terms, Manchester’s choices around strategic, uneven and ambivalent investment in international partnerships, expressed through programs of twinning events, were seen, even by its active friendship city representatives, as being relatively less potent in terms of measures of co-operation and competitiveness, and thus Manchester was seen as less important than their other partner cities. Thus, while Manchester’s friendship agreements clearly highlight how ‘those involved in the making of “local” policy often do so in a self-consciously comparative and relational manner’ (Cook and Ward, 2011: 8), our research shows that public and private sector elites were less aware that their efforts and activities were similarly judged and subject to the same relational and territorial strategies of both Manchester’s friendship cities and their twin city partners around the world. In these terms, while Manchester does indeed have an international reputation for the successful regeneration of the city, and its football teams, media industries and creative sector, attracting regeneration tourists and invitations for new twinning agreements, the city’s approach to friendship agreements and other inter-urban networks are being judged less favorably than those of other cities in an urban hierarchy characterized by intense competition. However, just as with the outcomes of twinning partnerships themselves, it is perhaps difficult to judge the impact and effects of this approach through measurable outputs, although what was clear nonetheless from the interviews was that other cities are being judged as more ‘careful’, more hospitable, and thus more successful than Manchester 74 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES at maintaining friendship/twinning relationships and at balancing the conflicts and tensions that circulate around territorial/relational trans-urban networking. As such, while these findings reinforce notions of the ways in which ‘urban networks produce markedly different regional variations in concentration’, our research into Manchester’s friendship agreements works against the view of selfreflexive urban policy that is multi-scalar, process-oriented and ­context-sensitive (Doel and Hubbard, 2002: 356) CONCLUSION City twinning is a practice that has changed over time, associated with diverse actors and institutions whose motives and interests are varied. This chapter has shown that Manchester’s recent approach to trans-urban exchanges has been to adopt a strategic approach to friendship agreements based on a ‘worldly’ evaluation of the entrepreneurial benefits of twinning relationships in contrast to the ‘less formal’ city-to-city connections which were forged in previous decades. What emerges from our study is that while the City of Manchester’s engagement in urban policy networks has proliferated, leading to relationships that can be characterized as ‘care-in-a hurry’, there has also been a parallel re-articulation of ‘traditional’ values of hospitality and reciprocity associated with the early motivations of twin city partnerships. In terms of Manchester’s active friendship agreements, it is not audits of measurable outcomes which determine success, but rather its hospitality and interactions between human and non-human actors – previously negatively associated with ‘junkets’ – which remain central to strategies to enhance the city’s international competitiveness through collaboration (Craggs, 2014). In these terms ‘twinning’ is clearly not a fading legacy of post-war co-operation and reconciliation that has been marginalized by ‘new urban politics’, but is an example of what we might call contemporary ‘care-in-not-so-much-of-a-hurry’. Our analysis also signposts a number of ways in which the study of city twinning has much to contribute to an understanding of the ways in which political-economic transformations are ‘embodied in, mediated by and productive of widely varied political, cultural and economic geographies’ (Spark, 2006: 3). For example, evidence from our research shows that in seeking to balance the territorial demands of economic development with the relational demands of specific twinning partners, there is clearly a lack of awareness that the strategic choices made by Manchester City Council are themselves being judged (often unfavorably) in relational/strategic terms by cities (and a diverse range of organizations, institutions and actors) connected to Manchester directly or indirectly through its twinning activities. As Clarke (2012) writes, twinning and friendship relationships are a clear form of ‘actually existing comparative urbanism’. Our research exposes how policy and knowledge exchange are shaped by variable socialities (Amin and Thrift, 2004; Gibson and Kong, 2005) and furthermore that the ‘worldly’ choices which underpin city twinning offer important theoretical and empirical insights into the ways in which ‘existing political/policy contexts … [are underpinned by] differential social power relations [and] notions of territory’ (Jones, 2009: 488). As for city twinning itself, current budget cuts and changing political realities are producing new couplings (and decouplings) of cities as they work to build, maintain or cut friendly relations both regionally and globally (Falkenhain et al., 2012; Van Ewijk, 2014). Notes 1 This chapter is a revised version of Jayne, M., Hubbard, P. and Bell, D. (2013) ‘Twin cities: ­territorial and relational geographies of “worldly” Manchester’, Urban Studies, 50(2): 239–54. Twin Cities: Territorial and Relational Urbanism 2 Our ethnographic research from the City of ­Manchester (UK) includes 16 in-depth interviews undertaken with local authority officers, councilors and community groups involved in Manchester’s twinning activities. Nine in-depth interviews were also undertaken with representatives from Manchester’s twin partner cities of Rehovot (Israel), Chemnitz (Germany), C ­ ordoba (Spain), Faisalabad (Pakistan), Bilwi (­Nicaragua), St Petersburg (Russia), Wuhan (China), A ­ msterdam (The Netherlands) and Osaka (Japan). The quotes have been anonymized and are v­ erbatim with any editing highlighted. 3 The Core Cities group is a network of England’s major regional cities: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, ­ Nottingham and Sheffield – http://www.corecities.com; Eurocities is the network of 140 large cities in over 30 European countries – http://www. eurocities.eu/; Digital Cities collaborate in project activity and develop applications for applying IT for regeneration REFERENCES Amin, A. (2004) ‘Regions unbounded: towards a new politics of place’, Georafiska Annaler: Series B, 86(1): 33–44. Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (1995) ‘Globalisation, institutional “thickness” and the local economy’, in P. Healy, S. Cameron, S. Davoudi, G. Graham and L. Mandi-Pour (eds), Managing Cities: The New Urban Context. Chichester: John Wiley. Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002) Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity Baldersheim, H. 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(1991) ‘The twinning of the world: sister cities in geographic and historical ­perspective’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81(1): 1–31. 6 Idealizing the European City in a Neoliberal Age Philip Lawton Within urban studies, the notion of the ‘European city’ as it has become re-­ ­ popularized in recent decades puts forward a particular set of principles about what European urbanization represents or, perhaps more accurately, how it can be defined. Bagnasco and Le Gales (2000), for example, hold up the ‘European city’ as being unique primarily on the basis of how it differs from North American cities. In evoking a form of neo-Weberian approach to the understanding of the ‘European city’, they highlight its difference on the basis of factors such as urban morphology, history, the urban system, political and social structures, and the role of the state. While Bagnasco and Le Gales (2000) are careful not to produce a particular trope of the ‘European city’, nevertheless it is made clear that there are differences that can be summarized as highlighting it as a distinct entity that is an essential component of being ‘European’. Indeed, such an idealization of the ‘European city’ can be traced to a form of reawakening of what it was felt the ‘European city’ is, or, should be that emerged through movements such as ‘Neo-Rationalism’ from the 1960s onwards (Rossi, 1982). It is also possible to identify a number of archetypes, such as, for example, the ‘Barcelona model’ from the 1980s and 1990s, and moving on to what might be labeled as the ‘Nordic Model’ of more recent years (Holgersen, 2014). Drawing upon examples that range from EU documents such as Cities of Tomorrow (European Commission, 2011), to the European Prize for Public Space, and the extolled virtues of ‘urbanity’ as contained in the lifestyle magazine Monocle, this chapter sets out to examine the evolution of the narrative of the ‘European city’ as it has evolved in recent decades. Throughout the chapter, the term ‘European city’ is used in a critical sense as a means of understanding the processes associated with its production and reproduction as a particular ideal of city making through various mediums. While the c­ hapter draws upon the notion of the ‘European city’, as it has evolved within debates since Idealizing the European City in a Neoliberal Age the 1960s, it aims to pay particular attention to the manner in which it has evolved in the context of shifting expectations and the formation of a powerful spatial imaginary which brings together architecture, city making and neoliberal forms of urban governance, particularly since the 1980s (Gospodini, 2002). While this evolution has been gradual, it has entailed a significant transformation of the meanings and experiences of European cities and normalized a city image as befitting its transformation into a post-industrial city focused on the emergence of a ‘new economy’ of knowledge and creativity functions (Baeten, 2007; Bontje et al., 2011; Lawton and Punch, 2014; Molnar, 2010). Following from Latham (2006), the chapter recognizes that there can be no one entity perceived as representing the ‘European city’. The adaptation of ideals related to the ‘European city’ within different contexts throughout Europe can thus be viewed as something simultaneously relational and ­territorial (Lawton and Punch, 2014; McCann and Ward, 2010). Yet, part of the motivation for this chapter lies in the continued evocation of a ‘European city’ as an entity that exists, albeit perhaps more as a form of floating ideal that is portrayed within policy documents, newspapers and lifestyle magazines than something which is directly experienced within reality. Nevertheless, as will be argued within this chapter, even the existence of the ‘European city’ ideal as an imagined or idealization of reality garners influence in terms of city-making. While much of this is driven through the individual push of different municipalities competing for footloose industry and mobile workers, there exists a more general discourse through which its evocation can be understood. Furthermore, the chapter attempts to engage with some of the more problematic features of the idealization of the ‘European city’, and particularly that with place making as its central driving force. It argues that there is an increasing tendency to offer the renewal of public space, as part of a wider transformation of the city more 79 generally, as holding the key to a ‘better city’, but one that is driven largely through consumption-oriented approaches. While there is nothing inherently negative in investing in public space improvements, it is argued that in its current guise, the rhetoric of place making at best disguises wider social problems and at worst reinforces them. Moreover, it articulates a particular notion of the city as a space directed towards consumption patterns of the middle- and upper-classes at the expense of a more inclusive approach to city making. FROM BARCELONA TO MALMÖ: IMAGINING EUROPEAN URBAN SPACE To a large extent the notion of the ‘European city’ is played out as a form of reality that heralds an essentialist notion of urban life as pursued by policy makers throughout Europe. This is the pursuit of the trope of the ‘European city’, albeit one increasingly infused with a mixture of influences, which range from invoking a spirit of Jane Jacobs, to the ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002), policyled gentrification, and ‘smart urbanism’. In terms of urban space, this urban imaginary, broadly recognizable since the late 1980s, can be identified by the mixture of historic streetscapes with pedestrianized public realms often peppered with an iconic building by a famed architect (Gospodoni, 2002; McNeill, 1999), all of which seek to further a form of European city competitiveness. The manner in which these different factors come together is summarized by Lawton and Punch (2014: 865) as follows: With city authorities paying a greater level of attention towards other cities internationally for inspiration, the ideal of the ‘European city’ has spread to represent a cross-city and cross-cultural ideal of harmonious social interaction associated with the middle class, which takes place within surroundings presented as befitting of refined and dignified patterns of urban life. 80 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Here, the circular logic at work becomes somewhat clear, whereby the fabric of the city comes to be associated with the ideal forms of social life in the city. Within this imaginary, questions of inequality become sidelined. Instead, implicit within such renderings is a form of ‘trickle-down urbanism’, whereby the regeneration of once dilapidated or abandoned parts of the city become rejuvenated in a manner that proclaims a future of prosperity for the city. That this rejuvenation encompasses the economic, social, and physical elements of regeneration is more often than not seen as enough to justify the claims that it will have a positive impact upon the general population. Moreover, that this form of rejuvenation draws upon a set of features – or an imaginary – that has often been associated with social inclusion and the promotion of public interaction gives further justification to its continued promotion. This is exemplified in the case of Barcelona, where what is promoted is an ideal of an inclusive and engaged form of urban regeneration as it has evolved since the early 1980s. This was summarized by Degen and García (2012: 1024–5) as follows: The ‘Reconstruction of Barcelona’, as it was ­officially labelled, favoured not only political participation (a persistent demand from the neighbourhood civic movement), but also provided the opportunity to build a reinvented local culture and identity, expressed in the design of public spaces for civic participation (McNeill, 1999). As is continued by Degen and García (2012), urban design was seen to reflect the newfound freedom of expression in the city as it emerged from Franco’s rule. However, as they go on to outline, the evolution of the ‘Barcelona model’ since the 1980s has been marked by a shift away from the dominance of factors of identity and inclusion to one in which design comes to be associated more directly with the promotion of the knowledge economy and intensified rounds of property investment (Charnock et al., 2014; Degen and García, 2012). The influence of the ‘Barcelona model’ had a profound impact throughout the European urban hierarchy, from the local scale, such as Dublin’s Temple Bar (Lawton and Punch, 2014) to its widespread inclusion within New Labour’s ‘Urban Renaissance’ of the mid- to late-1990s (Helms et al., 2007). Thus, the evolution of the ‘Barcelona model’ can be seen as bound up with the wider evolution of the ‘European city’ as it became adapted to suit the political and economic terrain of various cities throughout Europe. Indeed, arguably, the late 1990s can be seen as a turning point of sorts in terms of the representation of the ‘European city’. Earlier manifestations of its reappraisal were marked by a focus on notions of ‘memory’, as can be identified within the Neo-Rationalist approach of Aldo Rossi (Hebbert, 2005, 2006) and sociallyprogressive ideals of inclusion associated with Barcelona of the early 1980s (Degen and García, 2012). However, by the late 1990s, the urban imaginary of the ‘European city’ had come together with the various elements associated with entrepreneurialism in copperfastening an urban competitiveness agenda. One of the more powerful elements of the official approach to urban transformation of the ‘European city’ since the mid-1990s or so is the extent to which it draws upon a powerful and seductive urban imaginary. This is a city image that combines a mixture of historic architecture, upgraded for tourist-oriented or cultural uses or middle-class residential use, with contemporary ‘statement’ buildings by renowned architects such as Santiago Calatrava or Daniel Libeskind. Indeed, one of the driving forces of the ‘European City’ of the last two decades has been its acceptance, and promotion, amongst a set of actors from the realms of architecture and urbanism. In as much as it sits in opposition to the city associated with car-based transit and its associated model of sprawl, the ‘European city’ is widely perceived as a ‘progressive’ alternative. The ‘European city’ has therefore come to be seen as representing the virtues of the Idealizing the European City in a Neoliberal Age ‘good city’, albeit in a manner that incorporates and further promotes a set of processes that are deeply embedded within processes of a highly neoliberalized economic terrain (Baeten, 2007). While the imaginary of the ‘European city’ revolves around set of ‘soft’ features such as walkability, cycling and ‘good urban form’, its deepening shift towards a market-dominated approach has also at times entailed a darker side associated with an increasingly imbalanced approach towards the poor (BAVO, 2007). Baeten (2001), for example, outlines in detail a moralizing approach in Brussels, with a then emerging tendency to remove the poor from sight in the promotion of the tourist market. Moreover, a wide set of literature, including MacLeod (2002) and Atkinson (2003), has demonstrated the revanchist attitudes towards ‘undesirables’ in the promotion of an ideal landscape of consumption. Here, the literature demonstrates the extent to which newly emerging policies tend towards the sanitization of urban space with the desire to promote a favorable environment for consumption. It is also of note that, if anything, the upholding of the image of a highly neoliberalized notion of the ‘European city’, as espousing a set of principles deemed to contain the virtues of the ‘good city’, has been given further strength in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 (Charnock et al., 2014; Holgersen, 2014). This will be returned to at a later point in the chapter, with a focus on Malmö. Of key importance in terms of this chapter is the manner in which an imaginary of the ‘European city’ serves to normalize and legitimize a set of increasingly uneven practices within contemporary cities. While it is difficult to delineate with certainty the manner in which the image of the ‘European city’ is rolled out, there are a number of dimensions that can be identified. These include the role of policy mediators engaged in professional circuits, the promotion of particular highprofile individuals, and the role of urbanoriented forms of media. 81 The ideals of the European city are thus spread through overlapping networks of power, each seeking to convey a particular ideal of the good city. Here, the work of McCann (2011) on policy mobilities becomes of particular importance. While much of this work has demonstrated the extent to which governance strategies travel from place to place (Peck, 2012), a significant amount of the travelling ‘European city’ has been judged specifically upon the basis of urban design principles and the promotion of what is deemed a more comfortable living environment (see Lawton and Punch, 2014). Here, there is a strong role played by ‘policy tourists’, seeking out best practice from ­cities that are deemed to be successful. As is outlined by González (2011) and Temenos and McCann (2013), policy tourism becomes a highly influential means by which ideas travel from place to place. Moreover, in as much as it becomes highly mediated by key actors in the host city, it is highly selective in terms of the elements that are borrowed or adopted, with the ideal image often being perceived as being directly transmittable. While local actors shape much of the process of policy tourism, there is also a strong role for particular high-profile individuals who become central figures in the dissemination of ideals. This includes key individuals such as the aforementioned architects, Daniel Libeskind or Santiago Calatrava. However, it also includes figures engaged in the wider economic dynamic of cities, such as Richard Florida, or in the promotion of wider urban design strategies, such as Jan Gehl. Gehl is of particular note in as much as he has been a vehement proponent of cities based around the needs of pedestrians over those of cars. Taking his inspiration from Italian cities in the 1960s, Gehl subsequently both studied and influenced a shift in approach to the city center of Copenhagen towards one centered around the pedestrian and the bike. That his ideals have had a direct influence upon cities such as London, New York, and Sydney is illustrative of the extent of shift over recent 82 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES decades in the influence of the promotion of a ‘European’ ideal of pedestrian-oriented cities. Indeed, with such approaches perceived as being of increasing importance for their economic viability, his ideals have taken on a greater global relevancy, being adapted to suit a wider variety of contexts. The increase in intensity and mobility of ideals such as those promoted by Gehl also points to the shift in the role of different forms of media in the dissemination of such. While Gehl has had a direct and active influence through the output of key publications, such as Life Between Buildings (2011), this is intensified through interest from outside bodies with an ability to disseminate such ideals. For example, in recent years Gehl has become a figure of reverence within online urban publications such as ‘The City Fix’ and ‘Metropolis’.1 The example of Gehl points to the more general extent to which the online world has increased the ability for know­ ledge to move at an increasingly rapid rate on a global scale, with social media adding to this intensity. Indeed, with its ability to promote niche interests, the digital age demonstrates the extent to which it is possible to roll out particular urban ideals in a manicured and pristine manner without the often-messy baggage of real-life situations and politics. Arguably, this increases the potential for different ideals to be literally downloaded as quick fixes for the myriad of problems facing cities today, no matter what the particularities of the specific place might be. This chapter will now seek to critically unpack the manner in which a particular ideal of the ‘European city’ is produced, reproduced, and, at times, quite literally ‘sold’ as offering an ideal way of life. The structural transformation of European cities in recent years has been influenced at a variety of scales of engagement, all of which, in some way or another look to promote livability as a central tenet. What follows draws upon examples ranging from the EU, the European Prize for Public Space, to Monocle magazine. Scales of Engagement The operationalization of the ‘European city’ can be witnessed at a number of scales. For example, lately, the European Union has taken an increased interest in the promotion of cities as focal points of the European economy, and notions of European society more generally. How deeply embedded these notions are has become apparent in the development of a new ‘Urban Agenda’ within the European Union. During a conference in February 2014, entitled ‘Cities of Tomorrow: Investing in Europe’, which followed on from the title of the EU document, Cities of Tomorrow (European Commission, 2011), this approach was made explicit. While the dominant narrative recognized the myriad set of problems facing European cities in terms of inequality and exclusion, the mantra that these would be solved through continued engagement with an economic set of beliefs predominated. Within this approach, there is an embedded notion that ‘innovation’ can be the means by which a more inclusive urban Europe would come to be a reality. In outlining the contribution of cities to Europe 2020, it is posited that they will make contributions in terms of ‘smart growth’, ‘green growth’, and ‘inclusive growth’ (European Commission, 2011). Pointedly, it is ‘smart growth’ that is placed at the forefront of such renderings: Cities concentrate the largest proportion of the population with higher education. They are at the forefront in implementing innovation strategies. Innovation indicators such as patent intensity demonstrate that there is a higher innovation activity in cities than in countries as a whole. Innovation output is particularly high in the very large agglomerations. The three flagship projects – the ‘Digital Agenda for Europe’, the ‘Innovation Union’ and ‘Youth on the Move’ – address a series of urban challenges such as: exploitation of the full potential of information and communication technology for better health care, a cleaner environment and easier access to public services; the development of innovation partnerships for smarter and cleaner urban mobility; the reduction of the number of early school leavers and the support for youth at risk, young entrepreneurs and self-employment. (European Commission, 2011: 6) Idealizing the European City in a Neoliberal Age Thus, embedded within notions of the future of the ‘European city’ is an ideal where social inclusion and all other elements of an idealized city will be led through innovative practices. Yet, how exactly such elements will be joined together remains less clear. Moreover, such invocations repeat the tendency for cities – and particularly central cities – to be perceived as stand-alone entities, with a lack of recourse to the realities of wealth differentiation now evident throughout Europe. Embedded within such an approach is a tightly manicured urban imaginary which rolls out mantras of ‘innovation’, ‘smartness’ and ‘creativity’ in an unproblematic manner as saviours of the urban future. The focus upon innovation builds upon and reinforces an already-existing set of prescriptions around creativity as associated with European cities (Bontje et al., 2011). This can be witnessed through various sources at a variety of scales. Holgersen (2014), for example, draws upon the example of Malmö in emphasizing the connections between urban transformation and wider economic restructuring. Indeed, as a means of demonstrating the manner in which the image of the neoliberal ‘European city’ builds upon and repackages earlier embedded principles, the example of Malmö neatly demonstrates how the new image of the ‘European city’ draws upon and updates the myth of the egalitarian city of the welfare state. As summarized by Holgersen (2014: 290), ‘Postwar Malmö was a model of Swedish progress and modernity … It is based on a classical Swedish welfare model in terms of social housing, urban planning, welfare organization and industrial production’. In the context of post-industrialization, between the 1970s and 1990s, the example of Malmö reads in a similar manner to other post-industrial cities, with industrial decline and an associated rise in unemployment. As Holgersen goes on to outline – and again, in keeping with wider processes evolving throughout Europe from the 1980s onwards – through the development of a ‘vision work’, 83 the city was subsequently transformed in a manner which combined the knowledge economy with new investments in infrastructure and landmark buildings, such as the ‘Turning Torso’ tower by Santiago Calatrava. In as much as it built upon an earlier incarnation of the city, the new look Malmö came to embody an ideal ‘socially innovative city’, which according to URBACT should be emulated by other places throughout Europe (Guidoum, 2010; see also Holgersen, 2014). While the term ‘vision work’ is perhaps unique to the example of Malmö, it points to a ubiquitous feature of contemporary European urbanism, that of the high-profile inner city regeneration project that combines urban design with a shift to the knowledge economy wherein a form of serial replication becomes the norm. This is a form of replication that brings together a selective assortment of different parts, including ideals such as the ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative class’ (Baeten, 2007; Peck, 2012). Over the last decade the shift to the creative-knowledge economy has become a ubiquitous feature of economic and social shifts taking place in European cities (Bontje et al., 2011). While drawing on the example of Amsterdam, Peck perhaps best captures the significance of the ‘creative class’ in a European context more broadly: The language of creativity provides a means of freshening up this urban-entrepreneurial discourse, without upsetting established interests. And just as before, the most tangible prize is very often not economic growth itself, but discretionary public investment, allocated on a competitive (or ‘challenge’) basis to those cities best positioned to articulate a vision of creative growth. (2012: 473–4) Moreover, as is also highlighted by Peck’s analysis, far be it from the economic downturn to bring into question the creativity ‘articles of faith’; in many cases, this agenda has been further expanded and strengthened (Bontje and Lawton, 2013). That the manner in which this is being done serves to normalize these factors as containing the virtues of 84 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES ‘urbanity’ is further evidence of their increased importance. The synthesis of urban form, design and the knowledge economy can thus be seen as a key driver of the emergence of the new ‘European city’. Indeed, to a large degree there is a form of symbiotic relationship between the promotion of the city as a center of creativity, innovation, and, more recently, design. The most tangible of such is perhaps emphasized by the transformation of the image of the city according to up-todate design principles, which simultaneously draw upon historic ideals of European urbanity and newly emerging ideals of urban space. THE VIRTUES OF ‘EUROPEAN PUBLIC SPACE’: THE ROLE OF PRIZES AND LIVABILITY RANKINGS One of the more problematic elements of current approaches to the ‘European city’ is the manner in which discourses around urban public space serve to either hide or justify a set of processes that are often highly economized and, at a further extreme, exclusionary in their nature. There has, in short, emerged a notion of public space that pits normative forms of interaction in public space as being representative of what the ‘European city’ is or should become. There are a number of scales at which this can be identified. These range from the celebration of urban space through particular prizes to the embodiment of what represents urban ‘livability’ within contemporary lifestyle magazines. An illustrative manner in which public space can be read as being representative of the ‘good city’ is the example of the European Prize for Public Space, which has been running since 2000 and is organized by the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB). In a similar vein to many other elucidations of the ‘European city’, CCCB invokes a notion of the European city as something that is a defining feature of Europe: It is probable that one of Europe’s greatest contributions to humanity has been its particular way of conceiving and experiencing the urban fact. In its longevity, density and complexity, and endowed with a human scale, extraordinary cultural diversity and universally representative public spaces, the European city is, without doubt, one of the chief assets of the Old Continent. However, in a world that is ever more built-up and globalised, and in these times of uncertainty, confusion and inequality, the European model of the city is endangered, even in Europe itself. Yet this selfsame model may also be seen as representing a highly promising tradition when the aim is to ensure that coexistence between strangers in an urban habitat is more reasonable and democratic, more sustain­ able and fair. (CCCB)2 Here, public urban space is deemed to contain the possibility of holding up new forms of inclusion and civic engagement that are deemed ‘European’. Moreover, as is made explicit through the prize, the merits of public space are based on the positive virtues of new insertions through design ­ interventions. While to a certain degree recognizing the conflictual nature of public space, more often than not, within the Prize for Public Space, urban space is presented as an isolated container of the ‘public’. The production of urban space is reduced to a vision of engagement that envisages architectural interventions as reclaiming the city through design insertions. It is a rendering of urban space that remains largely disengaged from the politics of production of public space, both in terms of everyday political engagement and the wider politics of urban space. The spaces are presented based on their transformation of a once neglected area, or an area dominated by traffic, which has been ‘given back to the people’, largely on the basis of being walkeable or communal. It is a highly essentialized normative vision of public space with design as a lead driver. In terms of the social production of space, there remain key challenges as to the structural shifts leading to such alterations – including cycles of disinvestment and reinvestment – and how such space fits within Idealizing the European City in a Neoliberal Age wider economic, political and social restructuring of cities in which the altered spaces sit. Moreover, often missing is a discussion over for whom such spaces are developed, including discussions around the politics of inclusion and exclusion. Pointedly and as if to downplay the distinction of different modes of power in influencing inclusion and exclusion from public space, long-time jury ­member Dietmar Steiner commented: In reality … it doesn’t matter whether urban public space is under public or private management, nor whether it constitutes real or virtual space. Every point of access and activity in this space requires ‘political negotiation’. Left-wing complaints about growing privatization of public space – the transformation of plazas into shopping malls – cannot stand reality. (2010: 41) Management – no matter of what form – is thus deemed a necessity in order to uphold the virtues of the design insertion – which is extolled for embodying a normative notion of the ‘public’. From a general perspective the approach of the CCCB ignores any critical engagement with the wider context in which public space is transformed and the contestations over how it evolves, bar a celebration of ‘memory’ as being reappraised through a design intervention. The role of power is recognized, but it is presented largely ­ un-problematically and as a matter of fact. This is space as it is ‘designed’, not space as it is produced through daily action, nor through the political-economic restructuring of cities, which itself is bound up with a wider set of processes that are often exclusionary in nature. It is, however, of note that there is at least one occasion where the CCCB has recognized the importance of informal interventions in urban space. This is the example of the Acampada en la Puerta del Sol in Madrid, as it took shape to challenge the economic crisis in Spain in 2011.3 While the intervention stands as an example of people producing and claiming public space in the context of wider political and economic realities, and was celebrated by CCCB as such, what is perhaps most striking is how it is outlined as 85 a ‘special category’ and in the history of the Prize for Public Space is an isolated example of such. In this regard, the prize maintains a very particular imaginary which perceives public space as being characterized by a largely design-led agenda, where new insertions are perceived as solutions to problems, such as vacancy and deindustrialization, the causes of which go largely unexamined. While the CCCB prize essentializes a notion of European urbanity, and serves to fetishize a notion of public space as an almost depoliticized arena, it has as its c­ entral aim a desire to promote public engagement within urban space, which perhaps may serve as a point of departure in future imaginaries of European urban space. A second and perhaps more illustrative example of the promotion of the idealization of European urban public space emerges through its rendering within lifestyle magazines such as Monocle. Monocle describes itself as ‘a magazine briefing on global affairs, business, culture, design and much more’. In outlining its desired reach, it aims to engage a ‘­globally minded audience’ who is ‘hungry for opportunities and experiences beyond their national ­borders’.4 Monocle presents the (urban) world as a sleek and sophisticated – if not simultaneously laid back – atmosphere of ‘creatives’. Even a glance through the various adverts gives an indication of the readership it is targeting: Philippe Starck Bathrooms next to the €17 Million ‘Nauta Air 130’ Super Yacht, followed by a specially crafted wooden Hasselblad camera. When taken in combination, Monocle imbues a vision of the world as a place in which a global elite can move from city to city with relative ease. While there is a focus on the urban throughout each edition, it is perhaps within its yearly Quality of Life in Cities edition that its ideal urban image becomes most apparent. Here, Monocle seeks out the traits of what are deemed to be sought after in contemporary cities. While the rankings are global in terms of selection, it is European cities that tend to predominate, albeit with 86 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Tokyo becoming number 1 in recent years. For example, for the years 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, at least six of the top ten ‘most livable cities’ according to Monocle’s rankings have been located in Europe. Indeed, in 2012, the top five consisted of Zurich, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Vienna, and Munich. This Eurocentricism is often evoked in reference to the idealization of those features of cities deemed to summarize what the ‘European city’ is all about; this is the city of outdoor cafes, comfortable shopping streets, converted waterfronts and high-quality cycling infrastructure. It is a seductive city which fits neatly within already existing ideals of urban transformation that city authorities not only find hard to refute, but which they latch on to and come to embrace with gusto. The description of the 2013 winner, Copenhagen, is perhaps illuminating in this regard. After a short introduction commenting on how Copenhagen has changed over the last decade, its new image is elucidated as follows: These days, if the weather is even slightly permitting, [Copenhagers] bathe in the harbor swimming pools and lounge beside the waterfront. There’s a great barista or gelateria on every street, and not a week goes by without some or other festival erupting, be it film, music, art or food. There is the clubbers’ street party, Distortion; documentary festival CPH: Dox; Copenhagen Cooking; or the latest, the clunkily-named, but actually rather excellent, Wondercool – a February arts umbrella. (Monocle, 2013: 32) The ideal city according to Monocle is therefore the laid-back space where people can pack in a number of ‘experiences’ in one day, whether it be outdoor activities or a relaxing café or bar that is normally located in a recently transformed part of town. The focus on such a lifestyle magazine may seem somewhat frivolous, yet it has some very serious connotations. This is summarized by Moreno as follows: The off-the-cuff assertion that there is a spatial economic ‘golden mean’ of place-making is easy to dismiss. However, the tone of Monocle is ­ ecidedly serious, promoted as ‘a briefing on global d affairs, business, culture and design’ its intention is, ostensibly, to ‘influence’ discourse on the kind of places cities should produce. (2012: 349) Winning the title of ‘most livable city’ is therefore not just a passing side note, but something to be aspired to and to use as a means of heralding the city as a ‘successful place’. That Copenhagen’s rank of Number 1 for 2013 garnered press releases from the official Danish tourist website, the Copenhagen tourist website and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark points to significance attested to such designations. Moreover, as if to further beckon the approval of city authorities, and give a further veneer of legitimacy, Monocle makes sure to comment on how the transformations brought about have all been carried out by Social Democratic mayors. It is as though somehow the city image projected becomes one that is socially progressive while in reality promoting a city that is biased towards a select group of individuals. Importantly, as also commented by Moreno (2012), it is the ‘self-regarding tone’ of such approaches to notions of urbanity that is of key importance in such renderings of city life. It is a continuation of the transformation of the city according to the assumed tastes of an ever-evolving ‘creative class’ as the rightful heirs to the city. It is, as is often put forward within Monocle magazine, a recreation of the city according to what a highly mobile class of people have come to expect, if not demand, in cities. The urban competitiveness game takes the existence of those key factors of infrastructure for granted and seeks for a city that will offer the experiences they are seeking. This is the pinnacle of what Moreno (2012: 349) describes as a ‘synthesis of urban design and urban governance’. The experiences revolve around a rendering of the urban neighborhood as a meld of pieces of European ‘urbanity’ (albeit perhaps viewed through the lens of Jane Jacobs in a US context), comfortable streets and high quality Idealizing the European City in a Neoliberal Age amenities, bringing together a host of elements that now define the type of city sought by municipalities. The city as promoted within the pages of Monocle therefore comes to be seen as a real or viable city by various local actors aspiring to make their city visible on the global stage. In a manner that both reflects and reinforces Peck’s (2012) assertions about the ‘­creative city’, this urban imagery also serves to reinforce an already existing strategy of urban transformation as being what should be aspired to. Perhaps most important – and most worrying – however, is that the manner in which the transformation of Copenhagen is promoted within Monocle magazine serves to render invisible the severe social struggles over place. As is emphasized by the work of Baeten (2007) and Hansen (2006), the reality of Copenhagen’s recent ‘renaissance’ has involved a set of processes that are often severely imbalanced in terms of the approach and outcome. The comparison in descriptions of the Sydhavn area of Copenhagen is striking in this regard. As is outlined by Monocle: ‘We’ve already seen Sydhavn (the southern harbour) and the new town of Ørestad blossom with some interesting hotels, offices, waterfront housing and the magnificent new home for the national broadcaster, Danmarks Radio. Nordhavn (the north harbour) is well underway, with the new carbon-neutral United Nations City Complex now completed’ (Monocle, 2013: 36). Yet, as is demonstrated by Hansen (2006), the transformation of places such as Sydhavn as part of the promotion of Copenhagen as a ‘Wonderful City’ entailed an explicitly aggressive approach to urban transformation. In illustrating this tendency, Hansen quotes a planner in Sydhavn who openly admits to a desire to remove those deemed undesirable in order to make room for ‘proper tax-payers’ (Hansen, 2006: 109). This is further seen in paraphrasing a former head of planning as follows: ‘The means are to attract capital and the “economically sustainable” people and to get rid of the 87 “economically unsustainable” people, “the trash”’ (Hansen, 2006: 118). With perhaps a prescient vision of the future representation of Copenhagen in magazines such as Monocle, Hansen thus demonstrates the highly unequal manner by which contemporary European cities are shaped. This is not so much an egalitarian and inclusive city to be aspired to, but a highly exclusionary neoliberal city (Hansen, 2006). It is also worth noting the changeable nature of the Monocle rankings. Despite being ranked number one for three years in a row, the 2015 rankings placed Copenhagen in tenth place. The reasons for this were outlined as follows: Though always a contender for the top spot, this year Copenhagen has fallen. While the Danish capital remains a paragon in terms of public transport, culture, restaurants and business, 2015 has not started well. First there were the 14 February shootings outside a freedom-of-speech event and the city synagogue, resulting in three deaths (including the shooter). Then came the decline in the contentment ratings: the UN’s latest World Happiness Report has Denmark third, not first. (Monocle, 2015: 60) Thus, in line with the fickleness of the super-charged entrepreneurial city of the ­jet-set class, Monocle is not interested in even acknowledging deeply rooted social challenges until they are literally expressed in extreme form. It is as if there is an expectation that the city should adhere to Moncole’s reductionist reading, where other social realities don’t exist until they emerge above the surface in the form of either a terrorist attack or some form of happiness metric. It is instead focused on depicting the city as a depthless entity, whose sole purpose is to provide the lifestyle choices required by those who can afford to dip in to cities scattered across the globe. It may pay lip service to questions of equality, through for example, social housing, or rental costs, but all this does is to add to an allure of self-­ satisfaction that the cities being visited are ‘good’. 88 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to examine the evolution of the notion of the ‘European city’ over recent decades. It has been particularly focused on the manner in which the ideal is engaged with at different articulations, ranging from its promotion by different municipalities detailed within the relevant literature, to the scale of the European Union and wider media discourse. It has argued that the normative vision of the ‘European city’ and its associated discourse serves to glorify and justify an imbalanced approach to urban transformation. The manner in which the notion of the ‘European city’ – in a similar vein to Jane Jacobs’ sanitized vision of the city – has caught on within elite circles of planning and architectural discourse is not without its repercussions. The example of ‘Create Streets’ detailed in Tom Slater’s contribution to this volume is a case in point (Chapter 8). There is very often an explicit overtone of class-inflected stigmatization of urban forms that sit outside the comfort zone of the discourse of urbanity. It is as though the promotion of the ‘soft’ street of up-­ market interaction should be what all cities should seek. In short, the manner in which this urban ideal, albeit one that is differentiated based on particularities of place, has managed to become part of wider discourses about the city can be viewed as a worrying trend. In as much as it pits the ‘good city’ and its associated imagery as being the natural home of what is often quite evidently only one small portion of society – a ‘creative class’ of sorts – it becomes demarcated as an elite city with its associated challenges, such as distanciation and segregation. Moreover, by extension, it normalizes a set of processes that see it as a form of salvation from the post-industrial dereliction that has gone before. While very often such projects have the strap-line of promoting the economic, social, and cultural regeneration of an area, the reality is very often very different. This approach can be witnessed in cities from Dublin to Hamburg and Marseille. It is a city image that co-opts the ‘liberal’ city of the 1960s and 1970s and reworks it in its own image. That this is carried out under a mantra of ‘reclaiming public space’ from cars and other uses associated with the modernist city allows it to be perceived as progressive and forward looking. In summary, one of the more problematic elements of this city ideal is the extent to which it has been widely perceived to embody the specific traits of ‘urbanity’. The seductive image of bike lanes and consumption spaces has served to blinker a deeper reading of urban issues and association problem solving. There is a task to look underneath the surface of new urban interventions and seek to enquire what processes are masked or what, in a more general sense, do these interventions represent and to whom are they aimed. At its strongest, the endeavors of the CCCB hold out a promise of new potentials in public space. Yet, too often there is a tendency to reduce the discussions of European urbanization to a form of ‘Euro-Essentialist’ notion of the city, where it is framed as offering something unique to aspire to, based largely on design interventions lacking in any thorough engagement with the multidimensional nature of public space. While perhaps there is something more progressive hidden within this framing, it also presents a very real danger of ignoring the challenges facing European cities, many of which have structural causes. That urban public space comes to be seen as symbolic of positive implementations is one thing, but there is also a need to understand the wider dynamics that serve to produce such spaces in the first place. Too often, the politics of and politics in public space become ignored in favor of a stripped-down world of isolated uses and consumption-based practices. In this case, we are presented with a vision of what are predominantly central urban spaces as being isolated and bounded, as though self-emerging Idealizing the European City in a Neoliberal Age and set aside from the urban region in which they are situated, and the processes through which it is produced. It is a vision of the city that seeks to render everyday engagement as depoliticized and replaced by consumption and nonconflictual interaction (BAVO, 2007) as though this is the ‘public’. It is also a vision of the city that serves to hide the very means of its own production, particularly the manner in which it is so deeply embedded within highly uneven forms of urban transformation such as is evidenced in the continued marketization of housing in recent decades (Madden and Marcuse, 2016). Looking beyond this discourse, there is the potential to reframe what the future of European urbanization might look like. Indeed, in a similar vein to the disregard of the suburban reality of European urbanization of the last half century or so, the potential emerges to engage in a future that takes the various processes that produce and reproduce socio-spatial inequalities seriously and seeks to address them. This needs to move beyond the assumptions of ‘trickle-down urbanism’ of recent decades and seek means by which inclusion can be garnered in a manner that does not place urban form at its center. Moreover, this chapter has not dealt with the hugely significant forms of social mobilization emerging in cities throughout Europe in the wake of austerity. That those everyday urban issues, such as housing, are becoming increasingly central to media and political debates points towards potential new openings for the future of European cities. There is a significant need for municipalities to take such realities seriously and move beyond the continued engagement with an idealization of urban space as associated with emergent knowledge economy and with the consumption habits of the ‘creative class’ as being representative of the future of European ­ ­cities. This perhaps may form a point of departure for future engagement with the notion of the ‘European city’. 89 Notes 1 http://thecityfix.com/blog/urbanism-hall-famejan-gehl-integrates-humanity-urban-designcopenhangen-cities-for-people-dario-hidalgo/ and http://www.metropolismag.com/Point-ofView/August-2015/Q-A-Jan-Gehl-on-MakingCities-Healthier-Densifying-Societies-and-theReal-Meaning-of-Architecture/ 2 http://www.publicspace.org/en/post/the-newprogramme-europe-city-has-been-launched-touphold-a-european-idea-of-the-city (accessed 30 January 2014). 3 The Acampada en la Puerta del Sol was formed in opposition to the dominance of political discourse by the banking and political sectors in Spain and the severe inequalities emerging in the context of the Global Financial Crisis, along with corruption scandals and the need for good-quality housing: http://www.publicspace. org/en/works/g001-acampada-en-la-puertadel-sol 4 http://monocle.com/about/ (accessed 6 February 2014). It is worth noting that the editor-in-chief of Monocle, Tyler Brule, plays a key role in promoting the magazine, and embodies a lifestyle that is promoted throughout. Brule, who prior to M ­ onocle was a co-founder of the travel, design and lifestyle magazine, Wallpaper*, can be seen as a self-styled member of the jet-set international class. His ‘Fast Lane’ column in the Weekend ­Edition of the Financial Times evokes his lifestyle as he sojourns from city to city, visit­ ing design shows and staying in up-market boutique hotels. The world that he describes is one unimaginable for most of the world’s population, yet it is described with an air of passivity that almost makes it seem as if anyone could have it. REFERENCES Atkinson, R. (2003) ‘Domestication by cappuccino or a revenge on urban space? Control and empowerment in the management of public spaces’, Urban Studies, 40(9): 1829–43. Bagnasco, A. and Le Gales, P. (2000) Cities in Contemporary Europe. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Baeten, G. (2001) ‘Clichés of urban doom: the dystopian politics of metaphors for the 90 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES ­ nequal city – a view from Brussels’, Inter­ u national Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(1): 55–69. Baeten, G. (2007) ‘The uses and deprivation of the neoliberal city’, in BAVO (ed.), Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers. BAVO (2007) Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers. Bontje, M. and Lawton, P. (2013) ‘Mobile policies and shifting contexts: city-regional competitiveness strategies in Amsterdam and Dublin’, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 104(4): 397–409. Bontje, M., Musterd, S., Kovács, Z. and Murie, A. (2011) ‘Pathways toward European creative knowledge city-regions’, Urban Geography, 32(1): 80–104. Charnock, C., Purcell, T.F. and Ribera-Fumaz, R. (2014) ‘City of rents: the limits to the ­Barcelona model of urban competitiveness’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(1): 198–217. Degen, M. and García, M. (2012) ‘The transformation of the “Barcelona model”: an analysis of culture, urban regeneration and governance’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36(5): 1022–38. European Commission (2011) Cities of Tomorrow: Challenges, Visions, Ways Forward. Brussels: European Commission. Florida, R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Gehl, J. (2011) Life Between Buildings. Tr. J. Koch. Washington, DC: Island Press. González, S. (2011) ‘Bilbao and Barcelona “in motion”: how urban regeneration “models” travel and mutate in the global flows of policy tourism’, Urban Studies, 48: 1397–418. Gospodini, A. (2002) ‘European cities in competition and new “uses” of urban design’, Journal of Urban Design, 7(1): 59–73. Guidoum, Y. (2010) URBACT Cities Respond to the Economic Crisis: Malmö – Areabased Programmes for Completing the Recovery from the 1980’s Crisis. Brussels: URBACT. Hansen, A.L. (2006) Space Wars and the New Urban Imperialism. Lund: Lund University Press. Hebbert, M. (2005) ‘The street as locus of collective memory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23(4): 581–96. Hebbert, M. (2006) ‘Town planning versus urbanismo’, Planning Perspectives, 21(3): 233–51. Helms, G., Atkinson, R. and MacLeod, G. (2007) ‘Securing the city: urban renaissance, policing and social regulation’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 14(4): 266–76. Holgersen, S. (2014) ‘Urban responses to the economic crisis: confirmation of urban policies as crisis management in Malmö’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(1): 285–301. Latham, A. (2006) ‘Euro-commentary: Anglophone urban studies and the European city: some comments on interpreting Berlin’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 13(1): 88–92. Lawton, P. and Punch, M. (2014) ‘Urban governance and the “European city”: ideals and realities in Dublin, Ireland’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(3): 864–85. MacLeod, G. (2002) ‘From urban entrepreneurialism to a “revanchist city”? On the spatial injustices of Glasgow’s renaissance’, Antipode, 34(3): 602–24. Madden, D. and Marcuse, P. (2016) In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, Verso: London. McCann, E. (2011) ‘Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: toward a research agenda’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(1): 107–30. McCann, E. and Ward, K. (2010) ‘Relationality/ territoriality: toward a conceptualization of cities in the world’, Geoforum, 41: 175–84. McNeill, D. (1999) Urban Change and the European Left: Tales from the New Barcelona, Routledge: London. Molnar, V. (2010) ‘The cultural production of locality: reclaiming the “European city” in post-wall Berlin’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34(2): 281–309. Monocle (2013) ‘Our 25 cities for living, working, late nights and fresh starts’, 65(7). Idealizing the European City in a Neoliberal Age Monocle (2015) ‘Is this your perfect match? We name the best places to call home’, 85(9). Moreno, L. (2012) ‘Looking backward towards the critique of neo-modernity’, City, 16(3): 345–54. Peck, J. (2012) ‘Recreative city: Amsterdam, vehicular ideas and the adaptive spaces of creativity policy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36(3): 462–85. 91 Rossi, A. (1982) The Architecture of the City. Tr. D. Ghirardo and J. Ockman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Steiner, D. (2010) ‘A decade of awards’, in In favour of Public Space: Ten Years of the European Prize for Urban Public Space. ­Barcelona: Actar. Temenos, C. and McCann, E. (2013) ‘Geo­ graphies of Policy Mobilities’, Geography Compass, 7(5): 344–57. 7 City Branding as a Governance Strategy Jasper Eshuis and Erik-Hans Klijn INTRODUCTION The Upsurge of City Branding as a Governance Strategy City branding has become widely used as governance strategy to create favorable images of cities, and attract various target groups to cities. City branding has become an urban governance strategy for managing perceptions about places, such as perceptions about the identity of a city or opportunities in the city. Cities all over the world, both large and small, have launched branding campaigns to position themselves in the minds of citizens, tourists and investors. In the USA, numerous cities have applied branding for several decades now (see Gold and Ward, 1994). In Europe and Australia, place branding is commonly applied, and also numerous Asian cities, such as Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Tokyo, position themselves via branding (Berg and Björner, 2014; Braun, 2012; Dinnie, 2011). The same goes for South American cities such as Bogotá and Montevideo (Hartmann, 2011; Kalandides, 2011) and cities such as Dubai in the Middle East (Stephens Balakrishnan, 2008). City branding is not only used at city level, but also at district and community level. Especially in regeneration programs and new city developments, it has been used to attract investors and new residents (for example, Bennett and Savani, 2003; Eshuis and Edelenbos, 2009). Communities may also be branded as tourist destinations, as with the striking examples of favelas in India, South Africa or Colombia that are branded for ­purposes of ‘slum tourism’ (see, for example, Dürr and Jaffe, 2012; Dyson, 2012; Russo, 2013). For many cities, city branding has become more than only creating images; in addition, the city brand has become one of the guidelines directing urban development. Cities all over the world have introduced marketingled urban governance strategies, including advanced branding strategies. These cities City Branding as a Governance Strategy align their policies and urban development with the brand, in order to strengthen their brand (cf. Kavaratzis, 2008). Greenberg (2008) describes how for example the branding of New York was entwined with probusiness restructuring of (fiscal) policies. Place branding has evolved from applying promotional techniques for purposes such as increasing tourism, to branding as an integral part of urban governance (Eshuis and Edwards, 2013; Klijn et al., 2012). In other words, city branding has become influential not only at the symbolic level, but has also become a genuine governance instrument that plays a role at the level of urban planning, policy making and concrete urban development. In marketing terms, branding is intertwined with product development. City Branding Fits with Developments in Society and Governance The popular use of city branding can be understood against the background of a number of developments in society and urban governance. Modern society is characterized by visual culture (Bekkers and Moody, 2014; Rose, 2001; Wurman, 1989). Visual media such as television, movies and the internet now reach masses of people. Images play an elementary role in communication about places. A growing number of citizens no longer obtain information from newspapers or written documents, but from TV or the internet (Bennett, 2009). Intertwined with the development of the visual culture, is the phenomenon of information overload (Wurman, 1989). Information overload refers to the idea that people face more information than they can process and understand. The problem is no longer a lack of information, but an excess of information. In dealing with information overload, people need to selectively attend to information. Information overload gives rise to an economy of attention. Important questions 93 have become how to process the incoming information and how to reach audiences. In this context, many public and private parties search for easily processed images that catch public attention. Brands are images that can function as heuristic tools through which planners and citizens process complex place identities (Eshuis and Klijn, 2012). Brands are useful in this context because they draw on visuals and emotion-based communication that easily attract attention. In other words, brands are information carriers that thrive in the context of a visual culture in which media attention plays an important role. Therefore cities specifically draw on branding to ­communicate and position themselves via visual media. The positioning and branding of cities has come to be seen as crucial because the view has become dominant that cities compete in a global market for investors, companies, tourists, and inhabitants (see, for example, Berg and Björner, 2014; Braun, 2008; Zenker et al., 2013). In this context cities wish to position themselves and distinguish themselves from their competitors. They draw on brands to locate themselves and their assets in relation to other cities in the minds of their target groups (Björner and Berg, 2014). Interlinked with the idea that cities compete in a global market, cities have developed neo-liberal urban policies (Greenberg, 2008; Hackworth, 2007) and become ‘entrepreneurial cities’ (Hall and Hubbard, 1998). They aim to decrease state regulation and introduce private sector strategies. Marketing-led ­strategies and branding fit well with objectives of decreasing state regulation and ­introducing private sector strategies. Adding to this, the fact that urban governance involves networks of interdependent public and private parties (see, for e­ xample, McGuirk, 2000) means that city governments have to charm and appeal to, for example, private investors, developers, and other social actors for financial resources and knowledge. Governments do not often have sufficient resources and power to implement 94 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES all policies on their own. For the realization of their goals, governmental organizations but also the other stakeholders need to motivate other parties to participate and invest in urban development processes. Governance has developed in such a way that charming, engaging, and appealing to multiple parties has become highly important. Branding is therefore used to enthuse, activate, and bind stakeholders. To summarize, in the context of the developments described above, branding is used to fulfill three main functions in urban governance (see also Eshuis and Klijn, 2012): (1) the framing and managing of perceptions about cities and their development; (2) the activation and binding of actors to the city; and (3) communication to the wider environment via the media. THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF CITY BRANDING Forms of city marketing and city branding have been used for a long time. This section describes the historical development from city promotion, to city marketing and then to city branding. It shows how early promotion was mainly sending messages from the topdown via advertisements, how marketing puts more stress on receiving messages because it centers around fulfilling consumers’ needs, and how the development towards branding adds an emotional and psychological dimension to city marketing. Ward and Gold (1994) describe how during times of colonial expansion places were promoted to draw new migrants to Australia and North America. They also show how seaside resorts and historic towns have promoted themselves for ages. The positioning of cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be characterized as promotion (see Ward, 1998; Ward and Gold, 1994). Characteristic of promotion is that it is about sending out messages, and that it is a communicative add-on rather than an integral part of urban planning and policy making. Thus in the heyday of city promotion, urban policies ­ and plans were developed and implemented, and later in separate processes promotional ­messages were created to sell the city. The sending of messages occurred mainly via advertisements. These put forward positive aspects of the city, often in a wordy manner describing the strong features of ­ ­cities (for example, Ward, 1998). As Gold and Ward (1994: 11) put it: [place promotion] typically gave chapter and verse to about just about everything – municipal parks, cultural facilities, floral gardens, bathing pools, crazy golf, hours of sunshine, schools, local rates and the timings of market days. There was a clear reluctance to market a place solely on image ­association: the place itself had to be carefully and tediously delineated. The drawbacks of this approach, which were acknowledged later by scholars and practitioners, included a lack of clear profile and distinctive image, and a message that could not be processed quickly and remembered easily (see, for example, Ward and Gold, 1994). Place promotion thus differed from later forms of city branding: first, it was strongly product-oriented (instead of consumer-­ oriented); second, it drew largely on words and explanation (rather than images and emotive stimuli); third, place promotion tended to be uncoupled from place development and policy making. Thus, place promotion reflects classic marketing that was oriented at communicating the qualities and performance of products (cf. Kotler et al., 1999). The assumption was that consumers would buy the product that offers the highest quality and performs best. Later, the emphasis in marketing science and practice shifted towards consumer value, or the question of what is valuable for consumers. This idea is illustrated by Kotler’s example that consumers do not buy a drill but a hole in the wall (Kotler et al., 1999). Modern marketing more strongly revolves around consumer needs, City Branding as a Governance Strategy and is not only about sending out messages but as much about finding out what consumers want and receiving their messages. Modern approaches to marketing started to become used more often by cities during the second half of the twentieth century as a part of re-inventing post-industrial cities (Ward, 1998). A famous example is Glasgow with its ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign. Paddison (1993: 346) highlights that city marketing was used as the first step in what was recognised would be a slow process of urban revival. A well-orchestrated campaign could serve as an end in its own right, over the short term to meet political objectives; over the longer term, it was only one of a number of means to the goal of urban revivification. City marketing became more sophisticated in the sense that more attention was paid to composing a good city marketing mix. This included not only promotion, but also ­financial incentives, organizational policies, and product development (Ashworth and Voogd, 1994). City marketing became more integrated with urban development: ‘the ­ transformation of traditional manufacturing cities … into “post-industrial” service centres has necessitated a remaking of the built environment and a re-imaging of the city’ (Holcomb, 1994: 115). Cities wanted to change the direction of their development, and increasingly held the view that the creation of a new identity and image with the aid of marketing was an integral part of that. Many cities tried to become more ‘entrepreneurial’ (cf. Hall and Hubbard, 1998). Politicians and planners saw marketing and image management as crucial for urban development (Hannigan, 2003; Paddison, 1993) and turned to marketing-led urban development (Greenberg, 2008). The idea gained currency that marketing should not only improve images but also urban reality. This materialized in the form of spectacular architecture and ‘flagships’, to create areas which would exemplify the aspired identity and brand of the city, but also other forms of 95 ‘hard-branding’ whereby spatial elements of cities were consciously adapted to strengthen the city brand (Evans, 2003). Further, in several cities policies were aligned with the identity aspired to in the brand, as in the earlier mentioned example of New York’s fiscal policies being aligned with its brand as the world’s financial center (Greenberg, 2003, 2008). Increasingly, place marketing came to play a more important role in urban governance, especially in the US and UK, and more money was spent on it. Along with this development, place marketing became more professional (Holcomb, 1994). It used to be done solely by governments, without special expertise, but professional marketing agencies were increasingly involved. Target Groups With the involvement of marketing professionals, the thinking in terms of target groups started to develop. Whereas much of the oldfashioned advertising was untargeted, more modern marketing campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s were often geared towards specific target groups, such as potential buyers of residences from the upper-middle class. However, many cities still avoid choosing a specific target group in their marketing, ­following a common logic in public policies that local governments should serve all their citizens, not only particular groups. The risk of not choosing a target group is that one may end up with a bland, nondescript campaign, which is not attractive to any target group. Notwithstanding the broad approach many cities take in their marketing, residents have often been neglected as a target group since more attention is often paid to attracting external target groups such as visitors and investors (Aitken and Campelo, 2011; Kavaratzis, 2012). However, this seems to be changing. A recent nationwide survey in the Netherlands shows that 96 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES city ­marketers view residents as an important target group (Eshuis et al., 2014). Facilitating city pride and binding residents are important goals of contemporary city marketing and branding. From Marketing to Branding The developments in city marketing and branding have often followed broader developments in marketing science and practice, and this also accounts for the shift from marketing to branding. Towards the end of the twentieth century, marketers started to emphasize that consumer value is not only about the performance of the product but also about symbolic, psychological, and emotional value. Brands respond to this through providing experiential benefits (for example, cognitive stimulation and sensory pleasures triggered by the brand) and symbolic benefits (for example, how the brand adds to prestige, fashionableness, or the social identity of its user) (Keller, 1993). Increasingly, cities used branding to evoke emotional, mental, and psychological associations with a city (Kavaratzis, 2008). City brands have been applied to differentiate cities from their competitors by coupling ­specific symbolic or experiential features to it. Thus, city brands aim to distinguish one city from another by giving it an image, ‘feel’, and meaning of its own. Another development is that branding has changed from being based on classical marketing instruments such as slogans, logos, and advertisements to mainly revolving around events (organizing experiences), word-ofmouth, and developing brand communities (virtual and real). The latter also reflects a movement away from the brand owner doing all the branding towards focusing on strategies that stimulate the brand users to communicate about the brand themselves. Here we see a shift towards city branding as a process of co-production between public parties, private parties, and the citizenry. BRANDING AS A GOVERNANCE STRATEGY City branding refers to the application of brands to influence perceptions about a city by emphasizing certain functional, symbolic, and experiential aspects (cf. Kavaratzis, 2008; Kotler and Gertner, 2002). The city brand is a symbol that suggests ways of experiencing or relating to a city (cf. Arvidsson, 2006). Building on a definition by Kotler et al. (1999), we define a city brand as a symbolic construct that consists of a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of these, intended to identify the city and differentiate it from other cities by adding particular meaning to the place. City brands aim to give meaning – to products and services – that is valuable in the psychological and social life of target groups (cf. Arvidsson, 2006; Danesi, 2006). Someone buying a house in a posh neighborhood, for instance, is not only buying a house, but also identity and social status. A city brand is thus a sign with a denotative function that identifies an object. It also has a connotative function, as it evokes the associations through which the city is imbued with cultural meaning (cf. Danesi, 2006). For example, the city of Berlin often evokes such associations as ‘edgy’ and ‘artistic’. These associations make the city valuable to visitors both psychologically and socially by offering a connection with a certain style and community of people. Brands thus help to differentiate products from their competitors by coupling specific symbolic or experiential features to a product. A house in an upmarket community is not just a house, it is a residence for successful people. The brand also adds value: it allows house owners or developers to sell the house for a premium price (cf. De Chernatony and Dall’Olmo Riley, 1998). City branding is about influencing people’s ideas by forging particular emotional and psychological associations with the city. Thereby it is important to note that brands are not only City Branding as a Governance Strategy used to influence perceptions of external target groups such as visitors or investors, but also perceptions of ‘internal target groups’ or stakeholders such as politicians or civil servants. As such, brands may come to function as guidelines in urban development, for example when the brand values guide planning ­decisions regarding, for example, ­architecture in a regeneration area. Thus branding as governance strategy is about influencing perceptions through emotions and images, but also about influencing and directing actions of actors in the city. Branding is used to achieve three important governance functions (Eshuis and Klijn, 2012): (1) Influencing perceptions by providing specific images about policy problems and solutions. Providing images and associations influences the way people perceive problems and solutions to social and policy problems. Branding can serve the function of representing and positioning urban problems