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Globalizing City as
Informal, Contested, and
Anchored
Abstract
In attempting to expand the vocabulary of urban description and understanding,
and to offer a new composite conceptual framework for a more integrated
urban planning and policy, this essay addresses the informal, contested, and an-
chored dimensions of the urban in turn; second, it seeks to increasingly link
the three within the new global context; and finally, it attempts to draw these
strands together in a proposed reconceptualization of the contemporary city
within a world where the global is urbanizing and the urban is globalizing.
Keywords
Urban Informality, Contested Cities, Anchor Institutions
Introduction
The disciplines of urban policy and planning contain a lexicon that reflects the
flux and trends of both academic analysis and political priority: for instance,
1
Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
2
University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA
Corresponding Author:
David C. Perry, University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs,
Department of Urban Planning and Policy, Chicago, IL 60607
Email: dperry@uic.edu
urban renewal (in the aftermath of depression and war); urban regeneration
(in the wake of de-industrialization and urban sprawl); and, more recently,
urban resilience (in response to challenges of social, fiscal, and environmental
sustainability). In tandem, the processes underpinning these agendas have
also replaced their terminology. So, for instance, whereas importance used to
be attached to participation, now the talk is of partnership, and inclusion.
Instead of community development we refer more now to community capac-
ity. At the same time, contemporary discourses engage with how cities can at
once attain a competitive entrepreneurialism, while espousing the solidarities
of social cohesiveness; how the sociospatial polarizations associated with the
volume and pace of transnational flows of capital can be abated within current
logics of accumulation (Harvey 2010); how to achieve an integral urbanism
that embraces diversity and hybridity through deliberate designs to amplify
porosity and connectivity (Ellin 2006); how to embrace the new technologies
of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics, while paying heed to the
risks of social engineering and “posthumanism,” or conversely, how to link
bioengineering’s increasing recognition of the interdependence of organisms
to a greater recognition of social interdependence (Rushe 2009); and how
locality can relate to a global structural realignment that is reinventing power
relations between global north and south. Within this contextual turmoil, the
old politics and economics seem not merely antiquated but also increasingly
redundant. While the times are always “a-changing,” these times are genu-
inely both enigmatic and transformative. How can urban scholarship respond?
In attempting to expand the vocabulary of urban description and under-
standing, and to offer a new composite conceptual framework for a more inte-
grated urban planning and policy, this article addresses the central categories
of people, politics, and place. In the case of people and their social relations,
it examines the urban through the lens of the “informal city”—informality
here is not considered as a marginal state relative to the regular relations of
state and market, but rather as a valid mode of urbanism. In terms of the politi-
cal, it attends to the perennial presence of power and contestedness in the
urban arena, and the new ways these find expression in the reshaped transna-
tional city. With respect to the creation of place, it emphasizes the new pivotal
role of durable “anchor” institutions in shaping urban social space, in an era
marked by greater fluidity, mobility, and impermanence. In short, the argu-
ment is that contemporary urbanism in both the global north and south can be
better understood by unraveling the association between the formal and infor-
mal; between the consensual and contested; and between foundational and
less rooted institutions, and most importantly by appreciation of the engage-
ment among these three dimensions of informality, governability, and human
settlement. Accordingly, the article is structured to, first, address the informal,
contested, and “anchored” dimensions of the urban in turn; second, to increas-
ingly link the three within the new global context as the discussion proceeds;
and finally, to draw these strands together in a proposed reconceptualization of
the contemporary city within a world where the global is urbanizing and the
urban is globalizing. The methodology underpinning the analysis comprises
not just an interdisciplinary literature review but also participant observation
of policy making in cities such as Chicago and Belfast, and semistructured
interviews with leading urban stakeholders.
resistance, and engagement will feature more acutely as the contested nature
of cities becomes accentuated. Third, there remains the important role of
anchored urban institutions such as medical facilities, universities, and civic
foundations, and how such well-established formal agencies interconnect
with the growing presence of informal agencies will be an important deter-
minant of future urban equity and inclusivity.
