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.

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.

scholarly journals The Right to the City, the Right to Heritage – Material and Non-Material Traces of Scheibler’s ‘New Weaving Mill’ in Łódź

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-204
Author(s):  
Alicja Piotrowska ◽  
Inga B. Kuźma
Keyword(s):  
Research Field ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
City Life ◽  
Unusual Event ◽  
John Paul Ii ◽  
Industrial Space ◽  
The Right ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Everyday Space ◽  
The City

The paper presents the case of post-industrial space of the New Weaving Mill in Kilińskiego Street in Łódź, which was a part of Karol Scheibler’s empire. We use it to illustrate the tensions between actors of the city life and the related right to the city including the right to heritage. At the same time, we indicate the significance of involving different actors in the process of creating narratives (also those contributing to the extension of the research field) of it. In our discussion, we mostly perceive this space as everyday space – space of work that was marked with an unusual event: the visit of John Paul II in 1987. Thus, we consider the practices and strategies for commemorating/forgetting in the context of urban practices connected with the construction of heritage and the right to it.

A utopia do direito à cidade: Possibilidades de superação da dicotomia favela-bairro no Rio de Janeiro

GEOgraphia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Márcio Piñon de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
The Other ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

A utopia do direito à cidade,  no  caso específico do Rio de Janeiro, começa, obrigatoriamente, pela  superação da visão dicotômica favela-cidade. Para isso, é preciso que os moradores da favela possam sentir-se tão cidadãos quanto os que têm moradias fora das favelas. A utopia do direito à cidade tem de levar a favela a própria utopia da cidade. Uma cidade que não se fragmente em oposições asfalto-favela, norte-sul, praia-subúrbio e onde todos tenham direito ao(s) seu(s) centro(s). Oposições que expressam muito mais do que diferenças de  localização e que  se apresentam recheadas de  segregação, estereótipos e  ideologias. Por outro  lado, o direito a cidade, como possibilidade histórica, não pode ser pensado exclusivamente a partir da  favela. Mas as populações  que aí habitam guardam uma contribuição inestimável para  a  construção prática  desse direito. Isso porque,  das  experiências vividas, emergem aprendizados e frutificam esperanças e soluções. Para que a favela seja pólo de um desejo que impulsione a busca do direito a cidade, é necessário que ela  se  pense como  parte da história da própria cidade  e sua transformação  em metrópole.Abstract The right  to the city's  utopy  specifically  in Rio de Janeiro, begins by surpassing  the dichotomy approach between favela and the city. For this purpose, it is necessary, for the favela dwellers, the feeling of citizens as well as those with home outside the favelas. The right to the city's utopy must bring to the favela  the utopy to the city in itself- a non-fragmented city in terms of oppositions like "asphalt"-favela, north-south, beach-suburb and where everybody has right to their center(s). These oppositions express much more the differences of location and present  themselves full of segregation, stereotypes and ideologies. On  the other  hand, the right to  the city, as historical possibility, can not be thought  just from the favela. People that live there have a contribution for a practical construction of this right. 

scholarly journals Characterization of Spatial Planning in Brazil: The Right to the City in Theory and Practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Rocco ◽  
Luciana Royer ◽  
Fábio Mariz Gonçalves
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Planning ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

Peter Marcuse and the ‘Right to the City’

City ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-473
Author(s):  
Bruno Flierl
Keyword(s):  
Right To The City ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

The City-Logic of Resistance: Subverting Urbicide in the Middle East City

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 10-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Civil Resistance ◽  
Extreme Variant ◽  
Urban Terrain ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document