City Living

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quill R Kukla
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Embodied Agency

This book is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. It is the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. It draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of city living. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through a detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, the book makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book ends with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants.

Spatial Agency, Territory, and the Right to the City

2021 ◽  
pp. 257-286
Author(s):  
Quill R Kukla
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This chapter argues that inclusion in a city or neighborhood requires more than the right to physically reside in it; it requires what Henri LeFebvre, Don Mitchell, and others have called the “right to the city.” The right to the city is not just a formal right to be inside a city without being thrown out; it should be conceived, according to this chapter, as a right to inhabit the city. This requires that we have voice and authority within a city; that we be able to participate in tinkering with it and remaking it; and that we belong in it rather than just perching in it. The chapter explores the complex relationships between public spaces, inclusive spaces, and the right to the city. It examines what sorts of spaces city dwellers need in order to have a flourishing urban life and exercise their spatial agency. It explores some of the barriers that different kinds of bodies face to being included in urban spaces and speculates about what it would take to build a more just and inclusive city.

Prayer Calls and the Right to the City

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-178
Author(s):  
Alisa Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Muslim Americans ◽  
City Life ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
Call To Prayer ◽  
The Right ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
The City

This chapter discusses how Hamtramck residents engaged in public debates over the adhān, the Muslim call to prayer traditionally broadcast five times a day in Muslim-majority nations. The chapter introduces the concept of the “urban sensorium” to discuss how individuals on both sides of the debate described the adhān as rhythm that either facilitated or compromised harmonious relationships between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans, and how residents engaged in shared listening as a mode of spatial and temporal embodied practice across religious lines. Expressions of Islamophobia fomented by media coverage of the call-to-prayer campaign gave rise to an interfaith alliance in which Hamtramck Muslim and Catholic Americans publicly demonstrated new forms of identification with one another. The chapter considers how Muslim sound altered social and sensory dimensions of city life and how the debates presented opportunities to expand the sensory and cultural boundaries of municipal belonging.

scholarly journals Improvising “Nonexistent Rights”: Immigrants, Ethnic Restaurants, and Corporeal Citizenship in Suburban California

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 79-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Right To The City ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
City Life ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Right ◽  
Neoliberal Restructuring ◽  
Democratic Transformation ◽  
The City

Building on Henri Lefebvre’s radical concept of “right to the city,” contemporary literatures on urban citizenship critically shift the locus of citizenship from its juridical-political foundation in the sovereign state to the spatial politics of the urban inhabitants. However, while the political discourse of right to the city presents a vital vision for urban democracy in the shadow of neoliberal restructuring, its exclusive focus on democratic agency and practices can become disconnected from the everyday experiences of city life on the ground. In fact, in cities that lack longstanding/viable urban citizenship mechanisms that can deliver meaningful political participation, excluded subjects may bypass formal democratic channels to improvise their own inclusion, belonging, and rights in an informal space that the sovereign power does not recognize. Drawing on my fieldwork in the Asian restaurant industry in several multiethnic suburbs in Southern California, this article investigates how immigrant restaurant entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers engender a set of “nonexistent rights” through their everyday production and consumption of ethnic food. I name this improvisational political ensemble corporeal citizenship to describe the material, affective, and bodily dimensions of inclusion, belonging, and “rights” that immigrants actualize through their everyday participation in this suburban ethnic culinary commerce. For many immigrants operating in the global circuits of neoliberal capitalism, citizenship no longer just means what Hannah Arendt (1951) once suggested as “the right to have rights,” or what Engin Isin and Peter Nyers (2014) reformulate as “the right to claim rights,” but also the right to reinvent ways of claiming rights. I suggest such improvisation of nonexistent rights has surprising political implications for unorthodox ways of advancing democratic transformation.

scholarly journals Lefebvre’s thought in contemporary urban sociology

Sociologija ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-491
Author(s):  
Miloje Grbin
Keyword(s):  
Urban Sociology ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
The Right ◽  
Space Production ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

This paper presents the impact of Henri Lefebvre?s thought in contemporary urban sociology. In the first chapter, the reader can find brief descriptions of two most relevant Lefebvre?s concepts linked to his comprehension of space: production of space, the right to the city and a couple of firmly related concepts. The second chapter presents several examples of their recent interpretations by the authors from different theoretical backgrounds. Simultaneously, it evaluates the relevance of Lefebvre?s theoretical assumptions in contemporary social context, as well as their theoretical and methodological relevance for further research and development of urban sociology. Conclusion emphasizes that Lefebvre?s ideas have a deep and long term influence in urban sociology.

scholarly journals Civic media and technologies of belonging: Where digital citizenship and ‘the right to the city’ converge

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giota Alevizou
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Digital Citizenship ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This article contributes to an emerging field of ‘urban communication’ research and its intersections with civic culture and digital citizenship. It does so by presenting a case study of how an activist group in North London’s Tottenham region co-designed bespoke digital media platforms, akin to civic media, to advocate an approach to urban planning that also recognizes migrants’ rights. Conducted as a part of a broader participatory action research project, the study outlined here offers an analysis of the online and offline communicative routes taken, the urban rights enacted and the visions expressed during an eight-week consultation period. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative metrics from the official and alternative digital platforms inviting consultation around the community-led planning application, the article offers insights about the co-construction of space, and the effect that the particular site had in unearthing wider enactments of ‘the right to the city’ and affective belonging, alongside struggles against threats of displacement. By offering these insights, the study contributes to a better understanding of the digital mediation of belonging through space/place and what this means for urban citizenship. Looking beyond processes of urban planning, this understanding seeks to contribute to wider debates of urban citizenship, often expressed at the intersection of urban rights, digital citizenship and virtual reality.

scholarly journals High-capacity transport, floor area ratio and its relationship with urbanization of metropolitan areas

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Luis De Carvalho da Costa ◽  
Fabiene Cristina De Carvalho da Costa
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
High Capacity ◽  
Area Ratio ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Floor Area ◽  
Floor Area Ratio ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Most of the world’s population lives in urban areas (54%). Near 42% of the global urban population live in cities with more than 1 million inhabitants, where problems associated with urban sprawl such as informal settlement, social-economic changes, environmental degradation and deficient high-capacity transport (HCT) systems are common. Meanwhile, urbanization and its associated transportation infrastructure define the relationship between city and countryside, between the city’s inner core and the periphery, between the citizen and his right to move. This article discusses and presents an overview about the relationship between the planning and extension of HCT systems and urban planning, (in the figure of the floor-area ratio - FAR- prescribed in regulations). The methodological approach consists of drawing a conceptual framework and studying 33 different cities of metropolitan areas on five continents. It’s noticed that areas in cities with a high construction potential but with an insufficient HCT negatively influence in urban mobility and hence the right to the city. We consider right to the city the various social and fundamental rights that, among others, includes the right to public transportation. Therefore there’s a real need of an integrated approach of community participation, FAR distribution, urban planning and transportation planning and so that urbanization, inevitable these days, takes place in a fair and harmonious way.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/CIT2016.2016.3762 

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