with certain policy solutions, and thus influence decision making in governance processes. Tony Blair’s New Labour was a view of the problem (not the government or the market being the problem, but the cooperation between the two) and of the solution (partnerships and joined-up government). Thus, one can say that brands provide more or less coherent views about policy problems and solutions. (2) Activating and binding actors. Complex governance processes – many urban planning processes are no exception to that – include many actors with different perceptions and strategies (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004). Thus governments in urban governance processes depend on a large number of actors and their resources. It is crucial to bind these actors to urban governance processes and secure their cooperation. Brands can help to bind actors around core ideas and motivate them to participate in these processes. (3) Facilitating the communication of governments and other actors with the outside world and especially the media. The important role of the media has already been mentioned at the start of this chapter, as well as the problem of information overload. Brands allow governments to easily communicate through relatively simple images and associations in a mediatized world 97 where messages have to fit certain formats (short, highly visual) and be biased (emotionalized) (see Bennett, 2009; Hjarvard, 2008). Brands fulfill these functions better than, for instance, large policy documents or in-depth statements. Thus, branding can be seen as a specific form of governance. It is a form of governance that distinguishes itself from other forms of g­ overnance like framing or ‘rational’ governance forms (which focus on, for example, providing financial incentives or rule making). Differences between Branding and Other Governance Approaches Branding is very much a governance strategy aimed at how people view the world. In that sense it is related to other governance strategies, such as framing (Schön and Rein, 1994), but it works rather differently. There are important differences between branding and other governance approaches, in particular rational and deliberative approaches. In traditional, rational approaches to governance, governments use scientific research to clarify policy problems and determine possible policy measures. Persuasive communication and extension are applied to disseminate research findings and policy decisions. The aim of perception management in rational approaches is to convince stakeholders through scientifically established information and planned extension (see, for example, Braybrooke and Lindblom, 1963). This form of perception management resembles classical forms of public relations through one-way communication. The rational approaches have been criticized widely for the assumption that societal problems and optimal policy solutions can be determined objectively, and for their inability to deal with ambiguity and differing perceptions among actors (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004). Deliberative approaches 98 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES that help actors reflect on their own perceptions and jointly construct new problem ­perceptions have been brought forward as an alternative (Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003). In deliberative approaches, the management of perceptions facilitates deliberation between actors to develop new frames and jointly accepted packages of solutions. Examples of this approach include processes of reframing (Lewicki et al., 2003; Schön and Rein, 1994) and integrative negotiation (Susskind and Cruikshank, 1987). Branding differs from the two forms of governance mentioned above in several ways. First, branding emphasizes the emotional and the psychological; it is not particularly aimed at deliberation or reason. Branding does not aim for systematic information processing and rational weighing of arguments, but rather affective and quick assessments based on heuristics. For example, cities are not primarily branded by providing fact sheets that compare the city with other ones; city branding is centered on evoking images and associating the city with feelings and impressionistic adjectives such as ‘lively’, ‘exciting’, or ‘beautiful’. Furthermore, branding works partly through the unconscious. People are largely unaware of the associations triggered by brands, and they do not commonly deliberate about them. Two Approaches to City Branding Now that we have discussed the general characteristics of city branding as a governance strategy, we take a closer look at two main approaches to city branding, namely the topdown and interactive approaches (cf. Eshuis and Klijn, 2012). These constitute two ends of a continuum, with little stakeholder influence at one end (top-down) and high stakeholder influence on the formulation of the brand at the other end (interactive). The topdown approach aims primarily to persuade stakeholders and sell the city product. The focus is on communicating the quality and performance of the branded city products (for example, low taxes or good infrastructure). Branding is used to add symbolic and emotional qualities to the place by imposing particular meanings from the top down. The local government sees itself as the brand owner and main brand manager, and takes the primary responsibility for developing the brand and implementing branding campaigns. At the other end of the continuum, the interactive approach revolves around the needs and wants of stakeholders, and creating brands that respond to them. Branding is no longer viewed primarily as selling, but as satisfying citizens’ needs (Lees-Marshment, 2004). This approach takes branding to be more effective when aimed at people’s wants. It is therefore necessary to understand the concerns and wishes of stakeholders and then design a brand that reflects this (LeesMarshment, 2004). Branding thus involves both the transmission and reception of messages. It is about responsiveness rather than persuasion. In this approach, city branding is a m ­ atter of co-production between public, private, and other social parties, rather than being centrally led by local government. Here, ­ local governments may consciously seek cooperation with museums and other tourist attractions, the hospitality industry, universities, citizens, and the most important companies because they consider them important partners who can support the city brand ­ in many ways, but also severely harm the brand if their communications and actions run counter to it. By involving stakeholders in the process of brand development, attempts can be made to include stakeholders’ values, feelings and stylistic preferences in the brand (Eshuis and Edwards, 2013; Eshuis et al., 2014). Stakeholders can also be involved as ­partners in the implementation of branding campaigns. City branding then works through multiple actors who are co-­ producers of the brand. Interactive branding may take place in so-called brand City Branding as a Governance Strategy communities (McAlexander et al., 2002; Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001). Brand communities are communities of people who feel mutually related because of their shared interest in a particular brand (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001). Brand communities create brands in interactive ways, having ‘an active interpretive function, with brand meaning being socially negotiated, rather than delivered unaltered’ (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001: 414). When there is an active brand community, the brand manager may choose a role that is more about facilitating the activities of the community than about creating the brand itself. The brand is being constructed in and through the activities of the community, for example, through social meetings and community festivals. Branding then becomes a strategy that activates and binds actors in a community or network of actors. USAGE AND EFFECTS OF BRANDING City branding can be applied for both marketing purposes and planning purposes. In the case of the former, branding is primarily aimed at satisfying and attracting target groups. When branding is used as a planning instrument, it functions as a guideline or compass in urban governance. Similarly, Ind and Watt (2006) suggest that brand definitions provide boundaries, set benchmarks, and create clarity about what is aspired to and what is not. Thus, a place brand at the community level can guide planning decisions on, for example, the appearance of the public space. The effects of branding as a marketing instrument are notoriously hard to e­ stablish. It is particularly hard to establish causal effects of marketing efforts, because how can one be sure that, for example, increased numbers of visitors or hotel occupancy in a city are caused by branding efforts? The establishment of causal effects requires (laboratory) experiments in which the effect of 99 a brand element or branding activity can be measured. In the private sector, quite a few experiments have been conducted which have established causal effects of branding, but regarding city branding there is very little evidence. Before turning to the evidence regarding the effects of city branding, we first discuss the effects of brands in the p­ rivate sector. Private sector brands can influence perceptions and associations about products and services (see Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1993). Brands can trigger favorable evaluations even regarding products that are new to the brand (Reast, 2005). The literature on private brands shows that brands can increase trust, because brands can operate as credible and consistent symbols of product quality, thus reducing perceived risk and influencing consumer choice (for example, Erdem et al., 2006). Regarding city branding, there is less evidence of direct causal effects. Even with the widely acclaimed ‘I love New York’ campaign, critics say there is no proof of any causal relationship between the campaign and increased tourism or business investments. Others emphasize that awareness about New York has gone up, and that perceptions about the city have become more positive since the beginning of the campaign (see Greenberg, 2008). They emphasize that all relevant indicators have increased since the start of the campaign. In fact, they point at correlations between branding efforts and other developments, in particular awareness of the city and more positive perceptions about the city. The discussion about the ‘I love New York’ campaign shows that the causal relationship between city branding and final outcomes such as economic development or attracting visitors to the city may be difficult to prove, but one can determine statistical correlations. However, to our knowledge such research has not been carried out yet. Research on effects of city branding has been very limited, as has also been elaborated by Zenker and Martin (2011). One of the rare exceptions is the study by Zenker and Beckman (2013), who 100 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES show how the city brand of Hamburg does trigger particular associations over others. Klijn et al. (2012) show that according to professionals in city marketing, there is a ­ positive effect of city branding on the attraction of target groups. Probably more evidence exists regarding how brands as planning instruments influence city planning when used by municipalities as a guideline in decision making (for example, De San Eugenio-Vela and BarniolCarcasona, 2015; Eshuis and Edwards, 2013; Eshuis et al., 2014; Greenberg, 2008). Eshuis et al. (2014) report a case where a community brand was used by the local government to select shops and companies that were to be allowed in a particular community. De San Eugenio-Vela and Barniol-Carcasona (2015) bring forward how brands as symbolic constructs come to shape local actors’ narratives about a place, which in turn shape decisionmaking processes. RISKS AND LIMITS OF BRANDING With the upsurge of city branding, several drawbacks and downsides of this governance strategy have become apparent. This section describes the risks (regarding democracy and ethics) and practical limitations (regarding manageability and limited results) of city branding as a governance strategy. Practical Limitations of Branding It has become clear that the effects of brands are hard to measure while at the same time many scholars are convinced of the impact that branding has (see Arvidsson, 2006; Greenberg, 2008). Taking a closer look at the literature in general we can find three categories of ‘practical’ limitations (see Eshuis and Klijn, 2012). Firstly, there are limitations in the reach of brands. Brands have to reflect in some way the product they are connected to. One cannot brand a poor and economically not very vibrant city as booming and innovative. And images that people hold about a city c­ annot be changed overnight, so this limits what can be achieved by brands. Secondly, brands must be interpreted; brands receive their influence through the perceptions and actions of a wide variety of actors. Thus, brands can be understood differently than intended. Alternatively, there may be counter-branding through ‘doppelgängerbrands’ (Giesler, 2012), whereby groups of citizens actively oppose city brands or try to give them another meaning. And then, of course, it is not easy to create a brand that suits all the different stakeholders that are relevant for city branding (Braun, 2012). Thus this second limitation points not only to the fact that branding as a governance process cannot always be controlled, but also to the fact that it may be very difficult to attain positive interpretations of the brand among the multiple stakeholders of a city. Thirdly, brands have a limited effect on actual decision-making and actions. Even if we disregard the first two limitations, there is still the question of whether influencing perceptions actually leads to different actions of actors, to increased visitor numbers, changes in policy decisions, etc. Several authors question, for instance, the influence of branding on the behavior of individual employees (see Blichfeldt, 2005). Thus, the last category of limitations emphasizes that even if brands succeed in influencing perceptions they might not be so effective in influencing behavior. Risks of Branding Apart from practical limitations, there are also more ethical objections to branding that may be more fundamental, especially when it comes to city branding as an activity in the public sphere. First of all, there are a wide range of critical remarks to branding City Branding as a Governance Strategy that emphasize that brands and branding focus on sales and consumption, instead of on the resolution of problems through deliberation, which is at the core of democratic decision-making. A sales-oriented way of designing and implementing public policy may neglect the public. It is also argued that branding favors a populist agenda and discourages addressing unpopular issues (Reeves et al., 2006). After all, unpopular issues are difficult to pack into attractive brands. These are all serious criticisms but probably most difficult to address is the criticism of distorted communication or even manipulation of the public. Especially in Anglo Saxon countries, where there is a more ‘reserved’ attitude towards the state, one can hear the criticism that branding leads to manipulation by the state. The question is posed: what mechanisms are built into the system to prevent governments from misusing branding to push citizens towards accepting their policies or even misleading citizens by providing attractive images and associations that have no relation to reality? This criticism is supported by the example of city brands that exaggerate positive images of cities and overlook, for instance, social deprivation and poverty (cf. Paddison, 1993). Greenberg (2008), for instance, argues that the New York City campaign has constructed an image of New York as the financial capital and tourist destination of the world but understates the other sides of New York, including poverty and the vibrant underground culture. Thus, a distorted, unrealistic picture is constructed, which neglects serious problems. To put it more strongly, this critique emphasizes that there is a very thin line between branding and propaganda, with the latter having strongly negative connotations. The fact that branding works partly through the unconscious and by associations further strengthens this criticism. This is also the line of argument of critics like Naomi Klein (2000), who see brands as manipulative tools of large firms to sell products. 101 One could say that this criticism and debate, as well as the negative c­ onnotations that come with manipulation and propaganda, form good checks and balances against the misuse of city branding. And city branding experts also claim that it is very difficult to sell something that is not there, and thus that brands have to represent the reality of cities. But this is probably not reassuring enough for branding’s critics, especially not those with a more ‘reserved’ attitude towards governmental steering of citizens’ perceptions. From a pragmatic point of view, one could argue that brands and branding have become prominent elements in governance processes in general, and in urban processes in particular. This fact of life calls out for more research in this area and also research done by those other than marketing scholars, to critically evaluate not only the effectiveness but also the process through which brands are constructed. A more interactive perspective on branding, involving stakeholders in the development and implementation of brands, not only helps to construct brands that better fit urban reality but also diminishes the risks of distortion and manipulation (see Eshuis et al., 2014). CONCLUSION: CITY BRANDING AS GOVERNANCE STRATEGY City branding has developed from promotion through top-down communication of logos and slogans in advertisements to a wide variety of strategies including hard branding, events organizing, and interactive branding in virtual communities. Although classic promotion remains an important element in many city branding campaigns, city branding has changed from a more classical marketing instrument into a genuine (new) governance strategy, one that is different from other governance strategies and that has consequences for relations with stakeholders. 102 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES City Branding as Emergent Governance Strategy As an emergent governance strategy, city branding is mostly used to influence perceptions of target groups such as tourists and investors, but it is also used as a guideline that influences the identity of the city, the spatial plans, and economic policies that are developed to strengthen the aspirational brand identity. A holistic branding strategy involves, in marketing terms, both image development and product development. Thus, city branding has become a governance strategy to influence city development not only at the symbolic level, but also at the level of policies, services, and physical developments in the city. Cities have applied branding in more or less interactive ways. City branding is often a matter of co-production between public and private parties, at least in Western countries. The role of citizens in the development and implementation of city branding strategies is often less pronounced. In city branding, citizens are commonly viewed as an important target group, which means that their needs and wants are considered important. However, their involvement in the development of the city brand is usually quite limited, since these processes are dominated by local governments and private parties – often in a public–private partnership. City Branding and the Relation with Stakeholders In city branding practice it is more common to view residents as consumers (whose needs and wants must be satisfied) rather than as citizens and co-producers (in the sense of active democratic participants) (Eshuis et al., 2014). Put differently, many practices of city branding imply a particular relationship between a city and its residents, namely a relationship as consumers of a city rather than citizens in a city. This tendency can be criticized, for if city branding influences urban policies and plans, then it touches upon conflicting values and preferences among the citizenry. This begs for forms of democratic deliberation based on active citizenship and democratic participation rather than consuming government services. Democratic deliberation becomes even more difficult if city branding relies strongly on influencing the unconscious of residents. Thus, there are several mechanisms at play in city branding, which form a risk to democratic urban governance. City branding stakeholders (including ­citizens), however, do have multiple opportunities to influence the brand, even if they are not formally involved in the brand development process. In particular, stakeholders can interpret the brand in their own way, and communicate their own messages, which may run counter to the brand. Thus, city brand strategies might see (more or less) strong counter-branding activities of stakeholders who do not accept the image and corresponding associations that are being presented (see Eshuis and Klijn, 2012). This means that there are limitations to city branding used as a top-down governance strategy as we have discussed in this chapter. In the case where significant numbers of stakeholders challenge the brand, branding might very well turn out to be counterproductive and hinder city-making processes. Launching a brand is thus not without risk; brands may be hijacked and backfire against the party launching the brand (cf. Van Buuren and Warner, 2014). This is most likely to happen when stakeholders are not involved in the development of the brand, and when city brands are too remote from urban reality as perceived by citizens. Having said this, there are also interesting developments where actors try to arrive at the joint development of city brands, and where city branding contributes to the development of an effective governance network. Such interactive branding processes may be used to City Branding as a Governance Strategy integrate citizens’ feelings and emotions into governance processes (Eshuis et al., 2014). In this way, city branding may be complementary to predominately rational approaches to urban governance, by helping to address the emotional side of governance processes, but also connect various stakeholders to governance processes and make them contribute to the brand. Ultimately, how city branding will affect the relations with stakeholders in the city is not only related to the strategy itself but also to the way it is used (more interactively or more like a classical marketing instrument). REFERENCES Aaker, D.A. (1991) Managing Brand Equity: Capitalizing on the Value of a Brand Name. New York: The Free Press. Aitken, R. and Campelo, A. (2011) ‘The four Rs of place branding’, Journal of Marketing Management, 27(9/10): 913–33. Arvidsson, A. (2006) Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge. Ashworth, G.J. and Voogd, H. (1994) ‘Marketing and place promotion’, in J.R. Gold and S.V. 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(2006) ‘Brands and breakthroughs: how brands help to focus creative decision making’, Brand Management, 13(4): 330–8. Kalandides, A. (2011) ‘City marketing for Bogotá: a case study in integrated place branding’, Journal of Place Management and Development, 4(3): 282–91. Kavaratzis, M. (2008) ‘From city marketing to city branding: an interdisciplinary analysis with reference to Amsterdam, Budapest and Athens’. PhD dissertation, Groningen University. Kavaratzis, M. (2012) ‘From “necessary evil” to necessity: stakeholders’ involvement in place branding’, Journal of Place Management and Development, 5(1): 7–19. Keller, K.L. (1993) ‘Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity’, Journal of Marketing, 57(1): 1–22. Klein, N. (2000) No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. London: Flamingo. Klijn, E.H., Eshuis, J. and Braun, E. (2012) ‘The influence of stakeholder involvement on the effectiveness of place branding’, Public ­Management Review, 14(4): 499–519. Koppenjan, J. and Klijn, E.H. (2004) Managing Uncertainties in Networks: A Network Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making. London: Routledge. Kotler, P. and Gertner, D. (2002) ‘Country as brand, product, and beyond: a place marketing and brand management perspective’, Brand Management, 9(4–5): 249–61. Kotler, P., Armstrong, G., Saunders, J. and Wong, V. (1999) Principles of Marketing. 2nd edn. London: Prentice Hall. Lees-Marshment, J. (2004) ‘Mis-marketing the conservatives: the limitations of style over substance’, The Political Quarterly, 75(4): 392–7. Lewicki, R., Gray, B. and Elliott, W.M. (eds) (2003) Making Sense of Intractable Environment Conflicts: Concepts and Cases. ­Washington, DC: Island Press. McAlexander, J.H., Schouten, J.W. and Koenig, H.F. (2002) ‘Building brand community’, Journal of Marketing, 66(1): 38–54. McGuirk, P. (2000) ‘Power and policy networks in urban governance: local government and property-led regeneration in Dublin’, Urban Studies, 37(4): 651–72. City Branding as a Governance Strategy Muniz, A.M. and O’Guinn, T.C. (2001) ‘Brand community’, Journal of Consumer Research, 27(4): 412–32. Paddison, R. (1993) ‘City marketing, image reconstruction and urban regeneration’, Urban Studies, 30(2): 339–50. Reast, J.D. (2005) ‘Brand trust and brand extension acceptance: the relationship’, Journal of Product and Brand Management, 14(1): 4–13. Reeves, P., De Chernatony, L. and Carrigan, M. (2006) ‘Building a political brand: ideology or voter-driven strategy’, Brand Management, 13(6): 418–28. Rose, G. (2001) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage. Russo, A.P. (2013) ‘Branding Brazilian slums through “freeware” cultural production: the case of Rio de Janeiro’, in F.M. Go and R. Govers (eds), International Place Branding Yearbook 2012. Basingstoke: Palgrave ­Macmillan. pp. 174–83. Schön, D.A. and Rein, M. (1994) Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies. New York: Basic Books. Stephens Balakrishnan, M. (2008) ‘Dubai – a star in the east: a case study in strategic ­destination branding’, Journal of Place Management and Development, 1(1): 62–91. 105 Susskind, L. and Cruikshank, J. (1987) Breaking the Impasse: Consensual Approaches to Resolving Public Disputes. New York: Basic Books. Van Buuren, A. and Warner, J. (2014) ‘From bypass to bathtub: backfiring policy labels in Dutch water governance’, Environment and Planning C, 32: 1000–16. Ward, S. (1998) Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, 1850– 2000. London: Routledge. Ward, S.V. and Gold, J.R. (1994) ‘Introduction’, in J.R. Gold and S.V. Ward (eds), Place ­Promotion: The Use of Publicity and Marketing to Sell Towns and Regions. Chichester: Wiley. pp 1–17. Wurman, R.S. (1989) Information Anxiety. New York: Doubleday Books. Zenker, S. and Beckman, S. (2013) ‘My place is not your place – different place brand know­ ledge by different target groups’, Journal of Place Management and Development, 6(1): 6–17. Zenker, S. and Martin, N. (2011) ‘Measuring success in place marketing and branding’, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 7(1): 32–41. Zenker, S., Eggers, F. and Farsky, M. (2013) ‘Putting a price tag on cities: insights into the competitive environment of places’, Cities, 30(1): 133–9. PART III Marginality, Risk and Resilience The concept of ‘marginality’ dates back originally to the Chicago School of urban sociology in the 1920s and 1930s. Its founder, Robert Park, coined the term ‘marginal man’ to describe an individual with one foot in each of ‘two different and refracting cultures’. Later, his student Everett Stonequist (1931) expanded this into a monograph, The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture. While this usage persists, the term marginality has evolved over time to take on a more group-oriented meaning. Notably, Loïc Wacquant (2008), the French urban ethnographer, introduced the concept of advanced marginality, which he describes as a form of socio-spatial relegation and exclusionary closure that crystallized in the Fordist city. In Chapter 8, Tom Slater reviews and evaluates the small but expanding scholarly literature on territorial stigmatization, a concept introduced by Wacquant (2007) in an article entitled ‘Territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality’. Marrying Goffman’s discussion of ‘stigma’ with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, Wacquant added the dimension of ‘place’. In his 2008 book, he claimed that territorial stigmatization is arguably the single most protrusive feature of the lived experience for urban dwellers trapped in ‘sulphurous zones’ (2008: 169). Slater notes that research on territorial stigmatization reveals how urban dwellers at the bottom of the class structure are discredited not simply because of their poverty, class position, ethno-racial origin or religious affiliation, but because of the places where they live. This ‘blemish of place’ or ‘symbolic defamation’ is very real for those who have been refused taxi service or fast food delivery or who have been unable to obtain mortgage credit because their address is ‘tainted’. More research is need into the production of territorial stigma, especially 108 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES the roles played by journalists, politicians, planners and intellectuals in the social construction of ‘contaminated’ neighbourhoods. Slater draws our attention to an unresolved analytic puzzle: Why does gentrification rarely occur in the most severely disinvested parts of the city where the ‘rent gap’ is the widest (and therefore promises the most profit)? The answer, he suggests, is that these areas are perceived as so toxic that this perception acts as a symbolic barrier or diversion to the circulation of capital. In Chapter 9, Caroline Wanjiku Kihato treats marginality as both a state of mind and a socio-spatial reality. Drawing on empirical data from five years of ethnographic research on the lived experiences of women from eight African nations who live in inner city Johannesburg (Joburg) as refugees and economic migrants, she introduces the concept of the ‘liminal city’. Those who stay on in the city’s interstices live as if suspended in society, ‘between and betwixt a romanticized past and an imagined future elsewhere’. Common assumptions about how to think about urban space, marginality and governance are called into question. Migrant women live in poverty but there is an opportunity for social mobility. They appear to be divorced from any meaningful contact with the state but the apparatus of governance intrudes into their lives on a daily basis. What we see is city life as a hybrid of formality and informality, legality and illegality. This raises serious questions about the efficacy of the ‘good governance’ policy prescription, a mantra for ailing cities across the African continent that has become especially popular with urban political scientists and international development experts. Marginalized urban communities are especially at risk during and after natural disasters. Nowhere is this more evident than in the trials and tribulations of disadvantaged African-American residents of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. When the storm hit, the transit system was so inadequate that people who did not own a car could not evacuate; nor was there a plan in place for using school buses or other transit vehicles (Newman et al., 2009: 6). Post-Katrina, poor, black neighbourhoods suffered a much slower recovery. Conventional sociological explanations posit that this should not be considered surprising, in so far as prevailing structures of inequality and racial discrimination are invariably reproduced in disasters. Some commentators go so far as to suggest that elites actually go out of their way to neglect African Americans and other minorities after such disasters – what Giroux (2006) calls the ‘politics of disposability’. An alternate explanation that has been gaining traction in some quarters pinpoints the critical role of social capital and networks in the ability of a community to withstand disaster and rebuild the infrastructure and ties that are at its foundation (Aldrich, 2012). This is articulated as building ‘resilience’. In Chapter 10, Kevin Fox Gotham and Brad Powers, sociologists at Tulane University in New Orleans, present a critical overview of debates over the applicability and utility of the concept of resilience as it is applied to post-disaster urban communities. The authors caution us that resilience cannot be understood as an attribute that communities possess to varying degrees which can be objectively measured by a set of quantifiable indicators. Rather, it is a dynamic, multi-level process, and a socially constructed category. As John Hannigan in Chapter 13 does for smart growth, Gotham and Powers interrogate how reliance in postdisaster urban communities is constructed and contested. Rather than being apolitical, resilience is often employed by policy makers and government agencies to bolster policies promoting a business-as-usual approach. Questions are thus raised: resilience of what, for whom, and for what purpose? Resilience, they conclude, should highlight the material challenges that marginalized communities face in overcoming adversity while attempting to recover from Marginality, Risk and Resilience disasters like that spawned by Hurricane Katrina. These include institutionalized discrimination, socio-economic exploitation, housing damage and lack of access to insurance, emergency relief organizations, community- and faith-based assistance, and private rebuilding resources. REFERENCES Aldrich, D.P. (2012) Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 109 Giroux, H. (2006) Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Newman, P., Beatley, T. and Bayer, H. (2009) Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change. Washington, DC: Island Press. Stonequist, E. (1931) The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture. New York: Scribner Wacquant, L. (2007) ‘Territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality’. Thesis Eleven 91(1): 66–77. Wacquant, L. (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Urban Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press. 8 Territorial Stigmatization: Symbolic Defamation and the Contemporary Metropolis To m S l a t e r Physical squalor is an affront to the order of society, which readily becomes associated with other signs of disorder in the public image. Crime, drunkenness, prostitution, feckless poverty, mental pathology do indeed cluster where housing is poorest – though not there only. Once this association has been taken for granted, any anomalous pattern of life embodied in shabby surroundings is easily assumed to be pathological, without much regard for the evidence. Bad housing thus becomes a symbol of complex discordances in the structure of society and so to be treated as if it were a cause of them. In this way, society hands its most intractable problems to professional administrators, who accept the ideals which underlie their assignment, but are neither trained nor required to search out the social implications. (Peter Marris, 1986: 53–4) ‘CREATE STREETS’? ‘Create Streets’ describes itself as ‘a nonpartisan social enterprise and independent research institute focusing on the built environment’, with a mission to ‘encourage the creation of more urban homes with terraced streets of houses and apartments rather than complex multi-storey buildings’.1 The brainchild of Nicholas Boys Smith, a director at Lloyds Banking Group, it campaigns for ‘a London-wide programme of community-led building and estate regeneration which could deliver the homes London needs while building homes that are popular and stand the test of time’. Create Streets first hit the UK headlines in January 2013, when it published its first report in conjunction with Policy Exchange, a highly influential right-wing think tank.2 Boys Smith co-authored the report with Alex Morton (who left Policy Exchange that year to become David Cameron’s special advisor on housing policy, until Cameron resigned in June 2016) and together they argued that high rise social housing blocks in London should be demolished to make way for low rise flats and terraced housing: 112 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES London has a large amount of social housing built as large multi-storey blocks from the 1950s to the 1970s. This housing is unpopular with the public. Nor, ironically, is it particularly high density. Replacing it with proper terraced housing would transform London, making London more attractive, benefitting residents, and potentially allowing a large increase in housing in the capital. Create Streets has therefore been created to encourage and facilitate the replacement of London’s multistorey housing and the development of brownfield sites with real houses in real streets. (Boys Smith and Morton, 2013: 5) Leaving aside the high probability that those living in ‘large multi-storey blocks’ feel that their houses and streets are already ‘real’, a call for demolition and displacement on this scale cannot be made without some sort of moralizing justification, and it is to be found in the language and symbols deployed in Chapter 3 of the report, entitled ‘Multi-storey housing is bad for its residents’ (including the subtitle ‘Multi-storey housing is more risky and makes people sadder, badder and lonelier’). Some illustrations: Other studies have found children in high-rises suffering from more bedwetting and temper tantrums and that the best predictor of juvenile delinquency was not population density but living in blocks of flats as opposed to houses. (Boys Smith and Morton, 2013: 30) [T]he evidence also suggests that tower blocks might even encourage suicide. Without wishing to be glib, tower blocks don’t just make you more depressed. They make it easier to kill yourself – you can jump. (Boys Smith and Morton, 2013: 30) The atomising and dehumanizing size of multi storey buildings makes it harder to form relationships or behave well toward your neighbours. (Boys Smith and Morton, 2013: 32) Multi-storey buildings can create a myriad of opportunities for crime due to their hard to police semi-private corridors, walkways and multiple escape routes. (Boys Smith and Morton, 2013: 32) The ‘evidence’ for such claims, contrary to being ‘unambiguous’ and ‘overwhelming’ (a word used multiple times), appears to be drawn from a few highly questionable studies in the fields of architecture/urban design and psychology, from some journalistic memoirs, and hammered home via obligatory and hagiographic appeals to the writings of modernist-bashers Jane Jacobs, Oscar Newman and Alice Coleman. No ethnographic accounts of life in high rise public housing are referenced, and the very few social scientific studies that are mentioned have been mined for quotations entirely wrenched out of their historical, social and geographical contexts. Furthermore, the authors falsely claim that high rise housing is ‘bad for you’ regardless of income or social status (avoiding the question of how to account for the explosive growth and appeal of luxury condominium towers in many large cities), and the obvious and pressing question of how to account for any ‘social problems’ in low rise or terraced housing is studiously – perhaps judiciously – ignored. Later on, and in the wake of a stunning deployment of numerous semantic battering rams (‘sink estate’, ‘ghetto’, ‘slum’, ‘spiral of decline’, ‘anti-social behaviour’), Boys Smith and Morton make their case for demolition under subheadings such as ‘Building attractive streets provides the best returns for the long term landowner’ and ‘Plugging into the rest of the city improves economic returns’.3 Perhaps anticipating some challenges to their drastic manifesto for a ‘London that is more pleasant for everyone’, they conclude, ‘This agenda is pro-housing and pro-growth, and would create a more beautiful and better London. We cannot allow a minority with vested interests to defeat it’ (Boys Smith and Morton, 2013: 69). The astounding hypocrisy of a banker and an organization describing itself as ‘David Cameron’s favourite think tank’ attempting to guard against ‘vested interests’ is, in this instance, something of a red herring. At the time of writing, Create Streets has had two major policy impacts; first, the March 2014 UK Budget followed its recommendations, cited its work, and created a £150m Estate Regeneration Fund; second, in April 2014 the UK Government commissioned Savills (a global real estate corporation with expertise in elite residential markets) TERRITORIAL STIGMATIZATION: SYMBOLIC DEFAMATION to investigate the potential of its proposals.4 In considering these policy impacts, it is crucial to register that the mission, the website and the publications of Create Streets all rely upon the production, reproduction and activation of stigmatizing images of particular urban places. Such disturbing yet lush materials invite a consideration of the concept and impact of territorial stigmatization vis-à-vis the transformations roiling lower-class districts of unequal cities, which in turn are always tightly tethered to strategies and skirmishes traversing circles of power. ANALYZING A ‘BLEMISH OF PLACE’: THEORETICAL GUIDANCE Urban studies, notwithstanding theoretical fads and countless claims of novel approaches and theoretical frameworks, remains dominated by two generic modes of analysis: the Chicago School human ecological tradition and the political-economic tradition (either its Marxist or Weberian variant). Both these modes of analysis arguably short-change the symbolic dimension of urban processes, and therefore preclude the possibility that urban poverty and marginality can be understood via intense scrutiny of the symbolic defamation of particular urban places. For centuries – and certainly since the mid-nineteenth century with the confluence of urbanization, industrialization and upper class fears – particular quarters, districts and locales have suffered from negative reputations, so it is rather surprising that the social scientific literature has paid rather limited attention to the symbolic defamation of places in comparison to the array of stigmatized circumstances addressed by scholars at both the individual and collective levels. Sociologists, geographers, psychologists and anthropologists have developed a substantial body of scholarship on the stigma attached to those experiencing, inter alia, unemployment, 113 poverty, social assistance, homelessness, mental illness, ethnic discrimination, HIV/ AIDS and single parenthood. This has not been matched by a sustained focus on the burdens carried by residents of places widely perceived as urban purgatories to be shunned and feared. The disgrace of residing in a notorious place can become affixed to personal identity and may prove to become – true to the Greek meaning and history of ‘stigma’ – an indelible mark during encounters with outsiders. It is only in recent years that a small (and growing) body of scholarship has emerged revealing that urban dwellers at the bottom of the class structure are discredited and devalued not simply because of their poverty, class position, ethno-racial origin or religious affiliation, but because of the places with which they are associated. Furthermore, as we saw in the opening example of Create Streets, and, as Keith notes, ‘the manner in which tower blocks, estates, quarters and neighbourhoods are described … [is] central to a debate about their future’ (2005: 65). It is therefore of both conceptual and political importance to dissect what Keith helpfully identifies as an ‘iterative relationship between the folknaming of city spaces and their official or analytical cartographies’ (2005: 63). The concept of territorial stigmatization was forged by the urban sociologist Loïc Wacquant in several publications that have generated significant attention among urban analysts across a range of social science disciplines (for example, Wacquant, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010). Based on his comparison of the structure, function and trajectory of the remnants of the black ghetto of Chicago’s south side with a working-class peripheral housing estate in La Courneuve, Paris, he documented and then analyzed the crystallization of what he termed a ‘blemish of place’ (2007: 67): the profound sense of neighborhood taint emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. It is instructive to read Wacquant’s recounting of his research experiences: 114 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES The high-level civil servants whom I interviewed [in Paris] all spoke of the deteriorating working-class districts of the urban periphery with anguish and disgust in their voices. Everything in their tone, their vocabulary, their postures and gestures expressed regret at being in charge of a mission and a population degraded and therefore degrading. Then I found the same feeling of disgust and indignity at the very bottom of the urban ladder, among the residents of the Quatre Mille housing project in the Parisian industrial periphery and among black Americans trapped in Chicago’s hyperghetto. (2009: 116–17) In the French case, stigmatization had reached such heights that those high-level civil servants ‘considered receiving an assignment in one of the officially designated “sensitive neighbourhoods”5 a personal black mark and an impediment to their career advancement’ (Wacquant, Slater and Pereira, 2014: 1272). These qualitative encounters required an analytic register, and Wacquant thus sought theoretical guidance from the work of Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu. In his foundational sociological study of stigma, Goffman (1963: 14–15), argued that individuals become ‘discredited’ and then ‘disqualified’ from society in three respects: ‘abominations of the body’ (for example, disability); ‘blemishes of individual character’ (imprisonment, addiction, unemployment, etc.); and ‘tribal stigma of race, nation and religion’. In all three, he posited a relational view, whereby an individual possesses ‘an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normals’. For Goffman, each and any form of bodily, moral and tribal stigma constituted ‘a social impediment, a major axis along which all other characteristics are measured and evaluated’ (Cohen, 2013: 114). To Goffman’s dissection of stigma, Wacquant married Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power. Bourdieu was always interested in symbolic struggles between different classes, and particularly in the ways in which agents, authorities and institutions attempt to impose a definition of the social world best suited to their own interests, where symbols become instruments of knowledge and communication in the production of consensus on the meaning of the social world. Symbolic power is, in Bourdieu’s words, a power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself, an almost magical power which enables one to obtain the equivalent of what is obtained through force (whether physical or economic), by virtue of the specific effect of mobilization. (1991: 170) Notably, Bourdieu’s theory was also relational, for symbolic power ‘is defined in and through a given relation between those who exercise power and those who submit to it’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 170). Wacquant (2007) added place both to Goffman’s three categories of social discredit, and to Bourdieu’s insistence that symbolic power is the ‘power of constructing reality’ (or the power of making representations stick and come true). The result is that these two theorists lead us closer to understanding urban marginality from above and below: Bourdieu works from above, following the flow of efficient representations from symbolic authorities such as state, science, church, the law, and journalism, down to their repercussions upon institutional operations, social practices, and the self; Goffman works from below, tracing the effects of procedures of sense-making and techniques of ‘management of spoiled identity’ across encounters and their aggregations into organizations. They can thus be wedded to advance our grasp of the ways in which noxious representations of space are produced, diffused, and harnessed in the field of power, by bureaucratic and commercial agencies, as well as in everyday life in ways that alter social identity, strategy, and structure. (Wacquant, Slater and Pereira, 2014: 1272–3) Wacquant claimed that territorial stigmatization is ‘arguably the single most protrusive feature of the lived experience of those trapped in these sulphurous zones’ (2008: 169), and two key aspects of his TERRITORIAL STIGMATIZATION: SYMBOLIC DEFAMATION conceptualization of territorial stigmatization bear stressing at this juncture. First, there are some areas of disrepute in many societies that have become nationally renowned and denigrated; we are dealing with a new and vamped up circuit of symbolic production, quite different from earlier portrayals of destitution and delinquency that smeared the working-class quarters of the industrial city. Now, it is not only policy elites and upperclass voyeurs who recoil at, mock, or slam a small set of notorious urban districts; it is also the citizenry at large (many of whom have never visited them), and sometimes even the residents of those districts. Second, territorial stigmatization is not reducible to the ‘spoiled identities’ of, for example, poverty, ethno-racial origin, working-class position, unemployment, and so on, even if it may be closely tied to them in certain contexts. We are seeing a phenomenon of spatial disgrace that has become so powerful that it is partially autonomized from other forms of stigmatization, exerting its own very real and deleterious effects. It is a considerable analytical challenge to disentangle the effects of territorial stigmatization from myriad other ways in which those residing in lower class districts of cities are disqualified and stained. Much of this challenge stems from the intense racialization of residents of tainted neighborhoods of relegation, which are so often portrayed in homogenizing socio-spatial terms (for example, black or immigrant or Muslim ‘ghetto’) when their demographic composition and cultural characteristics are in fact extremely diverse. Nonetheless, the challenge is vital for knowledge and understanding, not to mention for remedial action in the form of appropriate social policies and effective community activism. In recent years, there has been increasing research momentum around the concept of territorial stigmatization, partly spurred by Wacquant’s writings but particularly in response to various urban and social policy developments that appear to rely on the activation and (re)production of stigmatizing 115 images and discourses attached to neighborhoods of relegation. Studies are emerging from societies as diverse as Scotland, Canada, Portugal, Sweden, Australia, Poland, Israel, Brazil, Japan and South Africa, to name just a few. The emerging literature can be sorted into several sub-themes, which are useful to discuss in turn in order to reveal the state of the art vis-à-vis research on spatial taint, to identify some emerging trends, and to identify avenues for future inquiries. THE PRODUCTION OF TERRITORIAL STIGMA Link and Phelan’s highly cited review and critique of social scientific treatments of numerous forms of stigma is propelled by their dissatisfaction with what they saw as the ‘decidedly individualistic focus’ (2001: 366) of published research – a focus that funnels analytic attention towards the stigma itself, rather than towards the producers of the stigma and the discursive and social strategies used to produce it. To gain a more complete understanding of stigmatization, they call for scholarship to scrutinize the numerous techniques of stereotyping, labeling and ‘othering’ that occur alongside the separation, loss of status and discrimination felt by stigmatized individuals. Very few studies have taken up the challenge of tracing the production of territorial stigmatization. Hastings correctly noted ‘the lack of in-depth analysis of the causes of the phenomenon’ and how ‘causal frameworks tend to be implicit rather than explicit’ (2004: 137). Similarly, Pearce observed that ‘there is relatively little work examining broader concerns relating how local residents become “contaminated” by their area of residence’ (2012: 1922). In the diverse contexts in which place stigma is present, much work remains to be done to identify stigmatizing agents, institutions and policies – what Musterd refers to as ‘the roles played 116 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES by journalists, politicians, planners and intellectuals in the [social] construction process’ (2008: 108). In one recent study, Glasze et al. (2012: 1208) deployed lexicometric analysis to scrutinize how housing estates in Germany, France and Poland were portrayed in major national newspapers, and in all these contexts they found ‘discursive demarcations which constitute and reproduce spatial and social structures’. Their research is a major step forward in identifying the production of place stigma, but they are rather lonely voices in a field of inquiry that tends to focus on consequence rather than causation (for fascinating exceptions, see Power et al., 2013 and Schultz Larsen, 2014). It is perhaps unsurprising that some parts of cities suffer from negative reputations: they are typically working-class districts that have been subject to long-term systematic disinvestment, where unemployment tends to be higher and where the presence of the welfare state is clearer than in other parts of the city (for example, with inordinate densities of social housing), where levels of recent immigration are high or rising, and where street crime, vice, physical abandonment and dereliction are prevalent. But precisely how such areas become so widely shunned, feared and condemned over time, how negative images circulate in everyday discourse as well as in the media and political discussion, and how extreme events in these areas are taken to stand for the whole of those areas and impugn the civic standing of their residents in toto, are all research questions demanding further attention. Much remains to be learned about how the blemish of place is produced in different contexts, not least because of critically important distinctions in respect of, inter alia, welfare state regimes, modes of housing tenure, municipal governance and planning priorities, the political orientation of local and national media, and the organizational structure and influences of neighborhood associations. In the UK, the activities, publications and influence of right-wing think tanks in shaping the urban perceptions of politicians and their supporters make them key specialists in symbolic production vis-à-vis territorial stigmatization. Witness, for instance, the work of the misleadingly named Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a think tank set up in 2004 by the current Conservative Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan-Smith, following his visit to the defamed neighborhood of Easterhouse in Glasgow (see Slater, 2014). Following his lead, senior personnel from the CSJ now visit and paint scornful images of this neighborhood repeatedly (not to mention of numerous other infamous districts and, in particular, declining seaside towns)6 in their efforts to corroborate the need and elicit support for the regressive welfare reforms currently sweeping across Britain. Even a brief glance at a few of its reports and press releases reveals writers keen to portray themselves as ‘lonely voices of reason, as principled outsiders in a corrupt, distracted, and wrongheaded world’ (Peck, 2006: 682), when actually they speak for and serve the interests of the powerful and the dominant: 2013 is the year to tackle the tyranny of sink estates, no-go neighbourhoods and child poverty … Look a little closer at such neighbourhoods, and we see something deeper than physical dilapidation. Behind the front doors are far too many broken and chaotic families. … Many adults could work but don’t because when they do the maths, there’s nothing to be gained by coming off benefits. There’s usually a local school where a culture of low expectations and high truancy rates is a catalyst for underachievement and future welfare dependency. Alcohol abuse and drug addiction tend to flow through these estates like a river … (Guy, 2013: 10) In a thorough analysis of the history and sociology of think tanks, Medvetz argues that their rise and influence must be set analytically ‘against the backdrop of a series of processes that have contributed to the growing subordination of knowledge to political and economic demand’ (2012: 226). Under such conditions, and vis-à-vis territorial stigmatization, it is TERRITORIAL STIGMATIZATION: SYMBOLIC DEFAMATION imperative to scrutinize and expose the practices of think tanks when trying to understand how symbolic systems do not simply mirror social relations but help constitute them. THE POLITICAL ACTIVATION OF TERRITORIAL STIGMA The Glasgow case above is doubly instructive, for it shows how territorial stigmatization is sometimes so powerful that it can shape the direction of national work and welfare policies. The CSJ is a think tank determined to portray poverty and worklessness as behavioral conditions, as genetic traits passed down the generations in thousands of ‘troubled families’,7 and therefore divorced from structural causes. The negative portrayals of Easterhouse speak to the urgency of the political activation of territorial stigma as a research theme, especially when considering the rise of penal policies in several advanced societies. As Tyler (2013) has argued in an analysis of social abjection in neoliberal Britain, territorial stigmatization (amplified via the resuscitated discourse of the ‘underclass’) has become a device to procure consent for punitive policies directed at those living at the bottom of the class structure. Hancock and Mooney’s discussion of the harsh political and judicial response to the 2011 riots in urban England is also alert to the relationship between the symbolic and the spatial: [P]articular representations of urban places as problematic on a number of different levels are mobilized. While the 2011 disorders were largely confined to inner urban areas with a significant degree of tenure mix, social housing estates (or areas where these dominate) and the populations therein are frequently highlighted and represented as being not only vulnerable, but as particular locales where social pathologies and problems flourish. (2013: 48) Thus, the stigmatized districts of dispossession in the post-industrial city elicit overwhelmingly negative emotions and stern 117 corrective political reactions driven by fright, revulsion and condemnation, which in turn foster the growth and glorification of the penal wing of the state in order to penalize urban marginality. When persons of power and eminence visit such districts, typically it is not in reformist but rather in martial mode, to announce measures designed to root out rot, restore order and punish miscreants. The sense of social indignity that has come to enshroud certain urban districts in increasingly unequal cities has implications for residents in terms of employment prospects, educational attainment and receipt of social assistance. The difficulties of searching for employment, succeeding educationally and dealing with public agencies (the police, the courts and street-level bureaucracies such as state unemployment and welfare offices) can be exacerbated as soon as residents of stigmatized areas mention where they live (McKenzie, 2012; Sernhede, 2011). There are examples in the literature of employers, educators and public officials modifying their conduct and procedures once addresses are revealed. In St Ann’s, a stigmatized housing estate in Nottingham, England, McKenzie8 discussed the treatment of a young single mother by local state officials: She felt an acute stigma, particularly whenever she went to any of the benefit agencies … [and] told me that when she gave her address to any of the ‘officials’ there was often a silence as they mentally processed her single-parent status, the ethnicity of her children, and then her address in St Ann’s: ‘I know what they’re thinking you can see it ticking over in their brain as you wait for them to think “oh it’s one of them from there”’. (2012: 468) A striking trend is how certain places become associated with class position, and how the names of stigmatized locales offer an alternative to the taboo of the word ‘class’. As Skeggs pointed out in research on class inequality in English cities, ‘the term “class” was rarely directly articulated … rather, local areas were continually used as shorthand to name those whose presence was seen to be 118 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES potentially threatening’ (2004: 112). This politics of naming has been shown in several societies to have profound implications for labor market participation, interactions in daily encounters, and for personal dignity (for example, Brattbakk and Hansen, 2004; Greenberg and Hollander, 2006; Mood, 2010; Morris, 2013). In Sweden, researchers who examined the implications of territorial stigmatization for the children of recent immigrants attending suburban schools found that it affected their life plans and educational prospects (Johansson and Olofsson, 2011; Sernhede, 2011). Because of the notoriety of their place of residence, youths were constantly having ‘to adjust to what they believe is the appropriate behaviour of a “good Swedish student”’ (Johansson and Olofsson, 2011: 197). A policy of ‘equality’ in the school curriculum (speaking, writing and thinking in Swedish) had the effect of reinforcing the ‘otherness’ of a ‘defective’ and ‘problematic’ immigrant category, one amplified by the stigma attached to certain suburban districts in Malmö and Stockholm. For the youths interviewed in these studies, school environments were far from a respite from living in stigmatized places – they unintentionally served as another context where place stigma was experienced and served to aggravate the daily challenges of learning and assessment (a situation also analyzed by Eksner, 2013, in Berlin). NEIGHBORHOOD INVESTMENT AND DISINVESTMENT: STIGMATIZING INFLUENCES The citywide, regional and/or national perceptions of particular places all play a vital role in patterns of investment and disinvestment in them, and correspondingly shape the opportunities available to their residents. The effects of disinvestment range from day-today frustrations (such as finding it impossible to get taxicabs to drop off/collect residents, or to arrange for deliveries of takeout food), to the more serious issue of finding it impossible to obtain mortgage credit due to the impact of the taint of place on lenders and financial institutions (Aalbers, 2011). The teachings of classical industrial location theory have long demonstrated that businesses of varying sizes – all of which hold potential employment opportunities for urban dwellers at the economic margins of society – partly make decisions on where to locate based on the images associated with places. If a place is widely shunned and condemned, private sector operators are likely to locate elsewhere in their mandate for profit. The cumulative effect of such decisions based on negative neighborhood reputations is sustained economic disinvestment (Rhodes, 2012). When this is considered in the context of many cities currently enduring a period of severe fiscal austerity, neighborhoods already facing a multitude of social challenges are especially vulnerable. In respect of the opposite – increasing investment – it should not be assumed that any investment is uniformly positive. The appropriate question to ask, rather, is ‘to what extent is any investment in stigmatized territories in the interests of their residents?’ This is because research evidence has revealed an intense and direct relationship between the defamation of place and the process of gentrification (August, 2014; Gray and Mooney, 2011; Kallin and Slater, 2014; Slater and Anderson, 2012; Thörn and Holgersson, 2016). The taint of place can become a target and rationale for ‘fixing’ an area via its reincorporation into the real estate circuit of the city, which can have major consequences for those least able to compete for housing. Symbolic defamation can provide the groundwork and ideological justification for a thorough class transformation of urban space, usually involving housing demolition, dispersal of residents, land clearance, and then the construction of housing and services aimed at a more affluent class of resident. TERRITORIAL STIGMATIZATION: SYMBOLIC DEFAMATION There are many examples of stigmatization occurring prior to gentrification (for example, Blomley, 2004; Liu and Blomley, 2013; Slater, 2004; Sommers, 1998). In addition, a substantial body of scholarship on public housing demolitions in several societies illustrates how the frequent depiction of public housing complexes as obsolete failures justified the expulsion of people from their homes and the subsequent gentrification of valuable central city land tracts (for example, Arthurson, 2004; Crump, 2002; Darcy, 2010; Goetz, 2013; Imbroscio, 2008; Kipfer and Petrunia, 2009; Steinberg, 2010). The role of the state is crucial in these and other examples of territorial stigmatization justifying gentrification. As Wacquant has it: Once a place is publicly labelled as a ‘lawless zone’ or ‘outlaw estate’, outside the common norm, it is easy for the authorities to justify special measures, deviating from both law and custom, which can have the effect – if not the intention – of destabilizing and further marginalizing their occupants, subjecting them to the dictates of the deregulated labour market, and rendering them invisible or driving them out of a coveted space. (2007: 69) Over forty years of research into gentrification reveals a process triggered by an alliance between financial institutions (supplying capital in the form of mortgages and loans) and the state (at various levels acting as an investor of that capital), whereby the state provides the conditions that stimulate private market reinvestment (Lees, Slater and Wyly, 2008). The instances where gentrification has happened without state intervention are rare, and the state often plays an active role in constructing the blemish of place it then purports to remedy via gentrification strategies (Kallin and Slater, 2014). Yet there is an unresolved analytic puzzle requiring attention: why does it appear to be the case that gentrification rarely seems to occur first in the most severely disinvested parts of a city or a region – where the disparity between potential and capitalized ground rent known as the rent gap (Smith, 1979) is at its greatest 119 – but proceeds instead in devalorized, working-class tracts that are disinvested but by no means the poorest or offering the maximum profit to developers? Hammel helpfully offers a clue: Inner city areas have many sites with a potential for development that could return high levels of rent. That development never occurs, however, because the perception of an impoverished neighbourhood prevents large amounts of capital being applied to the land. (1999: 1290) So, the wider ‘perception’ of a neighborhood that Hammel outlines can be so negative and entrenched that it acts as a symbolic barrier or diversion to the circulation of capital. In sum, as territorial stigmatization intensifies, there are major implications for the rent gap theory of gentrification, and further investigations are needed to understand how the theory might be recalibrated to account for the pressing issue of the symbolic defamation of space. Such defamation serves economic ends, but also vice versa: examples abound under authoritarian urban regimes whereby the economics of inter-urban competition – with gentrification strategies at the core – are serving the brutal and punitive policies directed at working-class minorities, and particularly, at the places where they live (Ahmed and Sudermann, 2012; Kuymulu, 2013; Sakizlioğlu, 2014). RESIDENTS’ STRATEGIES FOR MANAGING TERRITORIAL STIGMATIZATION Reflecting on his fieldwork in Chicago and Paris, Wacquant remarked that residents ‘demarcated themselves from their neighbours and reassigned onto them the degraded image that public discourse gives them’, and strategies for managing territorial stigma included ‘mutual distancing and lateral denigration, retreat into the private sphere, and flight into the outer world as soon as one 120 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES acquires the means to move’ (2009: 117). He has consistently argued that various forms of submission tend to be the dominant (it not exclusive) strategies employed by residents of degraded urban zones. These strategies to deflect spatial disgrace include: concealing the truth about place of residence from various public officials and private operators; rejecting being in any way like their neighbors and investing energy in spelling out microdifferences (see Shildrick and MacDonald, 2014); a rejection of the public sphere as an arena for neighborhood sociability; and exiting the neighborhood as soon as possible (see also Keene and Padilla, 2010, 2014). Yet submissive strategies of internalizing stigma as the dominant response of residents have been called into question by scholars who have undertaken fieldwork approaches in other contexts. Jensen and Christensen’s (2012) scrutiny of data gathered in Aalborg East, a deprived area in the northern part of Denmark, revealed that the residents were not resigned to the defamation of their place of residence. They became sad or angry when confronted with the stigma, but they had either a positive or an ambivalent view of the area, and most were content to live there. In Bristol, England, Slater and Anderson’s (2012) research in the deeply stigmatized district of St Paul’s uncovered a strong sense of neighborhood pride among residents, often in defensive response to external defamation. This was achieved via the claiming of the derogatory ‘ghetto’ label frequently affixed to the district by outsiders, in an attempt to invert that label and make it something positive. McKenzie’s (2012) work in St Ann’s revealed a profound sense of ‘being and belonging to’ the neighborhood, something common to different age groups and a resistant response to stigma. Similar conclusions were drawn by Watt from work on housing estates in London, where ‘knowing people and being known were important in facilitating a sense of safety and belonging, even in estates which to outsiders could well be regarded as “rough” or dangerous places’ (2006: 786). In a study conducted on the very site where Wacquant formed the concept of territorial stigmatization, Garbin and Millington’s article on La Courneuve in Paris explored how residents ‘negotiate the grammars of marginalisation associated with their banlieue, how they live with the effects of territorial stigma’ (2012: 2068). They found a variety of coping strategies, some submissive, others resistant. Chief among them was recalcitrance, or ‘an assertion of the right to be other’ (Garbin and Millington, 2012: 2075) via pride in La Courneuve’s ethnic diversity. Their nuanced conclusion was that future research should not fall into the traps of ‘glibly celebrating “resistance” or drawing overly pessimistic conclusions about the impact of place stigma’, but should focus instead on the ‘ambiguities of domination/ resistance’ (Garbin and Millington, 2012: 2079). This argument mirrors the work of Purdy in the now demolished public housing project of Regent Park, Toronto, documenting a place of ‘affirmative association’ for many tenants, where a common response to defamation was ‘self-affirmation and pride of place … reflected eloquently in the themes of solidarity, friendship, and community in the face of economic devastation’ (2003: 97–8; see also August, 2014). Whereas Wacquant (2010) reports that the internalization of territorial stigmatization has a dramatic effect on the collective psychology of place (to the extent that it undermines class solidarity and collective action), the above studies present a more positive picture of collective defiance and defense of residents in response to the denigration of their communities (dissected thoroughly in Nimes, France, by Kirkness, 2014). In sum, there is evidence that residents employ a variety of strategies of symbolic self-preservation in the face of territorial stigmatization, depending on class position, age/generation, life course stage, type of employment, housing tenure, poverty status, ethnic origin (to name but a few factors). Each and all of these demand TERRITORIAL STIGMATIZATION: SYMBOLIC DEFAMATION further intellectual scrutiny. Rhodes (2012) has shown that ‘while forms of contemporary stigma share commonalities … they differ both within and between national contexts, influenced by patterns of governance, racial formation, demography, and urban geography’ (p. 685). However, we still need to know much more about the contextual conditions under which certain types of residents adopt certain strategies to manage the impact of spatial disgrace in their lives. CONCLUSION: NOT A ‘NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECT’, BUT A GAZE TRAINED ON THE NEIGHBORHOOD The monstrous literature on ‘neighborhood effects’ is sustained by a near-obsessive belief in the view that ‘where you live affects your life chances’. That literature usually (and surprisingly) ignores how the stigmatization of neighborhoods matters, and in some instances ends up contributing to that stigmatization (for an elaboration, see Slater, 2013). When the focus is on place stigma, analytic errors and misconstruals are commonplace. For example, Maloutas has argued that when Wacquant writes of territorial stigmatization he is ‘definitely arguing about a growing neighbourhood effect’ (2009: 830). Yet what becomes clear from a close reading of studies of territorial stigmatization is that it is not a property of the neighborhood, but rather a gaze trained on it – and therefore definitely not a neighborhood effect. It is beyond dispute that the blemish of place affects life chances (Arthurson, 2012; Permentier et al., 2007; Sampson, 2012), but studying territorial stigmatization teaches us about the effects of symbolic structures applied to neighborhoods (or to other local geographies),9 which are not produced in neighborhoods, and therefore not ‘neighborhood effects’. 121 Failing to question the operation of a political-economic system that sorts people across metropolitan space based on their purchasing power in land and housing markets, and failing to question the role of symbolic structures in the production of inequality and marginality in the city, means that neighborhoods become the problem rather than the expression of the problems to be addressed. Health inequality researchers are especially prone to these failures: generally they tend to shy away from such structural and symbolic questions, preferring instead to focus on how neighborhoods are conducive to certain kinds of ‘health behaviors’ like smoking and unhealthy eating. Much of this stems from their lack of methodological self-consciousness in research on health and its social determinants, characterized by the refinement of measuring tools, boasting about the size of data sets, and soporific use of terms such as ‘controlling’ and ‘pathways’ – all at the expense of theoretical vision and conceptual clarification. Thus, they often fail to uncover the mechanisms by which place and people are linked (ironically, the ‘black box’ of neighborhood effects scholarship!). A wonderful recent exception is to be found in the blend of ethnographic and survey work by Wutich et al. (2014), who examined how neighborhood stigma10 and ‘social bonding’ affected the physical and mental health of Latino immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona. If, as Wacquant has argued, ‘the social psychology of place operates in the manner of a symbolic cog latching the macrodeterminants of urban political to the life options and strategies of the poor at ground level’ (2010: 4), then the study of territorial stigmatization provides propitious terrain for reformulating from ‘below’, in empirical terms, the labels, discourses and categories from ‘above’ that have been shown in scholarship to have corrosive consequences. Such work is necessary to inform not only public policies designed to reduce the burden of material deprivation and the press of symbolic domination, but also grassroots campaigns and political struggles geared towards fighting the impact of social abjection in the metropolis. 122 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Notes 1 From www.createstreets.com. 2 Just six months earlier, Policy Exchange published a report on the ‘future of social housing’, calling for social housing in ‘expensive areas’ to be sold off in order to fund housebuilding in areas that are ‘cheaper’. 