Population ageing and urbanisation have intensified efforts to design cities that support later life. The World Health Organization’s Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) framework promotes autonomy, participation, and health, yet it remains unclear how advanced old age and vulnerability are positioned within this agenda. This qualitative document analysis draws on situational analysis to examine how later life is constructed across international, national (Germany), and municipal AFCC policy documents. Using situational, social worlds/arenas, and positional maps, the analysis reconstructs actors, institutional logics, and discursive tensions. Ageing is predominantly framed as a functional and governable condition centred on activation, prevention, and environmental adaptation. Across governance levels, policy discourse separates activity from care: activation narratives cluster around early later life, while frailty and dependency are largely confined to specialised care systems. Advanced old age and health-socio-economic inequalities remain weakly integrated into the dominant urban imaginary. The article demonstrates how age-friendly urbanism constructs later life as active and locally governable, while structural vulnerabilities are only partially addressed, informing more inclusive and targeted approaches to urban ageing policy.
This paper contributes to urban studies debates on the commons-as-practice by examining the “secretly public” musicking spaces co-created by people seeking asylum and allies in Bristol, UK—a city where the language of sanctuary coexists with state-sanctioned forms of slow violence and uneven processes of urban regeneration. The analysis draws on 18 months of ethnographic and participatory research with a group of around 60 men and women of diverse origins, many seeking asylum, who convened weekly music sessions. Building on perspectives that show how sound shapes the sensing, sharing, and reconfiguration of urban space, the study attends to the sonic and affective registers, urban geographies, and (in)visible spaces of sociality that emerged from the group. It argues that “public secrecy” constitutes a condition of possibility for commoning in cities shaped by sanctuary initiatives and state enforcement infrastructures. The paper conceptualises a secretly public commons as a collective practice that composes publicness through thresholds of visibility, generating shared affective, social and material resources while exceeding normative frames of (in)visibility and (un)deservingness that dominate public narratives of asylum. In doing so, this paper extends debates on the urban commons, sanctuary, and sonic urbanism by showing how sonic practices reconfigure public presence under intersecting forms of dispossession, and by using ethnographic and participatory approaches to address what tends to go unnoticed in studies on urban commons and sanctuary urbanism.
This article examines how incomplete infrastructures are governed as politically expedient conditions in urban China. While scholarship on infrastructure in the Global South has foregrounded open-endedness as an ontological feature of infrastructure, less attention has been paid to how infrastructural non-closure is held in place and mobilised within high-capacity, centralised state contexts. Drawing on two cases – Pudong-Rd Market in Nanjing and the Jinsheng Relocation Site in Sihong County – we develop a conceptual distinction between incompletion , understood as an iterative, selectively governed process of infrastructural deferral, and incompleteness , as a provisional yet administratively sustained arrangement. We show how state actors mobilise ambiguity and temporality through performance regimes, regulatory discretion, and symbolic formalisation to manage visibility, accommodate informality, and defer resolution while sustaining the appearance of infrastructural progress. In doing so, the paper contributes to critical studies on infrastructural temporality, urban governance scholarship on China, and conjunctural approaches to state power by theorising infrastructural non-closure not as absence but as a modality of governance.
Situated within the discourse of post-socialist urbanism, this study investigates the interstitial ‘in-betweenness’ of Belarus to conceptualize the emergence of an ‘authoritarian post-political planning’ model. Through an empirical analysis of the China-Belarus Great Stone Industrial Park, we examine how the authoritarian state appropriates post-political governance to integrate transnational capital and ensure regime survival. Drawing on discourse analysis and in-depth interviews, the research reveals that the state bypasses explicit neoliberal narratives in favor of technical consensus and transnational policy mobility. It encloses decision-making through expert authority to structurally reorganize post-socialist assets, and utilizes procedural formalism to filter out dissent and significantly narrow the space for substantive public debate. However, this depoliticized planning framework does not resolve underlying socio-economic tensions; rather, it displaces them across spatial scales. At the micro-level, structural clashes over post-socialist welfare baselines manifest as passive labor friction, while at the macro-level, severe geopolitical ruptures force rapid strategic contractions that are masked by state narrative control. Ultimately, this article argues that while authoritarian post-politics serves as a powerful organizational device to suture state goals with global capital accumulation, its reliance on suspending and displacing conflict exposes profound spatial fragilities and the enduring paradoxes of the post-socialist transition.
