From the ger districts to the city centre: contrasts and inequities of access and mobility in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

This paper focuses on access, travel and social equity in the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. These areas, radiating outwards from the central part of the city, are home to approximately 60% of Ulaanbaatar’s population and a considerable range of socio-economic groups (Byambadorj et al. 2011). The few available studies on transport and mobility across the ger districts (e.g. Velez et al. 2016; ADB 2009) indicate a relatively low level of automobile access, creating high levels of public or informal transport use. However, motorisation in Mongolia has increased (ADB 2018). Drawing from a mixed methods research approach, the focus of this article is: what are the key mobility and access challenges facing ger district residents, and what social equity impacts do these have? This paper compares travel survey data from a ger district study site with data from an adjacent site in an apartment area linked to the core area of the city. Drawing from ethnography conducted among ger district residents, the paper then builds a higher resolution picture on the difficulties that residents face when travelling within their neighbourhood. The findings indicate that ger district residents face considerable access and mobility shortcomings compared to residents in central, built-up areas of the city. Residents in ger districts are required to engage in considerably higher forms of innovation and collaboration to meet transport needs. This imbalance could perpetuate further motorisation in a city that already experiences high levels of traffic congestion in both ger district and apartment building areas

Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia: Ulaanbaatar, Dynamic Ownership and Economic Flux

What can the generative processes of dynamic ownership reveal about how the urban is experienced, understood and made in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia? Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia provides an ethnography of actions, strategies and techniques that form part of how residents precede and underwrite the owning of real estate property – including apartments and land – in a rapidly changing city. In doing so, it charts the types of visions of the future and perceptions of the urban form that are emerging within Ulaanbaatar following a period of investment, urban growth and subsequent economic fluctuation in Mongolia’s extractive economy since the late 2000s. Following the way that people discuss the ethics of urban change, emerging urban political subjectivities and the seeking of ‘quality’, Plueckhahn explores how conceptualisations of growth, multiplication, and the portioning of wholes influence residents’ interactions with Ulaanbaatar’s urban landscape. Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia combines a study of changing postsocialist forms of ownership with a study of the lived experience of recent investment-fuelled urban growth within the Asia region. Examining ownership in Mongolia’s capital reveals how residents attempt to understand and make visible the hidden intricacies of this changing landscape

Social Sustainability and Ulaanbaatar’s ‘Ger Districts’: Access and Mobility Issues and Opportunities

This paper explores the concept of social sustainability in Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts in relation to access and mobility. Although ger districts are well-established in Mongolian culture as ephemeral encampments with transient residents, contemporary ger districts have become large and permanent residential districts that are now home to an estimated one-third of the country’s population. The more recent growth of the ger districts has taken place in three decades since Mongolia embraced market-based liberal economics, coinciding with waves of socially and economically-motivated urbanisation. More recently, difficult environmental conditions in rural Mongolia have created new waves of migration. The unfolding situation means that the ger districts have grown with little of the forward planning present in other built areas of the city. In turn, this has led to significant imbalances in the provision of transport services into the ger districts and the problems of access and mobility that this paper has highlighted. This paper has identified community-based local transport and delivery services as one potential means for addressing existing access and mobility shortcomings. Such approaches could provide temporary or complementary services alongside other public policy approaches

Effective Cynicism: Waste, Power, and the Negotiation of Urban Decay and Renewal in Ulaanbaatar

In this article, I show how “effective cynicism” allows residents to decipher unequal power relations in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Ethnographic analysis of the myriad ways residents hold onto dilapidated housing in a failed redevelopment scheme reveals how residents’ cynical reflections assist in their efforts to decipher and mobilize state authority. Residents undertake this while simultaneously negotiating the insidious decay of waste accumulated as a by-product of failed redevelopment processes. Throughout, I focus on the presence of waste and cynicism as phenomena that both foreclose and open possibilities. I argue that residents’ repurposing of cynicism as a diagnostic tool, rather than producing detachment, presents a reframing of Peter Sloterdijk’s (1987) discussions of cynical realism, where such realism holds generative potential. Considering the lived experience of urban decay through the three-pronged analytical framework of cynicism, power, and waste reveals subtle residential reconfigurations emerging within the materialities of for-profit redevelopment

Re-arranging the urban: Forms, rhythms, politics

This intervention is by a collective of scholars working on various facets of urbanisation in Asia. Focusing on the notion of arrangements/re‐arrangements, it seeks to extend the consideration of urban politics as a matter of surges, a provisional consolidation of intensities, inhabitants and their practices, affiliations and orientations that give rise to continuously mutating forms of sense, care, and collective action. Whereas the work and effects of institutions, with their genealogies, remits, and competencies, are to a large extent specifiable according to their operating norms and the various regulatory frameworks that govern their operations, the dispositions of arrangements – what they do, what they actually bring about – are not readily definable or clear, enacting a form of performative ambiguity. Involving workarounds, collaborations, exchanges, and agreements that exceed the familiar protocols of interaction among households, local authorities, markets, civil institutions, brokers, and service providers, arrangements entail the enactment of caring, provisioning, regulating, mapping, and steering as the purview of more provisional, incessantly mutating forms that fold in bits and pieces of discernible institutions. In this heuristic intervention we seek to further the ‘urbanisation’ of urban geography itself, in the sense of complexifying both the terrain and the methodological practices brought to bear. It attempts to open a way of speaking about urbanisation processes that exceed binary formulations, countervailing scales, or structural absences to encompass a broader range of processes at work in shaping dispositions that are materialised or simply potentiated. It proceeds from a process of collective composition whose objective is to diversify the working tools of urban analysis rather than simply offering new conceptual formulations

Annotating the Plasmodium genome and the enigma of the shikimate pathway

The completion of the Plasmodium falciparum genome sequence heralds a new era in the effort to identify all the parasite's genes along with their cellular functions. A combination of bioinformatics and experimental proof will facilitate this process. Many enzymes in metabolic processes have been identified, but several examples exist of incomplete pathways, such as the shikimate pathway. This review uses the example of the shikimate pathway to examine the application of bioinformatics to lead experimental design in post-genomic biology