3 This is a common tactic in urban regeneration strategies across Europe: implying that the area to be ‘regenerated’ is so degraded, outlandish and abnormal that it is not even part of the city. 4 In announcing this investigation, Eric Pickles, Communities Secretary, revealed the economic motive: ‘[T]his radical approach could also create value in land in a way that is not possible with the incremental, building-by-building regeneration, rather than optimal whole-scale, regeneration that has been favoured in the past. A greater potential for private investment, could, over 10 years, lead to several hundred thousand additional new homes in London’. See: http://www.savills. co.uk/_news/article/72418/175241-0/4/2014/ savills-research–london-regeneration-researchproposal. Building new homes in London seems promising, until one considers their obvious unaffordability to those displaced by regeneration. 5 For an intricate dissection of the history and politics of ‘sensitive neighbourhoods’ policies in France, see Dikec (2007). 6 Disregarding pressing issues of systematic disinvestment, the CSJ attributes poverty in Rhyl, Margate, Clacton-on-Sea, Blackpool and Great Yarmouth to ‘the ingrained disadvantage which has resulted from the decline in British bucket-and-spade holidays’ and draws the conclusion that the overarching problem is ‘poverty attracting poverty’ (2013: 33). Their solution to their own ridiculous contagion theory is just as farcical: ‘If we are to help communities achieve long-term resilience and upward mobility, it is essential that we help more people get together and more couples stay together. This means tackling teenage pregnancy, improving relationship education, removing the couple penalties that exist in the welfare system and recognising marriage in the tax system’ (2013: 35). 7 For a very detailed catalogue of the eugenic mentality of civil servants who think they can fix Britain’s ‘troubled families’, and of the abuse of statistics and general skulduggery that underpins the entire troubled families agenda, see the excellent work of Stephen Crossley at https://akindoftrouble.wordpress.com/ 8 Lisa McKenzie has recently published Getting By (2015), a rich and stirring ethnographic study of St Ann’s, which offers a fine-grained portrait of the lived experience of territorial stigmatization and of class prejudice. 9 Geographers reading this chapter may ask, ‘What is territorial about territorial stigmatization?’ It’s an important question that remains unaddressed by Wacquant, and indeed by all the other sociologists who dominate the literature. 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(2014) ‘Stigmatized neighborhoods, social bonding, and health’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 28(4): 556–77. 9 The Liminal City: Gender, Mobility and Governance in a Twenty-first Century African City1 Caroline Wanjiku Kihato INTRODUCTION When urban scholars discuss African cities, there is a familiar, solacing narrative that dominates the conversations: the continent’s cities are growing at tremendous rates (UN-HABITAT, 2014) and as more and more people move to urban areas, they find nonexistent economic opportunities, failing health systems, crumbling infrastructure, increasing poverty, ineffective and predatory authorities and an imperious moneyed elite (UN-HABITAT, 2014). Indeed, the dominant images Africa’s cities conjure are ones where the landscapes are rolling shantytowns, where toilets ‘fly’ and rivulets of sewerage snake through cobbled-together homes. Africa’s cities it seems, tell a story of failure – the failure of modernization, capitalism and the African state, a failure often juxtaposed with more successful urbanization in cities like London, Paris and New York. Although the images of flying toilets and sewer streams may seem extreme in Johannesburg’s inner city with its modern skyscrapers and art-deco buildings, a combination of capital flight and the influx of populations from South Africa’s rural areas and other African countries have resulted in pressure on infrastructure, the lack of investor confidence, poor building maintenance, absentee landlords, and overcrowding. These dynamics have precipitated the physical decay of many residential blocks and the infrastructure that serves them. The presence of international drug syndicates and gangs (Ohler, 2003) has sealed inner city Joburg’s reputation as an area riddled with ‘crime and grime’. But Johannesburg and African urban centers defy such easy characterization. They are at once spaces of opportunity and abject poverty; connected to global circuits and yet simultaneously marginalized from them; cities are places of hope and creativity and at the same time of despair and despondency; they are the harbingers of democracy and sites where human rights abuses also abound. THE LIMINAL CITY Using empirical data, based on five years of ethnographic research on women from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Nigeria and Zimbabwe living in inner-city Johannesburg as refugees and economic migrants, this chapter explores urban dynamics from the ground up. Specifically, it looks to shed light on commonly used policy and theoretical concepts – urban governance and informality. It explores these concepts through the lived experiences of migrant women in Johannesburg – a population that lives in the city’s interstices – ‘between and betwixt’ a romanticized past and an imagined future elsewhere. The women we meet in the following pages live in flux; they live in Johannesburg, yet remain dislocated there; they live in the inner-city, yet dream about living elsewhere; they aspire to social upward mobility but remain bound by their financial and legal circumstances. In this limbo location, women’s everyday lives and relationships unveil a world that has a profound effect on the city they live in. Migrant women allow us to see how populations living at society’s margins influence urban practices. Their lives show us how significant they are in shaping the actions of state agents, and overturning common understandings of urban governance as a stateled project. As we follow them through the city’s streets, the boundaries between legality and illegality, formal and informal, official and unofficial city collapse, rendering these categories inaccurate descriptors of the city or their lives. Migrant women compel us to rethink the twin frames that have for so long shaped how we plan and govern cities: the legal versus illegal city, the formal versus informal city, the visible versus invisible city. What we see instead is a city where these realities are intertwined and city life becomes a hybrid of formality and informality, legality and illegality. But the call to revisit our planning and governance frameworks requires more than simply tweaking what exists. It requires more than incorporating the 127 informal city into the formal one or applying ‘good governance’ principles to ungoverned spaces. Indeed, it calls for a transformation of urban planning and governance, and a redefinition of what these might mean in twentyfirst-century African cities. GENDER AND THE CITY Women’s urban lives and mobility have historically been ignored in dominant scholarly discourses. In industrializing Johannesburg, it was male migration and labor in mines and industries that dominated scholarly interest (Bonner and Segal, 1998; Cohen, 1986; Crush et al., 1991). With the focus on male migration the figure of the miner or factory worker came to symbolize images of the city. From the Flâneur, the nineteenth-century Parisian male-stroller (Benjamin, 2002) to Johannesburg’s twentieth-century indefatigable miner, the quintessential urban character in the study of the city has been male. Women within urbanization and migration discourses were add-ons who were either ‘left behind’ by or ‘tagged along’ with their male guardians (Boyd and Grieco, 2003; Gugler and Ludwar-Ene, 1995). Their lives in the city were subsumed by their domesticity, within the confines of their employers’ walls (Bozzoli and Nkotsoe, 1991; Cock, 1990). Where they operated without a legitimate male guardian or white sponsor, women in colonial cities whether in Johannesburg or Nairobi were ‘bad women’ (Bonner, 1990; Hellmann, 1949; Obbo, 1981; Sheldon, 1996; White, 1990), whose moral turpitude was always in question. But these caricatures of the invisible subservient passive woman on the one hand and the immoral liquor-brewing prostitute on the other elide a more textured understanding of women’s roles in cities and the ways in which they shape urban geographies, economies and politics. This chapter challenges the ‘male gaze’ in urban studies (referred to 128 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES by Bridge and Watson, 2002; Miranne and Young, 2000; Wolff, 1985) and the consequent invisibility of the female character as an integral contributor to urban spaces and practices. By highlighting migrant women’s experiences, this chapter seeks to make visible women’s lives in the city and reveal the ways in which they shift our knowledge of urban spaces. We see women as not only ‘case studies’ to be observed, but agents that transform urban economies, regulations and social relationships. JOHANNESBURG: THE LIMINAL CITY Located in Gauteng, the country’s most populous and fastest growing province (Statistics South Africa, 2012), Johannesburg is South Africa’s economic capital, with an estimated 3.75 million people living within its boundaries (Gauteng City-Region Observatory, 2012). This chapter is set in Johannesburg’s inner city – the Central Business District (CBD) and areas northeast of it, where the residential suburbs of Berea, Hillbrow and Yeoville lie. Unlike most of Johannesburg, the inner city has a high-density residential stock that was built in the 1930s during an economic upturn for a wellto-do upwardly mobile white population (Beavon, 2004). Through the early 90s however, this part of the city experienced a decline with the exodus of big capital. As Johannesburg’s financial capital moved north of the city, the black population from other parts of South Africa and the rest of the continent moved in. The availability of residential housing stock close to the city’s center and the promise of economic opportunities made it a prime location for a population whose domicile in the city had been restricted by apartheid’s pass laws. The number of foreign-born migrants in Johannesburg remains an intense point of debate. City officials tend to exaggerate the numbers, some believing that up to 86 percent of Johannesburg’s population comprises illegal foreigners (Schlemmer, 2008). Far from these estimates, the 2011 census puts the number of foreign-born nationals in the country at 3.2 percent (Statistics South Africa, 2012). Further, the 2011 census figures show that far from the exaggerated number of 86 percent, only 13 percent of Johannesburg’s population is foreignborn (Peberdy, 2013). In Johannesburg, the inner city provides many newcomers from South Africa and beyond a foothold in the city. Population figures in 2010 show that the CBD, the area where this research took place, has the highest population densities in Gauteng – with 64,623 people per kilometer (Gauteng City-Region Observatory, 2012). It is the transitional aspects that drew me to inner city Johannesburg to study women from other parts of Africa. Hanging out with them, I became aware of the fluid nature of Yeoville, Berea and Hillbrow. These parts of the city seemed to be places that migrants passed through rather than settled in. They were a place where newcomers saw themselves living for only a short period of time, their sights set on Johannesburg’s northern suburbs or on cities in North America or Europe. In 1999, Morris found that many cross-border migrants ‘saw South Africa and Hillbrow as a temporary stop’ (Morris, 1999: 327). A few years later, in 2006, a survey conducted by the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), Tufts University and the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), came to similar conclusions. The survey showed that the majority of respondents in the study, both local and foreign, imagined their lives elsewhere in the city, or outside the country (University of the Witwatersrand et al., 2006). Both South Africans and foreign-born migrants keep strong ties with kin and communities elsewhere, even as their everyday lives are physically rooted in the city. Few who live in the inner city stay there longer than three years, perceiving it as inappropriate for raising a family or living with a spouse (University of the Witwatersrand et al., 2006). Those who THE LIMINAL CITY stay on live as if suspended in society, aspiring for lives elsewhere. I use Turner’s concept of liminality to capture migrant women’s experiences in Johannesburg. When studying the Ndembu’s rites of passage in northwest Zambia, Turner observed a phase where initiates no longer held their previous social status but had not yet emerged into a new one. They were in a ‘limbo of statuslessness’ (Turner, 1977: 94). He described this phase as liminal, a word derived from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold (Turner, 1977). Turner’s limbo phase seemed to capture women’s ‘suspension’ in Johannesburg, living between and betwixt their host country and country of origin, between a romanticized past and an imagined future elsewhere. In Johannesburg’s inner city, cross-border women’s dislocation is structured both by their subjective ways of belonging and their legal status. Many of them had asylum seeker permits, which allowed them to be in the country as their refugee status was being determined. At the time of the research, asylum seeker permits allowed holders to work, seek education and be domiciled in the country until their status had been determined. In the statutes, the process should take six months, but it often took years. Despite the state’s recognition of Section 23 asylum seeker permits, few service providers accept these as forms of identification. Service providers such as banks, schools, landlords and employers often discriminate against refugee seekers, claiming not to recognize the permits they hold. Without the ‘street cred’ to work, participate in local politics or access basic services they are de facto excluded from fully participating in South African life. This structural exclusion further reinforces women’s limbo-state in the city. Despite their insistence that Johannesburg was a temporary place, migrant women’s narratives of leaving Johannesburg for greener pastures were more imagined than real. Women often told me they were leaving 129 ‘next week’ or ‘soon’. While a few have left, I continue to see, and talk to, many of those who were leaving ‘next week’, even ten years on. Cross-border women may live in limbo, but their experiences are emblematic of a paradoxical liminality – one with an uncertain life trajectory and an undefined structure. This chapter hones in on the particularity of these women’s experiences in order to explore how their mobility, both real and imagined, shapes urban processes in Johannesburg and elsewhere. Using a police raid in inner-city Johannesburg, the following sections unpack the levels of authority and regulatory power in the city, arguing that divisions between formality and informality, governed and ungoverned cities make little sense when examined through real-life experiences. Indeed, urban practices allow us to see how urban governance is co-constituted by the state and other urban stakeholders, and how the state is complicit in the undoing of its own laws and regulatory frameworks. GOVERNANCE IN THE LIMINAL CITY It was a late summer morning on the last day of March 2008. I was sitting next to Hannah’s makeshift stall when the police arrived. Their arrival had disrupted the rhythms of street banter, negotiations and trade, causing the illegal traders between Plein and De Villers streets in inner-city Johannesburg to take what goods they could and run. It looked like a tornado had come through this part of Johannesburg’s CBD leaving destruction in its wake. On the sidewalks were abandoned cardboard boxes. Alongside them were bright orange crates – one half-filled with maize was lying on its side with a few of the green cobs spilled over into the street. Strewn across the pavement were newspapers, plastic bags, sweets, oranges, beads, cigarettes and cooked mielie pap,2 which the wind and people’s feet were helping distribute to other parts of the city. Even though it was the last 130 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES day of the month, the street was eerily quiet. On this day, Superintendent Molokomme was issuing notices to appear in court, while his colleagues confiscated the goods left behind by some of the traders who had not been quick enough to make a clean getaway. I heard a woman crying foul, wailing that the police should have mercy on her because she was pregnant and needed the money to buy food for her children. The woman, Hannah, who was talking to Molokomme, and a few others were the unlucky ones – caught before they could escape ‘the metro’. That is what the traders call the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department – ‘the metro’. ‘Your name?’ ‘Hannah’ ‘How do you spell it?’ ‘H-a-n-n-a-h’ H|A|N|N|A|H, the policeman wrote painstakingly. ‘Your ID number?’ ‘I don’t have a South African ID … but my passport number is A470.’ ‘When were you born?’ interrupted the officer, glaring at Hannah. ‘I was born on twenty-three March, nineteen eighty-six.’ |1|9|8|6|0|3|2|3| | | | | | There were blank spaces left in the form, this would have to do, I imagined the officer thinking. Few migrant women had local identity documents. ‘Nationality?’ he asked brusquely. M|A|LA|W|IAN he wrote squeezing the letters together. The form only provides six spaces for this entry. ‘Address?’ ‘Flat 103, Fatis Mansion Jeppe corner Harrison street Johannesburg.’ F|L|A|T| |1|0|3| |F|A|T|I|S| |M|A|N|S| | … continued officer Molokomme. His left hand moved slowly, making jerky movements with the strokes of his pen. Each letter was carefully written in the spaces. I could not tell whether he had conviction in what he was writing, but he did seem to take pride in his written work. The written ‘Notice to Appear in Court (issued in terms of section 56 of the Criminal Procedure Act, 1977)’ is one of the legislative mechanisms empowering the city to regulate what can or cannot be done in a given space in the municipal area. The Act provides guidelines available to officers who work in the policing, justice and correctional services departments on the procedures available in criminal proceedings. Section 56 presents an officer of the law the option to hand an accused a written notice to appear in a magistrate’s court. The legal document outlines that the notice should: a) Specify the name, the residential address, and the occupation or status of the accused; b) Call upon the accused to appear at a place and on a date and at a time specified in the written notice to answer a charge of having committed the offence in question; c) Contain an endorsement in terms of section 57 that the accused may admit his guilt in respect of the offence in question and that he may pay a stipulated fine in respect thereof without appearing in court; and d) Contain a certificate under the hand of the peace officer that he has handed the original of such written notice to the accused and that he has explained to the accused the import thereof. (Republic of South Africa, 1977) As Hannah and the officer continued to their conversation, I wondered about the bureaucratic ritual taking place before me. I am no expert on the city’s geography, but I questioned whether F|L|A|T| |1|0|3| |F|A|T|I|S| |M|A|N|S|I|O|N| really did exist and whether Hannah in fact lived there. I noticed that Hannah had not given the officer her surname, nor had he pushed her to tell it to him. Moreover, the form had an incomplete identity number. The notice provides 13 spaces for the identity number – officer Molokomme only inserted eight digits. (South African identity documents typically have 13 digits.) The first six digits are the individual’s birthday – comprising the last two digits of the year of birth, month, and day – written in that order. |1|9|8|6|0|3|2|3| | | | | | was not only incorrect, but also incomplete. I wondered why officer Molokomme continued the charade of writing up the notice. Surely even he realized it would be impossible for the state to enforce illegal street trading restrictions with such THE LIMINAL CITY incomplete information? He may have fulfilled section 56b, c, and d of the Criminal Procedure Act, but without Hannah’s full name, residential address and identity number, the local police would be unable to collect the fine or summon her to court. Hannah was charged with trading in a restricted area. The officer continued to write that Hannah had the option to pay a fine of R 500 or appear in courtroom 35 at the Johannesburg’s magistrate court on May 8, 2008. When he was finished, the officer handed the notice to Hannah, and I wondered where it would end up. Maybe she would crumple it and throw it in a bin in a backstreet alley? Hannah mindlessly shoved the notice into her purse as she watched policemen load her goods into the back of the police van. Making a quick calculation of her day’s losses, she looked around for her friends and approached them two blocks away where they were putting what they had managed to save in the ubiquitous plastic ‘Ghana must go’ bags. ‘Eish, today they caught me … I couldn’t run fast enough.’ ‘Ag, shame! How much is your ticket for?’ ‘About five hundred Rands … my stuff is not even up to five hundred. That fine is just too much!’ ‘Just leave your stuff with them and start again my sister.’ ‘Eish, now where shall I get money for new stock to sell tomorrow?’ Hannah did not appear in court, nor did she pay the fine. Instead, she offered me the notice to appear in court: ‘Keep it as a souvenir for your research’ she had said as she handed me the folded legal document. ‘What if they catch you for being in contempt of court?’ I protested. ‘Who will catch me?’ she said mockingly ‘Where will they find me? Who am I?’ she laughed, making her point. Women’s ways of belonging in the city describe not just how they ‘root’ in a place, but also how they actively position themselves 131 as outsiders, not bound to the territory that they occupy. Hannah and many women like her invite us to rethink how we understand notions of citizenship. Without an address or a legible identity, she lives with an ambiguous legal status. Her ‘outsider status’ makes it difficult to root in South Africa – without a legible legal identity everyday activities like renting a home, opening a bank account, getting work, accessing health care or sending children to school, become gargantuan tasks (CORMSA, 2008; Misago et al., 2010; Vearey, 2011). Yet being an outsider has its advantages. Hannah can ‘disappear’, operate outside of the state radar, remain invisible and build – even if it is in her imagination – a life elsewhere. As a result, migrant women adopt a tactical citizenship to the city. They live in the city for as long as it takes to get what they want out if it, but they do not necessarily wish to forge a lasting relationship with it. Their investments and futures seem set elsewhere, either back home or outside the continent. What does this tactical citizenship mean for urban regulation and authority? How do people whose lives are not place-bound, who have few social and physical investments in the place they live help us understand the state and governance? The following sections turn to these questions. WEAK STATE POOR GOVERNANCE? RE-EXAMINING THE MYTH Policymakers and urban theorists use state weakness to explain persistent urban poverty, inequality and conflict. Embedded in this approach is a Manichean cognitive frame that constructs African cities and urban spaces in binaries: as well-managed versus mismanaged, as formal versus informal, legal or illegal, or governed versus ungoverned. The resultant analyses suggest that the crises facing many African cities lie with state failures and governments’ inability to provide services, manage diversity, and 132 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES enforce the law across Africa’s fast growing and fluid cities. If a weak or failed state is the basis of the urban crisis, it stands to reason that a strong state is the cornerstone of good governance, order, effective regulation, and the amelioration of poor socioeconomic conditions. Since the late 1980s, the term ‘urban governance’ has gained fashionable repute and a considerable following in urban studies (Halfani, 1996; McCarney, 1996; McCarney et al., 1995; Stren and White, 1989; Swilling, 1997). Defined loosely as ‘the relationship between civil society and the state, between the rulers and the ruled, the government and the governed’ (McCarney, 1996: 4), governance has become a catchall concept on which varied ideological fronts have hung their strategies for better-managed cities. Set against growing urban poverty, inequality, collapsing infrastructure and mounting social and political crises, ‘good governance’ has become the means through which the state builds relationships with urban actors to resolve urban problems – from the decentralization of government to the devolution of decision-making to communities (Beall et al., 2002; Swilling, 1997), from the democratization of local government (Lodge, 2001) to the privatization of government and New Public Management approaches (Harrison, 2001, 2006). Good governance – the mantra for ailing cities across the African continent – has come to mean something for everyone. Raids against illegal trading, ‘illegal immigrants’, crime and grime are part of Johannesburg’s inner city governance and renewal strategy. The regulation of the inner city includes on the one hand encouraging urban investment, and on the other enforcing municipal bylaws on informal trading, building codes, policing and health regulations (Makda, 2004). Ostensibly, the raid on illegal trade on Klein and Plein was an attempt by the city to enforce municipal bylaws. Illegal street trading presents urban governments with numerous problems (see City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, 2004). City officials argue that trading on sidewalks interrupts the flow of pedestrian traffic, creating overcrowded streets that can potentially harbor criminals. Unregulated street trading also affects formal businesses in the city in ways that could result in capital flight and the loss of a tax base for the municipality (see Emdon, 2003). The presence of informal street traders signals the inability of the city government to control its area of jurisdiction. Hygiene and public health are another concern for local authorities, and unplanned markets that have no ablution or cleaning areas present a potential health hazard for not only the traders, but also their customers. Yet through migrant women’s experiences on the street we come to understand that urban regulation and authority is not based solely on legal statutes and the letter of the law, but on socially embedded codes derived from relationships between actors in the state and outside of it. Lindell (2008: 1882) writes that ‘an exclusive focus on the relations between civil groups and the state seems to be insufficient to capture the complexity of governance in African cities today’. Indeed, by locating governance within regimes of knowledge that underpin how the state and other modern institutions order and make sense of the city, we miss the ways in which ordinary urban dwellers recalibrate the nature of the terms of engagement with the state (Demissie, 2007; Pieterse, 2008; Simone, 2002, 2005). More importantly, we are blinded to the ways in which the state itself unwittingly produces ‘ungovernable’ cities. True, weak institutions are ill-prepared to direct planning and investments in ways that build a successful city. But the ability of state actors to position themselves both inside and outside of the law makes the state a powerful actor in producing informal and extralegal urban spaces – precisely the kinds of practices that good governance aims to get rid of. In the performance of local bureaucratic practices, we see how state power is configured and reconfigured, and how categories that seem THE LIMINAL CITY so clear in official parlance – legal–illegal, official-unofficial – collapse into each other. This conception of urban regulation shifts how we understand dominant ideas of governance and presumptions that government can codify and regulate its territory in ways that result in predictable outcomes. It also reveals how those living at the city’s margins are agents in the making and unmaking of the rules that shape people’s relationships to the law, state and urban territory. EVERYDAY GOVERNANCE: CO-CONSTRUCTING URBAN REGULATION In classic Hobbesian readings, the modern state exercises the monopoly over violence, defining the boundary between orderly state territory and disorderly violence ‘out there’. In this vein, the notice symbolizes urban order, defining the boundary between a disorderly, poorly governed city and a rule-bound, well-governed one. Sergeant Molokomme’s lack of concern for the omission of critical information about Hannah’s identity and physical address, and Hannah’s indifference to the charges, compel us to revisit our understanding of urban governance and state regulation. Rather than a static instrument of law and order, the notice becomes a productive site of the making and unmaking of urban codes, continually revising the ways urban law is interpreted, created and enforced on city streets. If we move beyond a state-centric model of governance, and understand urban governance as comprising competing authorities, regulatory regimes and moral codes, we may find that it is not always in the state’s interest to enhance the legibility of its urban spaces. In the bureaucratic performance of the notice, it is not just Hannah’s illegibility that frustrates state laws. The state’s agent, Captain Molokomme, is complicit in ceding space for the remaking of urban regulations 133 and the unmaking of state law. Hannah did not intend to go to court or pay the fine. In fact, she planned to be back at her trading spot on the corner of Plein and Klein Street as soon as she could find money to replenish her stock. Few traders pay the fine. Fewer still try to retrieve their confiscated goods from police warehouses. The traders are aware that the police officers do not always declare all the goods they confiscate. Either they sell what they can or take what they want for themselves. Police ‘siphoning’, as it is sometimes known, is seen as part of a street tax that traders must pay to trade. There is an informal system of exchange at work. In addition to the confiscated goods the police help themselves to, every month street traders pay a protection fee to a designated leader who in turn pays the police. While the R 50 (approximately USD 5) cannot guarantee full police protection, it allows traders some respite from constant raids. On the one hand, the police tolerate some level of illicit street trading because it gives them an added source of income through bribes and the theft of confiscated goods. On the other, informal traders are aware that they are breaking the law by trading illegally and therefore see the exchange as part of a business expense. They may complain about the unfairness of police harassment and the amounts they have to pay, but they also recognize that the police, who possess the authority to execute official regulations, also have the power to turn a blind eye to their illicit trade. The grandstanding between Sergeant Molokomme and Hannah is not an isolated event, but an interaction that occurs often in the city (Bullard, 2003; Parker, 2012; Pelser, 2000). In this fragile system of exchange, the notice becomes a space where formal rules meet informal ones. Without the backing of the state’s laws and regulations, the police are powerless to enforce urban order. But because of their location in the state, they are able to facilitate an illicit sub-economy that allows illegal trade in the city. It is precisely because official rules occupy a position of 134 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES power in state officialdom, that the police are powerful actors in the informal economy. As James Scott points out, part of the power of the official over the subaltern ‘is the strategic use of “the rules”’(Scott, 2005: 399). Urban authorities represent law enforcement, yet at the same time they are complicit in its undoing. In this zone, where the boundaries between legal and illegal are blurred, it is possible to see the extent to which extralegal practices run through the institutions of the state (Das and Poole, 2004). State technologies like the notice shed light on the complex nature of relationships between the state and society in cities like Johannesburg. Indeed, if we look carefully, we can no longer speak of a city in which firm boundaries exist between official regulation and enforcement on the one hand, and unofficial and extralegal practices on the other. These practices collapse when we scrutinize local relationships between the state and urban actors. The notice may not always result in the enforcement of state law, but the ritual of officialdom endures where neither the police nor the traders take street-trading regulations seriously. Traders and officers alike may not pay much attention to the contents of the notice, but state law nevertheless remains a powerful, if symbolic instrument in shaping the nature of urban spaces. BEYOND THE ALL-SEEING STATE Beyond the blurring of the lines between urban order and disorder is a more telling demonstration of the nature of the state, which challenges the romanticism of its ‘all seeing’ imperative. Scott (1998), Foucault (Barry et al., 1996; Burchell et al., 1991; Foucault, 1980), and Bauman (1998) make the argument that the raison d’être of modern states has been to make their sovereign territory transparent, codifying it with rules and norms that shape behavior. In fact for Foucault, state disciplinary power is so pervasive in our everyday lives that we live in a Panopticon society, where not just surveillance, but even the idea of surveillance controls how people behave (1977). Yet, by examining local instances of the state’s interactions with urban dwellers, we unsettle these idealized renditions of the state’s disciplinary reach. It is not simply that the state is complicit in the illegibility of mobile populations or the undermining of its own legal frameworks, it is that there are parts of the state that flagrantly thrive on such illegibility. Landau puts it this way: ‘We begin to see that this mobility is not so much a threat to current state practice. Indeed … African states rarely have the capacity and often not even the desire to regulate and fix their populations’ (Landau, 2015: 232). If we move beyond the normative cloak around which draw around the state, we realize that the threat of ‘illegibility’ does not shake the foundations on which it stands. In fact, the opposite is true. By willfully obfuscating migrant identities on a legal form and taking advantage of the fact that many of them do not have identity documents that are traceable in the legal system, the police become co-conspirators in creating an invisible population. This may undermine the effectiveness of the law, but it does not shatter the state’s symbolic power as an institution that can mete out violence. Women traders dread the thought of appearing in court, deportation and encounters with state authorities, as much as they articulate their frustration at police corruption. Indeed it is this unique location, which the state occupies as a ‘double agent’ – both inside and outside of the law – that guarantees its continued presence as a significant actor in shaping urban spaces. In the dynamic and productive nature of urban regulation, governance and the law are not static. In fact, legal instruments like the notice are part and parcel of the production of a hybrid regulatory system created not just by the formalism of state rules and regulations, but also by the intersection of these rules with the alternative logics of non-state actors. THE LIMINAL CITY In the survival pressures of everyday life, they become productive sites for the creation of new urban codes and regulatory systems. In this context, regimes of urban practice cannot assume the supremacy of the state or the location of power in ‘one individual or group exercising power over another’ (Cronin, 1996: 56). Nor can we presume the dominance of extralegal practices. Writing about governance and security, Clunan points out that the state is joined by a number of other actors, benign and malign, who sometimes compete and sometimes collaborate in providing governance and security through bottom-up and horizontal forms of organization. In many places, states are themselves a main contributor to insecurity at the human and global levels. (Clunan, 2010: 6) What we see is the creation of hybrid practices that meld official with unofficial, formal with informal, legal with illegal. In the end, the outcomes make it impossible to disentangle the ‘official’ from the ‘unofficial’ city. In this hybrid and productive landscape, the nature of urban governance shifts as state power is subverted, reconfigured and reinforced in uneven and arbitrary ways. CONCLUSION In the liminal city, people’s experiences defy binary, either/or logics. True, they may be impoverished, but in the city there is a chance for upward social mobility. The state may seem absent and weak, but it is often present if complicit in regulating urban space. And those considered marginalized in the city remain part of shaping urban processes and outcomes. Cross-border women live paradoxical lives. They are invisible officially, but visible in discourses of the other. They live in Johannesburg but remain dislocated. They move to Johannesburg for its promise of wealth and safety but face poverty and 135 violence there. The city is about these contradictions, often lived simultaneously – even at times seamlessly – in everyday life. Women’s lives call into question common assumptions about how we think about urban space, marginality and governance. What does being ‘legal’ mean in a city where those with valid visas or refugee permits are considered illegal on the streets? What is ‘official’ when police officers collude to turn a blind eye to ‘unofficial’ street trading? What is ‘urban governance’ in a context where multiple regulating authorities exist with differing values and moral economies? On an analytical level, the language of ‘good governance’ and its Manichean ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ outlook ignores the potential opportunities that emerge out of structural failures and economic need. This is not to deny that some forms of sociality can make those at the margins of society even more vulnerable. But there are instances when these social experiments serve to expand spaces of inclusion in the city, when mechanisms within the formal system fail to do so. In a city where, understandably, much of the recent scholarly literature has focused on the role of the state in transforming apartheid’s historical racial and economic divides, we need to shift our gaze and look at how ordinary urban dwellers are, in their everyday lives, transforming the post-apartheid metropolis. The liminal city is a productive, hybrid space, where this liminal way of being is, as it was in Turner’s work, constantly about becoming. But unlike the clear life stages of these cultural rituals, we do not know the next stage, nor do those passing through the liminal city. Edward Said once wrote, ‘For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. 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(2005) ‘Afterword to “Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence”’, American Anthropologist, 107(3): 395–402. 138 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Sheldon, K.E. (ed.) (1996) Courtyards, Markets, City Streets: Urban Women in Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Simone, A. (2002) ‘The dilemmas of informality for African governance’, in S. Parnell, E. Pieterse, M. Swilling and D. Wooldridge (eds), Democratising Local Government: The South African Experiment. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. pp. 294–304. Simone, A. (2005) ‘Urban circulation and the everyday politics of African urban youth: The case of Douala, Cameroon’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(3): 516–32. Statistics South Africa (2012) Census 2011: The South Africa I Know, the Home I Understand. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. Stren, R.E. and White, R.R. (eds) (1989) African Cities in Crisis: Managing Rapid Urban Growth. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Swilling, M. 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(1985) ‘The invisible Flâneuse: Women and the literature of modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society, 2(3): 37–46. 10 Constructing and Contesting Resilience in Post-Disaster Urban Communities Kevin Fox Gotham and Bradford Powers INTRODUCTION Recent years have witnessed the growth of an interdisciplinary literature that seeks to identify the indicators, measures, and processes of resilience in communities affected by disasters. In ecology, resilience refers to the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and persist in a stable state (Gunderson et al., 2006). In Holling’s (1973) original and influential thesis, ecological resilience refers to the persistence of relationships within a system and the ‘ability of systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables and parameters, and still persist’ (p. 17). Researchers often use the terms adaptive capacity and ‘bounce back’, both of which refer to the ability of a system to block disruptive changes and to recover from shock and return to normal functioning. More recently, in the field of urban ecosystems research, studies of resilience have increasingly focused on ‘transformability’ as an essential characteristic of resilient urban ecosystems (Dietz et al., 2003). In this conception, resilience does not just mean adaptation, adjustment, and return to a predisturbance state. Rather, resilience implies the capacity for renewal, regeneration, and re-organization when faced with disturbance (Berkes et al., 2003: 13; Folke, 2006; Olsson et al., 2004). Resilience is a popular concept across the natural, physical, and social sciences and policy research communities, but there is significant disagreement about the characteristics that define resilience, appropriate indicators and measures of resilience, and processes and drivers of post-disaster resilience (Leichenko, 2011: 164). Physical and natural scientists and policy researchers have come to celebrate resilience as an attribute that places should strive to create and maintain (Vale and Campanella, 2005). Other social scientists have viewed the concept with skepticism and criticized prevailing applications for their conservative implications, top-down and authoritative assumptions, lack of clear 140 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES theoretical intent, and vague analytical focus (Gotham and Campanella, 2010; MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013). For social scientists, resilience is a fluid and malleable concept that defies easy categorization, especially in the context of global climate change and increased frequency and destructiveness of disasters. Debates over the applicability and utility of the resilience concept reflect differences in disciplinary conventions, theoretical orientation, choice of methods and analytical strategies, and interpretations of findings. In the following sections, we identify several points of debate, including theorizations of resilience, relationships between resilience and diversity, the interconnectedness of resilience and vulnerability, urbanization and resilience, and resilience as a contested category. CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF RESILIENCE: PROCESS, CONDITION, AND IDEOLOGY The term resilience provides a linking concept for understanding how both humans and urban ecosystems respond to traumatic events and what factors explain the pace and trajectory of human-ecosystem recovery and change. Scholars view resilience as a multidimensional concept that has a variety of divergent meanings. Resilience can be a theoretical perspective, a social-ecological process, a discrete object of empirical analysis, a social-ecological condition, or an ideology. Across the physical, natural, and social sciences there is little agreement or consensus concerning the conceptualization of resilience (for an overview, see Brand and Jax, 2007; Brown and Westaway, 2011). Ecologists have long defined ecological resilience as the amount of exogenous disturbance or trauma that a system can absorb without changing basic structural properties (Gunderson, 2000). In ecological systems, several system properties are indicative of resilience, including homeostasis and feedback transmission, spatial heterogeneity, biodiversity, limited hierarchical structure, and excess capacity (Holling, 1973). More recent research has moved beyond the ‘stable equilibrium’ concept of resilience as the ability of post-trauma systems to return to their fixed pre-trauma equilibrium condition. The opposing, non-equilibrium, view treats resilience as ‘the ability of a system to adapt and adjust to changing internal or external processes’ (Pickett et al., 2004: 373). This openended notion eschews a view of resilience as reaching an end-point or terminal condition and examines resilience as a non-linear and multidimensional process (Folke, 2006; Pickett et al., 2004; Pike et al., 2010; Redman, 2005). Within policy making and academic communities, there is a growing interest in the notion of resilience as a basis for post-disaster recovery, hazard mitigation, and adaptation to global climate change (Colten, Kates and Laska, 2008; Gunderson, 2010). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2007) defines resilience as the ability of a social system to ‘absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for selforganization and the capacity to adapt to stress and change’. In this conception, resilient post-disaster cities and communities are those that are able to adapt to uncertainty and surprise, absorb recurrent disturbances to retain essential structures and processes, and build capacity for learning, improvement, and advancement over pre-disaster conditions (Berkes et al., 2003: 13; Olsson et al., 2004). For post-disaster cities, resilience lies in the ability of groups, organizations, and institutions to access and effectively use political, economic, cultural, and natural resources for recovery, transformation, and innovation (Lebel et al., 2006; Masten and Obradovic, 2008; Wallace and Wallace, 2008). There are very real challenges concerning government responses to disasters that can enhance resilience through recovery and rebuilding efforts. On one hand, disasters Constructing and Contesting Resilience in Post-Disaster Urban Communities present opportunities for correcting past policies and developmental patterns that contributed to pre-disaster risk conditions and offer new possibilities for creating resilience to future disaster. ‘Although it may seem an uncomfortable conclusion, natural disasters can be good for nations’, according to Mutter (2010: 1042); ‘A disaster that sweeps away shoddy infrastructure can be an impetus to improve roads, hospitals and industry’. On the other hand, doubts have been raised about the extent to which the opportunities that disasters present are actually seized upon and used to reduce risk and build resilient cities and communities. Opportunities can arise to the extent that disasters lay bare the instabilities and inadequacies of pre-disaster forms of redevelopment and create temporary vacuums of political authority. More often than not, however, the response and outcome is to revert to business as usual and thereby reinforce the status quo. Rather than seizing the opportunity and creating the means to build more resilient communities, research suggests that the common response is to build back infrastructure to pre-disaster conditions, thereby perpetuating longstanding risks and vulnerabilities to future disaster (Pelling, 2011). As a social condition, resilience implies a form of adaptation and response to disaster that involves institutional efforts to secure the continuation of the desired system functions in the face of changing context. Indicators of social resilience include: efficient transmission of knowledge across space and time; social, demographic, and economic diversity; mobilization of social networks; access to material and cultural resources; and decentralization of decision-making (for an overview, see Boyd and Folke, 2011). At the metropolitan or regional scale, scholars have suggested that several factors are indicative of social-ecological resilience, including: availability of information and communication technologies; stock of human capital including education and security; stock of social capital including property rights; structure of 141 critical institutions; access to risk-spreading processes; and the ability of decision-makers to manage and validate information (Bristow and Healy, 2014; Davies, 2011). At the urban neighborhood scale, scholars have suggested that social-ecological resilience is strongly related to cultural factors such as collective memory, availability of physical gatherings, degree of place attachment, collective sense of shared community history and tradition, and committed community members (Cutter et al., 2008; Kulig, Edge and Joyce, 2008; Magis, 2010; Olick and Robbins, 1998). While these cultural factors are important indicators of community resilience, other factors including degree of neighborhood organization, formal connections with external allies, and diverse social networks and flows of resources are significant indicators (Gotham and Campanella, 2011). Craig Colten and colleagues highlight the importance of local cultural factors in a study of the persistence of communities along Louisiana’s coast despite centuries of natural and technological hazard events (Colten, Hay and Ginacarlo, 2012). Their study employs a comparative-historical analysis to examine ‘inherent resilience’, that is, practices that natural resource-dependent residents deploy to cope with disruptions and that are retained in their collective memory. The analysis classifies activities taken in advance of and following a series of oil spills using four elements of community resilience: anticipation, reduced vulnerability, response, and recovery. Findings show clear distinction between the elements of resilience that are sustained at the local level and interventions at the government/corporate level. Intimate local knowledge along with family and social networks provide the inherent resilience necessary to contend with past ecological damages. In contrast, abstract and formal plans developed by government agencies are typically implemented in a top-down fashion and heavily oriented toward anticipating events and reducing impacts. Yet these plans do not always function effectively because they do 142 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES not engage with local cultural practices and conditions. In particular, the distribution of massive sums of money through emergency programs redirects local efforts from restoring their own economies toward securing external funds. In effect, this process can contribute to an unraveling of local kin and social networks that had been central to community resilience in the past. Other scholars have eschewed a notion of resilience as a measurable outcome or socialecological condition and examined the ways in which communities and elites deploy various framing strategies and symbols about ‘recovery’ to respond to a disaster situation. In a comparison of post-disaster recovery in New York and New Orleans, Gotham and Greenberg (2014) draw attention to the framing strategies that particular groups and organized interests use to construct and deploy different meanings of resilience – for example, resilience as return of original residents, repopulation of new residents, or physical rebuilding and reinvestment. That is, resilience is a collective representation that expresses different meanings of neighborhood identity. Constructions of resilience reflect a variety of different symbolic forms that people use to communicate meanings about the post-9/11 and post-Katrina rebuilding process. Instead of viewing resilience and sustainability as a universal condition or end-state, the comparison of New York and New Orleans suggests that resilience is context-dependent, with contending meanings wielded by neighborhood leaders and activists. Resilience is not an a priori condition but is an emergent and negotiated process of urban reality construction. As a schema of interpretation (Goffman, 1974: 21), resilience is a constructed term that enables individuals to locate, perceive, identify, and label events surrounding the contested and conflictual nature of post-disaster rebuilding. As an outcome of collective negotiating and meaning construction, resilience involves simplifying social reality by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within the post-disaster environment. RESILIENCE AND DIVERSITY In recent years, scholars have focused much theoretical and empirical attention on understanding and explaining the connections between diversity and resilience (Bell et al., 2011; Gotham and Campanella, 2013; Janssen, 2007; Nelson et al., 2011). Ecological diversity refers to both the different types of species and the different functional roles of species. Tilman et al. (2001) demonstrated that more diversity helped in the recovery of ecosystem functions (productivity, biogeochemical cycling) after a disturbance. This finding is similar to Berke and Campanella’s (2006) observation that a diverse economy can contribute to human community resilience (capacity to rebound following destruction). Researchers have demonstrated that the development of socio-spatial heterogeneity can regulate flows of critical resources and coordinate various networks of socio-cultural and economic activity to sustain resilience (for an overview, see Grimm and Redman, 2004). Diversity in the political realm in the form of heterogeneous policies, socio-legal regulations, and land-use practices represents a mix of assets that can build functional redundancy to enhance the capacity of systems to face economic and environmental shocks. Adger et al. (2005: 1038) argue that sociospatial heterogeneity can confer resilience to the extent that ‘governance and management frameworks can spread risk by diversifying patterns of resource use and by encouraging alternative activities and lifestyles’. Such practices are ‘analogous to the way management of a diverse portfolio sustains the growth in financial markets’. The principle of portfolio management suggests that a diverse system can buffer against changes in one area and thereby regenerate after a disturbance, Constructing and Contesting Resilience in Post-Disaster Urban Communities thus turning crises into opportunities. When applied to cities, the metaphor of portfolio management suggests that a range of political, economic, cultural, and administration reactions to perturbations is critical to maintaining the flow of resources and services to a disaster-impacted region. Other scholars imply that diversity has trade-offs, costs as well as benefits, and may promote the growth of vulnerabilities and erode the resilient capacities of communities (Bell et al., 2011; Folke, 2006; Ives and Carpenter, 2007; Janssen, 2007; Low et al., 2003; Nelson et al., 2011; Ostrom, 2005; Walker et al., 2006). Newman and Dale (2005) draw attention to the importance of network structures in supporting the growth of resilience. Networks composed of a diversity of ‘bridging’ links to a plethora of resources and ‘bonding’ links that build trust can strengthen a community’s ability to adapt to change and build resilience. Yet networks composed only of homogeneous ‘bonding’ links can impose constraining social norms and foster group homophily, and thus reduce resilience. Thus, the size of social networks and interconnections between the social networks will influence the ability of a city and its neighborhoods to weather a major disaster. The take-away point is that a diversity of both scale-specific horizontal and cross-scale vertical networks is important in fostering resilience. Diversity of one or the other type of network tie can slow post-trauma recovery efforts while heterogeneity of linkages can promote post-disaster resilience. The above concerns resonate with the work of Wallace and Wallace (2008), who draw attention to how the resilience of neighborhoods depends on complex structures of tight and loose interpersonal ties. Using a study of the socio-economic disruption of New York City neighborhoods during the 1970s, they contend that the massive destruction of lowrental housing undermined close-knit social relationships that had existed between families and individuals for decades. Drug use, violent crime, tuberculosis, and low-weight 143 births were among the many public health and public order problems that soared in incidence consequent to the unraveling of these communities. Findings suggest that the ability of a municipality and its dependent suburban counties to weather a disaster depends on the size of social networks in its neighborhoods and on the interconnection between the social networks. Diversity such as gained by social and economic integration influences the strength of the loose ties between social networks. Even poor neighborhoods can be resilient if they possess a dense fabric of social networks and can maintain connections with mainstream political structures to access aid and resources. In a study that examines the recovery efforts that followed five major disasters during the past hundred years, Daniel P. Aldrich (2012) argues that the presence of social capital at the neighborhood level is an important asset to support recovery from a large-scale disaster. His study examines recovery efforts that followed the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, the 1955 Kobe earthquake, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. He defines social capital as the resources held by both the individual and the community made available by bonding, bridging, and the linking of social networks. Resilience at the neighborhood level, according to Aldrich, is the neighborhood’s capacity to effectively collaborate in its own ‘recovery’, which is the repopulation by old and new residents in a manner which moves daily life toward normalcy. Social capital can be quantifiably measured in four ways: attitudes related to trust, behaviors based on trust, levels of civic participation, and field experiments that reveal a community’s belief in reciprocity. Employing both qualitative and quantitative data, Aldrich explains that because social capital reveals itself differently over time and across societies, the chosen measurements of social capital must negotiate the historical and cultural environment of varying case studies. In this network conception of social resilience, bonding 144 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES social capital (within group network ties) and bridging social capital (between group network ties) connect individuals of the same status with a web of extra-local networks and resources. Linking social capital connects different groups to institutional power structures and resources via cross-scale interactions. Drawing on a wide range of data sources and through sophisticated statistical analyses, Aldrich notes that communities composed of a diversity of ‘bonding’, ‘bridging’, and ‘linking’ social capital are poised to access resources at critical times and adapt to change. Scholars have long recognized the role of diversity in contributing to the resilience of urban ecosystems but disagree over issues of conceptualization, empirical measures, and social-ecological linkages. Folke (2006) has argued that diversity is essential for the self-organization of complex systems, and for reorganization and regeneration following perturbations and external shocks. For ecologists, two kinds of diversity enhance resilience: (1) functional diversity, that is, the number of functionally different constituent groups which influence system performance and goal attainment; and (2) response diversity, that is, the diversity of reactions to shocks and perturbations (Elmqvist et al., 2003). These two forms of diversity are not conceptually separate and analytically distinct. Rather, they are intertwined and mutually reinforcing drivers of post-disaster resilience. The relationship between resilience and diversity is complex and fraught with theoretical and analytical challenges. Social diversities, including race/ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, culture, styles, tastes, and so on, are plural, variable, dissimilar, and socially constructed. While scholars acknowledge that diversity matters in explaining post-disaster resilience, few studies have examined the impact of disasters on patterns of social diversity or investigated whether the level of pre-trauma social diversity affects the resilience of post-trauma urban ecosystems. Moreover, scholars disagree on what types of diversity and at what scales may result in positive or beneficial post-disaster outcomes. More research is needed on how the diversity of cross-scale interactions, networks, and flows of resources can shape and determine the pace and trajectory of post-disaster repopulation and recovery. It might be that some types of diversity may propagate risks and vulnerabilities to disasters. RESILIENCE AND VULNERABILITY For years, researchers have considered resilience and vulnerability as antonyms or opposites of each other. The more resilient the system, the less vulnerable it is to disaster, as the argument goes. Recently, however, scholars have begun to rethink this conceptual distinction and explore the complex and interactive relationships among the two concepts (Miller et al., 2010; Pelling, 2011). Gotham and Campanella (2011) examine the extension, intensification, and acceleration of cross-scale interactions in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to reveal the connections between resilience and vulnerability in social-ecological systems. ‘Cross-scale interactions’ mean influences, connections, and networks among institutions, government agencies, and networks to facilitate the flow of recovery information and resources. Cross-scale interactions imply: (1) the extension or stretching of disaster recovery activities across borders; (2) the intensification, or magnitude, of recovery activities, and flows of investment and resources to encourage rebuilding; and (3) the velocity, or speed, of flows, activity, and interchanges to accelerate post-disaster recovery and rebuilding. Charting the extension, intensity, and velocity of cross-scale interactions involves identifying how and to what extent traumatic events affect patterns and processes of both vulnerability and resilience within and across urban ecosystems. Constructing and Contesting Resilience in Post-Disaster Urban Communities Rather than viewing urban ecosystems as either resilient or vulnerable, Gotham and Campanella (2011) conceptualize them as embodying both resilient and vulnerable components. Vulnerability and resilience are an interplay that presuppose each other. They are products of cross-scale linkages of policies, socio-legal regulations, networks, and organizations that facilitate some forms of action and decision-making while discouraging others. Cross-scale interactions are the communicatory and fiscal infrastructure through which government agencies and organizations circulate and transmit information and resources to facilitate post-disaster recovery and rebuilding. Cross-scale interactions can alter organizational couplings, leading to adaptive couplings that promote resilience, adjustment, and innovation, but can also reinforce maladaptive couplings, which in turn can produce vulnerabilities to future stress and trauma. Scholars have long known that disadvantaged people and groups, including racial minorities, the poor, the elderly, women, and children, always suffer more than the wealthy and affluent when a major disaster hits (Enarson, 2012; Greenberg, 2014; La Greca et al., 2013). In addition, disadvantaged communities tend to recover more slowly than wealthier communities in the aftermath of a major disaster. Eric Klinenberg’s (2002) research on the Chicago heat wave of 1995 demonstrates how low-income people and African Americans bore the brunt of the negative consequences of the record temperatures due to poor housing conditions, inadequate access to medical facilities, and less assistance from police, fire, and paramedics. As Kamel (2012) and Kamel and LoukaitouSideris (2004) have pointed out, federal assistance programs tend to favor well-off single-family homeowners, and offer limited resources for long-term recovery. Because post-disaster recovery processes are embedded in the socio-economic inequalities of cities and regions, they tend to reproduce prevailing racial and class structures that 145 are the root causes of vulnerability to disaster (Bolin and Stanford, 1998; Cutter et al., 2008). Studies have shown that high poverty neighborhoods and disadvantaged individuals – women, racial and ethnic minorities, elderly, and non-citizens – tend to receive less external resources to assist with recovery (Berke and Beatley, 1997; Donner and Rodríguez, 2008; Fothergill and Peek, 2004). During recovery periods, disadvantaged groups often face formidable barriers to effectively defining and communicating their collective needs (Erikson, [1976] 2004; Klinenberg, 2002). They also tend to be excluded from participating in decisionmaking related to the allocation of recovery resources (Kamel and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2004). The mechanisms of exclusion and disadvantage that shape the disaster outcomes include institutionalized discrimination, socio-economic exploitation, and housing damage, as well as lack of access to insurance, emergency relief organizations, community- and faith-based assistance, and public and private rebuilding resources. In many cases, as disaster resources are distributed unequally among different social groups, the recovery process further accentuates the harsh divisions of class, race, gender, and place stratification (Blaikie et al., 2004; Mutter, 2010). A major disaster or perturbation can alter pre-disaster forms of social organization and territorial development but also accelerate pre-disaster trends including rising inequality, rigid patterns of residential segregation, and unequal access to political and economic resources on the basis of race and class. The high losses experienced by socially disadvantaged groups – for example, poor people, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and the elderly – has traditionally been attributed to the lack of resilience of such groups to disasters. This ‘lack-of-resilience’ or ‘resilience deficit’ explanation zeroes in on the attributes of individuals as the root cause of vulnerability – a blame-the-victim view that diverts attention away from underlying 146 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES power structures and population dynamics (population growth, urbanization, migration) that increase exposure to disasters and contribute to the devastating impacts of disasters (Donner and Rodríguez, 2008). Moreover, such a perspective frames the post-disaster ‘recovery’ of upper-class and affluent areas in terms of the resilience of those communities (that is, a resilience surplus), an explanation that obfuscates the central role that state policies and programs play in buffering affluent neighborhoods and groups from the harmful effects of disasters (Gotham and Greenberg, 2014). The literature on resilience and vulnerability has evolved from a perspective centering on objective analysis of determinants to a more integrated and holistic understanding of how subjective understandings of risk, and the socially differentiated experience of disasters, relate to the production of social vulnerability. Freudenberg et al. (2009) and Colten (2006, 2009) have documented how past investments in levee building, construction of navigation canals, availability of flood insurance, and human-induced coastal erosion contributed to the increased vulnerability of New Orleans to hurricanes and flooding in the decades after 1960. Vulnerability to extreme events is shaped by both physical and social factors. Historically, low-income Irish and Italian populations suffered when floods affected New Orleans. Modifications in the structural defenses to floods and shifting demographics since 1950 altered the geography of vulnerability in the city. In recent years, both blacks and whites have occupied below-sea-level sites, exposing both to flood risks, although the racial composition of the city has undergone a near reversal. Additionally, low-income residents, found disproportionately within the African American population, suffered dual vulnerability. Not only did many live in low-lying areas, but evacuation plans relied on private automobiles that left many poor residents to endure the impact of the hurricane-induced flooding. Human actions, institutions, social policies, and government laws and regulations can nurture some forms of resilience (economic revitalization), undermine other kinds of resilience (neighborhood social networks and community ties), contribute to the long-term erosion of different kinds of resilience (for example, socio-economic, environmental, and so on), and reinforce and perpetuate social inequalities. Many cities around the world are hotspots of vulnerability to disaster, with residents marginalized from decision-making structures and absent in the development plans and visions of future urban growth. John Mutter (2010) notes that systems of inequality and disadvantage translate into a hierarchy of places in which wealthier countries such as the United States can buffer the effects of major disasters on a national level, whereas small countries with weak government systems and economies can be devastated by disasters. Disaster risk is a global phenomenon that is increasing, intensively concentrated, and unevenly distributed. Countries with small and vulnerable economies, such as many small-island developing states (SIDS) like Madagascar and developing countries such as Samoa, have seen their economic development set back decades by disaster impacts. The magnitude-8.8 earthquake in Chile in February 2010 released almost 500 times as much energy as the 7.0 quake a few weeks earlier in Haiti. Yet the death toll in Haiti – the much poorer nation, with a GDP more than 20 times smaller than that of Chile – was almost 500 times larger. In short, poorer urban communities suffer a disproportionate share of disaster loss, are less resilient to loss, and have access to few social protections. Growing urban populations will likely amplify the impacts of natural disasters as disaster risk concentrates in poorer countries. In sum, recent research views cities, regions, and urban ecosystems as composed of both vulnerable and resilient components that are reciprocally related. Scholars consider vulnerability and resiliency as a Constructing and Contesting Resilience in Post-Disaster Urban Communities dynamic duality – not as a dualism of independent sets of phenomena corresponding to processes of change and transformation. The usefulness of vulnerability and resilience concepts lie in the attempt to separate extra-local patterns and regularities from the context-laden urban environment, uncover differences between urban phenomena, and reveal the unique aspects of urban ecosystems and their subunits that would be difficult to detect otherwise. Research recognizes that power relations and social inequalities shape and influence the variability of cross-scale interactions, making some communities more vulnerable to disasters than others and making some disasterimpacted communities more resilient than others. High levels of socio-spatial inequality and segregation can increase vulnerabilities to different kinds of disasters, since disadvantaged people have fewer resources than the wealthy to respond and adapt. In many cases, community resilience relates to historical structural inequalities, patterns of investment and disinvestment, and sociospatial marginalization. RESILIENCE, URBANIZATION, AND URBAN POLITICAL ECOLOGY Explaining the relationships between resilience and post-disaster urban communities requires an understanding of contemporary urbanization. As a long-term process, urbanization defies easy categorization because no institution, no individuals, or groups of individuals have full knowledge or control over it (Ernstson et al., 2010). This global process of urbanization ‘manifests itself through changes in human population densities and land cover that are so rapid’ that scholars currently lack a complete understanding of the resulting consequences (Ernstson et al., 2010: 531). A collection of scholars working in the field of Urban Political Ecology have offered a theoretical understanding of 147 urbanization that understands it to be ‘a social process of transforming and reconfiguring nature’ (Swyngedouw, 2006: 35). Further, Urban Political Ecology takes seriously the global and multidimensional nature of urbanization and directs scholars to examine contemporary urbanization through urban society, not simply just the city per se (Angelo and Waschsmuth, 2015). Topics of inquiry include water (Gandy, 2002; Kaika, 2005; Loftus, 2006; Swyngedouw, 2004), food (Heynen, 2006) and other infrastructures that are supported by and in turn support various linked urban communities. The perspective that urbanization constantly reshuffles the city and the countryside is important when examining resilience in urban communities. Urban Political Ecology certainly allows for focus only on the ‘city’, but would assert that the environmental crises found in cities, which manifest themselves in many ways – among them so-called natural disasters – are in reality linked to larger socioecological processes (Keil, 2003: 724). With the worldwide spread of urbanization and the proliferation of larger and more numerous urban communities, scholars are engaging with how concepts and perspectives regarding resilience will adapt to the dawning of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch of the present that is chiefly defined by the dominance of the global ecosystem by humans, especially with regards to human-induced climate change (Steffen et al., 2011). The Anthropocene is generally understood to have begun with industrialization in Europe (Zalasiewicz et al., 2010). Urban communities, our focus, are drivers, components, and outputs of the Anthropocene. As we argue at the conclusion of this chapter, resilience should highlight the material challenges that marginalized communities face. Globalization generally fuels the elites; however, some scholars have revealed that new transnational social movements and their organizations are providing sources of power to marginal communities in unexpected ways (Ogden et al., 2013). 