2024 Prize Winners

The 2024 Early Career Researcher Prize was jointly awarded to Melissa Heil for Negotiating infrastructural citizenship beyond the state: philanthropy, non-profit organizations, and the Flint Water Crisis and Thilo van der Haegen for The Vancouver socioecological fix: indigenous real-estate development as the city’s imagination of sustainability, affordability, and reconciliation. Honorable Mentions went to Rafaella Lima and Tilman Schwarze & Krzysztof Jankowski.

Winners

Melissa Heil

I am delighted and honored to have been selected for the Early Career Research Prize. One of my primary research interests is how the non-profit sector shapes life in American Rustbelt cities. In the context of austerity and racialized disinvestment, the non-profit sector has frequently taken on government functions (urban planning, infrastructure, social services) in these cities. This paper, “Negotiating infrastructural citizenship beyond the state: philanthropy, non-profit organizations, and the Flint Water Crisis” is based on my dissertation research. Empirically, the paper examines how the non-profit sector, ranging from grassroots organizations to large philanthropic foundations, has been integral to the development of emergency water infrastructures in Flint. In the paper, I ask, how does such involvement of the non-profit sector in infrastructural provisioning reconfigure negotiations over infrastructural citizenship? What constraints and new possibilities emerge as these non-state, non-market institutions facilitate infrastructural access, mediated through the discursive construction of citizenship? The paper examines the power relations governing the non-profit sector as well as the transformed relations its work produces. The non-profit emergency water infrastructure interventions are marked by common structural concerns brought about by a reliance on philanthropy: a lack of democratic oversight and the possibility of corporate, foundation, and celebrity donors imposing their priorities onto Flint residents. But non-profits’ investments into alternative infrastructures, like reverse osmosis systems and water quality testing labs, also alter the power dynamics between citizen and state. Residents can pursue alternative water sources at community non-profits and obtain independent water quality testing, rather than being forced to rely on water quality assurances from a government that has already caused them harm. Working through the non-profit system, Flint community members have produced a more robust network of tools to monitor and shape the state’s actions.

I would like to thank the many people who supported the development of this paper: my dissertation advisor, David Wilson; my committee members Jason Hackworth, Sara McLafferty, and Faranak Miraftab; Nathan McClintock at Urban Geography for editorial guidance; the anonymous reviewers whose helpful feedback strengthened the paper considerably; and the participants of the 2022 AAG sessions “Pursuing new futures - Understanding the voluntary sector and geographies of survival in times of crisis” and “Rethinking the Multiplicity of Urban Infrastructure,” especially Aída Guhlincozzi, Simone Vegliò, and Nikolai Alvarado. I plan to donate the proceeds of this award to the McKenzie Patrice Croom Flint Community Water Lab.

Thilo van der Haegen

I am truly honored to receive the Early Career Researcher Prize from Urban Geography. I am a PhD student who works and studies at the University of Hamburg and the Hafencity University Hamburg. I am currently in the process of handing in my PhD thesis, in which I discuss some of the intersections between capitalist urbanization and settler colonialism as they occur in Vancouver, Canada. In the thesis, I focus on the emergence of several large real estate developments that the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations are currently developing or planning in the city whose land they claim as their traditional, un-ceded territory. In the thesis, I look to understand the emergence of such large-scale real estate activity from different angles.

In the piece published in Urban Geography, I focus on the perspective of the municipal government and the enabling conditions for such developments as found within municipal planning policies. To that end, I explore the city’s geographical imaginations of three aspects: sustainability, housing affordability, and reconciliation and describe how they manifest themselves in city policies. City policies, in turn, propagate a specific vision of how Vancouver can “fix” its issues of sustainability, housing affordability, and reconciliation that demands for a specific urban form. I call this the Vancouver socioecological fix: in response to its problems, the city conceptualizes reconciliation as First Nations constructing high density, highly profit-oriented real estate. This approach to reconciliation offers First Nations partaking in real estate development tangible resources and political power. However, it also reproduces the region’s extractive real estate capitalism that has arguably been at the root of Indigenous dispossession. These observations raise questions about how scholarship should contend with such contradictory approaches to reconciliation.

