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Heft
1/2011
PETER HERRLE, Berlin, JOSEFINE FOKDAL, Berlin
Beyond the Urban Informality Discourse:Negotiating Power, Legitimacy and Resources [1]
Jenseits
der Debatte Ÿber urbane InformalitŠt – Muster der Verhandlung von Macht,
Legitimation und Ressourcen
In recent years informality
has been defined and re-defined in the context of urban development. Evolving
from initially being understood as a ÔsectorÕ of the economy to currently being
redefined as a Ônew way of lifeÕ, ÔinformalityÕ has become a rather ambiguous
term.
According to our
understanding, many of the current concepts of informality do not capture the
complexity and importance of connectivity between sectors, levels, and actors.
In particular, they neglect the importance of power relations and the
blurriness of constantly negotiated and readjusted boundaries between the
acceptable and the non-acceptable, legal and non-legal.
In this article, we question
the usefulness of the term ÔinformalityÕ and instead propose a set of
parameters in order to describe negotiation processes inherent to the term âinformalityÕ.
We suggest a model that tries to avoid the ambiguity of the informality debate.
It offers a tool to understand the typically composite pattern of actors and
their interplay regarding the three dimensions: power, legitimacy, and
resources.
ANNA LENA BERCHT, Kiel, RAINER WEHRHAHN, Kiel
Urban restructuring processes in Guangzhou/China – the
significance of emotion-focussed coping
Urbane
Restrukturierungsprozesse in Guangzhou/China – die Relevanz von
emotionsfokussiertem Coping
Since the 1980s enormous changes in Chinese cities have been brought about by
dynamic transformation processes resulting from reform and open door policy and
rapid economic growth. High rates of in-migration, rapid urban
expansion, spatial restructuring of land use patterns
and the implementation of flagship-projects particularly characterise the
dynamic urbanisation of megacities in China. This paper explores and reflects
upon the main transformation processes of a traditional village in the megacity
Guangzhou, South China, processes that are linked to the nearby construction of
the South Railway Station. Our investigation addresses the issue of how the
inhabitants of this village cope emotionally with the restructuring of their
living environment, which is anything but straightforward.
The
primary aim of this article is to enrich the discourse on emotional geographies
by discussing the concept of emotion-focussed coping. Consideration of emotions
facilitates understanding of multifaceted and complex man-environment
transactions – emotions both connect and disconnect people from their
living environment and help to explain coping in relationships that seem
neither amenable to modification nor controllable by action. In-depth
interviews with the inhabitants of the village in Guangzhou and
auto-photography reveal that emotion-focussed coping is widely applied to
regulate emotional responses to stressful encounters through vigilance, avoidance
or by changing the meaning of the man-environment transaction without changing
it objectively.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
TABEA BORK, Cologne, FRAUKE KRAAS, Cologne, DESHENG XUE, Guangzhou, ZHIGANG
LI, Guangzhou
Urban environmental health challenges in ChinaÕs
villages-in-the-city
Herausforderungen
fŸr die Umweltgesundheit in Chinas Dšrfern-in-der-Stadt
ChinaÕs villages-in-the-city
are a typical form of marginal settlement that mushroomed in Chinese cities in
the course of booming economic development, rapid in-migration and urban
expansion processes after economic opening. Based on fieldwork in Guangzhou, the central aims of this
contribution are firstly to analyse the exposure of the rural-urban migrants
living in these settlements to environmental health threats, and secondly to
discuss the emergence of these threats, taking into account the role of various
actors at local and municipal levels and their impact on the environmental health
situation. Data was obtained from expert interviews with representatives of
village collectives and the urban administration in Guangzhou, from systematic
field observations in 19 villages-in-the-city and from
a quantitative survey of 450 rural-urban migrants. The findings presented here
show that the environmental health situation in villages-in-the-city reflects
the complex interplay of diverse forces and players in the Pearl River Delta.
Environmental health conditions vary according to density, economic structure,
the level of commitment of street offices to their management tasks, and the
financial resources of the village collectives.
