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ABSTRACTS in the alphabetical order

Aksel, Bahar, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Turkey, baksel@msgsu.edu.tr

Transformation from Coffee Houses to Café Culture in Istanbul and its


effects in urban spaces

With its growing population and economy Istanbul is dealing with lots of
changes in every scale. New developing urban areas, infrastructure
investments, physical planning strategies reshape the city according to the
needs of the century. On the other hand, Istanbul tries to have a highlighted a
place in global scale among other competing cities. Global consumer culture
and international investments affect the city’s culture as well as the physical
urban structure. These changes in upper scales affect everyday life and public
spaces immediately. One of the most remarkable changes happened in coffee
consuming places. Istanbul is a city that has a coffee house culture for
centuries. Coffee houses are the public centers of neighborhoods and also
socializing places especially for men since Ottoman times. With global
consuming trends and international coffee chains the culture and also the
reflections to the street life has changed. Café’s started to develop, coffee
chains defined a new trend, brought a new decoration approach to the stores
and a marketing strategy to this old product. New style of coffee consumption
creates a new approach to urban social life for different groups, change street
scene and urban interfaces and defined new gathering places in the city.

Alarcón, Amado, Universidad Rovira i Virgili, Spain, amado.alarcon@urv.net

Immigration and the linguistic division of labor in an industrial cluster.


Romanian migration in the cluster of furniture at Montsia, Catalunya
(Catalunya)

This communication presents the results of a research analyzing linguistic and


cultural integration of Romanians in an industrial cluster in Catalonia. Fieldwork
was undertaken in the comarca of Montsia (semi rural location in southern
Catalonia). The companies of furniture there form a cluster of specialized,
complementary and labour intensive companies. They co-operate and
complement each other in the productive cycle. Furthermore, they are
embedded and linked with each other and with the local institutions by
relationships of proximity and familiarity that reinforce trust in the local
productive system. Competiveness of cluster has been achieved through the
recruitment of cheap labour force. The first source of labour force was the
internal Spanish migration in the 1960’s and 1970’s, coming from other parts of
Spain. Blue-collar workers were Spanish speaking while businessmen and
managers were Catalan-speaking. Towards the late 90’s, a high increase on
demand was triggered by the housing expansion triggering the need of finding
new labour market niches. Those recruited were Romanian immigrants.
Nowadays, this group represents up to a 20% of total workers. These workers
strictly limited to executing simple instructions under the supervision of local
managers. Communication is highly asymmetric, because employees tend to be
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silent. Managers feel that there is no need for complex communicative skills in
order to do this kind of job. The fact of not speaking Spanish or Catalam is not a
barrier for hiring them. There is a widespread perception that these workers,
coming from a former socialist country, constitute a docile and industrious
labour force. Romanians have not been able to get a promotion towards
managerial positions in any of the companies. The semi-rural location and the
strictly national dimension of the companies have contributed to isolate this
cluster from international production and distribution networks. Even the arrival
of workers with more language skills, such as Romanians being able to speak
English and German, has not increased the international dimension and
connection of local managers. However, competiveness is centered presently in
a foreign labour force (Romanians) that accepts low work and employment
standards. Spanish and Catalan are learnt not because of the requirements of
production or job but as assets for integration in the local community.

Alpan, Ahmetcan, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Turkey,


ahmetcanalpan@gmail.com:

The influence of cultural and historical heritage on the creation of new


urban cultures in Istanbul

In the world context which is defined by the neo-liberal economic system, the
cities rule the world. Especially the world cities and the global cities- as defined
by Sassen- are the propellent power of the world economy. Istanbul, as the
most important economical and cultural center in Turkey and one of most
important centers in its region, intends to compete as a global and a world city,
in international scales. To reach this goal, new projects must be developed that
meets historical character and heritage with international ideas and needs. As a
city which is going to be the European capital of culture in 2010, cultural
industries and creative economies have crucial importance for Istanbul. This
paper aims to examine four architectural/urban transformation projects which
have taken place in Istanbul in the last decade, in the context of creative
economies, cultural industries and urban competition:
1- Tophane-i Amire Building, which used to function as a factory that cannons
were manufactured for the Ottoman Empire, and now being used by Mimar
Sinan Fine Arts University as an exhibition center since 1998.
2- SantralIstanbul, which used to function as a power plant, and now beig used
as the main campus of Istanbul Bilgi University since 2007.
3- Istanbul Modern, which used to function as a bonded warehouse, and now
being used as a modern arts museum since 2005.
4- Old Galata Bridge, which is a historical bridge which was built in 1845, and
now hosting the “Istanbul Design Week” once a year since 2006.

Appleyard, Bruce AICP, and Lucrezia Miranda, University of California-


Berkeley, USA, appleyard@berkeley.edu, lucrezia@berkeley.edu

Sustainability by Design: Coordinating Planning and Politics Between the


Neighborhoods and the Region
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Addressing common shortcomings of research and practice, our session will


present best planning and urban design strategies that employ the dual
perspective necessary for achieving a comprehensive set of sustainability
objectives, for the economy, equity and the environment. Applying urban design
to include both the aesthetic form and functional systems needed for effective
planning decisions at both the regional and neighborhood scales, our
presentations and joint paper will highlight both the theoretical and practical
frameworks useful in guiding researchers and professionals through the politics
of working with a diverse range of key stakeholders to effectively achieve global
strategies for sustainability. As well as drawing on the best academic research
on the urban design/sustainability connection, this session and paper will
highlight best practices and lessons learned from Portland, Seattle, San
Francisco and Vancouver, etc, and apply them specifically to Barcelona’s
planning and political context. By focusing on real-world successes with an
emphasis on effective and instructive communicative planning public
participation processes, this session’s attendees will better understand the
opportunities and obstacles to effectively understanding and achieving a
comprehensive set of sustainability objectives through the coordination of
planning and politics between the neighborhoods and the region.

ARAÚJO, Juliana, julianaaraujo_19@hotmail.com, Federal University of the


Amazon – Brazil; Center for Research and Study of the Cities in the Brazilian
Amazon (NEPECAB); José Aldemir de OLIVEIRA, Federal University of the
Amazon – Brazil; Center for Research and Study of the Cities in the Brazilian
Amazon (NEPECAB)

Where are the banks? Cities excluded of the financial system.

Social economic policy in Brazil is based strongly in direct government founding


for the low-income population: elderly, children in school age, special necessity,
ethical groups, forest extractivism communities and many other. This grant is
distributed through the financial system. In Brazil, specially in the Amazon
region, the geographical distribution of the banking system is uneven. The
consequences of this uneven distribution for the city dynamic and in this case
specially for the low income portion of the population and ethical groups, such
as the large native Brazilians living in their traditional manner in the Amazon, is
important for the urban network configuration. With this problematic in mind
three types of financial corporations where chosen for analysis: bank agencies,
lotteries (that in Brazil exercise some banking functions), and private credit
agencies. An urban network along the cities located in hydroviaria channel of
the river Solimões-Amazonas, in the Amazon State, was drawn. The
consequences of this uneven geographical distribution of the financial system is
the result of the empirical study and presented in this text.

Arbaci, Sonia, University College London, UK, s.arbaci@ucl.ac.uk


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MIGRANTS’ URBAN INSERTION AND NEW (?) HOUSING REGIMES IN


SOUTHERN EUROPE: NEOLIBERALISM AND THE RISE AND FALL OF
THE ‘RING BUOY EFFECT’

‘Immigration act as an analyser of the new [and old] territorial processes’ (Tosi,
2000: 1). Since the making of post-war urbanisation, Southern-European cities
have constantly entailed a distinctive territorial correlation between migrants’
insertion processes and housing regimes. Partly explored within the post-war
urbanisation processes, this correlation is currently eclipsed in the
understanding of past and present immigrants’ urban insertion and of
segregation issues. Neighbourhood and city level analyses have been
effectively unravelling complex urban processes and the diverse grained
patterns of ethnic residential segregation across Southern European cities.
Nonetheless, housing regimes and other contextual macro-processes remain
overlooked; their mechanisms of socio-spatial differentiation and particularly
their impacts on migrants’ urban insertion are misinterpreted, often when
context-indiscriminate USA-based references and overgeneralisations from
globalisation discourses are employed. This presentation seeks to investigate
the abovementioned territorial correlation, thus contributing to a more adequate
interpretative framework for the Southern European cases and for policy-
making purposes. It examines the socio-urban impact of housing regimes
before/after the liberation of the housing market (mid-‘80s), by presenting one
particular pattern of ethnic urban segregation - called inverted ‘ring buoy effect’
given its geographic connotation and here identified for the first time. This
pattern is distinctive only of Southern European cities and is/was visible on
those metropolises that, despite the process of ethnic peripheralisation, see the
absence of immigrants’ settlement in those former working-class first peripheral
belts developed during the rural-urban migratory inflows. (Lisbon MA is the
exception that confirms the pattern.) This socio-ethnic mismatch exemplifies
how present changes in housing production/provision and of access to land –
yet strengthening traditional Southern-European tenure-policies - have
generated a distinctive and additional mechanism of socio-spatial differentiation,
and have made it more difficult for current international migrants to pursue an
inclusive housing progression similar to previous rural-urban migrants.

Arapoglou, Vassilis P, George Kandylis and Ion Sayas, University of Crete,


Greece, arapoglv@hol.gr

New landscapes of urban inequalities in Athens: Multiethnic exposure to


affluence or deprivation?

This paper will explore if the segregation of migrants is related to the


landscapes of urban inequalities that have been taking shape in Athens since
the early 1990s. New findings on concentration of housing deprivation of
migrants are discussed in the light of recent research indicating that segregation
of migrants in Athens is weak. Our main concern in empirical terms is to explore
if concentration of the main ethnic groups, which compose the migrant
population, take place within areas of housing deprivation or neighbor to areas
of housing affluence. To this end, we present key indices of concentration,
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centralization, isolation and exposure to various levels of housing deprivation


and affluence (after Jargowsky, Massey & Denton), at census tract level.
Preliminary findings indicate a paradox, namely that whilst migrants’ isolation is
limited they are exposed to both centralized and decentralized forms of housing
deprivation. Although this paradox is “typical” of contemporary processes of
socio-spatial fragmentation we discuss the spatial intersections of class and
ethnic, local and global factors that give shape to specific forms of housing
deprivation in Athens.

Asiyanbola, Raimi Abidemi, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Nigeria,


siyraimi@yahoo.com and demisyra@hotmail.com.

Urban ethno-communal conflicts and social identity in Nigeria: an


empirical study.

In the past four decades, Nigeria has experienced various dangerous scenes of
incessant dysfunctional conflicts. Although there have been various studies on
African peace and conflict, however, when assessed jointly, the publications are
relatively weak in terms of systematically providing empirical evidence to
substantiate its claims. Social identity refers to that part of the self-concept
which derives from one’s knowledge of one’s membership of a social group (or
groups), together with the value and emotional significance attached to that
membership. As such it is derived from the belonging to or affiliation to precise
categories such as ethnic groups with which individuals identify themselves and
which generate a group of internal attributions and external attributions that
define the make up of this identity. As observed in the literature, social identities
are neither merely subjective self-images, nor fixed objective entities. They are
inter-subjective processes and are constantly being re-constructed, contested
and negotiated through discourses and practices. Observation from the
literature shows that one of the major important elements in ethnic conflicts is
socio/cultural identity. In the paper the interest is to examine socio/cultural
identity issues in urban-ethno communal conflicts in Nigeria using Ife-Modakeke
crisis as a case study. This is with a view to have a better understanding of the
challenges facing local urban residents in Nigeria. Among the issues that will be
examined are the construction of social identity, the role people played in the
conflict and in the community as a reflection of ethnic attachment and inter-
personal relationship among the people of the two communities. The data used
in the study is from a larger survey carried out by the author in Ife and
Modakeke communities between July/August, 2006.

Astor, Avraham, University of Michigan, USA, aastor@umich.edu.

Multicultural Celebration or Unwelcome Intrusion: The Politics of Mosque


Construction in Spain

Since 2000, there have been 25 cases of opposition to mosque construction in


Spain. 18 of these cases have occurred in Catalunya, while no more than two
have occurred in any other region. Moreover, despite having Spain’s largest
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Muslim population, Catalunya does not host a single purpose-built mosque.


This paper explains why there has been such strong opposition to mosque
construction in Catalunya relative to other regions with similarly large Muslim
populations. Data is analyzed from four in-depth case studies of recent
attempts to open mosques in Spain. Two of the cases concern instances of
opposition to the establishment of mosques in the province of Barcelona,
Catalunya, and the other two concern the absence of opposition to the opening
of mosques in the province of Málaga, Andalucía. In explaining the variation in
outcomes, emphasis is placed on the degree of compatibility between mosques
and extant urban initiatives, as well as the role of regional nationalisms in
shaping local understandings of belonging. Attention is also given to the
relation of mosque disputes to more general debates over Spain’s Catholic
heritage and the extent to which it should remain privileged in the country’s laws
and built environment. Finally, specific consideration is devoted to how
discourses surrounding mosque construction have shifted with key events, such
as September 11th and the Madrid bombings. This study contributes to our
understanding of the processes shaping the integration of Muslims in Spain,
and in Europe more generally. It also contributes to broader debates
concerning immigrant incorporation, ethnic conflict, and the production of
symbolic boundaries in urban contexts.

Barbon, Angela Luppi, University São Francisco (Itatiba/Brazil) and COHAB


São Paulo (Habitational Company of São Paulo), Brazil, albarbon@uol.com.br

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – POLITICS FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSES AND THE


FACE OF THE CITY

São Paulo is the biggest Brazil’s city and like other great cities of the world has
many urban problems. Understanding housing use is an important way to
understand how the cities’ space is organized. This paper pretends to analyze
São Paulo housing market and how it influences urban organization. This
analysis includes the relations between formal and informal market, its actors
and influences on spatial changes. In São Paulo, it is possible to identify the
transformation in the public politics to produce affordable houses moving from
the exclusive public production in large scale to a crescent participation of
private sector. It is important also to know the time line of public housing politics
and the space production regulatory systems to discuss how the changes can
affect the face of the city. More than the suburban sprawling and fragmentation
evident effects in urban configuration, we are looking for how much this could
be the result of different politics and relations between the public and private
actors in diverse conditions.

de Barros, Marfisa Cysneiros, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco,


Brazil, marfisa@hotlink.com.br

Some considerations on urban policies, democracy and governance in


Brazil
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In the last 20 or so years several developing countries have experienced an


impressive process of decentralization and municipalization of public policies
which have resulted in redefining the policy terms and institutional practices of
the municipalities. In Brazil, the seeking for new institutional arrangements
towards a more effective relationship between government, market and society,
led to the drawing up of sustainable development projects having the
municipality as a reference unit, conceived as a variable form of empowerment
of social energies in the construction of democratic governance. In many cities,
local participatory urban development councils were implemented in view of its
potential to enhance the delivery of services and to reduce corruption and
clientelism, among other benefits. The innovative role sometimes taken on by
local governments and local-level actors has resulted in different outcomes
which still need to be satisfactorily investigated and interpreted. However, some
empirical situations apparently indicate that the idea of “participation in
government” can go far beyond the institutional goals creating spaces for
public-spirit discussion and collective action.

Bernt, Matthias, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ,


Germany, matthias.bernt@ufz.de

Neither Normalisation, nor Decay: Large-scale housing estates in Eastern


Germany

Research on housing estates in Europe is often characterized by an East-West-


Divide: Whereas estates in Western Europe are often seen as places of
problems and decay, estates in Eastern Europe are rather described “normal”
neighbourhoods. The situation in Eastern Germany is somewhat different from
both pictures. Firstly, population decline has become a big issue here, leading
to vacancies and large-scale-demolitions. As most of the demolitions are carried
out in prefab housing estates, the future of this type of housing has become
more uncertain, than ever before. Secondly, due to developments inherited from
the socialist era, as well as the transformation of the housing sector after
reunification, specific trajectories can be found that can neither be described by
the “western” model of decay, nor by the eastern “normalisation”. Using data
from a long term survey (1979-2004) in Leipzig-Grünau I give an insight into
main trends of socio-spatial differentiation and discuss how inherited problems
and new issues interact, leading to a very specific situation.

Bhaskar, Manu (asok_manu@dataone.in) University of Kerda, India

Urban Restructuring in the Developing Countries and Emerging


Inequalities: State-led gentrification-The case of India.

The paper aims to explore the urbanization pattern in the developing countries
since the last sixty years and show how the national development policies was
strongly influenced by the western concept of modernization. Since the 1990’s
urbanization in the developing countries is associated with the transformation of
urban structure resulting from foreign direct investment (FDI) made by
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transnational companies or created and managed by external forces. The


central idea is that the cities are the products of the decisions made by the
capitalist class and political elites. The effect of globalization is another
important characteristic of Asian urbanization. Globalization has led to direct
foreign investment in Asian cities along with the development of a more
aggressive business sector at the national level. This has resulted in the
establishment of corporate sector industries, increased tourism and a rapid
increase in the middle classes. Consequently, there is a demand for
strategically located land for industrial, commercial and middle class residential
purposes. As a result, poor communities are evicted from land that they occupy
in or near the city centers and are being relocated formally and informally to
land in the city fringes from the places of work, livelihood, education, recreation
and from better health facilities. As a result of these changes there has been an
increase in real estate development. This has led to the strengthening of the
nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and developers due to which the
national and cultural heritage and assets are in the process of being wiped out.
The paper through case studies from different parts of India would substantiate
the arguments to show how state-led gentrification is uprooting people of their
livelihood, leading to increasing inequalities between social groups and the
potential for tension on conflict between groups. Therefore tackling of these
problems will test the ingenuity of mankind to the utmost and may yet determine
the capacity for sustained global development in the future.

Bodnar, Judit, Central European University, Bodnarj@ceu.hu

The Art of Public Space and the Politics of Presence

Public space is a delicate art of presences and absences, uses, non-uses and
misuses. This chemistry emerges in the interplay of design, rules, regulations
and practices. The contemporary politics of public space seems to revolve
around the removal of the metics and misfits of neoliberal restructuring: people
who have no power but their presence. The paper is about how this unfolds in
and around the public spaces of globalizing cities, and examines how the
reinsertion of those removed may hold out the possibility of an alternative
politics. The discussion relies on examples of public art that scrutinize the
notion of the public, criticize and overwrite dominant contemporary practices of
public space.

Brand, Anna Livia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA,


analivia@mit.edu

Rebuilding New Orleans: Tensions and Contradictions in Creating a


Sustainable City

For many urbanists, post-Katrina New Orleans presents an opportunity to re-


think the city along sustainable lines. Many neighborhoods are currently
pursuing green designs to replace housing lost to flood waters. Although many
of these neighborhoods have undertaken participatory processes to reach these
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sustainability goals, they have often ignored the deeper potential for economic
and social sustainability, a goal that is aligned not only with the merger of
material and non-material sustainability but with a call for justice as well. The
opportunity in New Orleans is to move beyond surface-level sustainability and
attempt to understand how sustainability might align with social justice.
However, this approach calls for re-thinking political action, participation, and
socio-historical ties to place. It requires understanding the tensions between
distributive and transformative practices in re-making the urban fabric and in
addressing critical environmental issues. This paper critically examines the
sustainability practices that have emerged in New Orleans and theorizes the
potential for deeper sustainability that includes social and economic justice.
Using qualitative research and historical analysis of the city’s social and
environmental settlement, this paper proposes that a deeply sustainable city
calls for the alignment of social, economic, cultural, and environmental justice
with material and non-material sustainability practices.

Breda-Vázquez, Isabel Breda-Vázquez, Carlos Oliveira and Rita Guimarães


(University of Porto, PORTUGAL) ivazquez@fe.up.pt, carlosol@fe.up.pt &
ritalobo@fe.up.pt

Creativity and urban dynamics: analysing social innovations in Porto


Metropolitan Area

Creativity and innovation are now main issues in the literature dedicated to
urban transformations, according to which cities that want to attract talented
people and flourish economically need to generate a favourable “atmosphere”
(Florida, 2002; Scott, 2006). However, these approaches are often criticized for
promoting a limited vision of human progress. They tend to rely almost
exclusively on market economy principles, neglecting other dimensions of urban
development such as social issues, which are particularly important in polarized
contexts, where market forces are frequently unable to provide basic needs
(Moulaert and Nussbaumer, 2005). Social innovation is presented as an
alternative concept, since it aims to integrate social, cultural and environmental
objectives in the “creative cities” agenda through community-centred agency.
Nevertheless, theoretical debates about social innovation used to be focused on
transformations of society as a whole (Moulaert et al, 2005). They barely
highlight territorial-specific aspects such as interrelationships between different
urban functions related with creative activities and the role of urban fabric as an
“incubator” of social innovation (Musterd and Deurloo, 2006). By analysing
socially innovative case studies, the paper aims to bring out these issues in
Porto Metropolitan Area, an agglomeration that over the last two decades
experienced considerable transformations in different domains of urban
creativeness.

Čaldarović, Ognjen, ognjen.caldarovic@ffzgh.hr,


Jana Šarinić, jana-sarinic@vip.hr, University of Zagreb, Croatia
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Inevitability of gentrification - Sociological aspects of urban regeneration


in the transitional society: the case of Croatia

Urban regeneration is usually defined as structural and functional change of a


certain part of the city powered by individual (corporate) or state initiatives.
Many times the question what to regenerate, where and what, why, how and
what to regenerate, remains unanswered. We will address the problems of the
“sudden appearance” of new actors in urban politics and their growing
influences on urban rehabilitation. The role of these corporate actors is more
and more felt due to their financial power and their “connections” with decision-
making levels of city and state administration. The recent proposed
rehabilitation of one city downtown block in Zagreb will be a topic of our case-
study analysis. The citizens protested in several occasions against the planned
project, yet the mayor and city administration decided to continue with the
project that will end in the formation of the dual-city structures. The paper will
connect current situations with the transitional society and its current social and
political organization patterns. Major problem concern the sudden and deep
change - new urban actors replaced formerly existing social ownership and
state interests. It is clear that the overall social and political system is not yet
prepared to cope with the new contradictions and that institutional changes are
to be applied.

Cardoso, Ricardo (ricardoc@fe.up.pt) University of Porto, Portugal

State-led rehabilitation in Portugal and the right to the (branded) city

Established by the central government in 2004, Urban Rehabilitation Societies


(SRUs) have become a fundamental tool for state-led intervention in the many
decaying urban areas across Portugal. Aimed at rehabilitating so-called critical
areas of intervention, these government-owned companies hold a range of
responsibilities which shape new forms of urban restructuring in the country.
After elaborating an intervention strategy translating a specific urban vision for
the defined areas they work in its implementation through real estate mediation
or direct initiative. This paper argues that such rehabilitation procedures are
explicitly contributing for the gentrification of Portuguese city centres and will
ultimately contribute for uneven development across the board.
Focusing primarily on Porto’s case, where “living downtown is like wearing
branded clothes”, the aim of this paper is to depict the specificities of such tools
of intervention while evaluating their patterns of restructuring against a
formulation of the Just City which envisions an urban society allowing for human
flourishing across class and ethnical divides through the specification of a
material right to the city. Therefore, this paper also seeks to contribute for
developing new theories in the intersection between state-led gentrification
research and social justice studies.

do Carmo, Renato Miguel, University of Lisbon, Portugal, rmcarmo@ics.ul.pt

‘Suburbanism as a way of staying alive’: reinventing the rural


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This paper will focus the social transformations that took place in the
Portuguese rural space. In particular, we will study a village (called Albernoa) in
the region of Alentejo (South of Portugal), as a way to characterize how this
place has suffered a deep structural social change. In fact, as resemblance of
what is happened with the major rural areas in the region, this village has
suffered a progressive ageing, and a continuous depopulation. These
tendencies occurred simultaneously with the reducing of several agricultural
occupations and activities. At the same time we identify some dynamic
indicators connected with the increasing of spatial mobility (sprawl) and the
gradual integration of urban habits. Although these modern social factors are
not strong enough to invert the tendency towards a progressive demographic
depression, we can say that urbanisation has swept through the village at such
a rate, that it has led the village further and further away from its traditional
agriculture system. Albernoa is now in the crossroads between suburbanisation
and marginalisation. To analyse these changes we will use a multidimensional
perspective of the concept of social space, based on the theoretical approach
presented by H. Lefebvre, who refers that the space should not be interpreted
as a mere receptacle of the social relationships. On the contrary, the social
space is produced daily in concrete places having for base different kinds of
practices and social representations. The distinction, and consequent
articulation, between the notions of space and of place will help us to look at
this reality as a complex gear from which the rural and the urban do not cease
to reinvent themselves.

Carr, Aitor Hernandez, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain,


aitorcarr@hotmail.com

Urban spaces, anti-immigrant attitudes and their political effects

Migrants that over the last decades have arrived to European countries have
had an intense relationship with cities. Cities are generally the place where they
settle and live in, and, migrants’ public image is in many occasions intimately
associated to certain urban areas and phenomena. In this sense, migrants have
played a key role in shaping the current dynamics of European cities and these
have influenced the social place migrants occupy in society. Following this idea,
the paper’s objective is to explore the role of urban spaces in the anti-immigrant
attitudes present in European societies, focusing its attention in those cases in
which there is a political party that benefits from, and stirs, the negative image
of the immigrant population. The paper will present the literature that has
adopted urban spaces as a factor to take into consideration in the explanation
of these anti-immigration attitudes and their political expressions. It will also
explore the role of urban spaces in comprehending the recent success achieved
by an anti-immigrant political party in a number of mid-sized cities of the
Spanish autonomous region of Catalonia.
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Çelik, Özlem, Orta Doğu Teknik Üniverstesi, Turkey,


ozlemcel79@yahoo.com, and Ibrahim Gündogdu, Orta Doğu Teknik
Üniverstesi, Turkey, gibrahim@metu.edu.tr

NEOLIBERAL URBAN SPACE: A SOCIO-SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF URBAN


REGENERATION IN ISTANBUL

As it is seen in many cities, the city of Istanbul has experienced fundamental


spatial restructuring through gentrification, large scaled urban investments and
urban regeneration projects since 2000s when Turkey has begun to be involved
in globalization process in a more intense manner. In this context the city of
Istanbul has appeared as both a loci and foci of this process. During this period,
in 2004, Istanbul Metropolitan Planning and Urban Design Center (IMP)
founded by central and local authorities in an unconventional manner, emerged
as a new urban governance model. And a group of experts are assigned to
prepare the metropolitan plans of the city in IMP. The main planning studies of
IMP, 1/100.000 and 1/25.000 scaled plans, and its urban regeneration projects
aim to create a particular urban space in which new middle classes and tourists
are invited back to the city center, while disadvantaged groups are excluded
and evicted to move to the peripheries of the city. Our paper will argue that such
a fundamental spatial restructuring process is an integral part of the neoliberal
policies that has been taken a further step, as the country has been much
involved in global flows of capital, especially after her candidacy for the EU
membership.

Connolly, Priscilla, Universidad Autónoma Metropoltana-Azcapotzalco, México


DF. pcd@correo.azc.uam.mx , pconnolly@prodigy.net.mx

The importance of Context and Scale for Measuring and Evaluating


Residential Segregation. Examples from Mexico City

The paper will take up the idea outlined in the session proposal that “serious
analysis of sociospatial issues” need to take into account contextual
considerations, but also suggests that the scale is an important issue when
looking at residential segregation. Questions of context will include the
following considerations: a) The general socio-economic, class and ethnic
composition of the city’s population; b) the housing markets corresponding to
this population composition; c) differential access to benefits offered by
transport networks; d) urban policies and differential relations between the
population and the government (modos de gestión). These contextual factors
affecting urban segregation work at different scales: at an interurban level,
between municipalities or neighbourhoods, between buildings in the same
neighbourhood and even within a single household. Similarly, the effects of the
resulting residential segregation need to be evaluated taking into account these
different scales of operation. These ideas will be illustrated with reference to
Mexico City, based on an on-going research project into urban restructuring and
mobilities.
13

Coppola, Eva Martin and Alberto Martin Perez, Consejo Superior de


Investigaciones Científicas, Spain, evamc@ieg.csic.es and
amartinperez@gmail.com:

Are `ethnic’ conflicts what they seem to be? Construction of ethnicity in


the context of urban transformation: the district of Tetuan Madrid.

This paper aims to analyze the influence of urban structures and city-planning
interventions in social conflicts. These conflicts are sometimes interpreted as
ethnic because of the over-representation of immigrant population in many
urban areas. In these cases, social and political interventions usually focus on
immigrants instead of on other structural problems. So that, as a result of a
process of ethnicity-building, immigration tends to become a social “problem”.
But, are these conflicts really ethnic? Is there any alternative explanation? We
will present the results of a case study: the district of Tetuán, in the city of
Madrid. Tetuán has the second largest immigrant population rate in the city. So
that, the opposition between immigrants and Spanish inhabitants usually raises
ethnicity as an easy explanation to conflicts. However, there may be other
issues disregarded by the public agenda. We will concentrate on three of them:
generational differences (between young people and older adults), social issues
(urban segregation mainly reflecting social segregation instead of ethnicity) and
the need of city-planning interventions (the fight against bad housing).

Costa, Marc Martí i Costa (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, SPAIN)


Marc Pradel i Miquel (Universitat de Barcelona, SPAIN)

Urban creativity in the spaces of capital: the case Poblenou in Barcelona

During the nineties, Poblenou, the former industrial district of Barcelona,


became a place that attracted artists. The closure of most of the industrial
factories due to the structural crisis of the seventies, as well as the
delocalization process to the periphery of Barcelona, led to the availability of
affordable, large spaces in the district. Without a clear city project, the
uncertainty about the future of the district generated a dynamic of affordable
spaces. Former factories were hired by artists, who created new culture based
activities in the district. The city saw the emergence of a cluster of creativity
without the promotion of the municipality. On the contrary, from 2000 onwards,
the city council started a new plan to transform the district. The 22@bcn plan
was aimed at attracting knowledge industries to the district in hopes of making a
cluster of technological industries in Poblenou. The underlying strategy of the
plan has collided with the already creative tenure of the neighbourhood. The
transformation of the district has meant the extinction of some of the creative
spaces and artistic workshops. As in many other cities, the artistic movement of
Poblenou was the first step towards the gentrification of the neighbourhood.
Nevertheless, the artistic movement has been the pivotal axis on which the
social resistance against a profound gentrification of the district has taken place.
In that sense, the artists have been a n important actor in the local movement
opposed to the transformation of the neighbourhood. As a first step, the article
seeks to revise the paradigm on the urban growth based on knowledge and
14

creativity and how that paradigm takes shape in the urban policies of Barcelona.
Secondly, we want to stress the relevance of the artists in the urban
transformation process of Poblenou by studying the development of three
different artistic workshops of Poblenou. We will study the cases of La Makabra
(a squattered centre), Hangar (a rented space ownership of the city council) and
La Escocesa (a rented space ownership of a private landlord). Finally, we put
into relation the relationship between artists, private developers and policies at
the local level to explain the sending-off, the resistance and institutionalization
of the artists.

Deffner, Alex, University of Thessaly (UTH), Greece, adeffner@prd.uth.gr

Popular culture as an element of modernization in Greece: the urban


temporal-spatial dimension

Popular culture has a plurality of meanings which are manifested in its


interrelationship with high culture, in the dualistic conception of culture, and in
the role of subcultures. Popular culture can be considered, especially after
postmodernism, as an alternative form of culture, and, from the moment that
cultural change is connected with modernization, popular culture can also be
considered as an element of modernization. The fields where this attribute is
examined are the following: the relation between modernization and tradition,
the relation between consumption and production, the impact of two of the most
popular arts (music and cinema). The focus is on the urban temporal-spatial
dimension of popular culture as it is manifested in the global-local
interrelationship, the differentiated use of public spaces, and the blurring of
‘urban genres’ (including tourism). The aforementioned elaborations are
examined in the case of Greece, especially in the manifestation of the
construction of cultural identity in public time-space.

D’OTTAVIANO, M. CAMILA L., Universidade São Francisco – Itatiba/SP –


camila.dottaviano@usp.br; SÉRGIO L. QUAGLIA SILVA - Universidade São
Francisco – Itatiba/S-, slqsadv@gmail.com

Urban Regulation and Housing: Challenge in the Brazilian Urban Context

The self-constructed housing in Brazil is a tradition even on big urban centers.


The peripheral neighborhoods are usually irregular settlements, with
environmental problems and with almost no infra-structure and small presence
of the municipality. In 2001 the “Estatuto das Cidades” (City Statute 2001)
established new possibilities for land regulation and regularization as an
alternative for solving part of the housing and urban problems. This paper
analyzes a small town at east part of the State of São Paulo: Amparo. Since
2005, the municipality has been using the tools implemented by the City Statute
in one specific neighborhood: Jaguari. The project pretends to improve the land
and urban regularization, with the implementation of infra-structure services and
land tenure in the Jaguari neighborhood. The Special Zone of Social Interest
(ZEIS) is one of the tools used in Jaguari. The ZEIS has proven to be an
15

efficient instrument to guarantee land tenure, thus avoiding removals. To the


resident population, in general, the land regularization is more important than
the implementation of infra-structure services. The Jaguari neighborhood urban
and land regularization project is a contemporary example of the new
challenges for architects, planners and public administrators in urban context of
the developing countries.

D’Ovidio, Marianna (University of Milano-Bicocca, ITALY)


marianna.dovidio@unimib.it

The field of fashion production in Milan: past and present

The paper addresses the field of creativity in an urban environment, exploring


the case of the fashion industry in Milan, a sector which undoubtedly improves
the economic wealth of the city. Nevertheless, more and more fashion operators
and critics are today lamenting that the fashion industry is living a period of
crisis, not (yet) from an economic point of view, but regarding creativity and
innovation. In order to clarify the nexus amongst fashion industry and the
creativity of the city, we will look at the history of the fashion industry in Milan, in
particular at a moment when the synergy between creativity and fashion
seemed to be at its top. In the late Sixties, Milan viewed a strong push to
innovation and the art; institutions played a very important role in spurring
creativity and art to diffuse within the folds of the urban life. What were the
social conditions which allowed such situation to occur? In order to perform our
investigation we will use Bourdieu’s concept of field of cultural production, which
enables us to reconstruct the frame of actors, institutions, networks, elements
characterising a given artistic, creative or cultural field. We will apply the frame
both to the Creative Milan of the Sixties and to the contemporary Milan, in order
to understand the differences between the two situations and in particular in
order to clarify the relations between cultural productions and institutions. It will
be demonstrated that the potential development for the city of the fashion
industry is put in danger by the looseness of the relations of institutions with the
creative sectors in general and with the fashion industry in particular.

Ferm, Jessica (Bartlett School of Planning, UK)

Emerging policies for the provision of affordable workspace in London appear at


face value to be addressing issues of marginalisation of small, cost-sensitive
businesses. This paper will argue, however, that the concept of affordable
workspace is being misused in order to support the growth of creative industries
- now one of London’s most important exports - thereby helping to sustain its
image as a dynamic world city and supporting its economic growth. At the
possible expense of other UK or European cities. This is a problem for two
reasons. First, economic growth is not equivocally a good thing; as well as
generating wealth, the intensifying pressure of property prices and rents creates
insecurity for low- and middle-income households, exacerbating poverty.
Second, the provision of affordable workspace interferes with the natural
process of regeneration and gentrification which can be catalysed by creative
16

industries and could benefit other cities. Supporting this assertion is the
argument that there is not a shortage of affordable workspace in the UK overall,
the problem is that it is not provided in places (mostly London) where there is a
demand. So, what could we do to stimulate a more decentralised development
of creative industries in the UK?

