Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality


Book Description

In Mexico City, as in many other large cities worldwide, contemporary modes of urban governance have overwhelmingly benefited affluent populations and widened social inequalities. Disinvestment from social housing and rent-seeking developments by real estate companies and land speculators have resulted in the displacement of low-income populations to the urban periphery. Public social spaces have been eliminated to make way for luxury apartments and business interests. Low-income neighbourhoods are often stigmatized by dominant social forces to justify their demolition. The urban poor have however negotiated and resisted these developments in a range of ways. This text explores these urban dynamics in Mexico City and beyond, looking at the material and symbolic mechanisms through which urban marginality is produced and contested. It seeks to understand how things might be otherwise, how the city might be geared towards more inclusive forms of belonging and citizenship.




Development and Decolonization in Latin America


Book Description

Written in an accessible language, this book is a fully updated and revised edition of Latin American Development, a text that provides a comprehensive introduction to Latin American development in the twenty-first century and is anchored in decolonial theory and other critical approaches. This new edition has been revised and updated in a way that takes into account recent changes in political leadership, the retreat of the Pink Tide, the Colombian peace accords, new forms of political and territorial mobilization, the intensification of extractivism, murders of environmental defenders, major disasters, and the new contours of feminist and anti-patriarchal struggles. It features new chapters on decolonial theory, Latin America in the world, disastrous development, Afrodescendant struggles, and the Latin American city. The book emphasizes political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental dimensions of development and considers key challenges facing the region and the diverse ways in which its people are responding, as well as providing analysis of the ways in which such challenges and responses can be theorized. It explores the region’s historical trajectories, the implementation and rejection of the neoliberal model, and the role played by diverse social movements. It is an indispensable resource for students and university lecturers and professors in development studies, Latin American studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and cultural studies. In addition, it provides an invaluable introduction to the region for journalists and development practitioners.




The Global Life of Mines


Book Description

Resource extraction exists in diverse settings across the world and is carried out through different practices. The Global Life of Mines provides a comprehensive framework examining the spatial and temporal relationships between mining and postmining as interrelated and coexisting features within the global minescape. The book brings together scholars from various fields, such as anthropology, geography, sociology and political science, examining ethnographic case studies throughout the Americas (Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, USA), Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Europe (Italy, Arctic Norway and Spain).




Shaking Up the City


Book Description

"Shaking Up the City critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of abstract theory and concrete empirical evidence, Tom Slater strives to 'shake up' mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion, turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. In doing so, he explores the themes of 'data-driven innovation', urban 'resilience', gentrification, displacement and rent control, 'neighborhood effects', territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation. Slater analyzes how the mechanisms behind urban inequalities, material deprivation, marginality, and social suffering in cities across the world are perpetuated and made invisible. With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, planning, and public policy, and engaging closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice, Shaking Up The City offers numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of vested interest urbanism"--




The Politics of Memory


Book Description

Who decides which stories about a city are remembered? How do interpretations of the past shape a city’s present and future? In this book, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos discusses notions of power and national identity by examining how nation-states negotiate the preservation of urban spaces and how a city interprets, resists, and consents to the functions and meanings that it has inherited and that it reinvents for itself. Looking at the Brazilian city of Ouro Preto, de Souza Santos applies fine-grained ethnography and historical analysis to discuss the limits of Brazil’s imagery of social harmony and participatory democracy amid continuous inequality.




A Sense of Inequality


Book Description

We have a detailed picture of how inequality impacts people’s lives, but a much weaker sense of how people perceive, interpret and understand issues of inequality. What shapes people’s everyday understandings of inequality? How are understandings of inequality located in everyday concerns, moral values and principles of justice? This book considers what provokes everyday ‘views’ or framings of inequality. It examines how different approaches can help us understand this process, drawing on a range of literatures, including social attitudes and perceptions research, class identities and neoliberalism, theories of the psychosocial, affect and the abject, social constructionism, social movements research, and pragmatism. The book examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, explores how they come to be understood as ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘racial’ or other kinds of inequality, and considers how such inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change.




