Search

The articles in this special issue extend research on urban space and politics in Istanbul with approaches that explorate the relationships between urban form, urban change, and political processes as assemblages of things, beliefs, institutions, and landscapes. They share a commitment to extended ethnography and thick description in urban studies, and contribute to research that destabilizes universalizing urban theory produced in Europe and America. The dramatic state-led project of neoliberal urban transformation in Istanbul has generated an important body of work that focuses on the consequences of creative destruction, urban displacement, and urban social and political exclusion. These papers contribute to that research with additional questions that incorporate understudied material and cultural elements of the urban political economy. What role do material elements (concrete, plexiglass, signs, maps) play in the practices that propel urban dynamics: that justify, for example, the rebuilding of some...

The contours of the so-called 'urban renaissance' in British cities have been the subject of increasing amounts of critical attention from urban scholars. In particular, many have noted the exclusionary consequences of the renaissance for urban public spaces in revalorized city centres. In this paper, the authors ask whether New Labour's urban policy might also be opening up new political opportunities for progressive interventions in contests over the meaning of the urban. After considering the influence of New Labour's social liberalism in the recently released Urban White Paper, the authors identify key tensions within British urban policy and show how both the re-scaling of urban governance and the urban design process have emerged as key strategies to overcome these tensions. The emphasis on urban design, it is argued, is opening up a new public sphere through which visions of the 'good city' might be contested. The political possibilities of this emergent public require further empirical investigati...

I n this short paper I want to sketch out some preliminary ideas on the implications of the conceptualization of urbanization in critical urban theory for our understanding of the right to the city...

While the prevalence of advertising in urban space has been broadly critiqued, how the diverse forms of the new media landscape produce affect and space in the city is not well understood. Exploring outdoor advertising that contains sexualised representations of women, this paper considers how certain images produce space and may potentially impact women’s experience of the city. Sexualised and hypersexualised depictions of women in advertising are problematic for many reasons. This is because advertising is not only concerned with selling goods and services but because it also has an ideological function, contributing to the reproduction of inequalities including the potential subjugation of women. This paper goes further to suggest that these types of images contribute to a fluid production of sexualised space when situated in the city, exacerbated at night when many advertisements become illuminated in backlit or digital displays. These effects compound the invisible walls of the city that already influence women’s navigations, mobilities, and rights to the city. Reflecting on and analysing select photographs taken in Norway, this paper offers a provocative exploration of the spatial and temporal effects of sexualised outdoor advertising.

This paper explores the forms of sociality that are implicit in discussions about a range of smart projects in one actually-existing smart city. Current scholarship on smart cities focuses almost entirely on their digital infrastructure and on the figure of the ‘smart citizen’. This paper argues that smart city projects also emerge and develop through specific understandings of the social. The paper explores understandings of smart sociality by analysing nearly sixty interviews with a wide range of actors involved in smart city projects in the UK city of Milton Keynes. Implicit in those interviews are three overlapping but distinct forms of smart sociality, which the paper terms sociological, neoliberal and cybernetic. The paper argues that it is important to engage both empirically and theoretically with these three understandings of the social in relation to smart, because they suggest that the reconfiguration of human activity assumed in smart city discourses is more diverse than most current scholarship acknowledges. The paper concludes by arguing that if this diversity is to become a critical resource, urban scholarship must give more empirical and conceptual attention to cybernetic forms of sociality in particular.

This paper connects two debates previously featured in City: ‘Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis’ and ‘London’s Housing Crisis and its Activism’. The paper uses assemblage thinking to explore how...

This paper analyses the transformation of the Maya solar in relation to the contested Marxian theory of primitive accumulation. The Maya of Yucatan are part of the Maya indigenous populations of south-east Mexico and Central America. Their solar, a house and garden plot that has historically supported an intricate indigenous system of land, livelihoods and identities, is today under threat along with the way of life it once sustained. The paper argues that a spatial–temporal reworking of primitive accumulation that draws on both a decoloniality perspective and critical geography can help us better understand both the historical and contemporary significance of the solar’s plight. Using this theoretical framework, the paper shows how the solar has in fact been historically constructed through different cycles of enclosure, dispossession and resistance in Mexico. The Spanish colonial period (1542–1821) enforced its ‘rationalisation’ in ways that disrupted space and time of native populations; the hacienda p...

