1st Edition

Locating Right to the City in the Global South

Edited By Tony Samara, Shenjing He, Guo Chen Copyright 2013
    328 Pages 39 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    328 Pages 39 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Despite the fact that virtually all urban growth is occurring, and will continue to occur, in the cities of the Global South, the conceptual tools used to study cities are distilled disproportionately from research on the highly developed cities of the Global North. With urban inequality widely recognized as central to many of the most pressing challenges facing the world, there is a need for a deeper understanding of cities of the South on their own terms.

    Locating Right to the City in the Global South marks an innovative and far reaching effort to document and make sense of urban transformations across a range of cities, as well as the conflicts and struggles for social justice these are generating. The volume contains empirically rich, theoretically informed case studies focused on the social, spatial, and political dimensions of urban inequality in the Global South. Drawing from scholars with extensive fieldwork experience, this volume covers sixteen cities in fourteen countries across a belt stretching from Latin America, to Africa and the Middle East, and into Asia. Central to what binds these cities are deeply rooted, complex, and dynamic processes of social and spatial division that are being actively reproduced. These cities are not so much fracturing as they are being divided by governance practices informed by local histories and political contestation, and refracted through or infused by market based approaches to urban development. Through a close examination of these practices and resistance to them, this volume provides perspectives on neoliberalism and right to the city that advance our understanding of urbanism in the Global South.

    In mapping the relationships between space, politics and populations, the volume draws attention to variations shaped by local circumstances, while simultaneously elaborating a distinctive transnational Southern urbanism. It provides indepth research on a range of practical and policy oriented issues, from housing and slum redevelopment to building democratic cities that include participation by lower income and other marginal groups. It will be of interest to students and practitioners alike studying Urban Studies, Globalization, and Development.

    Introduction: Locating Right to the City in the Global South Tony Roshan Samara, Shenjing He and Guo Chen  Part I: A City Divided Against Itself  1. Towards the Right to the City in Informal Settlements Mona Fawaz  2. Cities Without Slums in Morocco? New Modalities of Urban Government and the Bidonville as a Neoliberal Assemblage Koenraad Bogaert  3. The Divisive Nature of Neoliberal Urban Renewal in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso Wouter Bervoets and Maarten Loopmans  4. Greening Dispossession: Environmental Governance and Socio-spatial Transformation in Yixing, China Jia Ching Chen  Part II: Governance and Cosmopolitanism: Escaping the South  5. Urban Governance, Mega-Projects, and Scalar Transformations in China and India Xuefei Ren and Liza Weinstein  6. Bourgeois Environmentalism, Leftist Development, and Neoliberal Urbanism in the City of Joy Pablo S. Bose  7. Public Space Versus Tableau: The Right To The City Paradox In Neoliberal Bogotá, Colombia Rachel Berney  8. Resisting the Neoliberalization of Space in Mexico City David Walker  9. City Ghosts: The Haunted Struggles for Downtown Durban and Berlin Neukölln Christine Hentschel  Part III: Governance and Counter-governance: The Shape of Urban Conflict and the Urban Future  10. Insurgency and Institutionalized Social Participation in Local-level Urban Planning: The Case of PAC Comuna, Santiago de Chile, 2003-2005 Ernesto López-Morales  11. Distinguishing the Right Kind of City: Contentious Urban Middle Classes in Argentina, Brazil, and Turkey Ryan Centner  12. Bloggers’s Right to Cairo’s Real and Virtual Spaces of Protest Wael Salah Fahmi  Afterword: Re-engaging with Transnational Urbanism Martin J. Murray

    Biography

    Tony Roshan Samara is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, George Mason University, USA.

    Shenjing He is Professor and Assistant Dean at the School of Geography and Planning, interdisciplinary Urban Research Center at Sun Yat-Sen University, China.

    Guo Chen is Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Urban Studies at Michigan State University, USA.

    "Locating Right to the City in the Global South, brings together empirically and theoretically rich case studies that contribute to the development of conceptual tools for understanding contemporary urban inequality." — Andy Clarno, University of Illinois at Chicago, City & Community

    "While there is a rising appeal for understanding the contexts of global urbanism, this book represents a major concrete step towards this aim, by taking a widely popularized core concept of urban theory and paying extra attention to distinct locations in the Global South." — Fulong Wu, University College London, UK in Urban Studies