Some of this dilemma is apparent in India’s Kolkata,1 with the epic scale
and pace of its informal development, whereby multitudes of rural migrants
procure illegal possession of land and housing, and subsequently make a call
on requisite public services. Given its hemorrhaging of industrial jobs, its
existing land intensification, and the unrelenting population influx from
rural hinterlands and Bangladesh, the city is afflicted with both congestion
and intractable deprivation. Of the core city’s nearly five million residents,
one-third live in informal settlements of two types: (1) the acknowledged
bastis, which are more normalized, ordered, protected, and serviced, and (2)
the unrecognized squatter habitats, found typically straddling rail yards and
vacant public and private land in the periurban (Chatterjee 2002). Despite
the centrality of such settlement to Kolkata’s formation, its City Development
Plan 2006 actually depicts its periurban fringe as a “twilight zone” that encom-
passes both largely informal or “extralegal” land ownership and squatter con-
struction, alongside the more formal rituals among inhabitants, developers,
and state that constitute middle-class new town development.
Beyond such formal planning mechanisms, residents of impoverished peri-
urbanism tend to perceive their homemaking and pursuit of extralegal proce-
dures to attain basic utilities as a natural form of urban living. Occupants
organize into associations, which then typically intercede between slum dwell-
ers and government welfare authorities. This “entanglement” of the informal
with the formal—between informal settlements with internal formal organiza-
tion and formal government with some latitude for informal negotiation and
discretion—generates a contested politics of capital, land, and identity. Beyond
their role as intermediaries, these associations form part of a political society
that springs “from a collective violation of property laws and civic regulations”
(Chatterjee 2002, 62; Kundu 2010). While the state cannot validate them as
holding equal legitimacy to formal civic associations with exclusively legal
objectives, it cannot blithely bypass them either, and sometimes finds them
convenient channels for ordering some pattern and predictability to such settle-
ments. By the same token, while the squatters concede that their illegal habita-
tion in public land contravenes ideal civic convention, they nevertheless stake
an entitlement to residence and livelihood as a matter of civic right, deploying
their associations as the principal collective instrument to pursue that
policy, planning, and legal structures, which can help “to determine what is
informal and what is not, and to determine which forms of informality will
thrive and which will disappear” (Roy 2005, 149).
This ambivalent role of the state is evident in the Plan of Transformation
in Chicago, which called for the demolition of all 53 high-rise and most
midrise buildings, containing almost 21,000 of the city’s 39,000 units of
public housing, 40% of which were “legally vacant,” even though 55,000
people were waiting for housing. Located almost exclusively in the most
racially segregated and poorest city neighborhoods, these sites were
“estranged” from the rest of the city by highways, and so mired in poverty
and its most destructive impacts that the vast majority of units were consid-
ered by Chicago’s Housing Authority (CHA), and the federal government, to
be beyond rehabilitation. With demolition came a plan to relocate residents,
if they chose, by granting them Housing Opportunity Certificates (or Section
8 vouchers) to be used to enter the wider rental market, a process of dispersal
that was hoped would create new mixed-income, stable neighborhoods.
Advocates of the policy suggest that successive urban programs targeted
at such distressed areas over four decades have, at best, failed to make much
impression on the multiple problems that relate to the spatial concentration of
class and race and, at worst, had only served to accentuate dependency. Thus,
instead of further investment designed to ameliorate these conditions, this
radical approach would at once deconcentrate poverty and attract into these
formerly forbidding neighborhoods mixed income residents, whose presence
would quickly herald stability and marketability.2 Critics of the policy have
charged that both the social analysis and political intent are flawed. For
instance, Steinberg (2010, 221) is dismissive of the assumptions of the social
force attributed to concentrated poverty, claiming that proponents of this
theory fail to demonstrate its complementary effect to structural determinants
of deprivation, and its distinctive pathological impact on the behavior of poor
people. For him, the analysis indicates an ideological bias that demonizes the
racialized poor as inherently aberrant:
Why is it, one might ask, that social scientists valorize the solidarities
of white ethnics as “Gemeinschaft,” whereas in the case of racial
minorities, these same solidarities are disparaged as “hypersegregation”
whose only remedy is “deconcentration by demolition.”
