Placemaking is a vaguely defined yet ubiquitous activity of urban development. It comprises a professional field encompassing experts, technical discourses, canonical texts, and even academic programs. This article suggests that placemaking's popularity signals the growing complexity of the community development field and the political coalitions required for housing and neighborhood development in U.S. cities. Using Detroit as a case study, I examine how two distinct development coalitions downtown and in a residential neighborhood coalesced around different placemaking approaches, conceptualized as an economic development versus community development frame. The result of both efforts is similar: a narrow view of development prevailed, channeling placemaking processes into well-known urban development strategies. The urge to involve the community in decision-making comes at a time when issues of urban inequality have gained prominence in public discourse. Yet, city officials, non- and for-profit developers, community advocates, and "engagement professionals" operate within a state and federal competitive grant system that prioritizes lower-income neighborhoods located near stronger housing and land markets, raising concerns around displacement. Placemaking effectively minimizes this tension by symbolically elevating the local histories and affective ties of longtime residents while promoting market-aligned development.

Latin American cities have emerged at the cutting edge of urban planning best practices circulated by multilateral agencies, transnational NGOs, and a cadre of celebrity architects and urbanists. Coherent with - and sometimes prompting - global trends, cities like Buenos Aires and Mexico City have dutifully built bike lanes, pedestrianized streets, and developed new public spaces amidst the frenzied global competition for a vaunted "livable," "green," or "sustainable" city. This paper argues that such developments can be understood as constituting a globally dominant progressive urbanism. The defining characteristic of progressive urbanism is an equity priority that lacks meaningful engagement with contentious power relations or the democratization of urban decision making. This paper delineates the scope and influence of these planning and design idioms. In so doing, it signals disjunctions with the historical practices of progressive planning and situates these changes within the broader political economy of contemporary Latin American cities..

entirely detached from race. Of course, this is a very different reading of the relationship between race and religion than has emerged within American sociology over the last decade. Scholars such as Melissa Wilde, Lindsay Glassman, Penny Edgell, and Jacqui Frost, among many others, have argued theoretically and shown empirically that the fundamental categories of race and religion cannot be separated in this manner. While it might seem strange that I focus on this small part of the conclusion in such a short review, reading it at the end of the book helped me understand some of the unease I felt when studying the main body, as it illustrates the taken-for-granted nature of the analytical categories of race, religion, and secularization as presented in the book. Despite these shortcomings, the book will be useful to those who are interested in the history of race in the organized secular movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchVolume 44, Issue 1 p. 181-181 Book Review Guillermo Jajamovich 2018: Puerto Madero in Motion [Puerto Madero en Movimiento]. Buenos Aires: Teseo Jacob Lederman, Corresponding Author Jacob Lederman jaclede@umich.edu University of Michigan-FlintSearch for more papers by this author Jacob Lederman, Corresponding Author Jacob Lederman jaclede@umich.edu University of Michigan-FlintSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 January 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12886Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume44, Issue1January 2020Pages 181-181 RelatedInformation

Drawing upon an analysis of Flint’s 2012–2013 master planning process, this article explores a puzzling set of questions: Why would a city under emergency management with an abrogated democratic process explicitly encourage extensive citizen participation in one of its most important and strategic documents? How does the urge to involve the community in decision-making reflect new priorities of urban governance? The paper suggests that such a paradox can be conceived as a coherent strategy for addressing conflicting priorities. On the one hand, the exigencies of official claims to democratic engagement operate during a period in which public discourse on inequality has grown in prominence. On the other, harsh fiscal constraint compels local officials and stakeholders to create the conditions for new market-led investment as the singular remedy to urban decline. The result is a transformation of the normative boundaries of the public, lauded as democratic, yet narrowly defined as those participating in highly choreographed and non-binding civic rituals. Local stakeholders, outside consultants, and city administrators generated consensus on a set of urban planning best practices deemed conducive to novel forms of growth, suggesting a transferal of authority from elected office holders to non-elected experts. This process then established the conditions under which community participation was pursued. The intertwining of technical expertise and elite decision-making, however, predetermined community input by naturalizing technocratic logics in planning policy, while signaling the post-political bent of some participatory processes in U.S. cities.

at least plausible that other forces could be (more) responsible. For example, Schall focuses very little on the broader rise of neoliberal ideologies outside of Sweden, and I wonder if the availability of such ideologies, along with economic developments that are invoked in the service of such ideologies, might have more to do with political developments in Sweden than Schall’s account would suggest. Any study involving recent immigration in the western European context is at risk of being quickly outdated. Schall’s book ends just before the escalation of the European migrant crisis, in which Sweden has been one of the major refugee destinations. In the context of this development, Schall’s hesitant conclusion about the increasing importance of immigration and ethnicity in Swedish politics should probably be replaced by a more definitive one. The popularity of the far-right Sweden Democrats that Schall chronicles through 2014 has become even more startling in the last couple of years, according to polling data. If anything, however, this development just underlines the importance of Schall’s final conclusion that if Sweden’s social democracy is to survive, it must ‘‘speak back’’ to both neoliberalism and welfare chauvinism (p. 200). This is likely to be a difficult battle in the current political climate, in Sweden and elsewhere.

