Spatialized Injustice in the Contemporary City
Spatialized Injustice in the Contemporary City

Author: S. Nombuso Dlamini

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-05-12

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0429785399

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This volume documents research illustrating public dissents and interventions to injustice in modern-day cities. Authors present everyday occurrences of city life and place making; still, they show how the ordinary city grows from historical dimensions of injustice, violence and fear. Yet, ordinary citizens continue to make the city their own, to contribute to the creation of city structures and to contest those practices of spatial demarcation, which limit rather than uplift their everyday social livelihood. Chapters show how marginalized populations, from racial, to gendered, to the working poor, are part of the apparatus that makes the city function. However, their contributions to city arrangement and endurance are perpetually at the margins, and city spaces continue to be designed in ways that ignore and negate the existence of those who protest inequity. Novel to the volume are chapters that document and illustrate contestations of city spaces through artistic representation. Public spaces like schools, art galleries and museums are presented as central to projects of inhabiting, remembering and reimagining (in) the just city. Still, ordinary city spaces, like the public washroom, illustrate issues of gender inequity, spatial bias and other art-based protests. City dwellers interested in learning about ‘the making’ of the city; and those interested in the city as a space of possibilities – and the good life, will benefit from this volume. Scholars of geography, space, art and social justice will marvel and simultaneously be appalled by the everyday minute, yet shocking descriptions of the complexity – and unfairly structured city spaces in which they dwell.

Spatial Justice in the City
Spatial Justice in the City

Author: Sophie Watson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1351185772

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In the context of increasing division and segregation in cities across the world, along with pressing concerns around austerity, environmental degradation, homelessness, violence, and refugees, this book pursues a multidisciplinary approach to spatial justice in the city. Spatial justice has been central to urban theorists in various ways. Intimately connected to social justice, it is a term implicated in relations of power which concern the spatial distribution of resources, rights and materials. Arguably there can be no notion of social justice that is not spatial. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has argued that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. As such, urban planning and policy interventions are always, to some extent at least, about spatial justice. And, as cities become ever more unequal, it is crucial that urbanists address questions of spatial justice in the city. To this end, this book considers these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Crossing law, sociology, history, cultural studies, and geography, the book’s overarching concern with how to think spatial justice in the city brings a fresh perspective to issues that have concerned urbanists for several decades. The inclusion of empirical work in London brings the political, social, and cultural aspects of spatial justice to life. The book will be of interest to academics and students in the field of urban studies, sociology, geography, planning, space law, and cultural studies.

Seeking Spatial Justice
Seeking Spatial Justice

Author: Edward W. Soja

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2013-11-30

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1452915288

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In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice. Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city.

Social Justice and the City
Social Justice and the City

Author: David Harvey

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-04-15

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0820336041

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Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship between politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey's position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City is perhaps the most widely cited work in the field. Harvey analyzes core issues in city planning and policy--employment and housing location, zoning, transport costs, concentrations of poverty--asking in each case about the relationship between social justice and space. How, for example, do built-in assumptions about planning reinforce existing distributions of income? Rather than leading him to liberal, technocratic solutions, Harvey's line of inquiry pushes him in the direction of a "revolutionary geography," one that transcends the structural limitations of existing approaches to space. Harvey's emphasis on rigorous thought and theoretical innovation gives the volume an enduring appeal. This is a book that raises big questions, and for that reason geographers and other social scientists regularly return to it.

