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This paper investigates the multiple ways in which the lives of urban refugees are impacted by the presence of refugee camps. It builds on a growing body of literature on the urban refugee experience that recognizes the agency exercised in the rejection of the camp. But it also demonstrates how, in countries with an encampment policy, the presence of camps can limit urban refugees' mobility and their ability to take advantage of all that urban life has to offer. It also highlights the consequences of the choice refugees must make between receiving humanitarian aid in a camp and living unassisted in an urban area. The paper draws on qualitative interviews with refugees in Ethiopia, Kenya and Jordan. It presents conclusions on the inadequacy of the international response, which fails to capitalize on the presence of displaced people in cities, to achieve the supposed policy goal of "self-reliance". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the Muslim community's struggle to maintain their cemeteries in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and highlights a broader geo-temporal interpretation of the indigenous right-to-the-city. We analyse a succession of mobilizations against sales and demolitions of Muslim cemeteries across the city since the 1950s and investigate how activists recently gained tangible achievements by framing their protest as an urban citizenship mobilization. We show that by utilizing creative spatial performances, applying to municipal governance and stressing their right to use and produce urban space, to participate, and to have their local heritage acknowledged and commemorated, they invoked and reinterpreted right-to-the-city ideas. Their struggle also expanded this agenda, as they did not focus on their living area, but rather advanced claims related to the full city space and its history, and to the customary view of their spaces as 'terra nullius'. In analysing their struggle, we thus contribute to the right-to-the-city literature and agenda, highlight the right for commemoration as part of right to live in the city as equal citizens, and address the promise this case presents for minority ethnic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The original Cerdà plan (Pla Cerdà) of 1855 for the extension of Barcelona is famous for its grid array of large blocks and wide streets to promote circulation. Each block was originally intended to have an area of open space in the center to provide for the needs of residents. Already by the 1920s, however, the center of the blocks had been filled with buildings. Barcelona currently suffers from a chronic lack of open space, excess noise, and air pollution that exceeds European Union law. This article aims to trace the agency of play as a dynamic process in urban planning to provide new sources of open space through Superblocks (aka Superillas and Supermanzanas). We begin with a brief history of their implementation in the city of Barcelona and the evolution of their justification from the 1990s onward. We then explain the capacity for urban transformation that Superblocks have and how they can modify the urban mobility model and the public space model. We then analyze the role of different forms of play that are used in the area of Poblenou to suggest how play can be used to increase the legitimacy of public participation. Finally, we observe the contingent role of play within urban socialization and in motivating and shaping the urban planning processes of implementing Superblocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People's organized struggles for housing challenge Brazil's exclusionary urbanization. Occupations of vacant buildings by social movements have been pressing municipalities to guarantee the right to the city. Climate change accentuates the risks associated with exclusionary urbanization, and responses to its impacts demand mitigation and adaptation measures that support transformations tackling inequalities and vulnerabilities. This paper highlights the dimensions of inequality, as well as the role of social movements in setting an agenda on climate justice while reducing vulnerability and creating housing alternatives in vacant central buildings of São Paulo and Natal. To this end, we conducted a review of relevant literature along with participatory action-research on insurgent practices of housing social movements in both cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special issue "Gentrification and the right to the geomedia city." The aim of the special issue is to make up for the lack of research on how gentrification is shaped and underpinned by the normalization of various media platforms that currently define urban life—and what these media mean to the resistance to gentrification. Building on the seven contributions that make up the special issue, this article introduces the concept of the geomedia city as a discriminatory regime of dwelling. The geomedia city refers not only to the digital infrastructures built into urban environments—circulating and embedding data—but more crucially to the social and cultural dynamics whereby certain norms, skills, and forms of capital (and thus people) are legitimized (or marginalized) in the city. As such, geomedia constitutes a territorializing force that lubricates urban displacement processes by defining who has the right to belong where. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on national and local anti-homeless ordinances and investigates emerging spatial banishment strategies and their impacts on unhoused folks' basic freedoms. First, we review debates on co-existing geographies of punishment and care through theoretical and legal lenses. Focusing on sixteen cities in the United States, we examine categories of anti-homeless ordinances and their evolution in the past two decades. Next, we focus on Los Angeles and use archival research and interviews with activists to examine the expansion of newly emerging anti-homeless spaces. Our research details ad hoc strategies of spatial banishment targeting homelessness. We find that the city represents a fragmented landscape of "no-go-zones" for the unhoused. We posit that the COVID-19 pandemic enabled various spatial banishment strategies and that Los Angeles is neo-revanchist. We advocate for city policies that abolish spatial banishment strategies and respond to the needs of the unhoused. