Rethinking the Right to the City: DIY Urbanism and Postcapitalist Possibilities

A growing body of literature has been explicitly concerned with a range of microspatial practices that are currently reshaping urban spaces under the valuable denominator of “DIY urbanism.” However, there is still much work to be done if we are to take into consideration DIY urbanism's primary source and output: the commons. As such, Spanish DIY collectives have taken an explicit interest in building and reclaiming the urban commonwealth through participatory DIY interventionism. Therefore, this article assesses Spanish DIY urbanism through the lens of the commons and asks how the vocabulary of the latter might help us to further understand the DIY practice. In so doing, DIY urbanism will be put forward as “a field of possibilities” through three key features that inform commons theorizing: threshold spatiality, value, and legitimacy.

This chapter outlines a specific framework for the creation of critical playable cities. This framework combines three different concepts: DIY urbanism, critical design and urban gamification which are seen as complementary to each other. Cities are complex systems. Various actors often explicitly or implicitly harmonize or collide to shape the landscape of a city and its future. In the past decades, there has been an increased interest in activating citizens as vital actors in shaping urban life. This has taken place through various practical works and research around the paradigms of Playable Cities, DIY Urbanism and Gamification amongst other paradigms. Urban gamification—that is, using play and playfulness to alter our perception of and interactions with city spaces—is specifically emerging as one of the main strategies to activate citizens. Urban gamification alone, however, risks to be disconnected from the urban fabric and its communities. In this chapter we argue that combining it with the grassroot approach of DIY urbanism and the thought-provoking techniques of critical design creates a unique, multi-dimensional approach to designing urban experiences. This chapter, then, aims to explore how play can be used by citizens as a mean for critical reflection and practical re-appropriation of public urban spaces.

Escape is an enticing idea in contemporary cities, faced with among other things increasing inequalities and segregation, neoliberal governance, COVID-19 and the encroaching effects of climate change. Community growing projects offer a localized intervention in this landscape, a humble and hopeful attempt to provide a haven in an otherwise hectic and stressful cityscape, offering an escape into a different rhythm within city life. They can offer a reimagination of everyday urban life through practices of being communal and inclusive, and through challenging relations to urban land. In the contemporary climate of suspicion around immigration and difference in the UK, community has the potential to become a nostalgic throwback, but it also presents a horizon of renewal. But spaces of escape have an ambiguous politics, especially around who gets to escape, and what any escape means in relation to wider patterns of urban injustice. What is the balance of communal safety and care against social exclusion, upon which retreat is so often predicated? Drawing on ethnographic research in communal growing projects in Glasgow, this book explores the rhythms, politics and dynamics of community, asking who benefits from escape and how it actualizes a vision of a more just city. With the increased political salience of community in rhetoric around localism and community empowerment, this is a timely consideration of the tensions and consequences of urban communality, exploring the interconnections of community, justice and inclusion, DIY urbanism, and the politics of everyday life.

This article critically reviews two key works on urbanism in Africa: ‘DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice’ an edited volume by Stephen Marr and Patience Mesusa (2023) and ‘Making An African City: Techno-politics & the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra’ by Jennifer Hart (2024).While both the works unravel the dynamics of African urban developmental landscape, urban governance, infrastructural deficit and routine life world of African cities, the perspectives differ since both the works have captured the urban social reality through different standpoints. Stephen Marr and Mesusa’s focus is on contemporary and Africa’s grassroots urbanism and the very politics of it and Jennifer Hart seems more interested in investigating the historical roots of urban infrastructure and techno-politics in Colonial Accra (Ghana). This review essay critically looked into the theoretical frameworks and methodologies employed by authors besides the objective was to understand the contribution of these seminal works to African urban sociology, urban studies and discussing the limitations and intersections as well. While both the books offer valuable insights, there are still gaps in addressing the interplay between historical legacies (colonial urbanisms) and contemporary practices like Do-it-Yourself Urbanism (DIY) in African urban spaces today.