148 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES An urban housing advocacy group based in Mumbai, India, the Slum/Shack Dwellers International, is itself a decentralized organization that promotes affiliate networks which have grown to operate in more than twenty countries (McFarlane, 2009). These transnational activist networks provide a source of external power to marginalized urban communities that better allow them to react to adverse conditions. CONTESTING RESILIENCE While resilience has been a popular concept across the social and environmental sciences, there is significant disagreement about the definitions of resilience, the appropriate analytical unit for measuring resilience, and the political implications of resilience research findings. On one hand, scholars across the natural, physical, and social sciences maintain that resilience research is highly relevant both theoretically and empirically to understanding and explaining the various institutions, configurations of actors, and social processes that shape the different adaptive and transformative capacities of cities and urban neighborhoods (Ernstson et al., 2010). As mentioned, there has been shift away from the notion that resilience can be objectively measured by a set of quantifiable indicators toward a more complex, nuanced view that understands resilience as a multi-level process and socially constructed category (for overviews, see Brand and Jax, 2007; Brown and Westaway, 2011: 335). Researchers are increasingly employing dynamic complex adaptive systems approaches and cross-scale perspectives, though gaps remain in understanding how cross-scale interactions affect responses to disasters. On the other hand, resilience is a contested category and there is little agreement or consensus among scholars as to the social dimensions, drivers, processes, or outcomes of resilience. Planners and policy makers have struggled to reconcile the broad applicability of the resilience concept with placespecific social practices (for an overview, see O’Hare and White, 2013). MacKinnon and Derickson (2013) provide a theoretical and political critique of how the concept of resilience has been applied to places. Their critique focuses on several points: first, urban ecological conceptions of resilience miss the determinants of urban form, such as flows of capital and modes of state regulation. As they argue, the abstract language of systems theory and complexity science objectifies and depoliticizes the spheres of urban and regional governance, ‘normalizing the emphasis on adaptation to prevailing environmental and economic conditions and foreclosing wider sociopolitical questions of power and representation’ (2013: 258). Secondly, the resilience concept presents a ‘paradox of change’ that emphasizes the prevalence of disasters and crises, but places the responsibility for recovery and adaptation on communities, the effect of which is to passively accept and naturalize crises. Thirdly, resilience thinking is characterized by a certain imprecision in scalar terms, treating different scales similarly as arenas for fostering local adaptation in the context of the omnipresence of global climate change and increasing severity of disasters. ‘Yet the question of whether the spatial unit in question can be usefully or accurately understood as a self-organizing entity modelled after ecosystems remains unaddressed’ (MacKinnon and Derickson, 2013: 261). Thus, viewing cities and regions as self-organizing units is fundamentally misplaced, serving to divorce them from wider processes of capital accumulation and the sociopolitical realities of state authority, unequal power structures, and entrenched relations of domination and subordination. Another critical issue concerns the definition and application of adaptive capacity to places and communities. The discourse of resilience assumes a particular group, neighborhood, or city has the ‘capacity’ to adjust, Constructing and Contesting Resilience in Post-Disaster Urban Communities adapt, and innovate in response to a major crisis or disaster. Capacity presupposes a discrete entity or ‘system’ with agency, volition, and self-organization (Norris et al., 2008). Yet ‘capacity’ is a nebulous category since particular groups and organized interests can be ‘resilient’ in maintaining hierarchies, inequalities, and an unjust social system in which access to and control over material and cultural resources is segregated and unequally distributed. Importantly, resilience is not a static social condition with clear and finite indicators that researchers can measure at a single point in time. Rather, resilience is a conflictual process that plays out in different ways in different cities with different histories, political structures, cultures, socioeconomic conditions, and crisis triggers. Institutional actions, government policies, and socio-legal regulations can nurture some forms of resilience and undermine other kinds of resilience. Consequently, some policies may produce resilience to particular types of crises (but not others) while producing new risks and vulnerabilities to system-wide breakdown and collapse. Past urban redevelopment decisions can have legacy effects on present conditions and future possibilities. Just as pre-disaster social, economic, and environmental conditions can constrain and limit post-disaster resiliency, post-disaster developmental patterns can feed forward to affect the future resilience or vulnerability of different urban neighborhoods (Gotham and Campanella, 2010). Finally, we believe it is important for scholars not to reify resilience as an empirically measurable category or reify different spatial scales such as the urban or regional as discrete, self-organizing units. Conceptualizations of resilience need to be both inward-looking in focusing attention on the short-term recovery needs of disaster-devastated communities, and outwardlooking in stressing the need to cultivate and reproduce cross-scale linkages for long-term rebuilding (Gotham et al., 2011; Gotham and Campanella, 2011). In discussing resilience 149 policy discourses, Brown (2011) shows that resilience is often employed by policy makers and stage agencies to bolster policies promoting a business-as-usual approach rather than to challenge existing structures of domination and subordination and bring about fundamental changes to systems. MacKinnon and Derickson (2013) critique the apolitical nature of ecological conceptions of resilience, arguing that they fail to critically theorize or analyze the logics of global capitalism. As Gotham and Greenberg (2014) point out, the emphasis on assessing resilience at particular scales (region, city, neighborhood, etc.) distracts attention from the role of state policy in creating the initial conditions of vulnerability, and from state responsibility to support post-disaster rebuilding. Such issues raise questions about who are the main agents of change, the interplay among structure and agency and who defines resilience. In this situation, the questions become: resilience of what, for whom, and for what purpose? Resilience, as we conceive of it, should be used as heuristic device to identify the factors that explain variability in the pace and trajectory of post-disaster recovery and rebuilding. As a relational concept, resilience cannot be understood as an attribute that communities possess to varying degrees. Rather, resilience should highlight the material challenges that marginalized communities face in overcoming adversity and, in addition, clarify how cross-scale interactions and networks of activity underlie and support social relationships of coupled vulnerability and resilience. These points dovetail with Amundsen’s (2012) recent call for researchers to consider the multidimensional, complex, and dynamic nature of resilience. Although some residents living in disaster-impacted communities may consider their neighborhoods or cities to be resilient, the rate and magnitude of expected systemic global changes, especially climate change and increasing storm intensity and frequency, mean that current resilience may be fleeting and ephemeral. Moreover, the current reality of rising sea levels and global 150 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES warming means that future resilience cannot be taken for granted and may in fact be an illusion. 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(2008) ‘Urban systems during disaster: factors for resilience’, Ecology and Society, 13(1). Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Steffen, W. and Crutzen, P. (2010) ‘The new world of the Anthropocene’, Environmental Science and Technology, 44(7): 2228–31. PART IV Suburbs and Suburbanization: Stratification, Sprawl and Sustainability In an increasingly urban world where cities are, at least in some respects, borderless, Alan Mace (2013: 15) argues, ‘we need to hold on to the role of the suburb not as apart from the city but as part of a wider urban canvas and the changes happening across it’. In so doing, he states, we must acknowledge that there continue to be some significant differences between the two and these differences need to be understood. Complicating this project is the changing face of suburbs and suburbanization. Describing suburban growth as the dominant urban process in the twenty-first century, Hamel and Keil (2015) observe that North American gated communities, African squatter settlements, European housing estates and Chinese urban villages all share one thing in common: they represent types of suburban space. In North America, Britain, and increasingly in Australia, the big story is the inversion of city and suburb. The structure of the contemporary metropolis now resembles a doughnut, with better-off residents residing in the centre or on the fringes and the poor being stranded in the inner suburbs. Keil et al. (2015: 98) label the latter as ‘“in-between cities” – situated between the glamour zones of the wealthy exurbs and the “creative” downtown’. This inversion is the topic of Bill Randolph’s authoritative review in Chapter 11, ‘Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage’. For three decades after World War II, an array of centrifugal forces pushed aspiring working- and middle-class residents away from the industrial city into vast swathes of low density, auto-dependent development that stretched far into the urban hinterland. Those left behind in the inner city struggled with the effects of economic decline accompanied by rising unemployment, crime and drug use. Starting in the 1980s, this pattern 156 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES shifted into reverse. Randolph writes that worldwide the resurgence of urban core districts, often placed as coterminous with the districts that collapsed in the previous era, created new ‘go to’ places. So where then have the urban poor gone, he asks? The answer is outwards, into the old or inner suburbs. A major problem here is ‘transport poverty’; residents, few of whom can afford cars, lack or are poorly served by public transit. Vis-à-vis the debate over physical space discussed in the General Introduction, Randolph insists that cities are spatial constructs wherein social disadvantage is inextricably linked to locational position. This suburban disadvantage has been exacerbated by broader economic changes that have produced greater disparities between rich and poor in neo-liberal nations. The suburban poor are in an especially vulnerable position, situated as they are a long way from city leaders – out of political sight, out of political mind. Urban inversion relates primarily to the inner suburbs, but what about the extensive galaxy of outer suburbs, exurbs and satellite towns that spread far into the hinterland? While scarcely impervious to the financial meltdown of the past decade – subdivision after subdivision on the outskirts of Las Vegas and other American cities hard hit by the sub-prime mortgage crisis remain pockmarked with repossessed homes that have been colonized by squatters – the problems faced here are more likely to be environmental and health related. One longstanding issue is ‘sprawl’. For example, Atlanta, Georgia, dubbed in the 1990s by urban development expert Christopher Leinberger as the ‘poster child for urban sprawl’ (Mulholland, 2016), spreads over 10 counties and 16,000 miles of roads. In Chapter 13, John Hannigan looks at ‘smart growth’ (denser alternatives to suburban sprawl) as an urban policy and movement for change. Not to be confused with ‘smart cities’ (a policy alternative currently in vogue among some urbanists that privileges high technology solutions to urban problems), smart growth has been around for three decades in one form or another. As Anthony Downs (2001) has noted, smart growth refers to many different bundles of policies appealing in various degrees and ways to disparate groups: anti- or slowgrowth advocates and environmentalists, pro-growth advocates, inner-city advocates, better-growth advocates. Hannigan identifies three key frames that have been employed by advocates: urban improvement, public health, the environment (touted as a uniquely ‘American’ variation on sustainable growth along the lines of Local Agenda 21, a set of principles and proposed solutions that emerged from the 1992 Rio Conference). Smart growth’s durability may well be due to its ability to huddle under a big tent where groups with different goals and agendas can co-exist. However, Hannigan points to recurrent criticism that smart growth policies and initiatives lack any meaningful social analysis or critique. In Chapter 12, Ian Smith examines another environmental issue – climate change – as it relates to suburban communities. Smith provides a narrative literature review on four perspectives for understanding the characteristics and process of responding to climate change. Three of these – systems theory, socio-technical transition and social practice – have emerged from outside of urban studies, while a fourth, the governance position, is firmly located within the discipline of urban politics. As does Hannigan in the chapter following, Smith casts this as a ‘framing’ problem. According to the governance perspective, it is crucial to both frame the political problems to which collective resources might be directed and to ethically frame potential political solutions, for example environmental/climate change justice. Suburbs and Suburbanization: Stratification, Sprawl and Sustainability REFERENCES Downs, A. (2001) ‘What does “smart growth” really mean?’. Planning, 67(4): 20–25. Hamel, P. and Keil R. (eds) (2015) Suburban Governance: A Global View. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Keil, R., Hamel, P., Chou, E. and Williams, K. (2015) ‘Suburban governance in Canada’. In 157 Hamel, P. and Keil R. (eds) Suburban Governance: A Global View. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 80–109. Mace, A. (2013) City Suburbs: Placing Suburbia in a Post-Suburban World. London and New York: Routledge. Mulholland, Q. (2016) ‘Urban sprawl’s poster child grows up’. Harvard Political Review, 28: February. 11 Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage Bill Randolph INTRODUCTION Concern over the location of the ‘urban poor’ became a significant issue in the nineteenth century as the negative outcomes of urbanized industrialism took their toll on the populations drawn into the burgeoning cities of northwestern Europe and the USA. Commentators as diverse as Dickens, Engels and Booth all saw the phenomenon of urban poverty as a central social, moral and political matter that stimulated the earliest scholarship on patterns and drivers of urban disadvantage. In more modern times, a concern over the urban poor resurfaced in the 1960s with the recognition that the postSecond-World-War boom had left many behind, marooned in the inner city, as those more able, and the jobs they undertook, left for the suburbs. This chapter does not seek to review this substantial legacy. Rather, the aim is more circumspect: to focus on the changing spatial location of urban disadvantage in contemporary ‘western’ neo-liberal nations (broadly North America, the UK and Australasia) over the last thirty years or so. The way western cities have reformed themselves during this period under the prevailing neo-liberal policy environment, where markets have been given primacy, has lessons that are relevant for the wider debate on the future of cities in the twenty-first century. While far from homogeneous themselves, these places have shared both a broadly parallel economic and political trajectory and have all, to a greater or lesser extent, witnessed comparable trends in their spatial dynamics in recent decades. The central premise here is that marketdriven urban processes logically result in a reformation of the patterns of urban segregation, reflecting changes in the distribution of income and wealth. The long process of political reforms that emerged during the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War, and promoted more socially redistributive outcomes has been replaced by 160 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES a political hegemony that awards primacy to market principles and promotes greater social division. In the urban sphere, these divisions are articulated on the ground through the structure of residential property markets. In particular, these changes also reflect sequential phases of investment, disinvestment and re-investment that have moved through the built environment, reflecting the creation of both new and renewed built space as economies have restructured over the past thirty years as a result. In many cities the impacts of globalization and neo-liberalism, together with the technological transformations that have accompanied them, have had distinctive impacts on the nature of economic activity and social structures in each jurisdiction (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Harvey, 2006). There have been distinctive ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in these changes, which has had consequences for the way the social structure of our cities has been shaped and reformed over the last several decades. This chapter aims to illustrate the spatial repercussions of these processes in terms of those who have gained least from the ‘neo-liberal turn’. The underlying sub-text for this discussion is the now substantial literature on the development of much greater inequality across the global socio-economic system and the seemingly inexorable ‘stretching’ of incomes and wealth that it has generated. Within advanced economies, this has found its expression in the rise of the ‘über-rich’, with extremes of wealth not witnessed since before the early part of the twentieth century (Piketty, 2014). Of course, the changing position of those populations who have seen their wealth and privilege enhanced by the restructuring of urban economies that has been generated by the globalization of the world economy and reinforced by three decades of neo-liberal political hegemony is part of this story. However, the recent scholarly interest in the rise of the global super-rich, those at the very pinnacle of contemporary wealth aggregation and their consumption propensities, especially in terms of their predilection for high-end property in the central city and its impact on urban social polarization (Alvaredo et al., 2013; Hay, 2013), must remain outside the scope of this chapter. The chapter first reviews this current debate on the re-emergence of inequality and its implications for urban socio-spatial structure. It then moves on to explore the outcomes of this in terms of the inversion of urban social structure with a resurgence of the inner cities and the accompanying declining fortunes of many suburban areas. As a result, the old crisis of the inner city has been substituted by an emerging crisis of suburbia. CITIES AND DISADVANTAGE: A LONG HISTORY What are the primary generators of urban disadvantage? Income and wealth are clearly key factors. But social class, gender, ethnicity, age and life stage and sexuality are clearly other characteristics that also underpin a much wider constellation of personal and household attributes that help define disadvantage. These are not in and of themselves inherently spatial in nature. As a previous contributor to the precursor volume to the current one noted, cities might well exhibit populations strongly divided by class or income, but that does not necessarily mean these divisions will have a distinctive spatial outcome (Hamnett, 2001). The mixing of the very rich in their grand houses cheek by jowl with their impoverished servants in adjoining mews cottages in Victorian London (and indeed, within their own houses), as exemplified by Charles Booth’s historic maps of Inner London, show what would today be a startling spatial juxtaposition of classes. Mapped using contemporary census tract boundaries, these areas could well show up as socially mixed, a glowing exemplar of a Jane Jacobs inspired urban diversity. In contemporary London, as in other comparable Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage cities, these social juxtapositions remain embedded in the inner city, where public housing has been retained in a sea of gentrification. Nevertheless, in reality, these groups may as well be located in different universes, given the lack of effective social interaction. The causes and definition of ‘disadvantage’ are themselves both uncertain and contested, with a long history in social policy and social science. In contemporary times, these issues have been defined using a wide range of interrelated terms, such as poverty, deprivation, underclass and social exclusion, as well as disadvantage. These concepts may be relative or absolute in nature and much effort has gone into defining poverty benchmarks. Disadvantage can also be defined in contrast to the ‘life chances’ that disadvantaged people miss out on. Sen’s (2001) conceptualization of disadvantage as being defined in terms of ‘capability equity’ extends the more simplistic definition of what it means to be socially disadvantaged into explicitly relational and qualitative terms – how do a disadvantaged person’s life choices rate in relation to contemporary expectations of inclusion into society? Inevitably, for social scientists, the definition of what constitutes disadvantage or its related concepts will in large part rely on the availability of appropriate metrics to study and measure it. In practice, most would place the role of income and wealth centrally in any definition of disadvantage, however conceived. For simplicity’s sake, then, this chapter adopts the broad and necessarily imprecise term ‘disadvantage’ to capture the range of social, economic, cultural and political capacities that people lack where their life chances and aspirations are limited by their economic position – in other words, income and wealth lies at the heart of the definition. At the same time, these terms have been applied not only to people and their households, but also to the places and neighborhoods they occupy. It is the latter with which this chapter is basically concerned. Given that cities are spatial constructs, urban social 161 disadvantage is inextricably linked to a locational position. It is the one key defining factor that cities add to the structuration of social disadvantage. In this, housing and labor markets, broadly spatially constituted, form overarching opportunity structures within which these personal attributes play out over time and space. An individual’s position in both these key market relationships conditions their personal capacities in the marketplace. Structures of governance and the changing dynamics of urban policy add a further spatial framework that impacts the allocation and distribution of social and economic resources, acting to reinforce or counter the tendency of markets to aggressively ‘sift and sort’ households into distinctive locations in urban space depending on the context. But it is in the way these various dynamics play out in space that is the focus of the ongoing debates about the location of areas of urban disadvantage and the reconstitution of these places over time. Inevitably, in a market economy, those with least capacity move to the more marginal spaces in our cities, once those with more ‘capability’ have made their choices. And as the locus of advantage shifts over time, then the location of the disadvantaged shifts in a reciprocal manner. But before we consider the changing place in space of social disadvantage in the contemporary western city, a consideration of the drivers of these changes, specifically the rise of greater levels of inequality in income and wealth over the last thirty years or so, is necessary. THE RE-EMERGENCE OF INEQUALITY: A SHORT PRIMER The 1980s were watershed years in western economies when the political zeitgeist shifted radically towards a broad neo-liberal political agenda that has remained the dominant policy paradigm ever since. These policy reforms were intended to turn 162 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES countries struggling with fiscal imbalances and stagflation into economies based on ever-expanding growth through the promotion of a consensus on open markets, trade liberalization, labor market flexibility, lower company and personal taxation, tariff reduction, privatization, and financial and institutional deregulation (Kelly, 1992; OECD, 2011). A key, and deliberate, consequence of this has been the now widely recognized trend to increased socio-economic polarization and income inequality. Whatever the precise form the neo-liberal revolution has taken in each country, it has nevertheless resulted in much greater income polarization, specifically the stretching out of the income continuum towards those on highest incomes. As a result, western economies have become less equal. Data from the OECD has illustrated this is no uncertain terms. The average incomes of the richest 10 percent in OECD countries was approximately 9.5 times that of the lowest 10 percent by 2013, up from around 7.1 times in the 1980s (Cingano, 2014). As measured by the Gini coefficient, disposable income inequality increased from 0.29 to 0.32 over the same period (Figure 11.1). The impact of this restructuring has varied between jurisdictions, reflecting their individual political trajectories and contexts and to the extent to which existing social welfare support frameworks were either retained or jettisoned. But as Australian social commentator Eva Cox (2011) has pointed out, the emergence of neo-liberalism marked a turning point when tax reduction became a ‘right’ for the better off (as well as the burgeoning ‘middle-class welfare’ that these tax concessions represent), while the receipt of welfare benefits became an increasingly circumscribed ‘privilege’ for the low-paid or non-working. At the same time, labor market policies operated to increase inequality through two key ‘reforms’: the first improved the income potential of managers and highly-skilled workers but lowered the protection for incomes of the less skilled, in large part through a protracted attack on organized labor (where it existed) through legislation that promoted more ‘flexible’ (that is, lower-paid) labor markets; the second increased the level of employment insecurity for all, reflected in the growth of part-time employment and short-term or temporary contracts (Quiggin, 1999). Globalization has moved jobs into low-wage economies to the Figure 11.1 Income inequality by OECD country, 1985–2011/12 Source: Cingano (2014: 9) Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage detriment of both manufacturing and service workers in advanced economies (OECD, 2011). Cumulatively, these policies have favored the higher skilled or educated and penalized those with lower skills or fewer labor market capacities (Harvey, 1989). The outcomes in terms of income potentials have become increasingly stark. Standing (2012: 591) has termed the class of the marginally economically engaged workers that this process has generated as the ‘precariat’, a growing cohort of people ‘[in] precarious jobs … and [with] a limited and precarious range of rights’ (also Shildrick et al., 2012). While the debates on those disadvantaged in this process have parallels with the earlier and much contested identification of an urban ‘underclass’ in the US (Gans, 1995; Wilson, 1987), they also date back at least to the observations of Mayhew and others in the nineteenth century on the ‘outcast’ in working-class London (Stedman Jones, 1971). However this process is conceptualized, the key point is that these trends reflect a reversal of the move to greater equalization of income and wealth that prevailed for much of the twentieth century. They have been the deliberate outcome of political, economic and social transformations that have generated a widespread increase in income and wealth inequality across the major developed countries. There is now a veritable academic industry focusing on criticisms and causes of, and potential cures for, the growing inequality that neo-liberalism has generated. In the US, Stiglitz (2012) has subjected neo-liberalism to a formidable critique, while Wolff (2013) has charted the resulting decline of median incomes and the wealth of the middle classes in the US since the global financial crisis, linked to collapsing housing markets among debtladen middle-income households, the young and ethnic minorities. Similar critiques have emerged in the UK (Hutton, 2011) and, more recently, Picketty (2014) from France, the latter achieving global bestseller status. In Australia, Leigh (2013) offers an empirically 163 robust explanation of the rise of inequality in the context of post-1980 political settlement in Australia. Does all this matter? Well, yes it does. The global rise of inequality has prompted commentators as diverse as Pope Francis,1 President Obama2 and Christine Legarde3 to note its potential impacts on social cohesion and economic productivity. A recent OECD study has concluded that rising income inequality has now become a barrier to economic growth (Cingano, 2014). Far from bringing the much-lauded efficiencies and economic benefits that the neo-liberal lobby had predicted, it appears that inequality has limited growth and there is no evidence that over time, redistributive policies, roundly criticized by the neo-liberals, had any negative effects on growth, provided they were designed and implemented well. A central finding has been that rising inequality lowers the economic opportunities available to lower income individuals in the bottom 40 percent of incomes, reinforcing intergenerational social mobility barriers, thereby impacting on human capital growth and reducing aggregate economic output over the longer term. Lansley (2012) in the UK has come to essentially the same conclusion. An important point is that you do not need to be unemployed to be poor anymore. The rise of the deregulated, flexible labor market means that many of the jobs on offer are part-time, casual and temporary, and with few promotion prospects and poor income outcomes. In other words, the deteriorating position of those on lower incomes acts as a drag on the overall level of aggregate economic well-being. In a comparable vein, Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) have charted the impact of increasing inequality on, among other attributes, the health and well-being, educational achievement, social mobility and social dysfunction of those who are on the wrong side of the neo-liberal economic revolution. 164 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES THE RELEVANCE OF INEQUALITY AND URBAN SOCIAL STRUCTURE What, if anything, does the re-emergence of inequality have to do with cities? Clearly, rising inequality does not take place in a geographic vacuum. In relation to the impact that rising inequality has had on social mobility, Richard Florida, the Godfather of the ‘creative class’ beloved of inner city revivalists, has recently concluded that: The forces limiting economic mobility are quintessentially geographic in nature. It is not just a split job market and growing economic inequality that confront us, but the deepening geographic separation, segregation and isolation of people and communities. Our emerging geography is increasingly one of concentrated advantage juxtaposed with concentrated disadvantage. (Florida, 2013) Much the same point was noted some thirtyfive years ago in Australia by Stretton (1989). The political impact of these shifting geographies of advantage and disadvantage at the national scale were most prominently displayed in the 2016 US Presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK. The rejection by mainly non-metropolitan populations of the largely city-based ‘elites’ who were perceived to have gained most from neoliberal globalization represent a new spatially defined political expression of the processes described here. But they also have had significant implications for longer-term social – and political – outcomes within our cities. A recent US study by Sharkey and Graham (2013) of 96 US metropolitan areas showed that neighborhood economic segregation is linked closely to the opportunity for economic mobility. The more highly segregated a city is, the lower the rate of upwards economic mobility for those at the bottom of the economic scale. Florida (2013) spells out the consequences in simple terms: ‘Children raised in overwhelmingly affluent neighborhoods, with little exposure to poorer families, grow up to be affluent adults; children raised in poor neighborhoods, isolated from the more successful, don’t’. In other words, geography matters more than any other factor in determining a child’s chance of progressing up (or down) the socio-economic ladder, even more than schooling or tax credits or race. The same is true of access to a wide range of the other ‘goods’ the city has to offer, from health services, jobs, open space, recreational services, transport services, and so on. The impact on urban spatial equity has been well understood for many years (for example, see Troy, 1982). In relation to the more general issue of urban productivity, Berry (2013) has noted the negative impacts on city efficiency and equity that increased socio-spatial polarization can generate: If … cities grow and change in ways that increasingly segment and divide the urban population into enclaves differentiated by income, education and opportunity, then the functional efficiency of urban labour markets is undermined. Hardening patterns of socio-spatial inequalities have negative impacts on efficiency as well as equity. In short, if workers at all skill levels cannot readily commute to work, then productivity and growth suffer. (Berry 2013: 12) So the growth of socio-economic inequality has clear spatial outcomes that are potentially inimical to the social and economic wellbeing of our cities and are at the same time reconfiguring the social spaces in our cities and the location of disadvantaged populations. It is to this process that we now turn. INVERTING THE CITY Interesting though this debate is, the central question for this chapter is the way the reemergence of inequality has impacted the locational outcomes in urban areas for lower income households. Clearly, the broader socioeconomic transformations discussed above will have spatial outcomes, and the impacts of neo-liberalism are arguably most evident in our cities as the location of most major economic and social activity (Brenner and Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage Theodore, 2002; Leitner et al., 2007). From an urban perspective, critics of neo-liberalism see the process of uneven development that neoliberalism generates as a key driver of spatial restructuring, favoring some urban areas and leaving others behind (Brenner, 2004; Harvey, 2006; Peck, 2012; Peck and Tickell, 2002). There is evidence of a ‘stretching out’ or polarization of incomes across major urban areas commensurate with the neo-liberal period in Australian cities (Randolph and Tice, 2014), while in Canada between 1980 and 2000 the income gap between higher and lower income urban census tracts increased markedly (Heisz and McLeod, 2004). However, until relatively recently, much of the literature identified the economic decline of the inner cities and the resulting concentration of the urban poor in these areas as the locus of urban problems (Stimson, 1982; Wilson, 1987). As Teitz and Chapple (1998: 3) argued: ‘To grasp urban poverty in the United States, one must know the inner cities’. Even in the noughties, Hackworth (2007) was able to claim the inner city as the critical focus of the struggle between Keynesian interventionist policies and their nemesis in the form of neo-liberal marketization. The causes of the ‘inner city problem’ are well documented. The rapid suburbanization that took place just before, and then for thirty years after, the Second World War led to the growth of the suburbia we know today: vast swathes of low density auto-dependent development that stretch far into the urban hinterland. Promoted by planners, developers and politicians alike, suburbia became the ‘go to’ location of the aspiring working and middle classes. With the ideas of visionaries such as Ebanezer Howard’s Garden City and Frank Lloyd Wright’s later Broadacre City underwriting the prevailing city planning orthodoxy of the time (Freestone 2008), the suburbs were seen as an antithesis of the ills of the overcrowded nineteenth-century industrial city. By the mid-twentieth century, the process of ‘white flight’ in the US and comparable movement of ‘aspirational’ households to new fringe 165 suburbs – aided by the widespread movement of leading employment sectors to belt-way ‘Edge Cities’ in the outer city (Garreau, 1992) and fueled by property development and land speculation in new suburban subdivisions – had transformed many established western cities (see Galster, 2012, for a classic description of the process in Detroit, and Hall et al., 1973, for an earlier analysis of metropolitan growth in the UK of the 1960s). In the wake of the departing populations, the inner cities were drained of their economic foundations and more economically active populations. Tied to a rapidly declining industrial working base which relied on heavier manufacturing, often linked to dockside processing as well as ‘metal bashing’ technologies and engineering clustered about rail yards, the inner cities became the locus of the urban crisis of the mid- to late-twentieth century. The race riots that rocked US cities in the 1960s were perhaps a harbinger of trouble to come elsewhere, especially in the UK in the early 1980s and more recently in Europe. The oil shock of the mid-1970s, wholesale deindustrialization in the 1980s and the retreat from Keynesian interventionist government by the early 1990s all conspired over a relatively short period to consign many of these inner city areas, especially in the older industrial heartlands, to economic oblivion. Similar fates engulfed the older cities of Europe, perhaps no more so than in the UK, where deindustrialization tore the heart out of many of the larger urban regions that generated the industrial revolution a century and a half before. In the process, scholarly attention focused on the cumulative repercussions of this urban trauma on these locations. In many cases, this was in part due to the relocation of the urban poor into large-scale public housing developments built as a result of slum clearance policies in the previous thirty years. But it also reflected the concentration of disadvantaged households in the older and largely privately rented housing stock that remained in inner city areas yet to be gentrified or redeveloped. 166 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES THE URBAN INVERSION 1: BOOMING CORES Fast forward thirty years, and there is little on-going interest in the inner city as a ‘problem’. Indeed, the inner cities are increasingly becoming places where the poor used to live, or at least, are a declining component. This process has been termed ‘The Great Inversion’ by Alan Ehrenhalt (2012). The centrifugal forces that spread employment and housing away from the inner city during the twentieth century have been replaced by centripetal forces pulling economic activity and housing investment back into the centre. Fishman (2011) has labelled this process the ‘fifth migration’, leading to the ‘re-urbanisation’ of the inner city. While there remain some areas in the older industrial ‘rust belts’ that have never really recovered from the loss of their economic base in the 1980s, most of these are in regional centers away from the main metropolitan cores. In the larger cities, the inner city has all but disappeared as a policy issue. Where there are still concerns, much of it focuses on those remaining areas of public housing. Ironically, these public housing developments, where they have not been privatized or redeveloped, now remain as islands of low income, offering refuges for the working poor or welfare dependent and elderly in a sea of gentrification that has engulfed them. At the other end of the social scale, the activities of ‘Ultra High Net Worth Individuals’ in their global search for secure property bolt-holes to park their money now command more interest than the urban poor. With the recent sale of a penthouse apartment at One Hyde Park in London, reputed to be the most expensive residential real estate in the world, to an Eastern European buyer for a reputed price tag of £140m, the global elites have perhaps defined the return of the inner city as above all a real-estate-driven process. Despite signs that there is a growing realization that urban exclusivity may in fact harm a city’s productivity and social (and political) cohesion, the market will be hard to buck now that the re-commodification of residential space in the inner city is so pronounced. Why has this turnaround happened? Worldwide, the resurgence of urban core districts, often places coterminous with the districts that collapsed after the deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s, have emerged as the new ‘go to’ places. The resulting gentrification of formerly low-income districts, now an almost ubiquitous process across inner areas in most large cities in advanced economies, has remorselessly expanded outwards from the early enclaves, such as Greenwich Village in New York, Islington in London or Paddington in Sydney. Neil Smith (1996), identifying the basis of this as one of revalorization of previously devalorized built environments, was among many commentators who saw this process as more than simply an outcome of consumer choice (Ley, 1986; Zukin, 1982). Renovated through ‘adaptive reuse’, otherwise abandoned or underused facilities such as urban markets or disused railway stations have been transformed into creative hubs where start-up companies or creative entrepreneurs, the drivers of the new knowledge-based industrial revolution, have found footholds and infrastructure. From Hippies to Hipsters, the last fifty years have seen many older and decaying inner city and CBD locations transformed into the new information and creative age industrial heartlands. But gentrification is more than just a process of residential upgrading. Sassen (2001) was an early identifier of the macro-economic drivers of this phenomenon. Drawing on Bell (1973) and Castells (1989) among others, Sassen argued that the major world cities were experiencing the emergence of a polarized post-industrial labor force associated with the financial and ‘command and control’ functions of global capital on the one hand and a supporting low-wage service sector associated with large-scale immigration on the other. The polarization thesis itself, which suggested more at the top and bottom of the income Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage hierarchy and fewer in the middle, gained favor but was also seen as more specific to the US model than elsewhere (Hamnett, 2001; Musterd and Ostgendorf, 1998). More recently, the drivers of the new economic power of city regions have been understood as a broader reflection of the current transformation of advanced economies into new sectors underpinned by technology, finance and knowledge-based industries (Hutton, 2008; Kelly et al., 2014). For example, Katz and Bradley (2013) have documented the political and economic revival of many city locations in the US over the last decade or so. Citing the resurgence of the urban agglomeration benefits of developing new urban innovation districts, and fermented by a vanguard of pragmatic city leaders, Katz and Bradley argue that cities are reinventing themselves in order to survive and prosper in the post-GFC (global financial crisis) world, where national government is increasingly incapable of acting. While there is no locational specificity associated with these new innovation districts, they will tend to ‘reflect a new vision of where innovative firms want to locate, where creative and talented workers want to live and work …’ (Katz and Bradley, 2013: 116). Most importantly, the attraction of these new innovation districts for the lifestyle choices of the young educated demographic that underpins them, is based on ‘… proximity to restaurants, retail, cultural and educational institutions, and other urban amenities’. They seek out ‘… vibrant street life, historic neighbourhoods, and public transit’ (Katz and Bradley, 2013: 116). Of course, these are the very attributes the declining older suburbs do not have, or at least, not enough to make a real difference. But despite the market rhetoric, in many cases, this inner city revival has been led by large-scale public interventions and expenditures which have supported realestate revaluations and job growth (see Jones and Evans, 2013 for UK examples). These newly revitalized central cities are leaving suburban labor markets, and their 167 increasingly disadvantaged populations, lagging behind. The centrifugal forces that spread employment and housing outwards away from city centers during the twentieth century have been replaced by a centripetal force pulling economic activity and housing investment back into the center. Fishman (2011) has termed this the ‘fifth migration’, leading to the ‘reurbanisation’ of the inner city. In this sense, then, the new ‘triumph of the city’ (Glaeser, 2011; also Brugmann, 2009) appears in reality to be the triumph of the middle-class reinvention of the inner city. The prescient, and now iconic, cartoon by Tom Toles, ‘The Vast White Ring Conspiracy’, published originally in 1998, neatly summarizes the outcomes of the urban inversion we are now witnessing (Figure 11.2). THE URBAN INVERSION 2: SUBSIDING SUBURBS So where have the urban poor gone? The answer is outwards. In particular, there is now an emerging band of aging ‘middle ring’ suburbs built out mainly in the years between 1940 and 1970 that have become the epicenter of the relocation of the more disadvantaged populations across our major cities (Puentes and Warren, 2006). While the specific spatial terminology for these localities may vary (for example, ‘inner suburban’ or ‘middle ring suburb’ are terms that have been used – see Lee and Leigh, 2007), there is a clear indication that these now declining suburbs are concentrated in neighborhoods that developed in or around the three decades after the Second World War. Once the destination of choice for the ‘aspirational’ households of the post-war period, these suburbs have subsequently passed into the devalorization phase of the urban cycle (Short et al., 2007). The housing itself reflects the amenity standards of the day and their physical fabric reflect fifty years of use. So too, the social and physical infrastructure 168 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Figure 11.2 Tom Toles’ ‘The Vast White Ring Conspiracy’ (1998) Source: TOLES © 1998 The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved. which accompanied their development is now decaying and tax bases have failed to keep up with the need for renewal and replacement. Major new investment has shifted elsewhere, either further out past the beltway or back into the inner city, as noted above. Job growth has slowed and in many cases is now reliant on contracting public sector or low skilled retailing, warehousing and other employment more closely tied to population needs (auto repairs, etc.) than at the cutting edge of the new economy. Retail centers face declining fortunes as effective local demand falls away. As a result, the public domain becomes tired and lacks investment for upgrading and improvement. The literature on this process is more advanced in the US where, arguably, the declining fortunes of the aging middle ring suburbs have become more apparent due to the effects of US urban fiscal arrangements which rapidly drained the jurisdictionally fragmented suburbs around the edge of the older central city jurisdictions of revenue as socio-economic decline set in, comparable to the trends in the inner city thirty or more years earlier. As a result, the emergence of suburban disadvantage is now widely recognized in the United States (Kneebone and Berube, 2013). In effect, the old crisis of the inner city has been substituted by a new crisis of suburbia. Comparable trends have been identified in Toronto (Hulchanski, 2010) and London (Lupton, 2011). Pavlic and Qian’s (2013) analysis of Canadian inner suburbs showed Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage relative declines of property values, household income and a ‘prosperity factor’ in these areas relative to the inner city cores and outer suburbs. A recent report on suburban poverty in eight major cities in England and Wales revealed that a clear majority of people living in poverty were now living in suburban neighborhoods and that the number of suburban neighborhoods with above average levels of poverty had risen substantially in the last decade or so (Hunter, 2014). Comparable results were found by the present author with respect to Australia, with clear indicators that concentrations of disadvantaged households have shifted markedly into suburban locations beyond the inner city as this has become gentrified and where there is little public housing stock left to retain lower income households. Hunter’s (2014) research on England and Wales identified a range of key characteristics of the suburban poor that typify the types of households now concentrating into these areas: lone parents; overcrowded households; the unemployed, underemployed and ‘workless’; part-time and low income workers; those reliant on basic old age pensions or social benefits; and those with long-term disabilities or health problems. The aged are also a growing cohort in this group. Significantly, the suburban poor in this study were also strongly correlated with the private rental sector. A similar conclusion was drawn for the Australian case – the suburbanization of disadvantage was being driven in part by the suburbanization of the private rental market, as homes originally built for home buyers were increasingly sold on to landlord investors as these areas declined in value and status (Randolph and Holloway, 2004). The dispersal of the private rental market into these areas leads to a more diffused distribution of the disadvantaged (Cheshire et al., 2014). Galster et al. (2003) also found a correlation between rental housing and rising rates of poverty in US city neighborhoods. Clearly, the spatial restructuring of the private rental markets is a central driver of this process. 169 In an early identification of the process, Lucy and Phillips (2000) noted the role of increasingly aging and ‘non-competitive’ housing stock and public infrastructure in these areas, often associated with struggling commercial centers. In worst case scenarios, characteristics of falling population, ‘middle-class flight’, both black and white, rapid ethnic change, increasing poverty, poorer school performance, declining retail levels and the loss of local jobs through deindustrialization have left these places with a smaller economic base for opportunity and mobility (Puentes and Warren, 2006; Short et al., 2007). Kneebone et al. (2011) outline five key outcomes for disadvantaged suburban communities of their declining fortunes: limited educational opportunity; increased crime rates and poorer health outcomes; low levels of household wealth accumulation due to devalued property markets; reduced investment from the private sector and higher prices for goods and service; and increased costs for fiscally constrained local governments. Once on the urban frontier, these aging suburban communities are now the new ‘metropolitan pivot points’ of decline (Hudnut, 2003). In Australia, Gleeson (2006: 149) more directly links the new ideological hegemony and suburban decline, noting a growing ‘dysrhythmia’ evident in the suburban heartlands of major Australia cities as they struggle to cope with ‘broad attacks on the body politic made by neo-liberals through successive rounds of political and economic reform’. Gleeson explores the new forms of social life that have emerged in these ‘polyglot’ middle suburbs from an Australian perspective. He identifies the changing role of the suburbs, at the same time becoming more diverse as the older suburbs age and new fringe development draws aspirational, and predominantly Anglo, households further outwards, as well as their slowly declining fortunes in the face of a new urban order. In the process, they have become ‘the netherworlds of the private rental market, studded with decrepit housing 170 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES stock and generally wearing the mantle of public neglect’ (Gleeson, 2006: 46). A range of terms have been coined in the US literature for these newly impoverished locations, both functionally – ‘first suburbs’ (Puentes and Orfield, 2002), ‘midopolis’ (Kotkin, 2000), ‘first tier’ suburbs (Hudnut, 2003) – and more pejoratively – ‘crab-grass slums’ (Davis, 1990), ‘gloomburbs’ (Lang et al., 2008), ‘slumburbia’ (Grady Holt, 2010). In Australia, where the fiscal impact of middle suburban decline has been moderated by intra-urban redistributive government arrangements for service provision (as in the UK), these relatively declining areas have been characterized, more prosaically, as a ‘third city’ area between the ‘first’ (gentrified inner) and ‘second’ (aspirational fringe) cities (Randolph, 2002, 2004). Similarly, Newton (2010) refers to these regions as the ‘greyfields’ of Australian metropolitan areas, wedged between the fresh ‘greenfields’ of the fringe and the reviving ‘brownfields’ of the inner city, and sliding into physical, technological and environmental obsolescence. Canadians have used the term ‘inner suburb’ for the comparable neighborhoods (Pavlic and Qian, 2013). However, the literature has also thrown up critiques. Lee and Leigh (2007) note the failure to provide a consistent conceptualization of what constitutes these suburbs or their functional geographies, as well as a set of coherent indictors to chart their declining socio-economic performance in relation to the rest of the metropolitan area. What exactly is declining? For those studying the issue empirically, the issue of data consistency over time, data appropriateness and, above all, the spatial relevance of statistical boundaries used, all conspire to make analysis difficult. As a result, whether such a consistent definition can be achieved is perhaps unlikely. The First Suburb literature has also been criticized as failing to account for the growing suburban heterogeneity in which a traditional and simplistic ‘city–suburb divide’ has declining analytical power and policy purchase (Hanlon et al., 2006). The notion of ‘first tier’ suburbs seems to fit some typologies (Short et al., 2007) better than others (Lang et al., 2008). Indeed, one of the features of the last twenty years has been an increasing variety and heterogeneity of the suburban experience, with a decline in the more uniform (and largely white) social characteristics of the initial phase of development. And Florida et al. (2014) have argued that evidence suggests the socio-spatial structure of the entire city is becoming more fragmented so that pockets of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ are to be found across the new urban landscape. Hanlon (2009) also notes the considerable variety of suburban trajectories in part dependent on historical origins and demographics, a point reinforced by Jargowsky (2014). Randolph and Freestone (2012) have empirically illustrated this for Sydney. In many ways, of course, this may simply be a reflection of the way the concentrations themselves are shifting into new areas, with established ‘core’ areas declining in concentration, and places into which the urban poor are moving becoming more mixed as part of the process. At the same time, the populations falling into poverty have become more diverse, with strict racial or demographic differences dissipating in the process. Poverty is a more heterogeneous experience than it used to be. From a policy perspective, first suburbs as a whole may be ‘hampered by their heterogeneity’ (Puentes and Warren, 2006) and can display wide disparities in the standard statistical indicators: percentage of foreign born, owner-occupation, median household income, and minority representation, for example (Short et al., 2007). The clear implication is that it may be difficult to identify a singular ‘middle suburb’ phenomenon as a generalized construct even for the US, let alone as a global model. While place-bound diversity is acknowledged, appreciation of this diversity is often hidden in any attempt at generalization. The evidence for the emergence of struggling suburban communities Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage has become perhaps more clear-cut over time. In the US, recent research has found a resurgence of concentrations of urban poverty in many cities and that the increase in extreme poverty neighborhoods (where at least 40 percent live below the poverty line) was greatest in suburban areas (Jargowsky, 2014; Kneebone et al., 2011). Interestingly, these trends were also found in Sun Belt and Midwestern cities, well away from the Rustbelt industrial towns. As Allard and Roth (2010) have noted, there are more people living in poverty in the suburbs in the US than in the inner cities. Allard and Roth account for this rise in suburban poverty by two factors: the general suburban population growth that has simply brought in more poor households and the impact of the last two economic recessions on lower skilled workers. The collapse of the housing market post-GFC also piled more pain on these areas. A similar conclusion has been drawn for London (Hunter, 2014), although this has not, so far, happened in the Australian case, where the economy rode out the GFC supported by timely government stimulus, a mining boom and a more robust mortgage lending regime. Importantly, the suburbs are now fulfilling the role of ‘gateways’ for immigrant communities, once the traditional role of the inner city in the twentieth century. This trend, while underpinned by existing minority populations who shifted outwards from their earlier inner city redoubts either by choice or pushed by gentrification, have been joined by the new waves of immigration from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The suburbs have now become the de facto immigrant reception areas of our cities. Recent US research has documented the suburbanization of the non-white minority populations in major US cities (Frey, 2014; Orfield and Luce, 2013). While this research suggests these groups have not reached the outer suburbs in numbers, they have certainly moved into the middle suburbs. While far from socially or economically homogenous, this trend is consistent with the suburbanization 171 of disadvantage thesis, with many new arrivals finding a foothold in the more affordable rungs of the suburban housing market, with job opportunities in more open labor markets or in small-scale local entrepreneurial activity, often within their own ethnic group. The role of minority groups, in many cases formed by more recent immigrant communities, in driving this shift is paralleled in the UK and Australia (Burnley, 2000; Hunter, 2014). In the process, the established white domination of the suburbs has been broken. Frey’s (2014) analysis also points to the generational shift that is transforming these middle suburbs. Immigrant and minority groups have a much higher birth rate than their white compatriots. In time the white populations of US suburbs will become an urban minority overall – indeed, Frey predicts this to be the case by 2050 (Frey, 2014). Spatial heterogeneity is also a characteristic of suburbanized disadvantage. Unlike the inner city precedents, the spatial patterns of suburban poverty are often more dispersed and fragmented. In many ways, suburbanization of disadvantage has seen a growing diaspora of poverty rather than a replication of old-style ‘ghettos’. In the US, there is evidence that these concentrations are becoming more dispersed, with high-poverty census tracts becoming more ‘decentralised and disconnected’ (Jargowsky, 2014: 1). In the Australian case, while there is a clear outwards shift in the urban poor over the thirty years from the mid-1980s, there is also evidence that while the urban poor are concentrating into new suburban areas relative to the rest of the city, these areas are also dispersing in spatial extent – a ‘dispersed concentration’ process (Randolph and Tice, 2014). Hunter’s (2014) research on suburban poverty in England and Wales found similar tendencies. In part, this reflects the growing heterogeneous nature of the suburbs themselves, as noted above, with pockets of poverty mixed with middling and some high value housing areas. But it also is a reflection of the extended geography into which 172 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES the disadvantaged suburban populations are moving, as well as the essentially low density nature of the housing stock in these locations – apart from blocks of low-rise walk-up apartments, there are few if any areas of dense tenements. What has been the policy response? While many of these areas have benefited from significant assets in terms of urban accessibility and underused infrastructure, as well as a marked ‘resiliency of spirit’ (Hudnut, 2003: xv), the middle suburbs have found themselves in a ‘policy blind spot’, being neither desperate nor undeveloped enough to qualify for targeted governmental state assistance (Leigh and Lee, 2005; Puentes and Warren, 2006). Puentes and Orfield (2002: 18) have recognized that these communities are the places where ‘the nation’s most critical issues are played out on a daily basis’ and call for more balanced policies with a ‘focus on strengthening existing communities’. This has prompted a vocal policy response from the ‘First Suburb’ coalition of financially challenged suburban local authorities in many American cities (Lucy and Phillips, 2000). Such policies might include an emphasis on transport and land use planning, incentives for reinvestment, help to equalize fiscal health, and assistance to expand opportunities through the building of political coalitions (Puentes, 2006). Vicino (2009) argues that robust regional growth management policies are necessary to arrest the decline of such suburbs. Kotkin (2000, 2001) has mounted a strident defense of these suburbs as an essential part of the urban landscape. Rather than denigrate their attributes (not least the single family dwelling with a back yard preferred by many), he has argued that the suburbs should not be written off by the inner city elites but should be the focus of integrated policies that will retain the middle classes and reinvigorate their economic bases. Hudnut (2003) suggests ten principles for the revitalization of the first tier suburbs, including improving competitiveness and entrepreneurial capacity by exploiting the existing infrastructure and accessibility to the inner city. Randolph and Freestone (2012) have argued for greater interventions in the form of locally based renewal strategies and master planning underpinned by ‘whole-of-government’ interventions to support job creation and non-profit affordable housing investment to stabilize communities. However, in a neo-liberal policy environment, largescale government intervention in these areas is increasingly unlikely. Instead, as Kotkin (2015) argues, suburbs are going to have to fix their own problems. CONCLUSIONS The suburbanization of disadvantage is now an established feature of many US, UK and Australian cities. That it has occurred in these nations is likely to reflect the more aggressive exposure to market forces that prevail here – in labor force restructuring, welfare policies and housing markets – compared to some European countries. In terms of the location of the urban poor, what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of the process by which property markets are simply doing the time-honored business of sorting households into their respective positions on the housing opportunity ladder – with both the wealthy and the poorest within a polarizing income structure becoming more spatially concentrated. While the suburbs are clearly in a state of flux, the end result is likely to be a ‘hardening’ of the newly emerging urban socio-spatial structure, with a tendency for those trapped at the bottom of the housing market to become more so, as opportunities for intra-urban mobility are increasingly constrained in a solidifying housing market. In time, of course, once this transformation has worked its way through the urban system, we may well find that we are witnessing the re-emergence of new urban ‘ghettos’. Emerging Geographies of Suburban Disadvantage In conclusion, it is worth asking whether the suburbanization of disadvantage is qualitatively any different from the inner city problem that preceded it. Teitz and Chapple (1998) noted eight ‘hypotheses’ that had been collectively advanced as drivers of the problems faced by disadvantaged communities in inner cities in the 1970s and 80s: economic restructuring and job loss; inadequate human capital leading to poor employment prospects; racial and gender discrimination; cultural and behavioral interactions leading to economic exclusion; spatial mismatch between jobs and housing for low income workers; income-selective intra-urban migration – ‘white flight’; an endogenous growth deficit (lack of local entrepreneurship); and misjudged public policy. To a large extent it could be argued that these factors, suitably modified for the contemporary situation, are also involved in generating the new areas of suburban disadvantage discussed here. The spatial devalorization process has simply shifted into suburban places as the space economy restructures again, reflecting contemporary economic and political contexts. But there are differences. At a simple level there is a more heterogonous mix of households in these suburban locations, not least in the ethnicity of the populations. The fragmentation of post-modern society has put paid to the simple certainties of previous social divisions defined in terms of color or class. And the structures or constraints and opportunities within which individuals and their households work out their life chances have undoubtedly changed. But perhaps it is the spatial dispersion of these concentrations as they shift into the suburbs that has become a key defining difference: fragmented in the suburbs, there is less capacity to identify or be identified with specific neighborhoods. This may be both a good thing – these communities may suffer less from extreme stigmatization as earlier concentrations – but also a disadvantage, particularly in terms of place-based policy proscriptions or access to urban services and amenities which may be 173 scattered across larger suburban tracts, accessible only by car. Moreover, the downtown ghetto was never too far from City Hall. The disadvantaged in the suburbs are a long way from the city leaders and elites – out of political sight, out of political mind. This ‘policy blind spot’ is likely to continue for some time. Policies to address mounting evidence of suburban decline may be rather more difficult to both lobby for and to implement than the place-based policy interventions that have helped transform the fortunes of many inner cities, albeit with mixed results for the communities targeted. A further key feature of suburban disadvantage is its increasing association with locational disadvantage and ‘transport poverty’ (Currie, 2011; Lucas, 2004). Distant from the generators of the new economy in the inner city and overwhelmingly reliant on private vehicles for mobility, low income populations in these areas are likely to become ‘unjoined’ from the wider urban economy of the city. This again represents another stark reversal. The inner city poor of a previous generation became increasingly distanced from the new job growth in the suburban road corridors and ‘edge cities’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Now the tables have turned. Car ownership becomes a necessity here, unlike in the inner city where public transport is still likely to be functioning, or indeed increasing, as new rapid transit systems make a welcome return to many revitalized city cores. But maintaining a car, however cheaply, can place an excessive burden on households where incomes are already stretched, and can also expose the suburban poor to greater vulnerability to fuel price volatility (Dodson and Sipe 2008). Not owning a car, however, puts a household at a double disadvantage: car ownership rates were found to be lower among the suburban poor in research undertaken in suburban housing markets in both Sydney (Bunker et al., 2002) and in England and Wales (Hunter, 2014). Indeed, the rise of locational disadvantage is perhaps a defining new feature of the subsiding suburban landscape (Semuels, 2015). 174 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES On the other hand, there is also evidence of reinvestment in many of these areas, with the ‘tear-down’ market in the US (Dye and McMillen, 2007) and its equivalent ‘knockdown rebuild’ market in Australia (Pinnegar et al., 2015) a pervasive feature. This reflects Hudnut’s (2003) reference to these areas as displaying ‘resiliency’, noted above, and also their role as the ‘gateways’ for newly arriving immigrant communities who place a premium on aspirational improvement, often through strong community solidarity. Despite the longstanding evidence that concentrations of poverty tend to generate inter-generational disadvantage, these areas are not devoid of expectations for social advancement: as Gleeson (2006) has recognized, these aging suburbs are also ‘spaces of hope’. 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(Clark, 2003: 10) INTRODUCTION If anthropogenic climate change is a real challenge, as 99 percent of climate scientists claim, then suburbia is where the climate challenge will be met in Europe, North America and Australia (see Gleeson, 2002). Suburbs are becoming the dominant forms of urban settlement worldwide (Leichenko and Solecki, 2013: 82) and within Europe, North America and Australia they are already the place where most of us live. Thus, by default, suburbs are where most of us will experience the implications of climate change (UN Habitat, 2009). The role of the suburb is not only as ‘victim’ of climate change but the suburb is also a villain in the climate change debate. In the role of causing climate change, the suburbs create climate change through the knock-on effects of converting ‘green field’ land to low density, extensive built-up areas that accentuate existing and future environmental hazards. But suburban communities also ‘cause’ climate change through the energy-rich mobility and the consumption choices of those who live in them (see Glaeser and Kahn, 2010 on North America and Camagni et al., 2002 on Europe). So the ways in which suburbs, suburban communities and suburban households respond to the climate change debate matters both in terms of reducing potential climate harm (through reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and in terms of making suburbs ‘fit’ for environmental purpose as the climate changes. Although it is not always easy to distinguish the suburbs within the agglomerated city (see Thorns, 1972 for a definition of the suburbs), it is important to not see suburbs as static or homogenous places (see Dodier, 2007). Suburban communities have been present in debates on urban development (often in and 180 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES on the edge of the suburbs – see Baldassare, 1992; Clapson, 1998; or McManus and Ethington, 2007) for the past 150 years as cities themselves have responded to earlier environmental challenges of pollution and public health (see Hebbert and Jankovic, 2013). It is asserted that the suburb is particularly threatened by the changes that will be brought by climate change (see Dodson and Sipe, 2008; Leichenko and Solecki, 2013; or UN Habitat, 2011, Table 6.4), and so suburbs are also likely to be the most challenged by climate change. The responses (or adaptations) of suburbs and suburban communities might include reformulating the suburban built environment through new green spaces, using new forms of building technology and ways of facilitating water movements through the built environment. These are responses that might take place at the level of the home, the property (including gardens) or at the level of neighborhood overall (see Williams et al., 2012a). However, suburban adaptations might also take the form of living different lifestyles, practices and behaviors, for example through growing more food or through watching out for elderly neighbors during periods of heat stress. Thus there is a need for suburbs and suburban communities to face up to the climate change debate, but there is also a debate as to how suburban communities might be capable of responding to climate change issues. For example, it has been asserted that particular atomized forms of lifestyle associated with the suburbs may make a collective response from suburban communities problematic due to an absence of social capital (epitomized in Putnam, 2001). Lupi and Musterd (2006), however, have indicated in the case of the Netherlands that Dutch suburbs are not without social cohesion, albeit that the form of social cohesion is different. There is a burgeoning multi-disciplinary literature on community responses to climate change. The aim of this chapter is to offer a narrative literature review on four perspectives for understanding the characteristics and process of responding to climate change that bring together this literature. In particular, the chapter will draw out the ways in which these four perspectives, each of which comes from a particular disciplinary position, offer different and complementary insights into the process of place-based adaptation to the climate change emergency that might be applicable to understanding climate-related responses in suburbia. This is in contrast to existing reviews that have concentrated on the substantive impacts of climate change (see, for example, Hunt and Watkiss, 2011). Whereas the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) typically distinguishes between an adaptive response, that is, any ‘adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities’ (Parry et al., 2007: 869), and a mitigation response, that is, a response that reduces the climate harm generated by a natural or human system, this chapter will use the term ‘adaptation’ to cover both types of response. Not all changes that come in the wake of climate change will be harmful, but climate change does and will demand a response (adaptation). MULTI-DISCIPLINARY INSIGHTS INTO CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION Environmental hazard arising from climate change is a global threat that requires a response from all (including suburban communities). The ‘conventional theory of collective action’ outlined by Ostrom (2010: 551) would posit that no one in the suburbs is likely to respond to climate change (through reducing emissions either on an individual or collective basis) without external regulation, because the cost of adapting is significant and current, and the benefit dispersed. The issue of suburban adaptation to future projected threat (or existing perceived environmental threat) is likely to be hampered by the public good characteristics of adapted places: The Climate Change Challenge that is, not all members of a community need to act in order for a locality to be adapted ‘enough’. The question to be posed to the four bodies of literature is how they illuminate these propositions of the likelihood of community action within suburbs in response to the global challenge of climate change. This will be explored in relation to the four perspectives through the identification of the main concepts associated with each perspective, the spatial focus of adaptive action and the principal questions that researchers using these perspectives attempt to resolve. SYSTEMS THEORY POSITION ON URBAN ADAPTATION Systems theorists see the issue of adaptation as resulting from the interaction between ecological systems (such as climate or ecosystem) and social systems (such as a suburban community). It emerges from a scientific perspective (such as ecological science or management) and is deployed by researchers working on global environmental change, disaster management and sustainability science. Researchers work on situations where the environmental threat is self-evident, such as working with communities that have a history of environmental hazard through hurricanes, flooding and wildfires (for example – see Cutter et al., 2003) and it is a set of ideas applied to posing questions about how ‘social systems’ react to real and present dangers and then projecting how similar social systems might respond to future threats. As such, systems perspective work concentrates on the characteristics of social systems that allow some social systems to respond better than others. One notion that captures this idea of system characteristics is the adaptive capacity of a system. Brooks and Adger (2005: 168) define the adaptive capacity of any system as ‘the property of a system to adjust its characteristics or behaviour in order to expand its coping range’. 