International journal of urban and regional research pdf

Zhu Jiawei, Zhu Yingying. Sameh Mohamed Hamed Elyan. Sergiy Ilchenko. Mykhailyk Olha. Urban and Regional Planning URP is a peer-reviewed and open access journal that provides an international forum for researchers, scholars and practitioners of urban and regional planning to share experiences and communicate ideas.

It is to publish refereed, well-written original research articles that describe the latest research and developments in the area of urban and regional planning. Articles submitted should offer clear evidence of novelty and significance. The topics related to this journal include but are not limited to:. Join as an Editor-in-Chief. Open Access. Download Certificates. Not the least of these is the existing dominance of knowledge of 2 This statement, which might offend some scholars from the global South, is derived from the experience of editing IJURR.

This is, of course, not true of all contributions from the global South, and IJURR is pleased to have published many outstanding papers by Southern scholars. It is less true of scholars from the global North who study the global South, and are better plugged into international debates and literatures. The challenge of facilitating a larger number and broader range of scholars from the global South to play a fuller part in international debates must be a crucial challenge facing journals like IJURR over the next few years.

But critical urban scholarship requires that such challenges be tackled. There is perhaps no part of the world which is as subversive of established urban wisdom as contemporary China. In recognition of the importance of Chinese urban studies, we have made a series of appointments as Corresponding Editors of the journal and we look forward to appointing at least one Chinese specialist as a full member of the Editorial Board in the near future. With the help of these scholars, IJURR is committed to helping to develop the critical analysis of cities in East and Southeast Asia through an engagement with the analysis of cities in other parts of the world.

As urban scholars, we should be very aware of the risks of Chinese urban studies developing as either an enclave or a ghetto, isolated from comparative urban scholarship. This seems to us to be a valuable model of one way in which Chinese urban studies can engage with broader literatures. Of course, realising this aspiration will not prove easy. Continuity and change: format and content Substantively, urban and regional studies have come a long way since But much remains fundamentally continuous and ongoing.

Basic theoretical and epistemological issues persist. How do we go about understanding cities? What theories, methodologies and concepts have re- emerged to help us to understand cities and regions? But these concerns take on new forms in response to the changing global, intellectual, methodological and perhaps even political environments. In At issue are the relationships between theory, evidence and praxis, and including especially economic data.

Justin Beaumont and Walter Nicholls guest-edited a symposium on participation and governance in Both symposia were explicitly comparative and cross-disciplinary. The second symposium explores some of the diversity of infrastructural politics across North and South. IJURR An editorial statement ix gentrification was losing its critical edge, that a celebration of gentrification had displaced the study of the displacement of the working class. Both combined case studies from the global North and South.

Drawing on ethnographic research in a variety of settings, the contributors examined the interactions between religion, modernity and the city. In addition, we have recently published stand-alone articles on development mafias in Mumbai Liza Weinstein, Symposia and papers such as these provide some indication of the direction in which critical urban scholarship is moving.

Whilst it is not up to IJURR or any other journal to seek to direct scholarship in any particular direction, some directions do seem to be especially promising and worthy of whatever encouragement a journal like IJURR can provide.

One such direction is the critical analysis of urban process and form in light of the extraordinarily rapid changes sweeping across much of the global South. Critical urban scholars of the global South engage with states, markets and societies that are, in important respects, very different to their counterparts in the global North, i. Globalization and neoliberalism are certainly deserving of close attention, but it should not be assumed that they entail or generate the same changes in diverse settings.

They might also pay more systematic attention to the diversity of ways in which states, markets and societies are being remade, not only in obvious settings such as eastern and south-eastern China, but also in settings such as Brazil and South Africa where the dynamics of accumulation and conflict are shaped by distinctive social and cultural contexts.

Cultural sociology and social anthropology obviously have a lot to contribute to comparative urbanism, but so too do geographers, political scientists and even economists who are sensitive to difference. The dialectics of continuity and change also force us to constantly monitor and reinvent the format in which we publish urban scholarship.

