The Sound of Protest: Acousmatic Resistance in El Método

2020 ◽  
pp. 92-111
Author(s):  
Mónica López Lerma

Drawing on the works of Henri Lefebvre and Chris Butler, chapter four explores the relationship between justice, aesthetics, and (the right to) the city through the 2012 Spanish film Grupo 7 directed by Alberto Rodríguez. Based on real events, the film follows a police unit tasked with cleansing the touristy downtown of Seville of prostitution and drug trafficking in order to convey an image of modernity for the Universal Exposition of 1992.  By inviting viewers to experience the violent transformation of Seville, the film makes visible pervasive forms of violence (crime, police brutality, and corruption) concealed behind the promises of modernity. It exposes the ways in which the state and the law shape the social body, organize relations of power, and distribute the sensory order—meaning who and what are included or excluded and who and what are visible or invisible—in a way that erases difference and diversity. The chapter argues that rather than offering a solution, the film constructs a haptic aesthetic where the city’s suburbs and outskirts, its messiness and noise, generally all brushed off by the logic of progress and modernization, cannot be left out from the viewer’s sensory experience of the city.

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Zieleniec

Henri Lefebvre is now established as one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century. Over a long life (b. 1901–d. 1991) he wrote and published prodigiously more than sixty books and several hundred articles on a range of issues and themes. His legacy and lasting impact not only includes being the most influential and seminal theorist on the reprioritization of space in social and critical analysis but also recognition for his contribution to the analysis of everyday life, modernity, the Right to the City, and the urban. He continues to influence and inspire research across a number of disciplines and fields; these include rural and regional studies, sociology, geography, politics, philosophy, and urban studies. Lefebvre’s commitment Marxism; his nondogmatic and humanist approach to the definition, discussion, extension, and application of key concepts; and his integration of those concepts into his various analyses of the rural and the city, of the state, of space and politics, and of modernity and everyday life led him to a conflicted relationship and at times marginalization within the structuralist-influenced French Academy and the Communist Party of France in which he was a member for thirty years. His anti-Stalinist stance and nonconformist opposition to the structural determinism prevalent within the party led to his expulsion, but throughout the 1960s, as professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg and latterly at the new university at Nanterre, he became one of the most respected teachers and intellectuals inspiring and influencing the May 1968 student revolt. Lefebvre’s work after that, still influenced and committed to Marxist dialectics and critique, increasingly focused on the urban, the social production of space, everyday life, modernity, and the survival of capitalism. Of these his introduction of the concept of the right to the city and the social production of space have been immensely influential for a range of urban scholars and theorists and his work as a whole is being increasingly adopted, adapted, and extended by a variety of researchers of the city in a range of disciplines. The works selected below reflect Lefebvre’s long career and extensive corpus of work. However, only those books and articles that have been translated into English are included here. They represent his exegesis of Marxism and its application to a range of themes that were applied or are important for urban analysis. The secondary literature cited is organized thematically and while not comprehensive provides an overview of the expanding literature on, about, and applying Lefebvrian analysis.


Author(s):  
Oleksii Chepov ◽  

The qualitative and clear definition of the legal regime of the capital of Ukraine, the hero city of Kyiv, is influenced by its legislative enshrinement, however, it should be noted that discussions are ongoing and one of the reasons for the unclear legal status of the capital is the ambiguity of current legislation in this area. Separation of the functions of the city of Kyiv, which are carried out to ensure the rights of citizens of Ukraine and the functions that guarantee the rights of the territorial community of the city of Kyiv. In the modern world, in legal doctrine and practice, the capital is understood as the capital of the country, which at the legislative level received this status and, accordingly, is the administrative and political center of the state, which houses the main state bodies and diplomatic missions of other states. It is the identification of the boundaries of the relationship between the competencies of state administrations and local self-government, in practice, often raises questions about their delimitation and ways of regulatory solution. Peculiarities of local self-government in Kyiv city districts are defined in the provisions of the Law on the Capital, which reveal the norms of the Constitution in these legal relations, according to which the issue of organizing district management in cities belongs to city councils. Likewise, it is unregulated by law to lose the particularity of the legal status of the territory of the city. It should be emphasized that the subject of administrative-legal relations is not a certain administrative-territorial entity, but the social group is designated - the territorial community of the city of Kiev, kiyani. Thus, the provisions on the city of Kyiv partially ignore the potential of the territorial community.


