Maria Kaika
Biographic Data
| ID | 376597 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maria Kaika |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maria |
| FAMILY NAME | Kaika |
| SIGNATURE | KAIKA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8678-3082 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1218 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Ephemeral Earthmoving Labour Versus the Great Acceleration: (Re)producing the Flux Urban Political Ecologies of Bolivian Amazonia
The article investigates how Indigenous labour interacts with powerful sediment movements and flooding cycles in 23 riverine communities in Bolivian Amazonia. These interactions, we argue, transcend the binary between human labour and biophysical processes in shaping flux urban political ecologies, landscapes and human settlements that challenge colonial land expropriation practices. Navigating the intersecting histories of natural and anthropoge…
Jobs vs the environment: Struggles over the green steel plan at IJmuiden, The Netherlands
This article discusses how worker-led decarbonisation strategies can move beyond the “jobs vs environment” tension in the context of European just green transition plans. Focusing on the Green Steel Plan, a decarbonisation plan developed by the trade union at the IJmuiden steel factory in the Netherlands in response to the threat of job losses, we show how workers in alliance with environmental communities articulated a vision for industrial tran…
Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization
Class Meets Land reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over land as a catalyst for assembling the global financial constellation. Na…
Energy as social relation: Refugees' energy commons for infrastructuring beyond the grid
This paper reconceptualizes energy as a social relation of (re)production, focusing on the overlooked intersection of refugees, housing precarity, and energy practices. Drawing upon ethnographies with refugees living in squatted houses in Thessaloniki, Greece, we introduce the concept of refugees' energy commons , to explain how refugees' communities self-organize to meet their energy needs -repairing, maintaining, and improvising energy infrastr…
Socialización and labor unions in waterway port development in the Bolivian Amazon
The debt diaries: Turning participatory ethnography into action research
This article examines how piloting a diary method became pivotal in transforming a participatory ethnography on household debt in Greece and Spain into full-fledged Action Research —driven and shaped by the diary-writing participants themselves. We analyse the evolving dynamics between researchers and diary authors, as an initial phase of solitary diary writing prompted the collaborative development of workshops with drama and theatre methods whi…
Infrastructured bodies: Between violence and fugitivity
This article traces the trajectory of critical geographical scholarship on the body’s intertwinement with infrastructure systems. In doing so, it argues that although the body is not ontologically infrastructure, it can nevertheless enable infrastructure’s functioning – whether by being made into infrastructure of surplus value production or by suturing widening gaps in sub-optimal infrastructure systems. Analysing these dynamics, the article the…
The Second Displacement of Refugees: Urban Regeneration Against Commoning Practices in Belgrade's Waterfront
We develop the concept of “second displacement” to symbolise the renewed forms of uprooting that refugees undergo in arrival cities in the name of urban regeneration. Focusing on the eviction of 2,000 refugees from a self‐organised settlement in Belgrade's old train station in order to redevelop the site as a luxurious “Waterfront” project, we show how the refugees’ commoning practices and claims for living space in city centres often come into d…
A performing arts centre for whom? Rethinking the architect as negotiator of urban imaginaries
In this study, we interpret architecture not as a single imaginary stemming from architects and architectural patrons, but as the result of negotiating urban politics and urban imaginaries between different stakeholders, including policymakers, citizens, and developers. We focus in particular on the role of architects within this process as mediators between different stakeholders, who nevertheless have their own specific agenda to pursue. We dra…
Methodological rift: Applying infrastructure activism's 'skin in the game' embodied art research methods to urban green infrastructure planning
In this article, we explore the extent to which applying embodied, 'skin in the game' methods used in infrastructure activism (a contemporary art practice) can help expand the toolkit of methods applied in action research on infrastructures, interactions between humans and more-than-humans and urban socio-environmental processes in planning. In particular, we focus on two cases of infrastructure activism: the Amsterdam Zuidoost Food Forest (VBAZO…
Austerity: An environmentally dangerous idea
The article examines austerity as a policy and practice that is dangerous not only for human societies and economies, but also for more-than-human ecologies and lives. Often presented as an economic tool that can 'fix' an economic crisis, austerity nevertheless carries serious environmental consequences which are not systematically documented or theorized. Here, we sketch a political ecology agenda for understanding austerity as environmental pol…
From austericide to recommoning: Counter-Imaginaries for Democratizing Water Governance
