By using the concept of peripheralization as defined by Fischer-Tahir and Naumann (2013) ; I examine how processes of change in economy ; demography ; political decision-making ; and socio-cultural norms and values have marginalized southern Yemen after 1990 ; and especially after the war of 1994. I will argue that politically produced spatial injustice has strengthened the desire for southern Yemeni independence.
Densely populated informal housing has mushroomed in formerly segregated South African townships, attracting migrants who survive on the edges of the economy, excluded from basic services. In the pandemic, they have been even more vulnerable, unable to practice social distancing and forced to continue with marginal work such as scavenging to eke out a living. Drawing on interviews with residents of a Johannesburg settlement, the authors emphasize how urban space structures inequalities in every aspect of everyday life, requiring a new approach to city planning and governance with a focus on justice.
In this paper, the author addresses spatial injustices in Tunisia, and seeks to which extent social and territorial inequalities could hamper democracy. Many urban disparities and social anomies such as informal sector, terrorism, unemployment, and usustainable development process threaten the vulnerable democracy transition in Tunisia. The author described and analyzed urban planning process since independency to noawadays. He analyzed the successive economic development policy makings undertook by a mono-party Nation-State. The top down development policies implemented until nowadays entailed a big gap between coastal areas and inland. The former benefitted of its site across the sea shores and proximity to Tunis and former regime. Many factors fostered export industries and tourism activities. The latters were left behind due to their lack of resources and urban planning policy dominated by neo liberal capitalist development in favor of Tunis urban primacy and the littoral where concentrated most foreign and local investments. Urban disparities and inequalities in Tunisia join in a networked society where local and global actors play a key role in economic, social, and urban development process in Tunisia. Tunisian society is a subsystem within a global system (Wallerstein2012), and what is happening is not conjonctural, but it is due to global social movements (Sassen 2007 ; Castells 2012 ; Braudel, 1992 ; Amin, 2003). Terrorism, pollution, inequalities are not per se, but are the negative results of a a myriad of factors: economic, politics, cultural, emotional, aesthetics, social and urban morphologies. Many economic, social, and political actors intervened and interconnected in public and private arenas and triggered those anomies. Fair urban policies are expected to be achieved through a multilevel governance in order to implement the revolution objectives in Tunisia. Otherwise, a representative democracy only, won't fulfil the well-being expected by large Tunisian people. Sustainable urban governance requires a multi-scalar bottom-up and top-down policy-making. In Tunisia, after democratic transition success, the state should be revamped, and compensate its deficit. A sustainable urban planning implies a holistic policy framework involving private and public sectors, and civil society actors locally, regionally, and globally.
This article critiques the Detroit Future City (DFC) strategic framework concerning municipal service provision and land use over the next few decades. Relying on policy and media documents, we show that the DFC exhibits narrow, market-oriented logics characteristic of the pervasive hegemony of neoliberal urbanism in American city governance. We address the corporate orientation of the Detroit Works Project, the public–private partnership behind DFC, and argue that the plan may exacerbate the racialized spatial injustices produced in Detroit by 20th-century exclusionary metropolitan growth, ineffective governance, and decades-long flawed approaches to economic development. Furthermore, DFC not only advances previous planned-shrinkage attempts but also seeks to repurpose major areas of the city for global investment, reversing their zoning for agriculture and green space. Our analysis of census data shows that Detroit's most disadvantaged residents disproportionately reside in areas designated as future "innovation landscapes." Exploratory spatial data analysis indicates that these zones are not internally homogeneous and engulf resilient residential land usage. Moreover, greening serves the symbolic purpose of reconstituting problematically racialized "Black" areas as purified, investment-ready spaces. We urge neoliberal urban research to continue tracing its global embedding and relational evolution, but also to reorganize the pernicious sociospatial reality on the ground.
In recent years, the smog problem has aroused wide concern in China. However, people have different perceptions of the severity of air pollution, even in similarly polluted environments. Based on a quantitative analysis of Chinese General Social Survey data, air quality index data, news reports in 2013, and multi-site anthropological observations, this paper demonstrates that the public perception of air pollution is not determined by physiological feelings and the external environment, but rather by the media, social networks, and other sociocultural factors, which are highly localized. This creates a hidden form of spatial injustice—people living in regions that lack a social milieu of smog awareness are less likely to sense smog and to take precautions; they are therefore left behind in the perception of air pollution and in their chances of preventing illnesses associated with air pollution.
