Seth Schindler
Biographic Data
| ID | 3586283 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Seth Schindler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Seth |
| FAMILY NAME | Schindler |
| SIGNATURE | SCHINDLER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2233-0628 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 981 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
State Platform Capitalism: The United States, China, and the Global Battle for Digital Supremacy
Global capitalism is being reshaped by two major trends. States have become increasingly interventionist, reshaping their economies in response to crises and geopolitical tensions. Secondly, digital platform giants have emerged from the US and China that concentrate political economic power in private hands. This Element argues that these trends are increasingly symbiotic. Digital platforms are being folded into the spiralling rivalry between the…
Geopolitical Rivalry and the New Global Economic Geography: Dynamics, Networks, and Territories of Global Disorder
The geography of the global economy is being remade before our eyes. Trade disputes, export controls, and vast subsidy programs proliferate. At the sharp end of the wedge, naked geopolitical violen...
The emergence and politics of polyalignment
In the Second Cold War between the US and China, middle ground countries are overwhelmingly refusing to choose sides. However, despite resultant talk of ‘new non-alignment’, they do not seek to keep major states at arm’s length, as in the first Cold War; rather, they seek to build and maintain connections with rival players as much as possible, reflecting their attachment to the deep networks created under globalisation in the decades since 1989.…
Structural power redux: Geoeconomic rivalry in a networked world
The US and China are locked in a spiralling geopolitical competition to renegotiate globalization. This competition centres on establishing control over the transnational financial, infrastructure, digital and production networks that have taken shape after the Cold War. We historicize how US structural power became ‘networked’ in the neoliberal era, and theorize how these networks shape current superpower competition. We contend that contemporar…
Oligarchic sovereignty: Technology and the future of global order
Contemporary technology oligarchs are reshaping global power through their control over critical infrastructures, political institutions, and ideas. Across six essays, this forum examines the territorial, temporal, and ideational ambitions of Silicon Valley billionaires, highlighting how individuals like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg exercise unprecedented influence over states and societies. From charter cities and netw…
There cannot be a corridor without Türkiye!’: Türkiye’s polyalignment strategy in pursuit of strategic autonomy
Türkiye has responded to great power rivalry by attempting to maintain close ties with competing powers. According to many scholars, this affords Ankara a measure of ‘strategic autonomy’, and we contribute to this scholarship by highlighting the spatial component of Türkiye’s foreign policy. Indeed, Türkiye’s foreign and domestic policy is geared towards becoming a ‘central country’ in transnational networks and mediating between east and west. W…
China’s digital expansion in the Global South: Systematic literature review and future research agenda
At the intersection of China’s growing global presence and growing digital power lies its digital expansion in the low- and middle-income countries of the Global South. Worth billions of US$ annually in trade and investment, and having a significant impact on these countries’ social and economic development, this phenomenon has been relatively ignored by researchers to date. However, it has nonetheless now been sufficiently studied to warrant a s…
China’s digital expansion in the Global South: Special issue introduction
Geostrategic globalization: US–China rivalry, corporate strategy, and the new global economy
Geopolitical rivalry has intensified to a degree not seen since the Cold War. The US and China have embraced interventionist state-capitalist practices in competing attempts to gain control over the transnational networks that underpin globalization. As a result, multinational corporations (MNCs) are exposed to unprecedented levels of geopolitical risk. Most MNCs are responding in one of two ways. Some hedge and try to remain aloof from the US–Ch…
The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks
Relations between the US and China have deteriorated to their lowest point since their rapprochement in the 1970s. To make sense of contemporary geopolitics, our objective in this article is two-fold. First, we historically situate contemporary US-China rivalry to conceptualise the Second Cold War (SCW). We argue that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, both the US and China launched ‘restorative’ political projects that harked back to imag…
Structural violence and the urban politics of hope in Ankara, Turkey
This paper examines the role of violence in Turkey’s state-coordinated pursuit of rapid urban transformation. We argue that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) implemented an urban development regime that relied on structural violence to control and distribute urban rent, housing and land. Despite framing this mode of urban transformation as a way to include marginalised urban populations in economy and society, it ultimately proved to be pol…
Deindustrialisation and the politics of subordinate degrowth: The case of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina
Cities in low- and middle-income countries have experienced deindustrialisation as localised agglomerations that historically served domestic and regional markets have become exposed to highly productive global value chains as capital has been (re)allocated to primary sectors. State, corporate and social actors have responded to economic decline by embracing a range of coping and adaptation strategies, some of which are consistent with degrowth, …
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmen…
The US-China rivalry and the emergence of state platform capitalism
The rise of digital platforms as a new form of business organisation concentrates power in the United States and China. Platform capitalism further intersects with and reinforces pre-existing trends towards state capitalism, where states more actively direct economies in response to economic turbulence and heightened geopolitical tension. The concentration of global business power within two states, combined with the increasing capacity for these…
Interrogating China's Global Urban Presence
This paper examines the socio-economic and geopolitical outcomes associated with infrastructure development across multiple scales. Starting from the premise that planetary socio-technical transformations in this vein have distinctly national drivers, we focus on the urban agency of Chinese-led investment. The paper explores how different forms of infrastructural development generated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects transformations …
Africa’s new urban spaces: Deindustrialisation, infrastructure-led development and real estate frontiers
Many African governments have embraced centralised spatial planning and the construction of large-scale connective infrastructure as a means to synergise industrialisation and functional urban development. This article examines the tensions between these economic and urban development objectives in Ghana and Kenya. Infrastructure-led development in both cases has fuelled extended and unplanned urbanisation and the production of new frontiers for …
The limits to urban revolution: The transformation of Ankara, Turkey, under the Justice and Development Party
Contemporary urbanization is characterized by the incorporation of historically isolated places into vast urbanized networks that are planetary in scope. We underscore the political processes and actors that instantiate urban transformation. Drawing on Lefebvre's writings on urban revolutions - in plural - we show that he considered comprehensive urban transformation the result of multiple place-based revolutions that are typically driven by a st…
Infrastructure-led development and the peri-urban question: Furthering crossover comparisons
Contemporary development policy portrays enhanced connectivity as the key to fostering economic growth in lagging regions. This global policy consensus and consequent infrastructure scramble have resulted in a proliferation of new urban spaces. These are dispersed, fragmentary and often unrecognised as urban by projects and plans centred on large-scale connective infrastructures to integrate remote regions into circuits of capital. Whilst our und…
Towards a critical geopolitics of China– US rivalry: Pericentricity, regional conflicts and transnational connections
The deterioration of bilateral relations between the US and China heralds a new chapter in geopolitics increasingly characterised by competition and confrontation. We introduce insights from contemporary Cold War historiography, which we suggest can help deepen our understanding of the present. Historians have largely rejected the notion that the Cold War was a bipolar struggle between great powers. Instead, the ‘Global Cold War’ is increasingly …
Goodbye Washington Confusion, hello Wall Street Consensus: Contemporary State Capitalism and the Spatialisation of Industrial Strategy
Recent scholarship has narrated the financialization of development, which Gabor (2021) refers to as the Wall Street Consensus (WSC), whose purpose is to facilitate the investment of global capital in Southern infrastructure by institutionalising the distribution of risk, reward and responsibility between investors and states. Gabor's conceptualization of the 'de-risking state' subordinated to global finance capital stands in stark contrast with …
The political rationality of state capitalism in Tanzania: Territorial transformation and the entrepreneurial individual
States have become active participants in markets in the past decade, precipitating renewed scholarly interest in state capitalism. We contribute to the conceptualization of contemporary state capitalism by bridging it with scholarship on infrastructure-led development and analysing its political rationality. We begin by introducing mid-20th-century high modernism, which coupled spatial planning and social engineering for the purpose of transform…
Megaprojects, mirages and miracles: Territorializing the Delhi–Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) and state restructuring in contemporary India
Large-scale inter-city infrastructure projects are proliferating across the Global South as industrial policy-makers have used spatial planning to purposefully transform regions’ economic and urban geographies. The Make in India policy and its promotion of industrial development corridors is emblematic of these trends, and this paper explores the relationship between this emergent national spatial vision and the subnational governance restructuri…
The new cold war and the rise of the 21st‐century infrastructure state
The unipolar international order led by the USA has given way to a multipolar order with the emergence of China as a great power competitor. According to many commentators, the deterioration of Sino–US relations in recent years heralds a “new Cold War.” The new Cold War differs from its namesake in many respects, and in this paper we focus on its novel territorial logic. Containing the USSR was the overriding objective of American foreign policy …
