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The world's cities are plagued by serious ills of injustice, inequality and uneven development. Through hard-fought struggles against these urban inequalities and injustices, cities remain important breeding grounds for forms of democratic action that have the potential to reinvigorate the practice and potential of democracy itself. Contemporary struggles over rights to the city generate new answers to questions at the heart of the democratic ideal. In the everyday battles that take place over the institutions and infrastructures that will shape their everyday lives, urban inhabitants frequently resist the ossification of democracy in its inherited forms. Their struggles not only demand new solutions to the pressing urban challenges they face, they also challenge democracy as it is and make claims about democracy as it should be. As such, the historical geography of democracy maintains a close association with the city. This Special Feature on Democratising Cities brings together a survey of city-scaled possibility, canvassing diverse democratisation strategies across a variety of places. We treat democratisation as a process of extending and enacting a logic of equality as the foundation for legitimate authority in the face of specific problems and injustices. Our focus is on the doing of democratisation, exploring a set of innovative democratic practices that people in cities are employing in their efforts to make a better urban life—from alliances, networks, issue-based movements and citizen platforms to digital strategies, political contracts, participatory budgeting, occupations and alternative lifestyles and communities. We show how these practices of democratisation generate new understandings of the who, what, where, when and how of democracy itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shopping malls have replaced traditional public spaces and become an integral part of urban life in many cities. This paper seeks to explore the role of shopping malls as protest sites in Hong Kong during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protest movement in 2019. As the protests decentralised and filtered throughout the city, shopping malls became sites of protest and battlegrounds between riot police and protesters. In addition to singing and chanting, organising sit-ins, and exhibiting protest art inside shopping malls, protesters also confronted mall employees as well as disrupted businesses. Based on information gathered through media reports, planning and policy documents, as well as ethnographic observations, this paper aims to examine the role of shopping malls in the urban development of Hong Kong, their function as public spaces during the protest movement, and how the politicisation of shopping malls shaped and sustained the protest movement. This paper contends that the protesters' appropriation of shopping malls not only represented an important first step of reclaiming the right to the city, but also exemplified how such struggle and resistance can be extended beyond traditional protest sites and into different everyday spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the concept of structural violence through the lens of slum redevelopment policies in Mumbai. While slum redevelopment is often seen as a welfare policy that gives free houses to slum dwellers, the article argues that it is actually a form of ongoing structural violence that began as a scheme, but over time, has emerged as a regime of socio- spatial control that perpetuates dependence on speculative markets and creates new forms of exclusion. Additionally, the regime based on the unlocking of land values represents a violent social order that slowly changes the narrative and practices of informal settling and strikes at the heart of the political agency and voice of the basti residents. While the outcomes of this order are devastating, they are perpetuated through a facade of rehabilitation and a delegitimization of occupancy urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts an empirical focus on the everyday practices of Take Back the City, a housing activist campaign in Summer 2018 in Dublin, as an illustration of occupations as digital/material contention. It outlines how the temporary political occupations of vacant buildings were organised and unfolded across a digital/material nexus. I argue that reading occupations as digital/material (a) extends understandings of how urban struggles actually take place in contemporary cities, and (b) highlights the central role of the digital in contentious space-times before, during, and in the wake of temporary political occupations. I use the Take Back the City campaign to explore the relationship between urban spaces, digital technologies, and contemporary housing movements. Echoing recent work on radical urban space-times, I emphasise the digital/material practices and temporalities of the Take Back the City campaign as a useful example for research on the makeshift, improvised, and often uncertain ways in which digital technologies and urban space are now enrolled in struggles over housing futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus pandemic highlighted the deep-rooted links between poor housing and poor health, particularly for working class communities of colour, for whom the right to the city is systemically undermined by unaffordable, precarious and sub-standard housing. This paper examines these issues against the background of a grassroots movement against evictions in New York during 2021. It describes and discusses the organisation, tactics and strategies of that movement as it attempted to challenge the dominance and norms of the real estate industry. It suggests that the pandemic engendered a radical