Neoliberal Transformations of the Italian State


Book Description

The book is an exploration, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, into the nature and the transformation of the state in the neoliberal era. Nowadays, a widespread crisis of legitimation affects the institutions and authority of the state; similarly, and especially after the Great Crisis of 2008 to present, the European project is increasingly questioned by populist and neo-nationalist forces, which politically advance in the state and society, and promote further coercive-oriented reconfiguration of state powers and apparatus. The ‘nationalist international’, the ‘new populists’ and/or the ‘rise of new international fascism’ are questions on the verge of international scholarship and political debate. However, many of these studies often miss the specificity and critical importance of the study of the state and of state (institutional and ideological) powers; even more importantly, the phenomenon of populism/neo-authoritarianism is interpreted by the mainstream as a clear break with traditional centrist parties, with the result of neglecting the past authoritarian tendencies that accompany the entire history of neoliberalism. This book aspires to be a guide for political activist and policy-makers: specifically, by showing how the state is of critical importance to the making of neoliberalism in institutional and cultural terms, it also aims to rethink the state as the arena of politics and, accordingly, as the key site to promote alternatives to neoliberalism.




Rent and its Discontents


Book Description

The 1915 Rent Strikes in Glasgow, along with similar campaigns across the UK, catalysed rent restrictions and eventually public housing as a right, with a legacy of progressive improvement in UK housing through the central decades of the 20th century. With the decimation of social housing and the resurgence of a profoundly exploitative private housing market, the contemporary political economy of housing now shares many distressing features with the situation one hundred years ago. Starting with a re-appraisal of the Rent Strikes, this book asks what housing campaigners can learn today from a proven organisational victory for the working class. A series of investigative accounts from scholar-activists and housing campaign groups across the UK charts the diverse aims, tactics and strategies of current urban resistance, seeking to make a vital contribution to the contemporary housing question in a time of crisis.




Selective Security in the War on Drugs


Book Description

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times precisely in regions of economic growth. Legal and illegal economy are difficult to distinguish. A failure of state institutions to provide security for its citizens does not sufficiently explain this. Selective Security in the War on Drugs analyzes authoritarian neoliberalism in the war on drugs in Colombia and Mexico. It interprets the “security projects” of the 2000s—when the security provided by the state became ever more selective—as embedded in processes of land appropriation, transformed property relations, and global capital accumulation. By zooming in on security practices in Colombia and Mexico in that decade and juxtaposing the two contexts, this book offers a detailed analysis of the role of the state in violence. To what extent and for whom do states produce order and disorder? Which social forces support and drive such state practices? Expanding the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism and the coloniality of state power—thus linking political economy to postcolonial approaches—the book builds a theoretical lens to study state security practices. Different social groups, enjoying differentiated access to the state, influenced the state discourse on crime to very different extents. Security practices—which oscillated between dispersed organization by a multiplicity of actors and institutionalization with the military—materialized as horrific insecurity for social groups thought of as disposable. In tendency, putting security centerstage disabled dissent. The “security projects” exacerbated contradictions driven by a particular economic model and simultaneously criminalized precisely those that this model had already radically disadvantaged.




Companion to Urban and Regional Studies


Book Description

COMPANION TO URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES Indispensable overview and timely coverage of the major issues, debates, and research topics in urban and regional studies Companion to Urban and Regional Studies offers an up-to-date view of the rapidly growing field, exploring a diversity of theoretical perspectives, current and emerging research, and critical global policy concerns. Uniquely broad in geographical and thematic scope, this comprehensive volume brings together essays by more than fifty international scholars and researchers to provide expert assessments spanning the many dimensions of urban studies. Organized into five parts, the Companion begins with a review of the current state of cities across East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America, Europe, and Latin America, and all other world regions. Subsequent sections discuss contemporary theoretical perspectives, describe common methodological approaches used by urban scholars, and examine the political, social, and economic problems facing twenty-first century cities. Covering historical issues, current challenges, and comparative perspectives in urban studies, this timely resource: Addresses intensely debated policy issues such as governance, housing, immigration and migration, segregation, social mix, and gentrification Describes the use of demographic methods, advanced spatial analysis, social networks, policy mobilities, and ethnographies in urban studies research Discusses critical urban theory, feminist urban research, urbanization and environmental change, and the legacy of the Chicago School Covers contemporary research topics such as urban and regional inequalities, social heterogeneity and diversity, financialization Includes representative case studies of each region, including Australasia, Latin America, East Asia and South Asia Companion to Urban and Regional Studies is essential reading for scholars, researchers, practitioners, urban activists, and students, and it represents a must-have complement to The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies.