Urban inequality revisited: from the corrugated city to the lopsided city

In this forum paper, I revisit the rich and coherent literature on inequality from the 1990s, immersed in radical urban studies and Marxist political economy, and apply it to recent transitions in city fabrics, that is the built environment and the social worlds around it. Some city fabrics reflect powerful interests, while others are more everyday and mundane. Recently, there has been the sense that powerful fabrics have increasingly encroached upon or erased everyday ones. I use urban vignettes to visualize the shift from the corrugated city, where there was a rough balance between powerful and everyday fabrics, and the lopsided city, where powerful fabrics seek to displace and dominate. This transition requires a more robustly class-driven analysis than what is currently used in urban studies, itself fragmented. In response, I articulate a focused yet balanced analysis of the lopsided city in conversation with certain key legacies of the 1990s literature on inequality: studying the extremes, building theory on empirical richness, paying attention to the city fabric, a concern for social justice, the importance of formal mechanisms in the city (e.g. the state and developers), and balancing fragmented and totalizing views of the city. However, certain aspects of the 1990s literature have aged less well, such as the obsession with the dystopic, the narrow focus on global cities of the Global North, and the ‘all-or-nothing’ (universalistic) notions that class should dominate urban analysis

The role of the ‘ambiguous home’ in service users’ management of their mental health

Research on mental health geographies and housing has focused on pattern and distribution, rather than social and cultural constructions of home. Here we attempt to understand meanings and roles of home for individuals with mental illness in the UK within the context of a deep-seated housing crisis. The discussion is sharpened by the notion of the ambiguous home, ranging from a place for retreat, separation or even isolation from the world, with experiences of recovery, stability or wellness, to home as something more negative, in which distress or illness flourished, and in which people became entrapped or from which they sought relief. Three themes crosscut this range of experiences: home as material object; home as relational; and home as rhythm

Power, powerlessness and the politics of mobility: reconsidering mental health geographies

We use a qualitative, longitudinal study of 25 individuals with mental illness in the UK to better understand the relationships among mental health, power/lessness and im/mobility. Framed by the rise of the new mobilities paradigm and more specifically Cresswell's (2010) politics of mobility, we find that the extent to which the respective mobilities were expressions of internal free will or were undertaken as a result of external compulsion is a key demarcator of mental health. A key contribution is understanding the involuntary nature of (forced) immobility, or what we call entrapment. Entrapment is a punishing phenomenon, which causes distress to those unfortunate to experience it, and which can often be deepened rather than alleviated by those statutory bodies charged with providing care and support. The results speak to the need to recognize that (1) mobility is always relational and contextual, (2) (im)mobility is as much involuntary as voluntary, and that this has crucial implications for (mental) health, and (3) that the experience of individuals suffering from mental illness very much overlaps with what Philo (2017) called ‘less-than-human geographies’, providing a much-needed rebalance to the over-emphasis on well-being within health geography and (mental) health policy

The service hub as bypassed social infrastructure: evidence from inner-city Osaka.

We shed light on understudied social infrastructure by focusing on the service hub, those conspicuous clusters of voluntary sector organizations designed to help the most vulnerable urban populations. Using Kamagasaki, Osaka as an exploratory case study, we find that the service hub acts as a distinctly inner-city social infrastructure marked by very close proximity of clients and services, as well as high accessibility, mutuality, and provisionality, and clear motivations to ensure day-to-day survival. But the conversation between service hub and social infrastructure indicates that our case study must be understood as a bypassed infrastructure, unsung and out-of-sync with the market (but increasingly less so with the state). Kamagasaki suggested an social infrastructure of castoffs, standing apart and increasingly incompatible with current urbanism and its emphasis on privatization, gentrification, and neoliberal co-optation, or even with the older “infrastructural ideal” of the Fordist era, with its emphasis on large-scale universality

The relational geographies of the voluntary sector: disentangling the ballast of strangers

We propose that voluntary sector geographies are best understood using a systematic relational approach, drawing upon neo-Marxist and symbiotic perspectives. We focus on relations between the voluntary sector and the (shadow) state, internal spaces of client interaction, and external urban spaces. Our relational approach advances alternative understandings of the voluntary sector: ones that are partly but not fully in the orbit of the shadow state; more mediator than conduit for neoliberal policies; partly punitive, yet firmly in relation with other ambivalent measures for clients; and both spatially uneven and fixed, but always unbounded in its practices

Managing service hubs in Miami and Osaka: between capacious commons and meagre street-level bureaucracies

As key sites of governance and poverty management, service hubs are conspicuous inner-city clusters of voluntary sector organizations that serve vulnerable urban populations, including people grappling with homelessness, substance abusers and mental illness. In this paper, we frame service hubs as potentially embodying capacious commons on the one hand, and meagre street-level bureaucracies on the other, reconstituting Lipsky’s individual focus to embrace the agency level. We use a comparative case study approach, focussing on two service hubs – Kamagasaki in Osaka and Overtown in Miami – to show how organizations in each combined, in various ways, the two logics in practice. The results suggest that service hubs acted more as ‘managed commons’, but with some tendencies towards street-level bureaucracy. This conversation between the commons and street-level bureaucracies, and its comparative application to the voluntary sector within service hubs, serve as our primary conceptual and empirical contributions, respectively. We conclude by considering how the two logics overlapped and created hybridized models of poverty management

Connected growth: Developing a framework to drive inclusive growth across a city-region

This ‘in perspective’ piece addresses the (re-)positioning of civil society within new structures of city-region governance within Greater Manchester. This follows on from the processes of devolution, which have given the Greater Manchester City-Region a number of new powers. UK devolution, to date, has been largely focused upon engendering agglomerated economic growth at the city-region scale. Within Greater Manchester City-Region, devolution for economic development has sat alongside the devolution of health and social care (unlike any other city-region in the UK) as well. Based on stakeholder mapping and semi-structured interviews with key actors operating across the Greater Manchester City-Region, the paper illustrates how this has created a number of significant tensions and opportunities for civil society actors, as they have sought to contest a shifting governance framework. The paper, therefore, calls for future research to carefully consider how civil society groups are grappling with devolution; both contesting and responding to devolution. This is timely given the shifting policy and political discourse towards the need to deliver more socially inclusive city-regions

Entangling voluntarism, leisure time and political work: the governmentalities of neighbourhood planning in England

Neighbourhood planning was the first volunteer-led statutory planning tool to be created in the UK. Whilst it has provoked debate and critique covering numerous practical and theoretical aspects (Wargent and Parker, 2018), little attention has been paid to the actual experience and motives of the volunteers who spend their leisure time by volunteering to prepare a plan. Given the range of leisure activities that have been shaped in the context of a neo-liberalised policy environment we add to longstanding debates concerning the political nature of leisure and how neo-liberal policies require, and exploit, volunteer time and input while claiming to offer forms of empowerment. Qualitative data derived from neighbourhood plan volunteers is presented here to highlight the political work of neighbourhood planning, thus responding to calls to extend the analysis of the political in and through leisure (Rose et al, 2018). It is argued that neighbourhood planning pushes the boundaries of what can be legitimately asked of volunteers and expected in terms of delivering policy outcomes