We have long standing rubrics and sections but we also have added new features. These allow for groups of authors to tackle, together, a theme that is difficult to accommodate in a single issue. Ideally, we would also publish more essays that tackle large themes within a single, stand-alone paper. We are not sure why. Perhaps it reflects the institutional pressures on authors to publish more rather than better papers.

Some of our contributing authors suggest that our review process is unfair on writers of essays, favouring the more limited, empirically-based case-study. This new feature will allow authors to provide synthetic but critical reviews of a field in urban and regional studies. The field might be an emerging sub-field such as urban political ecology , a newly emergent issue such as terrorism and the city, or infectious disease and the city , or new scholarship on a particular urban region or school such as the Los Angeles School, or African urbanism.

Contributions to this section may comprise literature reviews, but we anticipate that most will rather locate new developments in the selected field within broader intellectual and urban contexts.

They will not include extensive reporting of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Taken together, contributions will serve to take the pulse of contemporary urban and regional studies.

IJURR is present in the world of urban and regional studies beyond the pages of the journal. Chaired by Neil Brenner New York University , the SUSC board3 has consistently accepted only the very best monographs and edited volumes that current urban scholarship has to offer. Furthermore, the sponsored IJURR lectures at RC21 and the AAG, for example, have been important in terms of raising the profile of the journal within the broader social science community and have increased visibility for the entire project.

Finally, we seek the input and advice of the IJURR community through reader surveys and inviting scholars to contribute intellectually in special sessions of our annual editorial board meetings. In our new website which is currently being built on the platform of Wiley-Blackwell, we intend to work as much as we can with interactive technologies as they have now entered journal publishing. Yuri Kazepov, who is a member of the IJURR editorial board as well as being a pioneer of technological change in urban sociology, reminds us that IJURR has a readership that would accept and contribute to an innovative shift in the use of technology.

In the end, our biggest challenge in the emerging, more competitive, more commercialized, more accelerated international landscape of academic research and publishing may be to stay true to our core belief in interdisciplinarity.

We believe there is a continuing need for critical interdisciplinary and comparative work, and we pledge to continue offering an outlet for both.

What is a region? What are cities? If none are what they once were, how does one now do a comparison? Jeremy Seekings Jeremy. Within this framework, the geographical locations and spatial boundaries of cities and metropolitan regions were inconsequential; what mattered was their differential population sizes relative to those of larger units national territories, subcontinents, continents.

Differences among cities whose populations exceeded the specified UPT of 20, were not captured in the map; nor were similarities among such putatively urban locations and those settlements that, owing to their lower population levels, were classified as non-urban or rural. However, for the UN-DESA research team, this homogenizing representation of national, subcontinental or continental territories was considered appropriate, given the need to grasp differential urbanization patterns on a world scale.

While contemporary urban age metanarratives are grounded upon updated data, we argue below that they have reproduced in nearly identical form the underlying conceptual orientations, geographical imaginaries and representational strategies associated with this methodologically territorialist model of world urbanization from the s.

Even at that time, population-based definitions of cities had achieved such prominence among urban historians, sociologists and demographers that Wirth was motivated to open his major theoretical statement on urbanism with a frontal attack on them. In broad empirical terms, Wirth recognized the practical need for such definitions, but on a theoretical level he considered them ahistorical and indeterminate. In so far as UPT definitions always relied upon the boundaries of extant local and regional administrative units, they had to be viewed as artifacts of juridical convention rather than as indicators of sociologically meaningful circumstances.

Moreover, Wirth argued, given the constant flow of people across such boundaries, population-based definitions of urban areas provided no more than a rough, and often highly misleading, indication of urbanity. The influences which cities exert upon the social life of man [sic] are greater than the ratio of the urban population would indicate, for the city is.

In other words, even if UPTs could not be relied upon to classify the spatial unit in question, Wirth continued to presuppose that this unit would naturally be characterized by certain sociospatial properties — discreteness, coherence and boundedness. Despite his otherwise sharp disagreements with Wirth, Castells ibid.

