Right to the City, Right to Rights, and Insurgent Urban Citizenship

Streaming video requires RealPlayer to view.The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.James Holston is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focuses on cities and citizenship; political theory, democracy, and law; planning and architecture; urban ethnography; Brazil, and the Americas. Holston is the author of Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil, (Princeton University Press, 2008), The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (University of Chicago Press, 1989), and editor of Cities and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1999). His current research examines the worldwide insurgence of democratic urban citizenships, their entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and their contradiction in violence and misrule of law under political democracy. He is also studying the new institutions and practices of participatory urban planning in Brazil and preparing a book that documents, through photographs and interviews, the autoconstruction of houses and neighborhoods in the urban peripheries of São Paulo.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photos, working pape

Rebeliões metropolitanas e planejamento insurgente no século XXI | Insurgent cities and urban citizenship in the 21st Century

A insurgência inaugurou o século XXI com uma série de rebeliões metropolitanas. Buenos Aires, Atenas, Reykjavik, Tunes, Cairo, New York, Madri, Phnom Penh, Istambul, São Paulo e inúmeras outras cidades ao redor do mundo rebelaram-se de formas diferentes, rejeitando as políticas existentes e assaltando o Estado com alternativas. Muitas dessas alternativas surgiram da própria produção da vida cotidiana urbana dos manifestantes e foram prefiguradas em seus próprios meios de assembleias e deliberação. Este artigo examina, por um lado, se essas rebeliões metropolitanas constituem um novo tipo de cidadania urbana insurgente que realizaria e demandaria novas formas de democracia direta, e, por outro, como elas podem inspirar um planejamento urbano insurgente. Esse exame é feito por meio da análise da interseção entre os processos de “fazer a cidade acontecer” (city-making), “ocupar espaços urbanos” (city-occupying) e “reivindicar direitos” (rights-claiming). Ademais, é-se considerada a transformação da esfera política e do planejamento por elas produzida

A linguagem das ruas: o discurso político em dois Modelos de urbanismo

Num dos capítulos de O Corcunda de Nôtre Dame, intitulado “Isto Matará Aquilo” , Victor Hugo diz que ‘isto’, a imprensa, mata ‘aquilo’, a arquitetura. Talvez com uma visão dirigida a seus próprios interesses, ele propõe a idéia de que a escrita em papel substituirá a escrita em pedra como o registro predominante da civilização. Argumenta que o papel, que é menos duradouro, paradoxalmente, terá vida mais longa que a pedra, porque a forma de sua produção mecânica assegura a sua reprodução infinita. Até a invenção da imprensa, a arquitetura fornecia uma forma singularmente monumental de transmitir tradições culturais e realizações históricas. Basta pensar na catedral medieval como um ícone da Bíblia, verdadeira enciclopédia em pedra de seu capítulo e versos, para nos darmos conta de que os edifícios podem ser “lidos como livros”. Desta maneira, a catedral servia como uma espécie de catecismo onipresente para as massas analfabetas, como instrução por representação dos ensinamentos da Igreja. De modo semelhante, arcos triunfais, prédios cívicos e, para os leitores mais perspicazes, até mesmo as habitações cotidianas, aparecem como formas pedagógicas. As convenções dessa instrução representativa tinham profundas raízes na tradição cláss’ca, como elementos formadores tanto do legado oficial, como do conhecimento popular. Embora o público pré- -modemo fosse incapaz de ler livros, ele era bem mais instruído na leitura da arquitetura

Engineering Software Assemblies for Participatory Democracy: The Participatory Budgeting Use Case

International audienceThe worldwide use of the Internet and social networking has transformed the constraints of time and space in human interaction: we can now be heard at a massive scale unprecedented in human history. As a result, ICT may enable citizens to undertake both government through direct assembly and collective action at a scale and an efficacy previously considered impossible. Our research concerns this opportunity to leverage a new sort of political life. We focus specifically on how software systems may enable partic-ipatory democracy, that is, the participation of citizens in democratic assembly, action, and governance. As an initial step, we have developed a service-oriented software platform, called AppCivist-PB, focused on a specific, yet representative use case of participatory democracy, namely, Participa-tory Budgeting (PB for short). PB is an allocation process used in many cities around the world through which they commit a percentage of their annual budget (often 5%) to implement citizen-proposed projects. In PB, residents of a city (or a higher level territorial organization), brainstorm, develop, and select project proposals that local government institutions are required to fund and implement. The key contribution of AppCivist-PB is to enable the cohesive creation of both citizen and software assemblies that together implement a given participatory budgeting campaign

Leveraging the Service Bus Paradigm for Computer-mediated Social Communication Interoperability

International audienceComputer-mediated communication can be defined as any form of human communication achieved through computer technology. From its beginnings, it has been shaping the way humans interact with each other, and it has influenced many areas of society. There exist a plethora of communication services enabling computer-mediated social communication (e.g., Skype, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Slack, etc.). Based on personal preferences, users may prefer a communication service rather than another. As a result, users sharing same interests may not be able to interact since they are using incompatible technologies. To tackle this interoperability barrier, we propose the Social Communication Bus, a middleware solution targeted to enable the interaction between heterogeneous communication services. More precisely, the contribution of this paper is threefold: (i), we propose a survey of the various forms of computer-mediated social communication, and we make an analogy with the computing communication paradigms; (ii), we revisit the eXtensible Service Bus (XSB) that supports interoperability across computing interaction paradigms to provide a solution for computer-mediated social communication interoperability; and (iii), we present Social-MQ, an implementation of the Social Communication Bus that has been integrated into the AppCivist platform for participatory democracy

Expanding the Design Space of ICT for Participatory Budgeting

International audienceThis paper analyzes existing practices and supporting technologies for Participatory Budgeting (PB), with a special focus on US-related initiatives, as a mean to understand the current and future design space of ICT for participatory democracy. We suggest new design opportunities for ICT to facilitate citizen collaboration in the PB process, and by extension, to reflect on how these technologies could better foster deliberative decision-making at a scale that is both small and large

Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the 'possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it' (Jayal, 2013, 71). Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the ‘margins’ of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable ‘hierarchies’ and ‘degrees’ of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection