Staging Equality in Greek Squares: Hybrid Spaces of Political Subjectification

This article stages a dialogue between Jacques Rancière's political writings and the squares movement in Greece. From May to July 2011, a heterogeneous multitude of protesters reclaimed the squares of the country from their allocation in the police order and articulated a multiplicity of divergent discursive, organizational and spatial repertoires. This was an urban political event that reasserted the importance of urban spaces in expressing political dissent and experimented with new ways of being and acting in common. This article draws on Rancière's conceptualization of politics to read the squares movement as an opening of spaces of political subjectification. At the same time, through a close ethnography of the squares, it highlights the tensions that marked this process and focuses on two of these: the coexistence of nationalist and equalibertarian discursive and performative repertoires and the co‐implication of horizontal and vertical organizational practices. The article builds on this analysis to argue that the squares movement opened hybrid spaces of political subjectification and to explore some of the tensions in Rancière's political writings. This reading, in turn, informs a discussion of the legacies of the squares movement.     

Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘Political Capital’ in Post‐Apartheid Johannesburg

Apart from local monographs and normative texts on community participation, research on community leadership constitutes a blind spot in urban leadership, urban politics, social movements and urban studies. This article, based on case studies in post‐apartheid Johannesburg, contributes to theorizing community leadership, or informal local political leadership, by exploring Bourdieu's concepts of ‘political capital’ and ‘double dealings’. Considering community leaders as brokers between local residents and various institutions (in South Africa, the state and the party), we examine how leaders construct their political legitimacy, both towards ‘the bottom’ (building and maintaining their constituencies), and towards ‘the top’ (seeking and sustaining recognition from fractions of the party and the state). These legitimation processes are often in tension, pulling community leaders in contradictory directions, usefully understood under Bourdieu's concept of ‘double dealings’. Community leaders are required, more than formally elected political leaders, to constantly reassert their legitimacy in multiple local public arenas due to the informal nature of their mandate and the high level of political competition between them — with destructive consequences for local polity but also the potential for increased accountability to their followers. We finally reflect on the relevance of this theoretical framework, inspired by Bourdieu, beyond South African urban politics.     

Urbanization and the City Image in Lowry at Tate Britain: Towards a Critique of Cultural Cityism

This article explores cultural cityism at a time when a more expansive, ‘planetary’ urbanization is argued to have superseded ‘the city’ as the dominant urban form. It takes an essentially Lefebvrian problematic and works this through an examination of one aspect of contemporary metropolitan culture, the L.S. Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain, held in the summer of 2013. The article scrutinizes the juxtaposition of Lowry's images of the industrial city with the image of ‘global’, corporate London provided by Tate Britain itself. The exhibition is presented as evidence of Lefebvre's argument that although the urban core has imploded and exploded, through images the city ‘can perpetuate itself, survive its conditions’. Taking stock also of the preponderance of city images in culture more widely, it is argued such images make a fetish of the city, producing also an ‘urban pastoral’ that obscures the defining characteristics of urban life today. Finally, Benjamin's concept of the ‘dialectical image’ and Rancière's notion of the ‘sentence image’ are invoked to capture the flashing together of past and present city images and the opportunities for critical reflection this constellation presents.     

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.     

Reconstructing Urban Politics with a Bourdieusian Framework: The Case of Local Low‐Income Housing Policy

This research aimed to reconstruct a local urban politics and develop a meso–micro‐level model of urban politics through a case study, drawing on a Bourdieusian relational framework. To this end, it investigated the case of local low‐income housing policy — inclusionary zoning — in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. It historicized the path of the local low‐income policy issue through document analysis and qualitative media content analysis. Through multiple analyses, the study revealed that urban politics consists of complex interlinkages among stakeholders with shared values or interests from different social domains, created in order to dominate the policy issue. The study further investigated, on the basis of Bourdieu's concepts of capital and habitus, what elicited different political strategies from key community leaders.     