The sharply critical epithets launched by Wirth in the s and redeployed by Castells in the s against the use of UPTs in the study of urbanization — arbitrary, empiricist, ahistorical — apply with striking accuracy to contemporary versions of the urban age thesis. Accordingly, in what follows, we subject early twenty-first century urban age discourse to a contemporary critique. This critique is intended to apply to the broad constellation of urban age references, discourses, metanarratives and projects that were surveyed at the outset of this article.

Foremost among these is the continued lack of agreement on what needs to be measured, and at what spatial scale, in analyses of world urbanization. In effect, the same problems of data compatibility and boundary demarcation that vexed Kingsley Davis and his colleagues in the s and s remain completely unresolved in the urban data sets that have been assembled regularly by the UN Population Division from the early s through to the most recent revision of World Urbanization Prospects in UN-DESA-PD, The problem has been discussed extensively among UN demographers and statisticians since the s, leading the organization to issue and regularly update general guidelines regarding the appropriate means to delineate localities for a detailed overview, see Champion, To the degree that the UN has proposed a technical resolution to this conundrum, its recommendations resonate closely with those introduced by Kingsley Davis in the mature phase of his work on the topic in the late s at Berkeley — namely, the combination of population size indicators with subsidiary ones pertaining to density, labor market structure and infrastructural outlays.

This meant that some municipalities or localities were declared to be urban regardless of population size or other indicators, while others, often large and densely settled, were excluded by administrative fiat. Such definitional recalibrations may produce dramatic fluctuations in national and — in highly populous countries such as China, India, Brazil or Nigeria — world urban population levels entirely as a result of classificatory modifications.

An equally serious problem relates to the timing of census data collection, which varies considerably across national states.

The use of such varied indicators and classificatory schemata has generated some counterintuitive statistical outcomes. In a detailed overview, Satterthwaite 84, 85 lists several typical examples: Mexico can be said to be 74 or 67 per cent urban in , depending on whether urban centres are all settlements with 2, or more inhabitants or all settlements with 15, or more inhabitants.

These were not classified as urban types — although they would have been in most other nations. If they were considered urban, this would mean that Egypt was much more urbanized, causing major changes to urban growth rates. From a strictly empirical point of view, there are two main strategies for confronting these questions.

In this approach, the notion of a worldwide rural-to-urban transition is preserved, but its precise timing and sociospatial expressions are considered to be more fluid than in official UN analyses — it is, in effect, understood as a long-term, world-scale secular trend rather than as a conjunctural transformation.

The main modification here is a greater level of reflexivity and flexibility in interpreting the heterogeneous forms of data that are subsumed under the urban age postulate. The major attraction of such approaches is that they permit the investigation of changing patterns of agglomeration, population distribution, land cover and land use that are no longer completely reliant on national census data.

The new array of mapping possibilities that flow from such techniques are productively complicating the representation of planetary urbanization processes Potere and Schneider, ; Angel, Whether recent developments in remote sensing might facilitate theoretically innovative interpretations of the global urban condition is a question that requires more sustained exploration elsewhere Brenner and Katsikis, Urban age as chaotic conception If the empirical edifice of the urban age thesis is unstable, its theoretical foundations are obsolescent, having been eroded through the dramatic forward-motion and geographical reorganization of the urbanization process which the thesis purports to be documenting.

The resultant, unevenly woven urban fabric Lefebvre, [] is today assuming extremely complex, polycentric forms that no longer remotely approximate the concentric rings and linear density gradients associated with the relatively bounded industrial city of the nineteenth century, the metropolitan forms of urban development that were consolidated during the opening decades of the twentieth century or, for that matter, the tendentially decentralizing, nationalized urban systems that crystallized across the global North under Fordist-Keynesian capitalism Hall and Pain, ; Schmid, ; Soja and Kanai, ; Soja, ; Brenner and Schmid, ; Merrifield, ; Schmid, ; Brenner, In some areas, urbanization has expanded on even larger regional scales, creating giant urban galaxies with population sizes and degrees of polycentricity far beyond anything imagined only a few decades ago.

