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Airbnb has recently become a growing topic of both concern and interest for urban researchers, policymakers, and activists. Previous research has emphasized Airbnb's economic impact and its role as a driver of residential gentrification, but Airbnb also fosters place entrepreneurs, geared to extract value from a global symbolic economy by marketing the urban frontier to a transnational middle class. This emphasizes the cultural impact of Airbnb on cities, and its power of symbolizing and communicating who belongs in specific places, responding to questions of class, gender, and ethnicity—and thereby potentially driving cultural displacement. Coming from this perspective, this paper uses computational critical discourse analysis to study how white and black hosts market black-majority neighborhoods in New York City on Airbnb, and how guests describe their consumption experience. The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb's marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decade ago, in their article on 'variegated neoliberalization', political geographers Brenner, Peck and Theodore proposed what has become one of the leading theoretical conceptualizations of neoliberalism. By developing a process-based account of neoliberal transformations, they successfully trace neoliberalization across geographies and temporalities, accounting for both its systemic and contingent qualities. In this paper, I suggest that the variegated neoliberalization approach would benefit from contributions made by the French Régulation school, particularly those that introduce the institutional complementarity/institutional hierarchy as crucial components for understanding institutional configurations of diverse capitalist economies. Namely, I point to the fact that shared institutional hierarchies underpin different regimes of accumulation (e.g. Fordist, neoliberal), allowing us to study patterns of accumulation despite evident variation across contexts. By drawing on these insights, it becomes possible to deepen our understanding of the patterned structural traits preceding the onset of neoliberalization and how they shape various courses of institutional differentiation, thereby taking the variegated neoliberalization framework one step further. In the final section, I sketch the neoliberalization of two cities – New York and Johannesburg – to illustrate how legacies of preceding institutions played a role in generating differential neoliberal landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial centres are central to contemporary capitalism, but research on their development has been impeded by methodological challenges related to data availability. This paper offers a new typology of financial centre activity. Based on the nationality of parent companies of financial service providers operating in a centre, and the nationalities of their customers, we distinguish between domestic, export, import and platform activities. Second, we compile a unique dataset of investment banking deals worldwide, which allows us to apply the new typology and introduce the first ever ranking of top financial centres based on the actual investment banking activity conducted in these centres. Our findings confirm the dominance of New York and London as global financial centres, with New York focused on domestic activities, and London on export and platform activities. Our data also show that, overall, investment banking activity has fallen dramatically since 2007, with 60% of the decline concentrated in New York, and a further 30% in Zurich, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Edinburgh combined. As a result, the dominance of investment banking by New York and London has diminished, contributing to a trend that predates the crisis, explainable by the increasing shares of Asian centres, with Tokyo and Chinese cities in the lead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a historic preservation controversy that surrounded redevelopment efforts in Coney Island during the late 2000s. This longstanding amusement district in Brooklyn, New York inspired widespread agreement about its importance as a heritage destination. The apparent agreement, however, belied profound differences over the aspects of the neighborhood that contributed to its iconic stature and about how they should relate to plans for the area's redevelopment. Because heritage value is not an inherent attribute of the built environment, these divergent cultural claims raise questions about how this value comes about. The literature on heritage finds answers to these questions in processes of community formation. This explanation, however, offers limited insight into the classification of Coney Island features as objects of heritage. I make sense of the valorization of these features in terms of experiential qualities that cast an anachronistic glow over Coney Island and that inspired in preservation advocates a sense of the neighborhood's heritage. By looking beyond community dynamics and examining alternative ways in which heritage value arises, my research contributes to our understanding of the contentiousness that surrounds the redevelopment of historic places. It also poses a challenge to preservation efforts that assume the centrality of communities to heritage value claims, bypassing the anterior question of how people experience and understand places of heritage in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores questions of sexual difference and religious belief in relation to recent debates in urban studies and geography on urban encounters. Although it has been widely suggested that increased contact between members of different groups is an important driver for tolerant and