Deindustrialization in cities of the Global South
Recent research by economists has shown that deindustrialization is more severe in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America than it ever was in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Nevertheless, most research on deindustrialization is focused on the former centres of Fordist manufacturing in the industrial heartlands of the North Atlantic. In short, there is a mismatch between where deindustrialization is researched and …
Demystifying Chinese overseas investment in infrastructure: Port development, the Belt and Road Initiative and regional development
Getting the territory right: Infrastructure-led development and the re-emergence of spatial planning strategies
This paper argues that infrastructure-led development constitutes an emergent international development regime whose imperative is to ‘get the territory right’. Spatial planning strategies from the post-war era are increasingly employed in contemporary attempts to integrate territory with global networks of production and trade. Large-scale infrastructure projects link resource frontiers and subnational urban systems – oftentimes across national …
Towards a paradigm of Southern urbanism
In this paper I argue that cities in the global South constitute a distinctive ‘type’ of human settlement. I begin by critiquing Brenner and Schmid’s concept of planetary urbanization which erases difference among cities and locates the essence of urbanity in the global North. I echo their criticism of postcolonial urbanism, however, which has struggled to articulate precisely how Southern cities differ from their Northern counterparts. I then pr…
Peri-urban promises of connectivity: Linking project-led polycentrism to the infrastructure scramble
This paper offers an interpretive framework linking polycentric urban expansion in emerging/frontier economies to the global extension of infrastructure networks. Drawing from scholarship on state restructuring, we theorize an infrastructure scramble whereby numerous state actors and agencies make massive investments in infrastructure connectivity to secure effective integration to transnational value chains as economic and geopolitical competiti…
Goodbye Washington Confusion, hello Wall Street Consensus: Contemporary State Capitalism and the Spatialisation of Industrial Strategy
Recent scholarship has narrated the financialization of development, which Gabor (2021) refers to as the Wall Street Consensus (WSC), whose purpose is to facilitate the investment of global capital in Southern infrastructure by institutionalising the distribution of risk, reward and responsibility between investors and states. Gabor's conceptualization of the 'de-risking state' subordinated to global finance capital stands in stark contrast with …
The new cold war and the rise of the 21st‐century infrastructure state
The unipolar international order led by the USA has given way to a multipolar order with the emergence of China as a great power competitor. According to many commentators, the deterioration of Sino–US relations in recent years heralds a “new Cold War.” The new Cold War differs from its namesake in many respects, and in this paper we focus on its novel territorial logic. Containing the USSR was the overriding objective of American foreign policy …
Contesting Urban Metabolism: Struggles Over Waste‐to‐Energy in Delhi, India
Recent scholarship on the materiality of cities has been criticized by critical urban scholars for being overly descriptive and failing to account for political economy. We argue that through the conceptualization of urban metabolisms advanced by ecological economists and industrial ecologists, materialist and critical perspectives can be mutually enriching. We focus on conflict that has erupted in Delhi, India. Authorities have embraced waste‐to…
Producing and contesting the formal/informal divide: Regulating street hawking in Delhi, India
There is a consensus that urban development schemes in India bear little resemblance to the well-thought-out plans of their genesis, and that the boundary between formal/informal is often blurry. I seek to contribute to this literature by showing how, in spite of efforts to implement a regulatory scheme, street hawking in Delhi remains highly informal and in a state of negotiated (im)permanence. I compare two recent conflicts over street hawkers'…
The Second Cold War: US-China Competition for Centrality in Infrastructure, Digital, Production, and Finance Networks
Relations between the US and China have deteriorated to their lowest point since their rapprochement in the 1970s. To make sense of contemporary geopolitics, our objective in this article is two-fold. First, we historically situate contemporary US-China rivalry to conceptualise the Second Cold War (SCW). We argue that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, both the US and China launched ‘restorative’ political projects that harked back to imag…
Covid-19 and the case for global development
Garbage is Gold: Waste-based Commodity Frontiers, Modes of Valorization and Ecological Distribution Conflicts
Waste is increasingly viewed as a resource rather than an externality. However, new waste management regimes must be introduced in order for value to be created, enhanced and captured. We refer to these regimes as modes of valorization, and they establish the conditions that allow waste to become a commodity frontier. The production of waste-based commodity frontiers is often accompanied by dispossession, and this explains why conflicts surroundi…
Demystifying Chinese overseas investment in infrastructure: Port development, the Belt and Road Initiative and regional development
