Showing papers in "Urban Studies in 2016"

The evolutionary dynamics of entrepreneurial ecosystems

Abstract: Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) consist of interacting components, which foster new firm formation and associated regional entrepreneurial activities Current work on EE, however, focuses on documenting the presence of system components, which means there is little understanding of interdependencies between EE components and their evolutionary dynamics To address these issues, the objective of the present study is to develop an evolutionary framework of EE development that integrates important components from prior work and describes how critical elements of an entrepreneurial system interact and evolve over time The value of this framework in understanding the evolutionary dynamics of EE will be demonstrated by profiling the EE of Phoenix, Arizona The evolutionary perspective developed is valuable because it provides a sense of how history, culture and the institutional setting impact EE It also provides stakeholders with action points to help maintain or propel an EE to the next level This is a dis

The financialisation of rental housing: A comparative analysis of New York City and Berlin:

Abstract: This paper compares how recent waves of private equity real estate investment have reshaped the rental housing markets in New York and Berlin. Through secondary analysis of separate primary research projects, we explore financialisation’s impact on tenants, neighbourhoods, and urban space. Despite their contrasting market contexts and investor strategies, financialisation heightened existing inequalities in housing affordability and stability, and rearranged spaces of abandonment and gentrification in both cities. Conversely cities themselves also shaped the process of financialisation, with weakened rental protections providing an opening to transform affordable housing into a new global asset class. We also show how financialisation’s adaptability in the face of changing market conditions entails ongoing, but shifting processes of uneven development. Comparative studies of financialisation can help highlight geographically disparate, but similar exposures to this global process, thus contributing to a critical urban politics of finance that crosses boundaries of space, sector and scale.

Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment:

Abstract: Urban studies today is marked by many active debates. In an earlier paper, we addressed some of these debates by proposing a foundational concept of urbanisation and urban form as a way of identifying a common language for urban research. In the present paper we provide a brief recapitulation of that framework. We then use this preliminary material as background to a critique of three currently influential versions of urban analysis, namely, postcolonial urban theory, assemblage theoretic approaches and planetary urbanism. We evaluate each of these versions in turn and find them seriously wanting as statements about urban realities. We criticise (a) postcolonial urban theory for its particularism and its insistence on the provincialisation of knowledge, (b) assemblage theoretic approaches for their indeterminacy and eclecticism and (c) planetary urbanism for its radical devaluation of the forces of agglomeration and nodality in urban-economic geography.

Effects of greening and community reuse of vacant lots on crime

Abstract: The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation initiated a 'Lots of Green' programme to reuse vacant land in 2010. We performed a difference-in-differences analysis of the effects of this programme on crime in and around newly treated lots, in comparison to crimes in and around randomly selected and matched, untreated vacant lot controls. The effects of two types of vacant lot treatments on crime were tested: a cleaning and greening 'stabilisation' treatment and a 'community reuse' treatment mostly involving community gardens. The combined effects of both types of vacant lot treatments were also tested. After adjustment for various sociodemographic factors, linear and Poisson regression models demonstrated statistically significant reductions in all crime classes for at least one lot treatment type. Regression models adjusted for spatial autocorrelation found the most consistent significant reductions in burglaries around stabilisation lots, and in assaults around community reuse lots. Spill-over crime reduction effects were found in contiguous areas around newly treated lots. Significant increases in motor vehicle thefts around both types of lots were also found after they had been greened. Community-initiated vacant lot greening may have a greater impact on reducing more serious, violent crimes.