idea of just going out and doing it, or as it is popularly expressed in the underground, the do-it-yourself ethic... is not just complaining about what is, but actually doing something different, notes New York activist Steve Duncombe (1997). Over the last quarter century, Time's Up! has taken just such a DIY approach to shaping the urban landscape of New York. Since its founding in 1987, the group has put forward sustainable solutions to urban problems such as pollution, increasing asthma rates, lack of green space, global warming, and congestion, through a direct action approach to street activism, demonstrating the possibilities of community gardens, non-polluting transportation, and bike power. The group has repeatedly offered cost effective approaches to challenges of living. Rather than implore those in power or ask for permission, these activists helped shape what streets and public space could look like with graffiti, guerilla gardening, and festive bike rides, reclaiming vacant lots and car-cluttered streets for people-based uses. In doing so, Time's Up! fashioned the as a mutable work of art challenging the increasingly contested nature of public space (Shepard and Smithsimon, 2011).As with many cities, public space in New York is subject to a highly competitive struggle over access, land use, rules, and policies governing a global city. Over and over, those favoring DIY uses of public space have had to compete with those who see public space as a commodity from which to maximize profit the inch (Logan and Molotch, 1987; Shepard and Smithsimon, 2011). These are struggles over the very nature and meaning of urban space. Influenced movements from squatting to Global Justice and Occupy, Time's Up! has honed innovations in direct action in support of a more sustainable brand of urbanism, helping urban spaces feel vibrant, sustainable, and user-friendly. The following considers the ways the group supported efforts around community gardens and biking, while fashioning a distinct model of sustainable urbanism.Full disclosure: I have been a volunteer with Time's Up! and the do-ityourself movement in activism in New York for well over a decade. This qualitative case study builds on multiple data sources including my voice as an observing participant, discussions with other participants, and historic accounts to highlight the story of Time's Up! and the public space movements it supports (Butters, 1983; Patton, 2001; Tedlock, 1991). Case studies such as this are effective for exploring and describing the life course of both social movements and community organizations (Snow and Trom, 2002; Yin, 1995). This form of research is useful for considering urban behavior and political participation seen throughout this report, as well as highlighting effective practices in planning and development, translating knowledge into action as Time's Up! has done to fashion its own distinct brand of sustainable urbanism (Birch, 2012; Shepard, 2013). In asserting a to urban space challenging a system of automobility, Time's Up! takes part in a distinct lineage of cycling activism extending from the Women's Movement to European socialism, environmentalism and anarchism, the Provo to Situationism, and clashes in the streets during the Republican National Convention and the Occupy Movement. Here, Time's Up!'s cycling advocacy is part of a pro-urban politics, which Henri Lefebvre described as a right to the city (Furness, 2010; Harvey, 2013; Horton, 2006).Through the case study of Time's Up!, we explore do-it-yourself strategies vs. more conventional strategies for urban transformation. When liberal reformers arrive, radical wings often follow, pushing change through direct action rather than more deliberate means. For Martin Luther King's message of nonviolence, there was Malcolm X who preached change by any means necessary. While liberal environmental groups such as Sierra Club support legal means to preserve the natural environment, more radical groups such as Earth First and Earth Liberation Front support blockades; Sierra Club sues and Earth First members climb into old growth trees to save them (Butterfly, 2010; Rosebraugh, 2004; Shepard, 2011). …

Though Bangladesh is often labelled as "climate change ground zero," the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) were never considered a significant climate change hotspot until heavy rainfall and consequent landslides in 2017. This shift in problem narrative seemingly overlooks myriad environmentally unsustainable 'development' initiatives along with (il)legal deforestation. This paper examines climate change trends and impacts on the lives and livelihoods of diverse local groups in CHT. By analysing changing patterns in meteorological data and qualitative information on changes and challenges in everyday life and the livelihoods of local people, we show a shortfall of captured climate data on CHT to make a strong case for climate change. Yet, this study finds that this region is exposed to a substantial threat of land degradation, flash floods, water scarcity, landslides, and other slow and quick onsets due to a combined effect of deforestation, neoliberalised development, and slight changes in temperature and precipitation patterns. This paper calls for proactive measures to address climate change impacts by endorsing sustainable development strategies prioritizing environmental stewardship, social justice, and economic prosperity.

