#FromMyReadings, Issue 1, 2020
As a tentative step towards slowly coming out of my hiatus, I’ve been working on a Substack Newsletter that I hope to publish regularly, once I get used to the routine. The content below is from my first issue. Please feel free to read this on either Medium or Substack, whichever works for you.
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At regular intervals, I plan to put out short summaries and commentaries on readings I find interesting. A minimum of 3 readings per post. Hopefully every fortnight, once I get used to it.
Corruption as Infrastructure: Rendering the New Saigon Global
(Hun Kim, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research)
Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12951
A paper by Hun Kim, suggesting a broader understanding of infrastructure by casting ‘corruption’ as an infrastructure unto itself in Vietnam, actively shaping the practices of actors and institutions in Saigon. Kim points out that different definitions and policy responses to corruption allow for “variable ways of seeing the city”, which ultimately have real impacts on the connections which exist between those who ultimately shape urbanisation processes in the city.
It’s an interesting notion. Simplistically, I suppose one can argue that infrastructures are ‘things’ which ‘lie under’ more palpable patterns, playing important roles in shaping those patterns. Eg: A flyover or underpass, guiding and shaping patterns of city traffic. By taking such a notion and applying it to a more amorphous concept like ‘corruption’, Kim makes the case that less concrete (pardon the pun) concepts can also be thought of infrastructure, thereby arguing that our notions of infrastructure ought to broaden.
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Spatial Structures and Trends of Cities in Europe and Asia: A Joint Methodological Approach Based on the Global Human Settlement Layer
(Debolina Kundu, Andre Mueller, Volker Schmidt-Seiwert, Regine Binot, Lukas Kiel, Arvind Pandey; Environment & Urbanisation ASIA)
Link: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0975425320958850
For those who don’t know, the United Nations adopted a set of 17 Goals in 2015, called the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs. It hopes countries around the world will achieve all 17 goals by 2030. These goals range from eradicating poverty, to ensuring sustainability of natural resources, to the conservation of life under water. Incidentally, Goal 11 of these 17 deals with building Sustainable Cities and Communities.
If you are pushing 200-odd countries around the world to focus on the same 17 goals over 15 years, you must have ways to measure and compare how each country is doing on each goal (it’s a lot more complicated than this, but let’s not dig too deep right now).
The authors of this paper argue that if we are trying to ensure sustainable urbanisation around the world, we need some kind of common framework to understand how urbanisation is playing out in different countries. They suggest studying “spatial structures and urbanization trends […] through standardized data and visualization” as a way to understand urbanisation across countries. In this paper, they use this approach to compare urbanisation across two rather different countries — India and Germany.
The call for standardised frameworks to compare urbanisation across countries is an old one, but remains relevant. However, casual readers who aren’t familiar with urbanisation need to be a little cautious. As satellite maps and geospatial data have become easier to access, there is a tendency among us to confuse ‘urbanisation’ with ‘spatial or built form’. That is, it’s easy to believe that urbanisation refers to how fields and forests physically change to streets and buildings (and how such changes show up on a map). The reality is that spatial form is only one of many components of urbanisation, albeit an important one.
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Resilient Urban Housing Markets: Shocks vs. Fundamentals
(Amine Ouazad, ArXiv)
Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.00413.pdf
A Working Paper (not peer-reviewed*) by Amine Ouzad of HEC Montreal Business School that asks a pertinent question — has the shock of the COVID19 Pandemic significantly changed the nature of housing in cities? How cities have changed post the pandemic is an enquiry on many peoples’ lips. I’ve been seeing long lamentations on how big cities are no longer desirable, as well as data about the emptying out of cities like New York and London.
Ouzad asks whether multiple short-run shocks in succession (Eg: pandemic followed by protests) are likely to have long-run impacts on urban housing markets in the United States. He divides his paper into two chapters, one examining the impact of short-run shocks upon housing market prices, and another examining longer-term effects since the 1970s, such as education/literacy and urban planning policies like segregation (which he labels fundamentals). He finds, in line with previous such research, that housing markets are more likely to be driven by fundamentals rather than short-run shocks, and predicts that cities are likely to bounce back over time.
*Peer Review is a formal process where a research paper is examined by two or more ‘peers’ (scholars who have similar expertise and experience as the author) and whose comments help refine and improve the paper before it’s published. Typically peer-reviewed papers are considered more reliable in academia, since bad research can be called out by the peers. However, it’s a process that’s really slow and many scholars now opt to release ‘preprint’ versions of their paper on databases like ArXiv before the actual publication, to get news of their research out early.
