FEATURED IN IJURR
A Shadowy ‘City of Light’: Private Urbanism, Large-Scale Land Acquisition and Dispossession in Ghana
The rapid expansion of African cities has created both housing deficits and a pluralization of urban orders, including the growth of slum settlements. With an ever-increasing middle class, urban sub-Saharan Africa is now also characterized by large-scale land acquisition processes linked to the construction of wholly...
Life After Resettlement in Urban China: State-led Community Building as a Reterritorialization Strategy
Resettlement thus far has been conceptualized as a large-scale form of displacement taking place within a short timeframe. In this article I attempt to reinterpret resettlement as a two-stage process involving both the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of residents by shedding light on the processes and...
Urban Shrinkage in China, the USA and the Czech Republic: A Comparative Multilevel Governance Perspective
Although the phenomenon of shrinking cities is a global one, policy responses can vary considerably depending on context. This article examines the initiatives of government agencies in a variety of contexts and finds that cities adopt different strategies to manage the problems of shrinkage. Specifically, the article...
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Detail from a map of the Kpone Katamanso Municipal Area in Ghana, site of ‘Appolonia City of Light’, one of the largest privately engineered and master-planned enclaved city projects on the continent, catering to the housing needs of a rapidly growing middle class (map © Austin Ablo, produced by RS/GIS Lab, University of Ghana)
Detail from a photo of a slogan in keeping with the Chinese government’s environmental objective. Framed by worn painted tyres, the characters read ‘Waste separation is the new trend’, encouraging residents of a resettlement programme to participate in the government initiated scheme (photo © Zheng Wang, July 2019)
Detail from a hilltop view of the shrinking mining town of Lengshuijiang in Hunan Province, China, focusing on some of the metal refineries and factories that dominate the landscape (photo © Kai Zhou, December 2021)