The author brings together the voices of citizens and workers and the power dynamics of civic leaders including James J. Hill and Archbishop John Ireland.
Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world. We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.
Urban Claims and the Right to the City explores how contested processes of urban development, and the rights of city dwellers, are understood and interpreted from the perspective of women and men working, in different ways, at the grassroots in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and London, UK. In doing so, it represents the grounded voices of authors whose work and lives mean that they engage, on a daily basis, with issues related to housing and spatial rights, and identity struggles around race, gender, disability, sexuality, citizenship and class. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
Jakarta is being transformed in an unknown speed and manner by new types of urban authorities and drivers of transformation. These actors are moving in a field of opportunity that was created by recent and severe changes in the economic, socio-political and natural environment of Jakarta. Including chapters written by contributors who have lived and worked in Jakarta for years, this book shows how urban space in Jakarta is increasingly created by the entanglement of different layers that co-exist in political and socio-economic life, with actors criss-crossing between formal and informal spheres. In each case the authors explore who are the drivers of urban change, and what are the processes in shaping the current and future city of Jakarta. Not denying that former elites are still a critical force in shaping Jakarta, the book analyses to what extent former stakeholders are undermined, and what types of new authorities or social institutions are emerging. It examines how drivers of transformation claim their right to space in the city and how their actions and strategies reflect their vision on the future of Jakarta. An important addition to the discussion of urban change and development, this book will be of interest to scholars interested in Indonesia, South-East Asia, urbanization, development research, anthropology and globalization.
Written as a social history of urbanization and popular politics, this book reinserts “the public” and “the city” into current debates about citizenship, urban development, state regulation, and modernity in the turn of the century Mexico. Rooted in thousands of pages of written correspondence between city residents and local authorities, mostly with the city council of Morelia, the rhetoric and arguments of resident and city council dialogues often highlighted a person’s or group’s contributions to the public good, effectively positioning petitioners as deserving and contributing members of the urban public. Making an Urban Public tells the story of how Morelia’s residents—particular those from popular groups and poor circumstances—claimed (and often gained) basic rights to the city, including the right to both participate in and benefit from the city’s public spaces; its consumer and popular cultures; its modernized infrastructure and services; its rhetorical promises around good government and effective policing; its dense networks of community; and its countless opportunities for negotiating to forward one’s agenda, and its urban promise for a better life.
How workers fought for municipal socialism to make cities around the globe livable and democratic - and what the lessons are for today. For more than a century, municipal socialism has fired the imaginations of workers fighting to make cities livable and democratic. At every turn propertied elites challenged their right to govern. Prominent US labor historian, Shelton Stromquist, offers the first global account of the origins of this new trans-local socialist politics. He explains how and why cities after 1890 became crucibles for municipal socialism. Drawing on the colorful stories of local activists and their social-democratic movements in cities as diverse as Broken Hill, Christchurch, Malmö, Bradford, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Hamilton, OH, the book shows how this new urban politics arose. Long governed by propertied elites, cities in the nineteenth century were transformed by mass migration and industrialization that tore apart their physical and social fabric. Amidst massive strikes and faced with epidemic disease, fouled streets, unsafe water, decrepit housing, and with little economic security and few public amenities, urban workers invented a local politics that promised to democratize cities they might themselves govern and reclaim the wealth they created. This new politics challenged the class power of urban elites as well as the centralizing tendencies of national social-democratic movements. Municipal socialist ideas have continued to inspire activists in their fight for the right of cities to govern themselves.