shift in the demands of tenant and housing justice organisations, which led to New York being virtually eviction free for 22 months. While this success partly arises from the particular circumstances of New York, it is argued that there are lessons to be learned for housing campaigns elsewhere. However, questions are raised about the extent to which 'professionalised activism' represents a sustainable model and the capacity for local mobiisations to influence national political forces at a time of unprecedented volatility in an age of crisis capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main argument of this article holds that São Paulo's notorious Teatro Oficina has been working toward an emblematic form of critical urbanism ever since its inauguration in 1958. Throughout six decades, the theater has been an urbanistic laboratory, where a combination of theatrical, architectural and urban experiments continuously reflected and reacted upon ongoing metropolitan transformations. Located in São Paulo's downtown neighborhood of Bixiga, Teatro Oficina's architectural history involves a complex assembly of artistic, social, intellectual, architectural and urbanistic movements. By unfolding a spatial memoir of the theater, this contribution probes the agency of theater-architecture as a means for investigating and intervening in the spatial production and reproduction of the city. In doing so, the aim is to examine the distinct quest for a more profound right to the city that emanates from such 'theatrical-architectural' critique and action. If implementing the right to the city is indeed critical urban theory's ultimate purpose, how then has Oficina been perpetually putting such right into debate and practice? In other words, what form of critical urbanism emanates from the distinctive convergence of movements in theater, architecture and urbanism? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the experience of revanchist urban transition among street-based sex workers—male, female and transgender individuals—in Bangalore city in India, over the last two decades. While analysing this, this study lays out the everyday struggles of this section of informal workers, against revanchist forces that further perpetuate their marginalised status. To capture these experiences, oral narratives from nearly five dozen sex workers were collected over nearly eighteen months of fieldwork, as well as from half a dozen organisations supporting them. This was further complemented by longitudinal archival information, elicited from reports published in Bangalore editions of newspapers over the period 1998–2018, from the archival collection housed by the organisation Sangama. This paper also provides a discussion on the ongoing human rights and citizenship empowering initiatives among this section of workers, by identifying the role of various individuals, organisations and movements in this regard. The paper then concludes by highlighting the vital need to improve the inclusiveness of these informal workers in urban life and urban transition, not only by law enforcement but also in public consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing is one of the defining social policy issues of our time. There is growing recognition that the housing market is failing and causing widespread damage, but alternatives struggle against deep-rooted capitalist norms and the perceived shortcomings of previous attempts to promote non-market housing. However, despite being a huge concern for millions of people, housing tends to operate below the mainstream political radar, as was demonstrated again by the December 2019 UK general election. This paper argues that a new agenda for public housing is gaining support and can overcome these obstacles, particularly by aligning itself to shifting lifestyle patterns and the urgency of combating climate change, thus enacting a true Right to the City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of culturally driven growth, urban identities are of central importance for the branding of cities. However, urban identities are under constant re-negotiation as cities' populations become more diverse. In northern Scandinavia, some cities have developed on what were traditionally Indigenous lands but have failed to acknowledge the role these roots and histories have played in shaping the city's identity. As the numbers of Indigenous people living in cities grow and they begin to assert their right to the city, the relationship between a city's 'majority population' identity and its 'Indigenous' identity may become contested. Looking at the northern Scandinavian cities of Tromsø (Norway) and Umeå (Sweden), we study the conflicts that have arisen around the cities' place identity. In Tromsø, the conflicts concerned joining the Sámi Administration Area. Whereas, in Umeå, the Sámi identity of the city was contested in relation to the inauguration of Umeå as European Capital of Culture 2014. Drawing on theories of place identity, social justice and the right to the city and analysing representations of place identity in the local media and public fora, we discuss the importance of change and reproduction of urban identities and power relations in the two cities. We conclude that contestation can open up space for change and challenge the city's dominant power relations, encouraging a resurgent politics of recognition of Indigenous identities rather than a conciliatory form of settler-state recognition that (re)produces and maintains colonial relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions, planning can be transformative? While also acknowledging Critical Urban Studies' general skepticism around the transformative power of urban planning policies, this article reflects on the possibilities of planning