Urban and Urbanization

Considers the spatial form and social processes of cities and urbanization with particular attention to the geographies and politics of building theories of the urban.

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Shifting peripheries: Dhaka's rickshaw garages and mess dormitories as spaces of work and movement

This article considers how urban peripheries are made and unmade by forms of “shifting”. We examine these shifts from the perspective of rickshaw garages and mess dormitories in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which both offer makeshift working and living arrangements to rural–urban migrants.

By

Annemiek Prins, Shreyashi Dasgupta

Autorecovery and everyday disaster in Mexico City’s peripheries

This article is concerned with urbanization as it shapes and is shaped by disaster finance instruments. It argues that where localized everyday disasters are ongoing, they fall through the cracks of existing financing schemes because of ongoing scalar mismatches between instruments and actually existing disaster conditions.

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Beki McElvain

Urban orientalism and the informal city in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

In this article, we scrutinize the concept of ‘urban informality’ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By unpacking key moments in Rio’s history when conceptualizations of informal housing (i.e., favelas) changed, we explain why favelas have been understood in different ways over the last century.

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Jeff Garmany, Rafael Gonçalves Almeida

The potential politics of the porous city

This article discusses the concept of porosity and what it might offer critical urbanism. It engages recent scholarly and practical writing on the “porous city,” outlining three sets of contributions that porosity offers in analyzing contemporary urbanization patterns and in orienting planning, policymaking, and knowledge production.

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Theresa Enright, Nathan Olmstead

Street Salafism: Contingency and urbanity as religious creed

Media representations such as the documentary ‘Undercover Mosque’ that aired on a British television channel in 2007 is a poignant example of how the banal, everyday life of religious spaces can be folded into – while also give succour to – such narratives.

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Ajmal Hussain

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