The Vortex of Rights: ‘Right to the City’ at a Crossroads

The right to the city concept has recently attracted a great deal of attention from radical theorists and grassroots activists of urban justice, who have embraced the notion as a means to analyze and challenge neoliberal urbanism. It has, moreover, drawn considerable attention from United Nations (UN) agencies, which have organized meetings and outlined policies to absorb the notion into their own political agendas. This wide‐ranging interest has created a conceptual vortex, pulling together discordant political projects behind the banner of the right to the city. This article analyzes such projects by reframing the right to the city concept to foreground its roots in Marxian labor theory of value. It argues that Lefebvre's formulation of the right to the city — based on the contradiction between use value and exchange value in capitalist urbanism — is invaluable for analyzing and delineating contradictory urban politics that are pulled into the vortex of the right to the city. Following Lefebvre's lead in such an analysis, however, reveals certain limitations of Lefebvre's own account. The article therefore concludes with a theoretical proposition that aims to open up space for further critical debate on the right to the city.     

Purity and Dirt as Social Constructions: Environmental Health in an Urban Shantytown of Lagos

The focus of this article, on everyday life management, emerges from a theoretical discussion about culturally specific attitudes to environmental health. Local perceptions of purity and dirt in an urban shantytown of Lagos, Nigeria, are examined through a case study of the Amukoko urban district. The qualitative data is from two fieldwork phases carried out in 1998 and 2001 in Lagos, consisting of eleven in‐depth interviews, eight focus group discussions and participatory observations among Yoruba women and men. In different communities, perceptions of purity and dirt are not self‐evident in terms of their meaning, but reflect the commonly shared values and moral codes of the community. Our principle interest is in the ways in which household water is construed as pure, particularly in the context of daily routines which reveal how the avoidance of pollution and the order of things are organized in the community. These constructions of purity comply with local perceptions of dirt, sanitation and environmental risks within the wider health care practices prevalent in the mixed and hybrid urban culture of metropolitan Lagos. Results imply that reformulated definitions of sanitation, for example between disposable and non‐disposable elements, are adopted via culturally specific perceptions of purity. Le thème de cet article, sur la gestion du quotidien, est né d’une discussion théorique sur les différentes attitudes culturelles face à l’hygiène de l’environnement. A travers une étude de cas sur le quartier d’Amukoko, sont étudiées les perceptions locales de pureté et saleté dans un bidonville de Lagos. Les données qualitatives émanent de deux phases de terrain réalisées dans la capitale nigériane en 1998 et 2001, comprenant onze entretiens approfondis, huit séances en groupe de discussion et des observations participatives d’hommes et de femmes Yoruba. Dans plusieurs communautés, pureté et saleté ne sont pas des perceptions évidentes en termes de signification, reflétant plutôt des valeurs partagées et des codes moraux communautaires. Le but est ici de comprendre comment l’eau du foyer est jugée pure, notamment dans le cadre des tâches quotidiennes révélatrices de la façon dont les précautions anti‐pollution et l’ordre des choses sont organisés dans la communauté. Ces interprétations de la pureté corroborent les perceptions locales de la saleté, de l’hygiène publique et des risques environnementaux au sein des pratiques sanitaires globales appliquées dans la culture urbaine mixte et hybride de la métropole de Lagos. D’après les résultats, sont adoptées des définitions de l’hygiène publique reformulées via des perceptions de la pureté spécifiques au plan culturel (éléments jetables et non‐jetables, par exemple).     

Secessionist Automobility: Racism,Anti‐Urbanism,and the Politics of Automobility in Atlanta,Georgia

Automobility — the centering of society and everyday life around automobiles and their spaces — is one of the most contentious aspects of contemporary urban growth debates at the local, national, and global scale. The politics of automobility is a spatial struggle over how the city should be organized and for whom. Yet there is little research on how this struggle is unfolding, and how that politics is shaping urban space. Part of this stems from the essentialization of automobility in policy and academic discourses on cities. Moving beyond essentialization, this article will explore how contentious political struggles reveal nuanced and diverse discourses and ideologies surrounding automobility and space. Focusing on what I call ‘secessionist automobility’— using an automobile as an instrument of spatial secession — I examine Atlanta, Georgia’s contentious automobility debate. Secessionist automobility is bound with the blunt politics of race‐based secession from urban space, but also more subtle forms of spatial secession rooted in anti‐urban ideologies. Implications for local, national, and global contestation of automobility will be provided.     