Ferro, Anna, University of Milano, Italy, anna.ferro@unimib.it

Framing the concept of transnational entrepreneurship in Italy.

Economic transnationalism and transnational entrepreneurship represent a


relevant facet of international migrations, referring both to economic integration
patterns and outlines in destination countries (particularly related to the
entrepreneurial occurrence), but also to the potentials of (social, family, formal,
informal, economic) networks in shaping major processes (ie.
internationalization of trade, increased import-export relationships, interfirm
relationships and global market connections, economic and social development
in origin countries etc.). There is no exclusive explanation why migrants become
transnational entrepreneurs as it relates to a compound of different factors:
labour market opportunities (or segregation and blocked-up mobility),
ethnic/local/mixed market demand and chances, international market
knowledge and differentials, previous entrepreneurial experiences, social,
cultural and human cultural availability etc. Certainly, the entrepreneurial
pathway and the transnational attribute are interlinked to individual experiences,
but also to structural conditions. With this paper we reason about the
phenomenon of migrant transnational entrepreneurship considering a) the
reason behind: why migrant entrepreneurs opt for a transnational choice
(verifying the importance of previous entrepreneurial activities, the existence of
family-business networks, the globalization of markets and products etc). b) The
two-sided development effect, in the origin and destination country. To what
extent entrepreneurship responds to labour market mobility/segregation and
economic integration in the destination country? and also, to what extent the
origin country is directly involved in productive/trading/transnational activities?.
Overall, we intend to verify to what extent is the migrant activity a spin off for
larger internationalization processes?. c) What can we infer from transnational
entrepreneurship at large, in terms of migrant community linkages, cultural and
social exchanges, individual transnational behaviours, formal and informal
routes, institutional programs versus everyday practices etc.
This paper intends to consider the Italian case, relying on different sources of
information that could help framing the discussion. In particular, fieldwork is
based on an analysis of transnational activities in Milan (in depth interviews to a
mixed range of migrant entrepreneurs in the city), on the analysis of a dataset of
transnational entrepreneurial proposals/projects from Senegalese and
Ghanaians in Italy (applying to the IOM-MIDA Migration for Development in
Africa Project), and from Andean migrants (responding to a Cespi-SID
Transnational Entrepreneurship Support Program).
The contribute of this paper stands upon the lack of studies on transnational
entrepreneurship in Italy, the possibility to access different and original sources
17

of information and the relevance of this socio-economic feature both in


relationship to integration processes and transnational linkages.

Frey, Oliver (University of technology Vienna, AUSTRIA)


oliver.frey@tuwien.ac.at

The Amalgamated City: Creative Clusters and Loft-Working in Vienna

The scientific community of urban research increasingly supports the idea that
globalisation has increased the importance of (urban) places such as districts
and public places for the self-organisation of both knowledge-based service
society and civil society (‘glocalization’). Even if virtual communication is
opening up completely new worlds of information exchange and
communication, the local/regional level based on face-to-face contacts
becomes more and more important for anchoring economic, cultural, and social
processes. This paper will suggest some of the ways in which places and
districts at inner city sites are contributing to a renaissance of the European City
by way of their role as `vibrant places´, both through processes of gentrification
processes and as being a location of creative industries. As Läpple (2001,
2003) has clearly shown, at ‘successful’ creative places there is a tight relation
between new ‘weak ties’ of civil society supporting new forms of social
cohesion. The variety of creative industries ranging from successful market
presence networks to fluid cultures/scenes of events and recreation has
developed creative clusters in inner city districts. Moreover, economically
successful creative industries need the ‘amalgamization’ of these ‘sticky places’
to build these creative clusters and networks. Cities have always had places
where the production and consumption of cultural goods happens. In this
context, creativity and knowledge have played an outstanding role for the
development of new ideas and goods. During recent years, scientific literature
has again addressed these creative characteristics: terms such as “Creative
City” (Landry 2000), Cultural Industries” (Wynne 1992), Milieux Innovateur”
(Aydalot 1986), or “Creative Class” (Florida 2002) are examples of combining
creativity and urban life. The common diagnosis is that cities and particularly
urban inner-city districts provide specific conditions for creative innovation in the
context of knowledge and culture production and that there are new kinds of
social community in the sense of newly regulating ways of work and life. This
potential of cities in the context of a knowledge society might contribute to a
“renaissance of the city” (Läpple 2003). This paper is based on an empirical
study and PhD project investigating this relationship and describing four places
of cultural production in contemporary Vienna. Using qualitative field research
methods (30 biographical-narrative interviews with an approach to spatial
mapping by Georgaphical Information Systems) this study will examine four
traditional industrial places in terms of their spatial cluster of cultural workers.
The analysis of the four places of “loft working” (see Zukin 1988) (a former
screws factory, a former chocolate factory, a former milk center and old trade
centers) will identify the three following resources: "space-resources", that is the
spatial-local work environment, "we-resources", i.e. networks and social capital,
as well as "I-resources", that is the knowledge and creative abilities of
participants. The concept of an "amalgamated city" aims at a mixture of different
18

places to form the urban spatial space of use, perception, and living. The
"amalgamated city" names a) the melting into one of places (physically-
materially) and the social (at least for the moment) and b) the
interdependencies of places due to actors moving around among them (also
information, images, streams of money and goods). For the use of regulations
and the setting of norms, making flexibility and diversity possible for spatial
development means keeping open every possible future of use and
development, city development not clearly determining how every possible
future should be regulated. In order of pushing through the various concepts of
so-cial and cultural life in an amalgamated city, city development must also
invent tools of "non-planning". "Planning the non-planning" allows more flexible
reactions to social and group-specific or also individual change of needs and
situations in life. The actors within the "crea-tive milieus" may themselves
design, organize, and utilize the thus resulting leeways - sup-ported by tools of
"non-planning".

Fujita, Kuniko and Richard Child Hill, Michigan State University, USA
fujitak@msu.edu, hillrr@msu.edu

Tokyo’s Urban Redevelopment Projects and the Post-Developmental State

There is a near consensus in the Japanese urban literature that Tokyo’s


neoliberal turn in housing and land use policies is causing growing spatial
inequality among the city’s communities. By contrast, this paper interprets
changes in Tokyo’s urban redevelopment policies—seemingly state-led
gentrification—and the effects on Tokyoites as part of the Japanese
government’s regime shift from a developmentalist to a post-developmentalist
state. The paper focuses upon three change dimensions: (1) ideological,
institutional, and political changes in the developmental state over the past two
decades; (2) changes in urban redevelopment policies and the forces and
actors involved in policy making in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG);
and (3) changes in TMG’s relations with the central government connected to
the political devolution reform program. Then we evaluate the effects of current
urban redevelopment projects on Tokyo’s communities, compared to past
experiences. We argue that Tokyo’s urban redevelopment projects embody a
state led mobilization strategy to counteract economic stagnation in which the
state continues to facilitate and guide private sector investment in desired
directions. The paper concludes that Tokyo’s redevelopment projects indicate
the Japanese state’s ongoing regime shift toward a post-developmental state.

Ganau, Joan, Universitat de Lleida, Spain, ganau@geosoc.udl.cat

Subsidized museums and private arts. Different approaches from


Barcelona and Philadelphia.

Arts and culture have placed a primordial role in the urban renaissance of many
cities. These two factors have contributed to the urban renewal of their centres
and helped to attract both tourists and “creative class”. Barcelona and
19

Philadelphia are both second cities and share an industrial past and an
important crisis in the 70s. They have also followed quite similar paths in their
attempts to adapt to a new post-industrial period. Culture has been used to
great effect in changing their images, redefining their economies, promoting
tourism and stimulating creative local economies. On the other hand, they are
also quite different in other aspects. In this paper we study the role played by
public and private investment in culture and art venues in these cities: more
public effort in Barcelona and more private collaboration in Philadelphia. The
objective is to show lights and shadows of two options and how they result in
different urban planning models.

Gómez, Mariana, Investigadora del Área de Estudios Urbanos, Instituto de


Investigaciones, Gino Germani, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Benito Karina, Investigadora de Área de Estudios Culturales, Instituto de
Investigaciones

Transformation of the space in Buenos Aires city: The role of the cultural
policies from the end of the convertibility.

This research arises immediately after the intensive changes registered in the
City of Buenos Aires, specially linked to the promotion of the tourism and the
culture, from the devaluation of the Argentine currency in the year 2002 and
with the consistent one “boom tourist". This study proposes to analyze the
actions of the local government in the production, elaboration, promotion and
diffusion of the city across the cultural policies. It is a question of analyzing the
impact of such policies on the city of Buenos Aires in its differents modalities
and the level of development that it has facilitated. In this sense, certain areas
of the city turn out to be paradigmatic to describe the orientations of the cultural
policies, since in them there is constructed a way of "thinking" and "doing" the
city. In this respect, is observed a mercantilización of the culture and try to
explain of the role that is playing the cultural policies in the invention, not only
of the cultural value of the (tangible and intangible) heritage, but also the culture
and the tourism as economic resource.

Gork, Reyhan Varli (Middle East Technical University, TURKEY)


rgork@metu.edu.tr

Creating ‘the Antalya Golden Orange Eurasia International Film Festival’


to Create a New Antalya

In order to compete with other cities, ‘urban elite’ seek to find new ways for
reshaping the city in creative manner. If creativity is a way of discovering
previously unseen possibilities it can not be reduced to “removing bureaucratic
obstacles to creativity” which Bianchini and Landry assert in their book The
Creative City. If it so, in other words, if creativity means merging into neo-liberal
policies to reduce the role of bureaucracy and politics in the management of the
economy and to unfetter the business from the burdens imposed upon it by the
20

regulatory environment, one can easily believe that the Mayor is the most
creative actor in Antalya. As he declared in an interview:
I have decided to make Antalya fly. In order to make this possible, I am going to give way
to private sectors. […] We are going to turn the Antalya National Golden Orange Film
Festival into an International one like the Cannes Film Festival. […]
This paper aims to analyse the cultural policies for transforming “the Antalya
National Golden Orange Film Festival into an International one”. For this
purpose, the field research is conducted in Antalya based on the realist
methodology by using the various tools and techniques of qualitative research
method of sociology. Following the Antalya National Golden Orange Film
Festival since 1964, the Golden Orange Eurasia International Film Festival
since 2005 and the Golden Orange Film Market Fair Events since 2006 are the
two striking examples to industrial cultural policy which focuses on the local
production of cultural goods to be consumed nationally or exported through the
mass media. Research shows that the crucial intention for organizing the
Golden Orange Eurasia International Film Festival can be described as to
nominate a fourth center of film industry in Antalya, in between Asia and Europe
beside other recognizable centers in the world, namely Hollywood, Europe, and
Bollywood.

Grossmann, Katrin, UFZ, Germany, grossmann@ufz.de

Sustainability – a virtue out of the necessity

The presentation will explore, how dynamics of urban shrinkage affects


mindsets. The discourse about shrinking cities in Europe, mainly in Germany,
announced a shift of paradigms in recent years. The growth paradigm, the
assumption that a good performance of a city is characterised by growing
economic activity, growing size and number of inhabitants, has been challenged
by an ever growing number of shrinking cities all over Europe. Because fertility
rates have in many European countries dropped below reproduction level, this
trend is likely to increase (Mykhnenko and Turok 2007, Atlas). But what comes
after the growth paradigm? Probably not a “shrinkage paradigm”. Widespread
patterns of thinking that conceptualise city development as dependent on
economic fortunes, loose ground with the discovery that cities and their
population are just as strongly influenced by demographic trends. This then lead
to a relatively young discourse among scientists and practitioners about the
assets and drawbacks of urban shrinkage. Based on a case study about the
discourse on the shrinking city of Chemnitz in Germany, I will argue that the
shrinking process paves the way for concepts that are based on integrative
approaches to city development. These concepts share a lot of characteristics
with the sustainability debate, like a long-term perspective, the integration of
different dimensions of development or the call for participation. It is mainly two
features of urban shrinkage that open fields for integrative approaches: 1) a
physical effect: brownfields and housing vacancies call for integrative solutions
when there is no economic land use pressure. 2) an effect on the process:
when one needs to manage decline instead of steering growth, more integrative
governance approaches are needed. That brings in different perspectives and
21

dimensions of city development. The connection between process and form


here comes from an empirical change of context that irritates dominant
concepts.

Guzmán, César Concha, University of Barcelona, Spain,


cesarguz@hotmail.com

Squatter movement in Europe: Sources of variation and political dynamic


of the mobilization

The squatter movement is one of the actors in the urban arena in several
European cities, and in many of them has played a leading role in the
contestation to large urban regeneration plans and new urban policies. The
squat embodies a form of political claim over urban issues. Despite similarity in
the nature of its political discourse, there are different types of squatting, which
may represent diverse models of contestation. In cities where the movement
was carried out just during the last two decades (e. g. many Spanish cities), its
development has taken place along with the raise of housing prices and high
rates of real estate’s construction. Whereas, in European cities which saw the
origins of the squatting as social movement in the early seventies, (e. g.
Amsterdam or Milan) this movement has reached a different profile, both
regarding the kind of organizations involved and the institutional responses.
Although there is an important tradition of research about social mobilization
both in the field of social movements’ theory and urban studies, there is little
investigation about radical movements in urban settings. Those investigations
have been formed basically for case studies; which mainly consist of structural
approaches that use ethnographic or historical methodologies. In these cases,
the variation is explained by structural factors in longitudinal perspective. Unlike
these approaches, this presentation aims to identify the set of variables which
bring about the squatter movement emergence in selected cities of Western
Europe, and to distinguish patterns of activation and development of radical
movements in urban settings by taking into account interactions between
factors. In order to illustrate the argument we will show up some evidence
regarding these selected cities.

Haila, Anne anne.haila@helsinki.fi University of Helsinki and Wing Shing Tang


(wstang@hkbu.edu.hk) Hong Kong Baptist University

Is there gentrification in China?

The Land and Administration Law of the People’s Republic of China stipulates
that land in the urban areas of cities shall belong to the state and land in rural
and suburban areas shall belong to rural collectives. The rapid urbanization has
left in the middle of urban areas, rural villages (villages-in-the-cities,
Chengzhongcun) where peasants cannot anymore cultivate their land nor take
rural jobs because they do not have urban household registration. The only
option for these heroes of the socialist period to survive has been to become
landlords which were in the socialist period regarded as class enemies.
22

Peasants have managed to negotiate with the local government for the use of
some part of the collectively owned land (less than 10%) (so called keep-on-
land (liuyongdi)) to develop housing for immigrants migrating to cities from all
over China. As a result urban villages have the whole variety of ethnic diversity:
from Hunan to Sichuan. The paper will analyze how the state, local state and
peasant developers co-operate and negotiate in order to develop land and
housing in urban villages and discuss the changes in the class and ethnic
composition in urban villages.

Hatuka,Tali, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, hatuka@mit.edu.

Circles of Urban Violence: Paris 2005

Many nations today are marked by a growing sense of social alienation, leading
to marginalized and disenfranchised communities increasingly prone to violent
actions. Unlike wars, this growing phenomenon takes place on a daily basis
within the boundaries of nation-states, essentially resulting in a new kind of
urban warfare and social aggression over resources and power. To what extent
is this warfare derived from racial tensions and class conflict? The paper looks
at this socio-spatial dynamic through the concrete place, the public arena, which
serves not merely as a locus to conflicts but is part of it, as a catalyst, as a
symbol, as material. Taking the 2005 riots in France as a point of departure this
paper explores the interrelationships of aggression, alienation and urban space
in order to expose the intensifying waves of social aggression within urban
habitats. The 2005 French riots, provide a case to be recognized for their
significance beyond French national boundaries.

Hernández-Medina, Esther, Brown University, USA, esther@brown.edu

Synergy, Mediation, or Exclusion? Globalization, Citizen Participation and


Urban Policy in Mexico City and São Paulo

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of ongoing ethnographic fieldwork


about citizen participation in urban policy in Mexico City and São Paulo. Does
globalization worsen or, on the contrary, help to transform political inequalities
between elite and marginalized groups? More specifically, why do the two Latin
American cities that are most integrated in the global economy follow such
different trajectories of citizen participation in public decision-making in spite of
globalization’s supposedly homogenizing effects? Mexico City and São Paulo
share striking similarities in terms of their integration into the global economy,
the social and spatial changes resulting from such integration, and the crucial
roles they play in their countries’ political structures. Nonetheless, these cities
exhibit divergent paths regarding elite vs. marginalized groups’ engagement
with the state. Even though elite groups are highly influential in both cities, there
are important differences in terms of marginalized groups’ participation. Less
powerful civil society actors are able to influence and, at times, significantly
transform decision-making processes and public policies in São Paulo. In
contrast, their counterparts in Mexico City often fall back into patterns of
23

retrenchment since they usually do not have a say regarding public policies
affecting their lives.

Hillmann, Felicitas, Bremen University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Human


Geography

Big Ships at the Horizon: Genoas transformation of the urban landscape

20 years ago Genoa was an industrial city in decline. The ailing port and heavy
industry on the western outskirts defined the city, and there was hardly any
tourism. Today Genoas urban landscape could present itself as a fresh and
modern European city, the vertical city structure had been enhanced, the former
port transformed into a tourist magnet. However, the elements of this new
urbanity evoke a déja vu: the reconstituted urbanity resembles a facsimile of the
modern Europe as portrayed in the urban developers’ trade journals. It was both
impulses from outside that prompted Genoa onto this development path, as well
as the endogenous potentials that lead to the accumulation of already existing
resources. In my lecture I will entangle the process of transformation and I will
show that governance could be attained rather through “soft strategies” like
strategical and on the surface democratic forms of planning. Such “soft
strategies” went as well along with the use instruments of “European planning”
like URBAN II and the participation in big events as catalysators for urban
develoment. The intelligent re-evaluation of the historical heritage in the center
and its integration with modern architecture paved the way for social
restructuring also. The dismission of the social question and the exclusion of the
periphery turn out to be integral part of the transformation.

Ibarra, Guillermo, Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa, Mexico,


gibarra@uas.uasnet.mx

The neoliberal urbanization of Culiacan, environment, and the new


grassroots movements

All kind of cities became global with the new round of capitalist urbanization,
notwithstanding of its size and regional location. The cities are facing new
processes of suburbanization, exopolization, physical and social fragmentation,
are experiencing a great obsession for security that led to the proliferation of
gated communities; it is raising a new flexible and service economy connected
to global markets, new segmented labor markets are arising, it is growing a new
underclass, a new postmodern sensibility, and new political rules commanded
by an entrepreneurial elite with public agendas oriented to the competitive of
cities. Culiacan, capital of the Northern State of Sinaloa, number 16th in the
urban hierarchy of Mexican cities (720,000 inhabitants in 2007), is experiencing
a neoliberal urbanization that undermine its historical and ecological landscape,
which collapse the riverside of its three waterflows (Humaya, Tamazula and
Culiacan). The urbanization is leaded by a few big developers connected with
local commercial retailers (HOMEX, COPPEL, LEY, VIZUR). The entrepreneurs
integrated several spurious NGO’s for blocking the urban political process, to
24

inhibit the grassroots movements that challenge its mega projects. The Coppel
group has the control of the boards of the Urban Planning Institute of Culiacan,
the Botanical Association of Sinaloa, Artistic society of Sinaloa, Sinaloa
Ecoregion, and so on. These organizations rule different projects: the downtown
redevelopment, the new urban system transportation, the so-called “Riverside
Park”. Recently, new urban environmental grassroots movements are pushing
for new rules in the urban political machine, appealing for accountability and
transparency on urban projects. In this paper, we shall analyze the new urban
political actors in Culiacan and the new grassroots movements from the
perspective of the critical geography.

Ibarra , Jorge and Blas Valenzuela, epifanioibarra@hotmail.com,

Collective participation in the urban restructure process of the inner city


of Los Angles California

Boyle Heights is a poor Mexican barrio located in the inner city of Los Angeles
city, featured for to be overcrowded and for the insecurity. Because of this,
since 2004 the local government begun to implement in this neighborhood, an
urban restructure project called “Adelante East Side”, which contemplate the
citizen participation and overview throughout community forums where the
inhabitants can express their opinion. Notwithstanding, the residents of Boyle
Heights have realized that this project is an attempt to evict the poor from this
area in order to construct high value residential projects, also they found the
community forums just as a mechanism to legitimize this capitalist urban
restructure process . In this sense, this paper analize how the community now
are organized by their own means and funds for participate independently from
the government giving, under their own conditions, a real social sense to the
planning in the city.

Johnston, Lauralyn, York University, Canada, lauralyn@sympatico.ca

Roller-coasting in the Zwischenstadt: An examination of place and


mobility at Canada's Wonderland

This paper explores the mobility and moorings, soft and hard infrastructure and
related image production of Canada’s largest private theme park. Using
theories of the Zwischenstadt and neoliberalism it reveals some of the trends of
uneven development that recur in both theories. Beginning with work on the
‘mobility turn’ of geography we can examine the infrastructure or ‘moorings’ that
have enabled the growth and development of the Zwischenstadt. The
Zwischenstadt would not exist in turn without the moorings of mass hyper-
mobility, creating unsustainable urban form enabled by the neoliberalized
market. This is legitimated by shared cultural understanding of movement and
place, replicated and propagated through image-production and the state. By
exploring mobility and the car-culture of the mega-amusement development one
can address questions of environmental sustainability and equity, access and
competence of infrastructure in the space of flows.
25

Jonas, Michael, Institute of Advanced Studies,Department of Sociology


Working Group ‘steps’, Stumpergasse 56,A-1060 Vienna,Austria
jonas@ihs.ac.at

About an urban development strategy: The case of the Dortmund-project

If one is searching an illustrative example of a neoliberal urban development


strategy in Germany, the case of the so called dortmund-project is a good one.
With a population of roughly 600,000, Dortmund is one of Germany’s larger
towns and is part of the Ruhr-area. Until the end of the last century large parts
of the local beer, coal and steel industries collapsed and destroyed 80,000 jobs.
The demise of the heavy industries has left areas of several hundreds hectare
contaminated grounds, where industrial plants once used to be. Since the year
2000, the so called dortmund-project – a ten-year project initiative concerned
with regional development – is following the aims of creating 70,000 new jobs
and of redeveloping the old industrial spaces. As a rule official statements for
example of the Dortmund office for the promotion of trade and industry entails
the story, that this task force was initiated by the Thyssen-Krupp AG, the local
government and the management consultancy McKinsey and Company in good
co-operation to transform the “Old Dortmund” to the “New and fast Dortmund”.
Using concepts of network sociology and conflict sociology as well as empirical
data like interviews and others the planned paper calls this story into question. It
analyses the implementation of the local development strategy and task force
as a result of co-operation and conflict processes between a heterogeneous
and by far larger group of actors.

Kalia, Rajesh, (rkalia69@gmail.com) Guru Nanak Dev University

Social implications of the state-led gentrification: A case study of the core


and the periphery areas of the holy city of Amritsar

It is being generally argued that the process of urban development in India and
so in Punjab is not equitable and therefore is not sustainable. Social Sciences
have increasingly started to debate the model of development-a direct offshoot
of globalization-that currently dominates the world. In the recent past, the state-
led gentrification initiatives under Jawahar Lal Nehru National Urban Renewal
Mission (JNNURM) by the municipal corporation in coalition with private
developers have uprooted few hundred families and small business
establishments from the core of the city of Amritsar. All this has been done in
the name of development and beautification of the area around the Golden
Temple Complex, the most popular holy Sikh shrine. This has led to some
serious implications not only for the uprooted working middle class and the poor
who have been forced to move to the fringe areas of the city but have also
affected the social fabric of the community life. The present study is based on
empirical investigations and it (i) explores the logic and motive of state-led
gentrification and the role of private developers. (ii) examines the impact of
displacement on the uprooted in particular and the community life of the city in
26

general and (iii) tries to see implications for the working middle class and the
poor on account of this state-led urban restructuring.

Kamibayashi, Chieko, Hosei University, Japan, c.kamibayashi@cpost.plala.or.jp

The Rooting Process of Temporary Migration System in Japan: Focusing


on Technical Internship Program

I discuss on Technical Internship Programme in Japan as one form of receiving


low-skilled foreign labour. Technology transfer is a good cause of this system,
and under this good cause temporary introduction of foreign labour is
legitimized. The system functions well and more enterprises apply for this
programme. Technical Internship Programme set up in 1993. This system
consists of 1 year of training period and 2 years of internship period. Under this
system almost 170 thousand trainees and interns are training or working in
Japan in 2005. A total number of trainees and inters are not limited nor sending
countries, only limitations are kinds of jobs and number of interns in each
enterprise. The trainees and interns mostly come from China due to cheaper
transportation cost, and they work in textile industry as well as food processing
and machinery. There are some abuses such as runaway interns, assignments
of interns to un-permitted enterprises. In spite of those defects of the
programme, there is no alternative to introduce foreign labour to Japan yet.
These foreign workers are indispensable to certain industries which compete
with rapid industrializing country China. Foreign trainees and interns are
already structured in Japanese labour market and local reception societies.
They are young and hard-working workers who sustain aging community.

Kharlamov, Nikita A., Center for Fundamental Sociology, State University –


Higher School of Economics, nkharlamov@hse.ru

Heterotopia, mobile public space and multiple uses of location: contested


spatial organization in the central mall-square complex in Moscow.

Central public places in world/global metropolises are the very locations where
forces of world-scale social change manifest themselves via the intersection of
flows and fluids of mobile persons, objects and cultures. Such locations hold
together vastly different kinds of places (work, leisure, tourism…), people
(workers, tourists, homeless…), and activities (vending, wandering, servicing,
policing…) in shared time and space. The study of this kind or places requires
construction of a new conceptual framework and new methodology. The paper
applies theoretical resources of ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (John Urry), ‘study of
heterotopias’ and sociology of space (Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Edward
Soja), ‘flâneur’ and ‘situationism’ (Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel de
Certeau) to construct a critical conceptual framework. Such a framework
presupposes a methodology of research based on participant observation and
experimenting (simulation of ‘flaneur’s’ action). The practical application of such
framework and method allows for the rich case-study description of specific
places that serves to recollect the understanding of public spaces’ constitution
27

and movement in the hybrid environment of contemporary metropolis. It will also


clarify theoretical concepts and explanations. The empirical base for the paper
is a study of the mall-square complex of “Okhotnyi Ryad” situated in
Manezhnaya square in the very center of Moscow, next to the Red Square. The
research has been conducted in the late 2007 – early 2008.

Konstantatos, Haris and Dimitra Siatitsa

Culture and Arts in a socially embedded perspective

In recent years, culture, arts and creativity have acquired a central place in the
debate on urban/local development, as a dynamic and highly competitive sector
of economic activity and/or as means to successfully combat social exclusion
and marginalisation of deprived neighbourhoods. The terms used in this broad
range of theory and policy often result in ambiguities and, at best, in a multi-
faceted debate. The present contribution aims to explore some limits of the
dominant approaches that correlate cultural and economic development,
highlighting contradictions and side effects of the pursued policies, eg. in terms
of unequal labour relations or wider issues of social justice. It proposes a
contextual reading of socially creative strategies, which may question the
homogenising and universalist approaches that prevail.
Drawing from examples which mobilise culture and arts as a resource, an
instrument or an end in itself in the regeneration of urban neighbourhoods, the
paper proposes to analyse how a broader view and practice of arts and culture,
incorporating a range of place- or community-specific material practices and
knowledge, can foster dynamics to overcome situations of deprivation and
social alienation. The various perceptions that come out from the different cases
point to a broader view of culture and arts, activated in a multiplicity of ways and
in a variety of geographical scales. Moreover, our examples indicate that
socially embedded strategies and local bottom-up initiatives have many aspects
and effects: personal/symbolic, political/ ideological and developmental.

Kulatilake, Ranjith, York University, Canada, ranjithk@yorku.ca.

Identity Politics and the Production of Space in Neoliberal Sri Lanka

How can the recent upsurge of ethno-nationalisms and the civil war in Sri Lanka
be understood as a reaction to and as an accomplice of globalization, stirred up
by the neoliberal economic policies introduced in late 1970s? How do
neoliberal, neocolonial interventions reframe nationalist ideologies in the
production of space? This paper argues that nationalism is a social, cultural and
historical phenomenon as well as a powerful means of producing and utilizing
space. The projection of Sri Lanka as 'the motherland' created by the dominant
Sinhalese Buddhist ideology continues to alienate the non-Sinhalese, non-
Buddhists. On the other hand, the concept of the 'traditional Tamil homeland' of
the Tamil Hindus in the North and the East of the country represents separation
from the majority ethnic group while marginalizing the minority Sinhalese and
Muslims living in these regions. In what ways does neoliberalism fuel these
28

ideologies? This paper explores the interface between neoliberalism and


identity politics that exploits space as a commodity for consumption.

Lehrer, Ute (lehrer@yorku.ca) York University, Canada

Condofication: State-led gentrification in Toronto and its unintended


consequence

Over the past ten years Toronto has seen an unprecedented condominium
boom that had significant impact on the socio-economic composition of large
parts of the inner city. This paper critically investigates the unintended
consequences of state-led policy documents on a local and regional level,
which, under the framework of ‘sustainability’, had asked for an intensification of
the already built up areas in the City of Toronto. The paper argues that
Toronto’s condominium boom represents a subtle and not yet scrutinized
enough form of state led gentrification that not only responds to structural
features of the political economy, but also represents a state led strategy to
displace the “obstacles” to capital accumulation, such as low-income
populations, members of Toronto’s working class, the poor and ethnic minority
groups (as well as the space of production and reproduction they inhabit) from
inner city areas that have been identified as potential sites to be reconnected to
the circuits of capital by transferring them to “higher and better” uses. Initiated
by state-led policies that contributed to new-build gentrification, Toronto is a
prolific example to discuss the accidental consequences that these policies
have on a city that prides itself to be balanced in its socio-economic and ethnic
mix. What this research is indicating is that the old urban middle class is being
squeezed out of the market and the poor are neglected all together, while
ethnicity is reduced to some socio-economic stereotypes. As a consequence,
Toronto’s condominium boom not only represents a state led rediscovery of the
inner city by capital, followed by a more and more homogenous upper middle
class workforce of mainly young, highly educated and well paid professionals,
but also represents a somewhat under examined form of state led displacement
of low-income groups from Toronto’s inner city. This paper seeks to draw
attention to the negative outcomes of “sustainability” seeking urban policies for
somewhat underrepresented groups in Toronto’s inner city and culminates in a
discussion of citizenship, social justice and the right to the city.

Lemmens, Stephanie (Free University of Brussels): slemmens@vub.ac.be

Local Cultural Policy(s) and Community Building: The Cultural Space of


Places

Culture is often considered as an instrument to improve the quality of living


together, of society. However, which format of social-cultural processes is
needed in an emerging diverse society? At stake is: ‘How do we live together in
diversity?’ Social-cultural policies need to be -above all- inclusive. Questions
concerning ‘Who’s culture should be represented?’, ‘Which communities are
included (and which are not)?’…. are put forward. However, when talking about
29

local cultural policies, not the whole world should nor can be included.
Accordingly, we need to reflect on the scale of intervention. In order to deal with
today’s diversity in an open and enriching manner; different kinds of social and
cultural capital (than the one put forward in national and regional, hence more
homogenous setting) are needed. Searching for a new interpretation of these
new forms of capital should take place in those places dense and diverse
enough and in that way representative for the complexity of today’s society. We
argue for the importance of proximity, of local settings in the city where people
relate to in one way or another. We examine how social-cultural policy(s)
interfere in local places which are consequently real cultural spaces in people’s
lives. This paper looks at possible constructions (socially, culturally, planning-
wise…) of such heterogeneous places in such a way so they enable enriching
interactions and attitudes of openness.

Li, Ming Huan, Xai Men University, China, mhlhere@xmu.edu.cn,


mhlherexm@gmail.com

Making a living at the interface of legality and illegality: Chinese migrant


workers in Israel

Since the late 1990s, Israel has become a new destination of the Chinese
migrant workers. In view of many works conducted in Israel, the Chinese
migrant workers are a neglected group that shows a dim figure in the distance.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the initiation of this migration trend and
its social consequences. The major discussion of this study focuses on how the
whole process of migration is carrying on at the interface between the legality
and illegality. The research in the sending area explores that, the badly need of
manual labour in Israel provides possibilities to allocate both documented and
undocumented migrant workers and therefore push the labour transportation
become a profitable business. Although no one agree that undocumented
working activities should be continuing, all of the factors interacted and resulted
in a permissive situation that allow this particular combination of the illegal but
licit to persist in transnational labour migration. More than anything else, this
micro-level study attempts to find the true picture from the individual voices of
the local.

Lin, Mei-Ling, National Open University, Taiwan, paulina@mail.kh.edu.tw

Cities, Competition and Governance: Urban Politics in a New


Landscape--Planning Capital City in Local Communities

City-level competition across national borders means that urban assets and
urban economic performance matter more for national economic outcomes.
Major cities benefit materially from these shifts and be recognized as key sites
of economic opportunity, so that they are seen as crucial to the achievement of
competitiveness, cohesion, governance and environmental sustainability.
Governments acknowledge the need to empower these cities in order to help
create the sort of dynamic, innovative provincial cities and regions. Cultural
30

industries are those in need in the creative, knowledge economy. Local


communities, Taiwan urban development is challenged by processes of
globalization, the shift towards a knowledge-based and technology-driven
economy. DPP government preoccupies with boosting the knowledge economy,
builds an image of Creative Taiwan and combats multiple forms of social
exclusion. The creative industries have become a focus of attention, on the
basis of their importance to economic growth, the knowledge economy and the
information society. This study presents a structured overview of national urban
development patterns, administrative and financial frameworks, urban policy
issues and challenges. The paper draws on the results of different strands of
the cities programme in order to map urban governance arrangements and
provide the evidence on its impact upon competitiveness.

Loyo, Angélica Herrera, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,


ahloyo@servidor.unam.mx

Uses and meanings of the public space: the social construction of the
Zocalo of Mexico City

In this investigation takes as study of case the Zocalo with the idea of offering
elements for the discussion of how a public space is constructed from the social
perspective. The Zócalo is the public space par excellence Mexico City: no
other place summons so diverse activities and so varied collective
representations. Its symbolic significance dates back over more than 500 years
of history: the Zócalo was in pre-hispanic time an avenue in the most important
ceremonial center of the city. Nowadays, the Zócalo is surrounded by the
federal and local government building, by the Metropolitan Cathedral and the
Supreme Court of Justice. It is the place where every day the national flag is
flewn and where the two most important events in the history of Mexico are
celebrated. In this square it is possible to observe a wide range of activities:
political rallies, public protests, massive camps to protest or resist against
political incidents, concerts, nudity groups in artistic performances, dancers etc.
It is the interest of this study to rebuild the symbolic public space inolved in the
Zócalo from a sociological perspective taking into account the social relations
developed there on the basis of practice, speeches and collective
representations of that public space.

McNeill, Donald, Urban Research Centre, University of Western Sydney,


d.mcneill@uws.edu.au

CITY OF VILLAGES? PUBLIC SPACE GOVERNANCE IN CENTRAL


SYDNEY

In early 2007, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, released the City of
Sydney’s ‘City of Villages’ strategy. A local action plan governing a range of
public space and urban policy interventions, the strategy identifies a series of
strands which are now becoming an orthodoxy in urban planning worldwide:
‘greening’ Sydney, walking connections, improved public transport, creative
31

industries, public art, cultural history, family orientation, and heritage


‘celebration’. Along with an ambitious public space strategy developed by the
Danish architect Jan Gehl, and arising as a partial result of the amalgamation of
central Sydney with South Sydney councils, the plan is evidence of an attempt
to govern centrality, to provide a unified sense of public space governance in an
erstwhile fragmented institutional landscape. However, behind the normative
power of the plan, a range of controversies and tensions sit. From growing
complaints of street violence among the gay community, to the contribution of
the village strategy to a housing affordability crisis, to the potential for
overdevelopment among the city’s property tycoons, the ‘city of villages’
strategy reveals an interesting moment in the governance of Sydney, with
parallels in major cities worldwide. This paper seeks to explain and explore
some of these tensions.

