The Changing Right to the City: Urban Renewal and Housing Rights in Globalizing Shanghai and Mumbai

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liza Weinstein ◽  
Xuefei Ren
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
Housing Tenure ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Housing Rights ◽  
The City

This article examines the changing housing rights regimes amidst the urban renewal currently underway in Shanghai and Mumbai. We examine the policies and regulations that govern residential security and housing tenure, the alteration of policy implementations by electoral and extra–electoral contestations, and the opportunities and strategies for housing activism in each context. We find that political contestations have enabled the construction of a more protective, although precarious, regime in Mumbai than in Shanghai. Despite striking differences, in both contexts housing rights regimes have produced fragmented urban citizenship rights by distributing protections unevenly and inconsistently to urban residents. Finally, although the forms of housing activism differ, residents and civil society groups in both Shanghai and Mumbai employ a variety of strategies in their resistance against demolitions and urban renewal. in the process, they become active urban citizens by articulating their rights to housing and by making new claims to the city.

Attempts at City Self-Empowerment

City, State ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 151-172
Author(s):  
Ran Hirschl
Keyword(s):  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Efficient Construction ◽  
The Right ◽  
Community Representation ◽  
Refugees And Asylum Seekers ◽  
The City

This chapter examines efforts by constitutionally voiceless cities and mayors to expand cities’ quasi-constitutional powers through urban citizenship schemes or, more frequently, through international networking and collaboration based on notions such as “the right to the city,” “sustainable cities,” “solidarity cities,” and “human rights cities.” For the most part, such initiatives have a socially progressive undercurrent to them. They address policy areas such as air quality and energy efficient construction, “smart cities,” affordable housing, enhanced community representation, or accommodating policies toward refugees and asylum seekers. Such experimentation with city self-emancipation is increasing in popularity and possesses significant potential in policy areas not directly addressed or hermetically foreclosed by statist constitutional law.

Citizenship at the Margins: Exploring Participation as ‘Right to the City’ in Vizhinjam, Kerala

Urbanisation ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-93
Author(s):  
Aarathi Ganga
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Fishing Community ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
The Right ◽  
National Governments ◽  
The City

This article explores the nature of urban citizenship among fishers in Kerala, one of the state’s most marginalised communities, by analysing their participation in a centrally sponsored slum rehabilitation programme—Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY)—in Vizhinjam, Thiruvananthapuram. The ‘right to participate’ is considered an integral part of the ‘right to the city’, and the inability of the fishing community to participate in the decision-making processes of urban development programmes that directly affect their lives reveals the exclusionary nature of their citizenship. In a state that is renowned for its achievements in human development and governance, the fishing community continues to be marginalised and lack collective power to influence policies. Participatory meetings in such contexts become tokenistic, and their transformative capacity is undermined. The inefficiency of participatory meetings organised under RAY also stems from the powerlessness of local governments to alter urban programmes designed by national governments.

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.

Urban Citizenship and Right to the City: The Fragmentation of Claims

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talja Blokland ◽  
Christine Hentschel ◽  
Andrej Holm ◽  
Henrik Lebuhn ◽  
Talia Margalit
Keyword(s):  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
The City

“The Right-To-The-City Question” and Indigenous Urban Populations in Capital Cities in Cameroon

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ambe J Njoh
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This paper explores the implications of state land tenure modernization and urbanization-promotion initiatives for human rights in Cameroon. The aim is to promote understanding of the implications of these initiatives for the right-to-the-city of indigenous urban residents. It is argued that the implications are more severe in politico-administrative headquarters than elsewhere in the country. Three different cities have served, at some point, as national politico-administrative headquarters in Cameroon, the study’s empirical referent. The designation of any city as a politico-administrative headquarters invariably creates a land scarcity problem in that city. The problem is aggravated for the city’s indigenous population by colonial and post-colonial planning policies. For this reason, the policies are said to be in violation of basic human rights as stipulated by the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights as well as the African Charter.

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