This paper examines the Colombo Urban Regeneration Project (URP) as a state-driven initiative aimed at transforming Colombo into a "world-class" urban center in postwar Sri Lanka. Drawing on qualitative interviews with relocated families, the study examines how militarized governance and speculative urban planning have shaped the lived experiences of residents resettled in URP's public housing. Using the concept of housing pathology, the paper interprets the systemic design, spatial, and governance failures that prevent these housing units from functioning as meaningful homes. The analysis applies a diagnostic framework that focuses on three interconnected forms: urban pathology-spatial and governance failures associated with forced relocation and urban exclusion; social pathology-disruptions to livelihood, identity, gendered forms of care, and community life; and building pathology-physical and cultural deficiencies in design, infrastructure, and comfort that contribute to place-based stigma. Although URP housing provides material security, the findings reveal widespread emotional detachment and social fragmentation. The study argues that URP public housing represents a hybrid form of state-controlled shelter-neither slum nor home-but a mechanism for urban order. These insights call for more socially integrated, context-sensitive public housing strategies prioritizing resident well-being over speculative development goals.

This paper examines podcasting as both a research method and a knowledge mobilization tool within disability geography. It does so with reference to Accessing Home, a narrative podcast involving disabled people living in social and affordable housing in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It focuses on how podcasting can produce and disseminate knowledge about the socio-spatial dimensions of disability, grounded in lived experiences. It argues that podcasting can effectively communicate experiences to audiences through storytelling, narration, and accessible digital distribution. One key to this communication is the preservation of participant voice, which can foster affective engagement. Strategies for enhancing the accessibility of podcasts are identified and described, including multimodal dissemination and production of original transcripts. By reflecting on the process and outcomes of podcast production, the article demonstrates how podcasting advances geographies of disability scholarship and offers practical guidance for researchers adopting similar approaches.

Abstract This article aims to enrich critical understandings of urban data platforms and their role in smart city implementation. Leveraging insights from critical data studies and drawing on the “data gaze” concept coined by David Beer, we examine the implementation of an open data portal in Edmonton, Canada to gain insight into the smart city‐in‐the‐making. Bringing together findings from policy analysis, key informant interviews, and an ethnography of an open data program, we show how the development of the open data portal necessitated an assemblage of imaginaries, viewpoints, and expertise—what we call a “municipal data gaze.” From this perspective, fundamental affordances and frictions linked to data flow come into view. While Edmonton's smart city strategy aimed to foster economic growth and service quality, data initiatives were beholden to privacy protection. Thus, in spite of the promise of the smart city agenda, there are places geo‐surveillance cannot go and cannot see.

Homeless service providers rely on practices of control with the intention of leading people experiencing homelessness into housing. These practices often reflect larger government rationalities of management and control of homelessness. Coupling these practices with the professionalization of homelessness resources, Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) are software used to gather data on service users to support case management and to generate insights into homelessness trends. To understand this dynamic of management, this research asks: how are HMIS operationalized as a tool of social control in a homeless space of care? Utilizing data from 2023 from one Canadian HMIS, we explore how the HMIS is used as a tool for staff to respond to service users within the space of care. Using the HMIS, service users' behaviors deemed "problematic" are captured as "events." These registered "events" permit a range of consequences, from being redirected to another homeless service, to signing a service agreement, to facing a service restriction, or being banned from the service. HMIS demonstrate that under a deepening responsibility to assume the failings of a welfare state, homeless service providers rely on models of management and control to care for high volumes and complex needs of service users.

Canada's housing crisis affects low-income immigrants seeking affordable housing. One option for increasing affordability is collaborative housing. However, for collaborative housing to be adequate for immigrants, it is critical to know what designs meet their needs. This study used co-design workshops with low-income recent immigrants in Canada to explore their housing pathways, needs and preferences. Participants developed artefacts corresponding to their dream homes, to minimum acceptable housing, and to collaborative housing. These artefacts were digitally translated into five core models of collaborative housing. The results show that the Research Through Design approach, combined with co-design methods, can be used effectively to identify models of collaborative housing for low-income recent immigrants and to envision alternative housing futures. Crown Copyright (c) 2025 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/).

“Landscapes of despair” is a metaphor coined by two geographers, Michael Dear and Jennifer Wolch, to describe the fate of formerly institutionalized populations living with serious mental illness as well as physical and intellectual disability in the community. “Landscapes of despair” are generally interpreted as the everyday worlds of homeless and precariously housed people living with serious mental and/or physical disability in conditions of extreme material deprivation who must navigate a fragmented landscape of threadbare community supports and negotiate increasingly punitive and paternalistic welfare policies in order to survive from one day to the next.

