This issue of the Berkeley Planning Journal is comprised of a lively set of articles that engage with the contemporary moment of socio- spatial restructuring. Planning has always been concerned with the problems and crises of cities and regions, with what Boyer (1987) calls the effort to “dream the rational city.” However, in recent decades, there has been a sense that the nature of the crisis has changed. With the rise of “advanced marginality” (Wacquant 1999), with the “space of flows” opened up by informational technologies (Castells 1998), with the emergence of critical theory as a challenge to standard epistemologies and methodologies (Beauregard 1991), a new world order has provoked planners and planning scholars to ask a different set of questions. Such are the interrogations that shape the contributions to this BPJ issue.

This dissertation examines the emergence of Phnom Penh as a city of speculation. It focuses, in particular, on the formation of speculative markets in real estate and the politics of urban renewal financed over the last decade in large part by Asian developers. Positioned as the next "Asian" city in a region of booming metropolises, the city's promise lies in its economic and spatial future. As such, this dissertation pays close attention to the city's integration into inter-Asian circulations of capital and imaginaries of urban modernity. Speculation organizes all economies functioning as the linchpin between risk and reward. But in a city without a master plan or without the formal valuation of property, speculation in Phnom Penh functions in various formats. It is a logic based on the overregulation of law. It is a platform in the production of space with property - its commodification and exchange - central to creating value. It is a form of governance structured as networks of relations between Asian investors, state officials, and Cambodian power brokers who negotiate opportunities and access to the economy. It is based on social ties that shape markets and mitigate risk through intimate and unofficial knowledge of the economy. It is the politics of anticipation in which claims to the future must be staked in the present. In a context where the city's real estate is among the most expensive in Southeast Asia, this dissertation is designed to help illuminate the productive life of speculation not only as the urbanization of capital but as an inter-Asian capitalization of growth.

Since the turn of the millennium, the city of Bangalore (officially Bengaluru) has experimented with a series of neoliberal, market-oriented reforms to overhaul the institutional, pricing, and financial aspects of its urban services. The city's water, in particular, long considered a service that must be subsidized by the state, has been targeted under interventions that seek to commercialize, rationalize, and privatize delivery, while simultaneously deepening certain forms of regulatory oversight. Supported by a melee of international development actors and administered by state-level experts, these policy changes have been especially focused on reforming the city's outskirts, where unruly growth and conflicting governance arrangements have produced highly differentiated patterns of land tenure and water access. Analysis of why certain water policy imaginaries are ascendant today, how programs of reform are conceived of and by whom, and to what ends they proceed in this dynamic peri-urban frontier landscape is essential to an understanding of metropolitanization in the Global South more generally.

Yet, critical scholarship on Bangalore and elsewhere has largely neglected the articulations between new infrastructure policies and the local politics of peri-urban frontiers. This dissertation addresses this gap through a multi-sited ethnographic study of policy-making and practice affecting the governance of drinking water at Bangalore's peripheries. It investigates two case studies: (1) a program that sought to reengineer municipal management of citizen complaints, and (2) a project that aimed to extend piped water to residents financed, in part, through the debt market and upfront cash contributions from peripheral residents. The study draws on archival research, in-depth interviews, and participant observation to interrogate the underlying logic, material significance, and political contestation surrounding these projects in the peripheral localities of Bommanahalli, Byatarayanapura, and KR Puram.

This research argues, first, that reforms derive not only from the fiscal concerns of the current moment, but also from a preoccupation with disciplining the conduct of local government and citizens in line with market principles. Crucially, this is a regime of rule that is deeply inflected with the enduring legacies of state-led development. It is the concoction of the developmental approaches of yesterday and the pro-market approaches of today that marks the homegrown logic of neoliberalism in India. Second, for all the rhetoric purporting to have overcome the incompetencies of a previous era, today's neoliberal interventions are marked by profound contradictions and limitations. A narrow focus on financial criteria, for instance, has resulted in a disconnect between the promise and material reality of water several years after new market-based policies and programs were instituted. Third, the grounded workings of new water policies cannot be understood without grasping the politics of the peripheralized middle class--a sizeable cross-section of the middle class that is propertied, but that nonetheless does not enjoy the same degree of tenure security as its elite counterparts. Through collective organizing, members of this social grouping contest and ultimately compromise over cost recovery-focused water pricing policies in order to legitimate their property claims in this globalizing and increasingly exclusionary city. The research thus reveals that the outcomes of water policies are contingent on historical geographies of struggle and insurgent claims to space in the places where they unfold. Overall, this dissertation elucidates how neoliberal hegemony in the urban waterscape is fluid and mutable--prone to becoming imbued with a diverse set of interests and to taking shape in and through a terrain of citizenship politics.

