Abstract The rapid development of technology, particularly generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), has brought significant transformation in the creative economy. GenAI has shown its capability to produce original artworks, presenting both opportunities and challenges for traditional artists. In this research we examine the perceptions of informal creative economy actors, particularly street painters in Braga Street, Bandung, and assess the local government's response to the emergence of GenAI. In this study, where we make use of stakeholder interviews and SWOT analysis, we found that artists’ perceptions of AI are divided: some see AI as a tool, while others feel threatened by it. In the study we also highlight the absence of legal frameworks in Indonesia that regulate the ethical use of AI in the creative industry. Our findings reveal Bandung city as the leading art hub in Indonesia, responding to AI development through knowledge, artistic, and stakeholder networks. This study therefore contributes by highlighting the importance of artists’ awareness and government policies to minimize risks and optimize the potential of GenAI in the arts sector.
Abstract This article examines how popular entrepreneurship operates as a cultural grammar that disrupts established practices of wageless life in urban peripheries. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research conducted in São Paulo, it analyses entrepreneurial discourses not simply as ideological impositions, but as ambivalent mediations of everyday strategies of social reproduction. Rather than emerging solely from contemporary labour market transformations, entrepreneurship is shown to be rooted in longer‐term trajectories shaped by family practices, moral values, and experiences of precarious work. The article situates the entrepreneurial ethos within broader processes of economic restructuring and the spreading of global trends of modernity, highlighting its entanglement with shifting expectations of mobility and autonomy. Empirical material from street‐level commerce, entrepreneurship events, and in‐depth interviews demonstrates how individuals navigate between survival and aspiration, mobilizing both residual practices and new normative frameworks. While entrepreneurship may provide access to resources, recognition and future‐oriented projects, it also reorganizes existing tensions within the limits imposed by precarious conditions of life and work. In this sense, popular entrepreneurship is understood as a contradictory formation, through which longstanding ways of life are reworked rather than replaced, and where competing moralities, expectations and forms of economic action might converge.
This article examines commodity-resettlement mixed communities (CRMCs) as a by-product of land-centred, property-led urbanization. Within the repertoire of land-centred urbanization, we show how the introduction of price-capped land auctions, coupled with competitive resettlement provision, has subtly reconfigured speculative urban (re)development, transferring the responsibility for resettlement from the local state to developers, thereby generating scattered resettlement patterns. Consequently, CRMCs emerge as rural-urban interstices where resettled households are embedded in-and subordinated to-an urbanized governance regime. Previously cohesive and resilient rural communities are thereby fragmented into interstitial formations. Against this backdrop, we turn to the repertoire of post-resettlement urbanism, examining how the state deploys multiscalar governance strategies to stabilize post-resettlement life. At the urban scale, the local state articulates resettled villagers' citizenship via infrastructure provision; at the neighbourhood scale, it establishes residential committees to orchestrate community-building initiatives. Confronted with the most intractable challenge-the socio-spatial tensions between resettled villagers and middle-class homeowners-the local state facilitates tacit agreement on spatial segregation within CRMCs, thereby preserving both collectivist and middle-class residential patterns. This study foregrounds the dominance of the state in urban governance, while illuminating the imperative to re-embed itself within the social fabric of post-resettlement urbanism.
Earlier writings on the political importance of play have discussed how it can make players conscious of the possibilities of otherwise worlds. Prefigurative politics has very similar aims, but the discussion between the two has been limited. In this article, I conceptualize prefigurative political forms of child mobility activism (i.e. mobility collectives, street experiments and demonstrations) as ludic spaces that prefigure children's right to the mobile city. Here, play is not mere make-believe but based on real emotional stakes, appropriation of real spaces and creation of disruptive rhythms. After that, I show how the players use ludic spaces as the foundation for prefigurative organizing, but also that these processes are highly contextual and fragmented. Finally, I discuss how ludic spaces and other prefigurative political forms can be considered part of the radical cooperative notion of the right to the (mobile) city.
Urban heritage scholars have often criticized simulacra as 'bad' copies that degrade the 'good' model of the past through commercialization and gentrification. This article challenges such Platonic dichotomies of good/bad and model/copy, arguing that the binary of good heritage and bad simulacra is flawed because heritage is itself actualized only as simulacra-a process of becoming that generates new trajectories and connections to all possible pasts. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Seochon Hanok Village in Seoul, South Korea, the article explores how various urban actors differently imagine and perform heritage in and through ongoing conflicts and negotiations to authenticate their divergent and coexisting simulacra of the past. Consequently, the article argues that a more inclusive approach to urban heritage emerges not by protecting a supposedly good heritage, but by embracing the ceaseless becomings and differences that revive all possible pasts as simulacra.