It took 50+ years of federal housing policy and municipal planning to transform Canada into a homeownership society. Over the past three decades, these efforts also coincided with significant periods of public austerity that curtailed social expenditures, especially in terms of social housing. Thus, as homeownership became "locked-in" as the dominant form of tenure, housing vulnerability became further entrenched. From the 1990s until the present day, government action to end housing vulnerability has remained at an impasse. We call this development pathway the housing vulnerability deadlock to draw attention to the interplay of economic and political mechanisms that have impeded government action. In this article, we describe the mechanisms constituting this deadlock and reflect on the prospects of breaking out of it.

Urban marginality has long-been a concern of urban studies. The governance of urban marginality is important empirical terrain, particularly in the context of COVID-19, an event that challenged established governance systems globally. This article contributes to our understanding of the governance of urban marginality during the COVID-19 pandemic by examining urban poverty management responses in one Canadian city, Edmonton, Alberta. The article makes two contributions in this regard. First, the paper theorizes urban poverty management as a dispositif, an approach which draws attention to the role of problematization in the configuration of poverty management landscapes and the implications these configurations have for the spatial management of urban poverty in the city. Second, we show that while municipal officials attempted to reconfigure Edmonton's poverty management landscape, their efforts were inflected, and ultimately limited, by three 'problem spaces': forward fiscal liability, risk management, and legal jurisdiction. These problem spaces comprise what we call the 'municipal mentality.' We argue that this municipal mentality is indicative of the fact that municipal government is a conflict-laden site of articulation and that municipal decisions are often shaped by deliberation, deference and jurisdictional struggles which can have implications for the character of urban poverty management.

Historically, governmental responses to homelessness in Canada have defaulted to the most basic of services such as food and shelter. Even under exceptional circumstances, such as the current coronavirus pandemic, governments still demonstrate reluctance to guarantee permanent, adequate and affordable housing to all. In this policy review we argue that this pattern suggests that reticence is an apt term for describing homelessness responses in Canada and that this condition is rooted in the continued dominance of liberalism in Canadian society.

With the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic and concern regarding the subsequent vulnerabilities of houseless populations, countries have sought to adapt and enhance emergency housing policies with a view of better protecting this population. Drawing on the poverty management perspective, this article focuses on local government and its role in managing houselessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. It achieves this by treating local council meetings as sites of problematization, in which the management of houselessness is rationalized and solutions negotiated. We transcribed local council meetings in Bristol, England and Edmonton, Canada, for an 18month period from March 2020. Our analysis found that a common set of 'problem spaces' - systems, strategic opportunism and power - were evoked by municipal officials in both cities. Under the umbrella of 'doing what we can', local councils: conceptualized houselessness as complex and systemic; identified what does and does not work; discussed jurisdictional limitations and their impact; and defended new forms of accommodation. Significantly, despite the discursive desire to 'build back better', and a slightly rebalanced poverty management landscape in terms of care and control, local governments alone were unable to end houselessness within the post-COVID city.

Abstract Objectives: The objective of this article is to explore how housing practitioners navigate the challenge of tenant retention within Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) programs and the practices they associate with program success. Methods: This article draws on semistructured interviews with 10 housing practitioners from 7 organizations operating 8 PSH programs in Edmonton, a city with roughly one million people in Alberta, Canada. Results: This article focuses on 3 specific challenges that have implications for the retention of residents: (1) interpersonal conflict, (2) property damage, and (3) guest management. It also focuses on 3 “promising practices” that practitioners have utilized to mitigate these challenges: (1) relationship-building, (2) community-building, and (3) security of the buildings. Conclusions: Tenant retention is integral to the realization of positive program outcomes in PSH. There are several factors affecting tenant retention. To address these challenges, the staff interviewed in this research found success in building programmatic elements that fostered positive interpersonal relationships, managed the behavior of guests on the property, and ensured the physical integrity of the buildings.

This essay introduces and frames the contributions to the special issue on learning and co-evolution in governance. It develops the argument that learning, dark learning and non-learning are necessarily entwined in governance, moreover, entwined in a pattern unique to each governance configuration and path. What can be learned collectively for the common good, what kind of knowledge and learning can be strategically used and shamelessly abused, and which forms of knowledge remain invisible, intentionally and unintentionally, emerges in a history of co-evolution of actors and institutions, power and knowledge, in governance. Learning becomes possible in a particular form of management of observation, of transparency and opacity, where contingency is precariously mastered by governance systems expected to provide certainty for communities.

