The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age

[Excerpt] Urban public spaces, from the streets and squares of Buenos Aires to Zuccotti Park in New York City, have become the emblematic sites of contentious politics in the twenty-first century. As the contributors to The City Is the Factory argue, this resurgent politics of the square is itself part of a broader shift in the primary locations and targets of popular protest from the workplace to the city. This shift is due to an array of intersecting developments: the concentration of people, profit, and social inequality in growing urban areas; the attacks on and precarity faced by unions and workers\u27 movements; and the sense of possibility and actual leverage afforded by local politics and the tactical use of urban space. Thus, the city —from the town square to the banlieu—is becoming like the factory of old: a site of production and profit-making as well as new forms of solidarity, resistance, and social reimagining.We see examples of the city as factory in new place-based political alliances, as workers and the unemployed find common cause with right to the city struggles. Demands for jobs with justice are linked with demands for the urban commons—from affordable housing to a healthy environment, from immigrant rights to urban citizenship and the right to streets free from both violence and racially biased policing. The case studies and essays in The City Is the Factory provide descriptions and analysis of the form, substance, limits, and possibilities of these timely struggles

Crises of capitalism and deficits of democracy: lessons from Vancouver’s Olympic Village development

AbstractMega-events like the Olympic Games remain widely recognized as key opportunities for cities to accelerate large-scale urban development projects through the construction of extensive Olympic Villages complexes. However, in the current global financial climate, these debt-financed urban renewal strategies are fraught with risk for both public and private partners. In the first part of this paper, I explore how the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, inherited the entire responsibility for the construction of the 2010 Winter Olympic Village following the 2008 global economic crisis and a number of undisclosed local political commitments. In what follows, I raise some political questions about the democratic limitations of the entrepreneurial urban policy - making context and the disproportionate transfer of financial risk associated with these developments to the public sector. Finally, I draw parallels between the experiences of Vancouver and the recent government bailout of the Olympic Village development in East London

Radical, Reformist, and Garden-Variety Neoliberal: Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture’s Contradictions

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the rolling back of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and fieldwork in Oakland, CA, I explain how urban agriculture arises from a protective counter-movement, while at the same time entrenching the neoliberal organisation of contemporary urban political economies through its entanglement with multiple processes of neoliberalisation. By focusing on one function or the other, however, rather than understanding such contradictions as internal and inherent, we risk undermining urban agriculture\u27s transformative potential. Coming to terms with its internal contradictions can help activists, policy-makers and practitioners better position urban agriculture within coordinated efforts for structural change, one of many means to an end rather than an end unto itself

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities is a global research network funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774) and housed at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. This open-access volume, co-edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, brings together movement-based and university-based scholars to build a shared field of inquiry focused on housing justice. Based on a convening that took place in Los Angeles in January 2019, at the LA Community Action Network and at the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays and interventions situate housing justice in the long struggle for freedom on stolen land. Embedded in the stark inequalities of Los Angeles, our work is necessarily global, connecting the city’s Skid Row to the indebted and evicted in Spain and Greece, to black women’s resistance in Brazil, to the rights asserted by squatters in India and South Africa. Learning from radical social movements, we argue that housing justice also requires a commitment to research justice. With this in mind, our effort to build a field of inquiry is also necessarily an endeavor to build epistemologies and methodologies that are accountable to communities that are on the frontlines of banishment and displacement

A New Examination of Urban Intervention: Social Acceptance of Urban Development

Largely inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre, our approach is based on the dialectics between the conditions of production of urban space and its appropriation by the people to whom it is destined. Therefore, the entire operation of transformation of space, has various effects on the social organisation; effects that cannot be accounted for without basing the analysis on the mechanisms of acceptance or of use of space. In this process, professionals think they have designed a space for certain uses but in reality something different happens. With every new urban organisation, the inhabitants change their way of behaving in urban space and their practices may or may not correspond with the space that was designed. Therefore, they recompose the space according to their representations. The demonstration of this is based primarily on the city of Saint-Etienne, located in the west of France. The project concerned a traditional working-class district and considers the future of its social morphology

Getting ‘Out There’ and Impacting: The Problem of Housing and Urban Research and its Anarchist Alternative

The Institute for Housing and Urban Research Housing and Urban Researchers (HURs) are under intensifying pressures to impact on society. Although this orientation towards research impact sits well with “policy oriented” HURs, it has sat less well with some “critical” HURs. It would nevertheless be wrong to paint critical HURs as unconcerned with research impact. Debates about research impact led to the emergence of “critical” Housing and Urban Research (HUR) in the first place. Critical HURs simply seek to ensure that their research impacts in different ways. In fact, this is the problem. Policy and critically oriented HURs both presume social science to be an appropriate vehicle for impacting social change. Yet, such presumptions were questioned in my 'Fallacy paper', which was philosophically hostile to the idea of social scientific HUR which it sought to dethrone. However, it stopped short of outlining an alternative to it. This paper addresses this lacuna by suggesting an anarchist approach to impacting social change that is equally suspicious of social scientific HUR but, unlike the 'Fallacy paper', conciliatory towards it