Suchergebnisse

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.

The author revealed the injustices in the territories formation of the united territorial communities (UTC) under the local self-government reform, which are manifested in different, uneven volumes of their land use and the resource basis in general for local socio-economic development. The methodological approach used by the authorities in determining the capacity of united communities in their formation (in terms of compliance with the criteria – the area and the population density), led to the fact that in rural areas with low population density they had to form large UTCs to reach specific parameters by population. The hypothesis that territorially large UTCs are capable is ambiguous: on the one hand, land tenure and land use is a resource for socio-economic development of communities, on the other – in a large area the cost of providing essential services to the population in remote villages increases together with the administrative and other costs. Paper proves that large-scale rural UTCs should become objects of the state support as the "rural areas in unfavourable conditions" under the State Strategy for Regional Development for 2021–2027. The author justifies injustices in the centralization of powers on disposal of land resources. The land decentralization as a transfer of relevant powers to UTC local governments will be finally completed, according to the Decree of the President of Ukraine "On some measures to accelerate reforms in the field of land relations" № 449 from 15.10.2020, which will contribute to orderliness in this area and filling local budgets. It is also advisable within the UTCs to give internal communities the right to dispose of their economic territory's land resources in these communities' interests. The paper shows discriminatory aspects of administrative reformatting of 120 voluntarily formed and functioning UTCs, according to the Government's long-term plans for 2020: by recognizing them as insufficiently capable, they should join other communities or unite into larger UTCs.

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.