The World Health Organization’s Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) agenda promotes environments that support independence and participation in later life, yet affords limited attention to the relational and intersectional dimensions of belonging. Drawing on IncludeAge, a multisite study across Great Britain, this study explores how community inclusion and exclusion are experienced and negotiated by two groups often marginalised within age-friendly research and policy: mid-older adults (aged 40+) with intellectual disabilities (ID) and mid-older LGBT+ people. In doing so, it extends age-friendly urbanism through the intersectional place perspective (IPP). Guided by community-based participatory research principles, life-course interviews were conducted with 77 participants with ID and 76 LGBT+ participants, across urban, suburban and rural contexts. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic and narrative co-analysis informed by the IPP. Three themes were developed through collaborative analysis: (1) everyday spaces, micro-interactions and the making of belonging; (2) agency, resistance and claiming space; and (3) digital spaces as sites of connection, exposure and mistrust. Across both groups, belonging was negotiated relationally and unevenly across physical, social, service and digital domains. By foregrounding intersectionality, place and life-course trajectories, the study advances a more reflexive understanding of age-friendly urbanism. It extends the IPP within urban ageing debates, illuminates cumulative disadvantage and resilience, demonstrates the value of co-produced knowledge and proposes a conceptual theory of change to support a more intersectionally responsive AFCC agenda.
This paper investigates the everyday production of the local state through street vending governance in an informal food market on Guanting Street, Hefei, China. By studying how three state and quasi-state institutions jointly govern street vendors on Guanting Street, we argue that existing literature, which explains street vending governance through state fragmentation or ambivalence, does not sufficiently capture how dispersed and fragmented institutions relate to one another in practice. We observe and analyze the mechanisms in use and conclude by advancing the idea of differentiated statehood to explain governance of street vendors on Guanting Street. The analysis further demonstrates a key political effect of differentiated statehood: the production of a state that effectively manages the street yet forecloses collective negotiation. While rooted in a contemporary Chinese city and within debates on Chinese governance, the paper contributes more broadly to debates on governance of urban informality and everyday state formation.
Most research on migrant acculturation focuses on transnational, multi-ethnic contexts. This article examines internal rural-to-urban migrants in China, exploring how urban public space shapes their place-based acculturation. It rethinks acculturation through the lens of everyday disciplinary power, introducing place-based urban disciplining and the concept of bubble acculturation that challenges quasi-internal colonialism manifested as urban supremacy. Based on ethnographic research in a megacity, the study reveals a slow, fluid process of acculturation, where migrants’ initial sense of familiarity gradually becomes normality through interactions with the urban environment. Public space plays a dual role: it facilitates acculturation whilst also projecting dominant urban values that discipline migrants culturally. These findings challenge static or decontextualised models of acculturation by highlighting the spatial and cultural power embedded in urban life. The article argues for a critical cosmopolitanism that resists cultural hierarchies and recognises the agency of internal migrants in addressing dynamic urban transitions.
As Southeast Asia urbanizes, urban expansion repeatedly displaces low-income communities, changes land use, and erodes cultural heritage. In Indonesia, the enclosure of low-income kampung settlements within master-planned private cities was not an organic market outcome but a deliberate product of the Suharto government’s location permit system. This article explores the contradictory pathways of densification through the lens of strangled kampungs, small, irregular settlements trapped within the expansive growth of exclusive, highly regulated private cities. Drawing on historical urban morphological mapping, semi-structured interviews with kampung residents, and field observation across eight strangled kampungs in BSD City, the study analyses four cross-cutting dimensions of this resilience: deliberate cartographic erasure by developers; border-making through enclosing walls, restricted access routes, and engineered flooding; religio-cultural anchoring through mosques, ancestral tombs, and active pilgrimage sites; and adaptive economic practices within the private city itself. The article introduces density of belonging where the concentration of shared memory, emotional attachment, cultural meaning, and religious practice embedded in place function as a critical and underexplored dimension of urban resilience.