Seen in these terms, the policy can be perceived as a soft form of Giorgio
Agamben’s (2005) “state of exception.” Even for those families permitted to
return to their former neighborhood, the new units are often not sized to
accommodate the traditional extended family structures. Contrary to this cri-
tique of the state’s position, a more differentiated view suggests that HOPE
V1 interventions generate conflict and ambivalence among all the stakehold-
ers involved, including the poorest tenants. In a recent ethnographic study of
the politics of race and class in Chicago, Pattillo (2007, 107), while skeptical
about the “mixed income route” of HOPE V1 “because it is consonant with
urban elites’ interests in recapturing the middle class for the city’s tax base,”
notes the complicated feelings involved: (Pattillo 2007, 109):
Poor residents . . . both favor income mixing and desire more low-
income rental housing; they don’t like the vacant lots but worry about
getting pushed out once those lots are all filled up, and they have
mixed opinions on the question of having neighbors with lifestyles
similar to their own.
Thus, this conflictive and confusing politics of housing among the vari-
ous stakeholders, particularly among the most socially marginalized who
have limited options with which to negotiate their urban condition, have
produced a “paradox”—whereby the informal city is relegated, by dint of its
“outcast” status (Wacquant 2008) to a “state of exception” and the urban
politics that frames policy and planning is meant as much to relieve the chal-
lenges of the state as it is to fully address the stigmatized conditions of the
“hyperghetto.” The challenges of housing and lease compliance are tied to
exigencies that stem from lack of access to living wage jobs. Without them,
the ranks of the “hard to house” will swell and the potential for evictions or
loss of right to return will also escalate.3 These tasks are burdensome. They
have not been solved anywhere in the system. To expect that the CHA and
its social connectors can readily achieve it is unrealistic. But in the formi-
dable task of building “new communities,” public housing administrators
act less like formal observant members of the lease compliance require-
ments and more like what Lipsky (1983) and others (Perry and Sornoff
1973) have called practitioners of street-level bureaucracy. In Chicago
today, very few, if any, former public housing residents are being turned
away— not from housing, and especially not from the counseling, training,
and requisite work development. Like Chatterjee’s examples of the state in
the “political society,” or Oldfield and Stooke’s analysis of the “politics of
engagement/resistance” in Capetown, or Smith’s consideration of transna-
tional urbanism, the CHA and public housing residents agree to engage—
even if regulations must be “stretched.” For everyone involved, too much is
riding on the transformation of Chicago’s public housing for anyone to
eschew flexible and “informal” routes to that policy objective.
From these perspectives, informality can be conceptualized as “instances of
the urban poor, under conditions of extreme inequality, producing the urban in
ways that help them survive day-to-day in the city, even if these survival strate-
gies violate local laws regulating urban space” (Devlin 2011, 145).
The degraded cites of the French urban periphery are not ghettos in the
sense of an ethnically uniform sociospatial formation based on the forc-
ible relegation of a negatively typed population to a reserved territory.
While the politics of identity and diversity can be consonant with deregu-
lated post-Fordist markets, greater income equality is not such an easy com-
panion with neoliberal urbanism.4 Yet the disaffection and insecurity that
attend this intensifying social disparity among low-income communities can
provide a kernel for the divisive politics of prejudice and race (Orr 2009).
