The Politics of Property in Planning: Hezbollah's Reconstruction of Haret Hreik (Beirut,Lebanon) as Case Study

This research looks at post‐2006‐war reconstruction of the southern suburbs of Beirut under the auspices of Hezbollah (the Islamic resistance movement in Lebanon). The project was widely acclaimed as an alternative to current neoliberal planning practices in the Middle East and beyond. Based on a critical reading of the conception of property issues in this planning project, the article argues that this reconstruction presents a new geometry or alternative to the mainstream configuration of neoliberal urbanism, rather than a departure from its precepts. The reason for this is that the adopted language of property corresponds closely with the conception of property advocated by neoliberal planning, one that enshrines private, individual ownership as sacred and desirable and that works to strengthen its model in the city. I further argue that the ‘neoliberal planning regime’ within which Hezbollah's urban intervention occurs is not accidental; rather, it is necessary for the party's control of this space's future and for consolidating its territory in the city. It is hence expected that Hezbollah's planning in the city will produce the same decried effects as neoliberal planning elsewhere in the city rather than usher an innovative, progressive model of planning.     

Whose Right to Jerusalem?

Jerusalem is a city mired in spatial conflict. Its contested spaces represent deep conflicts among groups that vary by national identity, religion, religiosity and gender. The omnipresent nature of these conflicts provides an opportunity to look at Henri Lefebvre's concept of the right to the city (RTC). The RTC has been adopted and celebrated as a political tool for positive change, enabling communities to take control of space. Based on extensive fieldwork and in‐depth interviews, this article explores the complexity of the RTC principles and examines three urban battlefields in Jerusalem — Bar‐Ilan Street, the Kotel and the Orient House. The RTC is a powerful idea, providing the opportunity to examine people's everyday activities within the context of how space can be used to support their lives. Yet Jerusalem's myriad divisions produce claims by different groups to different parts of the city. In Jerusalem, the RTC is not a clear vision but a kaleidoscope of rights that produces a fragmented landscape within a religious and ethno‐national context governed by the nation state — Israel. The growth of cultural and ethnic diversity in urban areas may limit the possibility for a unified RTC to emerge in an urban sea of demands framed by difference. Space‐based cultural conflict exemplifies urban divisions and exacerbates claims to ‘my Jerusalem’, not ‘our Jerusalem’. Identity‐based claims to the RTC appear to work against, not for, a universalistic RTC.     

Urban Vigilantism: A Study of Anti‐Terror Law,Politics and Policing in Istanbul

Focusing on the case of young socialist vigilantes who were arrested and imprisoned as ‘terrorists’ in 2007, this article illustrates how vigilantism in working‐class neighbourhoods of Istanbul with a high Alevi population evolved from an unarmed, public and participatory form of vigilantism to an armed one, and discusses the role of the anti‐terror law in this transformation. The article illustrates the ways in which the anti‐terror law, by narrowing the space for civil politics, paved the way for youth engagement in violent forms of extra‐legal security practice in spaces occupied by the historically stigmatized working‐class Alevi population. The article also argues that, over the last decade, Turkey’s ruling elites have used the anti‐terror law to wage a war against the oppositional politics conducted by the country’s historically stigmatized populations (such as Kurds and Alevis). Not only has this war put politically active and respected local figures from these communities behind bars, it also ‘polices’ (à la Rancière) these communities. Accordingly, the article illustrates how the law that considers attempts at self‐governance as a threat to state sovereignty effectively intervenes in local politics and space, leading to the reconfiguration of political space at the local level.     

Commentary on Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City by Warren Magnusson

Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City is Warren Magnusson's most recent book. It will find a permanent place as a key contribution in the annals of urban studies, urban politics, political and state theory and international relations, marking a turning point in the way scholars, activists and policymakers see the world. In particular, Magnusson fundamentally questions how we understand and analyse our world from the perspective of the state (the illusion of the sovereign), suggesting we shift instead to the perspective of the city (with its multiplicity of authorities). ‘How welcome should this be?’ is the question that I put to three Canadian colleagues — Roger Keil, Andrew Sancton and Zack Taylor — at the 2011 meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Waterloo, ON, Canada. Their answers follow a summary of this rather concise and very readable book that Serena Kataoka and I prepared to introduce those commentaries.     

