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Book Becoming Political Subjects in the City s Peripheries

Download or read book Becoming Political Subjects in the City s Peripheries written by Miguel Perez Ahumada and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social scientists and urban planners have long argued that social movements for housing, especially in metropolises of the so-called Global South, have been determinant in the politicization of the urban poor. Since the mid-twentieth century, the demand for rights to physical presence in the city has resulted in large-scale right-to-housing mobilizations in which lower-income dwellers seek to become homeowners by taking over peripheral empty plots and building themselves their homes and neighborhoods (e.g. Mangin 1967; Turner 1968; Castells 1983; Holston 1991; 2008; Garcés 2002; Fawaz 2009; Das 2011; Caldeira 2015a; Murphy 2015). Scholars have thus suggested that the urban poor, on account of their involvement in widespread practices of city making carried out mostly in the urban peripheries, have become citizens capable of addressing a language of rights to the state. This dissertation engages in these debates by posing some critical questions: What are the mechanisms through which the urban poor constitute themselves as legitimate rights-bearers when they are no longer the actual builders of their residential spaces? What kind of political subjectivity is formed when their demand for urban rights is performed less through mass land seizures and "autoconstruction" processes (Holston 1991; 2008; Caldeira 2000; 2015a) than through their participation in state-regulated housing assemblies? This dissertation examines the rise and development of housing movements in Santiago, Chile based on archival analysis of past urban mobilizations and ethnographic observation of contemporary housing assemblies. This study scrutinizes thus the ways in which working-class dwellers articulate a rights-based political language and produce new political subjectivities while enrolled in housing programs through which they apply for state subsidies. Since the 1950s, housing struggles in Chile have been grounded in a kind of social agency known as pobladores (urban poor). In the 1960s and early 1970s, pobladores made use of two interrelated performances of city making to become homeowners: illegal land occupations and autoconstruction. This gave rise to mass social protests known as "pobladores movement" (Castells 1973; 1983; Pastrana and Threlfall 1974; Espinoza 1988; Garcés 2002; Cortés 2014). However, the arrival of Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship (1973-1990) drastically repressed these mobilizations. Likewise, it implemented a neoliberal, subsidy-based housing policy, which changed significantly the way pobladores obtain and envisage social housing. Accordingly, since the late 1970s state policies conceive housing less as the result of collective practices of city making than as a commodity that the poor can obtain through both state subsidies and private savings (Bruey 2012; Özler 2012). Over the past twenty-five years, post-dictatorial governments have tried to avoid the reappearance of urban movements by pre-emptively building subsidized housing projects. During the 1990s, the state endeavored to construct at least 90,000 subsidized housing units per year (Arriagada and Moreno 2006). This eventually helped reduce the housing shortage from 918,756 units in 1990 to 743,450 in 2000, which represents a decrease from 53% to 37% in the number of households in need of housing. This reduction of the housing deficit persisted in the following decades reaching 459,347 units in 2013 (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social 2014a). In that context, by 2000 large-scale land occupations almost totally disappeared, calling into question the very existence of pobladores as subjects endowed with a capacity to intervene in the political sphere. However, while the government has massively delivered housing, these subsidized homes are often located in peripheral areas lacking infrastructure and services. This fact has triggered an emerging process of remobilization in the last ten years in which the new generations of pobladores are increasingly claiming the right to "dignified housing" (vivienda digna) and a "dignified life" (vida digna). Interestingly, the tactics of these new protests consist less of land occupations than of pobladores' enrollment in housing programs through which they expect to obtain subsidized housing. My dissertation, in this regard, discusses the mechanisms through which contemporary pobladores recreate their political agencies when they no longer organize their protests as squatters nor autoconstructors, but rather as "formal" dwellers enrolled in subsidy-based programs. I conclude that the Chilean urban poor, by identifying themselves as pobladores, form themselves as political agents capable of dealing with the state on the basis of a rights-based language. To do so, they bring the performative power of the word poblador into the present by executing a territorially situated political practices through which they evoke the pobladores movement of the mid-twentieth century. This work examines thus how the past informs the mobilizations of the present and how lower-income residents becomes pobladores even when the performances of city making that characterized past urban movements are recalled rather than actually performed. Likewise, this dissertation discusses to what extent such a subject-formation process makes possible the emergence of new kinds of citizenship in which pobladores, by conceiving of themselves as city-makers, legitimize their claims to have dignified housing and a dignified life.