We address a key question around the extent to which a commons-oriented imaginary could offer alternatives to further democratize water governance by shifting public water governance institutions toward collective governance mechanisms. Two cities that have successfully remunicipalized their water governance and engaged with commons-inspired governance arrangements are compared: Terrassa in Spain and Naples in Italy. The cases are both considered…
Financializing Healthcare and Infrastructures of Social Reproduction: How to Bankrupt a Hospital and be Unprepared for a Pandemic
literature despite the fact that ISRs can potentially enact or destroy forms of biological citizenship (Netz et al., ), strengthening or weakening community and social ties and deeply affecting economic and productive practices
Recommoning water: Crossing thresholds under citizen-driven remunicipalisation
Since 2008, the call to ‘remunicipalise’ water resources has become a key strategy for water movements across Europe. Remunicipalisation aimed at opposing the new wave of privatisation programmes and water commodification incentivised under austerity frameworks. However, the water movements’ lack of direct engagement with questions of re/commoning resulted in under-explored links, in practitioner and scholarly arenas, between demands for water re…
Urbanizing degrowth: Five steps towards a Radical Spatial Degrowth Agenda for planning in the face of climate emergency
We call for coupling degrowth with urban studies and planning agendas as an academically salient and politically urgent endeavour. Our aim is threefold: to explore ways for ‘operationalising’ degrowth concepts into urban and regional everyday spatial practices; to sketch pathways for taking degrowth conceptually and methodologically beyond localised experiments and inform larger scale planning practices and international agendas; and to criticall…
Seeing like an economist: Using the case of Dutch healthcare reform to bring professions and their epistemologies back in the field of new economic sociology
The article scrutinizes the Dutch healthcare market system to provide empirical grounding to the debates around the extent to which rationally constructed markets can develop as originally planned. Focusing on one specific pricing device, we document how the perceived economic 'rationalities' embedded in its design are challenged by the unforeseen and unanticipated 'irrationalities' of daily practices. We trace how healthcare professionals develo…
The refugees’ right to the centre of the city: City branding versus city commoning in Athens
Over the years, cities have figured as exemplary places for neoliberal urban policies which tend to appropriate the right to the city through city-branding policies. However, as this article demonstrates, there are important claims of the right to the city raised by newly arrived refugees in the city of Athens. Although most refugees reside in overcrowded state-run camps on the outskirts of the city, there are many cases in which refugees enact t…
Refugees' caring and commoning practices against marginalisation under Covid-19 in Greece
This article documents and juxtaposes two side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on refugee health, housing, and living conditions in Greece. First is the intensification of state-led practices of what is increasingly known as "campisation," hyper-isolation, and ultimately the stigmatisation of refugee populations. Second is the intensification of refugee-led "commoning" practices of self- and community care and the creation of "caringscapes" insi…
The Political Ecology of Austerity: Crisis, Social Movements, and the Environment
The Political Ecology of Austerity explores the environmental dimension of austerity that has thus far escaped academic, policy, and media attention. Offering a better comprehension of the full socio-environmental impact of austerity measures, the book highlights the importance of considering environmental issues when designing responses to economic crisis in the future. Mobilising detailed case studies from across the world, the volume documents…
Upscaling without innovation: Taking the edge off grassroot initiatives with scaling-up in Amsterdam’s Anthropocene forest
The article explores the extent to which the pressure to upscale grassroot planning initiatives can lead to the loss of their innovative potential. We advocate for the need to acknowledge the differentiated demands between community-involving pilot initiatives and grassroots initiatives when it comes to upscaling and argue that upscaling grassroots initiatives without loss of innovation takes more than just considering large-scale implementation …
Moving urban political ecology beyond the ‘urbanization of nature’
Urban political ecology (UPE) focuses on unsettling traditional understandings of 'cities' as ontological entities separate from 'nature' and on how the production of settlements is metabolically linked with flows of capital and more-than-human ecological processes. The contribution of this paper is to recalibrate UPE to new urban forms and processes of extended urbanization. This exploration goes against the reduction of what goes on outside of …
Ripping the Heart out of Ancoats: Collective Action to Defend Infrastructures of Social Reproduction against Gentrification
The article exposes attacks on infrastructures of social reproduction as a prime gentrification strategy, but also as an effective focal point for community resistance. We exemplify this through the conflict over Ancoats Dispensary, a Victorian hospital at the heart of one of the UK 's most deprived communities in East Manchester, which faced demolition following the 2000 New Islington Regeneration Plan. Using ethnographic and archival data we sh…
Reclaiming a scholarship of presence