McQuarrie, Michael, University of California, Davis, USA,


mmcquarrie@ucdavis.edu

“From Backyard Revolution to Neoliberalism: the Construction of an


Urban Anti-Politics Machine”

This paper uses a field analysis of community development in order to trace


neoliberal institutional transformation and its impact upon urban politics. While
the neoliberal project is often presented as one of a political struggle over
resource distribution and state control, it is also a powerful ideological and
practical mechanism for silencing protest. Community development, as it is
currently being constituted, is serving to enroll oppositional movement activity
into an overall neoliberal project. The result is that while community developers
have become extremely adept at rebuilding declining urban communities, they
are also operating as an “anti-politics machine” that marginalizes oppositional
movement activity. This doesn’t work through repression or political conflict.
Instead, it operates by enrolling organizations and day-to-day practices in a
general ideological project. In short, I use organizational field analysis to trace
the institutionalization of neoliberalism within oppositional groups.

Maloti, Ray, University of Melbourne, Australia, raym@unimelb.edu.au

Race and Kuala Lumpur Architecture: The Confluences of Conflict.

More than half the population of Malaysia are Malay, whose party dominates
the nation’s executive. The nation’s resources – land, labour and capital – are
distributed according to ethnic quotas. Recent political crises prove it ‘patently
clear that even the minimal conditions necessary for the practice of democracy
… do not prevail in Malaysia’ (Gomez, 2004, 1). Ethno-nationalist symbolisms
for Malaysia are, I argue, representative in the architecture of central Kuala
Lumpur. It is a young city – permanent settlement is recorded from 1857 shortly
before it became a British protectorate. This paper describes turns in urban
architecture, marked by four urban conflicts in Kuala Lumpur. In 1875, colonial
policemen assisted in ending the first inter-ethnic civil war. In 1942, the
32

Japanese army captured the city during the worst World War 2 defeat suffered
by the British. In 1969, clashes in the city led to the massacre of Chinese and
the burning of Chinese-owned property. In December 2007, the Malay-Muslim
executive violently suppressed an Indian rally against state discrimination.
Urban architecture in Kuala Lumpur conveys, within a compact two-kilometer
radius, cross-historical ideas of race and nationalism. This paper introduces
historical-comparative aspects of my PhD research, on the uses of city streets
in Kuala Lumpur.

Mandich, Giulana, Università di Cagliari, Italy, mandich@nm.unica.it

Domesticating urban space. Including public spaces in the domestic


sphere

The focus of the paper is on the process of reshaping of public space by its
inclusion in the domestic sphere. I will use, for this purpose, the concept of
domestication as it is been employed within the media and technology studies
(R. Silverstone, 2006). Domestication has to do with the capacity of individuals,
families, households to bring new technologies and services into their own
culture, to make them their own. It involves both practices and the construction
of meaning and it is a dialectical process, for these technologies and services
change the way things are done in everyday life. The aim of the paper is to
explain: why the concept of domestication can be used to analyse public spaces
and urban culture (which characters space share with technology); why it is
worth using it (overcoming the dichotomy used-objective space vs. lived-
subjective space it helps to understand the production of space in the cities);
how the phases of domestication process (appropriation, objectification,
incorporation, conversion) can be applied to public spaces. I will then show
some examples from a research in progress on the domestication of public
space in a medium sized city in Italy using narrative interviews and
ethnographic observation.

Martínez, Miguel, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain,


miguelam@cps.ucm.es, Silvia Rosende, Universidad de Santiago de
6

Compostela, silvia.rosende@rai.usc.es
67

Weak Citizenship and Soft Environment Planning: The Key Role of Method
and Contexts

Environmental planning such as the Local 21st Agenda launched by United


Nations in the Summit of Rio de Janeiro in 1992, has been increasingly used as
a soft strategy of urban governance without challenging the mainstream
patterns of economic growth and representative, whilst continuously de-
legitimized, democracy. This kind of planning focuses on sustainable questions
of cities and municipal territories by means of public debate, citizen involvement
and consensual agreements. The European Union has even supported and
funded many of these planning processes along the last decade based on the
expectation of a potential improvement of both matters: urban sustainability and
33

participatory democracy. What we have discovered due to the comparative


analysis of two cases of L21A, one in Portugal and one in Spain, is that neither
the former neither the latter have substantially advanced. We developed an
independent assessment of two of the cities, among eighteen, with a better
appearance of 'success' while making L21A under the umbrella of EU funds.
Based on in-depth interviews and documents, we conclude that this general
failure is mainly explained by the specific weak practices of citizen participation
such as the calls for debates and the group dynamics within the meetings
(methods) and the conflictive styles of managing the whole process by
authorities and experts (contexts).

Marzorati, Roberta Marzorati, Universitá degli studi Milano – Bicocca, Italy,


roberta.marzorati@unimib.it

Urban Ethnic Conflicts in Comparative Perspective: Peripheral versus


Central City Neighborhoods in Milan and Barcelona

The paper presents the results of a comparative research addressing the issue
of the representation of ethnic diversity in two cities of Southern Europe, Milan
and Barcelona. The research focuses on the representations constructed by
“autochthonous” residents, and key actors in particular, of the presence of non
communitarian immigrants in urban space in relation to variables linked to the
neighborhood and to its public spaces. To this aim three neighborhoods have
been taken into account, each characterized by different kinds of ethnic
relations and forms of conflict. In Milan: a peripheral neighborhood in which the
arrival of immigrants is considered to worsen the already difficult conditions and
a more central one in which the interests of middle-high class Italian residents
clash with the needs of immigrants who have opened shops in the area or who
gather in the neighborhood’s public spaces. In Barcelona: a quite central
neighborhood with middle-low class residents in which relations between
autochthonous and immigrants are mediated through local policy actions. The
comparison between the neighborhoods is analyzed against the backdrop of
public discourse on immigration and the different ways in which local authorities
pretend to integrate ethnic diversity into the image and identity of cities.

Mattar, Daniella, European University Institute, Italy, daniela.vicherat@eui.eu.

Divided Cities in the Global Age: Observing the prevalence of urban walls
in Europe

Cities are made of multiple and different parts that are connected or isolated
form each other, but in either case give form and reflect the social relations
which the functioning of the city produces. In shaping these divisions
boundaries and margins often play a more constitutive role than what
conventional, often centre-oriented policymaking discourses, show. In this
paper I discuss one specific urban form, namely walls, as the concrete
embodiment and the symbolic metaphor for the nature and reproduction of
urban segregation. I discuss ethic and religious divisions and conflict as they
34

are reflected by the presence of walls, which in turn paradoxically give shape to
the unity of the “city” space. While the mediatic impact of the fall of the Berlin
wall coincided with the consensual rejection of the presence of walls, ghettos or
segregated communities within cities in the European discourse, the examples
of the Peace Lines in Belfast, a recent wall built in Padua and the encircling
walls in the Spanish autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, show the contrary.
Arguments of ethnic and/or religious differentiation underpin the fear of
immigration, crime or terror attacks and serve as justifications for the presence
of walls in these societies. Thus, this paper begins by describing the ancient,
but still valid role walls play in the definition of the European urban experience.
Subsequently, relaying on the given of walls still erected in European territory, I
discuss whether their presence in their respective cities is sign of the unity of
the city or its progressive segmentation. This debate necessarily leads to a
discussion on the nature of the urban bond and the role debates on identity
formation play in shaping the nature of the urban experience. Finally, in the
conclusions, I recall the situationist claim, le droit à la ville, to state the need for
walls that protect urban experiences rather than fragment them.

Miranda, Lucrezia, University of California at Berkeley, lucrezia@berkeley.edu

Selling the ‘Creative City’: Planning, Culture, and the Control of Public
Space

One of the much discussed manifestations of global restructuring has been the
rise of the entrepreneurial city and the multidimensional processes of inter-
urban competition they engage in to secure a place in the new global economy.
Among these dimensions, scholars have underscored the significance of culture
and cultural representations of place within political economic processes of
urban restructuring, and have provided examples of strategies pursued by
different cities in response to historical global shifts. This paper seeks to
contribute to such discussion and add to critical scholarship exploring the role of
urban planning and local policy in the production and control of public space, as
well as the impact of such control upon alternative forms of cultural expression.
Looking to the examples of New York and Barcelona, the paper focuses on the
latter to discuss the much questioned Civic Bylaws (2005) implemented by the
City Council. The local government aggressively markets Barcelona as a safe
tourist destination, and as a ‘creative city’ that caters to the global business elite
and the ‘creative class.’ However, the question remains whether the city’s
concomitant promotion of homogenized representations of the historical avant-
garde comes at the expense of ‘dissonant’ cultural expressions and practices
that do not conform to the new urban and economic development priorities.

MORAES, André de, and.moraes@gmail.com Federal University of the


Amazon – Brazil; Center for Research and Study of the Cities in the Brazilian
Amazon (NEPECAB); Tatiana SCHOR, tschor@ufam.edu.br; Federal University
of the Amazon – Brazil; Center for Research and Study of the Cities in the
Brazilian Amazon (NEPECAB)
35

Food prices and urban network in the Brazilian Amazon

An interesting data to analyze urban network is the differentiation of food prices


in between cities. Brazil has since the 1930's systematized basic food supply
which is one of the components of the minimum wage and inflation calculation.
The collection of the prices of the food stuff that compose the food basket is
done in 16 metropolitan areas all over the country. In the northern region,
known as the Amazon Region, prices are collected only in Belém. Some areas
in the Amazon are distant from the big cities, specially along the river Solimões-
Amazonas in the Amazon State where there does not exist road system and the
transport fluvial the distance between the cities and the seasonal river
fluctuation (in some areas with 30 meters difference between wet and dry
season) affects the prices, and thus the urban network along the area. In order
to understand the urban network and the relationship city-hinterland food prices
were taken as a parameter. Empirical research was done in 23 cities along the
river Solimões-Amazonas. The result showed a high inflation in food prices in
the wet season especially in cities distant from the capital Manaus and this is
result is due to the disappearance of agricultural land when the river rises. The
methodology used, the results and a discussion relating economic and urban
geography are the mainstream of the text here presented.

Moulaert, Frank (ASRO, KU Leuven, BELGIUM and IFRESI-CNRS, Lille,


FRANCE) Frank.moulaert@asro.kuleuven.be

Dismantling the ivory tower of urban renaissance: From stylised


discourse to social innovation

The last few decades, urban policy and collective action debates have been
overshouted by discourse based on ideological premises, guru claims,
decontextualised research results and hastily delivered public survey outcomes,
etc. In an almost populist renouveau, the contemporary perception of how
public space and its governance should evolve in the near future, based on
outcries for more ‘urban’ technology, ‘intelligent’ networks and elite arts and
‘creativity’ communities, expected to foster security and equality for all Citizens,
dominates agendas of urban development. The paper argues that this new style
of public governance is sustained especially through a public discourse whose
reproduction is based on a triple ‘truth generating’ dynamics: (i) the self-feeding
‘democracy’ illusion of new-style governance; (ii) the ‘networkization’ of urban
society, as a collective metaphor and analytical category, increasingly
portraying urban communities as dense interactive patterns among rational
agents and functional nodes living within structure-free and acultural societies;
(iii) the commodification and instrumentalisation of social relations, with a
tendency to reduce human interaction to individual utility-based transactions
agglomerating into an creasingly ‘rationalised’ social capital. The paper
examines the role of social science in the reproduction of these discursive
dynamics. It shows that social science has not only lost a significant part of its
impact on public action and policy analysis, not the least within an urban
context, but has increasingly also become an ‘uncritical intaker’ of discourse of
the kind stylised above. While the loss of impact can be ascribed to a
36

reconfiguration of social forces and (urban) regime change, the latter only offers
a partial explanation for the increasingly uncritical role that social scientists play
within research communities and their relations with public policy and collective
agency. Still both explanations refer to the same fundamental problem, i.e. the
absence of a reflexive epistemology that addresses contemporary urban
problematics, due, among others, to the privileging of ‘flat of ontologies’ of
urban society and communities within urban analysis (polities without histories,
economies without structure, societies without pluroform cultures, futures
without past). Such flat ontologies can only be overcome by way of a structural-
institutional approach to urban development and urbanity, which focuses on the
collective agency roles of researchers and research communities. By reflexively
addressing the roles of the scientist in the understanding, bespeaking,
imagining and making of cities, urbanity will receive substance, both with
respect to the understanding and making of urban past and futures. However,
reflexivity does not refer to a condition of isolated scientific activity but is cross-
referential condition and attitude. It refers to the multiple roles which scientists
effectively or potentially have in society. Within the context of urban
development, collective agency and public action, this multiplicity can best be
explained by looking at the social scientist as a social innovator. However,
social innovation cannot be addressed by anology with the engineer’s or
economist’s view of (technological) innovation, but should be considered as part
of society’s cultural transformation. Within the context of the city, this means in
the first place the cultural transformation of urbanity.

Mugnano, Silvia (University of Milana-Bicocca, ITALY) ilvia.mugnano@unimib.it

Is Milan promoting policy strategies and actions for accommodating


creative-knowledge industry economy?

The European Union is working for putting cultural as one of the Lisbon agenda
pillars as well as the economy, the social and the environment for making
improving the competitiveness of the 2010 Europe. Furthermore, EU has
recently proposed a Cultural programme (2007-2013).The cultural and creative
sector represent between the 2.6 per cent of Eu GDP in 2003 (in the same year
the building sector contributed for 2.1 per cent and the food sector for 1,9 per
cent). The Cultural and creative sector invoices more than 654.00 million of
Euro in 2003 (considering that the car industry has turnover 271.000 millions
and in 2001 and the TIC 541.000 million in 2003). In the cultural and creative
sector work 5,8 million of workers in 2004 which is the 2.4% of the active
working population of the 25EU. Very interesting is the profile of the workers
employed in this sector. The 46,8 per cent of the workers in this sector has at
least a university degree and (compared to the 25,7 per cent of the total of the
employers ), a high percentage is self-employees (28,8 per cent in contrast to
the 14,1 per cent in other sector) and are temporary contract (17 per cent in
respect to the 13 per cent of the total amount of the employers).
In Italy the creative-knowledge industry economy in 2001 employed more
than 4.5 millions workers, constituting about the 30 per cent of the total
employment. Lombardy Region is the leading area of the country. And Milan
metropolitan area is the heart attracting 1/5 of the creative-knowledge labour
37

force. These figures show that present and, probably, future of the European
and Italian economy is going towards the creative-knowledge industry.
Surprisingly, the growing of this sector has not, at least in the Italian
context, been supported by any national or local policies and strategies. The
combination creative-knowledge industry and policy framework is very recent. It
is in fact a common agreement that the Milan metropolitan area has developed
this economic sector thanks to the cultural and economic heritage of the golden
age of the industrial time. The contribution shows very clearly that until few
years ago the leading role of Milan metropolitan area in the fashion, design and
bio-technology sectors has not been the outcome of a cohesive and structured
political strategy as well as other EU cities. On the contrary, it has been the
slow and persist work of innovative and inventive entrepreneurs who has
transformed their skills “forged” in the heavy industry into a new and innovative
sectors. Can this Milan self-made model resist to the international
competitiveness? The blindness of local institutions for promoting cultural
innovation can still be possible? Based on the result of ACRE Project -EU
research project –- the paper will present how Milan is in a crucial moment. In
the nineties private local actors have been acting for promoting innovation and
supremacy in different creative cultural and knowledge sectors. However, the
lack of an institutional role has created a situation in which Milan has damaged
its economic and cultural growth. In the fashion industry, Milan has lost ground
compared to Paris and London. In the design scene, Milan “has passed” the
change to Turin to been crowned European capital of Design 2008. It is very
recent that a political framework has been created to fostering the
competitiveness of territory. And the new century has the real land mark of this
new tendency. Is Milan at a turning point? From the nomination to the 2015
Expo to the new attitude of local politicians, it can be said that Milan might be
entering in a new Renaissance. Although local authorities- Council, Province
and Regions- have recognized that building multilevel governments is
necessary for entering in the international competition, partnership between
local authorities and networks actors, multi-sectoral strategies, participation of
the inhabitants and sustainability are only partially part of the public discourse.