Merrifield —9 characterizes the transformation in closely analogous terms: The urbanization of the world is a kind of exteriorization of the inside as well as interiorization of the outside: the urban unfolds into the countryside just as the countryside folds back into the city. Remarkably, contemporary declarations of an urban age replicate this methodological opposition by embracing the identical conceptual framework and geographical imaginary that Davis had relied upon — in particular, the core assumption that global settlement space can and must be divided neatly into urban or rural containers.

On this basis, the thesis posits an ineluctable shift of population, in both relative and absolute terms, to the urban side of this dualism. While urban age discourse is usually put forward as a set of empirical claims regarding demographic and social trends, the latter are premised upon an underlying theoretical and cartographic framework whose core assumptions, once excavated and scrutinized, are deeply problematic. Figure 4 presents a stylized overview of the key elements within this framework and their links to broader methodological tendencies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban social science see Figure 4.

Urban age discourse is articulated in diverse methodological forms and ideological guises, but the elements presented in this figure can be viewed as its theoretical foundation. First A , the theory is methodologically territorialist in so far as, like many entrenched traditions of twentieth-century social science, it assumes the territorial boundedness, coherence and discreteness of the spatial units in which social relations unfold Taylor, ; Brenner, Methodologically territorialist approaches presuppose rather than examine or explain the historical construction and reconstitution of territorial boundaries at any spatial scale; they ignore the historical specificity and political instrumentalities of territory as a form of sociospatial organization Elden, ; and they often bracket the role of non-territorial sociospatial processes such as place-making, networking and rescaling that likewise figure crucially in the structuration of political-economic relations Jessop et al.

Second B , urban age theory conceptualizes urbanization primarily or exclusively with reference to the concentration of population within cities or urban settlements. While this conceptualization is fairly standard within most major twentieth-century traditions of urban studies Soja, ; Gans, , it can be argued that such understandings bracket the ways in which the formation of cities and urban zones is premised upon and in turn triggers a range of large-scale, long-term sociospatial transformations beyond the agglomeration itself, across less densely settled places, territories and scales Berger, ; Soja, ; Brenner and Schmid, ; Brenner, The aforementioned intellectual influences have impacted diverse strands of twentieth-century social-science and urban studies, but in the contemporary notion of an urban age they have converged to form a particularly obfuscatory vision of the global urban condition.

As Figure 4 indicates, the intellectual core of the urban age thesis is 1 the methodologically territorialist assumption that the world is divided into discrete types of settlement, the classification of which facilitates understanding of major demographic and socioeconomic trends. In most urban age discourse, this opposition is understood in zero-sum terms: all of settlement space must be classified as either urban or rural; the extension of the former thus entails the shrinkage of the latter.

Figure 4 Conceptual architecture of the urban age thesis attuned to the role of urbanization in intensifying interspatial interdependencies and reorganizing territorial organization across the world.

The possibility that these entrenched envelopes of settlement space might themselves be deconstructed or transformed through the process of sociospatial restructuring is thereby excluded from consideration by definitional fiat.

Some version of this constellation of assumptions is presupposed in all contemporary versions of the urban age thesis, but they are on display in a particularly pure form in Figure 5, which is drawn from the most recent edition of the United Nations publication World Urbanization Prospects UN-DESA-PD, In this understanding, the distribution of global population may shift, like the sands in an hourglass, but the containers in which populations are located remain ontologically fixed.

Despite its updated data and its slightly modified visualization technique, this map is analytically identical to that produced by UN researchers in see Figure 3 above; UN-DESA, As in the s, urbanization is still represented as a property of national territories, which are once again graphically coded according to their respective percentage levels of urban non-rural population.

Today, however, this dualism and the broader concept of an urban age to which it has been attached have come to serve a broader academic and sociocultural purpose. Consequently, the popularity of the urban age thesis, whether in scholarly, political and corporate discourse or in everyday life, would appear to be connected to the ways in which, however crudely, it gestures towards naming and beginning to interpret what are indeed widely experienced as profound, even epochal, transformations of urban sociospatial organization around the world.

