Quickening Urban Pulse

Pablo Bose

Department of Geography, University of Vermont

In 2008 under the direction of Helga Leitner, Urban Geography launched the Urban Pulse series of short essays focused on emerging issues in cities and urban life across the globe. The series was designed in part to counter the longstanding critiques that Anglo-American urban geography was too focused on the global North, on the apex sites of the world cities hierarchies, and ultimately on the same spaces and the same faces. Instead this initiative would open up knowledge production and scholarship on many more urban sites—ordinary and extraordinary alike—and highlight contemporary sociospatial transformations and interconnections, diverse struggles over the city, and pathways towards new or different urban futures. It has done so by drawing on the work of scholars, activists, and policymakers, amongst others. The series has explored many of the most pressing and urgent challenges of contemporary urban life, ones that have manifested in various local and global struggles and often gained considerable public attention in the process.

In 2013 and 2014, for example, mass protests roiled Istanbul and shook the Turkish establishment, beginning ostensibly with local opposition to the gentrification of Taksim Gezi Park but extending and expanding into a more general critique of Turkey’s political and developmental trajectories. The complex dynamics that lie at the base of the current conflict are explored in a 2008 Urban Pulse article by Ozan Karaman entitled “(Re)making space for globalization in Istanbul.” Nathaniel Trumbull examines another example of opposition to urban renewal measures in a 2012 contribution to the series, this time in the context of post-socialist cities, as he turns to the case of St. Petersburg and the growing public resistance to the destruction of historic buildings and neighborhoods in service to a hyper-modern vision of the city center. As in the case of Istanbul, Trumbull sees the widespread discontent as something more than a pushback against a changing urban landscape but rather evidence of shifting political and cultural attitudes within the city. Sagie Narsiah also explores a story of struggle in another Urban Pulse article, “The struggle for water, life, and dignity in South African cities—the case of Johannesburg.” Here the story focuses on the privatization of water services by the city and the effects in particular on poorer neighborhoods and residents—their objections through the legal system, eventual victory for their right to adequate water service in the South African Supreme Court and the protracted conflict that has ensued even with the positive decision. Another publication in the series, Anant Maringanti’s “Urbanizing microfinance—examples from India” similarly details the ubiquity of market rationality in urban policies, especially those governing affordable housing and social services in South Asia.

The Urban Pulse series strives to show such cases not as isolated and unique but as linked in multiple ways. This is apparent in Tim Bunnell and Diganta Das’ essay “A geography of serial seduction: urban policy transfer from Kuala Lumpur to Hyderabad” which traces the many connections between the two cities and the ways in which they have been actively reshaped in recent years. The authors focus in particular on high-tech development, the use of the same urban experts to plan the transformations required to bring futuristic visions to life, and the displacements caused by the world city fantasies of both sites. The work and mission of the Urban Pulse series in highlighting such engaged and timely research was reiterated in Leitner’s collaboration with Eric Sheppard and Maringanti titled “Provincializing global urbanism: a manifesto” in which the authors lay out the necessity for a new direction in urban research and action. They borrow from postcolonial theory the notion that the traditional and mainstream forms of knowledge production—in this case global urbanism—must be de-centered and disrupted. The alternative approach to urban study and practice they urge is not simply about ‘Other’ spaces – indeed, the authors question the caricatured dichotomies that certain versions of subaltern urbanism can render – but rather deconstruct the orthodoxies regarding the cities in which we live: how they have come to be and what they offer as a future.

I am excited therefore to join the Urban Pulse series as an editor, to build on this already exciting collection of essays and further the agenda set forth by Leitner and others. So many of the key issues of our world are intimately bound with the lives and forms of the urban spaces that we inhabit. The spectacle of the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, the Euromaidan protests in Kiev, and popular discontent in Ferguson are linked in many ways; understanding what such events mean needs the intervention of urban researchers and activists, to move us beyond shallow caricatures and stereotyped representations of colonialism, nationalism, race, and class. It is my hope that the Urban Pulse series can continue to make such interventions, with essays that respond to the pressing urban issues of the day in a quick and substantive manner.

We would like to encourage contributors therefore to submit short essays (between 1,500 and 3,000 words, following the journal’s instructions to authors) that describes and critically discusses such issues as they manifest themselves in a particular urban area or a group of cities in different parts of the world. Please send your ideas for possible contributions to the editor of the Urban Pulse series: Pablo Bose, Department of Geography, University of Vermont (e-mail: pbose@uvm.edu).