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Unsanctioned tent cities are increasing in number in cities throughout the western United States. Scholars explain the phenomenon as homeless people asserting their ?right to the city? or as ?managed marginality?. These explanations capture much of the socio-political relationship between local government and homeless populations, but do not explain the long-term persistence of tent cities and the fluctuating nature of their visibility. A spatial history of informal encampments in Sacramento at three key moments?the founding of the city, the Great Depression and the Great Recession?reveals a long-term ebb and flow of tent cities occupying close-to-the-center, urban vacancies. Urban vacancies arise from the partitioning of the city into specific purposes, places and people, a taken-for-granted perception of how cities should be. The visibility of tent cities disrupts this aesthetic notion of stability and growth as homeless people use the tent to protest their isolation and exclusion.

What happens when Roma people move from the space of an informal settlement to that of a squat of a housing rights movement? In this article, which is based on the analysis of housing squats involving Roma people in the Italian capital city of Rome, I argue that this move is more than a housing solution: it is a new form of contentious and aesthetic politics. In Rome approximately 7,000 Roma face extreme housing deprivation and segregation, in both official and makeshift camps. While different associations have for many years advocated Roma housing inclusion through a minority and human-rights framework, in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 economic crisis an increasing number of Roma have moved to squats set up by social movement activists. The aim of the article is threefold. First, it illustrates the collective action repertoire of Roma-squatting. Secondly, it considers its aesthetic politics, which through spatial dislocation unsettles the racializing discourse endorsed by policymakers that underpins the segregation of the Roma. Finally, this article unpacks the process of politicization of Roma-squatting and discusses the urban frames and material resources that consolidate this transformation through a comparison of four housing squats that Roma people joined.

Ibadan, Nigeria, has been an outlier in the ranking of world-class cities. But in the past seven years, amidst the circulating Africa Rising narrative, Ibadan has embarked on what I call an Afropolitan Imagineering project of owambe urbanism. Afropolitan Imagineering refers to the production of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world-class and cosmopolitan. Owambe urbanism is a spatio-temporal neoliberal project concerning destination, arrival and place-making, which promises a shared and happy future for all urban dwellers. I argue that this promise of happiness is challenged by low-income women who are cognizant that a shared and happy future is impossible when little effort is made to address social inequality in the present. They thus refuse to be ‘good’ citizens and invoke an alternative urban futurity through their embodied and imagined resistance.

Over the past 30 years, we have been witnessing a rise in incivility policing across western but also non-western cities. The term “incivility policing” refers to bans and exclusion aimed at drinking alcohol, begging, loitering, sitting in public, and many other kinds of subcriminal conduct. Scholars have observed an increasing readiness to demand legal “solutions” aimed against these kinds of conduct. In this paper, I review two major strands of scholarship dealing with the origins of these calls: First, a rising punitiveness and a “law and order” mentality, inspired by the Broken windows theory and Zero tolerance policies. Second, privatization of space and the rising influence of private actors over public spaces are discussed with references to the concepts of neoliberalism, revanchism, and the right to the city. The effect of incivility policing on vulnerable groups is examined using the example of homeless people in public space. In the final part, I suggest new factors which could help us understand the rise in incivility policing: These include general trust, everyday trust, and the imaginaries of community.

