This paper investigates how queer women and nonbinary people (referred to as non-males) find space within a heteronormative context that actively resists their existence. In their modes of formation, these spaces actively resist the straightening and commodification of queerness and empower the community in a subversion of patriarchal norms. Using Seattle’s context, the authors investigate historic queer non-male spaces along with two contemporary case studies using archival research, oral histories, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. The result is an identification and examination of two different forms of counterpublic spaces utilized by the queer non-male community to create locations of queer belonging: the exclusive/inclusive space, investigated through the case study of a local lesbian bar, and the non-exclusive/ inclusive space, represented through the case study of a women’s sports bar. Both serve as places of resistance and empowerment. While both create spaces of belonging for queer non-males, the former achieves this by establishing an exclusive space, while the latter does so through a non-exclusive space that actively supports queer non-males. By engaging the inclusive/exclusive dichotomy the cases offer insights into the complex dynamics of identity, community and belonging for queer non-males.
The article explores how urban densification is defined, measured and conceptualised in the context of Lahore through the narratives of key policy stakeholders. A preliminary analysis of policy documents, and the recent changes in building regulations and land-use rules show that there is a commitment to increase density by discouraging urban sprawl and encouraging the growth of mixed-use, highrise buildings. By conducting an analysis of policy documents and the changes in building regulations and land-use rules through the narrative of key stakeholders in policy making, the research unveiled motivations which underpin policy makers’ commitment to higher densities, illustrating how urban densification is manifested in the realm of policymaking, the forms and typologies within which high densities are envisaged by stakeholders and how these have materialised on the ground, and the implications thereof.
In March 2024, Berkeley Planning Journal editors Xixi Jiang and Nick Shatan facilitated a virtual roundtable on “Publics and Planning Academia” with five former editors or contributors to the Berkeley Planning Journal who earned PhDs from the Department of City and Regional Planning between five and fifteen years ago: Fernando Burga, Ricardo Cardoso, Jia-Ching Chen, Paavo Monkkonen, and Hayden Shelby. This infor- mal conversation moved between multiple registers, from contemplations of the pub- lics and purposes of planning academia to personal reflections on writing, research, and career trajectories. Over the course of two hours, the discussion covered six major topics: Audience and voice; Resonance, relevance, and accountability; Working across linguistic publics; Planners as interpreters; Public teaching; and Doctoral reflections. This conversation has been edited for clarity.
The Boston Black United Front (BBUF) was a large meta-organization that stands as a pivotal counterpublic institution in the annals of 20th-century community organizing. This study draws on archival documentation to explore the multifaceted strategies employed by the BBUF, highlighting their innovative use of print media, their dual focus on large and small pragmatic interventions, and their impact on the City of Boston. Central to its classification as a form of counterpublic work, I explore the BBUF’s capacity to hold, process, and engage in discourse around ideological diversity and contradiction. The organization came about during a tumultuous period in Boston’s history, before slowly fading out of existence as members pursued other endeavors, but not without making lasting material impact. Their confrontations with carceral violence, endeavors for economic justice, and efforts to foster community-centered alternatives to oppressive systems form the crux of their legacy. I examine the BBUF’s nuanced position and varied roster, inspired by but not fitting neatly into the broader Black Power movement, and emphasize the breadth of their work. This study positions the BBUF as a model for both contemporary activists and planning scholars, illuminating the pathways of grassroots movements in challenging and reshaping cities.
