Urban Studies

This virtual special issue considers the empirical and theoretical resources that the back catalogue of Urban Studies specifically, and the discipline of urban studies more broadly, has to offer our understanding of the rapidly evolving contemporary moment in the USA, usefully dubbed ‘The Age of Ferguson’ (Bernard (2015); Derickson (forthcoming). Mobilising the concept of the ‘racial state’, this article considers Ferguson in the context of state rescaling and globalisation to continue to flesh out the role that difference and its geographical expression play in smoothing out and justifying the neoliberalisation of urban governance (see Derickson (2014)), and to begin to develop ‘countertopographies’ (Katz (2001)) that link up the margins of the Global North and South. In so doing, I engage each of the papers included in the special issue to consider how they contribute to and stretch our understanding of the present racial conjuncture, and to provide a first cut at thinking the Age of Ferguson relationally (Derickson, forthcoming; Jacobs (2012), through urban governance, racialisation, territorial stigmatisation’ (Garbin and Millington (2012)), policing and urban social movements.

Extending Small and McDermott’s ‘conditional perspective’, Blalock’s minority competition theory is used to explain how the relationship between African Americans and the number of supermarkets in a zip code depends on the city in which it resides. The 2010 American Community Survey and ZIP Business pattern data are examined with hierarchical general linear models to explore whether the previously observed negative relationship between the percentage of African Americans and the number of supermarkets in a zip code depends on the percentage of African Americans in the city. The results show that the relationship between the percentage of African Americans and the number of supermarkets depends on the percentage of African Americans in the city in the U-shaped pattern predicted by minority competition theory. Applications of minority competition to other theories of the unequal distribution of resources in cities are discussed.

With an understanding that organisations in a city are spatially located and that the geographical distribution of their resources is uneven, this paper examines how neighbourhood characteristics affect the spatial dimension of one basic resource in particular: organisational legitimacy. Specifically, we investigate how the presence of immigrants, the presence of youth and the degree of residential mobility in a neighbourhood may influence collective frames among its residents on what constitutes appropriate and suitable organisational forms. Employing multilevel analysis on data about the voluntary leisure organisations of immigrants in Amsterdam during three periods of time, we consider whether these neighbourhood characteristics do indeed have an impact on the number of organisations to be found and on their vitality. We conclude that an immigrant presence reduces the spatial dimension of organisational legitimacy, which consequently decreases organisational density and survival rates; a youth presence has the opposite effect; and the degree of residential mobility has no significant effect.

We study the choice of dwelling units in a condominium complex, a problem that has not been thoroughly investigated in the housing research literature. We take a revealed preference approach to quantify home buyers’ preference toward attributes associated with a dwelling unit. In particular, we estimate a mixed logit model using the hierarchical Bayes approach based on the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. We derive the willingness to pay measures for detailed attributes associated with a dwelling unit including its floor level, orientation, location in the complex, location on a floor level, and the type of bathrooms. We also find strong evidence for the preference heterogeneity among home buyers and conduct regression analysis to explain the preference heterogeneity using home buyers’ socioeconomic characteristics. Our results show that home buyers with older ages and higher annual household income tend to focus more on the quality of the dwelling units, while first-time home buyers are more willing to accept dwelling units with less-desirable attributes.

Social housing providers in many advanced economies have been directed towards market-orientated and commercial business models, whereas the scope of the private rental sector has been increasingly expanded to the provision of housing for low-income households. Where these developments coincided, the demarcation between the activities of social and private landlords has blurred, with the result of increasing competitive pressure on both groups. This paper sheds light on the behavioural aspects of competition by introducing the concept of inter-landlord rivalry in local rental housing markets. Drawing on data from 36 in-depth interviews with social and private landlords in Coventry/England and Breda/the Netherlands, this study shows that existing perceptions of rivalry among most landlords are exceptional in low-income renting but pronounced in more expensive, commercial rental segments. The paper will demonstrate that these perceptions are highly subjective and non-reciprocal. Moreover, competitive perceptions and interactions are strongly affected by political and market structural settings, and appear to be dependent on the trade-off between the social mission and commercial goals of individual housing associations in the social housing sector.

This study compares a conventionally used panel data model – that does not allow for regional variations in housing price dynamics – with panel models that let the dynamics differ across regions. We concentrate on examining the momentum dynamics and the reversion speed towards the fundamental price level. Based on data over 1988–2012, the results indicate that the regional differences are generally quite small in the Finnish market. Nevertheless, in several cities the dynamics differ significantly from those indicated by the baseline model that does not allow for regional variation. In addition, the long-term coefficient on income considerably varies across regions, the coefficient being greater in the more supply-constrained cities. The results indicate that the use of panel models that assume similar housing price dynamics across regions can lead to flawed conclusions being drawn.

