This study investigates how discourses on panhandling intertwine with the governance of beggars on China's urban streets. It focuses on local policy implementation in Guangzhou city, led by the bureau of civil affairs along with its centres for “custody and repatriation” and “assistance stations.” The study aims to understand how the state regulates panhandling and engages with beggars in public spaces. Exploring the internal logic of the state's approach and how it has changed during the 40 years of reform, it also considers the junctures at which contradictions and conflicts arise. Based on fieldwork data (2011 to 2014) and the analysis of government documents, yearbooks, academic and mass media discourses, I argue that the state's treatment of panhandlers poses a conundrum as welfare measures conflict with control. While several layers of state regulation and actors contradict each other and create grey areas of state-induced informality, people who beg for alms are continuously criminalized and excluded from public space.

This article considers ways in which human rights law ought to respond to a growingly urban global order of blurred private—corporate—and state power. Fragmented and dispersed power comes together, in different configurations of public and private, in the cities and towns of the world. For this reason, local government presents the appropriate scale at which to re-conceptualize the operation of international human rights norms, also against private power. This requires engaging not only with the reach and leanings of international human rights standards but also with the manner in which they are rendered applicable, through domestic constitutional law, against state and non-state actors at a local scale. The urbanization of human rights law accordingly also requires a second look at the powers, competencies and responsibilities of urban local government under domestic constitutional law.

Rome is a complex metropolis. The city faces the challenge of imagining and shaping an inclusive and sustainable future for its inhabitants. On several occasions, city policies and interventions have not met the goal of preserving environmental resources. For their part, the inhabitants of Rome tend to doubt the ability of institutions to take care of the city’s resources. We focus on civic environmental monitoring led by the local independent association A Sud, aimed at assessing the environmental status of two of the city’s rivers. From a review of applicable literature on governance, environmental and social justice and climate urbanism, we build a theoretical frame to guide our analysis. We inquire how civic monitoring in a complex city can benefit urban resource governance and foster urban transitions. We also explore the extent to which these initiatives have the potential to inform or have actually informed the scientists and policymakers responsible for designing city adaptations. Our analysis demonstrates that citizen-gathered data can enrich the scientific knowledge base and trigger claims for interventions, bringing in information on local issues often overlooked by competent institutions. The initiatives also improved individual and collective attitudes towards the city and its resources, stimulating a sense of care and a watchful citizenship.

In a context of hyper-diversity and social polarisation, it has been suggested that public parks constitute crucial arenas in which to safeguard deliberative democracy and foster social relations that bind loosely connected strangers. Drawing on empirical research, we offer a more circumspect and nuanced understanding of the – nonetheless vital – role that parks can play in fostering civic norms that support the capacity for living with difference. As ‘spaces apart’, parks have distinctive atmospheres that afford opportunities for convivial encounters in which ‘indifference to difference’ underpins ‘openness to otherness’. As places in which difference is rendered routine and unremarkable, the potency of parks for social cohesion derives from fleeting and unanticipated interactions and the weak ties they promote, rather than strong bonds of community that tend to solidify lines of cultural differentiation. Both by design and unintentionally, regulation and law can serve to foster or constrain the conditions that sustain conviviality.

Conflicts between urban street vendors and city regulators have become a common urban sight in Chinese cities today. This paper considers how visions of modern urban streets and sidewalks have helped to generate increasingly restrictive policies on street vending and spurred new forms of urban regulation and policing. While mostly an everyday routine of Chinese city life, the resulting vendor–chengguan conflicts dramatize state power in public and carry the latent danger of crowd violence in response. In particular, aggressive policing of highly visible city streets can at times produce a volatile “politics of the street” involving episodes of vendor resistance and even dramatic expressions of bystander solidarity which challenge these street-level expressions of state power.

Drawing on the insights of the growing critical literature on urban governance and housing policy, this article seeks to analyze the specific field of social reform in Turkey in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in which housing shortages for working class families were depicted as constituting a new social and moral question. Housing policy was born in the early 1950s, as links were established between external sanitary and moral conditions and the homes of the poor, and as rival parties competed to attract the votes of the growing laboring masses. However, neither the middle class reformers nor the political elite supported direct state intervention to provide social housing for low-income citizens. T h e chosen solution was encouraging home ownership through minimum public subsidies to workers' cooperatives. Yet, cooperatives continued to build largely middle class housing during the period, which was far too costly for workers, while unauthorized land appropriations and squatting became the primary mechanism through which the working poor could be incorporated into the urban fabric.