Irregular Connections: Everyday Energy Politics in Catalonia

While questions of energy and energy transition have become hotly contested, the abstract and fetishized conception of energy that dominates contemporary political debates occludes connections to everyday life. By tracing the activities of Catalan activist network Alianza contra la Pobreza Energética (Alliance against Energy Poverty or APE), this article seeks to excavate the political possibilities opened up by a more everyday energy politics. The article addresses the practice of illegal utilities connections among the urban poor of Catalonia, arguing that this constitutes a form of makeshift urbanism resonant of that conceptualized from within ‘Southern’ cities. These ‘irregular connections’ to urban infrastructure networks are then distinguished from the ‘irregular connections’ formed between people within the collectivized social infrastructure of APE. APE, I argue, translate ‘energy’ as social reproduction, framing their struggle for the right to energy around the right to sustain life with dignity. This, I suggest, is the starting point for a feminist praxis capable of creating new and unruly subjectivities, reconfiguring reproductive relations in more caring and collective directions, and ultimately challenging the violence of the commodity form.     

The Tunisian Revolution: Neoliberalism,Urban Contentious Politics and the Right to the City

This article engages in the debate on urban contentious politics by returning to the Tunisian revolution. In the article, I chart movements provoked by neoliberal restructurings, and show how these ultimately came together to form a mass movement demanding radical political change. I first describe the socio‐spatial roots of the Tunisian revolution to understand its dynamics. Based on the chronology of the unfolding events I sketch the classes, social groups and movements that coalesced against authoritarian rule in early 2011. Although the Tunisian revolution started in rural environments, I focus more specifically on the role of urban social movements in the uprising to link questions of urbanism to what were clearly national revolts. Secondly, I outline the scope of neoliberal reforms in Tunisia by looking at the impact of these reforms to chart the resulting emergence of contentious politics in response to the increasing violence that characterized all levels of economic life during this period. I also consider the resulting uneven development and the changing relations between the state and the different social classes. This enables me to reflect on the politicization of the city with the aim of opening up new opportunities for engaging with a more comparative and cosmopolitan theory about cities around the world.     

From Occupying Plazas to Recuperating Housing: Insurgent Practices in Spain

Urban insurgencies have spread across the globe like wildfire in recent years. The indignado plaza occupations in Spain are often cited as beacons of popular and widespread dissent. This article argues that urban insurgencies with the highest emancipatory potential in Spain today are found in the practices of the housing rights movement—the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, or Platform for Mortgage‐affected People)—that mainly entail blocking evictions and occupying empty bank‐owned housing. I elaborate on the notion of insurgent practice by examining how insurgency has been considered in relationship to citizenship, planning and public space. I propose insurgent practice as a way of articulating how people attempt to enact equality in everyday life and engage explicitly with socio‐spatial and political questions related to an emancipatory democratic politics. Based on a detailed analysis of two of the PAH's insurgent housing practices, I posit that recuperating empty bank‐owned housing with and for evicted families has the highest and most significant emancipatory potential, as it disrupts the core dynamics of urban capital accumulation and enacts equality for evicted households by directly contesting financial rent‐extraction mechanisms at multiple levels. In closing, I outline some conclusions that emerge from the Spanish housing case and from the concept of insurgent practice and urban politicizing practice in general.     

The Nomad,The Squatter and the State: Roma Racialization and Spatial Politics in Italy

What happens when Roma people move from the space of an informal settlement to that of a squat of a housing rights movement? In this article, which is based on the analysis of housing squats involving Roma people in the Italian capital city of Rome, I argue that this move is more than a housing solution: it is a new form of contentious and aesthetic politics. In Rome approximately 7,000 Roma face extreme housing deprivation and segregation, in both official and makeshift camps. While different associations have for many years advocated Roma housing inclusion through a minority and human‐rights framework, in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 economic crisis an increasing number of Roma have moved to squats set up by social movement activists. The aim of the article is threefold. First, it illustrates the collective action repertoire of Roma‐squatting. Secondly, it considers its aesthetic politics, which through spatial dislocation unsettles the racializing discourse endorsed by policymakers that underpins the segregation of the Roma. Finally, this article unpacks the process of politicization of Roma‐squatting and discusses the urban frames and material resources that consolidate this transformation through a comparison of four housing squats that Roma people joined.     

Squatting and urban renewal: the interaction of squatter movements and strategies of urban restructuring in Berlin

Squatting as a housing strategy and as a tool of urban social movements accompanies the development of capitalist cities worldwide. We argue that the dynamics of squatter movements are directly connected to strategies of urban renewal in that movement conjunctures occur when urban regimes are in crisis. An analysis of the history of Berlin squatter movements, their political context and their effects on urban policies since the 1970s, clearly shows how massive mobilizations at the beginning of the 1980s and in the early 1990s developed in a context of transition in regimes of urban renewal. The crisis of Fordist city planning at the end of the 1970s provoked a movement of "rehab squatting" ('Instandbesetzung'), which contributed to the institutionalization of "cautious urban renewal" ('behutsame Stadterneuerung') in an important way. The second rupture in Berlin's urban renewal became apparent in 1989 and 1990, when the necessity of restoring whole inner-city districts constituted a new, budget-straining challenge for urban policymaking. Whilst in the 1980s the squatter movement became a central condition for and a political factor of the transition to "cautious urban renewal," in the 1990s large-scale squatting — mainly in the eastern parts of the city — is better understood as an alien element in times of neoliberal urban restructuring.     