The paper presents a case of engaged ethnography developed by a group of geographers from the University of Cagliari focusing on the everyday experience of urban marginality by the residents of Sant’Elia, a low-income district in Cagliari, Italy. Stigmatised for being ‘at the margins’ of the city, the district reveals on the one hand, degraded socio-economic conditions and, on the other hand, a strong sense of identity and belonging among its inhabitants. The main aim of the study is to discuss and contrast the stigma affecting Sant’Elia through the direct involvement of a group of women living in the district in participative fieldwork utilising a mixed set of both quantitative and qualitative tools and aimed at collecting a multilayered reality of ideas, emotions, perceptions, experiences and images of the district as perceived by its own inhabitants. By presenting the different phases, methodologies and results of the study, the paper operates at two different, albeit interconnected, theoretical and me...

In this fourth and final paper in a series for City addressing the vertical politics of cities, Stephen Graham explores the politics of contemporary skyscrapers. Emphasising the changing geo-economics, geopolitics and political symbolism of skyscrapers, the paper critically interrogates their increasingly central contemporary role as purported signifiers and logos of ‘global’ cityness and seeks to underline the essential violence involved in their construction—and their demise. The discussion falls into three parts. The first contrasts the proliferation of elite-driven ‘super-tall’ skyscrapers as anchors of huge real-estate projects in the Gulf, Middle East and Asia with the historical ‘race’ between real estate, urban and corporate elites in North American downtowns to build skyscrapers which embodied highly masculinised notions of vertical corporate power. The second deconstructs the current construction of skyscrapers as ‘gigantic logos’ signifying wannabe or actual ‘global’ city status—promissory towe...

Gentrification, and its expressions in the housing market, is a burning issue, bearing many social implications. This paper examines this issue through the case study of the Baka neighbourhood in Jerusalem. Baka has a unique history as a Palestinian neighbourhood, turned into a poor immigrants’ neighbourhood in the 1950s and today a highly gentrified and desired place of residence. Baka’s gentrification resulted from both the geopolitical changes in Jerusalem’s borders after the 1967 war, which turned it from borderline into an inner-city neighbourhood, as well as the re-enchantment of Palestinian homes caused by new architectural trends. While the gentrification process of Baka was initially dominated by the secular and educated Israeli middle class, over time Jewish immigrants from Western countries—mainly the USA, France and England—have become dominant. The paper is based on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork, and analyses the developments in Baka’s housing market through a reading of the stages of gentri...

This reflective paper offers the metaphor of ‘Aleph’—the ‘place of all places’—as well as the material city of Jerusalem, as points of departure for rethinking critical urban theories. In the paper, Jerusalem is ‘prized open’ as a site of learning—exposing the diversity of structural forces shaping this—and any other—city. The ‘Aleph approach’ draws attention to the relational and often changing nature in which structural forces interact as they produce urban space and society. This is highlighted by a ‘guided tour’ of Jerusalem that reveals an array of colonial, capitalist, religious, gendered and political forces of domination and their fluctuations through time and place. As such, the paper offers a ‘South-Eastern’ perspective, framed by ‘dynamic structuralism’ as foundation for new and engaged CUTs—critical urban theories. Such theories, it is suggested, should be informed by the multiple and uneven nature of oppression and resistance, and by new concepts and categories that emerge from the analysis, ...

Can Jerusalem be considered a paradigm in urban studies and urban theory? Widening the debate over the ‘contested’ and the ‘ordinary’, this paper tries to address such questions whilst engaging with Giorgio Agamben’s powerful concept of paradigms. Considering Jerusalem a super, hyper-exceptional case trapped in the tension between particularism and exceptionalism, the paper reflects on Agamben’s approach to examples—or paradigms—which deeply engage the powers of analogy, enabling discernment between previously unseen affinities among singular objects by stepping outside established systems of classification. The paper suggests a possible new concept, ‘whatever urbanism’, to disentangle the apparent dichotomy between ‘ordinary’ and ‘contested’ as urban labels.