In this regard, a more inclusive politics of resistance can arise from those
who either defy “exceptional” status and the role of the state in marginaliz-
ing or delegitimating their lives, or produce an identity out of such excep-
tionality within which resides rights to the city and its services (Lefebvre
1996; Chatterjee 2002)—rights based on their ethnicity, race, class, slum
status, economic practice, and most importantly, their very presence in the
city as urbanites. Dumper (1997) argues that when the state engages in the
differentiated production of services for those who, by dint of their legal
status or identity, are living in an urban state of exception, this is prone to
create the “central paradox” of government. In essence, this means that pub-
lic policy inadvertently exacerbates rather than ameliorates the problem it is
designed to remedy. Applying this concept, he evidenced the role of the
modern practices of the Israeli state, whose macro agenda to maintain Jewish
demographic “security” has left Palestinians living in the country effectively
demoted into “a state of exception.” So even when the state formally set out
to redress some adversities experienced by Israeli Arabs, its nationalist pri-
orities compromised this intervention. Thus, conditions for those in this state
of exception actually deteriorated, even as certain economic and housing
conditions were materially altered. This partisan role of the state in using
legal and planning instruments to subjugate its political opponents has been
characterized as “ethnocracy” (Yiftachel 2006).
In cities like Belfast, the concept of ethnocracy in these terms holds little
explanatory power. Here, the state’s declared role in shaping the city
throughout the “Troubles” has veered between claims for even-handed neu-
trality (Bollens 1999, 2007), via a technocratic apolitical planning system,
and a limited compensatory model of positive discrimination, informed by
values of equity and diversity. Yet the state’s republican and loyalist oppo-
nents have at times challenged the accuracy of this formal characterization
of the state as referee between the two tribes, while champion of the disad-
vantaged in both. But on the ground, space and territory have been central to
the dispute, typical of turf wars in conflict about land (Sack 1986; Delaney
2005; Modan 2007). The spark for the Civil Rights Movement, which imme-
diately preceded this period of conflict, was housing allocation, and the dis-
tribution of housing settlement remains at the heart of the divide. In Belfast,
overall patterns of demographic decline—a reduction of one-third in the two
decades since 1971—have overarched shifts in sectarian geography, whereby
Catholic share of population has risen and Protestant share has declined, to
a point where a city that was once two-thirds/one-third in favor of Protestant
residents is now close to 50-50. As this pattern becomes reflected in the
political composition of city government, the extent to which these demo-
graphic changes are voluntary or enforced becomes a central part of the
ongoing contest about “whose Belfast?” It is a contest that has been marked
as much by informal street politics as by traditional political exchange
(Gaffikin and Morrissey 1990).
An example of this pattern is to be found in the relationship of West Belfast
to the rest of the city over recent decades. This republican heartland operated
for much of the Troubles as a state within a state, developing informally a set
of initiatives designed to challenge government as an alien British state and to
be prefigurative of an alternative nationalist polity and culture. Thus, follow-
ing a decision to curtail the formal public transport service in the area in
response to the intensity of regular rioting, a local community form of trans-
port, known as the Black Taxis, was developed. Flexible and affordable, this
provision offered itself as a superior model of public transport, relative to the
standard service, whose reduced public subsidy at the time compromised its
capacity for reliability and economy. Initially, government cast the organiza-
tion as illegal, operating without proper insurance and registration. However,
over time, its durability and popularity compelled the authorities to retreat
from outright opposition. Ultimately, the informal community service was
“incorporated” into the city’s transport system, an arrangement negotiated
with the Black Taxi Association, prepared to engage around issues such as
insurance. The outcome has contributed to a reconceptualization of transport
in the city and a more diverse service.
In similar vein, in response to persistent high unemployment in the area,
local groups developed a range of social economy projects that sought to
link local redundant skills to unmet social need. From such grassroots enter-
prise in such communities, a “third” economic sector has evolved in Northern
Ireland, between the orthodox private and public sectors (Morrissey and
Gaffikin 2001). Of course, since these schemes in West Belfast were largely
associated with a political project to subvert the British state in Northern
Ireland, there were notable linguistic and cultural programs attached to
them, such as the annual West Belfast Festival, geared to the promotion of
Irish arts. Again, many of these dimensions, such as the creation of Irish
language schools, where children would be taught through the medium of
Gaelic, have since become formally endorsed and financially supported by
government as part of a reshaped pluralist politics to respect diverse identi-
ties and cultures within a value framework of equity and interdependence
(Morrissey and Gaffikin 2006). Such patterns are typical of segregated
spaces where conflictive identity formations, and the deliberate use of sym-
bolism and idiom as cultural representation, significantly shape the urban
polity (Waters 1990; Musterd 2003; Pubrick 2007).
