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city: issue 26.5-6
founding editor: bob caterrall
editor: city editors
editorial: don’t write to ‘us’ -lindsay sawyer
The past few months have provided me the opportunity to meet three groups of colleagues and collaborators for the first time in two years. Putting aside the absurdity of getting back to business-as-usual as the permapandemic and periapocalypse moments roll on, it was a joy to meet these brilliant people in person and enjoy an immediate depth of engagement often so hard to produce in ersatz online spaces. One meeting made a particularly deep impression. I organised a writing workshop1 with Prof Taibat Lawanson from the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos. Held in Lagos in July, a group of 12 early career scholars from Nigeria finally got to meet after 2 years of mentorship, article development and training sessions. It was a tangible attempt to address uneven knowledge production through making the vital scholarship being undertaken by Nigerian urban researchers part of the discourse occurring in international journals. It was a space of mutual learning and reckoning, where the fault lines and very real effects of this unevenness became apparent. As one especially positive outcome, it also consolidated the cohort into The Critical Urban Researchers of Nigeria, a network of peer support, resource sharing and solidarity.
In one session, the group pointed out that while they are advised not to use colloquialisms in their writing, as it will be seen to detract from their work by making it seem parochial and less relevant to international audiences, north/western scholars often pepper their text with wahala or go slow or a line from a Fela Kuti song in order to add authenticity to their work. There were cringes all round as people shared anecdotes of parachute researchers who misuse, or worse appropriate, language and culture. The most recent being the furore over the use of Sọ̀rọ̀ sókè by white author Trish Lorenz.2 While allegations of plagiarism or appropriation in the book proved to be unfounded, the title still grates on Nigerian ears and the awarding of generous funds for writing the book is galling. This raises an important question: when north/western scholars deploy these phrases when writing about places like Lagos, who is their imagined audience? Not a group of Nigerian urbanists such as this, clearly. When Nigerian scholars submit work to journals, who are they required to write to?
linda Tuhiwai Smith questioned the politics of academic writing and of writing to different audiences, evoking Edward Said to ask who we are writing to, and who is we (Smith 2012, 38). She highlights the double function of indigenous academic writing, that it must ‘write back’ to the academy as well as write to themselves. Alongside this, there is the inescapable need to write directly to the academy in order to get past its gatekeepers (us/you editors and reviewers) and out into the world, and of course to write this in English. For the Nigerian urbanists in the room that day, there is also the local institutional audience that has to be satisfied to achieve promotion, which have their own disciplinary formulations (see below and Ahmed et al. 2022). For a north/western scholar who is not trying to radically disrupt the canon, there is perhaps often just one imagined audience.
What is being claimed in the use of local pepper to spice up a paper? It’s like displaying a souvenir, a demonstration of having been somewhere. This could be used to infer authority, to impress, to look cool, but this largely only works for people who haven’t been there. It is an act of seeking legitimation from ‘here’ and not ‘there’. To my chagrin, I am frequently seen as brave for going to Lagos when I navigate the city as an international elite, with risks different to but as manageable as a visit to New York (the same distance incidentally from Sheffield as Lagos). The notion that it requires bravery to go to Lagos only denotes fear of that place, which of course comes primarily from a lack of familiarity and basic racism. The point is that the deployment of a local detail to impress relies on and assumes a lack of knowledge in your audience. More meaningful, and more stringent, are the tests of competence, those subtle tests of tacit knowledge that researchers are regularly subjected to by local people in the ‘field’. How often do we, or can we, write to those examiners?
