Mexico is in the midst of a major urban transformation. State‐subsidized mortgage credit has facilitated the emergence of an affordable housing market and transformed the urban periphery into vast tracts of tiny concrete “social interest” housing developments. Easily available credit has allowed millions of Mexican workers to pursue the cultural and moral imperative to possess “patrimonio” by becoming

This article takes into consideration the importance of the concept of right to the city in Mexico City politics and raises three main questions: How have center‐left governments adapted the concept according to their own interests, in a neoliberalizing context marked by mandatory repositioning of planning and capital? How has the right to the city been taken up and modified by diverse social organizations

This article is concerned with the relationship between atmosphere and memory in the context of rapid urban development. I explore this relationship by looking to the northeastern fringes of central Stockholm, where a new neighborhood is being constructed in extension of industrial and residential areas long established as integral albeit peripheral parts of the city. Known by its official English‐language

Drawing on fieldwork in Bristol, UK, the article resituates the increasingly popular policy framing of a “learning city” within recent anthropological debates on urban political materiality. Using research findings from fieldwork conducted in sites of informal and non‐formal learning on the margins of a UNESCO Learning City, we argue for an ethnography that is attentive to the ways in which learning

Peters, Robbie. 2020. “Reflections on COVID‐19 in Sydney, Australia.” City & Society. In the above‐mentioned article, the reference list was mistakenly omitted. The reference list is provided below.

In this article I explore entanglements of Muslim sociality and informal livelihoods in Dar es Salaam. I propose that Muslim practices of affiliation deserve to be counted among the ordinary strategies that urban majorities employ to navigate the city amidst conditions of uncertainty. Building on the work of Stephan Lanz and Martijn Oosterbaan (2016) on 'entrepreneurial religion', I draw on 15 months

Taksim 360, located in the Tarlabaşı neighborhood of Istanbul, is one of the first state‐led urban transformation projects in Turkey. Originally scheduled to be finished in 2014, the project is still under construction. Concordant with broader discussions, Tarlabaşı’s urban transformation has been largely studied through spatial lenses centered on accumulation by dispossession and displacement. These

In 2017, the City of New Orleans removed four segregation‐era monuments celebrating the Southern Confederacy and valorizing white supremacist ideology. As in other cities, efforts to remove such monuments are not new, and historically have been connected to collective challenges to racialized inequality, and more recently to transnational postcolonial struggles. Given the longstanding activism in favor

In discussing how people make political use of public space from below, recent writings either emphasize the repurposing of monumental spaces, like Tahrir Square, or else look to how the poor and marginal produce facts on the ground through their everyday interactions without explicit political intentions. In the Hamra neighborhood of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, the daily life of politicized youth was

Strangers with different economic needs come to live together in social housing projects, posing an organizational challenge. In most current Latin American cities, this tends to be in standardized complexes with small apartments in segregated peripheries. Many residents change from living in informal neighborhoods to a different type of urban citizenship based on partially subsidized home ownership

Through vegetable gardening, residents of a small city in Michigan, USA, are striving to make their urban environments more socially equitable and ecologically sustainable. While gardeners across differences of class and race are motivated by a desire to change their environments and educate others, they do so in distinct ways due to different priorities. These range from neighborhood upkeep to ecological

Critical scholarship often presents technical experts such as architects and urbanists as unidimensional “organic intellectuals” in the Gramscian sense. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted among architects‐turned‐campaigners in Lebanon, this article argues that this portrayal of experts is partial, and inadequate to represent and make sense of the composite coalitions that animate contemporary

In Brazil, the advent of several mega‐sporting events—most notably the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Rio Olympics—has led to various state practices of city‐staging. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Natal during the 2014 World Cup, I examine the ways in which the problem of sex tourism became particularly prominent for Natal’s image, including how the World Cup exacerbated already existing state

As an Ammani café became a popular hangout for artists, artists’ social practices were reshaped by the spatial affordances of the café. This paper examines the ways that relationships between artists changed through this spatial rearrangement, exploring the political consequences of those changes. It compares three successive, distinct topologies of social practice within Jordanian art, including a