Motorway infrastructures are fundamental to the organized movement and metabolic reproduction of contemporary societies. They are inextricably entwined with globalizing economies, as they are integral for road freight or a prerequisite for mass car ownership. Given their centrality, motorways have been extensively studied; however, dominant research often reduces the social construction of these systems to partial insights. Within “objectivist orthodoxies,” motorways are treated as delineable technical systems serving a pre-defined economic logic. Conversely, “ethnographic subjectivisms” challenge these orthodoxies by focusing on everyday practices. Yet both approaches isolate the motorway either as a static entity or as a mere matter of individual perception, thereby obscuring the internal relations between state and capital. To offer a more comprehensive conceptualization, I draw on a dialectical methodology. I argue that motorways must be understood as a concrete universal, a socio-material system practically produced within capitalist social relations and a global network of nation-states. Accordingly, local practices are neither independent of these structures nor strict reflections of them; instead, they constitute a field of metabolic struggle where the violence of capital and statehood can be revealed and challenged.
Urban studies has repeatedly depended on imaginative acts, even if its imaginative capacities have often remained implicit, unevenly distributed, or overshadowed by explanatory commitments to understanding cities as they are rather than as they might become. Can urban imagination still sustain urban futures in a time of geopolitical fragmentation, democratic uncertainty, and academic precarity? This debate paper introduces the special issue on Urban Imaginations and Urban Futures by proposing a conceptual and methodological reorientation of urban studies around the relationship between imagination and futures thinking. It argues that urban imagination should be understood not simply as a representational domain but as an enabling infrastructure through which urban futures are made thinkable, actionable, and contestable. Drawing on recent debates on crisis, infrastructure, urban uncertainty, southern praxis, and computational urbanism, the paper advances three propositions. First, imagination is conceptualized as a distributed capacity embedded across diverse urban sciences and practices, from everyday urbanism and architectural design to engineering and computational modelling. Second, fragments are proposed as methodological resources that enable interdisciplinary dialogue while sustaining epistemic plurality and critical engagement. Third, imagination is positioned as a critical means of reclaiming resilience from its technocratic uses by expanding the generative capacity of urban scholarship to engage uncertainty, plurality, and transformation, thereby helping keep urban futures open.
This paper develops the concept of the military–spatial complex (MSC) to analyze how armed forces increasingly shape neoliberal urban development. While military urbanism has often been studied through the visible apparatus of surveillance and security, the MSC highlights subtler forms of militarization: the embedding of martial authority into civilian urban life through planning, land governance, and property development. Correspondingly, this paper argues that militaries today operate as hybrid actors, part sovereign apparatus, part market developer, transforming their privileged access to land and resources into mechanisms of accumulation and control. Drawing on Israel, Egypt, and Serbia, the paper demonstrates how the MSC operates across different political economies and institutional configurations. Whether the relocation of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bases and the militarization of the Israeli south, the development of the new administrative capital in Cairo and the military-led slum clearance programs, or the housing projects for military personnel alongside the rearrangement of military sites in Serbia, these cases reflect a broader reconfiguration of state power under neoliberalism, in which rather than retreating, states restructure authority through military-led urbanism. Accordingly, the MSC captures this paradoxical shift, in which armed forces seemingly demilitarize yet extend influence via civilianized urban mechanisms. Therefore, it offers a framework for understanding the ways in which neoliberalism emerged not as an externally imposed transition, but rather from internal power relations.