An internationally celebrated icon of community planning and grassroots activism, the late American urbanist Jane Jacobs is frequently reduced to a caricature of polite, all-purpose sentiments which obfuscate both the complexity and the political specificity of her work. In the first portion of this paper, I examine the popular representation of Jacobs by prominent urban nonprofits, as well as the ambiguity of her intellectual legacy in both urban scholarship and in recent media about her career. Highlighting Jacobs’s warm reception among libertarian thinkers, I devote the second portion of this paper to exploring the intellectual affinity between Jacobs and the famed Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Demonstrating their key points of convergence on mat- ters of social policy, governance, and expertise in relation to watershed moments in planning history, I conclude with an analysis of Jacobs’s little-discussed writing on American public housing, noting the various parallels between her argumentation and the radical reformation of American housing policy during the turn to “advanced liberalism” which occurred in the decades following the publication of her classic 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unimaginable adversity, with nations across the globe devising ways to cope with the loss of life, economic productivity, and social fabric. Due to the agnostic nature of the virus, no facet of society, whether in the Global North or South, has been left untouched. As beacons of economic and social agglomeration, the pre-pandemic city, in particular, has seen a rapid transformation, in often unforeseen directions. Local businesses have shuttered, while large technology companies have thrived;offices have closed, while their adjacent streets have been opened for active mobility and social activities;apartment rents have decreased, while single-family home prices have increased;the underprivileged have been adversely affected by both the virus as well as the economic reality of the pandemic, while the affluent have been largely untouched in both health and economy. Responses to COVID-19 in various nations have only exacerbated existing socioeconomic inequities, and, expectedly, not all federal, state, or local responses have been beneficial to all strata of society. This white paper focuses on several core themes that have evolved over the course of the pandemic and have behaved differently across geographies: (1) urban economics and equity (2) social and economic power dynamics, and (3) strategies to preserve urban social and economic systems.
This paper charts my path from observer to action researcher – and my ex post realisation that a transition had happened in my work. This transition happened on the fly, in the field, without me critically reflecting on it at the time, while I was studying evictions in Port Vila, Vanuatu, South Pacific. My ethics came into direct conflict with my research approach, and I chose to change my approach. I theorise my transformation in the modernity/coloniality literature and close by offering strategies to students and other researchers who are looking for ways to engage more deeply with, and give something back to, the communities they study.
Chinatowns in North America have been especially hit hard by COVID-19, a reality of anti-Asian racist and xenophobic sentiment exacerbated by the global pandemic. The factors contributing to increased business closures, commercial vacancy, and gentrification in Chinatowns have existed before the pandemic and have only been exacerbated. In order to preserve Chinatowns, municipalities have enacted historic preservation and small business support measures, such as historic designations, technical assistance for businesses, increased permit scrutiny, and legacy business programs. This study investigates the difference in retail changes across three Chinatowns in Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles both prior and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concurrently, this study also examines the impact of retaining a legacy business program and other preservation measures on the retail landscape. Interviews with city officials, organizers, community institutions, and members of the business community were conducted along with an analysis of existing local programs, policies and reports. This study finds that measures taken through historic preservation, small business support, and pandemic relief have not significantly addressed core needs within Chinatown communities. The most effective forms of relief and preservation was affordable housing, community-ownership of commercial businesses, and direct assistance for commercial rent. This study also acknowledges that some Chinatowns are faring better than others due to the ability of the Chinese community to fight against to historic discriminatory planning practices such as urban renewal, slum clearance, and highway building. The impact of these histories is deeply intertwined with the survivability of ethnic retail within each distinct Chinatown, and depending on the strength of existing community ties that remain will inform how preservation policies should be enacted.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of San Francisco sanctioned the use of public space on sidewalks and parking spaces for commercial use as part of their Shared Spaces initiative. Combined with streamlined permitting processes and an iterative rollout of design guidelines and inspections, the program facilitated a rapid and large-scale shift in the city’s streetscape. Using the Valencia Street commercial corridor in San Francisco’s Mission District as a case study area, we define and observe the “outdoor commercial spaces” (OCS) to present a preliminary typology based on degree of enclosure as a potential signifier of different patterns in use and perception of public space. We interview residents and other stakeholders to explore emerging themes in the perception of OCS, complemented by pedestrian path tracing along different sections of Valencia Street. Our findings indicate that differences in the degree of enclosure in OCS on Valencia Street partially reflect their diversity in use and business type. The limited interview data also suggests that individuals across all stakeholder groups generally believe OCS represent an improvement to public space even when more enclosed OCS imply the privatization of public space. Additionally, pedestrian behavior while the street is closed to vehicular traffic implies that the street closure is an important complement to OCS that maximizes the potential benefits of an activated streetscape while mitigating the negative effects and perceptions of privatization. However, these changes may amplify existing patterns of inclusion and exclusion in public spaces on Valencia Street. Especially as many OCS may become permanent fixtures of San Francisco’s streets, their design and purpose have important implications for street-level accessibility and city-wide equity for small businesses. These dynamics –and the OCS themselves –are likely to continue evolving during the transition to long-term guidelines and implementation.