Book The Making of a Periphery

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ulbe Bosma
  • Publisher : Columbia University Press
  • Release : 2019-07-30
  • ISBN : 0231547900
  • Pages : 309 pages

Download or read book The Making of a Periphery written by Ulbe Bosma and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Island Southeast Asia was once a thriving region, and its products found eager consumers from China to Europe. Today, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia are primarily exporters of their surplus of cheap labor, with more than ten million emigrants from the region working all over the world. How did a prosperous region become a peripheral one? In The Making of a Periphery, Ulbe Bosma draws on new archival sources from the colonial period to the present to demonstrate how high demographic growth and a long history of bonded labor relegated Southeast Asia to the margins of the global economy. Bosma finds that the region’s contact with colonial trading powers during the early nineteenth century led to improved health care and longer life spans as the Spanish and Dutch colonial governments began to vaccinate their subjects against smallpox. The resulting abundance of workers ushered in extensive migration toward emerging labor-intensive plantation and mining belts. European powers exploited existing patron-client labor systems with the intermediation of indigenous elites and non-European agents to develop extractive industries and plantation agriculture. Bosma shows that these trends shaped the postcolonial era as these migration networks expanded far beyond the region. A wide-ranging comparative study of colonial commodity production and labor regimes, The Making of a Periphery is of major significance to international economic history, colonial and postcolonial history, and Southeast Asian history.

Book Politics of the Periphery

Download or read book Politics of the Periphery written by Pierre Hamel and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New urban forms characterizing contemporary metropolises reflect a certain continuity with the patterns of the past. They also include unexpected forms of settlement and design that have emerged in response to social and economic needs and as a way of leveraging new technologies. Politics of the Periphery sets out to explore sub/urban governance in diverse contexts in order to better understand how materiality and space are shaped by the possibilities and constraints of confronting actors. This collection, edited by Pierre Hamel, examines the empirical aspects of collective action and planning in eight urban regions around the world – across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa – and reveals the impacts and consequences of various structures of suburban governance. The case studies feature a diverse range of local actors facing both the specificity of their respective milieus and the broader context of extended urbanization as metropolitan regions cope with new territorial challenges. The book focuses on suburbanization processes that characterize most of these post-metropolitan regions and questions whether it is possible to improve suburban governance in the face of growing uncertainties arising from structural and subjective transformations. Paying close attention to the relationship between the local and the global, Politics of the Periphery challenges the planning processes of evolving metropolitan regions.

Book The Spaces of Public Issues

Download or read book The Spaces of Public Issues written by Daniela Stoltenberg and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideas about matters of public concern are shaped by the spaces associated with them: Events occur in particular places, political regulations apply to specific territories, people in different locations are differentially affected by issues. Yet, political communication research has neglected the question of how the spaces of public issues are constructed in the public sphere. This is especially true for research on social media communication, which is often perceived as placeless. Yet, social media discourses are driven by unequal attention patterns based on users’ interests, resources, and abilities. To understand how these patterns manifest spatially, this interdisciplinary monograph builds on public spheres theory, communication infrastructure theory, and urban sociology to develop the framework of issue spatiality. It focuses on how social media users discuss different places in urban policy issue discourses. By applying the framework to four large-scale Twitter discourses on housing markets and cycling infrastructure in two German cities, Berlin and Frankfurt, the research reveals the spatial patterns and inequalities of social media discourses. It demonstrates that digital discourses are overwhelmingly focused on a small number of places in the urban center. These places emerge as the locus of activism and political controversy, while the urban periphery remains hidden or is discussed in purely administrative terms. Places with dense civic infrastructure and privileged residents receive disproportionate attention. The book provides an in-depth look at the ways in which socio-spatial inequalities are inscribed in public communication and shape ideas about societal issues.

Book Cities of the Global South Reader

Download or read book Cities of the Global South Reader written by Faranak Miraftab and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-10 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cities of the Global South Reader adopts a fresh and critical approach to the fi eld of urbanization in the developing world. The Reader incorporates both early and emerging debates about the diverse trajectories of urbanization processes in the context of the restructured global alignments in the last three decades. Emphasizing the historical legacies of colonialism, the Reader recognizes the entanglement of conditions and concepts often understood in binary relations: first/third worlds, wealth/poverty, development/underdevelopment, and inclusion/exclusion. By asking: “whose city? whose development?” the Reader rigorously highlights the fractures along lines of class, race, gender, and other socially and spatially constructed hierarchies in global South cities. The Reader’s thematic structure, where editorial introductions accompany selected texts, examines the issues and concerns that urban dwellers, planners, and policy makers face in the contemporary world. These include the urban economy, housing, basic services, infrastructure, the role of non-state civil society-based actors, planned interventions and contestations, the role of diaspora capital, the looming problem of adapting to climate change, and the increasing spectre of violence in a post 9/11 transnational world. The Cities of the Global South Reader pulls together a diverse set of readings from scholars across the world, some of which have been written specially for the volume, to provide an essential resource for a broad interdisciplinary readership at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in urban geography, urban sociology, and urban planning as well as disciplines related to international and development studies. Editorial commentaries that introduce the central issues for each theme summarize the state of the field and outline an associated bibliography. They will be of particular value for lecturers, students, and researchers, making the Cities of the Global South Reader a key text for those interested in understanding contemporary urbanization processes.