in facilitating enduring urban change. It does so by scrutinizing the Brazilian process of institutionalization of the notion of the Right to the City (RTTC) and its effects on the daily lives of vulnerable residents of the city of Fortaleza. Using the theorectical lenses of Insurgent Planning literature, the research offers some insights for examining the contradictory processes of rights based inclusion and material exclusion. On one side, it reveals an association of RTTC planning policies with neoliberal ideologies neutralizing the political gains of earlier urban social movements. On the other side, having residents check on the outcomes of state practices and adopting an attitude of not giving up on political confrontation, when deemed necessary, has proven an efficient way to materialize the redistribution of urban resources toward the excluded. The fidings are grounded in six years of field research on/about informal residents' struggle for adequate living conditions in a peripheral region of the city called Grande Bom Jardim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the prolific contemporary discussions on the right to the city, little attention has been paid to the multifaceted political meaning of the reshaping of city dwellers' rights, duties and responsibilities through regularisation processes inspired by neoliberal logics. This paper fills in this gap by engaging in an analysis of the dialectical relation between the political dimension of everyday life, urban rights, neoliberal urban policies and political emancipation. We thereby break from a radical reading of Lefebvre's notion and from a focus on political mobilisation in order to cast a new light on the debate on the right to the city. Three regularisation policies, all linked to the affirmation of a commercial or fiscal relationship to the state are considered through a cross-case analysis: the regularisation that followed the forced displacement of street traders in central Accra; an in situ process of regularisation of street trading in a Cape Town central market; the regularisation of electricity services in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, a policy that seeks to re-establish a commercial relationship with favela residents by redefining their rights and responsibilities as registered customers of a private electricity provider. We resort to an exploratory notion, the actual right to the city, to examine how these forms of administrative regularisation have reshaped urban life. We argue that these processes of regularisation convey de-politicisation dynamics, such as the fragmentation and individualisation of political identities, along with the possible re-politicisation of certain stakes, such as the strengthening of individual and collective political expectations toward the State. This tension is due to the ambiguous nature of the new social and spatial contract between State and citizens emerging from regularisation. Beyond the necessary analysis of political struggles against neoliberal policies, and the essential assessment of their impact on urban inequalities, we therefore call for a better consideration of the ambiguous and less visible political impact of processes of selective inclusion and recognition by the State on the way city dwellers envision their rights and duties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Displacement is central to the process of gentrification, but the importance of law in both enacting and resisting such displacement is often overlooked. Noting the tensions between existential, embodied meanings of displacement (i.e. being removed from a place called home), and the formal legal definitions of displacement (i.e. the removal of the right to a property), this paper explores how the law is implicated in the struggle for London's remaining council estates, with processes of expropriation providing councils a means of displacing residents from these estates to allow for (private) redevelopment but also an opportunity for residents to assert their ‘right to community’. Here, we focus on the implications of the UK Secretary of State's decision not to overturn the Planning Inspectorate's (2016) recommendation that Southwark Council should not be allowed to compulsory purchase those homes on the Aylesbury Estate which residents had not already vacated via negotiation. This decision was reached on the basis that while tenants would be compensated financially for the loss of property, they would not be adequately compensated for losing their home. This is suggestive of an expanded notion of housing rights that encompasses a right to community—something that raises the possibility of the law actually aligning with the interests of council residents rather than supporting the politics of gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990), Chile’s post-dictatorial governments drew on market-based policies to develop large-scale subsidised housing projects and, accordingly, avoid the reappearance of mass housing movements. However, the considerable building of subsidised social housing in the 1990s did not lead to better living conditions forpobladores(the urban poor). To become homeowners, they began to be systematically expelled from their neighbourhoods of origin and relocated to segregated peripheries. This phenomenon has resulted in the re-emergence of housing protests in the last decade, which are mostly organised aroundpobladores’ demands for staying in their neighbourhoods. This paper analyses such a remobilisation process by scrutinising ethnographically the case of a state-regulated housing assembly in La Florida, a district of Santiago undergoing a housing affordability problem due to the generalised increase in land prices in Santiago’s Metropolitan Area. It focuses on