Governance and the Policy Process In Contemporary Europe

Diverse recent literatures on ‘the hollow state’. ‘deliberative democracy’ and ‘governing without government’ are largely concerned with the workings of politics and public management under socio-political conditions of indeterminancy and fragmentation that are variously described as characteristics of high or late modernity (Giddens 1991) or, as some prefer to put it, of post-modernity (Fox and Miller 1995). This article, which reflects the author's interest in interdisciplinary forms of post-postmodern analysis that draw upon political science and sociology and social theory as well as administrative studies, examines a number of conceptual and empirical topics that, it is argued, are relevant to exploration of the thesis that postnational social milieux are steered via new forms of societal-cum-political governance that have largely replaced governmental institutions and processes of the kind associated with classical notions of the state, public administration and liberal democracy.     

Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities

In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.     

Consumption and the City,Modern and Postmodern

Whilst consumption has frequently been associated with the postmodern city, insufficient regard has been paid to the systemic logic of consumption. It is argued here that consumption takes on an increasingly significant role in this respect. Specifically, we have been witness to a profound social transformation whereby the active repression once centred on the city as a locus of production has given way to a new mode of social integration, which accords to the logic of seduction. By tracing the development of the modern city in terms of the imposition of the law and its transgression — figured in terms of cognitive space and the ‘spectral presence’ of the stranger — the significance of the postmodern is theorized in terms of the systemic appropriation of an aesthetic space initially traced out by the flâneur. The ludic existence of the flâneur has thus been translated into the general condition of a society oriented around consumption. This condition implies a new form of cybernetic control, governed by the aleatory play of the code, rather than the direct surveillance characteristic of the modern city. As a consequence, urban space has itself undergone a transition, which we might begin to address in terms of a ‘posturban’ hyperspace.     

Contradictions urbaines et guerre civile

The slum area of Quarantina formed part of Beirut near the coast. Migrants of disparate origins—nomads (Bedouins from Saudi Arabia), Kurds from Turkey, Palestinian refugees, Syrian labourers and uprooted Lebanese peasants from the south-settled on land belonging to state officials and to religious institutions, and gradually built up a network of marginal economic and social life. They soon became considered as dangerous social outcasts—as the pariahs of Christian eastern Beirut and of the Lebanese social hierarchy. Although providing the surrounding industries with a consistent labour force, their activities were feared because of subversive political implications. Communication between Palestinian camps and slum areas of Beirut led to raised political consciousness among the Quarantina inhabitants: the ideology of the Palestinian revolution became the symbol of a new struggle. The interlinking of both causes, that of the Lebanese masses and that of the Palestinian refugees, precipitated the repressive action taken by the conservative forces. Quarantina contained an insignificant proportion of Palestinians; nevertheless its inhabitants could possibly organize into embryonic revolutionary movements and give birth to urban guerilla warfare. The slum also obstructed the expansion of the Christian quarter of Achrafieh and impeded the partition projects of the right-wing Phalangist party. The repressive action meted out to the urban population of Quarantina took a particularly violent form. The men were massacred, shot down before their families. The dwellings were plundered. The site, cleared of its ‘gangrene’, is now ready for the construction of a new tourist complex.     

Seeing Like a Theorist

Warren Magnusson sees a problem endemic to political thought and practice: we see the world in ways that presume and reaffirm the necessity of a sovereign territorial state, on pain of violent disorder in its absence. The solution is to ‘see like a city’, shaking off the dualism of sovereignty versus anarchy and finding a richer space of political possibilities. I admire and applaud Magnusson's critical efforts to challenge dominant categories and illuminate possibilities, but these aims rest uneasily with his polemical contrast between sovereignty and cities.     

State Theory from the Street Altar: The Muscles,the Saint and the Amparo

This article identifies traces of the state in three urban neighborhoods of Mexico City. Instead of asking what is the state, where is it located or what does it do, the question posed here is: what are the effects of state practices at the street level? By ethnographically and visually describing how protection is performed, the article argues that the state is not only ‘somewhere’ in specific functions, actors or institutions; it also manifests materialized effects produced by a web of conflict‐ridden relations. Discussion about the state in the global South generally revolves around its failures and informality. The proposal here is that, by analyzing the state from the standpoint of urban space, the focus is on how protection is performed and by means of which operations, relations, objects and actors—not whether the state works or not, or whether actors are formal or informal. Based on ongoing ethnographic work and a collaboration with two visual artists in Mexico City, the article analyzes three protective processes: the ‘muscles’ (involving actors including police officers, gang leaders, fathers and husbands), the ‘saint’ (involving caring for representations of various saints and participation in other clientelistic chains of fidelity) and the ‘amparo’ (a form of application of the rule of law in a personalized manner for the redress of interpersonal conflicts). These are three sets of practices that have been embedded in Mexico's history of state formation since the days of colonization.     

LGBT Neighbourhoods and ‘New Mobilities’: Towards Understanding Transformations in Sexual and Gendered Urban Landscapes

In this article we apply insights from ‘new mobilities’ approaches to understand the shifting sexual and gendered landscapes of major cities in the global North. The empirical context is the purported ‘demise’ of traditional gay villages in Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia, and the emergence of ‘LGBT neighbourhoods’ elsewhere in the inner city. We reinterpret the historical geography of twentieth century LGBT lives and the associated ‘rise and fall’ of gay enclaves through the lens of the ‘politics of mobility’. In this reading, it is apparent that multifaceted movements — migration, physical and social mobility, and motility — underpin the formation of gay enclaves and recent transformations in sexual and gendered landscapes. After the second world war, LGBT communities in the global North were embedded in specific historical geographies of mobility and we trace these in the Canadian and Australian contexts. The ‘great gay migration’ from the 1960s to the 1980s has been joined by new LGBT constellations of mobility in the 2000s, and these have imprinted upon the sexual and gendered landscapes of Toronto and Sydney.     

Seeing Like a City‐State: Behavioural Planning and Governance in Egypt's First Affordable Gated Community

Haram City is Egypt's first ‘affordable’ gated community, hosting both aspirational middle‐class homeowners and resettled poor urban residents. Amidst legal ambiguity during Egypt's 2011–2013 revolutionary period, the management team of this public–private partnership was tasked with creating a ‘fully self‐sufficient’ city. While Haram City is the product of top‐down ‘seeing like a state’ master planning (Scott, 1998 ), the day‐to‐day resolution of class vulnerabilities and disputes over ‘reasonableness’ in city life requires forms of interpersonal adjudication otherwise addressed through local urban law—‘seeing like a city’ (Valverde, 2011 ). This article uses ethnography of management techniques aiming to ‘upgrade behaviour’ to theorize that a private entity, in a strategically indeterminate relationship with the state, reconciles future‐oriented planning and storied prejudices by merging two visions of governance. Imitating the repertoire of urban law, managers plan the very realm of bottom‐up decision making. They then adapt top‐down urban planning to bottom‐up dispute resolution to spatially consolidate the ‘consensual’ outcomes of a rigged game. Evoking both colonial Egyptian vagrancy laws and neoliberal paternalist welfare, ‘seeing like a city‐state’ governance amounts to authoritarianism that conceals itself within custom, appearing neutral so as to plan streets, codes and inner lives at once.     

Tent City: Patterns of Informality and the Partitioning of Sacramento

Unsanctioned tent cities are increasing in number in cities throughout the western United States. Scholars explain the phenomenon as homeless people asserting their ‘right to the city’ or as ‘managed marginality’. These explanations capture much of the socio-political relationship between local government and homeless populations, but do not explain the long-term persistence of tent cities and the fluctuating nature of their visibility. A spatial history of informal encampments in Sacramento at three key moments—the founding of the city, the Great Depression and the Great Recession—reveals a long-term ebb and flow of tent cities occupying close-to-the-center, urban vacancies. Urban vacancies arise from the partitioning of the city into specific purposes, places and people, a taken-for-granted perception of how cities should be. The visibility of tent cities disrupts this aesthetic notion of stability and growth as homeless people use the tent to protest their isolation and exclusion.     