Breaking With Neoliberalization by Restricting The Housing Market: Novel Urban Policies and the Case of Hamburg

Hamburg currently exemplifies the departure from a straightforward neoliberal urban track. The city's neoliberal path only moved into full swing in the first decade of the 2000s. During this period, urban development was primarily subject to property market mechanisms—with projects being granted to the highest bidder—prompting effects such as rapidly rising rents, deepened social segregation and increased property‐led displacement. Since 2009, however, the city's entrepreneurial urban policy encountered comprehensive resistance movements that eventually led to the rediscovery of a political will for a new housing policy and interventionist policy instruments. This article focuses on the turning point of neoliberal policies and examines the wider scope of the contemporary urban agenda in Hamburg. We first conceptualize potential limits of the neoliberal city in general and then discuss three momentous local policy experiments—the International Building Exhibition, promising ‘improvement without displacement'; the rediscovery of housing regulations through the ‘Social Preservation Statute'; and the ‘Alliance for Housing', aiming to tackle the housing shortage. We discuss these approaches as funding, regulation, and actor‐based approaches to limiting the neoliberal city.     

Rescaling and reforming the state under NAFTA: implications for subnational authority

The new free trade agreements are rescaling governance in ways that have critical implications for subnational governments. The nation state is not simply being hollowed out; rather, a new governance nexus is forming — of nation states, multinational corporations and international agreements — which explicitly excludes subnational and local government voice. This article describes the new governance features of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and illustrates how they work out at the national, subnational and local scales using cases from the United States and Mexico. NAFTA provides the template for other free trade agreements including the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and a growing number of bilateral agreements. We show how NAFTA's governance structure is undermining subnational and local government authority in legislative and judicial arenas. Designed to advance privatization of public services, these agreements undermine the very ability of local governments to use markets for public goods by defining traditional state and local governance mechanisms as ‘non‐tariff barriers to trade’. Contradictions between private profit and public interest appear at the subnational level but their resolution is engaged at the global level between private investors and the nation state. Recognition of this rescaling requires attention to the reforming state and its implications for subnational authority and democratic representation and voice. Les nouveaux accords de libre‐échange ré‐échelonne la gouvernance selon des modalités aux implications critiques pour les gouvernements infra‐nationaux. L'État‐nation n'est pas seulement en train d'êvidé de son contenu, mais une nouvelle sphère de gouvernance se forme —à partir d'États‐nations, de groupes multinationaux et d'ententes internationales —, excluant explicitement toute voix de gouvernements locaux ou infra‐nationaux. Cet article décrit les nouvelles caractéristiques de la gouvernance selon l'Accord de Libre‐Échange Nord‐Américain (ALENA) et illustre, avec les cas des Etats‐Unis et du Mexique, comment elles opèrent aux échelons national, infra‐national et local. L'ALENA fournit un modèle pour d'autres accords de libre‐échange, comme la Zone de Libre‐Échange des Amériques (ZLEA) et un nombre croissant de conventions bilatérales. L'article montre comment la structure de gouvernance de l'ALENA mine l'autorité des gouvernements locaux et infra‐nationaux dans les domaines législatif et judiciaire. Destinés à favoriser la privatisation des services publics, ces accords sapent l'aptitude même des gouvernements locaux à recourir aux marchés pour les marchandises publiques, puisqu'ils définissent les mécanismes de gouvernance locale et étatique traditionnels comme des ‘barrières commerciales non‐douanières’. Les contradictions entre profit privé et intérêt public apparaissent au niveau infra‐national, mais leur résolution est entreprise au niveau mondial entre investisseurs privés et État‐nation. La reconnaissance de ce décalage d'échelon appelle à s'intéresser à l'État réformateur et aux implications pour toute autorité infra‐nationale et représentation ou voix démocratique.     