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Displacement is most commonly conceptualized as forced relocation or dislocation due to physical or economic reasons. However, this conceptualization reduces displacement to a simple spatial moment in time and overlooks indirect forms of displacement. Yet, indirect displacement holds serious implications for equitable planning initiatives that seek 'revitalization without displacement', as these initiatives tend to only address physical dislocation. Incorporating a better understanding of the different dimensions of displacement will help inform equitable development efforts that are more inclusive and just. This research uses Detroit as a case study to examine senior tenant experiences of indirect displacement in a rapidly gentrifying downtown. These 'perspectives from below' help shed light on the redevelopment impacts on seniors, which could then be concretely incorporated in community planning approaches. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observation, the findings illustrate the material ways in which seniors have experienced indirect displacement through feelings of exclusion and non-belonging, diminishing social space, and fears of direct displacement – all of which contribute to an on-going loss of sense of place. These experiences suggest a diminishing ability to create place for some, which reduces their ability to assert their right to the city. The paper concludes by considering how an intersectional approach to understanding displacement could help strengthen equitable planning approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is evidence that commons have the potential to counteract socio-spatial injustices unleashed by neoliberal and capitalist forms of urbanisation, less is known about how commons lead to emancipatory change. Anchored in dialectical social theory, this article explains commoning as a mechanism through which people reproduce/transform their structural context and agency, arguing that the potential for emancipation through commoning lies in the commoners' ability to induce processes of structural/agential transformation. Empirically grounded in interviews with urban community gardeners in the City of Stockholm, Sweden, we show that collective gardening conceptualised as practice of commoning contributes to structural change in that female volunteer labour collectivises the mandate over municipally managed public space, transforming socio-spatial relations. Yet, garden commoning proves to reproduce structural whiteness and middle-class agency in public space, fails to establish autonomy from waged-labour relations, and is unable to abolish the separation from the sources of reproduction and subsistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the Right to the City (RTTC) still a useful framework for a transformative urban politics? Given recent scholarly criticism of its real-world applications and appropriations, in this paper, we argue that the transformative promise in the RTTC lies beyond its role as a framework for oppositional struggle, and in its normative ends. Building upon Henri Lefebvre's original writing on the subject, we develop a "radical-cooperative" conception of the RTTC. Such a view, which is grounded in the lived experiences of the current city, envisions an urban society in which inhabitants can pursue their material and social needs through self-governed cooperation across social difference. Growing and diversifying spaces and sectors of urban life that are decoupled from global capitalism are, we argue, necessary to create space for this inclusionary politics. While grassroots action is essential to this process, so is multi-scalar support from the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the intersection between waste, value, and the right to the city within the context of the Municipal Recycling Collection Program in Salvador, Brazil. It shows how the legal recognition of recyclable-waste collectors as legitimate workers and their integration into municipal practices of waste management has not materialized into improved working conditions and has done nothing to advance their struggle for the right to the city. A critical value perspective on this specific case demonstrates that waste and "humans-as-waste" "switching" from not-value to value-in-the-making does not represent a way of escaping abjection and exploitation. Instead, the inclusion of cooperative collectors into the municipal recycling collection program has resulted in new forms of dispossession, through state-increased control over recyclables and in the municipality appropriating the value produced by the struggles, knowledge, and informal collective labor of the collectors. The right to the city for waste workers in Salvador therefore entails the right to work with dignity and the re-appropriation of waste as the urban commons to create livelihoods based on labor relations and regimes of value against and beyond capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1967, Henri Lefebvre developed the Right to the City (RTC) as 'a cry and demand' for 'a transformed and renewed right to urban life'. In Brazil, the RTC was institutionalised in the City Statute in 2001. We examine the trajectory of the RTC in Recife, Brazil, through the lens of Alain Badiou's set-theoretical ontology of inconsistency, which argues that there is a fundamental disjunction between belonging and inclusion. The articulation between belonging and inclusion produces four different arenas of power and categories of being in the city that we develop as a heuristic framework for analysing the trajectory of participation in Recife, where the struggle for the RTC resulted in a system of popular participation. This system operated under the precept that 'everyone who lives and works here belongs here', in opposition to urban capital's drive to include everything and everyone in the market. However, the RTC was captured within a discourse of participation