‘You really do become invisible’: examining older adults’ right to the city in the United Kingdom

A global ageing population presents opportunities and challenges to designing urban environments that support ageing in place. The World Health Organization's Global Age-Friendly Cities movement has identified the need to develop communities that optimise health, participation and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age. Ensuring that age-friendly urban environments create the conditions for active ageing requires cities and communities to support older adults’ rights to access and move around the city (‘appropriation’) and for them to be actively involved in the transformation (‘making and remaking’) of the city. These opportunities raise important questions: What are older adults’ everyday experiences in exercising their rights to the city? What are the challenges and opportunities in supporting a rights to the city approach? How can the delivery of age-friendly cities support rights to the city for older adults? This paper aims to respond to these questions by examining the lived experiences of older adults across three cities and nine neighbourhoods in the United Kingdom. Drawing on 104 semi-structured interviews with older adults between the ages of 51 and 94, the discussion centres on the themes of: right to use urban space; respect and visibility; and the right to participate in planning and decision-making. These themes are illustrated as areas in which older adults’ rights to access and shape urban environments need to be addressed, along with recommendations for age-friendly cities that support a rights-based approach.

A Smart Right to the City—Grounding Corporate Storytelling and Questioning Smart Urbanism

Against the backdrop of multiple ongoing crises in European cities related to socio-spatial injustice, inequality and exclusion, we argue for a smart right to the city. There is an urgent need for a thorough account of the entrepreneurial mode of technocapitalist smart urbanism. While much of both affirmative and critical research on Smart City developments equate or even reduce smartness to digital infrastructures, we put actual smartness—in the sense of social justice and sustainability—at centre stage. This paper builds on a fundamental structural critique of (1) the entrepreneurial city (Harvey) and (2) the capitalist city (Lefebvre). Drawing upon Lefebvre’s right to the city as a normative framework, we use Smart City developments in the city of Graz as an illustration of our argument. Considering strategies of waste and mobility management, we reflect on how they operate as spatial and technical fixes—fixing the limits of capitalism’s growth. By serving specific corporate interests, these technocapitalist strategies yet fail to address the underlying structural causes of pressing urban problems and increasing inequalities. With Lefebvre’s ongoing relevant argument for the importance of use value of urban infrastructures as well as his claim that appropriation and participation are essential, we discuss common rights to the city: His framework allows us to envision sustainable and just—actually smart—alternatives: alternatives to technocapitalist entrepreneurial urbanisation. In this respect, a smart right to the city is oriented towards the everyday needs of all inhabitants.

The public rights to the sidewalk in a smart city framework: The case study of Surabaya

The pedestrian transformation in Surabaya smart city system encountered critical problem for pedestrians because transformation as a public space has reduced citizens’ rights to the city. Dominant forces tend to subordinate street vendors or Pedagang Kaki Lima (PKL), who require public space. The city or urban government produces pedestrians as public spaces to support the ‘Smart City’ concept. This study explores the government’s ability to guarantee citizens’ rights to the city. In addition, this study seeks to observe the process of public space transformation in cities that implement smart city systems and analyze spatial street vendors’ practices in the pedestrian space. This research applies the right to cities and public space from a Marxian spatial perspective. This research is a case study that uses a qualitative method and interpretive analysis. Research findings indicate pedestrians’ paradox due to the government’s dispossession process to protect pedestrians through ‘furniturization’ policies that reduce smart city implementation. In conclusion, there are dynamics of spatial practice and social expression as pedestrian problems. The smart city system’s implementation causes the loss of fulfillment of the poor and street vendors’ needs and rights to participate inclusively in the social and political process in managing the city’s public spaces.

Imaginaries of the Future City in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Vienna

Today, cities the world over are entangled in aspirational future visions, as regions compete with others in different parts of the world for investment, tourists, and talent to guarantee economic growth. This paper approaches the cities of Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Vienna via their self-presentations and projections of the future. It sees cities as learning assemblages and pays attention to the narrative construction of imaginaries and future trajectories, as depicted in the respective city galleries and planning museums. All cities are found to be entangled in international policy trends and, in their unique ways, strive for recognition, competitiveness, and conviviality. Singapore emerges as torn between ambition, transparency, and control, while wanting to foster creativity and revive its cultural heritage; Kuala Lumpur appears simultaneously geared by boosterism and at home in opacity and multiplicity, privileging Malays while trying not to alienate other ethnic groups; and Vienna ambivalently projects a future that reconciles nostalgia for monarchic splendor and the social-democratic heritage of egalitarian urbanism with ambitions for international recognition and newly popular trends for citizen participation and “rights to the city.”

Common sense politics: religion and belonging in French public space

Public “common sense” should be conceptualized as an important force structuring the politics of belonging. Homing in on the embodied and sensory aspects of common, taken-for-granted knowledge and the habits of perception that inform it, this article demonstrates how culturally entrained listening practices structure rights to the city and the exercise of citizenship. By tuning into the significance of ambient religious sound, it offers an empirical, ethnographic investigation into how common sense, in dialogue with constitutional and municipal law, shapes practices of citizenship and participation in French public space. The article argues that common sense deriving from perception and interpretation of public sound among majority French represents a stubborn obstacle to French Muslims’ exercise of full citizenship; indeed, it enacts a kind of violence that locks French Muslims out of agentive citizenry, rendering them objects to be muted at will, not fellow citizens to be heard.

Living on the Edge: Interrogating Migrant Labourer Lives of Bengaluru/Bangalore

This paper proposes to create a discourse of migrant labourers in the city of Bengaluru/Bangalore, especially during the current period of crisis ensued by COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being an essential part of the informal sector economy these workers are often rendered invisible from the urban social, cultural and political spaces of this global city. The United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development (Habitat III), held in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016 declared the New Urban Agenda (NUA) — that was adopted as the guideline for urban development for the next twenty years — with the vision of ‘cities for all’. But in reality, for their regional, linguistic, cultural, class and caste differences, the migrant labourers in the city are marginalized from the mainstream urban scene. The paper investigates the historiography of the migrant labourers in the city to interrogate the space they occupy in Bengaluru/Bangalore. Some of the important questions the paper attempts to grapple with are also about their fight for survival amidst the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and the relief measure responses from the state. Evidences show, the immigrant labourers are perceived as the city’s necessary ‘Other’ who are needed to build the city but barely finds any representation in the planning grids of urban architects. Their direct experiences and negotiations with ‘the lived city’, available from news archives and other secondary sources, will be interrogated through the lens of ‘the Right to the City’, a concept introduced by Henri Lefebvre. The paper attempts to explore if they have any agency to assert their rights to the city and become a meaningful stakeholder in the democratic control over Bengaluru/Bangalore.