Language mixing practices play a crucial underexplored role in shaping urban change. Linguistic diversity in cities is not merely decorative or confined to signs and place names; rather, it introduces forms of “visioning,” reflected in expert language use, spatial practices, and planning documents. This article examines translanguaging through the case of Teurastamo in Helsinki, Finland – a former abattoir redeveloped through “meatpacking district” models. Drawing on expert interviews, planning documents, and field observations, we analyze how translanguaging practices – such as untranslated borrowed words – are embedded in future-oriented planning and performances in urban space. As an example of Helsinki's shift from an industrial to a consumption-oriented city shaped by neoliberal approaches to development, Teurastamo illustrates how material and semiotic resources are mobilized to construct an urban imaginary aligned with global notions of “sustainable” postindustrial environments. These environments tend to appeal to skilled professionals and young adults, while potentially marginalizing local language practices and excluding others. Multilingual practices enable experts to connect Teurastamo to global models and make redevelopment concepts palatable, even as they may obscure elements of the local context. The study shows how translanguaging is integral to urban visioning and place-making processes.
In recent years, the concept of care has gained increasing relevance in urban sociology and critical cultural theory as a lens to analyse the relational, spatial and political dimensions of urban life. This article examines the European Capitals of Culture (ECoC) programme as an ambivalent infrastructure of urban (un)care. Drawing on literature on care, post-austerity governance and culture-led urban development, it investigates how large-scale cultural programmes may simultaneously enable and constrain practices of participation, inclusion and social cohesion.The study adopts a qualitative and comparative approach, focusing on the 2019 editions in Matera (Italy) and Plovdiv (Bulgaria). Through a structured analytical framework linking programme design, implementation and outcomes, it explores the tensions between participatory narratives and their practical translation within different local contexts.The findings highlight the coexistence of enabling and limiting dynamics: while both cases demonstrate the capacity of cultural programmes to mobilise resources and generate visibility, they also reveal challenges related to governance centralisation, limited continuity of participation and weak long-term institutionalisation.The article argues that care in culture-led urban policies should be understood not as a predefined outcome, but as a contested and context-dependent process. It concludes by reflecting on the conditions under which cultural policies can support more inclusive, relational and durable forms of urban development.
This article examines the politics of temporality in the regeneration of Beijing's historic core. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Dashilar in 2019, it analyses how competing temporalities mediate the framing, contestation, and eventual stagnation of regeneration. The article extends the concept of temporality to describe how actors relate to different periods of Chinese history and associated institutional, spatial, and symbolic legacies, treating some as more legitimate than others. Findings show that temporality mediates how actors understand and justify their interests. Socialist histories shape residents' understandings of housing entitlement, while imperial history informs what state actors recognise as heritage and authenticity. Actors mobilise imperial, socialist and post-reform times to legitimise their claims over the same urban space variously valued as heritage, housing, or commodity. State and market actors more often select and deploy particular histories strategically. For residents, temporality forms part of everyday experience and is inhabited rather than chosen. The article therefore treats temporality both as part of how interests become intelligible and as a resource in political contestation. The article contributes to debates on Chinese urban politics, urban regeneration, and critical heritage studies by developing a historically grounded framework of temporal negotiation among actors involved in urban transformation.
By adopting a feminist perspective and engaging with relational approaches to space, this article examines how care is enacted through urban policies and spatial practices in the context of the contemporary crisis of social reproduction. Based on a qualitative analysis of institutional documents and project materials, the paper examines four ongoing initiatives in Montevideo - the Plan Nacional de Cuidados, Cuidados en el B, Fincas Recuperadas and Reactor - to explore how care is embedded in urban arrangements that reorganise social reproduction beyond neoliberal logics, outlining new urban approaches that privilege communal practices and everyday life. We argue that the interaction between national policy frameworks and neighbourhood-scale interventions enables these experiences to territorialise care by extending it beyond assistance and reframing access to urban space, housing, and everyday services through principles of co-responsibility and collective use. Situating these processes within broader debates on social reproduction and urban studies, the article contributes to contemporary debates on care by grounding it in grassroot practices and interpreting the city as a shared platform where social relations are constitutive.
