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Urban Phenomenon (urban + phenomenon)
Selected AbstractsMumbai's Mysterious Middle ClassINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2006JAN NIJMAN Mumbai forms the décor to an interesting set of relationships among economic liberalization, globalization, class restructuring and an unprecedented housing construction boom. The much talked about new Indian middle class is primarily an urban phenomenon and seems nowhere more salient than in India's commercial capital and largest city. This article seeks to undo some of the mysteries that surround the new middle class: how it can be empirically defined, whether and how it is growing, how class restructuring in Mumbai conforms (or not) to Western arguments about social polarization, and how any such class restructuring can best be explained. The empirical analysis employs existing data from various sources on income and consumption in Mumbai (and India at large) and reports on selected findings from a recent survey by the author on housing, class and upward mobility among households in newly constructed homes in Greater Mumbai. Data on the distribution of household incomes show that the upper-middle income classes have grown relative to the total, that the lower-middle income classes have shrunk, and that the ranks of the poor have expanded slightly. Survey data among new home buyers in Mumbai suggest little upward mobility. Discourse about the ,new middle class' tends to focus on consumption rather than income and additional findings indicate that much of the growth in consumption is credit-based. [source] THE "ENTREPRENEURIAL STATE" IN "CREATIVE INDUSTRY CLUSTER" DEVELOPMENT IN SHANGHAIJOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2010JANE ZHENG ABSTRACT:,Literature on China's urban development discusses the nature and role of the local state. A set of concepts have been proposed, such as the "entrepreneurial state" (ES) and "local developmental state," and an ongoing debate attempts to ascertain whether the state is "entrepreneurial" in nature. This article uses a newly emerged urban phenomenon, chuangyi chanye jiju qu (CCJQs) or "creative industry clusters," in which the central government is not involved, to explore the nature of local governments, their role in urban development, and the ways in which they perform this role. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used. The findings of this research reveal a strong revenue-oriented nature of local governments, highlighting the "entrepreneurial state" as an important dimension in their character: they transform spontaneously emerged urban cultural spaces into a new mechanism generating revenues for both urban growth and their own economic benefit. Local governments promote CCJQ development with place promotion strategies, and they are directly involved in CCJQ-related businesses as market players rather than as independent bodies that effectively control and regulate the CCJQ market through policies and regulations. Further, this article reveals a "public,public" coalition as an important mechanism for local state participation. [source] Public intervention, private aspiration: Gated communities and the condominisation of housing landscapes in SingaporeASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 2 2009Choon-Piew Pow Abstract While the proliferation of gated communities worldwide has generated great interests and debates, the emergence of gated communities is by no means a ,global' urban phenomenon that displays uniform characteristics and genesis. Drawing on Singapore as a case study, this paper goes beyond the universalising and often polemical discourses on gated communities to provide a balanced account on how gated communities in the form of enclosed condominium estates are locally embedded in the city state where public housing dominates. As will be pointed out in the paper, gated communities in Singapore may be considered as a form of ,club good' that exists as part of the state's urban/national developmental agenda and are, arguably, less socially and spatially divisive than those depicted elsewhere. By teasing out the local specificities of gated communities, this paper underscores the need to read beyond the physical form of gated communities in order to understand the complex social and political production of housing landscapes. [source] Modernism and the Machine FarmerJOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2000Rod Bantjes In this paper I apply recent theoretical discussions of the spatial character of modernity to a ,rural' context. I argue that neither modernity nor ,modernism' has been an exclusively ,urban' phenomenon in the twentieth century, and that attention to modernism in the countryside yields insights into the modernist project. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the apparently ,rural' spaces of the prairie west were already integrated into modern trans-local structures. Wheat farmers were ahead of their contemporaries in their appreciation of the nature and scale of modern distanciated relationships. They were ,modernist' in embracing and celebrating the technologies, particularly organizational technologies, for dominating space and time. They were also innovators in modern organizational design, seeking creatively to control the modern "machine" and to bridge the local and the ,global.' Their progressive experimentation culminated in a surprising proposal for ,co-operative farms' not unlike Soviet collective farms. [source] | ||||||||||