Dissertation•
Business Improvement Areas and the Justification of Urban Revitalization: Using the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique to Understand Neoliberal Urban Governance
01 Sep 2019-
About: The article was published on 2019-09-01 and is currently open access. It has received None citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Urban sociology & Social order.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that to fully understand the impacts of governance approaches on our understanding of cities, urban regions and global urbanism, we must address how urbanism rather than urbanisation is governed.
Abstract: Governance has been a key concept in urban studies since the late 1980s. This paper reflects on its use and development over the past 25 years and identifies contemporary innovations and concerns that will likely define the future of urban governance studies. The paper argues that to fully understand the impacts of governance approaches on our understanding of cities, urban regions and global urbanism, we must address how urbanism, rather than urbanisation, is governed. An attention to urbanism highlights a wider range of scholarly work on how the mutually constitutive relationships between the development of built environments and the identities, practices, struggles and opportunities of everyday social life are governed. In introducing 15 contributions from the archives of Urban Studies, the paper employs a heuristic framing – urban governance studies (UGS) 1.0, 2.0, and beyond – to show that, while governance as a contemporary critical concept gained prominence through the work of Marxian political eco...
80 citations
TL;DR: More than 800 business improvement districts (BIDs) are reviving downtown and commercial areas in North American cities, large and small as discussed by the authors. But, by choosing to view BIDs primarily as a new mechanism for municipal service delivery, Mitchell occasionally misses implications of his own research, such as the leadership many of these organizations exercise in shaping public policy and their emerging role in the management and governance of cities.
Abstract: More than 800 business improvement districts (BIDs) are reviving downtown and commercial areas in North American cities, large and small. Jerry Mitchell’s 1999 survey offers the first independent, systematic census, providing valuable information about their size, budgets, services, and priorities. But, by choosing to view BIDs primarily as a new mechanism for municipal service delivery, Mitchell occasionally misses implications of his own research, such as the leadership many of these organizations exercise in shaping public policy and their emerging role in the management and governance of cities. While originating in North America, city center management organizations are springing up in Europe, Japan, Australia, and South Africa and represent a creative response to suburbanization. This article, written by the executive director of one America’s largest BIDs, looks at their origin and evolution, discusses current trends and new initiatives, and addresses some of the criticisms that have been directed ...
79 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the French pragmatism of Laurent Thevenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour is engaged in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and crit...
Abstract: This article engages the French pragmatism of Laurent Thevenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and crit...
77 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the question of what constitutes natural occurring interaction and the objectivity of sound-image records (SIRs) for fine-grained analyses. But they do not address the problem of data adequacy.
Abstract: Advances in film and video technology in recent years have made in increasingly feasible for students of social interaction to record, for fine-grained analyses, sound-image records (SIR). Such records have two principal advantages: density and permanence. Optimal data continues to require that investigators attend to ethnographic grounding and other criteria of data adequacy. The questions of what constitutes naturally occurring interaction and of the objectivity of SIR devices are briefly discussed.
75 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the internationalization and the contextualization of the North-American Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) model in both Northern countries (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden) and Southern countries (South Africa).
Abstract: This theme issue explores the internationalization and the contextualization of the North-American Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) model in both Northern countries (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden) and Southern countries (South Africa). The collection of articles focuses on key debates surrounding BIDs and presents different theoretical perspectives as well as lines of argument in relation to these debates. Relying on approaches based on political economy and local governance regimes, Foucault- inspired sociology of governance and governmentality studies or critical discourse analysis, the authors discuss the nature and significance of BIDs in relation to state restructuring and the neoliberalization of urban policies and to emergent rationalities and practices of security governance and policing arrangements. Using the recent discussions of policy transfer and 'urban policy mobilities', they look at the international circulation of the BID model and its local embeddedness, exploring the role of the global circuits of knowledge and the ways in which the model has been adopted and reshaped in different cities. Drawing a complex and differentiated picture of BIDs across continents and cities, this collection of articles emphasizes both the need for more comparative research across diverse urban experiences and contexts and the relevance of a relational perspective in urban studies that blurs the traditional lines of separation between studies of North American and European cities, and of Northern and Southern cities.
75 citations