Urbanizing citizenship: Contested spaces in Indian cities
This collection of essays is situated at the intersection of the politics of space and citizenship at the urban scale, and is a highly readable contribution to ongoing debates on urban politics and
The US-China rivalry and the emergence of state platform capitalism
The rise of digital platforms as a new form of business organisation concentrates power in the United States and China. Platform capitalism further intersects with and reinforces pre-existing trends towards state capitalism, where states more actively direct economies in response to economic turbulence and heightened geopolitical tension. The concentration of global business power within two states, combined with the increasing capacity for these…
A New Delhi every day: Multiplicities of governance regimes in a transforming metropolis
In this article I demonstrate the coexistence of multiple urban governance regimes in Delhi, India. While formal urban governance is geared toward transforming Delhi into a "world-class" city, I present original research that shows how the everyday governance of urban space in three very different areas of Delhi is determined by relations among non-state actors. These regimes foster access to space for street hawkers on an everyday basis while th…
Detroit after bankruptcy: A case of degrowth machine politics
It is widely accepted that neoliberalism is intensified in times of crisis, and Jamie Peck has argued that ‘austerity urbanism’ has been implemented at the urban scale since the 2008 financial crisis. This article questions whether this narrative of neoliberal expansion is applicable in cities where crisis is so severe that economic growth seems highly unlikely. I focus on Detroit, whose recent declaration of bankruptcy signals the recognition am…
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmen…
Infrastructure-led development and the peri-urban question: Furthering crossover comparisons
Contemporary development policy portrays enhanced connectivity as the key to fostering economic growth in lagging regions. This global policy consensus and consequent infrastructure scramble have resulted in a proliferation of new urban spaces. These are dispersed, fragmentary and often unrecognised as urban by projects and plans centred on large-scale connective infrastructures to integrate remote regions into circuits of capital. Whilst our und…
The Making of “World-Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class
Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter-class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero-sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of it…
Understanding Urban Processes in Flint, Michigan: Approaching 'Subaltern Urbanism' Inductively
Ananya Roy introduces the concept 'subaltern urbanism' in her 2011 article 'Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism'. She challenges researchers to move beyond existing epistemological and methodological limits, and offers four concepts which, taken together, serve as a useful starting point for understanding and representing subaltern urban space. In this article I argue that instead of a deductive approach that begins with an a priori ide…
Contesting the Indian city: Global visions and the politics of the local
Scholarship on urban India has proliferated since the mid-2000s, and there is a consensus that numerous contentious processes are transforming Indian cities. While a number of recent volumes have f
Africa’s new urban spaces: Deindustrialisation, infrastructure-led development and real estate frontiers
Many African governments have embraced centralised spatial planning and the construction of large-scale connective infrastructure as a means to synergise industrialisation and functional urban development. This article examines the tensions between these economic and urban development objectives in Ghana and Kenya. Infrastructure-led development in both cases has fuelled extended and unplanned urbanisation and the production of new frontiers for …
Governing the Twenty-First Century Metropolis and Transforming Territory
This article puts forward the argument that urban governance in metropolises in the global South has entered a territorial moment. There is a subtle shift of emphasis underway in many Southern metropolises as municipal governments increasingly focus on transforming urban space rather than ‘improving’ populations. This shift away from Foucauldian disciplinary tactics—i.e. fixing people in place, classifying them into populations and acting upon th…
Globalizing development in Bolivia? Alternative networks and value-capture challenges in the wood products industry
This article assesses the influence of global production networks (GPN) on regional development processes through an analysis of Bolivia's growing wood products industry. We develop a conceptualization of GPN integration that highlights the agencies of lower-tier suppliers and then identify four distinct kinds of production networks available to these manufacturing firms. The characteristics of two of these networks-those serving high-volume buye…
Contemporary Megaprojects
There is renewed interest in megaprojects worldwide. In contrast to high-modernist megaprojects that were discrete projects undertaken by centralized authorities, contemporary megaprojects are often decentralized and pursued by a range of stakeholders from governments as well as the private sector. They leverage cutting-edge technology to 'see' complex systems as legible and singular phenomena. As a result, they are more ambitious, more pervasive…
Constructing a universal logic of urban control: International standards for city data, management, and interoperability
