Rendering a Redeveloped France

International audienc

Neither Race nor the 93 Are What You Think They Are

This article aims at offering an American perspective on the study of Seine-Saint-Denis, a territory that has been the subject of numerous negative representations and that has often been compared to American ghettos. Like many American scholars, we use the concept of « race » (understood as a social construct) as a key lens for understanding geography and geopolitics. But France famously denies the validity of this lens. Both race as a critical analytical tool and Seine-Saint-Denis are the subject of distorting representations which prevent us from understanding their complexity. Consequently and in a comparative perspective, we will focus on three facets of this racial lens (racial politics, racialized stigma and questions of representation) to show both the complexity and utility of race as a concept, and the diversity and complexity of Seine-Saint-Denis as a place.We will insist on the necessity to develop a French way of understanding race in order to deconstruct fantasies and stereotypes, to struggle against the essentialization of racialized territories such as Seine-Saint-Denis, and to better comprehend the processes of domination at work in French society

The Emerging Economic Geography of SIngle-Family Rental Securitization

This working paper utilizes data culled from presale reports from the first wave of rental-backed securities to analyze and describe the emerging trend of single-family home rental (SFR) securitization. Authors provide a basic overview of the market, showing the number and market value of single-family homes involved in these new financial products. Analyzing the geography of the first 15 offerings made between November 2013 and January 2015, authors then produce one of the first maps of the phenomenon, showing a geography heavily weighted towards five states (California, Florida, Texas, Georgia and Arizona) and two Federal Reserve Districts (6 & 12). While the geography of rental securitization is not independent of the post-crisis geography of foreclosure, neither does it map perfectly. Moreover, this geography has evolved over time, with more recent securitizations expanding out from established epicenters of investor activity. Finally, authors examine data on the accessibility of SFR securitized homes to Section 8 tenants, an analysis which suggests a mixed and still very cloudy picture when it comes to the impact on renters. The fundamental conclusion for the policy and community development community is that we simply do not have enough information to draw conclusions as to the future, nature or impact of this growing phenomenon. More transparency and research is needed

Exploring the Relationship Between Housing Downturns and Partisan Elections: Neighborhood-Level Evidence from Maricopa County, Arizona

An understudied outcome of foreclosure crises is how their aftershocks affect partisan elections. Two hypotheses are that partisan shifts may occur in neighborhoods with concentrated foreclosures because of (1) declines in turnout among liberal leaning voters or (2) swells of anti-incumbency among all voters. This research explores these hypotheses in Maricopa County, Arizona, by using econometric modeling to uncover associations among neighborhood foreclosures, voter turnout, and changes in the Republican vote share between the 2006 and the 2010 Arizona gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections. Our results show evidence of (1) anti-incumbent voting behavior and more liberal shifts among neighborhoods harder hit by foreclosures and (2) conservative shifts in neighborhoods experiencing African-American and Latinx population growth. These findings are suggestive of a link between neighborhood housing market distress and neighborhood partisan shifts, which in aggregate may shape state and national policymaking and future neighborhood conditions

Replacing the services sector and three-sector theory: urbanization and control as economic sectors

Developed during the Second World War, ‘three-sector theory’ popularized the notion of the ‘services’ sector. It has quietly underpinned understandings of economic structure ever since. The limitations and influence of this basic breakdown have led to many critiques and extensions, but no replacements. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution (1968), we develop a four-sector model that replaces services with sectors focused on urbanization and control. We argue that this model is a better reflection of material economic life, and a more useful way of approaching the 21st-century economy. It also offers scholars of urbanization and regional development a creative new way of seeing urbanization