Beyond a Livable and Green Neighborhood: Asserting Control,Sovereignty and Transgression in the Casc Antic of Barcelona

During the past 15 years, the Casc Antic, a traditionally low‐income and immigrant neighborhood in Barcelona, has been the site of community‐based mobilization to revitalize abandoned areas and improve local environmental conditions. The organization of residents and their supporters is situated within a broader context of urban political and socioeconomic change — the transformation of the urban economy into a decentralized, global and technology‐ and service‐focused system, accompanied by rising socioeconomic inequality and displacement in inner‐city areas. To date, few studies in the urban environmental arena have been placed within processes of urban change and offer specificity on the purposes, intents and goals that poor and minority residents develop as they understand, resist and challenge their marginality. Why do residents of marginalized neighborhoods and their supporters organize to proactively improve livability and environmental quality? To what extent do the environmental struggles of marginalized communities serve as means to advance more complex political agendas in the city? Through the examination of neighborhood organization for livability in the Casc Antic, I analyze how activists use their environmental endeavors as tools to address stigmas attached to their place, control the land and its boundaries, and build a more transgressive form of democracy.     

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.     

Times and Spaces of Homeless Regulation in Japan, 1950s–2000s: Historical and Contemporary Analysis

Since the late 1970s, Atlantic Fordism has seen rising homelessness and ghettoization as the ‘new urban poverty’ (NUP) (Mingione, 1996). Despite some similarities, the NUP in Japan has a unique rhythm and spatial pattern. In order to explore Japanese NUP, this article develops an interpretation of Japan's strategies to regulate poverty and homelessness during the last 50 years, paying particular attention to the spatial consequences of such strategies within major Japanese cities. First, I theorize long‐term economic growth patterns as a basic parameter of poverty and homelessness regulation and present a periodization of Japanese trends since the 1950s. Second, I analyze poverty in Japan and the transformation of national strategies of spatial regulation in the 1990s, when homelessness grew. Third, I examine the multi‐scalar processes through which new regulatory spaces of homelessness were produced in the 1990s and 2000s, when failures of post‐bubble crisis management ballooned in Japan. I argue that, through a dialectic between national/local rule‐setting and homelessness, the Japanese state fragmented the dominant scale of poverty regulation, rescaled the site of homeless regulation and contained homelessness in relatively autonomized cities. I conclude that, from the 1990s until the late 2000s, Japan's homelessness and its contradictions tended to be transferred to the spheres of urban workfare and urban policing, which I call new regulatory spaces of homelessness, that lie around the fringes of national social rights.     

北京市物业管理现存问题及解决途径

从产权理论的角度界定了物业管理权是物业产权不可分割的组成部分,列举了物业产权与管理权相背离所产生的诸多经济和社会问题,指出了科学构建北京市物业管理实施细则的重要性和迫切性;对正在制定中的北京市物业管理实施细则的具体内容提出了相应建议.     

产权配置、地方政府干预与上市公司资产剥离——基于同属管辖交易视角的研究

本文以2004-2005年沪深A股上市公司资产剥离事件为研究对象,基于同属管辖交易的视角,研究地方政府如何借助产权的配置(不同的产权属性与层级),影响上市公司资产剥离的交易行为以及这种交易行为的财富效应。研究发现,财政分权导致的地方政府干预是形成上市公司资产剥离同属管辖交易行为的一个主要因素,不同产权下资产剥离的同属管辖交易行为呈现显著差异,相对于中央政府控制和非政府控制的上市公司而言,地方政府控制的上市公司更倾向于进行资产剥离同属管辖交易;市场给予上市公司资产剥离的整体反应是消极的,且同属交易与非同属交易公司在资产剥离交易宣告期间的财富效应不存在显著差异。     

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.     

Don't ask me where I'm from: thoughts of immigrants to Catalonia on social integration and cultural capital

Once you get here, you realize that thinking Foucault was writing for you was terribly na?ve, since in reality I did not exist as a subject for anyone like Foucault, or if I did it was only as an object of study’, recalls one of the protagonists in this essay, a collage of fragments of interviews with foreign immigrants from impoverished countries who have settled in Barcelona and other Catalan towns in recent years. Widespread prejudice in the host society dictates that these people are generalized as being on a lower cultural level, anonymous members of the growing mass of immigrants prepared to work at any price. The prejudice seems to be confirmed by the fact that the great majority of them do low-skilled or unskilled work in sectors such as the building trade, hotels and restaurants and domestic service. The reality, however, is very different. The average level of formal education of these immigrants is similar to that of the host population. It is the precariousness of their legal status or the often insurmountable barriers preventing recognition of their academic and/or professional qualifications, or simply cultural prejudice, that condemn them to accept jobs well below their personal potential. Thus, the host society wastes social and cultural capital of the first order, and lays foundations for a permanent division between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This essay offers a modest but revealing sample of the quality and diversity of the ideas and viewpoints of the immigrants themselves, an asset we continue to at best underestimate or more often ignore altogether.