Violent conflict came to Belfast in the late 1960s at the exact same time as
the city was undergoing comprehensive housing redevelopment. In this way,
issues of space and territory became readily entangled with the ethnonationalist
contest over land ownership and sovereignty. Specifically, the republican insur-
rection against the state and its alter ego in the shape of loyalist paramilitarism
provided a backdrop in certain working class communities to forms of “insur-
gency” planning, whereby local broad-based organizations would resist the
“bulldozer” form of demolition and population displacement.5 From such
informal campaigns materialized greater recognition on the part of the state for
the legitimacy of inclusive participatory planning (Gaffikin and Morrissey
1990; Neill 2004; Shirlow and Murtagh 2006).
In short, many of these initiatives that started out as informal and antistatist
were adapted and, in reconfigured form, validated by government. Interestingly,
this ingenuity was emanating from the kind of urban communities that by the
States, for example, this has been occurring in a changing policy context that
includes the further receding of a welfare state; the withdrawal of “carrot and
stick” federal grant aid; decline of revenue sharing and community develop-
ment block grants; and the transformation of public housing via HOPE VI.
So what are the features of anchor institutions that facilitate their deeper
urban contribution? First, in the aftermath of deindustrialization, they are
often the city region’s leading employers, with related significant purchasing
power and substantial real estate as “sunk investment,” an economic power
not always fully channeled for its multiplier impact. In particular, since they
often work in isolation from each other, the potential economy of scale and
scope of their greater connectedness frequently remains untapped (Wiewel
and Perry 2005). Second, as magnets for new economic investment, they can
amplify the role of urban centers as hubs of human and social capital (ICIC
2002; Perry and Wiewel 2005). Third, they can be important “ambassadors”
for their city as it attempts to recast its niche and image in a changing global
economy (Van der Wusten 1998). Fourth, they possess a durability and reli-
ability in a much less predictable cityscape. This so-called sticky capital
affords them the potential for long-term strategic planning that can be embed-
ded in the wider spatial planning of their city region (Porter or CEOs more
recently or Florida).
Fifth, many such institutions contain an interdisciplinary capacity that
permits a multidimensional civic participation, transcending the silo-type
interventions that are increasingly inappropriate in what is a complex multi-
faceted social arena. Many hold a geographical reach that extends beyond
the traditional urban boundaries to link the local with the regional and the
global. This is very significant, since behind all the rhetoric about smart
development and metropolitan and regional planning lies a protectionist
government and administrative structure that often fails to walk the talk
about collaboration and problem sharing. Anchor institutions like universi-
ties, major hospitals, and foundations have a geographical service catchment
that allows them to connect the predicament of city and suburb, and indeed
of city region and the wider national–global arena. So as major employers,
landholders, workforce developers, and procurers, anchor institutions are
prominent among urban stakeholders. By the same token, given the current
straitened fiscal circumstance for most urban centers, increasing pressure
bears on such institutions to provide more of a “public premium,” if only as
compensation for their typical exemption from property taxes. Moreover,
not all of their relations with other stakeholders, such as the most impover-
ished communities, are typically benign. Tension and contest about use of
urban land and resources can strain “neighborly” accord.
