Contemporary suburban landscapes have developed at scale, in variety, at speed and with ethnic concentrations or superdiversity. These complexities call for the reworking of urban theory and method. In this paper we contribute on both fronts. We develop an interpretative framework that emphasises the mediation of the production and consumption of new suburbs. Methodologically, we analyse on-site billboards

Smart cities build on visions for using technology to optimise various infrastructural functions andãmake city management more efficient, sustainable, and reliable. However, scholarship on smart cities has drawn attention to how data-centric planning simplifies the complexity of the urban environment and how a dichotomous approach to smart cities as either top-down or bottom-up may be overly reductive

Urban infrastructures, as socio-technical systems that transform metabolic flows, are a key focus for efforts at initiating a more circular economy of resource use and waste recovery. Beyond exemplar discourses and claims, an infrastructure-mediated understanding of and focus on actually existing circularity projects attends to the diverse array of components, sites and exchanges through which transformative

A longstanding maxim of urban research is that neighbourhood reputations matter. The subjective narratives and stereotypes about a neighbourhood influence a range of consequential processes, outcomes and inequalities. Yet, there remains considerable ambiguity regarding the primary drivers of the neighbourhood status hierarchy. What are the primary factors responsible for neighbourhood reputations?

Few places on Earth have experienced recent economic growth at the same level as Macau during the years of its gambling boom, which lasted for about a decade from when the first casinos after the liberalisation started to emerge in 2004. It may come as no surprise that, through gambling, the city was transformed under a broader strategy of human and urban ‘management’ in which neoliberal rationalities

This paper develops the idea of transcalarity to reframe analyses of urban development politics. Our analysis starts from African contexts but is relevant to, and in conversation with, experiences on other continents. Accounts of the politics of urban development have rarely benefitted from the experiences of African urban settings. Characterised by relatively weakly resourced municipalities, informality

As cities worldwide increasingly adopt commitments towards climate justice, questions remain about the ways that city governments will be able to fund more just climate efforts. While the use of novel debt financing schemes has been examined in the literature for its justice implications, scholars have rarely interrogated how the more mundane tools and practices of municipal finance can be applied

Indian society presents heterogeneity across two identities – that is, religion and caste – that lead to heterogenous economic outcomes, but affirmative action is mostly applicable to caste. Our empirical models affirm that economically less secure households have a higher homeownership propensity in India. Minority religions and backward castes also have a significantly higher propensity to own homes

Neighbourhoods are salient for many dimensions of individuals’ social and economic well-being, yet the impacts of rapidly emerging digital information and communication technologies (DICTs) on neighbourhoods and the social processes within them are understudied. This gap motivates this Special Issue, the themes of which we introduce here. We provide an overarching conceptual framework within which

The increasing occurrence of discontent and conflict regarding making creative cities across the globe has led scholars to pay significant attention to the political dimension of creative-city policies. This study, by exploring the controversy over the Incheon Art Platform, a warehouse-turned art space in Incheon, South Korea, offers a situated understanding of how the city government’s entrepreneurial

Digital neighbourhood platforms (DNPs) – also called online neighbourhood networks or neighbourhood social networks – are still a relatively novel phenomenon, and little is known about their actual reach among citizens and about neighbourhood conditions which foster or impede their spread. We consider DNPs as a digital extension of conventional neighbourhood social capital and analyse their spread

In this paper, we use the notion of administrative precarity to refer to the vulnerability and insecurity experienced by marginalised and disadvantaged groups as a result of their interactions with ambiguous administrative procedures. Using the example of water infrastructure administration in Mumbai, specifically the experiences of ‘Pani Haq Samiti’– the ‘Right to Water campaign’– we formulate how

This special issue focuses on the under-studied but increasingly pressing issue of urban heat. Cities are getting hotter, both due to the global crisis of climate change, and the related phenomena of Urban Heat Islands, which locally amplify increased global temperatures and exposure to solar radiation. We know a great deal about how heat is affecting cities from a scientific and public health perspective

This paper shows that there is superlinear scaling of vacancies with employment size. That is, there are disproportionally more vacancies relative to employment in urban areas, not just for overall employment, but also for occupational and educational classes. Hence vacancies are more strongly concentrated than the jobs to which they refer. Moreover, we find that, compared to all employment, the concentration

Cities often deploy infrastructure-based solutions to tackle problems such as congestion caused by increasing motorisation rates. Such solutions include the introduction of complete streets or improved public transit systems. However, these solutions are often viewed as ‘quick fixes’ that are expected to resolve issues with ease. This article examines this phenomenon, which we call infrastructure solutionism

This introductory essay aims to provide a comprehensive overview of a collection of 17 articles, previously published in the Urban Studies journal, now consolidated as a ‘virtual special issue’. The articles contribute to numerous strands of what has, over the decades, become an extremely voluminous literature concerning the interplay between population change and productivity within cities. It is

Despite the growth, prevalence and influence of private urban governance, scholarship that explores the intimate workings of these manifold and mutating forms remains limited. While these private ventures carry forward elements from the past, the landscape of urban governance has nonetheless undergone profound transformation. Over the past few decades, the global expansion and influence of private