In this article, we draw on the narratives of residents and development workers to understand what freedoms hinder and enable access to water services in informal settlements in the Indian cities of Faridabad, Delhi and Mumbai. We show that although development practice and thinking in the water sector often frame water deficiencies as politically neutral technical and governance challenges, residents and development workers on the ground identify a lack of freedoms relating to first of all, residents' rights to the city and its resources, and secondly, meaningful engagement between residents and the political establishment as key causes for inadequate access to water services. Our findings indicate that water‐service development efforts can be more effective if they include strategies to strengthen informal settlers' rights to the city through a politicization of public engagement. We discuss the implications of our findings for practice and outline a future research agenda geared towards operationalizing our key findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on everyday life and the dynamics of contestations between very different groups thrown together in dangerous proximity in a neighborhood of Istanbul called Tophane, this article contributes to debates on urban transformation, political aspects of gentrification and the right to the city, with a focus on how to live differentially. Amidst rising political tensions and polarization in Turkey, competing economic interests, gentrification pressures and/or ultimate clashes over norms and values have fueled these contestations, which have degenerated into violent encounters. Calling for a re‐evaluation of 'the right to the city', we argue that, unless the concept of right to the city is complemented by a commitment to live differentially—that is, by a right to difference—mediating and addressing these contestations will be difficult. Whether clashes over the right to the city and everyday encounters can lead to a new politics committed to resisting urban transformation that pushes the boundaries of urban citizenship, or whether these uncomfortable encounters will continue to escalate, with one group claiming hegemony over space until the neighborhood is finally and fully gentrified, remains very uncertain. But it will, ultimately, be the litmus test of the country's democracy and inclusive citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the affective and performative aspects of the right to the city with a focus on the materialisation of this right, its corporeal coming into being. In elaborating the idea of an affective right to the city, I will refer to Judith Butler's performative theory of assembly, along with findings drawn from ethnographic research conducted among individuals experiencing homelessness in Melbourne, Australia. My research suggests that the materialisation of the right to the city is embodied in the social, material and affective occupation of urban spaces. This work reveals how the body's inhabitation of place, and the affordances of the material environment, mediate the performative expression of the right to the city. It also calls for a shift from a juridical conception of the right to the city to an affective one, more accommodating of the social and material contexts in which this right is enacted. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this affective conception of rights for performative studies of homelessness in urban space.

This article takes the contemporary transformation in electricity access in Rio de Janeiro's favelas as a starting point for a broader review of the relationship between the right to the city in informal settlements and the neoliberalization of the electricity service (introduction of full cost recovery and 'the user pays' principle). It examines the socio-technical process through which contractual customer relationships have been established or restored through regularization of the electricity service in two favelas, namely, the installation of meters and networks. I suggest that applying a science and technology study perspective to the right to the city helps explore both the materiality and the spatial dimension of power and politics and, in so doing, provides an insight into some of the forms of mediation that help reshape recognition, urban practices and the favela dwellers' position within such an essential service. Our analysis shows how the means of recognizing these city dwellers 'by the network' are materially and symbolically reshaped by commercial processes. The question then is whether this right to the city, which is being reshaped by commercial processes, will be the source of new inequalities or new politicizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global number of refugees, asylum seekers, and those displaced within their countries are at record levels in the post-World War II era. Meanwhile, efforts by relatively wealthy and powerful nation-states to exclude unwanted migrants through enhanced territorial control have reached unprecedented heights, producing great harm–most notably premature death–for many. The factors driving out-migration from homelands made unviable, coupled with multiple forms of violence experienced by migrants, demonstrate the need for an expansion of rights–conceived of as both entitlements and sites of struggle. So, herein, I assert the need for “the right to the world”–specifically a right to mobility and a just share of the Earth's resources–to help realize the promise of a dignified life for all. In making the case for such, the article offers a critical analysis of the contemporary human rights regime and of the “right to the city”.

This article engages in the debate on urban contentious politics by returning to the Tunisian revolution. In the article, I chart movements provoked by neoliberal restructurings, and show how these ultimately came together to form a mass movement demanding radical political change. I first describe the socio-spatial roots of the Tunisian revolution to understand its dynamics. Based on the chronology of the unfolding events I sketch the classes, social groups and movements that coalesced against authoritarian rule in early 2011. Although the Tunisian revolution started in rural environments, I focus more specifically on the role of urban social movements in the uprising to link questions of urbanism to what were clearly national revolts. Secondly, I outline the scope of neoliberal reforms in Tunisia by looking at the impact of these reforms to chart the resulting emergence of contentious politics in response to the increasing violence that characterized all levels of economic life during this period. I also consider the resulting uneven development and the changing relations between the state and the different social classes. This enables me to reflect on the politicization of the city with the aim of opening up new opportunities for engaging with a more comparative and cosmopolitan theory about cities around the world.

This paper examines issues of power and resistance in “divided cities”. Basing my analysis on fieldwork I carried out in Skopje, Macedonia, I look at how urban space may be constructed and used by hegemonic groups as a means of asserting their power and how, in turn, the city may be a place of resistance where power is contested and public space reappropriated. Drawing on Lefebvre's perspective on the production of space, I compare the conceived city to the lived city and examine how urban inhabitants may resist the division of the city and challenge hegemonic representations. I also draw on Debord's psychogeography to define an artistic, active and participatory approach to urban space through which the inhabitants may re-conquer their right to the œuvre and to the city. I argue that the city as a lived environment may offer narratives other than division and that there are alternatives to the divided city.

