Emancipatory Urbanization

Emancipatory Urbanization
Author: Dan Narita
Publisher: Cuvillier Verlag
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3736965176

Peripheral mountain territories are often a critical backbone resource for metropolitan areas. Redefined relationships can catalyze new synergies for urbanization and alternative livelihood strategies. The overdevelopment of the South-East coastal cities in Greater China has caused environmental degradation, unbalanced economic growth, and acute social disparities between the developed Pearl River Delta and the remote mountain territories in Guangdong Province. In this book, the Dongjiang River Basin in Guangdong is taken as a laboratory for alternative and bottom up urbanization scenarios. Opportunities are presented for micro-economic scenarios, livelihood diversification and the development of rural-urban habitats located in the hinterland of the coastal zone. The rediscovery of ancient mountain territories as a productive resource is emphasized for a new phase of urbanization. Overshadowed by the dominance of global city networks – liveable cities responsive to climate change, conscious of the scarcity of resources, and aware of widening social inequalities, may not be found in densely populated urban areas. The underestimated potential of mountain territories with dispersed settlement structures are proposed as an alternative people-oriented urbanity.

The Emancipatory City?

The Emancipatory City?
Author: Loretta Lees
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2004-08-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1446237915

′The Emancipatory City is a wonderful addition to a growing literature on the public culture of the city. In these spaces, tolerance and intolerance, difference and indifference, transgressions, resistances, and playful spontaneity erupt to give texture to urban life. The book broadens our gaze and deepens our understanding of how cities enable people to express themselves and be free′ - Robert A Beauregard, New School University, New York Who are cities for? What kinds of societies might they most democratically embody? And, how can cities be emancipatory sites? The ambivalent status of urban space in terms of emancipation, democratisation, justice and citizenship is central to recent work in urban geography, `new′ cultural geography, critical geography and postmodern planning, as well as literature on urban social justice, public space and the politics of identity. Seeking alternative and progressive visions of the emancipatory city through an exploration of the tensions and possibilities between the freedoms and constraints offered by the city, the authors of The Emancipatory City? build on this wealth of current perspectives to present an critical analysis of urban experience.

Public Space Unbound

Public Space Unbound
Author: Sabine Knierbein
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2018-03-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1315449188

Through an exploration of emancipation in recent processes of capitalist urbanization, this book argues the political is enacted through the everyday practices of publics producing space. This suggests democracy is a spatial practice rather than an abstract professional field organized by institutions, politicians and movements. Public Space Unbound brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars to examine spaces, conditions and circumstances in which emancipatory practices impact the everyday life of citizens. We ask: How do emancipatory practices relate with public space under ‘post-political conditions’? In a time when democracy, solidarity and utopias are in crisis, we argue that productive emancipatory claims already exist in the lived space of everyday life rather than in the expectation of urban revolution and future progress.

The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanization

The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanization
Author: Roberto Rocco
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2019-01-02
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317292324

The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanization investigates the mutual relationship between the struggle for political inclusion and processes of informal urbanization in different socio-political and cultural settings. It seeks a middle ground between two opposing perspectives on the political meaning of urban informality. The first, the ‘emancipatory perspective’, frames urban informality as a practice that fosters autonomy, entrepreneurship and social mobility. The other perspective, more critical, sees informality predominantly as a result of political exclusion, inequality, and poverty. Do we see urban informality as a fertile breeding ground for bottom-up democracy and more political participation? Or is urban informality indeed merely the result of a democratic deficit caused by governing autocratic elites and ineffective bureaucracies? This book displays a wide variety of political practices and narratives around these positions based on narratives conceived upon specific case cities. It investigates how processes of urbanization are politicized in countries in the Global South and in transition economies. The handbook explores 24 cities in the Global South, as well as examples from Eastern Europe and East Asia, with contributions written by a global group of scholars familiar with the cases (often local scholars working in the cities analyzed) who offer unique insight on how informal urbanization can be interpreted in different contexts. These contributions engage the extreme urban environments under scrutiny which are likely to be the new laboratories of 21st-century democracy. It is vital reading for scholars, practitioners, and activists engaged in informal urbanization.

Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World

Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World
Author: Faranak Miraftab
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2015-04-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134521103

Cities continue to be key sites for the production and contestation of inequalities generated by an ongoing but troubled neoliberal project. Neoliberalism’s onslaught across the globe now shapes diverse inequalities -- poverty, segregation, racism, social exclusion, homelessness -- as city inhabitants feel the brunt of privatization, state re-organization, and punishing social policy. This book examines the relationship between persistent neoliberalism and the production and contestation of inequalities in cities across the world. Case studies of current city realities reveal a richly place-specific and generalizable neoliberal condition that further deepens the economic, social, and political relations that give rise to diverse inequalities. Diverse cases also show how people struggle against a neoliberal ethos and hence the open-endedness of futures in these cities.