The announcement of the national lockdown in India on 24 March 2020 triggered fear and panic among the people. A dystopian future of Mad Max and The Waste Land started playing in the minds of the millions. The middle class in urban India started its preparation by stockpiling whatever it deemed necessary. Various gated communities piled additional rules and clauses for self-preservation, sometimes

This article traces the history of cosmopolitanism in Marseille as well some of the major aesthetic developments in its Vieux Port over the last century. I consider a series of moments from the Vichy government’s destruction of the Vieux Port in an effort to stamp out resistance during WWII, to the transformation of La Criée aux Poissons from a fish market to a theater in the 1970s, to the recent pedestrianization

Public circulations of politicized visualizations and definitions of blight serve not only to define and police an idealized image of care, but also bolster the state’s valorization of creative interventions that appear to “domesticate” the postindustrial landscape. An image of care of single‐family homes presents an invented morality—one which sets itself as distinct from another manufactured idiom:

In recent months, we witnessed (and continue to witness) many empty places around the globe that are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. In some countries, there are gradual reopening of businesses, public places, and activities. Yet, these often happen under the consideration of safety measures. The surreal scenes of unoccupied places that are normally crowded with people and activities provide

This article presents public art experiments that have taken place in cities of the metropolitan region of Barcelona, Spain. Some of these experiments were commissioned with the purpose of fostering social cohesion, but instead, they have made social dissent visible. I analyze these public art experiments through two terms that have been often used to question them: utopia and idiocy. I argue that

This article focuses on Kampung Ledok Code, a small riverside community in Yogyakarta that was less exposed to outside influence and in the beginning had tenuous bonds among the population. It aims to understand how this marginalized society articulated and made use of gotong royong to engineer the kampung’s transformation. Challenging the traditional perception of gotong royong as a collective spirit

Intra‐class differentiation needs to be brought back into the analysis of gentrification. In this article I argue that in the context of gentrifying pressures, greenspaces are an important site of struggle between segments of the working class. By paying attention to how different clusters of low‐income residents in a housing project in Rio de Janeiro deploy plants, we gain insight into differently‐situated

Suddenly cities in southern British Columbia (BC) sounded differently. On March 17, 2020 the BC Provincial Health Director called a public health emergency of the pandemic. Public and postsecondary schools were suspended, gatherings of more than 50 people were banned, non-essential businesses and services shut down, outdoor recreation facilities were taped off, non-essential travel was discouraged

This article interrogates the meaning of kyukyaw, often shortened as kyu, a Burmese word that is used as both a verb—to occupy or encroach—and a noun—squatter or slum. This deployment of language demands attention because kyu evokes strong negative sentiments, despite its ambiguity. The rapid pace of change in post‐junta Myanmar has compelled both the elite and the marginalized to seek rightness through

This essay introduces six studies based on oral history and ethnography in spontaneous urban settlements in East and Southeast Asia. It proposes that asking residents to tell the history of their settlements provides an important tool for understanding them in the context of their cities. Rather than focusing on the theoretical issues around “informality,” we seek to understand the settlement process

This essay reflects on the problematic relationship between informal settlements and built heritage in Metro Manila, Philippines. Trained as a historian with scholarly and middle‐class socio‐civic sensibilities, I am oriented toward the preservation of historically significant structures. Such a seemingly safe positionality, however, is often made problematic by the reality of informal settlers occupying

The President asks us to stay home, but how? I have six children, I support my mother and father, I have a younger brother to support. This is where I get by, do you think I can stay at home flapping my hands? He [the President] should be helping people, he should be doing the same as foreign countries. I can understand it’s impossible to help everyone, but he should assist whatever way he can. He

Stories of settling and civilizing a landscape often mask or conceal stories of displacement. Settling stories are often unsettling stories—and scholarship on urban settlement should strive to show both faces of the settlement process. This article analyzes interview excerpts collected between 2010 and 2012 from residents who have been evicted from an urban development site located across the Saigon