Book Deciphering the Global

Download or read book Deciphering the Global written by Saskia Sassen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saskia Sassen is Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.

Book Cultural Political Economy of Small Cities

Download or read book Cultural Political Economy of Small Cities written by Anne Lorentzen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-02-13 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume highlights ongoing changes in the political economy of small cities in relation to the field of culture and leisure. Culture and leisure are focal points both to local entrepreneurship and to planning by city governments, which means that these developments are subject to market dynamics as well as to political discourse and action. Public-private partnerships as well as conflicts of interests characterise the field, and a major issue related to the strategic development of culture and leisure is the balance between market and welfare. This field is gaining importance in most cities today in planning, production and consumption, but to the extent that these changes have drawn academic attention it has focused on large, metropolitan areas and on creative clusters and flagship high culture projects. Smaller cities and their often substantively different cultural strategies have been largely ignored, thus leading to a huge gap in our knowledge on contemporary urban change. By bringing together a number of case studies as well as theoretical reflections on the cultural political economy of small cities, this volume contributes to an emerging small cities research agenda and to the development of policy-relevant expertise that is sensitive to place-specific cultural dynamics. In taking this approach, the volume hopes to contribute to emerging research on culture and leisure economies by developing a differentiated spatial dimension to it, without which sustainable urban strategies cannot be developed. This book integrates perspectives of economic development with questions of governance and equity in relation to the fields of culture and leisure planning and development. This book should be of interest to students and researchers of Urban Studies and Planning, Regional Studies and Economics, as well as Sociology and Geography.

Book Performance at the Urban Periphery

Download or read book Performance at the Urban Periphery written by Cathy Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume considers performance in its engagement with expanding Indian cities, with a particular focus on festivals and performances in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The editors ask how performance practices are affected by urbanisation, the effects of such changes on their cultural economy, and the environmental impacts of performance itself. This project also considers how performance responds to its context, and the potential for performance to be critical of the city’s development, and of its own compromises. Bringing together perspectives from the humanities, natural and social sciences, the book takes a multi-faceted analytical view of live performance, connecting contemporary with heritage forms, and human with more-than-human actors. The three sections, themed around heritage, everyday life, and future ecologies, will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance, heritage studies, ecology and art history.

Book Making the Middle class City

Download or read book Making the Middle class City written by Willem Boterman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-24 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ​This book seeks to understand the urban transformation of Amsterdam over a 40-year period. In addition to charting social and economic changes associated with gentrification, it analyses the electoral dynamics and middle-class politics that have underpinned Amsterdam’s change to a middle-class city.

Book How Border Peripheries are Changing the Nature of Arab States

Download or read book How Border Peripheries are Changing the Nature of Arab States written by Maha Yahya and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the multiple dimensions of the limited reach, or breakdown, of central authority in border regions of Arab states, and their implications for state sovereignty and modes of governance. These include the emergence of illicit networks of exchange, the rise of new nonstate actors in border regions, including paramilitary or jihadi groups, and the transformation of border areas into areas of regional conflict. Collectively, the essays in this volume address such processes, which have been observable in conflict-stricken countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and in fragile political or economic contexts, like the ones in Lebanon, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as in relatively stable Emirates such as Kuwait. The contributions also shed light on how border peripheries in the Arab world have impacted the center of political and economic power in their states.

Book Boom Town

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sam Anderson
  • Publisher : Crown
  • Release : 2018-08-21
  • ISBN : 0804137323
  • Pages : 513 pages

Download or read book Boom Town written by Sam Anderson and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City—a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny, from award-winning journalist Sam Anderson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Chicago Tribune • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • Deadspin Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous “Land Run” in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team’s 2012-13 season, when the Thunder’s brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti’s all-in gamble on “the Process”—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city’s history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed. Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.

Book Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry

Download or read book Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry written by Andrew Duncan and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry, Andrew Duncan raises the provocative question of just how accurate—and useful—the concept of a British literary culture is for a nation that stretches over 600 miles and includes four distinct national cultures. He identifies distinct regional poetic traditions in Scotland, Wales, and the north of England, examining writers such as Glyn Jones, Joseph Macleod, and Colin Simms and coming to the startling conclusion that the finest British poets of recent decades have lived not at the heart of "British" literary society, but in the outlands of the British Isles.