Building upon the concept of moral indignation, an analysis of the social reaction to a Buenos Aires shantytown shows how discourses that emphasize the criminality of its inhabitants are mobilized to explain the economic and ontological instability experienced by the local middle class. The media’s use of rhetorical frames that highlight the lack of boundaries between the middle-class readership and the residents of the shantytown produces indignation directed against the urban poor. The newspaper’s readership reconstructs social difference through discourses that frame the shantytown’s inhabitants as predatory, undeserving, and dangerous. Partiendo del concepto de indignación moral, el análisis de la reacción social a una villa miseria de Buenos Aires demuestra como los discursos que enfatizan la criminalidad de los habitantes de la barriada son usados para explicar la inestabilidad económica y ontológica que sufre la clase media local. Los medios usan marcos retóricos que resaltan la falta de fronteras entre sus lectores de clase media y los residentes de las barriadas pobres y esto produce una indignación dirigida contra los pobres de las zonas urbanas. Los lectores del periódico reconstruyen las diferencias sociales por medio de discursos que definen a los habitantes de esas barriadas como depredadores, indignos y peligrosos.

Scholarship in urban sociology has pointed to the reliance of city governments on ever-more market mechanisms for organizing social and economic policy. This form of governance involves prioritizing cities' cultural and social assets for their value in a global competition of urban brands, each competing for new infusions of human and investment capital. At the same time, however, cities have been at the center of seemingly progressive policy efforts aimed at promoting innovation, sustainability, and creativity. These themes represent a newly dominant planning discourse in cities across the globe. While researchers have thoroughly examined how creative classes and creative cities may exclude everyday, working-class, or poor residents, new urban imaginaries focused on sustainability potentially imply less stratified urban outcomes. Analyzing two high-profile interventions in Buenos Aires, Argentinaa sustainable urban regeneration plan for the historic downtown, and the creation of an arts cluster in the impoverished south of the citythis paper argues that despite divergent narratives, creative and sustainable urban projects suggest similar policy agendas, planning assumptions, and relationships to market mechanisms. Increasingly, global policies, whose design and objectives may appear to contradict market logics, may have outcomes that further them.

Argentina's Economic Growth and Recovery: The Economy in a Time of Default Michael Cohen New York, Routledge, 2012, 288 pp., $140.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-415-59480 Economic historians have long d...

En este articulo se analizan las pugnas por la pertenencia en el barrio de San Telmo en la ciudad de Buenos Aires, tomando como punto de partida que el espacio en si redistribuye recursos a los que pueden apelar para construir esta pertenencia. En un contexto de un fuerte flujo de turismo internacional y un estado local que privilegia un modelo neoliberal de desarrollo en el centro historico, reviso algunos conceptos acerca de los intereses de los distintos actores y clases sociales en el barrio. Cuestionando la vieja antinomia entre los desarrolladores inmobiliarios y comerciantes por un lado y sectores populares por otro, delineo una esquema de tipologia mas abarcativa e historica. Distingo entre a los que se les llama “patrimonialistas clasicos”, que entienden sus intereses en forma contraria a varios sectores populares pero tambien divergentes el estado local neoliberal; “artesanos progresistas” que enfrentan el estado local de manera discursiva pero derivan ciertos beneficios de su proyecto y finalmente, los sectores populares. Alguno de ellos se les llama “vanguardia popular” ya que reconocen que sus intereses se encuentran perjudicados por otros sectores pero perciben el poder simbolico de lo popular en un barrio supuestamente caracterizado por su autenticidad historica. Este sector adapta su discurso para insertarse en los repertorios simbolicos que mas poder de legitimizacion tienen, derivando beneficios materiales pero enfrentando de manera poco lineal los otros sectores.

Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork, this paper analyzes the occupation of an abandoned park in the south of Buenos Aires by the city's urban poor, delineating the implications of this incident for notions of citizenship in the context of deeply fragmented social rights. While public space has historically been understood as an expression of the universality of rights bearing membership in a political community, I show how this universalism became the object of struggle during a conflict over the park between the local middle class and squatters, many of which were of immigrant origin. The discourses mobilized by various social groups blurred the distinction between citizenship as a set of legal–formal rights versus a project of normative inclusion. While public space is juridically constructed as universal, particularistic claims to these spaces are imbued with increased legitimacy in a context in which social rights – conceived as a set of provisions guaranteed by the state under a regime of liberal citizenship – are unrealizable. By claiming this space for particularistic uses, squatters drew attention to the contradictions embedded in public space's democratic pretensions in a setting in which putatively universal rights are ignored by the state.

Sociological ForumVolume 27, Issue 4 p. 1048-1051 Book Reviews Brownstone Brooklyn Jacob Lederman, Jacob Lederman Department of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016; e-mail: jlederman@gc.cuny.edu.Search for more papers by this author Jacob Lederman, Jacob Lederman Department of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016; e-mail: jlederman@gc.cuny.edu.Search for more papers by this author First published: 09 November 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1573-7861.2012.01369.x Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume27, Issue4December 2012Pages 1048-1051 RelatedInformation