This essay introduces the stories of four former residents of a municipal housing complex built in the late 1950s in central Tokyo. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the interviewees and their families had found shelter in and around an abandoned Imperial Japanese Army base. After moving them into concrete housing blocks in order to hide their settlement prior to Tokyo's hosting of the Olympics

In 2005, a development proposal for the largest city center redevelopment in Edinburgh, Scotland since the 18th century was presented to the public. Intended for the medieval and recently industrial part of the city’s Old Town, the proposal sparked years of intense argument over appropriate development for the area. Perhaps no aspect of that debate has incited as much rancor as the question of aesthetics

Oral histories of former squatters trace the origins of modern Singapore to its largest and historically most important fire at Bukit Ho Swee on 25 May 1961. The inferno not only razed an urban kampong, it also set the stage for the government to transform Singapore into an organized public housing state of governable citizen‐workers. The storytellers’ ashen histories highlight the grey area colored

On a Friday morning, from the loudspeaker of a nearby mosque, I could hear the voice of the khateeb (mosque leader). In the first time for perhaps many decades, he asked people not to go to the mosque for Friday prayer so as to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. A few days later, a car with loudspeakers attached passed by my house. Inside, a man from the district council used the loudspeaker

The first words I heard people in my community speak of COVID-19 were, “Isso é doença de gente rica (this is an illness for rich people).” I live in Rocinha, the largest favela in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro, and by some estimates, in Brazil. As many people know, favelas are low-income Brazilian neighborhoods that are largely informally constructed and often neglected by the government. I am a

In recent months, we witnessed (and continue to witness) many empty places around the globe that are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. In some countries, there are gradual reopening of businesses, public places, and activities. Yet, these often happen under the consideration of safety measures. The surreal scenes of unoccupied places that are normally crowded with people and activities provide

Through an ethnographic study of a document in urban Brazil—the electricity bill—this article argues for developing a relational and materialist approach to citizenship. It analyzes the uses and meaning of this document for favela residents, the state, and the private electricity provider, within projects to regularize illegal connections and the so‐called “pacification” program, a state security policy

A growing body of work has highlighted the centrality of verticality to the making of contemporary urbanism, pushing scholars to begin conceptualising inequality, politics, and planning as multi‐scalar in nature. This paper builds off these interventions to argue that verticality should be understood as a fragile and unstable achievement, a fragility heightened when the oft‐taken for granted workings

The construction of new, purpose‐built mosques in Europe often stirs a number of controversies. This paper looks at one such project: a new mosque building in Almere, a town near Amsterdam. It focuses on two kinds of controversies: discussions between various kinds of mosque committee members about aesthetic preferences and how they relate to members’ views about Islam in Europe, and neighborhood protests

Smart city projects across the world are invested with the ideal that smart technological innovation smoothly negotiates the objectives, interests, and moral orientations of many different stakeholders. This article explores the politics of this ideal of “smart seamlessness” by taking a close look at the unfolding of the Amsterdam Smart Lighting project undertaken by a consortium of civic, academic

This article explores the political quality of relations between residents and urban materiality. Against a background of mass protests against transit fare increases in major Brazilian cities, and the violent infrastructural transformations of post‐Olympic Rio de Janeiro, I show how the four‐year suspension of a central city tramline has led to the emergence of new forms of urban collectivity. My

Expectations of urban upgrading projects in light of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro oscillated between hopeful prospects and pessimistic anticipation. The different opinions were clearly interwoven with stark socioeconomic inequalities and urban segregation. While authorities spread a celebratory narrative of improvements for the whole city, critics depicted a dystopian

Cardboard publishers (editoriales cartoneras) are small, independent publishers linked by the recovered cardboard that covers their books, a commitment to the promotion of local authors, and a drive to make literature accessible. This cultural movement, whose actors often form part of broader social movements, has spread across Latin America and beyond, with other 250 active collectives. Drawing on

In this article I explore the ways in which material things—bricks, documents, pipes, and utility poles—mediate everyday life and politics in informal neighborhoods in Niamey, the capital of Niger. I argue that informal neighborhoods are key sites where the material becomes political. Created “from below,” these neighborhoods are literally constructed brick by brick through the gradual division of