Critical Urban Theory, Common Property, and “the Political”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Webb
Keyword(s):  
Common Property ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory

Urban space and the politics of socially engaged art

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 985-1000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilie Sachs Olsen
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
Material Environment ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
Definition Of

This paper interrogates the political potential of socially engaged art within an urban setting. Grounded in Lefebvrian and neo-Marxist critical urban theory, this political potential is examined according to three analytics that mark the definition of ‘politics’ in this context: the (re)configuration of urban space, the (re)framing of a particular sphere of experience and the (re)thinking of what is taken-for-granted. By bringing together literatures from a range of academic domains, these analytics are used to examine 1) how socially engaged art may expand our understanding of the link between the material environment and the production of urban imaginaries and meanings, and 2) how socially engaged art can open up productive ways of thinking about and engaging with urban space.

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.

Theorizing Regulation-in-City for Homeless People’s Subaltern Strategy and Informality: Societalization, Metabolism, and Classes With(out) Housing

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110205
Author(s):  
Mahito Hayashi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Studies ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Homeless People ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
Urban Metabolism ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Housing Consumption ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory

This paper aims to expand critical urban theory and spatialized political economy through developing a new, broad-based theoretical explanation of homelessness and the informal housing of the deprived in public spaces. After reviewing an important debate in geography, it systematicallyreasserts the relevance of class-related concepts in urban studies and, mobilizing post-determinist notions, it shows how a class-driven theory can inform the emergence of appropriating/differentiating/reconciliating agency from the material bedrock of urban metabolism and its society-integrating effect (societalization). The author weaves an urban diagnostic web of concepts by situating city-dwellers—classes with(out) housing—at the material level of metabolism and then in the sociopolitical dynamic of regulation, finding in the two realms urban class relations (enlisted within societalization) and agency formation (for reregulation, subaltern strategies, and potential rapprochement). The housing classes are retheorized as a composite category of hegemonic dwellers who enjoy housing consumption and whose metabolism thus appears as the normative consumption of public/private spaces. Homeless people are understood as a subaltern class who lacks housing consumption and whose metabolism can produce “housing” out of public spaces, in opposition to a hegemonic urban form practiced by the housing classes. These urban class relations breed homeless–housed divides and homeless regulation, and yet allow for agency’s creative appropriation/differentiation/reconciliation. This paper avoids crude dichotomy, but it argues that critical urban theory can productively use this way of theorization for examining post-determinist urban lifeworlds in relation to the relative fixity of urban form, metabolic circuits, and class relations.

The People and the People: Democracy and Vitalism in Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-113
Author(s):  
Christian P. Haines
Keyword(s):  
Common Property ◽  
The Political ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Labor Politics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Common ◽  
Concepts Of Democracy ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between politics and philosophy in Walt Whitman’s 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. It focuses on Whitman’s articulation of two different concepts of democracy: a vitalist version, based on the organic life of the nation, and a revolutionary version, based on transforming the political culture of the people for the sake of fulfilling the American Revolution. The chapter traces Whitman’s reception as a Spinozist (an inheritor of the radical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza), a pantheist, and a monist. It argues that this philosophical legacy enables Whitman to reimagine the nation as the common property of the people and to reconceive of national belonging in terms other than citizenship. The chapter pays particular attention to Whitman’s commitments to labor politics and the abolition of slavery.

Spatial Justice

2022 ◽  
pp. 41-64
Author(s):  
Salvador Lindquist
Keyword(s):  
Urban Theory ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Participatory Systems ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
University Of Nebraska Lincoln ◽  
Social Environmental ◽  
The University ◽  
Alternative Mapping

Marginalized communities around the world are disproportionately impacted by the distribution of unjust infrastructure and environmental conditions. However, through distributive, procedural, and restorative frameworks, it is possible to teach spatial designers to challenge, inform, and reshape the world toward a more just and equitable future. This chapter delves into the various themes developed as part of the “Spatial Justice” professional elective at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which offers an interdisciplinary perspective on urban studies, urban design, and the roles that social, environmental, and ecological justice play in designing a more just and equitable urbanity. In this course, students explore critical urban theory, justice, counter cartographies, design activism, participatory systems, and spatial agency using alternative mapping methodologies to render legible latent sociospatial asymmetries.

Unsettling critical urban theory

City ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 476-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon M. Meagher
Keyword(s):  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory

Book review: Cities and Crisis: New Critical Urban Theory

Urban Studies ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-817
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Priya Rajendran
Keyword(s):  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory

scholarly journals A Review of Robert Shaw, The Nocturnal City. London: Routledge, 2018, 126 pр.

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (48) ◽  
pp. 239-251
Author(s):  
Fedor Veselov
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Artificial Lighting ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
New Research ◽  
The City

This review focuses on the book The Nocturnal City written by the British social geographer Robert Shaw. The author’s major objective is to put the night at the center of the research agenda in urban studies, to contribute to urban theory in general, and to open up a new research field — nightology. The theoretical ambition for Shaw is an attempt to establish a dialogue between planetary urbanism (critical urban theory) and the post-structuralist understanding of the city (assemblage thinking). The author employs the conceptual model of ‘three ecologies’ developed by Felix Guattari; it considers the city as consisting of three interconnected layers: ‘self — society — earth’. Another important analytical tool is the post-colonial metaphor of the night as a frontier, which Shaw develops, considering specificities of the nocturnal city: infrastructures of artificial lighting and cleaning, the night-time economy, the changing aesthetics of cities at night and the experience of night-time at home, beyond the public space. The book does not offer a ready-made solution to theoretical problems and reveals just a little of the empirical diversity of nocturnal cities, but it is recommended as an introduction to a new field — nightology (especially for the Russian social sciences) — and as an elaboration of the discussion around the compatibility of critical urbanism and assemblage thinking in urban theory.

scholarly journals Krisendiagnostik einer kritischen Stadtforschung

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 171-177
Author(s):  
Markus Kip
Keyword(s):  
Urban Theory ◽  
Critical Urban Theory

Höhne und Michel (2021) beschreiben Symptome einer „Krise der Städte“, die im Zuge der Coronapandemie deutlicher zum Vorschein kommen. Mit ihren Thesen legen sie nahe, dass es auf ein Ende des Städtischen – as we know it – hinauslaufen könnte. Im Grunde genommen bezeichnen viele der Thesen Entwicklungen, die schon vor der Pandemie zu beobachten waren. Gerne gehe ich auf die Einladung ein, über die Krisendiagnostik einer sich als kritisch verstehenden Stadtforschung zu reflektieren. Anstoß nehme ich daran, dass die Perspektive der Krisendiagnostik im Debattenaufschlag ungeklärt bleibt. Aus wessen Sicht wird hier eine Krise diagnostiziert und mit welchem Zweck? „Kritisch“ im von mir vorgeschlagenen Sinne ist eine Stadtforschung, die sich in der Krise zu verorten und (Ent-)Scheidungen herbeizuführen weiß. Dieser Beitrag argumentiert für eine kritische Stadtforschung als konsequente Fortsetzung des Erbes der Frankfurter Schule. Er baut auf Kernideen aus „What is Critical about Critical Urban Theory?“ von Neil Brenner (2009) auf.

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