Environment & Urbanization

World leading environmental and urban studies journal

Locating the Right to the City in the Global South

Author(s): 
Tony Roshan Samara, Shenjing He, Guo Chen (editors)

Publisher: 
Routledge

Year: 
2013

This book draws attention to the increasing social polarization and spatial divisions of cities, the refashioning of certain urban areas, and the complicated politics from local to global level that arise from and feed into urban changes and transformations.

The introductory chapter outlines how the right to the city can provide a lens to address one key issue behind many arguments in urban development practice and theory, namely socio-spatial segregation as the defining feature of cities. Positioning the right to the city as related to some form of integration, the book uses it as a powerful tool to articulate and re-politicize a relational understanding of cities.

The chapters critically examine some of the complex tensions that are highly debated in urban studies such as e.g. core and periphery, cosmopolitan and transnational spaces and local manifestations, multiple and emerging identities and notions of belonging, the urban poor and emerging middle classes, forms of informality and formality, and public and private claims.

Geographically, the book covers 16 cities of the Global South and authors enter urban discussions from various levels. Entry points range from the neighbourhood (e.g. Sankara in Ougadougou) to the city (e.g. Beirut, Yixing, Kolkata, Bogota), municipality (Mexico City), nation (e.g. Morocco, China, and India), and even virtual space (e.g. related to protests in Cairo).

Readers will find themselves inspired by the wide range of topics that can be viewed from the right to the city perspective and the innovative and empirically-informed efforts to make sense of urban transformations. These include the struggles of urban dwellers surrounding housing and land use, megaprojects and large-scale private developments, environmentalism and green movements, the production of public space, modes of participation and governance, and collaborative forms of communication and contestation.

Thus, the book adds to efforts to provide a fuller picture of the complex urban life in large cities. Cities have to be understood in the light of globalization pressures, e.g. as exposed to global markets, but also from the perspective of public administration. Most importantly, the authors argue for a stronger integration of ordinary city life and local circumstances, with their distinctive and very context-specific logics, norms and values, in order to elaborate a Southern urbanism that goes beyond current conventional categories, labels and hierarchies.

Book note prepared by Julia Wesely

 

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