This paper discusses Israeli rule in East Jerusalem through the lens of urban colonial governmentality, with a focus on the control and management of urban systems, institutions and services. Although Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem appeared stable, at least up until the early years of the new millennium, Israel never fully controlled Palestinian urban institutions and services in the city; to a great extent, large parts of these institutions and services continued operating after annexation under the auspices of Jordan or the Palestinian National Authority, in adversarial autonomy to Israeli rule. In this paper I analyze these ambiguities of rule as forms of governmental exceptions to the State’s administrative and managerial norms; exceptions which constitute an essential component of Israel’s control over East Jerusalem. I will argue that while political and urban theory ascribe exception from law and administrative normative order to a state’s offensive and discriminatory policies towards margin...

Against the background of a highly conflictive urban situation, the paper focuses on the planning and implementation of the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR). Running from the west all the way to the east of the city, the JLR traverses and connects contested territory. While Palestinians and the international community consider East Jerusalem to be part of a future Palestinian state, Israel adheres to its claim to the whole city, a unified Jerusalem. It is to that end that the JLR was implemented and, as this paper argues, it can be seen as an important governance tool that not only serves the city’s citizens and residents alike, but also works towards consolidating the Israeli authorities’ claim to the whole city. Further, the paper discusses whether infrastructure is inherently political or if there is a ‘politics of infrastructure’ at stake in Jerusalem with regards to the JLR and its wider implications for the urban fabric. The paper suggests that much can be learned from major transport infrastructure in ci...

This brief introduction provides an overview of the theoretical grounding of the special feature (CITY, Analysis of Urban Trends, 2016, VOL. 20, NO. 1) and explains why this collection of papers constitutes a cohesive whole. It begins by situating our theme within broader debates on migration, diversity and the city. It proceeds by selectively highlighting key points, as well as omissions, in the literature on migrant entrepreneurship with respect to issues relating to space and place. The papers are then introduced.

This paper aims to connect to recent debates in City (2011) regarding what assemblage thinking can offer to critical urban praxis. It proposes assemblage as a tool to take Sennett's (1970. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. Yale edition with a new preface by the author, 2008. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) ‘uses of disorder’ in city life from theory to practice. The main reason for this is the consideration that Sennett's early thoughts about providing non-regulated spaces for interaction have not been implemented in urban practice to their full potential. Planners and architects have not been able to counter the overdetermination of functions and the social segregation resulting from modern urban developments. Assemblage can offer tools for urban practitioners to combine definition and indeterminacy when intervening in the public realm. In order to do so, the paper looks at similarities between recent contributions on assemblage thinking and Sennett's notion of disorder: the in...

The ‘urban question’ isn't a question with an answer—not like the ‘housing question’, which is in essence, ‘Is the private market model of housing provision separable from capitalist social relations?’ and to which Engels replied categorically ‘No’ (though it took a book to say it). But, like the housing question, the urban question is an invitation to deeper analysis of a superficially straightforward matter, with its roots, as is the case with so many concepts in critical social theory, planted firmly in Marx. This paper situates the urban question in history, tracing its lineage from Marx to Lefebvre to Castells to its recent iterations via Lefebvre's concept of planetary urbanisation. In the course of this journey the paper considers the meanings and usefulness of the question to critical urban research and action. The paper concludes that the underlying concepts of the evolving urban question do meaningfully engage with age-old and contemporary questions of how to bring about social change, and that ...

This paper is a call for critical urban research to address the vertical as well as horizontal aspects of social inequality. It seeks, in particular, to explore the important but neglected causal connection between the demonisation and dismantling of social housing towers constructed in many cities between the 1930s and 1970s and the contemporary proliferation of radically different housing towers produced for socio-economic elites. The argument begins with a critical discussion of the economistic orthodoxy, derived from the work of Edward Glaeser, that contemporary housing crises are best addressed by removing state intervention in housing production so that market-driven verticalisation can take place. The following two sections connect the rise of such orthodoxy with the ‘manufactured reality'—so central to neo-liberal urban orthodoxy—that vertical social housing must necessarily fail because it deterministically creates social pathology. The remainder of the paper explores in detail how the dominance ...

