‘Seeing like a city’, or ‘seeing like a state’ in a city? Paris, capital of femonationalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110025
Author(s):  
Claire Hancock
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Common Factor ◽  
Local Democracy ◽  
Municipal Policy ◽  
City Life ◽  
Women In Decision Making ◽  
The City

This paper questions the ‘seeing like a city’ vs. ‘seeing like a state’ opposition through a detailed discussion of urban politics in the city of Paris, France, a prime example of the ways in which the national remains a driving dimension of city life. This claim is examined by a consideration of the shortcomings of Paris’s recent and timid commitment local democracy, lacking recognition of the diversity of its citizens, and the ways in which the inclusion of more women in decision-making arenas has failed to advance the ‘feminization of politics’. A common factor in these defining features of the Hidalgo administration seems to be the prevalence of ‘femonationalism’ and its influence over municipal policy-making.

Deliberazione e conflitto: evidenze da un'analisi comparata

2012 ◽  
pp. 79-105
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Pomatto ◽  
Stefania Ravazzi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Industrial Waste ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Living Will ◽  
Constructive Approach ◽  
Deliberative Process ◽  
Small Plant ◽  
Deliberative Processes ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

The article aims at analyzing the impact of deliberation on the dynamics of the conflicts in the policy making processes. We shall argue whether and how deliberation succeeds in stopping the typical escalation of the conflicts, lowering protests, generating more open-minded institutional decisions, reducing stereotypes and developing a new constructive approach in decision making. The analysis is based on the comparison of three recent cases of deliberative processes dealing with conflictual issues: a deliberative process on the hypothesis to write a bill regulating the use and power of the living will; a public debate on a new highway stretch in the city of Genova; a citizens' jury on the building of a small plant to dispose of industrial waste in the small tuscan town of Castelfranco.

scholarly journals Participatory Infrastructures: The Politics of Mobility Platforms

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-346
Author(s):  
Peter T. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
User Interfaces ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Digital Architecture ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Deliberation ◽  
The City

Much of everyday life in cities is now mediated by digital platforms, a mode of organization in which control is both distributed widely among participants and sharply delimited by the platform’s constraints. This article uses examples of smartphone-based platforms for urban mobility to argue that platforms create new political arrangements of the city, intermediating the social processes of management and movement that characterize urban life. Its empirical basis is a study of user interfaces, data specifications, and algorithms used in the operation and regulation of ride-hailing services and bike-share systems. I focus on three aspects of urban politics affected by platforms: its location, its participants, and the types of conflict it addresses. First, the programming forums in which decisions are encoded in and distributed through platforms’ core digital architecture are new sites of policy deliberation outside the more familiar arenas of city politics. Second, travelers have new opportunities to use platforms for travel on their own terms, but this expanded participation is circumscribed by interfaces that presuppose individual, transactional engagement rather than a participation attentive to a broader social and environmental context. Finally, digital systems show themselves to be well suited to enforcing quantifiable distributional goals, but struggle to resolve the more nuanced relational matters that constitute the politics of everyday city life. These illustrations suggest that digital tools for managing transportation are not only political products, but also reset the stage on which urban encounters play out.

Democratic Preferences of the Indirectly-Elected Mayor, Open or Locked-In

2016 ◽  
pp. 110-139
Author(s):  
Werner Pleschberger
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Local Democracy ◽  
The Core ◽  
Majority Principle ◽  
Local Decision ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Local Decision Making ◽  
The City ◽  
Dem Model

The Directly Elected Mayor (DEM) model is a prominent manifestation of global efforts to innovate and strengthen local democracy. According to the established reformist claim, a DEM generates an array of advantages for local democracy (e.g., personalization, visibility of power, an increase in accountability, more inclusion, even direct involvement of citizens in local decision making). The DEM model seems to overcome the democratic deficits of the Indirectly Elected Mayor (IEM) model; this is the core assumption of the “difference hypothesis”. The aim of the empirical part of the study is to allow the analysis of the democratic orientation and styles of actions of the IEMs in the city of Vienna from 1973 until 2013. They all asked to the citizenry to express their opinion in consultative referenda. The longitudinal study shows the clear preference of the mayors for representative democracy and the majority principle to decide local issues. The analysis provides evidence that indirectly supports the reformist claim promoting the DEM model in local democracy.

scholarly journals The dynamics of depoliticisation in urban governance: Introducing a directly elected mayor

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (5) ◽  
pp. 1068-1086 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sweeting ◽  
Robin Hambleton
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Leadership Style ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Local Democracy ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Fundamental Feature ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The City

Within the context of debates regarding depoliticisation, this article considers how the introduction of a directly elected mayor system of governance impacts on urban politics. Directly elected mayors are now a fundamental feature of many political systems. They have been widely introduced as a reform to improve processes of local democracy, enhance the effectiveness of governing practices and to offer a more potent form of city leadership. This article focuses on developments in England, by presenting the case of Bristol, a city epitomising many aspects of modern neo-liberalised urban development. Bristol adopted a mayoral system in 2012 and the article presents empirical data from before and after this reform pertaining to two frameworks to understand city leadership. We conclude that the move to mayoral governance, in Bristol in the 2012–2016 period, eroded the influence of party politics and led to the adoption of elements of a leadership style associated with a depoliticisation of urban politics in the city. Nevertheless, the analysis suggests that the mayoral model also provides significant space for the expansion of political agency on the part of the city leader, not least because power becomes concentrated in the mayoral position.

