In the arena: contesting disaster creation in cities

Space is a feature of all disasters, and it is through decisions on how space is developed, used, and reproduced that disasters manifest themselves. Critical urban theory sees urban space-cities-as an arena of contestation expressed through the relationship between people, power, and the built environment. Cities allow for an unpacking of this process of contestation through the interpretation of various temporal, spatial, social, and physical elements that together create complex issues and 'wicked problems'. In these urban spaces in all their complexity, disasters reveal both the worst injustices and inequalities present in a society. By drawing on three well-known cases-Hurricane Katrina in 2010; the Haiti earthquake in 2010; and the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011-this paper not only explores the opportunities that critical urban theory presents for gaining a deeper understanding of disaster risk creation, but also it encourages disaster scholars to engage with it.

The potential politics of the porous city

This article discusses the concept of porosity and what it might offer critical urbanism. It engages recent scholarly and practical writing on the "porous city," outlining three sets of contributions that porosity offers in analyzing contemporary urbanization patterns and in orienting planning, policymaking, and knowledge production. First, the porous city offers a critical epistemological lens focused on flow and relations, which supports mobile and infrastructural ways of viewing and knowing the city. Second, the porous city suggests the ontological features of interpenetrating geographies and temporalities, which take the urban to be a topological space of potential politics. Third, the porous city entails an ideal to which planning practice should aspire, particularly in relation to forms of urbanism and city-building that are open to multifunctionality, difference, and dynamism over time. While each of these represents a promising direction in critical urban praxis, we argue that porosity also has its limits. The porous city is conceptually malleable and normatively ambiguous and it risks overreach as well as recuperation within exclusionary and exploitative urban development agendas. We claim that the porous city should not be treated as a comprehensive global ambition, but rather, is most valuable when used to discern and build discrete architectures of power.

An Ethnographic Perspective on Urban Planning in Brazil: Temporality, Diversity and Critical Urban Theory

This article provides an ethnographic perspective on urban planning by presenting the creative practices of marginalized slum residents in Recife, Northeast Brazil, who are affected by planners' decisions. It argues that such a perspective contributes to current critical urban theory in three ways. First, while many studies of urban planning follow the temporality of the timeframe of a particular project ('project time'), this analysis emphasizes the timeframe of the lives of the affected residents ('people's time'). Second, it attends to diversity, taking account of the variety of affected residents and the diverse consequences of urban planning on their lives. Third, it shows how urban interventions - similar to marriage, divorce, the birth of children and the death of loved ones - are high-impact life events for the urban poor. Finally, the article assesses the engagement between ethnography and critical urban theory and argues in favour of 'grounding' the latter better in the analysis of actual practices and experiences.