181 Adaptive capacity relates to the resources available to a system – these might include financial capital, social capital, human capital and natural resources associated with a system or associated with multiple levels of a system (see Adger et al., 2005). For systems theorists, systems can never have too much adaptive capacity (see Engle, 2011), despite the observation by social capital researchers that social capital (as a multi-dimensional characteristic of a community) does not have a simple linear relationship with the capacity to adapt and change. Woolcock (1998), for example, emphasizes that communities can suffer from too much social capital, which might stifle the capacity of a community to adapt reflexively. Following from the focus on the resources associated with a community, some research from this perspective has posed the question of whether adaptive capacity is a generic resource of a social system or whether the same set of resources infers different levels of adaptive capacity depending on the nature of the environmental threat. Thus Newman et al. (2014) assessed the capacity of rural communities in Florida to face up to the threat of hurricanes (‘real’ and experienced) versus their capacity to face up to the threat of wildfires (assessed as a real possibility but not experienced to date). From this survey-based work, Newman et al. (2014) assessed that adaptive capacity of these Floridian communities was a generic characteristic of the community – the adaptive capacity of these communities to face up to hurricanes involved the same set of relationships, resources, skills and attitudes as the adaptive capacity required to face up to wildfires. The geography of analysis also varies according to the particular focus of the systemic analysis. Engle (2011) asserts that this difference arises from whether the concern of the researcher relates to ‘system’ resilience or whether it relates to ‘system’ vulnerability. Where the principal starting point of interest relates to the vulnerability of a social-ecological system interaction – where 182 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES vulnerability is defined as the exposure of a social system to harm (or the relative presence or absence of adaptive capacity) – the geography of analysis tended to be that of the social system (that could be a particular neighborhood). However, where researchers focused on resilience – defined as the capacity of a ‘system’ to either resist a threat (or to achieve an alternative desirable state) – the geographic focus of interest started from that of either the experienced environmental threat (the site of an environmental disaster) or potential ecological region. So again the systems perspective of understanding the response of communities to adapt relates to the resources that communities can bring to bear within the geography of interest. Developing from this concept of defining resources relative to a particular systemic geography, other systems-related work has allowed researchers to categorize different types of adaptive response. The original distinction between adaptation- and mitigationbased responses might be understood in this light. Equally, the work of Adger (2001) distinguishes between spontaneous and planned adaptation responses, where spontaneous adaption relates to responses that are mobilized once an environmental hazard is realized, in contrast to planned adaptation responses that are based on responding to projected future threats. Thus, there are many ways in which the context for adaptation can be classified and described that offer insight into the ways in which adaptation unfolds once it is initiated. Thus the systems theory perspective is useful in giving us terms to think about the characteristics of urban communities (both place-based and non-place-based) to face up to a climate (environmental) threat. The fundamental unit of analysis is either the locality of resilience (environment) or the locality of the vulnerable community. Following Engle’s typology, the vulnerability lens allows researchers to consider the ways in which adaptation might take place within suburban communities. It gives us a language to create typologies of different types of adaptation but places less emphasis on understanding how suburban communities might frame the climate change challenge to which they are responding. Systems theory does not say much about why adaptation is initiated, even if it offers insight into how different communities that have decided to adapt might have differing capacities to implement their plans. SOCIO-TECHNICAL TRANSITION POSITION ON URBAN ADAPTATION If the systems theory perspective starts from either a geography of risk or a geography of resilience and focuses on the resources that can be mobilized within those geographic units of analysis, the socio-technical transition perspective starts from a different place: the interaction of human actors and the technology that enables social and economic life in places like the suburbs. The socio-technical perspective is not directly interested in the process of climate change but, working backwards, it is interested in the particular intersections of people and technology that are either the (likely contributory) causes of anthropogenic climate change or that are threatened by climatic change. Like the systems perspective, the sociotechnical perspective is based on understanding ‘systems’ and how systems constituted of people, communities and things can change (or transition) to more sustainable versions of the technology (see Smith and Stirling, 2010 for a more detailed comparison of these two perspectives). The inanimate things might include urban infrastructures for energy (Verbong and Geels, 2010), waste (see Geels and Kemp, 2007) or water (Brown et al., 2013). The focus of this perspective is primarily on the technology and how the process of change might be managed. This incorporation of inanimate things resonates with conceptualizations such as actor-network-theory (ANT) or The Climate Change Challenge interdependency network perspectives (INP). Geels (2010), in an extensive review of seven ontologies applied to understanding sociotechnical transitions, explores the degree to which transitions are explained within the seven ontological frames. Geels (2010: 507) picks out the notions of ANT that are called upon in the socio-technical transition school, but also indicates that the lack of a specific notion of ‘levels’ or hierarchies included in the functionalist notion of transition theory is problematic. The multi-level perspective is central to the socio-technical and quasi-evolutionary theory that emerged from a Twente School of thought in the 1990s. Geels (2011), in responding to critiques of transition theory, outlined the perspective on the process or unfolding of transition. Thus the localized niche communities of technology users ‘learn’ to adopt new forms of technology that can contribute to the destabilization of a socio-technical regime if the ‘time is right’ in a wider exogenous context (or landscape) of the socio-technical regime. Without destabilization within the landscape and innovation from niches, socio-technical regimes will tend to stabilize themselves and resist change as they ‘are continuously reproduced and enacted by actors in concrete activities’ (Geels, 2011: 29). However, if opportunities for destabilization can be identified, the conceptualization of the transition process has opened up the rational notion of ‘managing’ transition through understanding and facilitating the interplay of these niches, sociotechnical regimes and landscapes through the concept of a transition arena (Foxon et al., 2009: 4). Managing change raises the issue of social and situated learning through the socio-technical regime. Geels and Schot (2007) cite four ideal-type transition pathways (transformation, reconfiguration, technological substitution or de-alignment/re-alignment). All four pathways are associated with policy change through the concept of network or social learning. Thus actors active in any of these 183 pathways are all engaged in social situated learning in reflexively making sense of the challenges of change. What can be missing from such a perspective of the managed transition, however, is the ‘messy, conflictual and highly disjointed’ (Meadowcroft, 2009: 323) process of transition points, although clearly all researchers working with the concept of reflexivity will accept the often unpredictable and political nature of understanding and framing change (Smith and Stirling, 2010). Chappells et al (2011) offer an interesting case study of building resilience to flooding in South East England through the drought of 2006 that illustrates the multiple meanings that different interest groups place on ‘being resilient’. Thus the problematic issue is understanding how some conceptualizations come to dominate others. The location of place is less explicit in this formulation of change. The non-placeness of the perspective is one of its distinctive features, according to Smith and Stirling (2010: 13), in contrast to the systems theory approach that is often focused on specific localities (although Hodson and Marvin [2010] raise the possibility of cities being an appropriate scale to manage transitions, and Späth and Rohracher [2010] focus on specific ‘energy regions’ in Austria). The perspective also takes a different view on time with the published studies following the alignments and realignments of a socio-technical regime over decades rather than over years. The advantage of the longer-term perspective on what change is required is that it allows researchers to ask different questions. For example, in considering the response of suburban householders to potential heatwave events, a simple systems response might see air conditioning as a ‘rational’ response in order to maintain ‘system’ performance to short-term shocks (comfort to the householder), but a longer-term perspective would be to re-design homes for passive cooling technologies that also enable lower carbon emissions and facilitate some level of ‘adapted’ comfort (see Williams et al., 2012b). 184 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES So the socio-technical approach generates questions regarding the ambiguous value of system resilience (where resilience resists change) in the short term against more credibly sustainable outcomes in the long term, if those longer-term ‘ideal states’ can be identified and agreed upon. Thus, the socio-technical perspective throws a light on the long-term nature of change and way that changes to the use and adoption of technology are framed at different ‘levels’. It draws our attention to processes of reflexive learning that are part of such shifts and has been interpreted as a schema for managing change. However, as a perspective, it does not have a specific focus on places (such as suburbs) and in practice it has tended to capture transitions related to mitigating the impact of people–technology interactions rather than being able to explain adaptations responding to future projected climate change. As with the systems theory approach, it offers interesting insight into the conditions for transition, but does not focus so much on why changes are instigated at particular points in time (either within the landscape or the socio-technical regime). SOCIAL PRACTICE APPROACH TO ADAPTATION AND RESILIENCE The social practice critique of the sociotechnical transition perspective is that it assumes an unproblematic and undeniably ‘sustainable’ outcome to transition (see Shove and Walker, 2007). The social practice perspective, which emerges from sociological and housing research work on the theme of sustainability and adaptation, accepts that the practice of everyday living is framed by the inanimate objects with which we interact (such as hot water systems, the layout of our homes and domestic appliances). This interaction is referred to as ‘scripting’, whereby the meanings and associations linked with particular inanimate things (such as houses or housing layouts, for example) make particular types of behavior and practice seem normal or appropriate to the practitioner. Thus the choice of whether we might take a weekly bath or take daily showers (increasing our consumption of water and energy) is ‘scripted’ by our social understanding of what is appropriate in everyday life and how that understanding is subject to ‘continual, ongoing reproduction’ (Shove and Walker, 2010: 471). This conceptualizing of scripting tends to reject the notion of a hierarchical level of the socio-technical perspective and also rejects the possibility that changes in the scripting of inanimate objects and practices can be managed to some idealized endpoint. Change or adaptation emerges from the reflexive realization of existing scripting. From the perspective of understanding suburban responses (or lack of response) to climate change, the implication of the social practice perspective is to change the unit of analysis to that of the household. So instead of being concerned with the wider sociotechnical regimes or wider social systems, the main focus of analysis in understanding sustainability in general and climate change responses in particular should relate to social practice. Writers on housing have made an interesting contribution to this discussion through researching the ways in which domestic practice interacts with the technology of housing. Thus, Hand et al. (2007) explore the ways in which technologies and lifestyle practices have resulted in a tide of material goods and an increasing demand for space to store these material possessions. It is ‘the temporal and ideological structuring of domestic practices’ (Hand et al., 2007: 668) that leads to ‘unsustainable lifestyles’ and the consumption of carbon, either embedded in these material possessions or through the use of energy in moving them about. So the demand for large kitchens, the demand for housing extensions and appliances emerge from the scripts (nuclear family structure, assemblage of material goods in the home, kitchens as central hubs for family The Climate Change Challenge life) associated with these inanimate things (see Klocker et al., 2012 on appliance use and household structures in the Australian suburbs or Hand et al., 2007 on the link between material consumption and housing extensions). Thus this perspective focuses on how social practices are stabilized (and are seen as ‘normal’). The notion of scripting has been used to explore why adopters of domestic technologies associated with responding to climate change experience differing levels of satisfaction with their adopted technologies. Gabriel and Watson (2013) researched the experiences of domestic adopters of solar heating panels in Tasmania and found that the satisfaction of the adopter was related to how well the new technological configuration fitted into the domestic practices of the adopters. So, the success of the technology was not related to the energy savings that went with solar heating panels (that was universal), but was related to the disruption of the ‘normal’ domestic life of the residents (or the implications for re-scripting ‘normal’ domestic life). Within this perspective the success of adopting new technologies (reducing greenhouse gas emissions or adapting environmental conditions) depended on the successful integration of ‘folk knowledge’ of the home (the recognition of scripts associated with domestic things) and the ‘technical knowledge’ of building tradespeople (Gabriel and Watson, 2013: 219) that allowed residents to work out (and reflect upon) appropriate energy saving technologies. A failure to realize these issues of scripting can also be labelled as ‘behavioral barriers’. For example, a survey of householders engaged in the Green Deal scheme (a statefacilitated mechanism to encourage the takeup of domestic energy efficiency measures) in the United Kingdom (reported in HMSO, 2014: 14–15) – although not using the interpretive frame of scripting – clearly identifies mismatches between the form of the funded technology and existing domestic practices (the loss of space, the hassle of re-modelling 185 domestic service technologies) as a ‘barrier’ to the take-up of the scheme. More broadly, the promotion of low-carbon technologies through state-led grant schemes (such as the UK’s Warm Front) or market-led initiatives (such as the UK’s Green Deal) is influenced by the degree to which these mechanisms fit the script of domestic life. The uncritical acceptance of scripts does raise wider problematic issues. For example, Reid and Houston critically evaluate the ways in which economic interests frame ‘low carbon housing’ as a means of maintaining the consumption of goods and services in and for the home (2013: 1). In practice, the acceptance of the script of low carbon ‘consumption’ without reflection effectively marginalizes alternative social, environmental and political issues associated with constructing sustainable lifestyles (Reid and Houston, 2013: 1). This is a perspective that moves our attention to the processes of stabilization and destabilization of the social practices that underpin the potential for adaptation at the level of the household. URBAN POLITICAL POSITION ON URBAN ADAPTATION Whereas the three positions outlined above have emerged from outside of ‘urban studies’, the governance position is firmly located within the discipline of urban politics. Pierre and Peters (2000: 6) outline governance as ‘a conceptual or theoretical representation of co-ordination of social systems, and for the most part, the role of the state in that process’. Governance and institutions are mentioned by systems theorists as one of the framing institutions for adaptive capacity. Equally, they can be conceptualized as part of the socio-technical regime or landscape under the socio-technical perspective. But equally, there is a distinctive collection of governance-related literature that attempts to 186 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES explain climate change adaptation within cities (see Betsill and Bulkeley, 2006; Hodson and Marvin, 2010). Governance researchers are concerned with the interdependent networks of agencies that regulate, produce and manage the built environment. Whereas the literature on the role of local government is relatively well-developed, the literature on the governance of climate change responses through community action is less clear. However, the key concepts in understanding the governance of policy issues and social movements come down to notions of who holds power (after Lukes, 1974) and the mutual interdependence of action on issues such as responding to climate change. Homsy and Warner (2013) have outlined the importance of getting a wide coalition of interests in rural areas of the US to co-construct a common understanding of what constitutes a climate change problem and what then constitutes a local climate change response. Lindseth (2005) outlined the importance of participative scope for response coalitions relating to climate change in the case of local government in Norway. The emphasis is always on giving voice to the wide range of actors that need to be mobilized in order to generate the breadth of partnership necessary to implement a wide-ranging response. But, as usual, this comes down to a normative starting point of who should be involved in the adaptation of suburban areas. Given the political nature of what governance networks do, there is also an interesting normative aspect of how to judge what governance networks do and what they should do. Here we can start to call on concepts like environmental justice. The notion of environmental justice emerged from grassroots struggles around compensation for pollution and environmental contamination (Čapek, 1993). Adger (2001: 923) specifically identifies the environmental justice issues relating to climate change as historic responsibility for past anthropogenic buildup of greenhouse gases, the global sharing of the burden of costs (for both mitigation and adaptation), as well as an awareness of the uneven spatial distribution of the impacts of climate change. Schlosberg and Collins (2014) argue that there is an emerging and consistent climate justice discourse. The climate justice derivative of environmental justice emphasizes the point that within democratic systems where there is a certain expectation of offering voice to ‘all’, any discussion of what adaptation is has to engage with as wide a range of interests as is feasible. One issue illustrative of the politics of adaptation in the face of climate change is installing wind turbines. Although wind farms are generally developed in rural (and urban fringe) locations, the debate around wind farms is illustrative of the problems of developing and retrofitting suburban areas to be ‘more sustainable’. Even though there is a clear technical discourse that suggests substituting some fossil fueled power provision with wind power is likely to have positive impacts on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, public opinion towards wind turbines is informed but ambivalent, especially when dealing with the localized impacts of turbine construction. This issue of debating the impacts and benefits of development in the light of sustainability criteria is captured more widely by Downs (2005), who discusses why ‘smart growth’ (denser alternatives to suburban sprawl) is often discussed but less often implemented. Both Aitkin (2010) and Downs (2005) make the point that communities that resist ostensibly ‘sustainable’ developments are not inherently opposed to more sustainable development but that the deliberative process is often unable to incorporate dissonant voices. However, the urban political perspective stresses the importance of discussion in establishing equitable outcomes, since the emphasis rests on the deliberative process rather than on the managed transition process or on the efficacy of the system to adapt. 187 The Climate Change Challenge SO WHAT ARE THE SUBURBAN COLLECTIVE ACTION ISSUES IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE? The chapter has set out four perspectives on adaptive responses to the climate change debate and this has attempted to identify where (and if) writers associated with the perspectives have commented specifically on climate change responses in the suburbs. Even though all the perspectives would make claims on offering insight on climate change adaptation (in urban and suburban communities), they are not all offering insight on the same aspects of adaptation. Table 12.1 summarizes the positions of the four perspectives in relation to the principal concepts of interest, the principal geographies of interest and then the types of questions to which researchers applying the perspective claim to respond. The issues of adaptation (in relation to climate change or any other contextual issue) will unfurl over time. The ‘conventional’ collective action problem as outlined by Ostrom (albeit within an ontological position of rational choice theory) deals with the issue as to whether the process of collective action (in the suburbs or anywhere else) will start at all in the absence of exogenous regulation. Three of these perspectives offer some insight into the initiation of collective action, although one (the urban governance perspective) focuses on the problem most clearly. Thus, the socio-technical perspective sees the problem of initiating collective action as one of articulating and making explicit opportunities within the landscape of the socio-technical regime alongside facilitating knowledge around socio-technical niches. The social practice perspective sees initiation of adaptation emerging from reflection and making explicit the scripts and frames that stabilize social practice in the suburbs, but most social practice work focuses on the scripts that stabilize and legitimize social practice rather than destabilize it. Finally, the urban governance perspective focuses on the issue of framing the political problems to Table 12.1 Summarizing four perspectives on urban adaptation to climate change Position/perspective Key concepts associated with the perspective Spatial focus of the perspective Questions associated with the perspective Systems theory perspective Adaptive capacity, vulnerability/resilience, social system Socio-technical perspective Niches, socio-technical regimes, landscapes, transition arena, social learning Social practice perspective Social practice, inanimate objects as agents Urban governance perspective Governance networks, power, equity, resistance and deliberation Geography of social systems What are the characteristics (vulnerability), geography of urban communities of environmental risk that adapt in the face (resilience) of climate change? What types of adaptive response are there? Geography of technological What are the conditions use and regulation (cityunder which urban level focus possible) technology changes to ‘more sustainable’ forms? How do [suburban] regimes learn to be more sustainable? Geography of social practice – How do social practices fix/ households stabilize the choice of sustainable lifestyles in the suburbs? Geography of place-based Who decides what urban institutions (such as local adaptation means? Who authorities) benefits? Who pays? 188 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES which collective resources might be directed and the ethical framing of what political solutions might deliver (through concepts such as environmental justice). In this case, the certainties of what the end solution might look like are part of the discussion, whereas the socio-technical perspective and the systems perspectives can make rather unproblematic assumptions about how the adapted suburb may be constituted. None of these three perspectives specifically identify why and how adaption in the suburbs (or in suburban communities) either might be different from or more/less likely than in ‘urban’ communities in general. The systems perspective, however, offers up the notion of the spatially uneven distribution of adaptive capacity (as a set of resources that characterize a community). Thus if two communities decide to adapt, the one with more adaptive capacity is more likely to achieve adaptation. Suburban communities are diverse and there exists less work on understanding how suburban communities mobilize often latent resources (conceptually associated through the notion of adaptive capacity) to achieve positive change (as opposed to resisting development). However, it is also worth reflecting on how these perspectives are deployed in the interest of fomenting (or facilitating) adaptation. It is clear that the systems and socio-technical perspectives have been embraced by policy communities since they claim to offer some instruments working on climate change issues to either identify where change is needed (vulnerable communities or dangerous ecosystems) or, in the case of socio-technical perspective, a process by which to engineer a change to a ‘better’ sociotechnical regime. This provides a good ‘fit’ to a hard science discourse of projecting climate change dangers. The perspectives of social practice and of urban governance offer insights into how to frame problems, how to mobilize networks and how to reflect upon the scripts that stabilize current policy and social practice. In terms of the insights on suburban adaptation and the collective action issues, Table 12.2 summarizes the four perspectives based on distinguishing how they explain the process of suburban adaptation and what the four perspectives would take as the ‘collective action’ problem associated with each of them. Thus, for system theorists, the collective action problem is one of mobilizing the assets and Table 12.2 Adaptation perspectives and the suburban collective action problem Systems theory perspective Socio-technical perspective Social practice perspective Urban governance perspective Perspective on explaining adaptation Suburban collective action problem Adaptation issue is framed un-problematically. Ability to adapt depends on adaptive capacity Adaptation can be a managed process where there is an un-problematic end state (in some cases) Mobilizing adaptive capacity, the more adaptive capacity the better Suburban communities can be ‘niches of innovation’ – problem of identifying the ‘right’ niches, problems of facilitating social learning Social practices make suburban life In order to instigate change, the resilient/resistant to change. current framing discourse needs Adaptation is possible through to be identified and then engaged ‘re-scripting’ everyday objects/ with reflexively. The ‘collective’ technologies issue is to recognize the social scripting Governance networks frame the Mobilizing networks of interest/ adaption ‘problem’ to be addressed resources around a ‘common’ issue. Potentially collective action resists imposed adaptation The Climate Change Challenge resources associated with adaptive capacity. In the socio-technical perspective, the collective action problem is one of articulated innovative niches or one of reconstructing networks within the socio-technical regime. Social practice theorists are concerned with the ways in which social practices are fixed rather than in the ways social practices are dissolved. Urban governance researchers see the problem of mobilizing actors and resources around either some common interest in climate change adaptation or some concept of resisting particular formulations of climate change response (for example, wind power). Suburbs remain an under-researched area of urban studies in general. In the case of how our urban societies respond to climate change, the voices, experiences and scripts of the suburban world are equally poorly understood. Re-scripted suburbs as ‘garden cities’ and mobilized places need to be understood as much as the suburban consumption of natural resources. Suburbs offer interesting adapted possibilities as well as being the causes of the climate change problem. Along with Leichenko and Solecki (2013), I would call for more research and engagement with suburban communities. It is not clear how much of the urban world needs to adapt to climate change for there to be sufficient adaptation, but it is likely that some suburbs will need to be part of the story of adaptation. As Ostrom (2010) suggests, there is a need to re-formulate the ‘traditional’ collective action question to one that can incorporate a more constructivist conceptualization of the issue of inciting collective action. It also raises questions about ‘how many is enough’ in the suburbs for, as sites of rampant individualization within a notion of suburban cohesion, there will be a need to accept the non-conforming suburban agent. 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This is very much the case for smart growth, which, as Anthony Downs (2001) points out, ‘refers to many different bundles of specific policies’ appealing in varying degrees and ways to disparate groups: anti- or slow-growth advocates and environmentalists, pro-growth advocates, inner-city advocates, better-growth advocates. At the same time, smart growth proposals have been sharply contested by a formidable cast of opponents, ranging from real estate developers and homebuilders, to rural libertarians and conservative think tanks. SMART GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT Smart growth has been called ‘a uniquely “American” variant on sustainable development’ (Krueger, 2010: 409). Indeed, some environmental groups in Europe even go so far as to equate smart growth with green policies in general. For example, in a book excerpt published in the Green European Journal entitled ‘Smart growth: twelve theses’, German politician and author Ralf Füchs (2013), offers up 12 theses that, he says, should form the basis of a sustainable future for the (European) continent: sustainable property for all; Europe as a pioneer (that is, as a model for the green economy); making more out of less; investing in the future; growing with nature; limits of growth, growth of limits; nature as a common; what we need to rein in (that is, our consumption of natural resources); ecology of freedom; what about ethics?; actions and alliances; the rediscovery of progress (http://www.greeneuropeanjournal. eu/smart-growth-the-green-revolutiontwelve-theses/). Smart growth, American style, is sometimes compared to Local Agenda 21 (LA 21), a set of principles and proposed solutions to the problem of unsustainable development that emerged from the 1992 Rio Conference Social Construction of Smart Growth Policies and Strategies (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development [UNCED]). A key facilitator under LA 21 is the ICLEI (International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives, now called Local Governments for Sustainability), a global sustainability network of more than 1,000 local governments in 84 countries headquartered in Berlin. On its website the ICLEI claims that its American office, based in Oakland, California, has long been ‘the largest regional network of the broader ICLEI network’ (ICLEI, 2016). Even so, only about two-dozen cities in the United States adopted the LA 21 approach in the first decade following the Rio Conference, most located in liberal states on the West coast (California, Oregon, Washington) and along the Atlantic Seaboard (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont). Krueger (2010) argues that the failure of LA 21 to ‘catch on’ in the US has provided an opportunity for smart growth to ‘become the vehicle through which sustainable development might occur in the United States of America’ (2010: 411). Much of the failure of LA 21 to gain significant traction in America can be attributed to deep-set ideological differences. State-imposed standards for land use similar to those that are widely accepted in many European nations are anathema in the US, where the market rules and the notion of wealth maximization is critical. Even proponents of compact cities, New Urbanism and smart growth are pro-market in America. Furthermore, any policy initiative flowing out of the United Nations is usually regarded with deep suspicion by neo-conservative elements in the United States who see it as the first step in an eventual imposition of world government. SMART GROWTH AND SMART CITIES Smart growth needs to be distinguished from ‘smart cities’, another urban policy discourse that has become pervasive in recent years. What muddies the waters somewhat here is 193 that the idea of the smart city, at least in part, derives from the concept of smart growth, as theorized by the New Urbanism movement in the United States of the 1980s (Söderström et al., 2014: 310; Vanolo, 2014). Nonetheless, Hollands (2008: 317, n 4) cautions that the two terms, smart growth and smart city, should not be completely conflated despite there being some overlap. The smart growth agenda, he points out, is a somewhat more wide-ranging urban approach with a strong emphasis on policy prescriptions and problem solving. Still, the two ‘share some similarities when it comes to emphasizing the underlying importance of IT and businessled initiatives when solving urban problems’. This is made explicitly clear in the ICLEI Smart Cities Agenda: ‘Technological progress and innovative solutions from the private sector are key drivers of Smart City developments’ (ICLEI 2015a). Ola Söderström and his collaborators see smart cities as a form of corporate storytelling that frames how cities are understood, conceptualized and planned. ‘Smart city talk is mostly practiced by urban management experts, marketing specialists and consultants, corporations and city officials’ (Söderström et al., 2014: 307). The smart city label involves quite a diverse range of phenomena: information technology, business innovation, governance communities and sustainability. As such, ‘smart cities’ can easily be confused with terms such as cyber, digital, wired and knowledge cities, each of which carries with it a somewhat different meaning (Hollands, 2008: 306). In October 2011, the narrative was officially co-opted by private industry when IBM registered the term ‘smarter cities’ as a trademark in tandem with its ‘smarter planet’ marketing campaign. The smart city narrative has increasingly permeated many corners of the applied urban studies field. For example, at the April, 2015 ICLWEI World Congress in Seoul, South Korea (‘Sustainable Solutions for an Urban Future’), smart city policies were featured. 194 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Notably, there was a thematic session entitled ‘What is a smart city?’ featuring a presentation entitled ‘Stockholm: a smarter city’ (ICLEI 2015b). Other researchers have linked economic prosperity, sustainability and smart city policies. Thus, Bakici et al. (2012) demonstrate that Barcelona, a leading European smart city, has integrated ICT (information and communications technologies) at all levels of municipal administration with the dual goal of competing economically and establishing a new model of sustainable development. Smart city narratives have provoked a number of concerns among researchers. As Holland (2008: 312) notes, the smart city is likely to become a more polarized city, economically, socially, culturally and spatially. That is, a widening gap develops between knowledge and creative workers and the unskilled and IT illiterate sections of the local poorer population. This can take various forms. Holland cites Stephen Graham’s (2002) research on ‘bridging urban digital divides’, wherein Graham found that smart city initiatives in Sao Paulo, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore and Singapore resulted in targeting IT services to high-end wealthy customers, creating fortified high-tech enclaves, and developing gentrified urban neighborhoods to house smart workers. As David Harvey (1989) has more broadly suggested, investments in the smart city threaten to create a ‘global spatial fix’, wherein scarce public funds are diverted from welfare and social services to help lure in mobile global capital, thus creating social polarization. agents (claims-makers) who assume ‘ownership’. This does not mean that they cannot be ‘real’, only that they are unlikely to be publicly recognized without undergoing this process of social construction. Morrill and Owen-Smith (2002: 93) make this point with reference to collective action frames, constructed sets of meanings and beliefs that guide an interpretation of reality. Frames, they note, do not emerge from thin air, nor do they develop by themselves from organic, mystical processes. Rather, ‘they require real people in interaction and conflict to formulate, contest, modify, and deploy them’. Social construction of environmental problems (and their solutions) involves three primary tasks: invention and labeling; presentation and legitimation; and contestation and consensus building. Woven throughout are an additional three components (borrowed from the study of rhetoric and communication): grounds (documenting the empirical basis of the problem); warrants (the moral imperatives justifying taking action on these grounds); and conclusions (proposed solutions to these claims). Establishing grounds tends to be a prime concern in the first stage (invention and labeling); constructing warrants a focus in the second (presentation and legitimation); and generating proposed solutions (conclusions) is characteristic of the third stage (contestation and consensus building). This social construction process generally unfolds in linear fashion, although ‘it does not necessarily play out that way’ (Heberle et al., 2007: 6). Invention and Labeling SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF URBAN SPRAWL/SMART GROWTH As I have argued elsewhere (Hannigan, 2014), environmental issues/problems are by no means self-evident. Rather, they must be discovered, named, demonstrated, legitimated, promoted and contested by social With most environmental problems, discovery begins with a scientific observation or finding that raises a red flag in terms of risk. Consider, for example, the case of ‘black carbon’, the subject of a extended profile in The Economist (February 19–25, 2011). Black carbon is normally treated as a separate problem from urban sprawl/smart Social Construction of Smart Growth Policies and Strategies growth, although it was the focus of a talk given by John Topping of the Climate Institute at a conference in Washington (Capitol Hill Summit on Sustainable Communities, October 15–16, 2009) that brought nearly 100 environmental justice advocates from across the United States together with smart growth advocates. Black carbon, a key component of ‘soot’, has been garnering increasing attention from environmentalists and climate researchers. Soot, of course, is hardly new (recall, for example, Dick Van Dyke covered from head to toe with soot as Bert the cheerful chimney sweep in the Disney movie version of the classic children’s book Mary Poppins). According to The Economist, the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) keen interest in black carbon dates to a plane journey taken a decade ago by Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and Klaus Topfer, then UNEP’s executive director. Ramanathan and Topfer observed a brown cloud along the foothills of the Himalayas ‘lapping at the mountain range like dirty water at the rim of a bathtub’ (The Economist, 2011: 89). The ascent of the smart growth movement cannot be traced to a single dramatic event such as this. As has frequently been pointed out, the idea of managing urban growth to reduce environmental impacts is almost as old as urban planning itself (Smart Growth Canada Network, 2007). The actual term ‘smart growth’, Anthony Flint (2006) reports, was first used by Robert Yaro while he was a planner in the administration of Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1970s. Kaid Benfield, a co-founder of the Smart Growth America coalition, suggests the defining moment for the smart growth movement was the adoption of a smart growth law in Maryland in 1997, under the leadership of Governor Parris Glendening. In a conversation with William Fulton (1997), Glendening confided that he adopted the term smart growth as a ‘political and marketing decision’ to implement 195 Maryland’s strategy of simultaneously funding infrastructure in targeted growth areas while conserving land in targeted preservation areas (Gearin, 2004: 280). Benfield (2010) claims the phrase suited the movement because ‘it emphasized that we were not opposed to population and economic growth, but felt it was important to accommodate it in a smarter way’. In the case of ‘black carbon’, scientists played a central role in establishing the ‘grounds’ for taking action. Ramanathan and Paul Crutzen, a Dutch climate scientist who was one of the first to theorize about ‘nuclear winter’, spearheaded a campaign encompassing 150 scientists, research aircraft and satellites to map the effects of what are known as ‘short-term climate changers’, the two leading examples being ozone and black carbon. Even though scientific understanding of the role that black carbon plays in the changing climate is ‘still rife with nuance, uncertainty and doubt’, restricting emissions of black carbon is politically appealing because it yields short-term results (as against efforts to control carbon dioxide), is comparatively cheap, and directs the health benefits to the country that is doing the cutting (The Economist, 2011: 90). Academic researchers were less central to the successful launching of the smart growth movement. While there have been hundreds of studies and reports on urban sprawl and its footprint, the impetus for the ‘smart growth revolution’ came from a coalition of forwardlooking governors and non-governmental advocacy groups drawn from the ranks of environmentalists, public interest lawyers, academics and planners (Flint, 2006: 94). A particular stumbling block here is that the effectiveness of smart growth management policies and programs has yet to be conclusively established. After systematically reviewing the main policy instruments that have been proposed and utilized for managing urban growth and protecting open space at various governmental levels, David Bengston and his colleagues concluded: 196 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES ‘Whether or not these efforts – even with an enhanced federal coordination role – will be sufficient to make development environmentally and socially sustainable remains to be seen’ (Bengston et al., 2004: 283). Five years later, a report by the Lincoln Land Institute of Land Policy, billed as the first major evaluation of smart growth policies in the United States, demonstrated only modest gains. Focusing on four states with statewide smart growth programs (Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon) and on five performance measures – promoting compact development, protecting undeveloped land, providing a variety of transportation options, maintaining affordable housing, and achieving positive fiscal impacts – the authors found that no state did well in all five measures. Several individual states succeeded in one or more of their policy areas, notably protecting open space and expanding transportation choices (Lincoln Institute, 2009). Encouraging as this may be, it does not provide the kind of headline-grabbing findings needed to establish smart growth as an urgent urban/environmental problem. Presentation and Legitimation In this second stage of environmental issue construction, a key task is that of commanding attention. This means attracting and maintaining public support, something that usually requires achieving a positive profile in the mass communications media. As Eric Lawrence and colleagues (2010) observe, problem definition and framing are critical elements in influencing public opinion and policy preferences. In securing public support for a national urban agenda, Lawrence et al. found evidence to show that policies that are constructed broadly (‘the plight of America’s cities’) rather than narrowly (specific city problems), that are aimed at positively perceived target groups (children, elderly) versus those that are negatively regarded (drug addicts, street youth), and that promise the delivery of resources to a wide swath of beneficiaries versus a minority (‘distressed cities’), have a better chance for success. In securing the support of the public, the smart growth movement has been both blessed and cursed. Unlike those environmental problems that are not visible to the naked eye and exist primarily as patterns of scientific data, urban sprawl and its discontents are readily visible to the ordinary citizen, from clouds of air pollution to gridlock on the freeways. The challenge here is to convince the public of two things: firstly, that these negatives are not just intermittent urban nuisances, such as noisy neighbors and raccoons, which are annoying but tolerable; and, secondly, that the cure for these problems is not worse than the illness itself. Anthony Flint (2006: 84), who worked for many years as a reporter for the Boston Globe, observes that smart growth advocates have been both quite successful and poorly understood by the media and the public. From 106 news stories about smart growth in 1996, the number grew to just under 6,000 in 2005. A Google search for ‘smart growth’ triggers 13 million results – 3 million more than ‘pornography’. On the other hand, the smart growth message has not been easily understood or clearly conveyed by the media; even the New Urbanists, with their campaign to build neo-traditional neighborhoods, have a message that is easier to rally behind. The warrants that underlie the smart growth movement have been framed in a variety of ways. Right from the beginning, smart growth has been set within an urban improvement frame. Advocates here argue that implementing smart growth measures would encourage pedestrian-friendly communities, mixed land uses, town centers, light rail mass transit, urban parkways and other amenities. Echoing the long-time involvement of conservation groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, smart growth has been cast as an environmental problem. Social Construction of Smart Growth Policies and Strategies For the most part, this has included a standard potpourri of green concerns: reducing air pollution and improving soil and water contamination; and preserving open space, farmland, wetlands and other ecologically sensitive areas. A more recent variation of this is the framing of smart growth in terms of urban agriculture and the food system. The warrant here states that curtailing the loss of farm land to urban sprawl paired with incentives to grow food in backyard and neighborhood gardens reduces the energy ‘footprint’. Most recently, urban sprawl/smart growth has been re-framed as an environmental justice issue. For the most part, this pivots on the argument that communities of color differentially experience negative environmental impacts and therefore stand to reap particular benefit from smart growth policies. To the extent that environmental justice is a particular concern in areas where past industrial development caused pollution and a legacy of contaminated or abandoned sites (brownfields) (‘How smart growth can address environmental justice issues’, 2001), smart growth programs can potentially encourage developers to revitalize properties in older distressed areas while reducing pollution exposure. Furthermore, given that minority and low-income communities already experience more health problems than other populations, smart growth policies that involve enhancing public transit and/or retrofitting existing affordable housing can be helpful. This third frame overlaps a fourth public health frame. As EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) Administrator Lisa Jackson has pointed out, African Americans die twice as often from asthma as whites and have higher cancer rates (Dubb, 2010). To the extent that these are related to high pollution levels, this is related to smart growth solutions. Beyond this, however, the public health frame focuses on the effects of an increasingly sedentary culture in the United States, a lifestyle that is associated with automobile dependence. In this view, people who are physically inactive put themselves at risk 197 for chronic diseases including diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, osteoporosis, cancer and stroke, as well as premature mortality. Insofar as creating walkable neighborhoods is a key plank in the smart growth agenda, this connects to the Active Living movement within public health. Finally, about 13 percent of traffic fatalities are pedestrians or cyclists. Among recommendations to reduce such fatalities from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are ‘the use of pedestrian bridges and traffic islands, narrower streets, more sidewalks and pedestrian malls, and denser community areas that combine work, shopping and residences – all Smart Growth measures currently being adopted in communities across the country’ (Geller, 2003: 1411). Consensus Building and Contestation Public support does not automatically ensure that a policy will be embraced. This third task demands that interest groups skillfully articulate their demands within the confines of the dominant policy climate. In the United States this means eschewing direct government involvement in planning and development decisions. Successful approaches for promoting sustainable development, Krueger (2010: 431) observes, demand that smart growth proponents devise policies that are ‘politically nimble and uncompromisingly equitable’. Several public administration scholars (Feiock et al., 2008; Hawkins, 2014; Lubell et al., 2005) have made a case for examining smart growth policies using a ‘political market framework’ rather than an ‘interest group’ model of policy adoption. The latter, they argue, ‘provides an incomplete explanation for policy adoption’ (Hawkins, 2014: 2506) because it presents an overly polarized picture of urban political life. Local governments cannot just be seen as working exclusively in the employ of real estate developers 198 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES and for other pro-growth interests. Rather, the local governance structure routinely mediates the demands of pro- and anti-growth interests, especially in cities managed by a professional manager/administrator. de la Cruz (2009) found that Florida cities and counties were most likely to adopt smart growth regulations such as urban containment, density bonuses and smart growth zoning where interest groups and local governments engage in mutually beneficial exchanges and where there is an optimal match with urban political institutions. This is facilitated by strategic framing practices on the part of smart growth proponents. To shape municipal policy decisions in ways that combat sprawl and achieve goals of sustainability, smart growth advocates must frame their arguments in such a way that they appear to be offering more efficient forms of development rather than proposing no development at all. Suggesting greater densities through zoning for mixed use and clustered housing is especially appealing to city managers. However, this is more problematic in cities with a strong mayoral form of government, where policy decisions are more likely to be shaped by considerations of mass political appeal and short-term political gain (Hawkins, 2014: 2506). Making this more difficult is the concerted opposition of a myriad of determined ideological and political opponents. Flint (2006: 98) fingers the powerful property rights movement for engineering the backlash against smart growth which began during the economic lull that followed 9/11, and saw stunning setbacks in Maryland, Oregon and New Jersey, the three states that originally pioneered smart growth policies. In particular, he notes the central role played by lobbyists for conventional homebuilders, strip mall and office park developers, and road builders in getting growth management bills defeated. Gonzalez (2009) takes it back even further, documenting the role of the US real estate industry and large landowners in instituting the techniques of urban sprawl nationwide from the early twentieth century onwards. They did so by operating through multiple policy planning organizations and federal government committees. This was manifested not only in the housing sector, but also in the form of allied policies such as the maintenance of low energy prices. In a comparative case study undertaken from a constructionist perspective, Heberle et al. (2007) examined the debate over smart growth in three states: Missouri, Kentucky and New Jersey, focusing particularly on the frames employed by opponents. In Missouri, where state-level smart growth legislation was slow to emerge, the ‘grounds’ for declaring sprawl a problem were challenged by opponents such as the Home Builders Association of Greater St Louis. The language and symbols used by detractors relied upon the notions of freedom of choice, the free market, local control of land use decisions, and the naming of urban dwellers as the real problem. In Kentucky, opponents drew upon libertarian ideologies surrounding land use – particularly those that eschew regulation, zoning and planning – to construct a frame to compete with smart growth. Specifically, they Framed the proposals as a challenge to local control, invoked the American dream to own a home, accused planners of being Communists, and argued that private enterprise knows how to provide affordable housing better than the government. (Heberle et al., 2007: 20) This appeal to a broader property rights ideology tapped into a nationally organized network of groups that advocate for property rights, including Freedom 21, the American Policy Center, the American Land Rights Association, and the Heartland Institute. In New Jersey, a densely populated and urban state, where rural libertarian ideology does not usually resonate very widely, opponents attempted to come up with a new frame: that smart growth policies would guarantee that the homeless and dependent children of middle-class homeowners would never be Social Construction of Smart Growth Policies and Strategies able to buy a home. Despite a high profile media campaign with the slogan ‘Where Will They Live?’, this approach failed to capture public sentiment, probably because it failed to tap into deep-seated, ideological seams. In the language of social movement scholars, they failed at the framing task of ‘bridging’. Most recently, opponents have deluged the internet with claims that smart growth policies played a significant role in exacerbating (and partially causing) the international financial crisis. In particular, an article by Wendell Cox, a well-known conservative op-ed commentator and editor of the website Demographia, entitled ‘Root causes of the financial crisis: A primer’ was reprinted by a number of right-wing institutions including the Heritage Foundation. Cox delights in citing superstar economist Paul Krugman, who wrote in the New York Times that the house price bubble has been limited to metropolitan areas with strong land use regulation (Cox, 2008). The smart growth movement has not been very effective at countering these frames. Whereas opponents have successfully engaged in the process of ‘frame alignment’, connecting their arguments to broader public beliefs and ideologies, smart growth proponents tend to ground their arguments in upbeat phrases such as ‘livable cities’ and ‘urban revitalization’, that do not leverage the power of broader ideological currents. A more effective bridge might be to the discourse of climate change; although, in America, this varies from region to region. CONCLUSION Environmental problems/issues typically stall in the third stage of social construction – securing political recognition and support. Claims that are legitimated in the media get bogged down in the corridors of government, where moral imperatives are less important than earmarks. Earmarks are individual spending items inserted by politicians into broader appropriation bills. They favour the pet 199 projects of senators and congressmen, and as such, have often been equated with ‘pork barreling’. Unusually, urban sprawl/smart growth entered the vocabulary of regional and state politics early on in its life, enjoying some legislative successes before falling back in recent years. In fact, it could be said to have entered the political arena prematurely, lacking a firm foundation of grounds and warrants. One decade into the twenty-first century, the most promising policy space for smart growth initiatives seemed to be situated at the ‘nexus of public health, the environmental movement and community development’ (Dubb, 2010: 1). One major reason for optimism was the changing culture within the Obama Administration during its first term. Roskie et al. (2011) cite three programmatic initiatives that favored this new direction: President Obama’s Sustainable Communities Initiative, an innovative partnership between HUD (Housing and Urban Development), DOT (Department of Transportation) and EPA (Environmental Protection Agency); a new focus on environmental justice in the EPA Smart Growth Program; and the inclusion of environmental justice speakers and topics in the 2010 New Partners for Social Growth Conference. Roskie and colleagues (2011) pose the question: ‘Can a renewed emphasis on smart growth really help environmental justice communities?’ The answer here is ‘maybe’. Sociologist Robert Bullard, a founder and icon of the environmental justice movement, is not alone in expressing skepticism, citing the devastating impact of urban renewal programs of the past that promised to revitalize urban centers, but ended up displacing black-owned businesses and homes (see Roskie et al., 2011: 78–80). More broadly, this echoes the recurrent criticism that smart growth policies and initiatives lack any meaningful social analysis or critique. That this is so should not be all that surprising, since the smart growth coalition has always huddled under the leaky umbrella of groups with very different goals who are trying to create the appearance of a united front (Downs, 2001: 1). Reconfiguring the alliance to include environmental justice 200 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES advocates could re-invigorate the warrants for smart growth, injecting them with a more robust, marketable moral argument. However, a risk here for the smart growth movement is that it will be taken over by environmental justice activists. Indeed, Bullard has indicated as much when he says that a ‘smart growth race/equity initiative should be driven, led, and facilitated by people of color and the environmental justice movement where equity and justice form the core’ (cited in Roskie et al., 2011: 79). I do not mean to suggest that this is inevitable, or that embracing environmental justice discourse is undeniably the optimal scenario for the future. Smart growth’s appeal has always been its ‘big tent’ philosophy, something that would suffer in a move to a more critical perspective directed toward inner cities. Nonetheless, as many cities and states teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, burdened with massive pension liabilities and a glut of devalued housing, it may be unrealistic to expect that problems such as suburban sprawl and preserving open space are likely any time soon to vault to the top of the policy ladder. Finally, we must consider whether the smart growth initiative is potentially harmful in the same way as smart city policies are said to be. On the one hand, the lack of emphasis on digital and wired solutions would seem to rule against this. At the same time, the discourse of smart growth is strangely blind to issues of power and inequality in cities, much in the same way as are sustainable narratives. For example, most smart growth advocates routinely endorse urban transportation policies that favor bicycles, mass transit and pedestrian-friendly land uses. 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(2008) ‘Will the real smart city please stand up?’, City, 12(3): 303–20. ‘How smart growth can address environmental justice issues’ (2001) Natural Resources Policy Studies, NGA (National Governors’ Association) Center for Best Practices, 22 May. ICLEI (2015a) Smart Cities Agenda (http:// worldcongress2015.iclei.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/04/SmartCity_Strategic-PlanDraft_26.3.15.34-35.pdf). ICLEI (2015b) ‘What is a smart city?’ (http:// worldcongress2015.iclei.org/en/sessions/ a3-what-is-a-smart-city/). 201 ICLEI (2016) Who we are (http://icleiusa.org/ about-us/who-we-are/). Krueger, R. (2010) ‘Smart growth and its discontents: an examination of American and European approaches to local and regional sustainable development’, Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 56(3): 409–33. Lawrence, E., Stoker, R. and Wolman, H. (2010) ‘Crafting urban policy: the conditions of public support for urban planning initiatives’, Urban Affairs Review, 45(3): 412–30. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (2009) ‘First major evaluation of smart growth policies in U.S. shows modest gains in fight against sprawl’, Press Release, 29 May. Lubell, M., Feiock, R. and Ramirez, E. (2005) ‘Political institutions and conservation by local governments’, Urban Affairs Review 40(6): 706–29. Morrill, C. and Owen-Smith, J. (2002) ‘The emergence of environmental conflict resolution: subversive stories and the construction of collective action frames and organizational frames’, in A.J. Hoffman and M. Ventresca (eds), Organizations, Policy and Strategic Perspectives. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. pp. 90–118. Roskie, J., Ferguson, S. and Yen-Kohl, E. (2011) ‘Being smart (growth) about justice: Can the Obama administration undo decades of environmental injustice via smart growth?’, Seattle Environmental Law Journal, Spring: 54–81. Smart Growth Canada Network (2007) Useful research (http://smartgrowth.ca/research_e. html). Söderström, O., Paasche, T. and Klauser, F. (2014) ‘Smart cities as corporate storytelling’, City, 18(3): 307–20. Urry, J. (2004) ‘The “system” of automobility’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21(4/5): 25–39. Vanolo, A. (2014) ‘Smartmentality: the smart city as disciplinary strategy’, Urban Studies, 51(8): 883–98. PART V Distinctive and Visible Cities Globalization and rising inter-urban competition has stimulated cities to seek out new strategies for increasing their attractiveness, distinction and visibility. Many cities have sought to do this through improving their physical environment, often with spectacular buildings and architectural masterplans, as described by Ponzini et al. (2016). However, the proliferation of ‘starchitects’ and their iconic buildings underlines the fact that these features are no longer as distinctive as they once were. They also tend to be expensive, and their iconic value often only lasts until another city creates a more interesting icon. One of the defining characteristics of urban development in recent years has therefore been the search for more flexible strategies that produce rapid economic and political returns. The trend towards ‘fast policy’ (Peck, 2005), outlined in the case of creative cities by Graeme Evans in this volume, has privileged strategies with shorter time horizons, greater visibility and the promise of high economic returns. One such strategy is the development of ‘art cities’, as analysed by Can-Seng Ooi in Chapter 14. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of large cities has long been important for supporting a lively ‘arts scene’. Ooi argues that such scenes feed off diversity, which is produced by the mixing of different social groups and cultures, by urban conflict and a critical mass of artistic production that stimulates innovation and creativity. Many cities have attempted to harness the arts to attract attention, improve their image or as an extension of public diplomacy. They also jostle for position in the global arts business, trying to attract artists to sell their works, galleries to display them, wealthy people to buy them and critics to publicize them. Some major cities, such as London and New York, are already global art hubs, and this coincides with their importance as financial centres. Other emerging cities, such as Hong Kong, 204 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Singapore, Shanghai and Beijing, have noted this trend and are trying to join the coveted group of ‘global art cities’. The role of light and illumination in cities is the theme of Tim Edensor’s contribution. He underlines the significant transformation from the darkness of the medieval city to the brightly lit spaces of the modern city. The shedding of the urban gloom was not uniform, but rather created a new landscape of bright and dark spaces which illuminate spatial inequalities to this day. Not only does the dark periphery of many cities contrast with the brightly lit city centre, but the unreliability of lighting is a feature of many emerging cities in the global South. Even in the most brightly illuminated cities there is growing criticism of over-illumination and light pollution, showing that an increase in brightness is not always welcome. In fact, the development of attractions based on encounters with darkness shows that the dark has now become a scarce good in some places. Edensor also considers how the ordering role of urban lighting gradually shifted towards a more festive role as urban consumption spaces developed in the nineteenth century. Early examples of the use of lighting to animate recreational and festive spaces include the public illuminations in Blackpool and Coney Island (Schivelbusch, 1988). In the contemporary city, lighting installations have turned illumination into an art form and design tool. In the Dutch city of Eindhoven, original home of the lighting company Philips, the Glow festival now presents state of the art solutions to contemporary urban design problems (Bevolo, 2014). In his contribution on the (in)visibilities of cities, Ricardo Campos (Chapter 16) argues that the city, as a product of human activity, is inherently designed as a form of communication. Much of this communication is visual, as cities are ‘built for vision’. In analysing the visual communicational environment of the city, Campos argues that communication has become an increasingly important function of (urban) life, and that the visual has become an increasingly important carrier of communication. In this context, visibility and invisibility are linked to questions of power. Power has to be made visible, and those in power can also render things invisible. The power of the city is made visible through its buildings and structures, while the undesirable are rendered invisible through removal to the margins. As Edensor argues in relation to the colonization of the night, however, these margins also become sites of resistance, with the gaze of the powerful being returned in new gazes of the marginalized – rendering them visible in new ways. In this context the elements of the city that different actors decide to make visible or to keep hidden and the reasons behind such choices become important aspects of the study of the urban. As Pier Luigi Sacco outlines in Chapter 17, a growing number of cities have jumped on the events bandwagon in the hope of becoming more visible at a global level. Usually cities tend to think big in terms of events, hoping to attract the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup or the European Capital of Culture to give an instant boost to the city’s international positioning. In addition, the host cities expect to generate some kind of impact or ‘legacy’, which is increasingly a key part of the justification for such events (Pavoni, 2015). However, as Sacco explains, the use of mega events as urban policy tools throws up four dilemmas: • • • • Transformation vs. Celebration Immediacy vs. Sustainability Mobilization vs. Participation Parochialism vs. Openness. Not surprisingly, in the fast policy world the rhetoric favours the transformation, immediacy, mobilization, parochialism side of these dichotomies, ensuring short-term high-profile impacts through projects that enjoy popular support because they support local development. This is much easier to sell to the raft of city and event stakeholders than the Distinctive and Visible Cities longer-term sustainability of local-scale events participated in by all. In essence, as Sacco outlines, the overall dilemma is ‘Event as Rent’ versus ‘Event as Risky Investment’. When the aim is generation of economic capital, it is clear who stands to gain, but when the aims widen towards cultural development, social inclusion and grassroots creativity, the gains become much less clear and less easy to measure. Sacco highlights the gap between the high expectations of event impacts and their actual effects, both in terms of the scale and type of effects observed. He applies a model of culture-led development based on observations of previous mega events, which shows that the emphasis of event planning and evaluation lies mainly on achieving high profile international impacts, which include media coverage and economic impacts gained through tourism. Other areas remain relatively poorly researched, not only because these are often difficult to measure, but because they do not fit neatly into most political agendas. In particular the sustainability of impacts is often overlooked. The media moves rapidly on after the event, followed by the politicians and local business. The involvement of local people is therefore often pragmatically focused on short-term mobilization in order to support the status quo, rather than achieving sustainable long-term change. The short-term objectives that are often linked to mega events by cities is one reason why Sacco argues that ‘winning’ a title or the right to stage a mega event might not always be the best option. There are a number of examples of ‘losing’ cities that bid unsuccessfully for major events, and yet managed to obtain positive and in many cases long-term effects. These arguably include the bids of Toronto for the Olympic Games in 2000 and the Newcastle-Gateshead bid for the European Capital of Culture in 2008 (Richards and Palmer, 2010). In spite of the many problems, Sacco ultimately argues that removing mega events from the urban policy maker’s toolkit would be unthinkable. 