From alessandro.busa at metropolitanstudies.de Tue Dec 1 13:30:46 2009 From: alessandro.busa at metropolitanstudies.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Alessandro_Bus=E0?=) Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 19:30:46 +0100 Subject: [URBANTH-L] "The Right to the City - The Entitled and the Excluded" - The Urban Reinventors Special Issue 3: 09 is out now In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Apologies for cross posting The Urban Reinventors Special Issue 3: 09 "The Right to the City - The Entitled and the Excluded" Out now, available online (free of charge) at: www.urbanreinventors.net *TABLE OF CONTENTS* *Editorial* THE RIGHT TO THE CITY: THE ENTITLED AND THE EXCLUDED - *Alessandro Bus?* *Paper Series *THE RIGHT TO THE CITY VERSUS BRIDGING THE URBAN DIVIDE - *Tom Angotti*, Hunter College, CUNY, New York ENACTING DEMOCRACY- PUBLIC SPACE: THEATER OF DISCOURSE - *Lois Ascher*, Wentworth Institute, Boston THE RIGHT TO THE CITY AND THE STRUGGLES OVER PUBLIC CITIZENSHIP: EXPLORING THE LINKS - *Anna Plyushteva * IGNORING INJUSTICE IN DISASTER PLANNING: AN AGENDA FOR RESEARCH ON KATRINA AND 9/11 - *Peter Marcuse*, Columbia University, New York REVANCHIST PLANET - *Neil Smith*, CUNY Graduate Center, New York Disconnected from society? Gated communities: their lifestyle versus urban governance - *Peer Smets*, VU University Amsterdam THE PRESENT CRISIS IS A CRISIS OF CITY BUILDING - *Neil Smith*, Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY Graduate Center, New York *In Depth * FAVELAS, PUBLIC HOUSING AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF URBAN SPACE IN BRAZILIAN SLUMS - *Gustavo Rivera*, University of Chicago A CURIOUSLY QUALIFIED LEGACYOF RESISTANCE TO GENTRIFICATION - *Kate Shaw*, University of Melbourne, Australia THROUGH THE SKY: VERTICAL GATED DEVELOPMENTS IN ISTANBUL - *Aliye Ahu G?l?mser*, *T?zin Baycan Levent*, Instanbul Technical University HOMELESS IN TENT CITY, USA - *Kathy Sanborn * THE RIGHT TO THE "WORLD CLASS CITY"? CITY VISIONS AND EVICTIONS IN MUMBAI - *Matt Birkinshaw *and *Victoria Harris * (Save Houses, Build Houses) IS DONGTAN ECOCITY A MODEL OF URBAN SUSTAINABILITY? - *Peter Sigrist*, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Combating Social Exclusion with "Activating" Policies: Lessons from Recent German Policy Reforms - *Margit Mayer*, Freie Universit?t, Berlin *Urban Stories *THE GREEN FIELDS OF AMERICA (pdf) - *D. L. Lewis * TALES OF A LITTLE GHETTO GIRL (pdf) - *Kathy Henry * HOMELESS FOR THE HOLIDAYS (pdf) - *Edgar Swamp * 106th STREET AND ME (pdf) - *Rafaela Santos* *Image Gallery * The "Prestes Maia" Reportage -* Tatiana Cardeal * The Right to The City: The Entitled and the Excluded - a collective project La Banlieu ? pied - *Ludovic Maillard * Night and Decay - *Lynn Smith * The Homeless Photographer - *Leroy Skalstad * The Duality of Darius Twin - *Darius Twin * The ongoing unfolding of the global recession, whose consequences have been devastating particularly to disadvantaged communities worldwide, is highlighting the underlying contradictions of dominant models of profit-driven urbanization. In the U.S., the recession has spurred a widening gap between rich and poor, while a wave of foreclosures has sent thousands of once-middle class households in the streets, in homeless shelters, or in "tent cities", in the midst of an ocean of vacant properties. Yet again, the most dramatic human costs of this crisis are to be seen among the poor across the developing world: the World Bank has estimated that up to 90 million extra people world-wide have fallen into extreme poverty (less than US $1.25 per day) in 2009 as a result of the global economic slowdown. This represents a reversal in the global extreme poverty reduction trend since 2005, with the global number of extreme poor rising to over 1.2 billion people only this year. Given this framework, a right to "equitable human settlements [...] in which all people, without discrimination of any kind as to race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or social status, have equal access to housing, infrastructure, health services, adequate food and water, education