editorial
abstract / preview
Abstract
Don’t write to ‘us’
The past few months have provided me the opportunity to meet three groups of colleagues and collaborators for the first time in two years. Putting aside the absurdity of getting back to business-as-usual as the permapandemic and periapocalypse moments roll on, it was a joy to meet these brilliant people in person and enjoy an immediate depth of engagement often so hard to produce in ersatz online spaces. One meeting made a particularly deep impression. I organised a writing workshopFootnote1 with Prof Taibat Lawanson from the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos. Held in Lagos in July, a group of 12 early career scholars from Nigeria finally got to meet after 2 years of mentorship, article development and training sessions. It was a tangible attempt to address uneven knowledge production through making the vital scholarship being undertaken by Nigerian urban researchers part of the discourse occurring in international journals. It was a space of mutual learning and reckoning, where the fault lines and very real effects of this unevenness became apparent. As one especially positive outcome, it also consolidated the cohort into The Critical Urban Researchers of Nigeria, a network of peer support, resource sharing and solidarity. In one session, the group pointed out that while they are advised not to use colloquialisms in their writing, as it will be seen to detract from their work by making it seem parochial and less relevant to international audiences, north/western scholars often pepper their text with wahala or go slow or a line from a Fela Kuti song in order to add authenticity to their work. There were cringes all round as people shared anecdotes of parachute researchers who misuse, or worse appropriate, language and culture. The most recent being the furore over the use of Sọ̀rọ̀ sókè by white author Trish Lorenz.Footnote2 While allegations of plagiarism or appropriation in the book proved to be unfounded, the title still grates on Nigerian ears and the awarding of generous funds for writing the book is galling. This raises an important question: when north/western scholars deploy these phrases when writing about places like Lagos, who is their imagined audience? Not a group of Nigerian urbanists such as this, clearly. When Nigerian scholars submit work to journals, who are they required to write to? Linda Tuhiwai Smith questioned the politics of academic writing and of writing to different audiences, evoking Edward Said to ask who we are writing to, and who is we (Smith Citation2012, 38). She highlights the double function of indigenous academic writing, that it must ‘write back’ to the academy as well as write to themselves. Alongside this, there is the inescapable need to write directly to the academy in order to get past its gatekeepers (us/you editors and reviewers) and out into the world, and of course to write this in English. For the Nigerian urbanists in the room that day, there is also the local institutional audience that has to be satisfied to achieve promotion, which have their own disciplinary formulations (see below and Ahmed et al. Citation2022). For a north/western scholar who is not trying to radically disrupt the canon, there is perhaps often just one imagined audience. What is being claimed in the use of local pepper to spice up a paper? It’s like displaying a souvenir, a demonstration of having been somewhere. This could be used to infer authority, to impress, to look cool, but this largely only works for people who haven’t been there. It is an act of seeking legitimation from ‘here’ and not ‘there’. To my chagrin, I am frequently seen as brave for going to Lagos when I navigate the city as an international elite, with risks different to but as manageable as a visit to New York (the same distance incidentally from Sheffield as Lagos). The notion that it requires bravery to go to Lagos only denotes fear of that place, which of course comes primarily from a lack of familiarity and basic racism. The point is that the deployment of a local detail to impress relies on and assumes a lack of knowledge in your audience. More meaningful, and more stringent, are the tests of competence, those subtle tests of tacit knowledge that researchers are regularly subjected to by local people in the ‘field’. How often do we, or can we, write to those examiners? There have been calls for local knowledge to inform, provincialise, and enrich urban theory for a substantial amount of time (e.g. Pieterse Citation2011; Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti Citation2013). Yet if African scholars risk being seen as provincial and irrelevant when they use local detail, and north/western scholars are congratulated for being (bravely) mobile across geographies, what kind of local knowledge is being permitted into theory? And who gets to write it? And in a very real way—how? The growing literature on employing non-extractivist methods and practices (e.g. Lawhon and Truelove Citation2019) is vitally important but mostly emphasises how north/western researchers can ethically access and use local knowledge. What of addressing gatekeeping practices for African scholars doing the same? As we grappled with in the writing workshop: how do you challenge the mechanisms of knowledge production through the mechanisms of knowledge production? Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s brilliant book ‘The Mobile Workshop’ (Citation2018) constitutes a rare and important refusal to translate indigenous words, instead he applies them for specificity and clarity, and demonstrates not only their role in knowledge production but firmly places them as knowledge with a goal to ‘re-Africanize’ analytical categories. One of the primary aims of the writing workshop in Lagos was to bring the rich empirical knowledge and theoretical insight being produced by Nigerian urban scholars into the global conversation. Yet there are further obstacles both systemic and mundane for many scholars to overcome in order to join ‘the’ conversation. We all know there is a particular way of writing that gives the best chance of publication in an international journal, or even being accepted for review. Whereas in the UK this way of writing is largely consistent throughout someone’s university education and into academia, in Nigeria how you are taught to write and how you are suddenly expected to write in order to be published in a top journal are not the same at all. Further, something that emerged during the workshop and through the international Urban ECA Collective (Ahmed et al. Citation2022) that does not receive enough acknowledgement, is just how busy scholars in the Global South are. While UK academics are expected to publish on a ‘quality not quantity’ basis, around one journal article per year, in Nigeria there is an expectation to produce between 20 and 25 journal articles alone for promotion to Professor. At the same time, Nigerian academics receive relatively low pay, are sometimes not paid for months and regularly go on lengthy strikes: for instance seven months in 2020, and since February this year. Nigerian academics also live in Nigeria, where just sustaining yourself and your household is a full-time job. A senior researcher once told me that, when on a three-month fellowship to Norway, he was amazed at what he could get done when not having to think about putting oil in the generator, fixing his car for the third time in a month because of the potholes, or fundraising amongst his neighbours to get those potholes on his road fixed. These are serious pressures and strains, not exactly conducive for that kind of writing. Beyond academic audiences, Nipesh Palat Narayanan (Citation2022) questions what it is to write to non-academics, those we interview and theorise, questioning the radical potential of ‘theorising from the South’ if local meaning is sacrificed for tenaciously totalising theory: [C]an the ‘dislocated’ urban theory be any better, as opposed to metropolitan urban theory, if it is based on the same aspirations of perpetrating itself as global (or globally relevant)? Will the global aspirations not make the location of theory situate in the metropolis, yet again? That formulation again: can the Critical Urban Researchers of Nigeria disrupt the conversation by being part of the conversation? How aware are editors and reviewers, we gatekeepers, of the different trajectories that lead to the submission of a paper? What capacity is there to accommodate differences on ‘our’ peer-reviewed pages? What kinds of conversations can we start? The City editors grapple with these questions all the time. City’s agenda has always been a radical one, and while we’re still very much part of the machinations of knowledge production, we’re asking ourselves what role we can play, what we can make way and space for. City will soon be launching the Majority Urbanisms Initiative to support the development and publication of work from and about the majority world as a way to multiply and thicken ‘the’ conversation. We plan to do this through building networks of solidarity and peer support, particularly among early career researchers, offering tools and spaces for the development of radical scholarship. We have also recently relaunched the special section of Scenes Sounds Action (SSA) within City as part of a commitment to the value of non-academic voices and contributions within an emancipatory project of bringing together theory and practice, welcoming a range of innovative submissions that do not follow a standard academic style. So now, when you send a submission to City, don’t just write to ‘us’.
original articles
politics of maintenance and care: rosa luxemburg’s commonplace urban theorizing
keywords: rosa luxemburg, doreen massey, maintenance, care, throwntogetherness, urban nature, multisensory, berlin, biography
abstract / preview
Abstract
Politics of maintenance and care: Rosa Luxemburg’s commonplace urban theorizing
Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) is commonly known as a political thinker, economist, and revolutionary socialist. A person of versatile interests and skills, she was certainly a widely admired public speaker, journalist, publisher, teacher, translator, editor, and party leader, as well as an amateur botanist, an occasional painter, and – particularly in her final years – an avid birdwatcher. What also powerfully comes through in her writing (especially her letters), but has received little attention to date, is that she had the mind and pen of an urban ethnographer. In her thick, vivid accounts of urban sights and sounds, Luxemburg generously tapped into her senses and emotions, in the process revealing how affect shapes urban experiences and imaginaries. Focusing on practices and politics of maintenance and care, this paper offers an analysis of Luxemburg’s multisensory descriptions of her urban surroundings and ‘the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now’ that Doreen Massey theorized as throwntogetherness. Taking seriously Luxemburg’s observations in and about the city recorded in her letters and botanical notebooks reveals the small acts of commonplace theorizing that in academia are still too rarely recognized for what they are.