Our claim, however, is that this cognitive map obfuscates much more than it reveals about contemporary urbanization processes. First, the urban age thesis divides the indivisible in so far as it treats urban and rural zones as fundamentally distinct, thereby ignoring the pervasive imprint of urbanization processes on settlement spaces that, whether based on criteria of population size, administrative classification or otherwise, are officially categorized as rural.

As used within urban age discourse, both of these categories are generalized to the point of meaninglessness; each refers to extremely heterogeneous conditions within and among national territories. More problematically still, in contrast to this pervasive black-boxing of the rural, the notion of the urban used within urban age discourse is radically overspecified. The concept of the urban associated with the urban age thesis is used to refer to so many divergent conditions of population, infrastructure and administrative organization that it loses any semblance of analytical coherence.

While the notion of an urban age is generally meant to imply a worldwide shift towards an encompassing, worldwide urban condition, its evidentiary base encompasses a vast spectrum of settlement conditions, ranging from small- and medium-sized towns to regional centers, metropolitan cores, large city-regions and sprawling megacities with populations exceeding 10 million Montgomery, Given the sweeping heterogeneity of settlement configurations and transformative processes that are subsumed under the notion of an urban age, it is highly questionable whether any meaningful theoretical content can be ascribed to it.

We thus return to the theoretically reflexive orientation towards the urban question emphasized by both Wirth and Castells many decades ago. As both authors insisted, without reflexive theoretical specification, the concept of the urban will remain an empty abstraction devoid of substantive analytical content and thus a blunt tool for deciphering or illuminating the nature of the conditions, processes and transformations to which it is applied.

Unless the proponents of the urban age thesis can explicate what specific phenomena — sociospatial, demographic, administrative or otherwise — unify the ostensibly unrelated or inessentially connected zones of settlement that obtain with its sweepingly vague categorization of settlement space, then this crucial methodological condition has not been met; the term will remain no more than an empty abstraction.

Conclusion: towards an investigation of planetary urbanization Even when they are grounded upon chaotic conceptions, hegemonic understandings of major social processes may have wide-ranging impacts, for they mediate expert and popular discourse, representation, imagination and practice in relation to matters of considerable consequence for the organization of political-economic relations.

Accordingly, as Wachsmuth forthcoming argues, the ideological dimension of urbanization requires sustained analysis and deconstruction by critical urban theorists, especially under conditions in which entrenched formations of sociospatial organization are radically reorganized to produce new landscapes of urbanization whose contours remain blurry, volatile and confusing, and are therefore particularly subject to fetishized forms of narration, representation and visualization see also Goonewardena, A more wide-ranging analysis of the practical effectivities of the urban age thesis would be of considerable interest and import at every conceivable spatial scale, not least for those committed to promoting more socially just and ecologically viable forms of urbanization in both North and South.

Can an alternative cognitive map of emergent urbanizing formations be constructed, one that supersedes the manifold limitations and blind spots associated with urban age discourse and other contemporary ideologies of urbanization? The urgency of this task is blunted by the entrenched empiricism that dominates so much of contemporary urban social science and policy discourse, leading researchers to emphasize concrete investigations and associated visualizations rather than interrogating the underlying conceptual assumptions and cartographic frameworks around which they are organized.

This problem has been long recognized by radical spatial theorists, but it continues to impede theoretical innovation in early twenty-first century urban studies owing to the persistence of stubbornly entrenched spatial ideologies that treat the urban as a pregiven, self-evident formation to be investigated or manipulated.

While it is not possible here to elaborate our alternative approach to such an endeavor in detail, we conclude by outlining a series of epistemological guidelines that follow from the preceding critique of the urban age thesis.

Our own current work on planetary urbanization is grounded upon these precepts, but we believe they could productively inform a variety of heterodox engagements with the urban question under early twenty- first century conditions. The urban is not a pregiven, self-evident reality, condition or form — its specificity can only be delineated in theoretical terms, through an interpretation of its core properties, expressions or dynamics.