Author(s): Berkowitz, Abra Sharkey; Abu-Rabia-Queder, Sarab; Orenstein, Daniel E. | Abstract: “Seeing from the South” (Watson 2008) and “Re-engaging Planning Theory with South-Eastern Perspectives” (Yiftachel 2006) are essential calls for the development of planning theories and empirical research from the Global South. Such scholarship has interpreted the rationalities at play as informal settlements develop on the peripheries of rapidly globalizing cities and explored how they reflect the nature of state interventions. This article examines the utility of planning theories issued from the Global South and North in explaining a case of state planning for an indigenous, ethnic minority in Israel: the Negev/Naqab Arab-Bedouins. The researchers conducted 90 interviews with planners, engineers, Bedouin residents, government officials, academics, and employees of non-governmental organizations. Their aim was to understand how stakeholders comprehended, engaged with, and approached planning for the Abu-Basma Regional Council, a state initiative to plan and provide services to informal Bedouin villages in Israel’s south, as well as the program’s outcomes. The findings indicate that planning theories from the Global South, which are focused on space, resource distribution, and resident-driven spatial change, are essential to understanding the outcomes of planning. They provide a necessary context for the North’s normative/prescriptive planning theories, which highlight tangible “episodes” (Healey 2007, 78) of planning practice but risk misattributing popular resistance to a program’s communication challenges, rather than to residents’ fundamental objections.
Author(s): Ravis, Timothy; Notkin, Benjamin | Abstract: Capitalist agriculture faces a crisis. Plateauing yields and profits are driving up food prices, and the ability to continue the traditional practice of expanding into new, un-commodified territories appears to be waning. This crisis is due in large part to the accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial agriculture, which systematically undermine the ecological conditions for its own success in pursuit of profit. We investigate how digital technologies are deployed as a potential data fix that does not solve the crisis but merely staves it off. We situate these technologies within the material context of capitalist urbanization, along the way arguing for bringing information back into the neo-Lefebvrian framework of “extended” or “planetary” urbanization. Digital agriculture technologies continue the centralization of economic knowledge and power as they facilitate the transformation of vast territories into “operational landscapes” that provide the material, energy, and labor for a rapidly expanding urban system.
The urban and rural co-dependency in Lebanon has been drastically transformed and further heightened since the joining of both territories with the Declaration of Greater Lebanon on September 1st, 1920.The lack of any formal planning during the past century has driven socio-political and economic forces to shape or disfigure the built environment.Historians, geographers, and urban planners have addressed Lebanon's urban-rural divide by highlighting unequal development.Even still, a comprehensive overview of key historical moments that investigates migrations and the economic system is needed to understand the current co-dependent and conflicted relationship between both territories.Accordingly, this paper explores the urban and rural dynamics starting from the early nineteenth century to modernday Lebanon, by juxtaposing the flow of migrations between Mount Lebanon and Beirut with the country's neoliberal economic policies.This analysis is derived from historical books, articles, and theses on the region and aims to highlight the integration of the rural feudalistsectarian structure with the hyper-financialized urban neoliberal system.