Cities are increasingly understood as systems that can be managed and transformed through scientific methods of data analysis and automated response. According to Batty (2013), cities are ‘sets of actions, interactions, and transactions’ that can be known and mapped with great precision, and it follows that their constituent components can be rearranged to interact and transact in new ways. The most visible manifestation of the ‘science of cities…
Kalahari Hunter‐Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and Their Neighbors. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore , eds
Globalizing development in Bolivia? Alternative networks and value-capture challenges in the wood products industry
This article assesses the influence of global production networks (GPN) on regional development processes through an analysis of Bolivia's growing wood products industry. We develop a conceptualization of GPN integration that highlights the agencies of lower-tier suppliers and then identify four distinct kinds of production networks available to these manufacturing firms. The characteristics of two of these networks-those serving high-volume buye…
Producing and contesting the formal/informal divide: Regulating street hawking in Delhi, India
There is a consensus that urban development schemes in India bear little resemblance to the well-thought-out plans of their genesis, and that the boundary between formal/informal is often blurry. I seek to contribute to this literature by showing how, in spite of efforts to implement a regulatory scheme, street hawking in Delhi remains highly informal and in a state of negotiated (im)permanence. I compare two recent conflicts over street hawkers'…
Urbanizing citizenship: Contested spaces in Indian cities
This collection of essays is situated at the intersection of the politics of space and citizenship at the urban scale, and is a highly readable contribution to ongoing debates on urban politics and
Governing the Twenty-First Century Metropolis and Transforming Territory
This article puts forward the argument that urban governance in metropolises in the global South has entered a territorial moment. There is a subtle shift of emphasis underway in many Southern metropolises as municipal governments increasingly focus on transforming urban space rather than ‘improving’ populations. This shift away from Foucauldian disciplinary tactics—i.e. fixing people in place, classifying them into populations and acting upon th…
The Occupy Movement and the Politics of Vulnerability
The Occupy movement has generated a significant amount of scholarly literature, most of which has focused on the movement's tactics or goals, or sought to explain its emergence. Nevertheless, we lack an explanation for the movement's broad appeal and mass support. In this article we present original research on Occupy in New York City, Detroit, and Berlin, which demonstrates that the movement's heterogeneous participants coalesced around the conc…
Contesting the Indian city: Global visions and the politics of the local
Scholarship on urban India has proliferated since the mid-2000s, and there is a consensus that numerous contentious processes are transforming Indian cities. While a number of recent volumes have f
A New Delhi every day: Multiplicities of governance regimes in a transforming metropolis
In this article I demonstrate the coexistence of multiple urban governance regimes in Delhi, India. While formal urban governance is geared toward transforming Delhi into a "world-class" city, I present original research that shows how the everyday governance of urban space in three very different areas of Delhi is determined by relations among non-state actors. These regimes foster access to space for street hawkers on an everyday basis while th…
The Making of “World-Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class
Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter-class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero-sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of it…
Understanding Urban Processes in Flint, Michigan: Approaching 'Subaltern Urbanism' Inductively
Ananya Roy introduces the concept 'subaltern urbanism' in her 2011 article 'Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism'. She challenges researchers to move beyond existing epistemological and methodological limits, and offers four concepts which, taken together, serve as a useful starting point for understanding and representing subaltern urban space. In this article I argue that instead of a deductive approach that begins with an a priori ide…
Why Delhi cannot plan its ‘new towns’: The case of solid waste management in Noida
Contesting Urban Metabolism: Struggles Over Waste‐to‐Energy in Delhi, India
Recent scholarship on the materiality of cities has been criticized by critical urban scholars for being overly descriptive and failing to account for political economy. We argue that through the conceptualization of urban metabolisms advanced by ecological economists and industrial ecologists, materialist and critical perspectives can be mutually enriching. We focus on conflict that has erupted in Delhi, India. Authorities have embraced waste‐to…
Detroit after bankruptcy: A case of degrowth machine politics
It is widely accepted that neoliberalism is intensified in times of crisis, and Jamie Peck has argued that ‘austerity urbanism’ has been implemented at the urban scale since the 2008 financial crisis. This article questions whether this narrative of neoliberal expansion is applicable in cities where crisis is so severe that economic growth seems highly unlikely. I focus on Detroit, whose recent declaration of bankruptcy signals the recognition am…
Globalisation, uneven development and the North–South ‘big switch’