This article examines the role of cultural events in Rotterdam’s urban sustainability transition by looking at the festival Rotterdamse Dakendagen [Rotterdam’s Rooftop Days]. During this week-long festival, rooftops are used by citizens and cultural groups to activate urban spaces as places of learning, exchange, and DIY urbanism, thus broadening the scope of rooftops as places for cultural sustainability. Drawing on empirical material collected via qualitative interviews, policy document analysis, and five months of participant observation, we identify three aspects that inform urban sustainability transitions via culture: (1) the (re)activation of rooftops via cultural programming, (2) institution-building that is mindful of festivals’ continuously temporary nature, and (3) the limited material, yet wide-ranging immaterial effects of urban cultural festivals that have accelerated the Rotterdam’s urban (cultural) politics of sustainability. In sum, the article argues that culture plays an important role in any investigation of urban sustainability transitions and should be considered with more conceptual nuance in the future.

Exploring implementation mechanisms of Tactical Urbanism in Jordan

Rust Belt Problems, Sunbelt Solutions: St. Louis, Dallas–Fort Worth, and the Migratory History of the “Metroplex” Concept Brian M. Ingrassia (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Texas Metro factual guide for Dallas and Fort Worth, Southwest Metroplex. Lester Strother Texas Metro Records (AR0327), University of North Texas Special Collections. [End Page 304] The Dallas–Fort Worth region is commonly known as “the Metroplex.” Residents and visitors to the United States’ fourth-largest metropolitan area are familiar with the name, and to call another city a metroplex would probably be confusing, if not quite inappropriate. A popular origin story says that in the 1970s, Harve Chapman of Dallas-based Tracy-Locke Advertising fused “metropolitan” and “complex” into the distinctive portmanteau. As of 2021, the website of the North Texas Commission (NTC), an agency established in 1971 to promote the region, claims it “coin[ed] and copyright[ed] the term ‘Metroplex’” in 1972.1 “Metroplex,” however, did not originate in Dallas or in a 1970s ad campaign. Rather, it originated in 1950s community-education projects exploring urban problems, especially in the congested and seemingly declining urban centers of the industrialized Midwest, the area that would eventually become known as the Rust Belt. Scholars initially used [End Page 305] the term to educate people about issues of transportation, race, land use, governance, migration, and pollution, before North Texas then repur-posed the term for its own, up-and-coming metro area. Dallas–Fort Worth employed “metroplex” to market itself as a unique and diffuse metropolitan region with scarce problems, a place where corporations and people escaped urban chaos by embracing a good life characterized by sprawl and leisure. The migration of the metroplex concept—from Midwest to Southwest, as well as from social science to marketing—exposes a significant moment in twentieth-century American history. Historians of the so-called Sunbelt often focus on the role of federal and state governments, religion, and grassroots politics in the quickly growing and influential region stretching from California to the Carolinas, including Texas. They also discuss broader shifts in urban space. John Findlay, for instance, portrays the post–1940 American West as a place of “magic lands”—theme parks, industrial parks, and residential subdivisions—that “seemed less troubled by urban problems and more open to improvements in metropolitan design, social relations, and styles of living.” In complementary studies, Andrew M. Busch and Alex Sayf Cummings show, respectively, how Austin, Texas, and Raleigh–Durham, North Carolina, based their postwar identities on technology, leisure, and the knowledge economy.2 The story of Dallas– Fort Worth’s embrace of the metroplex concept shows not only how a major Sunbelt metro area embodied innovative urban spaces and production, but also how it drew upon existing discourses created by postwar social scientific research to advertise itself as an exceptional place offering Sunbelt solutions to Rust Belt problems. As historian Andrew Highsmith observes, distinctions between Rust Belt and Sunbelt are based more on “narratives of regional development” than upon actually marking either place as “a coherent geographic region.”3 “Metroplex,” which started out [End Page 306] in the 1950s as a term connoting urban problems, assumed utopian connotations in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, it was relatively easy for North Texans to use the term to promote their region’s many purported advantages, such as cheap land, a state-of-the-art airport, low cost of living, and cultural amenities. The intellectual history of “metroplex” casts new light on Texas urban history. Scholars often write about either Dallas or Fort Worth, the twin transportation and commercial hubs of North Texas, rather than the conjoined metro area. Harvey Graff, perhaps controversially, says Dallas is defined in popular culture by the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Dallas Cowboys National Football League (NFL) team, and the television show Dallas. It is a city seemingly with no limits, characterized by the pro-business Dallas Way and the bold emulation of other cities. Yet it is important to note that urban planning, civic boosterism, and conservative politics are also important aspects of Dallas history. The Dallas Citizens’ Council was an important factor driving the city’s growth after 1937...

