Public space and the Political - Reconnecting Urban Resistance and Urban Emancipation (original) (raw)

City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy

2017

What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics? City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They explore the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), Researchers for Fair Policing (New York), Urban Movement Congress (Poland), urban activism (Berlin), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope and protests against Academic Ball in Vienna (Austria). By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy.

PUBLIC SPACE AS REPRESSION AND RESISTANCE MECHANISM: TOWARD GHETTOS TO EMANCIPATION

LIVENARCH VII, 2021

Public space is in a continuous change as representative and practical formation of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic power. Socio-spatial readings on social movements that have emerged with both global and regional dynamics in the world draw attention to the strategic importance of public space for "the right to the city". However, this article claims that there are ontological contradiction and inconsistency in social reproduction of public space with counter politics to the hegemony through mapping of places of assembly of discriminated identity groups. This research on occupied or appropriated public spaces against hegemonic power in Turkey has revealed an ambivalence in their social productions, which have turned to public ghettos through socio-spatial restriction and surveillance of othered identities. In response, this study proposes a new socio-spatiality for emancipation by criticizing dialectical reversals in representational and practical production of public space contemplated as an "alternative" for power relations.

Public space, civic dignity and urban resistance in the age of shrinking democracy

Transactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning, 2020

Neoliberal urban restructuring constitutes an underlying challenge facing cities and communities around the world. Public space, as a medium of political engagement and social interactions, may represent a vehicle for resistance against patterns of shrinking democracy. In its capacity as a place for active democracy, public spaces – the lived spaces of contemporary societies – deserve greater care, attention, and critical reflection. As movements evolve to confront new challenges, explore new opportunities, negotiate with new actors and circumstances, and utilise new technologies and platforms, our understanding of the agency of democracy – supported through an understanding of civic dignity – must also advance. This paper aims at examining the role of public space in reclaiming and reinstating democracy. By drawing on empirical findings from cities worldwide, explored through the lens of multiple disciplines, it argues that the study of urban protest might show directions for a new...

Public space, housing affairs, and the dialectics of lived space

This paper is structured into two parts. The first part is dedicated to conceptually frame "Relational Public Space and Emerging City Publics", whereas the second part deals with "Silences and absences from public space research": This part will deal with three case studies: Vienna, Barcelona and Berlin. The Vienna case will help to exemplify theoretical and conceptual considerations, whereas the main empirical study revolves around the Barcelona case. The Berlin case will help to translate again back from empirical findings to conceptual critique. As follows, I am planning to offer some key arguments why to combine housing activism and research, with public space activism and research. In the conclusions "Resistance combined", I will elaborate on the core hypothesis that a dialectical bridging of segmented fields in the scrutiny of urbanization processes is needed because of constant classificatory struggles and as an act to promote inclusive urban res...

Space, Emancipation and Post-Political Urbanization

Public Space Unbound: Urban Emancipation and the Post-Political Condition, 2018

This chapter expands understanding emancipation beyond the confines of political philosophy and positions it as critical concept in urban studies. The first part focuses on whose emancipation is addressed by outlining distinctions between political and social emancipation, whereas the following sections introduce relations between emancipation and the city, and emancipation and urbanization. After a critique of the colonizing features of emancipation in modern discourses, debates on emancipation will be situated in relation to debates on the post-political condition. Thereafter, emancipation is analysed per its current use in post-foundational thought, thus constructing a conceptual frame to situate the subsequent book sections and chapters.

Urban space and collective action: The city as a site of enactment and denial of rights

The links between law, people and land will be developed here in two broad dimensions: laws of the land, which define access and obligations; and laws of people, which define their rights. The intersection of rights to land and rights of people include property relations, rights to presence and occupation, ‘human rights’ and citizenship. I begin with a brief overview of laws (Aboriginal and Roman) that have defined rights and obligations to land. The lesson I take from that discussion is that our contemporary legal categories, understood in the shorthand of ‘public’ and ‘private’, have grown from a much more complex set of relations. The law of people’s rights begins from a recognition that they are not limited to declarations, bill and statutes but are instead dynamic interactions and claims. Two key authors to have recognised this aspect of rights are Hannah Arendt and Henri Lefebvre. Their approach to rights will be compared, to better understand how rights to the city can be claimed, and how spatial considerations impact on the right to have rights.

Social Movements and Urban Space

VIANA, Nildo. International Journal of Research in Geography (IJRG) Volume 1, Issue 2, 2015, PP 1-8 ISSN 2454-8685 (online), 2015

This paper discusses the relationship between social movements and urban space. To do so, it briefly discusses the concepts of social movements and urban space to subsequently provide an analysis of the relationship between them. Starting from the view that the urban space is a place of social division that ends up creating inequalities and social problems, it is possible to understand what are commonly known as urban social movements and urban popular movements as being characterized by its constitution of underprivileged social classes and that their claims ask for improvements in a part of the urban space, which creates a certain relationship with the state. In this process, there is a class conflict where we have the underprivileged classes in one side and on the other the state apparatus, representative of the ruling class.