and inclusivity (what we denominate the 'RTC for All') becoming an element in a post-political fantasy, resulting in the decay of popular participation. Nevertheless, we argue that the emancipatory and revolutionary potentiality of the RTC, as advocated by Lefebvre, remains powerful as long as the disjuncture between people's desire for belonging and capital's drive for inclusion is foregrounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: right to the city; urban appropriation; capitalism; identity; class struggle EN right to the city urban appropriation capitalism identity class struggle 697 702 6 04/12/22 20220501 NES 220501 Kohn, Margaret (2016). As a serious critique from the Left, rights within the liberal state are contradictory in that they seem to give to the people but reinforce a state's mechanism of domination. Kohn provides an excellent summary for this essay on struggle and appropriation in light its evaluation of "the public", of democracy and deliberation, and the strengths but also the shortcoming of rights' claims. "Lefebvre argued that the power to make urban spaces, which he viewed as the control points of modern capitalism", writes Herod, "must be wrested from capital and the state and located instead in the hands of the working-class people" (Herod, p. 197). [Extracted from the article]

The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divided societies by disclosing the distinctive features and mobilizing potential that the notion of urban commons retains in a war-torn society with a socialist legacy. Specifically, it investigates how urban space and urban commons are reclaimed in a post-conflict and post-socialist country such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. By using Sarajevo as a case study, the article explores several grassroots initiatives undertaken by local urban activists to reappropriate cultural buildings and public space in the city. The study discloses that in a post-conflict and post-socialist society urban commons can bear a unifying potential as acts of commoning favor trust reconstruction processes and strengthen community ties. While the erosion of social ties and the legacy of the war might not encourage mobilization for the commons, the reference to socialist-era practices and language can represent a vantage point to advocate in favor of collective governance. Throughout their actions, urban activists instrumentally referred to the historical experience of socialism to develop a discourse that resonates with the domestic cultural environment. The article points also to a generational difference amongst activists in their references to Yugoslav state socialism. While long-time activists strove to critically reappraise it, the younger ones born in the immediate post-war period appear to hold a more superficial and ambivalent historical knowledge of the socialist heritage, to which they had only partial access and no lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to the city represents a critique of the city as a place and an object of capitalist accumulation, in which priority is given to exchange value over use value. This critique references an ongoing and collective struggle for urban production to be radically democratic, as the expanded participation of city users would lead to appropriation, with social movements occupying a central role. This paper discusses the practices of urban social movements that cooperate with governmental institutions participating in and influencing the design and implementation of public policies. We focus on the possibilities of transformation towards the right to the city as well as the conflicts and contradictions that social movements face when partnering with the State. We carry out an in-depth investigation of two social movements involved in building housing units in Brazil as part of a federal government programme. By conceptually translating the right to the city into the economies of worth, we propose an original theoretical approach. Our study contributes to advance the understanding of the role of social movements that collaborate with governments without abandoning the goal of struggling for the right to the city. We add a pragmatic perspective to the radical conception of the right to the city by showing how different logics of action enable or hinder the possibility of the right to the city horizon. We propose that the prominence of the civic common world might transform operational processes mainly through self-management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children are important actors in the urban areas of Turkey since they make up the largest demographic group. Therefore, the reasons behind their being regarded as 'passive' should be re-examined, in view of the fact that they live and work in, and create and recreate the city. The purpose of this study is to elaborate the children's right to the city concept from two different points of view using liberal and radical approaches within the theoretical framework provided by Marcuse in the right to the city discourse. The reason for choosing Marcuse is that at some points, his arguments meet with both a liberal and radical understanding of the right to the city. Therefore, these two approaches will be compared regarding children's right to the city in Turkey in light of related literature. In the last part of the study, children's right to the city will be discussed from these two perspectives with the particular case of street children derived from findings in the literature. It is revealed that while there are significant developments in Turkey at local and international level in terms of children's right to the city and street children, there is still a need for a strengths-based perspective which positions children as active agents making decisions about their own lives and formation of urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New municipalism is a nascent global social movement aiming to democratically transform the local state and economy – but what, precisely, is so new about it? I situate new municipalism in its geographical, political-economic and historical contexts, by comparison with earlier waves of municipal socialism and