An apparent ‘big switch’ in attitudes towards and discourse over economic globalisation has occurred since the turn of the Millennium. Economic globalisation was formerly widely identified as being orchestrated in the interests of the global North. Sceptics, mostly left-leaning, expressed particular concern for its impacts in the global South. However, a recent backlash against globalisation has emerged within the global North from the political …
Women hawkers in Tehran’s metro: Everyday politics and the production of public space
Tehran’s metro symbolises the city’s claims to world-class status and its expansion enjoys widespread support across the political spectrum. This article focuses on the ways in which the carriages reserved for women are appropriated by female hawkers despite the efforts of municipal officials determined to eliminate hawking within the metro. On an everyday basis, the ubiquity of hawkers contributes to the production of a convivial atmosphere with…
Reflections on the New Urban Agenda
Towards a paradigm of Southern urbanism
In this paper I argue that cities in the global South constitute a distinctive ‘type’ of human settlement. I begin by critiquing Brenner and Schmid’s concept of planetary urbanization which erases difference among cities and locates the essence of urbanity in the global North. I echo their criticism of postcolonial urbanism, however, which has struggled to articulate precisely how Southern cities differ from their Northern counterparts. I then pr…
Beyond a state-centric approach to urban informality: Interactions between Delhi's middle class and the informal service sector
This article presents original research on relations between middle-class residents and informal-sector workers in Delhi, India. It shows how middle-class associations used their consumption preferences as well as relationships with local authorities to legitimize the work of street hawkers and waste workers. These findings suggest that the toleration of informality can be traced to governance regimes comprised of both state and non-state powerbr…
National urban policy making and its potential for sustainable urbanism
Constructing a universal logic of urban control: International standards for city data, management, and interoperability
Cities are increasingly understood as systems that can be managed and transformed through scientific methods of data analysis and automated response. According to Batty (2013), cities are ‘sets of actions, interactions, and transactions’ that can be known and mapped with great precision, and it follows that their constituent components can be rearranged to interact and transact in new ways. The most visible manifestation of the ‘science of cities…
Producing Localized Commodity Frontiers at the End of Cheap Nature: An Analysis of Eco-scalar Carbon Fixes and their Consequences
There is no single 'great' commodity frontier whose exploitation under current socio-technical conditions could fuel capital accumulation at the global scale. According to Jason Moore, this represents the 'end of Cheap Nature' and signals a terminal crisis for capitalism as we know it. In this article we complicate this assertion by showing how, in the context of global environmental governance frameworks of carbon control, a diverse range of act…
Transformative top-down planning in a small African city: How residents in Bagamoyo, Tanzania connect with a city in motion
The New Urban Agenda commits UN member states to the implementation of national urban plans, and this recentralization of urban governance reverses nearly three decades of political decentralization and devolution. The recentralization of urban governance is evident in Tanzania, where the most recent industrial development strategy articulates a spatial plan aimed at integrating the country with regional and global markets. The lynchpin of this s…
Getting the territory right: Infrastructure-led development and the re-emergence of spatial planning strategies
This paper argues that infrastructure-led development constitutes an emergent international development regime whose imperative is to ‘get the territory right’. Spatial planning strategies from the post-war era are increasingly employed in contemporary attempts to integrate territory with global networks of production and trade. Large-scale infrastructure projects link resource frontiers and subnational urban systems – oftentimes across national …
Florida in the Global South: How Eurocentrism Obscures Global Urban Challenges—and What We Can Do about It
According to Richard Florida, the world is in the grip of a ‘New Urban Crisis’. In his most recent book Florida recounts a visit to Medellín that provoked an epiphany in which he realized that the New Urban Crisis is global in scope. Unfortunately, Florida's discovery of the global South is informed by a deeply Eurocentric understanding of urbanization. This leads him to conclude that Southern cities should ‘unleash’ creativity, and he proposes t…
Peri-urban promises of connectivity: Linking project-led polycentrism to the infrastructure scramble
This paper offers an interpretive framework linking polycentric urban expansion in emerging/frontier economies to the global extension of infrastructure networks. Drawing from scholarship on state restructuring, we theorize an infrastructure scramble whereby numerous state actors and agencies make massive investments in infrastructure connectivity to secure effective integration to transnational value chains as economic and geopolitical competiti…
Political science (39 works) · Economics (32 works) · Politics (25 works) · Law (23 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Geography (21 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (21 works) · Economic growth (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Political economy (15 works)