Reveiw: Back to the Future: New Histories of New York in a New Age of Inequality (Journal of Urban History, 2015) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Multiplying resistance: The power of the urban in the age of national revanchism
In: Keith Jacobs and Jeff Malpas (eds) Philosophy and the City: Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Perspectives. Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019
In this chapter, we evaluate the politically generative dynamic of urban space. Notably, we put forward the notion of the ‘multiplier effect’ of the urban, referring to its ingrained tendency to multiply resistance to oppression and violence being exerted against subaltern groups and minorities and, in doing so, to turn this multiplied resistance into an active force of social change. We therefore look at the twofold valence of ‘resistance’: negative and affirmative. Resistance initially takes form as a defensive response to oppression and violence. When this happens, the urban becomes the living platform for a multiplying dynamic of encounter and, potentially, of inter-group solidarity, thus laying the foundations for a cooperative – rather than competitive, as in neoliberal rationality, or inimical, as in national-populist reason – way of ‘being together’. After having developed this argument against the backdrop of the women’s movement in Tehran and the urban disobedience to anti-immigration policies in Italy, our chapter concludes by reflecting on the multiplier effect of urban resistance within the current context of national revanchism.
Introduction. After the Urban Crisis: New York and the Rise of Inequality
Journal of Urban History, 2017
The introduction to this special section argues that the deconstruction of the city’s municipal social democracy was overdetermined by shifts in the global political economy toward increased income inequality and the depoliticization of national economic management. The city’s creditors forced it into an ideologically-motivated program of market discipline that cut its operating budget as the city’s economy financialized, defined by Greta Krippner as “the tendency for profit making in the economy to occur increasingly through financial channels rather than through productive activities.” The city’s leaders believed that their program would revive the city for the middle class. But financialization exacerbated income inequality. In 1970, the top 0.01 percent of earners made fifty times the average income; by 1998, that figure had increased to 250 times the average income. In 2013 Mayor Michael Bloomberg commented that: “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap,” which, he argued, was good for the whole city, because it would raise its tax base. The four articles of this section are part of a new and growing body of historical works about New York City since the 1970s that challenge the linear narratives of concepts such as neoliberalism, gentrification, public space, law and order, and resistance by reviewing how ordinary New Yorkers coped with declining infrastructure, services, standards of living, and increasing inequality.
2015
In this chapter, we propose to follow over several decades the long, turbulent politics of composing an urban order in both its social and material dimensions – a political task that involves debates and confrontations to determine the city’s forms and, more fundamentally, who could live there and how. At stake is a quest for emancipation and the art of governing difference, a dialectic where the city reveals both its liberating and oppressive dimensions. Exploring this dialectic will, in particular, enable us to follow the slow and ambiguous integration of 1970s’ critical ideals into the order of the contemporary city.
Tracce Urbane. Italian Journal of Urban Studies, n. 7, "Towards a Genealogy of Critical Urban Studies", 2020
Aim of this special issue of Tracce Urbane is to stimulate an exploration of the historical, political, social, and intellectual reasons that brought to a peculiar and, in a way, ambiguous field of knowledge: that of critical urban studies. David Madden, Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Co-Director of the Cities Programme, and co-author, with Peter Marcuse, of In Defense of Housing: The politics of crisis (Verso, 2016), whose Italian edition is forthcoming (by Barbara Pizzo for Edit Press), has been invited to discuss the complex social arena in which critical urban studies stands, reflects, and acts. In the conversation that follows, Madden explores some fundamental topics related to the production of this specific academic knowledge, such as the ‘canonlessness’ that characterizes urban studies, the emphasis on intervention and radical transformation that inhabits critical urban studies, the utopian dimension of this tradition of study, the heterogenous genealogies that should be considered when approaching this discipline, the necessity of listening and considering the social sources of critique that rise in every neighbourhood or city around the globe, the future of critical urban studies and its relation with urban struggle, the way in which social movements contribute to its development, the role of academics in promoting social changes, his personal commitment in defense of housing as a space for inhabitants. In his words we can find a first answer to Saskia Sassen’s argument that «spaces of the expelled cry out for conceptual recognition» (Sassen, 2014: p. 222). According to Madden, this recognition cannot be only conceptual. It must be grounded, it must be critical, it must be radical.