Providing an introduction to the special section ‘Close encounters: ethnographies of the coproduction of space by the urban poor’, this article sets out to argue that the image of ‘the informal’ as unruly, messy and dirty continues to inform urban planning around the world. As a reaction to this view, it contends that the informal and formal should be analysed as interconnected and that the informal sphere should be revalued. Urban development is studied as close encounters between established practices, with a locus and a history (tree-like), and newly emerging, unstable and untraceable practices (rhizomatic). Contrary to the tendency in urban planning to conflate the formal with the tree and the informal with the rhizome, we argue that from the perspective of marginal urbanites, formal planning tends to be very arbitrary and frightening (rhizomatic), whereas informal practices can be very predictable and stable (arboreal). The article analyses residents of marginalized urban areas as inventive navigators who explore the changing physical, spatial and sociopolitical environment, avoiding threats and looking for opportunities, grounded in their everyday practices and life histories. The article concludes that marginal urbanites should be acknowledged as coproducers of urban space and that the right to ‘coproduce’ the city lies at the heart of the call for the right to the city.

Violently divided cities are incubators of ethnic conflicts. Under the auspices of postwar reconstruction, these cities are supposedly disciplined into peace through the regeneration of the city centre, including privatization, commercial adaptation and gentrification strategies. Such dynamics render city centre space amnesiac, with no reference to the history of sectarian violence, and exclusivist by limiting public access. Rather than foster peacebuilding, city centre regeneration exposes the dangerous weakness of the neoliberal peace built on accommodating ethnic and socioeconomic divisions. This paper connects Lefebvre's right-to-the-city to non-sectarian social movements’ struggle to forge participatory democracy in Beirut's city centre. A key aspect of these movements’ activities is to reprogramme memory—cosmopolitan and inclusivist—into the city centre, a project supporting peacebuilding.

Many migrants who inhabit cities are illegalized, excluded from formal membership in urban communities, and denied full participation in urban life. In this article, I examine the possibilities of all inhabitants to belong to the city. Drawing on Ernst Bloch, David Harvey, Henry Lefebvre, and others, I theorize different “layers” of possibility and review the literature to explore how these layers apply to urban belonging. Furthermore, I investigate how urban protests and activist practices can materially transform the city to be more accommodating to illegalized migrants, while evoking the different layers of possibility. I conclude with a discussion of the practical and theoretical implications of contemplating the possibilities of urban belonging.

In this symposium, we explore how urban citizenship is about expressing, if not producing, difference, and how fragmentation of claims affects urban citizenship and right to the city movements with their universal, all-inclusive ideals. Investigating social movements, political participation and conflicting diversities in public space in Tel Aviv and Berlin, we see a trend towards a diversification of interests, a weakening of movements, and even a competition over rights and resources rather than a development of mutual support and solidarities among various groups on the pathway to a livable city. This tension, we argue, deserves attention. Radical urban scholarship and politics need to better understand the historical and place-specific contexts that structure the formation of citizenship claims and the courses that citizenship struggles take. Celebrations of urban citizenship as a more contextualized, community oriented, and bottom-up framework (in comparison to national citizenship) should therefore be complemented by a careful investigation of their fragmented and fragmenting practices.

Based on a comparison of Berlin and Tel Aviv, this article investigates the ways in which ensembles of participatory instruments mediate between neoliberal urban regimes and political agency shaping differentially the meaning of participation and the types of claims that can be advanced. The article gives an overview of the recent history of both cities through the lens of participatory politics. Two in-depth case studies further examine the relationship between participatory politics and claim making in each setting: the recent conflict over a social center in the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in Berlin and the Levinsky tent city of 2011 in Tel Aviv. In the concluding section, the article suggests that, rather than assuming that participatory tools either co-opt movements or can be appropriated by them, we need to rethink the relationship between participatory tools, rights and recognition, and ask how participatory structures and political agency constitute each other in interwoven dynamics.

This epilogue provides an overview and critique of the articles in this symposium, and an invitation to rethink, conceptually and empirically, our urban future. Using examples from cities in Israel/Palestine, it links the articles to the main currents in the literature on urban citizenship and ‘right to the city'. It draws attention to several voids in current debates, particularly around the rapid growth of urban informality and the changing nature of globalizing urban regimes. The epilogue introduces the notions of ‘gray spacing' to account for recent transformations in these regimes and the rise of ‘defensive urban citizenship' under conditions of neoliberal economy and persisting nationalism. It argues for the rethinking of the struggle for urban democracy in terms of ‘metrozenship' as a foundation for renewed critical research and political transformation.

