Negotiating Urban Conflicts

Negotiating Urban Conflicts
Author: Helmuth Berking
Publisher:
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2006
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Cities have always been arenas of social and symbolic conflict. As places of encounter between different classes, ethnic groups, and lifestyles, cities play the role of powerful integrators; yet on the other hand urban contexts are the ideal setting for marginalization and violence. The struggle over control of urban spaces is an ambivalent mode of sociation: while producing themselves, groups produce exclusive spaces and then, in turn, use the boundaries they have created to define themselves. This volume presents major urban conflicts and analyzes modes of negotiation against the theoretical background of postcolonialism.

Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon

Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon
Author: Mohamad Hafeda
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2019-08-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1838608893

Drawing on innovative research into sectarian-political struggle in Beirut, Mohamad Hafeda shows how boundaries in a divided city are much more than simple physical divisions and reveals the ways in which city dwellers both experience them and subvert them in unexpected ways. Through research based on interviews, documentation of various media representations such as maps, visual imagery and gallery installations, Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon exposes the methods through which sectarian narratives are constructed - arguing for the need to question, deconstruct and transform these constructions. Hafeda expands upon the definition of bordering practice by considering artistic research as a critical spatial practice which allows self-reflection and transformation of border positions. This study offers an alternative view to the mainstream narratives of what is meant by a border, and provides insights, methods and lessons that may be applied to other cities around the world affected by conflict and political-sectarian segregation.

Unions and the City

Unions and the City
Author: Ian Thomas MacDonald
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-06-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501712683

Labor unions remain the largest membership-based organizations in major North American cities, even after years of decline. Labor continues to play a vital role in mobilizing urban residents, shaping urban conflict, and crafting the policies and regulations that are transforming our urban spaces. As unions become more involved in the daily life of the city, they find themselves confronting the familiar dilemma of how to fold union priorities into broader campaigns that address nonunion workers and the lives of union members beyond the workplace. If we are right to believe that the future of the labor movement is an urban one, union activists and staffers, urban policymakers, elected officials, and members of the public alike will require a fuller understanding of what impels unions to become involved in urban policy issues, what dilemmas structure the choices unions make, and what impact unions have on the lives of urban residents, beyond their members.Unions and the City serves as a road map toward both a stronger labor movement and a socially just urbanism. The book presents the findings of a collaborative project in which a team of labor researchers and labor geographers based in New York City and Toronto investigated how and why labor unions were becoming more involved in urban regulation and urban planning. The contributors assess the effectiveness of this involvement in terms of labor goals—such as protecting employment levels, retaining bargaining relationships with employers, and organizing new workforces—as well as broader social consequences of union strategies, such as expanding access to public services, improving employment equity, and making neighborhoods more affordable. Focusing on four key economic sectors (film, hospitality, green energy, and child care), this book reveals that unions can exert a surprising level of influence in various aspects of urban policymaking and that they can have a significant impact on how cities are changing and on the experiences of urban residents. Contributors Simon Black, Brock University; Maria Figueroa, Cornell University; Lois S. Gray, Cornell University; Ian Thomas MacDonald, University of Montreal; James Nugent, University of Toronto; Susanna F. Schaller, City College Center for Worker Education; Steven Tufts, York University; K. C. Wagner, Cornell University; Mildred Warner, Cornell University; Thorben Wieditz, York University

Locating Urban Conflicts

Locating Urban Conflicts
Author: W. Pullan
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2013-07-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137316888

Cities have emerged as the epicentres for many of today's ethno-national and religious conflicts. This book brings together key themes that dominate our current attention including emerging areas of contestation in rapidly changing and modernising cities and the effects of extreme and/or enduring conflicts upon ordinary civilian life.

Negotiating Urban Space

Negotiating Urban Space
Author: Si-yen Fei
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684174937

"Urbanization was central to development in late imperial China. Yet its impact is heatedly debated, although scholars agree that it triggered neither Weberian urban autonomy nor Habermasian civil society. This book argues that this conceptual impasse derives from the fact that the seemingly continuous urban expansion was in fact punctuated by a wide variety of “dynastic urbanisms.” Historians should, the author contends, view urbanization not as an automatic by-product of commercial forces but as a process shaped by institutional frameworks and cultural trends in each dynasty. This characteristic is particularly evident in the Ming. As the empire grew increasingly urbanized, the gap between the early Ming valorization of the rural and late Ming reality infringed upon the livelihood and identity of urban residents. This contradiction went almost unremarked in court forums and discussions among elites, leaving its resolution to local initiatives and negotiations. Using Nanjing—a metropolis along the Yangzi River and onetime capital of the Ming—as a central case, the author demonstrates that, prompted by this unique form of urban–rural contradiction, the actions and creations of urban residents transformed the city on multiple levels: as an urban community, as a metropolitan region, as an imagined space, and, finally, as a discursive subject."