Naik-Singru, Ramola , London School of Economics (LSE), U.K.,


R.N.Naik-Singru@lse.ac.uk,

Democracy, Competitive Governance & Spatial transformation in


‘globalising’ Mumbai

India’s economic restructuring agenda of 1991-92 has been a catalyst for


change in the socio-spatial transformation of its financial capital Mumbai
(Bombay). However increasing challenge to its primacy from competitive mega-
cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore necessitated the State Government of
Maharashtra to embark on a mammoth programme of urban renewal. Moved by
business elite through the Bombay First commissioned report called ‘Vision
Mumbai: Transforming Mumbai into a world-class city’ by McKinsey Consulting
(Bombay First & McKinsey, 2003), Mumbai’s urban transformation agenda
spiralled on to a much higher level with the Government of India taking active
interest in the development of the city. In recognition of the critical importance of
38

rapid urban development, India recently launched the Jawaharlal Nehru


National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) on 3 December 2005 to upgrade
63 of its major cities and towns. JNNURM is a “reforms driven, fast track,
planned development of identified cities with focus on efficiency in urban
infrastructure/services delivery mechanism, community participation and
accountability of Urban Local Bodies (ULB’s)/Parastatals towards citizens”
(JNNURM Mission Statement). While western urban political strategies have
moved towards softer approaches of social cohesion and incorporation of the
local milieus; effective urban governance, management and capacity building of
ULB’s is the political mantra for cities of the developing world. Civic
engagement is not solicited by urban politics in India but is a grassroots activity
emerging out of the democratic ethos of the people. Where ancient mythological
scriptures like The Ramayana, relay stories of a citizen’s right to question its
ruler, the notion of citizenship and the rights of citizens are intrinsically ingrained
in the minds of Indians. Though time-honoured values have a strong hold there
is a robust presence of dynamic identities based on shared experiences that
transcend the traditional divides of caste and race to mobilise citizen
participation in restructuring urban spaces that portray the changing Indian
image in a globalising world. The Vision Mumbai report has sparked
discussions and critical appraisals on the future of the city and its infrastructure
at all different levels of civil society including academia, resident associations
and NGO’s. With the acceptance of neo-liberal policies, Mumbai has been at
the forefront of decentralisation of governance. As a model of regulation and
accountability to the people the Citizen’s Action Group (CAG) to monitor the
transformation of Mumbai is a precedent that underlines the changes in urban
governance emerging in the Indian context. The question is whether this has
contributed towards a more transparent and accountable form of democratic
governance or has it only increased the elitist influence on policy formulation
and urban development in the city. Increasingly, the impact of urban policies on
the social fabric of the city needs scrutiny in the context of inclusive social
development and progressive social policies. The key issues addressed by this
paper are those of competition between cities in India for trans-national
investment that initiate decision-making processes for urban governance,
changing business-state relationship and the discursive role of an emerging civil
society.

Nicholls, Walter J., California State University, Long Beach,


wnicholl@csulb.edu, Rodolfo Torres, University of California, Irvine, and Alfonso
Marquez, University of California, Los Angeles

New Planning Techniques for Segregating Cities: A Micro-Politics


Approach

This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s insights on space and power to examine
the micro-politics of ethnic and class segregation in cities. We posit that power
becomes manifest in urban space through the application of a wide variety of
techniques used by planners to govern urban space (i.e. zoning, taxing,
housing, parking, etc.). Planners and politicians combine different techniques to
form the ‘socio-spatial architectures’ of their particular municipalities. These
39

socio-spatial architectures not only affect the ethnic and class mix of
municipalities, but they also regulate how different status groups use particular
spaces (i.e. sidewalks, buses, parks, shopping centers, etc.) within them. When
shifting from the municipal to metropolitan scale, the particular architectures of
municipalities combine to create a general system of institutional channels that
shape the spatial behaviour of residents, diverting them into different locations
on the basis of ethnicity and class and regulating behaviour in the multiple
spaces that constitute daily life. This paper documents three distinct moments in
the application of these techniques: (1) It identifies changes in dominant
segregation strategies over the past 50 years, from strategies that stressed
large-scale, visible, and collective techniques (i.e. redlining, urban
renewal/removal, homeless warehousing in skid rows, etc.) to those that stress
stealth and individualized techniques (i.e. zoning, micro-displacements,
regulating homeless behaviour in residential neighbourhoods, transit
restrictions, etc.); (2) It surveys and catalogues techniques used to shape the
class and ethnic mixes in several Los Angeles municipalities, and (3) It
analyzes how these techniques aggregate to form socio-spatial architectures
that influence the location patterns of different status groups in these
municipalities.

Odoemene, Akachi, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, akaigolo@yahoo.com and


akaigolo@gmail.com.

The Contexts of Conflict and Cooperation in Indigene-Settler Relations:


Comparative Evidence from Ethnicity and Social (Dis) Order in Two
Nigerian Cities

This paper examines the transformative roles of ethnicity (conflict and


cooperation) in indigene – settler relations in two Nigerian cities – Kano and
Enugu – which exhibit contrasting but also comparable social characteristics. Its
analysis particularly focuses on the historical group relations between the Igbo
and the Hausa in each city since 1970. Whereas the Igbo are the most
dominant “settlers” in Kano where the Hausa are the “indigenes”, the reverse is
the case in Enugu. However, while inter-ethnic violence has almost become an
annual ritual in Kano, Enugu has witnessed a history of enduring inter-ethnic
harmony, cooperation and coexistence. Unlike previous focus on the study of
violence, this study, by studying violent-prone and peaceful societies with a
comparative perspective, persuasively explains why some plural societies in
Nigeria experience enduring patterns of violence (as manifested in Kano) and
some, despite cultural diversities, manage to remain ethnically harmonious (as
is Enugu’s case). The paper further examines the origins of, and problems
posed by the ‘indigene – settler dichotomy’ in accessing socio-economic
opportunities and political prospects, especially for the many millions who live
and work in multi-ethnic contexts. This essay employs an eclectic framework,
combining both primary and secondary data in social research.

Rafael da Silva OLIVEIRA, rafasol@bol.com.br Federal University of Roraima


and Study of the Cities in the Brazilian Amazon (NEPECAB), Brazil
40

Sexual exploitation of women, children and teenafers in Roraima,


BRAZIL: an urban network perspective

The urban network in Roraima, incipient and with low city density, is marked by
the precesence of the capital, Boa Vista, in all aspects such as demographic
and urban functions. In this relation of domination-dependence the road BR-174
which connects Brazil to Venezuela assumes an important role in the social
spatial interactions between the few existing cities, specially in relation to the
disposal of goods and services. The fragility of this urban network, specially due
to the concentration of most of the urban functions in the capital, contributes to
the maintaince of the precariety of the infrastruture of the other cities giving
ocasion to diverse social spatial and economic problems. Such problems
constitute vulnerabilities that permits the enforcement of ilegal activities such
as, for example, practices of commercial sexual exploration specially of children
and teenagers. In this sense, this paper analyses the role played by the urban
network and the sexual exploration network aiming to undersand the dynamics
of the predominace of the urban network , its fluxes and the road.

Oluwaniyi, Oluwatoyin, Covenant University, Nigeria, otoldo_olu@yahoo.com.

Traditional Dimension to Urban Ethno-communal Violence: A Study of the


Yoruba and Hausa Conflict in Ogun State, Nigeria.

There is an adage that says ‘there is unity in diversity’ but this has not been the
case in Nigeria’s urban cities. In fact, urban ethnic and religious violence have
become recurring issues in Nigeria’s body politic. Though many factors are
responsible, including issues of resources, rights and space, the impact of Oro
religious festival (a traditional religion) on urban ethno-communal violence in
Sagamu, between Yorubas and Hausas living within the terrain cannot be
imagined as it spurred conflicts to other states in Nigeria. Based on an empirical
study, this paper intends to explore the trajectories of urban ethno-communal
violence in Nigeria with focused attention on Oro festival conflict that occurred in
Sagamu in 1999, its impact on ethnic dichotomy and what the conflict portend
for current peace in an ethnically-divided society.

Onwuzuruigbo, Ifeanyi, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Nigeria,


maziify@yahoo.co.uk.

Migration, Urbanization, and Intra-Ethnic Conflicts: The Case of Aguleri


and Umuleri in Southeastern Nigeria.

There is an adage that says ‘there is unity in diversity’ but this has not been the
case in Nigeria’s urban cities. In fact, urban ethnic and religious violence have
become recurring issues in Nigeria’s body politic. Though many factors are
responsible, including issues of resources, rights and space, the impact of Oro
religious festival (a traditional religion) on urban ethno-communal violence in
Sagamu, between Yorubas and Hausas living within the terrain cannot be
imagined as it spurred conflicts to other states in Nigeria. Based on an empirical
41

study, this paper intends to explore the trajectories of urban ethno-communal


violence in Nigeria with focused attention on Oro festival conflict that occurred in
Sagamu in 1999, its impact on ethnic dichotomy and what the conflict portend
for current peace in an ethnically-divided society.

Pamperov, Alexey, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Open Society Institute,


Bulgaria, apamporov@gmail.com and apamporov@osf.bg.

Building Identity through Riots: The case of Fakulteto District (Bulgaria).

The Ethnic peace in Bulgaria was in danger around mid-August 2007 as


hundreds of Roma people (Gypsies) living in the Fakulteto district, armed with
clubs and axes took to the streets, setting garbage cans on fire, breaking cars
and shop windows and threatening the residents in Sofia by shouting: “We are
going to kill all Bulgarians!”. After three days of sharpened social tension, the
police took the control and calmed the crowd down. Shortly after, some Romany
leaders said the Roma had come out to protect themselves after hearing rumors
that they would be attacked by skinheads or drug dealers wanting to establish
control over their neighbourhood. Nevertheless, the precise reasons for the riots
are still unclear. The present paper is going to discuss the new phenomenon,
which left invisible behind the media hubbubs and hoaxes. The Romany identity
is usually defined as “unstable”, “multiple” and “kaleidoscopic”. There are five
main Romany groups in Bulgaria with more then one hundred subgroups, which
in general stay isolated one of each other. The groups (and often some of the
subgroups) are endogamous, having different occupation and clear margins of
residence even in a same ghetto. However, the riots function as a unifying
mechanism about the Romany people. Therefore, the paper queries: “Do we
observe a reconstruction of a common identity that going close to Anderson’s
Imagined communities or it is just a case of Durkheim’s territorial [ghetto] based
mechanical solidarity?”.

Panzer, Gerhard (Technical University Dresden, GERMANY)


gerhard.panzer@mailbox.tu-dresden.de

Paths to temporal creative cities: Changing city culture under federal


competition of European culture capital

What did cities win, when they take part in a federal competition to get the title
European culture capital? They put their historical grown cultural organizations
under competitiveness. With a self searched trouble they try to stimulate
creativity in the city. They become temporal creative cities: A very heavy task
for cities in a middle range. In a case study I analyse the impact on city culture
in three dimensions. First, the programmatic formation of a mission or
a corporate image of the city. Second, I analyse the transformation
of organizational field of cultural institutions and third, I take a special view on
external cultural consulting, and the federal financial or administrative support.
Third, I will provide an answer to the question: “Do cities become more than
temporal creative cities?”
42

Paül, Daniel, Department of Geography and Sociology, Universitat de Lleida,


dpaul@geosoc.udl.cat

New strategies in building museums. Comparative analysis in European


cities.

El paper que es presenta preten mostrar, a través de diversos casos d’estudi,


les principals tendències existents en la implantació d’equipaments museístics
de nova creació. Per fer-ho recorrerem a diversos exemples de les àrees de
Barcelona, París i Torí. Així, es pretén mostrar com cada una de les ciutats ha
posat en marxa, en els últims anys, una determinada forma d’actuació. En el
cas de Barcelona l’aposta principal ha estat la posada en marxa, per part de
l’ajuntament de la ciutat, de diversos equipaments en edificis de nova
construcció, situats fora del centre de la ciutat (Museu de la Música, Museu
Olímpic i de l’Esport). En el cas de París, ha estat la iniciativa estatal la que ha
realitzat les majors actuacions, amb edificis espectaculars, rehabilitats o de
nova construcció, situats habitualment en el centre (Musée du Quai Branly,
Musée des Arts et Métiers, Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine). Finalment,
en el cas de Torí, ha estat novament l’ajuntament qui ha tingut un paper motor,
però en aquest cas sobre equipaments estatals (Galleria Sabauda, Museo
Egizio, polo reale). L’estratègia seguida però ha estat completament diferent a
la de Barcelona, apostant per equipaments centrals en edificis històrics
rehabilitats.

Perez-Rincón, M Socorro y Jorge Cañas, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain,


urbperezrincon@hotmail.com

Proyectos urbanos alternativos: el conflicto entre la intervención efímera


y la renovación institucional

El urbanismo como pràctica de control, inscribe unas representaciones de


ciudad y desecha otras, sin embargo existen fuerzas subalternas construidas
espacialmente por grupos marginados que subvierten los actos impuestos por
el discurso urbano dominante y que utilizan la imaginación para inscribir
temporalmente sus propias narrativas de ciudad. El objetivo de este trabajo es
visibilizar impactos sociales y representaciones alternativas a proyectos de
transformación urbana de espacios céntricos degradados o considerados
fundamentalmente obsoletos. A través de casos empíricos de Barcelona, se
busca poner de manifiesto construcciones alternativas de revitalización urbana
y dinamización socio-cultural “contraproyectos”, que contradicen
macroproyectos estructurados para el turismo y el marketing de ciudad.

Pickvance, Chris, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK,


C.G.Pickvance@kent.ac.uk
43

“Is there a new conventional wisdom in critical studies of urban politics?

The aim is to examine some taken for granted claims which are made about the
impact of globalization and neo-liberalization, the hollowing out of the
state, theories of state scale, the functions and working of the local state
(growth coalitions, partnerships etc.), etc. The argument will be that too many
claims have been accepted without adequate evidence and have become an
obstacle to understanding.

Rittersberger-Tılıç, Helga, Middle East Technical University, Department of


Sociology; Nezihe Başak Ergin, Ph. D. Student, Middle East Technical
University, Department of Sociology

Squatting as Strategy of Protest or as Resistance to Planning: The Case


of Eyüp, Istanbul

Discussing squatting’s different meanings and characteristics; the study aims to


examine an “urban social movement” in “global” Istanbul. In Eyüp protests
emerged in 2005 and became discussed publicly after urban renewal projects
were started. The neighborhood was originally known as “leftist” squatter area
in the pre-military coup period (before1980s) and reappeared on the urban
agenda in the 2000s, this time as an area of resistance. Istanbul was discussed
as an emerging “global” or “world” city, and most recently has been assigned as
“European Cultural Capital of 2010”. In the frame of this macro changes
Istanbul itself started to be redesigned and so called “problem-areas” and their
populations more openly were “criminalized”. These developments were
reinforced by ongoing rural - to - urban migration processes. The differences
between “Squatting as a Protest or as Resistance to Planning” stem from
“movement” characteristics (i.e. identities, emergence, agents, networks,
strategies, alliances, institutionalization, and repertoire). The causes and goals
of “squatting” do show great variety, ranging from anarchist projects on an
individual or communal level (more typical for Europe); or addressing at
inequalities in the urban housing market, and at survival strategies in the
informal sector.

Rousseau, Max, University of Saint-Étienne (France)


Vincent Béal, University of Saint-Étienne (France)
Both members of the laboritories CERAPSE and TemiS (University of Saint-
Étienne) max.rousseau@univ-st-etienne.fr; vincent.beal@univ-st-etienne.fr

Social justice and the declining city: the evolution of governance in four
West-European former industrialized cities

This paper focuses on the evolution of the governance in a specific kind of


cities: the declining former industrialized cities. Based on the study of
Manchester and Sheffield (U-K), Roubaix and Saint-Étienne (France), which
have all seen some attempts to implement different neoliberal policies of
regeneration in the last two decades, the paper will deal with the changing
44

influence of the urban civil society over this period of entrepreneurialism. The
comparison between four cities and two national contexts allows us to ask
several questions: which parts of the urban civil society have managed to gain
political power and why? Which political outputs have resulted from the shifts in
the governance of these cities? More generally, which kinds of conflicts appear
between social cohesion and capital attraction around urban regeneration
policies, and how are these conflicts managed or hidden?

Sairinen, Rauno and Olli Maijala, Helsinki University of Technology,


rauno.sairinen@joensuu.fi

Promoting Sustainable Urban Form: Implementing urban consolidation


policies around the Helsinki Metropolitan Region.

Urban sprawl is recognised as a major environmental, economic and social


challenge in many growing European cities, likewise in the Helsinki Metropolitan
Region. Urban sprawl and anti-sprawl policies are in many ways linked to the
questions of urban sustainability, increasing fragmentation and polycentric
development. This paper assesses the ways in which development is steered
towards consolidating the urban structure in the margins of the Helsinki
Metropolitan Area. The research focuses on two satellite towns, Hyvinkää and
Lohja, whose development is very much connected to the development of the
Helsinki region. Hyvinkää has both rail and motorway connections to Helsinki,
while Lohja has only a motorway. The paper focuses specifically on the policies
and procedures of these two cities.The aim is to ascertain why some
municipalities seem to have been successful in developing an integral,
consolidated urban structure while others have not. In the case of the Helsinki
Metropolitan Area, an assessment is made as to whether it is possible that
satellite cities might promote sustainable regional growth (anti-sprawl). Of
particular interest are the measures that are taken locally by municipalities to
promote urban consolidation in planning, the guiding instruments that are used,
and the problems that might get in the way of a consolidation policy. Collectively
such implementation measures represent an operative policy for consolidation,
and the term ‘urban consolidation policy’ refers to an urban anti-sprawl policy by
which both urban structure and the quality of the living environment are
improved.

Sassatelli, Monica, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Ferrara, Italy,


sssmnc@unife.it:

UK Urban festivals, public culture and aesthetic cosmopolitanism


A growing number of major festivals are mixed-arts and multi-thematic, they can
be defined ‘urban festivals’ as they draw on urban identity, urban lifestyles and
values, being characterised by a strong focus on the city that hosts them, on its
specificity and ‘sense of place’. At the same time, they build on an intense
encounter with outside artists, cultures and even publics. This is perceived as
enlarging the city’s identity and is often explicitly connected to an official
discourse of cosmopolitan transcultural exchange. As spaces and time of
45

concentrated debate and social effervescence, urban festival highlight the art of
living together that the city supposedly always represented – from Simmel’s
stranger to contemporary theories of the global city – enabling a perspective on
cosmopolitanism not as an abstract or exclusively élite driven phenomenon, but
as it enters the public debate and culture. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork
research on some major urban festivals (the European Capital of Culture,
Brighton Festival, Venice Biennale), the paper offers both a theoretical advance
in their definition as a special type of festival, and an empirically informed
investigation of the link between cosmopolitan orientations connected to
aesthetic experiences, trasnational identifications and post-traditional festivals.

SCHOR, Tatiana, tschor@ufam.edu.br; Federal University of the Amazon –


Brazil; Center for Research and Study of the Cities in the Brazilian Amazon
(NEPECAB); Danielle Pereira da COSTA, CEFET, UNINORTE Manaus –
Brazil; Center for Research and Study of the Cities in the Brazilian Amazon
(NEPECAB); José Aldemir de OLIVEIRA, Federal University of the Amazon –
Brazil; Center for Research and Study of the Cities in the Brazilian Amazon
(NEPECAB)

Cities of territorial responsibility and sustainable socio-ecological urban


network policies.

