Agamben's figure of the homo sacer is much discussed and applied in various social sciences. This article discusses the limits of Agamben's perspective and illustrates the value of an amended version by a discussion of urban policy practices in the Netherlands that operate on the basis of a distinct logic of exception and create urban homines sacri. A discussion of the case of the policy practice of the Rotterdam “Intervention Teams” provides an account of how the city becomes a city of exception, and the development of such policies and of the discourses that legitimate them. We illustrate the ways in which the selection of urban zones of exception is heavily dependent both on ethnicity and on income.

Severe or even mild hyperhomocysteinaemia can cause a wide range of neurological problems. In recent years its vascular complications, including cerebral stroke, in children and young adults have gained special interest, because hyperhomocysteinaemia is treatable and recurrence of vascular incidents may be preventable. Current knowledge about biochemical mechanisms leading to hyperhomocysteinaemia, the pathogenesis of vascular pathology and neurological disfunction, and the various patterns of cerebral damage are reviewed. The significance of MRI in diagnosis, follow-up and research on hyperhomocysteinaemia is discussed.

Recent legislation in the Netherlands takes conditional welfare to a new level. Local welfare offices can now give benefit sanctions to welfare clients that 'obstruct employment' by their appearance. Through a qualitative and ethnographic study of aesthetic evaluation practices in Dutch welfare offices it is argued that: (1) an everyday aesthetic labour is pivotal in post-Fordist labour markets; (2) in times of precarization, this is so for unemployed as well as formally employed populations; (3) welfare clients are expected to give an aesthetic performance of work-readiness and adaptability; and (4) case managers use aesthetics as a pedagogy to achieve this readiness and adaptability. Aesthetic labour, it is then argued, is best conceptualized as a continuous, everyday, backstage labour for labour: a daily calibration for work contexts in flux.

Rotterdam organised the festival ‘La City’ as an entrepreneurial strategy to upgrade the city’s class position, using femininity as a tool. ‘La City’ was an attempt to introduce a new economy in Rotterdam: one that is service-based and post-industrial. Rotterdam is a former industrial city and is now trying to establish a new economy and a new spatial organisation. In this article, ‘La City’ campaign material, texts on the character of the city and interviews in local newspapers with policy-makers are analysed in the context of the urban renewal and gentrification policies of Rotterdam. This research shows how the city uses femininity as a marketing strategy to ‘cleanse’ Rotterdam of its working-class mythology as well as construing a hegemonic gender identity capable of excluding lower-class groups. Rotterdam, according to its own texts, is after bourgeois, feminine inhabitants that ‘lounge’ in ‘cocktail bars’ to replace the ‘rough’ men who worked in the harbour. ‘La City’ is one of many strategies to establish genderfication: the production of space for not only more affluent users (as gentrification is often defined), but also for specific gender notions. Genderfication is also established by practices of ‘mixing’ urban neighbourhoods and building homes for middle-class families.

Former industrial cities in the West are employing gentrification as urban policy. In these policies, women and families play an important role as gentrification pioneers. Analysing the case of Rotterdam (the Netherlands), I propose the term genderfication to understand the gender dimensions of this process. Genderfication refers to the production of space for different gender relations. I analyse Rotterdam"s urban planning program for the "Child Friendly City", in which current urban dwellings are replaced by new, larger and more expensive "family-friendly homes" as a strategy for urban re-generation. Urban re-generation supplements regeneration in the form of material and economic restructuring, and refers to the replacement of part of the current population by a new and better suited generation. The "Child Friendly City Program" is considered in tandem punitive "youth policies".