[URBANTH-L] "The Right to the City - The Entitled and the Excluded" - The Urban Reinventors Special Issue 3: 09 is out now

[Alessandro Busà]

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 Busà*

*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
Gülümser*, *Tüzin 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 Universität, 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 à 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
Gülümser, Tüzin 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