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....


2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lubomír Kopeček ◽  
Pavel Pšeja

This article attempts to analyze developments within the Czech Left after 1989. Primarily, the authors focus on two questions: (1) How did the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) achieve its dominance of the Left? (2)What is the relationship between the Social Democrats and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM)? We conclude that the unsuccessful attempt to move the KSČM towards a moderate leftist identity opened up a space in which the Social Democrats could thrive, at the same time gradually assuming a pragmatic approach towards the Communists. Moreover, the ability of Miloš Zeman, the leader of the Social Democrats, to build a clear non-Communist Left alternative to the hegemony of the Right during the 1990s was also very important.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 586
Author(s):  
Valdeci Reis

Estudo etnográfico, com revisão de literatura sobre a construção social do conceito juventude, tem como objetivo relatar e analisar narrativas juvenis em torno do direito à educação. A análise empírica seleciona duas ondas de mobilizações protagonizadas por jovens estudantes: Atos em defesa das Universidades e Institutos Federais ocorridos na cidade de Florianópolis-SC; Na capital da Argentina, Buenos Aires, a narrativa etnográfica se debruça na análise de mobilizações protagonizadas por jovens portenhos que tomaram as ruas exigindo a manutenção da Ley Nacional de Educación, além de se posicionarem radicalmente contra as medidas de austeridade anunciadas pelo Governo Maurício Macri. A análise dos dados etnográficos aponta que a pauta em defesa da educação é capaz de unir coletivos e organizações dos mais variados espectros ideológicos.Palavras-chave: Juventude. Neoliberalismo. Participação social. Etnografia. América Latina.NARRATIVES ON THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION IN DISPUTE: anthropological lights to understand youth mobilizationsAbstractEthnographic study, with a review of the literature on the social construction of the concept of youth, in order to report and analyze youth narratives around the right to education.The empirical analysis selected two waves of mobilizations carried out by young students: Acts in defense of public educational institutions occurred in the city of Florianópolis-SC, Brazil;In the capital of Argentina, Buenos Aires, the ethnographic narrative focused on the analysis of mobilizations carried out by young people who went to the streets demanding the maintenance of the “National Education Law”, as well as to stand radicallyagainst the austerity measures announced by the MaurícioMacri Government. The analysis of the ethnographic data indicates that the agenda in defense of education is capable of uniting collectives and organizations affiliated to the mostdiverse ideological currents.Keywords: Youth. Neoliberalism. Social participation. Ethnography. Latin America.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Nazzal ◽  
Samer Chinder

In Lebanon, the social connections are undeniable and crucial. However, meeting places remain private such as houses, restaurants, malls, and beach resorts. This is mainly due to the shortage of public spaces in Lebanon resulting from lack of planning, regulations and awareness around the right to the city and the importance of public spaces. In main cities where land prices are so expensive, common practice has prioritized the use of land in real estate development, thus trumping other uses such as public and communal spaces.In the late 1990s, Lebanon saw the emergence of malls, which have arguably acted as alternatives to public spaces. Malls, with their wealth of food courts, restaurants, cinemas, and play areas, have become the new downtown for a portion of the Lebanese population. They are also considered safe, which is another important factor.In 2015, the percentage of green spaces in Lebanon has decreased to less than 13%. While the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a minimum of 9m2 of green space per capita (UN-HABITAT, 2016), Beirut has only 0.8m2.


