Rob Shields

This study examines the political and elite motives behind Colombo’s ‘world-class city’ initiative and its impact on public housing in underserved communities. Informed by interviews with high-ranking government officials, including urban planning experts and military officers, this study examines how President Rajapaksa’s elite-driven postwar Sri Lankan government leveraged military capacities within the neoliberal developmental framework to transform Colombo’s urban space for political and economic goals, often at the expense of marginalized communities. Applying a contextual discourse analysis model, which views discourse as a constellation of arguments within a specific context, we critically analyzed interview discussions to clarify the rationale behind the militarized approach to public housing while highlighting its contradictions, including the displacement of underserved communities and the ethical concerns associated with compulsory relocation. The findings suggest that Colombo’s postwar public housing program was utilized to consolidate authoritarian control and promote speculative urban transformation, treating public housing as a secondary aspect of broader political and economic agendas. Anchored in militarized urban governance, these elite-driven strategies failed to achieve their anticipated economic objectives and deepened socio-spatial inequalities, raising serious concerns about exclusionary and undemocratic planning practices. The paper recommends that future urban planning strike a balance between economic objectives and principles of spatial justice, inclusion, and participatory governance, promoting democratic and socially equitable urban development.

This study examines the political and elite motives behind Colombo's ‘world-class city’ initiative and its impact on public housing in underserved communities. Informed by interviews with high-ranking government officials, including urban planning experts and military officers, this study examines how President Rajapaksa's elite-driven postwar Sri Lankan government leveraged military capacities within the neoliberal developmental framework to transform Colombo’s urban space for political and economic goals, often at the expense of marginalized and underserved communities. Applying a contextual discourse analysis model, which views discourse as a constellation of arguments within a specific context, we critically analyzed interview discussions to clarify the rationale behind the militarized approach to public housing while highlighting its contradictions, including the displacement of underserved communities and the ethical concerns associated with compulsory relocation. The findings suggest that postwar Colombo’s public housing program failed to achieve its anticipated economic objectives and continued to reinforce socio-spatial inequalities, raising concerns about the sustainability and ethical implications of militarized urban governance. The paper recommends that future urban planning strike a balance between economic objectives and principles of spatial justice, inclusion, and participatory governance, promoting democratic and socially equitable urban development.

This study considers virtuality in Qing ink wash landscape paintings via an album by Pan Gongshou (1741–94). We examine the painterly devices by which a liminal, ‘virtual,’ space is constructed as a ‘realm’ or world in which the viewer is synaesthetically absorbed into a landscape image. Landscape in this tradition is not a pure creation of the human gaze, nor a representation of material elements and topography. We examine the painterly devices through which a sublime loss of critical distance is linked to the represented elements to absorb the viewer into what Wang Guoweii (1877–1927) proposed as a ‘realm without self.’ Virtualities are intangible but real; they supplement material elements that are represented, changing their meaning and affect. These qualities are at the heart of a geometry of gazes and relations that compose the visual experience of a virtual landscape.

Walkability has emerged as not only a set of indexes and metrics but a normative discourse. This review of walkability studies draws on English, Spanish and Portuguese literatures, as well as case studies evaluating pedestrian walking in cities. In recent literature reviews, a pattern emerges of studies agreeing on relatively consistent factors while identifying problems with metrics. However, these studies continue to operate on an aggregate level, often without differentiating pedestrians by gender, age, and ability. The lack of higher-order socioeconomic and affective factors such as social norms and comfort reflects a lack of attention to diversity. The ubiquitous importance of hand-held mobile devices, although undercut by the lack of a single mobile platform, suggests the possibility of crowd-sourced assessments. GIS and GPS tools allow emerging professional practices focused on walkability audits.

Background: This article considers the temporal aspects and effects of infrastructure that bridges past, present, and future rather than connecting places or delivering services. Analysis: Four “moments” of time infrastructure will be considered in the case of a reconstructed heritage wooden bridge: heritage sites that link to the past, undertakings that mark the present, endeavours that project the current society forward into the future, and the forgetful overlooking of infrastructure as a taken-for-granted and abject temporality. Conclusion and implications: This requires a topological approach, studying “infrastructurality” as heterochronic and as a liminal “super-object” that transcends its normative presence and Euclidean dimensions.

Focus groups on nanoscience, walking tours and a Citizen Summit demonstrate the Edmonton Canada community acting as both a sounding board and also as a collective think tank that mediates across networks in a city-region where strong local elites that draw on mechanical solidarity. This demonstrates the collective learning potential of social networks to be effective mediators in the process of recognizing opportunities. Our participatory research did not pose a regulatory or ethical question for public deliberation. Instead, the public exchanges emerged as diagnostic fora where deliberation lead to a collective evaluation of a proposed nanotechnology cluster. Confronted with an unprecedented area, we trace the attempt of this polity to adapt to the demands of innovation and a knowledge-intensive sector. We found a place-based re-articulation of mechanical and organic forms of solidarity characterized by interdependent specialized sectors across difference. Place plays an important mediating role as a commons.

Introduction to Spaces and Cultures of Quarantine. This special issue assembles a set of short interventions selected by internal blind review from submissions in response to a call for papers. The contributors document the first phase of the pandemic from February to May 2020, reflect on and respond to the first few months of the global spread of COVID-19, its arrival in communities and its personal impacts and effects on the public realm, from travel to retail to work and civil society. They encompass many continents, from Latin America to Asia. Staying six feet apart provides a rubric for the spatial experience and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban life, our understanding of public interaction, crowd practice, and everyday life at home under self-isolation and lockdown. Time changed to a before and after of COVID-19. The temporality of pandemics is noted in its present and historical popular forms such as nursery rhymes (Ring around the Rosie). Place ballets of avoidance, passing by, long days under lockdown and hurried forays into public places and shops create a new social performativity and cultural topology of care at a distance.

Lexicons of Yup’ik sea-ice terminology rely on extra-textual elements, including photographs, diagrams and sketches. Definitions are also supplemented with stories about personal experience and of the behaviour of ice phenomena. Speech act theory argues that these elements communicate an often overlooked illocutionary dimension which shows the importance of semantics in addition to the syntax of scientific definitions. The illocutionary aspects captures the performative, experiential quality of sea ice as a lived environment engaged in processes of hunting, travel and fishing. I argue that the illocutionary force of the descriptions presented in the lexicons is epistemic and ignoring this silences the Indigenous “voice.” This supports Townsends argument that illocutionary silencing occurs when science treats environmental descriptions as not material but cultural and circumstantial.