205 Mega events are also becoming part of the urban agenda in cities in the Global South, as Christoph Haferburg and Malte Steinbrink point out in Chapter 18. They examine the role of major sporting events in delivering content for emerging cities, which provide the new ideal hosts for the event organizers – cities that can provide ‘political stability, sufficient economic capital, and hunger for symbolic benefits’. The hunger that cities display to attract mega events is reflected in the level of control that FIFA or the IOC can exert not only over the event, but over the city as a whole. The staging of mega events in the cities of the Global South also allows this power to be wielded in new ways, removing informal settlements and making social problems less visible. Through such semiotic interventions cities make themselves attractive for events, for the global media and for investors. Haferburg and Steinbrink analyse the cases of South African cities (World Cup 2010) and Rio de Janeiro, which has become ‘festivalized’ through the staging of successive mega events (2014 World Cup, 2016 Olympic Games). In the case of South Africa they argue that the cities have not been changed by the World Cup, although they have gained some infrastructure improvements. The biggest benefits are arguably to be found in governance and ‘orgware’ (organisational capacity and structures), with more informal structures enabling cities to address urban problems more effectively. In the case of Rio, which has been using ‘festivalization’ as a development strategy for many years, major events have been used to redevelop and also reposition the city. However, the favelas are a highly visible element of the cityscape, and therefore a policy of ‘invisibilization’ was employed in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. This has involved the forced removal of inhabitants and the enclosure of favelas by high walls. The favelas have also been ‘pacified’ in accordance with the wishes of FIFA and the IOC to ensure the safety of visitors. Pacification was followed by a 206 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES process of ‘beautification’, including painting houses and walls in bright colours suitable for consumption through the tourist gaze. REFERENCES Bevolo, M. (2014) ‘The discourse of design as an asset for the city: from business innovation to vernacular event’. In Richards, G., Marques, L. and Mein, K. (eds) Event Design: Social Perspectives and Practices. London: Routledge, pp. 65–77. Pavoni, A. (2015) ‘Resistant legacies’, Annals of Leisure Research, 18: 470–490. Peck, J. (2005) ‘Struggling with the creative class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29: 740–770. Ponzini, D., Fotev, S. and Mavaracchio, F. (2016) ‘Place-making or place-faking? The paradoxical effects of transnational circulation of architectural and urban development projects’. In Russo, A.P. and Richards, G. (eds) Reinventing the Local in Tourism: Producing, Consuming and Negotiating Place. Bristol: Channel View, pp. 153–170. Richards, G. and Palmer, R. (2010) Eventful Cities: Cultural Management and Urban Revitalisation. Routledge: London. Schivelbusch, W. (1988) Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Berg. 14 The Global Art City Can-Seng Ooi There is an affinity between the dynamics of the art world and the dynamics of the city. The arts are used by policy makers, businesses and communities to position their cities, so as to attract investments, visitors and skilled workers. And in turn the city is conducive for artists to practice and sell their craft. The symbiotic and intertwined relations between the city and the arts have led Jean Baudrillard, a philosopher well regarded by art theorists and critics, to consider art a ‘conspiracy’ (Baudrillard and Lotringer, 2005). He was angry with the exploitation of the arts for non-art purposes. He took a skeptical and critical view of the arts, and was peeved that the arts have become more about big business and extravagant shows organized by multinational corporations. He was similarly angered that these profit-focused art activities demand to be treated with reverence and awe. Society’s relationship with the arts has evolved over the centuries (Boll, 2011; Cuno, 2006; Edwards, 1999; Ivey, 2008; Weintraub, 2003). Art is now about more than aesthetics and beauty, it is also about politics, business and society. The art world thrives in the urban milieu and, at the same time, the art world is incorporated into city-making and urban development policies. The art city evolves from a mixture of policy, circumstances and deliberate promotion. This chapter looks at this mixture. ART PRODUCTION AND THE CITY Because the value of art is largely intangible and there is no consensus on what makes good art, faith in the arts and their values are socially accentuated and maintained (Becker, 1984; Bourdieu, 1996; Grenfell and Hardy, 2007; Moeran and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2011; Ooi, 2010a; Robbins, 2000). For instance, in framing and reifying painting as an artistic discipline, artists, art critics, galleries, museums, festivals, curators, art reviewers, museum visitors, collectors, art 208 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES teachers, art schools, auction houses, art historians and art-world researchers play complementary roles, where paintings are celebrated and criticized, artists are trained, and economic values are accrued to works. Together they constitute an art world. The institutional support and the discussions in the community create a social reality of art. Artistic values are negotiated, validated, configured and maintained (Moeran and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2011). A lively and nurturing art eco-system can only be found in the urban milieu. One reason why the urban dynamics are essential for a thriving art eco-system is in the way that most art projects are organized today. Art projects, from theatre performances to visual art exhibitions, entail a complex of interconnected activities built through temporary teams or organizations. Often in the art world, individuals and groups of people cooperate in temporary ways through projects (Kenis et al., 2009; Scott, 2006). Temporary teams are formed, and they disperse when the project ends. For example, a new production team, consisting of director, producer, actors and scenographer come together for a theater play, some having worked together on earlier projects, and many meeting for the first time (Eikhof et al., 2012). Similarly, for an art exhibition, curators, gallery managers and artists form temporary groups to realize the project. The ability to complement and work with each other efficiently and effectively is essential to the success of the project. And assembling the right persons for the various tasks is difficult because every project is somewhat different and entails new constellations and ways of working every time. As a response, artistic activities show a high level of spatial concentration in a few locations in spite of attempts at decentralizing cultural public policy (Menger, 1999: 549). The few special cities like London, New York and Paris have overcome a few temporary team challenges embedded in the art world. First, these cities offer networks of ties between companies engaged in the different parts of the art-making process and between the many employers who tap into the artistic labor pool. There is easier access to the necessary experts and workers for a project. Second, because art and creative work are project-based, a mechanism to process knowledge through this network emerges, so as to minimize the costs of identifying and hiring relevant art-world workers. Individuals have built up reputations that allow team managers to quickly find workers that match the tasks at hand (Bille, 2012; Jones, 2012). Third, the many art projects give rise to a general agreement on appropriate wage and fringe benefit schemes in the art and creative sectors. This reduces the negotiation and transaction costs in the labor market. The cluster of art-world activities is thus an effective way to overcome the complexities of the disintegration of the production process (Storper and Walker, 1989; Quigley, 1998). Furthermore, in the wider creative production world, a person takes on different roles in different art productions; for instance, a visual artist can be the featured artist in a show and she may be the curator in another exhibition or just a gallery sitter. Many careers in the cultural creative industries entail building a reputation, taking on short-term tasks and cultivating relationships (Mathieu and Sandal Stjerne, 2012). On the fluid dynamism in the creative and art worlds, Currid argues that the New York cultural economy’s success stems from the physical environment. Creative districts, for example, SoHo, Chelsea, the Meatpacking District and the West Village, are walking distance apart, constituting a creative and cultural clustering. This physical arrangement makes unplanned encounters with artists and tastemakers more likely (Currid, 2007). People in advertising, architecture and media meet through art events. In the arts, the cultural industries are largely based in the informal, where the economy is made up of processes that are dynamic, overlapping, ambiguous and ambivalent. There are no fixed and organized ways of getting a gig in a bar, exhibiting in a gallery and selling The Global Art City a line of clothes in a small shop. The densely located meeting points are ideal for creative individuals to find work, and to seek support and help within the art economy. So in the eyes of artists, cities are attractive for them to make art because there is a cluster effect both in terms of hanging around with artists and being in a well-established art ecosystem. They are able to find jobs, establish relationships, build their reputation and do creative work. Studies even show that in New York and Paris, the concentration and quality of artists allow artists themselves to learn from each other, and they produce their best works earlier in their careers (Galenson, 2006; Hellmanzik, 2010). Hellmanzik (2010) found that there is indeed a location premium for artists to be in cities like Paris and New York. ART INSPIRATION AND THE HETEROGENEOUS CITY Because the city is densely populated and heterogeneous, this mixed existence inevitably generates dynamic interaction, leading to unique traditions, practices and habits. Different artists draw inspiration from this pool of diversity (Currid, 2007; Zukin, 1995). For instance, in the last three decades Shanghai has become a modern metropolis, with more than 20 million residents. Its cultural life has been enriched by migrants coming from other parts of China, as well as foreign investors and workers demanding international-standard amenities and comforts. The authorities are also engaging with creative individuals and firms on transforming the city’s colonial heritage spaces, for example, the French Concession (Gulliver, 2009; O’Connor, 2009; Wang, 2009). The contrasting demands of the urban social, political and economic life result in a dynamic and often interesting cultural environment. The intertwining of historical and contemporary circumstances inspires new 209 and experimental artistic expressions, such as images of skyscrapers painted in traditional Chinese ink and interpreting Shakespearean plays in Shanghainese operas. Audiences easily engage with these new artistic expressions, partly because they reflect their everyday experiences. Besides that, social problems such as drug abuse, homelessness and gang violence, are common in many cities. Cities are spaces of conflicts (Massey, 1994; Sassen, 2011). The conflict-laden city is likewise used as a resource for artistic expressions. CNN journalist Michele Elam, for example, reported on ‘How art propels Occupy Wall Street’ (Elam, 2011). With New York as the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis, she observed that artists in the city challenge and compete with themselves to show sympathy towards the Occupy movement. Their works highlight the socialpolitical challenges that were not just New York’s but also the world’s. Many art works, ranging from plays to paintings, carry social and political messages. The disputes, anxieties and discontents in the crowded city are particularly potent for activist artists or artists who explicitly take on social and political issues in their work. The diversity in the city produces a set of dynamics that inspire artists. The resulting artistic expressions in turn position the city. This is part of the city’s soft power, which will be discussed in the next section. ART, CITY-MAKING AND BRANDING THE CITY The city has to be managed too. Urban development and the making of the city often involve the arts. The arts, in other words, are incorporated into the city’s urban development plans, providing a more humane face to the city. The arts also communicate vibrancy and excitement, indicating that it is eventful (Richards and Palmer, 2010). Cultural development policy in the city is thus considered 210 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES strategic. Richard Florida argues that cities are competing for prosperity and that growth will come from the city’s ability to attract clever knowledge workers (Florida, 2002, 2014; Peck, 2005). One important element that attracts the so-called creative workers is the city’s cultural life (Florida, 2003). A city offering a rich plethora of art and cultural products can position itself as attractive to persons who are broad-minded and accepting. And for residents, the arts and culture enliven the place in which they live (Ooi and Stöber, 2010). In addition to attracting talent, many cities are trying to attract tourists, sell their products and draw in investments and jobs. All these goals can be partly achieved through public diplomacy, branding and enhancing the image of the city (Dinnie, 2011). Public diplomacy is conducted through affective and symbolic means or ‘soft power’ (Nye, 2004). Soft power is transmitted in culture, political values and foreign policies, and it is also about winning the hearts and minds of people around the world. The goal is to get others to tacitly accept, emulate and aspire to the place’s values, beliefs and agendas. A country or in the case here, city, has strong soft power if global audiences empathize and are familiar with and feel sympathetic towards it. So in terms of conducting public diplomacy through the arts and culture, global pop cultures (for example, Korean-pop, Bollywood), national cultural promotion institutions (for example, the British Council, Confucius Institute, Goethe Institute) and international news channels (for example, BBC, CNN and RT) are channels that make the place more familiar and likeable to the world, enhancing the place’s soft power. So as part of the city-making process, and asserting its position in the world, authorities have other reasons for extending their cities’ profile through the arts. Many cities are competing to host internationally recognized art works, cultural events and art institutions (Ooi, 2014). This strategy attracts attention. Walter Benjamin for instance highlighted the drawing power of original works of art. His idea of the ‘aura’ shows that mechanical reproductions of art works do not dilute the value of original works. Instead, reproductions generate an interest and desire for the public to want to see and experience the original (Benjamin, 1968). So for instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa attracts millions to the Louvre Museum even though people have seen many reproductions of the painting. Works by famous artists like Andy Warhol, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and, more recently, Damien Hirst and Ai Weiwei draw visitors to museums. And such works are also aggressively promoted by city authorities to enhance the cultural credence of the city. Authorities in many cities are not only building museums and cultural spaces, they also want their cultural institutions to exhibit and perform works that can draw global attention. Many planners in developing cities have followed the tested formula of using cultural institutions to brand their cities; for instance, Doha’s massive and modern Museum of Islamic Art showcases the heritage and art in the region and it also transforms the image of the city and Qatar. The same logic applies to hosting art and cultural festivals. The festival format has spread in the various disciplines of the arts, ranging from film festivals (Mezias et al., 2011) to art biennales (O’Neill, 2012; Tang, 2011). City authorities are also founding festivals and events to enliven their cities and promote their cultural offerings, for example, the European Capital of Culture (Moeran and Strandgaard Pedersen, 2011; Ooi et al., 2014; Richards and Wilson, 2004). All these are part of the city-making process. Some cities are famous because they create art movements. For instance, the COBRA – abbreviated from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam – art movement in the middle of the twentieth century is a significant form of European abstract expressionism. If not extremely famous outside the art fraternity, references to these cities in exhibitions and museums allude to these cities’ importance in The Global Art City the global art world. As a result, authorities in some cities are trying to engineer and promote their cities along such lines. Singapore, for example, founded the Singapore Art Museum and also the National Gallery with the aim of collecting and promoting Southeast Asian modern and contemporary visual art. The concept of ‘Southeast Asian art’ is problematic and severely criticized by experts, but these Singapore museums invented and defined that genre, and assert Singapore as the art capital representing a very diverse cross-national region (Ooi, 2010b). Art is part of the city-making process. In an aptly titled book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Serge Guilbaut (1983) tells the story of how an art movement from New York became a public diplomacy tool. America was victorious after the Second World War. Its economic prosperity was also driven by its influence overseas. Its popular cultural exports were spectacular but the images of the country portrayed in American pop cultures were not flattering and depicted an America obsessed with decadence and materialism (Guilbaut, 1983: 194). The fine arts in the USA were then in the shadows of Europe and many American radical avant-garde artists faced political challenges at home. They were left-leaning, and anti-communist sentiments were strong and officially sanctioned in American society at that time. The artists were criticized and marginalized. The American federal authorities nonetheless wanted to garner global respect for the country and its finer arts, to mitigate the negative images stemming from the country’s highly commercial and populist cultural exports. The abstract expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and the like were chosen to be exported by the authorities because their works were antirepresentational, and their interpretations were largely vague and open. Such abstract works could be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as ‘apolitical’. The federal authorities embarked on a deliberate process of promoting this radical form of abstract expressionism in 211 Europe, for example through European art magazines which published articles comparing and linking the American avant-garde to great European artists and traditions, selling an idea of modern art beyond pop-culture kitsch. The plan was to use the arts to show that Americans and Europeans shared common basic ideals and struggles against the Soviet Union at that time. Soviet art was an explicit instrument of propaganda, offering little space for free expression. In America and Western Europe, artists supposedly had freedom for artistic expressions. Regardless, New York was promoted as an art city in that process. The arts can thus be seen as city-making policy tools for politicians and authorities. In this sense, the arts define the city. CITY, MONEY AND ART TRADING The financial city and the art market are closely intertwined. In the context of art trading – in terms of visual art and antiques – the significance of the city as an art center is tied closely to the wealth of the city. A thriving art trading city needs a big bourgeois society and rich corporations (Robertson, 2005a: 3). Art auction houses, as institutions, offer expertise in the art market and shape taste in art. Money is the medium of transaction, and the auction houses institutionalize the commercial value of tradable art works (Robertson, 2005b). The international art market as part of the art world is also supported by many other players, however, including state-supported cultural institutions, private galleries, art historians, scholars and aestheticians, as mentioned earlier. For instance, researchers in a national museum validate works of art that complement commercial deals, and, similarly, works are promoted when exhibited. There are also art critics who review exhibitions and works. Government policies and regulations, such as on taxes and duties, and export restrictions 212 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES affect how the art market functions (Pfister, 2005; Robertson, 2005b). The links between the art world and the financial city encapsulate many of these dynamics. New York and London house the main offices of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the two premier art and antique auction houses in the world. These cities are also global financial centers. This is no coincidence. The international art trading business is drawn towards the wealthy. An art collection has become an investment instrument for many wealthy individuals (Renneboog and Spaenjers, 2013; Robertson, 2005c). The US remains the world’s largest art market (McAndrew, 2014). Globally, the world imports of art and antiques achieved a record of 17.6 billion Euros in 2012, an increase of 19 percent from the year before. There were also 32 million millionaires worldwide in 2013, and 42 percent were based in the USA; more than 600,000 of these wealthy persons are considered mid- to high-level art collectors (McAndrew, 2014). There are at least four interlinked reasons why art sellers gravitate towards financial hubs. The first reason is to be close to wealthy customers in these cities. Auction houses for instance want to trade in places where they can get record prices. Besides increasing auction houses’ cuts from the sales, record prices generate publicity and excitement for art and their business. In a study that examines data on art and financial markets over three centuries, Goetzmann finds that the art market is correlated to stock prices. The only restricting factor in pricing an art work is the wealth of the collector who wants it, and this restricting factor somewhat disappears when the stock market is rising (Goetzmann, 1993; Goetzmann et al., 2014). It is a luxury consumption, and art prices depend on stock market sentiments (Renneboog and Spaenjers, 2013). Furthermore, a vibrant financial city – where the wealthy live or visit – offers closer physical access to potential customers. And thus new economic powerhouses attract art businesses. So, with the economic rise of China, many international collectors have taken an interest in Chinese art and antiques (Robertson, 2005d; Spencer, 2005). The market is promising, as new millionaires join the club of high-level art collectors. Cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Beijing are all vying to become global art cities, besides financial ones. A second reason is that the arts humanize and provide a particular social function for wealthy individuals. In a survey of 2,000 wealthy persons globally, Barclays bank released a report looking at their collection of ‘treasures’ (Barclays, 2012). The treasures include fine art, jewelry and antiques. The study estimates that wealthy individuals park about 9 percent of their wealth in treasures. The financial reasons are not particularly clear because many of them do not liquidate their collection; instead they develop strong social and emotional motivations for collecting their precious artefacts. This partly explains why art price records are regularly broken (Goetzmann et al., 2014). The association with art and supporting art satisfy the need for social recognition in many of the rich. Besides enjoyment, they also use their art collection to develop social capital as they loan out their works to museums, or to show off to friends and business partners. Giving to the arts also commands respect (Abbing, 2002: 181–202). It is an act of luxurious philanthropy. Christie’s and Sotheby’s, with close relations to private bankers for instance, have set up teams to convert newly wealthy individuals into art collectors and investors. A third reason is the symbiotic symbolic values embedded in the art and financial markets. A virtuous circle has evolved; New York and London have established themselves as art cities, and artists and other art-world players want to be associated with these cities, while in turn such motivations make these cities even more vibrant and increase their art-world reputation. The art market is essentially a cultural constellation (Velthuis, 2005). Market exchange is ritualized, and The Global Art City symbolic display, negotiation and manipulation are central in the social interaction of the art world. The global art city carries symbolic capital for art businesses. Being exhibited in London and New York, or being seen bidding for works in Christie’s, carries social status. The financial and art city come together as an exchange of wealth and status. A fourth reason why the art market overlaps with the financial market leans on the dark side. Art trading allows one to hide one’s wealth from prying eyes (Massy, 2008; Tijhuis, 2006). The hub and network effects of financial centers facilitate the sale of art. The art market is also not transparent or efficient (Ashenfelter, 2003; David et al., 2013). This is not necessarily an issue for wealthy individuals. For instance, freeports have been built or are being built in many financial cities including Beijing, Singapore and Luxembourg. Freeports offer security and confidentiality, little scrutiny, and the ability for individuals to hide behind nominees. They have also become spaces where the wealthy can trade and exchange their expensive goods, such as paintings, sculptures and even gold bars (The Economist, 2013). Art trading is also done outside freeports. London and New York have a good reputation for their arts and antiquity products but are also known to carry a number of formerly illicit cultural products. Many of these were ‘laundered’ through transit ports, which are also usually duty free locations, like Switzerland and Hong Kong (Chappell and Polk, 2011: 104–106). And rarely do such trades attract the attention of law enforcement agents, especially in the demand context; the buyers are wealthy, and are also part of the social and political elite (Chappell and Polk, 2011: 105–106). There are few legal constraints to check on sources of money when art is bought, and art trading has become a notorious means of laundering money (De Sanctis, 2013). Inadvertently or otherwise, such illicit businesses have blended themselves into the otherwise respectable art business. 213 SUMMARY There are many different ways to look at art and the city. The arts are considered an integral part of modern society. But cities are more attractive for artists to reside in, as places for collectors to buy art, for people to consume art and for art businesses to invest in art. There are several reasons for this. This chapter discusses the nature of contemporary art production today. The spatial concentration of artistic activities arises from the need to find efficient and effective ways for finding people in the production of art and cultural projects. At the same time, creative individuals are able to find work, cultivate their networks and build their reputation. There is an economic and organizational basis for cities being art centers. There is also an artistic basis. The city is heterogeneous and provides inspiration for many artists, particularly those artists who want to cross genres and those who want to address social and political issues. Original and new ways of artistic expression are generally celebrated in the contemporary art world. This can also be said about activist art. The city is a good venue to do both. The city has to be managed too. Urban development and city-making processes usually incorporate the arts. As a result, the arts are promoted and resources are made available. The arts have a more humane as well as a more vibrant image. The city’s image is also managed through a number of public diplomacy paths, such as promoting an art genre from the city, showcasing popular and famous art works and building cultural and arts institutions. Cities compete and the arts are used as part of that strategy. The final discussion centers on the financial city and the art market. The city offers a relatively large market of art consumers. But in the context of art trading, financial hubs matter in terms of the concentration of wealthy individuals, access to money and using art as another investment instrument. 214 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Wealthy individuals may use the arts to achieve emotional satisfaction and enhance their social status through their consumption or and/or investment in art. This angered Baudrillard. REFERENCES Abbing, H. (2002) Why are Artists Poor? 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London: Thames and Hudson. Zukin, S. (1995) The Cultures of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell. 15 Lights, City, Action… Tim Edensor This chapter explores how illumination continues to transform the meaning and feeling of the city. Firstly, I investigate the pervasive darkness of the pre-modern city and, subsequently, how this was utterly transfigured by the advent of early modern illumination that fashioned a new nocturnal urban realm of fantasy and excitement in which inhabitants were attracted to a proliferation of illuminated spectacles and attractions. Secondly, however, I discuss how these urban landscapes were also inscribed with power in new ways, and the ways in which inequalities wrought through illumination persist, though opposition has always responded to such ordering processes, not least through seeking out the dark realms of the city. Thirdly, I focus on how the sheer pervasiveness of illumination has culminated in poor lighting, over-illumination, light pollution and the creation of nocturnal ‘blandscapes’. Finally, I argue that partly in response to these conditions, new urban lighting designs promise to transform the experience of urban life after dark, especially with the rise of art installations and light festivals which defamiliarize sensation and meaning, deepen a sense of place, encourage interactivity and foster rich, convivial atmospheres in re-enchanting cities. URBAN GLOOM In an age in which illumination is an integral ingredient of urban experience, it is difficult to imagine how limited it was in medieval times, when darkness pervaded after nightfall, dim, flickering candles holding out against the gloom. This inescapable blackness promoted all manner of religious and superstitious beliefs about lurking perils, including the ghostly, devilish and uncanny forces that circulated through dark space. Besides generating enduring imaginary geographies of the urban night, there were many very real perils awaiting those who 218 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES ventured out after sundown. Piles of rubbish and excrement cluttered streets, hazardous ditches carried waste and water, and overhanging timbers meant that finding a path was fraught with risk. Indeed, historian Roger Ekirch reports that many accidents occurred in towns as well as to those who moved outside the city walls, stumbling into the dangers posed by ‘fallen trees, thick underbrush, steep hillsides and open trenches’ (2005: 123). Not only was the nocturnal medieval city an invisible obstacle course, but also the realm of human menaces, the footpads, burglars and arsonists for whom night provided cover. Even in the early modern city, where light spread further, violent gangs and criminals threatened the safety of night travelers. To keep these characters at bay, most householders performed the daily ritual of ‘shutting in’, firmly bolting doors and windows, and positioning swords and cudgels next to beds in case of nocturnal intrusion. Most towns and cities, with their defensive external walls, locked the gates at night once sundown approached, prohibiting entry to those who arrived too late, and typically organized a watch, a group of men who surveilled the streets, guarding against fire and interlopers, and scrutinizing any nocturnal wanderers. In the dark, friends and foes alike were subject to suspicion. Inside houses, candles provided ‘small patches of light amid the blackness’ (Ekirch, 2005: 100), and keeping them alight required unrelenting effort: tallow candle wicks were trimmed to prevent excess smoke and the dying of the flame. Those urbanites compelled to travel out after shutting-in carried candles and lanterns to illuminate their path, but these were always liable to be extinguished by wind. In the early modern city, one could purchase the services of a linkboy to provide a guide through the dark streets, yet it was feared that they might lead innocent travelers into the clutches of the very criminal gangs they were trying to avoid. The supernatural and practical fears inspired by these gloomy conditions fed into enlightenment narratives that championed the transcendent transformation from dark to light, signifying a passage from medieval ignorance to rational thought and science. According to Michel Foucault, such modern discourses drew attention to ‘the pall of gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths’ (1980: 153). The transformation of the urban night, it was believed, would ameliorate ignorance and ‘shed light on all things’ in the pursuit of ‘truth, purity, revelation and knowledge’ in embodying the ideals of ‘illumination, objectivity and wisdom’ (Bille and Sørensen, 2007: 272, 273). TRANSFORMING THE CITY WITH LIGHT Subsequently, successive technologies of artificial illumination opened up the urban night to diverse social practices as the frontiers of darkness were progressively pushed back (Melbin, 1978). At first, the expansion of lighting was slow and uneven. During most of the nineteenth century, the poor still used tallow candles and rushlights whereas the rich typically employed beeswax candles, and, later, with the growth of the whale industry, more expensive, cleaner and brighter Spermaceti candles. As scientific innovation accelerated, paraffin and kerosene were deployed to illuminate lamps and were followed by the introduction of gaslight. In the 1880s, the incandescent electric bulb challenged gaslight and was itself gradually improved with the replacement of carbon, tungsten and ductile tungsten filaments, and innovations such as fluorescent and neon lighting. This progressive urban illumination, documented in historical studies (Brox, 2010; Jakle, 2001; Nye, 1992; Schivelbusch, 1988), included bright streetlamps, illuminated shop windows and advertising, and private houses blazed light from windows instead of flickering candlelight. Lights, City, Action… Rather than fearfully remaining within their homes, people flooded out in search of amusement, spectacle, commerce and conviviality, as the early modern city staged new forms of experience. Light expanded into the diverse areas of the city, part of a moral crusade to make streets safer and open for commerce. Brightly lit shopping streets such as New York’s Broadway came to be known as ‘great white ways’, and illuminated driving spaces, night shopping areas and entertainment districts all contributed to the evolution of the ‘24-hour city’. The modern enthusiasm to banish darkness reached its zenith in Italian Futurist Marinetti’s manifesto of 1909 (cited in Attlee, 2011) in which he declared that we should aim to ‘kill the moonlight’. Synonymous with archaic superstition and the natural world, the moon would be conquered by the ceaseless surge towards a dynamic future of technological advancement and efficiency, in which brilliant, human-made illumination would displace its feeble light. Despite rapid technological development, Chris Otter (2002) insists that the emergence of urban illumination was far from ubiquitous but a largely contingent and ad hoc process. He argues that the patchy, partial replacement of gas lighting by electric lighting for instance, exemplifies how the history of illumination is characterized by ‘multiple, overlapping perceptual patterns and practices rather than singular paradigms’ (Otter, 2008: 10). Competing technological systems, different designs and large disparities in what local authorities could afford meant that there was a multiplicity of forms, with new electric luminaires co-existing with gas and oil lamps. Accordingly, as John Jakle (2001: 57) explains, in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA, the ‘night was made visually complex in its illumination because of the various overlapping technologies’. Whatever the form of lighting deployed, as illumination colonized the night across the West, the nocturnal urban landscape was utterly transformed. In the same way that it 219 is now challenging for the urban-dweller of the twenty-first century to envisage the darkness that formerly permeated urban life, so it is difficult to imagine how citizens must have been awestruck by the urban revolution in illumination. In forging ‘a new landscape of modernity’ whereby the city was transformed from ‘a dark and treacherous netherworld into a glittering multicoloured wonderland’ (Nasaw, 1999: 8, 6), darkness was ‘expelled into the realm of prehistory and mythology’ (Schlör, 1998: 57). This complete reconfiguring advanced an array of effects. Especially initially, illumination must have contributed to a significant process of geographical defamiliarization, producing uncertainty, fascination and illusory qualities as the city became perceived as a phantasmagorical realm, abounding with ‘the shadowy hauntings of the fleeting and insubstantial’ (Collins and Jervis, 2008: 1). In such a landscape, distances are difficult to ascertain, illuminated buildings appear to float amidst pools of darkness, and scale and proportion are deceptive. The modern city thus became what Scott McQuire terms ‘a perceptual laboratory’ (2008: 114), and though this initial sense of wonder has been largely replaced by routine apprehension, the urban nightscape still possesses the power to thrill, disorient and serve as a space of fantasy. Indeed, the nocturnal cityscapes of Manhattan or Tokyo, the iconic advertisements of London’s Piccadilly Circus and New York’s Times Square, the seamy yet enticing roads of Bangkok’s gaudily lit Khao San Road and the corporate landscape of Hong Kong continue to carry a powerful sensual and affective impact. At a smaller scale, urban illumination also has the capacity to excite passers-by: the neon lights of the ‘seedier’ places, the searchlights that scan the sky at the opening of a theatrical show, and the floodlights of stadia. These forms of phantasmagorical illumination have also been promoted in numerous cultural representations. William Sharpe identifies the aesthetic of the ‘nocturnal sublime’, a ‘realm of fascination and fear 220 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES which inhabits the edges of our existence, crowded by shadows, plagued by uncertainty, and shrouded in intrigue’ (2008: 9). The romantic conception of the urban night as a time of libidinal excitement and transgression is both alluring and frightening, signifying loneliness, danger and deviance but also potential thrills and adventures. As Sharpe elaborates, these representations have been particularly potent in the numerous representations of New York City after dark, which variously suggest ‘a snare, a canvas, a foreign land, a fantasy, a stage’ (2008: 7). He highlights the contributions of key artists, including the photographs of lurid accidents and crime scenes captured by Weegee, and the paintings of urban alienation created by Edward Hopper. Representing the urban night cinematically has been especially potent in the fantastic urban chiaroscuro of film noir, which foregrounds deep shadows, neon signs blending into wet tarmac, weird camera angles, smoke and rain, harshly-lit and twisted profiles, reflections and mirrors, shafts of disorientating light and corresponding pools of darkness. In these dream-like and unsettling scenes the action unfolds, featuring a cast of flawed characters with femme fatales, corrupt officials, gangsters and hard-bitten, jaded heroes marooned in a mire of greed, lust and corruption. According to Bryan Palmer, film noir captures ‘the distorted shadows of night’s always unfulfilled dreams, sliding inevitably into the sinister hole of nightmarish fears’ (2000: 392) in a nocturnal, gothic Babylon. The American cities of Los Angeles and New York predominate as cinematic stages, but other cities, including Paris and London, have also featured in these lurid melodramas. INTENSIFIED ORDERING Besides enchanting the urban landscape with these oneiric and dramatic qualities, the spread of illumination and the vanquishing of gloom have also been integral to the rationalization of the city, part of a much broader project in which air pollution, poor water supply and overcrowding were seen as parallel evils that had to be overcome. Illuminated streets were supplemented with wider planned thoroughfares, while the use of glass meant sunlight could enter interiors, creating clearer vistas and cleaner air. And lighting was increasingly deployed to facilitate efficient movement, direct traffic and signify commercial and instructional meanings. Extensive illumination was part of a bourgeois moral and political re-ordering of the city, used to promote surveillance, enhanced vigilance towards the self and others, techniques of supervision, networks of inspection, and privacy. These new infrastructures of surveillance allowed some to scrutinize the presence and practices of others, according to Otter, making ‘normal and durable the autonomous, rational judging, distant practices of the liberal subject’ (2008: 259) and instantiating norms of civil behavior. Those urban spaces that lay outside of the re-ordered city – such as the slums in which darkness, even in the daytime, meant that the sense of touch was often required for navigation – were conceived as synonymous with impaired sensation, ignorance and immorality, moral depravity as well as inefficiency. They represented a spatial decadence that had to be overcome in order to create a city of responsible, autonomous, rationally oriented, liberal citizens. Yet the persistence of these insalubrious realms reveals that inequality was inscribed through the production of what McQuire calls a ‘new “map” of the city’ (2008: 124). Here, particular buildings were floodlit whereas others were cast into darkness, producing a selective landscape in which there was a reduction in urban difference and complexity, and the city’s rough edges were unseen. As Joachim Schlör points out, the brighter the light in the centers, ‘the more starkly do the outlines of the darker regions stand out’ (1998: 65). This is underscored by Jane Lights, City, Action… Brox’s contention that the brightly illuminated shop windows, signs, theatre entrances, homes and pubs in commercial, prestigious and often central urban spaces contrasted with the darkness of the ‘far streets and lesser known neighbourhoods, disregarded and disparaged in relation to the new’ (2010: 104). Both the geographical inequality evidenced by the uneven distribution of urban illumination and the deployment of light in the service of power persist in contemporary cities. For instance, the luminosity of streets in American cities perpetrates a spatial hierarchy largely determined by the perceived relative importance of main streets, arterial roads, secondary business streets and varieties of domestic streets (Jakle, 2001). Furthermore, light projected onto state buildings, heritage sites, monuments and memorials re-inscribe the identities and values of the powerful on space. These effects are complemented by the glaring commercial illumination of corporate logos arranged across the high-rise corporate buildings that dominate the skylines of some cities. The intensification of the commercial uses of light are evident in the working-class seaside resort of Atlantic City in the USA, where private actors dominated the shaping of the illuminated seafront in which an abundance of neon-lit advertising hoardings came to saturate the city’s piers and boardwalk. In contrast, in the UK, Blackpool Illuminations were embedded within public control, and while a seafront realm of fantasy emerged, it was only marginally inflected with commercialism and corporate branding (Edensor and Millington, 2015). Practices of illumination have thus created ‘new centres of power and new margins of exclusion’ (Koslofsky, 2011: 280), with poorer urban areas contrasting with the glare of downtown areas in which the lights of giant office blocks are never switched off. This expression of power across the urban nightscape has been supplemented by an array of policing techniques. During the early adoption of electric light in Paris, plans to install a Tour de Soleil, a rival to the Eiffel Tower in 221 the competition that culminated in the latter’s construction, envisioned the erection of the world’s most powerful electric lamp situated on a huge tower and devised to transform the Parisian night into day. Such strategies were also epitomized by how Warsaw’s Palace of Culture during the communist era acted as a beacon of power, emanating a powerful beam over a large swathe of the city (Gilbert, 2000). Less ostentatiously, searchlights routinely regulate urban space, whether as stationary fixtures or as beams that scan the city from police helicopters. This regulation of urban bodies is being extended by recent initiatives. In the UK, pools of harsh pink light have been deployed in Lancashire towns to deter teenagers from congregating after dark, and police helicopters in Weston-Super-Mare have shone glaring halogen lights on youths gathered in public places, temporarily blinding them and causing them to move along. Smart streetlighting schemes developed in Glasgow utilize sensors to collect data on noise levels, with adjacent lights programmed to react by increasing their brightness if a disturbance is indicated by a rise in volume, directing police to the sites of potential trouble. And ultraviolet light is commonly installed in public toilets to eliminate blue and green colors, making it impossible for drug addicts to locate veins in which to inject narcotics (Bille and Sørensen, 2007). Illumination has also provided overwhelming demonstrations of ideological and political power through highly coordinated spectacles, most notoriously in the extraordinary cathedrals of light designed by Albert Speer for Nazi rallies at Nuremberg in the 1930s. Immense architectural classical columns were fashioned by numerous giant searchlights that shone upwards into the sky, creating a three-dimensional space in which tens of thousands of precisely situated followers participated in a mass choreography, producing ‘mysticism, awe and reverence’ amongst these participant-spectators (Khodadad, undated: 5). 222 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES As Sean Cubitt (2013) argues, the deregulation of electricity and lighting in a neo-liberal era have distorted supplies where monopolies hold sway over certain cities, with privatization and fragmentation of supply producing enormous variety in the availability of light. This is detailed in Jonathan Silver’s (2015) discussion of Accra, Ghana, where uneven supply results in frequent blackouts that disproportionately affect poor neighborhoods, while wealthier enclaves install their own systems of illumination to sidestep such disruptions. Yet as Cubitt (2013) also asserts, illumination is a contested field in which meanings and practices are continuously negotiated between scientists, engineers, manufacturers, light designers, government officials, architects, businesses, consumers and inhabitants, and these change according to cultural and historical contexts. In lighting, as in other areas of design, contestations that circulate around the taste of different classes can be particularly intense, as epitomized by the annual furor sparked by the display of Christmas lights on the houses of working-class inhabitants in the UK. The violation of middle-class notions of what constitutes good taste instigates accusations of excess, selfishness and other imputed failings, charges unrecognized by the displayers themselves (Edensor and Millington, 2009). Moreover, shared cultural norms of lighting can be mobilized at national and local levels, as with the championing of hygge, or coziness, in the low-level domestic illumination that pervades urban Denmark (Bille, 2015). THE DARK REALMS OF THE CITY As illumination is continuously contested, so urban darkness is always socially mediated by human practices and values; as Robert Williams contends, ‘night spaces are neither uniform nor homogenous. Rather they are constituted by social struggles about what should and should not happen in certain places during the dark of the night’ (2008: 514). As discussed, the powerful often attempt to colonize darkness with light, or control access to dark urban space. Yet darkness, like illumination, is profoundly ambivalent and multiply contested. Though commonly understood as antithetical to modern reason and construed as terrifying, fostering deviance and disorder, darkness has also been positively valued. In medieval Europe, before the arrival of industrial work schedules and widespread illumination, sleep patterns were characterized by a first sleep followed by a second, lighter slumber. In between these two spells, numerous activities took place in the dark, a welcome respite from work in which people were able to enter the world of the imagination, have sex and tell stories (Ekirch, 2005). In modern times, a range of meanings and practices have contested the hegemonic ideal that the nocturnal city should be saturated with illumination. For instance, in early modern Paris, opposition to early gas illumination took the form of lantern smashing, erecting ‘a wall of darkness, so to speak, protecting an area from incursion by government forces’ (Schivelbusch, 1988: 106). Besides the criminal activities, sedition and plotting that take place under cover of darkness, there are an array of other practices. Williams focuses on how darkness provides a cloak for alternative and oppositional practices that temporally disorganize space: ‘[B]ecause of its transgressive meanings and societally harmful uses, darkness threatens to deterritorialize the rationalizing order of society … when it obscures, obstructs, or otherwise hinders the deployment of the strategies, techniques, and technologies’ (2008: 518). Bryan Palmer also conceives darkness as a time for transgression, the ‘time for daylight’s dispossessed – the deviant, the dissident, the different’ (2000: 16–17) to grasp opportunities for clandestine, revolutionary and conspiratorial activities, to challenge the daytime norms of commerce, economic rationality and regulation. Moreover, in the dark, persecuted minorities, Lights, City, Action… marginal groups and the lower orders may escape domineering masters, carve out time and space outside working time, and organize political opposition without coming under scrutiny. Night also offers the occasion for witches, bohemians, beatniks, clubbers, drug-users, urban explorers, fly-posters, graffiti artists and counter-cultures to flourish, offering opportunities for experimentation. The demi-monde of the city, the gloomy, marginal realm of illicit clubs, brothels and gambling dens, provides the flip side to the brightly lit, tightly regulated spaces of commerce and respectable leisure. DISENCHANTED NIGHT As I have emphasized, the expansion of electric light has led to the thorough colonization of the night across the cities of the West and beyond. However, as John Jakle contends, this intensified saturation has meant that ‘much of the romance and mystery of the urban night evaporated, street lighting, in its excess, no longer capturing and holding attention as spectacle’ (2001: 15). While in earlier modern times ‘people moved in and out of illumination’ (Jakle, 2001: 104), the diversity of the nocturnal city, with its complex, variegated shades of darkness, shadow, glare and sparkle, has been lost. Instead of producing environments in which ‘different types and modes of light create different experiences of colour and … reflect the experience of things differently’ (Bille and Sørensen, 2007: 270), homogeneous lighting bleaches out contours and colors. In seeking to enhance mobility, security and commerce, the prevalence of over-illumination has culminated in the production of nocturnal ‘blandscapes’ in which standardized and poor-quality lighting reign. Particularly culpable in the production of these homogeneous nightscapes is sodium vapor lighting that produces a monochromatic yellow or pinkish glare to give environments a pale, 223 washed-out appearance. Even inventive and sophisticated forms of lighting are subsumed by such illumination, and architectural features fade into obscurity when instead, more creative luminaires might be deployed to bring out the distinctive features of buildings and space. Campaigners seeking more sustainable and attractive forms of illumination depict poorquality lighting as ‘light pollution’, identified in five ways: invasive ‘light trespass’; chaotic ‘light clutter’; unnecessary and excessive ‘over-illumination’; a blinding ‘glare’ that can imperil movement; and ‘skyglow’, the leaching of light into the night sky to produce a glow that obliterates the stars. The effects of light pollution are dramatically revealed each year during Earth Hour, when the lighting of iconic buildings and squares is switched off. For most urban inhabitants, the proliferation of urban illumination has caused a deep unfamiliarity with darkness, in contrast to earlier city-dwellers for whom it was part of mundane experience. In the past two decades, awareness of the dearth of gloom has led to the formation of an increasing number of areas far from the city that serve as dark sky parks. Flagstaff in Arizona and Scotland’s Galloway Forest offer opportunities to gaze upon starlit skies away from urban glare and provide an alternative engagement with space and landscape (Edensor, 2013). In addition, recent urban attractions have emerged that confront visitors with complete darkness. For instance, the Dialogue in the Dark franchise offers a simulated experience of cities in darkness. At the New York attraction, visitors become attuned to the noise, smells and textures of Times Square and Central Park, sensations often eclipsed by the predominance of visual experience (Edensor, 2013). Plays, concerts and art displays are also staged in complete or partial darkness and restaurants provide opportunities to eat in total darkness, foregrounding the textures and tastes of food and promoting social interaction unhindered by visual judgments about others and their eating habits (Edensor and Falconer, 2015). 224 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES In addition to the emergence of attractions that provide encounters with darkness, contemporary urban illumination is being transformed by more sustainable technologies and inventive designs. Most obvious is the replacement of incandescent electric bulbs with lower wattage bulbs, notably the more energy efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Other techniques direct and shield luminaires to minimize the loss of light to the sky and contain it within discrete realms. It is likely that more extensive implementation of motion- or heat-sensitive devices that provide illumination as they sense bodies but dim once they have passed will emerge, re-introducing darkness into the city but allaying concerns about safety. Other technologies explore the potential for enhancing urban sustainability and retaining the sensual affordances of gloom by developing materials that emit light without requiring electricity. A recent product called Starpath can be sprayed on any solid surface to make it glow in the dark, since it contains particles that harvest the sun’s rays during the day. Emitting a soft blue light at night, it facilitates safe movement without contributing to light pollution. Such approaches are spreading, as exemplified in the charter of the international association of lighting designers, Lighting Urban Community International (LUCI), which advocates a lighting strategy that foregrounds social and environmental imperatives. In advocating distinctive nightscapes that foreground creativity and enhance identity, they argue that ‘Cities must aim at creating comfortable light environments and protect darker areas’ and ‘make starlight visible again’ (Lighting Urban Community International, undated). Also signifying the increasing adoption of innovative illumination are strategies that instead of indiscriminately projecting light across space highlight unheralded architectural features, public statues or trees. In attempting to exemplify how light can be deployed more creatively, light designers occasionally form collectives and stage ‘guerrilla lighting’ events that utilize portable, low-cost, low-energy lighting devices to radically transform urban spaces with multicolored, targeted effects (Edensor, 2015a). LIGHT ART AND FESTIVE INSTALLATIONS With the advent of gas and then electric light, illumination very quickly became utilized to create recreational and festive spaces. Besides the overall phantasmagorical impact of city nightscapes, a battery of signs, animated displays, spotlights and floodlights were deployed to produce particular spaces of fantasy and allure. Indeed, such strategies emerged at the birth of electric illumination with the showcasing of fabulous and extravagant light displays at world fairs and their subsequent migration to amusement parks such as Coney Island in New York. Tellingly, at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘the Chicago fairgrounds … contained more light than any contemporary city in the United States’ (McQuire, 2008: 118). Blackpool, the UK’s largest seaside resort, followed suit in 1926 with the emergence of the annual Illuminations, running for six miles along the seafront (Edensor and Millington, 2015), contributing, according to Gary Cross, to novel forms of ‘popular modernity, mass consumption and a new collective experience’ (2006: 631). At Blackpool, illumination continues to powerfully shape a convivial, richly sensual atmosphere (Edensor, 2012). Gernot Böhme shows how stage production techniques set ‘the conditions in which the atmosphere appears’ (2008: 4), creating ‘tuned’ spaces, and, as Laganier and van der Pol (2011) discuss, light designers are well aware of the imperative to stage atmospheres that shape the meaning and feeling of space. Cochrane identifies how ‘lighting can reveal texture, accent, spatial transition, visual cues, security and perception of security, moods, cerebral temperature and drama in the city’ Lights, City, Action… (2004: 12–13), radiating diverse qualities of sparkle, glow, glare, highlighting and diffusion. By utilizing color, intensity and animation, light designers create symbolic and expressive installations but also tint the surrounding environs. These qualities thus condition urban settings, bestowing diverse moods to which people variously respond, whether nostalgically, expressively, sensuously, playfully or reflexively, adding to and co-producing atmospheres (Edensor, 2012). In considering the numerous ways in which light designers and artists are enriching urban environments through a medley of techniques and aesthetics, I now identify ways in which the experience of the nocturnal city is defamiliarized, symbolically deepened, and enhanced through the production of thick atmospheres and festivity. I argue that this is contributing to the initiation of a new era of urban illumination that carries echoes of the earlier production of phantasmagorical nightscapes. Temporary installations that commemorate historical events or place-based qualities are increasingly organized to enchant cities. A particularly spectacular example was provided by an ambitious light installation in London in August 2014 that commemorated the centenary of the start of hostilities in World War I. Situated next to the Palace of Westminster, Spectra, designed by Ryoji Ikeda, was formed by a twenty-meter grid containing forty-nine searchlights that blazed upwards from dusk to dawn (Figure 15.1). Variations of Ikeda’s installation have appeared in other cities, forging distinctive associations in each location. From a distance, the work seemed to constitute a single column of vivid white, an unmissable point of light in the city, yet as the source of the beam was neared and searchlights were separately visible, the symbolic resonances of the piece evaporated and its affective and sensual force emerged. The huge cube formed by these rising shafts of light framed the Houses of Parliament, trees and moon. Hundreds of people mingled in an excitable flurry of Figure 15.1 2014 225 Spectra, Ryoji Ikeda, London movement and chatter, some waved arms in the beams, some gazed upwards at the millions of insects that swirled within the light, and others lay on the grass, drinking wine and conversing. Affective intensities gathered and dispersed amongst the crowds, producing surges of excitable behavior and moments of calm (Edensor, 2015b). A more permanent work, Chris Burden’s Urban Light (Figure 15.2) has created a new public space in a city that lacks such realms. An arrangement of 202 restored streetlights from the 1920s and 1930s sited outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Burden’s work lures a host of participants, including playful children, tourists, wedding Figure 15.2 Urban Light, Chris Burden, Los Angeles, 2013 226 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES parties and fashion shoots who continuously produce a changing, convivial atmosphere. Other techniques are concerned with deepening a sense of belonging, using light to capture the often invisible, unnoticed rhythms that circulate through and around place, as Pierre Auboiron (2010) details in his discussion of the work of Yann Kersalé. In Lyon, the strength of the red lighting on the roof of the city’s Opera House alters in response to the information relayed by sensors and cameras about the levels of human activity inside the building, revealing the energies expended during night rehearsals and concerts. Auboiron also details how Kersalé captured the non-human energies that circulate around place by fitting the huge Cathedral of Nantes with 1,900 spotlights, the intensity of which responded to sensors in the nearby river Loire that recorded the velocity of the current. In 2013, a large inflatable light sculpture called MIMMI (Minneapolis Interactive Macro-Mood Installation) was situated at the Convention Center Plaza in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This work, described as an ‘emotional gateway to the city’, attempted to reflect the mood of the city as ascertained by the most prominent words and phrases occurring in local tweets as well as human movements around the plaza. In response to this information, abstract lights intensified, with warm and cool colors signifying particular emotions. Temporary events and installations are also deployed at the growing number of light festivals that cities stage to attract tourists and shoppers, advertise place and advance the development of night-time economies. These festivals may be very large in scale, such as Lyon’s Fête des Lumières, attracting around four million visitors each year, or Sydney’s two-week long Vivid festival. At Lyon, the festival serves as a catalyst for the wholesale re-envisioning of a more inventive and sustainable urban lighting scheme. Lyon’s urban nightscape is no longer characterized by generic lighting but a great diversity of colors and intensities, as well as peculiar surprises. Smaller and shorter events, such as Durham’s bi-annual Lumiere festival, are supplemented by a growing number of community-oriented lantern parades that foreground local creative involvement. Stevens and Shin point to their role in consolidating a sense of belonging, supporting ‘the redefinition, rediscovery and expansion of local social life and the meanings of place’ (2014: 1). There are also traditional festivals, such as the celebrations of light integral to the Hindu festival of Diwali and the illuminated floating baskets of the South-East Asian festival of Loi Krathong, now augmented by modern designs and technologies. Large light festivals seem to resonate with wider urban processes of intensified commodification, proliferating mega-events and the theming of space (Hannigan, 1998) that contribute to the generation of a night-time economy. Through culture-led regeneration strategies accompanied by deregulation of licensing and planning, cities hope to attract more inhabitants to city center locations, provide a greater range of entertainment, enhance job creation, attract more tourists and consumers, and facilitate a reduction in crime. Accordingly, a ‘global race to “colonise” the night’ is joined by an ever more diverse range of competitor cities (Yeo and Heng, 2014: 73). Within these broader neo-liberal, culture-led regeneration strategies, arts festivals have become ‘a mainstay of urban tourism and urban policy-making’ (Quinn, 2010: 266), with a huge rise since the 1980s. Critics contend that they are instrumentally devised to invigorate night-time economies and develop new, consumer-oriented subjectivities (Shaw, 2015) and circumscribed ‘playscapes’ within which limited forms of ‘play’ may occur (Chatterton and Hollands, 2002). However, it may be countered that in contributing to ‘a shift towards more fluid, fragmented and diversified structures and rhythms of work, leisure and mobility’ (Hadfield, 2015: 613), they provide a more diverse range of latenight activities and a ‘more mature attitude towards open-air activity and mixed use’ (Evans, 2012: 36). Lights, City, Action… In this context, light festivals may be conceived as contributing to the neo-liberal manipulation of nocturnal urban space to privilege spectacle, consumption and constrained forms of leisure and play. There are suspicions that their large showpiece installations and projections produce passive onlookers who are lulled into states of ‘false consciousness’. However, light installations take on a bewildering variety of forms, and generalizations disguise their multiplicity; large festivals thus contain an array of technologies, artistic approaches, scales and sites that thwart easy categorization. Accordingly, an alternative understanding regards the plethora of light festivals as signaling new creative applications of electric light in opposition to homogenizing nocturnal ‘blandscapes’. Such events can challenge habitual perceptions and understandings of places while also revealing overlooked elements. They have the potential to engender what Jane Bennett calls the ‘re-enchantment’ of modern life through encounters that render one ‘transfixed, spellbound’ through being charmed and delighted but also ‘torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition’ (2001: 5). In the UK, two installations at Durham’s 2013 Lumiere festival highlight the capacity of illumination to transform the usual apprehension of place. Firstly, a traditionallydesigned red telephone box was converted into a glowing Aquarium (Figure 15.3). This subversion of the usual function of this object and the unanticipated vision of a vivid blue scene of live fishes and plants disrupted expectations. Secondly, in Volume Unit, the locally reviled large concrete brutalist structure of Milburngate House was transformed into a giant visual jukebox, its rectilinear form mapped by different colored lights and projections that responded to music tracks chosen by the public. Urban spaces can also be reanimated by more modest illumination, as exemplified by Slaithwaite’s Moonraking Festival, a lantern parade during which the town becomes transformed by a moving 227 Figure 15.3 Aquarium, Durham Lumiere, 2013 procession of light that makes the familiar look and feel peculiar. Normally silent streets are turned into a riot of color, noise and illumination, generating a convivial, carnivalesque atmosphere through which a sense of place is powerfully reconsolidated (Edensor, 2017). An increasingly widespread approach to creating a sense of occasion is through the adoption of urban screens and projections. Digital video-mapping projects images, shapes and colors upon particular buildings, fixtures and spaces. Such techniques can foreground awareness of texture and form, highlight key and often ignored architectural features, transform a building’s color, make a structure appear transparent or fluid, and highlight key historical events. In challenging normative cognitive and sensual apprehension, the creation of such fantastic effects blurs the real and virtual. Moreover, where crowds gather to watch spectacles there may be a powerful sense of shared participation, 228 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES heightening ‘sensation, emotion and memory by compressing many people and activities into a confined time and space’ (Stevens, 2007: 2). An example of one such event is an ambitious work created by Czech group Macula to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Liverpool’s iconic Liver Building in 2011. To commence, the early castle at the port was projected onto the facade along with silhouetted carts and human figures, and these were then shrouded by a huge, spectral grim reaper who breathed the pestilence of the Black Death over the settlement. Subsequently, the prow of a sailing ship thrusting through the lower center of the building heralded Liverpool’s role as an imperial port but the visceral appearance of slaves in chains acknowledged the deadly trade that made this possible. The horizontal and vertical architectural lines served in re-imaging the building as a machinic assemblage to symbolize the industrial revolution, after which the loading of cargo featured in representing the city’s docks, with ocean liners contrasting with the earlier sailing ships. Following this came sounds and images of heavy German aerial bombing during the Second World War, with explosions, planes and searchlights subsequently melding into music from the Beatles. Such techniques foreground key historical events (Fisher and Drobnick, 2012) or proffer alternative narratives and images that challenge dominant versions of history and place. Digital mapping can also drastically transform the feel and meaning of the city in producing architecture that seems transitory and mobile, replete with ornamental and informational possibilities and shifting qualities of transparency, translucence and color. According to Abigail Susik, these technologies may potentially culminate in the merging of material and virtual space, producing a pervasive, enveloping image culture. She warns that a consequence may be that ‘all surfaces and images become superficially equivalent, and the ghostly “projection” may entirely conceal the identity and integrity of the object, site, or being’ (Susik, 2012: 112). It is possible that these techniques will be exploited by corporate advertising technology, yet their capacities to interrogate the usual perception of the material world, undergird and expand a sense of place, gather excitable urban crowds and provide unanticipated pleasures promise more positive outcomes. Critiques that focus on the commercialization and alienating propensities of festive spectaculars neglect how people playfully appropriate meaning. As Stevens (2007) contends, they ignore the ludic dimensions of festivals, which are not necessarily experienced passively but provoke pleasure and fun. The seduction of people into mobilizing a convivial disposition towards others and a more expressive engagement with urban space signals how play can prioritize ‘the non-cognitive and more-than-rational’, and heighten affective belonging (Woodyer, 2012: 319). As Woodyer claims, rather than romantically opposing the established order, ‘the politics of playing are primarily bound up in experiencing vitality rather than strategic oppositional endeavour’ (2012: 318); they privilege improvisation and sensation. The ludic capacities of light festivals were exemplified at Sydney’s extensive 2014 Vivid festival (an annual event which showcases miscellaneous approaches to illumination from designers and artists). On each occasion the festival is staged, the city’s renowned Opera House provides a fabulous form on which to project digital mapping, large fireworks and illuminated fountains provide visceral spectacles, and optical art works confuse vision. Yet the pre-eminent characteristic of Vivid lies in the emphasis it places on interactivity, with a plethora of installations inviting visitors to engage with them in playful, expressive and creative ways. In the 2014 event, certain installations reflected images of visitors back to themselves, as dynamic shadows or projected images, creating much hilarity amongst family and friendship groups. Others responded Lights, City, Action… to different sensory engagements, with colors and patterns of light inside a large sphere reacting to touch, lights suspended above a dark alleyway changing color when visitors clapped, and eight beach balls in a harbor were animated with human mouths that laughed in response to the mirth of onlookers. Visitors were invited to redesign the lights of the city’s iconic Harbour Bridge via a nearby computer console. Most strikingly, three adjacent harborside attractions encouraged visitors to discard self-consciousness and perform in public space in ways they would usually avoid, adding to the giddy atmosphere. People moved between these installations, engaging with them through different physical actions that loosened inhibitions. At the Pool (Figure 15.4), leaping visitors enjoyed the tactile engagement with the soft plastic material and the swirling movement of bodies and light, as over a hundred concentric circular pads responded to their movement and their number through the intensity and speed with which they dynamically produced patterns of changing color. Ray, by contrast, was activated by pulling on one of three ropes to trigger the bright illuminations that shot to the top of the sculpture, surging down its base. Finally, Mirror Heart Ball was a pulsing ballroom floor of ever-changing colors, populated with enthusiastically dancing adults and children. Inspired by the popular 229 Australian film, Strictly Ballroom, the display had served as a float on Sydney’s celebrated Mardi Gras parade. Collectively, these interactive illuminated attractions drew in participants who were willing to move, shout, and perform in ways that contravened the usual norms of public conduct. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have discussed the radical urban transformations wrought by electric illumination, focusing on the strategic deployment of light to achieve urban order, the tactics that avoid such measures, and the increasing appeal of darkness. Above all, I have explored how illumination provides a means with which to enchant the city, creating a phantasmagoric, often defamiliarizing landscape. Yet these potentialities, I have argued, have been stifled by standardized and poor illumination, creating urban ‘blandscapes’. However, in conclusion, I have foregrounded the emergent possibilities offered by artistic and festive illumination in defamiliarizing space in novel ways, deepening a sense of place, generating interactive urban engagement and fostering rich atmospheres. These events tantalizingly suggest that we may be on the threshold of a new era in which illumination will enchant the city as it did when it first staggered and startled urban inhabitants. The techniques that are being utilized to produce spaces of fantasy, belonging and sensation are surely first steps in the development of lighting technologies that will transform the future city in as yet unimagined ways. REFERENCES Figure 15.4 Pool, Sydney Vivid Festival, 2014 Attlee, J. (2011) Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight. London: Hamish Hamilton. Auboiron, P. 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(2015) ‘Disrupted infrastructures: An urban political ecology of interrupted electricity in Accra’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(5): 984–1003. Stevens, Q. (2007) The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces. London: Routledge. Stevens, Q. and Shin, H.R. (2014) ‘Urban festivals and local social space’, Planning Practice and Research, 29(1): 1–20. Susik, A. (2012) ‘The screen politics of architectural light projection’, Public, 23(45): 106–19. Williams, R. (2008) ‘Nightspaces: darkness, deterritorialisation and social control’, Space and Culture, 11(4): 514–32. Woodyer, T. (2012) ‘Ludic geographies: Not merely child’s play’, Geography Compass, 6(6): 313–26. Yeo, S-J. and Heng, C. (2014) ‘An (extra)ordinary night out: Urban informality, social sustainability and the night-time economy’, Urban Studies, 51(4): 712–26. 