J Uitermark
Biographic Data
| ID | 24864 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Uitermark |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Uitermark |
| SIGNATURE | UITERMARK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5274-1455 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1008 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Parsing the Chicago School legacy: Towards a critical human ecology
Although the Chicago School of Sociology serves as a shared reference point for scholars from across the subfields of urban studies, it is rarely engaged in any depth. The prevailing sense, it seems, is that there is little to be gained by seriously engaging with the work itself or critiques of it. Against this, I argue that sustained reflection on the Chicago School is productive for both liberal and critical urban studies scholarship. I thus pa…
Struggling with our demons and heroes
Despite their differences, all my interlocutors agree on one thing: urban scholars need to engage with the Chicago School. If the question is not whether urban scholars should engage the Chicago sociologists, the question is how to do so. How should we relate to the heroes and demons of our field? And what if our heroes are also our demons
Echo Chambers Are Defined by Conflict, Not Isolation
The influential “echo chamber” hypothesis suggests that social media drive polarization through a mutual reinforcement between isolation and radicalization. The existence of such echo chambers has been a central focus of academic debate, with competing studies finding ostensibly contradictory empirical evidence. This article identifies a fundamental methodological limitation of these empirical studies: they do not differentiate between negative a…
I Learned to Make a Lot More Space in Myself for Other People’: Examining the Negotiation of Hegemonic and Alternative Values in the Urban Commons
In this article, we examine the urban commons through the concept of subjectivity. We attend to the ways in which alternative and hegemonic values are negotiated among different commoners and within individual commoners. Which challenges do commoners face as they pursue alternative values within the context of capitalist urbanization? What sorts of subjectivities do people develop by participating in the commons? How do different commoner subject…
Has inequality grown or declined in Global South cities? Trends in occupational structure, education, and living standards
Urban inequality is widely debated but few studies examine developments over time and across cities. In this contribution, we develop a novel approach to study the dynamics of inequality in cities of the Global South. Using a sample that includes cities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, we track trends in equality since the 1990s in four domains: the labor market, education, private goods, and public amenities. With descriptive statistics, ineq…
Emancipatory Epistemologies and Municipalist Policies
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study
The politics of drains: Everyday negotiations of infrastructure imaginaries in Accra
In this article we unpack the infrastructural imaginary of urban residents in a neighbourhood in the northern periphery of Accra in Ghana, focussing on drainage. Based on interviews and observations, we describe how residents characterise their neighbourhood’s development as a linear progression in stages, each marked by the completion of different infrastructures. Our analysis brings out the visceral and affective underpinnings of infrastructure…
Political groups over national parties: Measuring the Europeanization of the political arena through MEPs’ Twitter interactions
The question of the democratic character of the European Union (EU) has been a center-point of decades of political research. An important critique suggests that the development of the European political arena is still incomplete, with European parliamentarians primarily orienting themselves to national issues and politicians, implying a problematic mismatch between the political arena and their policy jurisdiction. Research has however been limi…
Wikipedia: A self-organizing bureaucracy
Many authors have argued that digital technologies enable collaboration without central oversight or authority, obviating the need for the hierarchical bureaucracies that characterize industrial capitalism. In this context, Wikipedia is often mentioned as a paradigmatic example. We draw on the classical accounts of Robert Michels and Max Weber to study mechanisms pushing towards or away from power concentration and bureaucratization. Our historic…
Dynamics of digitally networked leadership in #blacklivesmatter
Using the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, activists have given new impetus to aspirations of ‘leaderful’ organizing. Disavowing the centralization of leadership and rethinking the history of the struggle for civil rights, many have sought to develop and revamp models of decentralized leadership. Digital networking features prominently in these models, but the literature suggests its role is ambiguous: while social media provide affordances for decentr…
Neoliberalization and urban redevelopment: The impact of public policy on multiple dimensions of spatial inequality