howpobladores’ demands for the right to stay put in La Florida account for a broader reframing of right-to-housing struggles, expressed in the growing incorporation of right-to-the-city claims in their political language. In doing so, I show that current urban struggles allow for the rise of a type of urban citizenship through which the urban poor, by conceiving of themselves as city-makers, generate particular understandings of themselves as rights-bearers. This process of citizen formation, however, is paradoxical: although it is the result of mobilisations aimed at contesting market-based policies, it is permeated by a neo-liberal ethics through which the urban poor legitimate themselves as urban citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The capital of Ecuador, as a case study, is here used to show how policies regarding urban heritage may improve urban democratic standards and practices by supporting popular participation to redefine the concept of heritage and by encouraging residents to make urban heritage spaces their own. Quito was the first city in 1978 (along with Krakow) to be awarded the title of ‘Cultural Heritage of Humanity’, for the cultural importance of its historic centre. Heritage then became an essential resource not only for local but also national and international actors, as well as a lever for a more comprehensive urban development policy. However, the gradual depopulation of the area reflects the difficulties in conducting a policy of sustainable urban planning. In this context, recent urban programmes mark a watershed as they have involved the inhabitants as actors in the heritage policies and have given rise to a redefinition of heritage—whose long-lasting impact on cultural policy needs questioning. This paper therefore examines the evolution of heritage policies in Quito, and highlights the innovative nature of a recent cultural programme, entitled ‘Tell me about your Quito’, and its impact on the definition and on the appropriation of heritage, in a specific national context, that of the ‘Citizens' Revolution’ and ‘Good Living State’ which Rafael Correa’s government has promoted since 2007. It finally concludes on the emergence of a ‘right to heritage’, as an inclusive tool that establishes the conditions for the residents to appropriate the city and consequently, for the emergence of a more inclusive urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a sympathetic critique of a right to the city perspective that sets up a binary between city inhabitants who actively produce and appropriate city space for its use value as opposed to those who expropriate urban space for realizing exchange value. It suggests that this tends to gloss over the actual divisions among users of city space and their complicity with forces of capital and the state that constitute real limits for the urban revolution that the right to the city envisions. It then argues that an analytics of contested place-making, including practices of commoning, can both include the central conflict that is important to the rights to the city perspective and overcome the limitations of a rights framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What is technical democracy? And why does it matter for urban studies? As an introduction to this special feature, we address these questions by reflecting onTo Our Friends, the 2014 manifesto of the Invisible Committee. We engage in particular its provocative diagnosis of the current situation: power no longer resides in the modern institutions of representative democracy and the market economy; instead, power has become a matter of logistics, infrastructures and expertise. This diagnosis, we suggest, brings into view the challenge of technical democracy, that is, the democratization of techno-scientific expertise and the instauration of forms of lasting collaboration among experts and laypeople. Urban politics, we claim, increasingly turns around socio-technical controversies and it is in terms of the politics of expertise that we should analyse and engage it. Building on Science and Technology Studies (STS), we conclude by pointing to four key conceptual dimensions of technical democracy—shared uncertainty, material politics, collective experimentation and fragile democratization—and provide examples taken from the papers included in this special feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on emancipatory socio-spatial change can be by no means only a matter of ‘right to the city’ − not even within the framework of the Lefebvrian concept of ‘the urban’ (l’urbain), whose scope is wider than is usual. I believe this implies meeting the challenges of reflecting deeper and with more sophistication on how to practically overcome the following aspects of reality: 1) the state apparatus and statism (be it properly capitalist or ‘socialist’) as well as the institution called ‘political party’ and all hierarchical, bureaucratic and vertical modes of collective organisation; 2) the technological matrix and the spatiality inherited from capitalism; 3) the capitalist ideology of ‘economic development’ (somewhat shared, albeit in a distinct and recontextualised way, by typical Marxism with its economism and productivism), full of economistic, Eurocentric, teleological and rationalist presuppositions. At the end of the day, what is at stake is the right to the planet, which requires rethinking a number of issues regarding spatial organisation (pointing out the necessary, radical economic-spatial deconcentration and territorial decentralisation, but without degenerating into parochial localism and self-insulating economic processes), the social division of labour, exploitation and alienation (in the context of which the trends of deterioration and regression such as labour precarisation