Reclaiming Rights to the Socialist City: Bureaucratic Artifacts and the Affective Appeal of Petitions (original) (raw)
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Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention. Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds. We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements. The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention to develop. Because cities are dense, they are likely to trigger confl icts over space. Because they are large, they have suffi cient numbers to sustain organizations of even small minorities. And because cities are diverse, they become the laboratories where new ties are forged and the battlegrounds where competing demands vie for domination. Contention thus emerges from the microinteractions between large numbers of diverse people living in close proximity. Social movements crystallize when people organize to collectively claim urban space, organize constituents, and express demands. Contention and movements emanate from cities but also stretch outwards as activists broker relations between local and their more geographically distant allies. The recent series of protests demonstrate how the urban is uniquely conducive of contention and reveals the linkages that connect contention between different locales ). All over the world, protesters occupied central areas, formed relations among themselves, and expressed their demands for equality and liberty. During the Arab revolutions, relational and cognitive connections permitted activists in Tripoli and Bahrain to imagine their struggles in very similar ways to those in Cairo, in spite of very different and uneven political opportunities, mobilization capacities, and cultures (Lopes de Souza and Lipietz, 2011). This movement then inspired protesters in Spain to take to the squares, which inspired Occupy Wall Street, which in turn spiraled into the global-yet geographically uneven (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2012)-Occupy movement.
Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city
Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention. Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds. We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements. The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention to develop. Because cities are dense, they are likely to trigger confl icts over space. Because they are large, they have suffi cient numbers to sustain organizations of even small minorities. And because cities are diverse, they become the laboratories where new ties are forged and the battlegrounds where competing demands vie for domination. Contention thus emerges from the microinteractions between large numbers of diverse people living in close proximity. Social movements crystallize when people organize to collectively claim urban space, organize constituents, and express demands. Contention and movements emanate from cities but also stretch outwards as activists broker relations between local and their more geographically distant allies. The recent series of protests demonstrate how the urban is uniquely conducive of contention and reveals the linkages that connect contention between different locales ). All over the world, protesters occupied central areas, formed relations among themselves, and expressed their demands for equality and liberty. During the Arab revolutions, relational and cognitive connections permitted activists in Tripoli and Bahrain to imagine their struggles in very similar ways to those in Cairo, in spite of very different and uneven political opportunities, mobilization capacities, and cultures (Lopes de Souza and Lipietz, 2011). This movement then inspired protesters in Spain to take to the squares, which inspired Occupy Wall Street, which in turn spiraled into the global-yet geographically uneven (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2012)-Occupy movement.
2006
Curiously, even progressive planners usually share with their conservative counterparts the assumption that the state is the sole urban planning agent. This paper outlines that even if the state is sometimes controlled by more or less progressive forces and even influenced by social movements, civil society should be seen as a powerful actor in the conception and implementation of urban planning and management. Drawing on examples from urban social movements in Latin America, in particular favela activism, the sem-teto movement and participatory budgeting, it explores how civil society can conceive, and even implement, complex, radically alternative socio-spatial strategies. This can be seen as part of a genuine attempt at ‘grassroots urban planning’.
