Search Results

Chapter 2 discusses local politics at the municipal government level. It focuses on land battles in the urban core between high‐ranking state units (or “socialist land masters”) and municipal governments. It argues that while the socialist land masters occupy premium land parcels inherited from the planned economy, the municipal government's authority is reinforced by a modernist discourse, Western urban planning doctrines, and recent policies that grant authority over state‐owned urban land to the territorial government. Rather than settling the matter of power in the city, however, municipal leaders' granted authority is tested and defined by their political, regulatory, organizational, and moral authority in negotiations with those above, within, and below them. The municipal government's regulatory capacity is especially challenged by a fragmented real estate industry that includes players from state, non‐state, and hybrid sectors.

Chapter 3 examines two types of grassroots resistance in Beijing triggered by inner‐city redevelopment. One concerns property rights protests launched by pre‐Revolution private homeowners; the other focuses on residents' rights protests by long‐term inner‐city residents displaced by redevelopment projects. The homeowners succeeded in recovering their pre‐Revolution homeownership, and their protests quickly escalated to challenge the more fundamental issue of the state's exclusive claim over land and land rents. The displaced residents, on the other hand, framed their grievances and demands not as property owners, but as residents whose livelihood is rooted in the inner city. While both groups used legalistic and territorial strategies to negotiate with the state and to expand mobilization networks, the expansion of their demands from property rights to residents' rights is particularly meaningful in the pursuit of citizenship rights.

Chapter 5 turns to the villages located at the urban fringe that have actually benefited from urban expansion, and looks at the nonconfrontational form of social mobilization in those sites. Rapid urban expansion since the 1980s has turned many “villages by the city” into “villages in the city” and has transformed villagers from vegetable farmers to rentiers, taking advantage of immigrant‐fuelled rental housing markets. These “corporatist villages,” as the author terms them, are most successful in the southern metropolises of Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Corporatist villages are able to enjoy relative territorial autonomy under the expansionist regime of the metropolitan government because of their skills in bargaining with the local state, their strategic location, recollectivization of the village economy, and reinforcement of village identity. These southern “villages in the city” thus represent a successful case of territorialization.

Organic Darwinian evolution is over, having been brought to an end by the vast explosion of technology that enables people to determine which species shall survive and which perish. This includes the evolution of people themselves. Though we live now in groups of many millions, the evolutionary stage at which we are stuck is that of the forty-member hunter-gatherer band. Edifying high beliefs, providentially there already when agriculture and civilization began, took on vastly enhanced importance as the social glue making cities and states and empires possible. And instead of the individual shaman of the band, civilization required and produced a class of professional priests, whose prestige and livelihood was bound up with the preservation of high beliefs.Political units in Egypt and the East were huge, whereas in the West they seldom exceeded the bounds of individual cities. This difference had a profound effect on the conceptions of the universe current in them.

Tourists rarely consider Chennai a “temple city”, yet this major commercial center is experiencing a temple building boom. As active in building the economy as in constructing temple, new donors and devotees, who openly describe themselves as “middle class”, hold responsible positions in Chennai's modern technological, scientific, governmental, and business establishments. This chapter introduces the array of temples surveyed in Chennai and the many rituals of consecration (mahakumbhabhisheka) observed. Highlighting three new temples and their urban donors in detail, the chapter reconsiders “religion in the city”/urban religion (post Max Weber); the interplay of “tradition” and “modernity” (post Milton Singer); and old issues of economic development and Hindu religiosity. The chapter argues that significant cultural-religious changes occur in these temples, where donors and devotees reconstruct “tradition” and establish innovations in the context of space not ideology, thus creating an emerging reconfiguration of Hinduism that both rivals and parallels the much-discussed Hindu nationalism.

This contribution focuses on the relationship between the urban milieu and high creativity firms, focusing on the videogames sector in Montreal. It reveals an organizational frame of a lack of large R&D departments and a lack of global networks of subsidiaries or partners through which firms access creative knowledge. None of these classical ways to enhance creativity is present. Instead, creativity relies on distributed and independent communities of knowing which generate, exploit, and develop a ‘creative slack’ as a source of growth for the firm. These communities find their source of inspiration and innovation in the fertile soil of a creative city.

In 1634, the colony of St. Mary’s City was founded by Lord Baltimore. Jesuits accompanied the colonists in hopes of evangelizing the Indians. Their efforts were partly successful. Because of religious upheavals in England, the inability to evangelize the Indian, and the sharp population increase of Catholic colonists, the Jesuits in Maryland shifted goals and became ministers to European Catholics. The Maryland Mission eventually extended to Pennsylvania.

The first Mormon structure was the Kirtland Temple, followed by the grander Nauvoo Temple. In Utah, Mormons built ward houses (often called chapels), tabernacles, and more temples. Their architecture is eclectic and derivative. Functional and pragmatic are the norm. They also pioneered city planning and built a literal Zion.

Islam retained clans and often tribes whereas Europe moved towards nuclear families. In Europe, significant social and political relationships were based on oath rather than kinship, whether between lords and followers (‘feudalism’) or among householders in city communities. Church and 'umma remained as universal societies. In Europe, territorial units of government became more entrenched, and, unlike in Islam, the nation sometimes became a political unit. Islam was well-disposed towards commerce. In Europe, the idea of the corporation as a legal body with specific legitimate powers favoured the city-state. In both societies, social inequalities and classes were justified, in Christendom by the organic metpahor, in Islam by a theory of the four social ‘orders’.

The papalist revolution of the 11th century led to greater divergence between the political thought of the West and of Islam and Byzantium. Pope Gregory VII's views on papal sovereignty provided a prototype for the modern Western state. He and his supporters desacralized kingship. Their attempt to subordinate the state to the church provoked a reaction which led to secular theories of the state. This ‘first European revolution’ coincided with the rise of city republics and economic development. Sunni Islam was consolidated through a firmer alliance between the sultans and the 'ulama. But the Mongol invasions hastened economic and cultural decline. The Shi'ite revolution in 16th-century Iran resulted in social dominance for the Shi'ite 'ulama. This laid a basis for their rise to political power in the 20th century. These changes in the relationship between religion and politics had the opposite results in the West and in Islam.