Globalization and Urban Restructuring

• Urbanization is a global phenomenon and a contested process involving transnational mobilities of capital, people, and policies.
• Global urban-nexus: cities are being globalized as the world urbanizes.

Forces Reshaping Cities

• Globalization reshapes cities through capital, labor, and culture.
• The geography of the economy is changing.
• There are changes in information and technology.
• Social processes affect housing, urban governance, community organization, and protests.

Urban Restructuring

• Urban restructuring involves multiscalar forces that affect and connect cities.
• It includes long-term changes in economy, physical layout, infrastructure, architecture, and politics.

Capitalist Urbanization

• Capitalist impacts include deindustrialization and spatial reorganization of production.
• It brings shifting patterns of urban growth.
• Example: King-Parliament District in Toronto relocates manufacturing with federal and provincial cutbacks and expensive offices/condos.

Key Terms

• City: A bounded political and jurisdictional space with varying size, elements, powers, and governance depending on the country, often with colonial links.
• Urban growth increases the number of people in urban areas and with socially-constructed processes.
• Urbanization: the percentage of people in urban areas, also a socially-constructed process with contested outcomes.

Global and Comparative Urbanisms

• Lloyd critiques Eurocentric views, promoting a global lens for understanding urbanization
• Understanding urbanization moves away from binaries needing commonalities and connections
• Understanding cities involves connected flows, deconstructing biases and stereotypes

Relational Urbanism

• Relational urbanism involves understanding connections between people and places
• The study of urbanism requires different perspectives and the lens of informality, intersectionality, youth, and women

Global Urban

• Viewing the global urban requires divergence and expansive perspectives.
• Use comparative lenses to grasp rapid changes in urbanization and to understand wider contexts.
• Integrate feminist and postcolonial methodologies,.
• Scale should be observed on global, national, regional, and local levels.
• Regions and the Global South have imprecise and varied situations; examining inspires new insights.

Planetary Urbanization

• Processes is shaping the planet beyond city boundaries
• It's a capitalist urban condition neglecting the diversity of everyday experiences.

Decolonial, Developmental, and Assemblages

• This involves decentering inherited approaches to urban areas.
• Emphasize needed interventions with a focus on everyday life.

Strategic Essentialism

• Requires understanding historical and political aspects through a global lens with an acknowledgement of limitations.
• The Global South critique traditional hierarchies.
• Comparative urbanism encourages exploration regarding urbanism globally.
• We are limited by ways of knowing the urban like binaries and language.

Transnational Mobilities and Places

• Massey studies a global sense of place, space, and gender.

Time-Space Compression

• The speeding up of capital, travel, and people.
• It involves communication across space and the stretching of social relations.
• Increasing internationalization with money, capitalism and developments
• Economic forces influence it.
• Time-space compression affects North/South relations, colonial ties, race, and wealth.

Power Geometry

• Involves different groups being placed in distinct ways in relation to flows and interconnections.
• Power creates flows and movement that some control; others initiate, and some are imprisoned by it.

Social-Differentiated Mobilities

• These Include jet-setters with hyper mobility
• Also features refugees with involuntary and difficult mobilities.
• Low-income seniors face limited mobility due to transit cuts (house-bound).
• Favel residents are often never get to downtown but global cultural influence
• Place is experienced differently, whether as a "sense of" or being "out of place."
• Global sense of place isn't self-enclosing; it's dynamic and outward-looking.
• What gives a place its specificity?

Everyday Mobilities

• How we experience space rather than what capital gets up to.

Global Restructuring and Social Reproduction

• labour is globally displaced in Beardstown, Illinois
• Revitalization of rust belt town due to de-industrialization

Michoacan, Mexico

• Land dispossession due to NAFTA
• Social reproduction of labour.

Linkages/Flows/Relations

• Involves labour/people, remittances, policies, segregated lifestyles and social reproduction.
• Social Reproduction reorganizes people biophysical, social, cultural.
• Outsourcing care work to families, gender roles to rescue capital, immigrants and cultural obligations, and imagined futures.

Multi-Sited Relational Approach

• It looks at the node, but also the web
• considers processes that capture and consume immigration and the labour force of migrants, but also those that produce migrants
• Attends to "Multiple spatialities and temporalities of globalization” and their linkages to urban processes
• "The transnational connections affecting people and places"
• Considers relational, comparative, diverse, time space compression, power geometry.

Global Restructuring

• Involves links between production, rustbelt revitalization and social reproduction
• Power geometries involve mobilities that are power-laden and socially-differentiated
• Springfield, Ohio was uses to be a ghost town.
• We need to consider how stories are told, who gets centered, and what is visible (or not).

Urban Governance

• Involves processes through which government is organized and delivered at town or city level
• Relationships occur between state agencies and civil society involving NGOs, governments, and institutions.
• Formal groups vs informal governance
• Neo-liberal influence causes inequality, housing crisis, decentralization.

Questions to Consider

• Who makes policy decisions and how?
• Who controls policy agendas and how?
• How are policymaking processes organized?
• Which actors have the power and resources to influence policy? Are efforts inclusive?

Changing Context of Urban Governance

• Aspects include neoliberal austerity and private-public partnerships.
• Urban precarity, fragmentation, polarization, global finance and citizen partnerships occur.

Urban Politics

• Concerns relationships between groups of people and interests involving power and authority
• Space is a social product and urbanization, is a political matter

Settlement, Trajectories and Logics

• Mass produced suburb is planned.
• Autoconstruction requires services, housing and planning

Peripheral Urbanization

• It creates unequal cities facilitating new politics and responses responding to social inequality.

Housing and City-Making

• Residents are agents of urbanization.
• Housing and city-making is a process.
• Specific agency and temporality: residents are agents of urbanization who are always-in-the-making.

Transversal Logics

• Ambiguous and negotiated engagements with state and "formal planning" not state absence

New Modes of Politics

• City and space-making claims for space with regards to its functions
• Heterogeneity considers diversity of socio-economic conditions and spatital unevenness

Housing

• Housing serves as shelter, social connection, identity and access to state
• Commodified, privatized, financialized, inaccessible, investments
• The loss of affordable private rental and slow provision of affordable new housing creates housing wage problems
• Ottawa is not targeting those who need housing the most
• New developments catered to those who can afford it
• Housing is more than a shelter but connected to space and culture creating social geographical inequality

Rent Gap, Upzoning, and Gentrification

• Rent gap is a difference between actual and potential rents triggering gentrification

Housing Issues

• Housing affected by dismantling of basic institutional welfare, the mobilization of a range of policies that intended to extend market discipline, competition and commodification
• This leads to housing as a commodity not a human right
• Creates displacement, declining affordability and less incluse cities

State Policies

• Reduce support
• Promote privatization
• Deregulate tenant
• Deregulate finance

Subprime Crisis

• Low-income was encouraged through unregulated mortgage markets
• Subprime led to foreclosures and financial instability
• Real estate markets competed globally prioritizing corporations over affordable housing
• Events gentrified cities justifying eviction and olypmics
• Government used public funds to bail out banks over funding public housing

Explore how globalization reshapes cities through capital, labor, and culture. Understand urban restructuring's multiscalar forces affecting cities' economies, layouts, and politics. Examine capitalist urbanization's impacts, including deindustrialization and shifting growth patterns.