The growing prominence of the creative economy in urban development and cultural policy has intensified debates on how public governance mediates economic, social and territorial change. Although public governance, the creative economy and tourism are increasingly intertwined in practice, academic research has often examined these domains through fragmented and sector-specific perspectives, treating governance as contextual rather than as a central analytical mechanism. Against this background, this study analyses how the academic literature addresses the relationship between public governance and the creative economy in urban and cultural contexts where tourism operates as a key field of application. It adopts an integrated, variable-oriented systematic review approach, combining structured literature screening with textual and conceptual analyses to enable a relational reading across governance, creative economy and tourism research. The findings show that these domains are mainly connected through policy-led frameworks shaping tourism-related urban development, sustainability strategies, social innovation and cultural dynamics. The literature also reveals a gradual shift towards participatory and multilevel governance models, alongside persistent challenges related to cultural instrumentalisation, precarious creative labour and fragile governance arrangements, particularly in urban settings. By providing a critical and integrated synthesis, this review advances debates on urban governance and creative policymaking globally.
This article explores how urban food places shape identity, memory, and gendered roles in the context of migration. Drawing on a feminist and interdisciplinary framework, the study investigates the everyday food practices of three Italian women living in the Chilean city of Valparaíso-Viña del Mar. Using a walking-based qualitative methodology, the research analyzes how migrant women navigate and signify urban spaces through food-related practices. The findings highlight how markets, cafés, and restaurants become symbolic nodes that sustain cultural belonging, challenge or reproduce traditional gender roles, and foster personal and collective wellbeing. The study identifies three interrelated themes: the search for Italianness in food places; the ambivalence of gendered responsibilities in the migration context; and the symbolic nourishment provided by urban culinary spaces. The walking method enabled participants to narrate their experiences in connection with specific places, bringing to light spatial, sensory, and emotional dimensions often overlooked in traditional interviews. This work contributes to urban studies by offering a culturally situated and gender-sensitive perspective on how migrant women inhabit, experience, and transform the city through food. It also advances methodological reflection by proposing a protocol that can be adapted in future studies of urban life, mobility, and belonging.
This article introduces a special issue on “The touristification of work in the post-digital city”. It outlines how contemporary cities are being reshaped by two intertwined dynamics: the touristification of work and the rise of post-digital urbanism. As mobile technologies and flexible labor practices enable people to blend work with travel, new forms of “touristified work” emerge, including phenomena like “workation”, digital nomadism, and coworking cultures that frame work as an experience. At the same time, growing unease with constant connectivity fuels post-digital trends that valorize disconnection, analogue practices, artisanal labour, and spatial rootedness. Together, these developments foster alternative formations of lifestyles, values and sentiments, or, what might be seen as articulations of a new urban structure of feeling. The special issue brings together interdisciplinary contributions that examine how cities enable and accommodate to these shifting formations through the touristified staging of (post-)digital urban work spaces and how touristified work mobilities and identities reshape the very meaning of cities under post-digital conditions. Through empirical cases from Europe, Asia, and North America, the issue advances a critical understanding of the post-digital city as a space of aspiration, phantasmagoria, and contradiction.
Research and activism at the intersection between care debates and urban studies has gained significant attention in recent years; and cities worldwide have begun to incorporate ideas and vocabularies from care research into policy and planning agendas, giving them greater visibility. These developments are based on different theoretical traditions and intellectual debates. This paper offers a differentiated introduction to key analytical frameworks within the discourse on “caring cities” and situates them in relation to urban sociology. It discusses three key perspectives: (1) care ethics, which advances a relational understanding of society and foregrounds practices of interdependence and solidarity; (2) care work, which examines inequal and gendered roles in the social reproduction of the city; and (3) caring relations, which highlights different qualities and the embodied dimensions of urban coexistence. Situated within the context of various interdependent crises of urbanization, it is argued that bringing these perspectives into dialog enables a partially open yet systematic approach to researching both care and uncare in the city. In doing so, the paper offers an analytical and normative vocabulary for critically engaging with the intersecting crisis of democracy, of social reproduction and of the body.