respectful intergroup relations, there is need for more careful consideration of the kinds of sites that actually facilitate 'meaningful encounters'. Specifically, we draw on empirical research in Episcopalian churches in New York City and examine how straight-identified parishioners and clergy narrate and perceive their encounters with the city's LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) population. Moving beyond the traditional focus on public space in the literature on cosmopolitan urbanism, we examine how churches serve as 'micropublics' which organize, facilitate, and/or limit encounters with sexual difference. To capture the tension between orthodox theological understandings of human sexuality and lived experiences in a metropolitan context where homosexuality is expressed relatively openly, the discussion focuses in particular on an evangelical case-study parish, where the church leadership is opposed to full LGBT inclusion in the church [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics often mourn a loss of publicness in cities due to the increased presence of antiterror security zones and related behavioral and access controls, although recent work suggests that security landscapes have shifted from the hard, intense, militarized architecture of the late 1990s-early 2000s to a softer, less obtrusive approach more commonly seen today. Nonetheless, these studies are mostly anecdotal in nature: few studies attempt to back these claims with empirical evidence and even fewer connect this physical security imposition with the policies and plans governing its implementation and operation. In this paper I describe results of site visits to Civic Centers and Financial Districts in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In each neighborhood I catalog security landscapes using a simple tool to assess the intensity, duration, and location of individual security zones. I find that the security landscape covers between 3.4% and 35.7% of publicly accessible space in the districts studied, and that this landscape is most prevalent and intense in New York City. I also find that security zones governed by multistakeholder networks are more intense and militarized than zones managed by a single entity. By understanding how the policies impact physical security, albeit in a relatively small sample of cities and districts, we can better predict what the future of urban security measures might hold. This paper provides empirical grounding to more common theoretical speculations regarding the future of the urban security landscape in the global West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the linkages between gentrification and the displacement of small-scale manufacturing and blue-collar work in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Although the link between global economic change and gentrification has been made for the upper classes who are the consumers of the gentrified landscape, very little work has been done on the bluecollar work and workers that remain in the central city despite the assumption by policymakers that deindustrialization is complete. I argue that manufacturing is still a viable sector of the urban economy that is increasingly at risk of displacement because of the conversion of industrial space to residential use and speculative real-estate pressure. In this way, gentrification is encouraging industrial displacement, which in turn is leading to the degradation of the blue-collar work that remains and to the increasing informalization of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the variegated urbanization of technology-based economies through the lenses of a comparative analysis looking at New York City and Rio de Janeiro. Over the last decade, the former has gained a reputation as a ‘model tech city’ at the global level, while the latter is an example of emerging ‘start-up city’. Using a Marxist-Foucauldian approach, the article argues that, while technopoles in the 1980s and the 1990s arose from the late Keynesian state, the globally hegemonic phenomenon of start-up urbanism is illustrative of an increasingly decentralized neoliberal project of self-governing ‘enterprise society’, mobilizing ideas of community, cooperation and horizontality within a context of cognitive-communicative capitalism in which urban environments acquire renewed centrality. In doing so, the article underlines start-up urbanism’s key contribution to the reinvention of the culture of global capitalism in times of perceived economic shrinkage worldwide and the central role played by major metropolitan centres in this respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a decomposition of residential self-selection by understanding the process of its formation. We take a life-course perspective and postulate that locations experienced early in life can have a lasting effect on our locational preferences later in life. In other words, what was experienced spatially is a key factor contributing to our residential self-selection, and our preferences in residential locations are formed long before the onset of our self-selection. We further hypothesize that this prior-location influence is modified by the duration and recency of the prior stay. Using a dataset collected in the New York City Area, we estimated a series of multinomial logit models to test these hypotheses. The results confirm the prior-location influence and demonstrate that this precedes residential self-selection and is impacted by its own properties such as duration and recency. Furthermore, the analysis separating child-bearing households from non-child-bearing households shows an interaction between prior-location influence and the presence of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]