Since the turn of the 21st century, several US cities have witnessed the resurgence of large-scale homeless encampments. This paper explains how and why such encampments emerged during a period of national economic expansion through a comparative study of encampments in Fresno, California and Seattle, Washington. Contrary to the widespread media coverage of tent cities as a consequence of the most recent recession, the paper argues they are instead rooted in penal and welfare urban policies. Precipitating as both protest and containment, durable encampments relieve the fiscal and legitimation crises of criminalization and shelterization for the local state and simultaneously function as preferred safe grounds to the shelter for homeless people in both cities. Rather than contradicting the existing policies and theories of the ongoing punitive exclusion of marginalized populations, the seclusion of the homeless into large encampments compliments its goals of managing marginality across the city.

This paper explores IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge as an example of global smart city policymaking. The evolution of IBM's smart city thinking is discussed, then a case study of Philadelphia's online workforce education initiative, Digital On-Ramps, is presented as an example of IBM's consulting services. Philadelphia's rationale for working with IBM and the translation of IBM's ideas into locally adapted initiatives is considered. The paper argues that critical scholarship on the smart city over-emphasizes IBM's agency in driving the discourse. Unpacking how and why cities enrolled in smart city policymaking with IBM places city governments as key actors advancing the smart city paradigm. Two points are made about the policy mobility of the smart city as a mask for entrepreneurial governance. (1) Smart city efforts are best understood as examples of outward-looking policy promotion for the globalized economy. (2) These policies proposed citywide benefit through a variety of digital governance augmentatio...

This paper examines the interlinkages between changing infrastructural regimes on a macro-level and changing cultural imaginaries, stagings and experiences of cities. New York City's waterfront serves as a case study to examine how the transition from the Fordist era to a so-called post-industrial era has fundamentally been a large-scale infrastructural realignment to facilitate global production networks which has brought with it new understandings and experiences of the city. This analysis puts a particular emphasis on the unevenness of these transformations and argues that the functional specialization of spaces has reinforced and rendered invisible social inequalities in multiple ways: through the displacement of work, the attribution of value through discourses of sustainability, and the relocation of environmental and social costs. In lieu of a conclusion, this paper makes the case for an infrastructural critique of urbanization processes.

This paper is a response to the paper by Manley and Johnston (2014, “London: A Dividing City, 2001–11?” City 18 (6): 633–643) which analyzed occupational class change in London 2001–14. While it queries some of their classifications, the census data show that middle class growth seems to have stalled in proportionate though not in absolute terms from 2001–11. However, this does not fundamentally challenge Hamnett and Butler's thesis that the middle classes, upper and lower, have grown substantially in London over the last 50 years as a result of changes in industrial and occupational structure. The paper discusses some of the possible reasons for changes in the last decade and reiterates the importance of using census data as a tool for the analysis of urban social change.

This paper considers the uneven though mutually reinforcing relationship between arts, redevelopment and global capital that has transformed New York over the past 40 years. The 5 Pointz Aerosol Arts Center in Long Island City, Queens, provides the basis for the study. Renowned as the legendary ‘graffiti building', 5 Pointz was recently demolished to make way for twin luxury towers. The paper places the history of 5 Pointz in the broader context of the deindustrialization of New York and the appropriation of former manufacturing districts by artists, cultural institutions and creative networks. It then follows the impact of boom and bust cycles, shifting industrial policies, property speculation and gentrification in Long Island City. Of particular interest is the emergence of a ‘redevelopment script'—a transnational suite of homogenizing planning and design practices backed by global finance. The fragmentary nature of creative communities left them open to appropriation into the redevelopment script as a...

This paper discusses precarious workers in London. The aim is to consider the particular challenges and possibilities for resistance in the context of London. It addresses the theoretical questions of precarity and its significance in post-Fordist capitalism. The innovations of the Operaismo—in terms of workers' inquiries, the concept of class composition and the strategy of refusal—provide the theoretical basis for the paper. The paper draws on two examples of recent struggles on university campuses, that of casual teaching staff and cleaners, which highlight different points. The first is that a method inspired by the tradition of the workers' inquiry can provide an important starting point for a campaign, combining knowledge production and a project of organisation. This is illustrated with the use of surveys as a starting point for a campaign at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London. The second example draws on the experience of the cleaners' campaigns at the University of London. The history of the dispute is considered along with the use of the London living wage and alternative forms of trade unionism. This paper argues that the particular pressures for precarious workers in London need to be considered, but could also be posed as potential demands from workers, drawing on Henri Lefebvre's notion of ‘the right to the city'. The conclusion of the argument is a call for further research that is attentive to the new forms of organisation that are emerging from workers' struggles and to how a consideration of urban demands could provide important opportunities for developing this further.