Social Power and the Urbanization of Water

Social Power and the Urbanization of Water
Author: Erik Swyngedouw
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2004-03-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0191543799

Taking as his case-study the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador, where 600,000 people lack easy access to potable water, Erik Swyngedouw aims to reconstruct, theoretically and empirically, the political, social, and economic conduits through which water flows, and to identify how power relations infuse the metabolic transformation of water as it becomes urban. These flows of water which are simultaneously physical and social carry in their currents the embodiment of myriad social struggles and conflicts. The excavation of these flows narrates stories about the city's structure and development. Yet these flows also carry the potential for an improved, more just, and more equitable right to the city and its water. The flows of power that are captured by urban water circulation also suggest that the question of urban sustainability is not just about achieving sound ecological and environmental conditions, but first and foremost about a social struggle for access and control; a struggle not just for the right to water, but for the right to the city itself.

Emancipation

Emancipation
Author: Peter Kolchin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 665
Release: 2024-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300280467

In this sequel to his landmark study, historian Peter Kolchin compares the transition to freedom after American emancipation with the Russian Great Reforms The two largest transitions from unfree to free labor of the many that occurred in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth century took place in the United States and in Russia. Both occurred in the 1860s, and in both the former slaves and serfs strove to maximize their autonomy and freedom while the former masters worked to preserve as many of their prerogatives as possible. Both were partially—but only partially—successful. In this magisterial and long-awaited work, historian Peter Kolchin shows that a more radical break with the past was possible in the United States than in Russia, with the Southern freedpeople coming to enjoy republican citizenship, whereas Russian peasants remained subjects rather than citizens. Both countries saw conservative reactions triumph in the late nineteenth century. While this conservatism was common in most emancipations, it was especially strong in Russia and the American South, in part as a reaction against the major efforts to restructure the social order that went by the name of Reconstruction in the United States and the Great Reforms in Russia.

Critique of Urbanization

Critique of Urbanization
Author: Neil Brenner
Publisher: Birkhäuser
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3035607958

Urbanization is transforming the planet, within and beyond cities, at all spatial scales. In this book, Neil Brenner mobilizes the tools of critical urban theory to deconstruct some of the dominant urban discourses of our time, which naturalize, and thus depoliticize, the enclosures, exclusions, injustices and irrationalities of neoliberal urbanism. In so doing, Brenner advocates a constant reinvention of the framing categories, methods and assumptions of critical urban theory in relation to the rapidly mutating geographies of capitalist urbanization. Only a theory that is dynamic—which is constantly being transformed in relation to the restlessly evolving social worlds and territorial landscapes it aspires to grasp—can be a genuinely critical theory.

Handbook of Gentrification Studies

Handbook of Gentrification Studies
Author: Loretta Lees
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 515
Release: 2018-04-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1785361740

It is now over 50 years since the term ‘gentrification’ was first coined by the British urbanist Ruth Glass in 1964, in which time gentrification studies has become a subject in its own right. This Handbook, the first ever in gentrification studies, is a critical and authoritative assessment of the field. Although the Handbook does not seek to rehearse the classic literature on gentrification from the 1970s to the 1990s in detail, it is referred to in the new assessments of the field gathered in this volume. The original chapters offer an important dialogue between existing theory and new conceptualisations of gentrification for new times and new places, in many cases offering novel empirical evidence.

Unshackled: Education for Freedom, Student Achievement, and Personal Emancipation

Unshackled: Education for Freedom, Student Achievement, and Personal Emancipation
Author: Greg Wiggan
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2014-04-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9462095248

Harnessing conceptual inspiration through the work of Harriet Tubman and Queen Nanny the Maroon of Jamaica, this book explores the historical and contemporary role that education has – and can continually play as an instrument of personal and group liberation. The book discusses the early formations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the enslavement of native populations, and the subsequent development of the Underground Railroad and Maroon societies in the Caribbean and Americas as systems of liberation. It investigates the development and maintenance of racial, gendered and class stratifi cation, and provides a personal path to freedom as a context for a broader discussion on using education as a mechanism for dismantling the effects of colonization, miseducation, and social-psychological domination in schools and society. As a contemporary issue, it presents an in depth analysis of the Tucson Unifi ed School District in Arizona, and the controversy surrounding its ethnic studies program as an example of one of the contested sites of curriculum development and student liberation. Additionally, it discusses high performing charter schools as an alternative model of education, which may help to provide a systematic way of unshackling institutional barriers and oppression. Ultimately, this book acknowledges that today the road tofreedom is still one we must all travel as: miseducation, school failure, school dropout, unemployment/underemployment, poverty, neighborhood violence, incarceration, and a growing prison industrial complex are all reminders of the work that still must be accomplished. Like those who historically sacrifi ced their lives to gain freedom and an education, today, with the lingering effects of institutionalized systems of domination, education must continue to be an instrument of social mobility and liberation, if indeed, we are to make schools and society more humane and inclusive towards those who are still waiting to be unshackled. The book presents implications regarding the treaties on education for freedom as a school reform and public policy topic.