Berlin is witnessing a massive tourism boom, and parts of it can be described as 'new urban tourism', which shows a preference for off the beaten track areas and 'authentic' experiences of the city. This form of tourism seems especially salient in Kreuzberg. It is here that an openly articulated critique of tourism attracted national attention in 2011 and has not ceased to do so since. This article aims to better understand the conflictive potential of (new urban) tourism in Kreuzberg. We argue that the readily expressed negative attitudes against tourists and the easily accepted link between tourism and gentrification have to be explained against the backdrop of certain housing-market dynamics. Rising rents and a diminution in the number of flats available for rent are fuelling fears of gentrification in Kreuzberg, while the interest shown in new urban tourism and the comparatively low-priced real-estate market in Berlin result in a growing number of holiday flats. Although adding only slightly to the tightening of the housing market, holiday flats render complex processes of neighborhood change visible and further sustain an already prevalent tourism critique.

Our paper addresses the complex role of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in current processes of inner-city restructuring and the function of BIDs in the implementation of new forms of social control in downtown areas. Our thesis is that, in the context of recent urban renaissance initiatives, BIDs are expanding their ‘clean and safe’ profile to be a much more comprehensive programme. Their goal is not only to produce safety and cleanliness in the urban environment but to influence the symbolic dimension of what the city is and for whom it is made. This implies indirect forms of governing the way in which the city is used, which go unnoticed if BIDs are identified solely as a tool to create ‘clean and safe’ public space. We will substantiate this claim with a case study on the current restructuring of downtown Los Angeles (L.A.). Since 1999, downtown L.A. has been profoundly ‘revitalized’ as a living and entertainment district for affluent residents. The nine BIDs covering the main parts of the downtown play an important role in making this gentrification happen by providing the appropriate context for restructuring. Beyond overt measures such as security forces or CCTV, the BIDs also have an important impact on the ‘geographical imagination’ (Harvey, 1973) of the city. The examples elucidate the anticipation of a broadening field of activity for BIDs, not only in securing an ‘urban renaissance’ but also in framing the way it is performed symbolically.

The growing fear of an emerging pandemic has facilitated efforts in infection control, where new technologies and laws have been introduced nationally and at the level of WHO. This renewed emphasis on infection control is changing the character of global health. This is well described as a securitisation of global health. Less clear is how an ‘emerging diseases worldview’ does play out on an urban scale. The city has historically been the preferred site for biopolitical interventions, which poses a question about the biopolitics of the ‘pandemic city’. Severely experiencing the SARS epidemic in 2003, Hong Kong may be an exemplary case in this regard. Focusing on ways of governing un/healthy bodies in post‐SARS Hong Kong, the article details a refined biopolitics, where longstanding mechanisms of social exclusion are combined with enhanced forms of social control through a mix of architectural, ideological and intelligence‐gathering processes.

Inner-city living is a hot topic in Germany. Policy-makers long for new middle- and upper-class residents; evidence of urban in-flight has been documented by scholars, and debates on reurbanisation are in full swing. This trend has also led to the emergence of a new housing product in German metropolises: high-priced, centrally located and newly built apartment and townhouse developments. In this paper, these luxury developments are analysed as part of a general process of urban restructuring and a focus is on the contradictions inherent to the idea of urbanity taking shape here. Guided by Foucault’s governmentality approach, new luxury developments are understood as a powerful reworking of how the city, its uses and users are imagined and governed. In doing so, the paper aims to show that the concept of governmentality enables a critique of current processes of urban restructuring that may enrich the on-going debates on gentrification.

Contemporary infectious disease surveillance systems aim to employ the speed and scope of big data in an attempt to provide global health security. Both shifts - the perception of health problems through the framework of global health security and the corresponding technological approaches – imply epistemological changes, methodological ambivalences as well as manifold societal effects. Bringing current findings from social sciences and public health praxis into a dialogue, this conversation style contribution points out several broader implications of changing disease surveillance. The conversation covers epidemiological issues such as the shift from expert knowledge to algorithmic knowledge, the securitization of global health, and the construction of new kinds of threats. Those developments are detailed and discussed in their impacts for health provision in a broader sense.