Negotiating Urban Conflicts (original) (raw)
Debating contemporary urban conflicts: A survey of selected scholars
Cities, 2013
This survey presents the results of a questionnaire sent to a list of key scholars and professionals in fields related to urban processes and planning – town planning, geography, sociology, architecture and anthropology. The survey raised four simple, straightforward questions. What are the most pressing conflicts with regard to contemporary cities? What are the main fields of action for solving them? How can your discipline contribute with respect to this task? Could you mention an intervention that could serve as an example of that line of work? The response represents a plural and multidisciplinary perspective on contemporary urban issues from which a series of research and intervention perspectives emerges. Keywords: Urban conflict, urban planning, urban geography, urban sociology, urban anthropology, social inequality
Peacebuilding , 2023
This special issue explores geographies of peace in violently contested cities – cities where the socio-political order is contested by actors who use violence and repression to either challenge or reinforce the prevailing distribution of power and political, economic, and social control. The articles within the special issue theorise and explore where, when, how, and why urban conflicts manifest themselves in the context of contested cities. Together, they also uncover strategies and mechanisms that can break dynamics of violence and repression, lead to urban coexistence, and generate peaceful relations in cities, grounding their analyses in rich case studies of different violently contested cities. The special issue thereby advances the research front on violently contested cities by studying their previously underexplored constructive potential. Bringing together different disciplinary perspectives, the special issue speaks to broader issues of conflicted and conflict-driven urbanisation, political violence in cities, and wider processes of urban change.
Thinking the City: The Arena of Conflict
tracce urbane, 2025
This paper examines how the city is conceptualised and defined as a place of conflict and how a critical urban theory can emerge from this very conception. To this end, I will first analyse Henri Lefebvre's central urban text Le droit a la ville (1968) and work out its idea of the city. I will discuss whether 'the city' is a suitable object of study at all and examine Lefebvre's position on this question. Thinking of the city as 'a thing' will play a central role. I will then focus on the definitions of the city Lefebvre formulates. Lefebvre offers various ways of conceptualising the city. One of these proposals is to define the city as a place of conflict. This proposal is to be understood in the tradition of Marx and Engels, for whom the relationship between city and conflict played a major role. I will briefly describe their assumptions putting it in dialogue Lefebvre, as real expert on the idea of the city highlighted by Marx and Engels. In the other direction of time, the concept of the city as an arena of conflict has various possible connections. I discuss these possibilities and propose a postfoundational concept of conflict with which Lefebvre's concept of the city can be made fruitful. Eventually, I explore the question of whether-and if so, why-a concept of the city centred on conflict might be of interest to urban studies.
The urban space in European cities is undergoing deep transformation, through formal and informal initiatives. The gentrification of poor neighbourhoods is often counterbalanced by fast projects of local revitalization fostered by public or private actors which seldom leave time to local population to adapt to those changes. In these processes, previous existing inhabitants face difficulties to accustom themselves to an evolution in the commercial, housing and public space fabric that is targeted to the new wealthier segments of urban dwellers. These fast urban renewal processes can create two major conflicting discourses. The first, between locals and newcomers' desires and the second, between the official renewal proposals and the alternative ones proposed either by informal citizen groups or by architects that contest the official plan. On the one hand, we have existing inhabitants and their way of life, comprising their adapted shops and bars, moderate housing prices and their accustomed gathering places. On the other hand there are the newcomers' natural will to produce and reproduce their own way of life into the new space they live in. According to Neil Smith 1 , this change usually occurs slowly but can turn into violent conflicts. This new desire for a better quality for a life can be compatible with the existing one, if the process takes place through dialogue, consensus among actors and following a slow pace of development. The conflict arises when the two discourses stop coexisting and come to a confrontation. A new form of Empire using Hardt and Negri's expression 2 , is creating an urban renewal discourse that precludes alternative discourses to coexist, other than a form of political and ecological resistance: "the will to be against". But this resistance, although it seems to be informal: through demonstrations in the streets, occupations of empty plots, and other contestations that receive media coverage 3 , is somehow supported, financed and disseminated by culture stakeholders through programs that push for citizen empowerment. BMW Guggenheim Lab analysing actual 100 urban trends 4 , Goethe Institut launching a debate about participatory politics and planning 5 , and the European Union culture program Creative Europe 2014-2020 6 , are only a few examples of culture actors that launch reflection groups in such phenomena, that decline in several funding programs for local culture centres. Given this nowadays growing interest of culture actors for the aforesaid resistance phenomena, what a better field to analyse the implication of culture centres in the debate between discourses and the production of a new form of consensus, as a clue to identify possibilities to overcome and positively counterbalance the confrontation between the two major discourses fore-mentioned. Public space as confrontation space The evolution towards a wealthier status of the neighbourhood of Malasaña in the city centre of Madrid has been the object of a large discussion in the Spanish social media, but also of an academic debate on whether to call this process gentrification or a natural urban evolution process. The Spanish sociologist and urbanist Aurora Justo analyses the urban and social changes of Madrid, from a gender
Insurgency and Juxtacity in the Age of Urban Divides
Urban Forum, 2020
This commentary concerns juxtapositions of varied spaces of citizen-authority negotiation within formal and informal politics. I build on the concept of juxtacity, as a productive articulation of contradictory realities and spaces of citizenship and authority, to reveal the co-constitutive and the non-binary spaces of action in insurgent movements. Focusing on a particular articulation of citizenship and authority that I conceptualize relationally as invited and invented spaces of citizens' action, I highlight how contrasting spaces of politics can work co-constitutively. I ground my reflections in practices of subordinate groups as key actors in southern urbanism, namely South Africa's township struggles for dignified sanitation (Social Justice Coalition, SJC, and Ses'khona movement), and Brazil's homeless workers struggles for housing and land (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto, MTST). In their citizen-authority negotiation, these movements are agile, moving across invited and invented spaces as necessary to advance their struggle. Keywords Southern urbanism. Southern turn to planning theory. Insurgent movements. Sanitation and housing justice .
Urban public space between fragmentation, control and conflict
City, Territory and Architecture, 2014
The article is focused on the different tendencies affecting urban public space in contemporary cities. It is based on a reflexion on some emerging themes in the recent debate in urban studies, paying particular attention to the approaches that emphasize the fragmentation of public space and the presence of control strategies, highlighting the function of tecnologies and material elements of built environment. The main thesis of the article is that public space, far from having become marginal in a context where virtual relations have a growing importance, is a field in which various types of dialectical tensions operate. In particular, at the one hand, in different contexts it is possible to recognize the presence of a complex strategy of domestication and control of urban places, linked to a process of commodification and privatisation. On the other hand many types of opposing practices and movements are also present, that propose an alternative project of use. In this framework, public space is both a place of confrontation between opposing tendencies and a stake, on which future city models depend significantly.