Metropolitics

Agrarian Fantasy, Settler Colonial Property, and the Making of Industrial Johannesburg

Renugan Raidoo — 2026-01-20T06:00:00Z

Some of the gated estates in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria sell residents a settler colonial fantasy of a bucolic idyll away from the urban condition. But Renugan Raidoo examines the important role agricultural surplus played in mining industrialization, which tells a much more complex story of urban–rural relations.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” “A piece of the past has found its' [sic] way to the future” in all-white majuscule is the first thing one sees on the

- Essays / Africa, South Africa, Global South, Johannesburg, Pretoria, gated communities, rural, colonial urban planning, agriculture, industry, history, apartheid, real-estate turn, real estate

From Scientific Uncertainty to Strategic Ignorance

Gwenola Le Naour & Valentin Thomas & translated by Oliver Waine — 2023-11-24T06:00:00Z

In the absence of data, uncertainties about the health risks of industrial pollution abound, and are used by private firms to assert that their activities are not harmful. In this article, Gwenola Le Naour and Valentin Thomas analyze how this “scientific ignorance” is maintained in the “chemical valley” to the south of Lyon in France.
On May 10, 2022, a public meeting was held in Lyon to present the results of an investigation by France Télévisions journalists into perfluorinated pollution

- From the Field / Lyon, pollution, Rhône-Alpes, risk, France, health, industry

Reflections on Retooling for the Covid‑19 Pandemic

Nichola Lowe & Tara Vinodrai — 2020-06-19T06:00:00Z

Factories are adapting to the new conditions and needs the coronavirus has introduced by retooling production lines and repurposing knowledge and technology to manufacture essential items for Covid‑19 management. Nichola Lowe and Tara Vinodrai assess the nature and scale of these retooling efforts and argue that institutions can support manufacturing in ways that respond to crises and support economic regeneration.
Factories in cities and communities around the world are retooling production

- Essays / manufacturing, Covid-19, coronavirus, industry, textile industry, North Carolina, South Carolina, United States, North America, start-ups, pandemic

Aubervilliers: Portrait of a Working-Class Suburb

Anaïs Albert & translated by Oliver Waine — 2020-02-21T06:00:00Z

The republication of an early-20th‑century realist novel set in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers brings the industrial towns of the pre-war era back to life—their smells, their health risks, but above all the lives of their inhabitants—offering today's readers a veritable ethnographic immersion into this working-class town.
Although today largely forgotten, except by historians of the working classes, Léon Bonneff was a major figure of social investigation in the early 20th century.

- Reviews / Aubervilliers, Paris, Greater Paris, France, Île-de-France, Paris region, industry, suburbs, banlieue, pollution, health, work, working classes, history, urban history, literature, environment, workers, blue-collar workers, manual workers

Reskilling Urban Manufacturing: Workforce Solutions from the Inside Out

Nichola Lowe — 2015-12-15T15:59:35Z

In the United States, a four-year college education has gradually come to be assumed as a prerequisite for entry into the middle class. This is troubling, as more than half the country's working-age population lacks this credential. Rather than being driven exclusively by a “college for all” mentality, argues Nichola Lowe, policymakers should strive for an economy in which social-mobility strategies are also embedded in the workplace, activating internal structures within firms that support and

- Debates / United States, work, public policy, industry, blue-collar workers, education, manufacturing, skills, training

Bargain hunting in the “small-commodity city” of Yiwu, China

Alison Hulme — 2015-11-10T06:00:00Z

China's rise in the global economy has been largely based on the manufacturing of both cheap and expensive goods. Focusing on the growth of “function spaces” of mass production in Yiwu, Alison Hulme explores this “other” city and its challenge to the rise of the spectacular “image spaces” provided by established world cities.
Approximately three hours by train inland from Shanghai lies the “small-commodity city” of Yiwu—a promised land for the international wholesale buyer of low-end

- Essays / consumption, urban economy, China, new town, industry, economic development, global supply chain, function spaces, image spaces, manufacturing, specialization, commodity city

The world of the blue-collar worker: changed, but not gone

2014-02-19T05:50:00Z

Despite deindustrialisation and increasingly acute economic difficulties in the former strongholds of heavy industry, manual workers remain a key group in French society. The photographs and text presented here describe the ways in which their work has changed, together with the reconfigurations both of manual workers as a group and the regions in which they live and work – and how these transformations have weakened them politically.
Manual workers played a central role in shaping and

- From the Field / inequalities, deindustrialization, work, crisis, photography, Le Bar Floréal, working classes, industry, blue-collar workers, manual workers, workers, mobilization