‘On behalf of the city’: wax and urban diplomacy in the late medieval Baltic and North Sea

Focusing on the largely unpublished ‘city accounts’ (‘Stadsrekeningen’) of Bruges, this article examines the city's giving of prestigious Baltic beeswax to their lords, the Valois and (later) Habsburg dukes of Burgundy. It sheds new light on urban government by analysing how civic leaders across north-western Europe used the apiary product to manage often fraught relationships with their rulers and reinforce their identities as trading centres or outposts of international repute. More broadly, the gifting of Baltic beeswax points to the political and diplomatic prestige associated with the trade and display of the commodity in the later medieval period and the desire of urban leaders and communities to extract symbolic and political capital from its exchange.

“Here We Go Again”: Race and Redevelopment in Downtown Richmond, Virginia, 1977-Present

This article examines newspapers, archival collections, interviews, and personal papers to place Richmond, Virginia, at the center of the national debate about public–private revitalization projects. Since World War II, America’s urban leaders, led by interracial coalitions of black politicians and white business elites, have used racial capitalism to promise that tax-funded redevelopment projects would enrich their cities, provide better public services, and reconcile the legacy of racist urban planning. Richmond’s issues with Project One and the Sixth Street Marketplace in the 1980s, as well as recent issues with the Navy Hill Project, reveals the continuum of political and economic peril that comes with using such plans. Because urban revitalization is supremely profit-driven and shaped by the economic thinking that created disparate levels of white corporate wealth and black urban poverty, it is bound to exacerbate systemic racism.

Discursive Regimes and Everyday Practices

This chapter examines the discursive regimes—the making and unmaking of truth—upon which cultural politics in North St. Louis County relies. The cultural politics of space deploys culture as a regulatory discourse to produce spatial imaginaries and social meanings that explain disparity as a “natural consequence” of inferior Black culture. Using a discursively produced cultural politics of suburban citizenship and capitalizing on expectations of suffering in spaces qualified as urban, leaders, administrators, and judges police residents. An emphasis on “good suburban citizens” is clearly part of the politics of truth used by leaders in North St. Louis County to justify state violence. Antiblackness, which is historically dependent on a dialectical construct of civilization and its other, is thus embedded in a localized understanding of citizenship and the terms for belonging. Modern interpretations of good citizenship based on capital accumulation further set the terms for good suburban subjects as functions of self-reliance and consumption that reinforce a self-perpetuating cycle of capitalism. This results in complex and nuanced relationships of race, space, and power that cannot be reduced to simplified readings of economic rationalism, identity politics, or racial imbalances in the police force.

The Fire, the Bomb, and the Fair, 1871–1893

This chapter analyzes three events that served both to define Chicago and reveal the city to the nation during the years between 1871 and 1893. It discusses the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket Bombing of 1886, and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. It also emphasizes on the enthralling stories of the three events that provided windows through which the late 1800s Chicago can be viewed by the world. The chapter talks about the fire, the bomb, and the fair that occurred within the context of late nineteenth-century apprehensions regarding Chicago. It also highlights how urban leaders managed the three events in order to combat the perception that cities were dangerous, immoral, and unnatural.

The Azd of Mosul

This chapter begins with a survey of the geography of Mosul and the surrounding al-Jazira region, as well as al-Azd settlement in the region during the Abbasid period. It then examines the region’s tribal politics under the Abbasids, and particularly the rivalry between al-Azd and Hamdan. Emphasis is placed on the way urban leaders maintained ties with Bedouin in the countryside, as well as the role of landed estates as a major form of wealth and powers. The chapter also examines the way tribal ties appear in connections between Mosul notables and figures outside the caliphate’s control, as well as the use of accounts of pre-Islamic Arabia’s history to support those notables’ status claims.

Energy Use and Weatherization Practices: Applications for Agent-Based Modeling to Support Vulnerable Populations

This work surveyed residents of an economically disadvantaged community on their attitudes toward weatherization and their energy use behaviors. To support urban leaders making decisions to mitigate the effects of large-scale climate change, data-driven simulation models are being developed. To ensure that these models are equitable, the needs of all citizens must be included, especially those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The results of this survey indicate that residents are taking steps to weatherize and conserve energy, but they are hindered by a lack of resources and knowledge of available assistance programs. These results are being applied to agent-based models (ABM) to model emergent community behavior. These models will be used to design decision support systems for city stakeholders.

The City as a Fiscal Derivative: Financialization, Urban Development, and the Politics of Earmarking

Contemporary urban leaders use exotic fiscal and financial schemes to fund development, which scholars theorize as tools for creating public goods or critically as growth entrepreneurs’ speculative self–enrichment schemes. Neither approach accounts for financing schemes’ reactivity, or their tendency to shape development patterns. This paper facilitates analysis of the latter by developing a new theory of growth coalitions: the politics of earmarking perspective. Urban leaders are akin to local state builders whose superordinate concern is establishing priority over revenues earmarked for noncity functions, a goal they pursue by pairing financing schemes with developments that maximize discretionary revenue under unique geographic, fiscal, and regulatory constraints. I illustrate this perspective's utility by comparing scholarship on California's municipal fiscal crises with an ethnography of development in two Iowa cities. Although reliant on the same financing mechanism—tax increment financing—California's municipal leaders pursued discretionary revenue by incentivizing extravagant commercial developments, whereas Iowa's directed industries to outlying business parks.

TRANSNATIONAL GOVERNANCE AND THE TRILHOS URBANOS: CIVIL SOCIETY'S RESISTANCE TO MEGA-EVENTS IN RIO DE JANEIRO

ABSTRACT Mega-events are urban spectacles that bring together capital, physical materials, symbols, people and organizations, to produce sports and cultural events. Rio de Janeiro hosted the soccer World Cup in 2014 and will shortly host the 2016 Olympics, two such mega-events. This paper discusses these mega-events in terms of a new and influential model of transnational governance that involves market-based alliances between urban leaders, real-estate developers, global corporations and sports-related civil society groups. It begins by defining mega-events and their significance to transnational governance, and then describes the mega-events being held in Rio de Janeiro. In the final section, the implications of these mega-events are reviewed, highlighting the on-going period of contestation within urban visions of transnational governance.

Craft Specialists at Moche: Organization, Affiliations, and Identities

This article examines the organization of specialized craft production at the urban site of Moche, known as the capital of the Southern Moche state. Recent excavations in workshop contexts revealed that the urban population of Moche was in part composed of ceramists, metallurgists, and lapidaries. These craft specialists played a significant role in the economic, political, and religious spheres of the Moche polity. Data obtained during excavations of workshops and domestic compounds are used to analyze the context, scale, and intensity of craft production, taking into account the nature of the goods produced and the identity of consumers. The discussion also considers the integration of craft specialists into the daily life and social structure at the site of Moche. Excavations showed that while urban craft specialists were not independent, they were not tightly controlled by a centralized ruling elite. They produced symbolic goods in various small to middle-scale workshops integrated into residential units, under the direct authority of urban leaders taking advantage of this particular organization of semi-attached craft production in various status-building strategies.