In search of local autonomy: the politics of big cities in Russia's transition

Despite a series of local government reforms in the 1990s, Russia's localities still lack serious autonomy. Only big cities maintain hopes for the emergence of local autonomy and local democracy. City politics has produced multiple conflicts between regional and local authorities; however, regional‐local relations merely reflect fundamental center‐periphery controversies on a smaller territorial scale. While big cities and their metropolitan areas serve as centers of political, economic and social modernization, other regional areas are lost in the peripheries. During Russia's transition period, some large cities acquired more political and economic autonomy from regions than others did. This article concentrates on the crucial role of (1) political opportunities inherited from the late‐Soviet period; and (2) strategic choices of political actors in the post‐Soviet period. The constellation of initial conditions and outcomes of political conflicts have contributed greatly to the diversity of city politics and urban autonomy in Russia's cities. Finally, the article considers the possible impact of local autonomy in Russia's cities on national social, economic and political developments. Malgré la série de réformes des années 1990 sur les gouvernements locaux en Russie, les localités manquent toujours d'une véritable autonomie. Seules, les grandes villes espèrent encore l'avènement d'une autonomie et d'une démocratie locales. La politique urbaine a généré nombre de conflits entre autorités locales et régionales; ceux‐ci ne sont pourtant que le reflet de la polémique fondamentale entre centre et périphérie à une échelle territoriale réduite. Alors que les grandes villes et leur métropole concentrent modernisations sociales, économiques et politiques, le reste de la région se fond dans les périphéries. Pendant la Russie de transition, quelques grandes villes ont acquis davantage d'autonomie économique et politique que d'autres par rapport à leur région. L'article détaille le rôle crucial qu'ont joué, d'une part, les ouvertures politiques héritées de la fin du régime précédent et, d'autre part, les choix stratégiques des acteurs politiques de l'ère post‐soviétique. La pléiade de conditions initiales et de séquelles de conflits politiques a largement contribuéà diversifier les politiques urbaines et le degré d'autonomie des villes russes. Enfin, l'article aborde l'impact éventuel d'une autonomie locale des villes sur les évolutions sociales, économiques et politiques de la Russie.     

The Local Polity as a Pathway for Public Power: Taming the Business Tiger during New York City’s Industrial Age

This article explores how bargaining advantages arising from the process of public‐private coordination of interests enable local government to contain business influence in urban development. A theoretical framework highlights how the scope of business demands and the impact of policy on political coalitions empower local officials as Brokers, Organizers, Entrepreneurs and Promoters. Each role affords different pathways for state power in competition with business. This is illustrated by surveying transportation politics during the industrial age in New York City. The city’s experience demonstrates alternative local public‐sector foundations for governmental power in growth politics. As such, it qualifies theories of business privilege in democratic politics and identifies how the dynamics of the public sector empower local officials. Cet article examine comment la négociation d’avantages, née de la coordination des intérêts publics‐privés, permet à un gouvernement local de contenir l’influence des entreprises sur l’urbanisme. Un cadre théorique explique comment l’ampleur des demandes des entreprises et l’impact de la politique sur les coalitions politiques autorisent les représentants locaux à agir en Médiateur, Organisateur, Entrepreneur et Promoteur, chacun de ces rôles permettant des chemins différents vers le pouvoir étatique, en concurrence avec le monde des affaires. L’illustration est donnée par une étude de la politique des transports de la ville de New York à l’ère industrielle. Elle démontre que le secteur public local dispose de diverses assises pour s’assurer un pouvoir gouvernemental dans une politique de croissance. A cet égard, il modère les théories sur le privilège des entreprises dans une politique démocratique et définit comment la dynamique du secteur public donne un pouvoir aux représentants locaux.     