________________________________________________________________________________________
BEIBEI TANG, Canberra, LUIGI TOMBA, Canberra, WERNER BREITUNG, Guangzhou
The work-unit is dead. Long live the work-unit! Spatial segregation and privilege in a
work-unit housing compound in Guangzhou
Die Danwei ist tot. Lang lebe die Danwei! RŠumliche
Segregation und Privileg in der Wohnanlage eines Staatsbetriebes (Danwei) in
Guangzhou
Through
the in-depth study of one State Owned Institution, University S in Guangzhou,
this paper argues that ChinaÕs traditional urban work units still perform
important social and economic functions and are instrumental to both the spatialization of social stratification and to the
implementation of a form of governance that owes much to the paternalistic
nature of employer-employee relations. The paper is based on both interviews
with residents and a survey inside the residential compound. It reveals that
the privileges that used to be associated with public urban employment during
the Maoist era have not disappeared and that the privilege of public employment
extends beyond higher salary and stability and provides important opportunities
to exploit the market opportunities offered by the ChinaÕs recent economic
development.
Heft
2/2011
KAI B†TER und J†RGEN
POHL, Bonn
Die performative
Herstellung von Clustern durch Theoretiker und Praktiker im Akteursnetzwerk
The performative creation
of clusters in the actor-network by theoreticians and practitioners
This
paper deals with the relationship between clusters as a theoretical concept and
their application in cluster policies. Due to the concept's fuzzy nature, the
scientific community cannot offer one single right definition for clusters.
Nevertheless, clusters play a crucial role in regional development strategies
all over the world although their scale and scope remain unclear.
This
paper does not primarily aim on contributing to the theoretical discourse in
cluster theory but on examining the relationships between the theoretical
debate in the scientific system and the practical sphere in politics and
promotion of economic development. It is shown that this relation does not only
consist of (maybe erratically) implementing the theoretical concept into
practice or of simultaneity of the non-simultaneous or even dilution in the
sense of a sunken cultural good. It rather emphasizes the normative power of
the factual, or put in a more modern way, performativity.
By making use of linguistic philosophy in a pragmatical
way combined with Actor-Network-Theory it is shown that some of the apparent
contradictions between cluster theory and cluster policies can not only be
solved but are logically necessary and inherent to the system.
PETER
DIRKSMEIER, ULRIKE MACKRODT und ILSE HELBRECHT, Berlin
Geographien der Begegnung
Geographical studies on
interpersonal contact in urban settings are usually focused on segregation or
social mixing, and thus limited, to a long-term perspective on contact. A
comprehensive analysis of urban life, though, calls for the additional
integration of short-term and situational aspects in urban encounters. So called geographies
of encounter, developed by British cultural geographies, seek to close this
research gap by scrutinizing the fugitive qualities of encounters in the city.
This altered approach is based on the premise that the interplay between bodily
performances and the urban environment – what we have called Ôsituational
placeÕ elsewhere – represents a constituting element of urbanity. The
empirical research discussed in this paper comprises videographic
data of encounters between strangers in public spaces in Berlin. In three
different urban settings interactions between strangers are analysed and new
theoretical insights are derived from these video sequences of situational
encounters. The authors suggest an extension of existing theoretical vocabulary
for analysing urban encounters in order to more comprehensively reflect the
interrelation between urban space and interaction.
Angelo MŸller and Rainer Wehrhahn, Kiel
New migration processes in contemporary China. The
constitution of African trader networks in
Guangzhou.
Neue Migrationsprozesse
in China. Die Konstituierung afrikanischer Handelsnetzwerke in Guangzhou.
The city of Guangzhou in southern China is characterised
by a particularly pronounced inflow of Africans active in the export trade of
Chinese goods to Africa. Research of such contemporary international migration
in China has so far focused on socio-spatial effects, the social impact on
society or macrostructure economic approaches. There has, however, been little
discussion of questions related to the emergence and processuality
of these very new migratory phenomena. Focusing on issues related to the
constitution of socioeconomic networks of African traders in Guangzhou, this
paper uses qualitative empirical investigation in order to describe and
interpret these migratory processes. Taking an actor-oriented perspective the
socioeconomic relations are investigated in relation to their resource and instrumental
character for the individual actors. Results show a disparity between the
social and economic dimensions of the constitution of network relations of our
focus group, which emphasises the importance of observing networks as a
product of a multiple process of social organisation based on individual action
and strategy.