Book Peripheralization

    Book Details:
  • Author : Matthias Naumann
  • Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
  • Release : 2013-01-12
  • ISBN : 3531190180
  • Pages : 316 pages

Download or read book Peripheralization written by Matthias Naumann and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-01-12 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peripheries emerge as a result of shifts in economic and political decision-making at various scales. Therefore peripheral spaces are not a “natural” phenomenon but an outcome of the intrinsic logic of uneven geographical development in capitalist societies. Discussing examples from Germany, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, Pakistan, India and Brazil, the volume describes the social production of peripheries from different theoretical and methodological perspectives. In so doing, it argues in favour of a re-politicization of the recent debate on peripheralization.

Book Cities  Violence and Gender  Findings and Concepts of the 21st Century

Download or read book Cities Violence and Gender Findings and Concepts of the 21st Century written by Anelise Gregis Estivalet and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2022-10-21 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The For the War Yet to Come

Download or read book The For the War Yet to Come written by Hiba Bou Akar and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Through elegant ethnography and nuanced theorization . . . gives us a new way of thinking about violence, development, modernity, and ultimately, the city.” —Ananya Roy, University of California, Los Angeles Beirut is a city divided. Following the Green Line of the civil war, dividing the Christian east and the Muslim west, today hundreds of such lines dissect the city. For the residents of Beirut, urban planning could hold promise: a new spatial order could bring a peaceful future. But with unclear state structures and outsourced public processes, urban planning has instead become a contest between religious-political organizations and profit-seeking developers. Neighborhoods reproduce poverty, displacement, and urban violence. For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut’s southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Hiba Bou Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranged, not in the expectation of a bright future, but according to the logic of “the war yet to come”: urban planning plays on fears and differences, rumors of war, and paramilitary strategies to organize everyday life. As she shows, war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery, and rifles, but involves a more mundane territorial contest for land and apartment sales, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects. Winner of the Anthony Leeds Prize “Upends our conventional notions of center and periphery, of local and transnational, even of war and peace.” —AbdouMaliq Simone, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity “Fascinating, theoretically astute, and empirically rich.” —Asef Bayat, University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign “An important contribution.” —Christine Mady, International Journal of Middle East Studies

Book The Power of Cities in International Relations

Download or read book The Power of Cities in International Relations written by Simon Curtis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities have become increasingly important to global politics, but have largely occupied a peripheral place in the academic study of International Relations (IR). This is a notable oversight for the discipline, although one which may be explained by IR’s traditional state centrism, the subjugation of the city to the demands of the territorial state in the modern period, and a lack of conceptual and analytical frameworks that can allow scholars to include the impact of cities within their work. Presenting case-specific scholarship from leading experts in the field, each contribution guides the reader through the changing nature of cities in the international system and their increasing prominence in global governance outcomes. The book features case studies on the financial power of cities, city action in the security domain, collaboration of cities in coping with environmental problems, transnational urban regions, and mayors as international actors to illustrate if the relationship between the city and the state has changed in profound ways, and how cities are empowered by structural changes in world politics. The multidisciplinary and global focus in The Power of Cities in International Relations sheds much needed light on the significance of the reemergence of cities from the long shadow of the nation-state. Only by examining the mechanisms that have empowered cities in the last few decades can we understand their new functions and capabilities in global politics.

Book Land Issues for Urban Governance in Sub Saharan Africa

Download or read book Land Issues for Urban Governance in Sub Saharan Africa written by Robert Home and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-11 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sub-Saharan Africa faces many development challenges, such as its size and diversity, rapid urban population growth, history of colonial exploitation, fragile states and conflicts over land and natural resources. This collection, contributed from different academic disciplines and professions, seeks to support the UN Habitat New Urban Agenda passed at Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador, in 2016. It will attract readers from urban specialisms in law, geography and other social sciences, and from professionals and policy-makers concerned with land use planning, surveying and governance. Among the topics addressed by the book are challenges to governance institutions: how international development is delivered, building land management capacity, funding for urban infrastructure, land-based finance, ineffective planning regulation, and the role of alternatives to courts in resolving boundary and other land disputes. Issues of rights and land titling are explored from perspectives of human rights law (the right to development, and women's rights of access to land), and land tenure regularization. Particular challenges of housing, planning and informality are addressed through contributions on international real estate investment, community participation in urban settlement upgrading, housing delivery as a partly failing project to remedy apartheid's legacy, and complex interactions between political power, money and land. Infrastructure challenges are approached in studies of food security and food systems, urban resilience against natural and man-made disasters, and informal public transport.