Why do crowds cause trouble? Exploring affective instability in collectivity

Through our ethnographic study of urban activism collectives in São Paulo, we propose another approach for exploring the process of collective formations and their longevity. Rather than seeking out the representational meanings of individualized communities, we approach collectivity from the perspective of crowds. Crowds are affective. Crowds are contagious. By adopting affect-based theorizing, we discuss affective intensities that bring about collectivity before the individuals awaken to narrate their meaning-makings. In our ethnographic context, collectives resist manifestations of gentrification (i.e., consumer culture in itself) and offer us a multifaceted site of being and becoming with the crowds. We explore how connections and disconnections affectively rekindle the social expression of collective bodies in consumer culture. This way, we add new dimensions to extant theorizing of consumer collectivity that tends to focus on individualized meaning, stability, and harmony.

Profil ideowy miejskiego aktywizmu w Polsce

The paper concerns the ideological profile of urban movements in Poland. In the first part, the author definesthe concept of urban movement based on the related literature and outlines the history of the urban matterin Poland. Then, attempts are made to reconstruct the ideological profile of urban activism. This is done onthe basis of an analysis that includes the main ideas to which urban activists refer (right to the city, idea ofparticular narratives, city-view) as well as the urban theses that include the postulations developed by theCongress of Urban Movements being the effect of consolidation activities in the Polish urban movements’environment. In conclusion, the key groups of postulations formulated by activists in Polish cities are analysedthrough the perspective of the views contained in the main contemporary political doctrines.

PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING PRACTICES AND CIVIC ACTIVISM FOR URBAN SPACE RENOVATION: THE CASE OF KHERSON

The article presents the results of the participatory budgeting research and urban activism in the renovation of the urban space of Kherson, and analyzes the modern features of urban space transformation.Participatory planning and budgeting today are the guidelines for the development of new, joint and integrated decisions in strategic development of the community. However, the Kherson city case study proved urban activism on issues of participatory budgeting to be small-scale in nature, which means that 2-5% of the city community is involved in budgeting, and the total cost of approved projects is less than 0.5% of the average annual city’s budget. Urban activism is quite sporadic beyond the participatory budgeting, which is the result of “small initiatives” of individual creative groups and entrepreneurs, rather than a strategic plan for spatial development of the community.The participatory budgeting in the Kherson city community development is still pseudo-participatory in its nature, given that much of decisions are aimed at solving the current domestic and communal problems, rather than implementing the agenda or strategic goals of community development. In the era of actual city deindustrialization, Kherson should not only be positioned as one of the leaders in foreign and domestic tourism, but also restore its status of a comfortable city and a unique recreational and logistics center. The article presents the author’s vision of the planning decisions and urban activism prospects in the urban spaces’ transformation. The key points are the next: 1) renovation and revitalization of urban space should be carried out primarily by creating different types and functional purposes of creative spaces (new formats of recreation, communication, information education, inclusive environment development); 2) creation or renovation of existing public spaces should be carried out only with the involvement of participatory management mechanisms in order to provide the city with the functional content really needed by the community; 3) a particular strategic direction of urban space renovation should aim at the increase of green public spaces and benefiting from the unique Kherson city community location at the mouth of the Dnieper.

'MEETING OF WATERS'? THE COMPLEX LANDSCAPE OF THE POLISH RIGHT TO THE CITY ACTIVISM

For over a decade, the explosion of various forms of urban activism has been observed: so- called urban social movements or the right to the city (RTTC) movements actively participate in the realm of non-institutional politics. This trend has been observed both world-wide and in Europe, particularly in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Poland is also a clear example of this tendency. The paper presented aims to achieve two goals. First of all, it is based on desk research and offers a broad literature overview, indicating the main directions and results in urban activism research in Poland of the last 10 years. Recalling and discussing the broadest possible body of literature, with particular emphasis on Polish-language references, should be useful for international readers and researchers. Secondly, the paper attempts to synthesize these current research results, including the authors own research results, identifying the complexity of the field of urban activism. As a result, it points to various entities using the RTTC slogan in their social struggles, consequently identifying two main types of RTTC activism: radical and middle-class (petite bourgeoisie?) movements.

Queering social reproduction: Sex, care and activism in San Francisco

In this paper I ask what is at stake when we move past static ontologies of the ‘gayborhood’ as a form of commercial and residential concentration in decline to theorise gay urban activism as a mode of queer social reproduction, through which queer caring labour ‘redeems’ the dislocations of the neoliberal city structured by oedipalised and capitalist social relations. Through well-documented formal and informal collective action, queers in the urban West have organised in response to health crises, exclusion and systemic threats of violence. Returning to socialist feminist imaginaries of care beyond the ‘social’, and to Guy Hocquenghem’s often-overlooked theory of the sociality of the anus, this paper draws on excerpts from the film Milk, the poetry of Thom Gunn and a discussion of gay men’s volunteering to examine San Francisco as a queer urban space constituted through a network of encounters, crossings, intimacies and labours enacted through the mundane caring practices of everyday life. I ask in what ways we can think of gay urban space as continuously made and remade through non-monogamous sex practices that perform the messy marrying of public and private, and erotic and platonic.