Planning Gentrification and the ‘Absent’ State in Athens

In times of austerity, gentrification is promoted as a prime investment opportunity capable of reviving stagnating local economies. In Athens, pro‐gentrification policies (using English slogans like ‘Re‐launch Athens’ and ‘Re‐activate Athens’) have become increasingly defined in their targeting of specific areas. Moreover, planning in Greece is characterized by spontaneity, fragmentation and tolerance of speculation, specifically favouring the gentrification process. In many cases, the state's ‘absence’ after promulgation of regeneration projects acts as a clear strategy for inner‐city gentrification. After discussing the emergent relations between state policies on urban intervention and gentrification in the post‐crash era, this article will focus on the peculiarities of the Greek planning system and how these have led to the gentrification of an inner‐city area called Metaxourgio.     

Fetishizing the modern city: the phantasmagoria of urban technological networks

Technological networks (water, gas, electricity, information etc.) are constitutive parts of the urban. They are the mediators through which the perpetual process of transformation of nature into city takes place. In this article, we take water and water networks as an emblematic example to excavate the shifting meanings of urban technological networks during modernity. Indeed, as water becomes commodified and fetishized, nature itself becomes re‐invented in its urban form (aesthetic, moral, cultural codings of hygiene, purity, cleanliness etc.) and severed from the grey, ‘muddy’, kaleidoscopic meanings and uses of water as a mere use‐value. Burying the flow of water via subterranean and often distant pinpointed technological mediations (dams, purification plants, pumping stations) facilitates and contributes to masking the social relations through which the metabolic urbanization of water takes place. The veiled subterranean networking of water facilitates the severing of the intimate bond between use value, exchange value and social power. We argue that during early modernity, technologies themselves became enshrined as the sources of all the wonders of the city’s water. Dams, water towers, sewage systems and the like were celebrated as glorious icons, carefully designed, ornamented and prominently located in the city, celebrating the modern promise of progress. During twentieth‐century high‐modernity, the symbolic and material shrines of progress started to lose their mobilizing powers and began to disappear from the cityscape. Water towers, dams and plants became mere engineering constructs, often abandoned and dilapidated, while the water flows disappeared underground and in‐house. They also disappeared from the urban imagination. Urban networks became ‘urban fetishes’ during early modernity, ‘compulsively’ admired and marvelled at, materially and culturally supporting and enacting an ideology of progress. The subsequent failure of this ‘ideology of progress’ is paralleled by their underground disappearance during high‐modernity, while the abandonment of their ‘urban dowry’ announced a recasting of modernity in new ways. We conclude that the dystopian underbelly of the city that at times springs up in the form of accumulated waste, dirty water, pollution, or social disintegration, produces a sharp contrast when set against the increasingly managed clarity of the urban environment. These contradictions are becoming difficult to be contained or displaced. Les grands réseaux techniques (eau, gaz, electricité, information etc.) font partie intégrale de l’urbain. Ce sont les médiateurs du processus continuel de la transformation de la nature urbaine. Dans cet article, nous prenons comme exemple emblématique l’eau et les réseaux d’eau afin d’explorer les significations changeantes des réseaux de technologie urbaine durant la période moderne. Alors que l’eau devient une marchandise fétichisée, la nature elle‐même est reinventée dans ses formes urbaines (esthétique, morale, codes culturels d’hygiène, purité, propreté etc.) et coupée des significations grises, ‘ternes’, kaléidoscopiques, et des utilisations de l’eau comme une simple valeur utilitaire. L’ensevelissement de l’eau par les médiations technologiques spécifiques souterraines et souvent distantes (barrages, usines de purification, stations de pompage) aide et contribue à masquer les relations sociales à travers lesquelles prend place l’urbanisation métabolique de l’eau. Les réseaux d’eau souterrains voilés facilitent la coupure du lien intime entre la valeur utilitaire, la valeur d’échange, et le pouvoir social. Nous soutenons que durant la première période de modernité les technologies elles‐mêmes devinrent inscrites comme sources de toutes les merveilles de l’eau de la ville. Les barrages, les réserves d’eau, les égoûts et d’autres éléments similaires étaient célébrés comme des icônes glorieux, conçus avec soin, ornés, et situés de façon prominente dans la ville, célébrant les promesses modernes de progrès. Durant la période de haute‐modernité du vingtième siècle, les lieux de pélerinage matériels et symboliques célébrant le progrès ont commencéà perdre leur pouvoir de mobilisation et à dispara? tre du paysage de la ville. Les réservoirs d’eau, les barrages et les installations industrielles devinrent simplement des constructions d’ingénieurs, souvent abandonnées et délabrées, alors que les courants d’eau disparurent sous terre et à l’intérieur. Tous s’effacèrent aussi de l’imagination urbaine. Les réseaux urbains devinrent des ‘fétiches urbains’ durant la première période de modernité, causant un émerveillement et une admiration ‘obligatoires’, culturellement et matériellement représentant et soutenant une idéologie de progrès. L’échec ultérieur de cette ‘idéologie de progrès’ a son parallèle dans leur disparition sous terre durant la période de haute modernité, alors que l’abandon de leur ‘dot urbaine’ annonçait un remaniement de la modernité dans des directions nouvelles. Nous concluons que le bas‐ventre dystopique de la ville qui surgit de temps à autre sous la forme d’accumulation de déchets, d’eau sale, de pollution, ou de désintégration sociale, produit un contraste marqué avec la clarté de plus en plus organisée de l’environnement urbain. Ces contradictions deviennent difficiles à contenir ou à supplanter.     