In this article Clayton Pierce reviews three books representative of the recent neo-Marxist literature on education: David Blacker's The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, John Marsh's Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality, and Pauline Lipman's The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City. His analysis of these books focuses on how each author remains consistent or advances traditional Marxist interpretations of the role of education in capitalist society. In addition, he puts the arguments of each author into conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis of schooling in a racial capitalist society — what he called caste education — as a way to generate discussion around some of the inherent limitations of Marxist studies of education. Here, Pierce is particularly concerned with the ability of neo-Marxist analyses of the neoliberal restructuring of education to articulate how white supremacy is preserved even in revolutionary critiques of capitalist schooling.

Critical urban theory (CUT) provides intellectual support for a politics of the right to the city. However, CUT has rarely engaged with the rich scholarship on sexuality and the urban, much of which directly addresses questions of social justice. CUT has most often treated sexuality as an attribute, rather than a diffuse discourse of subject-producing power intimately connected with race, class and gender. This article highlights two strands in contemporary queer studies--queer subjectless critique and queer temporality--that can enrich understandings of the key concepts of alienation, deprivation and resistance in the city. I illustrate the salience of queer thinking for CUT through a close reading of Flag Wars (2003), a documentary film recognized for its engagement with gentrification and the politics of difference in the United States. While the film ostensibly explores the problem of gay gentrification in a working-class black neighborhood, a queer subjectless approach asks how discourses on sexuality produce residents at risk of displacement as deviant, immoral and queer--regardless of sexual orientation. I argue that recognizing the wide range of ways in which narratives about sexuality can deprive and alienate urban subjects could generate additional alternative bases for solidarity in the struggle for a just city.

This article shows how the transformation of Istanbul's entertainment industry and of Beyoglu, Istanbul's oldest, largest and the most diverse entertainment district, represents and reproduces spatial and economic divisions in the city. We argue that these differences also become compounded and intertwined with distinctions in consumption and taste. Taking a simultaneous look at the spatial, economic and symbolic transformations of the entertainment industry enables us to understand how and why these intense divisions emerge, and what kind of contestations, rationalizations and resistance strategies are at work in this transformation. A major contribution of this article is to document and discuss the political economy of the process of urban transformation in the city through the lens of the entertainment industry, providing an interesting case of 'neoliberalism on the ground'. Examining the neoliberalization of nightlife in a relatively understudied context, Istanbul, also reveals that its segmentation and spatial inequality are not just determined by political economy but are also constitutive of it. By adding the concept of 'image consumption' and taste distinctions into the analysis, the article also uncovers the symbolic nature of the ongoing transformations. Finally, exploring Beyoglu as a district in transition with persistent contestations contributes, in turn, to the right to the city debate.

This paper critically analyses the construction of eco-cities as technological fixes to concerns over climate change, Peak Oil, and other scenarios in the transition towards “green capitalism”. It argues for a critical engagement with new-build eco-city projects, first by highlighting the inequalities which mean that eco-cities will not benefit those who will be most impacted by climate change: the citizens of the world's least wealthy states. Second, the paper investigates the foundation of eco-city projects on notions of crisis and scarcity. Third, there is a need to critically interrogate the mechanisms through which new eco-cities are built, including the land market, reclamation, dispossession and “green grabbing”. Lastly, a sustained focus is needed on the multiplication of workers’ geographies in and around these “emerald cities”, especially the ordinary urban spaces and lives of the temporary settlements housing the millions of workers who move from one new project to another.

Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the key observations. Peter Marcuse then offers his assessment of Critical Urban Studies: New Directions, which is reciprocated by a commentary on Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City by Jonathan Davies, David Imbroscio and Warren Magnusson.