Quota Women Are Threatening to Men

2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klea Faniko ◽  
Till Burckhardt ◽  
Oriane Sarrasin ◽  
Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi ◽  
Siri Øyslebø Sørensen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Organizational Performance ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Perceived Threat ◽  
Preferential Treatment ◽  
Public Sector Employees ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
Women In Decision Making ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. Two studies carried out among Albanian public-sector employees examined the impact of different types of affirmative action policies (AAPs) on (counter)stereotypical perceptions of women in decision-making positions. Study 1 (N = 178) revealed that participants – especially women – perceived women in decision-making positions as more masculine (i.e., agentic) than feminine (i.e., communal). Study 2 (N = 239) showed that different types of AA had different effects on the attribution of gender stereotypes to AAP beneficiaries: Women benefiting from a quota policy were perceived as being more communal than agentic, while those benefiting from weak preferential treatment were perceived as being more agentic than communal. Furthermore, we examined how the belief that AAPs threaten men’s access to decision-making positions influenced the attribution of these traits to AAP beneficiaries. The results showed that men who reported high levels of perceived threat, as compared to men who reported low levels of perceived threat, attributed more communal than agentic traits to the beneficiaries of quotas. These findings suggest that AAPs may have created a backlash against its beneficiaries by emphasizing gender-stereotypical or counterstereotypical traits. Thus, the framing of AAPs, for instance, as a matter of enhancing organizational performance, in the process of policy making and implementation, may be a crucial tool to countering potential backlash.

Reclaiming the City as Commons. Learning from Latin American Housing Movements

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-153
Author(s):  
Stavros Stavrides
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Housing Conditions ◽  
Urban Living ◽  
City Life ◽  
Urban Condition ◽  
Collective Creativity ◽  
Urban Movements ◽  
The City

This paper explores a renewed problematization of contemporary metropolises' dynamics in the light of speci fic efforts to reclaim the city as commons. Building on Lefebvre's theorizations of the city's virtuality and comparing it to contemporary approaches to the urban condition that emphasize the potentialities of contemporary city-life, it suggests that urban commoning is unleashing the power of collective creativity and collaboration. Struggles to appropriate the city as a crucial milieu for sharing transforms parts of city and produces new patterns of urban living. Examples from Latin American urban movements focused on establishing emancipatory housing conditions are used to illustrate the transformative capabilities of urban commoning.

Contesting the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian D. Liddy
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Town Government ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City

The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. This book takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the ‘citizen’. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople to make demands, to assert rights, and to resist authority. This book exploits the rich archival sources of the five major towns in England—Bristol, Coventry, London, Norwich, and York—in order to present a new picture of town government and urban politics over three centuries. The power of urban governors was much more precarious than historians have imagined. Urban oligarchy could never prevail—whether ideologically or in practice—when there was never a single, fixed meaning of the citizen.

scholarly journals A Proposed Framework for Identification of Indicators to Model High-Frequency Cities

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 317
Author(s):  
Ahmad M. Senousi ◽  
Junwei Zhang ◽  
Wenzhong Shi ◽  
Xintao Liu
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Traffic Congestion ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Highway Design ◽  
City Life ◽  
Cultural Affiliation ◽  
Internal Mobility ◽  
The City

A city is a complex system that never sleeps; it constantly changes, and its internal mobility (people, vehicles, goods, information, etc.) continues to accelerate and intensify. These changes and mobility vary in terms of the attributes of the city, such as space, time and cultural affiliation, which characterise to some extent how the city functions. Traditional urban studies have successfully modelled the ‘low-frequency city’ and have provided solutions such as urban planning and highway design for long-term urban development. Nevertheless, the existing urban studies and theories are insufficient to model the dynamics of a city’s intense mobility and rapid changes, so they cannot tackle short-term urban problems such as traffic congestion, real-time transport scheduling and resource management. The advent of information and communication technology and big data presents opportunities to model cities with unprecedented resolution. Since 2018, a paradigm shift from modelling the ‘low-frequency city’ to the so-called ‘high-frequency city’ has been introduced, but hardly any research investigated methods to estimate a city’s frequency. This work aims to propose a framework for the identification and analysis of indicators to model and better understand the concept of a high-frequency city in a systematic manner. The methodology for this work was based on a content analysis-based review, taking into account specific criteria to ensure the selection of indicator sets that are consistent with the concept of the frequency of cities. Twenty-two indicators in five groups were selected as indicators for a high-frequency city, and a framework was proposed to assess frequency at both the intra-city and inter-city levels. This work would serve as a pilot study to further illuminate the ways that urban policy and operations can be adjusted to improve the quality of city life in the context of a smart city.

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