The role of asylum in processes of urban gentrification

This article analyses the relationship between the accommodation of Dispersed asylum seekers and urban gentrification in the UK. We argue that alongside other racialised and classed minorities, asylum seekers are vulnerable to spatial strategies associated with gentrification such as neighbourhood ‘dumping’, containment and ‘territorial stigmatisation’, the highly coercive quality of the UK government’s Dispersal Scheme means that any relationship between asylum and gentrification must be treated as deliberate, the result of the multiscalar interests which have a stake both in Dispersal and urban ‘development’. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Glasgow, the recipient of the largest asylum seeking population annually in the UK, we find that asylum accommodation processes and gentrification have developed a symbiotic dynamic, whereby the ‘failure’ of mid twentieth-century urban ‘regeneration’ provided means and motive for Dispersal, and Dispersal provided sufficient resources to fuel further rounds of urban ‘regeneration’. We also find that recent changes to the Dispersal contract, from a dynamic in which resources were associated with housing availability, to one in which they are associated with maximum housing capacity, have created conditions for alternative forms of gentrification, in which strategies such as rent gap suppression are seen as having potential to yield more capital than infrastructural development. Finally, we argue that the respective spatial politics of both Dispersal and gentrification must be understood as mutually-interested, coercive technologies, which work together to contain and exploit racialised and bordered urban minorities. We call for urgent further research into how the asylum border is embedded in contemporary urban spatial economies.

Tenting the Circus

The itinerant character of the circus is best exemplified by tents. All life and work in the circus happens in and around various tents. The disasters related to circus also inevitably bring in the imagery of tents. In a sense, they have the twin facets of the carnivalesque as well as the dangerous. This chapter looks at the circus tent’s spatial economies and shifting technologies over the decades. Tents have been ubiquitous from the nineteenth century and were indispensable for a colonial state that was desperate to spread its tentacles.

Entgrenzte Zeitregime und wirtschaftsräumliche Konzentrationen

Disenclosed time regimes and spatial concentrations of economies. The creative sector in Hamburg’s Schanzenviertel from a time-geographical perspective. In recent years the spatial and temporal organization of everyday life has been transformed by the flexibilisation of economic relations and a growing variety of the ways how individuals coordinate their professional and private spheres and activities. Central elements of this transformation are (1) disenclosures of fixed socio-structural, temporal and spatial boundaries, (2) technical, social and cultural accelerations and (3) a growing subject-orientation within work and life conditions. Cities offer places where these transformations are well observable. These places provide both diverse infrastructures and images as material and symbolic frames for local socioeconomic processes: multiple encounters, mutual learning processes and work-life-combinations. The analysis of Hamburg’s Schanzenviertel shows the explanatory power of a broadened time geographical concept in elucidating those new socioeconomic spaces. We add the concept of coupling opportunities to the traditional constraints-approach in order to show why “the urban” under the label of the creative city should be understood as a specific form of organizing the everyday as well as the work life. Interrelations of subjective and structural conditions clarify the subject-orientation within spatial economies as both system-related constraints and chances for individual self-determination. This analysis opens up a critical perspective on the selectivity and spatial inequalities within the creative city debate.