In areas with low demographic densities and large distances such as the
Brazilian Amazon, where 70% of the population lives in cities, the analysis of
how the sparce cities interact with the urban network is essential to understand
the urban dynamic and subsidize sustainable socio-ecological policies. The
empirical research on the urban network along the rivers Solimões-Amazonas
in the Brazilian Amazon State permitted the creation of a new category that can
be useful for this debate: Cities of Territorial Responsibility. The research done
in the Brazilian Amazon permits a new understanding of the city function in low
density areas where the few existing cities are essential for the continuity of life
in all its aspects including the conservation of biodiversity.This paper presents
the methodology constructed for the analysis of the urban network in the
Amazon, the empirical data collected, the results synthesized in thematic
cartography and the theoretical category constructed.

Sedini, Carla (University of Milano Bicocca, ITALY) c.sedini@campus.unimib.it

Creativity & Management inside urban societies: An empirical research


on the city of Toronto

In the 21th century with the passage to a post-industrial society culture and
creativity became a means for coming out of the political and economical
insecurity (Zukin, 1995) and the engines of economic growth. Creativity has
became a characteristic which when present, allows to the economy of
businesses, of particular industrial sectors, and of a city in general to flourish.
The role of government, industry and university are defined by the triple helix
model (Etzkowitz, Leydesdorff, 1998) as the engine for innovation inside
46

society. The political dimension will be explained by the strategies of cultural


planning and the appearance of cultural districts in place of industrial districts
inside Western contemporary cities. The economic dimension will be explored
by the fact that creativity has become a characteristic which allows the economy
of businesses to flourish. The educational dimension is referred to the
relationship between creativity and innovation inside high educational courses.
When the features of creativity and management are joined and not thought in
contraposition, the innovation inside public sphere, companies and society can
be reachable. The aim of the paper will be to understand the synergy between
creativity and management inside urban society analyzing the three dimensions
of the triple helix model in the context of Toronto.

Shaw, Kate, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, kates@unimelb.edu.au

Planning the 'creative' city: global strategies and local creative


subcultures

The ‘creative city’ concept has high political and symbolic importance for global
cities seeking to attract jobs and investment. But the concept contains a well-
established dilemma: local creative subcultures, which feed city cultures, can be
vulnerable to the gentrification that often results. Increasing land rents in
Australian central cities are placing pressure on local creative initiatives,
displacing small cultural producers and dispersing local networks.
Genuinely creative cities foster new ideas and practices and new uses of space,
requiring that we plan for the unplanned. Some city governments are beginning
to understand this, and are developing planning policies that can create the
conditions for the continuity of their valued (and valuable) creative subcultural
activities. This paper examines the complex relationships between ‘creativity’
and place, and evaluates recent initiatives intended to nourish local cultural
diversity. In identifying cases of best practice in Australia, and with reference to
similar practices overseas, the research reveals an evolution in the range of
regulatory and negotiating tools available to governments, and in public
discourses around the maintenance of sustainable city competitiveness.

Silver, Hilary, Brown University, USA, Hilary_Silver@brown.edu.

Neighborhood Context and Social Integration: Comparing Ethnic Enclaves


in NeuKolln and Hohenschonhausen, Berlin

Fourteen percent of the Berlin population is foreign and even more have non-
German heritage. However, immigrants and ethnics are unevenly distributed
across the city’s neighborhoods and districts, with highly visible ethnic clusters
in some places. This has led to vocal concern about the rise of “parallel
societies” in Germany. The Federal Government, with its new seat in this
reunited capital city, has launched an official “Integration Summit” and a new
“integration policy” that emphasizes acculturation, especially German language
acquisition, but also democratic values, Christian public culture, German cuisine
and customs, and of course, labor market participation. From the ethnic
47

grassroots, however, “integration” has a very different connotation. Based upon


fieldwork in 2006-07, this study compares the successes of, and challenges to
social integration in two Berlin neighborhoods with significant concentrations of
visible racial minorities, many of whom are former guest-workers. Neukölln, in
the former West Berlin, is home to a very diverse population, especially a large
Muslim community of Turks and Arabs. Hohenschönhausen, in the former East
Berlin, has a sizable, if smaller Vietnamese community of former contract
workers under the communist regime who encountered racial violence and
discrimination after reunification. Although most members of neither group has
mastered German, both groups established ethnic self-help, cultural, and
religious associations, and developed ethnic economic niches, especially
through eateries and small commercial establishments. With ethnographic
techniques, including participant observation in two associations dedicated to
German acclimation and multicultural understanding, the study uncovered two
different conceptions of integration, reflecting contrasting local contexts of
reception and experiences of conflict with the German majority in Berlin.
Muslim migrants, whether secular (like many Turks) or observant (like the
young “new Muslims”), well- or poorly-educated, were more aware of racial
discrimination and saw obstacles to integration primarily in their lack of
employment opportunities. Vietnamese migrants were more likely to define
social integration in legal terms, partly reflecting a conflict in the 1990s in which
they were accused of cigarette racketeering. Thus, becoming “German” means
something very different, and is hindered for different reasons, in these two
neighborhoods.

Smith, Rob, Cardiff University, smithrj3@Cardiff.ac.uk

The Regeneration of Cardiff Bay: Power, interaction and space

‘Regeneration’ has been the focus of a great deal of research, the majority of
which seeks to understand the political economy of the production of sites such
as Cardiff Bay yet there is a paucity of research in the U.K. which seeks to
understand the role of the social actor, subjectivity and meaning in the
constituting of the complex nature of the reconfigured urban setting. This paper
will explore a multi-modal interactionist approach to understanding regenerated
urban locales and impacts upon the contours of subjectivity, notions of urban
citizenship and identities. The paper will focus on the methods employed by
social actors to navigate, interpret and utilise arrangements in their
surroundings as a resource for the accomplishment of legitimated actions,
interactions, and identity work. I will also explore how this social interaction is
constrained and regulated within this particular ‘strip of activity’. The paper will
also consider the relations that exist between orders of social organisation,
power and the mundane activity observed in ‘regenerated space’. This in turn
allows for a consideration of the fluid and reflexive interaction that occurs
between the global and the local, the self and the social, as well as temporal
relations where representations and interpretations of pasts, the present and
futures shape accounts of this specific regenerated area.
48

Souliotis, Nikolaos, University of Thessaly, Greece,


nicolassouliotis@hotmail.com

Urban Cultural Policy and Private Non-Profit Institutions in Athens:


Political and Symbolic Uses of ‘Social Responsibility’ Since the Mid 1990s

Since the mid 1990s cultural policy in Athens supports strongly the activity of
private non-profit institutions. After the dominance of a socialist re-distributive
logic during the 1980s, Greek urban cultural policy started, since the mid 1990s,
regarding culture as an important productive sector. This change was, mainly,
the outcome of the adaptation to European Union funding criteria and led to
quite extended public investments. The larger part of the latter was undertaken
by the central state and orientated towards archaeological sector. A smaller part
was channeled through private non-profit institutions into arts and science
popularisation. This evolution coincided with an ongoing, since the early 1980s,
increase of non-profit cultural institutions founded by entrepreneurs issued by
the prosperous sectors of constructing, banking and finance. The paper
explores the urban cultural policy/non-profit institutions partnerships by
examining strategies and resources of the groups and individuals implicated.
Data come from semi-structured interviews, documentary research and a record
of the organizational and social characteristics of the non-profit institutions. We
conclude that the partnerships in question result from the way that EU funding
programs regulate the interaction between Greek cultural policy and cultural
strategies of the local business elite.

Stavrides, Stavros, School of Architecture National Technical University of


Athens, Greece, zoesm@central.ntua.gr

Defacement and the alternative politics of urban memory

This paper aims at investigating the role gestures of defacement play in


directing new ways of creating public memory. It is not only vandalism that is at
stake when we talk about defacement. Programmed cultural events may be
targeted of reinterpreting urban landscape through a selective use of images
that replace actual buildings of sites. Can we discover in these ways of
replacing the recognizable view of an urban landmark with a new image, acts of
revealing what was supposed to be carefully hidden by cultural amnesia? A
comparison of two characteristic cases will be employed in search of a
theoretical framework focused on public memory as being reinterpreted in the
process of being of performed. The one case is Christo’s wrapping of the
Reichstag in Berlin as a way of unveiling a monumental building’s symbolic
ambiguity. The other case is the screening of an early modernist housing
building, considered as “ugly”, during the Athens 2004 Olympics by a large
image placard depicting a glorious Athenian historical site. In both cases
“official” defacement is a form of controlling collective memory. How can
alternative uses and interpretations of public spaces appropriate and criticize
official strategies of defacement? Observing children playing with monuments
(f.e. climbing on statues) skateboarders “rewriting” city spaces, graffiti artists
“painting” on urban surfaces, or demonstrators theatricalizing public landmarks,
49

can one, perhaps, understand the creative power of defacement. To hide may
mean to invent new ways of seeing the urban landscape. To hide may mean to
re-face (as the anthropologist M. Taussig suggests). De-facement and re-
facement can be taken as the two poles of urban memory dialectics: Memory is
performed and contested (explicitly or implicitly) in practices that re-invent public
space.

TANG, Wing Shing and Kim Ching CHAN, Hong Kong Baptist University, China,
wstang@hkbv.edu.hk

Urban sustainability in Hong Kong: the meeting of procedure and


substance in a colonial city

This paper contributes to the debate about the attempts to interweave the
substantive and procedural dimensions of urban sustainability. It is insightful to
argue that such attempts must pay heed to the regimes of practices of any
society. Nevertheless, even such an argument has its limitation, as its relevance
is usually restricted to a Euro-centric spatiality, where the procedural and
substantive dimensions of sustainable development can have a ‘symbiotic’
interaction. What about the situation in other parts of the world, where the
imperial employs discursive production to incorporate other parts of the world
into such a spatiality? Discursive production, such as sustainable development,
breaks down the barrier of socio-political practices of the local, serving the
interests and the governance of the ruling regimes. On the other hand, the local
may employ this kind of discursive production for its nationalist nation-building
project. Then, the interweaving of the procedural and substantive takes on a
form and content completely different from the West. The documentation of this
form and content, which is missing in the literature, not only provincialises any
serious understanding of the interweaving in the West but also sheds light on
the way urban problems are tackled in the developing world. This paper is a
contribution to such a documentation. It draws on a case study of the Wanchai
District in Hong Kong, where the concept of sustainable development was
recently invoked to prepare for a future plan. It illustrates step by step how the
sustainable development concept was re-interpreted and institutionalised by the
colonial government, deployed by NGOs and local district councils, understood
by the public and, finally, demanded to be incorporated into the development of
guidelines for the future plan.

Tapada Berteli, María Teresa, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain,


Teresa.Tapada@uab.cat

The social effect of the urban restructuring process in the city centre of
Barcelona: fighting against urban segregation?

The urban renewal projects in cities are frequently presented as a key


instrument to provide a possible solution to the generalization of the territorial
unbalance; spatial dimension of the increasing social inequalities. The
materialization of urban segregation is the visible example of the unbalanced
50

city. The nature of the concentration in the territory can be of a certain housing
tenure, social class or ethnic groups. The relationship between specific types of
urban segregation, housing systems and welfare regimes has been taken into
consideration in the European context. The paper considers that approach in a
more micro level scale in a neighbourhood level. The urban segregation in its
social, economic and ethnic dimensions is considered as a clear difficulty to
reach a cohesive and integrative city, offering the same opportunities to all the
citizens. The urban renewal policies in many European countries introduce
ways to fight against urban segregation. The ideas of a more balanced ethnic
mix are under consideration in these policies, by attracting middle classes to
unpopular neighbourhoods or promoting the different housing tenures and
income levels as a way to stimulate social integration. There are a variety of
experiences that consider the advantages of economic, social or ethnic
heterogeneity in order to improve the welfare of population. The idea behind this
statement is that mix gives to people new economic opportunities, stops
isolation and contains processes of stigmatization. In general, mix would help
residents of deprived areas of cities, on their particular social integration
processes. The general objective of this paper is to consider the theoretical
statements of social and residential segregation related to the specific case of
Barcelona city in order to define their limits and applicability. The urban renewal
projects under consideration will be the Raval neighbourhood and St. Caterina-
St. Pere neighbourhood. Those areas have been the focus of a massive urban
renewal intervention of the city centre of Barcelona developed between 90s until
today. The specific evaluation of the outputs of the regeneration project
especially in relation to levels of urban segregation and social mix will be the
main objectives of the paper.

Terrones, Albert (Albert.Terrones@uab.cat) Aitor Carr, Alejandro García, Mikel


Aramburu,Teresa Tapada, Autonomous University of Barcelona

Researching gentrification at the micro level. Residential adjustments and


social change in Ciutat Vella, Barcelona.

The focus of the paper is on the identification and explanation of the factors and
mechanisms producing socio-spatial changes in neighborhoods.
Gentrification, in particular, has been commonly explained by macro factors like
urban renewal, changes on the urban economy, immigration or alterations on
the housing markets. However, there are still some black boxes dealing with the
specific mechanisms through which these macro changes influence the
residential behavior of individuals. Defending and developing the concept of
“residential adjustments”, the paper argues that macro results in terms of social
changes in the city must be explained considering the different ways in which
groups react and adjust their residential behavior to their changing environment.
To do so, we compare the residential adjustments of three different groups: 1) a
long-time settled group of migrants (Philippines); 2) new young middle class
neighbors; and 3) working class youngsters – both from Spanish and migrant
origin – that are willing to emancipate from their household. Through in-deep
qualitative interviews variables like housing careers, or attitudes towards
housing and towards the neighborhood are researched. The research is
51

focused on the neighborhood of Ciutat Vella in Barcelona. During the last ten
years, this inner city neighborhood has experienced a deep physical
transformation as a consequence of an aggressive urban renewal plan.
Moreover, only partly as a result of this transformation, housing prices have
grown much faster than the city average. Although it is often used by the
academic literature like an example of a successful state-led gentrification, the
percentage of low income non-EU migrants (the highest in the city) has also
grown sharply. The result is a complex scenario in which process of segregation
and gentrification seem to be taking place at the same time.

Tornaghi, Chiara, Dept. of Sociology and Social Research - University of


Milano-Bicocca, Italy, chiara.tornaghi@unimib.it

Branding the “public” city: art in public spaces

As part of their strategies to regenerate deprived neighbourhood or former


industrial sites, public art has being used to re-brand the city as a convivial,
culturally attractive and vibrant public space.
However, despite its mere collocation in public spaces, public art
commissioning, conceptualisation and implementation often apply a model of
place-making and place-management that contradict in practice its claimed
publicness, embodying several exclusionary dynamics. Through the analysis of
empirical material collected in Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead (UK), and
particularly through the examination of the location choices, citizens
engagement, and process-product balance in public art making, the paper aims
at using the classical sociology analytical tool of community, power and identity
to conceptualise the “publicness “ of public spaces.

Ueno, Junko (junkou@n07.itscom.net) Japan Society for the Promotion of


Science, Japan

Disguised impacts of state-led urban restructuring: What prevented the


people from realizing its negative impacts?

In 2001, the Koizumi Cabinet began political reform to combat long-term


economic recession. The Urban Renaissance policy, concerning deregulation
of urban planning, was introduced as a part of this reform. Although this
introduction widened inter-regional disparities in Tokyo, the policy attracted
limited attention. This seems particularly odd considering that Koizumi Reform
has been accused of widening income disparity. This paper will argue the two
factors that made possible to implement the URP with so little opposition, by
analyzing the survey data of civil social organizations in Tokyo. First, the Urban
Renaissance policy focused on deregulations, which mislead the tax payers that
it will be less costly compared to conventional public development program. In
reality, for the government to promote the urban redevelopment by the private
sector, investment in urban infrastructure and tax deductions became
necessary. Second, income gap and segregation level of Tokyo had been
relatively small compared to western cities. Promoting development in certain
52

area was not perceived as favoring particular income group. For those who
were not living in the prioritized promotion area did not realize the investment in
the selected area was done at their expense. The trickle down effect is not yet
observed.

Uitermark, Justus (J.L.Uitermark@uva.nl) University of Amsterdam

How Goliath tries to defeat David. The resistance against state-led


gentrification in an Amsterdam neighborhood

Gentrification has become part and parcel of governmental strategies for urban
development since the 1980s. In the Netherlands, too, we find that state
agencies and housing associations that once curtailed processes of
gentrification are now actively implicated in the process. There is a new
consensus that there are too many affordable houses in cities and that the
housing stock needs to be transformed in order to keep the city ‘mixed’ and
‘liveable’. This paper traces the genealogy of this gentrified urban vision of the
city and examines how it is gains the power to shape reality in its image.
Following the premise that power is most easily identified when and where it is
contested, I present an ethnographic study into a case where a coalition of
residents, academics and activists promoted a counter-discourse that revolved
around ‘affordability’ and ‘diversity’. I analyze the competition between these
discourses and their respective strengths in various settings with the help of
theories of discursive and symbolic power. How and why can opponents or
proponents of gentrification promote their ‘common sense’ of what the city
should look like? What can the resistance against gentrified urban visions learn
us about the modalities and logics of state-led gentrification?

Vaiou, Dina, and Ares Kalandides, National Technical University of Athens,


Greece, divaiou@central.nutua.gr and kalandides@inpolis.de.

