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Geographical analyses on protests against austerity politics using the framework of post-politics have proliferated in recent years, mostly building on the work of Jacques Rancière and his conceptualisation of the political and the police order. The paper continues this tradition but seeks to move beyond those analyses reducing the political gesture to a 'rare' and 'heroic' act. It does so by bridging the work of Rancière with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, developing two main arguments. The first one concerns the local and situated dimension of the political moment; the second concerns the dialectical relation between the police order and its disruption, while at the same time viewing insurgent acts as part of a chain of perpetual acts that destabilise the police order, which moreover are the inevitable outcome of its excess. These theoretical arguments are developed in relation to the analysis of the trajectory of disruptive politics around vacant property in Dublin and Rome. In both cities, several contentious political initiatives around property emerged as a response to the crisis and austerity politics, but they were unable to translate into bigger movements. To account for this, the paper identifies two main factors: the limited violence of the crisis in terms of evictions and foreclosures, and the instrumental use of 'legality' and 'rules' by the police order. Nevertheless, we argue, activist engagements with vacant property can be considered as examples of 'world forming' that create the possibilities for further disruptive politics.

AbstractIn the wake of the global financial crisis, and as Europe's financial and fiscal woes continue, Ireland's beleaguered economy has attracted a great deal of scrutiny, with much made of the country's status as one of the PIIGS and the fact that it was bailed out by the troika of the IMF, EU and ECB in November 2010. Whilst most attention has been directed at Ireland's banks and the strategy of the Irish government in managing the crisis, substantial interest (both nationally and internationally) has been focused on the property sector and in particular the phenomenon of so‐called 'ghost estates' (or, in official terms, unfinished estates). As of October 2011 there were 2,846 such estates in Ireland, and they have come to visibly symbolize the collapse of Ireland's 'Celtic Tiger' economy. In this essay, we examine the unfinished estates phenomenon, placing them within the context of Ireland's property boom during the Celtic Tiger years, and conceptualize them as 'new ruins' created through the search for a spatial fix by speculative capitalism in a time of neoliberalism. We detail the characteristics and geography of such estates, the various problems afflicting the estates and their residents, and the Irish government's response to those problems. In the final section we examine the estates as exemplars of new ruins, the remainder and reminder of Celtic Tiger excess.

Using cutting-edge academic work on migration and citizenship to address three themes central to current debates - borders and walls, mobility and travel, and belonging - the authors provide new insights into the politics of migration and citizenship in the UK and the US.

For some time now, the field of urban studies has been attempting to figure the urban whilst cognisant of the fact that the city exists as a highly problematic category of analysis. In this virtual special issue, we draw together some examples of what we call urban concepts under stress; concepts which appear to be reaching the limits of their capacity to render knowable a world characterised by the death of the city and the ascent of multi-scalar de-territorialisations and re-territorialisations. We organise the papers selected for inclusion into three bundles dealing respectively with complex urban systems, the hinterland problematic and governing cities in the age of flows. The phenomenon of urban concepts under stress stems from the existence of a gap between existing cartographies, visualisations and lexicons of the urban and 21st century spatial conditions and territorialities. Given that this disarticulation will surely increase as this century unfolds, a pressing question presents itself: what is to be done with the field of urban studies after the age of the city? In this introduction, we argue that there exist at least six ways of responding to the present conceptual difficulties, each implying a different future for urban studies. We place under particular scrutiny voices which argue that nothing less than a scholarly tabula rasa will suffice. Our conclusion is that the phenomenon of concepts under stress provides an opportunity to think afresh about what to do with the field of urban studies and that it is premature to foreclose discussion about possible futures at this point.