This paper examines the impact of public policy on different dimensions of spatial inequality. We not only study residential segregation but also housing market access and inequality in terms of neighborhood status. We chart the impact of urban redevelopment policies in two Dutch cities—Amsterdam and Rotterdam—through a unique longitudinal and full-population dataset that enables us to distinguish the contributions of demolition, new construction…
The Swarm versus the Grassroots: Places and networks of supporters and opponents of Black Lives Matter on Twitter
While activists have effectively used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to organize protests against police brutality and racism, this success has also drawn out many who use the hashtag to express their opposition. How do supporters of the Movement for Black Lives and their opponents coordinate on Twitter? Drawing on a corpus of 18.5 million tweets, this paper compares coordination among supporters and opponents of #blacklivesmatter in terms of rela…
Urban Mediatization and Planetary Gentrification: The Rise and Fall of a Favela across Media Platforms
We are today increasingly experiencing the city through interfaces of platforms like Google Maps, Instagram, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, and Yelp. As our very sense of the city is shaped by these technological interfaces, the media are acquiring a constitutive role in reshaping contemporary urbanity. To conceptualize how media represent urban change, this paper draws on media studies and particularly the concept of “mediatization.” The paper studies the…
Tweeting ourselves to death: The cultural logic of digital capitalism
Media scholarship has long argued that public discourse is a function of the architecture of the media by which it is carried. Media architecture is, as political economists have argued, in turn shaped by the capitalist regime of accumulation within which the media operate. This paper draws together these two strands of literature to ask: as the accumulation of data is coming to define contemporary capitalism, what cultural logic does this produc…
Seeing the street through Instagram. Digital platforms and the amplification of gentrification
As digital platforms are woven into urban life, they become an intrinsic part of the urban experience. Here we examine how representations on digital platforms reflect and shape urban change. Which groups produce and share these representations? What places do they picture? What are their aesthetic registers and norms? And what are the material consequences of these representations? Elaborating on the concept of ‘discursive investing’ introduced …
Adoption and adaptation: A computational case study of the spread of Granovetter's weak ties hypothesis
How do new scientific ideas diffuse? Computational studies reveal how network structures facilitate or obstruct diffusion; qualitative studies demonstrate that diffusion entails the continuous translation and transformation of ideas. This article bridges these computational and qualitative approaches to study diffusion as a complex process of continuous adaptation. As a case study, we analyze the spread of Granovetter's Strength of Weak Ties hypo…
Dynamics of Distinction and Solidarity within Social Movements: Explaining Relations between Privileged and Underprivileged Groups in the U.S. Immigrant Rights Movement
Undocumented immigrant youths, known as the Dreamers, rose to exceptional prominence in the American immigrant rights movement in the 2000s and 2010s. The Dreamers had considerable success in presenting themselves as assimilated and hard-working patriots worthy of regularization. While this strategy worked well in the media and politics, it also created a distance between the Dreamers and less privileged groups of undocumented immigrants. In 2013…
Geographical Network Analysis
As the volume of digital data is growing exponentially and computational methods are advancing rapidly, network analysis is an increasingly important analytical tool to understand social life. This paper revisits the rich history of network analysis in geography and uses insights from that history to review contemporary computational social science. Based on that analysis, we synthesize the distinctive qualities of what we term geographical netwo…
A virtuous nation and its deserving immigrants. How the immigrant rights movement embraced nationalism
Immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, are oftentimes seen as disrupting the nation state and destabilizing its boundaries. This paper develops the argument that immigrants can, under certain conditions, actively employ nationalist frames and language to support their rights claims. It presents a two-prong argument to explain for this outcome. First, immigrant rights advocates needed to select a ‘master frame’ that would will reson…
For a heterodox computational social science
The proliferation of digital data has been the impetus for the emergence of a new discipline for the study of social life: 'computational social science'. Much research in this field is founded on the premise that society is a complex system with emergent structures that can be modeled or reconstructed through digital data. This paper suggests that computational social science serves practical and legitimizing functions for digital capitalism in …
The framing of 9/11 in American, French, and Dutch national newspapers (2001-2015): An inductive approach to studying events