Qualitative researchers engaging in systematic fieldwork encounter dilemmas that may illuminate cultural assumptions and enhance understanding of the contexts of studies. This article is based on a study of the extent to which the concept of competence in the everyday life of a teacher education institution in the United Kingdom (UK) showed sensitivity to the need to prepare future teachers as critical, autonomous professionals. I conducted ethnographic research in this institution and wrote a case study about the experience. The study was particularly imbued with a transformative approach to competence, the need to prepare teachers as agents of change of educational inequality in which certain groups whose cultural patterns differ from those in the school systems are systematically kept off the main tracks of the educational system. Transformative educational practices in teacher education involve teaching technical skills and competencies and encourage future teachers to reflect critically on the impact of their actions and perceptions on the achievement of pupils from different cultural backgrounds. I (Canen, 1984) undertook a similar study in Brazil in which I pinpointed practices contradictory to transformative approaches in teacher education in two teacher education institutions I used as case studies. The multicultural nature of the UK and Brazil (Canen, 1995) was a framework for reflection on preparing teachers to deal with cultural diversity. In this article, I focus on the ethical dilemma I encountered during an ethnographic study in the UK. I first deal with issues related to ethnographic studies and then describe the negotiations in the fieldwork and the constraints imposed on it. The relevance of these matters in qualitative research in teacher education is twofold: They show the contradictions and difficulties qualitative researchers likely encounter conducting research in a teacher education institution. In this study, they illustrate cultural assumptions informing the concept of competence itself, which might be detrimental to the enhancement of critical thought in a teacher education institution. Ethnographic Case Studies: Some Considerations in the Literature Denzin and Lincoln (1994) define case study as the study of things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them (p. 2). ... coupled with the presence of a gendered, multiculturally situated researcher (p. 11) throughout the process of research, from adoption of the theoretical framework and formulation of questions to the strategies of inquiry and interpretation of data. Fieldwork procedures and theoretical ideas are two sides of the same coin (Wolcott, 1992, p. 6). Fieldwork procedures are paradigms of interpretation [put] into motion (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 14). Case study is a choice of object to be studied (Stake, 1994, pp. 236-237). Ludke and Andre (1986) point out that a case is a unity inside a wider system, an instance such as an event, a person, a group, a school, an institution, or a program to be intensely and systematically studied. Case researchers seek out both what is common and what is particular about the case, the end results being generally something unique (Stake, 1994, p. 238). An ethnographic case study uses techniques such as observation, interviews, analysis of documents, and others to discover the cultural knowledge that people hold in their minds, how it is employed in social interaction and the consequences of its employment (Spindler & Spindler, 1992, p. 70). Even though some scholars recommend the description of conflicts of values and ethical challenges in ethnographic studies, others point out its low frequency. Punch (1994) notes that it would be inappropriate for the `scientist' to abandon objectivity and detachment in recounting descriptions of personal involvement and political battles in the field setting (p. …