and ‘hyperprecarisation’ should be highlighted), ethnocentrism (in this regard its renewed facets relating to xenophobia, nationalism and racism must be vehemently denounced), the various types of oppression (class, gender, etc.) and heteronomy in general - all this ultimately examined and judged on the basis of autonomy in the strong sense as the crucial parameter of analysis and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relationship between people and space is a hugely complex one; the intertwined nature of how people interactwithcertain spaces and with each otherwithincertain spaces both informs and is informed by the physical environment itself, historic and contemporary spatial practice, and the discourses about these spaces. In many cities, policies are developed and initiatives put in place to govern these complex relationships in a number of ways: access can be restricted to particular places at particular times to ensure safety; places where people gather can be monitored; the built environment can encourage different types of spatial practice and interaction between people. In Northern Ireland, ‘shared spaces’, or those spaces people from different ethno-national backgrounds can use, are the subject of intense attention from policymakers. This paper explores how policy is governing shared space, with a particular focus on how the term ‘shared space’ and the connotations of this term are used as a policy concept to legitimise how Belfast city centre is managed as a space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 recentCityarticle, 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 that may strengthen the discourse on the right to the city in South Africa and similar contexts of urban extremes across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “Right to the City” is, for better or worse, a catchy phrase, and has been used with quite a diversity of often contradictory meanings. The article describes Lefebvre's own reading, a strategic reading, a discontented reading, a spatial reading, a collaborationist reading, and a subversive reading. It concludes with the suggestion of an alternate reading, a sectoral reading, consistent with the experience of the Occupy movement today. One should be careful which reading one uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providing a critical reflection on Ash Amin's ‘telescopic urbanism’ this piece suggests that despite a burgeoning scholarship on governmentality, critical urban studies has not taken into account the role of law in obstructing or facilitating the struggles for right to the city and urban commons. It argues that rights cannot be realised through top-down political imperatives or gargantuan social engineering models. Neither can they simply be a matter of subaltern resistance and social organisation among the urban poor against the state. It argues that for much of the urban poor, the politics around right to the city is often focused on a politics of entitlement that is based on concrete and symbolic encounters with law in urban spaces. These encounters change the ways that the urban poor rethink their approaches, aspirations and futures in the city with respect to state, law and urban citizenship. Put another way, exclusion from the city and its urban commons transforms the relations between a public right to the city and a more private and intimate right to gendered freedom and capacity in everyday life. The future of progressive urban studies will be to reverse its continued silencing of the private and intimate city and bridge the divisive boundaries it has created between state-citizen, public-private, city-slum and centre-periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spark that drew Istanbul into a fire of protest and uprising was initially set off by a modest ‘occupy style’ peaceful resistance, staged against the destruction of an historically public park, an urban commons, in order to make way for yet another shopping mall in Istanbul. Following explicit police violence against the protestors, who were openly discredited by the government for being a few looters, the urban centers of Turkey saw a full-fledged uprising, gathering considerable international steam as well. Analyzing the path of this social mobilization flowing from Gezi Park to larger geographical scales of the urban, the national, and beyond, this article situates the urban uprisings in Turkey in the conceptual background of the right to the city, coined by Henri Lefebvre at the time of Parisian uprisings in 1968. The article further argues in the end that, if this revolutionary energy is to be channeled into a lasting social transformation, the Kurdish movement and the labor movement—historically, the two main motors of Turkey's democratization—should catch up with the protestors on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What happens when the Right to the City is understood as the right to reoccupy the inner city by middle-class suburbanites? In the self-styled Maboneng Precinct in Johannesburg, the writing is on the wall, literally. Graffiti reading, ‘We won't move’ on the roof of Revolution House begins to tell the story of hipster-styled urban gentrification in the city. These processes force a radical reinvention of the meaning of the right to the city, of centrality and of accumulation by dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two main questions are addressed in this paper, namely: to what extent can urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) contribute to the social inclusion of migrants? And does UPA practised by urban farmers of foreign origin contribute to the expansion of biodiversity in cities? A comparative analysis of current peri-urban agriculture practices in Lisbon and London was