Spatializing Authoritarianism
Spatializing Authoritarianism

Author: Natalie Koch

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0815655568

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Authoritarianism has emerged as a prominent theme in popular and academic discussions of politics since the 2016 US presidential election and the coinciding expansion of authoritarian rhetoric and ideals across Europe, Asia, and beyond. Until recently, however, academic geographers have not focused squarely on the concept of authoritarianism. Its longstanding absence from the field is noteworthy as geographers have made extensive contributions to theorizing structural inequalities, injustice, and other expressions of oppressive or illiberal power relations and their diverse spatialities. Identifying this void, Spatializing Authoritarianism builds upon recent research to show that even when conceptualized as a set of practices rather than as a simple territorial label, authoritarianism has a spatiality: both drawing from and producing political space and scale in many often surprising ways. This volume advances the argument that authoritarianism must be investigated by accounting for the many scales at which it is produced, enacted, and imagined. Including a diverse array of theoretical perspectives and empirical cases drawn from the Global South and North, this collection illustrates the analytical power of attending to authoritarianism’s diverse scalar and spatial expressions, and how intimately connected it is with identity narratives, built landscapes, borders, legal systems, markets, and other territorial and extraterritorial expressions of power.

Cities and Social Change
Cities and Social Change

Author: Ronan Paddison

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2014-06-17

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1473906199

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This textbook of essays by leading critical urbanists is a compelling introduction to an important field of study; it interrogates contemporary conflicts and contradictions inherent in the social experience of living in cities that are undergoing neoliberal restructuring, and grapples with profound questions and challenging policy considerations about diversity, equity, and justice. A stimulant to debate in any undergraduate urban studies classroom, this book will inspire a new generation of urban social scholars. - Alison Bain, York University "Stages a lively encounter with different understandings of urban production and experience, and does so by bringing together an exciting group of scholars working across a diversity of theoretical and geographical contexts. The book focuses on some of the central conceptual and political challenges of contemporary cities, including inequality and poverty, justice and democracy, and everyday life and urban imaginaries, providing a critical platform through which to ask how we might work towards alternative forms of urban living." - Colin McFarlane Durham University What is the city? What is the nature of living in the city? This new textbook provides students with an in-depth understanding of the central issues associated with the city and how living in a city impacts its inhabitants. Theoretically informed and thematically rich, the book is edited by leading scholars in the field and contains an eminent, international cast of contributors and contributions. It provides a critical analysis of the key thinkers, themes and paradigms dealing with the relationship between the built environment and urban life. It includes illustrative case studies, questions for discussion, further reading and web links. Examining the contradictions, conflicts and complexities of city living, the book is an essential resource for students looking to get to grip with the different theoretical and substantive approaches that make up the diverse and rich study of the city and urban life.

Socio-Spatial Inequalities in Contemporary Cities
Socio-Spatial Inequalities in Contemporary Cities

Author: Alfredo Mela

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-05-11

Total Pages: 83

ISBN-13: 3030172562

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The book explores social inclusion/exclusion from a socio-spatial perspective, highlighting the active role that space assumes in shaping social phenomena. Unlike similar books, it does not discuss exclusion and inclusion in particular geographical contexts, but instead explains these phenomena starting from the dense and complex set of relationships that links society and space. It particularly focuses on social differences and how the processes of exclusion and inclusion can produce a highly spatialized understanding of them, for example when particular groups of people are perceived as being out of place. At the same time, within the context of the different approaches that policies adopt to contrast the phenomena of social exclusion, it examines the role of participation as an instrument to promote bottom-up inclusion and cohesion processes.

Searching for the Just City
Searching for the Just City

Author: Peter Marcuse

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-05-29

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1135971412

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If today’s cities are full of injustices, what would a 'Just City' look like? Contributors to this volume including David Harvey, Peter Marcuse and Susan Fainstein define the concept, examining it from multiple angles in addition to questioning it and suggesting alternatives.

Geographies of Disability
Geographies of Disability

Author: Brendan Gleeson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-09-11

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1134681984

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This book explains how space, place and mobility have shaped the experiences of disabled people both in the past and in contemporary societies. The key features of this insightful study include: * a critical appraisal of theories of disability and a new disability model * case studies to explore how the transition to capitalism disadvantaged disabled people * an exploration of the Western city and the policies of community care and accessibility regulation. Brendan Gleeson presents an important contribution to the major policy debates on disability in Western societies and offers new considerations for the broader debates on embodiment and space within Geography.