international municipalism, arguing that it re-politicises traditions of transnationalism, based not on post-political policy mobilities but on urban solidarities in contesting neoliberal austerity urbanism and platform capitalism. This article identifies three new municipalisms – platform, autonomist, managed – whose characteristics, contradictions, interconnections and potentials are explored in terms of state-space restructuring, urban-capitalist crisis and cycles of contention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that it is generative to link struggles around access to, control over, and the transformation of urban energy systems to the imaginary of the right to the city; and we explore the conceptual, empirical and political contributions of this connection. Our paper starts with two main questions: (1) what do we learn from reading attempts to reclaim urban energy systems from a right to the city perspective? (2) What can this analysis add to debates around the right to the city? We make two main arguments from our empirical engagements with initiatives seeking to remunicipalise urban energy systems in Berlin and London, each of which is premised upon calls for more just, democratic and ecologically sustainable forms of energy supply. First, we argue that these struggles need to transcend concerns around energy infrastructure to raise broader questions around the democratisation of urban space. Second, we contend that appropriating long-lasting urban infrastructure requires the creation of new and durable forms of democratic institutions, providing insights into the notion of self-management (autogestion) beyond more spontaneous and fleeting forms of protest and uprising addressed in much of right to the city literature. Overall, the paper hopes to put the question of autogestion and related strategies at the centre of conversations around right to the city moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic research on the formation of new political subjects in the peripheries of São Paulo in a context of progressive governments and intense economic and social change suggests that cultural groups and especially poetry recitals play a fundamental role in a cultural struggle to articulate the valuation of a more communal way of life and a peripheral identity. In addition to contributing to the emergence of new public issues in the outskirts of São Paulo, the recitals have become known as venues for political formation in opposition to or in addition to more established spaces such as nongovernmental organizations, political parties, and the state itself. Pesquisas etnográficas sobre a formação de novos sujeitos políticos nas periferias de São Paulo, em um contexto de governos progressistas e intensa mudança econômica e social, sugerem que grupos culturais e, especialmente, saraus de poesia desempenham papel fundamental na luta cultural para articular a valorização de uma sociedade com mais estilo de vida comunitária e uma identidade periférica. Além de contribuir para o surgimento de novas questões públicas nos arredores de São Paulo, os saraus ficaram conhecidos como locais de formação política de oposição contra, ou além de, espaços mais estabelecidos, como organizações não-governamentais, partidos políticos e o próprio Estado. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airbnb has recently become a growing topic of both concern and interest for urban researchers, policymakers, and activists. Previous research has emphasized Airbnb's economic impact and its role as a driver of residential gentrification, but Airbnb also fosters place entrepreneurs, geared to extract value from a global symbolic economy by marketing the urban frontier to a transnational middle class. This emphasizes the cultural impact of Airbnb on cities, and its power of symbolizing and communicating who belongs in specific places, responding to questions of class, gender, and ethnicity—and thereby potentially driving cultural displacement. Coming from this perspective, this paper uses computational critical discourse analysis to study how white and black hosts market black-majority neighborhoods in New York City on Airbnb, and how guests describe their consumption experience. The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb's marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tourism industries remain inadequately and inconsistently theorised as a form of capitalist development despite their immense ability to transform spaces and economies. The fundamental proposition that tourism 'commodifies' place is widely declared yet rarely critically analysed. There exists confusion about the role of nature and culture, and the experiential nature of consumption, in the commodification of place. To clarify these processes, we extend previous geographic work on the commodification of nature to develop a typology of commodified tourist spaces firmly grounded in political economy. We deploy this analysis to illuminate the distinctive spatial politics of anti-tourism resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The displacement of working-class residents from center to periphery constitutes a crucial element of late-nineteenth-century urbanization. Yet urban historiography has paid little attention to how this process was perceived by those most directly affected. Analyzing primary source material from late-nineteenth-century Germany, this article argues that working-class urbanites opposed suburbanization not only because of their jobs or to remain close to places of entertainment and leisure. Rather, the nascent working-class movement also criticized suburbanization because they feared it jeopardized opportunities for political participation and collective action. Against this backdrop, I argue that contemporary discussions around the "Right to the City" differ considerably from earlier rhetoric. In particular, I show that working-class communities suffering from displacement in present-day cities are deprived of some of the most influential framings of the past. The paper, thus, illustrates how interdisciplinary perspectives open new avenues for critical research on notions of urban belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the