Urban neighbourhood has become a conspicuous arena of policy intervention in China, since the central government intensively promoted a Shequ system to strengthen its infrastructure power at neighbourhood level in the 1990s. As recent researches give increasing discussions to the roles different actors play and the division of responsibility within institutional procedures of Shequ, few empirical studies have been carried out to explore the everyday governing process and the stories happening at the receiving end of governance. This research uses a Foucauldian governmentality framework to critically analyse the Shequ institutions’ governing technologies in their everyday practices, and how these technologies succeed or fail to shape citizens’ conduct. Empirical evidences from the case study portray a hybridising scenario, in which the Shequ institutions embrace both the Maoist and Confucian discourses to cultivate active and responsible citizens. Nevertheless, residents’ divergent reactions to the government mobilisation suggest a process in which citizens develop their own ways to internalise or refuse the government interventions which aim to regulate their conduct. This paper concludes by suggesting that giving its materials of stories about the implementers and receivers of government discourses, neighbourhood governance can make important contributions to governmentality research in regards to the topics around the state’s power exercise at the grassroots society and citizens’ struggle around subjectivity.

At times, local politicians are described as barriers to interlocal cooperation; however, recent studies show elected officials are active in interlocal networks and harbour diverse motivations for their involvement in interlocal politics. This research introduces institutional role theory to the study of interlocal politics. Using a survey of elected officials in the San Francisco Bay Area, support for various roles in interlocal politics are assessed in relation to the scope of elected officials’ concerns about the use of interlocal agreements, as well as variables related to institutional context. Exploring elected officials’ concerns about interlocal agreements and the roles they undertake in interlocal politics sheds light on the democratic underpinning of metropolitan civil society and highlights new research opportunities at the intersection of public administration, political science and urban studies.

Over the last decade the English planning system has placed greater emphasis on the financial viability of development. ‘Calculative’ practices have been used to quantify and capture land value uplifts. Development viability appraisal (DVA) has become a key part of the evidence base used in planning decision-making and informs both ‘site-specific’ negotiations about the level of land value capture for individual schemes and ‘area-wide’ planning policy formation. This paper investigates how implementation of DVA is governed in planning policy formation. It is argued that the increased use of DVA raises important questions about how planning decisions are made and operationalised, not least because DVA is often poorly understood by some key stakeholders. The paper uses the concept of governance to thematically analyse semi-structured interviews conducted with the producers of DVAs and considers key procedural issues including (in)consistencies in appraisal practices, levels of stakeholder consultation and the potential for client and producer bias. Whilst stakeholder consultation is shown to be integral to the appraisal process in order to improve the quality of the appraisals and to legitimise the outputs, participation is restricted to industry experts and excludes some interest groups, including local communities. It is concluded that, largely because of its recent adoption and knowledge asymmetries between local planning authorities and appraisers, DVA is a weakly governed process characterised by emerging and contested guidance and is therefore ‘up for grabs’.

We examine Mexico City’s urban structure through a composite index by combining two previously existing metrics: one derived from the Urban Network Analysis tool (UNA), recently published by MIT researchers, and the other, using an Entropy Index, which in essence, represents the mixed land-use degree. The proposed composite index embodies a different approach from previous methods reported in the literature because it uses disaggregated data at the unit level, performs weighted cluster calculations through a network data set, and incorporates a mixed land-use metric. This method was developed in order to test if the urban arrangement showed signs of a polycentric condition under a particular centrality standpoint. We observed that Mexico City has a relatively weak polycentric urban condition.

The problems of violence in Latin America are often reiterated, yet understanding how and why violence declines is far less common. While urban violence takes different forms and has a range of motivations, we suggest that strengthening political and social institutions are important in violence reduction processes. We examine this using a comparative analysis of two cities which have recently seen unusual and marked reductions in lethal violence: Bogotá in Colombia and Recife in Brazil. Drawing on primary data collection, the case studies suggest that novel leaders who take advantage of critical junctures can deliver unexpected improvements to public security; and improvements are linked with institutionalising progressive security policies, increasing accountability of political institutions, and social reforms encouraging civic values and commitments to non-violence. While findings are specific to these two cases, they may plausibly apply to a broader range of cities, such that commitments to improve public policy and political institutions can overcome structural risk factors that foster violence.

The development of projects for new eco-cities is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon. Alleged eco-cities are being built across a variety of spaces via processes of urbanisation triggering substantial environmental, social and economic impacts. This article investigates how new eco-city projects interpret and practice urban sustainability by focusing on the policy context that underpins their development. The article argues that projects for new eco-cities are shaped in loci by policy agendas tailored around specific economic and political targets. In these terms, the ideas and strategies of urban sustainability adopted by eco-city developers are understood as reflections of broader policy priorities. The case study employed in this article, Masdar City, reveals how the Emirati eco-city initiative is the product of local agendas seeking economic growth via urbanisation to preserve the political institutions of Abu Dhabi. Following the economic imperatives set by the ruling class, the Masdar City project interprets sustainability as ecological modernisation and practices urban environmentalism almost exclusively in economic terms. The article shows how the developers of Masdar City capitalise on sustainability by building an urban platform to develop and commercialise clean-tech products, and concludes that the Emirati alleged eco-city is an example of urban eco-modernisation: a high-tech urban development informed by market analysis rather than ecological studies.