Manchester First: From Municipal Socialism to the Entrepreneurial City

After coming to power in 1984, Manchester's ‘New Urban Left’ were for a while at the forefront of those radical councils seeking to use the local state both as the primary site of resistance to the Thatcher government, but also to develop a genuinely ‘prefigurative’ local socialism. However, in Manchester this experiment proved short‐lived. The subsequent entrepreneurial project has proved both durable and more distinctive. This article provides a detailed narrative account of the transition from ‘municipal socialism’ to the politics of ‘Manchester First’. Whilst summarizing the notable differences between the two projects, the paper argues that an interpretative emphasis on the apparent political U‐turn after 1987 obscures important continuities. With hindsight, the municipal Left can be credited with redefining the role of local authorities in relation to the economy, creating a space for proactive local and regional economic strategies. At the same time, the embrace of urban entrepreneurialism in the late 1980s did signal a marked shift in the perception of what was actually possible in terms of the parameters and constraints on local strategy Après son arrivée au pouvoir en 1984, la ‘nouvelle gauche urbaine’ de Manchester fut au premier rang des municipalités radicals qui voyaient dans l'administration locale à la fois le site privilégié d'une résistance au gouvernement Thatcher et le champ d'élaboration d'un socialisme local d'avant‐garde. Cependant, à Manchester, cette expà rience fut de courte durée. Le projet qui suivit, d'inspiration ‘entrepreneuriale’, se révéla à la fois durable et plus typique. Cet article raconte en détail la transition entre un ‘socialisme municipal’ et la politique de ‘Manchester First‘. Tout en résumant les différences notables entre les deux projets, il démontre qu'en s'attachant principalement au revirement politique apparent qui débuta en 1987, toute interprétation dissimulerait d'importantes continuités. Rétrospectivement, on peut reconnaître à la Gauche municipale une redéfinition du rôle des autorités locales à l'égard de l'économie, créant ainsi un espace pour des stratégies économiques locales et régionales d'anticipation. Parallèlement, l'adhésion è‘l'entrepreneurialisme urbain’vers la fin des années 1980 marqua un changement net dans la perception des possibilités réelles quant aux paramètres et aux contraintes pesant sur la stratégie locale.     

China's Urban Speed Machine: The Politics of Speed and Time in a Period of Rapid Urban Growth

China's urban transformation since 1978 is notable for both its scale and speed. Focusing on the dimension of speed, we propose the concept of the ‘urban speed machine’ to assess its role in shaping the politics and political economy of Chinese urbanization. We argue that in China speed must not be understood merely by means of measurable outcomes of change, but rather that speed is an essential and vital element embedded within China's specific processes and mechanisms driving urban growth. In this sense, speed is constantly at the forefront of local cadres’ considerations, since moving fast to achieve urban growth is an expression of political imperatives and pervasive city‐based accumulation strategies. The Chinese urban speed machine, as we conceive it, mainly involves three state‐dominated institutional arenas: the Communist party's personnel review system, the planning mechanism and local finance. We also discuss regional variability vis‐à‐vis the nature of speed in urbanization and in the differing responses to problems of fast‐city growth in recent years. This article's core contributions are to clarify the paramount importance of speed in the political economy of urban growth and illuminate a relational understanding of the politics of speed in China's urban change.     