These findings, relevant for other rapidly urbanizing regions of the world, point to the need to rethink urban water praxis such that it valorizes diverse ways of knowing, anticipates the points of friction between water and spatial policies, and is sensitive to how and why institutionalized top-down schemes actually take root at the grassroots level.

This thesis intends to investigate the organization of the housing and land market in Los Angeles into an engine of racial capitalist value extraction, which produces profits for the owners of capital through the immiseration of low income communities of color. The primary research question I seek to answer is: what geographical form does the extraction of wealth from renter households and communities take, and how is this form established, by what structures and actors? Drawing on local property records and demographic data from the US Census Bureau, I visualize relationships of value flow between places and the relationships that they represent and construct through geographical and statistical approaches. The project blends empirical methodologies associated with sectoral analysis with value theoretical approaches, and seeks to offer a speculative sketch of the theoretical and empirical terrain as a base for further work. I am additionally inspired by the extension to critical mapping endeavors associated with Taylor Shelton’s “situated mapping,” which is relevant to the visualization of inequality I attempt (2021). I theorize the existence of a ‘rent plantation,’ a relational system of immiseration and valorization through which racialized and class differentiated geographically uneven development is enacted. I operationalize this concept analytically, and provide findings which point towards the usefulness and solidity of the theory, finding significantly differentiated relations of rent exploitation, rent share of income, and the translocal appropriation of housing values within LA county. I conclude with a discussion which addresses the case of South Central Los Angeles, a key site of extraction identified in these relations in detail.

This paper analyzes urban militarism, anti-imperialist movement organizing, and the contestation of space through a case study of the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit and protests in San Francisco, California. Building on existing literature on transnational continuities; urban militarisms; neoliberalism, imperialism, and militarization; and urban contestation and resistance; this paper studies the APEC protests and counter-summit as a site where anti-imperialist organizers in the Filipino diaspora contested American militarism transnationally in their interventions in militarized urban space. The qualitative research methods employed are primarily ethnographic, utilizing interviews and participant observation to capture the character, events, and discourses of the protests. This research intends to bridge the gap between Filipino, urban, and militarism studies, forming an analysis of the transnational continuities of militarism, neoliberalism, and counterinsurgency as synthesized by the organizers interviewed in this study.

This report, undertaken by the After Echo Park Lake research collective, was homework assigned by unhoused comrades, especially those who are part of UTACH, Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing. While the stark reality of unhoused deaths has long been a matter of concern, the COVID-19 pandemic brought surprising new challenges. As the report shows, in addition to deaths on the street, there were also deaths in hotels and motels, including in the emergency housing program, Project Roomkey. A large proportion of hotel/motel deaths are attributed by the coroner to drug and alcohol overdoses, a finding in keeping with general trends in unhoused deaths. As the report argues, it is crucially important to understand such deaths as evidence of the dislocation and trauma caused by housing insecurity and displacement as well as by carceral isolation in shelter and emergency housing programs. Drawing on the organizing by UTACH, Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing, the report amplifies the demand for unconditional and humane permanent housing.

The thesis examines the incorporation of anti-displacement measures to protect the vulnerable community into redevelopment and renewal projects that have taken place between 2000-2020 in the district of Jaffa in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel. In addition, the thesis examines state and city initiatives to provide affordable housing solutions in the district. This is done in response to the city government’s statements and commitments in the city's strategic plans to the vulnerable community of Jaffa, and primarily to the Arab community of Jaffa over the past twenty years. Using document and literature review as well as interviews with various stakeholders, I review five redevelopment and renewal projects as well as city and state affordable housing initiatives. I concluded that the city in the past ten years increased its efforts to provide affordable housing solutions and to protect the vulnerable community of Jaffa from the increased gentrification; however, its neoliberal approach to planning and its goal to attract younger middle-class residents to Jaffa overcome its commitment to the vulnerable community of Jaffa and limits its ability to incorporate anti-displacement measures in the district.

Millennial Delhi is a city whose landscape has been scarred by a series of evictions of the homes of some of its most vulnerable citizens. These evictions are different not just in degree but in kind from those that have come before. Evictions at this scale last occurred in Delhi during what is known as the Emergency from 1975-77 when democratic and fundamental rights were suspended. Unlike evictions within the Emergency, however, contemporary evictions have occurred through democratic processes rather than in their absence- they mark a different set of negotiations, legitimations, processes as well as horizons of resistance. A further factor makes contemporary evictions distinct: they were ordered not by the sarkar -the institutions of the executive across local, state and federal scales that govern the national capital - but by the adalat, the Judiciary. They were, in fact, ordered by the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India within a unique judicial innovation in India called the Public Interest Litigation that had been established, ironically, to enable the poor to access justice in the highest courts of the land.