Introduction: The financialisation of urban production: Conditions, mediations and transformations

Abstract: A distinctive feature of urban spaces lies in their high infrastructural density. Because buildings, roads, stadiums, airports are all capital-intensive, they rely in turn on financial infrastructures that circulate not passengers, power or data, but capital more or less temporarily fixed in the urban built environment (Harvey, 2001). Like many infrastructures (Edwards, 2003), financial ones remain invisible to most but for cases of major disruptions. Think, for instance, of how the subprime crisis revealed the interconnection between households’ mortgages and capital markets. This relative invisibility should, however, not obfuscate the importance of financial circuits in the design, construction, exploitation and ownership of the urban built environment (‘urban production’ from here on). Researchers in urban studies unevenly pay attention to financial circuits, understood here as the sociotechnical systems that channel investments in the forms of equity and debt into urban production. Major accounts of city-making under neoliberalisation from the 1990s and 2000s are a case in point. Such studies mainly focus on evolving rationales for public intervention and the resulting changes in public actors’ modes of operation where welfare provision gives way to entrepreneurial policies (Harvey, 1989; Moulaert et al., 2003; Tasan-Kok and Baeten, 2012); the growing importance of private investments and the concomitant reconfiguration of public spending is mostly acknowledged as a contextual factor, while the ‘private investors’ and ‘international finance capital’ targeted by public authorities remain in the background of analyses. There is thus a dearth of conceptualisation and of evidence on how private financiers and investors, collectively or individually, shape or adjust to this new context and on the role played by those acting at the interface between public and private bodies. It is thus important to go beyond simplistic analytical distinctions, such as ‘public subsidies’ versus ‘private investments’ and to scrutinise financial circuits as relevant …

Building cities on financial assets: The financialisation of property markets and its implications for city governments in the Paris city-region

Abstract: The 2008 global financial meltdown has redirected attention to the entwinement of financial markets and the urban built environment. Against that background, recent works in urban political economy have focused on how city governments support the rent-maximisation strategies of landowners, thereby reinforcing ‘the increasing tendency to treat land as a financial asset’ (Harvey, [1982]2006). However, this perspective paradoxically understates the importance of market finance actors, neglecting to demonstrate how, in practice, such financial investors, who have been shown to adopt selective investment practices, shape urban redevelopment projects. In this article, the role of financial investors is analysed through a case study of a large-scale redevelopment project on the outskirts of the Paris city-region (city of Saint-Ouen). The analysis of negotiations over urban design and economic development issues – raised by property developers seeking to fashion commercial properties as investment assets – reveals the unevenness of a local authority’s ability to implement an agenda that potentially diverges from the expectations of financial investors. Accordingly, given the growing importance of investors in the ownership of the built environment, the article considers urban redevelopment as the outcome of power relations that originate in the circulation of investors’ expectations. These expectations are met through translating market finance categories (risk, return and liquidity) into elements of the urban fabric. This bears substantial consequences for policy-making, given the current context of austerity, as municipal authorities are increasingly constrained to rely on property markets. Urban redevelopment projects are thereby increasingly shaped to provide investment assets for financial investors.

Revisiting territories of relegation: Class, ethnicity and state in the making of advanced marginality

Abstract: In the postindustrial city, relegation takes the form of real or imaginary consignment to distinctive sociospatial formations variously and vaguely referred to as “inner cities,” “ghettos,” “enclaves,” “no-go areas,” “problem districts,” or simply “rough neighborhoods.” How are we characterize and differentiate these spaces, what determines their trajectory (birth, growth, decay and death), whence comes the intense stigma attached to them, and what constellations of class, ethnicity and state do they both materialize and signify? These are the questions I pursued in my book Urban Outcasts (2008) through a methodical comparison of the trajectories of the black American ghetto and the European working-class peripheries in the era of neoliberal ascendancy. In this article, I revisit this cross-continental sociology of “advanced marginality” to tease out its broader lessons for our understanding of the tangled nexus of symbolic, social and physical space in the polarizing metropolis at century’s threshold in particular, and for bringing the core principles of Bourdieu’s sociology to bear on comparative urban studies in general.