This chapter questions the rapid ascent of “the Anthropocene” within critical humanities and social science, arguing that the imaginary of the Anthropocene itself may in fact be the most political thing about it. Even critical engagement adds symbolic power and scholarly weight to an emergent new master narrative that “naturalizes” capitalism. The chapter traces how a renewed intellectual responsibility could be configured through co-researching …
Between the frog and the eagle: Claiming a ‘Scholarship of Presence’ for the Anthropocene
Even before officially sanctioned as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene conquers the imaginary and is reified as awareness-raising, inspiring, universalist, capitalist-technocratic, dangerous. As critical scholarship discerns in this name-nomination an opportunity to rethink the human/more-than-human/environmental nexus, debating the Anthropocene becomes in itself more policy/politically relevant than its actual confirmation as a new geolog…
Don’t call me resilient again!’: The New Urban Agenda as immunology … or … what happens when communities refuse to be vaccinated with ‘smart cities’ and indicators
The Habitat III Conference’s New Urban Agenda hails a “paradigm shift” for pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the new call for “safe, resilient, sustainable and inclusive cities” remains path dependent on old methodological tools (e.g. indicators), techno-managerial solutions (e.g. smart cities), and institutional frameworks of an ecological modernization paradigm that did not work. Pursuing a new urban paradigm within th…
Fetishizing the modern city: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks
Technological networks (water, gas, electricity, information etc.) are constitutive parts of the urban. They are the mediators through which the perpetual process of transformation of nature into city takes place. In this article, we take water and water networks as an emblematic example to excavate the shifting meanings of urban technological networks during modernity. Indeed, as water becomes commodified and fetishized, nature itself becomes re…
Mortgaged lives’: The biopolitics of debt and housing financialisation
The paper expands the conceptual framework within which we examine mortgage debt by reconceptualising mortgages as a biotechnology: a technology of power over life that forges an intimate relationship between global financial markets, everyday life and human labour. Taking seriously the materiality of mortgage contracts as a means of forging new embodied practices of financialisation, we urge for the need to move beyond a policy- and macroeconomi…
Don’t call me resilient again!’: The New Urban Agenda as immunology … or … what happens when communities refuse to be vaccinated with ‘smart cities’ and indicators
The Habitat III Conference’s New Urban Agenda hails a “paradigm shift” for pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the new call for “safe, resilient, sustainable and inclusive cities” remains path dependent on old methodological tools (e.g. indicators), techno-managerial solutions (e.g. smart cities), and institutional frameworks of an ecological modernization paradigm that did not work. Pursuing a new urban paradigm within th…
Dams as Symbols of Modernization: The Urbanization of Nature Between Geographical Imagination and Materiality
The article offers an analysis of the iconography and symbolism of dam constructions at three levels: first, as embodiments of the dialectics between geographical imaginations and material practices in the process of modernization; second, as symbols of modernity's quest to conquer and urbanize nature; and third, as the catalysts for reconfiguring the relationship between nature and the city. The article grounds its analysis on the study of the M…
Interrogating the geographies of the familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home
This article studies the western bourgeois home, and argues that its social construction as a familiar, autonomous, safe, private haven is predicated not only upon the exclusion of undesired social elements (anomie, homelessness, social conflict, etc.) but also upon the exclusion of undesired natural elements (cold, dirt, pollution, sewage, etc.). Using the domestication of water in the western world as a vehicle, the article analyses the histori…
Architecture and crisis: Re-inventing the icon, re-imag(in)ing London and re-branding the City
London’s skyline is changing significantly with a new generation of iconic buildings, of which the Swiss-Re Tower is the most well known. Despite the fact that many of these buildings are located in the City (London’s financial heart), little attention has been paid to the relationship between the transformation of London’s skyline and the recent institutional reconfiguration of the Corporation of London, the authority that runs the City. Focusin…
Undoing environmental justice: Re-imagining equality in the Rosia Montana anti-mining movement
Moving urban political ecology beyond the ‘urbanization of nature’
Urban political ecology (UPE) focuses on unsettling traditional understandings of 'cities' as ontological entities separate from 'nature' and on how the production of settlements is metabolically linked with flows of capital and more-than-human ecological processes. The contribution of this paper is to recalibrate UPE to new urban forms and processes of extended urbanization. This exploration goes against the reduction of what goes on outside of …
Land Financialization as a ‘lived’ process: The transformation of Milan’s Bicocca by Pirelli