Clichés of Urban Doom: The Dystopian Politics of Metaphors for the Unequal City – a View from Brussels

Drawing on evidence from the city of Brussels, it will be argued that much of today's urban governance discourses and practices contributes to anti‐urban ‘clichés of urban doom’ and betrays middle‐class, ethnocentric, sexist and racist prejudices about urban societies. Mainstream conceptions of urban problems and policies are modernist, white, patriarchal, heterosexual, nuclear family‐minded, middle‐class and suburban. Mainstream urban planning metaphors contribute to, instead of help to eliminate, sexist and racist urban politics. The uncritical use of concepts such as ‘polarization’, ‘exclusion’ or ‘poverty’ accords with the quest for urban purification by dominant groups in society, who seek to minimalize the urban experience of heterogeneity, otherness, diversity and urban unpredictability. The main contribution of this paper will be in trying to make clear how some key metaphors in contemporary urban planning disempower the already disempowered and in fact contribute to conservative urban politics, even when they are not intended to. Á partir du cas de Bruxelles, l'article démontre que les discours et pratiques actuels en matière de gouvernance urbaine participent, pour la plupart, aux clichés anti‐urbains sur ‘la ville en perdition’, tout en révélant des préjugés racistes, sexistes, ethnocentriques et bourgeois à l'égard des sociétés urbaines. Les principaux courants conceptuels des politiques et problèmes urbains sont de source moderniste, blanche, patriarcale, hétérosexuelle, favorable à la famille nucléaire, bourgeoise et suburbaine. Loin de s'en débarrasser, les grandes métaphores de l'urbanisme contribuent à une politique de la ville sexiste et raciste. L'utilisation sommaire de concepts tels que polarisation, exclusion ou pauvreté s'inscrit dans l'entreprise de purification urbaine des groupes sociétaux dominants qui cherchent à restreindre l'expérience d'hétérogénéité, de différence, de diversité et d'incertitude du cercle urbain. Cet article s'efforce surtout d'expliquer comment certaines images‐clés de l'urbanisme moderne privent de toute influence ceux qui n'en ont déjà aucune, et favorisent en fait une politique urbaine conservatrice, même involontairement.     

Drug Policy‐making in Metropolitan Areas: Urban Conflicts and Governance

This article retraces the emergence and shows the implications of current regulative frameworks in the field of urban drug policy. Framed by an analytical perspective that is based on the concept of urban governance, the article focuses on the processes by which cooperation and coordination between various conflicting governmental and non‐governmental agencies are achieved to address drug‐related problems in the major agglomerations of Switzerland, as well as in the metropolitan areas of Amsterdam, Glasgow and Frankfurt am Main. In the first part, it is shown that these problems are structured and debated along a conflict between advocates of the public‐health approach and those of the public‐order approach in the field of drug policy, as well as, to a lesser extent, a conflict between core cities and fringe municipalities about spillover effects related to the provision of services for users of illegal drugs. It is argued that this stems from a general tension between the goals of an attractiveness policy aimed at enhancing local economic development, and the necessities of social policy needed to address urban social problems. The second part examines the emergence of mechanisms of governance aimed at addressing drug‐related urban problems. It is argued that a ‘social public order’ regime emerged to regulate drug‐related urban problems, controlling urban practices of drug users by a combination of police and social work. In addition, it is held that in Switzerland, where social policy is traditionally confined to municipalities, these mechanisms of governance contributed to the emergence of metropolitan regions as new territorial actors in the field of drug policy. Cet article retrace l'apparition et les implications des cadres régulateurs actuels dans le domaine de la politique urbaine contre la drogue. Dans une perspective analytique fondée sur le concept de gouvernance urbaine, il s'attache aux processus qui permettent coopération et coordination entre divers organismes antagonistes, gouvernementaux ou non, pour traiter des problèmes liés à la drogue dans les principales agglomérations suisses, ainsi que dans les zones métropolitaines d'Amsterdam, Glasgow et Francfort‐sur‐le‐Main. La première partie démontre que ces questions sont organisées et discutées au sein d'une opposition entre partisans de l'approche de santé publique et ceux de l'ordre public en matière de politique de lutte contre la drogue, ainsi que, dans une moindre mesure, au sein d'un conflit entre les villes centrales et les municipalités satellites sur les retombées des services mis en place pour les consommateurs de drogues; cette situation résulte d'une tension globale entre les objectifs d'une politique d'attraction visant à favoriser le developpement économique local, et les nécessités d'une politique sociale obligée de traiter les problèmes urbains. La deuxième partie étudie l'émergence de mécanismes de gouvernance en réponse aux problèmes urbains liés à la drogue; ainsi, un régime ‘d'ordre public social’ a vu le jour, les pratiques urbaines des consommateurs de drogue étant sous le contrôle combiné de la police et des travailleurs sociaux. De plus, en Suisse où la politique sociale est par tradition du ressort des municipalités, certaines zones métropolitaines sont devenues, grâce à ces mécanismes de gouvernance, de nouveaux acteurs territoriaux de la politique publique de lutte contre la drogue.     