and open spaces", has hardly ever seemed as out of reach as it does today. This notwithstanding, in the latest years a revival of interest in Henri Lefebvre's ideas on "the right to the city" has propagated among scholars and activists alike, as a way to counteract market-driven urbanism and commit to values of human dignity and human rights for all [...] Several papers in this issue engage with divisions and inequalities propelled by processes of neoliberal socio-spatial restructuring at the global scale. These span from critical commentaries on the link between social justice and class (*Peter Marcuse*), to accounts on the global scale of revanchism and on the urban roots of the global financial crisis (*Neil Smith*). Other papers explore the challenges associated with Lefebvre's concept of the "right to the city" and its practical implementation. These range from theoretical reflections on the challenges to overcome the divisive imperatives of capitalist urbanization (*Tom Angotti*), through reflections on the meaning of public citizenship (*Anna Plyushteva*), to accounts on the potential of public space as a theater for civic engagement *(Lois Ascher*). In addition, this issue hopes to give a partial answer to the title question (How does capitalist urbanization grant differential rights to the city? Who is entitled, and who is excluded from such rights?) with investigative contributions focusing on the divisive tendency of dominant models of capitalist urbanization on the local scale: from critical accounts of "urban sustainability" models of development in China at the cost of mass- displacement of peasant villages (*Peter Sigrist*), through reflections on the socio-cultural impacts of the production of wealth enclaves and gated citadels on urban governance (*Peer Smets*), to detailed analysis of the ongoing development of vertical gated communities in Turkey (*Aliye Ahu G?l?mser, T?zin Baycan Levent*). Other authors engage with issues of dispossession, marginalization or exclusion, with investigations on patterns of urban restructuring in the global South - from the slums of Mumbai (*Matt Birkinshaw and Victoria Harris*) to the favelas of Belo Horizonte (*Gustavo Rivera*) - and in the North, with a reportage from Californian "tent cities" (Kathy Sanborn) and a paper on the struggles of German trailer parks inhabitants (*Manuel Lutz*, forthcoming in this issue). *Margit Mayer *engages with the reorientation of welfare policies targeting social exclusion in Germany, while *Kate Shaw *reports on successful examples of (midly) sustainable gentrification in Australia. The Urban Stories section introduces three underground novelists and their stories of marginalization and dispossession. In "Tales of a Little Ghetto Girl", *Kathy Henry*, a single mother of three children, writes about her experiences of being black, female and poor in the ghettos of Chicago. In "Homeless for the Holidays", a bizarre *Edgar Swamp* tells us the story of a Christmas of his own choice as a homeless, while in "The Green Fields of America", *D.L. Lewis *writes about "the depths of human dignity when confronted with life's random inequities". Finally, in the short poem "126th Street and me", *Rafaela Santos *describes her love for Harlem, the place she calls home, and the fears associated with its sweeping gentrification. This special issue of "The Urban Reinventors" has been elaborated in a long time lapse, with the help and the original contributions of a wealth of excellent scholars, social activists, professional journalists, amateur writers, established artists and homeless poets, in a collective writing experiment. If you wish to contact us, visit us at: http://urbanreinventors.net/contact.php If you wish to know more about "The Urban Reinventors", subscribe or support this project, feel free to visit: http://urbanreinventors.net/donate.php Best regards, Alessandro Busa DFG Doctoral Fellow Center for Metropolitan Studies TU Berlin, TEL 3-0 Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7 10587 Berlin, Germany phone: +49 176 61 29 79 07 alessandro.busa at metropolitanstudies.de info at urbanreinventors.net www.urbanreinventors.net