Events across the globe in 2011, from the Occupy movements to the Arab uprisings, have made salient Henri Lefebvre's assertion that ‘the city and the urban sphere are … the setting of struggle; they are also, however, the stakes of that struggle’ (Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 386). This paper analyzes the city as both the site and stake of political contestation between state and society in Kuwait, and the relationship between contentious politics and city formation after the advent of oil. Specifically, it traces the spatiality of public protest from the 1930s until today alongside the changing social composition of opposition forces. During each new period of contestation, both the government and opposition adopted new spatial tactics that left their mark on the urban landscape. The paper focuses on the role of particular public spaces like the historic Sahat al-Safat and the newer Sahat al-Irada, and semi-private spaces like diwāwīn and civil society organizations, in ...

Long acknowledged to be a center for religious pilgrimage, the importance of the Istanbul district of Eyup is widely understood as being founded upon the figure of Halid bin Zeyd Ebâ Eyyub el-Ensâri, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Others point to the district's extensive cultural, political and social significance to explain its particular importance. In contrast, this paper avoids such reductive perspectives and argues that assemblage provides one particularly suggestive conceptual framework within which to reconsider Eyup's significance, glossed in this paper as the ‘matters of the mosque'. Linking that discussion of assemblage to recent scholarship on Islam calling for a greater interrogation of the multiple (and sometimes ambivalent) modalities of religious practice, this paper draws on a series of fieldwork encounters to present one such grounded perspective. Paying particular attention to questions of agency, materiality and belief, this paper argues that assemblage provides an especially rich...

This paper paints an altogether broader canvas building upon earlier debates in City concerning the decline of cities over the coming decades and the changed states of mind and understanding of what life is about that can be expected to unfold under these circumstances. There is already considerable preliminary experience of this, analysed in the paper, that has resulted from ‘economic shocks' over the past two decades and, on the positive side, the experience of the Transition Movement and of well over 1000 mature intentional communities scattered across the Occidental world. Taking the long view, the paper analyses the growth and fall of civilisations and their cities as centres of the accumulation of power. The discussion then moves on to discuss how modern civilisation came about, arriving in a state of ‘Possessive Individualism’ and through three centuries of social conflict culminating in our technology-dominated, consumerist world of megacities. The role played in this by the exploitation of fossil...

This paper reflects on the rapidly changing demography of Belfast and the (potential) role of ethnic minorities in facilitating the city's move to a more progressive and pluralistic society. Focusing specifically on two films about the migrant population—Lab Ky Mo's Oranges are Blue (2005) and Stephen Don's Faraway (2013)—it assesses the extent to which increased cultural diversity and alternative identities are complicating the dominant image of Belfast as a paradigmatic ‘divided city’ (between Catholics and Protestants). The paper also explores the city's alarming problem with racism—the number of racially motivated attacks increased by 30% from 2013 to 2014—as well as ongoing sectarian tensions and the ways in which these severely hinder the ability of migrants to contribute to the reconstruction of the city in imaginative and enlightened ways.

This paper considers a number of recently declassified documents from the 1970s and 1980s to show that the security agencies in Northern Ireland played a key role in shaping the redevelopment of the city of Belfast, which extends some way beyond that which had hitherto been considered to be the case. With the aim of creating a cordon sanitaire around the main areas of conflict, the planning system was successfully harnessed to achieve the key military objective of spatially isolating major areas of the north and west of the city. In this respect, the planning system very successfully achieved the objectives that were set for it by the security agencies. However, the legacy of this approach is that there are now large sections of the city isolated from the economic and social mainstream of post-conflict Belfast. This paper argues that what is now required is a reconfiguration of the planning system within the city, embracing the notion of reflexive regulatory aspects of equality law, which can ensure that ...

