Metropolitics

Defunding Social Services

Brenden Beck — 2025-07-15T05:00:00Z

Cities around the United States are bracing for federal funding cuts to social services. Yet, as Brenden Beck explains, cities have long been cutting social-service spending while increasing police spending, even as crimes rates have fallen.
When Dallas wrote its city budget last year, something was missing. The city had allocated zero dollars to its Skillman Southwestern library, effectively closing the branch. Seattle joined Dallas in slashing social services later in the year when it

- Debates / budget cuts, public services, social services, municipal budgets, police, United States

The Myth of Urban Exodus from Paris: Mobility in Times of Health Crisis

2025-05-02T05:00:00Z

The rushed departures of city dwellers to the countryside ahead of the first Covid‑19 lockdown, in spring 2020, played into the idea of an urban exodus. After analyzing previously unseen data on Facebook users in France, however, a team of researchers came to quite a different conclusion.
This article seeks to cast light on the mobility dynamics of people in France—and in Paris more particularly—between March 2020 and September 2022, in order to decipher the potential geographical impacts

- Debates / Covid-19, exode urbain, réseaux sociaux, confinement, mobilité, mobilité résidentielle, numérique

Can the Market Solve Los Angeles' Housing and Homelessness Crisis?

Katherine Smock — 2025-02-27T06:00:00Z

Policymakers in Los Angeles hope that market-based solutions will solve the city's housing crisis. Data from the first years of the city's planning streamlining program show that inviting investment won't improve conditions for low-income renters.
---- Series: Horizons in the Housing Struggle The city of Los Angeles, like many cities across the US, is in dire need of much more affordable housing to alleviate and prevent homelessness. Despite the promise of alternative methods of creating

- Debates / United States, California, Los Angeles, homelessness, housing, housing crisis, housing markets, tenants

The Banality of Innovation: Mythic Discourse and the Long Road to Shore Power in New York City

Iain McDavid — 2024-12-03T06:00:00Z

If the New York City Economic Development Corporation is committed to the city's “green transformation, ” then why is it dragging its feet to curb cruise-ship pollution at city ports? Iain McDavid explains how clean air doesn't align with EDC's primary concern of encouraging investment.
By allowing ships to plug into the electrical grid while at berth, shore power installations can drastically reduce carbon emissions and harmful pollutants produced by a vessel's auxiliary engines (CLIA 2024;

- Debates / cruise ships, pollution, air quality, Brooklyn, New York, United States, energy, environmental justice, environment, shore power

Deconstructing Gentrification

Todd Swanstrom & Jason Hackworth — 2024-11-05T06:00:00Z

Can changing the way we understand the process of gentrification open possibilities for political and social change? Todd Swanstrom and Jason Hackworth debate this proposition.
Summary Deconstructing Gentrification – by Todd Swanstrom On the Significance of Gentrification in Low-Demand Environments: A Reply to Swanstrom – by Jason Hackworth Don't Let the Word “Gentrification” Drive Us Apart: A Rejoinder to Hackworth – by Todd Swanstrom
Deconstructing Gentrification – Todd Swanstrom

- Debates / gentrification

Discrimination and Everyday Politicization in Working-Class Neighborhoods in France

Marion Carrel & translated by Oliver Waine — 2024-10-08T05:00:00Z

Drawing on a collective study, Marion Carrel highlights how experiences of discrimination structure people's relationship with politics in working-class neighborhoods. The everyday politicization resulting from these experiences, stifled by institutions, is key to explaining the unrest that followed the death of Nahel Merzouk in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre on June 27, 2023.
On June 27, 2023, in Nanterre, a western suburb of Paris, a youngster aged 17, Nahel Merzouk, was killed at

- Debates / discrimination, émeutes, politisation, police, quartiers populaires

When Rising Expectations Meet Rising Reaction: New York's 2024 Housing Policy Fight and the Prospects for the Future

Oksana Mironova & Samuel Stein — 2024-09-10T05:00:00Z

How did New York housing policy fare with Democratic control of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government? Oksana Mironova and Samuel Stein review the 2024 housing policy fight and the stakes going forward for the housing movement.
A few years ago, the New York tenant movement forced the state government to strengthen and expand its rent regulation system. This was the greatest expansion of renters' rights New York had seen in decades. In the years since, the movement has

- Debates / housing, real estate, real-estate industry, tenants, homelessness, New York, affordable housing, housing crisis, housing policy, housing justice, social housing

The French Exception on the European Migration Scene

Speranta Dumitru & Ettore Recchi — 2024-06-04T05:00:00Z

The notion of mass migration to France is regularly mobilized in the country's European election campaigns. Using international data, Speranta Dumitru and Ettore Recchi show that, in fact, France is less attractive to migrants than neighboring countries, and highlight the exceptionally broad scope of France's expulsion policy compared with those of other EU nations.
A century and a half ago, Victor Hugo, a staunch advocate of a “United States of Europe,” saw borders as a synonym for

- Debates / Europe, migration, migrants

Writing the Intellectual History of Bioregionalism

Antoine Dubiau & translated by Oliver Waine — 2023-12-22T06:00:00Z

As bioregionalist ideas spread in France, their history remains partly unwritten. This environmental movement, which originated in the United States, is characterized by a diversity of approaches that are perhaps mutually incompatible.
Among the ecological utopias that emerged in the 1970s, bioregionalism long remained exclusively North American. After two decades of widespread international dissemination, the concept is only just beginning to make its mark in France. The promotion of

- Debates / bioregion, Italy, ecology, environment, United States

“Urban Exodus” as an Extension of the Rentier Sector

Aurélie Delage & Max Rousseau & translated by Oliver Waine — 2023-09-15T05:00:00Z

In the French media, the increasingly recurrent topic of urban exodus has been portrayed as one of the consequences the Covid‑19 pandemic. Aurélie Delage and Max Rousseau, however, instead perceive a “relocation of capital” maintained by media discourse.
“There's nothing left to sell.” Heard from the mouths of rural mayors and real estate agents at the end of the summer of 2020, this phrase is taken up like an antiphon as clear proof of the “urban exodus.” If the theme of rural reinvestment

- Debates / exode rural, immobilier, capital, Covid-19, géographie critique