Contributing to an emerging debate that brings the mobilization of land rent as a financial asset to the heart of urban analysis, this article offers a narrative of land financialization as a ‘lived’ process. Focusing empirically on Bicocca (a post-industrial area north-east of Milan that traditionally hosted the activities of Pirelli, one of Italy’s most successful companies), the paper shifts the focus of enquiry on land financialization from g…
Autistic Architecture: The Fall of the Icon and the Rise of the Serial Object of Architecture
In this contribution I sketch a framework for interpreting the parallel process of banalisation of old and proliferation of new 'iconic' corporate architecture as the Janus-faced manifestation of a qualitative shift in the relationship between capital and architecture. Highlighting the change from place-bound, place-loyal urban elites to footloose transnational elites, I argue that after the 1970s the need to develop a new set of building specifi…
Constructing Scarcity and Sensationalising Water Politics: 170 Days That Shook Athens
This paper examines the drought that hit Athens between 1989 and 1991 and analyses the role of this natural phenomenon as the “ferment” for ongoing political‐economic transformations in the direction of liberalisation and privatisation of water management and allocation in Greece. The paper analyses how the drought was marshalled as an effective discursive vehicle to facilitate and expedite the state‐led neoliberal political‐economic agenda. It s…
The spatialization of democratic politics: Insights from Indignant Squares
This article departs from accounts that either deify Indignant Squares as a model for 21st century political praxis or demonize them as apolitical/post-political crowd gatherings. By performing a closer ethnographic reading of the Indignants’ protests at Athens’ Syntagma Square, we depict the Indignant Squares as a consensual and deeply spatialized staging of dissent, which nevertheless harbours in its underbelly internally conflicting and often …
Form follows power: A genealogy of urban shrines
In this paper, Maria Kaika and Korinna Thielen chart the historical development of ‘the secular shrine’—an assertion of state and corporate power that came to dominate the urban landscape from the second half of the nineteenth century. Many of the aesthetic features of this secular monumentalism can be identified in earlier sacred and classical architecture and served to legitimate its adaptation for secular purposes. With the exception of indust…
The economic crisis seen from the everyday: Europe's nouveau poor and the global affective implications of a ‘local’ debt crisis
The proliferating numbers of a new population of urban poor in the Western world—who I call here nouveau poor—is a phenomenon equally (if not more) significant as the emergence of the Indignados and Occupy movements, and calls for urgent attention from the part of critical urban studies. This phenomenon forces us to re-evaluate the analytical categories within which we study urban poverty (gender, age, ethnicity, marginality, etc.) and prompts us…
The Political Ecology of Austerity: An Analysis of Socio-environmental Conflict under Crisis in Greece
The paper focuses on two largely understudied and interrelated aspects of the post-2008 economic crisis: how the politics of austerity influences the dynamics of environmental conflict and how the environment is mobilized in subaltern struggles against the normalization of austerity as the hegemonic response to crisis. We ground our analysis on two grassroots conflicts in Greece: the “no-middlemen” solidarity food distribution networks (across Gr…
Cities, Natures and the Political Imaginary
Despite the seeming accumulation of natural and manmade disasters over the last decade, and increasing urban intensification across the world, there seems to be little or no actual progress in solving urban ecological problems. In exploring a way forward, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw highlight three potential approaches to urban socio‐ecological research and how these might provide a conduit for re‐politicising urban nature
Producing the ideal fascist landscape: Nature, materiality and the cinematic representation of land reclamation in the Pontine Marshes
Using previously unpublished material from the L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE) archive and the Central State Archive in Rome, this article examines how film-making became part and parcel of the process of ‘taming’ nature in the Pontine Marshes under Mussolini's regime. Fascist authorities perceived the undisciplined and unproductive nature of the ‘death-inducing’ swamps as something that had to be extinguished from the face of Italy, to…
Infrastructured bodies: Between violence and fugitivity
This article traces the trajectory of critical geographical scholarship on the body’s intertwinement with infrastructure systems. In doing so, it argues that although the body is not ontologically infrastructure, it can nevertheless enable infrastructure’s functioning – whether by being made into infrastructure of surplus value production or by suturing widening gaps in sub-optimal infrastructure systems. Analysing these dynamics, the article the…
Class Meets Land: The Social Mobilization of Land as Catalyst for Urban Change
The paper explores the active yet neglected role that local class struggle over land plays in negotiating new forms of urbanity. Unfashionably shifting research focus from global elites and the “creative class” to local industrial elites and industrial workers, we show that socially embodied local struggles over land are as relevant to globalized urbanizations as they had been to industrial capitalism, and need to be brought back squarely into ge…
The making of 'glocal' urban modernities