This introduction frames the special issue's focus on intermediaries and the expanding roles universities play in shaping urban cultural economies. Across diverse city-regions and institutional contexts, the papers examine how universities mediate relationships among: creative workers, cultural organisations, local government, funders, and communities. They thereby operate through formal knowledge-exchange infrastructures as well as informal, relational and place-based practices. We develop an analytic approach that treats universities not only as sites of research and skills formation, but also as multi-scalar cultural actors whose brokerage can enable new collaborations, redistribute (or concentrate) resources, and influence the symbolic and material production of urban culture. The introduction synthesises scholarship on cultural and creative industries, governance, anchor institutions, and intermediary labour to highlight recurring tensions between: civic missions and market logics; short-term project funding and long-term capacity building; inclusion claims and unequal cultural value; and the benefits and risks of universities' increasing presence in cultural policy and urban development. We argue that intermediary work is best understood as situated practice that is contingent on local institutional histories, power relations, and the often-fragile infrastructures that sustain partnerships. The final section maps the contributions, showing how each article advances understanding of intermediary roles, ranging from brokerage and translation to evaluation, advocacy and care, while collectively raising questions about accountability, legitimacy, and the conditions under which universities can support more equitable cultural futures.
This study examines the transformation of Martyr's Square roundabout in Nablus, Palestine, following the geopolitical shifts of October 2023, focusing on the emergence and impact of informal economies in public spaces during periods of conflict. Through a mixed-methods approach combining spatial analysis, observational research, and stakeholder interviews, this paper investigates how informal economic activities reshape urban spaces in anticipation of and response to geopolitical tensions. The research reveals how unauthorised stalls and informal markets have reconfigured the physical, environmental, and economic dynamics of the Dawar, serving as mechanisms for community resilience while presenting new challenges for urban governance. By examining these transformations through the lens of anticipatory urbanism, the study addresses a critical gap in understanding how public spaces adapt in uncertain times, particularly considering the experiences of vulnerable populations. The findings contribute to both theoretical discussions of adaptation and resilience, as well as practical policy considerations, offering insights into how cities can balance the immediate needs of informal economy actors with long-term goals of equitable public space access. This research advances our understanding of urban adaptation in conflict-affected regions while providing recommendations for inclusive urban planning policies that promote social cohesion under uncertain conditions.
This research examines whether contemporary cities exhibit parallel urban phenomena, understood as similar socio-spatial dynamics emerging independently across different geographical contexts. While recent research introduces quantitative indicators to address urban morphology, such as plot area, compactness, and land-use ratios, such approaches typically rely on citywide metrics and rarely address finer spatial scales or relationships between morphological and activity-related indicators. Moreover, vertical correlations among these indicators remain unexplored. To address this gap, the land-system-science framework is adopted, proposing a combined horizontal (cross-city) and vertical (cross-indicator) correlation approach. Specifically, this research investigates how local-scale compactness relates to three activity-related indicators —density, diversity, and popularity— to identify recurring patterns in cities of Spain and Germany. By integrating both morphological and non-morphological indicators at small-scale levels, this approach enhances existing index-based methods that often overlook interactions between urban form, activity patterns, and intangible values. Findings reveal a significant correlation between compactness and the concentration, diversity, and popularity of urban activities across all case-study cities. Despite differences in historical development, cultural context, and economic structure, these relationships display notable convergence. This suggests that contemporary urban dynamics increasingly evolve in parallel across different geographical contexts, potentially influenced by digitally interconnected patterns of urban use.