From gentrification to youthification? The increasing importance of young age in delineating high-density living:

Abstract: This paper considers the importance of age in delineating urban space, the latter operationalised as high-density living. Many cities have experienced an increase in inner city living contributing to gentrification. Today, inner cities contain more amenities, public transit and housing options than in the past but there are also growing affordability concerns owing to rising prices. Especially young adults, sometimes dubbed Millennials, are making location decisions in a context of lower employment security, higher costs and continuing high-density re-development that now extends into suburban areas in some cases. The analysis in this paper shows evidence of a youthification process that results in an increasing association of high-density living with the young adult lifecycle stage. The higher density areas remain young over time as new young adults move into neighbourhoods where there are already young people living, and they move out if their household size increases. Youthified spaces have become char...

Economic transition and speculative urbanisation in China: Gentrification versus dispossession:

Abstract: Gentrification requires properties to be available for investment through market transactions. In mainland China which has gone through transition from a planned to a market economy, it is necessar...

Intergroup neighbouring in urban China: : Implications for the social integration of migrants

Abstract: There is an emerging literature on social interaction and neighbourhood attachment of various social groups in China. However, few have directly addressed the interaction between the locals and migrants at the neighbourhood level. This paper examines the variation of intergroup neighbouring in the city of Nanjing and how housing characteristics and hukou status may affect this process. Measured by intergroup communication and mutual support, this study reveals that migrants are more likely to interact with their urban neighbours, which suggests that migrants might not only interact with each other but also are willing to interact and help with local neighbours. Furthermore, compared with modern commodity housing neighbourhoods developed through the real estate market, older and physically more deprived neighbourhoods characterised by courtyard housing and provisional shelters have higher levels of this intergroup bridging social interaction. This implies that the government’s extensive redevelopment schem...

The developmental state, speculative urbanisation and the politics of displacement in gentrifying Seoul

Abstract: What does gentrification mean under speculative urbanisation led by a strong developmental state? This paper analyses the contemporary history of Seoul’s urban redevelopment, arguing that new-build gentrification is an endogenous process embedded in Korea’s highly speculative urban development processes from the 1980s. Property owners, construction firms and local/central governments coalesce, facilitating the extraction of exchange value by closing the rent gap. Displacement of poorer owner-occupiers and tenants was requisite for the success of speculative accumulation. Furthermore, the paper also contends that Korea’s speculative urbanisation under the strong developmental (and later (neo-)liberalising) state has rendered popular resistance to displacement ineffective despite its initial success in securing state concessions. Examining the experience of Seoul in times of condensed industrialisation and speculative urbanisation helps inform the existing literature on gentrification by resorting to non-Western empirics.

Reconstituting the state: : City powers and exposures in Chicago’s infrastructure leases

Abstract: In the 2000s, cities across North America began leasing existing infrastructure to global investment consortia. Previous evaluations of infrastructure leases focus on the lack of transparency of th...

Pacifying Babel’s Tower: A scientometric analysis of polycentricity in urban research

Abstract: It is sometimes claimed that the degree of polycentricity of an urban region influences that region’s competitiveness. However, because of widespread use and policy relevance, the underlying concept of polycentricity has become a ‘stretched concept’ in urban studies. As a result, academic debate on the topic leads to situations reminiscent of Babel’s Tower. This meta-study of the scientific literature in urban studies traces the conceptual stretching of polycentricity using scientometric methods and content analysis. All published studies that either apply the concept directly or cite a work that does, were collected from the Scopus bibliographic database. This resulted in a citation network with over 9000 works and more than 20,000 citations between them. Network analysis and clustering algorithms were used to define the most influential papers in different citation clusters within the network. Subsequently, we employed content analysis to systematically assess the mechanisms associated with the formation of polycentric urban systems in each of these papers. Based on this meta-analysis, we argue that the common categorisation of polycentricity research in intra-urban, inter-urban and inter-regional polycentricity is somewhat misleading. More apt categorisations to understand the origins of polycentricity’s conceptual ambiguity relate to different methodological traditions and geographical contexts in which the research is conducted. Nonetheless, we observe a firm relation across clusters between assessments of polycentricity and different kinds of agglomeration economies. We conclude by proposing a re-conceptualisation of polycentricity based on explicitly acknowledging the variable spatial impact of these different kinds of agglomeration economies.

