The Grand Projet Politics of an Urban Age: Urban Megaprojects in Asia and Europe

This paper presents a comprehensive study of large-scale, master-planned urban developments in Asia and Europe. Increasing in numbers all over the world since the 1980’s, these urban mega-projects—here referred to as Grands Projets—have become major drivers of urban intensification. Set forth to actuate urban renewal or to augment city expansion, Grands Projets have become spatial manifestations of cities’ larger economic and political agendas. In their development process, they have triggered a change in the urban condition beyond the very boundaries of their sites. As such, they offer a productive means of investigating current urban trends in a globally connected form of concentrated urbanisation. This research, based at the ETH-Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) in Singapore, examines eight case studies in Asia and Europe through five analytical frames: a project’s conception, design, implementation, operation and implications. This approach addresses various spatial and temporal scales within different theoretical and material practices, allowing a comprehensive discussion of Grands Projets within and across varying socio-political contexts. This paper sheds light on the specific urban conditions of Grands Projets despite their global development trends, transnational owners or financing alliances and internationally regulated planning practices. Often dependent on exceptional regulations outside statutory planning procedures, they are subject to context-specific challenges, project-specific briefs and unique configurations of actors and stakeholders, all of which have created different manifestations of Grands Projets in space. This analytical framework, as presented in this paper, will form the basis of a larger comparative endeavour to be completed at a later stage in our work

Incorporation of urban differences in Tokyo, Mexico City, and Los Angeles

Reinvestment and intensification are common processes in many urban areas across the world. These transformations are often analyzed with concepts such as ‘urban regeneration’, ‘urban renaissance’, or ‘gentrification’. However, in analyzing Shimokitazawa (Tokyo), Centro Histórico (Mexico City), and Downtown Los Angeles, we realized that these concepts do not fully grasp the qualitative changes of everyday life and the contradictory character of the urbanization processes we observed. They do not take into consideration the far-reaching effects of these processes, and particularly do not address the underlying key question: how is urban value produced? Therefore, we have chosen a different analytical entry point to these transformations, by focusing on the production, reproduction, and incorporation of the intrinsic qualities of the urban. We found Lefebvre’s concept of ‘urban differences’ and Williams’ concept of ‘incorporation’ particularly useful for analyzing our empirical results. In this contribution, we compare the ‘incorporation of urban differences’ in the three case study areas and offer this concept for further discussions and applications

Data-Driven Citizenship Regimes in Contemporary Urban Scenarios: An Introduction

10.1080/13621025.2022.2147262Citizenship Studies272145-15

Incorporation of Urban Differences in Tokyo, Mexico City, and Los Angeles

City265-6791-81

Chapter 17: INCORPORATION OF DIFFERENCES: THE COMMODIFICATION OF URBAN VALUE

International audienc

Data-driven citizenship regimes in contemporary urban scenarios: An introduction

This Special Issue presents new perspectives on the idea of digital citizenship by delving into the nexus between its emerging concepts, the consequences of the global pandemic crisis, and the urban environment. It does so by addressing a wide range of case studies from three continents and developing two main hypotheses. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has expanded the impact of digital technologies on citizens’ everyday life. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new citizenship regimes are emerging through platformization, datafication, and the rescaling of the state. To introduce the Special Issue, this article: (i) examines recent scholarship about the effects of the pandemic on digital citizenship; (ii) discusses and expands concepts of digital citizenship through case studies; and (iii) assesses how emerging forms of digital citizenship are fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship’ regimes worldwide