radical unknowability: an essay on solidarities and multiform urban life
keywords: detachment, solidarity, urban life, lateral movement
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Abstract
Radical unknowability: an essay on solidarities and multiform urban life
If urban life emerges within a multiplex space, what forms of change are afforded by urban environments? The urban entails a series of relations and detachments that contain popular economies and urban commons. Rather than a system, the urban becomes an amalgamation of multiple forms. Thus, urban change does not follow one-off dramatic interventions, but rather, it results from numerous micro shifts constantly occurring in the urban environment. This kind of change entails lateral movements and movement sideways that add up to structural transformations. A crucial question is what kind of solidarities can deal with the barriers to urban life that people encounter and experience as a sense of impossibility, a ‘cannot’ that prevents their initiatives. Transcending such ‘cannot’ discourse will require discarding the moral looking glass that often taints urban futures imaginations.
incorporation of urban differences in tokyo, mexico city, and los angeles
keywords: difference, incorporation, commodification, gentrification, henri lefebvre, raymond williams, comparative urban studies, urbanization processes
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Abstract
Incorporation of urban differences in Tokyo, Mexico City, and Los Angeles
Reinvestment and intensification are common processes in many urban areas across the world. These transformations are often analyzed with concepts such as ‘urban regeneration’, ‘urban renaissance’, or ‘gentrification’. However, in analyzing Shimokitazawa (Tokyo), Centro Histórico (Mexico City), and Downtown Los Angeles, we realized that these concepts do not fully grasp the qualitative changes of everyday life and the contradictory character of the urbanization processes we observed. They do not take into consideration the far-reaching effects of these processes, and particularly do not address the underlying key question: how is urban value produced? Therefore, we have chosen a different analytical entry point to these transformations, by focusing on the production, reproduction, and incorporation of the intrinsic qualities of the urban. We found Lefebvre’s concept of ‘urban differences’ and Williams’ concept of ‘incorporation’ particularly useful for analyzing our empirical results. In this contribution, we compare the ‘incorporation of urban differences’ in the three case study areas and offer this concept for further discussions and applications.
rethinking the city with bourdieu’s trialectic
keywords: bourdieu, city, social space, symbolic space, physical space, capital, habitus
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Abstract
Rethinking the city with Bourdieu’s trialectic
My forthcoming book Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2023) is not intended as an eclectic combination of the structuralist and the phenomenological takes on the city rehearsing Pierre Bourdieu’s influential critique of the deadly antinomy of objectivism and subjectivism. Nor does it aim just to make room for the author of Distinction in the pantheon of theorists before which students of the city are expected to genuflect. I intend the book, not as an addition, but a challenge to the urban canon and a springboard for a possible reconstruction of urban theory and inquiry around what I christen the Bourdieusian trialectic of symbolic space, social space, and physical space. In this paper, I provide a compact characterization of the trialectic and then draw out its implications for the theory and comparative study of the city.