Legacies of Colonial History: Region, Religion and Violence in Postcolonial Gujarat Yogesh Chandrani This dissertation takes the routine marginalization and erasure of Muslim presence in the contemporary social and political life of the western Indian state of Gujarat as an entry point into a genealogy of Gujarati regionalism. Through a historical anthropology of the reconfiguration of the modern idea of Gujarat, I argue that violence against religious minorities is an effect of both secular nation-building and of religious nationalist mobilization. Given this entanglement, I suggest that we rethink the oppositional relationship between religion and the secular in analyzing violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat. The modern idea of Gujarat, I further argue, cannot be grasped without taking into consideration how local conceptions of region and of religion were fundamentally altered by colonial power. In particular, I suggest that the construction of Islam as inessential and external to the idea of Gujarat is a legacy bequeathed by colonialism and its forms of knowledge. The transmutation of Gujarati Muslims into strangers, in other words, occurred simultaneously with the articulation of the modern idea of Gujarat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus in particular on the role of nineteenth-century regional history-writing, in which the foundational role of Islam was de-emphasized, in what I call the making of a regional tradition. By highlighting the colonial genealogy of contemporary discourses of Gujaratni asmita (pride in Gujarat), in which Hindu and Gujarati are posited as identical with each other, I argue that colonialism was one of its conditions of possibility. One result of this simultaneous reconfiguration of religion and region, I argue, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to inhabit a Hindu religious identity that is not at the same time articulated in opposition to a Muslim Other in Gujarat. Another consequence is that it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for Muslims to represent themselves or advocate for their rights as Muslim and as Gujarati. How the reconfiguration of a Gujarati regional identity is imbricated with transformations in conceptions of religion is part of what this dissertation seeks to think about. Furthermore, I argue that the marginalization of Muslims in Gujarat cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on organized violence or on the Hindu nationalist movement. While recent studies on Gujarat have focused mainly on the pogrom of 2002 to think about the role of the Hindu nationalist movement in orchestrating mass violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat, I argue that the pogrom of 2002 is but one part of a broader spectrum of violence and exclusion that permeates the body of the state and society. In addition, I suggest that one of the conditions of possibility for such violence is the sedimentation of a conception of Gujaratiness as identical with Hinduness that cuts across the religious/secular divide. Instead of focusing exclusively on the violence of the Hindu nationalist movement, I explore this process of sedimentation as it manifests itself in the intersecting logics of urban planning, heritage preservation, and neoliberal development in contemporary Gujarat. Through an analysis of the contemporary reorganization and partitioning of the city of Ahmedabad along religious lines, I show how it is continuous with colonial and nationalist urban planning practices of the early twentieth century. Using ethnographic examples, I also argue that the contemporary secular nationalist discourse of heritage preservation is both complicit in the marginalization of Muslims and continuous with practices of urban planning and preservation that were articulated in the late colonial period. Finally, my dissertation demonstrates the enabling nature of neoliberal logics in the organization of violence against Muslims in Gujarat and argues that antiMuslim violence and prejudice are enabled by and intertwined with narratives about the promises of capital and progress. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this dissertation seeks to contribute to an anthropology of colonialism, nationalism, religion, secularism and violence in South Asia that is attentive to the continuities and discontinuities that are constitutive of the postcolonial present we inhabit. By historicizing contemporary debates and assumptions about Muslims in Gujarat and describing some of the genealogies that have contributed to their sedimentation, I hope to have argued that colonial legacies have enduring effects in the present and that the question posed by colonial forms of knowledge and representation is not merely epistemological or historiographical but also a political one. Written as a history of the present, this dissertation is motivated by a desire to imagine a future in which Hindu/Gujarati and Muslim are no longer conceptualized as oppositional categories; in which Gujarati Muslims are able to represent themselves as Muslims and in their own (varied) terms; and where Hindus are no longer invited and incited to inhabit a subjectivity that depends on making Muslims strangers to Gujarat.

