Global Links
City-Regionalism in a Comparative Perspective : Urban Austerity, Collective Provision, and the New "Geopolitics of Capitalism"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andy Jonas
This paper examines newly emerging forms of city-regional collaboration in Finland, UK, USA, and China. Despite conditions of urban austerity, such forms have enabled the strategic delivery of transportation infrastructure and related services by a combination of global and local providers. The management of the politics of collective provision by the state is thus a critical factor in the emergence of a new "geopolitics of capitalism," producing variegated national political geographies of city-regionalism. Previous explanations have attributed such national variations to differences in political capacities and governance processes operating within city-regions. An alternative and arguably more powerful explanation suggests that emergent forms of city-regionalism enable national states to balance more effectively domestic political problems with growing pressures to compete globally and deliver investments in major infrastructure projects under conditions of austerity. The paper argues that the political challenge of raising capital for the collective provision of infrastructure under conditions of austerity is opening up new opportunities for the nation-state to (re)assert its geopolitical influence both domestically as well as internationally.
Green Reparations in Berlin and Detroit: Sociospatial Trauma and the Role of Urban Nature
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paul Draus
Recent years have seen increasing interest in the role of green space in cities, from both an environmental and a social justice standpoint. The promotion of “green infrastructure” or “nature-based solutions” as regional responses to accumulating repercussions of planetary urbanization and climate change, on the one hand, and localized issues such as social inequality, vulnerability, and environmental injustice/racism on the other, has prompted a rich body of research examining these actual and potential interconnections. While many have emphasized the role of urban nature or green space in improving urban quality of life, others have raised questions concerning its distribution and the unevenness of benefits relative to different populations existing within urban regions. In this paper, we focus on the question of green space distribution and function in two cities from the Western industrialized world: Berlin, Germany, and Detroit, Michigan USA. Many parallels may be drawn between Berlin and Detroit, some facile and others more meaningful. For example, Berlin and Detroit are both recognized as centers of electronic music, they are both seen as fashionably gritty, and both have benefited from an influx of artists and others seeking affordable rents and the sometimes ghostly allure of post-industrial spaces. But the parallels run deeper than these superficial similarities. Berlin was devastated by two World Wars and decades of enforced political, economic, and cultural division following the occupation of East Berlin by the Soviet Union. These historical traumas and painful memories are reflected in the city’s landscape today. For forty years West Berlin was effectively a democratic island within communist East Germany, while Detroit after 1970 effectively became an impoverished Black island within a wealthy, majority-White metropolitan region. These are far from equivalent situations, but each has had a significant impact on the landscape and ecology of the city. We utilize Berlin and Detroit not only to pose questions of each other, but to lay out a comparative framework intended to guide other cities dealing with the long term social and environmental consequences of enforced political division and ethnic and spatial segregation. We first demonstrate that this social and historical trauma has a corollary in the physical landscape as well as in social and demographic measures. Borrowing from the Theorized Urban Gradient (TUG) model developed by Qureshi, Haase and Coles (2014), we compare Berlin and Detroit using a key set of ecological indicators that correlate with the legacy of sociospatial trauma, applying this comparison to the cities overall and to specific neighborhoods which might be seen as relative “winners” or “losers” in the process of post-traumatic recovery. We then forward an argument towards incorporating environmental degradation and restoration into discussions of social equity and recovery from historical trauma, proposing that green space should be seen as both a reflection of past harms and a means of healing them. Finally, we offer a concept of “green reparations” that may serve as an alternative framework to asocial concepts of “green infrastructure” and as a direct challenge to the potential creeping growth of “green gentrification.”
Translocal Urban Development in the Age of the Anthropocene: Mapping Bremen in "Sustainable Singapore"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Julia Lossau
My paper advances recent debates on translocality in urban studies by combining them with both research on urban imaginaries and a postcolonial account of the anthropocene. Taking Singapore as a case study, what interests me is how the city state’s development is influenced – rather unlikely perhaps at first sight – by relations to Bremen, a port city in the North of Germany. By way of a mixed-method analysis, my project explores how Bremen-based firms contribute, both materially and symbolically, to the making of "Sustainable Singapore." How do their decision-makers network translocally, how do they negotiate the relationships of the local to the global, and how do their entrepreneurial efforts materialize in the built landscape of Singapore? By – exemplarily – mapping Bremen in Singapore, it is explored how landscapes of late modernism are literally transformed into landscapes of the Anthropocene.
The Global Unrealized: Two aborted Japanese-designed extension projects to European art museums
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jens Sejrup
Despite prevailing notions of globalization as emanating from the West outward, cultural globalization and architectural interventions from outside the West are increasingly affecting Europe. Such globalizing projects are claimed to reflect local aspirations to better capture lucrative flows and uplift local institutions and localities to a global scale. But large-scale interventions are contentious, especially when they affect historic neighborhoods. Taking Japan as a prime example of a non-Western agent, this paper analyzes conflictual dynamics of locality and globality in two unrealized Japanese-designed extension projects to European museum buildings: the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the IVAM in Valencia. In both cases, the building projects were eventually shelved despite claims to localization and prestigious validation. The two cases attest to a European uneasiness with material manifestation of modernity flowing inward from elsewhere.