Creative Mediations of the City: Contemporary Public Art as Compass of Metro Manila's Urban Conditions

In this article, public art is proposed as creative agency mobilized to form urban imaginaries. These alternate visions are largely facilitated by artists and art collectives using urban communities as performative grounds. These projects promote a view of art as an effective channel for ‘recentering’ — the identification of a multitude of centers that endlessly fracture and shift, very much resembling the nature of cities themselves. An alternate vision of the city through cartography informed by contrast, temporality and ephemerality is proposed alongside dominant representations of the city. Works by artists Alma Quinto, Mark Salvatus and Wire Tuazon are representative examples of such strategies. Diverse in tactics and platforms, defined by site‐specific mediations, the projects facilitated by these artists reveal the uneven conditions that beset Metro Manila and its outlying areas. Quinto's altered Urban Plan/Duyan is the result of her engagement with women in an informal settler community in San Andres Bukid, Manila, while Salvatus's web‐based Neo‐Urban Planner is an astute observation of the obsessive yet futile ordering of people and space by the state. Tuazon's Amphibian installation is a commentary on the encroachment of multinational interests in local communities. These interventions are foils to state‐ and private‐led urban development schemes. Their strength lies in their direct engagement with the sphere of public dialogue and self‐determination. These artistic practices and strategies are shaped by community interaction, revealing that meanings residing in urban forms are relentlessly negotiated by the numerous actors that inhabit the city.     

How Portugal Became an ‘Unplanned Country’: A Critique of Scholarship on Portuguese Urban Development and Planning

In this article, I seek to expose how scholars came to construct the idea that Portugal is an ‘unplanned country’— a product of disorderly growth. While urban scholarship has now challenged the hegemonic view of spatial order as a proxy for modernity, development and progress, Portuguese scholarship has remained largely impervious to these debates as it consistently offers a view of the Portuguese city as ‘not quite yet’ modern and civilized. Based on a review of accounts by key authors recognized for their prominence and contribution to contemporary Portuguese scholarship, I argue that rather than being a constitutive fact of or truth about the Portuguese urban condition, the ‘unplanned country’ operates as an intellectual and discursive construct that organizes the experience of modernity, urban growth and social transformation throughout the twentieth century. The article discusses how Portuguese scholarship constructs the ‘unplanned country’ idea through insufficient engagement with relevant research and debates in urban studies and is based on several empirical shortcomings. The article concludes by offering a preliminary research agenda to address these imbalances. I suggest that such efforts could enhance the relevance and contribution of the Portuguese urban experience to recent calls for epistemological renewal in urban theory production. Cet article explique comment les chercheurs ont bâti l'idée que le Portugal est un ‘pays sans planification’, le résultat d'une croissance confuse. La recherche urbaine a désormais bousculé la vision hégémonique de l'ordre spatial comme indicateur de modernité, de développement et de progrès, mais la plupart des auteurs portugais sont restés hermétiques à ces débats, puisqu'ils dépeignent systématiquement la ville portugaise comme ‘pas encore tout à fait’ moderne et civilisée. En analysant les travaux d'auteurs déterminants, reconnus pour leur importance et leur contribution à la recherche portugaise contemporaine, cette étude préconise que, loin d'être un fait constitutif ou une vérité pour la situation urbaine portugaise, le ‘pays sans planification’ agit comme une notion intellectuelle et rhétorique qui structure l'expérience de modernité, de croissance et de transformation sociale au cours du XX^e siècle. L'idée de ‘pays sans planification’ est née d'un manque d'implication dans la recherche et dans les débats pertinents en sciences urbaines, ainsi que de plusieurs erreurs empiriques à la base de certaines démonstrations. La conclusion propose un programme d'études préliminaires pour remédier à ces anomalies. Ces travaux pourraient renforcer l'intérêt et l'apport de l'expérience urbaine portugaise dans le cadre de récents appels à un renouveau épistémologique dans la production de théories urbaines.     

Becoming a Slum: From Municipal Colony to Illegal Settlement in Liberalization‐Era Mumbai

This article argues that the transformation of a Mumbai neighborhood from municipal housing colony into illegal slum has been facilitated by the politically mediated deterioration and criminalization of its water infrastructure in the context of liberalization‐era policy shifts. These policy shifts hinge upon a conceptual binary that posits the unplanned, illegal and informal ‘slum’ as the self‐evident conceptual counterpoint to a planned, formal, ‘world‐class’ city. The story of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi problematizes this assumption by evidencing the deeply political and highly unstable nature of this binary — and thus insists upon an account of the shifting political and economic stakes imbued in these categories. The case of Shivajinagar‐Bainganwadi reveals that the neighborhood's emergence as an illegal slum has been mediated by the liberalization‐era politics that have come to infuse the neighborhood's water pipes — dynamics that have produced the illegality/informality of the neighborhood as a discursive effect.     

从公共标识牌中的错误翻译谈公共管理中存在的问题——以榆林市为例

公共标识牌作为城市生活的"指引者",特别是对外来人的指引作用之大。同时也是城市素质的窗口,在体现一个城市文明的同时为社会服务。榆林市的公共标识牌的中英文翻译带来了不可忽视的不良后果。所以通过"借鉴——引进——创造"的公共标识牌翻译模式对于改进榆林市的公共标识牌中英文翻译的是必不可少的。     

The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political

Historically, the urban was the condition of possibility for the political, but the symbiosis of the two has been concealed by the rise of the state and the concomitant development of the social sciences. The effort to recover the connection by denoting a separate domain of ‘urban politics’ is self‐defeating, because it re‐instantiates an ontology of the political that consigns the urban to the domain of ‘low’ politics. The dominant ontology suggests that ‘high’ politics — the most serious politics or politics proper — is always in the domain of states and empires, and that everything else is subject to it. This view is constantly reaffirmed by the political theory that underpins the state system and the modern social sciences. Nevertheless, a different ontology of the political is always already implicit in the concept of the city, understood as a local phenomenon and a global way of life. To see the political through the city is to notice how proximate diversity stimulates self‐organization and self‐government, generates politics in and between authorities in different registers, and defers the sovereignty claims it produces. On this view, the urban is neither high nor low, but is instead the very form of the political, encompassing states and empires as much as anything else.