Despite the technical and humanitarian rhetoric surrounding post-conflict reconstruction, such processes frequently produce more commodified, securitized, and fragmented urban formations, generating novel configurations of power. Recent scholarship on post-conflict cities has increasingly emphasized transformations in everyday practices and lived experience in order to understand these dynamics. This article engages these debates through the case of Diyarbakır, the principal urban center of Turkey’s Kurdish-populated southeast, focusing on the reconstruction of its historic core, Suriçi, following the urban clashes of 2015–2016. While existing scholarship has primarily examined how the Turkish state deployed coercion to demobilize Kurdish contentious politics, less attention has been paid to how reconstruction generated new sociabilities through more diffuse spatial practices and imaginaries. Addressing this gap, I conceptualize Suriçi’s reconstruction as a process of enclosure that operated not only through authoritarian imposition from above but also through the quieter neutralization of collective praxis from within. Based on fieldwork conducted between December 2022 and February 2025, the article examines how reconstruction instituted a novel regime that transformed Suriçi into a propertied place while dismantling the infrastructures of commoning and the contingent forms of place-making through which Kurdish urban poor had sustained social and political capacities. In doing so, the article argues that reconstruction extended violence beyond destruction and displacement by reorganizing the material, social, and affective conditions of urban life. Conceptualizing reconstruction as enclosure thus offers a framework for analyzing the everyday modalities of power shaping post-conflict urbanities.
Urban expansion across Europe increasingly unfolds under heterogeneous demographic conditions. While population change has long structured interpretations of urban growth, recent evidence suggests urban expansion no longer adjusts to contemporary demographic dynamics as it once did. This article examines urban expansion across 181 European Functional Urban Areas between 2000 and 2025, with particular attention to changes after 2015. Using stacked regression models, it identifies an acceleration in urban expansion after 2015 alongside evidence of demographic decoupling. A complementary cross-sectional analysis conditions post-2015 urban expansion on earlier development trajectories, allowing deviations from historically expected patterns to be identified. The article refers to this pattern as echo urbanisation, a benchmark-relative diagnostic that captures urban expansion exceeding what prior development paths and demographic change would predict. The results show that echo urbanisation cuts across population growth and decline and is not confined to post-socialist Europe, pointing to a broader European regime of demographically decoupled urban expansion, within which echo-driven expansion is widespread. It complements existing expansion indicators by flagging cities accelerating beyond expected paths that conventional density, sprawl or demographic-mismatch measures may miss.
Drawing on 16 high-speed rail (HSR) new towns along the Beijing–Shanghai corridor, this paper develops a middle-range explanation of how state entrepreneurialism is practiced and differentiated under conditions of economic transition in China. While the notion of state entrepreneurialism has been widely used to interpret postreform urban development, its application to HSR new town governance often under specifies how cognitive limits, uneven information and institutional heterogeneity shape local political choices. The empirical analysis suggests that, in these cases, local authorities operated under pronounced cognitive and informational constraints, and that bounded rationality shaped entrepreneurial practices through policy imitation, satisficing judgments and path-dependent commitments across cities at different positions in the urban hierarchy. Along the corridor, spatial heterogeneity is evident both in bargaining capacity and in developmental strategies: metropolitan governments were better able to push for institutional innovations despite high coordination costs; medium-sized cities tended to follow metropolitan templates while retaining some room for strategic adjustment; and smaller cities were more disadvantaged in central-local negotiations and more exposed to the risks of speculative development. By bringing bounded rationality and political choice into the analysis of HSR new town governance, the article shows how local entrepreneurial behaviour is shaped by limited cognitive capacity, uneven access to information and specific institutional settings. In doing so, it qualifies the state entrepreneurialism perspective by specifying scope conditions within the context of Chinese HSR new town development, rather than offering a general reconstruction of state entrepreneurialism across contexts.
