Femke van Noorloos

This article interrogates how temporary housing in the Netherlands is shaped by informal governance. It argues such practices enable a new state-led paradigm, termed LEGO urbanism, which transforms housing from place-bound infrastructure into modular, relocatable assets. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of the Dutch flexwonen policy, the study shows how LEGO urbanism is realized through three key mechanisms: trust-based networks, discretionary flexibility, and the public absorption of private risk. By theorizing the link between modularity, temporariness, and informal governance, this work extends theories of urban informality to the Global North. It raises urgent questions about the role of the state in temporary urbanism, modularization within urban development, and the normalization of housing impermanence.

This study extends the notion of invisible displacement from migration studies to gentrification in order to reveal the hidden forms of dispossession in authoritarian contexts. It conceptualises invisible displacement as operating across three interrelated dimensions: the ambiguity between voluntary and involuntary relocation, the stigmatisation and marginalisation of socially invisible groups, and the contested politics of compensation. This framework is applied to the case of heritage-led urban regeneration in Beijing. The analysis draws on empirical data from semi-structured interviews with 36 residents, supplemented by open discussions in community-based social media groups. Findings show that displacement is rendered invisible through policy design, discursive framing and spatial control. First, policy-embedded constraints, particularly those related to housing ownership regimes and consent procedures, limit residents’ agency, making them experience forced immobility or involuntary relocation. Second, public housing tenants who resist relocation are excluded from official displacement narratives, stigmatised in discourse, and further marginalised through the institutionalised loss of spatial control. Third, a significant reduction in compensation is legitimised by framing regeneration as heritage preservation and public welfare. By uncovering these hidden mechanisms and social consequences, this study advances a more nuanced understanding of displacement under heritage-led urban regeneration in non-Western contexts.

In current debates on land and resource grabbing, the question of urban land deserves, but has not attracted, sufficient attention. By the same token, debates on global urbanization and sustainable urban transitions only generally mention land in the side-lines. This chapter places attention on the emerging concept of ‘urban land grab’ and examines the relationship between intensifying urban land acquisitions and the experiences of urban dwellers based on the three major types of land investments observed in cities in the Global South: investments in rural and peri-urban land development and real estate; investments into infrastructure development for climate resilience and sustainability; and investments in building new cities. The chapter presents empirical cases from Khartoum in Sudan, Beira in Mozambique, and Konza New City in Kenya to highlight two key issues pertaining to urban land grabs: the complex alliances between investment actors and the various forms of economic and physical displacement. Solid attention is necessary to address these dynamics and advance the research and policy agendas on urban land grabs.

Digital technology has profoundly reconfigured state-society relations and Cuba’s recent broadening of internet access makes for a fascinating case in this regard. However, what this means for the country’s music sector is poorly researched. We explore the role digital media plays in the empowerment of Cuban musicians. While digital media allows musicians to work more independently from government institutions, the ability to benefit from the opportunity depends on unequally distributed resources. Nonetheless, the government’s broadening of internet access goes hand in hand with increasing control over musicians’ autonomy and expression, leading to a cycle of protest and repression. Digital media provides a highly self-reinforcing tool for collective action. Resumen: Medios digitales y el empoderamiento de los músicos cubanos en tiempos tumultuosos: ¿Un nuevo amanecer? La tecnología digital ha cambiado profundamente las relaciones entre estado y sociedad, como lo muestra el caso de Cuba, donde el acceso a internet se ha extendido recientemente. Sin embargo, existen pocos estudios que demuestren qué significan estos desarrollos para el sector musical en Cuba. En este artículo exploramos el papel que juegan los medios digitales en el empoderamiento de los músicos cubanos. Los medios digitales ayudan a los músicos a trabajar más independientemente de las instituciones gubernamentales. Sin embargo, las posibilidades de beneficiarse de estas oportunidades no están distribuidas de manera equita-tiva. La ampliación del acceso a internet por parte del gobierno va de la mano con el control sobre la expresión musical, causando un ciclo de protestas y represión. Los medios digitales ofrecen una herramienta autorreforzante para la acción colectiva.

Femke van Noorloos focuses on the fact that nowadays, consortia of investors, developers and architects, sometimes in collaboration with national governments, have across Africa introduced large numbers of new utopian urban mega-projects or ‘new cities’. Such speculative, planned forms of satellite urbanization increasingly gain attention in urban development debates: research is ongoing on the ways in which they embody specific trans-local flows of investment, ideas and knowledge. However, given the speculative character and lack of realization of many new cities, empirical evidence on their impacts is lacking. This chapter critically analyzes the effects of new cities for trans-local development in Africa. We argue that the trend of master-planning from scratch poses severe risks to inclusive urban development as formulated in SDG#11. The case of Konza Techno City in Kenya is put forward to illustrate these effects: it shows that new cities are inserted into real places with pre-existing activities, humans, and livelihoods which start to change and co-evolve as soon as an idea for a new city is elaborated The mere announcement of a new city can potentially trigger chains of displacement chains and attraction. The main problem of new cities lies in the failure to accept ‘informal’ development as being an intrinsic part of African cities.

Incremental housing drives urbanization worldwide, and is recognized as the basis for socially relevant solutions to housing shortages in the global South. However, scholarship on incremental housing continues to focus largely on tenure, building materials and housing conditions at a local level, while incremental housing is embedded in – and dependent on – larger urban and regional systems and flows. We argue that a further reconceptualization of incremental housing is needed that acknowledges the embeddedness of local incremental building practices within broader industries, markets and practices of city-making. Starting from this observation, we suggest an extended framework for understanding the city-wide industries and flows around incremental housing, in relation to five dimensions: 1) land, 2) finance, 3) infrastructure, 4) building materials and 5) labour. Mapping these dynamics is necessary to understand fundamental questions of where, how and why initiatives aimed at improving or developing incremental housing advance or get stuck.

On the heels of the rural ‘land grab’ debate, the ongoing urban transition combined with large-scale urban infrastructure investments and land scarcity forces us to also pay more attention to issues of land in urban discussions. Yet how can we conceptualise land-related problems in order to connect and integrate rural and urban debates in overarching discussions of development? In this commentary, we argue for moving beyond the directly visible outcomes and presumed ‘culprits’ of land investments by critically analysing indirect and long-term effects of land acquisitions on people’s livelihoods as well as the differentiation of these effects for different actors. We propose three specific arguments to disentangle the grab–development dichotomy: 1) placing a focus on the sequential chain of effects of displacement; 2) paying more attention to the ambivalent roles and contradictory interests of different actors; and 3) taking the three-dimensional aspects of land development into account.