Urban infrastructures are often celebrated within marketized development logics for their promise of equitable access while concealing ecological harm. This article examines whether and how ecological degradation is integral to infrastructural modernization, showing how infrastructures that promise improvement and inclusion simultaneously normalize harm within everyday urban life. Drawing on ethnographic research in Kumartuli, Kolkata (India), an artisanal neighbourhood renowned for Durga Puja idol-making along the polluted Hooghly River, the article traces how infrastructural interventions framed as heritage preservation and urban improvement intensify material flows and degrade river ecologies while concealing this harm beneath narratives of progress. The analysis situates Kumartuli's engagements with water infrastructures and seasonal festival economies within broader urban political ecology and hydrosocial debates, illustrating how infrastructures operate as socio-technical overlays that transform riverine ecologies while facilitating festival-driven metabolic intensifications. It argues that concealment is systemic, relational and constitutive of infrastructural processes, positioning infrastructural modernization as a mechanism through which ecological harm is rendered acceptable and less perceptible by embedding degradation within the material and discursive logics of improvement. While grounded in Kumartuli, the article offers conceptual insights relevant across global South urban contexts where infrastructural expansions intersect with degraded water commons and persistent ecological strain.
This article reconsiders the relationship between visibility and politicization. Drawing on empirical evidence from urban mobilization campaigns across Russia, we counter the existing literature on theories of the post-political and liminality by identifying four dimensions of visibility-publicity in urban space, objects of urban contestation, interaction with external audiences, and alliances with supporters-which activists fine-tune in their collective actions. Instead of treating visibility as either constitutive of, or entirely separated from, the political, this framework reveals its complex interplay with political engagement strategies in non-Western contexts. By doing so, it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of dissent in authoritarian and high-risk environments.
In China as well as in other countries, migrants often grapple with urban inequities by actively reshaping the functions and meanings of their environments. While acknowledging established frameworks such as place-making and urban informality, this study adopts a complementary lens, framing migrants' everyday practices as a process of reterritorialization. This research employs an in-depth case study of a representative urban village in Shenzhen, drawing upon data collected through questionnaire surveys, semi-structured interviews, and on-site observations from 2022 to 2023. The findings indicate that certain migrant groups develop a territorial subjectivity through chain migration, origin-based employment patterns, shared cultural backgrounds, stable living conditions, and neighbourliness. They reterritorialize beyond physical spaces to encompass socio-cultural landscapes and formal power structures, areas that have been largely neglected in current scholarly discussions. Although these efforts contribute to stability and dominance within an adopted neighbourhood, they also incite tensions and cause new situations that make the migrant group more vulnerable. Policy interventions are necessary in community governance to empower the migrants.
Metropolises are rapidly becoming spaces of stark inequalities. While much literature has emphasized the metropolitan scale as a driver of agglomeration economies, recent scholarship highlights either the ungovernable nature of large metropolises or the weak redistributive capacity of their governments as key causes of increasingly unequal urban landscapes. In response, this article advances the idea of a 'just metropolitan turn', arguing that metropolitan governance can play a crucial role in mitigating inequalities and that its redistributive capacity depends on governance characteristics. Through a comparative analysis of Barcelona and London, this article examines: (1) how governance processes shape housing retrofit in both cities, and (2) how their governance arrangements influence their capacity to address inequalities and promote a more just retrofit. Findings show that metropolitan policies and governance arrangements are vital not only in supporting municipal units but also in setting more ambitious, redistributive retrofit agendas. However, important differences emerge between the two cases in balancing municipal subsidiarity and metropolitan leadership, reconciling redistribution with recalibration of needs, and negotiating relations between public and private actors. These differences suggest that neither strong metropolitan institutionalization nor institutional fragmentation alone guarantees redistributive outcomes; rather, clearer delegation of competences, objective prioritization, and cross-scale collaboration can yield more equitable outcomes.
This article develops the concept of environmental statecraft to study changing urban environmental politics in China and beyond. Our review of existing conceptions reveals a growing need to account for temporal and geographical complexity. Neoliberal conceptions of eco-state restructuring are increasingly strained by contemporary geopolitical realignments, while authoritarian frameworks in the Chinese context have tended to overemphasize coercive enforcement and under-theorize regulatory flexibility and scalar politics. The article advances environmental statecraft as an alternative framework, which situates urban environmental politics within the current conjuncture of environmental geopolitics, protectionism, and state capitalism. We develop the framework by clarifying its sensitivity to historical and geopolitical conjuncture, its attention to multi-scalar state actions, and its realist focus on the versatile techniques through which state intervention is crafted. Building on Chinese environmental politics, we propose two analytical categories: managerial statecraft, characterized by flexible and diversified instruments under new managerialism; and developmental statecraft, which mobilizes multi-scalar resources and increasingly prioritizes regional interventions. The case of Chengdu's 'Park City' strategy illustrates how environmental statecraft is enacted to reconcile protection and development with an ethos of guaranteeing ecological and economic security.