pandemics and geoarbitrage: digital nomadism before and after covid-19
keywords: digital nomads, mobility, covid-19, borders, welfare state, geoarbitrage
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Abstract
Pandemics and geoarbitrage: digital nomadism before and after COVID-19
Digital Nomads (those working for higher wages in developed countries but living in less expensive locations, most often in the Global South) are known for their ability to practice geoarbitrage: they search for a lower cost of living while working remotely. Many in this group have merged economic ideas about mobility with cultural beliefs around the value of uprootedness as a means to live independently and appreciate experiences over possessions. This article, drawing from 900 social media observations and 25 long format interviews, shows how the coronavirus pandemic challenged core practices of digital nomads because of lockdowns and border closures. It also shows how the pandemic made some in this group reconsider their relationship with their home countries. For some Nomads, it fostered a greater appreciation of welfare state services: such as high-quality medical care, unemployment benefits, and vaccine access, but this was not always the case. A number of informants were relieved to return to their wealthy home countries in a moment of crisis, but others—using a more Libertarian understanding of their own position as independent purchasers of social services—resented the state ‘calling them back’ during the pandemic. Last, the paper considers whether digital nomadism will become more attractive with the growing acceptance of remote work and what ramifications this could have for destinations in the Global South that are already experiencing ‘transnational gentrification.’
hesitant migration to emergent cities: angola’s intentional urbanism of the ‘centralidades’
keywords: urban-to-rural migration, emergent urbanism, rural urbanisation, centralidades, africa, angola
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Abstract
Hesitant migration to emergent cities: Angola’s intentional urbanism of the ‘centralidades’
This article discusses migration to rural areas in Africa and its relation to the emergence and development of new towns and urbanism. New conditions of mobility and the establishment and development of newly urban and proto-urban areas call for a reassessment of mobility and settlement dynamics. Changing contexts of urban-rural relations with important societal implications, new transformations and reconfigurations of urban forms call for analyses beyond rural exoduses, unequal territorial development, or the primacy of major cities. In Angola, urban construction, namely of the new ‘centralidades’—emergent new cities made of blocks of buildings and respective infrastructure in vacant areas in the countryside—attempts the creation of cities before the agglomeration of population or the undertakings to attract migration, other than just housing. This intentional urbanisation is thus characterised by hesitant settlement, which this article analyses using empirical material collected in a variety of Angolan centralidades.
urban elite on the fringes of the growth coalition: homeowners’ selective opposition to urban transformation in istanbul
keywords: inequality, growth machine, growth politics, elite, urban transformation, istanbul
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Abstract
Urban elite on the fringes of the growth coalition: homeowners’ selective opposition to urban transformation in Istanbul
This research is an examination of the role of the urban elite in an earthquake risk-driven urban transformation process in Istanbul, Turkey. By displaying the mechanisms through which urban transformation in Istanbul’s privileged areas is invited and implemented by the urban elite that I locate on the fringes of the growth machine, this research contributes to the literature on urban growth, and specifically the role of the urban elite in this growth coalition. This article displays the urban elite’s ambivalent approach, which I describe as selective opposition: simultaneously occurring growth-controlling discourses and growth-engaging activities by affluent residents, who are neither fully members nor opponents of the growth coalition and who critique growth politics from which they accumulate wealth. This research displays the mechanisms through which the urban elite reproduce their power, privilege, and wealth, and hence sheds light on the processes of inequality reproduction and affluence maintenance.
land of sand: reclaiming the sea, landscapes and lives in malacca, malaysia
keywords: sand war, land reclamation, coastal urbanisation, malacca desert, land grab, southeast asia reclamation
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Abstract
Land of sand: reclaiming the sea, landscapes and lives in Malacca, Malaysia
Today, the landscapes of Asia—and Southeast Asia in particular—are undergoing major transformations, many of which are due to urbanisation processes that impact coastal areas. These are often controversial reclamation projects, generically referred to as the ‘war of sand’—an (in)visible conflict named for the raw material used to develop artificial land for property development. In Malacca, Malaysia, coastal urbanisation engenders serious environmental damage via the elimination of mangroves, deterioration of water quality and marine ecosystems, and erosion. It also causes severe social and economic transformation that leads to specific social dynamics marked by the marginalisation of certain ethnic minorities. This invites us to rethink the right to the city and the landscape in the moment of reclaiming land. For this purpose, this article describes how coastal development and reclamation projects are heavily mining local communities and the environment. The sand war, it turns out, is not purely a resource-grabbing conflict nor a real estate process with heavy environmental implications, but an implicit war against ethnic and religious communities. Inequality is a consequence not by accident but by design.
