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AbstractDrawing upon the Irish case, this article explores the interaction between the financialized economy and the urban planning system. While considerable scholarship has examined the financialization of real estate, it remains unclear how planning systems are being repurposed to facilitate a finance‐led regime of urban growth or how the 'real estate–financial complex' seeks to enact planning policy transformations that support its interests. This article explores how such actors have advanced the concept of 'financial viability of development' as a means of influencing the post‐crisis re‐regulation of Irish planning policy. This group has argued that housing construction in post‐crash Ireland is unviable given the high development finance costs, onerous planning gain contributions and the lack of development certainty in the planning process. As such, housing construction has been at an all‐time‐low, leading to a new crisis in affordable housing provision. In response, a complicit state has further liberalized the planning system, introducing an array of policies that are evermore facilitative of development interests. Empirical findings, based on interviews with developers, lobbyists and planners, emphasize the importance of informal access to policymakers, the wielding of 'expert knowledge' and media management to co‐opt the state into adopting financial viability within planning policymaking.

Queensbridge is the largest government-housing scheme in the US. The building opened in 1939 to house lower income families. In terms of its initial architectural structure, Queensbridge is designed to capture natural sunlight, and is a modernist state-funded venture typical of its time. This article considers the formative modernist design of Queensbridge as a backdrop to the hip-hop artist Nas's 1994 masterpiece Illmatic. Illmatic is the focus of recent academic studies, many of which hail Nas for the formal ingenuity of his lyrics and his songs' implicit socio-political content: the content of which deals with the systematic perpetration of criminality among black youth in the post-Reagan period. Nas's quasi-realist account of growing up in Queensbridge, his immersion in a life of crime, to his discovery of hip-hop as an art form, has since assumed legendary status. The article considers Illmatic from the perspective of 'time' in two specific contexts. The first takes empirical reality as its concern, exploring the album's coming-of-age narrative as a story about growing up in the poverty of the New York ghetto. A second iteration, the second strand, concerns anti-eschatological renderings of time. Taking this second strand to be an iteration of 'utopian time,' the analysis turns to Lucy Sargisson's transgressive utopianism. Illmatic, I argue, instantiates the coming-into-being of Nas as subject and furnishes the tools to critically transgress categorical binds involved in representing subjectivity. Illmatic is an album about representation and its utopian critique.

Presentación realizada en el congreso de bienestar y servicios ecosistemicos, organizado por la Universidad Militar Nueva Granada desde el día 7 a 11 de octubre de 2019. en la ciudad de Bogotá ; Bogotá ; Ciencias sociales y saberes de la Biodiversidad ; Congreso Colombiano de Servicios Ecosistémicos

22 Páginas ; Este artículo analiza la relación entre el control judicial de constitucionalidad y la legitimidad política entendida como la capacidad de un sistema político y jurídico de generar respaldo para la implementación de las leyes y políticas, incluso por parte de aquellos que se opusieron a estas por razones sustanciales. El artículo señala que a pesar de que existen diferentes modalidades de control judicial, así como diversas y respetables clases de legitimidad que se derivan de la función judicial, el control de constitucionalidad no está diseñado para producir legitimidad política. En tal sentido, y ante la imposibilidad de solventar esta dificultad democrática, se propone una serie de mecanismos para mitigarla como es el caso de la exigencia de supermayorías para decidir, la necesidad de contar con una presunción fuerte de constitucionalidad y la obligación de ofrecer razones que aborden explícitamente las preocupaciones democráticas. Finalmente, el artículo hace un llamado a la civilidad en el litigio constitucional, con el fin de evitar la demonización del oponente y abrir espacios de legitimidad política en el control de constitucionalidad.