creation of a cooperative bakery whose significance is fourfold: (1) it is the first located inside a Chilean campamento (informal settlement); (2) it was organized and managed by inhabitants, mostly Latin American immigrant women; (3) its implementation faced diverse conflicts that serve as lessons for similar experiences; and (4) it provides evidence from the field about strategies for advancing the right to the city agenda. The bakery was conceived by the community as a strategy to control the means of production. The study used a critical research approach, whereby researchers assumed an active role in the community processes around the formation of the cooperative. The article discusses the potential of cooperative socioeconomic organization as a path to developing community autonomy. It presents the Rayito de Sol bakery with its highs and lows, and reflects on the results of the project as a spatial, social and political approach to the relationship between academic communities and public institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past 20 years, street vendors in various cities in the Global South have resisted aggressive state sanctioned removals and relocation strategies by organizing for vendors' rights, protesting, and creating street vending member organizations with flexible relationships to the local state. Through these means, street vendors claim "rights in the city," even as the bodies they inhabit and the spaces they produce are devalued by state legitimizing systems. In this article, I present a case study of the Union de Tianguistas y Comerciantes Ambulantes del Estado de Quintana Roo, a "bottom-up" driven, flexible street vending membership organization not formalized by the state in Cancún. I argue that the Union becomes a platform for street vendors to claim rights to the city, and exemplifies vending systems that combine economic activities with leisure spaces in marginalized urban areas, and circumvent strict vending regulations without being absorbed into or directly monitored by the state. Highlighting the Union's sustainable practices of spatial transformation, and vision of self-managed spaces of socioeconomic urban life in Cancún, illuminates how the members of the Union claim rights to the city as an example of a process of awakening toward imagining possibilities for urban futures that moves away from the state and capitalists systems, and akin to what Lefebvre termed autogestion toward resisting neoliberal ideologies that currently dominate urban planning projects in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional legal responses to street art have tended to characterize it as a problem that is best dealt with through criminal or property law. This is not necessarily perceived of as a problem by street artists who have actively sought to situate understandings of their work outside of the law. But attitudes are changing. Street art is increasingly seen as having commercial value, enhancing the cityscape, creating new local art markets, attracting tourists, and contributing to the gentrification of impoverished areas. The result is that conventional ways of conceiving of street art have begun to pose new challenges to concepts of crime and property. Drawing on an observational study in London, this article proposes a new theorization of the legal problems posed by street art that pays close attention to the sensual experience of encountering it in the city and to street art as performance rather than artefact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we seek to encourage geographers to consider the discursive dimensions of urbanization as a locus for activist inquiry into the right to the city. Drawing from literatures on urban branding and critical toponymy, we implicate the entrepreneurial phenomenon of neighbourhood branding as a primary enabler of urban gentrification and dispossession. Placing the discursive elision of local history, identity, and aspirations into dialectical relation to material infringements upon inhabitants’ collective rights, we suggest how both branding and activist counter-branding tactics may be fruitful sites for future empirical research on the right to the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory budgeting (PB) has been a major innovation in participatory governance worldwide, with more than 3,000 experiences listed across 40 countries. PB has also diversified over its 30 years, with many contemporary experiments (referred to as PBs) only tangentially related to the original project to “radically democratize democracy”. We propose a taxonomy to distinguish the logics currently underpinning PB in practice: political (for radical democratic change), good governance (to improve links between the public and citizens’ spheres), and technocratic (to optimize the use and transparency of public resources for citizens’ benefit). Illustrating these competing rationales through contemporary experiences, we reflect on the contributions of the good governance and technocratic frameworks to managerial and state modernization. Undoubtedly, these help explain PB’s growing attraction for proponents of the good governance agenda. However, rekindling PB’s promise for democratic deepening, we argue, requires refocusing on its deliberative quality. We draw attention to civic education and empowerment of participants as key components of PB practices intent on opening pathways towards alternative political systems – indeed, of materializing Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore initiatives for the construction of substantive citizenship by transnational migrants in Buenos Aires. In looking at migrants’ political participation across the city, we found that the spatiality of citizenship practices is important. At the city level, there are migrant organisations representing specific nationalities. However, in informal settlements, where many migrants reside, we found that migrants engage in political practices across nationality and ethnic lines by coming together with their neighbours in grassroots organisations. These different forms of organising embody critically different views of migrants in their relationship with rights. While the