To understand how the evictions of the poor can be read as acts in the "public interest," this dissertation argues that we must first locate the basti in the particularity of the production of space in Delhi. The Hindustani word "basti" comes from basna which means to settle or inhabit. It is the term used most often by the poor to describe their homes that are often marked by some measure of physical, economic, and infrastructural vulnerability. The basti is often reduced to the slum, a marker of illegal occupation of land and, more broadly, the dysfunctional landscape of the megacities of the global South. Yet this dissertation argues that more than just a `slum,' built environment, material housing stock, or planning category, a basti is, in fact, a territorialisation of a political engagement within which the poor negotiate their presence in as well as right to the city. It is a spatial manifestation of the negotiations of citizenship. Its eviction then represents not just the demolition of a built environment but the transformation of precisely this political engagement- an erasure of the poor's presence within and right to the city. Put another way, contemporary evictions represent an altered urban politics where a set of familiar referents- development, order, governance, citizens, and the public- are redefined to not only enable evictions but also to see them as acts of good governance, order and planning.

Read this way, evictions allow us to access the central theoretical and ethical concern of this dissertation: the politics of the production and reproduction of poverty and inequality in the contemporary Indian city and the negotiations of citizenship that underlie it. Broadly, this dissertation argues that evictions make visible make visible a juridicalisation of politics in the Indian city. This juridicalisation is marked by the emergence of new frameworks, discourses and practices in urban politics that instantiate themselves in the city through the judiciary rather within the more familiar institutional compacts between institutions of representative government and urban residents. The juridicalisation of politics marks the expansion of the jurisdiction not just of the courts but also of the realm of the law within urban politics. As the sphere of authority of the Courts widens in the city, a series of questions, concerns, interventions, processes and debates within urban politics come to be come to seen, articulated, and addressed as juridical questions - they speak and are spoken about within the frameworks of law.

Following its concern with the politics of poverty, inequality and citizenship, the dissertation traces juridicalisation along one particular vector: it shows how evictions were made to make "legal sense" within public interest litigations. Four key frameworks thus emerge: (a) planned illegalities; (b) planned development and/as crisis; (b) the impoverishment of poverty; and (c) the juridicalisation of resistance.

The dissertation first constructs a spatial history of inhabitation in the city to challenge the assumed relationships between "illegality," planning and the settlements of the poor, arguing that the "illegal" production of urban space in Delhi comprises not just the `slum' but the production of illegal housing by the middle and upper middle classes as well. It does so by problematizing the familiar and commonsensical narrative of the "failure of planning" in the Indian city and showing that the traces of planning ensure that the city may not be as it was planned but it is an outcome of planning. It argues that illegality is the dominant mode of the production of housing in Delhi and that it is within illegalities that the production of urban space in the city must be understood. Questions of urban politics must thus look not at the dichotomy of the legal-illegal but instead at the ways in which planning and planned development produce illegality. Equally, they must interrogate the processes by which particular kinds of urban practices and actors are framed as "illegal" relative to others and what work such a framing is meant to do.

Having established the relationship between illegality, planning and planned development in the city empirically, the dissertation then analyses a body of case law in the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India to show that the Courts misrecognise illegality in their twin understandings of "encroachment" and "encroacher" when they portray the former as the visible manifestation of what they see as the crisis of the city and the latter as one of the actors primarily responsible for this crisis. Showing how the courts use narratives of the failure of "planned development" and what they call "Government" to justify their interventions into the city, the dissertation describes their attempt to make the city into a governable space using the "Plan in its legal position" to represent an idealized spatial order. Intervening in the crisis of the city towards this idealized order thus becomes not only the primary definition of public interest but also an ethico-moral imperative that acts as a rationality of judicial government.

Further, the dissertation argues that the case-law on evictions makes visible the impoverishment of poverty, drawing upon Upendra Baxi's concept of impoverishment as a dynamic process of public decision-making in which it is considered just, right and fair that some people may become or stay impoverished. The Courts enable impoverishment by through the creation of the category of the "encroacher" that binds the identity of the poor to a spatial illegality and becomes the basis of a disavowal of their rights. Additionally, through the discursive erasure of the vulnerability of the poor and the emergence of a new "urban majority" as the subject of urban politics, they transform the poor into improper citizens thereby legitimizing a regime of differentiated citizenship.

Using interviews with activists in urban social movements in Delhi, the dissertation further shows how the emergence of the judiciary as the site and object of resistance has resulted in the juridicalisation of resistance: the impact of the presence of the Court within the calculus of negotiation and confrontation as modes of engagement and resistance to evictions. The presence of the Court challenges the choice of strategies of urban social movements, introduces new actors and decision-making processes into movement spaces, alters the content of right-claims and forecloses certain kinds of claimants just as it shapes the political identity and history of basti and its residents themselves. Finally, in conclusion, the dissertation explores how new forms and claims to the city can emerge in response to these challenges that will be not just impassioned, but equitable and effective.