The Urban Question under Planetary Urbanization

In Le Droit à la Ville (1968), Lefebvre projects the urban trajectory of his day into the sci‐fi imaginary of Isaac Asimov's remarkable Foundation series, recognizing the germ of ‘Trantor’ in our midst, the planet of 40 billion inhabitants where urbanization has reached its absolute maximum; all 75 million square miles of Trantor's land surface are a single city. In La Révolution Urbaine (1970), Lefebvre had already begun hinting at a new reality, not only an urban society, but of planetary urbanization. Today, four decades on, Asimov's extraterrestrial universe seems closer to home than ever, and closer to Lefebvre's own terrestrial prognostications: planetary urbanization is creating a whole new spatial world (dis)order. But how shall we reclaim the shapeless, formless and boundless metropolis as a theoretical object and political object of the progressive struggle? If the arena of politics has no discernible form, what would be the form of these politics? What, exactly, are urban politics? This article tries to rethink theoretically the urban question and the question of urban politics in our era of planetary urbanization, working through the political role of the urban in the light of recent ‘Occupy’ mobilizations.     

San Francisco Through Bogotá’s Eyes: Leveraging Urban Policy Change through the Circulation of Media Objects

This article connects two emerging debates in urban studies—the need to pay more attention to the role of nonhuman actors in urban planning and the ways in which media objects affect urban politics and planning—by examining how a video on Bogotá’s car‐free Ciclovía program facilitated the adoption and implementation of a similar program in San Francisco. The analysis shows that media objects have the capacity to act as fulcrums in processes of leveraging urban policy change owing to their potential to alter urban governance structures. The article analyzes the digital storytelling and ‘eye‐opening’ practices through which the video enabled policy changes to be implemented in San Francisco, while also tracing the local and transnational actors, networks and agendas that were involved in the production and circulation of the video through digital archival research and multi‐sited fieldwork. In doing so, it shows the active role that media objects play in shaping urban policymaking processes and provides an example of a relational methodology for studying the digital materialities through which urban policy ideas increasingly circulate.     

City in Change: Globalization,Local Politics and Urban Movements in Contemporary Stockholm