former promote practices linked to ethnic belonging and see migrants as ‘guests’ in a foreign country, unable to make claims to the local or national governments, the latter see them as rights-bearing individuals with power to claim their right to the city. We argue that activism at the scale of the neighbourhood proves to hold more potential for the building of substantive citizenship than actions by organisations active at the city level. This is because migrant organisations active at the city level organise on the basis of nationality, while those at the neighbourhood level bring migrants and non-migrants together on the basis of their class-based interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon an ethnography of recent Congolese diasporic protests in central London, this article pays attention to the traversal histories of 'race' and the postcolonial dynamics that precede the emergence of a contemporary diasporic 'right to the city' movement. The authors critically engage with Henri Lefebvre's 'right to the city' as a way of explaining how the urban is not only the site but also, increasingly, a stake in urban protests. In doing so the authors relocate urban centrality - its meaning, symbolic power and heuristic status in protests - in a context where activists' claims are not restricted to one city or, simply, the political present. Rather, protestors talk about making geopolitical connections between local and global scales and contemporary and historical injustices. Drawing upon Simone's notion of 'black urbanism', the authors claim to enrich Lefebvre's original formulation by unpacking the complex performative dimensions of protest as they intersect with race and, more specifically, blackness and postcolonialism. It is concluded that activists' experience is fundamentally ambivalent; they are at once enchanted and disenchanted with protest in central London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is instructive to look at Pahl's Whose City? from today's perspective, though urban development and governance, in fact the very definition of the urban, have fundamentally transformed over these last 50 years. Comparing and contrasting the meaning of Whose City? then and now allows for a critical reflection of the changes neoliberal restructuring has wrought on urban landscapes and various stakeholders struggling over (the definition of and access to) the city. Such comparison helps to shed light on the (changing) role of urban sociology and urban theory in these transformation processes in general and on the ways in which critical urbanism has changed in response to these processes in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, Chilean democratic governments after Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship have made an effort to allocate publicly subsidized housing to the lower classes. Nevertheless, the dominance of market principles in urban policies has contributed to the formation of highly segregated neighborhoods and the gentrification of peripheral neighborhoods. As a result, Chilean public opinion is witnessing the rearticulation of what in the mid-twentieth century was known as the pobladores movement—social mobilizations demanding housing solutions for the poor. In the old working-class municipality of Peñalolén, severe gentrification since the late 1980s has triggered the appearance of autonomous grassroots organizations such as the Movimiento de Pobladores en Lucha (MPL). The movement has been able to fight social and spatial injustice in Santiago through a subversive appropriation of state policies. Its experience reveals the potentialities of such mobilizations for democratizing cities under a neoliberal regime.Desde principios de los noventa, los gobiernos democráticos chilenos que siguieron a la dictadura de Augusto Pinochet han intentado proveer vivienda social subsidiada a las clases populares. Sin embargo, el predominio de principios de libre mercado en las políticas urbanas ha contribuido a la formación de barrios altamente segregados y a la gentrificación (o “aburguesamiento”) de los vecindarios periféricos. Por consiguiente, la opinión pública chilena está presenciando la rearticulación de lo que a mediados del siglo 20 se conoció como el movimiento de pobladores —movilizaciones sociales que demandaban soluciones habitacionales para los pobres. En el otrora municipio popular de Peñalolén, la importante gentrificación que se ha venido desarrollando desde finales de los 80 ha redundado en la aparición de organizaciones de base autónomas como el Movimiento de Pobladores en Lucha (MPL). Este movimiento ha sido capaz de combatir la injusticia social y espacial en Santiago mediante una apropiación subversiva de políticas estatales, experiencia que revela el potencial de dichas movilizaciones para la democratización de las ciudades bajo un régimen neoliberal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a theoretical interpretation on the limits and potentials of the internationally highly acclaimed Brazilian urban reform as implemented since the 1990s. We argue that representations grounded in collaborative planning and neo-institutional property theory are of little help in providing insights to the somewhat disappointing progress of ‘really existing’ Brazilian urban reform. We provide a different theoretical framework based on adapted regulation theory and critical Brazilian urban scholarship. While it underlines that better plans, planning processes and redistributive land-market instruments frequently fail to produce better cities in light of a contradictory developmental state mode of production itself, it also recognizes potential progressive praxis of social movements and local governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this report I assess progress in legal geography – past and potential – in terms of its contributions to two significant projects in contemporary critical geographic thought: the discernment and diagnosis of spatial injustice and the idea of the right to the city. I argue that conventional spatial imaginaries tend to invisibilize injustices, obscure the contingencies and causes of injustice, and uncouple injustice from responsibility. Conventional