16 On Urban (In)Visibilities Ricardo Campos INTRODUCTION Taking an essentially theoretical and reflexive approach, the present chapter will consider the city as a communicational eco-system. Notwithstanding the essayistic nature of the text, I must nevertheless acknowledge the strong connection binding it to a number of empirical investigations carried out by myself over the years which, given their focus on the city, address the means used by certain social circles or communities to construct special forms of communication and representation. It is not just the theme of the city that said investigations have in common, but also the juvenile nature of the groups and communities under analysis. Having studied squatter youth groups (Grácio et al., 2000), the hip-hop movement (Simões et al., 2005), graffiti writers (Campos, 2009a, 2009b, 2010) and more recently black protest rap (Campos and Simões, 2011, 2014), I have gained a deep understanding of how certain youth cultures operate in the city using their resources for communicational ends. The foundations of sociological and anthropological thought are brought to bear on a reflection that can be situated in the somewhat diffuse field of communication. Knowing that communication is a basic feature of community life, and thus a central pillar of any thorough research on its cultural and social contexts, we should not find this combination strange. Not only does communication support some of the critical foundations on which collective identities are built, but as a result it also allows us to distinguish greatly diverse ways of life that make up our world. Something which all peoples and communities have in common is their ability to use the body, dress codes, and a whole array of other artifacts taken from material culture to codify forms of symbolic distinction on a visual level. Communication is herein understood to mean all forms of symbolic expression that use a system of culturally conventionalized On Urban (In)Visibilities codes to relay information. Considering this definition, we can identify different means of communication that make use of the body, including: the verbal kind (languages, dialects, various kinds of utterances, etc.) and the non-verbal (postures, gestures, dress codes, etc.); the development of different sorts of expressive formats (writing, music, painting, etc.); and the production of a variety of material objects (tools, instruments, buildings, etc.). Thus the spectrum of communication is considered here in the broadest possible perspective, basically encompassing all human actions and productions. In other words, I conceive social action as being inherently symbolic and therefore communicational. Every action is performed within a given cultural setting and conveys a specific meaning. Likewise, all human creations are laden with significance regardless of their practical purpose. How does this notion apply to the urban environment? To begin with, we must reflect on its relationship with territory. All inhabited territory is necessarily shaped by the human hand according to its needs and desires. The landscapes that we see before us, even when they emerge as a work of nature or an accident of time are the corollary of all kinds of human intervention, from the most insignificant mark to the most ambitious enterprise. From deforestation to cultivation, from destruction to construction, mankind has erected its inhabited landscapes in a permanent dialogue with nature and its available material and natural resources. While the bucolic spaces of the countryside are less prone to reflections on the production of space, the same cannot be said of urban sites. Cities are almost entirely a by-product of various ‘creative operations’ meant to establish a collectively inhabitable territory, which in turn result from the confrontation between the features of the terrain and a certain ‘territorial worldview’ (an ideology of inhabited space and its occupation). Today’s cities are spaces of concrete and asphalt, of all types of conduit networks (water, sewage, electrical and optical fiber 233 grids, underground transportation systems, etc.), which include both domesticated natural spaces (parks and gardens) and many different constructions (houses, public services, monuments, sports stadiums, etc.) as well as various equipment (transportation systems, ATM machines, public telephones, traffic lights, etc.). They are not, however, inanimate spaces. They accommodate thousands or millions of people who contribute daily to make the city a living entity, not just through the incorporation of their existence into the habitat, but also through small interventions that help to alter the face of urban spaces. The visual dimension is unquestionably a very significant, if not central, aspect of how cities are configured, both from an objective and material perspective and from the more subjective viewpoint of the representations and imaginings that they elicit. The present discussion aims precisely to address this dimension, focusing specifically on the central role played by vision in many urban devices and communicational circuits. In many senses, cities are built for vision, and the gaze has always been an essential means of orientation in this environment, as in fact some of the classical authors in the social sciences pointed out in the first decades of the past century (Benjamin, 1997 [1935]; Simmel, 1997 [1903]; Wirth, 1997 [1938]). Despite not being a new subject, today it acquires new features and a renewed relevance which deserve the attention of urban scholars. THE VISUAL CONDITION There is nothing new in the claim that the city is a communicational environment, to the point where it may sound like a cliché. Even so, I cannot stress enough the heuristic relevance that this notion continues to hold for our reflection on the contemporary city. Why? Because if, on the one hand, as I have already mentioned, all constructed space is 234 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES inherently communicational, on the other hand I believe that the last decades have been marked by the intensification and expansion of communication devices, which tend to assume an increasingly central role in our daily life. In other words, I propose that in our materially and technologically suffused societies, not only has the communicational field become more complex, but it has also permeated everyday life. This claim might seem paradoxical in light of my previous contention that all social action (and its consequences) is a collective manifestation of a communicational nature. What in fact I am trying to sustain is that the purpose of communication has become so crucial to all our actions that in a certain sense it inverts the order of priorities that served its original purpose. Thus, the functional or practical nature of many daily gestures is overridden by their communicational urgency. This becomes obvious in many of the theories that invoke the growing ‘stylization’ or ‘aesthetization’ of everyday life (Ewen, 1988; Featherstone, 1991, 1998). An example that is somehow paradigmatic of this can be found in the way the body has increasingly become an object of communication. Clothing, ornamentation, tattoos, and even plastic surgery, conjure up a mutant and performative body, an object of communication ‘par excellence’ (Santaella, 2004). Le Breton (2003: 28) states that ‘anatomy is no longer a predestination … the body has become a temporary representation, a gadget, an ideal stage for special effects’. This does not mean that the body is not an object of communication in other cultures and historical periods. Nevertheless, the significant value of matter gains extraordinary importance in how we interpret and describe the world, in a society marked by the power of appearances and surface value (Ewen, 1988), where the mutability and plasticity of objects is commonplace. Our actions are therefore increasingly imbued with performativity. The problem of ‘visibility’, despite being largely ignored by the social sciences, remains a most relevant social fact, as Brighenti reminds us (2007, 2010). Visibility occupies a vital place in how we relate to the world and to others. This fact brings us to the role of vision, an essential instrument of perception, which, according to a number of authors, has been privileged in western societies throughout the centuries (Classen, 1997; Jenks, 1995; Synnott, 1992). The much-vaunted western ocularcentrism is thus derived from this symbolical and practical favoring of vision, revealed in its recognition as the noblest of the senses. To begin with, it is the sensory organ most universally associated with knowledge and reason throughout history, dating back to Classical Antiquity, when authors such as Plato and Aristotle expounded the epistemological function of vision (Synnott, 1992). However, as the social scientists studying the history and anthropology of the senses have shown us (Classen, 1997, 2005; Howes, 2005), there are many different ‘sensory models’. Sensory hierarchies differ according not only to culture, but also to variables of a social nature. But even considering these reservations, the argument that our culture is deeply ocularcentric seems undisputable. This is confirmed not only by a long tradition of western thought championing the power and nobility of vision, but also by the constant development of technology that is not merely based on vision, but actually seeks to enhance its capacity and widen the horizon of human perception. Today we have the ability to obtain detailed imaging of the human body, of microscopic organisms or distant planets, to give just a few examples. The ‘visualization of existence’, to use the fitting expression coined by Mirzoeff (1999), points precisely to this culturally shaped disposition to create an extensive imaging perception of reality. As the author tells us, ‘Modern life takes place on screen’ (Mirzoeff, 1999: 1). In short, the problem of visibility is certainly not a minor issue. When we invoke visibility, we are necessarily highlighting the operations that stand between what our On Urban (In)Visibilities gaze can and cannot gauge. We are therefore referring to the relationships that are established within the parameters of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’. Although at a first glance this may seem easy to discern, upon closer inspection we find that charting the geographies of (in)visibility is an altogether more difficult task; first of all because each of us has a different viewpoint and therefore a different perspective, and thus the scope of visibility is radically complex and variable. What we see may be hidden from the gaze of others, and conversely what others can perceive is often unavailable to us. Furthermore, the gaze is actually mediated by a number of technological devices, a fact which renders many of our attempts to get a glimpse of reality a considerably more complicated matter. The use of visual reproduction and recording devices changes our perception, to the point of extending it beyond the scope of the naturally visible. And as Robins (1996) shows us, vision has always been a crucial strategic device in the establishment of power relations. The visible and the invisible are therefore intimately connected. We have only to consider a simple example such as walls,1 and how they create a boundary of (in)visibility, to find that while being an instrument of segregation, hiding from one side what it reveals to the other, they create two separate visible worlds. To render (in)visible is an act of extreme socio-anthropological relevance. It carries deep symbolical and communicational meaning, telling us a lot about a specific individual or community. How we decorate our homes, for instance, or hide certain parts of our body whilst showing others, is not fortuitous. We should also point out that (in)visibility is always a relational position. To define it we must always identify the relative positions of the observer and the observed. Invisibility as a condition of power may derive from a merely circumstantial situation, it may be the product of chance, but it can also result from deliberate social actions of profound symbolical significance. In the latter case, it may either reflect an imposed 235 condition, determined by social structures or conventions (specific socio-political or cultural-symbolical circumstances), or provide the framework for a given strategic or tactical option devised to elude the gaze of others. Let us consider the first situation. We know that under different historical and political circumstances, certain ethnic groups have not only been persecuted, but virtually ‘rendered invisible’, whether through their physical annihilation and forced displacement, or their concentration in distant areas, out of society’s view. Ethnic ghettoes are a clear example of this kind of phenomenon. The ‘cleaning’ operations which seek to rid city centers of undesirable citizens (homeless people, drug addicts, etc.) are another example. On the other hand, certain practices, conditions or rituals equally involve situations of social invisibility requiring the removal or hiding from public view of certain individuals. The second case leads us to consider invisibility as the result of a voluntary and strategic decision. I am referring to cases in which, for a variety of reasons, individuals or groups create private spaces of retreat and seclusion. The reasoning behind it is diverse and can range from the need for privacy within the domestic sphere to the desire to avoid unwanted onlookers. Here, I am interested in considering invisibility as a strategy used by certain groups as a way to escape the surveillance of authority or dominant society. Certain urban subcultures or social groups that are considered deviant, for instance, resort to strategies of relative invisibility as a way to pursue practices which are condemned by dominant morality or the legal system. This occurred, for example, in the cases of homosexual groups during historical periods of strong condemnation and even persecution (Humphreys, 1997), marihuana smokers (Becker, 1963), or graffiti writers (Campos, 2009a, 2009b, 2010), amongst numberless other examples. So far we have alluded to the political character of the gaze. From this perspective, the ‘observer’ has been usually represented 236 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES as the detainer of power (Foucault, 1975; Robins, 1996). Power is defined not only as the ability to impose a given vision (both metaphorically and literally) on someone or something that is deprived of that prerogative (either becoming merely an object of observation, or being unable to resist and avoid the gaze directed at him/her), but also as the control over the techno-symbolical apparatus that serves to maintain an asymmetrical regime of visibility (the Panopticon being the most paradigmatic example of this situation). But there is yet one other dimension that I find relevant to the notion of visibility as we have been discussing it. Power has always depended upon strategies of visibility for its sustenance and dominion. Power cannot simply be occupied and stated; it needs to be externalized in unequivocal and ostentatious terms. That is why we find a kind of ‘staging’, inherent to the exercise of power (Balandier, 1999), that reminds us constantly of its existence and of our place within its framework. This capacity of assertion in the public sphere, of making the presence of power within the visual narratives and landscapes inescapable, is not within the reach of every individual and social group. In a recent essay about Lisbon’s impoverished suburban neighborhoods, Zoettl (2013) clearly shows that the gazing competition between power (the state) and the socially excluded is a complex phenomenon, strongly marked by political issues. The young inhabitants of these boroughs feel permanently belittled by the vigilant gaze of the state (through the action of police forces) and mainstream mass media. They feel compelled to counter this oppressive surveillance by returning their own kind of gaze, one which possesses a frequently ignored political force – thus the urgency with which many of these excluded youths express themselves, creating centers of resistance that become manifest through various forms of cultural expression (rap, graffiti, etc.) intent on contesting the dominating gaze (Campos, 2013; Campos and Simões, 2011, 2014; Campos and Vaz, 2014). VISUAL CULTURE IN THE CITY: THE DOUBLE FACE OF URBAN (IN)VISIBILITIES How does the city provide a source of reflection on these issues? More specifically, how can we consider these problems in relation to the idea of the public space, which I consider to be the most relevant element in the social exchange operated by the gaze within urban settings.2 By definition, urban public space is everyone’s, a democratic territory for the circulation (or hanging around) of its inhabitants. In such a terrain, exercising the gaze (to ‘see’ and ‘be seen’) becomes a particularly interesting object for an anthropological discussion on visual communication and visibility. In recent works, I suggested a dualist, and essentially political approach to how social actors make use of the territory (Campos, 2014). This duality was construed upon the notion of order and power, considering strategies of ‘revelation’, ‘occultation’ and ‘surveillance’, which are found in metropolitan spaces. Thus, even running the risk of presenting an oversimplified and reductionist explanation of this theme, we might say that the field of urban visibility, politically considered, involves two poles, which I will define as the spheres of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’. In this regard it is important to summon Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’, which contributes to supporting theoretically the perspective which I seek to expound.3 For Gramsci, the concept of hegemony points to the maintenance of a certain social order by means of developing ideological mechanisms leading dominated social groups to accept social asymmetries and their own subjugated condition. According to this Marxist author, the dominant class has to ensure its authority over its subordinates, not through coercion but by obtaining the latter’s consent. This so-called consent is linked to the acceptance of hegemonic culture, dominant values and, consequently, of the raison d’être of the standing social structures. What On Urban (In)Visibilities we should bear in mind in the case in point is that hegemonic culture has different means of expression, namely through the ordering of physical space and the fabrication of landscape. In truth, power is, and has always been, ‘staged’, as Balandier (1999) points out. This kind of staging implies putting in place a whole arsenal of devices used to corroborate existing structures and procedures whose effectiveness in turn relies on their acceptance as natural and unquestionable. The process of constructing a landscape involves an underlying validation of hegemonic values that reflect what we may define as the dominant ideological framework. This does not imply that the city is entirely taken over by dominant powers that shape it according to their own models. We know that the city is a terrain of conflict and negotiation, and that these take place mostly within the visible sphere. The city is also comprised of an assembly of social and geographic segments where a wide array of social actors and practices operate. While it is true that in the majority of Western societies public powers exert their dominion over the largest part of their urban territories, it is also widely known that in some areas other micro-relations of power operate and frequently threaten the hegemony of the state itself. Regimes of visibility are therefore a target for permanent contestation/conflict. Let us take the example of certain neighborhoods regarded as ‘problematic’ and a focus of criminal activities,4 where the presence of the state becomes residual and the apparatus of power is generally absent. In these micro-worlds, regimes of visibility are dominated by gangs or cartels, which try to gain control over those territories. Their power is in many cases ‘staged’, visually marked so as to leave no doubt, as in the case of the graffiti made by certain northAmerican gangs to delimit their territory (Ley and Cybriwsky, 1974). In other words, despite mentioning two domains that belong in the field of visibility, I am perfectly aware of the volatile and conflictual nature of the social actors’ positions 237 and relations established within this field. Let us now resume the previously made distinction. The first polarity involves the actions of the most powerful social actors in favor of the institutionalization of certain practices that seek the maintenance of the status quo, the reproduction of social structures and the consecration of their underlying ideologies. The second polarity signals the opposite, comprising actions that either become forms of resistance or subversion of the dominant regimes of visibility, or use them to confront hegemonic ideological contents. Regarding the first polarity, I propose a classification that considers three aspects. In the first place, we can detect those that would constitute the ‘languages of official ideology’ (economical, political, religious, moral, etc.), secondly come the ‘languages of regulation, surveillance and discipline’, and lastly the ‘languages of desire, seduction and spectacle’. The first are directly linked to how urban landscape and the objects within it are shaped by the most powerful agents, thus strengthening their authority and materializing the ideological foundations of that order. The urban landscape is filled by endless material examples that remind us not only of the existence of power throughout history, but also of the extent of its influence on society. The political, religious and economic institutions reveal themselves through a series of visible devices, their grandiosity being literally reflected in the ways in which they shape and occupy the landscape. As Balandier (1999: 25) observes, ‘the manifestations of power do not get along well with simplicity. They are generally characterized by grandiosity or ostentation, propriety or pomp, ceremonial or protocol’. The state’s symbolically most relevant buildings, as well as religious temples or major economic enterprises, exhibit their opulence through their property and the security apparatus surrounding them. Furthermore, their power in society is also made patent through many other visible manifestations, which should be interpreted in terms of their geography 238 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES (the nobility of places), their material properties (the wealth of constructions) and their magnitude (the quantity and plurality of the institutions’ physical instances). Monuments and historical patrimony also reveal the institutionalization of a historical narrative construed by dominant groups, reproducing the national values that are currently considered more consensual. In this group we count the memorials erected to the nation’s heroes, to historical events or to common values, all of which seek to strengthen the collective spirit (Figures 16.1–16.4). Directly linked to this dimension, we find those systems operating within the sphere of the visible to guarantee the maintenance of order and of the status quo, and which may be understood as forms of surveillance, regulation and discipline (Figures 16.5–16.7). As Foucault (1975) so aptly demonstrated, the gaze has historically been used as a tool of power. Currently, increasingly sophisticated surveillance devices ensure power’s virtual omnipresence, its pervasive gaze extending over the whole territory. But I am not just Figure 16.1 Portuguese Parliament House referring to the surveilling gaze, but also to the features in the urban landscape that act as devices for the visual communication of order and regulation, ensuring citizens’ compliance to a set of rules. In this category we include traffic signs, video-surveillance cameras, police and military presence, private security officers, etc. While some of these devices, such as public signaling, serve their purpose merely by becoming visible, others have a double function of seeing and being seen. Lastly, I would like to recall the importance of what I have labeled the ‘languages of desire, seduction and spectacle’, which are deeply connected to a markedly consumeristic culture based on the power of images. I have no doubt that images and consumer goods are relevant actors of our present urban landscape, and that the central position they occupy in our visible horizon reflects their preponderance in our everyday life and imagination. Some might find it strange that I place this dimension under the sign of the ‘sacred’. However, in contemporary capitalist societies, which are largely On Urban (In)Visibilities Figure 16.2 Monument to the victims of the Great War (Lisbon) Figure 16.3 Headquarters of the Portuguese National Bank, Caixa Geral de Depósitos (Lisbon) 239 240 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Figure 16.4 Centro Cultural de Belém/Belém Cultural Center (Lisbon) Figure 16.5 Traffic signs Figure 16.6 Traffic lights (Lisbon) 241 On Urban (In)Visibilities Figure 16.7 Video-surveillance cameras (Lisbon) secular and where religion has lost the regulatory and symbolical weight it held in the past, consumption assumes an extremely prominent position from a symbolical point of view. Nowadays consumption has become an important element not only in the creation of emotional, but also of identity and cultural bonds, as various authors have claimed (Baudrillard, 1995; Ewen, 1988; Featherstone, 1991; Jameson, 2001). To this we have to add the power that the private sector and the large multinational corporations hold over how urban space is shaped. This becomes obvious due to their capacity not just to purchase property, but also to produce landscape. In view of this, to a great extent the city mirrors the consumerism of its society, becoming a repository of brands, products and imagination. Shop-window displays, billboards, public transports and buildings covered by advertisements, testify to this condition (Figures 16.8 and 16.9). Figure 16.8 Shop window (Lisbon) 242 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Figure 16.9 Outdoor advertisement (Lisbon) In the opposite direction, we find different instances of a more narrow and contained nature, revealing more or less obvious or ingenious ways to counter the hegemony of the powerful and their regimes of visibility. These are usually popular forms of creativity, spontaneity or resistance, which undermine the ordered and regulated system, the predictable and uneventful nature of metropolitan life and of its landscapes. These forms of expression may have a more or less pronounced political character. I do not intend to suggest that they all have an obvious or conscious political facet, since they may be more concerned with entertainment or aesthetic value. But even these, insofar as they belong in the field of confrontation, revocation or suspension of the established order, summon a political dimension that cannot be ignored. Throughout history, different forms of popular culture have drawn on this disruptive drive, on the cathartic energy released by gestures of disorder, inversion and defiance of hegemonic powers (secular or religious) (Balandier, 1999). I have already invoked Gramsci’s definition of hegemony, and I would now like to summon de Certeau and his ‘tactics’: Many everyday practices … are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many ‘ways of operating’: victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’ (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning’, maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike. (de Certeau, 1984: xix) On this side of the polarity, I propose a classification that considers two dimensions. The first of these refers to the ‘counter-hegemonic languages’ that, through various means, challenge the dominant visual or cultural regime. The second contemplates those ‘minority or peripheral languages’, which, despite not directly confronting power, give rise to eccentric, creative, hybrid and non-consensual communicational reservoirs. These two categories are often overlapping. In any case, they generally presuppose actions that originate in social groups which maintain a relation of antagonism or resistance to the establishment or dominant social norms. On Urban (In)Visibilities Let us begin with the first dimension. I consider that it involves an explicit action in the political sphere, insofar as it implies the existence of individual and collective manifestations that seek to shake conventions and hegemonies. Such actions may be directed at the dominant ideological system, but they can equally defy how the city is used and planned, the existing urban visual regime, etc. In other words, they involve actions in the domain of visibility whose contents, languages or practices upset the status quo. Thus, on the one hand we have actions with a semiotic character. I proposed the term ‘aesthetics of transgression’ (Campos, 2013) to address those aesthetic cultural expressions and creations that in one way or another use various means of communication to create disruptive episodes that confront or suspend official order and social conventions. We might call them forms of ‘semiotic guerrilla’, to use Eco’s famous definition as applied by Hebdige (1976) to subcultural styles,5 which are generally vernacular in nature, used by the common people to question the power of dominant social Figure 16.11 Illegal writings (Lisbon) 243 institutions. A common element of graffiti works, unveiling their transgressive nature, is the satirical or offensive content, the obvious desire to challenge prevailing beliefs, to mock the order and the symbols of power (Figures 16.10–16.12). Giving visibility to these forms of expression is therefore not just an aesthetic manifestation, but also a political one. A good example of this can be found in illegal graffiti, or pixo, in the case of Brazil. Figure 16.10 Sticker placed on a banking advertisement (Lisbon) 244 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Figure 16.12 Illegal mural graffiti (Hall of Fame), (Lisbon) The dissemination of these illegal enunciations throughout the urban landscape forces official powers to react, not just through preventive measures such as the development of surveillance devices, but also through erasure techniques meant to make these forms of ‘symbolic pollution’ invisible.6 This need for cleaning becomes all the more important the nobler the urban spaces threatened by these expressions, since these represent and preserve the fundamental collective values (historical, patrimonial, symbolical, economical, etc.) and are thus considered inviolable. A pixo or illegal graffiti executed in a noble area or object is a provocation that must be swiftly suppressed (made invisible).7 This means that what bothers the authorities (and forces them to react) is that graffiti offends state and capital hegemony in urban landscape management. Therefore, the attack on graffiti is a form of defending the aesthetics of authority (Ferrell, 1996) and the visual vocabulary of moral order (Austin, 2010). But we cannot ignore actions whose communicative impact is not limited to their resulting semiotic content. In some cases, the field of visibility is seized to exercise certain practices with a deep social significance. In this category we might include those actions which challenge the instituted powers’ ordered and monitored city. Subverting the functional nature of certain urban features, for instance, is a form of resistance to the regulated and planned city. Thus, in Lisbon certain features of the historical and monumental district are regularly used by dozens of skaters who find there perfect conditions for their activity, reconfiguring the function of such places, ‘desacralizing’ them. In other, more episodic instances, we find operations of near ‘guerrilla’ or ‘insurgency’ type that seize the city and its resources through highly visual manifestations. In this respect, the urban public space has been the main stage for demonstrations that occur in the field of the visible, subverting public order and defying power. These demonstrations therefore have a performative character which must be underlined, since they constitute staging strategies that make use of visibility. The impact these events at the same time have on the media leads me to believe that their social On Urban (In)Visibilities actors are perfectly aware of the relevance and communicational amplitude of these actions. Thus a certain degree of ‘spectacularization’ is used in urban protest as a communication tactic. Several recent examples could be invoked, such as the ‘acampadas’ in Spain, or the Occupy movement, which have achieved global proportions. Let us now focus on the second dimension, concerning the ‘peripheral and marginal languages’. My understanding is that these do not necessarily have to be linked to explicitly political actions, which does not mean that they do not have a political role. In this case, I am referring to sociocultural bastions occupying a minority, subordinate and symbolically despised position within a given society. Not incidentally, many of the cultural forms of expression originating from said contexts are ignored or disparaged, which is tantamount to a certain symbolic effacement of those communities. In other cases, the communities or groups themselves are subjected to processes of invisibility within the urban landscape, which result, for instance, from their placement in less noble parts of the city, or the erasure of signs of their presence or historical memory. In fact, many of these groups’ visual expressions (dress codes, gestures, artifacts, etc.) collide with dominant models, generating situations of cultural clash and rejection. We are therefore talking about singular, peripheral and marginal visual cultures. It is thus not a coincidence that certain ethnic ghettoes become visually distinctive territories, what Jerome Krase (2004) calls ‘vernacular ethnic landscapes’. These become ethnically and socially homogenous urban ghettoes, where the regulatory presence of official institutions is virtually absent, and they are thus unbound by the dominant taste imposed by official regulations, as occurs for example in several boroughs within the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Campos and Vaz, 2014). These neighborhoods provide particularly interesting cases for reflecting upon questions of visibility, insofar as their relative 245 invisibility to the majority of citizens8 and the lack of official regulation allow them to become ‘micro-landscapes’ that have their own identity, as kinds of ‘collective private spaces’ that follow their own internal principles of visibility. In this case, the memories, celebrations and alternative role models are celebrated and made present in the cityscape (Figures 16.13 and 16.14). The historical narrative is therefore not controlled by the official instances, a fact which is actually made manifest in different evocations that demonstrate resistance to the powers of the state and dominant normativity. Table 16.1 seeks to summarize my proposed classification of urban visual culture, bearing in mind the two polarities presented above. We should mention that the relation between these two polarities (‘sacred’ and ‘profane’), is not stationary, much less rigid. Therefore, not only do we find areas of darkness and overlap, but the very meaning of Figure 16.13 Mural Painting celebrating Amilcar Cabral9 (Cova da Moura)10 246 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES and illegal languages to gradually becoming legitimate aesthetic and artistic forms of expression. This kind of social legitimation is enabled by the concrete action of a number of social actors and institutions (the media, local authorities, the art world, etc.). Thus, certain marginal and transgressive languages can gradually be reconverted semiotically and ideologically to become economically, aesthetically and symbolically appealing, assuming new roles within the urban landscape. CONCLUSION Figure 16.14 Memorial to resident youth murder victims (Cova da Moura) urban artifacts and certain languages is in constant transformation. Roland Barthes, in a seminal work from the 1960s (Barthes, 1988 [1967]), had already highlighted the difficulty of developing a semiology of the urban, given that the language of the city is constantly shifting. Thus, certain urban languages and artifacts oscillate in their proximity to one or another pole. It is actually common to find certain visual manifestations that are originally transgressive or marginal to be gradually reconfigured and appropriated by social actors who are closer to the mainstream. Consider, for instance, the slow process of legitimation of graffiti and street art, which went from being transgressive The examples we have been considering are far from exhausting the kind of reflection presented here. The problem of visual communication in metropolitan settings is complex and leads to a profusion of empirical objects that can be subject to multiple perspectives. What becomes incontrovertible is the dimension of visibility, which in itself becomes an essential feature for anyone interested in studying community life. Not just because vision occupies the center of most actions involved in the exploration of reality, but mainly because the latter is culturally shaped, given that the way in which the horizon of the visible (and the invisible) is construed is revealing of profoundly significant individual and social choices. Why, and under what circumstances do certain elements, symbols, artifacts, groups or individuals have to be visible while others remain hidden? These are the greater questions we have to pose. Such an inquiry becomes all the more urgent as we realize that besides conferring a central role on vision, our society Table 16.1 Urban visual culture polarities ‘Sacred’ ‘Profane’ ‘Languages of official ideology’ ‘Languages of regulation, surveillance and discipline’ ‘Languages of desire, seduction and spectacle’ ‘Counter-hegemonic languages’ ‘Minority and peripheral languages’ On Urban (In)Visibilities has multiplied the technical devices used to aid in the visual gauging of the world. Technology has thus become a major actor in the field of visibility. The ability to see is not evenly distributed, and the possession of technological devices becomes a determining factor in deciding how relations are established within the visible field. When we talk of the city, we are alluding to an extensive territory, inhabited by a large quantity of people with many different origins and customs. The physical space of the city is therefore a vast and multifaceted landscape, reflecting the diversity of its people and their actions on and in the city. The territory communicates with us. The territory is a repository of symbols that is open to its inhabitants’ interpretation. While there are powerful actors who act on the space and shape it, it is also true that the less powerful are not deprived of doing the same. It is in the field of visibility where cultural identities, symbolical conflicts and aesthetic statements are played out. The state exhibits its authority through its police forces, its official buildings and the monuments or official acts of the state. The market and its corporations flaunt their goods through advertising that pervades the city; the financial sector demonstrates its power through the erection of imposing buildings. But amidst this ordered landscape, there are fissures, unregulated spaces giving rise to a variety of disruptive expressions. All relations of power are marked by exercises of revelation, occultation and surveillance, where the different actors position themselves accordingly. The reflections and images presented here have striven precisely to stimulate debate around this issue. I do not pretend to present a definitive framework of analysis for this phenomenon. On the contrary, I acknowledge the fragilities resulting from the attempt to create a taxonomy or structure of interpretation for urban visual culture, when it encompasses such a wide range of human operations and creations. However, I hope to have contributed to encouraging the anthropological and sociological debate on issues 247 that have been largely neglected by these fields. Notes 1 On this topic, see the stimulating volume edited by Brighenti (2009), which gathers a variety of perspectives on the significance of walls. 2 Private space is always reserved to the gaze of a few; it is the domain of privacy. Therefore, there is a strong correlation between the private and the invisible, and inversely, between the public and the visible. However, the private sphere is not entirely opaque. There are two dimensions, one which belongs to the sphere of invisibility and is protected from the outside (by walls, protection, etc.), and another which belongs to the domain of the visible and is available to the gaze of others (the outdoors of houses and buildings, their gardens, etc.). Goffman’s (1999) theorization is relevant here, as it distinguishes between the ‘backstage’ and the ‘frontstage’ in how we present ourselves to others. In the case in point, if we apply this notion to the physical setting of residential spaces, the internal and private space can be seen as the ‘backstage’, invisible to others (except as guests), while those parts which are exposed and visible from the outside are the ‘frontstage’, reflecting how we represent our habitat. 3 The mention of Gramsci stems from the works of several authors connected to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, where, during the 1970s and 1980s, they developed an important theoretical corpus on the so-called urban youth subcultures. Part of the inspiration for their analysis of youth subcultures of that period derived from Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, which explained how the mechanisms of acceptance of dominant ideologies functioned. See for instance the works of Hebdige (1996) and Hall and Jefferson (1976). 4 Drug trafficking being the most common example. 5 In his work Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige underlines the subversive power of subcultural styles as devices of semiotic guerrilla action. According to this author, subcultural styles afford a kind of inversion in the symbolical order of things. The surprise, shock and outrage, as well as panic, caused in the common citizen by these forms of communication derive precisely from this power to disrupt an ontological order. 6 Douglas’ idea of symbolic pollution (1991) has been applied by several scholars (Campos, 2009b) 248 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES to explain the social aversion caused by this phenomenon. 7 Inversely, ‘invisible terrains’ are those that are not exposed in the more central public sphere and are thus kept more secluded, and which, having a peripheral or marginal character, are less exposed to the surveillance of power and its normative action. Let us think of the widely known writings found on public bathrooms, or on the walls of suburban areas or thoroughfares (for example, overpasses), etc. In fact, these are usually accompanied by a host of other ‘symbolically polluting’ elements which go against the model of the aseptic and normative city. The fact that they remain relatively invisible to the eyes of power also favors the emergence of singular visual landscapes. 8 In contrast and ironically, these neighborhoods are made visible in the media, who often seek to construe a set of images about the so-called ‘critical neighborhoods’. The fact that the state’s regulatory power is also negligible in these settings does not invalidate the frequent incursions of police forces who seek, through these ‘performances of strength’, to signal the presence of the state and the respect for normalcy and order. On this topic see the article by Zoettl (2013), which addresses these questions, focusing on some of Lisbon Metropolitan Area’s ethnic neighborhoods. 9 Amílcar Cabral was one of the founders of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo-Verde PAIGC). 10 Cova da Moura is a self-built, clandestine neighbourhood that sprouted in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area during the 1970s and 1980s. In many ways, this neighbourhood has poor living conditions and precarious urban infrastructures. It is mostly inhabited by individuals and families of African descent or immigrants from African countries, particularly Cabo Verde. REFERENCES Austin, J. (2010) ‘More to see than a canvas in a white cube: For an art in the streets’, City 14(1): 33–47. Balandier, G. (1999) O poder em cena. Coimbra: Minerva. Barthes, R. (1988 [1967]) ‘Semiology and urbanism’, in The Semiotic Challenge. Oxford: Blackwell. Baudrillard, J. 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Olympics, Expos, Culture Capitals, World Forums, and all kinds of similar initiatives put cities and territories under the spotlight, promising to attract money and all sorts of long-term benefits for local communities (Andranovich et al., 2001) – and this sounds particularly seductive in times of uncertainty and weak economic growth in many developed economies, but also for emerging, booming countries that are striving to find their place on the global visibility map (Foley et al., 2012). Whatever the main focus of such events – be it sports, technology, economy, international politics and peace, not to speak of culture itself, they always have some (possibly kitsch, for example, Sudic, 1992) cultural coté, which contributes to the definition of the event’s symbolic universe and to its rooting in the local context, also in terms of post-event legacy (Davis and Thornley, 2010). For this reason, it is often contended that such events are ideal platforms for launching or consolidating some kinds of creative districts, turning the oneshot impulse of the event into a permanent hub of activity with valuable impacts in terms of economic value added, local identity, social dialogue, and so on. Is this really the case? There are a few examples that seem to confirm this, the most well-known being perhaps Glasgow’s European Capital of Culture (ECOC) in 1990 and Barcelona’s Olympics in 1992. It is widely held that both cities have demonstrated, in their own right, how a large event may have a deep transformational impact on many different dimensions that may be rationalized in terms of a culture-led development model, which has been taken as a benchmark by countless other cities in their strategic planning development (for example, Events as Creative District Generators? Beyond the Conventional Wisdom González, 2011). Glasgow, together with Lille (2004) and Liverpool (2008), is also commonly ascribed to the ‘trinity’ of cases of indisputably successful editions of the ECOC (Ooi et al., 2014). In fact, however, ex post evaluations of these success stories often point out how the main role of flagship events is that of glossing over an otherwise critical reality without a real chance of addressing the deep structural issues (Boland, 2010; Mooney, 2004), and that, as a general rule, the role of arts and culture in the perceived success and legacy of the big events is less relevant than one might expect – or hope for (Garcia, 2004). But there is also evidence that in some cases, such as for example the Lille 2004 European Capital of Culture, a medium/ long-term structural change has effectively materialized (Paris and Baert, 2011; Sacco and Tavano Blessi, 2007). Should we then give more emphasis to the (relatively few) success stories or to the failures in deciding whether events matter or not for cultural development? And, should we not be concerned with the fact that, instead of a multiplication of recent success stories, we still keep on referencing to a relatively limited number of cases, most of which are not very recent? These are the questions that we address in this chapter, on the basis of the analytical framework for culture-led development that has been developed in Sacco et al. (2013a, 2013b, 2014) and Sacco and Crociata (2013). In particular, we will review how, on the basis of the existing literature, large events fare as platforms for culture-led development with respect to the 12 developmental dimensions that have been identified as characterizing sustainable models of this kind in the already mentioned approach of Sacco et al., and which are reported in Table 17.1. Notice how these dimensions can be grouped in five different blocks, namely: Quality, Development, Attraction, Sociality, and Networking, thereby generalizing some of the most credited current approaches that focus on just one or a few such blocks (Sacco et al., 2014). 251 Table 17.1 The 12 culture-led developmental dimensions Quality Development Attraction Sociality Networking Quality of Cultural Supply (QCS) Quality of Production of Knowledge (QPK) Quality of Local Governance (QLG) Development of Local Talent (DLT) Development of Local Entrepreneurship (DLE) Attraction of External Talent (AET) Attraction of External Entrepreneurship (AEE) Capability Building of the local Community (CBC) Involvement of the Local Community (LCI) Management of Social Criticalities (MSC) Internal Networking (INW) External Networking (ENW) As we will see, the evidence that comes from a reasoned literature review is mixed and mainly critical. One may question, then, whether events can still be regarded as the best (cost-effective, socially efficient) way to spark culture-led development in contemporary societies and economies. We will briefly comment on this in the concluding remarks. QUALITY: EVENTS AS DRIVERS OF ARTISTIC EXCELLENCE, KNOWLEDGE, AND GOOD GOVERNANCE? Despite the fact that artistic excellence and production of knowledge are obviously key aspects in the establishment of a sustainable culture-led local development process, such factors remain relatively marginal in the overall context of events and of their permanent legacies. Rather than on truly transformative cultural experimentation or on innovative modes of production of knowledge, the emphasis is mostly placed upon cultural initiatives and projects that can command global visibility and interest, as well as local consensus, not to speak of the need for compromise between cultural themes and the 252 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES event’s non-cultural aspects and dimensions (Inglis, 2008). As a consequence, there is a tendency to rely upon brand names and spectacularization rather than upon controversial but path-breaking experimentations (Gotham, 2005; Shin, 2012). There is of course sparingly rich evidence of challenging and highly original cultural and artistic projects in the programs of mega-events, but they are to be seen more as exceptions than as the rule, once they are evaluated against the whole body of programs of the many events carried out in the last couple of decades. This is a first major source of weakness, in that artistic and scientific standards of excellence mark a difference in terms of the long-term impact of transformative cultural projects due to their effects on innovation, vision, and risk taking (McMaster, 2008). Some more emphasis is placed instead upon the creation of knowledge-generating institutions as an event’s legacy, especially in the European Capital of Culture program: think for example of recent cases such as the expansion of Ars Electronica for Linz (2009), the new National Art Museum in Vilnius (2009), the European Center for Creative Economy in Essen for the Ruhr (2010), the MuCEM in Marseille (2013), or of the new National Library in Riga (2014). The creation of such institutions has a direct consequence in terms of stimulating the local cultural and artistic scene, and can therefore be regarded as a key factor for the creation of a sustainable cultural district. Evidence in this regard, however, is relatively weak, apart from cases such as Ars Electronica in Linz, whose history long precedes the event itself and only takes advantage of it for further reinforcement of an already established global leadership (Sacco et al., 2013b). As a consequence, we can say that the QCS and QPK dimensions in our scheme are rather poorly superseded in the mainstream approach to events, and that the really critical dimension is that of governance, namely, QLG. Here, in particular, we can single out a characteristic tension which is particularly useful in reading how local and national administrations address the design, implementation, and ex post maintenance of large events, namely that of Transformation versus Celebration: although the stated purpose of the event is mainly that of fostering deep changes in the social, economic, and cultural structure of the territory, the most likely outcome, and the one upon which a major focus can be traced, is that of celebrating the status quo and bringing visibility and consensus to the incumbent administration, while avoiding controversial references to past, unresolved conflicts and issues (Telesca, 2014). In fact, in order to bring about a truly transformational process as a consequence of the event, policy makers should in the first place regard this as an occasion to deeply modify their own governance styles, and in particular their learning and decision-making approaches (Healey, 2004). In practice, however, there is rather the tendency to appeal to more or less sophisticated forms of rhetoric to proceed to a symbolic rather than logical legitimation of the event’s aim and scope, to maintain actual political focus on the shortterm (mandate) horizon, and to circumvent real ex post accountability for decisions (Zan et al., 2011). The fact that the evidence of significant impacts of events is much more conclusive in the short rather than the long term, might thus be read as a consequence of the fact that the events were purposefully designed with the shorter planning horizon in mind, contrary to stated intentions (Richards, 2000). The rhetorical approach even applies to expensive, large infrastructural investment decisions such as stadiums and public facilities (Sapotichne, 2012), a key aspect of sports-related mega-events decision making (but similar considerations could apply, for example, for large new cultural facilities; for example, Vivant [2011]), which typically present huge problems of post-event reconversion and management (Roult and Lefebvre, 2010). As a consequence of the prevalence of the rhetorical dimension, failure to get the title in the case of competitive bids typically Events as Creative District Generators? Beyond the Conventional Wisdom causes the erasure of the project from collective memory, irrespective of its technical merit and quality of content (van Dijk and Weitkamp, 2014) – a rather inconsequential choice from the point of view of rational decision making – and poses serious problems in terms of evaluation (Richards, 2014), while at the same time encouraging juries to preserve their own credibility by opting for relatively vital socio-economic environments as winning bidders (Poast, 2007). The key issue from the QLG point of view is anchoring decision making to a fair cost–benefit evaluation of the event and of its likely consequences (Deng and Poon, 2011). The rhetorical dimension, however, favors a bias toward underestimating costs and overestimating benefits (Whitson and Horne, 2006), and towards tweaking the whole implementation process away from ex ante objectives to serve immediate political purposes, also thanks to huge gaps in actual governance (Müller, 2015). As a matter of fact, even in those cases where local decision makers are firmly motivated to ensure that the event has an impact on certain categories of socially valuable targets, making this happen turns out to be difficult and calls for a firm and persistent commitment (Colomb, 2011). A strong shift toward a more solid and transparent accountability is needed, and especially so in terms of outcome indicators as an integral part of the whole planning, implementation, and evaluation cycle (Leonardsen, 2007), which does not reduce mechanically to an all-encompassing quantitative toolbox (Belfiore and Bennett, 2010). On the other hand, the decision making of events could be pulled by other kind of factors, which rather than development and sustainability could emphasize issues of socio-political legitimization and representation, as is for instance clear in the case of the Beijing 2008 Olympics (Close, 2010), but as is also true to a certain extent even for the European Capital of Culture program in the light of the recent social and identity tensions across the EU (Immler and Sakkers, 2014), 253 in particular in the context of post-socialist countries (Lähdesmäki, 2014a). The existing evidence therefore suggests, as a general rule, a relatively weak connection between events and a clear strategic perspective for the establishment of a sustainable cultural district. In the Transformation– Celebration dilemma there are natural political incentives to focus on capitalizing on the status quo rather than embarking on risky endeavors to bring about deep structural change. There may be exceptions to this rule, but they do not consequentially stem from the very nature and purposes of the event, but rather call for an obstinate and resilient counter-action. In the QLG perspective, therefore, events are not to be regarded as facilitators of culture-led development but rather as a major challenge. Likewise for QPK, where the opening of large facilities for knowledge production such as research institutes and museums, often falls short of truly stimulating a lively local cultural environment. As to QCS, it is paradoxically more often irrelevant than not, as cultural programming is not driven by a quest for quality and longterm value but rather for well-known brands, immediate consensus and return in terms of media exposure. DEVELOPMENT AND ATTRACTION: EVENTS AS PLATFORMS FOR TALENT, STARTUPS, AND JOBS? In the stated objectives of mega-events, the creation of new jobs and companies, and more generally making a substantial impact on the local economy, is inevitably a key feature that is always present. When postevent cultural development is at stake, cultivation and attraction of fresh creative talent is therefore just as inevitable as the former goals. But although bold claims in terms of expected impact are the norm, and especially so in countries with significant developmental gaps (Bob and Swart, 2009), ex post 254 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES evidence is often shaky and there is little incentive from the event promoters and organizers to carry out a proper reality check, as already emphasized in the previous section. As could be expected, the primary focus of the impact goals are the sectors that are more closely connected to the event’s main sector and theme, and this always includes tourismrelated businesses such as hotels, restaurants, transportation, and so on – and here the key issue is not whether or not an impact is made, but whether or not it can last beyond the short-term perspective of the event itself. However, whether the impact can also extend to specific cultural and creative businesses is less direct and obvious, even for the shortterm event time frame. On the other hand, in the absence of a significant economic impact, it is unlikely that the event may support a sustainable creative district in the first place, and therefore this aspect becomes quintessential to answering this chapter’s basic question. As in the case of Quality, here also we witness a typical dilemma between two opposing tensions, namely, Immediacy versus Sustainability of economic effects. In spite of the preponderant role of economic dimensions in most plans and designs for mega-events, there is an open debate as to whether this reflects an overarching neoliberalistic logic of mass consumption that jeopardizes any sound ambition of long-term equitable and socially sustainable development, and reduces culture to its market-oriented component (Greene, 2003; Hall, 2006; McGuigan, 2005). But in fact, perplexities also arise, for example in the case of the Olympic Games, by evaluating their impact in terms of purely economic indicators such as real GDP per capita and trade openness: Billings and Holladay (2012), for instance, show that there is no significant long-term difference in these two dimensions between winners and non-winners of an Olympic bid. Most impact evaluations, in fact, remain at this general level, and rather than exploring how the event influences the creation of new companies, the attraction of direct investment, or the emergence of new creative talent, they focus upon the return of public and private investment – therefore, evidence relating to the four factors AET, AEE, DLT, and DLE remains scant and fragmentary. A typical example is given by Kasimati and Dawson (2009), who build a simple macroeconometric model of the Athens 2004 Olympics, finding that most effects relate to the preparatory and the implementation phase, whereas the ex post effects are modest, as suggested by Billings and Holladay (2012). For European Capitals of Culture, Herrero et al. (2006) measure, for example, the impact of Salamanca 2002 at the regional, national, and even international levels, but mainly concentrate on aggregate economic (tourist-related) impact, providing less insight about the effects on the local cultural system. Conversely, Campbell (2011) examines this specific aspect for the case of Liverpool 2008, but finds that there is little relationship between the European Capital of Culture program and legacy, and the actual dynamics of local creative industries. Hudec and Dzupka (2016), on the other hand, find that the Kosice 2013 European Capital of Culture has stimulated local artists, organizers, and entrepreneurs to adopt new approaches to culture-led regeneration. Polèse (2012) points out, however, on the basis of a country-wide Canadian cities sample, that relevant arts-related occupational effects are likely to materialize in large cities only. The lack of significant ex post evidence concerning a key aspect such as the longterm impacts on the local economy suggests that the basic issue in regarding events as generators of local creative economies may be a consequence of the poor and often confused conceptual perspective that provides the rationale for the event itself, and in particular for its cultural dimensions. Two valuable methodological contributions are by Dickson et al. (2011), who develop an evaluation framework that also considers the very much overlooked (but potentially very significant Events as Creative District Generators? Beyond the Conventional Wisdom in terms of legacy) Paralympic Games; and Leopkey and Parent (2012), who track the evolution of the concept of legacy across Olympic bid competitions, underlining the increasing complementarity with city and regional planning and multi-stakeholdership. Kennell and MacLeod (2009) carry out an (ex ante) evaluation exercise in this regard as to the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, clearly pointing out the link between the planning and design phase and the event’s likely impacts. The ex post outcomes and their evaluation are somewhat mixed, however. Scott (2014) argues that the whole 2012 Cultural Olympiad planning, implementation, and evaluation cycle has made a contribution in raising awareness about event legacy evaluation issues, and in fact one of the most interesting aspects of the program has been its derivations across other UK territories outside Greater London. Gilmore (2014) and McGillivray and McPherson (2014) analyze the cases of the North West of England and of Scotland, respectively. Pappalepore (2016) goes on to provide a comparative evaluation of the Turin 2006 and London 2012 Cultural Olympiads in terms of their effect on small local creative business, finding positive effects in terms of mutual learning and ideas and skills exchange, but in the context of a relatively un-structured, non-systematic planning approach, so that the cumulative, long-term effects are again largely uncertain. The results that emerge are encouraging but still very partial, and far from conclusive in terms of useful evidence for decision makers. This outcome clashes significantly with the strategic importance and the level of ambition of a mega-event such as the Olympics and its cultural coté, and proves that even in cases where strategic objectives and evaluation protocols are deeply ingrained in the event’s planning process, much remains to be done even to properly understand in which sense, and to what extent, the event yields a significant long-term legacy. This is somewhat paradoxical if one realizes that, in the legitimization phase, emphasis on the impact 255 is the main argument used to win public support (for example, Hiller, 2000). Another strategic framework approach, which is somewhat easier to tackle in terms of its indirect impact on the local cultural economy, is to mainly think of the event in terms of placing the local creative economy on the map for global opinion makers and investors. This is for instance clearly the case with the Shanghai 2010 Expo, whose purpose was mainly to profile the city rather than make a difference in terms of economic impact, particularly in view of the already striking growth performance of China in that period. Carta (2013) argues that the global perception of the Expo site as a world-class ‘architectural park’ has definitely contributed to the perception of Shanghai as an emerging creative and cultural city with an indirect benefit for the city’s creative businesses; Björner and Berg (2012) show in addition that the Shanghai Expo has been a major platform for private companies to develop their PR and communication business in the crucial Chinese market. Similar valuable insights have been obtained in the case of some successful European Capitals of Culture, such as Rotterdam 2001, which has likewise benefited the city in terms of a renewed image as a bustling creative city (Richards and Wilson, 2004), as a consequence of a coherent strategy of cultural capital creation (Go et al., 2000). Once again, however, what the literature provides us with is a very fragmentary picture that provides little basis for a fullblown impact evaluation, to say nothing of the evaluation of the whole event cycle. To sum up, then, the only aspect that has been studied at an acceptably systematic level is that of tourism impact, which certainly also affects the local creative economy, but only tangentially. In this perspective, the event with the most clear-cut strategic implications for the local creative economy is unsurprisingly the European Capital of Culture, where the cultural dimension is the main driver. Liu (2014) makes a systematic review of the successful link between this type of event and the 256 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES development of cultural tourism, whereas, for example, Wang et al. (2012) argue that in the case of the Shanghai 2010 Expo ‘aesthetic value’ (that is, the cultural dimension) did not significantly affect behavioral intentions of visitors and revisit intentions. As a matter of fact, we can therefore conclude that, at least as far as impacts on the creative economy are concerned (but the argument can be easily extended to the general economy), there is at most anecdotal and sparse evidence that supports the claim that events provide a lasting long-term impulse to the local economy. Not only the evidence in terms of DLT and DLE is fragmentary, but there is practically no study we are aware of to date that even addresses the issue of the successful attraction of talent, companies and direct investments (AET, AEE) as the outcome of a mega-event. In terms of the Immediacy versus Sustainability tension, in particular, a comprehensive evaluation of most of the available studies, as reviewed in this section, suggests that, despite the emphasis toward improved methodologies for legacy measurement and appreciation, there is in the current practice a massive focus upon shortterm, immediate results. These are also mostly related to the impact of tourism flows and to improved city image, and the appreciation of long-term sustainability issues is mainly rhetorical, with little concern for permanent effects upon the local creative economy. A major reconsideration of the arguments for, and of the consensus dynamics around, mega-events seems therefore to be called for in the evaluation of future projects and bids – and in the corresponding public decision-making process. SOCIALITY: OPPORTUNITY FOR COMMUNITY BUILDING AND SOCIAL COHESION? The social dimension is typically an object of attention in the literature on mega-events, for reasons that are easy to grasp. Generally, events entail not only substantial amounts of public investment, but they also affect the life of the local community in different ways: from urban renewal to infrastructure upgrading or building, to solicitation of proposals from the local art and culture scene and civil society, and so on. Therefore, it is widely contended that community involvement is a key critical factor for the eventual success of the event, also in view of the frequency with which local oppositional movements stand against the event for a variety of possible reasons. Here, the main tension is therefore Mobilization versus Participation – or: is the involvement of the community sought from a top-down perspective to which the community is intended to adhere, rather than from a bottom-up perspective where it is the community itself that becomes an active player throughout the design, implementation, and even evaluation process? The three dimensions of our conceptual scheme, CBC, LCI, and MSC, capture these phenomena from different angles in terms of their cultural components, and allow a multi-faceted appreciation of the role of the social component in the event and in its aftermath in terms of facilitating ex post culture-led development. In principle, the momentum heads toward the bottom-up approach, because if the community is called upon as an active player, it is much more likely that it will embrace the project and will eventually endorse it. Practically speaking, however, a truly participative decision-making process can be extremely complex and dangerously slow vis-à-vis the often tight deadlines of the event production process. Thus, in practice, there is a common complaint that, despite lip service paid to deep community involvement, the process remains firmly in the hands of the event’s main promoters and stakeholders. The main concern is the event’s long-term effects, namely how the event modifies the economic and social use of space, and how it impacts the living conditions and opportunities of different classes and constituencies of citizens. Events as Creative District Generators? Beyond the Conventional Wisdom From the social point of view, the positive impact of an event does not require that the event is actually held (or, in the case of competitive bids, that the city actually wins the title). As shown for instance by Lenskyi (1996), failing to win the title but succeeding in actually involving the local community in participative decision making may be an ex post win, and conversely winning the title but missing the target of real community involvement can backfire, as the parallel stories of Toronto and Sydney for the 2000 Olympics demonstrate. Actually, for Toronto the democratic decision-making process started with the 2000 Olympic bid has created a legacy that has benefited subsequent projects and the positioning of Toronto as an inclusive and culturally progressive city, also in terms of a public track record of attempts at reconciliation of different local economic and social interests (Tufts, 2004). However, the impressive story of failed Olympic bids for the city (five in total, from 1960 to 2008) also shows how the emphasis upon the urban renewal process drew design focus away from the specific nature of Olympics as a sport megaevent, thus determining the conditions for a self-defeating process (Oliver, 2014). Ultimately, the way in which the local society impinges upon the long-term outcome of the event is in terms of social sustainability. In this respect, the European Capitals of Culture program has, especially recently, put the social dimension under the spotlight, making of it one of the key criteria for the choice of the winning bid. Guimaraes 2012, for example, has been often cited as a striking example of a participation-fueled European Capital of Culture. However, field research about the social sustainability legacy of the event has led to mixed results, despite a massive presence in the program of cultural participative projects, in that they did not fully manage to ‘stick’ to the social context of the city (Koefoed, 2013). Similar research for Stavanger 2008 finds that the cultural program managed to be fairly inclusive but did not explore its social sustainability dimension 257 in depth (Fitjar et al., 2013). In other cases, however, the participative dimension has been basically hijacked by local interest groups, leading to overt conflict and to oppositional protest by parts of the local community that refused to accept that the event became instrumental to the pursuit of exclusive real estate development projects, such as in Cork 2005 (O’Callaghan and Linehan, 2007) or in Istanbul 2010 (Uysal, 2012) – an opposition that can even take the form of a cultural counter-program, as in the case of Turku 2011 (Lähdesmäki, 2013). One could then turn the argument on its head by pointing out how the encouragement of creative dialogue through dissent may have a more long-lasting and beneficial effect on the local community (and in particular on the cultural scene) than the event itself (O’Callaghan, 2012). Such issues become even more pressing for events that do not fall into the European Capital of Culture’s tight prescription about participative inclusion. In the case of Valencia, for instance, which has tried to position itself as a globally specialized venue for sport mega-events, there has been a major opposition from large sectors of the local community that protested against the commodification of city identity following a neo-liberal paradigm of ‘new urban modernity’ (del Romero Renau and Trudelle, 2011). In fact, effective participation calls for attention to vernacular and often un-glamorous but historically and spatially situated cultural elements. These pull in the opposite direction from the glittering cultural branding of a city (Gilmore, 2013) and of elite-appealing marketing of the event (Hayes and Horne, 2011), and require strong integration between cultural participation related to the event and overall cultural policy (Gilmore, 2012). Divergent design and implementation philosophies produce a fundamental contradiction, which can drive a wedge between the planned branding objectives and the actual event experience for residents and visitors, as in the case of Beijing 2008 (Zhang and Zhao, 2009) – although Zhang et al. (2013) find evidence 258 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES that Beijing residents still experience multiple ex post benefits after the Games, irrespective of their actual support for the event. How this dilemma is tackled can have long-lasting consequences, in that it is the very notion of citizenship that is at stake, and particularly in view of the increasingly important role of temporary forms of citizenship linked to large tourism flows, which reshape the social logic of use of public city space (Misener and Mason, 2006a), and to the development and evolution of community networks (Misener and Mason, 2006b). Pervasive media presence and the structuring of the mega-event program in terms of highly spectacular, ‘exceptional’ happenings risks generating a simulated city life whose ultimate effect is to undermine, rather than stimulate, urban identity of the community (Houdart, 2012). On the other hand, the event can also foster alternative ways to experience the city that can be come to be appreciated as stimulating and appropriate by residents, despite previous opposition and controversy. This was the case with the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games (Hiller and Wanner, 2011), which eventually paved the way for systematic post-event attempts at long-term social sustainability (VanWynsberghe et al., 2012). This suggests the existence of multiple channels through which citizen participation in cultural experiences can affect urban regeneration dynamics and social capital formation, which in different cases may also work in divergent directions (Prior and Tavano Blessi, 2012). From the previous discussion, it emerges that the focus of participation processes, be they more or less intrinsic and successful, basically refers to the LCI dimension, whereas CBC remains somewhat in the background – a serious shortcoming in terms of long-term social sustainability where skills and capability building can make a difference. As to MSC, the discussion is mostly concentrated on the (re)distributional effects of the event rather than on the capacity of cultural projects to facilitate social inclusion and integration. Kavetsos (2012) estimates that the effect of the announcement of London 2012 Olympics on real estate prices has been substantial enough to cause a massive relocation of existing residents, as well as a corresponding wealth redistribution. As McLaren (2012) puts it, London’s East End is transformed thanks to the Games, but not for those who need it most. However, Coates and Matheson (2011) find a weak relationship between mega-events and house rental prices on a panel of US cities, thereby suggesting that such negative social inclusion effects depend on the specific socio-economic context. Another aspect related to MSC where there is some initial stream of research, is the relationship between the event and individual and community levels of quality of life and well-being. Kaplanidou et al. (2013) show that highly anticipated mega-events such as the Cape Town World Soccer Cup 2010 can bring about substantial changes in the variables that mediate perceptions of quality of life before and after them, whereas Steiner et al. (2015) find that, surprisingly, for the European Capital of Culture program, there is a negative impact on perceived quality of life of residents during the ECOC year. Wellings et al. (2011) make a case for a public health effect evaluation of the London 2012 Olympics and for the importance of a health vision for mega-events as a key feature of any sensible impact evaluation. In this still meager evidence base, we then find little support for the idea that cultural participation may be helpful in alleviating life conditions for residents during live events, and that culturally pervasive events such as the ECOC can even worsen quality of life perception. In a nutshell, the three sociality dimensions, LCI, CBC, and MSC, are very unevenly covered in the current literature. The overall picture that emerges is that, in terms of community building and social cohesion, the impact of events for social sustainability as mediated by cultural participation is ambiguous and yields mixed results. In particular, there is little support for the idea that Events as Creative District Generators? Beyond the Conventional Wisdom events may make a difference in the longterm in all sorts of socio-economic environments, so that the final outcome seems to be highly dependent on specific local conditions. Moreover, from the Mobilization versus Participation dilemma, the evidence is once again inconclusive: instances of highly engaged resident participation do not seem common enough, and in several cases participation has played against the event through organized dissent of segments of the local community and even counter-programming to the event itself. NETWORKING: LOCAL COOPERATION AND GLOBAL CONNECTEDNESS? Finally, we briefly consider the two networking dimensions, INW and ENW, which both play a crucial role in ensuring that culture-led development processes can count on cohesive alliances of local players and reach out to other players in other territories and cities. The defining tension here is Parochialism versus Openness, both in the local and in the global realm. Studies about the networking dimensions of mega-events, however, have been even more rare and sparse than for other blocks of factors. In particular, little has been said so far about how to induce local cultural players to improve their cooperative attitudes as a consequence of the opportunities and challenges put forward by the event. As a partial exception, Low and Hall (2012) study the dynamics of engagement of cultural players in the 2010 Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver, finding that the artistic community received little benefit from the program, and in particular much less benefit than claimed by the policy makers. But they also found that the actual level of opportunity seized by the players depended to a significant extent on whether they chose to engage with the global versus local stage, thus singling out a counterproductive trade-off between INW and ENW 259 themselves – it paid off to play the game as outward-looking free riders rather than as part of the team. Interestingly, a similar negative trade-off between individual global outreach and cooperation within the community is found by Rosi (2014) with reference to the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, showing that, however, increased levels of cooperation tend to improve single cities’ perspectives for self-promotion and branding, thus solving the trade-off. Short (2008) argues in turn about the socially disruptive effects of the increasing globalization of the Olympics on local community cohesion, exposing yet another possibility of trade-off between local and global networking. McGillivray and McPherson (2012), however, point out that the increasing diversity of territories entering the global arena of mega-events can create new possibilities for international cooperation and improved local governance, once again dissolving the trade-off. Also in this respect, the ECOC program deserves special consideration for the explicit role that it gives to the construction of stable, far-reaching European networks as a key feature for obtaining the title. Lähdesmäki (2012) remarks that this results in a rhetoric of ‘unity in diversity’, which might simply reflect instrumental illustrations of the European character of ECOC programs for accreditation and consensus purposes. As Sassatelli (2008) observes, the real challenge in this respect is the possibility for creating an authentic European cultural space – an accomplishment that still seems in the making at best. For instance, Tölle (2013) finds that in the case of the shortlisted Polish cities for the 2016 ECOC title, the extent of transnational networking sparked by the competition dynamics in the Eastern European context was still too poor to warrant a satisfactory level of connectedness to other European territories. Accordingly, Lähdesmäki (2014b) finds that, in the case of Pécs 2010, local discourses of Europeanness are mainly filtered by local categories rather than by reference to a common European heritage or history. 