Author(s):  
César Simoni Santos

The presence of the spatial element in the reflections of Henri Lefebvre does not merely result from work involving the translation and adaptation of critical thinking developed up until his time. The realization that not even the highest expression of the critical tradition had sufficiently noticed this crucial dimension of life was one of the connecting points between theoretical advance, represented by the spatial orientation of critique, and the effort to renew the utopian horizon. A very distinct assimilation of the early work of Marx and the proximity to revolutionary romanticism, particularly of Nietzschean extraction, rendered a decisive impact on Lefebvrian conception. Practice, body, pleasure and instincts, recovering their place in the critical social imagination, went on to become the basis for the re-foundation of a theoretical-practical program that involved the formulation of the notion of the right to the city. The perspective of appropriation thus replaced the vague emancipatory statements of the subject's philosophies.


Author(s):  
Ilaria Geddes ◽  
Nadia Charalambous

This project was developed as an attempt to assess the relationship between different morphogenetic processes, in particular, those of fringe belt formation as described by M.R.G. Conzen (1960) and Whitehand (2001), and of centrality and compactness as described by Hillier (1999; 2002). Different approaches’ focus on different elements of the city has made it difficult to establish exactly how these processes interact or whether they are simply different facets of development reflecting wider socio-economic factors. To address this issue, a visual, chronological timeline of Limassol’s development was constructed along with a narrative of the socio-economic context of its development.  The complexity of cities, however, makes static visualisations across time difficult to read and assess alongside textual narratives. We therefore took the step of developing an animation of land use and configurational analyses of Limassol, in order bring to life the diachronic analysis of the city and shed light on its generative mechanisms. The video presented here shows that the relationship between the processes mentioned above is much stronger and more complex than previously thought. The related paper explores in more detail the links between fringe belt formation as a cyclical process of peripheral development and centrality as a recurring process of minimisation of gains in distance. The project’s outcomes clearly show that composite methods of visualisations are an analytical opportunity still little exploited within urban morphology. References Conzen, M.R.G., 1960. Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan Analysis, London: Institute of British Geographers. Hillier, B., 2002. A Theory of the City as Object: or how spatial laws mediate the social construction of urban space. Urban Des Int, 7(3–4), pp.153–179. Hillier, B., 1999. Centrality as a process: accounting for attraction inequalities in deformed grids. Urban Des Int, 4(3–4), pp.107–127. Whitehand, J.W.R., 2001. British urban morphology: the Conzenian tradition. Urban Morphology, 5(2), pp.103–109.


Author(s):  
Gabriela Torres-Hernández ◽  
Patricio García-Espinosa ◽  
Edgar Botello-Hernández ◽  
Diego Ortega-Moreno

During February  2021, a protest was organized by Mexican medical students through social media. About 200 interns, social service physicians and physicians protested peacefully in front of the city hall of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, the capital of Mexico's second largest metropolitan area. Due to the current contingency situation, it was requested to attend with face shield and masks. The reason for the protest was to raise their voice due to the precarious situation where social service physicians are sent to rural areas of the country in which they have all the obligations of workers but without belonging to the working class - lacking the the benefits of this same as a living wage or fair working hours. The protesters were in limbo between student and worker. The protest also demanded justice for the sensitive death of young doctors due to malpractice situations of the Mexican authorities. We believe that a total reform of the social service in medicine is necessary. It is the responsibility of the authorities to cover the rural areas with permanently trained doctors without depending on recently graduated doctors. It is always important to assert our fundamental rights, including the right to protest in a peaceful manner.


Author(s):  
Jackie Gulland

Social justice is a popular concept, used by academic theorists, international bodies such as the United Nations, politicians on both the left and the right and by community activists. This chapter considers how the term ‘social justice’ may or may not be useful in the context of ‘administrative justice’ by looking at the relationship between administrative justice and structural inequalities. Administrative justice scholars usually focus on procedures. By contrast, social justice scholars are more concerned with substantive outcomes. They draw attention to the major rifts in society which lead to huge inequalities of outcome in terms of material wealth, health, education and life expectancy. Administrative justice, with its emphasis on rule following and fair procedures, can often seem divorced from these inequalities. This is where the concept of social justice can help administrative justice scholars. Administrative justice scholars, often dismiss outcomes as being beyond the reach of law, as being about politics. The emphasis on the ‘social’ in social justice compels us to look at this broader context and to show us how the great schisms in society create and enforce inequality.


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