This thesis explores the class impact of gentrification, contributing to a deeper insight into multiple experiences of gentrification. Centring on an ethnographic study of gentrification in Dikmen Valley in Ankara, it is concerned with the relations among the multiple actors involved in the on-going Dikmen Valley Urban Transformation Project. The project aimed to transform an area that contained many squatter communities into an area of luxury apartments and parkland. Its implementation and the conflicts it prompted were deeply shaped by shifts towards a neoliberal urban development regime and by a revision of earlier policies towards the squatter settlers. The study approaches gentrification as a dynamic process in which urban space is redeveloped in ways that complicate class hierarchies. The thesis argues that it is vital to examine the processes of inclusion to grasp the class impact of gentrification, which is not limited to displacement and stigmatisation. It therefore examines the processes in which inclusion is promoted and negotiated by multiple actors living through gentrification. To address these questions, the study combines historical and ethnographic research. Drawing on documentary research on the changing urban policies and citizenship agendas, the research reveals how the disciplining effects of gentrification operate through citizenship. It details how in Dikmen Valley gentrification was employed to marginalise and punish those who made rights-based claims to homes and land, while the state offered those who obediently participated in gentrification the reward of legal homeownership and recognition as ‘good citizens’. The study also draws on participant observation and in-depth interviews with people from a diverse variety of backgrounds living in and around the Dikmen Valley Project Area during January to October 2015. Through this combination of methods, the thesis demonstrates that the ways in which gentrification, promoted by the state actors and negotiated by the multiple actors living through it, complicates existing class hierarchies.

This chapter discusses how media use changes when everyday life undergoes change, focusing on major life transitions. I briefly introduce different perspectives on evolving media repertoires across the life course, and argue for the relevance of studying periods of destabilization and reorientation, when elements of media repertoires and modes of public connection are temporarily or more permanently transformed. I argue that easily adaptable media technologies such as smartphones tend to become more important in unsettled circumstances, as easy-to-reach for tools for new forms of self-expression, information-seeking or social contact, in accordance with shifting social roles and everyday circumstances. The primary empirical material analyzed in the chapter is a small qualitative interview study with mothers, about their media use the first year with a new-born.

This article examines how sports fandom fits into the nexus of late capitalism, displacement, and identity within the United States. The article adds to a growing literature on late capitalism and sports fandom by analyzing how displaced fans look to sports teams from their former places of residence as a way to understand “home.” An ethnography of a Pittsburgh Steelers fan club in Fort Worth, Texas, is used as a case study. Drawing on the fields of television studies and cultural geography as well as theories of diaspora, this article argues that sports fandom allows displaced people the ability to reconnect with and manage the irreconcilable tensions of home.

Human stampedes are anthropogenic disasters. The purpose of this study is to identify the emic construction of disaster in Cambodia and thus enable a cultural framing. The case study is the 2010 human stampede at Diamond Island in Phnom Penh, which resulted in the deaths of 347 people.An ethnographic study was carried out in Phnom Penh and nine provinces, starting in 2010, with cases followed up for up to eight years. We explored the beliefs about the causes and meaning of the disaster held by 5 survivors and 8 of their family members, 34 bereaved relatives of 9 people who had been killed, 31 villagers, and 48 key informants (7 monks, 10 female Buddhist lay devotees, 22 Buddhist lay officiants, 4 mediums, and 5 traditional healers).It was popularly believed that the disaster was a consequence of the supernatural “dark road” and the neoliberal development and disrespect to the Landlords of Water and Earth guardian spirits that triggered a retaliation by the spirits. Millenarian explanations for disaster were foretold through the “Buddha Predictions” and the “Three Vast Plains” of disaster.The Diamond Island stampede powerfully illustrates how people confronted by mass disaster draw on cultural and religious explanations for misfortune, and it is woven into a wider narrative about the national tragedy of the Khmer Rouge era. It is proposed that an emic understanding of the ontology of disaster that is grounded in local knowledge can strengthen cultural responsiveness to disaster prevention and management.