Taking the example of the urban university, the evidence suggests that its
land development practices are increasingly informed by an urban as well as
campus mentality (Perry and Wiewel 2005). Thus, the campus is less and less
simply a ring-fenced “academic” terrain and more an urban space, with
mixed-use development that blurs the academic and commercial uses around
the edges of the old campus (Amborski 2005; Dixon and Rorhe 2005). In this
sense, the university real estate plan is part of urban planning (Kelley and
Patton 2005). This is a spatial expression of the changing role of academy
(Rodin 2007). It is no longer expected to just focus on a knowledge-creating
capacity, without optimizing its wider civic role in social, economic, and cul-
tural life in the city-region. One example in the United States is the Greater
University Circle in Cleveland, where universities, with their multifaceted
character, both link up with adjacent hospitals and connect with 40 nonprofit
institutions in the nearby cultural district. With involvement from the
Cleveland Foundation, and engagement with city government and commu-
nity development agencies, this project aims to help revitalize a wide corridor
of a city that has endured sustained economic and demographic decline,
through the provision of new housing, schools, retail, and social enterprise. In
this way, campus planning becomes completely intertwined with urban plan-
ning.6 To some extent, this role as “good neighbor” and active community
developer involves a civic leadership that is filling a void left by the loss of
stable, committed corporate leadership,7 and at the global level we expect
universities to be central institutions in nation building. In short, we expect
universities to not only be great academic institutions but fully vested urban
institutions— “anchor institutions,” foundational to the building of cities. As
such, they transcend (or should) the distinction between the formal and infor-
mal, open to the possibilities that come from erasing such a binary and simply
seeing the twenty-first-century city as under renewal, with new voices and
agencies that speak to the significant diversity of possibilities built upon,
NOT dependent upon, network relationships of globalization.
The role of academy has achieved most prominence in this discussion
about the potential regenerative power of anchor institutions, particularly
with respect to the most disadvantaged urban areas in the United States
(Taylor 2011, 3):
The options are usually either to turn a blind eye to the practices and
hope for the best or to roll out strict enforcement. There are rarely
provisions in laws and rules that allow for contextual flexibility and
incremental upgrading, leaving planners and urban administrators with
few options.
the “informal” belongs to the global south while the formal is the preserve
of the global north. Both processes coexist in each part of the world. Thus, it
is crucial to appreciate the intersection between informal communities and
formal institutions of state and market in both parts of the world, and how
the contested articulation of this in one part can assist investigators in mak-
ing sense of the process in the other. To complicate further, within the for-
mal, there are many aspects of informality. Thus, behind the apparent
rigidities of official procedures in first world cities lie the uncertified nego-
tiative networks of hidden influence and deal-making “subterranean” poli-
tics. Similarly, within the apparent unsanctioned informality and mayhem of
much human settlement in the global south, operate systematic organization,
rationality, and methodical association.
Legitimating their consequential presence does not imply a depreciation
of the “formal” city as illusory. Nor does the “informal” city merely offer
illustration of sites of resistance, if only because such repressed constituen-
cies exhibit both passivity and defiance in the face of uneven power. Indeed,
concentration on resistance, embedded in an oppositional politics of identity
or reaction to a status of exception, ignores the facet of engagement between
these putative “outcasts” and the formal state. Thus, cityscapes comprise
multispaces, whose intersection provides the dialectic encounter between the
formal and informal—between official and unofficial, orthodox and tacit
knowledge, modernity and tradition, discernible and oblique power, inclu-
sion and exclusion—that can engender conflict but can also convert, often
unintentionally, into the assorted hybridities that recurrently invent everyday
routine of city life. In this context, the response of urban planners and other
“regulators” can at once retain core principles of civic equity, while acknowl-
edging that uniformity of treatment is not the same as equality of treatment.
Unequal conditions justify variation in intervention. While this complicates
the decisions of such public officials, the comfort zone of current profes-
sional proceduralism underestimates the complexity and disparity inherent in
what Castells and Portes (1989) described as “the world underneath.”
Examples of urban relations have been introduced here to emphasize the
dominance of these conflictual as well as unofficial components of normal
everyday city life. The resourcefulness and resilience nurtured by the infor-
mal city provide at least a modest balance in this uneven power encounter.
Thus, perhaps, something significant can be learned about successful urban
outcomes by examining, for example, the politics of informality in Capetown
and Kolkata, Chicago and Belfast—revealing ways that produce direct ser-
vices to squatters, townships, and hyperghettos, not because these parts of the
city are “illegal” or “nontraditional” or “lawless” or sites of “urban outcasts”
but because life in these settlements is urban life, and engaging this life, in a
direct politics based on the right to the city (Lefebvre 1996) that derives from
that life, creates not only practical urban policy, but also a theory of urban
politics that brings into higher definition the city’s informal and contested
dimensions.
