Mundane activism as a mode of urban repair: A view from the global south

Abstract

This article brings forward the conceptual lens of Mundane Activism to understand alternative modes of counter-space making that accounts for Southern modes of practice. It describes conscious everyday actions that certain social groups pursue, to address their needs, with no aim of structural change or direct confrontation with the state. These everyday actions take the form of repair that enable these social groups to achieve those needs. I discuss this concept through the case of the Friday market, a second hand market in Amman/Jordan. It describes how the market is repaired spatially and imaginatively by its vendors. Particularly, it identifies and describes the material and non-material acts of repair that shape the socio-spatial contours of such activism. Furthermore, how the vendors are able to come together to incrementally restore, alter and maintain an urban space over a period of time, through an ‘infrastructure of social capital’. The article concludes that Mundane Activism, as a lens, has the potential to extend urban theorization, add to the developing lexicon of ‘an otherwise’ mode of urbanization, and enrich urban studies with empirical and practical knowledge from geographies ‘elsewhere’.