Having read so many excellent papers in Urban Geography in 2024, I was really surprised to receive the prize. I am therefore extraordinarily grateful to the Editor’s Committee for seeing value in my paper. Writing the paper would not have been possible without the support of many friends and mentors. A special thanks goes to the anonymous reviewers and the editors at Urban Geography who brought the ideas I present in this paper to a higher level.

Honorable Mentions

Rafaella Lima

My article Subordinate housing financialization: tracing global institutional investment into Lisbon’s urban development is based on my PhD research and reflects its core arguments. Early in my project I was trying to grapple with the incredibly rapid pace of urban change in Lisbon in the aftermath of the global financial crisis-turned-'Eurozone crisis'. There was a lot of attention on how post-crisis reforms led to the regeneration of the historic center, largely in the interests of tourists and global wealthy elite. However, I noticed a pattern of new actors and investments emerging, in the form of corporate actors buying up land outside the city center to build large-scale residential projects, generally for sale. I wanted to find out what was behind these dynamics and what it would mean for access to housing in the city. I set out to build a database of major investment projects in the Lisbon area along with the actors behind them, drawing from news media, firm websites, and other (quite limited) publicly available data sources. I also conducted interviews with various real estate actors, including developers and consultants, to understand these evolving trajectories, and drew on industry reports and events.

In ‘following the money’ up from various real estate developments, I found a dominance of capital-rich institutional actors originating primarily from core economies - for example, a pension fund based in Germany, or a family office based in Austria, with investment often via tax havens. Capital has accrued disproportionately with these non-bank financial actors since the 2008 crisis. My paper argues that such investment both reflects and reinforces core-periphery relations through housing, as Lisbon’s status as a city of the semi-periphery—highly dependent on outside investment—provides fertile ground for global investors to build what they want. This in turn produces uneven development on the urban scale. The paper thus connects ‘subordinate financialization’ to housing production, and shines a light on the role of these increasingly powerful intermediary investors in urban development. I am very grateful for my work to be recognized by Urban Geography through this honorable mention. This research would not have been possible without the guidance of my PhD supervisors Miguel Kanai, Jon Silver and Desiree fields, and so many others who offered support throughout.

Tilman Schwarze & Krzysztof Jankowski

Our article Rhythms, dressage and pacemaking in South Side Chicago: examining the construction site of the Obama Presidential Center initially evolved out of conversations we had over the role of rhythmanalysis in our respective research in Chicago and Hong Kong. We realised that one of the key concepts within Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis – dressage – had not received sufficient attention in secondary research and that Lefebvre’s own engagement with the concept was also limited to only a couple of pages. At the same time, Tilman had just returned from field research in Chicago where I observed the significant impact of the construction site of the Obama Presidential Center on adjacent communities in terms of how it changed people’s walking routines and adjacent traffic. The way in which this construction site enforced a specific spatio-temporal order onto urban space resembled Lefebvre’s observation of the power of dressage in ‘forcing’ certain rhythms and spatial behaviours onto people. However, as we argue in our article, Lefebvre does not engage more deeply with how exactly dressage is enacted and produced. In his writings, it remains a passive operator rather than active organiser. This was surprising to us, giving that Lefebvre’s oeuvre is most known for his urban and spatial theories. In order to foreground the active organising power of dressage in the production of space, we suggest a critical reading of dressage through the theory of pacemakers. In particular, we argue that pacemakers, such as buildings, traffic lights, or, as in our case, construction sites, are organizing material elements which enact dressage and thereby structure, impose, and determine rhythms. By focusing on a construction site of a large-scale infrastructure project, our article extends the analytical focus of geographical research on infrastructures to the period of construction and construction sites as material pacemakers. Construction site, we argue, have an equally significant impact on people’s everyday lives but are often ignored in geographical research. Our research on the construction site of the Obama Presidential Center highlights that the site enacts dressage through pacemaking in two distinct ways. First, through the alteration of the urban built environment of the area, particularly the destruction of public space in the park where the Center will be located, the construction site has altered the association of the park as a public space for recreational activities, enacting dressage through pacing residents’ spatial practices. Second, the construction site enacts and produces a new security regime of control and surveillance within the park, equally pacing and controlling spatial behaviour and practice.

We are incredibly grateful to receive an honourable mention of our article. We would like to extend our gratitude to the editorial team at Urban Geography as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable feedback on earlier versions of our article.