In this article, the authors employ work on events, framing, and social problems to develop an inductive approach to studying events. The article's central premise is that tracing direct references made to events offers a fruitful strategy to investigate their framing cross-nationally and over time. The authors apply their approach to the case of 9/11 in American, French, and Dutch national newspapers (2001-2015). By combining word counting, topi…
Governing through Religion in Amsterdam: The Stigmatization of Ethnic Cultures and the Uses of Islam
Filtering feminisms: Emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram
Based on interviews with feminist Instagram users, this article studies emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram through the concept of filtering. Filtering entails both enhancement and subtraction: some feminist sensibilities align with Instagram’s interaction order, while others become subdued and remain at the margins of visibility. Taken together, users’ filtering practices contribute to the confident and happy image, individualistic strea…
In search of the Smart Citizen: Republican and cybernetic citizenship in the smart city
The smart city has been both celebrated for opening up decision-making processes through responsive digital infrastructures, and criticised for turning citizens into mere nodes of socio-technical networks under corporate or government control. In line with these depictions, smart city politics is often analysed as a struggle between aspirations for bottom-up participatory democracy and authoritarian control. Drawing on ethnographic research on an…
From fragmentation to integration and back again: The politics of water infrastructure in Accra’s peripheral neighbourhoods
This paper examines the dynamics of fragmentation and integration in Accra’s water infrastructure. Inspired by figurational sociology, we analyse infrastructure as both reflective and constitutive of interdependencies between different class fractions and parts of the urban region. We draw on historical archives, the in‐depth ethnographic study of one suburban neighbourhood, a survey of eight additional neighbourhoods, and statistics from Ghana’s…
Gentrification as a Governmental Strategy: Social Control and Social Cohesion in Hoogvliet, Rotterdam
The emergence of gentrification as a 'global urban strategy' (Smith, 2002, "New globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as a global urban strategy" Antipode 34 427-451) is clearly visible in the peripheral boroughs of Dutch cities. We suggest, however, that the driving force of gentrification in these areas is not the local government's need to strengthen its tax base or developers' pursuit of profit. Gentrification is also not a response to the …
Cities and Social Movements: Theorizing beyond the Right to the City
Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention.Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds.We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements.The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention…
Reassembling the city through Instagram
How do people represent the city on social media? And how do these representations feed back into people's uses of the city? To answer these questions, we develop a relational approach that relies on a combination of qualitative methods and network analysis. Based on in‐depth interviews and a dataset of over 400 000 geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam, we analyse how the city is reassembled on and through the platform. By selectively drawing…
Integration and Control: The Governing of Urban Marginality in W estern E urope
Drawing on the figurational sociology of N orbert E lias and the Foucauldian governmentality approach, this article outlines the political rationalities and governmental technologies pertaining to the territorial governance of urban marginality in W estern E urope. Whereas many authors have suggested that segregation is key to the governing of urban marginality in the USA and perhaps the post‐industrial city generally, I suggest that, at least in…
Social Mixing' and the Management of Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods: The Dutch Policy of Urban Restructuring Revisited
The Dutch government currently pursues a comprehensive and ambitious policy of 'social mixing' in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The second section of this paper suggests that it has as yet not been adequately explained why the Dutch government pursues this so-called restructuring policy. The third section develops an approach derived from regulation theory that potentially helps to decipher the forces behind the Dutch restructuring policy. It is …
Reinventing Multiculturalism: Urban Citizenship and the Negotiation of Ethnic Diversity in Amsterdam
A number of authors have recently suggested that cities are becoming increasingly important as sites for the negotiation of ethnic diversity. While multiculturalism has been declared 'dead' in many countries, cities are now experimenting with new ways to accommodate ethnic diversity. This article reports on research conducted in Amsterdam. In this city, a 'minority policy' has been replaced by a qualitatively different 'diversity policy'. Even th…
Re-scaling, ‘scale fragmentation’ and the regulation of antagonistic relationships