Jerusalem is a city mired in spatial conflict. Its contested spaces represent deep conflictsamong groups that vary by national identity, religion, religiosity and gender. Theomnipresent nature of these conflicts provides an opportunity to look at Henri Lefebvre’sconcept of the right to the city (RTC). The RTC has been adopted and celebrated as apolitical tool for positive change, enabling communities to take control of space. Basedon extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this article explores the complexity of theRTC principles and examines three urban battlefields in Jerusalem — Bar-Ilan Street,the Kotel and the Orient House. The RTC is a powerful idea, providing the opportunityto examine people’s everyday activities within the context of how space can be used tosupport their lives. Yet Jerusalem’s myriad divisions produce claims by different groupsto different parts of the city. In Jerusalem, the RTC is not a clear vision but akaleidoscope of rights that produces a fragmented landscape within a religious andethno-national context governed by the nation state — Israel. The growth of cultural andethnic diversity in urban areas may limit the possibility for a unified RTC to emerge inan urban sea of demands framed by difference. Space-based cultural conflict exemplifiesurban divisions and exacerbates claims to ‘my Jerusalem’, not ‘our Jerusalem’.Identity-based claims to the RTC appear to work against, not for, a universalistic RTC

In the post-Mao era from the 1980s, market reforms have seen profit-led neoliberal forces being introduced into China's urban spatial movements. In supporting such movements, labour mobility is allowed but the hukou system has been retained to prevent urban informality and slum formation and to control municipal public expenses. Without residency permits granted by the host cities, low-wage rural migrants enjoy little right to the city' and are deprived of local welfare and benefits. They often become drifting tenants', frequently driven by urban renewal, rising rentals and change of jobs. This study examines the spatial effect of causes (residency system) and consequences (frequent shifts in residence) experienced by low-skilled and low-wage migrants. A survey was conducted from February to mid-April 2011 in northwestern Beijing's Great Zhongguancun area which shows and the marginalised state of displaced migrant tenants. This includes their adaptations to change, the pattern, causes and history of their intra-city mobility.

Reintegrating the city is a priority of social justice and development in many urban centres of the ‘South’ that bear the legacy of forced displacement. In South Africa, much of the land restitution programme has thus far focused on urban areas. In certain large cluster claims involving the transfer and development of significant tracts of well-placed land, restitution has presented the prospect of altering landed property regimes in the heart of the city. The predominantly rural and economic emphasis in scholarship and policy debate on land reform in South Africa — which reflects historical trends in development studies — has led to a narrowed vision of what is at stake in urban land restitution. Complex interventions aimed at redressing urban spatial segregation can potentially alter the relationship between citizens, institutions and urban space in ways that expand the possibilities for social and political agency in sites that are strategically important for influencing the direction of change more broadly. A key, as yet unrealized, challenge is how to articulate such struggles for a ‘right to the city’ with efforts at redressing the spatialization of poverty on the urban periphery.

In many cities around the world we are presently witnessing the growth of, and interest in, a range of micro-spatial urban practices that are reshaping urban spaces. These practices include actions such as: guerrilla and community gardening; housing and retail cooperatives; flash mobbing and other shock tactics; social economies and bartering schemes; 'empty spaces' movements to occupy abandoned buildings for a range of purposes; subcultural practices like graffiti/street art, skateboarding and parkour; and more. This article asks: to what extent do such practices constitute a new form of urban politics that might give birth to a more just and democratic city? In answering this question, the article considers these so-called 'do-it-yourself urbanisms' from the perspective of the 'right to the city'. After critically assessing that concept, the article argues that in order for do-it-yourself urbanist practices to generate a wider politics of the city through the appropriation of urban space, they also need to assert new forms of authority in the city based on the equality of urban inhabitants. This claim is illustrated through an analysis of the do-it-yourself practices of Sydney-based activist collective BUGA UP and the New York and Madrid Street Advertising Takeovers.

The right to the city concept has recently attracted a great deal of attention from radical theorists and grassroots activists of urban justice, who have embraced the notion as a means to analyze and challenge neoliberal urbanism. It has, moreover, drawn considerable attention from United Nations ( UN) agencies, which have organized meetings and outlined policies to absorb the notion into their own political agendas. This wide-ranging interest has created a conceptual vortex, pulling together discordant political projects behind the banner of the right to the city. This article analyzes such projects by reframing the right to the city concept to foreground its roots in Marxian labor theory of value. It argues that Lefebvre's formulation of the right to the city - based on the contradiction between use value and exchange value in capitalist urbanism - is invaluable for analyzing and delineating contradictory urban politics that are pulled into the vortex of the right to the city. Following Lefebvre's lead in such an analysis, however, reveals certain limitations of Lefebvre's own account. The article therefore concludes with a theoretical proposition that aims to open up space for further critical debate on the right to the city.