This paper argues that to understand the Cultural and Creative Sectors (CCS) we need a wholesale re-conceptualisation of its economic organisation to render visible its production system. We counter the model of the sole artist engaged in craft production, or the corporate industrialised mass production of commercial products, with a more nuanced model of cultural production (eco-)systems which does not depart from location, but instead from organisation. Drawing on research for the CICERONE Horizon 2020 project, we show that by adapting a Global Production Network (GPN) framework to analyse the particularities of the CCS, we can develop a conceptual lens which goes beyond the creation phase and systematically maps other related activities and their respective locations; looks at the forms of embeddedness of these activities and at the governance of the production networks. This challenges extant approaches to understanding the CCS which are siloed either by industry, phase of production or by location. The structure of the paper is as follows: we present a brief overview of key developments in the CCS. This is followed by a critique of existing cluster and ecosystem approaches. Next, we outline the conceptualisation of the cultural economy version of the GPN. Finally, we provide a synoptic overview of the key findings of the CICERONE project organised around production network cycle, mode of governance and embedding to explain the spatiality of the creative economy in a new way.
Since 2012 UK policy surrounding regional development has increasingly prioritised the development of creative clusters to support and bolster the country's creative economy. The Creative Industries Clusters Programme (CICP) is one such example of the current models of support being enacted through this policy and is mainly delivered by universities who act as intermediaries between the creative sector and government. The primary mechanism of support involves micro-funding initiatives aimed at supporting creative small, micro and medium-sized enterprises (SMME) within a given, usually medium to short, timeframe. However, as the sector is largely composed of micro-enterprises and freelancers, ongoing instability due to these types of funding cycles often leave organisations vulnerable once support ends resulting in a need to either ameliorate the impacts of these types of policies or holistically rethink these types of policy models. This paper examines the BSU Boost initiative (formerly Counting House), developed at Bath Spa University (BSU), as a case study of a ‘policy instrument affordance’ within the UK's creative cluster policy environment. Drawing on Hellström and Jacob's (2017) theoretical framework of policy instrument affordances, this paper argues that Boost operates as an intermediary mechanism that bridges critical gaps in public funding cycles. It offers new possibilities—or affordances—for creative micro-enterprises by enabling them to access grants that would otherwise be out of reach due to pre-financing requirements. Through a reflexive case study methodology, the paper details how these affordances do not emerge from the policy instrument alone but rely on active intermediation by the university. Acting as an intermediary, BSU translates complex policy into practical support through Boost, but faces challenges like administrative friction and sustainability concerns. This case highlights the importance—and limitations—of university-led intermediation in making policy affordances real for creative clusters. Accordingly, this initiative serves as an illustrative case of alternative mechanisms for addressing the limitations inherent in short-to medium-term policy frameworks designed to support creative clusters.
Independent coffee shops are often associated with local community culture and authenticity. Yet these shops often seem to contain highly similar aesthetic elements, which aim to appeal to a specific clientele. This research probes the interior design aesthetics of independent, so-called ‘third wave’ coffee shops in the United States and Canada, questioning how unique they actually are, and whether their repeated use and homogenization may make these coffee shops less uniquely identifiable and locally rooted. Based on the results of two online surveys, we demonstrate that the majority of third-wave coffee shops presents a homogeneous and narrow range of aesthetic elements in their interior design, which make them hard to distinguish and to localize. These choices in effect become a de facto brand that is not necessarily reflective of the local culture or geography, but rather of the expectations and aspirations of their consumers. This commodification of aesthetics may counteract the original and oft-advertised mission of third-wave coffee shops to be unique, local, and authentic.
This article examines Macau as a case study for the transformation of cultural urban regeneration. Macau's commitment to preserving its Portuguese colonial heritage aligns with a cultural policy supporting urban regeneration for economic diversification. Through interviews, observations, and literature reviews, the study addresses research questions regarding changing roles of stakeholders, evolution of governance, and influence of the governance system on the outcomes of regeneration projects. Two prime examples are explored: St Lazarus neighbourhood, which has retained its colonial architectural heritage, and Taipa Village, which has transitioned into a vibrant lifestyle district. These areas have transformed into creative hubs where arts and culture are central in driving urban regeneration.
