Wiley-Online-Library: City & Society: Table of Contents

Knocking Off the Street: The Subversive Writings of Hong Kong's Grassroots Kings

Shizheng Liang, Zihong Zhang — Fri, 22 May 2026 05:06:23 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article examines how two grassroots street artists in Hong Kong, the King of Kowloon (Tsang Tsou-choi) and the Plumber King (Yim Chiu-tong), intervene in the city's everyday visual order. Moving beyond celebratory collective memory narratives and easy analogies to graffiti, it frames their works as subversive urban practices that rework regimes of visibility through which authority and capital are spatialized. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, the article develops “knockoff” as an analytic lens, arguing that the subversiveness of Tsang's and Yim's practices lies in their strategic mimicry of dominant visual languages and their tactical engagements with the urban landscape. Through these knockoff tactics, they produce vernacular claims to territory, recognition, and belonging that illuminate urban inequality and the contested boundaries of power in a late-capitalist, postcolonial city. The article thus locates the possibility for an art of resistance emerging from grassroots street practices that confront unequal urban visual regimes through the city's ordinary surfaces and circulations.

Rusting Bodies: De‐Industrialization, Decay and the Making of a Biomedical Corridor

Sanaullah Khan — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:15:49 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article examines Northeast Ohio's transformation from an industrial hub, once known as the rubber capital of the world, into a “biomedical corridor,” which has been experienced as particularly disruptive by community members. This disruption stems largely from the loss of employment and the emergence of new forms of racial inequality that directly affect both emotional and physical well-being. I theorize decay as a form of vitalism, representing the affective experience of unemployment, the experience of policing, the movement of crime, environmental effects of privatization and industrial decline, the physical decay of households, and the difficulty of holding families together. Furthermore, I explore how the experience of decay unfolds in the shift from an industrial economy to a privatized biomedical corridor, as residents confront the cumulative effects of urban displacement, waste, aging, and chronic illness amid the absence of meaningful employment opportunities and the limited capacity of hospitals to absorb the unemployed workforce. Despite structural barriers, many continue to imagine new futures and draw on the region's vibrant industrial past as a new politics of hate emerges amid shrinking welfare provisions.

Liminal Nostalgia: Internet Cafés, Immobile Millennials, and Suspended Identity in Hebei, China

Shenghao Xing — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:09:02 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the concept of “liminal nostalgia” to explore urban millennials' attachments to internet cafés in China. Initially stigmatized as sites of gaming addiction leading to personal failure, these places are being reshaped by the civilizing agenda of urban renewal. Focusing ethnographically on a regional city in Hebei Province, I trace a group of local millennials who grew up immersed in internet cafés and are geographically immobile. While existing literature often frames urban nostalgia as a reconstruction or critical acceptance of past identities, I argue that focusing on individuals' suspended identity offers a more productive understanding. In adulthood, local working-class regulars who continue to frequent internet cafés are positioned in a liminal status by multiple social expectations—including national discourses, local moral standards, and personal commitments to upward mobility. As a result, I reveal that nostalgic emotion possesses an anti-structural dimension—critically embracing the past while facing a fatalistic impotence towards unrealized possibilities. Ultimately, by examining the transformation of internet café spaces within urban renewal, this study reveals the affective entanglement between place nostalgia, masculinity, and thwarted social mobility.

“Here, We Are Middle Class”: Aspirational Materialities and Boundary Work in Self‐Constructed Neighborhoods in Bogotá

Sandra Pulido‐Chaparro — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:09:39 -0700

ABSTRACT

Urban studies have tended to locate middle-class urbanism in formally planned neighborhoods, while self-built settlements are typically analyzed through frameworks of informality and poverty. This article challenges that dichotomy based on 5 years of ethnographic research in neighborhoods of informal origin in Bogotá, Colombia. I argue that in these contexts middle-class identities emerge through what I term aspirational materialities—transformations of the domestic and neighborhood environment that express projects of social mobility. Practices of building, expanding, and beautifying homes—including vertical expansion, finished façades, garages, and security devices—function not only as architectural improvements but also as means of producing social distinctions. The article brings together approaches to symbolic boundaries with the anthropology of space and materiality to analyze spatial-material boundary work, through which residents use the built environment to claim recognition and respectability. First, I examine how everyday evaluations of façade “improvements” morally classify neighbors according to notions of effort, discipline, and neglect. Second, I show how residents mobilize the city's socio-spatial imaginary to claim an intermediate position between the “poor” and the “elite,” turning urban geography into evidence of status. The article contributes to debates on middle classes in the Global South by showing how class is constructed through material and spatial practices of distinction in contexts of inequality.

Issue Information

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:04:42 -0700

City &Society, Volume 38, Issue 2, August 2026.