A digital information explosion has transformed cities’ residential and educational markets in ways that are still being uncovered. Although urban stratification scholars have increasingly scrutinised whether emerging digital platforms disrupt or reproduce longstanding segregation patterns, direct links between one theoretically important form of digital information – school quality data – and neighbourhood

Neighbourhood social cohesion is associated with a range of beneficial outcomes for residents. However, it is commonly hypothesised that neighbourhood relations face potential disruptions from digital information and communication technologies (DICT) as they are assumed to alter traditional community structures previously grounded in physical proximity. We systematically review 52 empirical studies

This paper develops the concept of thermal governance as a way to think critically about urbanisation and the management of heat at a time of climate change. Through the urban history of Doha between the 1950s and the 1980s, this paper deploys thermal governance to rethink urbanisation and air-conditioning dependency in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) cities, especially in relation to the notion

The issue of urban vacancy is both a complex and a prevalent phenomenon in multiple contexts globally, providing an opening to address systemic issues of precarity. In this article, I explore the issue of urban vacancy in São Paulo, where the problem of vacant property has been highlighted for years alongside housing challenges and socio-spatial segregation. While São Paulo’s real estate market is

The issue of what constitutes effective regional growth policy has remained elusive, particularly for ‘broad-spectrum’ policy aimed at a large part of a country. We undertake one of the first quantitative studies looking at the City Deals in England, analysing effects on productivity. We employ a difference-in-differences model, an event study, and a synthetic control method to evaluate effects on

Neighbourhood effects are commonly understood as an effect of a characteristic of the residential location on social outcomes – although people are also linked to other places in their everyday lives. Based on a mixed-methods study on the significance of neighbourhoods for political recruitment of first- and second-generation Turkish immigrants in Berlin, this article shows that neighbourhoods with

Build-to-Rent (BTR) developments have expanded rapidly in the UK since 2013, often advertised as providing better quality rented accommodation for university-educated Millennials than available elsewhere in the private rental sector. However, the implications of this type of housing development, and especially its affordability, are poorly understood at the city scale, partly due to a lack of evidence

African urban populations are growing predominantly through types of settlement commonly referred to as ‘informal’– settlements constructed outside the control of city or state governments. For the UN New Urban Agenda, informal settlement presents a challenge to developing sustainable cities. Settlement qualification in urban development discourse often relies on prescriptive formal models and considers

The effects of individual organisations on the location of invention in the United States is underexplored. A handful of companies generate most of the inventions in most American cities and their actions do not average out in the aggregate. Temporal stability in city system properties corroborates agglomeration theories built on models of monopolistic competition that treat all firms as small and

Pleasure is at the heart of ‘nights out’, yet research on the UK’s night-time economy has consistently focussed instead on the risks and harms experienced by particular groups. Where this body of work has met research on young women, the emphasis on the problems of the night-time economy has been especially evident. This paper extends understandings of this subject by making an analysis of young women’s

Despite the substantial number of studies on the relationships between crime patterns and built environments, the impacts of street-level built environments on crime patterns have not been definitively determined due to the limitations of obtaining detailed streetscape data and conventional analysis models. To fill these gaps, this study focuses on the non-linear relationships and threshold effects

This work pursues a new explanatory framework for understanding some of the variance and homogeneity of informal work between cities in the Global South. Rooted in a materialist approach to informality, it seeks to explain the dynamics of informal work in different urban contexts via a novel application of the global division of labour, termed the global division of urban informal labour. Through a

North American downtowns are struggling to recover from the global COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to investigate the varying rates of recovery experienced by downtown areas in the 66 largest cities of the United States and Canada. Leveraging Location-Based Services data extracted from mobile phone location trajectories, we assess the recovery rates in the 2023 post-pandemic period, juxtaposed against

Sub-Saharan African cities have experienced significant spatial transformation in recent years. This transformation, in part, has been characterised by the proliferation of new cities and the privatisation of urban spaces. Yet, an understanding of how the growing trend of privatised urbanism is producing marginalisation and exclusion hurdles for the majority of urbanites in the context of self-organisation

The COVID-19 pandemic placed considerable stress on restaurants from restrictions placed on their operations, shifting consumer confidence, rapid expansion of remote work arrangements and aggressive uptake of third-party delivery services. Industry reports suggest that restaurants are experiencing a much higher rate of failure in comparison to other sectors of the economy. Restaurant survival was assessed

This article focuses on the governance of Granville Island, a former industrial stretch of land that operates as an arts destination abutting the City of Vancouver’s waterfront. While Granville Island might look like any other neighbourhood in Vancouver, it is in fact owned and managed by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, a federal agency, on behalf of the Government of Canada. This article

A city’s primary school segregation is closely related to its residential segregation. However, in education systems that allow primary school choice, parental behaviour often boosts school segregation beyond the segregation determined by the families’ place of residence. Taking up previous research, the paper starts by addressing the extent to which parental choice impacts school segregation in a

