In This Issue...

In urban studies, the themes of spatial exclusion and territorial stigma have long endured in research and scholarship. The articles in this issue of IJURR extend this field of inquiry in three distinctive ways. First, in keeping with the mandate of the journal to maintain an international scope of theorization, the collection spans diverse national and urban geographies. The intention is not to search for coherence or even comparison. After all, the regulation of residential mobility in China (Li and Mao) is inherently different than residential segregation and stratification in the United Kingdom (Coulter and Clark). Yet, we remain convinced that there is intellectual value in holding such socio-spatial formations in simultaneous view in the pages of a journal. As many of us have argued, the intention is to sharpen our attention to historical difference and the geopolitical specificities that constitute what is too easily presented as mere context. Second, the articles published here give us a fine-grained understanding of the lived experience of exclusion and stigma, be it the performance of symbolic boundaries that maintain class distinctions in Sari, Iran (Hashemi) or the affective politics of worth and care under conditions of militarized urbanism in Israel/Palestine (Pasquetti) or territorial appropriations in a housing area in Lund, Sweden (Kärrholm and Wirdelöv). Such work carries important methodological implications for urban studies, as evident in Cuny’s use of visual research, specifically photography, to uncover power and representation.  Third, this issue of IJURR takes up the question of the persistent and resurgent histories of right-wing populism.  Two of the articles in this collection, that by Mitchell and MacFarlane on the structures of racial violence that are constitutive of liberal cosmopolitanism in Hamburg, Germany, and that by Creţan and O’Brien on the renewal of Roma stigmatization in the spatial imaginations and practices of the New Right in Timişoara, Romania, emerge from a special call for papers on right-wing populisms and the city that we issued last year. But as the paper by Maestri reminds us, racial othering is not limited to right-wing populisms. It also haunts the politics of squats in cities such as Rome, Italy, presenting a challenge to housing justice movements and their fragile solidarity with Roma communities. As Watson shows, it is thus vitally important for urban studies scholarship to continue a critical analysis of ‘refugee humanitarianism’ and the various agendas of welcome and inclusion underway in cities across the North Atlantic.

— Ananya Roy