Recent years have seen the emergence of what might be called a ‘re-scaling’ literature. This paper tries to combine this literature with insights from regulation theory in order to identify some of the ways in which antagonistic relationships are regulated in the after-Fordist period. It is argued that re-scaling not only affects (anti-)regulatory forces by manipulating the power distribution among different agents but also manipulates the ways i…
Civilising the City: Populism and Revanchist Urbanism in Rotterdam
This paper discusses the relevance of American literature on `revanchist urbanism' for understanding the policies of the populist government that ruled Rotterdam between 2002 and 2006. It is suggested that revanchist urbanism in the European context in general and in the case of Rotterdam in particular takes on a different form from that in the US. Moreover, a wholesale displacement of social-democratic policies by revanchist policies is not obse…
From Politicization to Policing: The Rise and Decline of New Social Movements in Amsterdam and Paris
This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left‐wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for bo…
An in memoriam for the just city of Amsterdam
This paper shows how the just city of Amsterdam came to live, celebrates its achievements and mourns its death. The paper suggests that an equitable distribution of scarce resources and democratic engagement are essential preconditions for the realization of a just city. Social movements of Amsterdam struggled hard to make their city just and they had considerable success. However, in the late 1980s, social movements lost their momentum and, in t…
The Symbolic Politics of Gentrification: The Restructuring of Stigmatized Neighborhoods in Amsterdam and Istanbul
Since gentrification entails significant negative social consequences, one important question is why residents of neighborhoods on the verge of gentrification often do not effectively oppose the process. Why do residents not resist? And, if they resist, why are they not effective? To answer these questions, we attend to the symbolic politics of the gentrification: that is, the ways in which process is framed and experienced. We examine the dynami…
The genesis and evolution of urban policy: A Confrontation of Regulationist and Governmentality Approaches
Longing for Wikitopia: The study and politics of self-organisation
Self-organisation is an idea whose time has come. As an explanatory concept, self-organisation is central to complexity theory, which is quickly becoming a powerful and perhaps even dominant paradigm in both the natural and social sciences. As a political ideal, self-organisation is filling the void that is opening up as both the state and market are increasingly perceived as undemocratic, unjust and inefficient. Drawing on observations from the …
Filtering feminisms: Emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram
Based on interviews with feminist Instagram users, this article studies emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram through the concept of filtering. Filtering entails both enhancement and subtraction: some feminist sensibilities align with Instagram’s interaction order, while others become subdued and remain at the margins of visibility. Taken together, users’ filtering practices contribute to the confident and happy image, individualistic strea…
Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics: From Accommodation to Confrontation
Integration politics in the Netherlands has changed dramatically between 1990 and 2005. Whereas ethnic and religious differences were hitherto pacified through accommodation, a new and increasingly powerful current in Dutch politics problematized the presence of minorities. Celebrity politicians like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Pim Fortuyn disrupted the pragmatic political culture that had traditionally characterized the Netherlands and argued for confro…
Performing Authority: Discursive Politics After the Assassination of Theo Van Gogh
In November 2004, the assassination of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam by an Islamic extremist shocked The Netherlands. Critics of multiculturalism quickly linked the murder to the perceived failure of ‘soft’ integration policies and questioned the authority and legitimacy of Amsterdam’s political leadership. This article studies the response of political leaders to those challenges from a performative perspective. Analysing governance a…
Chiefs in the City: Traditional Authority in the Modern State
While forms of authority that descend from social or cultural tradition are commonly understood as archaic, traditional authorities often survive and occasionally even thrive during the formation of modern states. Chieftaincies do not only endure in the Ghanaian countryside but also proliferate in new neighbourhoods on the peripheries of Ghana's fast-growing cities. We develop an explanation for the endurance of traditional authorities, based on …
How Local Networks Shape a Global Movement: Comparing Occupy in Amsterdam and Los Angeles
