The relationship between religion and urban governance challenges the prevailing assumptions of secularist and modernisation theories. We argue that religious institutions are central to urban governance, shaping welfare provision, spatial politics and moral imaginaries. Drawing on empirical case studies from four Middle Eastern cities - Beirut, Kuwait City and Tehran, we present a dual analytical framework focusing on the political economy of (de)sectarianisation and the moral topographies of urban belonging. Through this lens, we examine how religious actors engage in hybrid governance and influence land and housing markets, disaster recovery and cultural heritage, constructing contested moral orders in urban spaces in the process. This framework captures the material and immaterial dimensions of urban life, revealing how religious actors and institutions produce segregation and coexistence, and belonging and exclusion, along and across religious lines. Theorising from the Middle East in this way contributes to critical urban studies and decentred urban theory, offering new insights into the role of religion in shaping contemporary urban transformations and politics.
Over the last decades, critical urban scholarship has shown that spatial injustice is not an accidental feature of urban life but the outcome of historically situated power relations embedded in planning, housing policies and capitalist accumulation. Yet these debates have often privileged formal politics and visible mobilisation, sidelining the mundane practices through which inequality is lived, negotiated and contested in everyday life. This article addresses that blind spot by bringing feminist theories of care and social reproduction into dialogue with spatial justice. Drawing on long-term feminist ethnographic research in a working-class neighbourhood in the northern periphery of Granada (southern Spain), the article examines how women collectivise care and organise mutual support in a context marked by segregation, infrastructural neglect and territorial stigma. Rather than treating care as a merely social or adaptive response to deprivation, the analysis conceptualises it as a political and spatial practice that reconfigures the conditions of urban life.Empirically, the article traces a repertoire of everyday urban politics: the defence and regulation of shared spaces, neighbourhood-based infrastructures of care, and the scaling up of care networks into institutional claims-making and disruptive collective action. The findings challenge androcentric definitions of politics and argue that rethinking spatial justice requires recognising care-based practices as central to the right to the city.
This paper examines how street vendors in Chandigarh deploy everyday design as a political strategy of spatial negotiation. Focusing on the rehri-a mobile handcart, it traces how restrictive bylaws produced non-compliance by design. In response, rehriwallas collaborated with local technicians to retrofit existing carts, developing an electrified rehri that was affordable, locally sourced, and legally legible. These interventions exemplify everyday design-iterative material adaptations produced within the constraints of informal work, where technical decisions are inseparable from questions of formal compliance and affordability. Read against Chandigarh's modernist legacy, where mobility functioned as a technique of discipline and displacement, the redesigned rehri reclaims mobility as a tactic of presence. Electrification also enabled the cart to be reframed as municipal innovation and adopted as a formal program, culminating in a mayoral launch of an electric rehri fleet. The paper argues that everyday design operates as a material politics of legibility-an ongoing negotiation through which informal workers reconfigure the terms of recognition. By centering retrofit and affordability as forms of technical expertise, the case expands what counts as design beyond professionalized planning and demonstrates how informality is not residual to the city, but a generative mode of city-making.
This photo-essay explores the migration crisis that has hit Cuba in recent years, with a focus on street-front material traces such as real estate sale signs testifying to the material cultural belongings left behind by people leaving or attempting to leave the country. The authors collected photographs in Santiago de Cuba from 2023 to 2025. We collaborated to develop collage visuals to show at a glance the quantity of houses for sale and the creativity that emerged in a period of extreme scarcity. Yet, we argue that the Cuban ingenio, the ingenuity and creativity often referred to as a resource to navigate daily difficulties, is fading away like the surface of a house-for-sale sign exposed to daylight. Instead, a sense of betrayal in the revolutionary project-for which home-making, home ownership, and housing were a materialization of the socialist values-is leading to a lack of hope in a future on the island. The images aim to visually portray the story of a forced diasporic movement and the betrayal of a promise of belonging deeply rooted in the Cuban Revolution. Therefore, we explore what the street signs tell about this story. How are they representative of a society at loss of its own sense of belonging and home-making? Through visual methods, we aim to record and recount how material culture testifies to socio-political issues such as forced migration, diaspora, and belonging.
While a large body of scholarship has explored the proliferation of explicitly radical initiatives to challenge the dominance of neoliberal approaches to urban planning, less attention has been devoted to what this paper suggests labeling as moderately heterodox experiments to foster alternatives to these practices, but not transform neoliberal urban development regimes at their core. The paper sheds light on the limits and prospects of such initiatives by exploring the visions and outcomes of the Vallastaden project in Link & ouml;ping, Sweden, intended to chart a new path for urban development through the construction of a purportedly socially sustainable neighborhood. By devising and implementing rather unconventional planning practices, the municipality that spearheaded the project managed to wield comparatively extensive influence over the development of the neighborhood. However, the key goal of building a substantial amount of affordable housing was not achieved. The paper postulates that while such moderately heterodox projects are imbued with important limitations, they can open up cracks in hegemonic urban development regimes. Projects of this kind, which incorporate practices capable of actually changing planning, should be differentiated from those where such claims amount to mere rhetoric. Urban scholars may benefit from giving more attention to initiatives along these lines.
This paper revisits and revitalizes an older yet still relevant debate regarding the explanatory power and political traction of assemblage urbanism. The discussion, which unfolded across the pages of City in 2011, involved a key critique: that assemblage urbanism is too theoretically vague to clearly identify the 'social forces' of urban becoming-offering, in turn, limited value to those seeking to explain, interrogate, and intervene in urban realities. We address this theoretical quandary by employing Theodore Schatzki's practice-based ontology. Following Schatzki's lead, we articulate practices as the social forces of urban assemblages, contributing, in turn, an analytic for understanding the powers through which urban phenomena take shape. This analytic is put to work through two empirically informed vignettes on urban homelessness and the constitution of urban energy demand. These provide two different takes on how social practices underpin urban assemblages, with the rigors of performance highlighted in the first instance and constitutive chains of action emergent of multiple practices in the other. By articulating a practice-based account of the social forces of urban assemblages, we contribute to conceptual debates long at the heart of City on the power and politics of urban becoming and discussion of possibilities for intervention. The key implications of this contribution for future critical urban research are laid out.
