In What Sense Suburban Infrastructure?

The aim of this chapter is to develop an analytically meaningful framework to analyze ‘suburban infrastructure’ by paying concerted attention to how infrastructures relate to the production and experience of dynamic and highly variegated suburban environments. My approach is built around two conceptual triads: the first unpacks the modalities of infrastructures as they exist in, for, and of suburbs (broadly understood as the landscapes of extended urbanization); the second discloses the political economic processes (suburbanization), lived experience (suburbanism), and dynamics of mediation internalized by particular suburban infrastructures. I am not concerned with the tasks of ensuring definitional rigor or bounding what does and does not constitute ‘suburban infrastructure’. Rather, I seek to identify adaptable conceptual and methodological innovations from the distinct relations between the suburban and any number of hard and soft infrastructures facilitating social processes and relations across space. I concretize this argument by briefly unpacking the politics of rail infrastructure in the Chicago region, focusing on the changing modalities of suburban infrastructure surrounding the 2007-2009 acquisition of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railroad by the Canadian National Railway

Review of New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question by Neil Brenner

New Urban Spaces is a landmark contribution to urban and regional studies. Through a rich, dense and provocative argument, Neil Brenner synthesizes over a decade-and-a-half\u27s work on state rescaling, globalization and urban governance into a comprehensive and radical retheorization of urbanization

Anchoring (in) the Region: The Dynamics of University-Engaged Urban Development in Newark, NJ, USA

While academic and policy analyses have explored universities’ roles in urban regeneration and regional development, issues arising from intraurban collaboration and competition in multi-university city-regions have received scant attention. In response, this paper examines how higher education institutions (HEIs) connect and splinter urban space at multiple scales through a case study of Newark, NJ, USA. Newark’s attempts to reposition itself as a hub for university-enabled innovation disclose the complex ways in which the infrastructures of knowledge urbanism are implemented, negotiated, and spatialized at local and city-regional scales. The study’s multi-disciplinary analysis assesses the discourses, technologies, and territorial constellations through which HEIs (re)shape place and project urban peripheries into wider city-regional networks. The paper’s findings reveal an emergent and decentred ‘de facto’ form of university regionalism crystallizing in Greater New York that illustrates the need for robust, scalar-sensitive assessments of anchor institution strategies as they are articulated within broader regionalization processes

Regionalizing the Infrastructure Turn: A Research Agenda

An interdisciplinary ‘infrastructure turn’ has emerged over the past 20 years that disputes the concept of urban infrastructure as a staid or neutral set of physical artefacts. Responding to the increased conceptual, geographical and political importance of infrastructure – and endemic issues of access, expertise and governance that the varied provision of infrastructures can cause – this intervention asserts the significance of applying a regional perspective to the infrastructure turn. This paper forwards a critical research agenda for the study of ‘infrastructural regionalisms’ to interrogate: (1) how we study and produce knowledge about infrastructure; (2) how infrastructure is governed across or constrained by jurisdictional boundaries; (3) who drives the construction of regional infrastructural imaginaries; and (4) how individuals and communities differentially experience regional space through infrastructure. Analysing regions through infrastructure provides a novel perspective on the regional question and consequently offers a framework to understand better the implications of the current infrastructure moment for regional spaces worldwide

Placing the university: thinking in and beyond globalization

In some respects, the impact of globalization on universities is well rehearsed (competition for international students; the drive for status in global rankings; the opening of overseas campuses; the dream of massive open online courses and other forms of digital education), but the relationship between universities as place-based institutions and globalization is less well understood. It is on that this chapter focuses. Drawing on work undertaken as part of an Economic and Social Research Council project (“Higher Education and Regional Social Transformation”) the author sets the arguments in a wider context. He explores the extent to which and ways in which universities have become key players in the reimagination of their city regions in a (neoliberal) global context. As well as reflecting on the wider public (and local) role of universities, he also considers how universities use the tools available to them to position themselves effectively as successful businesses within the new world in which they find themselves

The rhetoric and reality of urban policy in the neoliberal city: implications for social struggle in Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati

This paper explores the disparities between the ideological discourses and material outcomes of three key urban policies, contextually grounded within the neoliberalised social and institutional spaces of Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati. Whilst the rhetoric of neoliberal doctrine presents an emancipatory urban imaginary based upon individual freedom and the beneficent role of free markets, the embedding of the policies discussed accentuates the political and economical disenfranchisement of the most marginalised neighbourhood inhabitants. Moreover, the ability of this group to politically mobilise against hostile neoliberalisation and gentrification is undermined by the facilitation of out-migration of stable low-income families and community leaders, and the reproduction of the negative, criminal, and blighted aspects of Over-the-Rhine’s environment. Neoliberalisation is seen to operate through material and discursive moments of social exclusion and in perpetuating sociospatial structures which justify the continued implementation of repressive political and regulatory projects. In concluding, I suggest neoliberal hegemony may be undermined through exposing the ways in which it reproduces and exacerbates the phenomena it condemns.

University-led Innovation In and For Peripheral Urban Areas: New Approaches in Naples, Italy and Newark, NJ, US

This paper focuses on the spatial development problem of university-led innovation in peripheral urban areas. Highlighting issues of proximity, uneven geographic development, and multi-scalar urban governance as weaknesses of the regional innovation systems literature, we provide a novel synthesis of regional economics, innovation policy, and critical urban studies to assess the development roles of universities in concrete contexts. A comparative investigation of Naples and Newark, NJ captures the functional operation of regional innovation and urban development as a contested product of discourses, technologies (material and governance), and territorial arrangements. Our analysis demonstrates the significance of multi-scalar relationships in structuring innovation policy and practice in peripheral urban areas. The architecture of innovation is not simply rolled out into pre-determined spatial containers in places lacking established ‘institutional thickness’ or urban centrality. The spatial development of university-led innovation is a social product: material and governance infrastructures are essential components of the urban fabric and are essential to its co-constitution. Universities are shown to contribute differing resources dependent on their institutional strategic goals and the capacities and spatial imaginaries afforded to them by their situation in broader territorial governance regimes. We conclude by drawing comparative lessons and identifying directions for future research

The Rhetoric and Reality of Urban Policy in the Neoliberal City: Implications for Social Struggle in Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati

This paper explores the disparities between the ideological discourses and material outcomes of three key urban policies, contextually grounded within the neoliberalised social and institutional spaces of Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati. Whilst the rhetoric of neoliberal doctrine presents an emancipatory urban imaginary based upon individual freedom and the beneficent role of free markets, the embedding of the policies discussed accentuates the political and economical disenfranchisement of the most marginalised neighbourhood inhabitants. Moreover, the ability of this group to politically mobilise against hostile neoliberalisation and gentrification is undermined by the facilitation of out-migration of stable low-income families and community leaders, and the reproduction of the negative, criminal, and blighted aspects of Over-the-Rhine's environment. Neoliberalisation is seen to operate through material and discursive moments of social exclusion and in perpetuating sociospatial structures which justify the continued implementation of repressive political and regulatory projects. In concluding, I suggest neoliberal hegemony may be undermined through exposing the ways in which it reproduces and exacerbates the phenomena it condemns