Adopting a case study approach, this paper explores the psychological dimensions of two shared spaces within the ethno-nationally divided city of Belfast. The paper highlights recurrent perceptions ascribed to the case studies and explores the correlation between the psychological and physical dimensions of the shared spaces. The findings draw on a series of semi-structured interviews with a wide range of stakeholders of the shared spaces. The paper concludes that the psychological and physical dimensions of shared space are very much intertwined: the built environment wields great power in reinforcing the perceptions required to establish and promote shared space in Belfast.

In recent years, the built environment has emerged as a critical target of climate change intervention for urban governments around the world, engaging developers, professionals, activists and communities in a range of new eco-urbanism projects. While important contributions have been made, this paper suggests that critical academic and policy debates on urban climate politics have so far paid insufficient attention to the sheer divergence in urban experiences, concerns and public–professional responses elicited through such experiments worldwide. By juxtaposing architectural and other eco-housing practices from diverse cities on three continents—Kyoto (Japan), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Surat (India)—this paper aims to conjure a more cosmopolitan research imagination on how climatic solidarities may emerge in the face of multiple urban differences and inequalities. Towards this end, the paper mobilizes assemblage urbanism as a set of methodological sensibilities towards issues of knowledge, materiality, mu...

This paper details two research encounters with Beijing in order to explore the connections migrants make with cities. The first is with poor internal, sometimes called ‘floating’, migrants in Xiao Jiahe on the NW edge of the city. The second is with UK migrants in the gated community ‘Capital Retreat’ on the NE edge of the city near the airport. Both locations are city gateways of different sorts. These (incommensurate) streams of migration are placed side by side in this paper, which explores migrants’ practice of mobility and the knowledge undergirding it. I argue that these ‘navigational skills’ are more appropriate to the analysis of migration than definitions based on formal educational and occupational skills, or simplified generalizations about motives, generally used by migration scholars. Comparing the two groups of migrants for their navigational skills reveals their similarities and differences: it displays the imagination and flexibility of internal migrants and the fears and difficulties of UK migrants. Navigational skills have the added advantage of revealing migrants’ relationship with the city, which the survey data on internal migrants misses. From these two close encounters I suggest that the concepts intimacy and distance, protection and exposure, provide ways thinking more systematically about the connections these migrants make with Beijing and the navigational skills underpinning them, thus demonstrating the advantages of spatially dynamic, biographical and comparative approaches to researching cities.

The urban uprisings which occurred across England in the summer of 2011 are deemed in this paper to highlight the unstable, depoliticised ‘publics’ being increasingly convened within neo-liberalised cities. It contends that the diverse, dispersed and multiple events of August 2011 were ‘staged’ and ‘storied’ by assorted media and political narratives to represent socio-spatial ‘communities’ as fallen, harmed or resurgent entities. The paper exposes some of the evidential limitations of these reworkings but largely focuses on these imaginaries to reflect on how they implicate the city in the delineation of fragile and contradictory socio-spatial formations emerging from, through and in response to neo-liberalisation. In this regard, the scripting of the ‘riots’ around narratives of community crisis and redemption belies the sifting, bordering and reproducing of urban populations through the strategic governing dualities of abjection/exclusion and participation/responsibility. The paper suggests that these ...

This paper investigates the ways urban policies on homelessness are discursively framed and practically enacted in Turin, Italy. The notion of ‘assemblages of care’ is introduced to show how these policies contribute to the constitution of different experiences of homelessness, by means of their discursive blueprints and practical enactments. Relying on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper questions four policies. Three of these interventions are found to have negative impacts on homeless people's emotions and ways of life; the remaining policy, I argue, holds the potential to produce alternative assemblages and more positive engagement with the individuals encountered. The conclusion provides more general critical reflections on urban policy and homelessness.