An exploration of the importance of the strategy used to identify gentrification

Abstract: Urban scholars have described the importance of gentrification in major cities across the USA since the 1970s. While there is consensus that gentrification shaped social and physical aspects of neighbourhoods, scholars have yet to agree on how gentrified neighbourhoods should be identified. Owing to the lack of consensus, gentrification was measured in a variety of ways, which greatly influenced the neighbourhoods studied in previous research and potentially the findings of research that assessed the importance of gentrification for other neighbourhood outcomes. The current study contributes to this debate by applying and comparing two census-based strategies for identifying gentrified neighbourhoods with a qualitative neighbourhood selection strategy derived from The New York Times to New York City neighbourhoods for the span of years from 1980 to 2009. Results confirm that each of the strategies identified different neighbourhoods and that qualitative strategies for identifying gentrified neighbourhoods...

The re-emergence of self-managed co-housing in Europe: A critical review of co-housing research

Abstract: This article reviews a decade of co-housing studies and publications, to identify major themes and research gaps. Generally, co-housing is seen as a promising model for urban development, and most empirical case studies report active and diverse communities, creating and maintaining affordable living environments. However, numbers are small and there is as yet no quantitative evidence to substantiate the claims. Nevertheless, important lessons can be drawn from co-housing as an integrated practice to meet today’s societal and environmental challenges. Rather than its utopian ambitions, the frictions with current institutional frameworks point the way to transform these into more adequate agents of development.

Urban eco-modernisation and the policy context of new eco-city projects: Where Masdar City fails and why

Abstract: The development of projects for new eco-cities is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon Alleged eco-cities are being built across a variety of spaces via processes of urbanisation triggering substantial environmental, social and economic impacts This article investigates how new eco-city projects interpret and practice urban sustainability by focusing on the policy context that underpins their development The article argues that projects for new eco-cities are shaped in loci by policy agendas tailored around specific economic and political targets In these terms, the ideas and strategies of urban sustainability adopted by eco-city developers are understood as reflections of broader policy priorities The case study employed in this article, Masdar City, reveals how the Emirati eco-city initiative is the product of local agendas seeking economic growth via urbanisation to preserve the political institutions of Abu Dhabi Following the economic imperatives set by the ruling class, the Masdar City project

Transforming transport planning in the postpolitical era

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to examine how the postpolitical era of planning has created both binaries and intersections in the reimaging of transport futures and how the latter precipitates a redefinition of democratic transport prioritisation. Focusing particularly on the point in the transport planning process when urban transport priorities are identified, the paper explores how citizens respond to the inherently political, yet not always democratic, aspects of setting transport investment priorities. This relationship is investigated through a single case study of Melbourne, Australia where a six km inner city road tunnel was deemed a ‘done deal’ by elected officials in the lead up to a state election, removing the controversial project from open public scrutiny. Drawing upon ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews with community campaigners opposing the proposed East West Link road tunnel, this analysis reveals how community-based groups and individual residents alike can evolve beyond NIM...

Do rural migrants ‘float’ in urban China? Neighbouring and neighbourhood sentiment in Beijing

Abstract: Urban China reached 50% of the nation’s population by 2010, mainly as a result of massive rural–urban migration. There is substantial evidence of their social marginality in terms of occupational and housing opportunities. Here we ask about their incorporation into the neighbourhoods where they live. Rural migrants are called the ‘floating population’ in China, suggesting that their residence in the city is only temporary and that they are unlikely to develop strong local ties. This study contrasts the neighbourhood socialising of migrant tenants with that of urban homeowners who were born in the city. It draws on original survey research in Beijing that included questions on relations with neighbours and neighbourhood sentiment. It is found that migrants are more likely to engage in socialising and exchange of help with neighbours, and consequently their neighbouring helps strengthen their sentiment towards the neighbourhoods where they live. It is argued that contemporary social changes – including rising education and homeownership – may actually reduce neighbouring, while rural migrants’ marginality makes them more dependent on their local social network.