Ethnic Neighborhoods? Everyday public spaces of inclusion/exclusion

The formation or consolidation of ‘ethnic’ neighbourhoods in European cities


has made ethnic/racial difference more visible in urban space and has brought
back to the forefront of both academic and political debate questions about
spatial concentration of ‘strangers’ (‘segregation’), about citizenship rights and
‘integration’. ‘Strangers’ in the city make their presence visible and, in the
process, reconfigure the meanings and uses of everyday public spaces, within
and against dominant spatialisations. Also, interaction among locals and
strangers is inscribed in a web of inequalities and power relations, which
continuously re-define the ‘subject of rights’ as they activate processes of
access, participation and inclusion/exclusion in/from the urban public sphere.
The paper proposes to discuss the above processes and terms, drawing on
examples from Berlin and Athens. We will be focusing in particular on spatial
concentration as a means of group identity formation and on how it is related to
participation and urban citizenship. The two cities offer different contexts: on the
one hand institutional policies (in Berlin) and on the other informal practices and
53

claims (in Athens) for participation at neighbourhood level define, in different


ways, citizenship as a spatial strategy and help qualify the content of
inclusion/exclusion.

VALLADARES, Licia

The ‘intellectuals’ of the favela: new actors of social innovation

The debate on the favela focuses largely on its innovative and creative capacity.
Its contribution to Brazilian music through samba and the samba schools,
through hip-hop and funk, through football and popular culture in general, is
largely recognized and has helped to create a positive image that counteracts
the negative image of marginalization, criminality and poverty. In fact the
traditional image of the favela seems to be fading. It is no longer the territory of
the migrants in the city or of the poor tout court. In cities such as Rio de Janeiro
the favela population is increasingly urban, socially mobile and heterogeneous
and many such urban areas now house buildings of six to eight floors and have
an active rental and real estate market. A new social actor seems to be on the
move; although so far a minority group, it deserves attention as it contributes to
new forms of social innovation. They are called in Brazil the “doutores” or the
“intellectuals” of the favelas. They work in NGO’s or are members of resident’s
associations, have gone or go to universities where they obtain an under-
graduate or a graduate degree and most of them continue to live in the favelas
where they grew-up. What does such a group represent? In which activities
exactly are they involved? Are they more legitimate to speak about the favela,
as they seem to claim, than those who are not originally from the favela but
study it ? How are they perceived by the majority of the local population? This
paper intends to explore the degree of social innovation and urban creativity
that such group represents.

Van der Graaf, Peter (p.vandergraaf@verwey-jonker.nl) and Lex Veldboer


(A.P.M.Veldboer@uva.nl) University of Amsterdam
State-led gentrification, place attachment, and the role of the middle class

Although European middleclass flight from cities is modest compared to the


American situation (and European cities still attract urban seekers looking for
jobs, amenities, diversity etc.), cities are worried to have a shortage of middle
class groups. Several reasons are at stake, amongst them the idea that
middleclass is necessary to lift up starting groups. The middle class is regarded
as a stable factor helping others. The Dutch policies for urban restructuring and
state led gentrification are fueled by the idea that there is something as a
middleclass burden. Research will be presented that shows that great parts of
the middle class involved in urban renewal projects in deprived areas don’t fit in
this picture, but yet some do. Contrary to what is mostly expected these
helpers are not the ones that have climbed up from the own group, but social
arrives with idealistic ideas. Yet their numbers are small. Moreover, the paper
examines that the emotional ties people developed over time with the place
where they lived provided an emotional source of comfort and identity which is
54

cut by moving, causing distress, feelings of displacement and not belonging.


These findings suggest that in specifying the effects of state led gentrification
and social mix more attention is needed to place attachment.

Vargas-Hernández, José G. (jgvh0811@yahoo.com) Sistema nacional de


Investigadores.

From entrepreneurial state to state of entrepreneurs: ownership


implications of the transformation in Mexican governance since 1982

This paper has the aim to analyze the ownership implications of the
transformation in Mexican governance since 1982. The turning point of the
implementation of a new model of development was prompted by the Mexican
State financial crisis of 1982, after a period of steady economic growth. The
entrepreneurial State since then has been under the attack of new business
elite, who are the direct beneficiaries of the massive transfer of public assets
and change in ownership from public property to private property. The Mexican
State is now captive under the interests of entrepreneurs rule and governance.
This paper brings some specific cases related with the change in ownership in
the land property, the banking and financial system, the telecom company
TELMEX, airlines, etc. The effects of this change in ownership are evident. A
weak system of regulatory agencies and mismanagement of privatization
programs has ended in private monopolies, low economic growth, uneven
social development, political instability, alarming increment of insecurity, social
unrest, etc

VERPRAET, Gilles, CNRS/GRASS, France, verp@ehess.fr

Social deliberation and public coordinations in the urban trajectories for


sustainability

The relations between the material and the procedural dimensions of urban
sustainabilities can be linked into a more constructive and consistent dialogue.
A study of the implementation process of theses politics and thematic makes
evidence of different social supports: (a) The role of the social deliberation and
(b) the role of institutional and political coordinations, so to frame the
sustainable urban form (eco district, requalification of industrial area). We can
analyze the transformation of the urban and sustainable politics on these two
issues. This can be demonstrated on city cases (as Nantes and Plaine
Commune in France). This can be compared with the European frames of
urban sustainability. Within this approach, we compare the social outcomes in
the production of the urban sustainabilities between policies of the National
State and the policies of the local State: (1) The politics of the national State
focus the debates on the politics of energy, on transportation priority and
economy of energy. (2) The politics of local State on the sustainable
development may articulate citizenship mobilizations on concrete issues, an
open construction of these politics between public deliberation and social
changes, the framing of alternative way of life (compact district, soft mobility).
55

We notice different urban assemblages between contexts and nature, between


social territories and institutional coordinations. So results some new relations
between sociological analysis, the form of State and the public debates.

Vicario, Lorenzo (lorenzo.vicario@ehu.es) and Arantxa Rodriguez, University of


the Basque Country

Neoliberal Regeneration and Policy-led Gentrification in Bilbao

In recent years, there has been considerable debate over the changing nature
of contemporary gentrification. Current research suggests that gentrification has
mutated radically from its original meaning to include a variety of new forms and
geographies, challenging traditional definitions and leading to broader, more
inclusive definitions. Contemporary gentrification is also closely tied to
increasing state involvement in the process, with a larger role being played
today by local governments in promoting and supporting gentrification under the
influence of neo-liberal urbanism. And, while the role of urban policy in fostering
gentrification can be hardly considered as new, recently there has been
mounting evidence that gentrification, far from an unintended outcome, has
turned into an integral component of urban regeneration strategies.
Increasingly, local governments are actively pursuing gentrification dynamics as
a key means for regenerating distressed areas and redundant spaces in cities.
Indeed, urban regeneration policy has turned into a fertile ground for the
production of new exclusionary urban landscapes. This paper examines the
links between urban regeneration and gentrification dynamics in Bilbao through
a critical analysis of revitalization strategies implemented during the last
decade. It reviews urban policy-making and implementation in three areas in the
city, where despite quite distinct logics and regeneration initiatives, an explicit
and purposeful strategy of gentrification is nevertheless clearly identifiable. The
paper points to the emergence of policy-led gentrification as a basic feature of
urban regeneration strategies and examines the consequences and social costs
of this model.

Vieira Tomás, Ana Paula, Maceió City Hall, Brazil and Maria do Carmo Vieira,
Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil, carmov703@ Hotmail.com

Brazilian Cities – The Sustainability Challenge

To reflect on the sustainable city means to adopt a comprehensive approach,


not restricted to the new technologies used to construct the urban environment.
To reflect on the sustainable city means to seek the collective construction of a
urban model as a strategy, a political project of development planning and
management that includes all the sectors of society, and that can be adopted by
these different sectors. One can evaluate the complexity of achieving new
approaches to thinking about our cities by considering the (un)sustainable
reality of the majority of Brazilian cities, and the serious problem of urban
poverty.
56

Beyond the disparity of the city's size and amount of resources available, one
has to pay attention to distinct cultural, political and institutional realities. In
respect to the planning and management of the green urban areas, we propose
thinking about the sustainable city as a collective process. We rely on
institutional data from the city of Maceió - Alagoas and specific population
research within the city. We discuss sustainability principles such as: ecology,
cooperation, policies integration, democracy, community involvement,
transparency and accountability, in a context strongly marked by social
inequality.

Vite Pérez, Miguel Ángel (miguelvite@yahoo.com) CIECAS-IPN

La ciudad mercancía como proyecto del desarrollo urbano globalizado de


la Ciudad de México

El objetivo del trabajo es mostrar la utilidad de la idea turismo-mercancía, que


ha sido aplicada, mediante acciones del gobierno de la ciudad de México, en su
parte histórica, para reactivar las actividades comerciales y, al mismo tiempo,
las relacionadas con el turismo, considerado como una fuente permanente de
valorización, desde un punto de vista mercantil, del espacio urbano. En este
contexto, se puede observar que el desalojo de los comerciantes informales,
que usaron de manera intensiva las calles y avenidas de la zona histórica,
forma parte de la política pública de renovación urbana que antepone el valor
de cambio al valor de uso. Por otro lado, el uso del poder público local para
expropiar predios o casas, bajo el argumento de que se usaban para las
actividades del crimen organizado, se transformó en una opción para reubicar a
los comerciantes informales, lo cual ha disminuido la conflictividad de las
organizaciones de comerciantes informales vinculadas al partido político que
gobierna la ciudad capital desde hace 10 años. Al mismo tiempo, la próxima
celebración del centenario de la Revolución Mexicana en el año 2010, se ha
vuelto parte de la agenda gubernamental local para realizar obras de
remodelación y buscar también la edificación de nuevos monumentos
conmemorativos.

Vivoni, Francisco, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, vivoni@uiuc.edu:

Reclaiming Public Space: Skateboarding, Direct Action and Urban Unrest

The quest for alternative social horizons continues through mounting


dissatisfaction towards present day life conditions. Spearheaded by sporadic
youthful insurgencies, direct action social movements with imagined political
links to the Situationist International seek to undo corporate globalization. A
performative framework from which to delve in and out of the complex
narratives of resistance that dot the current milieu of unrest is concocted
through an exposition of variations on the theme of skateboarding. Politics
through play seek to intertwine the centrality of negation with the productive
onslaught of creativity focused on the imperative of taking back the streets.
This study locates street skateboarding as an alternative use of public space
57

within a wide gamut of direct action initiatives that challenge business as usual.
The city as playground is explored as unintended consequence of capitalist
accumulation. Through this study, I seek to broaden meaningful interpretations
of the built environment in order to forward nuanced visions of embodied social
change. The insights gained through the coupling of skateboarding and direct
action are useful for framing future research through critical ethnography of the
intersections of spatiality, democracy and public life.

Vogelpohl, Anne, University of Hamburg, Germany,


anne.vogelpohl@metropolitanstudies.de

Culture or creativity – Two different concepts of urban places?


Rooted in prospering cultural industries the concept of creative industries has
become a promising approach for urban politicians and planners. Thereby, the
concepts of culture and creativity are mostly not even distinguished und mixed
up randomly. But there are several issues to be regarded when transferring one
to each other and comparing the production and reproduction of social relations
within cultural and creative industries. Main contrasts are to be seen in the role
of productivity of the cultural / creative work, the organization of everyday life
and requirements to the physical and social surrounding. My concern is to shed
light on the arbitrariness between culture and creativity along these lines. Based
on empirical studies in the Schanzenviertel, an urban quarter in Hamburg, it will
be shown that the distinctions between these concepts become manifest in
different uses as well as different impacts on urban places. Both the individual
dimension of everyday needs and the social dimension of establishing und
maintaining social relations require another type of spatiality. Thus, the
distinction of culture and creativity results in different concepts of urban places.

Wahdan, Dalia E. University of Pune, India, dewahdan@aucegypt.edu

Spatio-temporalities of Urban Mass-transit Operations in Sitta October,


Egypt

This paper seeks to understand the nature of urban spaces that emerge within
the context of privatizing the provision of infrastructure networks and services,
through investigating urban mass-transit operations in Sitta October, Egypt a
suburban city near Cairo, linked to global flows of capital and labour. It focuses
on the dynamic interactions between government and non-government
providers of mass-transit and analyzes the nature of urban governance. It
contextualizes this dynamic within four overlapping forces: a) existing
institutions of local government, b) global capital and labour flows, c) regional
infrastructural and policy measures, and d) the will of mass-transit operators to
have a stake in their own livelihoods. The analytical framework conceptualizes
the city as an assembly of infrastructure networks, working at once
harmoniously and discordantly, to provide inhabitants with services and
amenities. It conceives roads and vehicles as socially constructed primary
technical systems, interdependent, with secondary systems of land use,
58

planning, governing and traffic regulation. These technical systems mediate


socio-spatial and institutional changes. Privatization of these technical systems
involves technical, spatial and managerial fragmentation of various tasks of
production, operation and management. This process requires various forms of
public-private collaborations with implications on the nature and modes of urban
governance.

Walks, R. Alan (alan.walks@utoronto.ca) University of Toronto

From Gentrification to Social Mix, or Social Polarization? Testing the


Claims in Large Canadian Cities

Gentrification in the form of ‘neighbourhood revitalization’ is increasingly touted


as one way of decreasing the social exclusion of residents of poor inner-city
neighbourhoods and of increasing neighbourhood levels of social mix and social
interaction between different classes and ethnic groups. Yet, the gentrification
literature also suggests that the process may lead to increased social conflict,
displacement of poorer residents to lower quality housing elsewhere, and
ultimately social polarization. Much of this hinges on whether gentrifying
neighbourhoods can remain socially mixed, and whether neighbourhood
compositional changes result in more or less of a polarized class and ethnic
structure. However, the impact of revitalization and gentrification on levels of
social mix, income polarization or ethnic diversity within neighbourhoods
remains unclear and under-explored. This paper addresses this gap by
empirically examining the relationship between gentrification, changes in
income mix, and shifts in immigrant concentration and ethnic diversity, using
census tract data for each decade from 1971 to 2001 in the large Canadian
cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. This research demonstrates that
gentrification is followed by declining, rather than improving, levels of social mix,
ethnic diversity, and immigrant concentration within affected neighbourhoods. At
the same time, gentrification is implicated in the growth of income polarization
and inequality within the inner city.

Watt, Paul, University of London, UK, p.watt@bbl.ac.uk

Council Housing Stock Transfers and State-Led Gentrification in London

The main targets of New Labour’s regeneration policies in England are what it
considers to be anachronistic forms of housing which are culturally and
politically associated with the poor, inner-urban working class. In London this
means local authority (a.k.a. council) housing estates. New Labour has tied
funding arrangements for much-needed housing renewal to stock transfer, i.e.
tenants voting to transfer their landlord from the council to a registered social
landlord (RSL). Although RSLs nominally provide ‘social housing’, they
increasingly operate along business lines. One impact of stock transfer is that
the injection of private finance means houses are built for sale, not affordable
rents. Given high house prices in London, such new properties will not be
bought by the local poor but instead by incoming affluent gentrifiers. New
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Labour is therefore bringing about the gentrification of those remaining parts of


inner London that have thus far avoided it, i.e. council estates. The paper
discusses the various ideological and financial explanations for this policy. As
part of New Labour’s programme to distance itself from the class politics of Old
Labour and thereby prove its ‘modernising’ credentials, one can argue that it is
breaking up council housing, one of the last symbolic vestiges of
‘workingclassness’ in London. However, despite the loaded gun held at council
tenants’ heads (‘either transfer or don’t have the repairs’), stock transfer ballots
have not all gone New Labour’s way. Across the country, but especially in
London, tenant activists have opposed the transfer process as seen via the
campaigning group ‘Defend Council Housing’. The paper considers what such
resistance tells us about contemporary social change and politics in London in
relation to gentrification, class and ethnicity.

Weyher, L. Frank, Kansas State University, USA, weyher@ksu.edu.

Race, Labor, and Restructuring during WWII

How did World War II affect the salience of “race” and “class” as bases for
identity and social action in the industrial cities of the U.S.? How did the
interaction of these two foci for identity affect urban development, and how, in
turn, did urban changes affect their interaction? While “nation” and
“nationalism” (in the form of patriotism” and support for the “war effort”) seem to
displace class” during these years, “class” was by no means absent and, for
some, may have even transcended “nation” in favor of a broader
“internationalism.” Even at home, the tremendous labor upsurge of the 1930s
continued into the 1940s and many unions retained some of their pre-war
militancy. Furthermore, changing class relations, both inter- and intra-class,
intersected with “race” and race relations in the U.S. in complex ways. In
previous work (with Maurice Zeitlin) I examined the impact of the intra-class
balance of power between rival unions on the emerging patterns of racial
inequality of this period. In this paper, I analyze the different ways in which cities
and their residents dealt with the increased competition over “place,”
“resources,” and “rights” which accompanied often profound racial and ethnic
shifts in the composition of the urban labor force

Zuccotti, Carolina V., University of Buenos Aires, Argentina


carolinazuccotti@gmail.com

“Moving towards increasing spatial segregation? A comparative study of


Buenos Aires and Barcelona (1991-2001)”

It is well accepted that not all cities experience the same levels of social and
spatial inequality. Phenomena such as poverty, social polarization and
exclusion are historically higher in Latin American cities than in European ones,
and those situations are clearly reflected in the urban space (and also
reinforced through it, as said by Gregory and Urry). However, and this is our
main hypothesis, in spite of these differences it is still possible to find common
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patterns of spatial segregation in cities that, at first sight, seem very different.
Moreover, and on the assumption that economic models promote distinctive
socio-territorial configurations (Kesteloot; Torres), it is feasible to identify similar
transformations of the urban structures during the last years. In fact, a number
of studies have shown that due to globalization processes cities have started to
experience an increase of spatial segregation and socio-spatial contrasts (Borja
and Castells; Sassen; among others). The paper discusses this issue for “two
new regional centers of the global network” (Borja and Castells): Buenos Aires
and Barcelona. Using Census Data and statistical techniques such as Factor
and Cluster Analysis, it presents: i) the main socio-spatial transformations
produced in both cities between 1991 and 2001; and ii) the principal tendencies
regarding the evolution of spatial segregation and polarization, pointing out the
particular characteristics that the phenomenon has acquired in each city for the
period under analysis.

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