carried out in allotment gardens and other spaces far from the centre in and on the edges of these capital cities. In both cases, a significant proportion of the migrant population is involved in two different frameworks: regulated in London and non-regulated in Lisbon. The paper concludes that patterns of social inclusion are quite city specific: urban farming communities from the Cape Verde islands maintain and strengthen community bonds through their activity but this does not necessary lead to better social integration within the wider Portuguese society. In London, migrants of foreign origin become part of an integrated communitarism on an individual basis. Concerning the contribution of peri-urban agriculture to biodiversity, evidence gathered strongly suggests that urban farmers of foreign origin do contribute to broadening biodiversity primarily in Lisbon and to a lesser extent in London. Final observations note to what extent these urban practices contribute to the Right to the City and thus if they are, more broadly, of an emancipatory and transformative nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resistant performances in Athens have gathered momentum over the last year, transforming the fixed landscape of a city into a platform for negotiation and dialogue. The singular compelling imagery of ‘occupying’ as a form of resistance is its multiplicity of voices—the collective mobilisation of the ‘multitude’. Yet, the force and urgency of a collective resistance lies in the individual untold stories of its proponents. Rather than glorify the movement as a faceless entity, this paper embraces the daily stories, struggles and wounds of occupation, by using photographs. Resistant performances are connected with existing social conditions: austerity measures, mass immigration and ‘crisis’. Such narratives of globalisation and empire building are transforming central areas and traditional notions of Athenian identity, giving birth to a new street-level language that has twisted, innovated and filled in the gaps of a culture's hegemonic discourse. The paper analyses both protests and specific examples of street art as visual markers of the shifting, complex discourses of power struggles, marginality and counter-cultures that establish a new reality that must be seen and heard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The proliferating numbers of a new population of urban poor in the Western world—who I call here nouveau poor—is a phenomenon equally (if not more) significant as the emergence of the Indignados and Occupy movements, and calls for urgent attention from the part of critical urban studies. This phenomenon forces us to re-evaluate the analytical categories within which we study urban poverty (gender, age, ethnicity, marginality, etc.) and prompts us to focus on commonality, rather than difference, when it comes to collectively reclaiming the ‘right to the city’. Focusing on the political, social and affective consequences of the presence of nouveau poor on the streets of Athens, I argue that the shock waves that Greece's nouveau poor send down Europe's spine are partly due to the fact that Athens' new ranks of beggars are not migrants, junkies, alcoholics or homeless; they do not fall in any of the familiar categories of the urban ‘other’ or ‘subaltern’. As they belonged, until very recently, to the mainstream aspiring middle classes, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to ‘other’ them, ignore them or dismiss them politically, or socially. The presence of Europe's very own ranks of middle class-come-poor begs for a reconceptualisation of the link between urban theory and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a brief comparative reading of how Peter Marcuse and Edward Soja conceptualise the spatiality of justice and the right to the city. The work of both of these authors has been featured in City in recent issues, and while there are clear differences in their approaches, I argue that there are also points of convergence. In particular, both Marcuse and Soja insist that working towards the 'right to the city' is not only a matter of re-ordering urban spaces, it is also a matter of attacking the wider processes and relations which generate forms of injustice in cities. In making this case, the paper provides an illustration of my belief that both Marcuse and Soja are right in arguing that a commitment to the 'right to the city' can serve as the 'common cause' or 'glue that binds' for radical theorists and activists across their differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the examination of two critical analyses of garbage politics, I argue that both can benefit from the insights of a critical urban theory as developed by Marcuse, Brenner and Mayer. At the same time, I argue that bringing garbage into the analysis both underscores the importance of certain key features of critical urban theory—especially its focus on everyday life and the Right to the City as a collective moral rather than legal claim cashed out by individuals while at the same time demonstrating the importance and necessity of including a focus on environmental crises and issues that emerge in the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between theory and practice is tricky. Sometimes theory seems irrelevant under the pressures of everyday crises; sometimes the problems of practice seem so overwhelming as to leave no room for theory. This paper argues that theory, specifically critical theory, is an indispensable part of effective practice, and in turn rests on practice for its understanding and analysis. Examples are given from several current struggles: homelessness, around disaster recovery, mortgage foreclosures, and others in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]