The Occupy encampments erupting around the world in Fall and Winter of 2011 developed into local platforms where activists from different milieus came together and forged relations and shared understandings. While Occupy protests broke out around the world in a synchronized fashion and used similar symbols and narratives, the protests were sustained by quite different local networks in different cities. We argue that the abilities of local Occupy…
Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics: From Accommodation to Confrontation
In the past decades several large-scale social, cultural and economic developments have occurred.Processes of economic restructuring (de-industrialization) have brought into existence new categories of unemployed people; the process of individualization is manifested in increased individual independence, a growing sense of personal rights, andpossiblyin a growing opposition between self-interest and civil virtues; the increased world-wide mobilit…
The co‐optation of squatters in Amsterdam and the emergence of a movement meritocracy: A critical reply to Pruijt
This article explains how and why the relationship between the Amsterdam squatter movement and the local government has changed over the last decade. Besides reassessing Pruijt's analysis of the Amsterdam squatter movement in a recent issue of this journal, the article also engages with the post‐Fordist literature on social movements. This literature is largely based on the assumption that a subversive identity is incompatible with co‐optation. H…
Wither the ‘Undivided City'? An Assessment of State‐Sponsored Gentrification in A msterdam
Like many other governments, the D utch government has simultaneously pursued the contradictory goals of liberalising the housing market and countering the concentration of low‐income groups. This paper discusses how the tension between promoting market forces and countering segregation has played out, using A msterdam as a case study. The findings suggest that the policy may have mitigated but did not prevent a deepening division between the cit…
Citizen Participation in a Mediated Age: Neighbourhood Governance in The Netherlands
Two developments - the fragmentation of governance and the mediatization of politics - lead governmental organizations to engage in discursive and institutional competition. These new circumstances also drastically change the relationship of governmental organizations to clients, target groups and the citizenry as a whole. We empirically investigate these changes through a study of a privately funded community development organization in the Neth…
Introduction: Planning/resistance
For years urban planning has been understood as a government instrument to rationalize space, populations, and the conduct of residents. This view is consistent with recent discussions of the “post-political” city. As the introduction of the special issue on Planning / Resistance, this paper takes a different view. It examines the politicizing effects of planning. It argues that planning conceives and implements the orderly city by imposing lines…
Looking Forward by Looking Back: May Day Protests in London and the Strategic Significance of the Urban
This paper deals with the question of how oppositional movements can adapt their protest strategies to meet recent socio‐spatial transformations. The work of Lefebvre provides several clues as to how an alternative discourse and appropriation of space could be incorporated in such protest strategies. One of the central themes in Lefebvre's work is that the appearances, forms and functions of urban space are constitutive elements of contemporary c…
Mediated Interaction Rituals: A Geography of Everyday Life and Contention in Black Lives Matter
The Movement for Black Lives has connected millions of people online. How are their outrage and hope mediated through social media? To address this question, this article extends Randall Collins’s Interaction Ritual Theory to social media. Employing semisupervised image recognition methods on a million Instagram posts with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, we identify four different interaction ritual types, each with distinct geographies. Instagram…
Spatial policy in the United Kingdom: Regulatory experimentation in the after-Fordist era
Re-scaling, ‘scale fragmentation’ and the regulation of antagonistic relationships
Recent years have seen the emergence of what might be called a ‘re-scaling’ literature. This paper tries to combine this literature with insights from regulation theory in order to identify some of the ways in which antagonistic relationships are regulated in the after-Fordist period. It is argued that re-scaling not only affects (anti-)regulatory forces by manipulating the power distribution among different agents but also manipulates the ways i…
Social Mixing' and the Management of Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods: The Dutch Policy of Urban Restructuring Revisited
The Dutch government currently pursues a comprehensive and ambitious policy of 'social mixing' in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The second section of this paper suggests that it has as yet not been adequately explained why the Dutch government pursues this so-called restructuring policy. The third section develops an approach derived from regulation theory that potentially helps to decipher the forces behind the Dutch restructuring policy. It is …
Framing urban injustices: The case of the Amsterdam squatter movement