Dynamic genome evolution in a model fern

The large size and complexity of most fern genomes have hampered efforts to elucidate fundamental aspects of fern biology and land plant evolution through genome-enabled research. Here we present a chromosomal genome assembly and associated methylome, transcriptome and metabolome analyses for the model fern species Ceratopteris richardii. The assembly reveals a history of remarkably dynamic genome evolution including rapid changes in genome content and structure following the most recent whole-genome duplication approximately 60 million years ago. These changes include massive gene loss, rampant tandem duplications and multiple horizontal gene transfers from bacteria, contributing to the diversification of defence-related gene families. The insertion of transposable elements into introns has led to the large size of the Ceratopteris genome and to exceptionally long genes relative to other plants. Gene family analyses indicate that genes directing seed development were co-opted from those controlling the development of fern sporangia, providing insights into seed plant evolution. Our findings and annotated genome assembly extend the utility of Ceratopteris as a model for investigating and teaching plant biology

Origins of an Urban Crisis: The Restructuring of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Geography of Foreclosure

Communities on the fringes of the American metropolis have recently garnered attention as the centers of the foreclosure crisis and its aftermath. On the one hand, this attention to the urban nature of the crisis is welcome, as the metamorphosis of the mortgage fiasco into a financial crisis‐cum‐global economic meltdown turned popular attention away from the urban roots of this calamity. But this emphasis on the exurbs as the site of crisis lends itself to the misconception that they, rather than the restructuring of the metropolis as a whole, are the sole source of the crisis. This article works across multiple scales to examine how three interwoven factors — demographics, policy and capital — each reacted to the San Francisco Bay Area landscape inherited at the end of the 1970s, affecting the region in new ways, leaving some places thriving and others struggling with foreclosure, which leads to plummeting property values and the deep uncertainty of the current American metropolis. This restructuring can be seen as the convergence between the unresolved urban crisis of the postwar era and the various reactions in the neoliberal era. It demands a reimagining of both planning and geography, especially from the left

Discourse and dystopia, American style: The rise of 'slumburbia' in a time of crisis

This paper examines the recent growth in the popular media of new discourses of decline focused on the American suburb. This new discursive twist, which appropriates language traditionally reserved for inner cities, is rooted in both the city/suburb dialectic, which has long dominated American urbanism, and the empirical realities of the foreclosure crisis and changing geographies of poverty in the American metropolis. Scholars should be concerned about the rise of this new discourse, as it reinforces a dialectic long since outdated, roots decline in a particular geography rather than examining the root causes of the crisis, and has potentially deleterious effects on communities already facing social and economic struggle in the wake of foreclosure. Linked as this discourse is to academic research on the suburbanization of poverty, it gives pause to those scholars who would speak in terms of 'suburban decline'

Beyond Chapala and Cancún: Grappling with the impact of American migration to Mexico | Más allá de Chapala y Cancún: Lidiando con el impacto de la migración estadounidense en México

Over the past two decades, a twist in the migratory relationship between Mexico and the United States has begun to attract the attention of policy makers and scholars: a growing stream of people moving permanently or semi-permanently from the United States to Mexico. Th e general understanding of this phenomenon until recently has been that these migrants are wealthy retirees moving to isolated resort-type complexes in beach cities. However, the present paper demonstrates that the migration is actually heterogeneous in terms of its people, places and impacts. Th us, we argue that study of the phenomenon must be expanded to include not only a better understanding of the migrants themselves, but also the impacts on the receiving localities. To this end, we propose a framework for a research agenda, creating a typology of receiving places and the settlements within these places.link_to_OA_fulltex

From Sanford to Ferguson: Race, Poverty, and Protest in the American Suburb

The tragic deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, two unarmed black teenagers, in Sanford, Florida, and Ferguson, Missouri, helped launch protests across the United States over police violence in African American communities. These two suburban communities were, however, more than just the backdrops to shootings and subsequent uprisings; they were central to the events that took place within them. This chapter investigates how the unrest in Sanford and Ferguson was rooted in a long history of structural violence aimed at African Americans and realized across the metropolitan landscape. We argue that these two communities – one a small inner-ring suburb in the Rustbelt, the other a sprawling Sunbelt city – evidence the ways that African Americans have become increasingly segregated in diverse but struggling suburbs within fragmented metropolitan areas. The uprisings highlighted the racialized policies and practices that have followed African Americans from the city to the suburbs, and the suburbs’ critical position in the modern struggle for racial justice and inclusion in the United States