This article explores and theorizes the ways in which urban space and political contestations are mapped onto each other. The ethnography illustrates the multifaceted transformations in a notoriously secularist neighborhood of Istanbul, Tesvikiye, as it first turns into a high-consumption locality in the post-1980s, then into a high-conflict urban space in the new millennium on the arrival of Muslim high-spenders, particularly headscarved women. Aiming to fill the gap left by the absence of spatial analysis from political science and political sociology, I argue that the urban neighborhood becomes central for political contestation when both government and opposition fail to protect and secure liberties and rights. Now that devout Muslims are integrated into highly contested urban sites and share bourgeois lifestyles, ordinary people act in defense of their 'sphere' of freedom and privacy. This new territoriality is largely symptomatic of increasing fears of losing freedom, privacy and social status. This spatial defensiveness is reinforced by people's decreasing trust in, and increasing demands from, the state for the protection and security of their rights and liberties. My overarching argument is that exclusive attention to the bipolar clash between devout Muslims and secularists under the rubric of 'neighborhood wars' obscures multipolar conflicts around the discontents stemming from authoritarianism and democratization.

Since the late 1990s, the 'urban citizenship' literature has accentuated the burgeoning potential of the city as host to more democratic interpretations of citizenship. A more recent literature highlighted the 'local trap' in such assumptions, arguing that the local cannot exist outside of neoliberalization. This article examines some of the recent institutional transformations in Istanbul's local government and seeks to understand where these might be situated in this discussion. Three institutions dealing with disability are scrutinized with regard to their power dynamics, discourses and practices. The argument is that, although superficially such developments seem to represent some of the tendencies highlighted by the urban citizenship literature (in terms of their scale, timing and appeal to a group previously excluded from modern citizenship), deeper analysis shows that these often promote charity- rather than rights-based approaches. This is because the push factors in the emergence of these institutions are not the urban struggles on the part of the disability community, but rather the ruling party's populism, the impact of supranational agencies and the demands of non-disabled residents at district level. Each of the three institutions examined is shaped primarily by one factor, leading to differing degrees of charity- and rights-based practices. Arguments concerning the prospects of more democratic interpretations of citizenship at local level need to consider experiences in diverse settings.

In Le Droit a la Ville (1968), Lefebvre projects the urban trajectory of his day into the sci-fi imaginary of Isaac Asimov's remarkable Foundation series, recognizing the germ of ' Trantor' in our midst, the planet of 40 billion inhabitants where urbanization has reached its absolute maximum; all 75 million square miles of Trantor's land surface are a single city. In La Revolution Urbaine (1970), Lefebvre had already begun hinting at a new reality, not only an urban society, but of planetary urbanization. Today, four decades on, Asimov's extraterrestrial universe seems closer to home than ever, and closer to Lefebvre's own terrestrial prognostications: planetary urbanization is creating a whole new spatial world (dis)order. But how shall we reclaim the shapeless, formless and boundless metropolis as a theoretical object and political object of the progressive struggle? If the arena of politics has no discernible form, what would be the form of these politics? What, exactly, are urban politics? This article tries to rethink theoretically the urban question and the question of urban politics in our era of planetary urbanization, working through the political role of the urban in the light of recent ' Occupy' mobilizations.

Globalisation, liberalisation and urbanisation have contributed to a rapid growth of urban informal economies in sub-Saharan Africa. Commerce has become a dominant feature of national economies, and street vending has become a prime source of employment for poor urban dwellers, yet most work illegally, and evictions and harassment are common. The paper examines the process and impacts of three pro-poor reform agendas in Tanzania, each representing a different ideology of reform, and draws on survey results from 2007 and 2011 to assess their potential to legitimate the activities of street vendors and to ameliorate their relations with the state. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Neoliberal restructuring has engendered significant economic and social changes. The advent of deregulation, diminished role of the state, and the crisis of social contract have meant that a vast number of subaltern groups are now left on their own to survive and better their lives. Consequently, a strong view in the current debates seems to suggest that neoliberal city is a lost city—where capital rules, the affluent enjoy, and the subaltern is entrapped; it is a city of glaring inequality and imbalance, where the ideal of the “right to the city” is all but vanished. While this conclusion enjoys much plausibility, I want to suggest in this paper that there is more to neoliberal urbanity than elite rule and subaltern's failure. For the new realities of these cities tend to engender a new discrete form of politics. Drawing on the recent urban transformation in the Middle East, the paper elaborates on this distinct politics by discussing how a key spatial feature of neoliberal city, what I call the “city-inside-out,” is likely to instigate “street politics” and inform the “political street.”