Constructing the narrative of the sustainability fix: Sustainability, social justice and representation in Austin, TX

Abstract: In recent years Austin, Texas has gained popular recognition as a ‘sustainable city’ while experiencing robust economic growth. Austin’s ability to resolve many of the political tensions between development and environmental protection have made it a favoured case study for North American policymakers who seek to mimic the ‘Austin model’. However, despite recognised environmental achievements, the popular storyline of Austin’s move toward sustainability overlooks key aspects of sustainable development, including equitable political representation, affordability, displacement of vulnerable populations and other social justice issues. Using While et al.’s ‘sustainability fix’ as a conceptual framework, this paper explores the historical development, ideological construction and strategic implementation of Austin’s sustainability agenda. In doing so, this paper moves beyond a lateral understanding of sustainability rhetoric toward a more nuanced and critical analysis of the selective promotion and implementa...

Introduction: Locating gentrification in the Global East:

Abstract: This special issue, a collection of papers presented and debated at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded workshop on Global Gentrification in London in 2012, attempts to problematise contemporary understandings of gentrification, which is all too often confined to the experiences of the so-called Global North, and sometimes too narrowly understood as classic gentrification. Instead of simply confirming the rise of gentrification in places outside of the usual suspects of North America and Western Europe, a more open-minded approach is advocated so as not to over-generalise distinctive urban processes under the label of gentrification, thus understanding gentrification as constitutive of diverse urban processes at work. This requires a careful attention to the complexity of property rights and tenure relations, and calls for a dialogue between gentrification and non-gentrification researchers to understand how gentrification communicates with other theories to capture the full dynamics of urban transformation. Papers in this special issue have made great strides towards these goals, namely theorising, distorting, mutating and bringing into question the concept of gentrification itself, as seen from the perspective of the Global East, a label that we have deliberately given in order to problematise the existing common practices of grouping all regions other than Western European and North American ones into the Global South.

Making meaningful commitments: Accounting for variation in cities’ investments of staff and fiscal resources to sustainability

Abstract: Environmental sustainability is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. A number of explanations have been advanced for why some local governments make strong commitments to sustainability while others do not. Most of the extant empirical research, however, has relied on models that employ only one or just a few of these explanations. As a result, empirical analyses do not encompass a comprehensive set of variables that account for alternative explanations. This study begins to fill this lacuna by specifying an empirical model that examines six explanations for local commitment towards sustainability: local sustainability priorities, regional governance, climate protection networks, interest group support, local fiscal capacity, and characteristics of the local governing institution. Moreover, we use the designation of human and financial resources specifically for sustainability to operationalise commitment. This is a more substantive measure than has been used in previous studies. We accomplish...

Jiaoyufication: When gentrification goes to school in the Chinese inner city:

Abstract: Gentrification, or the class-based restructuring of cities, is a process that has accrued a considerable historical depth and a wide geographical compass. But despite the existence of what is otherwise an increasingly rich literature, little has been written about connections between schools and the middle class makeover of inner city districts. This paper addresses that lacuna. It does so in the specific context of the search by well-off middle class parents for places for their children in leading state schools in the inner city of Nanjing, one of China’s largest urban centres, and it examines a process that we call here jiaoyufication. Jiaoyufication involves the purchase of an apartment in the catchment zone of a leading elementary school at an inflated price. Gentrifying parents generally spend nine years (covering the period of elementary and junior middle schooling) in their apartment before selling it on to a new gentrifying family at a virtually guaranteed good price without even any need for ref...