legal imaginaries commonly legitimize injustices or render them as mere misfortunes, if not deserved fates. Because traces of the legal are commonly constitutive of the spatialities of injustice – underpinning them, shaping relations of power with respect to them, rendering places meaningful in distinctively legal ways – then much of what legal geographers do is investigate the contingencies and constraints of spatial justice. I also draw attention to recent work by non-geographers and the increased penetration of critical spatial thought into legal scholarship as grounds for anticipating future progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the politics of public space through the particular example of Taksim Square in Istanbul. Tracing Taksim’s history since the early twentieth century, the article analyzes the instrumentalization of public space in nation-building, the socialization of politics within the context of postwar rapid urbanization, and the (re)politicization of public space under neoliberal Islamism. Finally it arrives at an assessment of the nation-wide antigovernment protests that centered on Taksim Square in May–June 2013. Throughout this historical examination, the politics of public space is discussed with reference to the work of Henri Lefebvre, in order to scrutinize the spatial aspects of the relation between state and society. Accordingly, the rise of democratic public space is defined as a result of the mutual interaction between two bottom-up impetuses; the immanent politics of the social (the political character of everyday life) and the socialization of the political (civil political action). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal and improvised practices of occupation and settlement have been known in the Mumbai region since before the birth of the city. These practices have since evolved into a tactic of the poor as they assert a “right to the city” among various structures of inequality and domination produced by the state and civil society. Heritage preservation, as it is practiced in Mumbai, participates in such state work and its failures render it as an object and instrument of class struggle. Within this context, heritage regimes agitate certain wounds of misrecognition borne by urban marginals and have produced assemblages, such as the Jogeshwari Caves, that assert a demand for their redress. Long pursued practices of “quiet encroachment” have become a generative urban force in Mumbai, but their histories remain understudied and unarticulated. This paper seeks to bring historical attention to these struggles and suggests that archeology can further attend to this project of redress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an analysis of key dynamics of sociospatial change in Indian cities to offer a sympathetic critique of recent efforts to extend gentrification theory into the Global South. Despite the postcolonial overtures of this new, Southern gentrification literature, the paper argues that the global search for gentrification risks following a diffusionist logic that either presumes a Euro-American template, or else so sheers gentrification of its analytical specificity that it loses both its explanatory power and its political potency. The paper shows that gentrification theory operates on four implicit presumptions, which fail to characterize the primary dynamics of urban change in India. These include: (1) the presumption that lower-class displacement is driven by a reinvestment of capital into disinvested spaces; (2) a property centrism; (3) an agnosticism on the question of extraeconomic force; and (4) the presumption that land from which lower classes are displaced finds a 'higher and better use'. A priori commitment to the gentrification analytic thus overlooks key features of urban change in contexts, like India, with property, planning, and legal systems different from the postindustrial geographies from which gentrification theory developed. The paper suggests that 'urban revolution', 'enclosures', and 'accumulation by dispossession', while equally abstract terms, more clearly allow for the comparative analysis of displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategy and demand for the ‘right to the city’ was first advanced by Henri Lefebvre in the late-1960s. The concept has been used as a slogan by urban movements in various countries since the 2000s, and has also been discussed in left academic literature. This special section of Capital & Class contains interviews on contemporary urban politics and the right to the city by two Marxist urbanists, Neil Smith and Jamie Gough. These are preceded by a brief history by Jamie Gough of the idea and use of the slogan. Neil Smith died in September 2012. Jamie Gough begins this special section with an appreciation of Neil’s enormous contribution to Marxist geography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the 'right to infrastructure' as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and implications of an open source infrastructural project in Madrid. In all, the paper analyses three challenges that the development of open source urban infrastructures is posing to the institutions of urban governance and property: the evolving shape and composition of urban ecologies; the technical and design challenges brought about by open source urban projects; and the social organisation of the 'right to infrastructure' as a political, active voice in urban governance. In the last instance, the right to infrastructure, I shall argue, signals the rise of the 'prototype' as an emerging figure for contemporary sociotechnical designs in and for social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transport is a critical system in the city, which, through providing access to essential activities, enables diverse women and men, girls and boys to “appropriate” their right to the city and to realize a fully rounded and substantive urban citizenship. Yet, despite decades of work on gender in urban development and urban planning, mainstream transport planning still remains largely untouched by debates on diversity and difference in cities. The tendency to focus on the economic and now environmental aspects