Swyngedouw and Kaïka explore some of the classic tensions and preoccupations of urban planners and theorists: emancipation/disengagement, global/local, social justice/neoliberalism. In particular, the authors refer us to the effects of the 'drastic re-assertion of the forces of modernity in the contemporary city. They raise the question' can we still build an enabling and empowering urbanisation process?'. To answer the question they tell various…
Ripping the Heart out of Ancoats: Collective Action to Defend Infrastructures of Social Reproduction against Gentrification
The article exposes attacks on infrastructures of social reproduction as a prime gentrification strategy, but also as an effective focal point for community resistance. We exemplify this through the conflict over Ancoats Dispensary, a Victorian hospital at the heart of one of the UK 's most deprived communities in East Manchester, which faced demolition following the 2000 New Islington Regeneration Plan. Using ethnographic and archival data we sh…
Urbanizing degrowth: Five steps towards a Radical Spatial Degrowth Agenda for planning in the face of climate emergency
We call for coupling degrowth with urban studies and planning agendas as an academically salient and politically urgent endeavour. Our aim is threefold: to explore ways for ‘operationalising’ degrowth concepts into urban and regional everyday spatial practices; to sketch pathways for taking degrowth conceptually and methodologically beyond localised experiments and inform larger scale planning practices and international agendas; and to criticall…
The refugees’ right to the centre of the city: City branding versus city commoning in Athens
Over the years, cities have figured as exemplary places for neoliberal urban policies which tend to appropriate the right to the city through city-branding policies. However, as this article demonstrates, there are important claims of the right to the city raised by newly arrived refugees in the city of Athens. Although most refugees reside in overcrowded state-run camps on the outskirts of the city, there are many cases in which refugees enact t…
Between the frog and the eagle: Claiming a ‘Scholarship of Presence’ for the Anthropocene
Even before officially sanctioned as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene conquers the imaginary and is reified as awareness-raising, inspiring, universalist, capitalist-technocratic, dangerous. As critical scholarship discerns in this name-nomination an opportunity to rethink the human/more-than-human/environmental nexus, debating the Anthropocene becomes in itself more policy/politically relevant than its actual confirmation as a new geolog…
Refugees' caring and commoning practices against marginalisation under Covid-19 in Greece
This article documents and juxtaposes two side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on refugee health, housing, and living conditions in Greece. First is the intensification of state-led practices of what is increasingly known as "campisation," hyper-isolation, and ultimately the stigmatisation of refugee populations. Second is the intensification of refugee-led "commoning" practices of self- and community care and the creation of "caringscapes" insi…
Fetishizing the modern city: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks
Technological networks (water, gas, electricity, information etc.) are constitutive parts of the urban. They are the mediators through which the perpetual process of transformation of nature into city takes place. In this article, we take water and water networks as an emblematic example to excavate the shifting meanings of urban technological networks during modernity. Indeed, as water becomes commodified and fetishized, nature itself becomes re…
The Water Framework Directive: A New Directive for a Changing Social, Political and Economic European Framework
This article examines the intricate process of developing the European Union's Water Framework Directive. It sees the Directive as a response to recent economic, political and social changes related to water management, including the shift from government to governance, the liberalization of water markets and the emergence of a new set of institutions, actors, etc. and their respective relations (i.e. social capital). The article focuses on the k…
The making of 'glocal' urban modernities
Swyngedouw and Kaïka explore some of the classic tensions and preoccupations of urban planners and theorists: emancipation/disengagement, global/local, social justice/neoliberalism. In particular, the authors refer us to the effects of the 'drastic re-assertion of the forces of modernity in the contemporary city. They raise the question' can we still build an enabling and empowering urbanisation process?'. To answer the question they tell various…
Constructing Scarcity and Sensationalising Water Politics: 170 Days That Shook Athens
This paper examines the drought that hit Athens between 1989 and 1991 and analyses the role of this natural phenomenon as the “ferment” for ongoing political‐economic transformations in the direction of liberalisation and privatisation of water management and allocation in Greece. The paper analyses how the drought was marshalled as an effective discursive vehicle to facilitate and expedite the state‐led neoliberal political‐economic agenda. It s…
City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City
Typically, cities and nature are perceived as geographic opposites, cities being manufactured social creations, and nature being outside of human construction. Through a historical geography of water in the modern city, Kaika shows that this is not the case. Rather, nature and the modern city are fully intertwined, with cities integrating nature at
Interrogating the geographies of the familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home