Densification is often presented as a solution to urban challenges in Asia, from housing and infrastructure provision to climate change. These arguments however, are typically not informed by how different forms of high density are lived and politicised in the city. Drawing on research across a variety of cities in South, East and Southeast Asia, this paper develops a conception of density and its politics through two interrelated domains: material provisioning and urban crowds . The paper reflects on how these domains might serve as a conceptual provocation for understanding density in urban Asia today, which it short-hands as ‘dencity’. The paper contributes to critical urban studies by shifting attention from normative debates about whether density is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to a focus on the everyday practices, inequalities, and struggles through which dense urban life is produced and contested.
As the continuous influx of migrants highly stratifies Shanghai’s demographic structure, regional discrimination within the metropolis has undergone a profound transformation. Drawing on Loïc Wacquant’s triadic dialectic of space, this study investigates how the perceived erosion of the historically dominant position once held by segments of Shanghairen community in both social and physical space has triggered defensive exclusionary practices in symbolic space. This inverts Wacquant’s canonical model, in which territorial stigma is imposed on marginalized populations from without; here, a formerly dominant group actively deploys stigmatization as a compensatory strategy. Significantly, the target of discrimination has expanded from traditional rural laborers to encompass some new groups of non-locals. Facing real-world marginalization, segments of the Shanghairen community have retreated to emerging social media platforms, such as Xiaohongshu and Bilibili, reappropriating them as exclusionary digital territories. Through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the findings reveal that Shanghairen erect an invisible digital boundary-making by leveraging Internet Protocol (IP) geolocation visibility and written Shanghainese dialect expressions to perform and consolidate cultural capital boundaries. Furthermore, to navigate? strict algorithmic moderation?, they engage in cod?ed cyber-slang, mutating traditional derogatory terms into highly coded, metaphorical cyber-slang.
How landlords go about pressuring tenants to leave to achieve more intense commodification remains understudied, particularly in highly regulated housing contexts. We address this gap through an analysis of Vienna, Austria, where the regulatory framework provides comprehensive tenant protection. We draw on interviews with tenants who experienced displacement pressure, as well as on interviews with tenant union representatives. Conceptually, we build on and extend Marcuse’s concept of displacement pressure and distinguish four forms: economic, physical, contractual and social. Adopting a relational perspective, we situate the four forms vis-à-vis the Austrian Tenancy Act to disentangle how, even in a system with well-developed tenant protections, displacement pressure materialises in a variety of ways. Furthermore, we account for tenant reactions to displacement pressure, going beyond an understanding of displacement as uni-directional process from above. The article furthers current understandings of the practice of commodification and provides an extended heuristic for analysing tenant–landlord conflicts.
Transnational municipal networks (TMNs) play a pivotal role in urban planning and policy by encouraging peer learning among member cities. Recent studies have called for examining influencing-learning patterns in these networks. This study identifies key hypotheses related to policy diffusion within TMNs from extant literature and empirically tests their validity by studying the diffusion of resilience policies in the 100 Resilient Cities Network (100RC), the leading urban resilience TMN. A referencing network of member cities (nodes) and directed resilience policy knowledge flows (edges) is developed using the resilience strategy documents of the member cities and is analyzed along five urban resilience dimensions: health and well-being, economy and society, infrastructure and environment, leadership and strategy, and equity. Various network configurations and node centrality measures are explored, along with exponential random graph modeling and negative binomial regression analysis. The findings indicate the presence of highly influential cities (influencers) belonging to high-income countries. Influential cities are climate champions, joined 100RC early, have membership in multiple TMNs, and are from geographies with low physical resilience. Strong learners are predominantly from upper-middle-income and lower-middle-income countries. New York, Melbourne, New Orleans, Rotterdam, Mexico City, and Medellín are superstars in 100RC. We find a “Global North bias” in 100RC, despite its efforts to encourage peer learning between diverse cities. The study highlights the need for practitioners to carefully consider the design of TMNs committed to nurturing peer learning between cities, ensuring that geopolitical disparities and network organization do not inhibit meaningful sharing of knowledge.
