Andrew Harris

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective

Gentrification has become a global phenomenon over the past 15 years and has been understood as an increasingly important strategy within neo-liberal policy-making. Focusing on London and Mumbai, this paper details how public policies and planning regimes have been reconfigured and rescaled to facilitate and encourage new property speculation. However, against more generalised and abstract accounts of the neo-liberal city, the paper uses its comparative perspective to emphasise the geographically and historically specific manifestations and effects of gentrification processes. By highlighting different forms of state intervention and sharper socio-spatial impacts in Mumbai, the paper challenges the Eurocentric framing of a global spread of gentrification and argues that Mumbai can act as an important source of learning for gentrification research.

Planning Histories and Practices of Circulating Urban Knowledge

This symposium creates and stimulates new dialogue and cross-disciplinary exchange between planning theorists and geographers in researching the transfer of urban policy and planning models, ideas and techniques. The symposium challenges a restricted historical focus in much of the emerging geographical literature on urban policy mobilities by drawing on a rich tradition within planning history of exploring and documenting the trans-urban travel of planning ideas and models over the last 150 years. It is argued that this longer-term perspective is required to highlight important historical continuities and institutional legacies to contemporary urban policy circuits and pathways and to question what is particularly new, distinct and innovative about an intensification in the travel of urban ideas, plans and policies over the past decade — and the accompanying scholarly interest in them. The symposium also uses the emphasis on particular details and specific experiences within planning histories to foreground and develop approaches, particularly from recent geographical scholarship, that investigate the contingent and embodied practices and wider epistemic contexts that enable — or hinder — contemporary policy transfer.

Vertical urbanisms Opening up geographies of the three-dimensional city

This paper develops a more diverse and multi-dimensional agenda for understanding and researching urban verticality. In particular, it argues for vertical geographies that encompass more than issues of security and segregation and are not necessarily framed by the three-dimensional politics of Israel/Palestine identified by some commentators. In opening up a wider world of vertical urbanisms, the paper outlines three key approaches: close attention to where urban verticality is theorised and the relationship between power and height, the importance of ethnographic detail to emphasise more everyday verticalities and disrupt top-down analytical perspectives, and geographical imaginations that carefully attend to the myriad spatial entanglements of the three-dimensional city.

Concrete geographies: Assembling global Mumbai through transport infrastructure

Through a focus on the concrete geographies of transport infrastructure in contemporary Mumbai, this paper develops a critical engagement with assemblage theory and the global city. It details how international consultants, contractors, investors and investment, as well as materials, techniques and technologies, have helped sustain and strengthen Mumbais relations, associations and flows of global reach. In so doing, it demonstrates how ‘global city-ness’ is generated and articulated through diverse human and non-human components. However, the paper argues this exploration of socio-material assemblages needs to be combined with an analytical probing of the comparative imaginations, discursive categories, elite coalitions and uneven geographies involved. By drawing on post-structuralist theories of globalisation while emphasising the practices, visions and agendas of specific social groups in Mumbai, the paper aims not only to provoke new empirically grounded dialogue between assemblage thinking and critical urbanism, but also to encourage alternative ways of imagining and planning the global city.

The Metonymic Urbanism of Twenty-first-century Mumbai

Over the past decade, Mumbai has increasingly been understood as representative of new forms, trajectories and processes of 21st-century urbanism. This has been a welcome rejoinder to a continued predominance of North American and European cities within international urban research and debate. Yet it is important to query what theory cultures and geographical imaginations have been mapped onto Mumbai in this recent emphasis on the city. This paper argues that, unless Mumbai’s specificities and grounded realities are used to disrupt and reframe existing urban analysis, there is a risk of replicating the comparative perspectives and visions of élite policy-making. This does not mean conferring paradigmatic status on Mumbai or isolating Mumbai as an exceptional form of contemporary urbanism, but instead generating new theoretical dialogue and opening up new channels of urban research and policy formation within a wider world of cities.

Livingstone versus Serota: the High-rise Battle of Bankside

Abstract In 2001, plans were unveiled by a private developer for a 32-storey residential tower next to the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in Bankside. Although not the tallest building proposed within Londons high-rise landscape, this tower became a minor cause célèbre within the citys media. The twists and turns involved in attempts to win — and oppose — planning permission for the building are charted in this paper. Yet, the vociferous battle involved does not reveal distinct political and social fault-lines. Instead, it highlights how an agenda of corporate property-led development has come to dominate efforts to regenerate and re-imagine contemporary London.

Smart ventures in Modi’s urban India:

This commentary emphasizes the topicality and critical importance of a close focus on a smart city such as Dholera. Not only does this address a smart city craze in urban planning and thinking in contemporary India, but it offers a way of exploring the urban visions central to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s model of economic development. It is argued that Ayona Datta’s engagement with Dholera importantly ‘provincializes’ discussion around smart cities in India within wider urban studies debates. But it is suggested that this work might develop greater genealogical connections with histories of colonial urbanism and employ more nuanced empirical research to help disrupt the promotional bombast that currently accompanies smart cities in Modi’s India.

Stress relaxation in epithelial monolayers is controlled by actomyosin

Epithelial monolayers are one-cell thick tissue sheets that separate internal and external environments. As part of their function, they withstand extrinsic mechanical stresses applied at high strain rate. However, little is known about how monolayers respond to mechanical deformations. In stress relaxation tests, monolayers respond in a biphasic manner and stress dissipation is accompanied by an increase in monolayer resting length, pointing to active remodelling of cell architecture during relaxation. Consistent with this, actomyosin remodels at a rate commensurate with mechanical relaxation and governs the rate of monolayer stress relaxation – as in single cells. By contrast, junctional complexes and intermediate filaments form stable connections between cells, enabling monolayers to behave rheologically as single cells. Together, these data show actomyosin cytoskeletal dynamics govern the rheological properties of monolayers by enabling active, ATP-dependent changes in the resting length. These findings have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of developmental morphogenesis and tissue response to mechanical stress.

Adventures in the Art of Dissent and London’s Olympic State

W here am I? Routed into the Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford, East London I’m trying to get to the Queen Elizabeth Park (Figure 1). Signposts out seem to have disappeared; I’ve been sucked into a zone of full-intensity shopping. It is September 2014—exactly two years since the last of the London Olympics jamboree left town with the Paralympic Games closing ceremony—and my first visit back since sitting high up in the Aquatics Centre amidst a flurry of Union Jacks. I find a route out through the multi-storey car park and emerge into the Park via billboards proclaiming a forthcoming ‘International Quarter’. There’s a businessman in a striped suit, a group of headscarfed young women, cyclists, people photographing reeds, swarms of seagulls, underworked kiosk vendors. There’s smartly uniformed security people on bikes, police on bikes, there’s cleaners patrolling in fluorescent jackets with the Park logo, there’s gardeners tending vegetation which manages not to leave any hidden spaces. I sit down and notice a continuous rumble of construction activity, and how in the distance to the west the towers of central London lurk in the late-summer haze. I take out The Art of Dissent book. Although published in June 2012, this seems a world away; like the Stephen Gill photographs on its front and back cover, the book feels like it’s been degraded. The Art of Dissent, edited by the anthropologist and sociologist Isaac Marrero-Guillamón and artist and scenographer Hilary Powell, captures a whirl of critical energy that amassed around the frustrations, anger and despair felt at the Olympic takeover of this chunk of East London. It expertly compiles 60 contributions that document an important moment in London’s recent cultural energies, described as ‘words that were not meant to be heard, images that were not supposed to be seen’ (8). It’s a rapid-fire array of short essays, photographs, poetry, artworks and speculations; produced by an assemble of artists, photographers, architectural historians, musicians, sociologists, film-makers, activists, writers and many others. No chapter outstays its welcome; no section goes without any illustrations, while a ‘long poem’ by Jude Rogers is split into three fragments. The book has a clear structure and direction throughout in its division into four thematic sections: ‘Incursions’, ‘Excursions’, ‘Displacements’ and ‘Aftermaths’, with the rationale for each carefully outlined in the introduction. The footnotes are squirrelled away like pylons from the Olympic Site; while the writing is always accessible even in its occasional theoretical forays into Agamben, Lefebvre and Deleuze. The book’s publishers Marshgate Press, printers Calverts Co-operative and designers See Studio, deserve laurel wreaths

The New Urban Crisis: how are cities are increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and failing the middle-class – and what we can do about it

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