Cities, where 60% of the world’s population lives, are particularly vulnerable to global warming. The environmental aspect is therefore an important dimension of sustainable smart cities, as is citizen participation. Based on the Value–Belief–Norm (VBN) theory, we explore the idea that citizen participation in the smart city is largely conditioned by the environmental consequences and responsibilities

Mobility research and theory suggests that new parents often develop a car-dependent way of living that runs counter to prevailing climate policies. In this context, the current study investigates the influence of public transport accessibility on car ownership among first-time parents in the Oslo region. Specific attention is paid to how the effect of accessibility varies with different income levels

The centre of major cities is a focus of commuting patterns, and this article sets out how major cities use calculative practices to guide commuters through a complex, multiplanar, volumetric city. It examines how public transport officials, consultants, city planners and property developers interact to move commuters through inter-locking public and private spaces on a journey between underground

Investment in publicly subsidised social housing units – designed to ensure long-term access to dwellings for households with low and moderate incomes – is a strategy that cities around the world leverage to increase housing affordability. But the availability of such affordable units varies tremendously between cities, even within the same country. To what degree is this variation the product of local

This paper discusses how Tactical Urbanism aligns with the principles of the ‘open city’ framework. The ‘open city’ is often theorised as the urban condition that best welcomes diverse and flexible use of a city’s public spaces. However, the nature of the planning system at its core is to control and predict urban development, thereby effectively reinforcing the principle of a ‘closed city’ with more

Neighbourhood satisfaction is an important facet of life and consideration for policy, as it affects one’s quality of life and well-being, as well as broader residential mobility patterns. While studies have addressed gentrification’s various outcomes, especially residential displacement, few have investigated the relationship between gentrification and neighbourhood satisfaction. Using data from the

The purpose of this study is to examine how localised information and communication technologies (ICTs) use is related to interactions with local familiar strangers, from the perspective of communication infrastructure theory. More specifically, we examine (1) how individuals differ in terms of their relationships with local familiar strangers; (2) how individual-level socio-economic factors affect

Prior studies find that neighbourhoods abutting gentrifying spaces are viewed as ideal for capital investments and thereby subjected to increased police attention. Yet the categorical operationalisation of gentrification in such work presents limitations, particularly given that it is a spatial process. This area of scholarship also warrants a theoretical explanation of the diffusion of urban redevelopment

Suburbs are at the forefront of urban change, with urban policy looking to increase the density of suburban centres. Thus, the compact city has emerged as a dominant urban policy paradigm, where policy settings are configured to enable densification in designated centres. For some, this is a form of post-suburbanism, characterised by new drivers, experiences and outcomes of suburban redevelopment pressures

What happens to firms’ innovation activities when new firms enter or leave their urban neighbourhood? We empirically explore the role of knowledge spillovers through firm dynamics using firm-level panel data from Berlin. The results indicate that an increase in firm activities in the neighbourhood through entries and influx positively relates to incumbents’ innovation activities. This finding is restricted

This article explores the ambivalent role of a grassroots cultural and activist association and its forced displacement between two districts as a result of the rapidly advancing frontier of gentrification in the city of Lisbon (Portugal). Strong institutional and private pressures led to the eviction of the association from its former location in the now gentrified Bairro Alto and its relocation to

This article examines real estate platforms and the data they generate to provide new insights into housing markets and practices, focusing on lower-cost and informal sectors, where building or rental regulations are often bypassed or contravened. We examine online listings advertised in Sydney, one of the most expensive cities in Australia and the world, compiling data from four dominant platforms

As digital mobility platforms, such as ride-hailing apps, have become more widespread and popular, they have garnered public and scholarly interest as potential solutions to challenges of climate change, insufficient mobility services, urban congestion and pollution. This paper examines the potential of ride-hailing platforms through a more critical lens. Thereby I draw attention to how platform transportation

This paper extends the debate on medium-sized cities as active designers of place-specific neoliberal identities by reporting relevant findings from Bologna, European Capital of Culture in 2000 and a UNESCO City of Music since 2006. The study identifies the formal relationships of collaboration among local musicians as a relevant proxy to discuss the individualisation of the pop-rock music scene and

This article examines inequalities in the spatial accessibility of childcare between high- and low-status neighbourhoods in the city of Vienna and asks (i) whether specific public and non-profit provider types contribute to these inequalities and (ii) which factors may cause these inequalities in a mainly tax-funded childcare system. For our analysis, we combine data on the location and characteristics

The potential of infrastructure ‘as a solution’ is currently at the forefront of American political consciousness. Historic levels of investment in infrastructure proffer seismic material, economic, and symbolic transformations at a near-continental scale. However, the present policy context for infrastructure planning in the US is confounded by a mosaic of decision-making authorities that hamper the

Familiar strangers, individuals who are visually recognisable yet do not engage in verbal conversations, emerge in communal urban places on the way and in between regular daily activities in the home and workplace. Described as invisible social ties and light touch community, familiar strangers represent an understudied and untapped source of sociality that offer promise by way of an antidote to the