Defining the American urban form relies on a perceived division between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ areas. I trace the idea of the urban/rural divide through the evolution of human settlement patterns in the United States from the nineteenth century onwards. I argue that while a superficial distinction between urban and rural land was once relevant to characterizing city forms and metropolitan growth trends, in contemporary contexts there no longer exists an actual separation of lands based on their ‘natural’ character around cities. Thus, continuing to plan for urban/rural areas ignores how pressing planning concerns arise from greater socio-ecological processes, and places that extend beyond designated settlement boundaries. I explore how new conceptualizations of urbanization, including urban sustainability, urban resilience, and planetary urbanization, can inform a post-urban/rural divide planning paradigm.
The conceptual dyad of urban/rural has long formed the basis of the planner's description of space.However, the terms themselves are increasingly insufficient to describe the world in which we live, presenting as overdetermined and reductive signifiers.In this photographic essay, we use Google Earth satellite images to examine a series of locations where descriptors such as 'urban' and 'rural' falter against manifold, shifting, and unstable landscape forms.We draw on Henri Lefebvre's concept of the abstract spaces of capitalism, globalization, and urbanization, which he argued are dialectically produced through their interaction with landscape.However, where Lefebvre contended that abstraction instantiates in more or less discrete typological forms, we argue that abstract space only becomes intelligible under conditions of 'entanglement,' where qualities such as 'urban' and 'rural' become momentarily comprehensible at the instant we observe or describe them.In the end, holding the world still long enough to describe it reveals crucial patterns and relations, but always at a cost, always with the risk of reduction, simplification, and overdetermination.Such pitfalls are inevitable in research; however, they become all the more prevalent as the terms we use to describe the world become less and less applicable, and as the accumulation of anomalies compels us to build new models and to tell new stories.
The New Urban Agenda, the outcome document of the United Nations Habitat III conference in 2016, was adopted by consensus by all 193 member states of the United Nations. The Habitat III leadership has proclaimed that the document represents a "new paradigm" in urban planning, reversing the "over-determined" model of 20th century Western-dominated planning, and embracing more locally-determined forms of informality. This paper examines the intellectual history of the document, and compares it to its antecedents, thereby evaluating the claim that it represents a new paradigm. The conclusion assesses implications for future planning practice, particularly as we confront an age of rapid urbanization in many parts of the globe.
This collection of essays by prominent African scholars centers familiar themes of continuity and emergence, as well as rupture and disruption, but filters them through new light.To think of African futures here is to engage with the diverse contexts through which these accounts reimagine visions of futurity and connections to the past-from the macro scale of urban construction in Kinshasa to the micro dynamics of a prayer meeting breaking up-and to view their interconnections.Drawing from new material and earlier pieces of Africanist scholarship on crisis and change by these scholars, 1 the contributions in this collection are grouped thematically and speak to one another through a framework, which describes the construction, imagination, and deconstruction of temporality and, in particular, futurity in Africa.The editors, Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio, offer a textured introduction and foreground the collection as a relational reflection on the "motley ensemble of verdicts and diagnoses" proffered by previous writing on African contexts (1).The volume thus avoids the binary of despair and triumph in representations of the continent, and provides a valuable addition to scholarship on temporality in relation to refiguring Africa's futures.As the editors write, the volume aims "not so much to iron out the contradictions nor to disprove the verdicts (though such disproving will at times be necessary) as to think within the paradoxes, perplexities, and apparent certitudes Africa is taken to insinuate" (3).
Well performing recreational open spaces (ROSs) are essential amenities that improve the quality of urban life in the context of rapid urbanization prevalent in developing nations. In Indian cities, the quantity and quality of recreational amenities like parks and playgrounds do not compare well with global standards. Design interventions that are undertaken while developing ROSs significantly impact their value in terms of attractiveness, accessibility, and usability. To evaluate this impact, an empirical survey of select ROSs was conducted in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai. The analysis revealed the dichotomous nature of design interventions. Multiple interventions or 'too much design' resulted in the open space losing its 'openness' and allowed only an orchestrated use of space. Whereas the lack of any intentional intervention or 'too little design' resulted in informality, which made the open space susceptible to encroachment. Using photographic evidence, this essay illustrates the dichotomous nature of design intervention affecting the use value of ROSs in urban India.
