New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory for Critical Urban Theory

Most armed conflict today takes place within urban terrain or within an urbanised context. An extreme variant of such armed conflict is violence perpetrated by external state and non-state forces within the city, known as urbicide. Urbicidal violence deliberately strives to kill, discipline or deny the city to its inhabitants by targeting and then reordering the sociomaterial urban assemblage. Civil resistance within urbicidal violence seeks to subvert the emerging alternative sovereign order sought by such forces. It does so by using the inherent logic of the city in order to maintain/restore the community's social cohesion, mitigate the violence, affirm humanity, and claim the right to the city. This paper investigates the city-logic of civil resistance through examples drawn from the recent urbicidal experiences of Middle East cities such as Gaza, Aleppo, Mosul, and Sana'a. Theoretical insights from the conflict resolution literature, critical urban theory, and assemblage thinking inform the argument.

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Theorizing Regulation-in-City for Homeless People’s Subaltern Strategy and Informality: Societalization, Metabolism, and Classes With(out) Housing

Critical Sociology ◽

10.1177/08969205211020502 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 089692052110205

Author(s):

Mahito Hayashi

Keyword(s):

Urban Studies ◽

Urban Form ◽

Homeless People ◽

Public Spaces ◽

Theoretical Explanation ◽

Urban Metabolism ◽

Class Relations ◽

Housing Consumption ◽

Urban Theory ◽

Critical Urban Theory

This paper aims to expand critical urban theory and spatialized political economy through developing a new, broad-based theoretical explanation of homelessness and the informal housing of the deprived in public spaces. After reviewing an important debate in geography, it systematicallyreasserts the relevance of class-related concepts in urban studies and, mobilizing post-determinist notions, it shows how a class-driven theory can inform the emergence of appropriating/differentiating/reconciliating agency from the material bedrock of urban metabolism and its society-integrating effect (societalization). The author weaves an urban diagnostic web of concepts by situating city-dwellers—classes with(out) housing—at the material level of metabolism and then in the sociopolitical dynamic of regulation, finding in the two realms urban class relations (enlisted within societalization) and agency formation (for reregulation, subaltern strategies, and potential rapprochement). The housing classes are retheorized as a composite category of hegemonic dwellers who enjoy housing consumption and whose metabolism thus appears as the normative consumption of public/private spaces. Homeless people are understood as a subaltern class who lacks housing consumption and whose metabolism can produce “housing” out of public spaces, in opposition to a hegemonic urban form practiced by the housing classes. These urban class relations breed homeless–housed divides and homeless regulation, and yet allow for agency’s creative appropriation/differentiation/reconciliation. This paper avoids crude dichotomy, but it argues that critical urban theory can productively use this way of theorization for examining post-determinist urban lifeworlds in relation to the relative fixity of urban form, metabolic circuits, and class relations.

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Urban space and the politics of socially engaged art

Progress in Human Geography ◽

10.1177/0309132518807756 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 43 (6) ◽

pp. 985-1000 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Cecilie Sachs Olsen

Keyword(s):

Urban Space ◽

Urban Setting ◽

The Political ◽

Urban Theory ◽

Socially Engaged Art ◽

Material Environment ◽

Ways Of Thinking ◽

Critical Urban Theory ◽

Definition Of

This paper interrogates the political potential of socially engaged art within an urban setting. Grounded in Lefebvrian and neo-Marxist critical urban theory, this political potential is examined according to three analytics that mark the definition of ‘politics’ in this context: the (re)configuration of urban space, the (re)framing of a particular sphere of experience and the (re)thinking of what is taken-for-granted. By bringing together literatures from a range of academic domains, these analytics are used to examine 1) how socially engaged art may expand our understanding of the link between the material environment and the production of urban imaginaries and meanings, and 2) how socially engaged art can open up productive ways of thinking about and engaging with urban space.

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Something Can Be Done! â A Report on the Conference âRight to the City. Prospects for Critical Urban Theory and Practiceâ, Berlin November 2008

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research ◽

10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00931.x ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 33 (4) ◽

pp. 1067-1072 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

SABINE HORLITZ ◽

ANNE VOGELPOHL

Keyword(s):

Right To The City ◽

Urban Theory ◽

Critical Urban Theory ◽

The City

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New Directions for a Critical Theory of Work: Reading Honneth Through Deranty

Critical Horizons ◽

10.1080/14409917.2018.1453287 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 19 (2) ◽

pp. 111-124

Author(s):

Timothy Boston

Keyword(s):

Critical Theory ◽

New Directions

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Spatial Justice

10.4018/978-1-7998-8463-7.ch003 ◽

2022 ◽

pp. 41-64

Author(s):

Salvador Lindquist

Keyword(s):

Urban Theory ◽

Marginalized Communities ◽

Spatial Justice ◽

The World ◽

Participatory Systems ◽

Critical Urban Theory ◽

University Of Nebraska Lincoln ◽

Social Environmental ◽

The University ◽

Alternative Mapping

Marginalized communities around the world are disproportionately impacted by the distribution of unjust infrastructure and environmental conditions. However, through distributive, procedural, and restorative frameworks, it is possible to teach spatial designers to challenge, inform, and reshape the world toward a more just and equitable future. This chapter delves into the various themes developed as part of the “Spatial Justice” professional elective at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which offers an interdisciplinary perspective on urban studies, urban design, and the roles that social, environmental, and ecological justice play in designing a more just and equitable urbanity. In this course, students explore critical urban theory, justice, counter cartographies, design activism, participatory systems, and spatial agency using alternative mapping methodologies to render legible latent sociospatial asymmetries.

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