Revanchist City Research Articles

Towards an exclusionary social contract: Narratives of a revanchist city in (post)war Syria

ABSTRACT This article asks to what extent national narratives drive changes in social contracts on both national and local level. Societal and especially state actors can use narratives to underline or omit specific rights and duties in social contracts, or to privilege particular contracting parties. In the Syrian case, repression and foreign intervention triggered changes in the national social contract, yet the exclusionary narrative functioned as a catalyst for these changes and entrenched them on both, the national and the city level. We show that housing, land and property (HLP) policies in (post-)war Damascus have an urban scope but a national impact. Not only wartime destruction but also post-war demolition have been particularly high in selected neighbourhoods and (re-)construction favoured upscale urban mega projects. This approach to urban planning reflects an exclusionary national narrative, which stigmatizes parts of the population as ‘terrorists’ and suspects them of stirring up public disorder. In consequence, these groups are marginalized or even ‘evicted’ from the social contract. For those Syrians still covered by the social contract, the narrative seeks to offer a justification for the large-scale exclusion of fellow citizens. Our analysis is based on an extensive review of literature from human geography, with a focus on the physical and social urban fabric, and political science, on intra-societal power relations.

Café culture and retail gentrification: a nonlinear canonical correlation analysis of intraclass diversity and bivalent class narratives in Cluj, Romania

ABSTRACT Retail gentrification remodels high streets and inner cities worldwide to appeal to the middle class, including specialty coffee consumption. The consumption of coffee in Cluj-Napoca’s inner-city district, a Central and Eastern Europe city, challenges certain tenets of the ‘revanchist city’ hypothesis, as shown through the concepts of ‘intraclass diversity’ and ‘bivalent class narratives’. Analyzing café consumer preferences, keywords associated with cafés, and social positions through nonlinear canonical correlation revealed that the working-class is co-opted into sustaining a creative, business-friendly city image consistent with middle-class consumption fantasies and self-expression.

La ville solidaire, au service de la ville revanchiste ? Vers une « invisibilisation bienveillante » du sans-abrisme à Portland (Oregon)

Face à l’accroissement du sans-abrisme aux États-Unis, une multitude de dispositifs se sont mis en place pour y faire face, de la multiplication des plans de lutte et des espaces de soin au développement de mesures anti-sans abris et de la criminalisation de la précarité. Cet article vise à comprendre la façon dont s’articulent ces registres d’intervention punitifs et socio-sanitaires et la signification de cette combinaison au regard de la reconfiguration des modalités de gestion du sans-abrisme. À travers une enquête de terrain menée à Portland (Oregon) aux États-Unis, cet article montre que le travail social et les espaces de soin (spaces of care) sont mobilisés par les pouvoirs publics comme un levier des opérations de « nettoyage » des camps, révélant des porosités entre le soin et le punitif, et traduisant une « invisibilisation bienveillante » du sans-abrisme et des effets de la crise du logement dans les espaces publics.

Narratives of city exposure: Incarnations of the street person in Zanta: The Living Legend and The Dregs

This article examines the rationale for definitions of the homeless in the public imagination and the kind of discourses used to create a physical, psychological, and moral distance between the domiciled and the destitute. In a society where the worthy individual is tied to an ideal of entrepreneurial, rational, homed, successful consumer, and where public space is solely destined for the unobstructed consumption of the privileged, street dwellers are naturally seen as a threat to the economic, social, and moral order as well as a visual blemish: an obstacle to safety and wellbeing. Drawing from a number of sociological, urban, and narrative studies on the survival tactics of homeless people, and especially from Nicholas Blomley’s (2010) insights about street mobility and Leon Anderson’s (2017) classifications of stigma management, this article describes how subjects defined as pathological, dangerous, or pitiful, negotiate street restrictions and create their own standing within a revanchist city. These individuals feature in two comic books published in Canada, Zanta: The Living Legend (2012) and The Dregs (2017), whose originality lies in the heroic role the street person assumes, a legitimate searcher for meaning that sees what most people overlook. In their different format as non-fiction comic and serialized fictional comic we find the expressive visual and narrative potential of the genre and become witnesses of the tribulations of two characters whom the world may consider as deranged but are, however, able to enhance their self-esteem, dismantle ideologies behind assumed notions of respectability, and actively contribute to the city as a place of encounter with difference.

The Ambiguities of Homelessness Governance: Disentangling Care and Revanchism in the Neoliberalising City

AbstractWhilst “caring” responses to homelessness (e.g. shelters, drop‐in centres) have been held up by some as a counter‐current to the revanchist city, recent US studies highlight how the structural dynamics of neoliberalisation can implicate caring spaces in revanchist processes of discipline and spatial control. In this paper, we employ an assemblage approach to examine the intersections between care, revanchism and neoliberalisation in Brisbane, Australia. We extend the insights of recent studies by showing how the vulnerability of care to the revanchist pressures of neoliberalisation play out outside the US, despite the prominence of care rationalities and a milder revanchist politics. However, we also push beyond this insight to demonstrate the ongoing progressive potential of care in the neoliberalising city, despite its vulnerabilities to revanchism. Specifically, we highlight the capacity of housing‐focused responses to homelessness to shield people from criminalisation and to prefigure and call‐forth post‐neoliberal practices and spaces.

Right To The City: Lagos, An Emerging Revanchist City In Nigeria?

Right to the city is a concept that is part of discourse about contemporary urban development with its resultant social inequalities while revanchist city refers to a city that has zero tolerance policies against the poor, marginalized and downtrodden people who are seen as threats to urban order and culprits of urban decay. Gathering data from secondary sources, this chapter x-rayed programmes and policies executed by Lagos State between 2007 and 2015. The results showed that various processes of neoliberal restructuring of Lagos city had threatened democracy. Lagos State government, in a bid to revitalize the city, demolished some slum areas and evicted the residents because it would no longer tolerate the existence of slums in the centre of the state with a megacity plan for a ‘world class’ Lagos. Beggars and the destitute were forcibly removed from the streets and taken to the rehabilitation centre in Ikorodu. Some were evacuated to their various states or countries. The result further revealed that a number of the beggars were sent to Kirikiri Prison while illegal aliens were expelled and repatriated to their homelands. It was also observed that riding commercial motor-cycles popularly known as ‘okada’ was banned in most parts of the city. Markets in Tejuoso and Oshodi were demolished and rebuilt beyond the reach of the former traders. Also banned was street trading. With all these inhumane strategies, this article concludes that Lagos is becoming a revanchist city and suggests that the state should jettison this neoliberal legislation and reconsider liberal policies characterised by redistributive policy, affirmative action and antipoverty legislation because constitutionally in Nigeria, every individual has the freedom to live in any region, state, or city of his/her choice.

The Business of Homelessness

Rather than the streets, the focus of this article will be upon other spaces in the city that homeless individuals occupy. Within a context of the purported punitive or revanchist city, the paper examines a seemingly more accommodating, social welfare response to homelessness—“spaces of care”—enacted by frontline workers who interact with homeless individuals in one mostly volunteer-run day center in Brighton, United Kingdom (Cloke et al, 2010: 10). The research focused on how the organization is financed because of a shift in model of funding—from a reliance on smaller donations to relationships with larger corporate organizations—and how this affected service provision. I surmise that funding from larger corporate organizations does not usually come with conditions, but what was found at the day center was that the presence of the funders created limitations on what the service could and could not do with its service-users. Drawing on the research carried out from an ethnographic study of a mostly volunteer-run homeless day center based in central Brighton. The focus of this article is on these funding relationships in order to assess the tensions organizations like the day center in Brighton face between, on the one hand, organizational growth and restructuring in order to provide good quality services, and the freedom for its frontline workers to outwardly contest the punitive measures that their service-users experience on the other.

To soothe or remove? Affect, revanchism and the weaponized use of classical music

Over the past 30 years, in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, classical music has come to function as a sonic weapon. It is used a means of dispelling and deterring ‘loiterers’ by making particular public and privately owned public spaces – such as shopping malls, bus stations, shop fronts and car parks – undesirable to occupy. In this article, I present weaponized classical music as a ‘revanchist’, audio-affective deterrent. Drawing upon Neil Smith’s description of the revanchist city, I examine how weaponized classical music works to affectively police neoliberal ‘public’ space. While credited with the capacity to ‘soothe away’ deviant behaviour through its calming influence, weaponized classical music ultimately aims to ‘remove’ the figure of the threatening and menacing ‘loiterer’ insofar as it is heard as repellent. Although affect has often been understood in contradistinction to social determinisms, weaponized classical music exemplifies the capacity of musical affects to function as a technology of social reproduction.

The libidinal economy of revanchism: Illicit drugs, harm reduction, and the problem of enjoyment

Harm reduction is generally presented as the compassionate, pragmatic alternative to prohibitionist drug policy. This article examines harm reduction in relation to debates over the revanchist city in urban geography, arguing that it should be understood as an ambivalent social policy. I advance a psychoanalytic conceptualization of ambivalence to explain the often contradictory character of contemporary drug policy, including harm reduction. Calling attention to the centrality of enjoyment ( jouissance) in debates over drug policy, I argue that fantasies about the enjoyment of the Other play a crucial role in drug policy, with profound consequences for marginalized drug users.

”Ni är inte välkomna i vårt fina Malmö”

”You are not welcome in our lovely Malmo”: Conditions for belonging in mobilization against organized crime Several murders occurred in the Swedish city of Malmö between 2011 and 2012. Against this backdrop, the municipality and the police initiate a public campaign. The aim is to mobilize the city’s population against organized crime. In this study the ideology of the initiative is analysed. It is argued that the representation of organized crime as nurtured by the black economy can be read as an example of neoliberal revanchist city agenda, albeit an ambivalent one. The role of groups working in the low-price sphere of the economy becomes that of a threatening projection, while a consumption ideology regulates the boundaries of belonging

An Anthropology of Parking: Infrastructures of Automobility, Work, and Circulation

While there is a growing anthropological literature on cars and infrastructures of automobility, it has failed so far to open up ethnographic analysis to nonmoving cars and the socialities that such immobile objects entail. Focusing on self-appointed parking attendants in Bucharest – a growing presence since the early 2000s in many car traffic hotspots – we describe how informal parking allows a growing number of disenfranchised families and individuals to subsist. Parking, that is, the activity of helping drivers to find parking places, works in two related yet distinct ways: (1) it produces direct payments for forced, mostly unsolicited, parking services imposed on drivers who seek free parking spots; and (2) it maintains a social infrastructure composed of a highly provisional matrix of lateral connections, possibilities, and transactions that allows such self-appointed parking attendants to circulate and live in a revanchist city. As self-appointed parking attendants operate daily in many cities throughout the world, parking may be an excellent analytic window into work, poverty, and urban infrastructures.

Marginal Gentrification as Emancipatory Practice: An Alternative to the Hegemonic Discourse of the Creative City?*

The main purpose of this article is to present and discuss marginal gentrification as a potential emancipatory practice. This movement is spearheaded by the less privileged sectors of the new middle classes, individuals who are underemployed or in temporary, precarious employment yet still prefer to live in central areas of the city, thus becoming pioneer gentrifiers. They refuse the conventional suburban norms and revanchist city canons, and thus, as a group, they may become an alternative to the dominant narrative presented by the creative city.

Panic on the streets of Birmingham? Struggles over space and belonging in the Revanchist City

The riots of 2011 have generated substantial interest, leading many media commentators, politicians, senior police officers and others to consider the causes of the surprising, and even, shocking s...

City of Exception: The Dutch Revanchist City and the Urban Homo Sacer

Abstract: Agamben's figure of the homo sacer is much discussed and applied in various social sciences. This article discusses the limits of Agamben's perspective and illustrates the value of an amended version by a discussion of urban policy practices in the Netherlands that operate on the basis of a distinct logic of exception and create urban homines sacri. A discussion of the case of the policy practice of the Rotterdam “Intervention Teams” provides an account of how the city becomes a city of exception, and the development of such policies and of the discourses that legitimate them. We illustrate the ways in which the selection of urban zones of exception is heavily dependent both on ethnicity and on income.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Gentrification: What It Is, Why It Is, and What Can Be Done About It

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Gentrification: What It Is, Why It Is, and What Can Be Done About It

Population increase and 'new-build gentrification' in central Tokyo

Since the second half of the 1990s, population figures started to recover in the central wards of Tōkyō. The suburban hinterland, by contrast, is marked by overall stagnation. This study focuses on the question of how this process is affecting the social composition of the city center, illustrated by the case of Minato ward. It can be demonstrated that Tōkyō is certainly not a “revanchist city” in the sense defined by Neil Smith in his study on New York (1996), nor is it appropriate to interpret the re-urbanization process as a mere return of middle-mass suburbanites, a view that is popular in Japan. Instead, by developing high-rise housing clusters on centrally located brownfield land or newly reclaimed waterfront sites, a gradual and place-selective replacement of the preexisting, socially rather mixed population of central Tōkyō by in-movers who are mainly composed of singles and childless couples (and only in some areas including a larger share of nuclear families) is taking place. Based on the idea of a multi-functional and neatly designed city landscape which can prevail in the competition with other global cities, this process is actively promoted by state authorities as key actors. It is therefore concluded that re-urbanization of central Tōkyō can be put in the context of “new-build gentrification” as defined by DaviDSoN and leeS (2005).