Evictions are a common contributing factor to homelessness and are experienced overwhelmingly by vulnerable populations, including low-income households, single parents, and minority groups. At the same time, social and affordable housing providers serve increasingly vulnerable populations. Although all evictions are potentially problematic, those that occur in social and affordable housing can carry particularly severe consequences. Little research exists on evictions in social and affordable housing, and there is even less on eviction prevention practices in this sector. This project seeks to fill this research gap by exploring emerging eviction prevention practices in social and affordable housing in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Our findings show that evictions are a complicated process for both tenants and housing providers, and most commonly occur because of rent arrears. Housing providers try to prevent evictions, and toward this end, they have adopted four broad eviction prevention practices, centered on financial management, regular communication with tenants, provision of tenant supports, and community development. However, housing providers are often constrained in their ability to prevent evictions, in particular by human resource and financial limitations. These challenges lead to complex negotiations between housing providers’ social mandates to provide affordable housing to vulnerable households and their regulatory and operational environments.

This paper introduces the concepts and ideas that frame this special issue on co-evolution in governance, and their implications for policy learning and adaptation. It offers a brief overview of co-evolutionary approaches to governance and their elementary connections with systems theories, post-structuralism, institutionalism, and actor-network theory, and explores how they are connected to co-evolution in governance. Co-evolutionary approaches differ from other influential understandings of knowledge and learning in policy and governance. It furthermore presents a typology of learning in governance and systematically discusses how each type is affected by patterns of coevolution in governance.

Weather is an elementary and fundamental characteristic of place. In any given place we encounter the materiality of weather, local meanings attached to weather, and practices adopted in response to living with weather. Winter cities are places defined by their weather-long, cold winters that can pose challenges to urban life. Efforts to address these challenges centre on place-making activities, such as seasonal festivals, which seek to enrich public spaces. In this paper, we examine the relationship between winter, place, and placemaking in three Canadian prairie cities. Participants sought to promote a celebratory relationship with winter by changing public attitudes, fostering unique winter experiences, and incorporating winter into their cities' identities. This shift was encouraged by strategies and events that were "authentic" to local context and community. They did not simply reframe winter weather as positive, but recognized the season as presenting both challenges and opportunities. Enabling residents to realize opportunities is critical to being a successful winter city, and requires negotiating a set of dyads: warm/cold, indoor/outdoor, and light/dark. This paper highlights the constitutive role of weather in shaping place, while revealing the agentic ways in which communities act towards and with weather.

In this article, we examine strategies to ?end? homelessness in Anglo-American countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia. In the process, we critically reflect on the shifting terrain of homelessness governance in these ?liberal? welfare regimes. Beginning in the early 2000s, municipalities across the United States, and later Canada, reconfigured their homelessness policies around the ambitious goal of ending homelessness in 10 years. Grounded in evidence-based interventions such as Housing First, 10-year plans target resources toward the hardest-to-house, endeavor to achieve zero homelessness within a set time frame, and do so while purportedly reducing the economic cost of homelessness. In the time since these plans were initiated, ending homelessness, in an absolute sense, has proven elusive. These circumstances reveal an impasse: we have never known more about homelessness yet, in cities and nations of the Anglo-American world, we seem incapable of ending it. In the face of this impasse, an epistemological inquiry into the very meaning of ?zero? homelessness has emerged among homelessness experts and practitioners, one that focuses, in particular, on the notion of ?functional zero? and a new campaign called Built-for-Zero. We critically examine this discursive configuration and in doing so work to unpack its significance for homeless governance.

Aging occurs in a variety of social and physical environmental settings that affect health. However, despite their rapidly growing populations, public health research in sub-Saharan Africa has yet to address the role of residential environments in the health and well-being of older adults. In this study, we utilized an ethnographic research methodology to explore barriers and facilitators to health among older adults residing in two contrasting neighborhoods in Accra, Ghana. Our specific objective was to identify patterns of health risks among older adults in the two neighborhoods. Data were collected through qualitative interviews with a purposive sample of health workers (n = 5), community leaders (n = 2), and older adults residing in a slum and non-slum neighborhood (n = 30). Our thematic data analysis revealed that, despite different underlying drivers, health barriers across the slum and non-slum were largely similar. The harmful effects of these health barriers - poor built environments, housing precariousness, unsanitary living conditions, defective public services, and social incivilities - were mitigated by several facilitators to health, including affordable housing and social supports in the slum and better housing and appealing doors in the non-slum. Our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which aging and urban environments intersect to influence population health in resource poor settings. In particular, rather than the commonly referenced dichotomy of poor and non-poor settlements in discourses of neighborhood health, our findings point to convergence of health vulnerabilities that are broadly linked to urban poverty and governmental neglect of the elderly.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is challenging many of the basic assumptions that make up the fabric of society from the global to the local scale. In this essay, I diagnose the present moment by exposing the epistemological conditions that enable us to talk meaningfully about the pandemic and become constituted as subjects through this experience. Looking backward to diagnose our present situation reveals the limits imposed upon us by certain epistemic objects. It also focuses attention on an essential backdrop to this biopolitical experience: the problematic relationship between freedom and government.