Every social movement is engaged in an on‐going process of ‘framing’ to determine what goals are just and what means are legitimate. This paper provides an analysis of several frames that have been developed by the squatter movement in Amsterdam. This movement emerged in the 1970s as a major force that was able to put the shortage of affordable housing on the political agenda. The paper also gives attention to the contemporary squatter movement a…
Looking Forward by Looking Back: May Day Protests in London and the Strategic Significance of the Urban
This paper deals with the question of how oppositional movements can adapt their protest strategies to meet recent socio‐spatial transformations. The work of Lefebvre provides several clues as to how an alternative discourse and appropriation of space could be incorporated in such protest strategies. One of the central themes in Lefebvre's work is that the appearances, forms and functions of urban space are constitutive elements of contemporary c…
The co‐optation of squatters in Amsterdam and the emergence of a movement meritocracy: A critical reply to Pruijt
This article explains how and why the relationship between the Amsterdam squatter movement and the local government has changed over the last decade. Besides reassessing Pruijt's analysis of the Amsterdam squatter movement in a recent issue of this journal, the article also engages with the post‐Fordist literature on social movements. This literature is largely based on the assumption that a subversive identity is incompatible with co‐optation. H…
A clash of policy approaches
Politicization of research and the relevance of geography: Some experiences and reflections for an ongoing debate
In this paper we address the revival of interest in recent years in the relevance of geographical research and highlight problems of politicization faced by researchers through cases of policy‐oriented research in the UK and Belgium. We argue that geographers should be aware of the possibilities and constraints for critical engagement in the context of policy‐oriented research. We identify at least two important opportunities for researchers to a…
The genesis and evolution of urban policy: A Confrontation of Regulationist and Governmentality Approaches
Reinventing Multiculturalism: Urban Citizenship and the Negotiation of Ethnic Diversity in Amsterdam
A number of authors have recently suggested that cities are becoming increasingly important as sites for the negotiation of ethnic diversity. While multiculturalism has been declared 'dead' in many countries, cities are now experimenting with new ways to accommodate ethnic diversity. This article reports on research conducted in Amsterdam. In this city, a 'minority policy' has been replaced by a qualitatively different 'diversity policy'. Even th…
Amphetamine users in Amsterdam: Patterns of use and modes of self-regulation
After identifying some omissions in existing literature on research on amphetamine use, this article sets forth to answer some questions with respect to (1) use patterns, (2) advantages and disadvantages of amphetamine use as experienced by users, (3) the formal and informal modes of control that users employ to reduce or negate negative side effects of amphetamine use, and (4) the role of context variables in fostering in facilitating these mode…
Performing Authority: Discursive Politics After the Assassination of Theo Van Gogh
In November 2004, the assassination of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam by an Islamic extremist shocked The Netherlands. Critics of multiculturalism quickly linked the murder to the perceived failure of ‘soft’ integration policies and questioned the authority and legitimacy of Amsterdam’s political leadership. This article studies the response of political leaders to those challenges from a performative perspective. Analysing governance a…
Gentrification as a Governmental Strategy: Social Control and Social Cohesion in Hoogvliet, Rotterdam
The emergence of gentrification as a 'global urban strategy' (Smith, 2002, "New globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as a global urban strategy" Antipode 34 427-451) is clearly visible in the peripheral boroughs of Dutch cities. We suggest, however, that the driving force of gentrification in these areas is not the local government's need to strengthen its tax base or developers' pursuit of profit. Gentrification is also not a response to the …
Civilising the City: Populism and Revanchist Urbanism in Rotterdam
This paper discusses the relevance of American literature on `revanchist urbanism' for understanding the policies of the populist government that ruled Rotterdam between 2002 and 2006. It is suggested that revanchist urbanism in the European context in general and in the case of Rotterdam in particular takes on a different form from that in the US. Moreover, a wholesale displacement of social-democratic policies by revanchist policies is not obse…
Citizen Participation in a Mediated Age: Neighbourhood Governance in The Netherlands
Two developments - the fragmentation of governance and the mediatization of politics - lead governmental organizations to engage in discursive and institutional competition. These new circumstances also drastically change the relationship of governmental organizations to clients, target groups and the citizenry as a whole. We empirically investigate these changes through a study of a privately funded community development organization in the Neth…