Transnational gentrification: Globalisation and neighbourhood change in Panama’s Casco Antiguo:

Abstract: Drawing upon the case of Panama’s Casco Antiguo, this paper establishes the theoretical concept of ‘transnational gentrification’: a process of neighbourhood change both enabled by and formative of a spatially embedded transnational ‘gentry’ whose locational mobility creates new possibilities for profitable housing reinvestment in geographically disparate markets where such possibilities would not have otherwise existed. Globalisation does not just create a common political-economic structure driving urban change or a common ideology for a gentrifying cohort. In this case, it creates historically and geographically specific connections between places, which themselves can become pathways along which gentrification processes propagate, connecting local capital to international consumer demand. The case of the Casco Antiguo offers a provocative inversion of a standard critical narrative of globalisation, whereby capital is freed from national constraints and able to roam globally while people largely remain...

Neoliberalism, economic restructuring and policy change: Precarious housing and precarious employment in Australia

Abstract: Housing, employment and economic conditions in many nations have changed greatly over the past decades. This paper explores the ways in which changing housing markets, economic conditions and government policies have affected vulnerable individuals and households, using Australia as a case study. The paper finds a substantial number and proportion of low income Australians have been affected by housing and employment that is insecure with profound implications for vulnerability. Importantly, the paper suggests that in Australia the economic gains achieved as a consequence of mining-related growth in the early 2000s were translated as greater employment security for some on low incomes, but not all. Enhanced access to employment in this period was differentiated by gender, with women largely missing out on the growth in jobs. For the population as a whole, employment gains were offset by increased housing insecurity as accommodation costs rose. The paper finds low income lone parents were especially vulnerable because they were unable to benefit from a buoyant labour market over the decade 2000–2010. They were also adversely affected by national policy changes intended to encourage engagement with paid work. The outcomes identified for Australia are likely to have been mirrored in other nations, especially those that have embraced, or been forced to adopt, more restrictive welfare and income support regimes.

Urban sprawl as a risk factor in motor vehicle crashes

Abstract: A decade ago, compactness/sprawl indices were developed for metropolitan areas and counties which have been widely used in health and other research. In this study, we first update the original county index to 2010, then develop a refined index that accounts for more relevant factors, and finally seek to test the relationship between sprawl and traffic crash rates using structural equation modelling. Controlling for covariates, we find that sprawl is associated with significantly higher direct and indirect effects on fatal crash rates. The direct effect is likely due to the higher traffic speeds in sprawling areas, and the indirect effect is due to greater vehicle miles driven in such areas. Conversely, sprawl has negative direct relationships with total crashes and non-fatal injury crashes, and these offset (and sometimes overwhelm) the positive indirect effects of sprawl on both types of crashes through the mediating effect of increased vehicle miles driven. The most likely explanation is the greater prevalence of fender benders and other minor accidents in the low speed, high conflict traffic environments of compact areas, negating the lower vehicle miles travelled per capita in such areas.

Virtual special issue editorial essay: ‘The shitty rent business’: What’s the point of land rent theory?:

Abstract: In this introduction to a virtual special issue on land rent, we sketch out the history of land rent theory, encompassing classical political economy, Marx’s political economy, the marginalist turn and subsequent foundations for urban economics, and the Marxist consensus around rent theory during geography’s spatial turn. We then overview some of the contemporary strands of literature that have developed since the break down of this consensus, namely political economy approaches centred on capital-switching, institutionalism of various stripes, and the rent gap theory. We offer a critical urban political economy perspective and a particular set of arguments run through the review: first, land is not the same as capital but has unique attributes as a factor of production which require a separate theorisation. Second, since the 1970s consensus around land rent and the city dissipated, the critical literature has tended to take the question of why/how the payment exists at all for granted and so has ignored the particular dynamics of rent arising from the idiosyncrasies of land. Amongst the talk of an ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘planetary urbanisation’ it is surprising that the economic fulcrum of the capitalist remaking of geography has fallen so completely off the agenda. It is time to bring rent back into the analysis of land, cities and capitalism.