Urban China

Urban China
Author: Xuefei Ren
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2013-04-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745665454

Currently there are more than 125 Chinese cities with a population exceeding one million. The unprecedented urban growth in China presents a crucial development for studies on globalization and urban transformation. This concise and engaging book examines the past trajectories, present conditions, and future prospects of Chinese urbanization, by investigating five key themes - governance, migration, landscape, inequality, and cultural economy. Based on a comprehensive evaluation of the literature and original research materials, Ren offers a critical account of the Chinese urban condition after the first decade of the twenty-first century. She argues that the urban-rural dichotomy that was artificially constructed under socialism is no longer a meaningful lens for analyses and that Chinese cities have become strategic sites for reassembling citizenship rights for both urban residents and rural migrants. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of urban and development studies with a focus on China, and all interested in understanding the relationship between state, capitalism, and urbanization in the global context.

Getting to Yes

Getting to Yes
Author: Roger Fisher
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 242
Release: 1991
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780395631249

Describes a method of negotiation that isolates problems, focuses on interests, creates new options, and uses objective criteria to help two parties reach an agreement.

Dealing with an Angry Public

Dealing with an Angry Public
Author: Lawrence Susskind
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1996-04-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0684823020

Some portion of the American public will react negatively to almost any new corporate initiative, as Disney discovered when it announced its plans to build an historical theme park in Virginia. Similarly, government efforts to change policy or shift budget priorities are invariably met with stiff resistance. In this enormously practical book, Lawrence Susskind and Patrick Field analyze scores of both private and public-sector cases, as well as crisis scenarios such as the Alaskan oil spill, the silicone breast implant controversy, and nuclear plant malfunction at Three Mile Island. They show how resistance to both public and private initiatives can be overcome by a mutual gains approach involving face-to-face negotiation, a strategy applied successfully by over fifteen hundred executives and officials who have attended Professor Susskind's MIT-Harvard "Angry Public" seminars.Susskind and Field outline the six key elements of this approach in order to help business and government leaders negotiate, rather than fight, with their critics. In the process, they show how to identify who the public is, whose concerns to address first, which people and organizations must be convinced of the legitimacy of action taken, and how to assess and respond to different types of anger effectively. Acknowledging the crucial role played by the media in shaping public perception and understanding, Susskind and Field suggest a way to develop media interaction which is consistent with the six mutual gains principles, and also discuss the type of leadership that corporate and government managers must provide in order to combine these ideas into a useful whole.We all need to be concerned about a society in which the public's concerns, fears and anger are not adequately addressed. When corporate and government agencies must spend crucial time and resources on rehashing and defending each decision they make, a frustrated and angry public contributes to the erosion of confidence in our basic institutions and undermines our competitiveness in the international marketplace. In this valuable book, Susskind and Field have produced a strong, clear framework which will help reduce these hidden costs for hundreds of executives, managers, elected and appointed officials, entrepreneurs, and the public relations, legal and other professionals who advise them.

Winning Together

Winning Together
Author: Bruno Verdini Trejo
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2017-12-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262534371

Strategies for transboundary natural resource management; winner of Harvard Law School's Raiffa Award for best research of the year in negotiation and conflict resolution. Transboundary natural resource negotiations, often conducted in an atmosphere of entrenched mistrust, confrontation, and deadlock, can go on for decades. In this book, Bruno Verdini outlines an approach by which government, private sector, and nongovernmental stakeholders can overcome grievances, break the status quo, trade across differences, and create mutual gains in high-stakes water, energy, and environmental negotiations. Verdini examines two landmark negotiations between the United States and Mexico. The two cases—one involving conflict over shared hydrocarbon reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico and the other involving disputes over the shared waters of the Colorado River—resulted in groundbreaking agreements in 2012, after decades of deadlock. Drawing on his extensive interviews with more than seventy high-ranking negotiators in the United States and Mexico—from presidents and ambassadors to general managers, technical experts, and nongovernmental advocates—Verdini offers detailed accounts from multiple points of view, on both sides of the border. He unpacks the negotiation, leadership, collaborative decision-making, and political communication strategies that made agreement possible. Building upon the theoretical and empirical findings, Verdini offers advice for practitioners on effective negotiation and dispute resolution strategies that avoid the presumption that there are not enough resources to go around, and that one side must win and the other must inevitably lose. This investigation is the winner of Harvard Law School's Howard Raiffa Award for best research of the year in negotiation, mediation, decision-making, and dispute resolution.

Urban Ethics as Research Agenda

Urban Ethics as Research Agenda
Author: Raúl Acosta
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2023-07-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000933865

This book provides an outline for a multidisciplinary research agenda into urban ethics and offers insights into the various ways urban ethics can be configured. It explores practices and discourses through which individuals, collectives and institutions determine which developments and projects may be favourable for dwellers and visitors traversing cities. Urban Ethics as Research Agenda widens the lens to include other actors apart from powerful individuals or institutions, paying special attention to activists or civil society organizations that express concerns about collective life. The chapters provide fresh perspectives addressing the various scales that converge in the urban. The uniqueness of each city is, thus, enriched with global patterns of the urban. Local sociocultural characteristics coexist with global flows of ideas, goods and people. The focus on urban ethics sheds light on emerging spaces of human development and the ways in which ethical narratives are used to mobilize and contest them in terms of the good life. This timely book analyses urban ethical negotiations from social and cultural studies, particularly drawing on anthropology, geography and history. This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in ethics and urban studies.