Conventional fiscal federalism posits subnational governments as 'empire builders' constantly seeking autonomy. We challenge this orthodoxy by documenting a counter-intuitive phenomenon in the global South: 'voluntary recentralization'. Focusing on Indonesia's fragmented decentralized landscape, we investigate why local governments in fiscal peripheries actively petition to surrender jurisdiction over high-value infrastructure assets to the central state. Employing a comparative case study of fiscal extremes-juxtaposing the industrial core of Sidoarjo with the agrarian hinterland of Jember-we argue that under conditions of structural insolvency and the visibility paradox of viral politics, autonomy transforms into an unbearable spatial burden. We identify a causal mechanism termed the 'threshold of viability': when the risks of electoral blame and bureaucratic compliance paralysis exceed fiscal capacity, the rational strategy shifts from credit-claiming to 'defensive rescaling'. Surrendering authority becomes a survival mechanism to inoculate incumbents against the material politics of infrastructure failure. This study introduces the concept of 'hollow autonomy', demonstrating how symmetric decentralization designs inadvertently incentivize local governments to retain the trappings of power while strategically outsourcing core governance functions back to the center, creating a territorial trap for the periphery.
Narratives, visuality and symbolic representations are increasingly important in contemporary urban planning and development. This article seeks to understand how urbanity, one of the key goals of Helsinki's recent planning, has been constructed in the Kalasatama regeneration area. The construction of urban image and identity is viewed as soft planning, framing social space, and aiming to affect the socio-economic future of the neighbourhood. The concept of place-framing is used to analyse the contents of planning and development, and the findings reveal four place-frames through which urbanity is constructed as well as the subtle political power invested in place-framing. These place-frames aim to present a narrative of a wealthy neighbourhood with authentic historical roots and plenty of possibilities for cultural consumption. Furthermore, this article complements the discussion on the role of discursive production of space and suggests place-framing as an approach to better understand the socio-economic implications and political meanings of soft planning.
This article examines how urban space functions as a micro-political arena in the production and localization of ethnic contestation in Ethiopia's contested cities. Focusing on the Igziabiher Ab church in Dire Dawa and the Menelik statue in Addis Ababa, it investigates why particular urban sites emerge as central nodes of unrest during periods of citywide political violence, even when physical confrontations unfold elsewhere. Through a qualitative approach that combines ethnography and case studies, the analysis reveals that public spaces with dense symbolic significance, ambiguous spatial control, and distinct spatial morphologies become recurring nodes of unrest. These sites operate not as passive backdrops but as active terrains where narratives of belonging, authority, and historical legitimacy are enacted and challenged. By foregrounding intra-urban differentiation, the study highlights how neighbourhood histories, spatial configurations, and localized power relations mediate the unfolding of conflict. The article argues that understanding ethnic contestation in Ethiopia requires moving beyond city-level generalizations toward spatially grounded analysis of specific urban fragments. A relational spatial lens reveals how hyper-local interactions intersect with wider urban and national dynamics, demonstrating that the uneven geography of violence is a window into the spatial logics that shape-and are shaped by-Ethiopia's volatile nation-building.
Asset managers, private equity firms and other institutional investors have assumed an increasingly important role in the ownership and management of housing and infrastructure since the Global Financial Crisis. This article analyses how social housing in London is being transformed into a financial asset through an analysis of 'income strip' leases, long-term contractual arrangements between institutional investors and local authorities. Building on insights from urban political economy and the social studies of finance, we explore the moral politics, temporal logics and forms of obligation and risk embedded in these financial arrangements. We situate the rise of income strips within a longer arc of state-market entanglements and argue that they exemplify a recursive and cyclical tendency in the local state's experimentation with private finance. At the level of the contract and the asset, we show how value and risk are distributed and negotiated, and how income strips produce hierarchies of obligation and indebtedness. While institutional investment into social housing is narrated as a 'common sense' policy solution that promises to fill the 'housing gap' and secure returns for workers' retirement savings, we show how income strips erode security of tenure, increase rents and entangle states and tenants in new forms of financial obligation, foreclosing alternative political imaginaries.