It is essential, therefore, that twenty-first century debates on urban questions reflexively embrace the need for conceptual abstractions related to the changing form and geography of urbanization processes. Without this recursive work of theory, the field of urban studies will be poorly equipped to decipher the nature and 5 For a brilliant example of how to track this process of interspatial policy transfer and mutation across scales and territories in the context of contemporary neoliberalization tendencies, see Peck and Theodore and Theodore and Peck Urban age discourse represents a particularly egregious expression of the latter tendency and its associated intellectual and cartographic hazards.

In contrast to inherited concepts of the urban as a definitionally fixed unit or static form, its meanings and expressions must be understood to evolve historically in relation to broader patterns and pathways of global capitalist development. As Lefebvre [] insisted, the study of urban forms must be superseded by the investigation of urbanization processes at all spatial scales.

Much of twentieth-century urban studies embraced a methodologically territorialist cartography in which the urban was treated as a distinct, relatively bounded settlement type, assumed to be separate from purported non-urban zones located beyond or outside it. Urban age discourse represents only the most recent, influential exemplar of this long entrenched methodological tendency.

Such territorialist and settlement-based understandings of cityness had a basis in the morphologies of industrial and metropolitan urbanization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but even then they represented only partial, one-sided depictions of a polymorphic, variable and relentlessly dynamic landscape of urbanization. However, given the accelerated differentiation of urban landscapes across the world since the s Brenner and Schmid, ; Schmid, , it is clear that settlement-based understandings of the urban condition have now become obsolete.

The urban cannot be plausibly understood as a bounded, enclosed site of social relations that is to be contrasted with non-urban zones or conditions. It is time, therefore, to explode our inherited assumptions regarding the morphologies, territorializations and sociospatial dynamics of the urban condition.

Once urbanization is seen as a process that transforms diverse zones of the world, another entrenched methodological tendency must be superseded, namely the exclusive or primary focus of urban scholars on agglomerations, the densely settled zones cities, metropolitan regions, megacity regions, and so forth in which population, economic activities and infrastructural systems are clustered.

However, throughout the history of modern capitalism, this terrain has been neither empty nor disconnected from the process of agglomeration; it has actually evolved dynamically through a complex, constantly thickening web of economic, social and ecological connections to the heartlands of urban concentration across every zone of the world economy.

Though largely ignored or relegated to the analytic background by urban theorists, such transformations — materialized in densely tangled circuits of labor, commodities, cultural forms, energy, raw materials and nutrients — simultaneously radiate outwards from the immediate zone of agglomeration and implode back into it as the urbanization process unfolds.

Today, urbanization is a process that affects the whole territory of the world and not only isolated parts of it. The urban represents an increasingly worldwide, if unevenly woven, fabric in which the sociocultural and political-economic relations of capitalism are enmeshed.

This situation of planetary urbanization means that even sociospatial arrangements and infrastructural networks that lie well beyond traditional city cores, metropolitan regions, urban peripheries and peri-urban zones have become integral parts of a worldwide urban condition.

There is, in short, no longer any outside to the urban world; the non-urban has been largely internalized within an uneven yet planetary process of urbanization. Urbanization is a process of constant transformation and leads continuously to the production of new urban configurations and constellations.

Zones of urbanization, and the urban condition more generally, should not be treated as homogeneous — neither in the contemporary era nor during earlier historical periods. Rather, urbanization processes produce a wide range of sociospatial conditions across the world that require contextually specific analysis and theorization. It focuses on the distribution of population among the two boxes rather than exploring their substantive contents, conditions of emergence or developmental pathways.

As such, each term within the dualism is no more than an empty abstraction since neither is adequately attuned to the massive patterns of differentiation and variegation that characterize urbanization processes.

Consequently, and rather urgently, these black boxes must now be opened, and their contents explored. Inherited analytical vocabularies and cartographic methods do not adequately capture the changing nature of urbanization processes, and their intensely variegated expressions, across the contemporary world.

For a more detailed account see Brenner and Schmid