From brew town to cool town: Neoliberalism and the creative city development strategy in Milwaukee

This research critically examines a new chapter in the evolution of the entrepreneurial city; one distinguished by its reliance on Richard Florida’s thesis about the relationship between the creative class and economic growth. Since the 2002 publication of his wildly-popular book, The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida’s ideas were broadly assimilated into the infrastructure of urban entrepreneurialism across the United States. This was especially the case in slow-growth metropolitan areas, where it was hoped that a “creative city” development strategy might reverse decades of relative decline. Using Milwaukee, Wisconsin as a representative case study, this paper scrutinizes the actions of that city’s image-makers, planners, and municipal actors, who together orchestrated a new round of urban promotional activities and planning strategies. What made this new round of growth coalition activities unique was that it highlighted a distinct set of urban motifs presumably commensurate with creative class lifestyles, cultural practices, and consumption habits. Following MacLeod [MacLeod, G (2002) From urban entrepreneurialism to a “revanchist city”?: on the spatial injustices of Glasgow’s renaissance. Antipode 34(3), 602–614], Maliszewski [Maliszewski, P (2004) Flexibility and its discontents. The Baffler 16, 69–79] and Peck [Peck, J (2005) Struggling with the creative class. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(4), 740–770], this work argues that this creative city growth strategy worked primarily to repackage and strengthen the extant downtown-based property-led development paradigm. The marriage of Florida’s ideas with municipal action therefore brought into even sharper relief what was already one of the most economically and racially polarized large cities in the United States.

Young People and the ‘Right’ to the City

Cities are increasingly controlled and domesticated (Atkinson 2003, Raco 2003) as a result of the gentrification of the city and symptom of what Smith (1996) terms the ‘revanchist city’. Given the current moral panic in the UK around young people and anti-social behaviour, large groups of teenagers are not part of plans for the regenerating city. This paper will examine young people’s experience of urban public space and the exclusions (Sibley 1995) they encounter there. This will be achieved via secondary analysis of questionnaire data collected by young people themselves. Mitchell (2003) argues that certain groups have the ‘right to the city’ and as such are seen as legitimate users of urban spaces. Other groups are perceived as having less legitimacy in public space and are therefore viewed as problematic. Whilst Mitchell (2003) focuses on homeless populations this study will concentrate on another group marginalised from the city, namely teenagers. How teenagers gain legitimacy in the city is an important question here. This will be illustrated by using a case study of Cathedral Gardens, a newly regenerated public space in Manchester city centre, UK. As a solution to the ‘problem’ of large numbers of young people gathering in the gardens at weekends and during school holidays and with the threat of a citywide dispersal order aimed at groups of teenagers, local youth workers and a charity group set up a peer youth work scheme. This involves groups of young people being advised and in effect ‘policed’ by their peers. Using data gathered from interviews with peer youth workers the paper will explore how these young people gained legitimacy in the space and ‘the right’ to be present there.

The local state and homeless shelters: Beyond revanchism?

Within a context of the purported punitive or revanchist city, I examine a seemingly more accommodating, social welfare response to homelessness—the homeless shelter—and examine if it may provide an empirical and theoretical counterweight to the current understandings of homelessness that narrowly focus on anti-homeless ordinances and expulsion from public spaces. Upon an empirical profiling of the provision, location, growth and form of shelters in the city of Los Angeles (1996–2000), I surmise that there was little evidence to suggest that Los Angeles shelters were systematically punitive/revanchist. I then propose an alternative framework—poverty management—to understand homeless regulation in a more managerial and ambivalent way.

North American Gentrification? Revanchist and Emancipatory Perspectives Explored

By offering a response to recent calls for a ‘geography of gentrification’, the author attempts to move on from the intractable theoretical divisions and overgeneralizations that continue to pervade the gentrification literature. The research described in this paper takes the form of a comparative assessment of the gentrifying neighbourhoods of South Parkdale, Toronto, Canada, and Lower Park Slope, New York City, USA. A central part of this research has been an engagement with two contrasting academic discourses on gentrification, the ‘emancipatory city’ (a Canadian construct) and the ‘revanchist city’ (a US construct), to examine how gentrification may or may not have changed since these discourses were produced and articulated. The author combines narratives from in-depth interviews (with a particular focus on displaced tenants) with supplementary data from secondary sources and demonstrates that gentrification is neither emancipatory nor revanchist in either case. This has important implications for how gentrification is understood and evaluated in Canada and the USA. Although one can see crucial broad similarities both in the causes and in the effects of gentrification in each neighbourhood (which would appear to endorse casual references to ‘North American gentrification’), the process is also differentiated according to contextual factors, and the nuances of the gentrification process are illuminated and clarified by international comparison. In sum, the author points to the need to exercise caution in referring to ‘North American gentrification’, especially as a geography of gentrification is only in its infancy.