special feature: law at the margins of the city
law, the city and the poor: a roadmap
keywords: urban poverty, law, property, raciality, spatial injustice, radical insurgencies
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Abstract
Law, the city and the poor: a roadmap
In this introduction to the themed Special Feature ‘Law at the margins of the city’, we present a roadmap of concepts and practices across the various fields that are explored in this collection of articles. We invite readers to visit a disciplinary and creative encounter by untangling different routes and layers connecting law, finance, raciality, urban poverty and radical insurgencies. The aim is to delineate and reinaugurate an existing but still not entirely explored area of knowledge, in which the contributing articles provoke insightful critiques about legal articulations on and from the margins of the city. Through a multi-sited perspective, reflected in the contexts from which the invited authors are writing, we suggest that the ‘problem of poverty’ is not only globalised, but also embedded in and facilitated by globally effective legal processes. By bringing together variegated urban experiences in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Italy, Mozambique, Colombia, Turkey and India, that could be read as isolated and localised, a clear global pattern reveals itself in the transformation of cities and their margins. Likewise, a global web of insurgent practices emerges through the local ways in which law is appropriated by resistance groups from the margins. As will be seen in the contributions to this Special Feature, by disputing law and by disputing space, these ongoing practices can work to destabilise an entire world-making system of property, raciality and urban organisation.
territorial dispossession under financialised capitalism and its discontents: insurgent spatialities and legal forms
keywords: urban policies, financial capital, built space, urban margins, property law, insurgent spatialities
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Abstract
Territorial dispossession under financialised capitalism and its discontents: insurgent spatialities and legal forms
The financialisation of land and housing marks a new empire colonising the urban landscape in which territories are increasingly captured and populations are dislocated and dispossessed. Under this model of urban development, the link between capital and built space has reached unprecedented scale and speed by mobilising new legal, political and economic instruments. In this article, we examine how law constitutes and operates this link by enabling a true domination of finance over built space. At the foundation of the connection between space and finance lies the liberal idea of private property, which has historically modulated the territorial organisation of cities and established borders between the city and its margins. Identified all over the world as outcast and subnormal, the urban margins are stigmatised, criminalised and racialised places which are under permanent threat and, simultaneously, functional to the real estate financial capital. Performing the role of preferred territories to be used as new frontiers of capital expansion, these places can be deeply marked by violence and destruction in the name of legality. But in addressing this scenario, it is important to recognise that the city is under dispute and, beyond the capture of territories by finance, there is also a permanent movement of emplacements, generating landscapes for life. Different resistance experiences in cities around the world, with their use of insurgent tactics such as occupations, communal forms of ownership and other collective and complex bonds with land, perform blockages against the referred submission of built space to finance. We argue that, in this ‘urban warfare’, space is not the scenery where battles take place, but rather the object of these battles itself. In this context, insurgent spatialities and legal forms emerge as key collective processes of building new forms of urban life.
governing gurgaon as a financial investment
keywords: financialization, financial capitalism, real estate, local government, gurgaon, india, investment, global cities
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Abstract
Governing Gurgaon as a financial investment
This article explores the spatialization of financial capitalism through an examination of the private governance of Gurgaon, Haryana, India, a city which has become something of an emblem of neoliberal real estate development. Gurgaon illustrates the processes through which financialized values, rationalities, and culture permeate urban governance and reshape urban space. The way that capital lands in Gurgaon—what is built, for whom, and how populations are both shaped and shape themselves around it—demonstrates what happens when the rationalities of finance govern urban spaces. The primary argument here is that Gurgaon demonstrates the ‘private acting like the public’—meaning, a private actor assuming the governance responsibilities of public actors while executing those responsibilities in the interest of finance. This form of governance includes the following dimensions: the assumption of the duties of local government by private actors such as real estate developers; the transformation of the built environment to both reflect the desires of investors and to include only certain populations; and a form of self-governance whereby the population takes it upon itself to transform in the reflection of financial values and financialized lifestyles. In short, governance power is delegated to private actors—here, real estate developers and investors—and the eventual result is the use of land and a social order that benefits financial instruments and investment. Crucially, though, Gurgaon’s experience also illustrates that this ‘permeation’ is a constant process and is not as simple as financialization landing and local government and geography receiving it. Local government and geographies shape financialization at the same time that their land and resources are financialized into globally traded assets.