continues to dominate urban transport. In contrast, concerns for the identity of urban residents or “users” are addressed through, and ultimately marginalized to, “the social” and distributional aspects of urban transport planning. This paper argues that the distributional aspects of transport are cross cutting, and go beyond the disaggregation of transport users by social relations such as class, gender, age and ethnicity. The social identities of transport “users” are deeply embedded in social relations and urban practices, the latter ranging from the everyday lives of people to urban policies and planning. Furthermore, in transport, these social relations are played out in public space, with implications for how diverse women and men, girls and boys are able to exercise individual and collective “travel choice” and negotiate access to essential activities in the city. Recognition of these processes, as reflected in the “deep distribution” of the transport system, is essential to reframing the notion of “travel choice” and, ultimately, to urban transport and urban planning that is committed to social justice in cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we engage with a theoretical reflection on the concept of the right to the city amidst China's emerging urbanism. In particular, we conceptualize the right to the city as embedded within the complex geometries of power relations throughout the production process of China's urban modernity; and in this sense assert the right to urban life is inevitably entangled with a social project of altering dominant power structures. We suggest that the rights of three social groups--namely socialist workers in work units, rural migrants, and urban redevelopment displacees--to the modern Chinese city is situated within the uneven distribution of social power and corresponding infrastructures of social control, which contribute to these social groups' structural marginality in the process of urban social formation. In some cases, these social groups may be endowed with substantial rights to social welfare but the dominant power structure is left unquestioned and unchallenged, resulting in latent forms of social vulnerability. Therefore, the concept of the right to the city needs to be captured as a combination of the distribution of things (social welfare) and the mobilization of process (structural change). In this sense, a Hegelian teleology of linear social development to comprehend the rights issue amid China's emerging urbanism must be called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay critically examines the concept of the right to the city. While many progressive scholars have embraced the idea of the right to the city, what these scholars mean by rights has often been left unexplored. The first half of this essay focuses on the distinctions that political philosophers and legal scholars often draw between various kinds and forms of rights. The second section focuses specifically on how rights are mobilized within scholarship on the right to the city, as well as the tensions and contradictions – with respect to rights – that arise therein. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A growing body of work over the past two decades has been explicitly concerned with the interdisciplinary connections between law and questions of space. Traversing topics such as the regulation of the city, control of public space and the symbolic dimensions of spatial conflicts, this literature constitutes an important contribution to critical legal scholarship. However, there is still much work to be done on the development of the theoretical foundations of this field. This article will present the writings of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre as revealing a sophisticated theory of space with potentially profound implications for the research program of critical legal studies. Lefebvrean ideas are directly relevant to the renewal of critical approaches to the structure and form of planning law and regimes of urban governance. His work also contains fertile resources for research into the transformation of traditional forms of political citizenship into the broader concept of urban citizenship. Both these examples highlight the importance of the politics of space for critical legal thought and the role Lefebvre's social theory may play in its future development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that conflict is inherent to urban life. With the increasing economic, political and cultural importance of cities, the management of urban conflict becomes essential to the well-being of the majority of the world's people. Communication in the sense of 'disarming conversation' can play a crucial role in preventing low-intensity disputes escalating towards violent and deeply damaging conflicts. A key element of the 'right to the city' should be the 'right to a communicative city'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there has been a growing utilization of Henri Lefebvre's concept of the 'right to the city', not much has been said about the legal implications of such a concept. This article discusses the main aspects of the legal construction of the 'right to the city' in Brazil. Following a discussion of Lefebvre's contribution to the debate on urban politics, the article analyses the role played by the legal order in the determination of the exclusionary pattern of urban development in Brazil, as well as the role a redefined legal order can have in the processes of urban reform, socio-spatial inclusion, and sustainable development. Emphasis is placed on the main dimensions of the 2001 City Statute, the legal framework governing urban development and management, which recognized the 'right to the city' as a collective right, followed by an introduction to the proposed 'World Charter of the Right to the City'. As a conclusion, it is argued that, while a great deal has already been done to promote the materialization of the 'right to the city' in Brazil, there are still serious obstacles to be overcome, and renewed socio-political mobilization is required for the new legal- urban order to be fully implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]