This article studies the western bourgeois home, and argues that its social construction as a familiar, autonomous, safe, private haven is predicated not only upon the exclusion of undesired social elements (anomie, homelessness, social conflict, etc.) but also upon the exclusion of undesired natural elements (cold, dirt, pollution, sewage, etc.). Using the domestication of water in the western world as a vehicle, the article analyses the histori…
In the Nature of Cities
Including urban case studies and contributions from prominent urban scholars, this volume will give students, scholars and researchers of geographical, environmental and urban studies a better understanding of how interrelated, everyday economic, political and cultural processes form and transform urban environments.
Form follows power: A genealogy of urban shrines
In this paper, Maria Kaika and Korinna Thielen chart the historical development of ‘the secular shrine’—an assertion of state and corporate power that came to dominate the urban landscape from the second half of the nineteenth century. Many of the aesthetic features of this secular monumentalism can be identified in earlier sacred and classical architecture and served to legitimate its adaptation for secular purposes. With the exception of indust…
Dams as Symbols of Modernization: The Urbanization of Nature Between Geographical Imagination and Materiality
The article offers an analysis of the iconography and symbolism of dam constructions at three levels: first, as embodiments of the dialectics between geographical imaginations and material practices in the process of modernization; second, as symbols of modernity's quest to conquer and urbanize nature; and third, as the catalysts for reconfiguring the relationship between nature and the city. The article grounds its analysis on the study of the M…
Producing the ideal fascist landscape: Nature, materiality and the cinematic representation of land reclamation in the Pontine Marshes
Using previously unpublished material from the L'Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE) archive and the Central State Archive in Rome, this article examines how film-making became part and parcel of the process of ‘taming’ nature in the Pontine Marshes under Mussolini's regime. Fascist authorities perceived the undisciplined and unproductive nature of the ‘death-inducing’ swamps as something that had to be extinguished from the face of Italy, to…
Architecture and crisis: Re-inventing the icon, re-imag(in)ing London and re-branding the City
London’s skyline is changing significantly with a new generation of iconic buildings, of which the Swiss-Re Tower is the most well known. Despite the fact that many of these buildings are located in the City (London’s financial heart), little attention has been paid to the relationship between the transformation of London’s skyline and the recent institutional reconfiguration of the Corporation of London, the authority that runs the City. Focusin…
Autistic Architecture: The Fall of the Icon and the Rise of the Serial Object of Architecture
In this contribution I sketch a framework for interpreting the parallel process of banalisation of old and proliferation of new 'iconic' corporate architecture as the Janus-faced manifestation of a qualitative shift in the relationship between capital and architecture. Highlighting the change from place-bound, place-loyal urban elites to footloose transnational elites, I argue that after the 1970s the need to develop a new set of building specifi…
The economic crisis seen from the everyday: Europe's nouveau poor and the global affective implications of a ‘local’ debt crisis
The proliferating numbers of a new population of urban poor in the Western world—who I call here nouveau poor—is a phenomenon equally (if not more) significant as the emergence of the Indignados and Occupy movements, and calls for urgent attention from the part of critical urban studies. This phenomenon forces us to re-evaluate the analytical categories within which we study urban poverty (gender, age, ethnicity, marginality, etc.) and prompts us…
Cities, Natures and the Political Imaginary
Despite the seeming accumulation of natural and manmade disasters over the last decade, and increasing urban intensification across the world, there seems to be little or no actual progress in solving urban ecological problems. In exploring a way forward, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw highlight three potential approaches to urban socio‐ecological research and how these might provide a conduit for re‐politicising urban nature
Land Financialization as a ‘lived’ process: The transformation of Milan’s Bicocca by Pirelli
Contributing to an emerging debate that brings the mobilization of land rent as a financial asset to the heart of urban analysis, this article offers a narrative of land financialization as a ‘lived’ process. Focusing empirically on Bicocca (a post-industrial area north-east of Milan that traditionally hosted the activities of Pirelli, one of Italy’s most successful companies), the paper shifts the focus of enquiry on land financialization from g…
Reflections on the Academic and Economic Environment
When we took up the job as editors, we felt the heavy weight of responsibility that comes with being assigned the task of building upon 35 years of brilliant work, and continuing IJURR's mission. Our sense of responsibility was also heavily gendered. Although women have a place in IJURR's history, the past three years have been the first time that IJURR has been edited by two women, with the incredible support from an all-women editorial office: …
Urban Political Ecology. Great Promises, Deadlock… and New Beginnings?
