期刊导航 | Urban Studies文章精选(159-162）
Abstract: Mumbai’s storm water drainage system is rapidly transforming as incidences of heavy rainfall rise. Its transformation is built on the idea of conserving the city’s ‘rivers’ that were lost to urban development. While this move to recuperate a heritage of rivers seems like a step in the right direction, Mumbai’s drainage system was largely cobbled together over time through piecemeal interventions in an estuarine landscape. This article shows how by engineering a history of rivers, the city’s planning authorities set in motion an agenda to train the expansive estuarine and improvisational systems into governable riverine channels contained within the state’s developmental visions. It focuses on one major channel, the Mithi, to show how the rationality of disaster preparedness, the emergent calculus of carrying capacities, as well as infrastructure are braided into constructed ecological histories to inscribe a new hydrological order on the city. For Mumbai’s engineers, these changes introduce new scalar logics and alter the nature of the drainage assemblage. Mithi’s transformation is emblematic of how articulations of nature, technology and urban development are emerging from the anxieties of climate change.
Keywords: climate change, disaster preparedness, floods, infrastructure, urban ecology
Abstract: Mesoamerica was the most urbanised landscape of the precolonial Western Hemisphere, and urban dwellers there shared many cultural commonalities. They also varied significantly regarding what social institutions they emphasised, what forms of urban infrastructure they created, their fiscal financing and systems of governance, as well as how they managed ecological resources and risk. In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of Mesoamerican cities using a database of archaeological indices of Indigenous urban characteristics. We report positive correlations between the longevity of cities in our sample and more collective institutions of governance, higher population densities, and more shared and equitably distributed forms of urban infrastructure. The study draws on Indigenous knowledge and practices to assist the target-based approach of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and New Urban Agenda and provides insights into how certain urban institutions and infrastructure can foster greater resilience and equity in the face of ecological and cultural-historical perturbations.
Keywords: Aztec, collective action, governance, Maya, neighbourhoods, social infrastructure, urbanism
原文地址：https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221105418
Abstract: In Birmingham, a badger visits me each evening outside my front door. Five years later, a fox meets me on a city street at 5 am. Two years after that, walking along the city’s canals, my eyes lock with a heron’s. A year later, a eucalyptus tree becomes my shade and respite in a disturbed city. Months later, as I get ready to leave the city, I encounter a group of parakeets. In this paper, I ask how these seemingly disparate encounters and relationships are intimately connected as part of Birmingham’s urban ecologies and larger stories of urban regeneration – and its consequences for thriving and precarious life in the city. I argue that the tension between thriving and precarity in Birmingham (and cities like it) results from new exertions of control whilst urban dwellers establish new forms of more-than-human urban cohabitation. The stories in this paper, relating to different non-human lives caught up in Birmingham’s transformation into a neoliberal city, demonstrate that serious consideration of more-than-human theory and experience is essential to the future of urban studies scholarship.
Keywords: environment/sustainability, inequality, more-than-human urban theory, public space, redevelopment/regeneration, social justice, urban ecologies
原文地址：https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221104975
Abstract: Although residential crowding has many well-being implications, its connection to mental health is yet to be widely examined. Using survey data from 1613 residents in Beijing, China, we find that living in a crowded place – measured by both square metres per person and persons per bedroom – is significantly associated with a higher risk of depression. We test for the mechanisms of such associations and find that the residential crowding–depression link arises through increased living space-specific stress rather than increased life stress. We also identify the following subgroups that have relatively stronger residential crowding–depression associations: females, those living with children, those not living with parents, and those living in non-market housing units. Our findings show that inequality in living space among urban residents not only is an important social justice issue but also has health implications.
Keywords: China, health, housing, overcrowding, urban planning, well-being
Abstract: Ubiquitous in fast-urbanising China, land-driven urban growth is increasingly inter-urban in nature – a trend that is underexplored in the literature. Grounded in a conceptual framework concerning the rescaling of the land regime, this study probes the unfolding land development processes of city-regionalism. Key findings of an examination of the Shenzhen–Shanwei Special Cooperation Zone in the Pearl River Delta are as follows: land regime rescaling is an emergent driving force for city-region making in China; the rescaled land regime centres on uneven capacities among the states of cooperating cities and benefit sharing (immediate land-related profit and potential long-term profit); provincial government engagement is fundamental to legitimatising this contested process; the rescaled land regime has been orchestrated by state interests in land development, rather than business interests released by marketisation, spawning a ‘stretching’ state territoriality of the central city. This article furthers the field’s understanding of a ‘world of city-regionalisms’ through a situated account of emerging city-regionalism characterised by land development in the Chinese context.
Keywords: city-regionalism, land regime, Pearl River Delta, provincial government, regional cooperation
原文地址：https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221101781
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