Reclaiming the city one plot at a time? DIY garden projects, radical democracy, and the politics of spatial appropriation

2020 ◽  
pp. 239965442097402
Author(s):  
Claire E Bach ◽  
Nathan McClintock
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Inner Core ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Urban Land Use ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Spatial Appropriation ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Democratic Spaces

Unsanctioned guerrilla gardens, long a feature of North American cities, are frequently planted as radical challenge to conventional urban land use. Over the past decade, a number of community-led garden projects – projets citoyens – have appeared on sidewalks and in vacant lots, and alleys of Montreal, Quebec’s inner-core neighborhoods under the banner of “appropriating” or “reclaiming” urban space. In this article, we examine the rise of these DIY (do-it-yourself) garden projects and the extent to which they have been institutionalized via municipal agencies and NGOs. We find the distinction between institutionalized and guerrilla projects to be quite blurry, and ask whether such spaces – and the social relations forged within and between them – are able to effectively challenge hegemonic abstract space (as conceived by Lefebvre) and contribute to a radical democratic urban politics (as conceived by Rancière). We conclude that the power of these projects to transform capitalist urban space and challenge the dominant socio-spatial order is limited. We argue, however, that their transformative potential lies instead in their functioning as spaces of political subject formation, where participants collaboratively articulate counter-hegemonic imaginaries and master the skills of collective autogestion – albeit only for a small and relatively homogenous group of Montrealers. Critical attention to absent and silenced voices and self-reflexive awareness of historical and contemporary processes of exclusion and displacement are crucial in order for these projects to become truly radical democratic spaces.

Space Making as Artistic Practice: The Relationship between Grassroots Art Organizations and the Political Economy of Urban Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Zilberstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Art Organizations ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The Relationship

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do–It–Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations. Through their engagements with cultural representations, space and time, grassroots artists represent and amplify the interests of marginal actors. By allying with residents, community organizations and other art spaces, grassroots artists form a social movement to redefine the goals and usages of urban space. My findings indicate that heterogeneous art networks exist and grassroots art networks can influence urban space in opposition to top–down development.

scholarly journals Novas formas associativas na produção recente de moradia social no Brasil

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camila Moreno de Camargo
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Housing Policy ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Housing Production ◽  
Brazilian Government ◽  
And Performance

O presente artigo aborda aspectos relacionados à produção habitacional da modalidade “Entidades” do programa Minha Casa, Minha Vida, a partir de observações de campo. Pretende-se elaborar uma chave de leitura que destaque, no contexto de atendimento do programa federal mencionado, as entidades organizadoras e os diferentes graus de vinculação e relação que estabelecem com os movimentos de luta por moradias nacionais, a sociedade e o próprio Estado. Tais questões vêm se construindo e nos mostram certa urgência de análise e pesquisas mais aprofundadas, no sentido de avançar na discussão acerca da produção habitacional por meio da autogestão no Brasil, visto que, ainda que inexpressivo do ponto de vista quantitativo e em comparação com a produção mais massiva empreendida pelo mercado, ela nos revela uma série de transformações que vem redefinindo as relações sociais e a produção do espaço urbano contemporâneo. Palavras-chave: habitação de interesse social; Minha Casa, Minha Vida; entidades; movimentos sociais; política habitacional. Abstract: In response to the global economic crisis of 2009, the brazilian government launched the Minha Casa, Minha Vida – MCMV program, with the purpose of producing one million houses in the country. In its second phase, currently the program aims to produce another two million housing in the country. This production occurs by means partnership among actors at the various political, commercial, social and voluntary levels. In this context, this article aims to develop a new key for reading the entities responsible for organising the construction of the project contracted and the different degrees of attachment and relationship they establish with the national fight for housing movements, the society and the state itself, in the composition of demand and performance location. Such questions show some urgency in the analysis and further research for advancing in discussion about housing production through self-management in Brazil, it reveals a series of transformations that has been redefining social relations and production of contemporary urban space. Keywords: social interest housing; “Minha Casa, Minha Vida”; entities; social movements; housing policy.

scholarly journals Keep That Lane Open!: Race, Space, and Mardi Gras in Kansas City

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Williams
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Bodily Movement

This essay explores the open-ended and complex performance of an underground Mardi Gras parade in Kansas City, MO, in 2012. The sounds, movement, and route of the parade are shaped by a network of globally circulating images of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the history of race and space in Kansas City, and the intercultural exchange involved in white performances of black cultural practices as they move from the “circum-Caribbean” city of New Orleans to the U.S. heartland of Kansas City. The parade is a partially improvised performance of a historical narrative linking Kansas City’s mostly white bohemian arts culture in the present to the city’s past as a major jazz city and center for African American culture. This narrative is told by bodily movement through urban space and through improvised sound and dance, and demonstrates the complex social relations that are highlighted when a cultural form is subject to cross-cultural communication, borrowing, and appropriation.