Urban life is often characterised by multiple challenges that citizens face from increasing exposure to air and water pollution, stress, unsustainable lifestyles and high inequalities. Urban agriculture (UA), which includes urban farming and gardening for productive and aesthetic uses, is often highlighted as helpful to foster healthier, more sustainable urban lifestyles. We examine self-reported individual- and community-level wellbeing outcomes of urban agriculture in India, drawing on a household survey ( n = 361), key informant interviews ( n = 50) and in-depth interviews ( n = 7) of home gardeners. The novel dataset captures UA practices and outcomes in formal and informal settlements, going beyond current data in India. We operationalise the wellbeing outcomes of UA through outcomes for physical and mental health, impacts on intra-family, community and beyond-human connectedness and contribution to pro-environmental values. We find that UA has significant perceived benefits at individual, household and community levels and allows citizens to participate in, innovate through and collectivise around UA in deeply meaningful ways. These findings emphasise the need to recognise and mainstream UA in ongoing urban sustainability and climate change initiatives.
Using financial disclosure reports of U.S. senators and representatives, we examine whether politicians’ municipal bond purchases anticipate subsequent fiscal support and how targeted counties evolve afterward. We find that counties whose municipal bonds are purchased by politicians subsequently receive higher federal funding, consistent with politicians investing in jurisdictions that later benefit from intergovernmental transfers. Secondary-market yields on these bonds decline roughly 4 months after purchase, suggesting that elected officials tend to buy when yields are elevated and benefit from subsequent price adjustments. However, we do not observe corresponding improvements in local real activity: new residential construction and housing prices remain flat, while 90-day mortgage delinquencies and unemployment rise in the post-purchase period. Using an Average Treatment Effect on the Treated/Rubin causal framework, event-time analyses, and placebo and robustness checks, we show that these patterns are not driven by differential pre-trends. Overall, politician bond purchases align with predictable changes in fiscal flows and bond pricing but are not followed by positive local economic spillovers, with implications for urban fiscal governance and the political economy of intergovernmental transfers.
Stigmatised neighbourhoods are commonly associated with social discredit, fear and marginalisation. Yet in recent years, they have increasingly attracted tourists in both the Global South and the Global North. However, few studies have explicitly theorised the relationship between territorial stigma and tourism. This paper addresses this gap through the case study of Scampia, one of the most stigmatised neighbourhoods of Naples – and arguably of Italy – which has recently become the focus of growing tourist interest. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and interpretative analysis of media and cultural representations, the findings suggest that territorial stigma itself may become a significant driving force of tourism. Moreover, situating the discussion within the debate on coping strategies, the article develops the concept of tourism-led commodification of territorial stigma , showing how local actors may temporarily accept stigma and strategically leverage it as a resource within the tourism industry. The conclusions call for greater attention to the relationship between territorial stigma and tourism in both urban and tourism studies, while also showing how commodification may become a pragmatic way of negotiating stigma.
This article critically examines the complex and ambiguous relationship between resilience and violence in the recovery of conflict-affected cities. Focusing on Medell & iacute;n, Colombia's second-largest city, it traces its transformation from a hotspot of intense urban conflict to a celebrated hub of tourism and innovation. Once labeled the world's "murder capital," Medell & iacute;n has become a flagship for resilience initiatives, frequently lauded for its recovery from decades of violence. Yet beneath the celebrated narrative of the "Medell & iacute;n Miracle," extortion and forced displacement continue to permeate life in marginalized neighborhoods. Everyday violence challenges dominant accounts of postwar success and blurs the boundaries between wartime and the post-conflict period. To unpack these contested dynamics, the article advances a twofold framework-examining the resilience of violence and the violence of resilience-as a lens to rethink how urbanization and conflict mutually shape one another. By doing so, it demonstrates how recovery efforts, while promising stability and security, can also reproduce entrenched inequalities, consolidate marginalization, and generate new forms of victimization. By highlighting these tensions, the article contributes to broader debates on the politics of resilience, the afterlives of violence, and the uneven geographies of urban transformation in post-conflict settings. (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)"(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)"(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic),(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).