260 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Even in the case of the event that is more purposefully and strategically tailored toward culture-driven social integration at the local and global level, therefore, the existing evidence presents significant gaps and criticalities still in place. The insidious trade-off between INW and ENW that is foreshadowed by some of the existing literature seems therefore a real possibility, even if there are tensions between integration and the win–win composition of local and global networking in the joint interest of single players and the whole network. The Parochialism versus Openness dilemma consequently registers a momentum that, despite good intentions to move toward the latter, still finds considerable energy pushing toward the former, even in the case of events such as the European Capital of Culture that should be in principle fully geared toward open-minded Europeanism. HOW CAN EVENTS CONTRIBUTE TO THE CREATIVE FLOURISHING OF CITIES? Should we then conclude from our previous analysis that events are essentially a nuisance to culture-led urban development, and the best way to deal with them in cultural policy design is to just remove them from the set of viable options? The answer is, obviously, no. Events are not critical per se, but they become critical when they receive an inappropriate role in the urban development strategy and, in particular, when they are embraced uncritically without a sound cost–benefit evaluation and without any serious reflection on their opportunity costs. What the previous analysis clearly points out is that decisions on events are mainly taken by public decision makers on an irrational basis, generally driven by a sensational (but at the same time logically unwarranted) expectation as to their future benefits and by the lure of the consequent media coverage that the event preparation and implementation phases are going to secure for the next few years. Another issue is that the efficacy of the event is strongly dependent on how it is actually designed and implemented, and for what purpose. The four dilemmas presented in this chapter (Transformation versus Celebration, Immediacy versus Sustainability, Mobilization versus Participation and Parochialism versus Openness) clearly illustrate this point. The most critical aspect is the implicit association between the event and the notion of a rent – that is, generating value irrespective of specific skills, or risky investments, or a clear vision. Of course, any of these elements is crucial for the eventual success of the event, and the riskiness of the project is, as we have seen, very high, but the consensus-making element helps to present it as a safe bet. In terms of the dilemmas, this naturally leads to privileging the self-assuring Celebration option over the controversial, challenging Transformation: the former pleases everybody in its exaltation of the status quo, whereas the latter would certainly conflict with the certainties and the conventional wisdom of so many incumbent stakeholders. Likewise, the seductive element of rentseeking choices is that it focuses upon the here and now of an immediate return, rather than upon ineffable long-term Sustainability considerations. Moreover, if Participation is again risky and challenging in giving a voice to all local constituencies, including the most marginal and critical ones, Mobilization for the event’s final success (and the implicit censorship of critical voices as being against the ‘common good’) closely mirrors the familiar schemes of the political rally. The Parochialism/Openness dilemma has more subtle implications here, as the attraction of highly paid international testimonials (a very rent-seeking form of openness, once again) may provide the event with a very superficial outer layer of cosmopolitanism, which is, however, very ephemeral, as much as the costly ‘celebrity connection’ it establishes. Events as Creative District Generators? Beyond the Conventional Wisdom As far as urban development strategies are concerned, the truly critical element is the QLG one: the vision and planning culture of the decision makers, in the first place. Eventually, the most basic dilemma of all is that between ‘Event as Rent’ and ‘Event as Risky Investment’. If events become local activators of resources and opportunities as, say, catalysts for innovation (including its social dimension), platforms for capability building, or laboratories of enhanced social sustainability, and in particular if their characteristics and costs are well balanced against these criteria, they can become an effective policy tool at the urban level. But our previous analysis suggests that the optimal event scale for achieving such objectives is unlikely to be, with a few exceptions, that of the big, global, extremely costly event, such as the Olympics or Expos, but a more modest one, that trades real learning and better local governance against media sensation. To some extent European Capitals of Culture, with their relatively reduced scale both in terms of cost and global exposure could get closer to the optimal compromise, but the mixed evidence available suggests that this needs not always be the case, and that in many instances this type of event could still overshoot the social optimum. Examples such as the already cited Ars Electronica Festival in Linz provide an interesting illustration of this point: a bottom-up initiative that emerged as a niche event for early tech geeks in the late 1970s, and then gradually and organically developed into a global platform with an increasing range of local stakeholders, to eventually become a key development player at the city level (Sacco et al., 2013b). Something similar is currently happening with the South by Southwest Festival’s role in the global positioning of Austin, Texas, as a primary tech and innovation hub (Long, 2010). In these cases, issues of authenticity and socio-cultural sustainability, and the capacity to establish a vital, non-instrumental connection with the local community’s needs and aspirations 261 is of primary concern (Swearingen, 2010). Moreover, the vision and competence drive precedes and nurtures the event, rather than having to be artificially generated to support the assignment of an event-related title granted through abstract criteria from a third institution, as in the cases of the Olympics, the Expos, or the European Capitals of Culture. Events are ephemeral, but, as often emphasized above, what makes the difference for the city is their legacy. We have also seen that, despite frequent lip service to monitoring and accountability, a true evaluation of big events’ legacies is not a priority for city administrations, and it is not difficult to understand why. The rent-seeking mentality feels much more at ease looking for the next, brand new, big event, so that the entire cycle of social expectation and mobilization can start again, rather than having to come to grips with the lights and shadows of what has been, and to laboriously build upon it, with all its burden of social controversy, self-critical awareness, and the need to admit mistakes and to learn from them. We could then conclude that, in a nutshell, the events that are useful as development catalysts are those that bring about substantial social learning, at the city administration and community level. The real danger of the rent-seeking event logic is that hardly anything is learnt through the process, as learning is simply not a real goal. Once one cycle is over, the city enters a new one where basically the same mistakes are made over and over again. And the reason is that if the decision makers believe that it is the nature of the event that paves the way to the city’s developmental potential in terms of skills, civic energy, or entrepreneurial spirit rather than the other way round, in a sort of magical thinking, the only problem becomes that of finding the ‘right’ magic wand. If this misunderstanding persists, there is no event format, however carefully conceived and however brilliant, that can really deliver in a lasting, sustainable way. 262 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have reviewed a considerable amount of literature on mega-events and their relationship to the development of creative districts and local economies. Drawing general conclusions is very difficult. However, it turns out, quite clearly, that, in terms of the characterization of sustainable culture-led development processes according to the 12 characteristic dimensions adopted here (see Table 17.1), as a general rule the available evidence shows that mega-events manifest significant gaps in practically all of the dimensions, thereby raising some concern on the actual effectiveness of the event formula in achieving sustainable, long-term targets of culture-led development. There is, most likely, also the need to differentiate among typologies of events. In this paper, we have analyzed various types of events rather interchangeably, but it is clear that subtle as well as evident differences apply between them, in a number of different respects. We look forward to future research developing more fine-grained distinctions, and to a larger body of literature providing more articulated and detailed evidence that allows this to happen. A program like the European Capitals of Culture, which is explicitly shaped in terms of cultural production and participation, is likely to be more conducive for our purposes than events where culture interplays in complex and sometimes even conflicting ways with other fields. But the existing evidence does not allow us to conclude that a specific type of event is definitely superior to all others in terms of creative activation of a territory. Dependence on local conditions and circumstances seems to play a complex but important role, and the detailed nature of this dependence is still hard to decipher on the basis of the existing knowledge. We have to keep in mind that megaevents have been invented and have developed in a different socio-economic and historical context, in which hosting large flagship projects was a crucial and almost inescapable way to attract international visibility and interest in a specific territory. In the current context, the dynamics of local identity in the global arena follow a multitude of different paths, and it should not be taken for granted that the best way to achieve sustainable long-term objectives is by investing a large amount of resources in short-lived, gigantic projects, which absorb a disproportionate amount of resources, while crowding out more community-oriented and possibly sustainable activities. This is especially true if the final objective is that of embarking on a long-term endeavor of culture-led development, where issues of community capability building, social cohesion and substantial participation and co-creation of strategies and projects would likely favor different formulas than megaevents. We look forward to future research and case studies that can better elucidate these points, and inspire policy makers to venture into courageous, carefully pondered experimentation in the field. REFERENCES Andranovich, G., Burbank, M.J. and Heying, C.H. 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(2013) ‘Residents’ perceived social-economic impact of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games’, ICHPER-SD Journal of Research, 8(2): 19–25. 18 Mega-Events in Emerging Nations and the Festivalization of the Urban Backstage: The Cases of Brazil and South Africa Christoph Haferburg and Malte Steinbrink THE INTERNATIONAL CLASS OF MEGA-EVENT HOSTING The trend of hosting mega-events in ‘emerging nations’, that is, in non-western countries, seems prevalent – the summer Olympics in Beijing 2008, the football World Cup in South Africa 2010 and in Brazil in 2014, the summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 are the prominent examples. The designated next hosts for the football World Cups in 2018 and 2022 are Russia and Qatar, respectively. Similar to other developments, this can be related to a dissolution of the longstanding hegemonic dominance of old-industrialized western countries. The international political context has been shaping the making of mega-events throughout most of its history. After all, the symbolic value of becoming a host especially of the summer Olympics has been held in high esteem by aspiring political leaders and powers for a long time: the 1936 games in Berlin took place under Nazi Germany’s auspices; and at the height of the cold war, the capitalist west decided to boycott the games in Moscow in 1980, prompting a counterboycott of the 1984 games in Los Angeles by socialist countries. However, whereas this context was highly charged ideologically in the twentieth century, it seems that currently, in global competition, countries are more likely to stress economic aspirations in relation to hosting. Competition and ambition have become virtues in their own right, while the political side of hosting still remains relevant. Indeed, only if a minimum of economic capacity (including the representation of important global sub-markets) and substantial political backing is given, can the possibility of hosting be translated into a successful bid. Thus, being selected as a host is already perceived as a symbolic recognition of being a ‘well respected’ nation (Cornelissen, 2004; Desai and Vahed, 2010; Ley et al., 2010). An understanding of mega-events thus has to 268 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES consider the reputation at stake on the global stage and in international relations, as well as the inward-oriented emotional and symbolic fascination. It can be argued, that the latter is especially relevant for the (re-)construction of a national identity (Cornelissen, 2012), making this aspect of nation building more important for younger, less consolidated and possibly post-colonial states – especially when political arrangements need to be affirmed. This is one of the reasons why mega-event research has developed a specific interest in the hosts of the ‘Global South’. The term ‘Global South’ alludes to an understanding of a politically constructed contrast between so-called emerging/ developing nations (‘South’) on the one hand and the old industrialized countries (‘North’ or ‘West’) on the other. Economically, politically, socially, historically and geographically, however, it would seem overly simplistic to reduce the trajectories of the more than 200 countries globally into a spectrum of binary oppositions. Although economic power, antagonistic colonial experience and, to a certain extent, societal structures seemed to justify this type of categorization in the latter half of the twentieth century, the dualism in this perspective is more of a hurdle than a gain in understanding urban development, or different host countries of mega-events. Consequently, instead of referring to the Global South, this chapter starts with the observation that mega-events increasingly take place in emerging economies and aspiring nations. Besides the transformations in the global context, the events themselves have changed. Here, a shifting of balance towards economic considerations is manifest, with bigger amounts of money invested in stadiums and infrastructure, and bigger profits generated through marketing and ticket sales (Table 18.1). The characteristics of sport events can be distinguished by five dimensions: political value; economic relevance; socio-emotional involvement; material impact (that is, built environment); and symbolic importance. If the event’s size is beyond contextually defined thresholds of spectators, profit and media attention, the term sports mega-event applies: by convention this label is reserved to designate the Football World Cup and the Summer Olympics. Both events are marketed, managed and owned by international sporting bodies, the ‘content providers’: the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). These organizations have developed successful brand identities and managed to guarantee – up to now – to produce spectacles that attract an unrivaled level of public and media attention. These events are also in a league of their own because of the immense power held by both institutions responsible for the format. The emotional and symbolic aspects of the events are the basis of this monopoly, in turn creating a true civil religion with global reach. The internal structures of these contentproviding institutions (leadership and branches run by committee members elected in democratic procedures based on country membership) make them comparatively more open to influence from the Global South, since their proportional share of membership is bigger than the share of the few politically and economically leading nations. The principle of rotating the host country (different from, for example, Super Bowl or Formula One) provides for a dynamic element, making long-term allegiances more difficult to achieve on the one hand, but also providing for an institutionalized form of policy transfer and travelling models of event implementation, on the other hand. Another remarkable feature of megaevents (compared to mega-projects) lies in the clearly determined time span of contract loyalty, binding all involved parties together as long as the success of the event still is pending – with higher reputational stakes than generated for example by huge building or infrastructural projects, also due to the fixed deadline. Although the balance of power tends to shift towards the hosts during Summer Olympics FIFA World Cup 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 2022 1993 1996 1997 2000 2001 2004 2005 2008 2009 2010 2013 2010 Total cost (US$, estimate) Greece (Athens) Germany China (Beijing) South Africa England (London) Brazil Brazil (Rio) Russia Japan (Tokyo) Qatar 15 bn3 4.12 bn4 45 bn5 5.25 bn6 15.97 bn7 11.00 bn8 11.1 bn9 20 bn10 n.a. n.a. Australia (Sydney) 6.93 bn1 Japan/ South Korea > 4.00 bn / > 2.00 bn2 Host 302 bn 3,333 bn 5,040 bn 375 bn 2,499 bn 2,412 bn 2,319 bn n.a. n.a. n.a. 4.97 0.12 0.89 1.4 0.63 0.46 0,48 n.a. n.a. n.a. 0.853 0.911 0.719 0.658 0.892 0.744 0.744 0.788 0.890 0.851 > 0.08/> 0.25 0.890/0.891 > 5,126 bn/ 797 bn 0.933 HDI (2013)12 0.82 Estim. cost % of GDP 846 bn GDP at market prices (US$, in year of hosting)11 Notes: CPI = Consumer Price Index 1 Preuss (2004) 2 Barclay (2009) 3 Itano (2008) 4 Steinbrink et al. (2012: 31) 5 Fowler and Meichtry (2008) 6 Steinbrink et al. (2012: 31) 7 http://www.theguardian.com/sport/datablog/interactive/2012/jul/26/london-2012-price-olympic-games-visualised 8 https://www.statista.com/statistics/296493/total-costs-fifa-world-cup-2014-brazil/ 9 Leme (2015) 10 http://www.espnfc.com/story/1475625/russias-2018-world-cup-projected-costs-spiral 11 http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD?page=2 12 United Nations Development Programme (2014) 13 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html 14 http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/income-gini-coefficient 15 http://www.transparency.org/research/cpi/overview Summer Olympics FIFA World Cup Summer Olympics FIFA World Cup Summer Olympics FIFA World Cup Summer Olympics FIFA World Cup Summer Olympics FIFA World Cup Event Sports mega-events in the 21st century: economic and societal attributes of host countries Year of Year of allocation hosting Table 18.1 37.6 (2008)/ 31.1 (2011)13 34.3 (2013)14 28.3 (2013)14 42.1 (2013)14 63.1 (2013)14 36 (2013)14 54.7 (2013)14 54.7 (2013)14 40.1 (2013)14 37.6 (2008)13 41.1 (2013)14 30.3 (2008)13 Gini (year) 53.5 76.00 35.00 46.00 86.00 35.00 37.00 21.00 74.00 77.00 70.50 No data CPI (when allocated)15 43.00 80.00 36.00 45.00 74.00 43.00 n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a. 71.00/45.00 83.00 CPI (in year of hosting)15 270 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES the preparation of the event, a weakness of their position lies in the fact that for almost all host cities (especially in the Global South), a mega-event is ‘once-in-a-lifetime’. Yet, for FIFA and IOC, the preparations for the next event start immediately in the aftermath of the one currently underway (or earlier). Interestingly, the commodification of events has increased their iconographic value, too, which is a major factor for the hosts’ aspirations to boost their image by throwing sport’s biggest parties. The athletes’ performances are increasingly embedded in a grand entertainment scheme, consequently leading to a holistic staging of the host cities: opening and closing ceremonies, architecture, theme songs and branding strategies, national imaginations and ‘the spirit of the games’ as well as of the associated products – all this goes hand in hand. The profits to be generated by the Olympics and the soccer World Cup are mainly for the benefit of the IOC and FIFA. These gains have been increasing, in line with the cost of hosting, which is almost entirely at the expense of the hosts. The desire to outperform earlier hosts contributes to the rising cost of hosting. In the past decades, investments have reached dimensions way beyond the financial capacity of host cities – national budgets thus provide the main economic base, effectively leading to a situation where taxpayers raise concerns about the rationality of being part of this. Indeed, decreasing support in western public opinion has been identified to be a factor in favoring the hosting of mega-events in countries that are politically less open (for example, China, Russia, Qatar), and/or if the related economies are ascending and thus not requiring tight control of government spending (China, Brazil and, to a lesser extent, at least at the time of hosting, South Africa) (Table 18.1). As can be seen in Table 18.1, the total cost of the events has been multiplying in the past two decades, making the hosting increasingly impossible for smaller economies and underlining the role of mega-events as a means to demonstrate international status – this is to some extent reflected in the relatively high ratings of the countries in the human development index (HDI). On the other hand, there is no clear response to the question of the events’ relation to societal inequality or to corruption, at least not if the probe is based on existing Gini and CPI data (expressing statistical measurements of inequality in income distribution and of structural corruption, respectively; cf. the last three columns of Table 18.1). Again, there is no tendency visible towards the opposite, and the connection to hidden payments of the content providers has been heavily demonstrated in the case of FIFA, as the recent legal action against its top representatives shows. ‘Informal benefits’ such as bribery can only unfold, of course, if two partners are involved. Consequently, a political elite hoping to boost national identity and pride through hosting is a precondition. Thus, in the process of applying for the event, cities do play a role, but often not the most prominent: this would then fall to members of national governments and to the national committees of the related sporting bodies, including their relationship to FIFA or IOC. Nevertheless, especially since the rise of ‘global terrorism’ in recent years, security concerns have become more prominent as an additional concern for host selection (Eisenhauer et al., 2014) – an aspect that might promote less open societies as hosts. Speaking broadly, from the point of view of the content providers, ‘ideal’ hosts provide political stability, sufficient economic capital and hunger for symbolic benefits (including a broad emotional involvement of the population, be it orchestrated or by its own inspiration) – consequently, a new generation of host countries, characterized above, has emerged. With regard to securing a smooth course of events, both FIFA and the IOC have developed a comprehensive catalogue of obligatory requirements addressed to potential hosts. Their fulfillment must be guaranteed in the bid books. The fact that host countries willingly grant FIFA and IOC tax MEGA-EVENTS IN EMERGING NATIONS AND THE FESTIVALIZATION OF THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 271 exemptions, diplomatic rights and influence in urban planning is a clear indication of the huge political interest that the governments associate with the staging of these events (Steinbrink et al., 2011). In the case of applications from emerging countries, the symbolic enhancement of the national profile plays a particular role – the successful staging of a mega-event is meant to counter the stigma of ‘underdevelopment’, thus enabling the country to cross the symbolic ‘threshold’ into the circle of the world’s leading nations (Greene, 2003; Ley et al., 2010). The applicants also cherish hopes with regard to domestic affairs. Besides the argument of economic growth, which is constantly put forward in the run-up to events (foreign direct investment, promotion of tourism, etc.; Hiller, 2000; Maennig and Schwarthoff, 2010; Whitson and Macintosh, 1996), the function of sport as a generator of a sense of belonging – in terms of a national ‘feel-good effect’ – must be mentioned here as well (Cornelissen, 2012). In short, although historically a very western invention, the mega-events of today can be described as a form of globalized entertainment with unique dimensions, and with an attributed increase of the symbolic value of hosting achieved through the submission of the host to potentially universalizing effects. As stated, this applies chiefly to the hosts, but to some extent to the content providers as well. THE URBAN PERSPECTIVE: MOTIVATION AND CHALLENGES OF HOST CITIES Mega-events as Catalysts for Urban Development, North and South From the point of view of urban policy, globalization, neoliberal economic strategies and the worldwide competition between metropolises are seen as driving forces behind the interpretation of mega-events as an element of urban development (Häußermann and Siebel, 1993). In the old industrialized nations, the events are said to help to compensate for de-industrialization and to counter stiff international competition for foreign investment, consumption markets and entertainment (Clark, 2011; Greene, 2003; Harvey, 1989, 2013; Sassen, 1991). For the metropolises of the South, however, urban growth challenges and infrastructure deficits as well as socio-spatial disparities represent additional and different hurdles beyond the preparation of the mega-event itself. Hosting an event in a ‘southern’ ‘urban’ context thus is related to the hope of empowering host cities vis-à-vis these challenges. Beyond this, throughout the world, mega-events are still promoted as stimuli of economic growth and as a focal point of urban development and city marketing over decades. Similar to the distinction we made at the national level and in economic terms, the desired effects of hosting can be categorized as either aiming at an external context, or at an internal one (Häußermann et al., 2008: 263f.). With regard to the global audience, events have become instruments of marketing and image building. The staging of the hosts as world class cities is also linked to expected or at least heralded local employment effects and a growth in tourism (Andranovich et al., 2001; Greene, 2003; Häußermann et al., 2008; Hiller, 2000). Regarding the internal context, the main purpose of an event is to serve as a catalyst for urban development and a legitimation for big infrastructure investment (Mayer, 2007). During the preparation phase, a huge amount of pressure is built up due to the fixed timeframe. An intended side effect of this pressure is the temporary empowerment of key actors – thanks to an artificially created ‘state of exception’ (Vainer, 2011). Consequently, some fields of urban policy lose budget shares and attention (for example, social policy), 272 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES whereas other sectors benefit (urban planning, infrastructural investment) (Haferburg and Steinbrink, 2010a; Matheson and Baade, 2004). A mega-event thus provides a boost for a selected range of projects, and provides a focal point for all kinds of urban interventions. Successful bidding and preparing for a mega-event creates an entanglement of all actors involved – governance configurations within the host cities, national government, and international sporting bodies. The result is an amalgamation of the interests at stake, with the common goal of the incident-free staging of an event that is marked by a unique intersection of mass appeal and world-class elitism. The marketing value and the generated profits depend profoundly on this untainted projection of nationalized success through individual and collective achievements. The Production of Sport MegaEvents beyond the West – Dimensions and Key Actors Mega-event research beyond the west was quite limited until the 2010 FIFA World Cup was awarded to South Africa in 2004 – only a few events prior to this had been analyzed through this lens. Matheson and Baade (2004) and Horne and Manzenreiter (2006) are among the pioneers of this field. Since 2010, edited collections (Haferburg and Steinbrink, 2010b; Pillay et al., 2009) and a considerable number of studies have been published (de Souza, 2012; Newton, 2009; Schausteck de Almeida et al., 2015; Steinbrink, 2013; Steinbrink et al., 2011), some also looking back at earlier events (for example, Brewster, 2010 on the Olympics in Mexico 1968). For this type of host, two claims can be made: first of all, based on a lower GDP per capita, economic effects (positive or negative) tend to be more articulate here (Cottle, 2011). Additionally, the interventions into the built environment as well as into planning and administration of the host cities are more thorough, since, at the outset, the gap between world-class ambitions of the hosts, as well as the benchmarks set by of FIFA and IOC on the one hand, and existing infrastructure on the other hand, is much wider compared to western host cities (Haferburg, 2011). On a metropolitan scale, the most critical differences can be identified in attributes of urban structure and in the way economic development and transformation take place. Scarcity of space for inner-urban redevelopment is a concern, especially in growing cities – and since a considerable economic base is required to sustain the event-related infrastructure, most host cities share this challenge. However, in most emerging countries, the economic growth paths have not yet been transformed as severely as in the de-industrializing nodes of the North. In these historical ‘mega-cities’, the hosting of events was often in connection with brown field development of old ports, railway infrastructure or production sites. The inner peripheries of the new host cities, in contrast, are typically represented by informal settlements, although redevelopment of older infrastructure can also be involved. The prophylactic ‘ordering’ of urban informality is especially visible regarding housing and trading. The extent, however, to which informality has been erased goes beyond the requirement to build stadiums and training facilities, or to expand the property market. The formalization and ordering of the urban sphere is indeed linked to a displacement of elements not suitable for this kind of embracing commodification – the process thus has to be understood in the context of the staging of cleanliness, modernity and orderly urbanization. The Visible Backstage Since large-scale events primarily aim at showcasing a visible image of the city internationally, there is the inevitable tendency, in mega-event policies, to actually consider everything that is invisible as unimportant, too. This, of course, includes the MEGA-EVENTS IN EMERGING NATIONS AND THE FESTIVALIZATION OF THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 273 many social problems that cannot be integrated into a positive image. (Häußermann et al., 2008: 265) [authors’ translation] The preparation of events in aspiring nations can lead to a conflict between image objectives in the context of global competition on the one hand and the needs of urban residents, most of whom are economically weak, on the other hand. Tensions are particularly evident in the engagement with urban poverty areas and related socio-economic disparities, since the spatial structures of the cities are equally fragmented. A large part of the urban population – especially the lowest income groups – live in overcrowded inner city housing, or in informal dwellings on the city outskirts and on residual urban land. These settlements can be described as ‘slums’ (UN-Habitat, 2003: 11) and generally do not comply with the right to adequate housing as defined in the UN Charter for Human Rights (United Nations, 1948). But within the logic of mega-events, the host cities’ ‘slum problem’ is discussed in a very different light: to begin with, low-income housing is often located in zones earmarked for event-related development (stadiums, roads, etc.); secondly, it conflicts with the cities’ image-building efforts. Governments, city administrations and organizing committees often perceive these settlements as ‘eyesores’ – therefore, they are considered as an obstacle to city staging. In cities of the Global South, social problems of poverty and inequality tend to be more visible, for example, in the form of informal settlements. Hence the host cities are compelled to cope with these visible problems, or rather with the problem of their visibility (Steinbrink et al., 2011). There is hardly any room for strategies of sustainable development, firstly because of the condensed timeframe typical for mega-events, and secondly since the limited financial resources flow into other event-related investments. As a result, cheaper short-term measures are preferred: ‘visual protection screens’ such as fences and walls, as well as the demolition of settlements and forced evictions. The more visible a slum is for the media and for the international public, the higher the probability of such interventions. The most affected settlements are located near city centers or important event venues, next to airports or along important roads connecting the venues (Greene, 2003; Newton, 2009). In compliance with the general idea of ‘urban semiotics’ (Gottdiener and Lagopoulos, 1986; Lagopoulos, 2009), this staging problem can be interpreted against the backdrop of the specific semiotic nature of the ‘urban backstage’ – informal settlements, slums, informal trading, but also their ‘personnel’: hawkers, homeless people, and urban dwellers that are marginalized in other ways. Figure 18.1 shows in which way related interventions take place, using the example of Rio’s favelas – but ‘favela’ could be easily replaced here with ‘slum’, informal settlement, township, bidonville, villa miseria, etc. When falling under the logic of the event, the sign ‘favela’ has two problematic aspects: The first is the high visibility of the (material) signifier – that is, the large number of favelas, central and exposed locations of some favelas, and their broad presence in the media. The second problematic aspect is the specific signification, that is, the semantic charging with negative ascriptions such as ‘poverty’, ‘crime’, ‘bad governance’, etc. Based on this notion, the various observable urban policy measures can be interpreted as semiotic interventions, as governmental attempts to interfere with the signifying character of the favela, and can hence be assigned to the two problematic aspects mentioned above. Accordingly, two types of strategic interventions can be distinguished: (1) invisibilization and (2) transformation of the sign ‘favela’; or of ‘the slum’, or of informal, disorderly elements of urbanity in general. 274 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Figure 18.1 ‘Favela’ as a problematic sign and urban-policy interventions in the context of mega-events – a heuristic model STAGING (IN) THE URBAN SOUTH We will now turn to the examples of hosting the FIFA World Cup in South Africa in 2010 and in Brazil in 2014. Additionally, we are including reflections on the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 – making use of the conceptual and contextual reflections outlined above. For both host countries, the analysis is presented in its own form of narrative. Each case thus has to be considered as an independent vignette, not as a comparison along a parallel structure. Still, the summary at the end of the chapter will develop a cross-cutting perspective. South Africa – Three Host Cities On Different Tracks When South Africa hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the move to stage this mega-event at the southern tip of the African continent was greeted as a timely acknowledgement of the growing importance of the ‘Global South’. Most of the fears that had been raised in international discourses before the kick-off proved unfounded once the event was under way. Nine host cities enjoyed the international spotlight; the new and revamped stadiums were the focus of the media. Behind the scenes, however, more infrastructure had to be created, locational decisions taken and structures of governance honed (Fleischer et al., 2013). The aspects most lauded were the smoothness and professionalism of hosting – both have to be read as a proof of the possibility of a nonwestern modernity. The stadiums and the new transport infrastructure such as the bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Johannesburg and Cape Town can be considered as the most significant interventions in the built MEGA-EVENTS IN EMERGING NATIONS AND THE FESTIVALIZATION OF THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 275 environment – the former costly, but underutilized today, the latter significantly cheaper and very well received by a broad public (Wood, 2014). All in all, the faces of South African cities have not been changed thoroughly by the event, but some lessons remain – partly humiliating ones, like being subject to the imperial dictates of FIFA, but also the experience of empowerment of those local players who managed to use the event as an instrument to implement projects that had been in the pipeline for many years – for example, the Gautrain, a high-speed rail link between Johannesburg airport, the CBD and Pretoria; again the BRT system; or a new airport and the beautification of the beachfront in Durban (Haferburg et al., 2014). Possibly the most important legacy might be found in the field of urban governance – circumventing complicated participatory and democratic procedures, forging alliances around specific projects and selling worldclass city dreams to a wider audience are certainly on the list of results. There were also a number of interventions against ‘crime and grime’ that inevitably targeted the informal sector, the homeless, squatters and informal settlers. To this day, and possibly boosted by the clean-up actions legitimized by the hosting of the World Cup, informality has become a target of urban upgrading policies. ‘Beautification’ and ‘ordering’ thus represent two cornerstones of a comprehensive discourse on world-class host cities, which has a very ambiguous heritage in South Africa, given that the old apartheid city was equally shaped by an aesthetics of architectural modernity and was shielded by policies of ‘orderly urbanization’ based on European planning concepts. Today’s post-apartheid cities still bear the scars of these older forms of ordering, equally associated with sanitizing and staging the urban sphere: the segregated city – and its precursor, the colonial city – in practice and in vision were as much about cleanliness, ordering and representing ideals of the ‘civilized world’. Current regulatory interventions dovetail neatly with this, thus legitimizing a strong state – and indeed, developmental authoritarianism was a welcome companion to big events during the past decades (Mexico 1968 and 1970, Argentina 1978). However, in South African cities the impact of almost twenty years of market-oriented urban upgrading policies is equally present – it comes as no surprise, then, that these were accompanied by a lack of coherent metropolitan development strategies and a sometimes poor municipal performance (Oranje, 2012). As a consequence, most of the host cities faced huge development tasks (many of them linked to the persistence of spatial fragmentation) when they were granted the right to showcase the World Cup. The following urban issues were identified as most urgent: deficits in housing and difficulties in creating jobs close to the places of residence of the unemployed; huge traffic problems and immense transport costs; lack of infrastructure and municipal services in the former ‘non-white’ and still poorer neighborhoods; high crime rates; a prevailing xenophobic discourse and manifest attacks on ‘perceived’ foreigners; and a low degree of social cohesion (Haferburg, 2011: 335; Harrison et al., 2008). Income-based segregation has created new patterns of urban exclusion, and, by way of example, Johannesburg has been described as the world’s most unequal city with a Gini-coefficient in income of 0.75 (UN-Habitat, 2010: 72f.). The effects of recent dynamics of socio-spatial differentiation are somewhat contradictory: although some neighborhoods in Johannesburg have changed considerably in terms of their inhabitants (Freund, 2010), a continuity with the apartheid era lies in the social fact that one’s place of residence is still crucial regarding life chances and social trajectories (World Bank, 2012). Awarding the World Cup to South Africa in 2004 was thus accompanied by strong expectations from FIFA, the international 276 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES community and local actors alike to mitigate the most apparent of these urban development problems as quickly as possible and certainly before the event began (Cornelissen, 2011). In this light it becomes clear that ‘ordering’ the city, or the neighborhood, was a major challenge for stakeholders in post-apartheid urban development. A safe and orderly urban environment was not only high on the agenda of the hosts, but also of FIFA. Johannesburg – the African City and the World Cup Metropolitan development schemes of South African host cities all follow more or less explicitly a blueprint vision of becoming ‘world-class cities’, with international competiveness being the common benchmark. Attracting more foreign investment requires identifying key projects as well as development nodes and corridors. Here, Johannesburg has demonstrated that some groups of stakeholders foster an alternative spatial perspective that looks at the inner city and to the south, towards Soweto, as new channels for investment. In opposition to the dominant development trend towards the Northern Suburbs and beyond (in the direction of Pretoria), the former ‘South Western Township’ with its run-down and crime-ridden image has benefitted from the aspired to ‘African’ guise that had been chosen as one of the unique selling points of the 2010 World Cup (Haferburg and Steinbrink 2010a). Township tourism – a sector that has been developing since the end of apartheid in the mid-1990s – has exploited this interest and in turn contributed to a remodeling of a perceived African urbanity within South Africa (Figure 18.1) (Frenzel, 2014; Rogerson, 2008; Rolfes et al., 2009). This type of ‘grassroots’ staging is flanked by a government-led transformation of public spaces that took place all over the country. The aesthetic concepts, especially for bigger interventions, try to create a fusion of an imagined pan-African style with international design trends. Both sides of this casting mold are epitomized by Freedom Square and the Soccer City Stadium, both in Soweto (Figures 18.2 and 18.3). In addition, some actors hoped that the World Cup would provide a chance to accelerate real-estate and business investment, and especially that the public spending would trigger private sector cash flow into marginalized areas (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2009). This, however, has not materialized beyond some limited projects in the inner city (for example, the Maboneng precinct; Walsh, 2013) – private investment has shied away from areas like Bertrams (next to the Ellis Park stadium) (Haferburg et al., 2014). Substantial government-funded infrastructural upgrades took place in the wealthy northern suburbs, too – the Gautrain is the most prominent and most costly example. The current spatial patterns of investment thus provide an ambiguous and somewhat blurred picture. Durban – Driving the Event towards the Beautiful South In eThekwini (Durban), a distinct regime of urban governance exercised tight control over event-related investment. This resulted in an orchestrated ‘state of emergency’ (Haferburg et al., 2014: 284), which fueled a number of existing development projects, for example, the new King Shaka Airport and the upgraded beachfront, increasing the speed and scope of their implementation. Creating a ‘sanitized’, crime-free environment changed the face of the inner city for the duration of the event, and of the beachfront for a bit longer. This formerly derelict zone with potentially extraordinary value for tourism, has not (in spite of substantial beautification) reached the glam factor of eThekwini’s ‘catwalk’ and prime site for the international visitor class, which is situated out of town in Umhlanga Rocks. The impact of the event on the inner city is very fragmented, changing from street to street, and quickly fading away (Fleischer et al., 2013). Nevertheless, and in line with the MEGA-EVENTS IN EMERGING NATIONS AND THE FESTIVALIZATION OF THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 277 Figures 18.2 Freedom Square (Soweto, Johannesburg) Source: Marie Huchzermeyer Figures 18.3 Soccer City Stadium (Soweto, Johannesburg) Source: Christoph Haferburg newly constructed stadium (the only one that can be used for track and field events as well, cf. Maennig and Schwarthoff, 2010), sport and entertainment play an important role in Durban’s development strategy. A case in point is the fact that Durban has just won the bid to host the Commonwealth games in 2022 – the first competition of its type to be held in Africa. Cape town – Cleaning up the Mother City In Cape Town, substantial investment was allocated to the inner city. However, compared to Durban or Johannesburg, Cape Town’s inner city (dubbed the ‘City Bowl’) was in much better shape, thus not presenting a big challenge in terms of visible problems or lacking appeal for the visitor class. In fact, 278 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Cape Town’s three most prominent staging issues had been dealt with in a heavy handed top-down approach. First, the originally designated location of the new stadium was shifted from the intersection between rich and poor neighborhoods in Athlone to the extremely scenic coastal stretch at Green Point (Swart and Bob, 2009). Then, secondly, homeless people were systematically relocated to a ‘transit camp’ called Blikkiesdorp, more than 30 km outside of the city. Finally, and most controversially, a prominent informal settlement on the highway N2 between the airport and the CBD had to make way for a flagship social housing project – but only a fraction of the forcibly evicted informal settlers were included as beneficiaries of this new housing scheme – the others stayed behind in the same camp in Blikkiesdorp (Newton, 2009). In Cape Town, then, the preparation for the World Cup was marked much more by hiding the problems (‘invisibilization’, Figure 18.1) compared to redefining them (‘transformation’). Concluding Remarks: South Africa Overall, the urban interventions in South Africa’s host cities are scattered and temporary. Staging and ordering have been and remain important points of reference for urban policies, but have not been applied in a comprehensive fashion. The effect of an event-related designing of the urban (back-) stage in South Africa, is therefore, to a large extent, subject to local adaptations, derived from specific power brokers and area-based institutions as well as articulated interests in places and spaces. Thus, externally constructed and initiated attempts at ordering and staging (such as World Cup-related interventions) are met by a complex web of local understandings, trajectories and practices of how to frame, shape and control city space (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2006; Harrison et al., 2008). While the 2010 FIFA World Cup has come and gone, the first academic assessments of the event have found that economically (in relation to sectors including tourism and the labor market) it was a futile exercise, and the effects on South Africa’s international reputation were ambivalent (Cottle, 2011; Du Plessis and Maennig, 2011; Hammett, 2011). All in all, the World Cup did not contribute significantly to solving any of South Africa’s urban problems. The most tangible urban legacy is the BRT bus system, but even this is operational in only two host cities (Johannesburg and Cape Town) at the time of writing. Up to now, most reports on urban impacts focus on the construction and location of the stadiums (for example, Bahadur, 2011; Hlatshwayo, 2011), which can be considered as a huge disappointment, since none are profitable, and some run at huge losses even in big cities like Durban. South Africa’s image certainly received a boost in 2010, but recent political developments and xenophobic attacks have quickly diluted these impressions. The country and its cities are lost in a semiotic antagonism, aspiring to intersect African traditions and world-class aspirations (as epitomized in 2010 in branding the global event as an African world cup), but uncertain how to bridge this gap in discourse and in practice. Accolades such as the World Design Capital awarded to Cape Town in 2014 (cf. Wenz, 2014) or Durban’s successful bid for the Commonwealth Games in 2022 seem to confirm a consolidation of South Africa’s position on the world stage; the script of these events, however, has not yet been written in the South. Brazil – Festifavelization in Rio De Janeiro For nearly ten years now, Brazil – especially Rio de Janeiro – has strongly been hedging its bets on the urban policy of festivalization. This is reflected in the list of sporting megaevents taking place there: Pan American MEGA-EVENTS IN EMERGING NATIONS AND THE FESTIVALIZATION OF THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 279 Games (2007), World Military Games (2011), FIFA Confederations Cup (2013), FIFA World Cup (2014), Summer Olympic Games and Paralympics (2016), as well as Copa America (2019). Further, large-scale political, religious and/or cultural events such as the RIO+20 Conference (2012) and the World Youth Day (2013) took place there. The world’s eyes are upon Brazil now, which, under its former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has evolved into a major economic world power. And Rio is its main stage, on which the new, strong Brazil wants to present itself to the world. For Rio de Janeiro, this is a special opportunity after having experienced a substantial decline in importance since 1960 when Brasília had become the new federal capital. Compared particularly to São Paulo, which has steadily grown into Latin America’s biggest economic center in the past decades, Rio has continuously been lagging behind (Steinbrink et al., 2015). The FIFA World Cup 2014 and the upcoming Olympic Games are perceived as great opportunities to push forward urban redevelopment and infrastructural projects in order to reposition the city both nationally and globally. Most of Rio’s informal settlements are located in its western part or in the Northern Zone (Zona Norte), far from the city center and from the economically flourishing Southern Zone (Zona Sul), with its popular Copacabana, Leblon and Ipanema beaches. However, there are numerous favelas in these parts of the city as well, and they shape Rio’s cityscape since they are built on the steep mountain slopes and partly border the most expensive residential areas (cf. Perlman, 2010). These favelas are by no means Rio’s poorest areas with the worst living conditions, but it is precisely these that represent the biggest planning problem in the context of the mega-events: firstly, some of them are located in areas that have been chosen for infrastructure projects relevant to the events (for example, the construction of roads connecting important event venues); secondly, these centrally located favelas pose an aesthetic staging problem. Due to their exposed locations, they are very visible on the city’s front stage, and their appearance is difficult to reconcile with the striven-for world-class city image (Steinbrink et al., 2015). Due to their dense and apparently chaotic building structures, the favelas rather emblematically stand for attributes (poverty, bad governance, social ills, etc.) the elimination of which is meant to be presented to the world. Intervention Type I: Invisibilization This first type of strategic intervention represents the conventional method of approaching the slum as a staging problem (see above); it aims to render the favela (signifier) ‘invisible’. Different urban policy measures of this type could be observed in Rio de Janeiro in recent years. The coarsest form of invisibilization is the forced removal of inhabitants – mostly to the outskirts of the city – and the demolition of the buildings. Extensive eviction measures had already been taken in the period prior to the 2007 Pan-American games, and relocations of ‘less advantaged communities’ were also mentioned in the Olympic bid book (Rio 2016 Candidate City 2009: 145). In 2009, Rio’s municipal government published a list of 119 favelas to be partly or fully removed before 2016 (Gaffney, 2010; Silvestre and Gusmão de Oliveira, 2012). However, in most cases the official rhetoric does not link the announced relocations to the approaching events; instead, the settlements are often said to be threatened by the environment (landslides, floods, etc.) or presented as a threat to the environment (extension of settlements to forest conservation areas). The argument of environmental preservation was also used to justify a program for the erection of walls (‘eco limits’ to protect the Atlantic forest), 3 meters high, around 19 favelas in Zona Sul, for a total of 11 kilometers in length and encompassing 550 removed families. This program started in 2009 and was heavily criticized in the 280 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES international media. The first favela to be enclosed by walls was Santa Marta (Turcheti e Melo, 2010). This measure, which cost approximately US$18 million, and which was financed by the State Fund of Environmental Conservation (Fecam), can be considered part of the invisibilization strategy, for walls were not only to be erected along forest fringes, but also along connecting roads that are important for the events. Another form of invisibilizing ‘the favela’ refers to the manipulation of the visual representation of the host city in the media: the City of Rio is making remarkable efforts to ensure that the favelas are left out of official promotion photos and advertising videos. It is also remarkable that the term ‘favela’ does not even appear once in the three volumes of Rio’s 419-page bid book (Rio 2016 Candidate City 2009); here the politically correct term ‘community’ is used in its stead. This official language policy, too, can be interpreted as an attempt of (notional) invisibilization of ‘the favela’. Furthermore, favelas are also left out on the Official Tourist Map (RioTur); instead the areas are mostly indicated as green spaces. In this context, there was also a conflict between the City of Rio and Google Maps in 2011. The city complained that the online maps had presented the favelas too prominently and had highlighted comparatively little of Rio’s tourist attractions. The city, fearing that it might suffer damage to its image, asked that the maps be changed. Google complied with Rio’s demands and amended the maps. Thereafter, the term ‘favela’ no longer appeared on the online maps and the areas are indicated as green spaces (Figure 18.4). Intervention Type II: Transformations The second type of intervention represents a more innovative urban policy strategy applied in an effort to deal with the favela as a ‘problematic sign’ and ‘staging obstacle’. It relates to the practice of interpretation and sense-making. This involves firstly governmental attempts to improve the image of the state with regard to how it deals with the favelas and their inhabitants, and secondly the attempts to actively transform the favela image. Against this background, different measures of intervention in the favelas can be interpreted as parts of a three-step strategy of semiotic favela transformation: (1) preparation, (2) remodeling and (3) staging (Figure 18.1). 1. Preparation: The first step is preparation by ‘pacification’. Shortly after the announcement of FIFA’s choice of Brazil as the host of the 2014 World Cup tournament, the government started a large-scale program for the ‘pacification’ of favelas in Rio. The declared goal of the campaign was to improve the general security situation in Rio, as well as to create a precondition for social projects and infrastructural measures in the settlements. The first phase consisted of the massive deployment of BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais), a special military police unit of Rio de Janeiro State. The invasions carried out by these notorious Special Forces were intended to expel, arrest or kill members of drug gangs and to occupy the favelas. In the second phase, police stations of UPP (Unidade de Policía Pacificadora), Rio’s ‘pacifying police unit’, were to be set up in the favelas. The newly established and specially trained UPP police units were to act as ‘community police’ and to make sure that these areas permanently remained free from drug trafficking and armed violence. Their official task was to act as regulators and helpers in the communities, to establish communication and interaction with the residents and to promote the overall acceptance of police presence in the favelas. So far, 38 UPP police stations with a total of 9,543 police officers have been set up (Governo do Rio de Janeiro, 2016) and the two largest favelas, Complexo do Alemão and Rocinha, were also occupied in preparation for the stationing of UPPs. Altogether, the authorities planned to pacify 40 favelas before the FIFA World Cup in 2014, and 100 before the Summer Olympics in 2016 MEGA-EVENTS IN EMERGING NATIONS AND THE FESTIVALIZATION OF THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 281 Figure 18.4 Cartographic invisibilization of the favela Pavão-Pavãozinho/Cantagalo Source: Google, 2013 282 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES (Freeman, 2012; Gaffney, 2010). The program is by no means a city-wide measure; it is confined to selected favelas, and they are not necessarily those with the highest crime rates (Frischtak and Mandel, 2012: 8) but those located in city areas that are strategically relevant to the events. The pacification is a means to fulfill the requirements of FIFA and the IOC regarding the safety of international visitors. With this ambitious program, the state is demonstrating its political power and capacity in matters of public security. However, it is not only the clenched fist of the state that is put on display in the cities and in the media; the state’s helping and protective hand is also skillfully stage-managed. In addition, UPP police officers are trained in media relations. Journalists, social scientists and foreign delegations are welcome to visit UPP stations, where they are supplied with information (on the program’s achievements). This intensive public-relations work has given rise to the predominantly positive news reports. In the media, UPP police officers are presented as close to the community, helpful and friendly. The UPP program is an integral part of strategic city-staging. It is part of a campaign with which the host city seeks to demonstrate its capacity to protect citizens and visitors alike. But the pacifications also create preconditions for a change in the globally communicated image of the favela itself. The program can be seen as a first step in the host city’s strategy to transform the sign ‘favela’ by actively influencing the signification and interpretation in a way that makes it possible to integrate the favela in the sugar-loafsweetened and samba-saturated event-image of the ‘marvelous city’. 2. Remodeling: The second step is aesthetic remodeling (‘beautification’). Remodeling relates to acts of interference into the materiality of the signifier. Some elements of the sign ‘favela’ are deleted, changed or added, with the aim of suggesting other – more positive – ascriptions or interpretations. Many of the massive construction and infrastructural activities in the pacified favelas can serve as examples for this aesthetic intervention. In public speeches, these measures are presented as projects designed for the betterment of the local living conditions; a closer look, however, reveals that many of the developments are largely intended to improve the outward appearance of the favelas or are particularly orientated towards the needs of visitors. For example, in the pacified Favela Mangueira, which is located next to the Maracanã Stadium, a cable car was installed, a samba school designed by star architect Oscar Niemeyer was erected, and public places were tastefully redesigned. As a result of these beautifications, many houses in Mangueira had to be demolished and their inhabitants displaced. A further example is the Cantagalo-PavãoPavãozinho complex, which used to be infamous for its high homicide rates. The favela is located near some particularly popular residential areas at the boundary between Ipanema and Copacabana and is quite visible from the beach. The favela complex was pacified in late 2009. Before the pacification, construction work had already commenced on the new Ipanema metro station. Until then, Ipanema’s middle-class inhabitants had considered this neighboring area extremely unsightly, dubious and dangerous, mainly because of the disorderly appearance and the various – partly informal, partly illegal – business activities. A 64-meter tower with a lift and a viewing platform for tourists constitutes a central element of the upgrading project; it also features a modern bridge construction connecting the tower with the favela. Although it was claimed that the tower was designed to improve the accessibility of the settlement, this oversized building might rather be serving the purpose of remodeling an infamous part of Ipanema so as to meet the aesthetic requirements of the middle class and the tourists. The favela entrance and the houses located there disappeared as a result of the construction project; they MEGA-EVENTS IN EMERGING NATIONS AND THE FESTIVALIZATION OF THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 283 were replaced by iconic architecture and by a clean, camera-monitored square controlled by security staff. The hyper-modern building designed in blue and green and illuminated at night dominates the scenery; it also conceals large parts of the settlement when viewed from below. Another form of remodeling favelas, which clearly aims at a positive change in outward appearance and is primarily orientated towards the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry, 2002), involves the aesthetic interventions made on favela facades. For example, the City invested in paint in order to redesign the roadside structures in the lowest part of the wellknown Favela Rocinha in bright colors. Also, along a major street within Rocinha (Rua 4), houses were revamped in this way. The bright and colorful design contrasts sharply with the usual appearance of the grey or unplastered house fronts inside the favela. The project, dubbed ‘Favela Painting’, conceived by the designer duo J. Koolhaas and D. Urhahn, represents a particularly impressive example of aesthetic intervention. The two designers focused on the facades in the central square at the entrance to the lower part of the first pacified favela Santa Marta. They remodeled the square into a comprehensive work of art. They hired people from the favela, who, after completing a brief course in painting and scaffolding, painted the house facades, following the basic pattern drafted by the artists. The outcome of this work is a colorfully bright ensemble (Figure 18.5). The new facade design in Rocinha and Santa Marta is unusual both for the favelas and for Rio as a whole; yet, the design still provides meaningful aesthetic links. In terms of choice of color and pattern it connects with representations of the favela which are particularly prevalent in the context of city tourism in Rio: the facades apply the same elements of style which are known from favela paintings that are offered as souvenirs on the streets. These pictures, often designed in a naïve, child-like style (Figure 18.6), reflect a favela image devoid of misery, drugs, crime and violence. Instead they draw on notions of an exotic way of life which, though chaotic, is largely colorful, vibrant and happy – notions of ‘the real exotic Brazil’. The examples of activities directed towards changing the outward appearance of the favela (be that by building or painting) can all be interpreted as an expression of a politically initiated facelift for the visitors’ eyes. The intention is not to render the few exposed favelas invisible, rather it makes them prettier, suggesting other, more positive interpretations. 3. Staging: The third step is touristic staging. In addition to governmental attempts to achieve a transformation of the sign ‘favela’ by way of transforming its materiality, the City of Rio has been making efforts to selectively direct the tourist’s gaze and to influence the interpretation of the remodeled signifier. In the process, the city draws upon a trend in tourism which has been spreading in the Global South since the early 1990s: namely, slum tourism, the touristic valorization of urban poverty areas, which mostly takes place in the form of organized tours for visitors from the Global North (Steinbrink et al., 2012). In Rio de Janeiro, favela tourism – the Brazilian version of slum tourism – emerged in the context of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Sustainable Development (UNCED) in 1992. Favelas, already visible in the distance, drew the attention of representatives of NGOs, political activists and journalists, mainly because the police and military had cordoned them off during the conference, owing to security and image concerns. They therefore demanded guided tours of Rocinha, Rio’s largest favela (Freire-Medeiros, 2009). The center of attention was the situation of the socio-spatially marginalized ‘favelados’ (Frenzel, 2012: 52). From these first informally guided tours a commercial tourism branch developed in the following years. Today, there are about ten commercial agencies and many independent 284 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES Figure 18.5 ‘Favela Painting’ in Santa Marta Source: D. Urhahn, with permission of the artist Figure 18.6 Examples of typical favela paintings tourist guides offering tours to various favelas in Rio, and approximately 70,000 Rio tourists take advantage of their offers annually – and an upward trend can be observed (Frenzel et al., 2015). In the early phase of this development, the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry, 2002) was a politicized gaze charged with politico-moral outrage and, as a rule, combined with a more or less openly accusatory side glance at ‘the system’ and at ‘the political class’. Favelas were regarded as a social and political problem, as places of oppression, exclusion and exploitation. Meanwhile, in the course of the commercialization and MEGA-EVENTS IN EMERGING NATIONS AND THE FESTIVALIZATION OF THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 285 professionalization of favela tourism, political concerns have shifted to the background. The main focus today is, firstly, on cultural matters and on the mode of life in the favelas, and secondly, and particularly, on issues of violence and drug-related crime. At least until the pacification of Rocinha in November 2011, crime and the drug war were unmistakably the central topics and gang members carrying assault rifles were the major attraction of the tours. Besides, the tours of ‘Be-a-Local’ are explicitly guided through parts of Rocinha which, both optically and olfactorily, appear extremely run down and dirty. In a bid to meet the expectations of international tourists, private tour companies tend to draw on certain daunting as well as thrilling aspects of the favela imaginations disseminated by the media (Frisch, 2012). It is obvious that such tours hardly serve the purpose of positively changing this image; the hitherto common mode of representation rather reproduces the stereotypes which are supposed to be overcome. If favela tourism is to be valorized in terms of the festivalization paradigm, then the favelas will need to be staged differently. The City of Rio therefore decided to play an active role in favela tourism. In May 2010, the program Rio Top Tour – initiated by the Ministry of Tourism, Sports and Leisure and TourisRio, the urban tourism agency – was created. The aim is to develop touristic structures in pacified favelas. The program’s pilot project started in Santa Marta. Cantagalo and Providência are also among the areas covered by the program. The fact that the then president Lula da Silva personally inaugurated the program highlights the political importance attached to favela tourism. For the project in Santa Marta, tourist maps were produced, bilingual signposts and information boards installed, local tour guides trained, and micro-loans made available for businesses interested in tourism. The tourist attractions advertised in the favela include the ‘Favela Painting’ art project (see above), the local samba school, stalls of local Figure 18.7 ‘Rio de Janeiro from a new point of view’ – logo of Rio Top Tour artisans and a look-out point. In addition, the newly established UPP station is also marked as a touristic site by a plaque explaining the official idea of pacification. By engaging in favela tours, the state actively tries to transmit a differently composed picture and to show the favelas ‘from a new point of view’ (Figure 18.7). The colorful and pleasant aspects are moved to the foreground, which contrasts with what is usually emphasized in most of the established favela tours. In other words: social inequality is deproblematized and the tourist gaze is depoliticized – and that is definitely good for creating a happy festival mood for the visitors. Concluding Remarks: Brazil The housing and living situation of lower income groups probably represents the most sensitive sphere regarding the effects of the recent festivalization trend in the Global South. This is not only because the public budgets of the host cities are strained by gigantic investments, which also tie up important financial resources needed for social housing programs. Additionally, due to the intrinsic logic of festivalization policy, the urban poverty areas themselves represent a staging problem to be solved before the event starts. This, however, is only one possible interpretation. The event-related measures can 286 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF NEW URBAN STUDIES just as well be interpreted in line with the inwardly directed objective of promoting particular urban development dynamics and at the same time as a means serving powerful economic interests: for the host cities, the events constitute an opportunity to legitimize certain policies. The immense pressure resulting from the high expectation of achieving the national goal of successfully hosting the events creates the necessary public acceptance and permits a bundling of capacities as well as financial resources for measures and strategies which would hardly be implementable without the events. In Brazil, this applies particularly to the expensive favela pacifications. The interests behind the pacification program and also the effects of these measures go far beyond the shortterm purpose of improving the security situation in regard to mega-events. The regained state control over the favelas not only creates a secure environment for public infrastructural measures and social programs, but also gives rise to attractive conditions for private investments. Despite the undeniably positive effects for the favela residents, the pacification and the follow-up projects lead to a tremendous rise in the value of land and rents and thus, indirectly, to a displacement of large parts of the resident population. Increases in prices of up to 400 per cent are being reported from some of the pacified favelas (Freeman, 2012). The pacifications will also have an immense impact on the formal real estate and housing sectors. In calculations conducted for the whole city, Frischtak and Mandel (2012) report that the pacifications are responsible for about 15 per cent of the rise in price in the formal housing sector between mid-2008 and mid-2011. In some residential areas directly bordering pacified favelas, real estate prices have already doubled (Freeman, 2012). We can thus assume that in the foreseeable future, gentrification will occur. Medium-income households will move from formal areas into the pacified favelas; and so pressure due to rent increases will be intensified and will lead to favela residents moving out (Steinbrink et al., 2015, Steinbrink and Pott 2016). The examples illustrate how the city of Rio uses mega-events to achieve urban policy goals. With these measures, the state enables the ‘invisible hand of the free market’ to take hold of certain highly attractive areas, areas that have remained outside the sphere of formal economic valorization up to now. SUMMARY Based on research into recent major events, we have suggested five core dimensions to be considered in order to comprehend the logic of mega-event staging, or of the festivalization of urban development in a broader sense: political value; economic relevance; socioemotional involvement; material impact (that is, built environment); and symbolic importance. The articulation and relative weight of each dimension differs depending on the event we are looking at (Olympics versus FIFA World Cup), and on the scale we are focusing on (international, national, metropolitan or the immediately affected neighborhoods, for example, in ‘exclusion zones’ around the stadia, or ‘strategically in the way’ of related upgrading projects). The relative strength of the actors involved (content provider versus national government versus city management versus private sector contractors versus civil society) is equally variable, at least to a certain extent – and when looking at this in relation to the respective research perspective, any one of the five dimensions may become more central than the others. To complicate matters, within this amalgam of interests and fields of action, the relative weight of each element is also subject to an adaptation and transformation of the event itself, since the latter has to be understood as a localized re-production of a potentially global form – constantly refined by integrating the experiences of the former hosts, as well as the translations made during MEGA-EVENTS IN EMERGING NATIONS AND THE FESTIVALIZATION OF THE URBAN BACKSTAGE 287 each implementation and the strong tendencies of streamlining and standardization promoted by the international sporting bodies. In the given political and economic world system, specific national elites have become prone to launch their countries in the bidding process to become future hosts. To understand the potential gains of these aspiring hosts by interacting with the international sporting bodies, with consultants and their national branches, it is, however, not sufficient to focus on economic benefits or on national ‘political capital’ – the interests of the urban stakeholders need to be understood as well. Our claim is that the intersecting motives of staging and ordering the local urban realm have become an aspect of hosting which is increasing in importance. For emerging economies and aspiring nations, representing the new generation of hosts, political reputation and symbolical importance is comparatively more significant (without denying that economic expectations remain a strong selling point). This translates into a mode of urban implementation that pays more attention to the staging of cities as neat and orderly. The production of urban iconographies for non-western settings resonates well with imagined alternative modernities in self-proclaimed developmental states – societal visions with considerable political value are included in this package, and symbolic responses for rapid urbanization as well. Beautification efforts and strategies of ordering are thus embedded in a bigger scheme of institutional empowerment and societal progress by controlling urban design and metropolitan space. 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