Introductioǹ`For every plan there is a non-plan, for every net, there's a contra-net. The uncontrolled areas are essential places in life and need not to be known, but understood.'' Scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's movie Stalker (1979) (cited on the urban unlimited webpage,

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This paper seeks to understand why secession movements gained momentum in Los Angeles and what their effect will be on regional governance. A brief discussion of liberal theories of secession demonstrates that they cannot explain secession movements at the urban scale, as they are exclusively focused on cases of nationalist secession from a nation-state. Furthermore, liberal theories of secession offer normative arguments on the right to secede. Following a change in California legislation granting municipalities the right to secede, the secessionist debate in Los Angeles is not so much concerned with normative issues, but more with devising an effective and revenue-neutral process for secession. Using a threefold theoretical approach based on theories of secession, regulation theory and theories of state rescaling, and theories of social movements, this paper argues that the 'political opportunity structures' provided by globalisation and the prevalent neo-conservatism, might explain how secession movements in Los Angeles were able to mobilise large efforts to their cause. We hold that globalisation has forced cities to re-open the debate on size and governance. Secession movements have been very successful in raising public awareness on the issue. Their strength lies mostly in their populism, well in tune with the prevalent wave of neo-conservatism. These movements use arguments well grounded in Southern California's complex history of regional fragmentation and consolidation. As a social project of the Right, they offer secession as a potential 'solution' to the problems of urban governance in the age of globalisation, in a context of simultaneous consolidation.

This introduction briefly reviews the intertwinement of ‘informality’ and ‘modernization’ and their implications for the theory and practice of the city. The editors identify the importance of recognizing uneven processes of informalization, emphasizing the need to compare the quality of state–citizen–market relations more than the quantity of ‘informality.’ In the process they ask whether and how informal and formal practices can help to rethink modern concepts such as citizenship, universal infrastructural access, organized resistance, and the state itself. One way to do so is to reposition these concepts as relational processes involving various actors, spaces, and temporalities rather than as essentialized objects. Such epistemological moves will shed light on the extent to which basic social needs such as the distribution of justice, the production of authority, and the regulation of class relations are not the sole terrain of the state, but negotiated relationally. The article concludes by proposing three epistemological devices – iterative comparison, ambiguous categories, and the use of hermeneutics – that can help scholars avoid the biases associated with essentialized categories.

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Between 1997 and 2002, homeowners in various parts of Los Angeles sought to secede from the City. At the same time, in Toronto, the province of Ontario forced the amalgamation of six municipalities forming a new megacity of 2.4 million. Residents mobilized for several months. In 2000, the province of Quebec forced the merger of 28 local municipalities in Montreal, forming a new city of 1.8 million. Angst came mostly from suburban Anglophone municipalities, where it was felt mergers would affect linguistic privileges. In the three cases, but stemming from different positions on the Left-Right political spectrum, social actors claimed more local autonomy 'in the name of local democracy'. Comparing these cases where institutional reforms and claims for local autonomy captured the political agenda, the article asks whether the use of 'local democracy' as a legitimizing tool for territorial claims may point to the emergence of a new generalized discursive strategy. Comparing variations in interpretations, and locating them in their respective local political cultures and in relation to the political positioning of claiming groups, highlights the processes by which socio-political movements mobilize residents to their cause while avoiding accusations of NIMBYism. In the end, the article questions the moral tone attached to the expression 'local democracy'. Copyright (c) Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.

Understanding the causes of urban fragmentation in Hanoi: the case of new urban areas 1Since the late 1990s, a new model of urban development has been promoted in vietnam. So-called 'new urban areas' are being built on the agricultural lands at the periurban interface of cities across the country. these large-scale redevelopments feature commodity housing and public services, along with commercial and office space. Foreign scholars have criticised the lack of integration between these built environments and existing urban agglomerations. the resulting urban fragmentation is commonly blamed on the imposition of a foreign model of urban development that promotes a break with previous urban space production mechanisms. this paper provides a nuanced view on these ideas by exploring the history of housing policy in vietnam and in the region of Hanoi in particular. this approach underscores the locally situated nature of the new urban area experiments. at the same time, it reveals the need to explore ongoing shifts in the way various groups straddling the state, markets and society interact in contemporary urban space production processes.The appearance of new urban areas (khu do thi moi, hereafter KDTM) on the outskirts of Vietnamese cities has garnered a great deal of attention lately, especially by foreign researchers interested in the urbanisation process in the post-Doi moi era. 2 In the region of Hanoi, on which this paper focuses, new urban areas mixing residential, commercial and office uses first appeared in the 1990s. Since then, the rural-urban interface has seen paddy fields and other agricultural landscapes give way to high-rise residential towers, large avenues lined with villas and row-houses, and big box stores. At first glance, the new urban landscape that emerged out of the rice fields has little to do with older neighbourhoods in the city centre or with the periurban villages of the surrounding countryside.