USP 617: Sociology and Politics of Urban Life (original) (raw)
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SYMPOSIUM — TheOrIzIng The POlITIcIzIng cITY
This introductory symposium article develops a framework for an urban polit ical reading and a theorization of urban uprisings. We argue that there is a need to foreground the notion of the urban political as central to the theoretical and practical demands of urban research today. First, we revisit critical urban theory in light of recent urban insurrections and point out a lack of sustained theoretical engagement with the political. Second, based on this critique, we argue for what we call a 'recentring of the urban political' to rethink urban theory in ways that consider the city as a site of political encounter, interruption and experimentation, even when, or perhaps especially when, these ways fall outside institutional forms or lack the organizational form or legitimacy of social movements. Thus, we attempt to place politics at the heart of radical urban politi cal theory and practice today in order to make sense of urban subjects, events and claims that elude established government practices and institutionalized structures.
Introduction: Urban Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Theories of Urban Politics
In bringing the volume together, we engaged in a vibrant dialogue with contributors and other colleagues. We held several conference panels on the book-notably at the 2006 and 2007 Urban Affairs Association annual meetings and the British Political Studies Association annual meeting in 2006. Colleagues at these events posed important questions to us as editors. What does it mean to study theories of urban politics? Specifically, is there anything distinctive about urban theory: is it merely general theory adapted to scale; or is there something distinctive about the urban such that urban theories are not generalisable to a broader canvas? Or since, as Richard Stren illustrates in this volume (see Chapter 10), half of the world's population now inhabits urban spaces (see also Davis, 2006), is the study of the urban increasingly synonymous with the study of society at large? On a second dimension, it was suggested that we needed to think about the relationship between theory and practice in the field of urban politics. Does urban politics constitute the necessary fusion of theory and practice? If so, practice of what kind, and whose practice? That these searching questions were posed is itself an indication of the good health of the discipline. As editors, it was incumbent upon us to provide some direction to our contributors on how to address these issues. In very different ways, it is clear that all were able to meet the challenge. Here, we flesh out our thoughts as they evolved over the past couple of years. Perhaps the most interesting question posed to us was 'what do we mean by theories of urban politics?' To begin with 'theory', the first key term in the volume title, we asked authors to engage empirical (or explanatory) theories in their respective subject areas rather than explicitly normative ones. Such guidance was, of course, given with the recognition of the impossibility of value-free social science, so we take as given the idea that empirical theory will be infused with normative influences and do not try to force a strict separation. Empirical theory seeks to explain observed phenomena, usually by establishing a number of conceptually linked and generalisable causal relationships about how some factors affect (or cause) phenomena to occur. Most of the (urban political) theories or theoretical propositions collected in this volume fit this general notion of empirical theory.
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.
Politics and the City: Introduction to Special Issue
Contour Journal, 2020
The challenge of this special issue in finding words and coming to terms with contemporary city and contemporary politics is amplified by the difficulty to pin point what and where exactly a city is and how can we perceive political activities in its context. We might be better off asking: what is not city today, which place on Earth is empty of city-ness? This special issue presents four contributions that proceed from the panel City, Civility and Post-political Models of Freedom and Conflict panel held in November 2018 as part of the Scaffolds international symposium organized by ALICE lab from the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne, supported by the C I.II.III.IV. A, the Kanal Centre Pompidou, and with the participation of several institutions and university departments from KU Leuven, ULB, TU Delft, and TU Vienna. Without pertaining to comprehensiveness, the present collection captures some points in the debate on city and civility informed by questions that originate in d...
Planning Theory, 2020
This paper proposes a new theoretical perspective for understanding urban social spaces and their interrelations. In an effort to understand these multifaceted, complex relations, an inquiry committed to a flat ontology was deployed. Accordingly, we draw our theorization on the Lacanian ontological lack, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Laclau and Mouffe’s discursivity of social reality. Thus, we propose that urban social spaces are discursive and real entities with real and sensual qualities and constituted through specific relations. They are located within discursive social relations, where each urban social space has a “differential position” in an urban system of relations. Each urban social space has an “identity,” defined by its specific mixture of social groups and its specific real and sensual qualities. These qualities construct a sensual object with a specific sensual identity within the web of different urban social spaces. Therefore, urban social spaces are being ...
Recent anti-systemic social movements have illustrated the central role of cities in social movement mobilization. We not only highlight the characteristics of urban social relations that make cities fertile ground for mobilization, but also point to the disjunctures between the geographies and spatialities of social relations in the city, and the geographies and spatialities of many systemic processes. Struggles for a more just society must consider the broad geographies and spatialities of oppression, which we illustrate with a brief analysis of the Occupy movement. Finally, we introduce the next five articles in this special issue, all illustrating the importance of the geographies and spatialities of urban social struggle. [
Social Movements in Urban Society: The City as A Space of Politicization
Urban Geography, 2013
Recent anti-systemic social movements have illustrated the central role of cities in social movement mobilization. We not only highlight the characteristics of urban social relations that make cities fertile ground for mobilization, but also point to the disjunctures between the geographies and spatialities of social relations in the city, and the geographies and spatialities of many systemic processes. Struggles for a more just society must consider the broad geographies and spatialities of oppression, which we illustrate with a brief analysis of the Occupy movement. Finally, we introduce the next five articles in this special issue, all illustrating the importance of the geographies and spatialities of urban social struggle. [
FROM THE EDITOR: "CITIES: IDENTITIES, APPROPRIATION OF SPACE AND RESISTANCE PRACTICES"
The idea of this special issue came from a discussion about the need to bring a collective analysis in the global making of cities which is rare in urban studies in Turkey. There are assuredly many precious high-quality research on the ongoing urbanization processes and policies in different metropolitan cities of the country and this research takes largely into account the specificities of Turkish urban policies, Turkish cities, the construction of " gecekondu " neighbourhoods and the everyday life inside them. However, few research place this examples in a more global debate: What is the genesis of the current development of cities and what are the political and economic rules behind their development and their spatial organization? Which place and role is attributed to the city dwellers in this process? Do the latter seek also to create their own spatial practices and how do they invest the city. The objective of this issue is to make a modest contribution to this global debate by proposing case studies from different countries. The issue does not have the objective to focus only on urban development and urban transformation but to show rather how different everyday practices both from public actors and city dwellers contribute to the spatial appropriation of city. By making this, it would like to analyze also if the inevitable interaction between different actors create some tensions, resistances and protest. Cities are frequently characterized by concentration of inequality, insecurity, and exploitation. They have also long represented promises of opportunity and liberation. Public decision-making in contemporary cities is full of conflict, and principles of justice is rarely the explicit basis for the resolution of disputes (Marcuse et. al., 2009). Cities are today confronting also a more competitive global environment, and local governments have taken to place-marketing, enterprise zones, tax abatements, public-private partnerships, and new forms of local boosterism but also have reached out for new strategies of social control and workfare policies (Mayer, 2007: 91). According to Mayer, the most important goal of urban policy has become to mobilize city space as an arena for market-oriented economic growth (ibid). However, the cities and city life cannot be resumed to an economic AP