3. Intervening with Agriculture: A Case Study of Guerrilla Gardening in Kingston, Ontario

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Crane
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Agriculture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Community Gardening ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

The purpose of this study was to analyze guerrilla gardening’s relationship to urban space and contemporary notions of sustainability. To achieve this two case studies of urban agriculture, one of guerrilla gardening and one of community gardening were developed. Through this comparison, guerrilla gardening was framed as a method of spatial intervention, drawing in notions of spatial justice and the right to the city as initially theorized by Henri Lefebvre. The guerrilla gardening case study focuses on Dig Kingston, a project started by the researcher in June of 2010, and the community gardening case study will use the Oak Street Garden, the longest standing community garden in Kingston. The community gardening case study used content analysis and semi-structured long format interviews with relevant actors. The guerrilla gardening case study consisted primarily of action based research as well as content analysis and semi-structured long format interviews. By contributing to the small, but growing, number of accounts and research on guerrilla gardening this study can be used as a starting point to look into other forms of spatial intervention and how they relate to urban space and social relations. Furthermore, through the discussion of guerrilla gardening in an academic manner more legitimacy and weight will be given to it as a method of urban agriculture and interventionist tactic. On a wider scale, perhaps it could even contribute to answering the question of how we (as a society) can transform our cities and reengage in urban space.

Ato Quayson's Oxford Street, Accra: Tracing Autobiographical Narrative in Analytical Method

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 496-504
Author(s):  
Anjali Prabhu
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
African City ◽  
Creative City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Implicit Argument ◽  
Oxford Street ◽  
The City ◽  
Autobiographical Narrative

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.

Exploring Post-National Natures: Nature in the Shadow of the State

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Whitehead ◽  
Rhys Jones ◽  
Martin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
National Level ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Pollution Monitoring ◽  
Sustainable Cities ◽  
Monitoring Networks ◽  
Institutional Perspective ◽  
Territorial Strategies ◽  
State Nature

From the beginning of this book we have consistently emphasized that our multi-faceted understanding of states cannot be simplistically equated with a nationally scaled and territorially bound institution. Despite this stated aim, in many of the preceding chapters we have described a series of ways in which state natures have been produced at a national level. Whether it has been through water supply networks, national mapping and land-use surveys, nationalized pollution monitoring networks, or nationwide judicial frameworks, we have described how nature has been framed at a distinctly national scale. While exploring the national framing of nature we have seen how the national centralization of ecological knowledge and the territorial framing of the natural world have transformed the social experience, understanding, and ability to transform nature. A closer inspection of our descriptions of the nationalization of nature within the modern state, however, revels that the process of nationalization is never quite as national as it may seem. Attempts to produce a national picture or vision of nature are always based upon more localized practices and conventions than may be immediately apparent. It is our contention that attempts to manage and regulate nature through the multifarious processes of nationalization are best conceived of as the unfulfilled desire of numerous state regimes. This statement has two implications. First, it indicates that nationally based strategies for the control and regulation of nature are only one among a series of scales in and through which states can potentially manage nature. Secondly, it suggests that states could develop other (non-national) territorial strategies in their evolving historical relationships with the natural world. This final chapter is devoted to exploring these alterative sites and moments of contemporary state–nature relations. We begin by considering the rise of sustainable cities as alterative (‘post-national’) territorial strategies in and through which states are attempting to manage contemporary social relations with nature. As sub-national, decentralized territorial units, sustainable cities provide an interesting spatial and institutional perspective on contemporary manifestations of state nature. Drawing on the example of Australia’s Sustainable Cities Inquiry, we consider how states attempt to regulate nature through the control and administration of urban space.