In this article contemporary city change in Stockholm is first described against a background of theories on global cities. Stockholm cannot be seen as a global city, but displays many typical signs of the ongoing development in global cities. In the article this is shown by examining the situation in Stockholm regarding the economic structure, especially the expanding IT‐sector, social and economic polarization, local politics and the efforts to improve the infrastructure. In the change of the city social movements have been very active. Since the 1960s three different kinds of movements have existed, which are described and analysed against a background of theories on social movements. The first of these, the so‐called neighbourhood movement, emerged at the end of the 1960s and had all the typical signs of the so‐called ‘new’ social movements of that time. In the 1990s a new environmental movement acted mainly against proposed big traffic‐routes. This movement reflected in its structure some important features of today's society: fragmentation, individualization and globalization. At the end of the 1990s a third movement emerged as a reaction against the new competitive urban politics and the ongoing change of the city. Finally, the modifying impact that movements and local factors in Stockholm have had on globalization is discussed, as well as the difficulty in estimating the impact of movements on local politics. L'article décrit d'abord l'évolution urbaine contemporaine à Stockholm, en fonction des théories sur les villes planétaires. Même si la capitale suédoise n'est pas censée en faire partie, elle présente nombre des caractéristiques du développement actuel de ces grandes villes mondiales. L'article le montre en examinant sa situation en matière de structure économique (en particulier, l'expansion de son secteur technologique informatique), de polarisation sociale et économique, de politique locale et d'efforts d'amélioration des infrastructures. Les mouvements sociaux ont largement contribuéà l'évolution urbaine. Depuis 1960, ils sont intervenus sous trois formes, décrites et analysées par rapport aux théories des mouvements sociaux. La première, le ‘mouvement de quartier’, est apparue à la fin des années 1960 et présentait tous les signes typiques des dits ‘nouveaux’ mouvements sociaux de l'époque. Dans les années 1990, c'est un mouvement environnemental qui a agi surtout à l'encontre des grands itinéraires de circulation proposés, révélant par sa structure quelques caractéristiques importantes de la société actuelle: fragmentation, individualisation et mondialisation. A la fin des années 1990, un troisième mouvement est né en réaction à la nouvelle politique urbaine concurrentielle et à l'évolution vécue par la ville. Pour finir sont discutées l'incidence, sur la mondialisation, des mouvements et des facteurs locaux propres à Stockholm, ainsi que la difficulté d'évaluer l'impact des mouvements sur la politique locale.     

Spaces of Difference: Reflections from Toronto on Multiculturalism,Bourgeois Urbanism and the Possibility of Radical Urban Politics

What explains the lack of what Mike Davis famously called ‘magical urbanism’— referring to the increasingly influential and potentially radical role played by Latino immigrants in US politics — in such diverse Canadian cities as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver? This article points out how the Canadian legacy of multiculturalism constitutes one key cause of the failure of left urban politics in Canada to produce yet anything approaching the promise of ‘magical urbanism’ south of the border, especially by underlining how this bulwark of liberal ideology lends itself so readily to some resilient variations of bourgeois urbanism — including the commodification of difference, most recently under the auspices of Richard Florida's ‘creative class’. Against the pluralism of the food court and the shopping mall, both in its official multicultural and seemingly oppositional ‘hybrid’ forms, are radical approaches to difference in the city still possible — in Canada or elsewhere? The authors argue that the concepts of ‘maximal’ and ‘produced’ (vis‐à‐vis ‘minimal’ and ‘induced’) difference and the politics of ‘the right to the city’ elaborated by Henri Lefebvre — in conjunction with the reflections on subaltern experiences of difference by critics such as Himani Bannerji and Ambalavanar Sivanandan — indeed provide a starting point for radical urban politics. Comment expliquer, dans des villes canadiennes aussi différentes que Toronto, Montréal ou Vancouver, l’absence de ce que Mike Davis a appelé‘l’urbanisme magique’ en parlant du rôle de plus en plus influent, voire radical, des immigrants latinoaméricain dans la politique des États‐unis? L’héritage canadien du multiculturalisme explique d’abord pourquoi la politique urbaine de gauche n’a encore rien pu produire au Canada qui s’approcherait de la promesse d’un ‘urbanisme magique’ comme au sud de la frontière. L’article souligne notamment comment ce rempart d’idéologie libérale se prête si facilement à quelques variantes résistantes d’urbanisme bourgeois, dont la banalisation de la différence, tout récemment sous les auspices de la ‘classe créative’ de Richard Florida. Face au pluralisme de l’aire de restauration et du centre commercial, tous deux sous des formes ‘hybrides’ multiculturelles et aparemment contradictoires, des approches radicales de la différence dans la ville sont‐elles encore possibles, au Canada ou ailleurs? Les concepts de différence ‘maximale’ et ‘produite’ (par opposition à‘minimale’ et ‘induite’) et la politique du ‘droit à la ville’ conçue par Henri Lefebvre — alliés aux réflexions sur des expériences de différence subalternes émanant de critiques tels que Himani Bannerji et Ambalavanar Sivanandan — offrent indubitablement un point de départ pour une politique urbaine radicale.