2010
The last half century has been a time of unprecedented global urbanization, democratization, and neoliberalization. In a matter of decades, countries that were mostly rural have become mostly urban. At the same time, the number of electoral democracies has doubled, increasing from one third to two thirds of the world's sovereign states. In many regions of the world, the growth of cities and the invention of democracy has also coincided with the institutionalization of neoliberalism as an organization of state and a rationality of privatization and dispossession. These processes of urbanization, democratization, and neoliberalization are deeply related. Although their combinations are intensely local in combustion, they produce a remarkably similar condition worldwide: enormous numbers-soon approaching a majority-of the world's population now live in impoverished urban peripheries in conditions of illegal and irregular residence, around urban centers that benefit from their services and their poverty. Yet these conditions also generate a characteristic response: precisely in the urban peripheries, residents come to understand their basic needs in terms of their inhabiting the city, suffering it, building their daily lives in it, making its landscape, history, and politics a place for themselves. The many meanings of this making often coalesce into a sense that they have a right to the city. This transformation of need into right has made cities a strategic arena for the development of new and insurgent Holston 2 citizenships. By citizenship I mean membership in a political association or community that articulates a relation, not a dichotomy, between structures of power and social lives. By insurgent urban citizenship, I refer to the political transformation that occurs when the conviction of having a right to the city turns residents into active citizens who mobilize their demands through residentially-based organizations that confront entrenched national regimes of citizen inequality. Not all urban peripheries produce this kind of insurgence of city against state. But enough do to qualify this collision of urban and national, local and imperial, insurgent and entrenched citizenships as a global category of conflict. The results of these processes in Latin America, Southern Africa, India, and elsewhere have been contradictory. If democratization would seem to hold special promise for more egalitarian citizenships, and thus for greater citizen justice and dignity, in practice most democracies experience tremendous conflict among citizens as principle collides with prejudice over the terms of national membership and the distribution of rights. If cities have historically been the locus of citizenship's expansion, contemporary peripheral urbanization creates especially volatile conditions, as city regions become crowded with marginalized citizens and noncitizens who contest their exclusions. Thus the insurgence of urban democratic citizenships in recent decades has disrupted established formulas of rule and privilege in the most diverse societies worldwide. Yet the result is an entanglement of democracy with its counters, in which new kinds of urban citizens arise to expand democratic citizenships and new forms of urban violence, inequality, impunity, and dispossession erode them. Today, I want to emphasize that this insurgent right to the city confronts the entrenched with alternative formulations of citizenship; in other words, that its conflicts Holston 3 are clashes of citizenship and not merely idiosyncratic or instrumental protest and violence. I want to emphasize that although brutal political economies of labor, land, and law segregate the urban poor into peripheries and reduce them to a "bare life" of servility, the very same structures of inequality incite these hinterland residents to demand a life worthy of citizens. The incitement that I am talking about takes place in the realm of everyday and domestic life taking shape around the construction of residence in remote urban peripheries. It is an insurgence that begins with the struggle for the right to have a daily life in the city worthy of a citizen's dignity. Accordingly, its demands for a new formulation of citizenship get conceived in terms of housing, property, plumbing, daycare, security, and other aspects of residential life. Its leaders are the "barely citizens" of the entrenched regime: women, manual laborers, squatters, the functionally literate, immigrants and, above all, those in families with a precarious stake in residential property, with a legal or illegal toehold to a houselot somewhere far from elite centers. These are the agents who, in the process of building and defending their residential spaces, not only construct a vast new city but, on that basis, also propose a city with a different order of citizenship.
In the daily lives of people in the metro, slum areas have been a common sight in our daily routine. But what caused the existence of the slums and informal settlers, the urban poor and dwellers, and their condition are structural and systemic in nature. In 2013, over 860 million people were living in slums, which is tallied to be about 725 million in 2000 (UN Habitat, 2013). This study aims to understand the condition of the urban poor communities in resettlement areas and the forces that affects their struggle.
More-than-human planning: the agency of buildings and bodies in the post-political city
Geographical Research, 2018
Through a comparative study of political activism in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks in Sydney from 1971 to 1974 and from 2014 to 2017, this paper examines the more-than-human force of bodies and buildings in redemocratising cities. The paper brings theoretical insights from urban assemblage and Deleuzian scholarship into dialogue with post-political theory. In doing so, it shifts the focus in urban political geography from a concern with diverse social groups to the political potential in more-than-human assemblages. Through a re-reading of Sydney's Green Bans in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks, the paper first shows how the withdrawal of labour and stilled building sites comprise informal pathways of planning rejection that centralise social and ecological concerns in decision-making in urban development. That first case is then contrasted with the contemporary case of privatisation and displacement at the same sites, showing how aged bodies can energise latent deliberative spaces across diverse (if repressed) institutions in liberal democracies. Given the capacities of materials and bodies to produce planning outcomes, the paper conceptualises planning as a more-than-human process enhanced by immersion in the experimental materialism of political movements—and this materialism is inherently geographical. The paper concludes with my reflecting on whether the proximity of workers and residents to the materials of the built environment in social movement activism of the 1970s intensified the reach of the event compared with the uncertain struggle over Millers Point today.