circumventing the investor-friendly city and displaceability in maputo’s street economy space
keywords: maputo, displaceability, street economy, urban redevelopment
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Abstract
Circumventing the investor-friendly city and displaceability in Maputo’s street economy space
This article explores how street economy workers are resisting the condition of ‘displaceability’ imposed upon them via exclusionary market-led redevelopment and state-municipal practices in Maputo, Mozambique. In particular, it focuses on how street and market workers engage in forms of ‘street politics’ to build their rights to produce, to inhabit and to work in public spaces from which they are being excluded. Drawing on Yiftachel’s notion of ‘displaceability’ and adopting a spatial perspective, we describe and discuss the main exclusionary aspects of current market-led redevelopment in Maputo’s peri-central area, including municipal and state practices and the (non)use of planning laws. Against this background, we examine the circumventing tactics of street and market vendors. We construe these tactics in the terrain of social legitimacy—or actual rights—as forms of challenging market-driven state practices of demolitions, resettlement, forced zoning, and social banishing of street economy workers.
the brighton homeless bill of rights
keywords: human rights, homelessness, rancière, homeless bill of rights, activism
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Abstract
The Brighton Homeless Bill of Rights
‘Homelessness’ in the UK, currently at record levels, is the focus of an ever-expanding mass of law, policy, procedures, practices, and institutions and enterprises of all sorts, from government, local government, national and local NGOs. All are implicated in the drive to keep houseless people in their place, obedient, out of sight, receiving assistance in the ‘appropriate’ way. This contribution is an account of a successful activist campaign to make a UK city adopt a Homeless Bill of Rights. It is unusual as a campaign using a legal discourse, that of human rights, not to create legally enforceable rights but as a political tool to force a different kind of visibility and equality. The political philosophy of Jacques Rancière helps to theorize these issues.
between urban commons and touristification: radical and conservative uses of the law in post-austerity southern italy
keywords: property, social movements, urban poverty, southern italy, touristification, neoliberalism
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Abstract
Between urban commons and touristification: radical and conservative uses of the law in post-austerity Southern Italy
The movement for the urban commons in Southern Italian cities has been facing the increasing touristification of the historic centres, a process of value extraction built on the character of ‘authenticity’ and ‘marginality’ of the urban poor’s living to the external gaze. In this resistance, activists encountered the law both as a counter-hegemonic tool exploited to assert their claims over the urban space and as a governmental technique deployed by the public administration to partially tame their political praxis into bureaucratic frameworks. The law has thus been used both to shelter the marginalised from the effects of touristification and as a means to govern urban space by extracting value from urban poverty. This analysis highlights how movements opposing the commodification of urban poverty could gain political strength from creatively exploiting legal tools, which would allow them to protect the interests of the poor and achieve wealth distribution. It also stresses how urban studies would benefit from integrating the perspective of critical legal studies that considers the law as a battleground for social conflict.
the “right to the city centre”: political struggles of street vendors in belo horizonte, brazil
keywords: the right to the city, popular economies, urban politics, crisis of labour, informality
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Abstract
The “right to the city centre”: political struggles of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil
The article aims to investigate the relations between work and urban space, focusing on the struggles of street vendors for the ‘right to the city centre’ in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. We join critical debates on Brazil’s internationally praised urban reform by focusing on informal workers. Beyond lacking the protection of labour laws, the ‘right to the city’ (RttC) of such workers has been consistently denied through restrictive legislations and policies. In the context of the ‘crisis’ of waged labour, we explore the increasing centrality of urban space for working-class political struggles. Looking at Belo Horizonte, the article traces the relation between urban participatory democracy and the development of legal-institutional frameworks that restricted street vendors’ access to urban space in the city. In the context of an urban revitalisation policy implemented in 2017, we then explore the use of legal frameworks to remove street vendors from public areas of the city and the resulting political resistance movement. The discussion focuses on the emergence of the Vicentão Occupation, a building squatted by homeless families and street vendors in conflict with the local state. Through this case, we explore the radical potential of contemporary articulations of Henri Lefebvre’s framework emerging from the confluence of diverse local urban struggles for ‘the right to the city centre’. Ultimately, we argue for an understanding of the RttC as a process and a site of continual struggle whose terrain is shaped, but cannot be replaced by, legal frameworks that need to be constantly contested and evolving to reflect the shifting socio-spatial relations.
a double movement of enclosure and commons: commoning emek movie theatre in three acts
keywords: enclosure, urban commons, emek movie theater, gentrification, property, subjectification, imagination, istanbul
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Abstract
A double movement of enclosure and commons: commoning Emek movie theatre in three acts
The article focuses on the relationship between the urban renewal project that led to the demolition of the Emek movie theatre, located in the center of Istanbul, and the commoning struggle, which emerged against the enclosure of the site. The enclosure of the site was a pioneering project intending to control, regulate, and tame socio-spatial relations, curtail ‘unruly’ cultural practices and expunge the history and cultural memory of Beyoğlu district while the commoning struggle stood against not only spatial eviction and social expulsion from the center of the city, but also defied physical, social and cultural marginalization—that is, being decentered from the urban center. In reading this case, I develop a dialectical argument in which enclosure, led by capital and facilitated by the state, unavoidably engenders forms of resistance, which in turn propitiates new forms of commoning. The dialectics of enclosures and commoning practices is understood in three interrelated ‘acts of contestation’: property-making, subjectification and imagination. The first act of property-making relates to the ‘past.’ It discusses how everyday uses of public spaces can become a zone of contestation, problematizing violent histories of the making of state and private property and proposes common property as an alternative. The second act focuses on the ‘present’ of commoning movements and considers how they produce non-capitalist value practices against the process of capitalist subjectification endorsed by the spatial regime of enclosure. The third act, namely imagination, looks at the practices that, while resisting enclosure, also challenge the impossibility of imagining a future different to that of capitalism. As a final act, the article proposes that an emergent culture of the commons is being built even though local commoning struggles seem to fail in the short-term.
securing the port against the black poor in buenaventura, colombia
keywords: racial capitalism, violence, precarity, development, port, resistance, buenaventura, colombia
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Abstract
Securing the port against the Black poor in Buenaventura, Colombia
In May 2017, the community of Buenaventura, Colombia’s main port and the city with the largest Afrodescendant population, went on a general strike. By scrutinising this event, this article reveals some shades of the entanglements of race, class, political subjectivity, security, capitalist development and histories of colonialism that structure the racial dynamics of space. Relying upon discourse analysis of policy papers, legal regulations and secondary sources, coupled with informal interviews and direct observation, it is argued that violence and coercion have been central techniques for harnessing the local poor population in accordance with the needs of the port as the emblem of capitalist development. The article pays particular attention to how law is implicated in the violence deployed in the city-port either as a legitimising factor or as discursive formation which portrays the local population as dangerous and thereby as a security threat to the port. This narrative about the insecurity of the poor, created and recreated by the law, reinforces the image of the Black population as undeserving poor, while at the same time legitimising the coercive interventions that have characterised the control of criminality and social mobilisation in the city-port. However, the strike allows us to see that precarity and violence have resulted in a politically active population and sophisticated levels of mobilisation which have managed to stop capitalist development, at least for a while.
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