The paper starts from the premise that it is vitally important to recognize that the rapid rate of planetary urbanization is the main driver of environmental change. Indeed, the ‘sustainability’ of contemporary urban life (understood as the expanded reproduction of its socio-physical form and functions) is responsible for 80% of the world’s use of resources and most of the world’s waste. We wish to highlight how these urban origins are routinely …
The spatialization of democratic politics: Insights from Indignant Squares
This article departs from accounts that either deify Indignant Squares as a model for 21st century political praxis or demonize them as apolitical/post-political crowd gatherings. By performing a closer ethnographic reading of the Indignants’ protests at Athens’ Syntagma Square, we depict the Indignant Squares as a consensual and deeply spatialized staging of dissent, which nevertheless harbours in its underbelly internally conflicting and often …
Class Meets Land: The Social Mobilization of Land as Catalyst for Urban Change
The paper explores the active yet neglected role that local class struggle over land plays in negotiating new forms of urbanity. Unfashionably shifting research focus from global elites and the “creative class” to local industrial elites and industrial workers, we show that socially embodied local struggles over land are as relevant to globalized urbanizations as they had been to industrial capitalism, and need to be brought back squarely into ge…
Undoing environmental justice: Re-imagining equality in the Rosia Montana anti-mining movement
Ijurr Editorial
Mortgaged lives’: The biopolitics of debt and housing financialisation
The paper expands the conceptual framework within which we examine mortgage debt by reconceptualising mortgages as a biotechnology: a technology of power over life that forges an intimate relationship between global financial markets, everyday life and human labour. Taking seriously the materiality of mortgage contracts as a means of forging new embodied practices of financialisation, we urge for the need to move beyond a policy- and macroeconomi…
Don’t call me resilient again!’: The New Urban Agenda as immunology … or … what happens when communities refuse to be vaccinated with ‘smart cities’ and indicators
The Habitat III Conference’s New Urban Agenda hails a “paradigm shift” for pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the new call for “safe, resilient, sustainable and inclusive cities” remains path dependent on old methodological tools (e.g. indicators), techno-managerial solutions (e.g. smart cities), and institutional frameworks of an ecological modernization paradigm that did not work. Pursuing a new urban paradigm within th…
The Political Ecology of Austerity: An Analysis of Socio-environmental Conflict under Crisis in Greece
The paper focuses on two largely understudied and interrelated aspects of the post-2008 economic crisis: how the politics of austerity influences the dynamics of environmental conflict and how the environment is mobilized in subaltern struggles against the normalization of austerity as the hegemonic response to crisis. We ground our analysis on two grassroots conflicts in Greece: the “no-middlemen” solidarity food distribution networks (across Gr…
Reclaiming a scholarship of presence
This chapter questions the rapid ascent of “the Anthropocene” within critical humanities and social science, arguing that the imaginary of the Anthropocene itself may in fact be the most political thing about it. Even critical engagement adds symbolic power and scholarly weight to an emergent new master narrative that “naturalizes” capitalism. The chapter traces how a renewed intellectual responsibility could be configured through co-researching …
Political science (38 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (23 works) · Law (18 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Geography (15 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (12 works) · Environmental ethics (11 works)