This analysis implies that the standard models of urban planning and
policy in both the global north and south would need to be reconceptualized,
and in this process, a basic paradox would have to be acknowledged.
Modernist Planning extols the virtue of regulation as a vital instrument to
compensate for inequities in market-led development, particularly in the
context of neoliberal nostrums favoring de-regulation. Yet informality also
challenges proceduralist regulation. So an inventive approach by planning to
the spatial manifestations of informality would still have to pay heed to the
principle of public benefit. Moreover, following from this essay, no longer
would the north’s model of development be taken as orthodox and thereby
to be transposed on an “emergent” south. By the same token, in its rush to
“modernity” and growth, the global south would need to reappraise its incli-
nation to implant urban models from the West. With regard to measuring
urban resilience, less attention would be paid to capacity to withstand shock,
or for recovery to equilibrium and stability in the wake of a disturbance.
Rather, “stress-testing” cities would assess capacity for a dynamic flexibility
and adaptability. In other words, there would be less concern about scope for
coping and constancy, and more for competence for transformability—for a
more sustainable globalism based on a representative, plural agonistic plan-
ning (Mouffe 2000; Sandercock 2003), to be reflected in more diverse and
equitable cities. The complex interpenetrations of contest and consensus,
formal and informal, modern and traditional, the fluid and anchored, and the
role of native and newcomer—as outlined here—need to be better appreci-
ated for their subtle synergies.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article.
Notes
1. This discussion of Kolkata benefits from the research of our colleague, Ratoola
Kundu (reported on, in part, in the chapter “The City and Its Politics: Informal and
Contested” in the book The City, Revisited: Critical Perspectives from Chicago,
Los Angeles and New York, edited by Dennis Judd and Dick Simpson (Minneapo-
lis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
2. Interviews with Community Development Corporation and New Communities
Program officials.
3. See the careful work on the “hard to house” and post–public housing settle-
ment by Popkin and Cunningham (2005) and Popkin, Cunningham and Woodley
(2003), among others.
4. The notion of “neoliberalism” in general and neoliberal urbanism is found
throughout contemporary social science literature. Here we suggest just three
sources for this topic: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo Liberalism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal
City Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2007); and Eugene McGann and Kevin Ward, eds.,
Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age (Minnesota: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2011).
5. Interviews with community activists in Belfast.
6. Interview with senior official charged with the development of University Circle
(July 2009).
7. See the example of the universities of Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States
where the notion of “place-based” or “anchored” institutional development of
the city/region required “360 degrees” of such development, where the univer-
sity had to be not only a “neighbor” but also a “city planner” and an innovative
“entrepreneur.” This requirement for a full approach to the role of the urban
anchor institution is evident in cities throughout the world. For the Atlanta exam-
ple, see D. Perry et al., “360 Degrees of Development: Three Universities and
the City of Atlanta” (working papers series, Lincoln Institute for Land Policy,
Cambridge MA, 2009).
8. This section’s discussion of public housing benefits greatly from the histori-
cal description found in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
1996. An historical and baseline assessment of HOPE VI. Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office.
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Bios
Frank Gaffikin is Professor of Spatial Planning at the Queens University, Belfast.
He is also Director of the Institute of Spatial and Environmental Planning and the
Director of the Contested Cities and Urban Universities (CU2) program at the
Institute. The author of numerous books and articles, Professor Gaffikin’s most recent
book, with Mike Morrissey, is Planning in Divided Cities (2011) Wiley/Blackwell.
David C. Perry is the Associate Chancellor for the Great Cities Commitment and
Professor of Urban Planning and Policy, Public Administration, and Political Science
at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The author of 10 books, including 2 recent
edited volumes with Wim Wiewel on the role of urban universities as anchors of
urban development in the cities of North America and the world, Perry is presently
writing 2 new volumes on place-based urban development, using universities and
community foundations as empirical examples.