International audience ; This article seeks to examine the sequence that precedes the coming to power of the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in the UK (1979-2010) and to explore how urban policies, spatial injustice and neoliberalism were articulated in London during this period of neoliberal transformation of the state. Liberal and radical formulations of justice by Rawls (Rawls, 1971) (Rawls, 2001) and Harvey (Harvey, 1973) are drawn upon to help frame the injustices produced by urban policies implemented by the Conservatives (1979-1997) around a dual problem: the reduction of political equality and the deteriorating socioeconomic conditions for the worst-off segment of society. Following on from this, I then explore New Labour's response (1997-2010) to this double injustice and look at how its discourse emphasized the crisis of political participation. A presentation of the transformation of New Labour's political project follows along with a subsequent illustration of how it was actually applied to urban policies. The New Deal for Communities (NDC), an area-based initiative targeted at deprived areas, is used as a case study to observe these processes. To conclude, I evaluate the types of injustices produced by New Labour's policies and distinguish between those which were manifestly caused by sustained neoliberal economic policies of those which were the result of institutional and procedural failures.
International audience ; This article seeks to examine the sequence that precedes the coming to power of the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in the UK (1979-2010) and to explore how urban policies, spatial injustice and neoliberalism were articulated in London during this period of neoliberal transformation of the state. Liberal and radical formulations of justice by Rawls (Rawls, 1971) (Rawls, 2001) and Harvey (Harvey, 1973) are drawn upon to help frame the injustices produced by urban policies implemented by the Conservatives (1979-1997) around a dual problem: the reduction of political equality and the deteriorating socioeconomic conditions for the worst-off segment of society. Following on from this, I then explore New Labour's response (1997-2010) to this double injustice and look at how its discourse emphasized the crisis of political participation. A presentation of the transformation of New Labour's political project follows along with a subsequent illustration of how it was actually applied to urban policies. The New Deal for Communities (NDC), an area-based initiative targeted at deprived areas, is used as a case study to observe these processes. To conclude, I evaluate the types of injustices produced by New Labour's policies and distinguish between those which were manifestly caused by sustained neoliberal economic policies of those which were the result of institutional and procedural failures.
International audience ; This article seeks to examine the sequence that precedes the coming to power of the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in the UK (1979-2010) and to explore how urban policies, spatial injustice and neoliberalism were articulated in London during this period of neoliberal transformation of the state. Liberal and radical formulations of justice by Rawls (Rawls, 1971) (Rawls, 2001) and Harvey (Harvey, 1973) are drawn upon to help frame the injustices produced by urban policies implemented by the Conservatives (1979-1997) around a dual problem: the reduction of political equality and the deteriorating socioeconomic conditions for the worst-off segment of society. Following on from this, I then explore New Labour's response (1997-2010) to this double injustice and look at how its discourse emphasized the crisis of political participation. A presentation of the transformation of New Labour's political project follows along with a subsequent illustration of how it was actually applied to urban policies. The New Deal for Communities (NDC), an area-based initiative targeted at deprived areas, is used as a case study to observe these processes. To conclude, I evaluate the types of injustices produced by New Labour's policies and distinguish between those which were manifestly caused by sustained neoliberal economic policies of those which were the result of institutional and procedural failures.
Peripheries emerge as a result of shifts in economic and political decision-making at various scales. Therefore peripheral spaces are not a "natural" phenomenon but an outcome of the intrinsic logic of uneven geographical development in capitalist societies. Discussing examples from Germany, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, Pakistan, India and Brazil, the volume describes the social production of peripheries from different theoretical and methodological perspectives. In so doing, it argues in favour of a re-politicization of the recent debate on peripheralization.
Segregation has been widely discussed by social scientists and especially by urban geographers and planners over the past decades. However, regardless of their focus, most of these studies view segregation as an obvious case of spatial injustice. I argue that this implicit relationship between segregation, (in)justice, and space needs to be reexamined. This paper approaches this task by reviewing an interdisciplinary body of literature (including geography, sociology, history, political sciences, and philosophy) that deals with segregation without (explicitly) tackling the issue of justice. Focusing on the case of poor, segregated neighborhoods in France, this paper examines the question of whether the segregated city is essentially unjust, analyzes the extent to which segregation is a spatial injustice, and identifies segregation's underlying (spatial) causes. It will then question the dominant contemporary discourse that holds that the Just City should be a diverse city at the neighborhood scale.