An in memoriam for the just city of Amsterdam
This paper shows how the just city of Amsterdam came to live, celebrates its achievements and mourns its death. The paper suggests that an equitable distribution of scarce resources and democratic engagement are essential preconditions for the realization of a just city. Social movements of Amsterdam struggled hard to make their city just and they had considerable success. However, in the late 1980s, social movements lost their momentum and, in t…
Islam in the Spotlight: The Mediatisation of Politics in an Amsterdam Neighbourhood
Conflicts over the presence of migrants and Muslims in Western societies have become increasingly ‘mediatised’ in recent years. Interactions between governments and migrants are now subject to constant scrutiny and the media have become a prime battle ground for political struggles. This paper investigates the effects of mediatisation on the relationships between the government and civil society associations in one Amsterdam neighbourhood before …
S. Fainstein: The just city
Thanks to Fainstein's concerted efforts over the last two decades, which have culminated in this seminal book, justice is now once again squarely on the agenda. What, then, is Fainstein's just city? The just city, according to Fainstein, has three components. First, it is democratic in the sense that people have control over their living environments. Fainstein values democracy but immediately qualifies her support as she argues that local democr…
Urban renewal without displacement? Belgium’s ‘housing contract experiment’ and the risks of gentrification
Gentrification has become part and parcel of urban policies throughout the world. Critics have argued against those policies but they have not yet developed concrete and comprehensive alternatives. This paper seeks to remedy this omission by investigating the Belgian ‘housing contract’ experiment (2005–2007). Quite exceptionally, Belgium’s ‘housing contract’ experiment was based on the premise that housing policies should improve the quality of l…
Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics: From Accommodation to Confrontation
Integration politics in the Netherlands has changed dramatically between 1990 and 2005. Whereas ethnic and religious differences were hitherto pacified through accommodation, a new and increasingly powerful current in Dutch politics problematized the presence of minorities. Celebrity politicians like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Pim Fortuyn disrupted the pragmatic political culture that had traditionally characterized the Netherlands and argued for confro…
How Local Networks Shape a Global Movement: Comparing Occupy in Amsterdam and Los Angeles
The Occupy encampments erupting around the world in Fall and Winter of 2011 developed into local platforms where activists from different milieus came together and forged relations and shared understandings. While Occupy protests broke out around the world in a synchronized fashion and used similar symbols and narratives, the protests were sustained by quite different local networks in different cities. We argue that the abilities of local Occupy…
Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics: From Accommodation to Confrontation
In the past decades several large-scale social, cultural and economic developments have occurred.Processes of economic restructuring (de-industrialization) have brought into existence new categories of unemployed people; the process of individualization is manifested in increased individual independence, a growing sense of personal rights, andpossiblyin a growing opposition between self-interest and civil virtues; the increased world-wide mobilit…
Detecting Communities through Network Data
Social life coalesces into communities through cooperation and conflict. As a case in point, Shwed and Bearman (2010) studied consensus and contention in scientific communities. They used a sophisticated modularity method to detect communities on the basis of scientific citations, which they then interpreted as directed positive network ties. They assumed that a lack of citations implies disagreement. Some scientific citations, however, are conte…
Cities and Social Movements: Theorizing beyond the Right to the City
Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention.Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds.We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements.The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention…
Integration and Control: The Governing of Urban Marginality in W estern E urope
Drawing on the figurational sociology of N orbert E lias and the Foucauldian governmentality approach, this article outlines the political rationalities and governmental technologies pertaining to the territorial governance of urban marginality in W estern E urope. Whereas many authors have suggested that segregation is key to the governing of urban marginality in the USA and perhaps the post‐industrial city generally, I suggest that, at least in…
Sociology (61 works) · Political science (53 works) · Law (44 works) · Politics (38 works) · Law (31 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (26 works) · Economics (24 works) · Political economy (23 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Geography (20 works)