‘The City of Our Dream’: Owambe Urbanism and Low‐income Women's Resistance in Ibadan,Nigeria

Ibadan, Nigeria, has been an outlier in the ranking of world‐class cities. But in the past seven years, amidst the circulating Africa Rising narrative, Ibadan has embarked on what I call an Afropolitan Imagineering project of owambe urbanism. Afropolitan Imagineering refers to the production of new images/narratives of Africa and Africans as world‐class and cosmopolitan. Owambe urbanism is a spatio‐temporal neoliberal project concerning destination, arrival and place‐making, which promises a shared and happy future for all urban dwellers. I argue that this promise of happiness is challenged by low‐income women who are cognizant that a shared and happy future is impossible when little effort is made to address social inequality in the present. They thus refuse to be ‘good’ citizens and invoke an alternative urban futurity through their embodied and imagined resistance.     

Urban Citizenship and Right to the City: The Fragmentation of Claims

In this symposium, we explore how urban citizenship is about expressing, if not producing, difference, and how fragmentation of claims affects urban citizenship and right to the city movements with their universal, all‐inclusive ideals. Investigating social movements, political participation and conflicting diversities in public space in Tel Aviv and Berlin, we see a trend towards a diversification of interests, a weakening of movements, and even a competition over rights and resources rather than a development of mutual support and solidarities among various groups on the pathway to a livable city. This tension, we argue, deserves attention. Radical urban scholarship and politics need to better understand the historical and place‐specific contexts that structure the formation of citizenship claims and the courses that citizenship struggles take. Celebrations of urban citizenship as a more contextualized, community oriented, and bottom‐up framework (in comparison to national citizenship) should therefore be complemented by a careful investigation of their fragmented and fragmenting practices.     

A Socio‐Technical Perspective To The Right To The City: Regularizing Electricity Access in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas

This article takes the contemporary transformation in electricity access in Rio de Janeiro's favelas as a starting point for a broader review of the relationship between the right to the city in informal settlements and the neoliberalization of the electricity service (introduction of full cost recovery and ‘the user pays' principle). It examines the socio‐technical process through which contractual customer relationships have been established or restored through regularization of the electricity service in two favelas, namely, the installation of meters and networks. I suggest that applying a science and technology study perspective to the right to the city helps explore both the materiality and the spatial dimension of power and politics and, in so doing, provides an insight into some of the forms of mediation that help reshape recognition, urban practices and the favela dwellers' position within such an essential service. Our analysis shows how the means of recognizing these city dwellers ‘by the network' are materially and symbolically reshaped by commercial processes. The question then is whether this right to the city, which is being reshaped by commercial processes, will be the source of new inequalities or new politicizations.     

Institutionalization and Depoliticization of the Right to the City: Changing Scenarios for Radical Social Movements

The right to the city, a concept previously associated with radical social movements, has been accepted by several governments and has inspired new public policies. However, some authors see this process of institutionalization as involving a loss of a significant part of the radical origins of the concept. This article approaches this process and the new opportunities and limitations it may entail for social movement organizations with a more radical perspective on the right to the city. We explore the paradigmatic case of Brazil and the action of a particular organization, the Movimento dos Sem Teto da Bahia (MSTB, or Homeless Movement of Bahia) in the city of Salvador. We draw on the discussion of the politics of the right to the city and on an original combination of social movement theories and critical discourse analysis in order to analyse political‐institutional and discursive changes in urban reform in Brazil and Salvador. We then analyse how the MSTB moves within this new context, navigating its tensions and contradictions while advancing a radical project of transformation of urban reality within a reformist context. We also reflect on the relevance of Lefebvrian ideas for understanding and inspiring contemporary struggles for the right to the city.     

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.     

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.