Producing Urban Space

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Dolly Kikon ◽  
Duncan McDuie-Ra
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Municipal Elections ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
Village Level ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

This chapter analyses the efforts to make Dimapur more city-like. Beginning with attempts to hold municipal elections with reserved seats for women in 2017, we navigate the deeply contentious politics around the classification and re-classification of space in the city. As the largest city in a tribal state, Dimapur is an experiment in the production of legible urban space in areas with customary law and constitutional protection. At present the experiment is provoking deep anxieties. Producing legible urban space from the collection of settlements, villages, barracks, commercial zones, ceasefire camps, encroached tracts, and wastelands under various socio-legal regimes is rarely coherent and often chaotic. We argue that the city is a space to challenge and transgress customary law in ways unthinkable at the village level. However, transgression was a catalyst for crisis, a scenario likely to remain constant in urban politics for the conceivable future.

scholarly journals Beyond agency and passivity: Situating a gendered articulation of urban violence in Brazil and El Salvador

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mo Hume ◽  
Polly Wilding
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Violence ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
San Salvador

This paper argues for a situated politics of women’s agency in enduring intimate partner violence (IPV) in contexts of extreme urban violence. We contend that interrogating agency as dynamic and lived facilitates an acknowledgement of the multi-scalar entanglements of violence across urban spaces. Recognising the complexities in human agency holds the potential for a radical gendered urban politics to emerge whereby people are neither simplistically victims nor pawns of violent processes, but located within dynamic ‘webs of social relations’ (Cumbers A, Helms G and Swanson K (2010) Class, agency and resistance in the old industrial city. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 42(1): 54). Drawing on feminist theory, our conceptualisation of agency serves as a lens through which we can examine the dynamic and gendered nature of urban violence as rooted in multiple social relations (McNay L (2010) Feminism and post-identity politics: The problem of agency. Constellations 17(4): 512–525). The paper draws on research in the urban peripheries of Rio de Janiero and San Salvador.

scholarly journals Mapping the Essential Urban Land Use in Changchun by Applying Random Forest and Multi-Source Geospatial Data

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 2488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shouzhi Chang ◽  
Zongming Wang ◽  
Dehua Mao ◽  
Kehan Guan ◽  
Mingming Jia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Semantic Segmentation ◽  
Urban Land ◽  
Urban Land Use ◽  
Geospatial Data ◽  
Classification Model ◽  
Rapid Acquisition ◽  
Street View

Understanding urban spatial pattern of land use is of great significance to urban land management and resource allocation. Urban space has strong heterogeneity, and thus there were many researches focusing on the identification of urban land use. The emergence of multiple new types of geospatial data provide an opportunity to investigate the methods of mapping essential urban land use. The popularization of street view images represented by Baidu Maps is benificial to the rapid acquisition of high-precision street view data, which has attracted the attention of scholars in the field of urban research. In this study, OpenStreetMap (OSM) was used to delineate parcels which were recognized as basic mapping units. A semantic segmentation of street view images was combined to enrich the multi-dimensional description of urban parcels, together with point of interest (POI), Sentinel-2A, and Luojia-1 nighttime light data. Furthermore, random forest (RF) was applied to determine the urban land use categories. The results show that street view elements are related to urban land use in the perspective of spatial distribution. It is reasonable and feasible to describe urban parcels according to the characteristics of street view elements. Due to the participation of street view, the overall accuracy reaches 79.13%. The contribution of street view features to the optimal classification model reached 20.6%, which is more stable than POI features.

scholarly journals Do–It–Yourself Urban Design: The Social Practice of Informal “Improvement” Through Unauthorized Alteration

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon C. C. Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Analytical Category

There are numerous ways in which people make illegal or unauthorized alterations to urban space. This study identifies and analyzes one that has been largely ignored in social science: explicitly functional and civic–minded informal contributions that I call “do–it–yourself urban design.” The research, which began as an investigation into more “traditional” nonpermissable alterations, uncovered these cases—from homemade bike lanes and street signs to guerrilla gardens and development proposals—that are gaining visibility in many cities, yet are poorly accounted for by existing perspectives in the literature. This article examines the existing theories and evidence from interviews and other fieldwork in 14 cities in order to develop the new analytical category of DIY urban design. I present findings on the creators of these interventions, on their motivations to “improve” the built environment where they perceive government and other development actors to be failing, and on the concentration of their efforts in gentrifying areas. This introduces the possibility of conflict and complicates their impact. I argue that DIY urban design has wide–ranging implications for both local communities and broader urban policy.

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