In South Africa, the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban invokes a Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city while embarking on rights-based action as one of several approaches it employs. In a recent City article, Shannon Walsh frames the use of the right to the city by social movements in South Africa as having liberalizing and neutralizing effects, and as subverting the social antagonisms inherent in capitalism. This paper responds to this assertion with reference to Abahlali baseMjondolo, the movement that in South Africa is most vocal and reflected in referring to a right to the city in its urban struggles. The paper explains Abahlali baseMjondolo's philosophy as well as the context in which it invokes a right to the city. Drawing on scholars who have explored Lefebvre's use of liberal notions (humanism and rights), the relevance of his right to the city in the context of urban neoliberalism and the purposes of invoking the right to the city, the paper aims to present positions ...

According to Paul Mason's account of 2011, we are in the middle of a revolution; a moment of social upheaval that must be measured against 1848, 1917 and 1968. This article assesses Mason's eloquent description of capitalist crisis by distinguishing between three different parts of it: ideological failure, politico-ideological refusal and social change. Slavoj Žižek's theories of ideology and recent commentary on 2011's revolutionary events are drawn upon to develop three sequential arguments relating to these three moments of crisis. First the paper argues that an obvious ideological failure (of neoliberalism) does not guarantee any kind of ideological rejection, by either political left or right. By extension, we must reassess the political and/or ideological refusal that characterizes many of the protest movements that were ignited by the recent economic crisis. Crucially though, this valuing of politico-ideological refusal cannot come at the expense of normative action. The paper concludes by explorin...

This paper explores the European Parliament's new visitors' centre in Brussels, the Parlamentarium. It examines how the Parlamentarium and its displays might be related to various conceptions of European Union (EU) territoriality, mediating between an ‘informational’ conception of the EU and one that is grounded in a more traditional idea of place. The paper argues that the Parlamentarium seeks to make sense of the multi-centred, multi-scaled spatial organisation that characterises the EU and that, by promoting the notion of an extensive European cityspace, it attempts to create for the EU a compelling visual and spatial imaginary. In some senses, the Parlamentarium might be seen to take on the functions of the capital city that the EU lacks. The paper also explores a number of contradictions and points of tension within the Parlamentarium, noting that it seems to be a constitutional centre without a constitution, and a place in which meaning appears to be fragmentary and fleeting. Examining the ‘televisu...

This is a sequel to another paper—also entitled ‘Readjusting to Reality’, published in City 17 (1)—that focused on Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture (UPA) as a vital component of the downward passage from our energy-intensive modern world to one where we will have to live more in tune with our ecological context, with re-localised economies that live on local resources and production. This paper focuses on the Transition Movement that is growing rapidly around the world, aimed at responding more broadly to the emerging energy and climate change problematic, ahead of what otherwise can be expected to be the collapse of our globalised economy and the social aspirations and political structures that this has created. The Transition Movement, by contrast, is concerned to develop positive responses that reintegrate local communities, living in harmony within their local worlds. The heart of the paper, however, focuses on the current tumult of protest movements and demonstrations around the world, enquiring as t...

The slogan ‘capitalism is crisis’ is one that has recently circulated swiftly around the global Occupy movement. From Schumpeter to Marx himself, the notion that the economic cycles instituted by capitalism require periodic crises as a condition of renewed capital accumulation is a commonplace. However, in a number of recent texts, this conception of crisis as constituting the very form of urban capitalist development itself has taken on a more explicitly apocalyptic tone, exemplified by the Invisible Committee's influential 2007 book The Coming Insurrection, and its account of what it calls simply ‘the metropolis’. ‘It is useless to wait’, write the text's anonymous authors, ‘for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement.… The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.’ In considering such an apocalyptic tone, this paper thus situates and interrogates the text in terms both of its vision of the metropolis as a terrain of total urbanization and its effective spatialization of the present as itself a kind of ‘unnoticed’ apocalypse: the catastrophe which is already here. It does so by approaching this not only apropos its place within contemporary debates surrounding leftist politics and crisis theory but also via its imaginative intersection with certain post-1960s science fiction apocalyptic motifs. What, the paper asks, does it mean to think apocalypse as the ongoing condition of the urban present itself, as well as the opening up of political and cultural opportunity for some speculative exit from its supposedly endless terrain?

This paper highlights the role of narratives in expressing, shaping and ordering urban life, and as tools for analysing urban conflicts. The paper distinguishes analytically between two prominent epistemological meta-narratives in contemporary urban studies and multiple ontological narratives in a given city—in this case Belfast. The first meta-narrative represents cities as sites of deepening coercion, violence and inequality and the second sees them as engines of new forms of transnational capitalism. Both are marked by the strategy of specifying ‘exemplar’ or ‘paradigm’ cities. The core of the paper addresses how these two meta-narratives map onto and interact with, three contemporary ontological narratives of urban regeneration in Belfast. We conceive of narratives—epistemological and ontological—as analytical tools and objects of analysis but also as tools for social action for competing political and economic interests and coalitions. While in the urban studies literature Belfast is typically studie...

In 2003, UN-Habitat warned that by 2030 around a third of the world's 9 billion humans could be suffering from multiple deprivations, living in slum-like conditions in the world's cities. Urban attention is beginning to turn to this problem, and to questions of sustainable urban competitiveness and growth, but without much referencing of the one to the other. This paper claims that the city of the future is being looked at through the wrong end of the binoculars, with ‘business consultancy’ urbanism largely disinterested in the city that does not feed international competitiveness and business growth, and ‘human potential’ urbanism looking to the settlements where the poor are located for bottom-up solutions to well-being. The paper reflects on the implications of such an urban optic on the chances of the poor, their areas of settlement and their expectations of support from others in and beyond the city. While acknowledging the realism, inventiveness and achievements of effort initiated or led by the poo...

The dynamic of the street in political struggles is not to be found merely in the fact that it is the space for visibility and representation, but also in that it is the space where potential emancipatory action and non-mediated modes of social conduct can play out. This paper will examine this notion of the street in the context of events of unrest and crisis in Athens from 2008 until 2012. The paper argues that the irregular changes of social, economic and political features in the city during that period transformed public space from primarily a ‘space for representation’ and a ‘space of representation’ to the site/space allowing the subversion of social relations in times of crisis.

This paper is a reflection on bohemia, both as a historical and a contemporary phenomenon. It explores bohemia as an expression of and a response to the contradictions of both 19th-century bourgeois society and present-day neo-liberal society. It begins with an examination of the origins of bohemia in 19th-century Paris and follows its expansion and popularisation through the 20th century. The paper then focuses on Berlin as a paradigmatic example of present-day bohemia in its globalised and industrialised form; Berlin is significant in this context for two reasons: first, because it has become a global destination for followers of a bohemian lifestyle as described below, and second, because the concept of bohemia has been incorporated into property speculation and economic development policy discourses. Drawing on Barthes' definition of myth as an imaginary solution to unresolvable contradictions, Elizabeth Wilson characterises bohemia as a ‘cultural myth about art in modernity, a myth which seeks to rec...

This paper extends an earlier discussion on ‘The Politics of the Encounter and the Urbanization of the World’ (City 16 (3): 269–283). There, I outlined what a politics of the encounter is and might constitute, how it can be seen as a reframed politics of the urban and how it depends on a certain constituency coming together. With the development of urban society (as Lefebvre outlines it), the possibility for sustained and continued encounters between people will grow. But these encounters can be both affirmative attractions (like Occupy) and negative repulsions (like riots). In this present paper, Lefebvre's argument is taken a step further, because, he thinks, there's something else ‘immanent’ in urban society: a propensity to create ‘post-work’ conditions. This provocative thesis is voiced in an overlooked book called La pensee marxiste et la ville (1972). A shift from cities to urban society is, for Lefebvre, correspondingly a shift from the world of steady work to informal work, or at least to ‘post-s...

This paper examines the much-hyped 2012 Olympic Games ‘legacy’ in relation to the displacement experiences of lower-income East Londoners. The paper begins by outlining the overall context of housing-related regeneration including the reduced role for social housing, especially council (public) housing in London. It then sets out a framework for understanding how regeneration, state-led gentrification and displacement are intertwined, as well as how such processes have been contested. The paper examines these issues in greater depth with reference to case studies of the inhabitants of two working-class spaces in the London Borough of Newham, an Olympics host borough. The first study is based on the Carpenters Estate, a council housing estate in Stratford that is facing potential demolition, and the second focuses on young people living in a temporary supported housing unit. These studies illustrate how the 2012 Olympics, alongside other regeneration schemes, is changing the nature of space and place from ...