Suchergebnisse

This paper engages with Loretta Lees' suggestion that this journal include research collaborators beyond the academy as commentators in its urban dialogues. In it, I highlight the contortions and contradictions involved in extracting individual scholarly outputs from collaborative research, drawing on my experiences as a doctoral researcher in the UK. These challenges are intimately entangled with key questions posed by Loretta about who counts as an urban scholar or theorist, and what urban theor(ies) are – or might be – for. The difficulties involved in publishing engaged and collaborative research in academic formats contribute to its marginalision within critical urban studies, robbing the discipline of the particular understandings and possibilities it can open up. Making space for engaged dialogue beyond the academy within this journal can help to open up the production and circulation of urban knowledge to a greater diversity of perspectives and interests, creating a more hospitable environment for engaged, collaborative and activist research within the academy. Such a shift invites authors to bring their multiple subjectivities and identities into urban dialogues – as modelled by Loretta – challenging conventions designed to separate and elevate academic knowledge from the diverse others it depends upon. Extending urban dialogue to non-academic collaborators can therefore help to connect critical urban research with the communities and interests in whose name it claims to operate.

AbstractThis article focuses on the role of traders and small businesses in urban social movements by exploring three examples of opposition to commercial displacement in London. While the work of Castells, Lefebvre and the wider field of urban social movement research has radically expanded the terrain of struggle beyond the workplace to take in a wide range of community and grassroots groups and concerns, little attention has been paid to the potential role of traders and small businesses, particularly in the global North. The article focuses specifically on the mobilization of traders and small businesses in response to the threat of commercial displacement which, as one of the ways in which surplus value is extracted from cities, is a potentially significant site of urban contestation. Drawing on the author's research and involvement with one metropolitan and two local 'workspace struggles' in London, the article demonstrates that commercial displacement may mobilize threatened traders and small businesses to play a role in broader urban social movements with wide‐ranging goals and concerns. Further research on workspace struggles has the potential to offer much‐needed insights for radical urban politics and possibilities for developing alternatives by challenging and working across divides between economy and society.

This book explores the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure in 'left-behind places'. Such places, typically once flourishing industrial communities that have been excluded from recent economic growth, now attract academic and policy attention as sites of a political backlash against globalisation and liberal democracy. The book focuses on the role of social infrastructure as a key component of this story.

Seeking to move beyond a narrowly economistic of reading 'left behind places', the book addresses the understudied affective dimensions of 'left-behindness'. It develops an analytical framework that emphasises the importance of place attachments and the consequences of their disruption; considers 'left behind places' as 'moral communities' and the making of social infrastructure as an expression of this; views the unmaking of social infrastructure through the lens of 'root shock'; and explains efforts at remaking it in terms of the articulation of 'radical hope'.

The analysis builds upon a case study of a former mining community in County Durham, North East England. Using mixed methods, it offers a 'deep place study' of a single village to understand more fully the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure. It shows how a place once richly endowed with social infrastructure, saw this endowment wither and the effects this had on the community. However, it also records efforts of the local people to rebuild social infrastructure, typically drawing the lessons of the past. Although the story of one village, the methods, results and policy recommendation have much wider applicability.

The book will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and others concerned with the fate of 'left behind places'.