Detroit after Bankruptcy: A Case of Degrowth Machine Politics

Abstract: It is widely accepted that neoliberalism is intensified in times of crisis, and Jamie Peck has argued that ‘austerity urbanism’ has been implemented at the urban scale since the 2008 financial crisis. This article questions whether this narrative of neoliberal expansion is applicable in cities where crisis is so severe that economic growth seems highly unlikely. I focus on Detroit, whose recent declaration of bankruptcy signals the recognition among local officials and elites that the city’s decline cannot be reversed with out-of-the-box neoliberal policies. Instead, the city’s bankruptcy precipitated a breakdown of an interscalar growth coalition, and local actors have embraced a plan for Detroit’s future which diverges from ‘austerity urbanism’ favoured by extra-local investors in significant ways. Importantly, local actors have embraced a plan that seeks to improve the quality of life for the city’s residents in the context of irreversible degrowth. I refer to this as degrowth machine politics and I ex...

Mobile transitions: Exploring synergies for urban sustainability research

Abstract: Urban sustainability approaches focusing on a wide range of topics such as infrastructure and mobility, green construction and neighbourhood planning, or urban nature and green amenities have attracted scholarly interest for over three decades. Recent debates on the role of cities in climate change mitigation have triggered new attempts to conceptually and methodologically grasp the cross-sectorial and cross-level interplay of enrolled actors. Within these debates, urban and economic geographers have increasingly adopted co-evolutionary approaches such as the social studies of technology (SSTor ‘transition studies’). Their plea for more spatial sensitivity of the transition approach has led to promising proposals to adapt geographic perspectives to case studies on urban sustainability. This paper advocates engagement with recent work in urban studies, specifically policy mobility, to explore conceptual and methodological synergies. It emphasises four strengths of an integrated approach: (1) a broadened understanding of innovations that emphasises not only processes of knowledge generation but also of knowledge transfer through (2) processes of learning, adaptation and mutation, (3) a relational understanding of the origin and dissemination of innovations focused on the complex nature of cities and (4) the importance of individual actors as agents of change and analytical scale that highlights social processes of innovation. The notion of urban assemblages further allows the operationalisation of both the relational embeddedness of local policies as well as their cross-sectoral actor constellations.

Effects of China’s urban form on urban air quality

Abstract: Poor urban air quality in China has received global attention. This article analyses the extent to which the urban form of all provincial and prefectural cities in China affects urban air quality. A geographically weighted regression model was used to quantify the relationship between the urban form indices, as well as the satellite-derived pollutant column density of NO2 and SO2. The results show that urban form has a significant effect on the urban air quality in China. The effect of urban form on air quality varies among the cities in this vast region. The compact ratio index is negatively correlated with both NO2 and SO2 column density for most of the cities. An ‘X’- or ‘H’-shaped city has less air pollution than a rhomboid-shaped city when the city is located in northern or central China. In comparison, the fractal dimension index is not a statistically significant predictor of air quality. Urban form can have effects on air quality that are equivalent to some meteorological and socioeconomic factors.

Financialisation, the valuation of investment property and the urban built environment in the UK

Abstract: The financialisation literature has been criticised for its limited empirical base and its failure adequately to link the everyday world with that of high finance. The paper addresses these shortcomings by examining the calculative practice of property valuation. The way that valuations are performed affects their results and, therefore, the operation of the property market. The paper traces the evolving influence of finance capital on the valuation of commercial property in the UK by constructing a historiography of investment valuation since 1960. Traditional approaches to valuation have been increasingly challenged by those derived from financial economics. However, the former remains the dominant method for undertaking market valuation. Its grounding in comparison – a centring and standardising process – offers an explanation for some of the changes in the urban built environment that are ascribed to financialisation. This suggests that a more detailed and historically sensitive interpretation of financialisation is required.