The latest issue of the CITY journal is now available, and all the papers in this issue is free to download! I am pleased to find my own picture (depicting the two main slogans of Shanghai World Expo 2010) included as cover image of this issue.
In this issue, there are two special features, one on The Production of Shared Space in Northern Ireland and another on Crisis-scape: Athens and Beyond. The latter is a collection of papers originally presented at a conference with the same title, which took place in May 2014. My own paper Contesting Speculative Urbanisation and Strategising Discontents is also included in this special feature, along with Tom Slater’s passionate piece on Unravelling False Choice Urbanism. Also recommended are the pieces by Stavros Stavrides on Emerging Common Space as a Challenge to the City of Crisis, and by Nasser Abourahme who wrote his own reflection on the crisis-scape.net’s recent documentary Future Suspended.
- Click here to watch the documentary Future Suspended. This made me think again what has happened in South Korea at the time of the 1997-1998 Asian Financial Crisis. I should revisit the experience and produce my own account sometime…
The editorial piece by the journal’s editor-in-chief Bob Catterall, has wonderfully captured the essence of own paper, and made a perceptive connection with the key features covered in this issue. See here for the editorial piece, “Editorial: ‘City makes your life happier’?“.
My paper’s abstract is pasted below (this paper was earlier presented at the Crisis-scape: Athens and Beyond conference in May 2014, and made available via its conference proceeding. See my earlier post here):
This paper explains what the production of speculative urbanisation in mainland China means for strategising emergent discontents therein. It is argued that China’s urbanisation is a political and ideological project by the Party State, producing urban-oriented accumulation through the commingling of the labour-intensive industrial production with heavy investment in the built environment. Therefore, for any progressive movements to be formed, it becomes imperative to imagine and establish cross-class alliances to claim the right to the city (or the right to the urban, given the limitations of the city as an analytical unit). Because of the nature of urbanisation, the alliances would need to involve not only industrial workers and urban inhabitants but also village farmers whose lands are expropriated to accommodate investments to produce the urban as well as ethnic minorities in autonomous regions whose cities are appropriated and restructured to produce Han-dominated cities. Education emerges as an important strategy for the discontented who need to understand how the fate of urban inhabitants is knitted tightly with the fate of workers, villagers and others who are subject to the exploitation of the urban-oriented accumulation.
Readers of the journal would also find an insightful contribution by Andy Merrifield, Against Accountancy Governance: Notes towards a New Urban Collective Consumption, which can also be read along with his latest book The New Urban Question and one of his interventions on Antipode Online entitled ‘Whose City? The Parasites, of course…‘.
To mark the launch of this latest issue, especially its featured collection of papers on Crisis-scape: Athens and Beyond, the journal hosted an event, Athens and Beyond: Cities in Financial/Economic/Social Crisis, on Saturday 11th October 2014. Here is the link to the event poster. A virtual special issue is also put together by the journal in relation to this event (click here to visit). It is said that:
“The selection is presented here in six chronological and thematic sections, intended as a possibly helpful but not constraining guide to the articles, starting with three Greek perspectives – to varying extents centered on Athens – from 2012, moving on to two specifically action-related articles from 2013, and then on to a more global approach with articles from mid-2013 to mid-2014, three of which relate to Costas Lapavitsas’ political economy approach in Profiting without Production and two to a more cultural approach (one of which extends towards a bio-social materialism).”
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